Polling

                                                                     Family Feud

Yeah, I'll fuck up a good thing if you let me

Let me alone, Becky

A man that don't take care his family can't be rich

I'll watch Godfather, I miss that whole shit

My consciousness was Michael's common sense

I missed the karma, that came as a consequence

Niggas bustin' off through the curtains 'cause she hurtin'

Can't losin' the babies 'cause their future's uncertain

Nobody wins when the family feuds

Survey says!

One of my favorite podcasts, Planet Money, most recent episode was on polling.   As the episode highlighted, the mistakes in the Alf Landon and Tom Dewey polls were the problems of NOT being a representative sample.  Ironically, the Supreme Court will hear cases on representative samples which are being called  Affirmative Action.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/08/affirmative-action.html

The golden age of polling was in 2012 was because not only was robo calling in polling still allowed, and caller ID was not yet ubiquitous, but also because land line phones defined geography.  Today, a cell phone's area code means nothing.  My household cut the phone cord shortly after 2012. Now not only do we have cellphones with caller ID, this has been compounded by keeping your cellphone number when you move such that the area code NO LONGER means geography.  My colleague, who has lived in Tallahassee for almost 20 years,  has a (617) Area code because he obtained the cellphone when he worked in Massachusetts.  My cell phone has my work Area Code (617), not my suburban home Area Code, (508).  My son in LA cellphone has our suburban home in Massachusetts Area Code.  He got my wife her cell phone and thus she has a LA (310) Area Code.

Phone polling was not all that is cracked up to be anyway.  Phone ownership is highly correlated with income.  Lower incomes might not have a land line.  So phone polls have always been biased against low incomes.  And replacing phone polls with internet polls?!?  Don't get me started!

And even if it did work, there is this thing called spurious correlation.  As pointed out in https://www.amazon.com/Spurious-Correlations-Tyler-Vigen/dp/0316339431, despite the fact that pool drowning deaths are well correlated with the release of Nick Cage movies, Nick Cage did not cause pool deaths.  As we say in my profession, Correlation is NOT causation.

Personally, I hope that the wisdom of crowds is wrong in the vote.  What is in your heart is not always what you show or tell the world. Sometime you are pretending. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/10/passing.html

And anyway,  polling for elections is wanting to know what  the future will be.  Push a pollster hard enough and you will find that they always wanted to be Hari Sheldon and discover psychohisotry.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QYV5GTz7c But the future is not ours to see, Que Sera, Sera. That is why we vote, even though we poll.  

But when you vote, do so for the nation. As Jay-Z said in the song, "Nobody wins when the family feuds".

Vote II

 

When I Was Young

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow man
And I was so much older then
When I was young

If you want to grow old, you first have to grow up.

In 1963, comedian Alan Sherman’s song “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter From Camp)” reached number 2 on the Billboard charts.  It won the 1964 Grammy for best Comedy Performance.  The song is a parody written to the tune of the Dance of the Hours .  Alan Sherman wrote the song because his son kept coming up with excuses as to why he did not want to be at summer camp.  In the song, the son invents fantastical lies to achieve his goal, leaving Camp Granada.  Those lies involve playing on the fears of his parents.  Joe Spivey did NOT have poison ivy, Leonard Skinner did NOTget Ptomaine poisoning.  His bunkmate did NOT have malaria, etc.  He also makes promises that he can NOT keep.  He of course will make noise and mess the house.  He will complain when Aunt Bertha hugs and kisses him. The song ends when the son sees other campers swimming, sailing and playing baseball. And the song ends with the line  “Muddah, Faddah kindly disregard this letter.”

When you don’t get your own way, telling lies and making false promises are NOT a grown up response.  Your own way may not even be what is best for you.  You may find out that another thing is actually better for you.

Remember this when you vote.  Don’t make up, or believe, lies, or believe false promises.  Grow up. 

Democracy

 

Democracy

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
To the USA

Elections are not the only indication of a democracy.

The late Leonard Cohen, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, not only wrote such classics as Hallelujah and Suzanne. He also wrote the song. above. To those of us who think that the USA IS already a democracy, it might seem strange to hear that “Democracy is coming to the USA.”  But democracy is NOT just about elections. It is about free and fair elections that mean something.

The Holy Roman Empire, long before the Hapsburgs, was a monarchy that used elections to select its Emperors, so clearly elections alone do not mean a democracy. The recent “elections” at gunpoint by Russian soldiers approving the annexation of Ukraine provinces into the Russian Federation were hardly fair and free. Votes in the Senate to end debate and move votes to the floor, popularly known as the “filibuster”, which are not secret, and where the losing Party may punish that vote, are not free. If the loser of an election refuses to leave office, then the election, was to that loser just another contest of domination and the election itself meant nothing.

Democracy assumes that the will of the people will be expressed and accepted. Let us hope that on October 30^th democracy comes to Brazil. And that on November 8^th democracy will come to the USA.

Vote

 

Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy

Straight ahead
Knock 'em dead
Pack your kit
Choose your hypocrite

You don't have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody's crying mercy
When they don't know the meaning of the word
Nobody knows the meaning of the word

Vote

In less than two weeks I, like millions of others, will be exercising my vote. I do NOT plan on voting for any Republicans because I am afraid that those Republicans are “rINOs,” "republicans In Name Only.”  I realize that I will be voting for Democrats, but their brand has not been tainted so much that I do not believe that those candidates are “dINOs", "democrats In Name Only". I will be voting only for candidates who believe in democracy, including the representative form that is the US republic.

Democracy is the political system where all decisions are decided by the group. Representative Democracy, a republic, recognizes that each voter may not have the flexibility in time, expense, knowledge, or interest, etc. and the infrastructure may not all of them to participate in each and every decision. As such, the voters may choose a representative to make those decisions for them. That candidate is only a representative, whether that candidate is for town council, state legislature, governor, federal congress, or, while not in this election cycle, President. They may “win” an election, but they are still only a representative. This contrasts with those who believe that the decisions of the group leader ARE the decision of the group. Such a system is called authoritarianism, whether that “leader” is chosen by election, birth, or an act of domination, such as a revolution or a coup. I believe that all voters, whether deplorable or not, have a vote, and the decisions of those voters in a democracy is vital. I will not vote for dINOs or rINOS. They are hypocrites, since they believe in neither a democracy nor a republic, and do NOT deserve my vote.

Tolerance

 

Crown  of Creation 

In loyalty to their kind
They cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind
We cannot tolerate their obstruction 

You should never respond to intolerance with intolerance. 

One on my favorite podcasts, Stuff You Should Know, recently did an episode on Fundamentalism.  While I agree with everything that was said, (like that was a surprise), the best outcome to me is that I got a word to use in place of standard deviation. 

I am a semi-retired engineer and one of the things I have been struggling with is the branding problems created in mathematics, especially statistics, which uses the term standard deviation.  IMHO, standard deviation should be rebranded as the degree of tolerance, which IMHO sounds much better.  The synonyms of deviation are perversion, anomaly, error, aberration, abnormality.  However in statistics what is meant is the only the difference from the mean.  If you are confident that the mean is without error, then having no difference from that mean, truth, is good. 

However having a standard deviation of zero, means that you are absolutely certain that the mean IS the truth.  In this instance statistics has a term that IMHO does NOT need to be rebranded.  If the truth is not yet known, then statistics says that distribution of truth is NORMAL.  Tolerance is normal, it is intolerance that is not.  I wrote a blog post previously on the problem of decreasing the standard deviation.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/01/resiliency.html

BTW statistics also shows that for the mean to increase, grow, standard deviation...errr tolerance, has to increase.

 

Alex Jones

 

People Got To Be Free

 Hear the shoutin' from the mountains on out to the sea
No two ways about it, people have to be free
Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be
Natural situation for a man to be free 

Is freedom of speech absolute? 

Charles Dicken was right in his novel Oliver Twist. "The law is an ass—an idiot.". One only has to look at the writing of that “distinguished” lawyer, former New Jersey Superior Court Judge, former professor at the Brooklyn Law School, and current conservative pundit Andrew Napolitano for proof. Writing in the New Jersey Herald on October 20, 2022, https://www.njherald.com/story/opinion/2022/10/20/alex-jones-and-the-freedom-of-speech/69577197007/, Napolitano says that any school child can see that Alex Jones was protected by the Freedom of Speech of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. 

The problem is that Judge Napolitano apparently doesn’t understand the meaning of that protection. It was intended to protect the freedom of an individual to express an opinion. However it does not mean that anything can be expressed as an opinion. It does not supersede legal judgments being rendered for perjury, slander, defamation, etc. It does not protect the speaker from the consequences of expressing an opinion, famously falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. If a stampede and injury results, the fact that it was only “speech” does not protect the speaker from the consequences of his lie. 

Alex Jones did not merely express his opinion. He stated those opinions as facts, profited by expressing those opinions, and there were deaths threats and other crimes that were the consequences of his “speech.”   If it were merely his opinion and was expressed as opinion then of course it was protected. However an individual must bear the responsibility for the consequences of his words. Just as King Henry II was responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket when he said “"Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”, so too is Alex Jones guilty for the garbage he spewed. Don’t be misled by Andrew Napolitano’s credentials. He is an ass. Alex Jones was not found guilty for speaking. He was found guilty for the nature and consequences of his “speech.”

Passing II

 

The Great Pretender

Oh yes, I'm the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
My need to be all I am not you've seen
And you've left me to dream all alone

Is Passing pretending?

I know that the subject hits close to home when I was torn between using the posted lyrics and Honey  Suckle Rose, “Flowers droop and sigh when you're passing by”,  at the start of this post. Passing sounds so much nicer than pretending. If were to look at me, and hear my name, I could pass for a straight, male, White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. You would only be correct on only half of those attributes. By appearance I am white, I am a male, by marriage I am straight, and my surname could easily be confused for an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but unless you know me you might not know that I am an Irish-Polish Catholic and my beloved brother, the godfather of my oldest child and the best man at my wedding, is not straight.  However because many people judge a book by its cover, I am often mistaken for, passing as, one of their "own". As such, I have heard my share of Irish jokes, Polish jokes, Catholic jokes, sexual orientation jokes, etc. And much to my shame I have opted to “grin and bear it". I pretended. I did not stand up for the part of me that was being mocked, much to my shame. Thus while those telling the jokes were acting badly, I was complicit.

And that is the problem with passing. As long as there is an exclusion from certain groups or action against members of those groups, if you are mistaken for a member of the group doing the excluding, but you are a member of the group being excluded, you are denying yourself. The rooster has already crowed three times for me. It will crow no more. Passing to “get by” does not get you ahead, it puts you further behind.