Seven Eighths

An exercise in nonfiction as something semi-poetic....

One

One eighth in music is a semiquaver.  I always thought that was a fun word; as your intervals get smaller, the words get longer: demisemiquaver is half an eighth, and a hemidemisemiquaver is half that again.

Two

Two eighths is a quarter. Asking random strangers for one on the subway has at times not ended well.

Three

Three eighths is a number you're most likely to hear in the context of hat size... though some of us are a couple of eighths larger.

Four

Four eighths is a half.  This post marks halfway to my WNFiN goal for the month.

Five

Five is about how old I was when I first noticed that stock quotes used to come in numbers like 43 5/8 dollars per share; it was an artifact of manual floor-trading via hand signals.

Six

Six eighths, or three-fourths, is roughly the fraction of Americans whose lives don't really require major economic upheaval.

Seven

As in, seven-eighths.  This miserable year is seven-eighths over.

Fourteen, Fourteen

As in...

What the Texas State game was tied at before Idaho scored 33 unanswered points to win, and thus become bowl eligible in their second-to-last season in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Most of the predictions I've seen have Idaho going to the Arizona Bowl in Tucson.  I'm keeping my eyes peeled. 

We're Better Than This...?

Seriously?

In the five days since the election, we've had protest marches in cities all over the country, rioters (possibly anarchist infiltrators) doing property damage in Portland, calls for changes in rules after-the-fact (as a veteran of Democratic Party rules committees in more than one state, this really doesn't surprise me), and a petition with over three million signatories calling for dozens of people to compromise their own integrity and stated preferences... all because we didn't get our way.  This is sore-loser-ism in the WORST way possible, and I want NO part of it.  We were aghast when the other side threatened protests and a refusal to accept the results when it looked like our side was going to win, and yet here we are drowning in a sea of our own hypocrisy four days after our candidate conceded.  What happened to Michelle Obama's admonition a few short months ago that, "We go high," in this instance?

A Profound Inability to Behave

In the last half-century, the left has been plagued by ill-behaved protests, from the SDS sit-ins in Berkeley and the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, to the WTO riots here in Seattle (while a Clinton was President; see yesterday's post about how the inseparability of globalism from the Clinton brand probably did us in) and the Occupy tempests a few years ago.  Not that we have a monopoly on it, mind you, but rather it's the whole holier-than-thou mindset about that's troubling: I've been to both Sproul Hall and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and if you're looking for moral authority about which sit-in disrupted far fewer people, you probably aren't going to like the results.

Concentrate Energies Where They're Effective

Honestly, I've been to exactly one protest march, back in 2003 in Texas, and I found it a considerable waste of time.  There were plenty of people there trying to co-opt it for other causes -- the event was about gerrymandering, yet people were displaying peace stuff, and anti-nuclear-power stuff, and reproductive stuff, and just about everything else except having the backs of the state senators who'd fled Austin for Albuquerque.  The number of man-hours wasted in these protests is staggering; you'd get a lot more mileage out of having these people fund-raise to make media buys.  And that's part of the big takeaway: In a century where it's rare to see kids outside on tricycles, protest marches are more unnerving than persuasive anyway. 

Bernie Sanders and Broken-Clock Syndrome

I've Not Come Here to Praise Bernie

That should come as no surprise, given how outspoken my opposition was to his candidacy.  I'm even more opposed to the idea his faction -- led by surrogate and really poor choice for Chair Keith Ellison -- should be trying to take over the Democratic Party and drive it even further left.  Frankly, the Sanders-inspired platform was an overreach, and that itself might have made the difference in key narrow-margin states; as this last election painfully demonstrated, we are still overwhelmingly a center-right nation at the core, which doesn't exactly jib with peaceful isolationism and democratic socialism.

To quote Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, "Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.... In their view the government was broken, the economic system was broken, and, we heard so often, the news media was broken, too. Well, something surely is broken."

He Was Right Twice

First and foremost, Sanders was able to capture the tide sweeping the working class throughout the historically "first world" countries: A backlash against globalism, neoliberalism, Clintonism (it's in the brand), or whatever else you'd like to call the Davos-friendly center-left policies behind free trade and transnational mergers that characterize the "New Left" worldwide.  Sanders turned Rust Belt primaries into a referenda on these ideals in general, and specifically their manifestation through NAFTA; it should come as no surprise, then, that Trump was able to capitalize on these same sentiments late in the game and duplicate his efforts.

Second, Sanders was quick to realize his brand of egalitarian socialism would resonate well with  Millennial generation whites who largely grew up in a culture of participation trophies.  This explains the massive age and race gaps back in Democratic primary season: That same message was tone-deaf both to older generations brought up in a culture where awards come for hard work and merit, and among non-white populations often deprived of the largess required to afford a participation-trophy culture.  Nevertheless, this same schism - perhaps reflected in the Sanders-driven left-shift overreach of the Democratic/Clinton platform - played out among the sizable fraction of potential voters who ultimately stayed home rather than holding their noses to participate.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

First things first, we need to find a Democratic leader who can reconnect the party to working-class white people; I've heard Martin O'Malley, former Maryland Governor, is looking at a run, and I think he'd be an extraordinary choice.  Those of you who know me probably know O'Malley was my first choice over either Clinton or Sanders in the primaries, and I think he bowed-out way too early.

We need to stop being the party of political correctness as a suicide pact.  Allowing ourselves to become the vessel for an Academic Left led by the Black Panthers' own Metternich, Angela Davis, to steer us into sociological no-man's-land, often literally, has been one of the greatest failings of the modern Democratic Party.  We can talk about tolerating Islam without embracing it, and that may make all the difference: The President-elect is, admittedly, right that failing to confront "radical Islamic terror" verbally head-on demonstrates weakness.

But most importantly, we need to find, as Robert Reich has correctly pointed out, an economic agenda which stops prioritizing investors over voters.  That heavily-tarnished shareholder-lawsuit firm Milberg Weiss' partners have been massive donors to the neoliberal-flavored Democratic Party should come as a shock to no one, but theirs is exactly the sort of cancer we need to cut out and then take strong chemotherapy to keep from recurring.

Hip-Hop Isn't Usually My Thing...

This Post Wasn't Supposed to Be THIS Post

I went on Spotify looking for covers of "Darling Nikki," thinking it would be fun to do a sort-of countdown. THEN I heard the one by Saint and realized I'd found some special new music worth sharing by itself.

This kid is 19, from Gambia, and currently lives in Sweden, where he moved as a refugee.    And he seriously has talent; as everyone who has spent little more than an hour or two with me knows, I'm really, REALLY not into hip-hop.  But Saint has made his work just melodic enough to transcend the genre.  It's a new thing, and it's really, really good.

Obviously, young and fresh as his talent is, his catalog isn't particularly deep... but worth every minute spent listening!

Civic Unicorn Math

The Myth of the "National Popular Vote"

One unfortunate casualty of the decline in civics education in this country is a misunderstanding of how it was actually designed; "Hamilton" the musical aside, I fear much of the country has never touched the Federalist Papers.  So it comes as no surprise to hear people talking about the United States as a "democracy," when that is precisely the form of government it was designed to avoid.  The Founding Fathers knew the work of the Roman political philosopher Polybius backwards and forwards, especially the inevitable descent of democracies into mob rule.  From this was born a vision: A constitutional republic, governed by policymakers who themselves are elected by the people, but which has no national election.

In that mix then were forged compromises to create what has scaled upward to the system we have now: 51 separate elections, and a weighting scheme designed to aggregated their results in a meaningful way the preserves the integrity and rights of smaller states.  There's no shortage of advocacy, especially this week, for attempting to subvert that model with an amendment to dignify the unicorn of arithmetic called the "National Popular Vote" -- a mythical creature with about as much real value as the average temperature of the whole United States at any given time -- despite the obvious realpolitik that there's no way 38 states could be persuaded to surrender their sovereignty so fundamentally as to ratify such an amendment.

Properly Contextualizing Each State's Results

Nuance and context are -- as is the case in most situations -- key to understanding how deeply flawed the brazen act of simply totaling the individual outcomes of 51 separate elections and attempting to infer meaning can be.  For example, in some states, there were four choices on the ballot, whereas in others, there were dozens.  This year, Evan McMullin was on the ballot in eight states; absent single-transferable-vote, how do you interpret his net impact on an overall total in the context of attempting to infer the absence or presence of a "mandate" for another particular candidate?  In such a scenario, does the absence of any candidate winning an actual "majority" really allow for any kind of legitimacy inferences between a pair of narrowly-competitive pluralities? A majority of the voters voted *against* each.

Worse are the opportunities to rig an election two orders of magnitude worse than the compartmentalized results we have today; someone puts their finger on the scale in Florida, they flip Florida.  Imagine dozens of independent opportunities for election officials across the country to find ways to puff-up vote totals incrementally in favor of one candidate or another.

The Electoral College Then and Now

One thing to keep in mind: The impact of Senatorial Electors (the two each state gets just for playing) was substantially higher in the 18th Century than it is today. In the original design of the republic, there were 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators, so 26 of the 91 electors (28.57%) were part of that not-population-apportioned skew.  By way of comparison, and with DC treated by Constitutional amendment as if it were Wyoming, today 102 of the 538 electors (18.96%) are "Senatorial" in origin.

An alternative way forward then: Rather than trying to undo 228 years of a system designed for scalability and durability in the face of challenges, why not challenge some of the larger states to break themselves up and claim their missing Senators (and their respective electors) in the process. Again, using 1788-era ratios, the size of the House would suggest we should have 87 states, not 50.

Short Form

In which I've had a long, exhausting, grueling day, but I didn't want to miss my WNFiN target by not writing anything for Wednesday.  So, this is it: 30% through the month and I've managed to keep to generating a new post each day, even if this is kind of a punt....

Lessons and Metaphors

While You Were Watching the Election...

Half a world away, in Fukuoka, Japan -- certainly the foreign country that set the whole "Rust Belt" thing in motion in this one forty years ago -- a giant sinkhole appeared.  If that's not an apt metaphor for the day, I don't know what is.

Meanwhile, like a lot of people, I'm going to spend a lot of time in the coming weeks trying to digest what happened today.  Perhaps I'll find tighter metaphors.  Hopefully I'll find lessons. Hopefully I can dissuade others from attempting to take away the wrong lessons from this.

There's plenty of evidence that things are still moving forward, just more slowly. For example, Nevada, a state that has heretofore had some of the strictest drug laws in the country, just passed a recreational marijuana bill.  Clinton won Nevada. The Nevada Senate seat being vacated by retirement stayed Democratic. In short, Nevada is starting to look like the rest of the Pacific Time Zone.

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but it's late and I want more data. Stay tuned....

Star-Spangled Banter

Not Exactly an American Tradition

On this election eve, I'd like to tackle a subject that's become a bit controversial in recent months: The national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner."  But I'd like to start by clearing up a few misconceptions.

First, it didn't even become the national anthem until an act of Congress in 1931.  Read that date carefully: 1931.  Herbert Hoover was President.  Not much good came from the Hoover administration, which is why he was fortunately only a one-term President.  Let that sink in a moment: Its selection was a morale booster during the catastrophic early years of the Great Depression.

Second, musically it's borrowed from "The Anacreontic Song," a drinking song from a society of Eighteenth Century English revelers replete with neo-Classical Pagan self-styling.  Given the nature of the society, that the song is difficult at best for even accomplished performers to sing, spanning over an octave and a half of range, comes as no surprise.  But for a nation with as rich a tradition of native musical forms as the United States, from blues to bluegrass, country to rock to rap, that our anthem lacks domestic musical roots is a national embarrassment.

And third, while we only typically sing the first verse at ballgames, Francis Scott Key's poem actually contains four verses.  Key was a slave-owning lawyer who used his office as U.S. Attorney to prosecute abolitionists, and those rarely-sung latter verses contain an affirmation of slavery. THAT is what so many athletes have been up in arms about in recent months.  A century and a half after the Civil War, we shouldn't be carrying on cultural traditions that edify the abhorrent practice whose end necessitated said war in the first place.

Yes, But If Not That, Then What?

Well, there are no shortage of options. Pre-1931, one of the most common unofficial choices when an anthem was required was "Hail, Columbia," which was originally composed for George Washington's first inauguration, and thus has literally unimpeachable American roots.  "America the Beautiful" is the end product of combining works by two famous Americans, writer Katharine Lee Bates and musician Samuel A. Ward.  Or, staying classical, you have pretty-much the entire catalogs of John Philip Sousa and Aaron Copland to work with.

But why stop there? Our nation is replete with musical homages in nearly every genre, from Night Ranger's "(You Can Still) Rock in America" to competing folk songs named "America" by Neil Diamond and Simon & Garfunkel, respectively, to a jukebox-full of country numbers by artists like Brad Paisley.  OR, we could explore the roots of all of those in choosing a work by blues legend Robert Johnson; consider, for a moment, how epic it would be to celebrate our country to the tune of Johnson's epic "Traveling Riverside Blues," perhaps best-known today for it's metal rendition by Led Zeppelin, who are, admittedly, English, despite frontman Robert Plant's fascination with American musical traditions.

Or, as I have been tongue-in-cheekly suggesting for nearly a quarter century, we could instead pick a song that celebrates our modern American identity like no other, and opt for Meat Loaf's epic, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."  Nothing screams America quite like sex in a car described as a baseball play-by-play.

A Small Tale of Two Small Cities

Attempting to Understand Rural America

For a committed, near-lifelong suburbanite, I've spent a nontrivial amount of time in rural America; I lived in a small, rural college town for a couple years while in grad school, I spent most of a summer in rural Wisconsin, and I've logged hundreds of thousands of miles on non-Interstate highways.  Often, I've found those last forays can bring insights you couldn't hope to pay for from any amount of demographic research and statistical analysis.  Given all the commotion about the rural South and Midwest this year, I thought a pair of contrasting anecdotes were in order.

Sweetwater, Texas, 2005

Sweetwater caught my attention on a road trip back to Dallas from Phoenix; it was my final overnight stop on the trip, and I rolled into town about an hour before sundown, roughly this time of year.  Sweetwater, like many other towns I encountered in West Texas, had seen far better days.  Its Main Street was a litany of closed businesses and failed dreams.  Yes, it had a Wal-Mart along the freeway, which skirted the city leaving its Downtown several blocks from useful traffic, and it's hard to say which of those had hit the Downtown harder.  However, and more to the point, it was an indicator of just how tenuous rural living can be, and how one or two key employers can make or break a small city.  That tenuous living is the fear-friendly environment certain types of politicians tend to thrive on, and this year's rural electorate is no different in the slightest.

Hermiston, Oregon, 2011

Hermiston is an interesting counterpoint. I'd been to Hermiston before: it sits on a convenient highway cutoff between/along the freeways between Boise and Seattle.  But what took me aback on that particular trip was the presence of a Fuddrucker's.  For those of you unfamiliar, Fuddruckers is a fast-casual burger chain usually found on outlots near suburban shopping malls.  And yet, there was one in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere in a farming community known for watermelons.  What I came to learn, however, was that Wal-Mart can giveth as well as taketh away; Wal-Mart had built a massive distribution center in Hermiston precisely because it was so conveniently positioned. The resulting logistics work had made Hermiston into a boomtown.  Not that working in a Wal-Mart warehouse is the sort of job a twelve-year-old might dream about, but there again, hand-to-mouth work in tenuous places is expected and not to be taken lightly.

What's Really Not to be Taken for Granted

The reality is that my current town is roughly the size of Sweetwater, or Hermiston, or even Moscow, Idaho, where I went to grad school.  However, unlike those places, within an easy commute around here are more employers for highly-skilled jobs than I can even dream to keep track of.  In those cities, a single factory, or warehouse, or university makes or breaks the entire county and beyond.  And thus, the roots for disproportionate local power take hold... but that's for further discussion later.

Silver and Gold

A Hard Couple of Decades

It's been a rough couple of decades to be an Idaho Vandals fan/alumnus.  Moving up to what is now the FBS has proven to be an unsustainable fundraising arms-race -- demonstrated by the Vandals' plans to move back down to the FBS and Big Sky Conference in 2018.  While in the mid-'90s, attempting to maintain parity with Boise State seemed perfectly reasonable, the reality is that an urban audience and national marketing deals (Nike in particular) aren't matched by the architectural innovation of the Kibbie Dome and convenient small-town walkability of Moscow.

But THIS Year....!

I'm starting to believe the Vandals will wind up in a bowl in their second-to-last opportunity to do so.  Right now, Idaho is 5-4, with two of those losses against Washington and Washington State, who themselves are headed for an Apple Cup showdown likely to determine which of them wins the PAC 12 North.  Meanwhile, Idaho's three remaining opponents are a combined 8-17, and two of those games are in Moscow.  The Sun Belt Conference has five bowl tie-ins, so a 7-5 finish, entirely reasonable, would all-but guarantee the Vandals an appearance.  Needless to say, I'll be watching intently to see how this shapes-up!

A Different Kind of Progressive Voting

Vote Yes for Yes

These legends of prog[ressive] rock -- of which there isn't enough in the Hall already -- are on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot for the third time.  They deserved to get in on the first ballot!

So please, follow through on the above link and go vote for their induction.  Musical taste compels it.  You can vote once per day, so there is a chance to vote legitimately more than once, unlike some other elections going on.  Voting continues through December 5th.

Obligatory PSA: You can vote in this election online.  Anyone trying to convince you that you can vote in those political elections that way is yanking your chain trying to disenfranchise you.

Surprise-and-Delight Security

Why Two-Factor Authentication?

I won't belabor the arguments in favor of it -- because they're many, and starting to get overplayed -- but the bottom-line is that some things need to be more secure than just a password is going to provide. Among those are some of the things I use for work, so I've been using two-factor for quite some time at my employer's behest.  However, I'm starting to want to move it into other parts of my life as well, but convenience has been a barrier to entry.  Incidentally, I also not really the sort of person who's really into product testimonials, but in this case, I feel compelled to make and exception both because of how overwhelmed I am by the simplicity and convenience of this app and its potential to make a lot of people's lives more secure comparatively easily.

You see, I live in an area where cell coverage inside my home, in particular, can be spotty at best. And the traditional two-factor implementations I've worked with have often depended on SMS.  Needless to say, I became curious when a colleague mentioned the successes he'd had with the Google Authenticator mobile app (which our company also accepts), so I was eager to give it a go.

I Installed Google Authenticator

Like most Android apps, downloading and installing it took a mere couple of minutes from the Play Store; so far, so good.  Configuring it to work with my work account was a matter of seconds; even better.  Using it in place of the codes I *used* to get from SMS was faster than waiting for the signal; this was turning into a major win already.

And THEN, I found the real magic....

Surprise and Delight!

What they didn't really talk about in the app description -- and what my co-worker was unaware of -- was that Authenticator automatically also installs a bundled Android Wear client if you have a Wear device managed by your phone.  So, not only was it more convenient than waiting for the SMS, but I don't even have to have my phone out to use it: I can get the second-factor code just by swiping left on my watch (LG G-Watch R) and opening the app on my *wrist*.  So as far as I'm concerned, they've conquered the biggest obstacle to two-factor security, namely convenience, in a massive way.

Less-Than-Sound Reasoning

An About-Face

Admittedly, I'd been going along most of the year under the assumption I would be supporting and voting for ST3, the regional transit capital-projects initiative here, in the current election.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized the devil really was in the details, and in this case, the details just weren't right. So, I've decided to oppose the measure instead, and I'll document my rationale.

Closest to Home: Risk

Here at the north end of King County, one of the major projects in the bond measure is a "Bus Rapid Transit" line along SR522 above 145th St., and then along 145th (SR 523) to the soon-to-be new light rail line along I-5.  This sounds great in principle, but in practice it comes with certain risks and inconveniences; in particular, hundreds, if not thousands, of riders each day use the existing 312, 372, and 522 lines along SR522, two of which are direct lines into Downtown Seattle, while the 372 is a direct line to the UW main campus.  A BRT line that cuts off at 145th St. means that all of those commuters using the new lines would have to make a mode switch at the station, and many of them would potentially have much longer trips in the process.  This doesn't feel like a capital improvement.  Even if the initial commitment were to attempt to keep the 372 in place, KC Metro (which operates the 3nn lines) doesn't exactly have the best track record in the face of perceived duplication of services in the suburbs.

Fighting the Last War

While it's a bit worn-out as an analogy, it certainly appears as if the planners who put ST3 together were trying to design for the region as it was in 1986, rather than the way it is today.  Consider the over-emphasis on extending services to Downtown Everett and Downtown Tacoma, in particular: Are these supposed to be hubs for people living, working, or both?  Meanwhile, the highest growth areas in both directions -- for example, Mill Creek and Snohomish to the north, and Covington and Puyallup to the south -- wind up underserved.  Overall, it feels like it was drafted in a headspace either unaware or ambivalent about how to connect commuters to their jobs and thus relieve traffic.

Speaking of Tacoma

Tacoma deserves better treatment than what it gets out of ST3, namely, a transit system only Boston could love: Mismatched-gauge rail lines converging at a forced transfer point near a stadium, while still leaving much of the city (in this case, including PLU, Bates, and everything else south of the Tacoma Dome) completely dependent on buses.

While We're at It

Without belaboring the fiscal side of the proposition too much, since this is mostly a criticism of design, it doesn't seem readily apparent (though it should!) that taxpayers in Pierce and Snohomish Counties are picking up the lion's share of the costs for their respective extensions.  If I missed that somewhere, great, but they didn't do a very good job of making a point of it if so.

Platypus as Metaphor

The axe that a platypus is "a duck designed by committee" seems particularly relevant here.  There's just enough in any given part of the region to give the ballot measure a shot at winning-over local constituents there... but not enough to provide any real, comprehensive, substantive traffic improvements in any of them.  When I lived near Hartford, the bus system there had a similar political proclivity: It was optimized, locals suggested, to get "from Frog Hollow to West Farms," thereby connecting a ghetto area with a suburban shopping mall. Hyper-localized political pandering transcends any particular region, in these instances, it appears.

There You Have It

Again, I had been supporting this all along, up until I looked at it more closely and decided we deserved better planning.  I like transit, I believe we need transit, but I can't get behind a plan this costly that appears likely to make life worse for my immediate neighbors.

Motivation

What's this and why now?

Sometimes, you just have to get out of your own way.  I have a busy life, but I've found myself lacking in constructive habits just for myself.  I have no shortage of civic and community engagement, especially for an admitted introvert, and some personal projects (*cough!* D&D *cough!*) I enjoy with a select group of friends, but I need to feel like I'm sharing my thoughts with the world, mano e mondo as it were.

And so, as legions of people worldwide pick up the mantle of a November challenge or another, I've decided to embrace NaNonFiWriMo, aka WNFiN this month; I'm committing to producing at least one piece of useful nonfiction (in the form of blog posts, in this case, unless I happen to blog about a piece otherwise) a day for the month of November 2016.

What to expect?

In case you missed it, there's an election on! I'm sure -- as those of you who read my blogging efforts a decade ago may recall -- there will be more than one political post along the way.  Hopefully, I'll also get to a few things that are more lasting, and more technical, and maybe even ever-so-slightly more personal.  Not too personal, however: Writing for me is an act of ego, but not an act of narcissism.

Who the *bleep* are you?

I'm middle-aged; I've been politically active for decades, particularly as a political contrarian in some very red states, but now I live in King County, Washington, though close enough to the Snohomish line an average golfer could hit an 8-iron shot over it from my front yard. I'm secular, epicurean in my positions (i.e. sometimes liberal and sometimes conservative, depending on the issue), and somewhat aloof enough to have been referred to as a "technocrat" by a fellow political blogger.