Free Republic

Readers of my Post piece predicting Donald Trump will win and Republicans will have a good night in congressional contests may wonder how I derived the numbers underlying those calls. Here I examine that in detail and show why getting the balance between Democrats and Republicans among voters — partisan preference — is the key unlocking the polls. Polling’s theoretical accuracy relies on the statistics underlying the relation between a random sample and the broader population it’s drawn from. But surveyors can no longer get truly random samples because cellphones and the Internet have changed how people live. Pollsters have...

Filmmaker and activist Michael Moore is forecasting Democrats to keep control of Congress with a blue “tsunami” in this year’s midterms. With Election Day just two weeks away, Moore — who accurately predicted former President Trump’s 2016 win in the face of many pollsters who said otherwise — is anticipating a Democratic wave following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. “On November 8th, 2022, an unprecedented tsunami of voters will descend upon the polls en masse — and nonviolently, legally, and without mercy remove every last stinking traitor to our Democracy,”...

A newly released international study debunks climate models on global warming that forecast extreme rainfall and drought tied to temperature swings, casting doubt on disaster scenarios promoted by the climate-change movement. The study in the journal Nature published Thursday examining Northern Hemisphere rainfall data going back 1,200 years found that today’s climate models were frequently wrong on predicting extreme rain and drought. In the 20th century, for example, higher-than-average temperatures failed to produce wet-dry extremes, which contradicts the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s consensus that global warming will make dry areas drier and wet areas wetter. The scientists

Best Recession Forecaster: Robert F. DieliJanuary 12, 2012Jeff Miller Since last May I have been reviewing the record of those who forecast the business cycle. I developed a stringent list of requirements, "Jeff's Acid Test," and I frequently invited nominations. Here were the stated requirements: * Openness -- with the potential for peer review Small number of input variables. Most people do not understand that "small is good." If you have a lot of variables, it is easy to do back-fitting on a few cases. Beware. * Real-time performance. This means that you do not go back in history doing...

Tsunami airglow signature could lead to early detection system Researchers at the University of Illinois have become the first to record an airglow signature in the upper atmosphere produced by a tsunami using a camera system based in Hawaii. It preceded the tsunami by one hour, suggesting that the technology could be used as an early-warning system in the future.

This is one creepy video. As you may or may not know, there is a flu outbreak in Ukraine. An Israeli microbiologist in Los Angeles predicted the outbreak and claimed it was a bio weapon and was hunted down in his car, gassed and tased after a robot smashed out his car windows. You can't make this stuff up.

Edwards predicting big second-quarter drop-offBy Sam Youngman June 22, 2007 Former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) is expecting a significant drop-off in campaign contributions for the second quarter that might look like a pittance compared to the dollar amounts Democratic rivals Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) are expected to raise. Though it would not be unheard of for a campaign to try and lowball its fundraising expectations, an e-mail to supporters from senior adviser Joe Trippi, of Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, tells Edwards’s fans the campaign is two-thirds of the way to its goal of $9...

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Winter temperatures are rising steadily across the European Alps but snow volumes have varied wildly, making it harder to assess the risk of avalanches, a Swiss climate expert said on Friday. Climatologist Christoph Marty said the cold winds and snow that greeted more than 2,000 members of the world's political and business elites in Davos this week masked a clear warming trend in the region, where winter had a very mild start. A reduction in snow cover generally means that the danger of avalanches decreases, but Marty said increased variability of snowfall made it hard to...

  Digital RulesPredicting the Future: Part IIRich Karlgaard, 02.13.06 I graduated from college in 1976. That was 30 years ago, the same 30-year gap experienced by Marty McFly in the movie Back To the Future (see Jan. 30, p. 33). Let's fire up Doc Brown's DeLorean time-traveler and return to 1976. But would we really want to go? We'd be reminded that the prevailing view of the world in 1976 was: • The planet was severely overpopulated and would soon run out of natural resources. • The age of entrepreneurship was dead and was being replaced by the conglomerated...