That’s what they told me when I specifically requested to be reminded when it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It means “No.” And so I missed it. Finally, the perfect holiday: no business closures and… Pirates!
“The far right combines the pity of the minority with the power of the majority.” —Leon Wieseltier
This is according to Ari Melber on an internet-only bit from The Last Word, who I think may have the wording wrong. Perhaps that should be “self-pity”?
Update (22 September 2012 9:43 am)
I guess I was wrong about the “self-pity” change. I just found a more exact quote from—Surprise!—Ari Melber in Bill O’Reilly Raps: NYT Discovers Talk Radio-Hip Hop Nexus in The Nation:
That would make the quote more accurately, “The far right combines the power of a majority with the pity of a minority.” That does sound better. The right article makes all the difference in the world.
I’m not sure if I agree with Lawrence O’Donnell here, but this is powerful and insightful. There are many things to recommend it. For one, there is some Nixon administration history, and I love Nixon stuff. I really want to go to his library! And there is more about the now infamous Romney 47% video, where the real story seems to be the audience who make me despair of their class and for our society. My concern about accepting his argument is that I think the treatment of the Obama administration by the Republicans is the same as it was of the Clinton administration. All the talk of socialism and tyranny were the same then. I’m sure race is a factor, I just don’t think it is the primary one.
Watch this. It’s good:
Last weekend, I was walking around the Santa Rosa downtown, on my way to Treehorn Books to see if they had any new copies of Don Quixote that I don’t already have. This is a fools errand, because I think I already have every English translation of the book except for three minor quasi-translations from the early 19th century. But I still look. It makes me happy. (Plus, they have the first edition of the Putnam translation in a single volume. I keep not buying it because I already have several Putnam translations including the absolute first edition in two volumes. But it calls to me.)
So I’m on my way to the bookstore, and I see a bunch of Romney posters in a shop that has long been vacant. It had the “For Lease” sign clearly displayed above the door. This made me kind of mad: the owner (Or Realtor!) is such a partisan that he doesn’t care that these signs will turn off prospective tenants. Boy, was I wrong!
I look in the window and there were tables and chairs. There was even a Romney standee. That’s when I noticed the little sign in the window, “Sonoma County Republican Party.” At last, I’d found the seat of conservative power in Santa Rosa! The last time I saw them was a year ago at the Sonoma County Fair. They really annoyed me with their “No RINOs” sign. I thought, “How can a major party actively push the idea that they are a “little tent”? It annoyed me so much that I took them up on their bumper sticker design contest.
The “For Lease” sign was just perfect. I’m well aware that some Democratic politicians can be rented, but if you want to lease, you have to go Republican. What’s more, in front of the building (just outside of the frame because I was scared) was a crazy man ranting about some unseen force that was oppressing him. And that too struck me as perfect! Invisible President. Elders of Zion. The folks who fluoridate the water. Romney-Ryan 2012!
Only a couple of blocks away is the Obama Headquarters. The photo below gives you a good idea of the difference. For one thing, the Democrats were open! And their space looks permanent. If you go inside, there are offices. People are coming and going. There are actual Democrats out registering voters and going door to door. I haven’t seen a single Republican, and I should have because I spend a good part of the day walking around doing my shopping.
Yes, I am a partisan. But not a happy one. In fact, until the Democratic National Convention, I was going to change my registration to Peace & Freedom. So I’m pleased that my local organization is one I can be proud of. The fact that the local Republicans can be mocked is just icing.
I caught this on The Young Turks. Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe said, “I believe conservative policies help 100% of Americans. I don’t believe it helps the 1%. I really do believe that you don’t help the waiters and waitresses, who want to get a better job, by raising taxes on the job creators. ”
Here is the problem with this comment: I don’t believe it.
There is no way a serious person can have gone through the Reagan and Bush years and still believe that cutting taxes on the rich will cause the them to create jobs. No business decides to create jobs just because they have more money. To say that they do shows a shocking ignorance of how real businesses work.
Let me give you an example. My business partner William and I might eventually hire someone to work for us. We will do that only when there is too much work for us. Otherwise, if we make more money than we feel we need, we will give the money to charity. We won’t hire someone. Business is not a charitable endeavor. And conservatives, more than anyone else, should know this.
This is why I say that Scarborough is lying.
Here is another example, every year WalMart makes billions of dollars in profit. Do they use that money to hire more clerks that they don’t need? Of course not! The very idea is ludicrous. And yet, that is the underlying assumption of the “job creator” myth.
Here is the video:
Perhaps the best refutation of this nonsense is Nick Hanauer’s TED talk. He says, “Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a course of last resort for capitalists. It’s what we do if—and only if—rising consumer demand requires it.” Check it out:
Yes, yes, I’ve already written about Mad Kane before. But she deserves at least two articles because she won the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, which was presented by Bob Freaking Newhart. This is the coolest thing that has ever happened to anyone I know and I know some pretty cool and famous people. Anyway, as regular readers know, I have many intense if fleeting obsessions.
Mad Kane has a limerick challenge of sorts. I had planned to avoid it, but I happened upon her post that requested a limerick that started (more or less), “A woman was trying her hand.” I liked that because I immediately thought, “A surgeon was sawing her hand.” The comedic potential was too great and my resistance folded like an ironing board that folds particularly well.
But other than thinking that a surgeon sawing her own hand off was hysterical (Everyone loves a good self-torture narrative!) I had nothing. That was when I made my Big Mistake.
“Hand” rhymes with “Sudan” and “Koran.” That had possibilities. After a fair amount of work, I came up with this:
I worked particularly hard on that second line. It was originally, “At a mission in eastern Sudan.” Although this works in hearing, I find it is disrupting in reading. But this probably says more about my poor reading skills than anything. I also changed a number of things so it wouldn’t be offensive. For example, it was originally “zealot” rather than “preacher.” And it sure wasn’t “dear” Bible, originally!
In the end, I was very pleased with it. This is especially the case because it does the one thing I think a limerick should do: pay off in the last line. This is what I have a very hard time doing. Here is a limerick written by Carolyn Henly that really made me laugh:
But you know me: I love silly.
Anyway, it turns out that Mad Kane is Good and True of Heart. That is: she’s as much of a pedant as I am! She noted that “hand” does not rhyme with “Sudan.” Woe is me! Mad Kane was dissing my cherished rhyme! (She has a very thorough discussion of the limerick on her site, including a very clever “how to write a limerick” limerick.)
It seems I am in over my head, which is not that bad. I like the feeling. But as a longtime songwriter, I have gotten to the point where I prefer assonance to rhyme. One of my more recent songs “rhymes” the words “gas,” “dad,” and “match.” So my standards are kind of low. You can imagine what a great limerick you would get using those three words.
So I went back to work and wrote a limerick that talks about what it is:
“Bland” is the operative word here. But I can’t be smart all of the time. (Andrea: do not comment, “Or any of the time.”) To console myself, I am altering my original limerick:
Count yourself lucky the preacher wasn’t from Nantucket!
Via Ezra Klein most recently, I offer you the Tabarrok curve. It supposedly shows that some patent protection is good, but too much is bad. I agree with this. Most recently, I wrote about it in regards to Apple, which has always been on the forefront of stupid and evil patent disputes. Perhaps you’ve heard that Apple has the patent on the rectangular phone.
The patent system is broken, although I’m not clear that it ever really worked. Dean Baker is the most innovative thinker I know of when it comes to these issues. I recommend reading Robert Samuelson Shows Us How Patents Monopolies Impose Enormous Costs With Medical Technology for a very brief introduction.
Polls, polls, polls! Everyone loves polls! Leading up to elections, we get lots of the little suckers. Yet, it seems that most people don’t understand them. Especially the people who report them.
I am here to help, because this just isn’t that complicated.
The issue is the poll’s margin of error. I was just reading an article over at the every good P M Carpenter blog, The NBC/WSJ poll reveals that sometimes a cigar really is a cigar. In it, he states that in a new poll, Obama is beating Romney by 5%, which is larger than the margin of error. (To be fair, Carpenter clearly does understand polls.)
I’m afraid that to most people, the margin of error means too much and too little. The fact that Obama is beating Romney by more than the margin of error does not mean that more people are necessarily planning to vote for him. Just the same, if Obama were beating Romney by less than the margin of error, it would still mean that it was very likely that more people were planning to vote for him.
Most margins of error are reported as 95% confidence intervals. This means that there is a 95% chance that the real number is within the margin of error. It also means that there is a 2.5% chance that the real number is one margin of error lower than this value. And there is a 2.5% chance that it is that much higher.
The NBC/WSJ poll finds that 50% of likely voters support President Obama. There is a 3.3% margin of error. This means there is a 95% chance that Obama’s actual support is between 46.7% and 53.3%. But there is a 2.5% chance that his actual support is less than 46.7% and a 2.5% chance that it is more than 53.3%.
Now let’s suppose that Obama were only ahead of Romney by 1.65% (half the margin of error). This is the one-sigma confidence limit and it indicates 66% certainty rather than 95%. If Romney similarly polled at 48.35% (half the margin of error below Obama), there would be a 66% chance that Obama’s real number was between 48.35% and 51.65%. Plus, there would be a 17% change that Obama’s real number was above 51.65%. And a 17% chance that it was below 48.35%. Thus, there is still an 83% chance that Obama is beating Romney.
The take away here is that being ahead but not by as much as the margin of error is still a very good thing. It doesn’t mean that the two candidates are tied. But just the same, this is statistics and it is possible for any given poll to be way off—even if it is a bigger difference than the margin of error.
Afterword
Polling is very difficult. The math is all fine, but there are all kinds of sampling problems that can make the math irrelevant. The best known example of this is the 1948 Dewey Defeats Truman debacle. The problem was that the polls had been based on telephone surveys when only more affluent (i.e. conservative) people had them. Now, the biggest issue is for polling organizations to figure out what exactly a “likely voter” is. This is why election day polling is so accurate—unless George W. Bush is running.
This seems to be floating around the internet:
It is funny, of course, but I think there may be a darker truth underlying it and all the jokes about Mitt “The Robot” Romney and Mitt the Clueless. Could Mitt Romney be a psychopath? It’s entirely possible. We know, for example, that while only 1% of the population are psychopaths, 4% of CEOs are.
When most people think of psychopaths, they think of movie villains: murderers like Hannibal Lecter. But most psychopaths are law abiding citizens. What distinguishes them is that they lack empathy. They have little or no ability to understand others. And what are we to make of statements from Romney like, “Everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way.”
Romney seems to approach life like I approached Dungeons & Dragons[1] when I was a kid. When I played it, I gamed the system, doing the minimum required to advance in the game. Romney does this in real life. Two examples are telling. First, there is his constant claim that he has done exactly what the law requires—no more and no less. He pays, “Only what the tax code requires.” And, “What is required by law—the financial disclosure—has already been made.”
Second, there is the fact that Romney, even though ridiculously wealthy, appears to only give the minimum 10% tithe to his church. This strikes me as particularly telling. If you are going to treat God the way I used to treat dungeon masters, then there is something wrong with you.
What’s important about this is that Romney seems truly confused that voters might expect him to do more than the legal minimum. It shows a lack of understanding of social interactions. Most people refrain from murder and rape because it is wrong—not because it is illegal. Psychopaths don’t do it because it is against the law. “Those are the rules, right? I’m following the rules. What’s the problem?!”
I can’t say with any degree of confidence whether Mitt Romney is a psychopath or not. There are certainly troubling signs based upon his public persona. Regardless, he is a man of limited empathy who really can’t run the country in the interests of the vast majority of its citizens.
Others have thought this same thing. And still others have argued against it. The argument goes that most psychopaths have problems when they are in school. Well, it seems that Romney was at least a bully who enjoyed tormenting weaker children. Another argument is that most psychopaths are impulsive. In Romney’s business deals, there are some signs of impetuousness—or at least carelessness. Regardless, it isn’t right to base this call on what his business did, given there would be calmer people to modulate his impulses. And finally, most psychopaths don’t form strong family bonds. This is true, but a great many psychopaths create the illusion of family bonds.
I’m not saying that any of these attributes apply strongly to Mitt Romney. But he could still be a psychopath. Arguments like this all depend upon the ridiculous (but never stated) assumption that the rich are necessarily morally superior to the poor. No one is shocked when a poor man shoots his wife, but when a rich man does it: shock! Mitt Romney can’t be a psychopath, just look at all his money!
Yesterday, my father came to me with a math question. He had been hired by a Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer who wanted a wooden box for her hat. She wanted it to be an octagon with a height (h) of 8 inches and a diagonal (d) of 12 inches. My father had been trying to make this work for some time, but was stymied.
I don’t do a lot of geometry, but I smelled a rat. An octagon is a very symmetrical form with equal angles and sides. The 8/12 combo just didn’t seem like it would work.
So I went online and did a search for “octagon measurements.” It took me to this excellent site called Had 2 Know, which has an “octagon calculator. You enter any parameter and it tells you all the others. I entered 12 inches for the diagonal and it spit back a height of 11.1 inches. So there was a reason my dad couldn’t make those measurements work: they are inconsistent.
I thought a hexagon might work better. Thankfully, Had 2 Know also has a hexagon calculator. And I was right: a 12 inch diagonal would dictate a 10.4 inches height—better but still a long way off from 8 inches. It seems to me that a pentagon might be the way to go, but because it has an odd number of sides, it doesn’t make sense in this discussion.
It occurs to me that what is really desired is not an octagon, but an eight-sided box. After all, the human head is not round. Go look at a bowler, for instance: it is longer front to back than side to side to side. So one could create an oblong quasi-octagon. But frankly, this is madness. Who wants an eight sided hat box? It will be a storage nightmare. I think what our Guardian really wants is a rectangle.
Eight by twelve. Perfect!
Afterword
Where did you get that hat?!
Via Back2Stonewall, this interactive map over at France24 is really telling:
What I find most interesting is that we are surrounded by same sex marriages: Canada and Mexico have them. I really do think that we are a small minded people—even in a relative sense.
A friend sent me a bunch of links to some excellent short films. One of them was very sweet and it got me thinking of a film I very much like, Tanghi Argentini, which is on the excellent A Collection of 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films (2007). Here it is for you to enjoy:
I want to be that man. Or should I say, “Angel”?