The Reticulator – Page 9 – Everything is connected to everything

The reality might not be a bit more complicated.

Mar 182012

Four numbers: 10, 20, 30, and 20.

Me: The average (arithmetic mean) is 20.

WSJ: The reality may be a bit more complicated. Some of the numbers are not 20. The numbers include some that are larger and/or smaller than 20.

Me: [Facepalm]

Sigh. The above is not really from the WSJ, but page A5 of the print edition of the weekend WSJ has an item that’s even more ridiculous than the above. It’s by a Dante Chinni and is titled, The Gingrich Effect: What if it went away?

Following a tough Tuesday night, calls have grown for Newt Gingrich to abandon his presidential run, even as he vows to battle on. Some assume his departure would shake up the race, and supporters of Rick Santorum figure their man would benefit because more of Mr. Gingrich’s supporters would line up behind him than behind Mitt Romney. The reality may be a bit more complicated. Patchwork Nation’s demographic/geographic breakdown of counties suggests support for Mr. Gingrich varies greatly by community type, and from state to state. In some states, such as Illinois, the impact of the Gingrich vote looks relatively small–Mr. Gingrich hasn’t won many votes in the type of places that make up most of Illinois’s population. In others, such as Louisiana, it could be substantial. [Emphases are mine.]

The main problem is the statement, “The reality may be a bit more complicated.”

No, the reality is NOT more complicated than that. The situation may be more complicated than the simple summary, but that doesn’t mean the summary is wrong or any less real. The summary may be wrong, but if is wrong it’s wrong because it’s wrong, not because it’s not complicated enough. An accurate summary is reality, and a detailed breakdown is reality. One is not more real than another just because it’s more or less detailed.

There are three questions:

Is there a Gingrich effect?
If yes, who would benefit?
If yes, would it shake up the race?

The data that are presented on a chart show that the “Gingrich effect” is big in some places and small in others. That’s interesting to know, but it doesn’t help us understand who would benefit or whether it could “shake up” the race. The answer to the latter question would of course depend on more than just the numbers. It’s hard to predict what the psychological effect of a vote shift would be, for example.

The numbers that are presented are interesting, but they don’t support the silly statement that, “The reality may be a bit more complicated.” The reality may be different than what Santorum thinks. If Newt drops out, Santorum may not benefit enough to make a difference. But that’s not because the reality is more “complicated”.

Photos for St Patrick’s Day

Uncategorized No Responses »

Mar 172012

I usually downplay holidays and ceremonial celebrations to the greatest extent I can get away with. But since it’s St. Patrick’s day, I decided to post a few photos from a day in Dublin that wasn’t quite St. Patrick’s day. (We weren’t there on Patrick’s day.) This one is from Grafton Street.

No Guinness in the house today (or most any day) but here’s one stop inside the Guinness Storehouse, the building where Guinness used to be made.

And a view from the top, where the “free” pint of Guinness is exceptionally good.

Question time

electoral politics No Responses »

Mar 052012

I’m reading “The Granger Movement : A study of agricultural organization and its political, economic and social manifestations 1870-1880” by Solon Justus Buck (1913). On page 103 Buck mentions one of the ways the Granges used to exert some political influence:

Another favorite method of attempting to influence legislation was that of interrogating candidates for office regarding their position on certain proposed legislative measures.

We could use more of that. Written Q&A forums are not unheard of these days, but if we had more of them we might get around the tendency of the MSM to ask only the stupidest, most irrelevant questions. A Tea Party group, for example, could establish an identity by insisting that the candidates for all offices a set of good questions. The format could include followup questions, to get around the tendency of candidates to provide bland, meaningless answers or to change the subject.

Newspapers would be faced with a quandary. On the one hand, they desperately need readers. Q&A like this lend themselves to print more than broadcast, so this would give them a way to compete. On the other hand, they would interfere with their mission of obscuring information. But with the internet there is no reason that newspapers have to be the medium.

Here are some questions I’d like to see asked:

Is federal funding of NPR and CPB compatible with the first Amendment?
Do you support de-funding of Solyndra-type programs in order to end the appearance of corruption?
How important is it to replace a myriad of state regulations on insurance, health care, food safety, or any other topic, with uniform federal regulations?
Is there a connection between uniform federal regulations and companies becoming too big and monopolistic — too big to fail, even?

Picks up steam

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Jan 292012

Even if Wikipedia was censored, students would still be able to learn by reading the WSJ headlines which party controls the U.S. government administration. Note the contrast between the headline where the cheerleading is done (to be read by the masses) and the subheadline that provides a more sober view (and is read by fewer people):

Headline: U.S. Economy Picks Up Steam

Subheadline: Fourth-Quarter Growth Rate of 2.8% is Fastest in 18 Months, but Doesn’t Appear Sustainable

Buttress

Abuse of power No Responses »

Jan 142012

News blurb on the front page of the WSJ (Friday, January 13):

A Justice Department opinion buttressed Obama’s contention that his recess appointments last week were constitutional.

Um, considering scandals such as Fast and Furious and the its handling of the 2008 voter intimidation case, wouldn’t that be like saying Newt Gingrich buttressed Herman Cain’s contention that there was no affair?

Solyndra Stonewalling

Abuse of power, Budget reform, Crony capitalism, Energy policy No Responses »

Nov 062011

The White House response to the Solyndra subpoena has been referred to as “rejecting” and “pushing back”. In the days of the Nixon administration it would have been called stonewalling.

Stonewalling is the term I’ve used in comment sections in various places on the web. But more recently I’ve read the subpoena and the exchange of letters. (Links are at the web site of Fred Upton’s Energy and Commerce committee.) I haven’t exactly changed my view of what’s happening, but I do think some of us have allowed this scuffle to distract us from the main point.

I still am amazed that the White House can have already produced 85,000 pages of documents and then complained that providing the rest could distract the President from his constitutional duties. If there are that many documents, it seems that the White House’s dealings with the Solyndra loan have been a distraction from the President’s constitutional duties from the beginning.

It’s also interesting that the most political of presidents, the president who uses a tax paid trip to bash Republicans while campaigning for his jobs bill, would find it in himself to complain that Upton’s committee was engaging in political partisanship.

The fact that the White House saw fit to time its rejection for the Friday night news dump suggests that it isn’t completely comfortable with its own behavior.

But why is it necessary for the Energy and Commerce committee to go through this subpoena exercise? If it’s just to find some grounds for damaging President Obama’s re-election prospects, that’s not really behavior any better than the government’s funneling a $1 million consulting fee for evaluating the options to Lazard Ltd., one of the biggest DNC contributors.

The problem is that when the government gets in the loan business, there are vast opportunities for political corruption — opportunities for insider dealing in government funds. The fact that it’s difficult to determine whether or not the White House was doing special deals for its friends is all the information that the committee needs. It doesn’t need any more documents to know that it should terminate the opportunity for corruption by terminating the loan program. Going after one particular President doesn’t do anything about the root problem.

Hammurabi-Handed Regulation

Bash the Messenger, Hammurabi-Handedness No Responses »

Aug 072011

The image (derived from Wikipedia Commons) is of a clay tablet that contains the prologue to Hammurabi’s Code.

The latest regulatory atrocity that made me go here is the Obama administration’s plan (now dropped, at least in this instance) to regulate pharmaceutical companies by forcing the resignation of executives it disapproves of. (WSJ article: “U.S. Drops Effort to Oust Forest Labs CEO” The print edition headline was a less honest, less accurate one: “Forest Chief Prevails Over U.S.”)

When I was a wee kid in elementary school (possibly as early as 4th grade) we learned that Hammurabi’s Code was an advance because people knew from it what the laws were and what the penalties were. Now our leaders devise regulatory systems under which nobody can know what is required, and under which the best one can do is try to stay on the right political side of the authorities. And this in an environment where the current administration has been willing to attack and threaten private businesses that make political statements that it perceives to be critical or contrary to its agenda.

People in our country used to understand about due process. But now we have President who supposedly has an advanced degree in constitutional law, but who institutes a regulatory system that is about as far from any constitutional system as you can get. And some headline writers for the WSJ don’t get it.

There is such a thing as good regulation and there is necessary regulation. I’ve long wished that we could discuss good vs bad regulation rather than re-regulation vs deregulation. But trying to regulate in the way Obama has tried to do here is likely to give all of regulation a bad name.

So to do my part to get the discussion back where it needs to be, I’ve instituted a new category of articles: Hammurabi-Handedness. That term is in part an allusion to related concepts, such as the invisible hand. Hammurabi-Handedness refers to letting the invisible hand do its thing, but within a regulatory system that is as clear and well-defined as possible, and which minimizes waste and corruption.

Lemonade Freedom Day

Leviathan Ankle-Biter No Responses »

Aug 062011

I hereby confer on the organizers and participants in Lemonade Freedom Day the Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award, to be enjoyed by them with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

The big event is on August 20. The web site is at lemonadefreedom.com. You can sign up on facebook

I must confess I’ve ridden past a couple of lemonade stands this summer without stopping, but I will be sure to correct that error on August 20 or any other day when there is an opportunity.

View Local Restrictions on Kid-Run Concession Stands in a larger map

Update: Here is a Google Map provided by the Freedom Center of Missouri. The Red markers indicate towns where kid-run concession stands have been shut down. The Green ones are towns that allow kid-run concession stands without requiring a permit. The Yellow ones are places that require kids to get at least one city permit.

Back to Digging the Hole Deeper

Stimulus spending No Responses »

Aug 042011

This photo is of a hole I was digging in my back yard several years ago. It provided some very clean fill dirt for our new garage. I dug it deeper than this before I was done, but unlike our national economy, I never dug it so deep I couldn’t get out. It has since been filled in.

Speaking of digging ourselves in deeper, there is an interesting side to the left’s hysterical screaming of the last several days. If you let them rage and rant long enough and loud enough, eventually they will scream off-message and let a bit of the truth leak out. That seems to be what happened with Rep. Mike Doyle.

For a couple of weeks it was all about how to deal with the deficit. We knew the left was not particularly interested in reducing the deficit, of course, because Pres. Obama wouldn’t even give up his $128 billion in walking-around money for the 2012 re-election campaign. But they tried to sell the idea that higher taxes were needed in order to reduce the deficit. A few of their own followers may even have believed it.

But now, Rep. Mike Doyle confirmed what we knew all along. It wasn’t about deficit reduction. It was about Democrats feeding their spending habit. “We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

And did Vice President Biden try to steer Rep. Doyle back on message by reminding him that deficit-reduction was the object? No, all he could do was agree that the Democrat opponents have acted like terrorists.

And if anyone thinks it was just one rogue Congressman, President Obama couldn’t help himself, either. Now that there was no reason to restrain himself, he came out promoting more of his wild spending plans, aka “key investments.”

See Michelle Malkin’s column, Back to Big Government-Spending as Usual

Softball

Bash the Messenger No Responses »

Jul 212011

I don’t watch television news, but I learned from the internet that a reporter named Contessa Brewer recently asked a U.S. Representative who disagreed with her if he had a degree in economics. (His answer: “Yes ma’am, I do. Highest honors.”) URL here.

That’s a good start. But reporters need to start asking President Obama questions like that, too.

And instead of just printing his campaign ads as news, they should ask him these questions about the debt limit debates:

If the debt limit is not raised or is not raised enough to pay for all of the nation’s spending, which would you cut first? a) NPR/CPP subsidies b) ag subsidies c) NEA subsidies d) Social Security [A non-answer would be almost as good as an answer.]
If the debt limit is not raised enough right away to pay for all the nation’s spending, will you use your $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds to help pay the bills? Or is it more important for you to hang on to it to pay for your 2012 re-election campaign?

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