meditations

Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy

Today, one way or another, the country turns in a new direction after eight badly wasted years. Bush’s belief (a la Harry Truman) that he’ll be vindicated by history may give him comfort, but the passage of time will show it’s about as realistic as his 2000 campaign promises to be a “uniter” who would pursue a “humble” foreign policy.

At the same time, I doubt he’ll go down as the worst president ever. Awful yes, but worst no. Once you start using a superlative history sets some pretty tough benchmarks and I think the descendants of Buchanan and Franklin Pierce would take exception (a group that includes Bush himself via Barbara Bush nee Pierce).

A Contrarian Thought

So I took it easy this beautiful Sunday morning — amazingly for November in KC, the sun is shining and the temps are headed towards 80 degrees — and watched MSNBC and a couple of the talking heads shows. One common theme, over and above the general bloviation and predictions and posturing, was that there is going to be a huge turnout on Tuesday and that is to Obama’s advantage. Indeed a few people said he would need high turnout to win.

Okay, so essentially everyone who knows me considers me a contrarian, if not an outright curmudgeon. F.I.N.E. I’ll play to type and say that this time around the analysts have it largely if not completely backwards. If we start hearing that turnout is less than expected on Tuesday that’s “edge to Obama.” This year is fundamentally different from prior ones in a few key ways

1. By Tuesday over a third of the people will already have voted, and based on all the surveys that vote strongly favors Obama — I’ve heard figures as high as 60-40 although that seems optimistic. Hence, Obama is running up a big lead in key states and the fewer people who vote later the fewer the possibilities of McCain coming back.
2. By all counts Obama has the better ground game and is more likely to be getting his people to the polls on Tuesday. Moreover — and this is well into the “boggles the mind” category — the McCain campaign has been taking money out of GOTV efforts to increase advertising in states like Pennsylvania and Iowa. Apparently his some of his field people have been told they’ll have to foot their own air fare, housing and car rentals.
3. Every poll has Obama way ahead in terms of how enthusiastic and motivated his supporters are.

All this suggests to me that if turnout is less than the record expected on the 4th it will be because disaffected Republicans either chose to stay home or, on seeing long lines at the polls (long but still not record that is) decided they had a better way to spend a few hours than standing in line for a candidate who doesn’t enthuse them.

So perhaps it’s just my contrarian nature, but that’s how I see it.

UPDATE: So I caught This Week with George Stephanopoulis late in the day and on their roundtable they did indeed point out that this point heavy turnout works more to McCain’s advantage than Obama’s. Makes me a little more certain I got it right.

Then again, each and every one of them predicted an Obama win with, if I remember right, 348 being the lowest estimate for his EV total, and that was from Matt Dowd who said it should be considered a “floor.” We can only hope.

A single paragraph summary of the McCain Campaign

From the Poor Man via Andrew Sullivan...

Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties.

Amzingly, I think they stole this from Jodi's mother.

New Digs

One of the really great things that has happened in my life is that in the course of relocating from Seattle I got to realize a “life dream” and bought a really special historic home. Mind you, I still miss Seattle in a lot of ways, particularly my friends, family, and favorite restaurants. (BTW, the best restaurant in Seattle is Nell’s, which is on the east side of Greenlake. Check it out when next you’re in town.)

But the house, which turned 100 this year, fills me with pride and I don’t plan to ever give it up, at least so long as I’m hale enough to navigate the stairs and maintain it. The architecture (externally) is Jacobean, which is sometimes called English Baronial. The inside is very much Arts & Craft. I’l talk more about it in upcoming posts — with several little renovation projects underway the house is much on my mind — but for now will just post a picture.

Back to Blogging

So since the start of the year a friend of mine has been encouraging me to start making entries in this blog again. That’s definitely something which had already been on my mind as, particularly with the upcoming election there have been a lot of thoughts I’ve been wanting to share. But I held off for a while, in part because for the first six months of the year all I would have done is rant about Hillary Clinton, and for the last four all I would have done is rant about Sara Palin (well... to be fair, McCain would have come in for a little ranting as well). Thankfully, in a few days that will all be behind us — unless McCain really does “have them just where we want ‘em” — and I can focus on more positive things. Like the housing crisis!

But there really are a lot of good things going on in my life and I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts on more than a few subjects including, yes, the housing crisis.

ROTFL

Thanks to Kevin Drum for pointing me to an absolutely hilarious post by Deepak Chapra today on the Huffington Post.  The initial chuckles swelled to full-fledged ROTFL when I read through the comments. Favorite response:

" Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.

I think I think, therefore I think I am."

Somehow that just belongs on this site!

More seriously... as a practicing (if only occasionally) theoretical physicist, Chopra's post is just a particularly ludicrous example of people appropriating technical terms, in this case both from  physics and philosophy, they ill understand --- I'm trying to be kind here --- to promote their agenda. At least Chopra does little harm. I find the tendency far more infuriating, and dangerous,  when practiced by politicians and dim-bulb corporate executives.

Amid all the ugliness...

My last couple posts have focused on some of the uglier aspects of life in the Pacific Northwest, but today a quick visit to the Seattle Times web site reminded me of why it's such a special place to live. Here's a stunning image of Mt. St. Helens undergoing a minor (well... not so minor) eruption. Click here to see the full sized version, which is even more spectacular.

More on Infospace

Following up on my previous post, there were a couple of final twists today as the Seattle Times investigative report on the wreck that was Infospace came to a close.  First is the almost unbelievable irony that when Naveen Jain was finally brought to heel for his multitude of questionable actions, the SEC got involved... by filing a friend of the court brief on Jain's behalf! Whoa, it's like The Sixth Sense or some other convoluted film, "I didn't see that one coming."

The final bizarre aspect (of many) to the story is the ongoing success of "bad old Infospace" --- as opposed to the "good new Infospace" run by Jim Voelker --- at keeping their dirty laundry under lock and key. As this article details, the jurist in key cases against Infospace,  King County Superior Court Judge Sharon Armstrong, consistently allowed Infospace to keep their documents in the case confidential. At times it seemed that Armstrong had evolved into an advocate for the company, and her logic to protect the company was extremely tortured. For example

Armstrong had ruled that many of the records were protected by attorney-client privilege and should be sealed. But the Washington Supreme Court said the privilege was lost once such documents were filed in court and used by her to make a decision.

Well... Uhh... yeah. I'm not a lawyer, but that's just basic case law, and her decision was overturned by the Washington State Supreme Court 9-0.

There's lots more along these lines, and you really should look at the entire article. I've got a feeling there's still a lot going on here that hasn't seen the light of day.

A Bad Day in Emerald City

Even though I've relocated to the Midwest, I still find time almost every day to catch up on the Seattle news via the internet. Seattle is one of the few cities in the US that still has two active (and competing) daily papers, and both the Times and the PI have web sites, fairly good ones actually after recent upgrades.

Most days the news from latteland is fairly dull... the Sonics are winning, the weather is variable, the Mariners have hope, Microsoft is less nimble than it used to be, etc. But today, today was special. A very cloudy day for the Emeral City.

First, realizing they had completely screwed up their case, the NCAA and the University of Washington folded early this morning and settled their case with Rick Neuhisel.  I'm not sure how much play this has gotten outside of the Pacific Northwest, but the quick version is that Rick Neuhisel is a slick, self-promoting, pathological liar of a human being. I fell for it initially, and was overjoyed when the UW lured him away from Colorado. But then there were recruitment scandals, lies about interviewing with the San Francisco 49ers, and further lies about his involvement in a high stakes March Madness pool in violation of NCAA rules. By the time the UW fired him my opinion had turned completely. Of course... never bet against the ineptitude of the NCAA and and college administrators. Neuhisel filed a wrongful termination suit, and while the facts presented  in court clearly showed him to be  a --- let's all say it together --- slick, self-promoting, pathological liar of a human being, it also turns out that the NCAA violated it's own by-laws in how they investigated him and, by presenting the wrong version of the by-laws in court, set themselves up for a mistrial. The UW, paragons of virtue by comparison, apparently chose to "wing it" when firing the most expensive employee in state history, kept inadequate records, and had a medium level employee issue a memo (which Neuhisel probably never saw ahead of time) condoning his participation in the gambling pool.  If Dante were still alive, he'd revise Inferno to have an extra ring of hell for all involved.

Compared to this, the news that Boeing fired Harry Stonecipher for having an affair with an executive at the company is small potatoes.  Still, it's another black eye for one of Seattle's most famous companies, and I suspect the worst of this story is yet to come out.

But none of this compares to the ongoing slow-motion train wreck that is the Seattle Times investigative report of Infospace during the dot-com bubble. As a senior Seattle technology person, I was well aware of Infospace and the reputation it had during the boom. Every serious IT professional I met suspected things weren't right there and wouldn't consider working at the place.  Moreover, just from reading his interviews in the papers it was obvious that founder Naveen Jain was (you all know where this is going) a slick, self-promoting, pathological liar of a human being. Later, I got to learn in far more detail just how bad things were, as I worked at several companies with ex-Infospace employees. The stories they told left me speechless --- and as my friends can tell you, that doesn't happen too often --- but none of this prepared me for the details coming out now that the Times has access to all the court documents, having filed (and won) a lawsuit to get them. Today's remarkable revelation wasn't that corporate executives bent the rules to cash in their stock options before the house of cards collapsed --- in our post-Worldcom existence that was long ago assumed ---  it's that one of the first and most egregious sinners was Ellen Alban, the house counsel for the company. Truly this was a company without a conscience.

Come to think of it... Dante would have to write an entire second volume of Inferno just to  handle these guys.

Not Ready for Prime Time

My Jump the Shark post a couple days ago got me thinking about my favorite television shows over the years. My tastes are far enough out of the mainstream that a large portion of the shows I really enjoyed can't be found even on 300+ channel DirectTV. Still, bit by bit, some of them have become available on DVD. Last year, for example, I cycled through the episodes of The Prisoner, the cult classic, years ahead of its time, from 1968. 

If there's one show I'd like to see come out on DVD (and I'd instantly put my money where my mouth is) it would be Action, the surreal comedy about the film industry starring Jay Mohr and Illeana Douglas.  Irreverent and profane, it's easily the funniest thing I've ever seen on TV, but also was completely inappropriate for network prime time. I can't imagine what the executives at FOX were thinking; they should have left the show to HBO or some other premium channel, where it could nurture a mature audience in safety. Instead they cancelled what was arguably the best show on television after only 13 episodes (only 8 or so of which had even aired at the time, the others weren't seen until FX decided to do an encore presentation of the series).  Meanwhile, laugh-track driven pablum like Friends clogs up the airwaves.