Your Comedic Interlude I

Your Musical Interlude XXXI

Hurricane Sandy. Unprecedented As Long As You Ignore The Precedents

The loonies are out in force.

“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’m at a loss for expletives to describe what this storm could do.”

Yes, I’ve never seen anything like it either nor have our modern meteorological tools. As I wrote yesterday afternoon, we don’t know whether our tools are up to the task because no storm of this nature has occurred in the modern meteorological era….


“Isn’t it strange that a hurricane in the Bahamas would somehow turn into a monster mega-storm and slam into the Northeast at the end of October? Aren’t hurricanes supposed to weaken as they move north over cold water? What the hell is going on?
The answers are… yes, yes, and we’re not completely sure. This is a beyond-strange situation. It’s unprecedented and bizarre.

What a crock of shit.  I spent five minutes and found three October storms with similar profiles to Sandy. All three originated in the same spot in the Caribbean. All of them intensified as they moved north. Two of them plowed straight into the North American continent. Hurricane Irene, in 1999 (ancient history I guess) intensified into a Category 2 hurricane over the same water Sandy has held (barely) its Category 1 status.
Hurricane Hazel, in October 1954, intensified as it moved north through the Bahamas to strike the Carolinas as a Category 4 storm. Hurricane Isabell, in October 1964, also intensified into a Category 3 storm as it moved north over the same waters as Sandy before striking near the North Carolina/Virginia border.

Just imagine what I could have found had I looked before 1950?

Who Is More Civil?

I just did a little Google experiment by searching for the following terms:

"X should be shot"
"X should be killed"
"X are evil"

Where "X" is either the word Republicans or the word Democrats.

Using the word "Republicans" returned 217,400 responses.
Using the word "Democrats" returned 85,100 responses.

Just sayin'.

A Confession

I have a confession to make.

I have not voted in an election, of any kind, since 1998.

I fell out of the habit on voting when I lived in Washington, DC. Voting in DC is a pointless prospect (for everyone) as there are no competitive elections there, and, besides, the local pols are hopelessly corrupt. After I left DC I lived in five different places in three years. Not a situation that encourages civil engagement to any great degree.

In the meantime, I continued to think about and, once I started this blog, write about politics. However, I found I was content to leave things in the realm of opinion. Sure, I had a rooting interest, but not at a level that required my participation.

I began this election cycle with no intention of that changing. Romney was always the most likely to emerge from a decidedly lackluster group of Republican candidates and, for me, there was nothing all that appealing about the prospect. It must be said, in all honesty, my feelings concerning Romney really haven't changed over time. I will never think, "Wow! I get to vote for Mitt!"

So what happened to get me motivated to register and vote? In a word, Benghazi.

I have not written much of anything about the attack and its aftermath, mostly because it would have been a string of invective fit to make a longshoreman blush. The initial responses of the Obama administration (to blame a YouTube video, and to attack Romney in a bid to gain a temporary political advantage) were bad enough, but as September wore on I was still content to criticize and stay on the sidelines. However, by the dying days of September, as the ineptitude and duplicity of the Obama administration became increasingly apparent, my disgust level reached an intolerable level. Writing out my opinions and standing on the sidelines was not going to cut it anymore.

In a sense Obama will accomplish the impossible on election day; he will make it possible for me to vote for Mitt Romney with enthusiasm.

A Tale Of Two Polls

I mentioned last time out that the more Obama friendly polling assumes Democrats will enjoy similar advantages in enthusiasm compared to Republicans that they did in 2008. You can see this assumption built into some of the polling. For example, this recently released Time magazine poll which shows Obama up 5 points in Ohio and which many lefties are convinced means the election is over.

If you look at he internals of the poll you discover the pollsters have broken down the Ohio electorate as follows:

Democrat: 37%
Republican: 28%
Independent: 29%

(The numbers don't add up to 100% in the above because 40 something respondents answered something else.)

Now, lets compare this to the Suffolk University poll which found the race a dead heat.

Democrat: 39%
Republican: 35%
Independent: 27%

Very, very different samples, you will agree. So different, in fact, that the Time sample seems to be measuring an "Ohio" in a alternate universe (presumably one in which the sky is always fuchsia.) Indeed, no other poll listed by Real Clear Politics is claiming Independents outnumber Republicans in Ohio. However, that is the sample Time is using. When you look at the exit polling from 2008, when everything, and I mean everything was breaking in Obama's favor the partisan split between Democrat and Republican was only +8D. That's right, Time is telling us this election will break even more favorably for Obama than 2008 at +9D.

The way they achieve this "result" is by skewing the gender numbers. In the Time sample a full 65% of Democratic respondents are women, in the Republican sample its a 50/50 split (exactly.) The only way they make the whole thing not look ridiculous is by making the Independent sample skew male heavy at 57%.  As males as a group break heavily for Romney this gender imbalance has the effect of depressing Romney's vote total among Republicans and pumping up Obama's score among Democrats. Time has Romney winning among Republicans by 84% to 11%, while McCain won 92% to 8%.  Meanwhile they have Obama winning amongst Democrats 92% to 6%, while in 2008 those numbers were 89% to 11%.

Among Independents Romney is ahead 53% to 38%. In 2008 Independents went for Obama by a 52% to 44% margin.

Any way you want to slice it, it don't add up.

What A Difference A Month Makes

I put together a little chart looking at ten prominent "battleground states" to see what the last month or so has meant for the poll numbers. (Positive numbers = Obama lead; negative numbers = Romney lead).

It certainly looks like there has been a lot of erosion of support for Obama, doesn't it?

(Note: There has been no recent data released for North Carolina as Obama is no longer viewed as being competitive in the state. I used the latest available data, October 18th, for the later North Carolina average. All data gleaned from Real Clear Politics.)

As a point of comparison, here are the current poll numbers compared with the actual results of 2008.

Many of the "predictive models" have been assuming 2008 levels of enthusiasm for Obama in the tailoring of their samples. However, its difficult to see that enthusiasm when you look at the numbers.

An Analogy (Presented As If Tweeted)

Grapes are like twelve pressure treated 2x4s.

If you don't understand why that is you must be an idiot.

#shitobamasays

Thank Goodness. I've Been Delisted.

There is something kind of quaint about "blogrolls" in this day and age. Those of us who have been writing these sorts of things for awhile can certainly remember a time when getting added to this or that blogroll was viewed with a generous amount of satisfaction.

As the technology has changed so has the need for hyperlink collections diminished. I still use my blogroll to quickly jump to sites, but even I largely use Twitter and aggregators like Memeorandum to see what is new. Still, I try from time to time to clean up my links. You will notice I break the links up into two groups. The first group, the "Roll of Honor" included those site which reciprocated with a link back to The Iconic Midwest. The "Link We Life (Mostly)" section includes sites that have not reciprocated.

Today, I am rather relieved to remove The Moderate Voice from my roll of honor. Once upon a time this would have been a melancholic occasion, but those days have long since passed. Whatever TMV was back in the day, it has become the kind of site I feel like I need to take a shower after visiting. The kind of tin foil hat wearing conspiracies you would expect to find only in the bowels of The Daily Kos have become the everyday fodder at TMV. They have become so warped that they consider places like Little Green Footballs and Kiko's House as "centrist voices." Look, I link to Kiko's on my blogroll, but I wouldn't call "centrist" a blog that routinely has posts such as "America's Most Dangerous Organized Crime Family: The Republican Party". (As for the hate-fest that is LGF, the less said about it the better. Rank partisanship of the Kiko's House variety is fine. The dehumanizing rhetoric of LGF is not. It's more than a little scary that TMV sees no distinction worthy of making here.)

Ah well...sadly it is the way it is these days.

They Got Nothing

You know things are getting bad in Democrat-land when their only response to people who are worried about getting a job or holding onto the the multiple jobs they are taking just to make ends meet is to say "Romney said 'Binders of Women'!"

Wow. They must really disdain the American people to believe they would be swayed by such crapola.

On the other hand, it isn't like they have any ideas to offer.

Do No Harm

If someone were to try to pin me down about why I view the world, and in particular the American political landscape, the way I do it would most probably boil down to a few main points. Some of them would touch upon my own eccentricities (e.g. I am an incorrigible contrarian), but mostly my political principles stem from a belief that ideology is neither inevitable nor desirable. This is the reason that while I am certainly right of center as such things are measured in American political discourse, you will find no Randian nonsense here.

My biggest beef with ideology is that it acts as a replacement for thinking. When presented with a question or with a situation in the real world that needs addressing, the ideologue responds automatically with a canned answer. Wed this approach with a belief in the moral superiority of their brand of ideological thinking and you have a recipe for disaster on a large scale.

Affirmative action is a classic case in point. The confluence of ideology and rampant moralizing has produced a toxic brew that has positively harmed minority students in this country despite the "best intentions" of the Left. Tragically the ideologically fevered are simply unable to see the truth of this and are therefore doomed to keep inflicting this harm upon minority students.

There is now increasing evidence that students who receive large preferences of any kind—whether based on race, athletic ability, alumni connections or other considerations—experience some clear negative effects: Students end up with poor grades (usually in the bottom fifth of their class), lower graduation rates, extremely high attrition rates from science and engineering majors, substantial self-segregation on campus, lower self-esteem and far greater difficulty passing licensing tests (such as bar exams for lawyers).

The most encouraging part of this research is the parallel finding that these same students have dramatically better outcomes if they go to schools where their level of academic preparation is much closer to that of the median student. That is, black and Hispanic students—as well as the smaller numbers of preferentially admitted athletes and children of donors—excel when they avoid the problem of what has come to be called "mismatch."

... Even as social scientists have transformed our understanding of affirmative action, universities don't seem to be paying attention. Consider the University of California system, which since 1998 has been legally precluded (by Proposition 209) from considering race in admissions. Throughout the past 15 years—most recently in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court—university officials have denounced race neutrality and pointed to the substantial drop in freshman black and Hispanic students at the system's two flagship schools, Berkeley and UCLA.

Yet race-neutrality has produced stunning benefits for minorities in the UC system as a whole, as shown in a data set that economists obtained from UC administrators. Black, American-Indian and Hispanic students made up 26% of all U.C. freshmen in 2010, up from 16% in 1997; the number of B.A.s earned by black and Hispanic students in four years rose 55% between 1995-97 and 2001-03, while the number with GPAs above 3.5 rose 63%.

So, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that not mismatching students via affirmative action has led to dramatic improvements for minority students in California, the ideologues still want to impose their failed ideas upon everyone. It is as if they are saying, "We would rather harm minority students than have them succeed on anything other than our own terms." I'm sorry, but there is nothing noble or moral about such a position. The only thing that should matter is what is best for students, i.e. under what conditions are they most likely to succeed? Nothing else matters very much. Lousy ideology matters not at all.

Happy Columbus Day

And I mean it. No, holier than thou crapola here.

Maureen Dowd Reaches New Low: UPDATED

It's amazing the way liberal anti-Semitism has becomes so blatant in our day. Once upon a time these bigots used to just whisper it amongst their confidants. Now, they proclaim it in the pages of the New York Times, as in Maureen Dowd's "Neocons Slither Back." Slithers. Nice. For those not up on such things:

...criticism of neoconservatism is often a euphemism for criticism of Jews, and that the term has been adopted by the political left to stigmatize support for Israel. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert J. Lieber warned that criticism of the 2003 Iraq War had spawned[80] "a conspiracy theory purporting to explain how [American] foreign policy... has been captured by a sinister and hitherto little-known cabal. A small band of neoconservative (read, Jewish) defense intellectuals... has taken advantage of 9/11 to put their ideas over on [Bush]... Thus empowered, this neoconservative conspiracy, "a product of the influential Jewish-American faction of the Trotskyist movement of the '30s and '40s" ([Michael] Lind)... has fomented war with Iraq... in the service of Israel's Likud government (Patrick J. Buchanan and [Eric Alterman)."

And, in case you were not aware of the history of anti-Semites comparing Jews with snakes:

Like the cuckcoo, Jews are depicted as stealing other people's homes. They are the foreigners who threaten to displace the Germans from Germany. As hyeanas strike disabled animals, Jews are portrayed as preying upon disadvantaged Germans/Christians. Other animals included in these comparisons are the chameleon (the great deceiver), the locust (the scourge of God), the bedbug (the blood sucker), the sparrow (good-for-nothings), the poodle-mops-dachshund-pincher (an inferior race created by cross-breeding various types of races), the poisonous snake (the viper of humanity, and the tapeworm (the parasite of humanity).

If you are writing on politics for the New York Times you have to be aware of the currents of public discourse AND have a rudimentary understanding of history. Maureen Dowd either, A) Was completely unaware of these historical precedents, or B) Knew all about them and decided to show her assent to them by comparing neocons to snakes. Either way, be she incompetent or downright evil, she should not be writing for a respectable publication.

UPDATE:

Amazingly (or, sadly, not-so-amazingly) there are those who can find nothing wrong with taking a group routinely depicted as American Jews more interested in the well-being of Israel than the United States and calling them sneaky snakes controlling U.S. policy from behind the scenes. In fact, they are saying such depictions are true:

The biggest mistake you can make is getting caught telling the truth on Israeli politics.

 Wow.

Of course some people do have a moral conscience, like Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic:

Oy" is right. Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, "(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.")

This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.

Maybe Dowd doesn't know this. But, c'mon. Just how blithering an idiot would one have to be to not know this already?

Krugman Is Still A Lying Sack Of You Know What

From Mr. Duplicity himself:

During today’s round table on ABC, Rand Paul seemed shocked at my claim that government employment is down under Obama. Of course, it is.

Oh, is it? Well, then someone ought to tell the U.S. Office of Personnel Management because they tell a different story:

Federal Personnel (Executive Branch):
2008: 2,692,000
2010 (latest data): 2,776,000 For a increase of 84,000 employees.

Total Federal Personnel:
2008: 4,206,000
2010: 4,443,000 For an increase of 237,000 employees.

 I'm still looking for the decrease here Paulie. But, that's right, Krugman cannot be bothered looking up the real numbers because he is too busy blaming Bush:

But maybe he’s thinking of the fact that since govt employment rose under Bush, we’re still at higher absolute levels than we were a decade ago.

Well, let's look at the Bush numbers, shall we?

Federal Personnel (Executive Branch):

1999: 2,687,000
2008: 2,692,000 For an increase of 5000 employees in 8 years.

So Bush increased the Executive Branch by an average of 625 employee per year. The Obama number? 42,000 per year.

Total Federal Personnel:
1999: 4,135,000
2008: 4,206,000 For a total growth of 71,000, or 8875 per year. The Obama number? 118,500 per year.

So, how does Krugman get his numbers? Well, by lying. Krugman adds in all of the local and state government jobs lost since the start of 2009 because of the horrible Obama economy, and portrays them perversely as evidence of Obama's penny pinching ways. So, your local government had to lay off teachers because property tax revenues have plummeted? Well, says Krugman, you can thank Obama. And, hey, all you protestors in Wisconsin! According to Krugman you've got it all wrong. Scott Walker isn't to blame. Any changes in state spending and hiring are all Obama's doing!

I'm sorry, but in the real world President Obama controls the Federal government and its hiring practices. The Federal government has increased since Obama came to office and at a rate many times that of President Bush. President Obama has nothing to do with whether your local government has to lay off its librarians, except in the generic sense of being to blame for the state of the so-called recovery that has put state and local governments in the bind they are in. 

 I'm sure Paul's hesitation when confronted with the Krugman statement on the Sunday talk shows was caused by his not being able to believe that A) Anyone could make as stupid or dishonest an argument as Paul Krugman has made, or B) That there could be anyone so stupid as to believe it.

Get A Grip People: UPDATED

I don't know if this is an entirely new phenomena, but when did we all devolve towards the memory ability of hamsters? CNN moves O'Brien, Cooper to NOLA

In a move that signals how Tropical Storm Isaac threatens to eclipse the Republican convention, CNN has announced that it is sending Soledad O'Brien and Anderson Cooper to New Orleans. The storm, which is bypassing Tampa and on course for the north Gulf Coast (and very possibly New Orleans), could now pose far bigger problems for the Republicans than high winds and waves ever would. There is a very real fear among Republicans that a natural disaster in New Orleans (seven years after Hurricane Katrina) or nearby could all but eclipse the convention -- or, worse, create an unfavorable "split-screen situation" in which images of Hurricane damage are juxtaposed with the theatrics of Mitt Romney's nomination.

Oh, for crying out loud. I know it has been awhile since we have had a hurricane of note make landfall in the United States but this is downright stupid. For starters, Issac has somehow managed to become a media star despite the fact it has not actually become a hurricane. Most forecasts had it gaining enough strength overnight, but it hasn't happen yet.

SUMMARY OF 100 PM CDT...1800 UTC...INFORMATION ---------------------------------------------- LOCATION...26.1N 85.9W ABOUT 255 MI...410 KM SSW OF APALACHICOLA FLORIDA ABOUT 280 MI...450 KM SE OF THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...65 MPH...100 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 305 DEGREES AT 14 MPH...22 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...984 MB...29.06 INCHES

Secondly, the idea that this storm could cause the same trouble as Katrina is just laughable. Katrina spent a good part of its life cycle as a Cat 5 storm, though it hit the coast as a more pedestrian Cat 3. Because it had been so strong the storm surge piled up ahead of it to the tune of 26+ feet. To put this in perspective the National Hurricane Center puts the possibility of even a 10 foot storm surge in New Orleans at under 5%. (The most likely upper end is around the 4 foot level.) All indications are Issac is going to be a pretty wet event and the dangers of flooding in low lying areas, including New Orleans, will always be with us when these kinds of rainmakers come ashore. However, there is no indication there is a major natural disaster brewing in the Gulf.

One wonder if there is some "wishful" thinking going on at CNN.

UPDATE:

4PM CDT advisory:

SUMMARY OF 400 PM CDT...2100 UTC...INFORMATION
----------------------------------------------
LOCATION...26.4N 86.2W
ABOUT 320 MI...515 KM SSE OF MOBILE ALABAMA
ABOUT 255 MI...415 KM SE OF THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...70 MPH...110 KM/H
PRESENT MOVEMENT...NW OR 305 DEGREES AT 12 MPH...19 KM/H
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...981 MB...28.97 INCHES


WATCHES AND WARNINGS
--------------------
CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY...

THE HURRICANE WARNING FROM THE FLORIDA-ALABAMA BORDER TO DESTIN HAS
BEEN CHANGED TO A TROPICAL STORM WARNING.

 Still not a hurricane and they are downgrading some of the warnings.

Yep, sounds like the apocalypse to me.

"It's Not A Nazi Tactic When We Do It"

The liberal demonization of all those who do not agree with their agenda continues apace. But, of course, when they demonize people its because they were asking for it.

Hmmmm..... Where have I heard that before?

Why I'm Not Blogging About Politics Much Anymore

There was a perfect example on a Memeorandum thread today of the reason why I don't care to blog about politics these days.

It begins with this piece by David Brooks where Brooks castigates the Obama campaign's cynical rhetoric against "modern capitalism," of which Romany is supposedly the archetypal specimen. Its the usual Brooks fodder; a good bit here and there surrounded by over broad generalizations and the occasional sweeping denunciation.

Its not much of a piece, by any standard. That presidential campaigns will stoop to cynical populist posturing is hardly breaking news anywhere.

But, no! According to some leading lights, Brooks' column is actually offensive!! Memeorandum helpfully links to drivel by Booman Tribune, No More Mister Nice Blog, The Reaction, and Balloon Juice that make a collective case that is at once idiotic, pig ignorant, dishonest and a complete waste of time for any thinking person. (I'm shocked that Steve Benen, the single dumbest and most unqualified political writer of our day didn't weigh in stupidly as well... he must have been napping.) Its pointless to even waste my time fisking it because it is all so bad I'd have to fisk even the definite articles. Worse yet, if I were to attempt to do so it would only sink myself into that shitty morass.

Part of me would like to blame Memeorandum for linking so often to such useless shit, but maybe they are simply constrained by the sheer amount of shit being produced. Its sad because there are real arguments to be had out there, and I love a good argument. What I do not like are dumbshits, especially when people are being tricked into taking the dumbshits seriously.

It begins to feel like we are all being sucked into the Monty Python "Argument Clinic" sketch, where one wants to say "I don't want to argue about that!" when more and more shitty drivel is being flung in our direction by this new class of aggressively stupid opinion makers. That is the scary part in all this. Its the stupid ones who are driving what gets counted as the "conversation" these days.

So, if you are wondering why I am not writing more just imagine an exasperated Michael Palin saying "I don't want to argue about that!" and you won't be too far off.

The Supreme Court Does The Democrats No Favor

Only time will tell what the practical upshot will be of SCOTUS's rubber stamp of Obamacare, but there may come a time when Democrats will say "with 'victories' like this who needs defeats?"

The trouble comes from the Court correctly labeling Obamacare as what it is; the single largest tax increase in the history of the United States. A tax increase, it must be stated, the brunt of which will be borne by the middle-class; precisely the group Obama promised he wouldn't raise taxes on. Of course Obama's tax promises were hollow from the get-go, but voters may be less likely to view things so strategically. This will be especially true given we are going into a campaigning season where nearly unlimited PAC money will be spent like it was going out of style. The advertizing theme resulting from this spending spree is easy to predict: "Obama is a liar who saddled the middle-class with the largest permanent tax increase in history."

And who said this was the case? Why, every liberal member of the Supreme Court. That's who.

The attempts of spin will be interesting. For the moment, press coverage is focusing upon the "victory" aspect. The political ramifications are a different animal all together. Obama and the Democrats have deliberately kicked the hornets nest. That has consequences, no matter how desperately they wish it didn't.

Let the fun begin. And, yes, for a political junkie this is where the fun kicks in. If you find yourself wishing it would all go away because you want to "win" once and for all, well, you're not a political junkie at all. You're a tyrant. Ain't democracy great?

The Problem Of Being Psuedo-Educated

From the "You've got to be kidding" department: Why Smart People Are Stupid

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)


For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman, the late Amos Tversky, and others, including Shane Frederick (who developed the bat-and-ball question), demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

Talk about a bad premise.

For starters, when economists and social scientists assume "rational actors" they are usually doing so in the context of a model, and not using it as a description of the real world. The real world is far too complex for any social scientist to incorporate every potential variable that could affect their model. As a result, things get abstracted; things like the decision making processes of people. Economists and social scientists know "rational actor" models are unrealistic, but they work well enough for what they are trying to do.

As for philosophy... anyone who would claim that for centuries philosophers, as a group, have assumed people are rational doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. Socrates and Plato certainly make no such assumption. Even a cursory reading of The Apology or Crito make it clear that while rational thinking is a human possibility it is not a universally realized one. When Criton visits Socrates under house arrest awaiting execution and urges him to flee from Athens, Socrates responds by telling Criton to not worry about what "the many" think or do. The many do not use reason, argues Socrates, therefore they do not act from knowledge but instead act randomly so worrying about it won't help. So, for Plato at least, rational thought is not the default position for human beings.

And Plato is not alone. Thinkers as diverse as Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and, especially, pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, make no assumptions regarding the rationality of man. The philosophy of Peirce would be especially relevant to understanding why subjects respond to these questions from Kahneman the way they do.

For Peirce the way human beings think is made up of a few mental methods, one of which is indeed the classic rational method of syllogism and deduction. However, it is much more common for us to use the process which Peirce called "abduction" in order to make educated guesses about the world. We do it all the time, Peirce argues, without even realizing it. Have you ever had a conversation with someone about another person, except you thought you were talking about Person X while your conversation partner thought you were talking about Person Y? We can go on for a little wile talking at cross purposes, even when the information doesn't exactly conform to what we knew of Person X, until something way out of whack causes us to ask "Wait. Who are we talking about?" and the problem is revealed. Now, not only do we do this all of the time, we are actually pretty good at it. Most of the time when we make these sorts of guesses we do so correctly. Only when we screw it up do we realize we have even been guessing in the first place.

Movie makers realize this fact as well. Actually, our guessing is the only thing which allows shocker surprise endings in the first place. Take the movie The Sixth Sense. The filmmakers know we will make a guess, or fill in the blanks, in a particular fashion even though we have not been given the information to make our guesses accurate. The movie only works if we continually make such guesses over the course of the film which, luckily for filmmakers, is exactly what we are prone to do.

Which brings us back to the magic questions which prove how dumb we all are. The reason they work in tripping up people is similar to the way The Sixth Sense works. They are not "simple arithmetic questions," they are riddles.

OK, lets look at these more closely:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

If we were going to represent this problem mathematically it would be:

x + (x+1) = 1.10 

Which could be simplified to:

2x +1 = 1.10

And resolved as:

2x + 1 - 1 = 1.10 - 1

2x = .10

2x / 2 = .10 / 2

x = .05

So, while there is no difficult math going on here, it isn't as simple as the question sounds.

The article offers another example. Read it as a riddle.

In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?

The answer is obviously 47 days. I'm willing to bet most people reading it after being told to treat it as a riddle would get it right. (Just as I'm willing to bet most people caught on to The Sixth Sense if they were first warned about a surprise ending.)

My point here is not to dog Prof. Kahneman's research, which sounds like a useful compendium of the variety of bad guesses human being make, as much as it is to dog the idea that rationality is a baseline assumption in philosophy. It isn't. And if journalists, among others, knew the first thing about it they would not make such dumb errors themselves.

Life At Ground Zero

For one day at least Wisconsin has become the political centerpiece for the country.

Oh goody.

You may have noticed I've had precious little to say about the electoral doings in my adopted home state. The thing is I'm essentially a contrarian at heart. Stuff that people generally don't care about (philosophy, power pop music, good whole grain mustard) I invest a lot into. Now politics is usually something I could add to that list. Most of the time most people keep only a casual watch upon the political scene. Oh, they will have their opinions on the questions of the day, but most of their energy is directed towards their own business (work, family, etc.).

Up in Wisconsin these days this isn't the case. Far too many people are far too emotionally involved in this election for my liking. I have an instinctual dislike for passion in politics. As a result the more emotional energy people put into a political campaign the more likely I am to tune it all out. And, if there was ever a contest that deserved to be tuned out it is this one. It was simple petulance which generated the abusive recall efforts in the first place. (I'm sorry folks, but this is an abuse of the recall mechanism. There is no way to spin it otherwise.) Losing an election has consequences, including ceding legislative initiative to the winning side. They might even (the horror) enact legislation you really dislike! The thing is there is a sure fire way to undo these sorts of things; win the next damn election which is only two years off anyway.

That being said I've found Walker's "all or nothing" governance to be almost entirely short-sighted. Walker's approach has made it almost inevitable that as soon as the pendulum swings back to the Democrats at the state level everything Walker did will be undone. Indeed the "all or nothing" attitude Walker exudes smacks of zealotry and not measured conservatism, and as such he appeals to my sensibilities very little.

So where does that leave me? Mostly as a spectator. I'm watching what is going on, but I am in no way invested in it. For today at least, I'm happier this way.

Is John Cole The Dumbest Person On The Internets?

Granted, there is a lot of competition out there, but when you read pig ignorant crapola like this you have to think we've got the new king of stoopid:

Democrats tell us that photo ID requirements disenfranchise minority voters, who, inexplicably, have limited access to photo IDs. Yet, at their own convention, they insist that all delegates provide a photo ID to even have access to the convention floor.

I guess they don’t understand the concept of the basic right to vote and how that differs from being one of a very few delegates to a party convention.

Uh, sorry to break it to you John but there is no "basic right to vote." Never has been. Its not a recognized "right" in the English common law tradition; its not a recognized "right" in the Natural Law tradition; its not a "right" in the liberal democratic tradition.

In order for something to be a "basic right" it has to be inalienable (or unalienable if one wishes to echo Jefferson.) Thus, if John Cole were to become a convicted felon, and we can only hope one day he manages to do so, he could lose his ability to vote. In other words, his vote is alienable and therefore not a right.

On the other hand, John Cole's right to liberty and free speech means he has the inalienable right to go on the Internet and make an ass of himself.

And aren't we all lucky?

Breaking My Silence For Convicted Domestic Terror Bomber Brett Kimberlin Day

There is no need to go into details, as they are copiously explained in dozens of places around the Net today. However, I would like to point people towards this harrowing account on harassment and attempted intimidation directed towards Patrick Frey of Patterico fame.

THE NIGHT I COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED BECAUSE OF MY BLOGGING



At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.


When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.


They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?


I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.


Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.


Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.


The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.


Because I could have been killed.

Pat is a friend of a friend, has been incredibly nice and generous to me and my little blog over the years, and has fantastic taste in music. It is a damn shame he was to deal with these kinds of lunatics. Its also a damn shame that so many on the Left, after they hear about this situation, have taken the side of the lunatics because they disagree with Pat's politics. It is unconscionable, but, sadly, par for the course these days.

The Liberal Mind In Action

It goes something like this....

"Those people in North Carolina are sooooooooo prejudiced. It must be because they are inbred hillbillies."

....and they go on and feel wonderful about themselves all the live long day because they are so enlightened and tolerant and stuff.

The Chronicle of Higher Education And Fascism

Well, the cyber brown shirts were out in force over an opinion piece written by Naomi Schaefer Riley suggesting that black-studies programs were a bastion of "political partisanship and liberal hackery." Granted, you would have to be a braindead moron to not realize the truthfulness of such an opinion, but that hasn't stopped The Chronicle from firing Riley because she offended moronic political partisans and moronic liberal hacks.

This will be the last time I ever read, comment or link to anything in The Chronicle. They have violated the basic principles of a liberal society. In fact they have thrown their lot in with the brown shirts and have announced they will deem entire blocks of the American political tradition, such as Republicanism and conservatism, as anathema. They are goosestepping against freedom and I will have nothing to do with them.

Demagoguery At Forbes: Education Edition

Here is a piece from someone claiming to be against "bad science."  Evidently, they don't include "bad social science" in that description:

Wow, no one saw this coming. The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.4 million. The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments.

Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?
save about $1.7 million

OK, Mr. Outraged, you tell me: How many majors was the UF computer science department producing? What was the quality of its graduate program? Will eliminating classes taught by grad student teaching assistants improve or worsen the quality of instruction?

The answers to the above questions are: Who knows; Who knows; and Probably improve. Without dealing with these fundamental questions there is no way to rationally assess the impact of this move by UF. Indeed, this entire piece is more about emotionalism than rational argumentation. Time for the non sequitar:

 Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is , $97.7 million, an increase of more than $700,000 from last year.
$99 million

Ah, yes, the old bogeyman, college athletics. It's the eggheads favorite punching bag. Of course, as the writer had to ultimately admit, the athletic budget has nothing to do with the UF budget process for academics (oops), but, hey, it feels good to take the moral high ground against the dumb jocks. How enlightened.

But maybe there is a reason why this particular subject is being deemphasized at UF: (From the same freakin' article!!)

 Meanwhile, just two days ago, Florida governor Rick Scott approved the creation of a brand-new public university, Florida Polytechnic University, to be located near the city of Tampa.

Gee, could it be the state has decided not to have redundant departments, and instead will focus upon building the program at the Polytech? There is nothing special or magical about being the "flagship" campus that requires their program to be the prestige programs. Plenty of state university systems have other campuses which host the premiere programs in various subjects.

Maybe this is what is going on. Maybe it is not. From this Forbes article it is impossible to know. Then again, I think that maybe the point of this piece, i.e. to leave its reader uninformed but emotionally engaged. If that isn't demagoguery then nothing is.

Thomas Friedman: Wile E. Coyote Op-Ed Writer

From one of the NY Times super-geniuses:

I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.

Gee, that's a coincidence. I too was recently at Union Station in DC having caught the MARC train down from Baltimore where my wife and I stayed while she hits some libraries for a biography she is writing.

For those who do not know DC well, and as someone who lived there for eight years, let me fill you in on a couple things:

A) There is no traffic circle around Union Station (mostly because of all the train tracks coming into it.... duh.)

B) There is a traffic circle in front of Union Station.... well kind of. Columbus Circle isn't a traffic circle the way Dupont Circle is. In fact, it is less a traffic circle and more a traffic ampersand. (Strange but true.)

C) That traffic circle is currently being re-constructed. That is why its so bumpy.

D) Union Station itself is in the middle of a large renovation project. Maybe this could explain why Mr. Friedman was inconvenienced so by that faulty escalator. One can only hope he was able to extricate himself from the station in an unexerted state.

E) The wife and I used our phone, which uses the dodgier Virgin Mobile network to boot, along the line as far as Princeton Junction with nary a problem. Maybe Mr. Friedman should think about switching carriers.

F) I can't say anything about the Acela one way or the other. Normal people like us can't afford to take it. The slower trains we were on were clean and comfortable. Of course, without a quicker train we may have been forced to do without this particular piece of Mr. Friedman's work. Now that would have been a tragedy too terrible to contemplate.

I'm always suspicious of these personal anecdotes used to illustrate whatever point an Op-Ed writer is trying to make. I nearly always suspect they are BS. In this case I know it is BS because I was just there.

And, when we see one of the reasons why the road is bumpy and the escalators aren't necessarily working, etc. is that we are already doing the "renewal" the opinion piece claims we are not doing... well, its enough for me to just shake my head and say "Shut up."

Our Tax Future

Almost an actual proposal: Romney Specifies Deductions He'd Cut

Mitt Romney, speaking at a private fundraising event on Sunday, offered the first details of deductions he would eliminate or limit in order to offset the income tax cut he has proposed for all taxpayers.

Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said he would eliminate or limit for high-earners the mortgage interest deduction for second homes, and likely would do the same for the state income tax deduction and state property tax deduction.



He also said he would look to the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for budget cuts.

Mr. Romney discussed his plans while speaking to high-dollar donors at a private estate. During the backyard event, which could be heard by reporters outside on a public sidewalk, Mr. Romney offered policy specifics he has yet to unveil on the campaign trail.



Mr. Romney has pledged a 20% cut to income tax rates for taxpayers in all income brackets but has offered few details for how he would pay for the proposal. Mr. Romney also has vowed to bring federal spending under control, while offering few details on which programs he would cut.

The problem with all of these sorts of things is it is difficult to know what the impact will be at the level of the individual. Like most Americans I don't hold a mortgage on a second home, so there is no personal impact on my family there. However, I do itemize deductions including state income and property taxes. So I hear this proposal and I immediately think "Crap. I'll have to take the standard deduction."

But, what would the overall impact be?

It's hard to know exactly how the "20% cut to income tax rates for taxpayers in all income brackets" will be implemented, but right now my taxes came to 13% of taxable income. A 20% reduction in that rate would result in a 10.4% rate. However, using the standard deduction (sans the state income and property tax deductions) would raise my taxable income 3.5%.

The net result? Under Romney's plan my family would owe $1100 less in taxes.

I could live with that.

Q: How Do We Know Republicans Are Radically Right?

A: Their last two Presidential nominees will have been John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Wait.... what?

Never mind.

In Case You Didn't Already Know

Cory Booker rocks.

Democrats: We Have To Destroy The Country To Save It

I have no idea what this is all about. I can only assume they hyperventilated so much last week they suffered a lack of oxygen to the brain: Impeach the Supreme Court Justices If They Overturn Health-Care Law

The problem with the current court is not merely that there is a good chance it will strike down a clearly constitutional law. The problem is that this decision would be the latest salvo in what seems to be a sustained effort on the part of the Roberts Court to return the country to the Gilded Age.

Uh, ok. Good luck with that "argument." The problem with all of this is it is imbecility bordering on madness. Actually, in the case of historian David Dow, the author of the above, I'm pretty sure he jumped over the border, moved right into looney-toonsville, and built a duplex.

Why are we supposed to think Obamacare is "clearly" cconstitutional? Well, because Dow says it is. After all, who is the Supreme Court to argue with an historian!?! If only Dow had issued his inerrant proclamations earlier we could have foregone all these hearings and court dates and legal briefs and such.

Also, you may be surprised to know that in all the years before Obamacare was passed we were practicing "Social Darwinism." Yes, because those are the only choices. Obamacare or letting babies die in the streets. Who knew?

I'll tell you who it is a shame we cannot impeach; idiot professors whose intellectual dishonesty is only matched by their, to get all urban dictionary here, dumbassery. There are historical analogs to the good professor here. All of the blindly partisan Southern Democrats who sowed discord, bad logic and set the stage for the Secession movement and the Civil War would find a kindred spirit in David Dow. For all of their certainty in their moral righteousness they did nothing but harm to their country. The Dow's of our day haven't reached those depths yet, but they are working on it.

UPDATING:

More craziness:

Here is CBS News's Jan Crawford on a federal appeals court's angry response to the gauntlet Pres. Obama threw down:

...Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional...

What Jan Crawford does not mention here is that the judicial right that 1803 ruling asserted -- Marbury v. Madison -- has only been invoked once since 1803.

This seems to be claiming that the Supreme Court has only struck down a law as unconstitutional once in 209 years. Uh, wow.

I've tried to figure out an alternative rational meaning for this statement... I really have... but, damn it all, I can't come up with one. I've even considered the possibility they were trying to say something else and this just inexplicably appeared. No dice there either. The only thing I can think of is they were hacked and some devious person posted this to make them look like utter fools.

Sadly, I believe they mean every word of this.

A Post-Mortem On The 2012 General Election

I recently got this message from the future concerning our upcoming elections in November:

Worst. Election. Cycle. Ever.

You heard it here first.

Conservatives Are Less Trusting Of Science Because They Are More Rational

Among the authoritarian minded (i.e. American liberals to a man and woman) there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the recalcitrant American conservative who simply refuses to knuckle under and do what their betters tell them to do. This, we are told, is because conservatives are "anti-science." The real reason is conservatives are more likely to adhere to the skepticism inherent in rational scientific discourse, while liberals generally do not challenge the sources of authority because they have PhD's and attend all the right liberal cocktail parties (evidently.)

The problem, for liberals, arises when reality is examined, like in this story: In cancer science, many 'discoveries' don't hold up

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.



During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.


Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature....

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.



"We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure," said Begley. "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning."


Such selective publication is just one reason the scientific literature is peppered with incorrect results.


For one thing, basic science studies are rarely "blinded" the way clinical trials are. That is, researchers know which cell line or mouse got a treatment or had cancer. That can be a problem when data are subject to interpretation, as a researcher who is intellectually invested in a theory is more likely to interpret ambiguous evidence in its favor.


The problem goes beyond cancer.


On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.


Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, speaking to the panel, said he blamed a hypercompetitive academic environment that fosters poor science and even fraud, as too many researchers compete for diminishing funding.


"The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high-profile journal," said Fang. "This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior."

Of course, such a situation could never take place if the basic tenets of science were being followed. Notice the problem is not with a bad paper here, or a rogue researcher there. The problem is systemic. In the face of such poor system-wide practices the only rational response is to doubt the validity of the research produced via faulty methods. Public opinion polling on the subject is clear; only conservatives express such doubt. Therefor, only conservatives are thinking and acting rationally on this matter.

Wherein Joe Nocera Makes A Really Dumb Argument

See if you can follow this: Orwell and March Madness

If you’ve been watching the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship — a k a March Madness — you’ve undoubtedly seen the commercial. It’s an N.C.A.A. ad that shows college athletes pumping iron, running sprints and playing games. The voice-over, though, talks not about athletic achievement but academic accomplishment. “African-American males who are student-athletes are 10 percent more likely to graduate,” says the narrator. As the ad concludes, a female athlete looks into the camera and says, “Still think we’re just a bunch of dumb jocks?”...


Is it true that black male athletes have a higher graduation rate than other students? It is not.

Notice the pea getting moved? Nocera say the ad is making a claim the ad certainly does not make. The ad only claims that black male student athletes graduate more often than black make non-athletes, which is interesting to know. Nocera misrepresents the ad in order to say it is lying, but the only person lying here is Nocera.

In fact, Nocera goes off the deep end and claims:

The N.C.A.A. has created several other Orwellian concepts, such as an Academic Progress Rate, which allows it to use data to create the illusion that athletes are doing better academically than their peers.... ...In comparing college basketball players with their true peer group — full-time college students...

What? So comparing black males athlete with black male non-athletes is not a "true peer" group comparison? On what planet? Really, Joe says comparing black athletes with, for example, white suburban kids who graduated in the Top 15% of their high school class would be a "true peer" comparison, while comparing a black football player from Detroit with other non-athletes blacks would be "Orwellian." Uh, OK.... good luck with that. Look there is plenty to criticize the NCAA for, but you don't have to do it so ineptly, or so dishonestly.

A Public Service From The Iconic Midwest

In case you were contemplating spending part of your day reading one or more of the varied and sundry liberal accounts of the recent Supreme Court's questioning of the law known as Obamacare, let me offer you instead this short précis :

The sad fact is this is fairer to their reaction than their depiction of the arguments against the individual mandate.

As Andrew Klavan puts it:

Listening to MSM reports about the Supreme Court judges questioning lawyers on ObamaCare has been kind of comical. As Rand Simberg points out, both the media and the government’s lawyers seemed wholly unprepared for the basic questions from the judges — questions they would have heard a million times by now if they ever actually listened to conservative commentators instead of simply demonizing them. The conservative judges especially are only asking what Tea Partiers at town hall meetings have been asking since the bill was passed: “If the government can force you to buy insurance for your own good, what CAN’T it force you to do?”

Well, Klavan is wrong about one thing. They have answered this question. It just so happens that the answer is "nothing" and they are afraid to admit it in plain language.

Look! Something New & Shiny!

Why do bloggers jettison their own past? I ask because from time to time I look back at posts from the not all that distant past here at the Iconic Midwest and discover that the things I linked to simply don't exist anymore. At some point the sites have been "updated" to the latest and the greatest thing and as a result much of what had been on their site has been discarded. I know in many ways this is ephemeral stuff, but it does give us a unique perspective on just what we were thinking way back when. So the loss of so much material is a shame. Even when sites, like The Moderate Voice, have kept all of their posts they almost always lose user comments, which is a shame as some of my best work (and most fun arguments) took place in the comments section on those early days of TMV.

The Iconic Midwest won't ever change, as long as Blogger is still around. Every post and every comment ever posted here will remain, as long as I can keep myself from being distrac....

Hey! Look at THAT!!!!!!!

Irrationality. Its Whats For Breakfast...

....lunch AND dinner. I'm beginning to think this must have been what it was like to live in the days of the Weimar Republic. Everything these days, and I do mean everything, is not just politicized, it is linked to specific forms of political action in such a way that once the table has been set nothing can shift it; not facts, not reason, not reality itself. As a result every meme is clung onto with ferocious tenacity, not matter how ridiculous it may turn out to be or how divorced from reality we later discover it is.

Once something has been viewed as a useful political tool it will not be discarded, even if reality itself (or one's perception of it) has to be altered. In the name of political expediency everything is fair game, and dishonesty is something only the "other guy" does.

It doesn't even matter what we are talking about here. I can speak generically because this pattern fits just about every political topic one wants to talk about. That is the point. The content of political discourse isn't important anymore.  Political discourse, as such, simply doesn't exist in this society. What passes for such discourse is merely the tribal identifiers we use to differentiate "Us" from "Them." The scariest part of it is the more one is afflicted with this pathology the more likely it is you will selected by the media as the ones to set the terms of the "debate."

"Political Science A 'Gaffe'" Says New York Times

Who knew? Romney’s Day to Relish Is Marred by Aide’s Gaffe

Mitt Romney sought to use the coveted endorsement of Jeb Bush on Wednesday to amplify his call for Republicans to rally behind his candidacy and get on with the mission of ousting President Obama....

...But if the endorsement held the potential to further choke off the oxygen to Mr. Santorum’s insurgent candidacy, the Romney campaign inadvertently gave Mr. Santorum a new supply when a senior adviser went on CNN and seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney’s conservative positions in the primary season could change like an Etch A Sketch drawing.

“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime adviser to Mr. Romney, said in response to a question about pivoting to a matchup with Mr. Obama and appealing to moderate swing voters. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

OK, fine. I realize the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns are desperate, and will say any damn fool thing in a vain attempt to bolster their fading relevance, but why is the Times endorsing such foolishness?

And it is foolish. One thing Political Science has shown us very clearly is that candidates run towards their party's ideological base during primaries and run towards the center in general elections. Every candidate has the "do over" moment, usually on television at the moment of their nomination acceptance speech, where they stop focusing on the base. We all know this. Its a truism of American politics.

How can acknowledging a truism be a "gaffe"? The short answer is, it can't. The more cynical among us might speculate on the motives of the Times in portraying this unremarkable statement the way they are. For example, they may be panicked
at the idea of the GOP coalescing around Romney at this early date - a date far earlier than the Democrats managed in 2008 I might add - so this is their feeble attempt to keep the contest going a little longer. Who knows.

The way it looks, however, is that the Times is simply ignorant of the most basic parameters of American politics.

Sadly, that sounds just as plausible.

Stasis And The Left

Surprise, surprise; George Will has something worth reading: The inexorable march of creative destruction

After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

I have often found this aspect of the American Left unusual. Be it the longing for the artificial industrial dominance of the U.S. after World War II or the period of social upheaval labelled "The 60's"; the strange desire to stop "climate change" when change is what climate does by definition (and as if any given climate has any claim to being the best or most proper climate); and countless other examples.

Maybe it all stems from the irrational notion that somewhere out there there must be an egghead who can solve our problems, or maybe it is simply a lack of vision and a deficiency in historical knowledge. Whatever the root cause, it certainly results it an outlook which can be as often regressive as progressive, backward looking as often as forward looking.

Very strange.

Why The Democratic Party Simply Is Not An Option For Me

From The Volokh Conspiracy:

The Supreme Court today issued a unanimous decision in favor of the property owners in the important case of Sackett v. EPA... Justice Alito’s concurring opinion includes a particularly clear description of what was at stake:

The position taken in this case by the Federal Government—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) employees.

The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the Act, and according to the Federal Government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy. The EPA may issue a compliance order demanding that the owners cease construction, engage in expensive remedial measures, and abandon any use of the property. If the owners do not do the EPA’s bidding, they may be fined up to $75,000 per day ($37,500 for violating the Act and another $37,500 for violating the compliance order). And if the owners want their day in court to show that their lot does not include covered wetlands, well, as a practical matter, that is just too bad. Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. By that time, the potential fines may easily have reached the millions. In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable.

While it is heartening to see none of the Supremes could sign off on this situation, it is still disturbing that the position of the Obama Administration, and thus the Democratic party as a whole, was in favor of unfettered power for the Federal Government without even the option of judicial review.

It's indefensible because it is tyrannical, and until the Democratic party accepts the notion that Washington needs to have some (any) limits on its power, even in its pursuit of Democratically anointed goals, they are a non-starter for me.

Romney's Time

RedState has it right:

It is a mathematical improbability that Rick Santorum will get to the magic number of 1,144 — the number of delegates needed to be the Republican Presidential nominee. It is a political improbability that Rick Santorum will stop Mitt Romney from getting to 1,144.

Last night in Illinois, Mitt Romney won his first victory without caveats.

Even in Florida, a big win, there were plenty — counties that saw increased turnout rejected him. The northern part of the state rejected him. It required an amalgamation of voters not quite typical of the base to get Romney the nod in Florida.

In Illinois, Romney won. Period. The Santorum campaign stumbled badly in Puerto Rico, gave up a lead in Illinois, and the candidate proved horribly undisciplined. Like Dug the dog in Up getting distracted by every random squirrel, Rick Santorum loses all ability to focus when social issues come up....

Theoretically, Rick Santorum could keep Romney from getting to 1,144. But as Romney piles up more and more wins and neither the Gingrich nor Paul campaigns remain factors, let alone have pulses, the inevitable will set in. Conservatives may not really like Mitt Romney, but they do not want a fractured party too divided to beat Barack Obama. There will be no white knight, no dark horse, and no brokered convention. We have our nominee.

I've already stated my apathy towards the current crop of candidates, though I haven't had the energy to outline exactly the reasons behind my apathy. (When you are apathetic, that's often the way it goes.)

Of the four still standing in the GOP race, Romney is probably the easiest for me to put up with, and that will have to be enough. I'm certainly not interested in looking at the others and pretending they are someone they are not. There exists a smart and intellectually rigorous form of conservatism, but it isn't represented in this race. Instead we have a choice between a wonkish bureaucrat, an economic ideologue, a 1950's style moralizing church lady, and a consummate creature of Washington.

I ain't excited about it, but I'll put up with the wonkish bureaucrat.

News From The Washington Monthly: Democrats Have Never Lied

No, really. That is their "argument".

If you read The Washington Monthly and find it compelling you must be dumber than pigshit; the particularly dumb kind of pigshit at that.

Gloria Allred: The Dumbest Person In America

I know I shouldn't bother. It's beneath me on so many levels., but... Gloria Allred seeks Rush Limbaugh prosecution

Rush Limbaugh has drawn the ire of celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, who sent a letter to the Palm Beach County state attorney requesting an investigation into whether the popular radio host should be prosecuted for calling a law student a “slut” and “prostitute” last week.

“Mr. Limbaugh targeted his attack on a young law student who was simply exercised her free speech and her right to testify before congress on a very important issue to millions of American women and he vilified her. He defamed her and engaged in unwarranted, tasteless and exceptionally damaging attacks on her,” Allred told POLITICO Friday afternoon. “He needs to face the consequences of his conduct in every way that is meaningful.”

That's the beautiful thing about the First Amendment. It protects all comers.

Even shameless publicity whores like Gloria Allred.

And I, for one, am happy about it because it allows us to see exactly how much of a fascistic nitwit she really is.

Affordability: Government Style

Government-subsidized green light bulb carries costly price tag

The U.S. government last year announced a $10 million award, dubbed the “L Prize,” for any manufacturer that could create a “green” but affordable light bulb.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the prize would spur industry to offer the costly bulbs, known as LEDs, at prices “affordable for American families.” There was also a “Buy America” component. Portions of the bulb would have to be made in the United States.

Now the winning bulb is on the market.

The price is $50.

Retailers said the bulb, made by Philips, is likely to be too pricey to have broad appeal. Similar LED bulbs are less than half the cost.

“I don’t want to say it’s exorbitant, but if a customer is only looking at the price, they could come to that conclusion,” said Brad Paulsen, merchant for the light-bulb category at Home Depot...

Gee, aren't people dumb? To equate the affordability of a product with its price.

OK, let's do some math.

A cheapie incandescent 60 Watt bulb (1500 hour) would cost out this way, using it 10 hours a day for the life of the bulb:

Cost of bulb: $0.61
Cost of Operation @ $0.12 kWh: $11.28

Total Cost: $11.69

The Phillips L Prize bulb over the same time period:

Cost of bulb: $59.95 (the best I could find)
Cost of Operation for 1500 hours @ $0.12 kWh: $1.92

Total Cost: $61.87

I use a max of 12 60 Watt bulbs in my house at any given time, so the total outlay for me were I to transition to these bulbs would be $742.44 (plus tax!) for the first 1500 hours of use.

Granted, over the long run, you would get ahead making the switch as the new bulbs are supposed to last 20 times longer. (We shall see. In my experience, CFL bulbs came no where near providing the longevity they promised. I'll believe it when I see it.) So, to get to 30000 hours of use it would cost $233.80 using standard bulbs, and $98.35 cents for the new LED.

However, to get to 31500 hours of use the cost would be $245.39 to $160.22 (at current prices.)

So, it takes buying and using seven incandescent bulbs before the LED bulb starts paying off (a little less than three years of use @ 10 hours a day.)

What it comes down to is I can buy bulbs to light my entire home today for $7.32, or I can light my house for $719.40. Does the average American probably have more pressing concerns that $712 could address?

My Kingdom For A Tank Of Gas?

Roger Pielke Jr. has an eye opening graph on gas prices related to total personal expenditures.

Evidently, folks like me who didn't start driving (or paying for gas) until the mid 1980's were unaware we had it so good.

Live and learn.

Twitter Ain't My Bag, Baby

I don't really do the Twitter thing a whole lot. (And I don't do politics at all on it because 99% of the time its beyond pointless.)

However, Twitter did give us this, which is a very good thing. (Treacher's response is an all-time internets classic.)

The Most Implacable Enemy Of Free Expression: Higher Education

FIRE has the low down on a case that, sadly, has become all too typical in the very places that ought to know better: Peace College to Critics: ‘Desist’ From Exercising Free Speech

In higher education, a significant transformation has been underway at Peace College in North Carolina, a women's college that will begin admitting men to its full-time undergraduate programs starting this fall. The proverbial "winning hearts and minds" is an important task for a college leader guiding her institution through a major transformation, and criticism from within and without is an inevitable part of the process. How colleges respond to such pressures can greatly affect their public perception.

Pity, then, the way Peace College (which will be renamed William Peace University as part of its transformation) has responded to criticisms leveled by the Preserve Peace College Campaign. In response to a letter circulated by the coalition, Peace College (through an outside law firm) has not-so-kindly asked all signatories to the letter to "desist from further distribution" and "send letters of retraction" to atone for the letter's supposedly "damag[ing]" content....

FIRE does not vouch for the assertions in the group's letter or take any position on its content, though it is worth pointing out that the assertions in the letter can be checked rather easily, and statements of opinion are clearly labeled as such. And, to be clear, the right to circulate a list of grievances as the Preserve Peace College Campaign has done is about as basic a principle of freedom of expression as there is.

Yet here is what Arrowood wrote to roughly 40 signatories of the letter:

The university has recently become aware of a letter sent over your signature which contains various statements about the University and its President, statements which are not only false but individually and collectively damage the reputation of the University and its President. The letter reflects an intent to deliberately and improperly interfere with the University's relationships with its various constituencies. ...

[...]

[I]n order to mitigate damage arising from the continued publication of the letter, you should desist from further distribution of the letter and send letters of retraction to any persons to whom the letter was published, whether they received the letter directly by mail or otherwise. In addition, we ask that you furnish us with the list utilized to distribute this letter so that we may communicate directly with its recipients to correct your misstatements.

You have to give them some credit: It takes a lot of nerve to send that kind of letter in response to a letter expressing disagreement with the way Peace College is being run. Actually, you don't have to give them credit. Such disrespect by the college for the basic exercise of the group's free speech rights, in fact, smacks precisely of one of the charges leveled against the college by the group: that it is unaccountable to the public and that "[c]oncerned alumni of Peace College are treated as adversaries when they pose legitimate questions to the new guard."

God only knows what is going on here, and what the motivations are of those who have "taken over" Peace College is certainly a mystery to me. However, the bullying brownshirt tactics being used to silence dissent have no place in a free society, especially at an institution supposedly dedicated to free inquiry. Seemingly, the powers that be at Peace College had no rational arguments to make in response to their critics, so they resorted to threats and intimidation.

How classy. How enlightened. How pathetic.