Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The Big Winner


Election Day has come and gone, and I'll admit to getting a little caught up the madness for the last couple days. I always tell myself I won't compulsively watch the election coverage on television, and this year I have once again broken my promise. Last night was a huge and total victory for a man who many people have mocked, insulted and written off as a guy who just got lucky one time. I personally had a lot of faith in him, so it was quite gratifying to see him completely and utterly vindicated. So, congratulations, Nate Silver. You were right on the money. The number crunching nerds have triumphed over the crusty old pundits.

Of all the big networks, Fox News certainly had the most entertaining coverage over the last few days. The political equivalent of the reality distortion field seemed to have engulfed the network, with various talking heads popping up on Nov 5 to explain that, yes, Romney was definitely going to win this election, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Naturally, we've been treated to all sorts of meltdowns and Twitter freakouts the last 2 days. Probably the guy who got the hardest slap on the face from reality was human carbuncle Dick Morris, a man so completely out of touch that he was predicting a huge landslide for Romney up to the last minute. Election night itself, of course, also treated us to the sad spectacle of of Karl Rove freaking out, and disputing Fox's call of Ohio for Obama. Cognitive dissonance at its saddest.

Of course, now guys like Morris are blaming Hurricane Sandy and New Jersey governor Chris Christie for creating some kind of last minute upset in the election. This seems pretty absurd, as polls indicated the likelihood of an Obama win had been steadily increasing well before Sandy. Furthermore, according to Nate Silver, the odds of Obama winning never dropped below 62%, even in the aftermath of the first debate.

Here in the crazy state of California, we still have one hotly contested US House seat in the air. Supposedly, it will be "days, or even weeks" before the final vote is decided. And, in a move that might seem pretty weird to people outside the US, we rejected a measure that required genetically modified food to be labeled as such. I guess we just don't want to know what we are eating.

Oh, yes, on my Halloween post, I thought I was being unique and special by posting that crazy "It Came in the Night" song. Surely only Kenneth Anger fans or record collector geeks know that song, right? Yet, it so happens that weirdo punk rockers The Black Lips created a Halloween mixtape for frickin' Vice Magazine. And guess what the last track was?

(Shakes fist) DAMNED HIPSTEEEERRRRRSS!!!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

My wife turned on the tv for some election coverage while I was out of the room and inadvertently had it on fox news. While I was watching they were showing results for states in the electoral college and the announcer was proclaiming that Romney had won the state. I forget which one. And he kept repeating Romney has taken the state. Yet inexplicably the graphic for said state on their screen showed Obama 54 percent Romney 46 percent throughout the entire segment. I was like WTF are they talking about? Then I realized it was on Fox news and changed the channel. Yes I put great faith in the number crunchers. When some of the most respected statisticians were like Silver were saying Obama had 80 percent chance of winning election a couple of months ago I figured Obama was going to win. Not saying people shouldn't vote, but that unbiased science without political spin (such as Slvers math) seemed to carry a lot of weight in my book. I would have been fairly shocked to see a Romney win with those kind of numbers.

Anonymous said...

If it makes you feel any better, the Black Lips haven't been relevant in a few years now.

Kamiboy said...

I guess all none western nations can breath a sigh of relief now that there are less likely to be any wars started against them by a certain monger. Well, at least not for the next 4 years.

matt.mcneely said...

I thought The Black Lips' Arabia Mountain was a very fine pop album that was sort of overlooked last year. If their sound has gone away from the scuzzy gutter punk of years passed in favor of landing accessible fuzz-pop on the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack, I don't necessarily count that as a bad thing.

But yeah, it's increasingly difficult to have unique taste as the world shrinks due to the internet.

Dr. Sparkle 2020.

Doctor Sparkle said...

Hey, Anon - Chrontendo is a celebration of things that haven't been relevant in quite a few years!

Truthfully, I've always been more of a Black Dice fan than a Black Lips fan.

Most of the conservative pundits seemed to have simply taken the poll figures and said "You have to add 5-7% to Romney's numbers. Because Mittmentum." Unskewed Polls is (was) a fine example of partisan data manipulation.