Messages

 

Razzle Dazzle

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle
Razzle Dazzle 'em
Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it
And the reaction will be passionate
Give 'em the old hocus pocus
Bead and feather 'em
How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

Don’t be fooled by the Razzle Dazzle.

The medium is NOT the message, no matter what Marshall McLuhan might have said.  Yes, Nixon was sweating during the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates, but his appearance is not why he lost.  Barry Goldwater might not have been as crazy as the infamous mushroom cloud and the little girl picking daisies TV commercial made him appear, but that was not why he lost.  The message is the message.  The rest is Razzle Dazzle.  Ronald Reagan might have said he paid for this microphone, but that microphone wasn't Reagan’s. It was a Bob Molloy microphone. "One of the many," says Molloy, who had been doing sound and video contracting for New Hampshire events since 1976. https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2015-12-05/meet-the-microphone-ronald-reagan-paid-for-at-the-famous-debate-in-nashua.

That Ronald Reagan bent the truth, gave us the Razzle Dazzle, should not be a surprise.  He started in show business by creating play-by-play accounts of baseball games using only basic descriptions that the station that employed him received by wire as the games were in progress. He appeared in movies and TV, make believe, long before he entered politics.  He was a union leader and pretended to be a friend of the unions, before he broke the union of air traffic controllers.  He embraced what was called “voodoo” economics by his rivals, particularly George H.W. Bush, who then sold his soul by becoming his vice president.  The Reagan Tax Cuts and “Reaganomics” were the beginning of a long con that saw a decline in the growth of the US economy and a shift of wealth and income to the very rich.   The only two countries that saw a marked increase in the inequality of income over this period are the US and the UK which also embraced “supply side” economics under Margaret Thatcher.  At least the British appear to have reversed that trend in the 1990s.  The US  shows no sign of abating.

The long con has been aided by inflation.  When inflation is not considered it appears, according to Census reports, that the mode, most common, income has been increasing or stable.  Stated in 2019 US Dollars, and considering inflation, the mode of income has been decreasing.  It is long past time to separate the Razzle Dazzle from the message.

History

 

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

For the sake of havin' you near
In spite of a warnin' voice that comes in the night
And repeats, repeats in my ear,
Don't you know, you fool, you never can win?
Use your mentality, wake up to reality.

Is history a warning voice that repeats?

The caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts. The attack was in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders, including South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks. The beating nearly killed Sumner and contributed significantly to the country's polarization over the issue of slavery. It has been considered symbolic of the "breakdown of reasoned discourse" and the use of violence that eventually led to the Civil War.

Although Sumner was unable to return to the Senate until December of 1859, the Massachusetts legislature refused to replace him, leaving his empty desk in the Senate as a public reminder of the attack.            
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner

The Senate is the “World Greatest Deliberative Body” is it not?  By the way, I just checked.  The Sumner tunnel under Boston Harbor to Logan Airport is not named after Charles Sumner

Following the declaration of secession by South Carolina on December 20, 1860, its authorities demanded that the U.S. Army abandon its facilities in Charleston Harbor. On December 26, Major Robert Anderson of the U.S. Army surreptitiously moved his small command from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island to Fort Sumter, a substantial fortress built on an island controlling the entrance of Charleston Harbor. An attempt by U.S. President James Buchanan to reinforce and resupply Anderson using the unarmed merchant ship Star of the West failed when it was fired upon by shore batteries on January 9, 1861. The ship was hit three times, which caused no major damage but nonetheless kept the supplies from reaching Anderson. South Carolina authorities then seized all Federal property in the Charleston area except for Fort Sumter.

During the early months of 1861, the situation around Fort Sumter increasingly began to resemble a siege. In March, Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, the first general officer of the newly formed Confederate States Army, was placed in command of Confederate forces in Charleston. Beauregard energetically directed the strengthening of batteries around Charleston harbor aimed at Fort Sumter. Conditions in the fort deteriorated due to shortages of men, food, and supplies as the Union soldiers rushed to complete the installation of additional guns.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

Let’s stop the nonsense that the Civil War was fought over state rights or was a War of Northern Aggression.  The debate was over the expansion of slavery into federal territories, not  the ending of slavery. This why Bloody Kansas, which at that time was a federal territory not yet a state, earned its name.  The Southern States started the aggression, not the North. That the South ultimately lost the aggression does not change that fact. Note in the article that the President was James Buchanan not Abraham Lincoln.  It was the election of Abraham Lincoln as President that prompted the formation of the Confederacy. 

Violence in the Capitol?  Election deniers?  Polarization? What state does Lindsey Graham represent? Mark Twain was right.  History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Sovereigns IV

 

You’ll Be Back

You'll be back like before
I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise
And I'll love you till my dying days
When you're gone, I'll go mad
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love

We WON'T be back.

When King George III sings the above in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, he is speaking as the sovereign of the colonies in America, whose people were revolting to eventually become their own sovereign as enshrined in the US Constitution. The role of a sovereign is to serve their subjects, NOT to rule their subjects.

Sovereigns are often chosen by dominance, which is why we have coups, revolutions, wars, etc. When sovereigns are chosen by succession, they are heirs of the previous sovereign. If that sovereign has no heir, then war can result when the sovereign dies, e.g., the War of Spanish Succession; the War of Austrian Succession; the Carlist Wars, etc. It is also why when there is a coup or revolution it often involves the death of the old sovereign and their heirs, e.g., the deaths of the Romanovs during the Russian Revolution, the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, to ensure that old sovereign can not return.

To promote peace and to ensure that the sovereign is a servant, not a ruler, of their subjects, the US Constitution took great pains to make it clear that the sovereign IS the People. Constitutional officers serve their subjects, they do NOT rule their subjects. Persons who confuse the fact that the People are the sovereign and Constitutional officers are merely servants of the sovereign, and are not the sovereign, are wrong and are to be pitied. The United States has chosen the path of peace. We WON'T be back.

Diversity

 

Seventy Six Trombones

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand
They were followed by rows and rows

Of the finest virtuosos

The cream of ev'ry famous band
Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun
With a hundred and ten cornets right behind
There were more than a thousand reeds
Springing up like weeds
There were horns of ev'ry shape and kind

IOW, that parade is NOT just trombones

Typical is NOT a synonym for normal.  In statistics, typical is the mode, the most common value of a distribution.  It is not the ONLY value in a distribution.  A normal distribution is one where the skew is close to zero and we don’t always expect the mean to be equal to the median.  Why then would we expect the mode to be equal to the mean.

A parade of only trombones would be silly.  An orchestra of only one type of instrument would NOT be an orchestra.  A string quartet consists of violins, violas, and cellos.  A barbershop quartet consists of baritone, bass and tenor voices singing in harmony. Diversity in music is why there is harmony.  In life, diversity is a good thing as well. If diversity is harmony then the opposite of diversity must be discord.

Changes

 

For What It’s Worth

There's something happening here
But what it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop
Children, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?

Isn’t it worth figuring what is happening?

When something is happening, it is generally obvious.  In the world of data analysis, pattern recognition, this is called a discontinuity, a phase change, etc.  Often when plotted as a curve, the data will display a “Hockey Stick” shape, so much that I was tempted to use lyrics with H-E- Double Hockey Sticks to begin the post.  The heel of that hockey stick most probably represents the beginning of a change from one equilibrium to another. It can be expected that there will be two discontinuities, one at each equilibrium.  Knowing why there is the first discontinuity might provide an understanding of the nature, the what, and where, of that second equilibrium.

A plot of life expectancy shows a hockey stick shape, a discontinuity. The blue bars are the reported life expectancies for various period in history.  The red line is a moving average of those life expectancies.  A discontinuity happened in the 19^th Century, …perhaps modern medicine and sanitation?…which is continuing today.  However at some point this trend will be capped by the life span of a human and what we are seeing is a change from an life expectancy of  ~30 years to one of ~100 years.  Eventually it will be harder and harder to increase life expectancy and the curve will follow another downward facing hockey stick.

Source: analysis of data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Another famous instance of the Hockey Stick shape may be global temperatures. Beginning at the start of the industrial revolution and its accompanying burning of fossil fuel, this increase will continue until it reaches a new equilibrium.  That equilibrium can include humans that have switched to non-fossil fuels for energy, or it can be without humans and their fossil fuel burning.  The first discontinuity has already happened.  The debate is what and where will be that new equilibrium.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

A third discontinuity  is  consumer prices.  As I have blogged before, https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/01/inflation.html, there was a discontinuity that occurred with the Nixon Shock of 1971. It is when the USD dollar continued to be the major international trading currency, but it was no longer convertible into gold by foreign nations.  It is suggested that this discontinuity has occurred and the new trend will continue until an international trading currency which is separate from any national currency, is adopted. At that point there will be a second discontinuity.

 

Source: https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/01/inflation.html

Theses shapes are most probably the Cumulative Distribution Function of a logistic distribution, where µ is the mean of the distribution,  and note that the median, the  50% percentile value, occurs at this mean, and s is the the scale, an indication of the range over which the change occurs.  The scale is a fixed factor of the variance of the distribution. 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_distribution

As shown in that distribution, there will be a second change, discontinuity. Understanding the first can help make decisions about the second.  Stop.  Everybody look what's going down.

Ranked Choice Voting II

 

I’m A Loser

I'm a loser
And I lost someone who's near to me
I'm a loser
And I'm not what I appear to be

Is Sarah Palin, or Donald Trump for that matter,  a Loser?

Sarah Palin lost the Ranked Choice voting for the election of a representative in Alaska. Unsurprisingly, she and many Republicans blamed the state’s ranked choice voting system.  They have characterized it as too complex and unfair.  But it is not so complex that a form of it is used in college sports polling or parimutuel betting systems.  Just because the public changed the system, and you lost, doesn’t mean that the change was unfair.

The first college basketball tipoff is not until two months from now in November. But the preseason polls are already out.  The North Carolina Tarheels are ranked first.  They did not receive a first place vote on every ballot.  But that is not how basketball polls work.  They may work on a points system where a first place on a ballot listing the top 20 teams is worth 20 points, a second place ballot is worth 19 points, etc.  The consensus first place might not be the majority choice for first place, but that is not how these polls work.

In the Kentucky Derby or any pari-mutuel horse race, the first place pay-out is based on the number of people who selected that finisher for first place.  Unless the odds on a horse are lower than 1 to 1, they were not the first choice of the majority of bettors.  The race is not awarded to the consensus of the betting.  The race actually matters! 

Ranked choice voting is not uncommon.  It is how rankings with more than two selections are generally made.  The best restaurant is not the one that receives the most first place votes.  If a restaurant is everyone’s second place restaurant and people are divided on what is their first place restaurant, then that consensus second place is probably the best restaurant. Just because you didn’t want to lose, doesn’t mean that you couldn’t lose. 

 

Voting Rights II

 

How Long ( Has This Been Going On?)

Oh, your friends and their gentle persuasion
Don't admit that it's part of a scheme,
But I can't help but have my suspicions,
'Cause I ain't quite as dumb as I seem.

How long is too long?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 established preclearance rules for states, counties, and townships that had in the past acted to restrict voting rights.  If those jurisdictions wished to enact changes in voting procedures, they had to pre-clear those changes with the Federal Government before those new procedures could take effect.  In 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby vs. Holder held that the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which determines which jurisdictions are covered, is unconstitutional because it is based on an old formula.  They effectively ruled that after nearly fifty years, those mostly southern states who were covered under the VRA have learned their lesson and deserved relief.  It is true that those who enacted and enforced those restrictions were probably no longer in power and proposing new procedures.  But that is besides the point.  The restrictions were government actions, not those of individuals.  States, counties, and townships do not die, even if the individuals in those jurisdictions have died.  No one who is alive today participated in the 1916 Turkish death marches of Armenians.  So obviously Turks and Armenians must have agreed to let bygones be bygones!  The battle of the Boyne happened in 1690, so clearly Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants have gotten over it!

How long should preclearance be required?  To paraphrase Jesus, seven years might seem like a long time, but shouldn’t the standard be seven times seventy.  It is a matter of trust.  Preclearance means that the changes in the voting procedures are not forbidden, they just are not trusted.  When ever I fly, TSA assumes that I am not to be trusted.  They have required that I remove my belt and shoes, subject my carry-ons to x-rays, forbid liquids, etc.  I do not expect those restrictions, which were enacted after September 11th, to be lifted anytime soon.  Why does SCOTUS think that those governments that have demonstrated that they should not be trusted in the past, should be trusted now. A crime is a crime regardless of when it was committed.  Being based on an old formula does not mean that it was not a valid formula at that time.  Bills of attainder are unconstitutional.  You can not make an action that was not a crime at the time, retroactively a crime.  Similarly, you should not be able to make a past action, which was a crime, not a crime.  You can be pardoned, but it was still a crime.  How long?  How about forever. If you asked for preclearance to be eliminated, to me this is pretty convincing proof that your preclearance should NOT be eliminated.