As the campaign winds down and feeling start running high, people tend to be more unguarded in what they say. We thus witness high levels of irrational hatred of Barack Obama that would be truly a wonder to behold if it were not also scary to see that some people live in an alternate reality where manifestly self-contradictory views can be held in the same mind with complete lack of awareness. [Read more…]

One of the puzzles of the current presidential election has been the divergence between the national polls (which indicate a close race with the lead fluctuating between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) and the predictions of the poll aggregators based on state polling which have had Obama showing a fairly steady lead that would result in around 300 electoral votes. [Read more…]

Those of you who follow politics closely may have noticed a curious feature about the current state of discussion about the presidential election.

One is that the national polls and the so-called objective fundamentals models favored by political scientists show a close race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama as to who will get the majority of the national vote. [Read more…]

In my post on the Cuban missile crisis, I spoke about how the myths that were perpetuated in dealing with that crisis, of America being successful because it was rigid and unyielding and forced the other side to back down, has cast a long shadow over how to deal with future crises. [Read more…]