Follow this link to the AP story in the Worcester T & G.  I imagine it was the T & G that chose the headline. The story was written on the trading day which closed before the polls in Massachusetts closed.

The Dow Jones Industrial average is down 165 points as I write this during the first trading session after the election.  I wonder if the T & G is sticking with their theory that the election affects the market.

Perhaps the market is worried that Scott Brown will accomplish the spending cuts he promised and the economy will dive into a tailspin because of it.

Of course all these explanations for why the market does what it does is pure confabulation.  By confabulation, I mean A psychological term denoting explaining of imaginary patterns in events by the invention of fictitious details.

According to Benoit Mandelbrot’s analysis, the patterns in stock market behavior are made up of fractals which are no patterns at all.

Follow this link to the New York Times column that discusses a sociological study to find out if and why academy is oriented toward the liberal side of the political spectrum.

The study is by Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse. One conclusion they reach is that certain jobs get typecast so that different people choose different careers based on this typecasting.

The column ends with a quote.

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, he said, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.

One might also note that conservatives might prefer the higher salaries in the business world to the salaries in academia.

One possible reason why The United States is losing its competitive advantage in industry is that some of the brightest students get lured into Finance and Law because of the higher salaries than even Engineering or Science let alone the Liberal Arts.

Follow this link to the page with suggestions on how to help.

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I post the the link to his inspirational Letter From the Birmingham Jail.

I have heard about the letter, but this is the first opportunity that I have had to actually read it.

It was sent to me in a request for aid to Haiti from Progressives For Haiti. As with all things like this that I post, this link is only for informational purposes.  Of course you decide whether or not to follow the link.  If you do follow the link, you decide what to do in response to the information you find there.

Follow this link to the story posted on the McClatchyDC web site.

This just adds to the story in my previous post Dire Situation In Yemen.

I never thought I could imagine it, but now I can.  Someday, I can see President Obama standing before a press conference saying, “Why do they hate us so?”

The news story finally hit me over the head with the obvious.  The attack on the U.S. Navy ship Cole, was perpetrated in Yemen.  That I knew.  It just didn’t strike me forcefully enough how long has been our record of trouble with Yemen, how connected this was with Gitmo prisoners from Yemen, and the al-Qaida bomb plot hatched in Yemen. Previously, I had carelessly said that al-Qaida has moved their operations from Afghanistan/Pakistan to Yemen. The point is that they have had an operation in Yemen for a long time. They didn’t just move it there.

The discussion in the Coakley/Brown/Kennedy debate is sounding better and better on Coakley’s part.  Let me take up where I left off in a previous post with David Gergen’s question.

Gergen:

Would you then send troops into Yemen where al-Qaida is?

Coakley:

No, That’s exactly the point.  This is not about sending troops everywhere we think al-Qaida may be or where they are training. We have all kinds of resources at our disposal including CIA, our allies who work with us. The focus should be getting the appropriate information on individuals who are trained who represent a threat to us and use the force necesary to go after those individuals.

34:30

Brown:

Let me explain once again what the mission is. The mission is to make sure that the Taliban and al-Qaida do not join forces, move on Pakistan, get nuclear weapons, and export them around the world number 1. And to think that al-Qaida is not everywhere we’re talking about and we should not be going and addressing these very real concerns is naive.

Coakley:

I think it is naive to think that we have the troops to send everywhere and they are the best way to go after people who are terrorists who disappear into the night  who do trainings and who get on planes frankly with bombs in their shoes and other pieces of clothing.

Maybe we need Martha Coakley to go to Washington to explain a better way to fight this war with al-Qaida in a way that does not build an even larger force of terrorists who hate us.

In the video below, President Obama explains why we should volunteer for and support Martha Coakley.

Follow this link to the request from the President for action on our part.

Monday night I made calls from a phone bank in Worcester to urge voters to go to the polls and vote for Martha Coakley. As many of my friends may know, I normally do not really like to use the telephone. I made this exception, because I thought it was that important. These phone banks continue until the election in case you want to give it a try too.

Follow this link to the commentary by Mark W. Lowenthal posted on the McClatchyDC web site.

Mark M. Lowenthal is the president of the Intelligence & Security Academy. From 2002-2005, he was the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production.

He makes the point that I have made several times that fixing the failure to analyze massive amounts of data is not done by increasing the amount of data.

Our efforts to get more data remind me of an old Sesame Street routine.

Customer:  I’ll have bacon and eggs and orange juice for breakfast.

Server: We don’t have orange juice.

Customer: Then I’ll have cereal and orange juice

Server: We don’t have orange juice.

Customer: Then I’ll have pancakes and orange juice

Server: We don’t have orange juice

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I first posted the link to the final debate video in my post on this blog titled Final Debate in Massachusetts Senatorial Special Election.

On the Worcester T & G message board, I got into a discussion about something that Coakley said during the debate.

The anti-Coakley crowd pounced on what they thought was a big gaffe. We argued over exactly what she said, but until this morning I had not understood exactly how good her comment actually was.

The conversation with the moderator, David Gergen went something like this (as well as I could transcribe it):

Coakley: If the goal was and the mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists, we supported that. I supported that goal. They’re gone. They are not there any more. They are in Yemen, apparently Pakistan. Let’s focus our efforts in where al-Qaida is and not …

Gergen: Would you then send troops into Yemen where al-Qaida is?

We went into Afghanistan because al-Qaida had a safe haven there and they used it to plot the attack on 9/11. We wanted to eliminate the people who planned and helped carry out this attack.

So now, we are bogged down with thousands of troops in Afghanistan out of the fear that al-Qaeda might come back to Afghanistan if we left there. Did anybody but Martha Coakley make the connection that the failed Christmas bomb plot was similar to what drove us to Afghanistan, but it did not come from Afghanistan? The plot was hatched in Yemen.

The plot could have been foiled by good intelligence and police work instead of using our military, but it was not foiled that way.

Perhaps we have our focus in the wrong place. Well, what do you know, that is what Martha Coakley said.

Good out of the box thinking Martha.  Prior to this exchange I had been a reluctant supporter of President Obama’s plan to escalate the troops in Afghanistan.  Now I am beginning to have third thoughts.  While we worry about al-Qaida’s possible return to Afghanistan, they have already moved their base of operations.  A military response to al-Qaida is never going to be nimble enough to get the job done.

Follow this link to the Worcester T & G article Brown says Coakley not tax-cut candidate – – Kennedy wants deep spending reductions.

I particularly liked the comment:

Some of the questions were like, If you were trying to travel from MIT in Cambridge to Sturbridge, should you have turned right or left at the Canadian border?

Brown and Kennedy argued over the direction. Coakley made the mistake of trying to explain what was wrong with the premise of the question.

She would have been better off by going back to the basics and explaining that you just get on the Mass Turnpike, head west, and get off at the Sturbridge exit.

The fact that I posted that comment has nothing to do with my liking it, of course. 🙂

I am sorry to say that I found the last debate very unsatisfying. I was very hard pressed to think how Martha Coakley could have handled the two bozos without coming off looking like Al Gore correcting George Bush.

I finally think I figured out what the problem is.  Brown and Kennedy are throwing out so much junk that it would take anyone longer to explain what is wrong with what they are saying than it would take to just explain what is right with what the Democrats and Coakley herself are trying to accomplish.

Rather than refute what either of the other two had to say by referencing anything they had to say, she need to explain how the plans are going to work.  She did squeeze in a little of how the Health Care plan and the rescuing of the economy are tied together.  How fixing the health care system will save money and help business to prosper by taking off some of the burden of the cost of supplying health care insurance to their employees.

Incidentally she would be touching on all the points to knock down what Brown or Kennedy are saying.

She could talk about how a healthy economy is boosted by business doing what they are supposed to do and government doing what it is supposed to do.  There are investments such as education, helping funding basic research, building and maintaining infrastructure, and formulating and enforcing laws and regulations that are what the government does.  If government doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain, then businesses has a very difficult time doing what they should be focusing on.  During the past decade we have been underfunding the government end of things (except for over funding war).  Things are getting out of balance and need to be put back in balance.

She could dominate the conversation and keep the other bozos from interjecting their craziness.  Once you let them set the message, it is very hard to get it back.  The other candidates could be forced to talk on her terms about what is wrong with her explanation.  Then they would be suffering the problem that she is now suffering.