In the lead up to the Iraq War, I was working at home and listening to a lot of NPR. At that time, I wasn’t really a partisan. This was the period where I was transitioning from libertarian to what I am now. (Anarcho-syndicalist?) But it was a very frustrating time because it was obvious that the Bush administration was pushing us into war for no particular reason. And this came out of my listening to NPR, which was fairly pro-war.

This is part of a broader frustration I have that things that seem obvious to me are quite surprising to our cultural elites. The dot-com bubble? The stock market bubble? These were things that were obvious, even if you weren’t paying much attention. They were, however, unbelievable if you were an insider—a Power Player.

This morning Paul Krugman wrote an article about Jonathan Martin’s stupid comment that liberals would be disheartened to learn that Nate Silver’s model was mostly based upon polls, Scoop Dupes. Only someone who doesn’t follow Nate Silver would think that would surprise anyone. But Krugman makes the argument that the reason there is so much push back against Silver by political journalists is that Silver’s work makes the work of journalists much less important. What separates a journalist from, say, me is that they have contacts; they can get the inside scoop from the campaigns. But more and more, this kind of information is shown to be useless—especially compared to people like Nate Silver or even Real Clear Politics.

But Krugman goes further and said something that made me feel better about my experiences and ought to make bloggers the world over feel better about the work that they do:

Exactly!

Don’t get me wrong. I have a great deal of respect for muckraking. But this kind of work is so rare that when it happens, they make big budget films about it that star Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. And note: you don’t expose corruption in the White House by talking to the president and his chief of staff. One of the reasons that Woodward and Bernstein were able to do so much work was that they were young and not that plugged in. By far their most prominent source was Mark Felt (Deep Throat), and they only had him because they were using (typically) a disgruntled employee.

To some extent, Krugman is only saying exactly what I want to hear. All I have to offer as a writer is the vast amount of information that I consume and my relatively efficient but slightly skewed brain. But I’m not at all convinced this isn’t better than listening to the newest Judith Millers at America’s elite newspapers.

Listen up my little ones, because I have a story to tell that I was pointed to by Dave Weigel! You certainly know about the website Real Clear Politics, where they put together all of the major polls and provide an average, even though the polls are not all of equal value. But still, that’s not a bad approach to figuring out what’s going on. It is certainly better than getting all excited about one poll or another. But it was not always this way.

Remember back in 2000, Al Gore ran against the President Whose Name Dare Not Be Mentioned. As you probably recall, Gore won the popular vote. And he would have have won the electoral college if the Supreme Court had not voted to stop the recount in Florida. So you would think that the polls from that time would have been close. And you would be right!

But if you thought that the Real Clear Politics final call would be close, you would be very, very wrong. Take Florida for example. There were four polls: Bush +4, Gore +2, Bush +3, Gore +3. That is close with an average of Bush +0.5. The RCP final call: Bush +6! (This was at best a minor win for Bush: less than 0.1 percentage points.) But there’s more: Pennsylvania. There were two polls: Bush +1, Gore +1. The RCP final call: Bush +4! (Gore won by 4.2 percentage points.) But there’s more: California! There were three polls: Gore +9, Gore +4, Gore +6. The RCP final call: Bush +2! (Gore won by 11.7 percentage points.)

What is particularly funny about this is Real Clear Politics seems to have been snookered by Karl Rove and the Bush campaign. At the end of the campaign, Rove sent Bush to California. This was done only to get the media chattering: “Bush has a chance of winning California! He’s another Reagan!” And it not only worked with the regular media, but RCP fell for it as well.

I am genuinely concerned that we liberals are placing too much faith in poor ol’ Nate Silver. He does seem the most reasonable person to listen to. But the truth is that the polls are a mess. Perhaps it is best to take William Goldman’s advice and trust no one. “Nobody knows anything.”

From Voters Rising:

I’ve learned a great deal from reading Robert M. Price. But probably the most important thing I’ve learned is that people don’t read the Bible and then decide what it means. They may read the Bible, but they do so in the context of what their pastors think it means. And where did the pastors get their ideas? You get the idea. There is no literal reading of the Bible.

Blue Texan has written a very good article over at Crooks & Liars, Billy Graham’s Full Page Ad in the NY Times Urges Followers to Vote Against Abortion, Gay Marriage. In Graham’s Times ad, he tells all good Christians that they should vote for biblical principles. Those principles just happen to be the usual right wing hate issues: anti-choice for both reproduction and marriage rights.

Blue Texan points out that Graham doesn’t mention other biblical principles like prohibition of usury or caring for the poor or men having multiple wives. And he calls it when he says that Graham is just doing what Christian demagogues always do. “They begin with a set of right-wing values, then they selectively interpret the bible to comport to those values.”

Smart Christians are fond of pointing out that they don’t really believe in an anthropogenic God. They don’t envision a guy with a white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds. God it something much greater than that—something unimaginable. And yet, they claim that he would care about such trivial things as human sexuality. It seems bizarre. But as Robert Price has shown, this isn’t about God. Religion is just the accumulated prejudices of generations of church leaders. And this is why they can skip multiple passages about being kind to others and just focus on the ones that say, “Get the fags!”

I do wish I believed in heaven and hell, because I think it would be fitting if Billy Graham spent eternity being anally raped with a red hot poker.

I have long thought that Niall Ferguson was an idiot, but I think that may be the wrong way to think about him. Ferguson is just evil.

I understand being partisan. I certainly am. But to be only partisan is to be only interested in power. Today Ferguson has written an article over on The Daily Beast, Niall Ferguson on Obama’s Possible Mideast Surprise. His argument is that Obama is down in the polls and that he will try some kind of “October Surprise” or a “Wag the Dog” move.

Let’s just step back from this for a moment. In what universe is Obama losing in the polls? In the conservative media bubble, of course! In the real world, the national polls show Romney very slightly ahead of Obama. But more important, the national polls mean absolutely, positively nothing. We elect presidents based upon the electoral college, and in that contest, President Obama is and has been the likely winner for months.

In an attempt to mollify conservatives, their own personal alternative media are providing lots of articles to sooth them so they won’t fall into a funk and end up missing the election. Typical of this is Jay Cost at The Weekly Standard who claims that Romney is doing really well with the “independent” voters and this will prove decisive. You know what I think of this kind of wishful thinking: it is more wishful than thinking. But this kind of thinking is all over. Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review writes about this in, The momentum behind a misleading narrative. Basically, Romney gained in the week before and the week after the first debate. And that’s it. There is no miracle on the horizon.

But Niall Ferguson thinks there is and he thinks that the Obama campaign thinks the same thing. What will they do? Don’t worry: Ferguson has a thought. Obama will tell Israel to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. This makes sense from a Republican standpoint: it is just the way they roll; since they will do anything for power, everyone else must act the same way. But with a clear-eyed view of the real world this is nonsense. Would the president really start a war just to win re-election? A democratic president, that is? And if he did, would the people really believe that it wasn’t an act of political desperation? After all, why not wait another week and do it after the election? And who, other than wackjob conservatives like Ferguson, wants a war with Iran? It is a ridiculous idea: Obama weighing his choices, “Should I work on getting out the vote or just start a war with Iran? It’s such a tough choice!”

Ferguson isn’t calling for war explicitly, of course. He is calling for Israeli strikes on Iran’s alleged nuclear laboratories. But this is the same as calling for war. This is, in fact, an act of war. And having Israel start it would not make it any less our war.

Hopefully with Newsweek breaking away from The Daily Beast I won’t have to read Ferguson again. But I fear I am being far more wishful than even the conservative poll watchers.

There is a meme that Romney has closed the gender gap. It is almost exclusively coming from conservatives, but they are speaking with such unanimity that it seems real. The implication is that it is because the Democrats are talking down to women. “Women care about economics, not lady parts!”

Of course, this is not just about women. I find the anti-choice movement repugnant as do a great many men. The war on woman was never a good idea from a tactical point of view. It only encouraged staunch Republicans, it never appealed to vast swaths of the electorate.

Below is a shockingly stark graph from Real Clear Politics. On 19 August, Todd Akin made his “legitimate rape” comments in an interview with KTVI. Note how the race essentially flipped on that day:

So people really do care about this stuff. What the Republicans mean is that they don’t.

Joss Whedon has released a ad in favor of Romney because, “He will put this country back on the path to the zombie apocalypse.”

Zomney 2012!

I’ve been reading Believing Bullshit by Stephen Law. I’ll write about it more later. For now, I just want to mention something about his chapter on Pseudoprofundity. This especially has to do with postmodern academics where traditionally the field has been so weighted down with jargon that there is often nothing other than the jargon.

In my experience with science, I have found that pretty much all concepts are really simple. In order to be precise, scientists and philosophers weight down these concepts with a lot of baggage. But if students are trying to learn something and they find it difficult, they are probably missing the concept.

Here is an excellent example. Nothing is more mind blowing than Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. This theorem says that any mathematical system (e.g. Euclidean Geometry) can never be fully formed. There will always be things that are true inside that system that cannot be proved to be true. Here is a simple proof of this from Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker:

If I could impart any wisdom to young learners, it would be this: all concepts are simple. This of course helps in a general sense: it allows people to drill down to the bottom of what they are learning. But there is another aspect of this. It frees the student to ask what he may think of as dumb questions. If you have a professor who is droning on about something that seems very complex, just call him on it. “Excuse me professor: this seems awfully complicated. What is the concept you are trying to relate?”

Afterword

When I taught physics, students would often tell me that they understood the concepts but that the math was hanging them up. This caused me, over time, to eliminate the math and just deal with the concepts. And what did I find? They didn’t understand the concepts either. I said these concepts are simple—not trivial. One thing was for sure: the math was blinding them to the concepts. By focusing on the concepts, they found that the math was fairly simple.

This week John Sununu continued his campaign to be the most vile man in American politics by saying that Colin Powell was endorsing President Obama because they were both black. You know those two modern day black panthers with their shuck and jive shtick. They’ve got that whole deep-seated hatred for white people thing going on.

Colin Powell’s former chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson said the obvious on The Ed Show Friday: most of the people in his (Republican) party are racists. That’s about right. It is a stunning bit of video however; it is so rare to seen anyone in politics be so candid:

Let me clarify this observation. Most of the time, racism isn’t an active hatred of one group. Instead, it is assuming the best of “us” and assuming the worst of “them.” That’s what the whole birth certificate nonsense is all about. A couple of months ago I was talking to a conservative who claimed that he didn’t know if Obama was a United States citizen. He claimed that he had never seen his birth certificate, so he just didn’t know; he wasn’t saying anything one way or another. I noted that he had never seen the birth certificates of any other presidents but he never questioned their citizenship. This, of course, caused some desperate face saving about how maybe he should have done that.

This is a case of racism. It isn’t hatred. It is just being naturally suspicious of black people. And this is the kind of racism that the Republican Party is overflowing with. There is a lot of it in the Democratic Party too, but it is nowhere near as powerful an element. In many places, racism is the main thing the Republicans have on offer.

Nothing will happen to Sununu, of course. I think the mainstream media just accept that much of the draw of the Republican Party is subtle and not so subtle racist appeals. So they will continue to note when a particular Republican steps over the obviousness line and says something that is clearly racist. But otherwise, they will continue to pretend that poor southern whites still vote Republican because they really believe in more corporate welfare and less Social Security.