Jim

We begin, again, with lyrics:

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim
-- Jim Croce

More dirty laundry explaining the Romney Bubble (Yahoo! feed):

"As a result," says Crawford, "they believed that the public/media polls were skewed" in Obama's favor, and rejiggered them to show Romney with "turnout levels more favorable to Romney." In essence, Romney "unskewed" the polls, mirroring widely mocked moves by conservatives to show their candidate with a lead, epitomized by the now-infamous website UnskewedPolls.com.

Much the same as The Great Recession implosion, the Boys In Power decided to invent their own reality. They believed their propaganda. They were convinced that they could re-make the world into their image. They learned from Karl Rove.

That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Can there be anything like a Right Wing quant? Put another way, is it possible for those attached to the Right Wing (including, obviously, Wall Street) to be based in the data? The evidence, so far, is No. These Wall Street quants ignored the most basic of data driving their MBS, CDO, CDS, and other derivatives (income/mortgage ratio). Incompetence of the highest order, but The Boys In Power wanted what they wanted, and their quants were happy to say Yes. Empires fall. The Right Wingnuts have fallen. Could they have won? Not without turning their back on the Tea Party and Rand-ians who have co-opted the party.

Reagan co-opted the so-called blue collar middle class, through the brilliant stratagem of convincing enough of them that, while they were Chosen People, their neighbors were freeloaders who deserved to starve. Steve Jobs was often accused of having a reality distortion field; those that fudge data in order to appease The Boys In Power today, sometimes end up on the losing end of the bargain. Not always, of course, only when the data are important. If they are truly attached to the agenda of the clients. In the usual scheme of things, the quants get their cut up front, of course. I suspect that the devisers of Orca made out very well. If they had built a system which accurately reflected reality (in the data), they would have lost the contract, since it would have contradicted the desires of The Boys In Power. Just as the Wall Street quants were only following orders.