Lamenting ( or cheering for) the death of democracy. NHPR

NHPR was on this depressing theme all day Saturday.  The were talking about "economical man" the theoretical man of the economics text books who does every thing for money.  The claimed that such a man would never bother to vote, because there is no money in it, and because his one vote won't count for much in the myriad of other votes.  They ragged on about this for a half an hour.  Depressing talk.
   Of course the entire concept is malarkey.  People don't vote 'cause there is money in it, they vote cause they believe in the cause.  It doesn't cost money to vote, and the trivial amount of time it takes is of little account.  I managed to vote for fifty years stopping at the polls on my way to work or on my way home from work.  Not a significant burden. People vote for either a candidate they like, for an ideology they like, or against a candidate or ideology they despise.  Except in the simple case of vote buying by party bosses, money is not the question.  Which means voting is not properly a subject of economics, or concepts like "economical man"
   And, American democracy has a good track record of selecting decent leadership.  For the great crises of American history, Revolution, Civil War, the two world wars,  our democracy  put forth good strong effective leaders, Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt. 
   We did better than Europe.  European leadership was monarchies, and the governments, even France and Britain, were staffed by the aristocracy.  They weren't very good at their jobs.  In the supreme crisis of 1914 they allowed events to drift into a terrible war, a war that wrecked all of Europe for good.  US democratically elected leadership knew enough to stay out of it, and once it became clear that we had to step in to prevent the bad guys from winning US leadership brought the united backing of a large industrialized country into battle, and in both world wars,  created the moral high ground, Wilson's 14 points, FDR's four freedoms.  "In war the moral is to the physical as three is to one," said Napoleon once upon a time.  US democratically elected leadership understood this where as European aristocratic leadership did not. 
   Churchill once said "Democracy is the worse form of government, except for all the others."   I like that.

FBI Director Comey says there is nothing in the Weiner computer emails

This is the 600,000 odd emails found on Anthony Weiner's computer.  How in the name of all that's holy can anyone, any gang of agents look at 600,000 emails in eight days?  That's 75000 emails a DAY.  Maybe the FBI had a computer program scan them looking for keywords?  That sounds sorta flaky.  Any how, the FBI director said he wasn't going to prosecute Hillary again last night. 

Man vs Clocks Going back to Standard Time

So, this morning I  did the clock reset  thing.  First my wrist watch, that's easy, just turn the knob.  Then the clock radio.  Not too bad, has a button marked "clock set" and a couple of arrow buttons. Now things get sticky.  Antique Tiffany mantle clock, inherited from my long dead grandmother.  Gotta be a hundred years old.  I've been told you NEVER push the hands of such a clock backward, it breaks things and/or seriously confuses the hour striking mechanism.  So I stop the pendulum swinging with my fingers, wait an hour, and restart the pendulum.  And then we check the cell phone.  Wonderbar, cell phone has automatically gone to standard time, hands off, no tinkering required.  Wonder how cell phone managed that trick.  Does the internal program have the dates of Daylight time burned in it?  If so, does it still work after the Congresscritters change the dates again?  Or does the cell phone home base broadcast a "Change clock now" signal to every cell phone in the land? 
  Then the VCR.  Not that I use it much anymore, but it's still there.  I find it is showing standard time.  I guess I never bothered to set it on daylight time.  It's a yard sale machine, with a remote picked up at a different yard sale.  
   And desktop, still running old but fast and trusty XP, made the change automatically.
   Shortly I will go down to the garage and tangle with the car clock.  Last time I had to dig the car manual out of the glove compartment to figure out how to set the car clock.
   If I had my druthers, we would stay on Daylight time all year.  We don't have enough sunlight in winter to give us light for both the drive to work and the drive home.  Druther drive to work in the dark, when I am fairly rested, and have some coffee in me, and get a virtuous feeling of getting up early, than drive home in the dark, tired, and feeling like it's midnight cause it's black everywhere.  Depressing that is. 

Can we believe the polls?

Good question.  Especially as the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the election consists mostly of reading the latest poll over the air.  That's why newsies love elections, they are so easy to cover, you don't need to know anything, you don't have to get out of the office and talk to people, you just read the poll results over the air. 
   Longish piece in the Wall St Journal over the difficulties of the pollsters in this cell phone age.  The Journal says that a special law passed back in 1991 forbids the use of demon dialers on cell phone numbers.  For a pollster to call a cell phone number, he has to hand dial the number.  Which is slow.   So all the pollsters prefer to call real wired phones.  But, the Journal says that most of the people who answer the wired phones are over 65, which is not very representative.  I can believe this, none of my three grown children has a wired phone.  To add insult to injury, a large number of people just hang up the phone when they hear it is a pollster.  I can believe that too.  I have done a bit of political phone banking over the years.  Used to be, the voters were sort of pleased to receive a call from the party and would talk to you about politics and stuff.  Not any more.  Now a days, they just hang up as soon as they learn who you are.
   So the pollsters have trouble reaching a representative sample of voters.  They compensate by "weighting" the sample they do manage to get.  "Weighting" is adjusting the results based on past experience, or hunch, or voodoo.  Actually it is surprising that they do as well as they do.  And they have missed trends, like Brexit completely.
  So, it might be worthwhile watching the election results come in next Tuesday.  There might be a November Surprise for all of us. 

NH Senate debate on WMUR

We have Republican incumbent Senator Kelly Ayotte going up against Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan.   First issue discussed was cyber security.  Both candidates managed to speak for several minutes on this issue without ever mentioning the name of the cyber security problem, namely Windows.  Any Windows computer connected to the internet can be secretly taken over, everything on its hard drive transferred to the attackers, malware emailed to every address in the victim's address book, keylogger installed to capture all the victim's passwords, and DDOS attack software installed.  Plus other bad stuff.
   Windows is so riddled with security holes as to be unfixable.  If you want any security at all, you must run something else, Linux or Apple. 
   Anyhow neither senatorial candidate seemed to be aware of this.

Obama is on TV trashing the Donald for not paying enough taxes

Obama, your IRS has audited the Donald every year of your administration.  They didn't find anything wrong with his tax returns.  If The Donald ain't paying enough taxes to suit you, your IRS was OK with it. 

Will this endless election actually end next week?

Lord I hope so.  But it might not.  The polls are very tight, the election could go either way, or worse,  deadlock.  That would throw the election into the US House of Representatives.  Where the current Republican majority ought to be able to elect Trump.  Even after they vote by states, one vote per state, as required by the 12th amendment, which was passed after the disputed Adams/Jefferson election of 1804.
  Or it goes to the Supremes.  Last time (2000) the Supremes had a 5 to 4 conservative majority.  This time, since the death of Justice Scalia, the court is split 4-4.  The Supremes are as partisan as all the other Washington pols, and so would be unable to reach a decision.  What happens after that is any one's guess. 
   The newsies like elections.  They are simple, horse races, and even the dimmest newsie can find things to saw that don't make him/her sound too dumb.  So they will do what they can to keep this one going.  That's essier for them than starting up the coverage of the 2020 election, which the newsies would otherwise do a couple of days after the polls close next week.  We will surely hear more about Hillary's email and the FBI, whether she wins or looses. If she wins, the constant harping on the emails won't help her.  If Trump wins, the newsies will settle down to harassing him for his entire term.
   And, the voters on the loosing side are going to be unhappy, and stay unhappy.  If you believe the polls, that's gonna be about half the country.  Can the winner find anything to do or say to ease that unhappiness?