Books! Actual books!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Snappy and informative"
-- Associated Press
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game
"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
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“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."
— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review
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Math, not conspiracy theory |
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Friday, 12 November 2004 |
Finally picking back up again from my last post
on last week's "elections"... (I've been delaying because frankly I get
sick to my stomach just trying to start. That's the truth.)
I hope you'll download and read a paper called The Unexplained Exit
Poll Discrepancy, released on Thursday by Prof. Steven Freeman of the
University of Pennsylvania. It's worth seeing in its entirety. A lot
of other folks have been posting about it. Rightly so.
What jumped out at a lot of people on the night of the election was how
the "errors" in the exit polls consistently occured in the same
direction.
The thing about genuine errors, extremes, and anomalies in results... is that they're random.
The chance that a flipped coin will land "heads" four times in a row is
only 1 in 16 -- but you're just as likely to see it land "tails" four
times in a row. And if it's an honest coin, flipped fairly, over time,
you will. Very basic math will tell you exactly how likely a given
outcome is.
But even without the math, we have a sense of this in our daily lives.
If you were betting another guy a dollar a flip, and the coin came up
tails ten times in a row (about a 1 in 1000 chance) common sense would
tell you the coin was weighted.
And if somebody told you it wasn't -- that it was just an error or pure
random chance, never mind, keep emptying your wallet -- you'd start to
wonder about their motives.
Common sense. Not a conspiracy theory. Just what you're seeing, right in front of you.
Without getting into all the state-by-state details -- I'll let Prof.
Freeman tend to the numbers -- what happened last Tuesday, where a wide
variety of extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to be at
the extremes or even beyond their margin of error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.
But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored Bush. Over and over
and over. That's the coin flipping. And flipping. And still coming
up heads. Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of other
swing states (even while the exit polls remained relatively accurate
elsewhere). Almost everywhere the election was close, the coin just
kept coming up heads.
How bad was it?
According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in 250,000,000.
One in a quarter of a billion.
In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up "heads" almost thirty times in a row.
Do you still trust that coin now?
That is what you're being asked to do.
Now, a lot of folks are understandably unwilling to come right out and
say the word "fraud." I get that. I respect everybody here. And I
won't guess other people's feelings on it, but for me, merely
acknowledging the possibility that our elections were hijacked this
broadly makes me feel all sorts of unpleasant emotions.
It's frankly a terrifying prospect, because if true, we have one hell
of a goddam fight in front of us, against a group of powerful people
who clearly will stop at nothing whatsoever to continue centralizing
their power.
That's what the word "fraud" means here.
So yes, I would very much prefer to believe in the remote possibility
that there are factors unaccounted for, and the numbers are off a
little, reducing the chance down to, oh, one in 50,000 or so.
Sure, maybe all the Republican voters just didn't feel like talking to
exit pollers, only in swing states, all at once, for hours. (That's
one of the explanations we're being given, often by the same people
deriding reasonable suspicion of foul play as a conspiracy theory. Nice.)
I do not know exactly what happened or how, nor can I (or you) yet.
And without more specific knowledge, I understand how it might seem
irresponsible to come right out and say that the election was
bullshit. It feels like an allegation without evidence.
But it should not be tinfoil hat territory to simply understand what the basic math means and scream foul. The math is
evidence. And we already know that the votes weren't secure; we
already know how somebody could easily rig the vote counts; and we've
already caught dozens of consistently pro-Bush impossibilities (like
more Bush votes in some parts of Ohio than there were registered
voters) in the final tally.
That's a hell of a lot to go on.
And now we learn it's a 99.9999996% likelihood that the numbers were
wrong, as far as can be calculated with the limited data available,
precisely because the outcome was so incredibly slanted for Bush.
I repeat: we know the numbers are screwed up because of how absurdly they were slanted.
Let that sink in.
Just because we weren't standing right there when it happened doesn't mean we can't see what was done.
Look, Nicole is dead. There are bloody size 12 shoe prints running down
the walk, and her ex-husband has been threatening her for years.
But gee, would her husband really do such a horrible thing...?
Let's talk about that. Would they?
We already know that allies of this twice-unelected president in
Florida
and Ohio screwed with the voter rolls, screwed with people's ability to
vote, and are working right this very minute
to continue distorting the vote, right before our eyes. Is screwing
with the votes on election day somehow qualitatively different?
No one should need reminding that Karl Rove has always broken any rule necessary to win at all costs, and that there have been no costs for cheating since this administration took office. Someone near the top of this administration has already committed damn-near treason by leaking Valerie Plame's name to the press, and received nothing but protection ever since.
And let's not forget that this very same band of merry men conspired
for over a year to lie their way into an illegal war and generate
rationalizations for torture, indefinite detention, and even
disappearances -- a series of high crimes against the constitution, existing law, and
humanity which makes electoral tinkering seem tame by comparison.
I mean, what sort of behavior is necessary to start suspecting the
beneficiaries of the obvious rigging in their favor? Does Karl Rove
have to come to the house personally and start humping the furniture?
(He will, you know. You probably want to dig out that old can of Scotchgard.)
Until Karl finally shows up... just do the math.
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