2016 Presidential election Prediction

The presidential election is starting in one month on February 1st in Iowa for both major parties, and my predictions are as follows:

Hillary Clinton will sweep Iowa given her more moderate positions, and New Hampshire is a tossup between Sanders and Clinton. If Clinton succeeds in winning New Hampshire, then given her lead in the hidden primary for super delegates and amount of money raised already then she will sweep the nomination quickly. If Sanders wins in New Hampshire he will have an uphill battle to fight in most other states outside of New England, and Clinton will still probably get the nomination. Even if Sanders pulls off a miracle and gets more votes than Clinton by a small margin he still will lose the super delegate vote and she will get the nomination. It is unusually easy to predict this year's election.

The Republican field is more challenging to predict, Marco Rubio is currently leading the betting pool odds out of all Republicans, which tends to be the most accurate way to predict the winner of the primary. The biggest issue right now is the vast number of candidates and no ranked voting to tell what people's true preferences are after candidates drop out. I expect we will see most candidates drop out fairly quickly and then we will see Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and Carson left in the race. Bush and Christie supporters are closely aligned and they will fall behind Marco Rubio since he has more experience and is slightly more moderate than Ted Cruz, giving the Republicans a bigger advantage in the general election. Rubio will play into Republican fears of drugs which is one of the few wedge issues between the two, and his support of Social Security is going to win him a lot of older conservative votes in a match between the two. He is also better than Bush for most Republicans because he opposes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants which will appease older white conservatives again. Donald Trump vs. Marco Rubio is going to be the major factor in the later primaries, and as less ideological Republicans come into the play Donald Trump is not going to see much more support than he already has given how he is more extreme than the other Republican Candidates.

When it comes to the General Election it will be Marco Rubio vs. Hillary Clinton. The states which are most contested are still North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. The states which lean more towards Clinton are Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada. (in order) The only other state which could start to swing is Texas given its growing Hispanic population, Texas could start to be a swing state if the Democrats turn out the vote in Hispanic communities, but this all depends on strategy. It will be a full swing state in 2020. I do not think running Marco Rubio is going to succeed in pulling in many Hispanic voters because of his policy positions.

For Vice Presidential candidates, Clinton has a lot of options, Sanders is a possibility depending on how he talks about her in the election, Russ Feingold would be a wonderful choice, Julian or Raul Castro are amazing people and would help turn out Hispanic voters (particularly in Texas), among other picks.

Among Republicans, Rubio could pick Cruz given their ideological similarities, Jeb Bush for his connections,

The Democrats start with 237 electoral college votes not including swing states, and Republicans start with 191 (not including the 9 states which are swing states). Nevada and Colorado are seeing a growing Hispanic population and they will vote Democratic bringing the Democrats up to 252 votes. Florida continues to see an increase in its Hispanic population and this makes it lean slightly more in favor of Democrats which will determine the election. Even if Florida goes to Marco Rubio, Virginia is almost certainly going to go for Democrats again given the growing size of the DC Metro area will continue to push Virginia further to the left. This will give Hillary Clinton the Presidency and she will be our 45th President. Using 538s tool, it seems almost impossible for Democrats to lose as well.

Every Student Succeeds

Yesterday President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act which amends significant portions of the No Child Left Behind Act. There are a few major things this bill does, such as:

1. Requires equitable funding between schools in the same district. This is a massive improvement. (Sec. 1501)
2. It increases the amount of money for children from at-risk homes (Sec. 1002D)
3. The high stakes with the testing have been removed.
4. It expands access to preschool.

There are a few major things it does not do:

1. Standardized Testing, which does not work, is still going to waste classroom time

The biggest issue is the Federal government sends money to schools through state governments, which as we know from TANF is a horrible idea because it is inefficient (with 56 bureaucracies doing exactly the same thing) and with 2/3 of states with Republican governments gives a lot of leeway to corruption and discrimination against minorities by wasting funds, which is what happens with TANF. States are now able to set more state standards and control standardized tests, which is a huge victory for Creationists. What we need to do ultimately is get state governments out of education and fund schools from the Federal level, and make school districts so they only serve one high school each along with their feeder schools (unless if a feeder school elects to have its own district, like at my middle school which makes a lot of sense in a lot of rural areas) so that we can't see the incompetence and disproportionate allocation of resources these obscenities create. We need to eliminate property taxes which are horribly regressive obscenities and fund public education fully from a progressive income tax like the one I proposed. The Federal government would provide the same amount per pupil in every district (keeping in mind scales of efficiency for larger schools of course) which will help end a lot of racism and inequality in America's schools. I fully believe that as long as state governments and school districts are involved in allocating funds to schools we will continue to see the awful inequity of education we see in this country and the only fair way to do it is a per pupil allocation which guarantees equality of opportunity which experience tells us cannot coexist with school districts serving entire cities.

It's a long bill, with a lot of good things and a lot of bad things, and it doesn't go far enough in funding poor schools.

Text of bill

NPR

Freedom and Schengen

With the latest terrorist attack in France people are trying to reduce the liberalization of Europe. Under attack now is the Schengen treaty with xenophobes calling to close the border. The issue is that there have been very few terrorist attacks in Europe relative to other countries is still very low, and his won't stop them. Even with massive surveillance no country has succeeded in stopping a single terrorist attack through such methods, and without that information all closing the borders will only waste money and hurt the economy. The United States has the NSA of course, and there is no evidence that surveillance has ever been necessary to stop a terrorist attack.
https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/do-nsas-bulk-surveillance-programs-stop-terrorists/

I do not think closing the border will make any significant difference regarding terrorist attacks. There were attacks before open borders, and there are still attacks. All it will do is isolate Europeans from each other and inconvenience travellers.

To fight terrorism, the only thing we can do is reach out to people at risk of these groups. Increasing communication and trust between peoples through travel, internet, and friendship will help tear down dictators and expand liberty. Closing the borders only plays into their hands by doing the opposite.

The Evil of Mao

The 20th century saw several horrible events, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, the Young Turks genocide in Armenia, and other smaller events under a million dead, but no one in the 20th century came as close to one man in terms of the total number of lives lost as a result of the action of Mao Zedong. Hitler killed up to 14 million people (including over 70% of all Jews) in the Holocaust, Stalin killed over 11 million people through famines in the USSR, Pol Pot killed a quarter of all Cambodians (over 2 million), and half of all Armenians were killed in the Turkish genocide by the Young Turks. Add up all these numbers (which is 30 million approximately) and you still don't come close to the total number of people killed as a result of one man, and that tyrant's name was Mao Zedong.

The 30 million people killed by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Young Turks is about 2/3 of the total number of people killed by starvation by Mao Zedong during the Great Leap Forward. As information has been released, recent estimates have concluded at least 45 million people died as a result of the famine brought on by the decisions of Mao Zedong. For these 45 million deaths the economy actually shrunk, failing in every way.

45 million people dying (0.6% of the global population and 3% of China) should be enough for a man to be seen as a monster by anyone with a soul, but this is not all that Mao Zedong committed. China has supported the dictatorship in North Korea since its founding and if it weren't for China's support of Kim Jong Song it is likely that Korea would not have been divided for long. Because of Mao Zedong's actions, and the actions of the government which follows in his footsteps of supporting the world's largest prison has given the government of North Korea the support it needs to keep from tumbling under internal pressure. They continue to support North Korea to this day by returning refugees and allowing exports of weapons to the tyrant.

For all of these reasons, there is no other person in the history of the world I am aware of who comes close to Mao Zedong in terms of his absolute destruction of human rights and inhumanity. There are certainly people who have tried and are rightfully detested and hated around the world for it, such as Hitler and Stalin, but no one else has been able to succeed as well as he did for almost 70 years.

Obama's roots

The hatred against Obama makes sense, not only was his father born in Africa, but his mother was born in a UU family and he attended religious education at the UU church in Honolulu. He is the antithesis of everything the Republican Party stands against. His roots are in one of the two religions (the other being Quakers) which has fought the hardest against their dogma, and it is reflected in his speeches. The values which he was raised with are embedded deeply in the decisions and political platform he has ran on his entire political life over the last 20 years. While Carter was from the South and started the NSA, and Clinton (another Southern boy) destroyed food stamps and deregulated the banks, Obama on the other hands succeeded in health care reform, put back significant regulation on the banks, and on every issue besides surveillance has been extremely liberal. He is the most liberal president since Johnson by a wide margin, and has his roots in the two things Republicans hate most, hippies and Africans. He is the only president in the last 45 years (as of 2015) who has had any desire to move us towards those goals and if he had been able to get his party behind him on the most important issues would have destroyed the Republican Party’s Nixonite ideology more than any other political leader in the last half century.

In 1961 the UUA was formed and President Obama was born. President Obama turned out to be the first truly liberal president in exactly 40 years after President Johnson left office and the only President since Johnson to expand our human rights legislation. He started live in the UU church and those values have never left him. You can take the person out of a UU church, but you can’t take the UU values out of that person. We are so lucky as a country to have him as a President.

Copyright is broken

It now appears that Anne Frank didn't really write her novel, but instead it was her father, according to the company which owns her work (no relation to the Frank family). Never mentioning her father as a coauthor before means there probably is no credible source between the two is blatant copyright abuse, and just shows how the current copyright system is broken. Not allowing derivatives off of Anne Frank's work is going to seriously hurt writing about the Holocaust and World War II, and is not going to produce any benefit for society. Hopefully the courts in Switzerland will block this move and her book will be available for everyone.

They want us to be terrified

The attacks on Paris yesterday were a cowardly act against innocent people. These people thrive on people being afraid of them and use that to their advantage in their attempt to create a Caliphate. But different from the Caliphates off old where Christians and Jews were allowed to live alongside Muslims as long as they paid tribute to the Caliph, the caliphate these extremists want to create looks a lot more like the system of government in Saudi Arabia where women's rights are limited, and freedom of religion doesn't exist. The historical caliphates of old were places where learning was fostered, algebra was invented, science progressed, and toleration was mostly practiced, particularly in comparison to contemporary Europe and the Arab States today. The history these radicals want to go back to never existed and they are on the wrong side of history.

They are financed by Saudi Arabia and other Wahabbi states primarily (source) who are all American allies given the amount of trade and aid that goes between them and us. These states are doing nothing to apprehend the plutocrats who fund terrorism and their inaction is itself an action. They could treat these people the way they treat journalists (Reporters) and end al Qaeda, ISIS, and other major extremists groups right here and now. But they choose not to because they agree with them. The lack of freedom in these countries is what al Qaeda wants to bring for the whole world, and their sickness can only be stopped by ending their support network and then bringing the region back to the support of science, philosophy, and art which the Muslim world was in the Middle Ages as the height of human civilization. There is no reason this cannot happen again, and it is criminal that the West does nothing to make it happen again by continuing to trade with and support state sponsors of terrorism.

So, instead of being terrified by the terrorists and giving them what they want, write about what they are doing. We need to show them that oppose the way they treat people in their countries, we oppose the slave trade, we believe that men and women are inherently equal to one another, we believe that everyone is important and deserves to be treated fairly. We will not vote for people who will seek to divide and conquer us. We oppose Marine la Pen, Viktor Orban, and Alternativ fur Deutschland with as much fervor as we oppose ISIS, the House of Saud, and al Qaeda, and for the same reason. We will not give them what they want, and we stand with the majority of Muslims who only want peace and an opportunity to do well against their oppressors. We will continue to invest in renewable energy to destroy their power and then help them build a system where they can live in peace. The Muslim world reminded Europe of Greek philosophy in the 1300s when Gemisthus Pletho (who was from the Ottoman Empire) brought it to the Medici family, sparking the Renaissance, and it is time we reach back in thanks to the Muslim world and bring their gift of philosophy back to them, so they too can prosper from its teachings. Europe suffered from Feudalism for 1000 years and much of the Arab world is suffering from the influence of Wahabbism today. There is no reason they cannot have a renaissance as well. We (the West) stand with you (the Muslim world) against our common enemy of the Saud family.

Vive le France

Vive le Union européenne

Vive le Schengen
Vive le Monde