5 Thoughts for November 28, 2016

1. Seahawks Offensive Line: Bleh. You could see what TB's defensive line was doing with their wide splits and overloading one side then stunting, and yet the hapless offensive line could not respond. George Farmer got lots of time in the game, and even he did a better job of blocking defensive linemen than Seattle's O-line. The critical loss of their center and the sudden shuffling of personnel probably is to blame for most of the O-line's problems (aside from not being that good).
2. WWAD: What Would Annoy Donodus. That's how the left should gauge its actions going forward. I didn't think too much about what would come of Jill Stein's recount efforts, but it's the prudent thing to do, as you can't win the lottery if you don't play, so to speak. But now that it has annoyed Donodus, such that he's gone off on tweetstorms criticizing it, I'm completely in on it, 100%. Mitt Romney should come out in public and tell Americans that there's no way he'll work under a tyrant. Why? WWAD. A massive sit-in protest of thousands at his Trump Tower. Why? WWAD. The absolute worst of Donodus comes out when he's annoyed, so let the meltdown occur; the sooner the meltdown occurs, the quicker Americans will have their moment of clarity.
3. Nationalism: I have previously chimed in on the dangers of Nationalism, and for all of the supposed benefits of the Olympics, instead, we've seen the rise of yet another massive cheating regime that was state-based and vigorously defended by its people. This is not an isolated event. Brexit was partially driven by Nationalism and so was Germany's austerity push aimed at Greece. If you take it back further, WWII was the result of Nationalism gone bad. Mind you, I'm not saying that Nationalism is necessarily bad, but that a nation can easily slip from Nationalism into Autocracy which then speeds up the severance of ties that once bound us -- whether trade deals, friendly borders, defense or peace agreements -- and descend the world into chaos as one Autocrat confronts another.
4. PAC-12 Championship: You know, one of the great things about archive.org's wayback machine is that you can go back and check to see what the odds were set for different games. Naturally, I'm talking about going back to check what USC's odds were against Washington and Colorado. The Trojans had just a 21% chance of beating the Huskies while they enjoyed a 60% chance of beating the Buffaloes. Even taking out the rankings of the teams, one would expect UW to be favored, and indeed they are. I'm one of those people who believe that how you performed recently matters far more than how you were just one month ago, and as such, these two teams played WSU in the last two weeks. Washington beat WSU by 28 points while Colorado won by 14. Washington thoroughly dominated the Cougs while Colorado had a tough fight for about three quarters before the Cougs simply fell apart. As such, I think Washington will blow past Colorado, 31 - 17.
5. Economics + Politics: This video of Mark Blyth speaking about Economics at the intersection of Politics from this past September is entertaining and informative. If there appears to be cross-over with my point above regarding Nationalism, it's purely coincidental as I had already written that point before I had a chance to watch this video. I urge you to spend 52 minutes and listen / watch it: