This isn’t physics, where the observer effect will cause the election to be greatly altered by my singular addition to the millions of people already doing the observing. We could also see it as a thought paradox, like Schrödinger’s Cat . This was intended to point out the ridiculousness of quantum thought, but it’s still a very useful tool for seeing exactly how each version of quantum thought plays out.  I’m thinking that the same kind of ridiculousness is happening with the US presidential election–that Obama both is and is not President-Elect until we open the box (the Electoral College votes are tallied, and then the Supreme Court casts the only twleve that count) and that my anxiously watching the outside of the box won’t help either me or Obama.

I prefer to try to think about it from a zen perspective: there is no observer.
Now if only I could remember that all the time.

* “These findings demonstrate that watching the news on television triggers persisting negative psychological feelings that could not be buffered by attention-diverting distraction (i.e., lecture), but only by a directed psychological intervention such as progressive relaxation.”

I don’t have a good answer to the war, to any of them. I don’t agree with most of them, begun and fueled as they are by greed and fear, but I don’t have a better answer than Mohandas Ghandi’s massive protests, which any Subsaharan African, Southeast Asian, or American warlord would completely ignore. Still, it’s important to continue to think about it, chew it over, and come up with answers other than what we are spoon-fed by the media; if we’re diligent enough, we just might be able to avoid being machine-gun-fed further answers.

Garrison Keillor touches on some truths worth ruminating in his essay here: “For the troops to fall into line is a noble thing; for civilians to fall into line is shameful. ”
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/features/deskofgk/2008/04/01.shtml