Avaphrenia - Mangione's Possible Legal Defence

It seems obvious that Luigi Mangione murdered Brian Thomson on December 4, 2024. Mr. Thomson was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. His murder by Mr. Mangione has sparked a wide range of veneration of Mr. Mangione on the internet and otherwise. Please see here...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8nk75vg81o

You can read this report. In short, Mr. Mangione has become a kind of folk hero, with people even buying clothing similar to what he wore on the day of the murder to show their affiliation with him. His infamy has grown.

Mr. Mangione has been charged both federally, and in New York State. The federal charges are of stalking and murder through the use of a firearm, which can net someone the death penalty. The state charges are of with three counts of First Degree Murder in New York, with the last charge asserting that the murder was a terrorist act. The maximum penalty for First Degree Murder, which is a class A-1 felony, is life in prison.

Charges like this at both levels of government are very unusual. They strongly suggest that the federal and state authorities in the United States are trying to throw the book at Mr. Mangione in a way that they would never have done with a normal defendant. It should be obvious that they are sending a message to anyone who would think about copying Mr. Mangione's alleged actions. If the law is meant to protect, these authorities know exactly who the law needs to safeguard. 

Mangione has entered a plea of "not guilty".

Does Mr. Mangione has a plausible legal defence?

Let's explore that question at length below.

The Legal Defence of Insanity: As noted, it is very likely that Mr. Mangione committed the act of murder. His defence would therefore have to be based on the "mens rea", or mental element of any crime, which requires proof that a person not only committed a criminal act, but that they also intended to commit the act. 

To "beat the rap", Mr. Mangione would have to "plead insanity", or put forward an affirmative defence that he suffers from a mental disease or defect sufficient enough to negate the criminal charges he faces.

A defence of insanity is available in In New York State. The state follows a softened version of what is known as M'Naghten Rule. This is a British Common Law rule which states as follows:

"Every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defense on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, and not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong."

In summary, this test focuses on two possible defences - 1. whether a criminal defendant knew the nature and quality of the act that they had committed, as in, they did not know what they were doing at all, and/or 2. whether they understood right from wrong at the time they committed the crime, as in, they knew what they were doing, but they did not know that it was wrong.

As noted, New York State softened this defence in favour of defendant's by replacing the word "know" as noted above with the word "understand". The effect of this was to broaden the defence so that flight from the crime scene would no longer be considered as proof of knowledge of the crime. Instead, it could be argued that in fleeing the defendant had only a slight or surface knowledge of the fact that she/he had committed a crime, but not an actual understanding of what they had done sufficient to make out the mens rea element of a criminal prosecution. In short, the fact that Mr. Mangione ran away cannot be take of proof that he "understood" that what he had done was a crime.

So how what would a defence of "insanity" look like for Mr. Mangione?

"Insanity", Mangione's World and "BOOM"!: Mangione's claim of insanity would have had to have been in effect at the time of the offence for it to constitute a criminal defence. Any mental illness before or after is irrelevant. So what matters is Mr. Mangione's mental state when he shot Mr. Thomson.

Also, to invoke an insanity defence at the trial itself, Mr. Mangione has to first admit that he committed the act. He can't say that he didn't do it, but if he did, then he was insane! By admitting the act, he would be putting himself in a very precarious legal position simply because, if his insanity defence does not work, he will be found guilty.

There is an exception. If Mr. Mangione enters a not guilty plea and tries to defend himself by denying that he committed the act, and in the course of the trial it becomes obvious that he was, in fact, insane when he committed the crime, then even though he did not specifically plead this, he may still be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Finally, courts, not medical professionals, decide whether or not someone was actually insane when they committed a crime. Expert witnesses who testify as to the medical aspects of a persons mental state are vital in these cases, but they do not decide the issue - judges and juries do.

Mr. Mangione does not appear to have been operating while in a drugged state, or while severely intoxicated through the consumption of alcohol. A mens rea defence based on severe intoxication is therefore not available to him. There is also no report, as yet, that he suffers from a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, which could also be the basis of such a defence.

So how was Mr. Mangione "insane" when he killed Mr. Thomson?

We know that Mangione suffered from physical ailments. Based on news reports, we know that he had claimed on social media that he was in constant pain from a back injury suffered in a surfing accident in 2022. He apparently had back surgery that helped with the issue, but prior to that he had been "terrified" of the implications of his back injury. He also suffered from what he called a "brain fog" that started when he returned to his fraternity in 2023. He also apparently wrote that "It’s absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue...The people around you probably won’t understand your symptoms - they certainly don’t for me.”

Secondly, Mangione may have suffered a psychological episode recently. He had cut himself off from his family, and essentially disappeared. His family reported him as missing in San Francisco in November. He was also apprehended with a notebook in which he had written several notes expressing hostility to the health care industry, and toward health industry executives in particular.

Thirdly, and in line with the last point, he may have become a social outsider. For example, he reviewed books online, and his longest and most comprehensive review was of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. This fellow was know as The Unabomber. He killed three people in a mail bombing campaign that he unleashed on academics across the United States of America from 1978 to 1995. He was caught when he insisted that his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, be published promising that if it was published in the New York Times, he would stop the bombings. It was published, and his brother recognized the theses in the work as similar to the thoughts and beliefs of Kaczynski, and turned him in.

If you are interested, the life and times of Ted Kaczynski is here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

The manifesto of Kaczynski warned of the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies, and that modern technical society needed to be dismantled. In that respect, Kaczynski may be one of histories great conspiracy theorists. Mangione's review of Industrial Society and its Future is especially chilling. Here it is:

"Clearly written by a mathematics' prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the quality of 21st century life. 

It is easy to quickly and thoughtless(ly) write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it is simply impossible to ignore his prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.

He was a violent individual - rightly imprisoned - who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary." (The board of mewetree.blogspot.com read the manifesto when it was first released; Mangione is not entirely wrong regarding Kaczynski's prescience.)

Today, in social media and in less reputable political circles, Mangione has become Kaczynski - an extreme political revolutionary who appears to have murdered in the name of some sort of revolt against "The Man". As noted, his followers are legion!

Mangione's problem is simple - violent revolutionaries are typically not considered to be insane.

So how could Mangione go from being seen as a sympathetic Unabomber admirer and possible copycat, to avoiding prison based on an insanity defence? Enter the internet and social media - see below.

(BTW - Ted Kaczynski refused to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, in spite of being urged to do so by his lawyers, as he did not want to be saddle with the reputation as someone with a mental illness. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison to avoid the death penalty as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. He died in 2023, living long enough to see technology evolve to a state that arguable reflected many of his concerns. In pleading not guilty and not pursuing an insanity defence, at least for now, is Mangione doing the same thing as Kaczynski?)  

Traditional Insanity: There are two parts to the defence of insanity, as noted above. Of the two parts of the defence of insanity noted above - that the defendant either did not know the nature of the act that they had committed, or that they did not know the difference from right or wrong when they committed the criminal act, Mangione would need to rely on the second of the two. This is because he likely knew that he was shooting someone when he did it - he actually cleared a jam in his firearm, for example. So he would have understood the nature of the act he committed.  What he must show is that he did not know what he was doing was wrong when he killed Thomson. 

Let's start with a traditional defence of insanity and see where that takes us. We will then consider something more updated and more than a bit "ironic".

Political assassins and others have a long and less-than-honourable history of escaping the noose by being found not guilty by reason of insanity in America. Here are a few that kept their necks intact...

• Richard Lawrence, who tried to shoot Andrew Jackson in 1835;
• Danial Sickles, who shot a US District Attorney named Phillip Barton Key in 1859;
• John Shrank, who shot Teddy Roosevelt in 1912;
• Ezra Pound, found mentally incompetent to stand for trial for treason in 1946; and,
• John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981.

These people have been found not guilty by reason of insanity after psychiatrists testified as to their mental states, and based on such phenomena as: a belief that the murderer was the heir to the British throne (Lawrence); temporary insanity and rage at finding out that the victim was sleeping with the murder's wife (Sickles); claims that William McKinley appeared to the murderer in a dream and told him to commit the crime (Shrank); and, claims that the treasonous bastards political ramblings were so off-base as to be evidence of mental instability (Pound); and that he committed his crime to impress actress Jodie Foster (Hinckley - one wonders how things would have worked out if he had known that she is gay!?)

Regardless of these notable successes, it is worth noting that amongst non-political, but still notorious murderers - John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer - the insanity defence failed, this in spite of the fact that these fellows were obviously totally crazy. In fact, when Dahmer's claim to be insane was rejected, it was widely noted that this could spell the end of the insanity defence in the United States of America for high-profile cases.

And now, we have Mr. Mangione.

Mangione's brain fog, his medical issues and his odd behaviors in the month leading up to the murder could be expanded by medical professionals to something like a mental illness. How he conducted himself on the day of the murder would also tell - was he so calm that it suggested he did not realize the moral implications of what he was doing? Much would depend on how he presented himself at trial, and how his psychiatrists testified on his behalf. He could put his case for insanity forward, and see how it lands with the jury and/or judge.

And it is here that things get interesting.

This case is very high profile, and extremely political - again, the federal and state authorities almost never lay charges in the same case. Many, many people sympathize with the killer of a person who ran a multinational health insurance company with a reputation for squeezing the Little Guy. It is very possible that a jury may not convict Mr. Mangione given their possible sympathy for his "cause". If he entered a new plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, would a jury be convinced to find him non-guilty as a kind of protest against "The Man", and by so doing, keep him out of jail?

As noted by "Wicked Bunny", who is the only person that the board of mewetree.blogspot.com has ever worked with in preparing a blog, the machinations around a guilty plea are very interesting.  

First of all, and as noted, did Mangione just plead not guilty as part of a martyr complex, explaining that he is proud of what he has done, and urging others to repeat his actions? (Thanks Wicked Bunny for catching my typo here.)

Recall that Kaczynski did not plead guilty by reason of insanity because he didn't want to be considered to be mentally ill. That man was "all in" on his cause! He understood that a judicial finding of mental illness would reflect very badly on the thesis that he put forward about losing our freedom to technology.

Is Mangione thinking the same way?

What of the opposite? 

If he changes his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity, would the prosecution really want that plea to be rejected, and for him to be found guilty, or would they prefer that he be found to have been insane when he killed Thomson? 

Consider this - if he is found to be insane, that could temper much of the growing pro-Mangione hysteria that has greeted his arrest, including the possibility of copycat murderers, and calls for social change. Mr. Thomson was part of an industry that literally owns much of the American political process, after all. Further assassinations of healthcare and other powerful CEOs would be bad for business.

In conclusion, Mangione may have a traditional insanity defence - at least the case could be argued. But if he invokes a traditional insanity defence, he may have sympathetic allies in both the jury and amongst the prosecutors who would want to see him found to have been insane at the time of the act, but for entirely opposite reasons; the first to praise him, the second to bury his cause and everything he espouses.

The New Insanity: What if Kaczynski and Mangione merge across time and space through a brand new defence of insanity; one that stems, not from the mental state of the person charged with an offence, but from the normal mental state of all of us in an age of high technology and the negation of the traditional self?

WTF??

Could a criminal defence of insanity be constructed based on the innovation we know as the internet and social media, and on how it likely changed not only Mangione, but many of the rest of us as well?

Let's go back a bit. 

In 1991, a social psychologist named Kenneth Gergen coined the phrase "multiphrenia". This phrase stems from a phenomena related to our interactions with advanced technology where individuals could become essentially a fragmented version of themselves, by being pulled in so many directions that the essential individual could be lost. He coined the expression, "I am linked, therefore I am." well before the advent of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, Sims, AI, internet dating and cybersex, and social media, and email and texts. 

Extrapolating his thesis to today, could many of us be suffering from what may be termed "Avaphrenia", and could this be used to explain Mangione's actions? I will again thank Wicked Bunny for exploring this concept with the board of mewetree.blogspot.com and for suggesting this new term.  The "Ava" is from the word avatar, and the "phrenia" is the ending of the word schizophrenia. 

Avaphrenia could be defined as, "The negation of one self through the adoption of multiple distinct micro-personalities occasioned by the use of social media and other internet-based platforms which require the user to play a different role, or to adopt a different "avatar" for each platform, with these interactions happening multiple, even tens or hundreds of times every single day. The result is a new fragmented version of the previous one self, where each fragment has a different moral base, adopted to suit the required social media or internet-based interaction."

Of course we all have a personality in the real world that is bound by well-understood social and other moral norms. But what would happen if our internet-based mirco-personalities started to bleed into this real world, taking their altered sense of morality with them?

Given avaphrenia, and given the high tech evolution from which is came, is it possible that an individual fragment of Mr. Mangione's divided self committed the crime, were his personality in the real world, and his other micro-personalities versions may not have done so? 

Put another way, can he claim that he is effectively schizophrenic, not by way of mental illness, but by way of the multiple personalities that he plays each and every day as a product of being a normal consumer of information technology?

To be clear - all users of the internet have multiple personalities. Some are advertent, such as when a person plays someone else in a SIM, or cruises for sex on Tinder, or plays a video game. Others are inadvertent, such as when we lie to bots and online help people about various aspects of our personal and financial lives. There is no question that Mangione, like most of the rest of us, has micro-personalities when he is using the internet.

Do you see the delicious irony here. Mangione is an admirer of Kaczynski. Is it possible that his defence is based in the very world that Kaczynski both predicted and abhorred?

What would an Avephrenia-based defence of insanity actually look like?

The Defence: Mangione would first have to change his plea to not guilty by reason if insanity, where the insanity would be based on the idea that a micro-personality of Mangione, not Mangione himself, killed Thomas. 

The defence would note that the micro-personality was enraged at what he had experienced at the hands of the health care system, and it sought to target someone in that system to take revenge - the intent formed on the internet, not in the real world. 

In that sense then, the micro-personality of Mangione was playing a role that extended into the real world from the internet, but it also brought with it the essential morality and norms of Mangione's internet-based micro-personality.  This one of Mangione's internet-based mirco-personalities simply did not think killing Thomas was wrong, and he even thought he had a right to do it. Beyond that, he believed that doing it would bring Mangione accolades - which turned out to be true.

In clinical terms, a medical professional would have to testify that the essence of his state of avaphrenia was a disassociation from other real persons, and an inability to understand that they are not objects of social media distain, but they are actual humans. So, acting in a state of avaphrenia, his defence would argue that Mangione committed a murder which he planned and executed almost as if he were going to the grocery store. He was so nonchalant that he went to Starbucks before the killing. He even cleared the jam in his firearm as if he was playing a video game. In essence, he was.

If this is accurate, then who is this guy and what may he mean for the rest of us? 

From a sociological perspective, Mangione becomes anyone who has left reality and traditional morality in favour of potentially immoral internet fantasy and the narcissism that comes from their inevitable technological isolation. His insanity is their insanity. It may be found that he did not understand that what he did was wrong - recall, he shot someone down in the street in cold blood.

Implications: If this defence were to succeed, it would be immediately followed by legislation outlawing this it literally everywhere.  

Why?

Because hundreds of millions of people likely suffer from avaphrenia. If this can excuse criminal conduct, that could open the flood gates to potentially limitless crime of all sorts where the defendant could simply argue that one of their micro-personalities did it, and they could walk away free. 

That won't be allowed to happen. But maybe it could happen just one time.

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Trump Ascendant! Why Did Trump Win, and Harris Lose? Lessons Learned...

Donald Trump won the 2024 election quite handily. 

Trump took 312 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris's 226. She lost every battleground state, including that of her running mate.

He also won the popular vote, gaining, as of this date, 77,193,105 votes to Harris's 74,898,009, or 49.9% of the popular vote to 48.4%.

Trump has a clear and unquestionable mandate to govern and to put in place his electoral platform.

How did we get here? 

Let's look at the Democrats first. 

Harris's biggest problem is that she can't communicate. She has no innate sense of how what she is saying is being heard by her audience. I can't state this strongly enough - if communication is key to political success, she is a political idiot. You can see the disconnect in her face when she speaks - her confusion and discomfort is masked by smiles and platitudes. It is totally bizarre. There is a reason why her handlers kept her under wraps - she may have been the worst presidential candidate in the history of the United States of America.

The Candidate - Bad Being Bad: Harris was a bad candidate when she ran to be the Democratic nominee in 2020. She ran a terrible campaign in 2024 and she was an equally terrible candidate. The key problem she had was that, after hiding from the press for the first month of her candidacy, she did a range of interviews which, even though they were staged with Democrat-friendly interviewers, allowed voters to get a sense of who she really is, and they were simply not impressed. After the throw-away propaganda lines, people craved content. She had very little to offer.

Her coronation as the Democratic candidate was not deserved. The Democratic Party needed to consider putting a democratic process in place to replace Biden. They didn't. The result was an incompetent candidate who lost them a very winnable election.

Lesson 1 - Let the People decide.

The Agenda - Bewake The Woke: Voters woke up to the Woke agenda. Human rights are supported by the vast majority of voters in America on the Left and the Right, but the continuing cult-like suppression of differing opinions, coupled with the seething passive-aggressive arrogance by which some proponents put forward the Woke agenda has turned many people off. Coming across as if everyone who even asks questions about the agenda is stupid, racist, misogynist, and deeply unacceptable, just doesn't win anyone any friends. 

The people putting forward this agenda often seem to be truly awful people personally, who never seem to chat with anyone outside of their cult group. Couple this with societal changes that the Woke agenda pushes that most people do not yet support, and the Democrats created a recipe for electoral defeat.  

One day, most people may support much of the Woke agenda. For now, the challenge for proponents is to gingerly and carefully get them there. 

The art of politics is persuasion, not condemnation.

Lesson 2 - Let the People catch up.

The Enemy - The Big Bad Wolf:  Are the people at The Lincoln Project insane? Some of their short videos, which were designed to encourage voters to abandon Trump, were and are borderline crazy. Do these people actually think that cops are going to pull over teenage girls crossing state lines so they can administer pregnancy tests, or that women will be required to report pregnancies to track them to prevent abortions? Even the Nazis didn't do that.

And CNN and MSNBC? How many times did they mention that Trump was a "felon"? Was it 5,000 times? Did that work?

In spite of these relentless assaults, Trump's popularity went up as the campaign progressed. Not many people seemed to care about Trump's convictions - he didn't commit any crimes against them personally, after all. With his popularity rising, these anti-Trump hucksters were challenged to pivot to a different approach that could have been more effective. They didn't pivot because they didn't believe the polls, and they didn't believe the polls because they didn't trust the people of American to not make a decision that they deeply opposed, and that they could not even fathom. 

The result; they lost.

Lesson 3 - The People are always right - ignore them at your peril.

The Economy - Empathy, Now!: The Democrats seem to live in a bubble, almost entirely removed from the realities of the day-to-day lives of Americans. They spew their propaganda lines, no doubt carefully focus-group tested in advance, in trying to reach out to those whose votes they seek. Fewer and fewer people are listening, and many Americans are on to them now. 

Part of the reason why the Democrats are so disconnected from ordinary people should be crystal clear - many of these people are the very ones who often oppose or at least question the Woke agenda. By ignoring, and even pillorying these people (the "Deplorables" of Clinton...the implicitly stupid according to Woke activists...), the Democrats made a conscious choice to put Woke ahead of Folk. 

But there are way more Folk than Woke. Trump was happy to pick up the political gems from a crumbling Democratic historical and formerly empathetic political edifice.

Lesson 4 - When you don't make the basic concerns of the People the centre-point of your campaign, they don't vote for you. (One other challenge of politics is to create the illusion that everything you propose is about the People...hello Premier Ford...)

The Characteristics - The Racist, Sexist Bigots: Did Biden decide to get out of the race too late? No one knows, but the rapturous and borderline orgasmic reception that Harris received upon being nominated strongly suggests that she would have been anointed anyway.  

In nominating Harris, the Democratic Party saw a Younger, Black, Indian Woman and thought they could run the electoral table with her by capturing every associated demographic subset. Specifically, she is Black, so they thought that sewed up the Black vote; she is Indian, so they thought that sewed up the Southeast Asian vote; she is a Woman, so that would sew up the female vote; and she Younger, so they thought that they would sew up the Youth vote. 

If this theory of voter preference - that voters don't vote based on personal interests, but based on the colour of their skin, shape of their genitals, and ethnicity - is accurate, then the Democrats should be able to govern the United States of America forever.  

Say hello to President Trump, again. The theory isn't accurate; they could have just asked Kim Campbell. 

Now imagine, for a moment, a political party that catered to White Men; held out that it was The White Guy's Party, and based on putting forward White Male candidates, that party asserted that it would sew up the entire White Guy vote. The words to describe that approach would be Racist and Sexist.

Yup.

Lesson 5 - People mostly vote based on their interests, not their demographic profile.

And...

Lesson 6 - People do not appreciate being told who and what they are by people who don't know them at all.

Now let's look at the Republicans. 

In general, Trump has always been very badly underestimated by his opponents. The only one to take him seriously was Biden - how did that turn out? Clinton and Harris were shocked that they lost to him; they shouldn't have been. 

Trump is a very skilled politician who "reads the room" that is present American sentiments and predilections much better than just about everyone else. 

Reality - love him or hate him, Donald J Trump is the preeminent American personality of this century, so far.

Channeling McLuhan - The Message is the Message - Quick! Name the top three things Harris wanted to do as President!? Crickets...did she even know?

Trump stuck to some simple messages, and just kept repeating them. Off the top of my head...tariffs on China; end the Ukraine war; tax cuts; smaller government; secure the border and expel illegal immigrants. Many voters disagree with what Trump wants to do, but at least they know what much of that actually is.

Lesson 7 - The People want to know what you stand for. Figure out the five big things you want to do, and just keep repeating them over and over whenever you can.  

Channeling Reagan - The Lessor Communicator: Ronald Reagan was famously "The Great Communicator". Trump is a far less capable orator than Reagan, but like him he does understand the need to go to the People to communicate effectively. In Reagan's day, that meant mastering television. Today, it means dominating social media. On that, Trump has no equal in his exploitation of social media in order to get his message across. 

Lesson 8 - The People will only see your message where they congregate. Go to the People if you want to get noticed.

Channeling Truman - Speak Their Language: Truman was famous for speaking plainly to Americans. Trump does the same. His events are boring, tedious and uninspiring, but they are also homey, familiar and strangely comfortable. He speaks as if he is talking directly to each and every member of his audience personally. He may be lying to their faces, but he comes across in a sincere way. His approach shows a tremendous respect for his audience by treating them almost as proverbial "members of the family."

In sum, his folksy style is devastatingly effective, especially with people who have not normally participated in a political process, and who are not used to discerning "political speak." 

Lesson 9 - Speak to the People as they want to be spoken to and as they speak amongst themselves.

Or...

Lesson 10 - If you speak in a disingenuous and distant style designed to cover policy weaknesses, and if you obfuscate while appearing to be answering questions and addressing issues that you may not even understand, the People will think you're a fucking idiot. They literally HATE that shit.

Channeling Orwell - Rage On!: Americans are angry. The anger of this epoch in political history was predicted by George Orwell, who included the phenomenon of "Two Minutes Hate" in his novel, 1984. With reason gone and hate in ascendence, there is an opportunity for politicians who have no qualms about the moral implications of political hatred to exploit the situation. This is Trump, personified.

Is he the baddie?

Those who read this and think Trump is the issue should reflect on the fact that two people attempted to assassinate him during the campaign, and one person came within a hair's breath of actually doing so. He doesn't have a monopoly on hate, he just uses it better than anyone else.

Lesson 11 - Understand the political age in which you live, conduct yourself accordingly, and the People will follow.

.   

2020...Why Does Trump Think He Won?

Trump has never stopped saying that he thought he won the United States presidential election in 2020. The standard response is to state that there were about 60 court challenges to the outcome, and that they almost all failed. Besides that, there is literally no evidence of wide-spread fraud, and none has been produced to date.

Having said that, no one seems to have tried to figure out why he continues to maintain that he won, except to state that he is knowingly lying - which is admittedly normal conduct for him - and that he knows that he lost.

What if he isn't lying, and he actually believe this? Where might this belief come from?

This blog has illustrated that the charges against Trump in Georgia related to election interference are highly questionable. The reason for this is that Trump never stated that he thought he lost the election. Without proving this mental element, charges cannot be made out as no one will be able to show that he has a guilty mind. See here...

https://mewetree.blogspot.com/2024/01/trump-v-raffensperger.html

Let's take a closer look at Georgia in 2020 to try to glean why Trump may still think he won.

On election day in 2020, Trump led Biden by 0.2% in the polls in Georgia, and in 2016, he led Clinton by 4.8%. See here...

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/georgia/trump-vs-harris

We know that polls in the 2016 and 2020 elections were skewed in favour of the Democrats, meaning that they polled about 2% better than their results on election day. Let's look at other "battleground" states from 2020.

In North Carolina, Trump was up only 0.2% on election day, and he won the state by 1.4%. The polls favoured the Democrats by 1.2%.

In Michigan, Biden was up by 5.1% on election day, and he won the state by 2.8%. The polls favoured the Democrats by 2.3%.

In Wisconsin, Biden was up by 6.7% on election day, and he won by only 0.7%. The polls favoured the Democrats by a whopping 6.0%.

In Georgia, Trump was actually ahead in the polls on election day in 2020 by 0.2%. He lost to Biden in the closest election of any state by 0.3%. This means that, unlike elsewhere in the battleground states, the pre-election polls appear to have actually favoured Trump not Biden. 

If Trump has a rationale for his claim that he actually won in 2020, it could be that the outcome in Georgia looks odd. In fact, the result looks like an outlier as it bucked a trend of polling that favoured the Democrats that was apparent throughout the United States.

Trump has constantly maintained that he won Georgia by 200,000 to 300,000 votes. About 5 million people voted there in 2020. The average of 250,000 votes that Trump claims he won over and above the certified result would be about 5% of that vote. This would be on the outer edge of the polling advantage that the Democrats had in most states in the 2020 election, but Wisconsin illustrates that a 4.5% shift between the polls and the election in favour of Trump in Georgia would not be unheard of.

He lost in 2020, but he is not a stupid man. States other than Georgia are not analyzed here, nonetheless there may be more to Trump that pure malevolence. 

Stock Market? Time to Sell...UPDATE!!!

It's been a long time since the editorial board here at mewetree.blogspot.com opined on stock market issues. This is primarily because the board has what is called a "liquidity issue"...it has no liquidity to invest, so this issue has not been front and centre for a long time.

That changes today.

The Shiller's P/E ratio is at 37. 

This measure tracks the historic price to earnings ratio of the S&P 500 stock exchange. Normal is 16. See here...

https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

Buying equities which paid a pittance as a dividend and which therefore had very high P/E ratios was rational in a world of super low interest rates, given that an investor could not do better with bonds. Rates are not low anymore. 

This P/E ratio of 37 is screaming that there will be a pull-back soon, as investors can get an equal or better return on bonds than they can on equities for a given level of risk. It's just math.

Inverted, then Not.

The interest rate curves were inverted for over two years, meaning that long term yields were lower than short term yields. This happens when smart money gets out of equities and into long term bonds in expectation of a market decline. 

A recession and stock market pull-back follows after the inversion ends and the relationship between long and short term yields returns to normal. They returned to normal this month. No one knows when the bad things will happen, but this indicator is 100% accurate. The stock market has never been higher. The good times will end, as they always do.

Buffett Buffet. (Updated - Jan 2, 2025)

Warren Buffet has over $325 Billion in cash or easily convertible assets as of November, 2024. This is a record amount, nearly double the balance at the end of the previous year and more than 400% higher than ten years ago. He would not have this much cash on the sidelines if he thought there was any good place to put it. If he is moving out of the market, you should be too. That cash will be deployed to take advantage of opportunities once prices have declined.

New President. 

Except for Clinton and Trump, the first year of a new President's term in office has seen markets downturns ever since JFK. We don't know who will win next Tuesday, but we do know it will not be Biden - there will be a "new" President. 

If it is Trump, the market pull-back noted above could be delayed, but it will happen - the market fell almost 5% in Trump's second year in office.  

If you are in the stock market, time to think about redeploying to safer assets.

We seek safe harbour!

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Why is Harris Doing So Badly?

The editorial board of mewetree.blogspot.com has predicted a very narrow Harris victory in the 2024 United States presidential election. This was based on her strong showing in public opinion polls right after she received the Democratic Party nomination. 

And then, Kamala Harris and the Democrats happened...

Readers of this blog will note that prior to this the editorial board did think that Donald Trump would "...wipe the floor with Harris if she is nominated." Indeed, it looks like that is exactly what he will do, as he now leads in every single battleground state. 

See here...

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-harris

Real Clear Politics has Trump up by 0.1% in national polling. This is misleading. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential election campaigns, the pollsters proved to be off by about 2 - 3%, with polls being badly skewed in favour of the Democrats. 

For example, just before the vote in 2016, Clinton led Trump by over 4%. On election day, Clinton only got 2.1% more votes than Trump, and he won the Electoral College. In 2020, Biden was ahead by over 7% in the polls on the day of the election, but he only beat Trump by 4.5%. 

If previous pro-Democrat polling bias holds true, Trump is probably ahead of Harris by about 2.5%. With this level of support on election day, Trump will win the election in what could be a landslide, winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

So what happened?

Harris is a terrible candidate. She seemingly cannot answer simple questions with straight-forward answers. Hillary Clinton had the same problem. This is probably because she has been told that if she takes a firm position on anything, she will lose votes. The concept of gaining votes and/or that her refusal to answer questions leaves voters thinking she will not be able to make decisions should she become the President may have not occurred to her.  There is a reason why the press wasn't allowed anywhere near her for the first month of her campaign.

But something else is happening...

The Democrats appear to have slammed up against the sad reality that they don't actually understand at least half of the American population, and their view of the world is unfamiliar to most voters. When they look at that population, they see groups divided by gender, race, age, education level, ethnicity, income level, etc. They don't see actual people, in and of themselves. Most people in America don't see the country that way.

Because they are "class" oriented, the Democrats propose policies designed to buy the votes of these specific groups, with those proposals specifically targeted at those groups. 

For example, they have proposed $25,000 for young people to buy their first home. As well, they would set up a loan initiative allowing Black people to borrow up to $20,000 each toward establishing their first businesses, with the loans guaranteed by the federal government. 

These and similar initiatives are essentially federally-funded bribes targeted to groups whose votes the Democrats believe they own, with the bribes promised to encourage them to go the extra mile and come out to support Harris on November 5th. The $20,000 loan guarantee was proposed owing to Harris's declining standing with Black male voters. If she was not doing worse with this group of people, the loan initiative would not have been proposed, as the Democrats see no utility in proposals such as this other than their ability to buy them votes. 

Let's make this clear - the Democrats often do not have a perspective on how American should be run, outside of this type of targeted policy proposal. For them, much of governance comes down to a class analysis, where "class" is reduced to the characteristics noted above - especially race, gender, sexual preference, and age. Democratic policy is often about class division and political exploitation, not about wise policy in and of itself.

Compare that to what Trump does.

Trump has policy proposals for people and for the entire country, not classes. He probably doesn't give a rat's ass about anyone other than himself, but in providing guidance on what he intends to do if he again gains office, he doesn't break the population down by their characteristics, with the population encompassing each characteristic presumably deserving of different policy proposals, and even different rights. Proposals like ending taxation of tips, stopping illegal immigration and renegotiating free trade agreements are not directed at any identifiable group. Like him or not, he speaks to all Americans as Americans, not to subsets of them.  

The American people may be starting to get it. The waning of support for Harris amongst groups like Black men may suggest that at least some of these people increasingly dislike identity politics, which is the only way that Democrats play the game. They especially won't like being called misogynist, racist, sexist and all the other "ists" that the Democrats use to demonize the people who are part of the groups that they don't like (Whites, men, heterosexuals, religious people, capitalists, etc.) The stupidity of demonizing large and specifically identifiable sections of the population, then asking for their votes, is mindboggling - Biden may have been a way station between the "Deplorables" of Hillary Clinton, and the Woke agenda of Kamala Harris. 

Let's chat about identify, specifically Harris's identity.

Trump appeared before the National Association of Black Journalists in July, and questioned Harris's Black heritage, stating that he had always thought she was Indian as that is how she had presented herself. He was savaged in the left media, which claimed this was evidence of his racism.  

And yet, 20% of Black men would vote for Trump if the election were held today, and he would get 15% of the Black vote overall. In 2020, he only got an estimated 9% of the that vote. The 6% change in his favour could spell the end of the Harris campaign, as it could hand many of the hotly-contested battleground states to Trump. 

While Harris will still get an estimated 85% of the Black vote, one has to wonder if Trump's viscous dig at her heritage has struck a chord with some people - as in, do a significant  minority of Black people actually think that Harris is not really "Black"? (For the record, she is.)

In comparison to her 85% support, 95% of Black voters supported Obama in 2008, and 93% supported him in 2012. That 10% loss of support for Harris amongst Black voters is massive, but is it really inexplicable? 

We need to ask...who is Kamala Harris, really? 

Her failure to show America who she is and what she stands for, instead of focusing on attacking Trump, is slowly destroying her campaign (Note - if someone starts calling their political opponent a "Fascist" who loves Hitler, they have reached the "jump the shark" point of their campaign...it's over.) Even to the extent she has defined herself, many don't like what they see. 

There is a reason why she got no delegates in her 2020 campaign to become the Democratic nominee.

 

 

Trump Fraud Case - Update

The editorial team here at mewetree.blogspot.com previously questioned the validity of the civil fraud case against Trump in this post...

https://mewetree.blogspot.com/2024/02/trumps-fraudulent-fraud-conviction.html

That blog post ended with this prediction...

"This entire charade will be thrown out on appeal, much to the chagrin of Trump haters everywhere."

The Trump civil fraud case has made it to the New York Court of Appeals. Here is how that appeal is faring...

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/26/trump-civil-fraud-appeal-oral-arguments-00181339

The appeals court has questioned how this law, which is a consumer protection law, applies to private business transactions between equally sophisticated parties, where there were no losses on the part of either party - a.k.a. no victims.  

The judges asked if the District Attorney - who ran for office on a promise to go after Donald Trump, personally - had overstepped the intent and scope of the law being applied.

Judges who think this case was kosher wouldn't ask questions like this.

If they throw this fraud case out, and they do it before the election in November, doing so will validate Trump's claim that they judicial system has been set against him. 

Which, of course, is the case.

 

Fake Polls

We need to chat about polls. See here...

https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/pennsylvania/trump-vs-harris

The latest polls for Pennsylvania show a slight Harris lead. But look more closely.

Of the last eight polls up until the Bloomberg poll yesterday, five showed that Harris and Trump were tied, two had Trump ahead by 1% or 2%, and one poll had Harris ahead by 2%.

The Bloomberg poll has Harris ahead by 5%. Real Clear Politics averages the results of polls so a poll result like this skews the results in favour of Harris.

Harris does not have a 5% lead in Pennsylvania. As noted in previous blogs, the editorial team here at mewetree.blogspot.com thinks she will win the state by under 0.5%. But it will not be a landslide, as is suggested by this Bloomberg poll.

So how did this poll come about?

Pollsters will skew results by polling people who they know will favour their own favored candidate. This can be done by polling people in geographic areas known to support the pollster's favourite candidate, or by having less balance to the demographic spread than is optimal, and polling demographic groups that are known to favour their favourite. Finally, when they see results that do not support their preferred line, they simply don't publish the polls. If you see large gaps in the time between the release of polls by a pollster with particular political leaning, you can rest assured that this is because they haven't been able to generate results that suit their candidate or party.

In short, pollsters actually know who likely favours whom in terms of voting preferences and where those people live, so to skew a poll they just make sure to ask those who they know will give them the answers that they want.

To see how easy it is to fake a public opinion poll, see here - this is the classic explanation...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks

The key is this, "...so they don't mention the first five questions, and they publish the last one..."

It's not a matter of "Trust no none!", but it might be a matter of "When things look out of the ordinary and/or look illogical, they are usually just so."

Internet Technology Follies

I have been thinking of doing THIS THING since the start of COVID-19 pandemic.

What is THIS THING that I want to do?

I want to track how utterly incompetent IT actually is. How often it actually fails. How utterly idiotic are many of its security requirements. How many of the "cures" for IT issues are comparable "chicken noodle soup" remedies passed on by our grandmothers. How it masquerades as the essential connector and facilitator of the 21st century, but how it is really still in the stone age. 

When you think of IT, do not think of the Bethesda Medical Institute. Think of witch doctors prescribing bleeding by leech, or a range of herbal remedies for things like cancer or broken bones.

They don't want you to know this...

IT is in the Middle Ages when it comes to the technology. This fact is camouflaged behind the knowledge that we, the users, don't understand the technology.  If we did, we would stand back aghast at the idiocy and incompetence set out before us.

Let's start...you will see a daily log of IT issues below.

September 19, 2024.

Issue #1: I work in a secure building, on a secure laptop, using secure internet supplied to service the same secure building. I arrived at work, and tried to log into the secure internet system using the secure laptop. I provided my two different passwords, via two different access portals. The passwords were accepted. Then I got this message, which is a message I get about half the time I try to log in...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Why was my access denied? The notice doesn't explain. When you call IT services, what do you think they say? Well, I think we all know what they say, now don't we...

"Have you tried shutting your computer off and starting again?"

Translation...

"Have you tried wormwood root for your tummy ache, or maybe a lavender enema?"

Reality - they don't know what is wrong. They have no clue. 

Emperor IT is walking down the road. Have you noticed that he is naked?

Issue #2: I was just asked to approve something in the internal IT system where I work. To do that, you need to log in via the Internet. The internal site will not function on Microsoft Edge. It will only work on Google.  

The place I work has hundreds of thousands of employees, and a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. And yet, it's internal approvals system does not work on one of the world's top internet service platforms.  

You can't make this shit up.

September 20, 2024.

In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

September 22, 2024.

In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

September 23, 2024.

I met someone for lunch at a restaurant. My cellphone simply stopped working - no access to the Internet. I did not change any of the Settings. 

I shut it off and started it again. That didn't work. Some time later, it just accessed the Internet again, also for no apparent reason. 

I have no idea why it stopped. I have no idea why it started again. We met for lunch in the middle of a medium sized Western city, so access to the Internet was not the issue.

What if automobiles operated like this - sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. Would we then realize how desperately incompetent the auto industry would have to be to build such occasionally useless crap?

September 24, 2024.

I uploaded a Word document this morning. 

I have received at least fifteen "Upload failed" notifications, even though I successfully uploaded the document. 

I have also received about fifteen notifications telling me to save the document that the computer says I didn't upload!

These notifications reduced my productivity by about 10%, as I had to stop working to deal with the notifications, one after the other. 

I had no idea how to stop the notifications, which were coming at regular intervals. 

"The new definition of 'insanity' is responding to the same IT notifications over and over again, expecting that they will somehow miraculously end. They won't end.” 

 

September 25, 2024.

Issue #1: I uploaded a Microsoft Presentation. I started working on it, and wanted to save it to my computer as a draft and rename it.  I could not save it unless I first uploaded it to the Microsoft Cloud.  The only way to rename it was to send it to myself and save it from the email.

Why? Why not let me just "save as" and create a different presentation? Who is in charge of this presentation, me or Microsoft?

I found a way, but this was irritating and a total waste of my time.

Issue #2:  I was on a Teams meting and had to leave early. I looked for the "Chat" button so that I could inform the group of my intention to leave. There was no "Chat" button. I had to interrupt the speaker to advise that I was going to depart.  

Where as the button? Was I using an older version of Teams? I don't know. I tested Teams this morning; there is a Chat button again.

Imagine that you owned a car that had windows that rolled down or not depending on who knows what!? One day the window rolls down, the next day it doesn't. Would you buy that car? This "optional functionality" is 100% normal in the world of IT.

September 26, 2024.

In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

Note that I did log in successfully yesterday, when outside of the secure building using a non-secure internet.

Yup...Yup.

October 1, 2024.

In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

October 3, 2024.

I went for a walk and had to go to the bathroom at some point. I stopped in at a local donut shop, and sat to do my business. I put my cell phone in my pocket, and was surprised to hear my good buddie chatting with me in my pocket. I pulled the phone out only to see him looking at me in a video call.

It turns out that I had pocket called five people when I put the phone in my pocket. The screen is so sensitive that literally any slight touch sets the apps off and running. You have to work hard for your phone to keep this shit from happening.

October 4, 2024.

Issue #1: In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

Issue #2: I took a day off yesterday, so I did not log in.  

Oh oh!

I just got partially into the grid - see Issue #1. The file saving system is booting up every minute asking me to save files that are not opened and that I did not work on. When I close that screen, a second screen comes up saying "Upload failed".  I have not tried to upload anything as yet.

October 7, 2024.

I tried to access two web sites today based on emails sent to me by the institutions that own and operate the web sites. The log in request asked for my email address. Both said that they did not recognize my email address - the very same email address to which they had sent the requests.

Is IT really this fucking stupid?

Yes.

I still haven't been able to log in.

October 8, 2024.

In secure building, on secure laptop, trying to log into secure internet, both passwords accepted, after restarting my computer, made two attempts...

"Login denied. You have hit the DlftAccessPolicy - Connection terminated."

Yup.

Trump - Eating Dogs and Creating Diversions

The debate is over.  

The Left is all atwitter about Trump's claim that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs off the streets of Ohio. CNN won't stop talking about it...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/politics/haitian-immigrants-springfield-false-rumor-what-to-know/index.html

Did Trump do this on purpose?

For years, Trump Tweeted-out things that were borderline crazy. The Left focused on each and every one of these completely irrelevant utterances, while being seemingly blind to what was really going on. 

While they were mostly distracted, Trump stuffed the US court system with Conservative judges. He gave massive tax cuts to his buddies. He mismanaged the deadliest pandemic in 100 years. He moved forward borrowing at such a level that it eventually resulted in a negative assessment of US debt. He repealed reams of environmental and other necessary regulations.

In short, he used the cover of the Left's predictable responses to his regular irrational outbursts to remake much of American legal and fiscal life.

He said that Haitians eat dogs. Reality - not even one of his hard-core supporters cares about this. They hate the Democrats so much that if he actually ate a dog while on stage in the debate, they would still stay with him. 

The Independents might be swayed against Trump. These people will decide the election, but as of this morning, Trump would win the Electoral College if the election were to be held today.

https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/president/2024/no-toss-up/electoral-college (see note at bottom)

Trump is constantly talking about bread and butter issues. Those are the ones that Americans are mostly concerned about, especially Inflation, which is an issue that affects literally every single voter.

Unless the Democrats stop focusing on what this writer thinks are Trump's carefully crafted dodges, and start communicating how they will improve the lives of average Americans, they will lose this election.  

On that, Harris has just started crisscrossing America talking to groups about her vision and taking actual questions. This welcome change could not have come a moment too soon.

Watch Pennsylvania. The state has flipped back and forth from Biden/Harris to Trump eight times since March, and three times in the last week! 

The editorial board of mewetree.blogspot.com has predicted a narrow Harris victory in November based on her winning Pennsylvania by less that 0.5% of the vote. In fact, that state just flipped back to Harris...WHILE THIS BLOG WAS BEING WRITTEN! 

The URL included above now shows Harris winning the Electoral College!

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