The US Presidential Election 2008
On November 4, 2008 the people of the United States will elect a president. The choice is Barack Hussein Obama or John McCain. The election is a particularly important election because of the global economic meltdown, the stock market crash, and the potential blowup of the mideast conflict. The next president will be burdened with one crisis after another. Problem solving strategies that were successful in the past will no longer work. Strength and having the right set of values will be most important.
One of two possible events will occur on November 4, 2008. Either Obama will be elected president or McCain will be elected president. Since there are only two possible events, we decided to put the same systematic and consistent effort to explore in Torah codes the possible event of Obama becoming president and the possible event of McCain becoming president. Our exploration is not in terms of a single table, but in terms of multiple coordinated tables, a network of tables. This kind of exploration has been done implicityl and incompletely with other historical events on which we have worked. These prior studies can be found on this website.
One of the events we explore will happen; one will not. We would like to understand what is the pattern in the coordinated Torah code tables that distinguish those tables associated with an event that happens from a potential event that does not happen. Our exploration, as it proceeds, will be publicly documented on our websites. We will be examining test statistics that measure the relatedness of networks of Torah code tables. Technical discussions of our research, as they are completed, will be found in our website torah_code.org. Sets of tables identified to be statistically significant networks of related tables will be shown on this website.
The Structure Of An Event
We begin by explaining the structure of an event and how it relates to a methodology for discovering Torah code tables related to an event.
A systematic Torah code exploration must proceed with some understanding of what are the components of an event and how these components relate to the Torah code exploration methodology.
In general, an event has a topic and who, what, where, when, and how components. The topic component usually coincides with one or more of the who, what, where when and how components. Each simple table is constructed using one or more key words from the topic component combined with one or more key words from one of the who, what, where, when, and how components not involved in the topic. More complex tables are constructed using key words from the topic component combined with key words from more than one of the who, what, where, when and how components.
To decide for any particular event exactly what these components are requires subjective choice, choices sometimes not even fully consciously recognized by the experimenter. Here we will be as complete and explicit about our a priori choices as possible.
The what component of this event is President. The where component of this event is the United States. The when component of this event is November 4, 2008. The when component has a subcomponent as the date, November 4, and a subcomponent as the year, 2008. The how component of an is the enabling means or instrument through which the event happens. For this event the means is being elected. For the Obama event the who component is Obama. For the McCain event the who component is McCain. We choose the topic component to be the who component and the what component.
This give us a structure by which to explore tables associated with these two possible events. Each table must have the key words of the topic: Who and what. Therefore, for this event we can construct the 15 possible categories of tables. These are listed in the table below. We will explore all 15 categories of tables. Each of these categories will have some key word set combination yielding a best table. That best table will have a p-value. It is this p-value that we will record.
P-values
| Who What | ||
| 1 | Where | |
| 2 | When Date | |
| 3 | When Year | |
| 4 | How | |
| 5 | Where When Date | |
| 6 | Where When Year | |
| 7 | Where How | |
| 8 | When Date Year | |
| 9 | When Date How | |
| 10 | When Year How | |
| 11 | Where When Date Year | |
| 12 | Where When Date How | |
| 13 | Where When Year How | |
| 14 | When Date Year How | |
| 15 | Where When Date Year How |
Key Word Choices
The Who Component
For Obama's name, there seems to be consistent agreement on its spelling: ברק אובמה. For McCain's name, it seems that the most frequent spelling is גון מקיין. However, it is not infrequent for the media to use the spelling מקין. If we want to do a more complete experiment we could include the spelling with a single yod. But actually our initial thoughts were to spell the name phonetically using the spellings of phonetically similar syllables of biblical Hebrew words. In that case, the spelling would be מקאין, the ain sound being pronounced like the Hebrew word אין. However, the matter of the spelling of McCain in Hebrew is not so simple. A native Hebrew speaker would look at the spelling מקאין and instead of pronouncing McCain, would pronounce it MeKayn, which is the wrong pronunciation. Therefore, we take the route open to the least criticism and use the most frequently occuring spelling.
We chose to use four forms for each name: the last name, the last name preceded by the initial of the first name, and the first and last name as separate key words, and the first and last name, concatenated together as one key word.
The What Component
For the what component, we use President, נשיא. The other possible choice would have been election. We reasoned that election is the means to the what. So election will go with the how component.
The How Component
How does a person become president? By the process of being elected. In English, a noun oriented language, that process is called an election. But for the how component, we chose the process itself, in the verb form, using all tenses: is elected, was elected, or will be elected. For the Hebrew root בחר, is elected and was elected have the same conjugation נבחר. Hence, there are only two choices of key words for the how component.
The Who Component
The where component is US. Its abbreviation in Hebrew is ארהב, literally the abbreviation for land of the convenant. Had we wished to be more complete, we could have used some additional forms, For example we could have included בארהב, meaning in the US or the form של ארהב, meaning of the US. However, in these experiments we chose only the basic form.
The When Component
The when component is the date and year. The year is clear. The election takes place on November 4, 2008, which corresponds to the Hebrew year 5769.
We use in the experiment
what is now for us the standard four forms 5769, in 5769, (5)769, in (5)769,
התשסט,
בהתשסט,
תשסט בתשסט,
respectively.
For the date we had a choice: should we use the date of the election, the date of the
inauguration, or both dates. We chose to use the date of the election. November 4, 2008
corresponds to the Hebrew date of the 6th of Cheshvon. We used the standard three ways
in which this date is most commonly written: Cheshvon 6, 6th of Cheshvon, on Cheshvon 6
ו חשון, בו חשון,
ו בחשון, respectively.