The morning after

As a blogger with a worldwide readership base (well, excepting Antarctica... c'mon my loyal readers- someone has got to know someone [or someone who knows someone] in Antarctica- please recommend my blog... I'M BEGGING!), I suppose I should comment on the events of November 8, 2016, a.k.a., the General Elections in the United States of America.

But first, my blog title.

As the gentle reader may be aware, my blog titles are often tied directly to my subject matter, but also can be puns or cultural references. In this particular case, it is a bit of all three. Most importantly, it has absolutely nothing to do with RU-486, which became available in the United States in 2000, and was known as the "morning after" pill.

It is, in fact, a reference to the Maureen McGovern song from the original 1972 Irwin Allen classic disaster movie "The Poseidon Adventure". In a way,this movie symbolized the beginning of the demise of the hippie era, but it also shows that, when faced with dire straits, we all need to come together.

In a very broad way, this ties in rather well with U.S. politics and elections.

To some readers, this might seem rather odd, but please bear with me- I hope give a short, understandable explanation of the U.S. election process.

For starters, the basics: the United States is often referred to as a "constitutional federal republic". That's a mouthful, and quite honestly, many U.S. citizens would refer the the U.S. as a "democracy". This is inherently incorrect, as it merely says that the people participate in the government- primarily by electing proxies, or representatives. These "representatives" can be called representatives, senators, sheriffs, or any of a host of other titles.

"Constitutional" means that all of our laws are based upon a common document upon which all of our laws are derived. "Federal" means there is a strong central (national) government, and smaller (states) local governments. "Republic"- the head of state is elected or nominated by the people or their representatives.

Having said all of that, we have a new leader who will be installed as the President in January, 2017.

For what its worth, I did not support either candidate.

Anyway, its the morning after. I have a crashed HDD to deal with. In all honesty, the hard drive is more of a concern than the election.

...and for all those who follow this for my data snippets... nothing today, I'm sorry to report.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.