2016 Nov 3^rd

Five more days of this idiocy and then we will be subjected to an idiocy of a different kind: Will the Republican controlled House of Representatives start impeachment proceedings before Clinton takes office or will they wait until January 21, the day after she is inaugurated. Maybe the FBI will arrest her the instant she completes the oath of office. There are just no end of entertaining possibilities awaiting us. Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Speaking of the FBI, these crimefighters claim to have discovered 650 thousand emails on a computer shared by Huma Abadin, a Clinton assistant, and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Let’s do a little elementary school arithmetic. Abedin was married to Weiner from 2010 to 2016; then they separated. Maybe they were sharing things before they were married, so let’s give them seven years of computer sharing. That means 92,857 emails a year over that seven year period. We’ll call it 90 thousand a year for easy figuring. Let’s assume a work week of 50 hours a week and 50 weeks a year. If we divide 90 thousand by 2500 hours we get 36 emails an hour. That’s about an email every one hundred seconds. That’s also ridiculous! It’s certainly possible to write an email in 100 seconds, but writing one every 100 seconds fifty hours a week, every week for seven years is silly. Why don’t the crimefighters at the FBI give some thought to how those emails got on this computer in the first place.

Trump has gained ground in the polls and in the well-regarded 538, a blog that factors in all of the available information to come up with a prediction about the election’s outcome. If we look at the prediction for November 1 by Nate Silver, the 538 guru, we find Clinton and Trump almost exactly where they were a month earlier. Within the month of October, Clinton had pulled well ahead of Trump, only to fall back to where she was on October 1 by the first of November.

The Brit’s betting site Paddy Power has nearly identical predictions. On October 2 PP has Clinton at 4/11, meaning that you must risk eleven dollars to make four dollars if Clinton wins. On October 15^th Clinton was at 1/6, much more likely to win. Then On November 1^st Clinton is back to 4/11,  exactly where she was a month earlier.