George Rebane
We add solyndra and solyndrize to the RR G&S lexicon. Both in lower case, the first is a noun, the second a verb. Other forms of modifiers like ‘solyndrizable’ will be readily formed and used as needed. A solyndra is a government picked and supported enterprise foisted on the taxpayer as a private corporation/institution that has no ability to survive or succeed in the marketplace on its own. One can also consider it as an entrepreneurial façade using taxpayers’ money in the attempt to bolster a misguided government policy. To solyndrize a company is to select it for the infusion of government monies and other regulatory protections so as to shield it from the realities of the marketplace. A natural extension here is ‘solyndricide’, the final failure of a solyndricized organization which is usually brought about by the government’s cutting off the solyndra’s financial transfusions.
Polls and margins of error are much in the news today. A little calculator work shows that the vaunted Real Clear Politics average of polls is just that, the arithmetic average – add all the poll results together and divide by the number of polls in the average. This is a severely crude and often misinformative attempt to derive information from the blizzard of pre-election polls that are cited to support all kinds of arguments by commentators and media talking heads.
A more professional approach to the estimation of current sentiment across a population of polls would take into account the attributes of each poll, and include them in the weighting of the poll’s result. Such attributes include its variance (margin of error), time late, and validity instant that contribute to each poll’s reliability and timeliness. Sample sizes matter, and public opinion is a volatile commodity that quickly decorrelates. I’ll have more to say about it in a post that will present the correct way to aggregate and produce information from a set of polls. And I’d appreciate getting pointed to a site from which I can download such data as sample size, and the interval over which the questionnaire was administered. Thanks in advance.
Central banks are buying gold by the tons, none of them care about price. Now that everyone in the world that can print fiat money is printing it – e.g. the Bernank’s QE3 of $40B/month forever – we get updated on what the world’s monetary experts really think about “that ancient relic”. Central banks used to pooh-pooh the metal and keep their reserves in a trusted ‘reserve currency’ like US dollars. This is going by the board as the European Central Bank, Russia, China, India, …, and the United States are hauling in tons of the stuff from the world’s mines. Each has added large percentages to their already quietly accumulated hoards, and the beat goes on. It’s as if they think that the stuff they’re printing won’t be worth much in the future.
A Pennsylvania judge has blocked the application of the state’s new voter ID law for the upcoming election. The consistency of the rationale here is simply amazing. The most important and sacrosanct act by a citizen of a liberal democracy is relegated to the level of kindergartner’s belief in Santa Claus. Photo ID’s are required for every conceivable transaction in our land – you can’t pass gas on a subway without a photo ID; well maybe – but walk into a polling station and you can register to vote right then and there, and vote. All you have to do is lie that you’re a citizen, and give them your driver’s license or state ID number (or even SS number). Both of these have your picture, and all can be had without proving US citizenship. The Nevada County Registrar of Voters Office informed me that under Secs 2111 and 2112 of the Elections Code, the registrant’s statement that s/he is a US citizen is deemed to be a sufficient affidavit and proof of citizenship under penalty of perjury – no further verification by the state is required or performed.
‘Ragheads’ and/or ‘Savages’?? Seems that finding the appropriate pejorative label to tag Islamic terrorists is an undertaking that has a broader scope than that in these pages. “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” read an ad in the New York subway stations. Well, that got the leftwing’s undies in a bundle. Referring to the ragheads (q.v.) as savages was considered “hateful”, “hate speech”, “racist”, … (you know the drill). Putting together ‘savage’, ‘jihad’, and the implications of Islamic involvement (ya think?) was apparently beyond the pale. I don’t know; looking at the formal definitions of ‘savage’, you could have a good quibble with each of them as applied to ragheads, which I think is a pejorative much more semantically precise. Oh well, we continue the search.
Dr Thomas Sowell on Obama. The renowned academic and good professor has a very revealing interview with a colleague at the Hoover Institution. (See ‘Tax Cuts and Obama’s Myth of Trickle Down Economics’, worth watching.) One of the Bush2 myths that he demolishes is by describing the roots of the subprime mortgage explosion that run deep into Clinton’s administration which pushed banks to make these loans by guaranteeing that the government would cover defaults. We all recall the Democrats following ol’ Barney’s willingness to “roll the dice on Fannie and Freddie.” Win some, lose some.
What do debates reveal? Joseph Epstein agrees (here) with my long held belief that candidate debates – especially the presidential kind – are mainly circus and don’t reveal anything much about the qualities of the candidate that make for a good President. One of the many foibles that debates emphasize is the quickness of response – and better if it is a deep slicing one liner – that “has nothing to do with genuine thought, which requires brooding over a subject, laboriously working through its complications.” In sum, the silver-tongued devil is a shoo-in for winning the debate, his other presidential qualifications are optional.
rebanesruminations.com 
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