Michael

http://makemevoteobama.org/

It's up and running!

I think I'll launch a website concerning that entry I posted yesterday. I'll take comments from interested parties there. More details soon.

Heading into election season, I once again have to endure ongoing ridicule and ostracism that I face from my Democrat-loving peers. And once again I am struck by the fact that, when it comes to personal decision-making, there's not a single issue with which they actually agree with the Democrat platform.

They are excited about the possibility of their "team" winning, but they have no rationale as to why they are on this team to begin with. They offer the shibboleths of issue stances, but these are invariably abstract statements of morality or principle that don't affect them personally in the slightest. In my day-to-day existence, I get left-wing morality shoved down my throat way, way more than its right-wing counterpart.

So, I offer an open challenge to any Obama supporters reading this to convince me to vote for Obama. This involves demonstrating to me why having Obama in the Oval Office will be good for me - a 30-year-old, white, educated, single, home-owning professional.

In order to do this, you have to tell me how I will be better off with Obama's policies. Don't give me Obama's star power or his life story - I really, really don't care where he grew up or how great his speechwriters are. Don't give me his background or his relationships unless they serve as a guide to his decision-making tendencies. Don't give me abstract arguments about class struggle or social justice or how Obama will help other people; that's great for them, they can vote for him as far as I'm concerned. My vote is mine, and I will use it for myself. Other people's votes are theirs. This isn't about me convincing you to vote for McCain (though that's an entirely separate line of argument). This is about you convincing me to vote for Obama. Got it?

Now, just to help you out, let me give you examples of approaches that people have tried on me that do not work....
( Read existing arguments and why they fail... )

The other day I invited Leftists to demonstrate their stupidity by equating the Russian invasion of Georgia to the US invasion of Iraq. Barry accepted my invitation!

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Bwahahah, yeah, because Russia looks to us as an example of how to act!

See, nobody on Earth actually makes their own decisions except for Americans. No human beings except for Americans can exhibit volition, initiate action, or function as a starting-point in a chain of causality. Americans are the only sentient human beings on the planet. Americans are the only human beings with minds and souls. Americans, unique among the world population, are direct descendants of Adam and Eve; Americans have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and are therefore accountable for their actions. Everybody else in the world lives in naive bliss, a state of childlike innocence akin to the moral accountability of animals. When Americans cause harm, it is because we are Evil. When anybody else on Earth causes harm, it is because they know not what they do and the outcomes of their actions are ultimately on our shoulders.

Riiiiight.

Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth, the only thing that restrains Russia to merely invade Georgia, rather than, say, all of Europe and the Middle East, is the knowledge that the US will kick its ass at the first sign of rough-housing. (Okay, well, maybe the second sign.) Whatever you might think of the US's invasion of Iraq, the fact is that demonstrating our willingness to use military force is the key to preventing acts of territorial aggression by other countries. This Russian invasion of Georgia occurred not because of our invasion of Iraq, but in spite of it, and the failure of us or anybody else to launch a credible military response will serve as encouragement to Russia and others to continue this behavior in kind.

Now, before I close this, I want to clarify something that I think is pretty important.

I know a lot of Leftists - in fact, even Americans who don't consider themselves Leftists - will get stuck on this "setting a precedent" thing. I understand that the idea of, "Well, so-and-so did this, so now why shouldn't I?" is a very fundamental component in Western philosophies of social cohesion. Our laws are based on the idea of applying an objective set of standards to all individuals; our jurisprudence system is based on the use of precedent to guide the interpretation and implementation of those laws.

Within the context of a functioning consensual government, this is a remarkably good system. It allows people to live their lives on a day-to-day basis with a pretty good understanding of what they can and can't do, what results they can and can't expect. It's a fairly rare arrangement as far as societies of the world go. It's something to cherish. It's one of the reasons I love my country.

But Americans often forget that it's a man-made system, one that functions only because we choose to keep it functioning. When applied to international politics, especially with other cultures, the idea that everybody will try to play by the same set of rules is hopelessly, almost adorably naive.

For example, Leftists often accuse the US of "hypocrisy" in trying to prevent countries like Libya from having nuclear weapons. After all, if the US has nukes, Libya should have nukes. It's only fair, right? Wrong. It's only "hypocrisy" if the US was promoting some universal set of rules and then discretely rejecting the importance of adhering to those rules itself. The US is doing no such thing. The US does promote a universal set of rules, those rules being that the US gets nuclear weapons and Libya doesn't. There's nothing hypocritical about this. As for whether or not it's "fair" is another story, but "fairness" is a quaint notion when there's no higher authority around to enforce it.

From my point of view, an ideal set of laws would enable me to steal other people's stuff and kill people I don't like with total impunity. When I try to explain this to people, they think I'm talking about promoting anarchy, and quickly delve into all the reasons why anarchy doesn't work from an economic and self-sustainment perspective. They miss the point. I'm not saying that an ideal set of laws would allow anybody to steal and kill without consequence. I'm saying an ideal set of laws would let me do so. Me, and me alone. You and the rest of the other schmucks around me can go cower in fear of me for all I care. I'm not talking about anarchy, I'm talking about a Pharaonic monarchy in which I'm Pharaoh.

I'm not talking about double-standards: I believe you and I should both live under a common set of laws, those laws stating, among other things, that Pharaoh has absolute dominance and that I am Pharaoh. There's nothing hypocritical or unfair about this. These laws, the laws that state that Pharaoh's privileges supercede your rights in every way (and that I am Pharaoh, and I alone), will be applied with equal objectivity to both of us.

Unfortunately, there's essentially no way for me to make the world work like that. Moreover, pretty much everybody is trying to make the world work like that for themselves. For this reason, everybody's visions of ideal societies are, at heart, grossly incompatible; my vision of an ideal society in which you are subservient to me is at odds with your vision of an ideal society in which I am subservient to you.

So how do we live together?

Well, when there's thousands or millions of us, we agree on common sets of rules, and then try to work within those rules to make the real world resemble our ideal one as closely as possible. The rules are fictions, but they're useful fictions - they're fictions that help make sure that you working towards your ideal world doesn't disrupt me working towards mine too much.

When the population is very small, though, such as a clan or a tribe, you no longer need such fictions. You can strategize with and against others directly. In a functional population smaller than, say, 200 - such as the number of recognized sovereign nations on this planet - your best bet for making the world more closely resemble your ideal is by throwing away such quaint notions as "international law" and recognizing that might makes right.

You have got to be kidding me.

The United States has been left diplomatically isolated after European members of NATO moved to reject an American proposal to scale back ties with Moscow following Russia's invasion of Georgia.

US diplomats attending an emergency NATO summit in Brussels had called on the alliance to suspend ministerial meetings with Russia, held twice a year, as a way of demonstrating the West's disapproval of the war.

But other members of the alliance, including Britain, rejected the plan, saying that it would be foolish to isolate Russia. Instead diplomats released their strongly-worded statement, stopping short of concrete action, at least for now.

What's more pathetic? Responding to Russia's naked territorial aggression by dis-inviting them from a biannual tea party? Or deciding that such a response would be too harsh, and opting instead for a strongly worded statement?

No, please, comrade, anything but another one of Europe's strongly worded statements? I cannot take another!

I'd be laughing if I wasn't crying.

P.S. I wholeheartedly invite any Leftists reading this (btw, why do you read this? :) ) to demonstrate their vapid idiocy and complete moral bankruptcy by trying to argue that Russia's seizure of Ossetia is equivalent to the US's invasion of Iraq.

I came to a realization the other day.

I support Barack Obama!

And what I mean by that is the same thing that Obama and the rest of the Left mean when they say they support the troops.

In other words, I don't want him to actually win. I believe his candidacy was ill-conceived from the very start and that he never should have run in the first place. I believe that, while he can probably win the election, he doesn't have the training or preparation necessary to conduct a successful Presidency. I believe that the goals he is striving for are poorly defined, grossly unrealistic, and generally very bad ideas anyway. And I believe that, for the best interest of the country, he should end his candidacy immediately, regardless of how well he might be doing at the moment and what kind of mess his immediate withdrawal will leave in the Democratic party.

In the process of responding to an anonymous reply to my previous post, I found myself stating some basic principles that I thought I should elevate to a top-level posting. The original reply (which, I gotta say, sounds a little bit like a troll, but it doesn't matter) says:

No, the eco-freaks' goal is the control of the economy. Co2 scrubbers eliminate their long sought quest for absolute power. These people are dangerous, anti-American zealots who must defeated at all costs.

Now, that is one way to read it - that is, the econuts' actions are consistent with that interpretation. There's a quote that originally referred to a group of Congressmen; I forget the quote's exact origin, but it goes to the effect of, "I'm not accusing them of being on the Soviet payroll. I'm simply asking, if they were working for the Soviets, how their actions would be any different?"

But such explanations seldom end up panning out, when much simpler ones suffice.

When trying to understand the motivations of incomprehensible actions or statements, I tend to favor those hypotheses that make the fewest assumptions about the background, intellect, or behind-the-scenes dealings of the people in question.

Occam's Razor dictates that you should never assume a complex explanation when a simple one will do. Morgan's Canon (the Occam's Razor of cognitive psych) dictates that you should never assume that someone performs an action because of high-order cognitive processes when low-order ones will explain the action as well.

When applied to politics, I believe that these principles rule out most accusations of corruption or malice.

Claiming that a person is evil is a cop-out - and an unnecessarily complex one, at that. Yes, there are people out there who extinguish cigarettes on babies and get a sexual thrill out of stomp videos. However, such people are pretty rare, and they usually have a host of other psychological problems. In other words, yes, I'm sure somewhere out there is some protester who opposes the construction of CO2 scrubbers because he was molested by his uncle and now harbors fantasies of watching the entire human race choke to death on automobile fumes. However, I'm pretty sure that only a tiny minority of Greenpeace members have ever been forcibly sodomized by a close relative, and most of them are there for far simpler motives.

Claiming that a person is corrupt - i.e. that they are personally profiting off of their political stances - implies that the person is both an extremely clever strategist and a highly skilled actor. The fact is, most people just aren't that bright - and even if they were, Occam's Razor says that, if you assume they're some kind of supergenius criminal masterminds, then chances are you're not that bright. Moreover, in order to profit off of his political power, the other players in the corruption scheme have to have something in it for themselves, and they have to all be able to keep a secret. In short, to perceive corruption in every political statement is to descend rapidly into the abyss of paranoid delusion where everybody around you is part of a vast Orwellian machine. While this might accurately describe Soviet Russia or modern-day China or Venezuela or the Middle East, in modern America most people have better things to do.

So what's left?

Well, first there's sheer incompetence. The world isn't full of evil people, just stupid people. Or, more to the point, normal people who occasionally make mistakes, and then lack the maturity to recognize it as a mistake and stand by their erroneous action, entrenching themselves deeply in their error.

Then there's juvenile petulance or basic mammalian contest for dominance. People just pick an arbitrary thing to insist on, and fight like hell for the sheer pleasure of getting their way. Whether it's a husband and wife arguing over what color to paint the bedroom, or a Senate appropriations subcommittee arguing over which pork-barrel project to subsidize, or a protest group petitioning to get some obscure animal on the endangered species list, the principle is the same: the purpose of the fight is not to find an objectively optimal answer but to establish who gives the orders and who obeys. The point of getting that animal onto that list isn't to save that animal, it's to show that Congress will do things at the protest group's command. People need to show other people that they're powerful; a contest-driven self-organizing power structure is a fundamental principle of all social mammals. So people pick arbitrary sides on contentious issues and fight with other people who have picked the opposite side, just to see who wins. The fight is what's important; the issue itself is not.

Lastly (by my count, anyway), there's simple hedonism and social reinforcement. Getting into a righteous snit is fun! Showing off how superior you are to other people is a real dopamine rush; getting to stick a finger in someone's face and shout, "I told you so!" induces a measurable drug-like high (in fact, the whole point of cocaine is to mimic this sensation). And when you can do this in the context of a set of like-minded friends who reinforce this sense of righteous superiority, you get to build social bonds and a sense of identity. This isn't really separate from the mammalian drive for dominance - in fact, it's the driving motivation for it. We fight to prove we're right because it feels good to win; we fight to be in charge because it feels good to be the king. I call it out separately here because the social reinforcement adds an extra dimension to this phenomenon; people will join a cause because that's how they can form the closest friendships. If the issue itself is irrelevant and the choice of which side to join is ultimately arbitrary, then you might as well join whichever side all the cool guys and hot girls are on. When your side wins, these people will join you in celebration; when you lose, these people will join you in solace. They are your tribe, and nothing differentiates them from the enemy tribe except for each individual's arbitrary declaration of tribal loyalty.

So, when we look at the hippie protesters opposing the construction of CO2 superscrubbers, I believe it's naive to think that their statement of opposition represents some diabolical effort at economic control. In fact, I think it's naive to think that their statement of opposition represents actual opposition to the construction of the scrubbers - that is, I really don't think that these people believe that constructing these scrubbers will make their lives or anybody else's lives worse.

Instead, what I see is a group of people staking out a position that is effectively arbitrary, and then fighting to get their way just for the sake of getting their way. They've picked a highly outlandish position, but that just makes the victory that much sweeter - it magnifies the pride they will feel if they set out to achieve something highly unlikely and succeed. Mmmm, sweet dopamine. And if, against their wishes, this Columbia University research proceeds as planned and results in the widescale construction of CO2 superscrubbers, these protesters will have each other to lean on, lick their wounds, and try again. After all, without victory, the fight goes on, and the fight is what's important.

This just in from the Heartland Institute.

Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day.

While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists are opposing the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.

At first I thought the Columbia physicists were simply moonbats of a slightly higher grade, but these guys seem legit.

"Now, I don't know about whether this technology will solve global warming," said Burnett, "but let's say it is cost-effective, and let's assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a real, serious problem that needs to be solved. Then I would argue that this technology may be a good thing."
...
Leading energy analysts agreed with the scientists, rather than the protesters.

"If CO2 emission reduction is a goal, then investigating and investing in strategies for capitalizing on our existing infrastructure efficiently and effectively makes more sense than throwing away reasonable options simply because they don't align with a political philosophy about our energy economy," said Amy Kaleita, an environmental policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.

Note that they're not ceding the premise that CO2 contributes to global warming. They're simply creating a way to entirely separate the question of CO2 buildup with the question of fossil fuel consumption. This allows ongoing legislation efforts to work on questions of economic policy (f.e. the price of gasoline) separately from questions of environmental policy (emission control, pollution taxation, etc.). This research is a classic example of how to unravel a Gordian knot. In short, these scientists are trying to make everybody's lives a helluva lot simpler, easier, and better.

Of course, not everybody wants this Gordian knot to be broken.

Environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace have consistently opposed similar technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration, because they do not address what they see as the root of the problem.

On May 5, for example, the activist groups Students Promoting Environmental Action and Save Our Cumberland Mountains demonstrated in Knoxville, Tennessee against carbon sequestration. Repeatedly citing a Greenpeace position paper, they argued eliminating the use of coal, not reducing atmospheric CO2, should be society's primary goal.

So, the Greenies are upset because it won't stop people from burning fossil fuels - it'll merely take away all allegedly negative ramifications of doing so. 'Cuz when you base your entire sense of self around throwing a righteous snit that purportedly demonstrates your moral superiority, nothing's worse than some clever engineer coming along and knocking the wind out of your sails by obsolescing the premise of your anger.

But hey, maybe they have legitimate arguments. Let's hear them out. What do they bring to the intellectual table? This:

"Our position is we need to start phasing out coal as soon as possible," said Cathie Bird of Save Our Cumberland Mountains.

"Carbon capture and storage does not make coal clean," read a banner hoisted by protesters.

Actually, yes, it does. That's exactly what it does. And besides, modern-day coal-burning facilities are insanely clean in the first place - coal power plants today are not only far more energy-efficient than oil, but they have far better mechanisms for reclaiming secondary pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

Evidently these Greenies can't produce a valid intellectual point - possibly due to the relative locations of their brains to their colons. Of course, I make the assumption that they are actually interested in making points, rather than protesting just because it's fun to be angry about stuff with all your friends and make a big scene and maybe pick up some hippie chicks while you're at it. Perhaps I give them too much credit.

So, I was flipping through channels last night, and happened across "The Daily Show". At the moment I tuned in, Stewart was saying something about oil prices.

Stewart then cut to a clip of Bush saying, and I paraphrase: "We see that oil consumption has dropped, because the price of oil is up. People can choose to use less oil when it costs them more. People know how to manage their own finances. They can balance their own checkbooks. The market works."

Stewart responded by hunching over and saying, in a mocking imitation of Bush's voice: "We see that, with the collapse of mortgages, people can choose to live outside." Peals of laughter from the audience.

Yes, Jon. Everybody who can't afford a house by themselves is homeless. My guess is Mr. Stewart has been rolling in the big bucks for long enough now that he's forgotten that people can also rent, which is a helluva lot cheaper per month than paying a mortgage. They can also co-own, get roommates, or - heaven forbid - move to places of the country where houses are cheap. But those places are red states, so I don't think Stewart wants to acknowledge they exist.

He then goes on to mock the idea that people can manage their own finances, by showing a clip from a Home Shopping channel in which some guy on the phone enters into a really unwise financing program. 'Cuz, yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous and uproariously hilarious to believe that people can take care of themselves. Why, everybody knows the poor dears need government to tell them how to live!

It reminded me of why I don't watch The Daily Show. Stewart doesn't actually make jokes. He just repeats things Bush says and then his audience laughs regardless of the content of the statements. It's more like 1984's "Two Minutes Hate", except longer and more juvenile. Lame.

And follows basic principles of supply and demand!

Shocking, I know!

Oil today fell as low as $132 a barrel, more than 10 percent below the record of $147.27 reached on July 11.
[...]
Gasoline stockpiles rose 2.47 million barrels to 214.2 million barrels, the report showed.
[...]
Consumption of gasoline averaged 9.3 million barrels a day over the past four weeks, down 2.1 percent from the same period last year, the Energy Department supply report showed.

``I don't see anything bullish is this report,'' said Rick Mueller, director of oil markets at Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Wakefield, Massachusetts. ``There were higher inventories across the board in the face of weak product demand.''

So, let's see if I get this straight. There used to be a very high demand for oil, and as market supplies dwindled, the price went up. This reduced demand, which made people buy less oil, which made market supplies grow, which is now causing the price to drop... which will increase demand, reduce market supply, and cause the price to rise. My god! It's so simple and elegant! This kind of thing should, like, be in a textbook or something, don't ya think? Maybe it can be called "The Law of Supply and Demand", or something to that effect...

I recently stumbled across a famous, delightful article by a guy named Nick Lowe, written in 1986. It's about plot devices and the use of clichees, particularly in fantasy and science fiction, as a cheap and expedient means by which to compel events to happen in a story. This excerpt is priceless:

But actually, it's not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters, chiefly on account of its omnipresence and lack of physical body. It'll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon's Plan, or The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I'd only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. "The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot." "Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot." When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero's head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses "a great disturbance in the Plot."

This is evidently a famous article, particularly for introducing the world to the concept of a plot coupon:

A plot coupon is an object whose possession or use is necessary in order to resolve the conflict upon which the plot hangs, when this necessity clearly springs from the arbitrary decision of the author to make it so necessary. (The name is derived from a joke: When the characters have collected enough plot coupons, they can trade them in for the denouement.) [...] For example, one might imagine that defeating an alien threat would require one to organize a resistance, figure out the enemy's weaknesses, and draw up some kind of strategic plan. If instead the answer to this threat becomes "find these five components to construct the superweapon which will eliminate all the aliens in one fell swoop," the story can be more linear, the obstacles more arbitrary, the proportion of cause to effect less proportionate, the particular circumstances of the story less realistic, and the required research far less onerous.

Priceless. :)

Lucia de Vernai, writing for the North Star Writer's Group, pens a superb article that excellently captures my perspective on American race relations.

Probably because I – along with many born-and-bred Americans – do not suffer from white guilt. This affliction of the conscience is one of the luxuries of white privilege, since only those who have the time and resources to reflect on the critical race theory aspects of affirmative action can engage in self-flagellation in the vein of: “They deserve additional help after all we’ve put them through.”

Two immediate questions arise: Who the hell is “they”? And who the hell is “us”?

Read the whole thing. And get me her phone number!

Holy shit!

The team, led by the Burnham Institute's Stuart Lipton, figured out how to coax the embryonic stem cells of mice to become nerve cells that, when transplanted into a mouse brain damaged by stroke, link themselves to the existing network of neurons.

The mice showed therapeutic improvement, and none of them developed tumors, which has been a problem associated with the implantation of stem cells, according to the article published today in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Lipton said that since submitting the article several months ago, his team has been able to achieve the same result with human embryonic stem cells implanted in mice.

This is just ridiculously amazing. The brain simply does not grow new neurons by itself. I would never have expected the new neurons to integrate themselves into the brain's existing network, nor to exhibit any useful activity if they did.

In the next 30 years these guys might be able to cure stroke. At this rate, maybe I will live forever.

Hey, Morgan Spurlock! Take this, you manipulative, self-aggrandizing, socialist, Michael Moore wannabe!

“Then last December, he tipped the scales at 278 pounds and made a bold pledge – to drop down to the 185 pounds he weighed on his wedding day by resorting to a McDonald’s-only diet.”

Coleson told “Good Morning America” he lost his weight by limiting his calorie intake to 1,400 calories daily. He explained that he stuck to McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) salads, wraps, apple dippers and their hamburgers – without the bun – for six months.

“The apple dippers – and they were a great snack,” Coleson said. “They have a caramel sauce that comes with it; I’d stay away from that. I'd just eat the apple dippers alone.”

Since Coleson began his diet, he has lost 86 pounds and his cholesterol has also dropped.

This Coleson guy did it exactly right.

Any non-charlatan dietitian will tell you that you will get nowhere on any diet in which you prohibit yourself from eating food you love. All that'll accomplish will be to stress you out (which will make you fat), make you overcompensate for the lack of satisfaction by eating more of food you don't want anyway, and ultimately drive you to snap one day and gorge yourself on the forbidden fruitcake.

The right way to do it is to let yourself eat what you love, and to do so slowly and savoringly, avoiding all distractions, letting yourself be fully absorbed in the delightful eating experience.

You can lose weight eating macaroni and cheese. You can lose weight eating cheeseburgers. It's just a matter of how much you eat, which is a function of how much you crave. And you can satisfy your cravings not by eating more, but by eating more consciously, making what you do eat count for a lot more.

As for Morgan Spurlock and his utterly asinine display of willful self-destruction, blatant blame deferment, and obnoxious condescension against all those supposedly ignorant blue-collar "poor people" who eat at McDonald's because the poor dears don't know how to enjoy a wheatgrass-infused soy wrap... The problem, Mr. Spurlock sir, isn't that you ate McDonald's every day, it's that you ate 14,000 calories worth of McDonald's every day. You ate 'til you puked, repeatedly, for days on end, and you wonder why your health suffered? I'd like to see how healthy a normal red-blooded American male would be after thirty days of 14,000-calorie-a-day ingestions of cruelty-free fair-trade organic latte smoothies.

An old article in Discover Magazine, titled Math Against Tyranny, offers a very good explanation of what the Electoral College is all about, and why it's a good idea.

The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports--which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill Moose Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded that Pittsburgh deserved to win. Nobody walked away saying it was unfair, he says.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close. And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888, Natapoff continues. Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies. And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

That's a great way of putting it, and something I'll have to remember the next time I find myself in an inescapable argument with some twit that's still sore over Bush-v-Gore 2000. :)

This Natapoff guy's analysis is really very interesting.

At the outset, he defines "voting power" as the probability that any one single vote will swing the election. That is, what's the probability that all the voters in a nation, except you, all split perfectly down the middle in their votes, and it all comes down to you? Natapoff then looks at what happens to this probability value as a function of population size and candidate predisposition (i.e. how much the voting population likes one candidate over the other), and compares this function's behavior in a direct versus districted election model.

He finds that, with a districted (electoral) election model, you increase each individual's chance of being the one guy who swings the election.

The idea is that, in a direct election, the probability of everybody splitting their votes down the middle and leaving it in your hands alone is, of course, vanishingly small.

If you are part of a district (or state, rather), then the probability of everybody in your district putting you in that position is higher, simply because there are fewer people in it. For example, if you're in a state whose population is three people (yourself included), then there's a 50% chance (all other things being equal) that your two friends are going to vote for opposite candidates, leaving the decision in your hands. This probability goes down as the number of people in your state rises, but it's always going to be higher than it would be in a general election, for the simple reason that, by definition, there are fewer people in a district than there are in the country.

So, in a districted election, you have some chance of swinging your state. And there's also some chance that all the other states besides yours end up splitting their electoral votes 50-50 (or at least within a margin smaller than your state's number of electoral points). The probability of the states splitting down the middle is astoundingly higher than the probability of the general electorate population splitting down the middle! After all, all that matters is that half the states go one way and the other half go the other; within each state, it doesn't matter if the decision is made by a blowout or by a razor-thin margin.

So, to show that districting increases the probability that "it all comes down to you", Natapoff has to show that the probability of everyone in your state splitting their votes, multiplied by the probability of all the states splitting their points, is greater than the probability of everyone in the country splitting their votes.

As it so happens, this is not the case for a straight-shot 50-50 election, where each candidate has an exactly equal probability of winning any vote. In such a mathematically perfect election, districting actually reduces the probability that your vote will be the deciding ballot.

However, for elections where there is a favored candidate going into the race, districting starts to increase that probability. There's a break-even point, where, past a certain amount of bias (say, for example, one candidate is 60% likely to win any given individual vote), districting increases the probability that the pivotal vote will come down to you. This break-even point gets smaller and smaller the larger the voting population - that is, for large populations, districting maximizes this probability for more and more narrowly-biased elections.

What this means in practical terms is that, if a candidate is inherently more popular than his opponent going into an election, he's almost absolutely guaranteed to win a direct election, so your vote really doesn't matter - or, more precisely, there's pretty much zero chance that all the votes in the nation will split evenly across the two candidates, leaving you in a position to decide the outcome. However, with districting, there's a significant chance that the states will split evenly across the two candidates (or at least evenly enough such that your state's electoral points will tip the scales), and then there's a chance that all the votes in your state will split evenly, leaving you as the deciding vote - sure, that chance is also pretty much zero, but it's orders of magnitude more likely than the national equivalent.

What this means is that the Electoral College increases the probability that you will get to elect the President, no matter how popular he is or what your out-of-state friends think.

That James Madison fellow was one smart mo'-fo'. :)

Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek writes, "If you set aside the war in Iraq, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years."

Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such."...

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

Remember that one of the points of going into Iraq in the first place was to set up a place to fight terrorists that was preferable to fighting them on home soil. "We will fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them here at home", or something to that effect.

Now, neither Bush nor Zakaria ever used the term "honeypot" in public discourse, but computer security folks are very familiar with the principle, and also generally aware of its relevance to Iraq.

A honeypot is a low-value, low-security target that you place on your network in order to encourage attacks and thereby thwart attackers. Well-designed honeypots will help you find security holes in your real networking equipment.

For example, if you run an e-commerce server, a honeypot could be a copy of that server running on your intranet. Hackers trying to infiltrate your network will see the server and break into it, stealing credit card numbers and invoices. Unbeknownst to them, the invoices are fake and the credit card numbers are either expired, worthless, or tied to the police. The hackers think they've made a big heist, but all they've done is alert you to their IP address. In the meantime, your real server, obscured behind a second layer of firewall, continues operating unmolested.

A honeypot by nature increases the total number of attacks on the system. By making it easier to make a theoretically successful attack, a honeypot effectively increases the incentive to attack (or decreases the disincentive), and therefore increases the attacks' total number. However, a honeypot significantly decreases the impact of an attack, so that, even though there are more total attacks occurring, the net damage being done to the system is much less than it would be otherwise.

The numbers cited by Zakaria bear out the idea that Iraq is being used as a honeypot. The total number of terrorist attacks around the world has been going up, but they've all been occurring in Iraq. That is, The number of terrorist attacks around the world outside Iraq has been dropping, but the number of attacks in Iraq has been going up more than enough to compensate, thus making the total climb.

As for whether the cost of each attack is less than it would be otherwise... Well, from a national security point of view, yes, absolutely, a bomb in Baghdad is better than a bomb in Chicago. I'm not necessarily saying that Iraqi's lives are cheaper than Americans' on an objective scale, but let's face facts: if I had to choose between a hundred people in Tikrit and a hundred people in Seattle, I would barely even hesitate.

Critics of the war have complained that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding-ground. As I've said for the last five years, that's sort of the point. Terrorists go to Iraq, train in Iraq, stay in Iraq, fight in Iraq, die in Iraq. There are more terrorists total than there would have been otherwise, but they're flocking to Iraq faster than they're arising, and the amazing men and women of the American military are exterminating them with ever-increasing effectiveness.

That's why these numbers, five years into the conflict, are so valuable. They quantitatively demonstrate the wisdom of a honeypot approach to a conflict with a terrorist organization.

The numbers also quantify the impact of the demoralizing effect of going for a honeypot. Look at it this way: Let's say you run a terrorist organization. You see opportunity after opportunity in Iraq, so you increase the number of attacks you launch. Yet the effectiveness of each attack, the degree to which it hurts your enemy, drops so dramatically that your total impact is barely a fraction of what it was before. You lose followers, you lose respect, you lose funding, you lose everything. You so stupid.

But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent. In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years. With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."

Strategically, there is no better way to fight a terrorist organization. Sun Tzu wrote, "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. ... If you are formless, the most penetrating spies will not be able to discern you, or the wisest counsels will not be able to do calculations against you." When faced with a formless organization like al Qaeda, resistant to our spies and inscrutable to our calculations, the best way to fight it is to make it take form.

History will not remember Iraq as a boondoggle or as a quagmire. It will remember Iraq as a brilliant strategic campaign against an asymmetrical enemy, and a prototype for a 21st-century style of war. Crimea offered Europe a glimpse of what mechanized warfare is like and taught the lessons for the campaigns ultimately used in World War I. Likewise, when the next great global conflict arises, those who know their history will look back to the War on Terror, with the Iraq War included, and will glean from it the templates that will guide the future of war.

If you're a Democrat, the more you learn about the global warming* issue, the more concerned and distraught you get. If you're a Republican, the more you know, the less you care.

In February 2008, researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station published a survey suggesting that Americans who see themselves as well informed about global warming are actually less concerned than those who admit to knowing little Risk Analysis. ...This was most marked for respondents who identified themselves as Democrats, and those who said they trusted scientists to provide reliable information on environmental issues.

...In part, this may reflect the different ways people get information about global warming. If your sources are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, Krosnick suggests, the relationship between knowledge and concern is likely to be different than if your main sources are sceptical advocacy groups such as the Heartland Institute, and the conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not sure if there's something to be made of this, but I believe it's strongly tied to the fact that the global warming controversy wouldn't even exist without people believing there's something to "get informed!" about in the first place.

In other words, normal people with day jobs and kids to feed, without the influence of media activists, don't bother thinking about climate change - at least, not any more so than they think about plate tectonics or terrestrial gyroscopic precession or lunar orbital decay. That is, they can be aware that it exists. They can even be aware that its effects can be incredibly dramatic. But they are also aware that the magnitudes of time and space involved are so gargantuan as to be irrelevant to them. The events won't affect them - nothing noticeable will change within the imaginable future. They can't affect the events - the geological or galactic forces in question are so far beyond the scale of human manipulation as to be utterly ridiculous (go ahead, try stopping a continental plate! Or try ironing out a sunspot!).

Hurricanes happen. Floods happen. Droughts happen. Earthquakes happen. Sometimes summers are very hot. Sometimes winters are very cold. And sometimes summers and winters are surprisingly mild, and hurricanes and floods don't happen. That's normal. Without being told otherwise, based on casual observation alone, a normal person would never know that there's such thing as "climate change" going on.

This does not mean that normal people, left to their own devices, wouldn't notice a freakin' glacier carving its way through their favorite strip-mall. If there was a foot of snow a day in Tijuana for all of May, or if there were Category 4 hurricanes hitting Florida every week all of a sudden, then yes, of course a normal person would notice that something strange is afoot (that's even before getting into the question of whether or not it's anthropogenic, or if we can do anything about it now even if it was). But no such events have occurred - the world right now works pretty much exactly as we've always known it to work, with shitty things happening occasionally but life still going on normally.

In short, you need to be told that there's a pattern in order to believe that there's one there. Someone has to show you a photo of a receding snowcap on Kilimanjaro and a video of Hurricane Katrina and say to you, "These things are related!"

And, of course, like the number 23, once you believe there's a pattern to find, you find it everywhere.

Fnord.


* Or global climate change, or global lack-of-climate-change-which-is-bad-because-we're-supposed-to-be-in-an-ice-age-right-now-and-the-fact-that-temperatures-haven't-changed-is-bad-because-an-ice-age-would-be-good-or-something),

Writing in SFGate, Mark Morford's column today is about some guy named Mukesh Ambani of some company called Reliance Industries who's building a $2 billion 27-story personal residence in Mumbai.

Of course you've never heard of him or his company, Reliance Industries, because it's one of those nefarious megapower supercorporations that block out all life and own entire governments and hold presidents in their pockets and yank the levers that make the world spin and tilt and groan. Therefore plebes like us know as much about its true weight and influence as an army ant knows about a whirlpool galaxy.

The column reads at first like an "Eat The Rich!" rant. But I read through the whole thing awaiting the inevitable call-to-arms for socialist uprising or even a really pointed invective against the well-to-do, and never got one. Morford pokes a lot of fun at the overwhelming opulence of the residence in question, but his jests, while snide, never cross the line into anger or hatred.

He never even so much as descends into jealousy. It definitely did not sound like a socialist diatribe. Like a socialist he repeatedly incorrectly associates capitalism with wanton myopic consumption, and makes extremely heavy use of the old "Money can't buy happiness" canard. But he makes a show of pity rather than contempt for the opulently wealthy, and never calls for any kind of "more efficient" "redistribution" of their resources.

What makes this article stand out for me is that, near its end, he issues this pointed reminder:

And at the same time, if you're reading this column right now with your $5 latte and your clean running water and functioning limbs and intact teeth, you can rest assured that there are roughly 3 billion people on the planet who subsist on about a dollar a month who see you just about exactly as you see Ambani. Which is to say: pampered and wealthy in the extreme.

And then you realize, of course, that money is no measure of anything that truly matters, really. It's merely another form of energy, a nice expression of ego, either all-consuming and destructive or capable of tremendous joy and good. Often, it's both.

We need to get the right people talking to Morford. Maybe we can make an Objectivist out of him yet. :)

Democrat superdelegate Steven Ybarra of Sacramento will vote for whichever of the two DNC candidates first pays him $20,000,000.

See, this I respect! :) I mean, seriously, I don't think it even counts as "corruption" when it's entirely out in the open and without an iota of shame like this. I'd be doing the same thing if I had the balls. And the superdelegate seat, of course. :)

This man is my hero!

3. Get politically uninvolved!

All politics stink. [...] Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound like on today's campaign trail:

"No, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"

Go read the whole thing.