Thoughts Aloud

Archive for November 2nd, 2008

It seems the Iowa Hawk and I share an affinity for T-Bucket Hot Rods. Perhaps I can entice him to come have a look at mine:

Click on the picture to learn about the Pismo Derelicts, one of my other websites. The Iowa Hawk is now in my must read folder. ◄Dave►

I just knew I was going to like exploring the Iowa Hawk blog; but I had no idea how much. Here is some of the most brilliant satire I have ever had the pleasure of reading and laughing out loud over. I have gotten pissed at several of the supposed elite conservative commentators who have spoken out against Sarah Palin, and even cringe when McCain frequently says we have nothing to fear from Obama. Even Peggy Noonan, once my unrequited love, alienated me with a catty column; but I just figured she was jealous over my new heartthrob.

You must read, “As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow’s Jib,” so I’ll try to limit my quotes to just enough to entice you to do so. To give you a taste of his style, and where it is going, it begins:

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that “Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard.” In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman’s notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father’s pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it’s time we conservatives once again grab the rigging, and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

Trust me, I haven’t taken this tack lightly. No Van Voorhees has supported an avowed socialist since great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpapa Cragmont Van Voorhees lent Peter Minuet $24 and a sack of wampum to swing a subprime mortgage on Manhattan Island. Old dad himself often recounted how, as a lad, he would command the family chauffeur Carleton to drive the Duesenberg down to the Times Square Trans-Lux so he could hiss Roosevelt. But I’ve taken a good measure of this Obama fellow, and I must say I like the cut of the man’s jib.

Go read it before I spoil the effect. My favorite part comes early:

Even Peggy Noonan — the Grand Dame of Gipperism — has succumbed to Obama’s undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final.  “Why Peggy, you old dowager,” I quipped, “I believe you just had an orgasm.”

Writing just doesn’t get any better than that, but he tries:

It’s an inescapable conclusion that this woman has, in 6 short weeks, single-handedly destroyed the Republican party. Certainly George Bush may share some of the blame; but we conservatives must remember how our hopes were buoyed by his impressive bloodlines and Yale degree before we realized his excursion to Texas had caused him to “go native.” But la Palin offers true conservatives no such extenuating graces. I mean, my God, this woman is simply awful; the elided vowels, the beauty pageantry, the guns, the crude non-Episcopal protestantism, the embarrassing porchload of children with horrifying hillbilly names, the white after Labor Day.

or:

The idea of this dreadful woman in Washington is almost too much to
contemplate. Not only would it be a fashion disaster, one can scarcely
imagine the White House social calendar — mooseburger fetes to that
ghastly Joe the Plumber, perhaps followed by snow machine derbies
through the Rose Garden?

Brilliant stuff. Enjoy. ◄Dave►

Here is another beaut from a blog called Iowa Hawk (that is begging to be explored further by me). Entitled, “Balls and Urns,” it boils down statistics and calls polling for what it is:

Statisticians love balls and urns. A typical Stats 101 midterm, for example, usually includes a question along these lines:

“You take a simple random sample of 1000 balls from an urn containing 120,000,000 red and blue balls, and your sample shows 450 red balls and 550 blue balls. Construct a 95% confidence interval for the true proportion of blue balls in the urn.”

After choking back a giggle about “blue balls,” you whip out your calculator and text your frat brother who has a copy of last semester’s midterm. He instantly recognizes the correct formula is

95% confidence interval for P = p +/- 1.96 * sqrt( p*(1-p) / n) * FPC…

Then he goes into the geeky math that I used to thrive on as a kid, but just haven’t found much use for in the real world for the past 45 years, before making his case:

But what if the thing you are studying doesn’t quite fit the balls & urns template?

• What if 40% of the balls have personally chosen to live in an urn that you legally can’t stick your hand into?
• What if 50% of the balls who live in the legal urn explicitly refuse to let you select them?
• What if the balls inside the urn are constantly interacting and
  talking and arguing with each other, and can decide to change their
  color on a whim?
• What if you have to rely on the balls to report their own color, and some unknown number are probably lying to you?
• What if you’ve been hired to count balls by a company who has endorsed blue as their favorite color? 
• What if you have outsourced the urn-ball counting to part-time temp balls, most of whom happen to be blue?
• What if the balls inside the urn are listening to you counting out
  there, and it affects whether they want to be counted, and/or which
  color they want to be?

If one or more of the above statements are true, then the formula for margin of error simplifies to

Margin of Error = Who the hell knows?

Very well said indeed! He concludes with:

Because, in this case, so-called scientific “sampling error” is
completely meaningless, because it is utterly overwhelmed by
unmeasurable non-sampling error. Under these circumstances
“margin of error” is a fantasy, a numeric fiction masquerading as a
pseudo-scientific fact. If a poll reports it — even if it’s collected
“scientifically” — the pollster is guilty of aggravated bullshit in
the first degree.

The moral of this midterm for all would-be
pollsters: if you are really interested in how many of us red and blue
balls there are in this great big urn, sit back and relax until
Tuesday, and let us show our true colors.

Until then, fondle your own balls.

I couldn’t agree more! Mary would have loved this one. ◄Dave►

Here is an awesome essay regarding the fallacy of trusting polls and their use as a strategy for sheeple herding. Entitled, “The Left’s Big Blunder,” it is both encouraging and seriously thought provoking; starting with:

Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I’m not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. I’m talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.

The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events. These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts — but not anymore. Facts and events in and of themselves are no longer important; what’s important is how everyone reacts to them. And how do we find out the public’s mood concerning this or that incident? Why, the media tells us, that’s how.

Or so we’ve been led to believe.

We’re all part of the campaign now. Every single one of us. Our opinions, our actions, are bundled together as a group and used as weapons in the race for the White House. When the media reports on what people think, either through public-opinion polling or reportage about anecdotal incidents, it becomes an endless feedback loop, in which the media’s representation of most people’s purported thoughts is supposed to influence everyone else’s thoughts. And then they take another poll to determine how effective the first poll was in influencing public opinion, and the cycle starts all over again. Since everyone now knows that any public expression of their political opinions might be reported by the media, even the most innocent activity becomes a calculated campaign action. Saying how you intend to vote is not simply an expression of how you intend to vote, but rather a component of the public barometer of how the majority intends to vote, which is then used by the media and the blogs to influence everyone else. Nothing is done in all innocence anymore.

Thinkers should definitely take the time to read the whole thing. I have bookmarked it for future reference. It covers the “Clever Hans Effect” and particularly the “Solomon Asch Experiments” extremely well (do watch the video). He then makes a credible case that, while the Bradley Effect is said to have dissipated over time, the focus on race in this election and the deliberate charges of racism toward all who speak against the Obamessiah, will have brought it back:

The situation is even more extreme in social interactions in liberal areas, where in casual conversation the race card is played almost continuously. I live in the San Francisco area, in an artsy/intellectual/academic circle, and never once have I heard anyone professing support for McCain. If your boss mocks McCain supporters, if all your co-workers express a desire to for Palin to be raped on national TV, if your family are all Obama volunteers, if the media tries to shame everybody into voting for Obama by stating implicitly and explicitly that only a racist would do otherwise, could you have the nerve to come out of the closet as a McCain voter?

In such an environment, where admitting to disliking Obama in the interpersonal sphere has become the equivalent of social suicide, it seems very likely that the Bradley Effect is not just back, but back with a vengeance. The more that Obama supporters go unchallenged in their blanket accusations of racism against McCain supporters, the less likely anyone will publicly admit to dislike of Obama. Hence, the Bradley Effect is not an artifact of racism, but rather an artifact of false accusations of racism.

So, when the phone rings and the pollster calls — and your Clever Hans social antennae tell you the pollster is young and liberal and likely an Obama supporter — would you have the nerve to tell the pollster the truth that you wouldn’t vote for Obama in a million years? I mean, they called you; they know your number. They know who you are. Can you be absolutely sure they aren’t putting a check mark in the “Racist” box next to your name in some mysterious database?

I must agree with his logic here. I have been surprised by a number of Lefty associates who will admit their concerns over Obama’s underpinnings to me, but wouldn’t dare mention them to their peers. I suspect the PUMAs (still angry Clinton supporters) are far more numerous than anyone dreams. I have spent time on their blogs and they are serious about their stealth campaign. Some even admit deliberately lying to polsters. He concludes with:

Now, it could very well be that, after all is said and done, Obama will indeed win this election — I can’t predict the future any better than can anyone else. The Obama campaign and its supporters are also engaging in many other strategies (unrelated to the exaggeration of his popularity) that have likely been effective — such as blanketing the airwaves with advertisements, disparaging McCain, insulting Palin, and so on. The unabashed and unapologetic Obama boosterism from the traditional media certainly isn’t hurting either. In prior elections, candidates worried about an “October Surprise,” some last-minute revelation or scandal that threatens to realign the entire race. But in 2008, two or three October Surprises seem to be cropping up every single day, and there’s no reliable way to predict what will happen next (other than that the media will try to emphasize the anti-McCain news and downplay the anti-Obama news). And it may be that less than 50% of the population was ever interested in voting for McCain in the first place, and that an Obama victory was a foregone conclusion long before the campaign even began; I simply don’t know. However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama’s supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another — only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don’t match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold — they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

Now, there is some hope for a change I could believe in.  ◄Dave►

For a change of pace, I found some good news at Paleo Lithics blog regarding national embarrassment, John Murtha, being in trouble and appealing for more cash from his donors to save his seat. Then he mentions the famous Johnstown flood tax of 1936, another classic example of “temporary” taxes that outlive their original emergency purpose:

Oops. Welcome to the wonderful world of Pennsylvania politics, where earmarked “temporary taxes” never go away and instead are diverted to “discretionary use.” Where a candidate for office calls his constituents (aka voters) “racist” and “redneck” and the same candidate takes credit for the revitalization of an area that the taxpayers pay toward with the purchase of every bottle of wine or liquor in the overpriced and tiny state monopolized “Wine and Spirit” shops. Where, if you have a few dollars left in your wallet after paying federal, state, and local taxes, you might be able to afford a cheap bottle of wine – if you can afford the sales tax calculated  on top of a decades old temporary tax.  It’s long past time for change in Pennsylvania, starting with John Murtha.

Federal Income Tax itself was promised to be only one percent for the duration of WWI. Right. It is this reality that makes me so nervous about the “temporary” bailout of our major banks. Any bets on how soon the government no longer has any “ownership position” in them?

I saw this “badge” on another blog and decided to check it out.  When I entered the URL for this blog it returned the code to embed here to produce this:

I found that encouraging, because I have often been criticized for my verbosity and penchant for fifty-cent words. It seemed implausible, however, and I noticed that my last entry was the simple one regarding my new hardware; so I tried it again using the URL for my “About Thoughts Aloud” page. This returned:

Come on… OK, how about my serious essay on Sovereign Rights? This returned:

Ouch! I guess I wasted my time with that one! How many geniuses am I going to entice to read it? I tried several more and a few of the longer posts I have made. They all came out as Jr. High School, High School, or:

Finally, I retested a few of them to confirm that it is consistent, and not just generating a random output. If this thing has any validity, I am pleased; for that means my writing is readable by most nominally educated folks, even if they occasionally need to use a dictionary.

You can try out your own blog, or just about any webpage, by clicking on any of the above images; they all take you to the same test. ◄Dave►