Why Protein Wisdom is Voting Romney

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Thursday November 01, 2012 · 7:14 AM PDT

2012/11/01 · 07:14

Because of the coming Zombie Apocalypse!
Now we all know why Jeff Goldstein is voting Zomney.
So he can use his new gun.
Joss Whedon's viral video is at five million views in three days.
Clint Eastwood's Romney commercial is at 32k views in three weeks.
The power of the interwebs amplified with humor.
c'est formidable.

Is Benghazi-gate a Black Swan?

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Thursday September 13, 2012 · 6:48 AM PDT

2012/09/13 · 06:48

Black swan events are statistically unpredictable. No one could have predicted Romney would attack President Obama on 9/11 in such an illformed manner.
Nate Silver's nowcast has Romney in the single digits. The nowcast is a snapshot, just based on poll data. If the election were held today, the nowcast is the result based on poll only input.
Now, the polls won't likely be affected by Romney's gaffe until later in the week, because Nate keeps a rolling temporal average. But like Nate says, a gaffe that sticks can cost the candidate 10 points.
One place I can see Benghazi-gate as possibly eroding Romney's base is with veterans. Currently veterans are 13% of the electorate.

U.S. veterans, about 13% of the adult population and consisting mostly of older men, support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama for president by 58% to 34%, while nonveterans give Obama a four-percentage-point edge.

If you want to know more about the possible motivations of "filmmaker" and "christian activist" Steve Klein, here is a good analysis from the Guardian. Anonymous almost instantly fingered the non-existent "half-Israeli" Sam Bacile as Klein the evangelical on twitter.
I heart Anonymous.

Dear Condi

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Wednesday September 12, 2012 · 7:02 AM PDT

2012/09/12 · 07:02

I was appalled by your speech at the RNC. But I figured not a lot of people heard it. I kind of tuned you out myself. No one wants to talk about the failed policies of the Bush adminstration, the administration you were part of.
But today we have to talk about the horrorshow that was G.W.Bush's foreign policy and your tenure as secretary of state.
Because of this.
Because if anyone is responsible for Ambassador Stevens death it is you and George Bush, and the war on Islam you propagated while pretending to promote "democracy" for the good of the muslim people.
So lets not talk about President Obama "leading from behind" but instead about how you and Dubya tried to force secular democracy on dar ul Islam with your "nation-building" shell game, all the while fleecing the taxpayers to pay for an unwinnable war that bankrupted us.
Condi, I always heard you were highly intelligent, but how is it you didn't ever understand the tragic flaw built into Dubya's "democracy promotion"?

When muslims are democratically empowered to vote they vote for islamic democracy, and never for secular democracy with freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

So simple a fifth grader could get it.
Want an example, Condi? When Iraqis got the power to vote they voted to kick America out of Iraq and establish closer ties with Iran. Think about that Condi. To the Iraqis, the US became worse than Iran.
So Condi, I'll take a little leading from behind anyday over the horrific cost of the covert war/con-game you and Bush perpetrated. May I just remind you of the cost of your and George Bush's policies?
More than a decade ago Iraq was 97% muslim and Afghanistan was 99% muslim. Over ten years, trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, seven thousand dead American soldiers, a million dead muslims and millions of orphaned muslim children later, Iraq is still 97% muslim and Afghanistan is still 99% muslim.
Do you understand why that is, Condi? Because there is no separation of church and state in Islam. So trying to install/impose/force/implant secular democracy was tantamount to trying to change the religion of roughly 60 million people.
Now, America respects all religions, that is what I was brought up to believe.
But that certainly wasnt true under the Bush administration, was it Condi?
I think you should take a page out of your bosses book and be really quiet about the horrorshow of his administration.
He's going down as the worst president in history.
Does that mean you will also be known as the worst secretary of state?

Sincerely yours,
the upper half of the bellcurve.

Holy Kurtosis! JayCost Gets Twitter Stomped by Nate Silver

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Monday September 10, 2012 · 11:02 AM PDT

2012/09/10 · 11:02

Nate is catching a lot of flack from conservative pundits over his latest post which has Obama's win chance over 80% (and Romney's under 20).
Nate felt obliged to tweet to Jay Cost of NRO,

@JayCostTWS: Kinda not cool that you're literally just making stuff up now.

Stay tuned for more in the twitter wars.
I think the conservative punditocracy is trying to bully Nate into changing his analysis.

I’ve been picking up some sentiment from analysts and journalists in my Twitter feed recently, who correctly note that polling around the party conventions can be volatile. They suggest that we ought to wait for more data before concluding very much about the bounces that the conventions have produced.

I cant wait to see how the chirp story plays out.
Bravo Nate!

update: now they are going to roll around in the muck

update II: escalation

Taking Back the Chair: Why Conservatives Don't Understand Culture

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Monday September 03, 2012 · 8:34 AM PDT

2012/09/03 · 08:34

Today is EmptyChairDay in Real America, where Real Americans are supposed to put an empty chair with an Obama name tag on the watered, mowed, fertilized Real American front lawns of their Real American (not-rented) houses.
This is another attempt in the ongoing problem of "Taking Back Culture", a doomed effort that conservatives have devoted many websites to, including the American Scene, Culture 11, and Big Hollywood.
Andrew Breitbart's mission statement, circa 2009:

Big Hollywood is not a “celebrity” gabfest or a gossip outpost – it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.
Big Hollywood’s modest objective: to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in – again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.
Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans – who will be the lion’s share of Big Hollywood’s contributors – recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle. -Andrew Breitbart

So symbolically taking back the Eastwood chair would return some measure of cultural authority to the right.....or so they think.
But in reality culture doesn't have a steering a wheel. Its a multidimensional reflective surface. That is why contemporary conservative film, music, literature, and art, are all so uniformly awful. RATM rejects Ryan, Bon Jovi, Heart, Survivor, Van Halen, Foo Fighters all reject Palin, Muse rejects Glenn Beck.
That is also #romneyshambles and #AmericanBorat and @InvisibleObama and #eastwooding...the list is endless.
And that is why Eastwood, Hollywood icon, was so important to the RNC, all the hype about the Mystery Guest, and the spot right before Romney.
To give conservatives cultural validity.
That is also why Mitt just achieved one million twitter followers while President Obama has twenty million.
Liberals are better at culture because we are just part of culture.....we dont try to steer.

Bibi and the Black Swan

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Saturday September 01, 2012 · 7:15 AM PDT

2012/09/01 · 07:15

Its looking like Romney isn't getting much of a convention bounce, so the small cadre of statnerds that are obsessively following the statistical forecasting have prettymuch written the presidential horsehorse off as a done deal.
In horserace terms it looks to us like Romney is a "dweller" that cant break-out, and Obama is a front-runner that can't be caught.
Sam Wang at PEC has Obama's chance to win at 10:1, and he is now redirecting his attention to the House and Senate races as more interesting problems. BTW he has the House returning to the dems with a probability of 69%.
But there is one way we all agree that Romney could still win the presidency....a black swan event.

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Friday August 31, 2012 · 3:48 AM PDT

2012/08/31 · 03:48

Nate Silver says "In Prudent Speech, Romney Seeks Role as Generic Republican". Nate, Gob bless him, entirely missed the subtext of the speech. I guess hes tone-deaf to the dog whistle.
Sure, Romney is seeking a role as a generic republican, and that means WHITE MAN.
That speech could been entitled A Return to the White Patriarchy Social Cohesion Model.
The Romney campaign, having finally copped to the fact that the stuttering economy isnt going to deliver the presidency, has gone full-frontal Sailer Strategy.

The basic concept behind a long-term Sailer Strategy for Republicans: You want more of the kind of people likely to vote for your party in the country and not so many of the kind of people likely to vote for the other party.

Shorter Sailer: Maximize the white vote, minimize the non-white vote.
Its like the MinMax Theorem!
Pardon if I dont link, but I dont want to attract any Stormfronters.

In a previous post Nate says Base Turnout Strategy May Be Too Narrow for Romney.
No.....yah think?

"If Mr. Romney not just matches but exceeds Mr. Bush’s 2004 performance among white voters, a base turnout strategy could be enough for him to win."

But that is just not true Nate. Bush got 58% of the white vote in 2004. But whites made up 77% of the electorate in 2004. The percentage of whites in the 2012 electorate is estimated to be between 70 and 72%.
So Romney 2012 needs an unimaginable 65% of the white vote to beat Obama in the new electoral landscape. Reagan only got 60% at the top of his game.
FYI, Kerry would have beaten Romney.
Kerry got 37% of white males and 41% of white women.
All Obama needs is 36% of the total white vote.
Romney has what...58% of white men? And 46% of white women?
That is only 52% of the white vote.
Like Brownstein, Chait, and Medved all said, Game Ovah.

Obamas Pole Position in the Horserace

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Tuesday August 28, 2012 · 10:04 PM PDT

2012/08/28 · 22:04

In my last post I complained that Nate Silver is obscuring the real state of the race by adding artificial uncertainty to his model, and adding artificial uncertainty to the media horserace by refusing to debunk conservative claims of "dem oversampling". We can call Nate Silver's forecasting Market Probability, since it is apparently shaped by market forces. It is not the same as True Probability.
Some have accused me of tinfoil hattery.
But I'm not alone.
Jonathan Chait says:

Who’s winning the presidential race? There’s an odd disconnect between the polls and the body language of the candidates. John Harris and Alexander Burns report from Tampa, “Republicans believe Obama’s governing defects should make a GOP victory virtually inevitable, but Romney’s political defects make it only a long-shot possibility.” Likewise, Mark Halperin, after extensive discussion with Obama’s campaign team, remains convinced that the campaign is not bluffing about its belief that it remains ahead in the race and unlikely to lose barring an unforeseen external event.

Why is Team Obama so confident? What do they know that Joe Public doesn't?
I know the answer.
This election isnt really about the economy-- its about demographics.
And like Nate Silver once said (before he was co-opted by the NYT)....

Demographics is destiny.

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Monday August 27, 2012 · 4:11 PM PDT

2012/08/27 · 16:11

On August 4th, Nate Silver published a post at 538 using conventional protocols, i.e., he made a tiny url and tweeted his new post.
But for some reason, the post was almost instantly retracted, and replaced with a different one, not matching the old tiny url.
Nate said this:

An earlier post in this space about poll oversampling was published in error and will be updated and published later this week.

But that was the 4th, THREE weeks ago.
So where is the oversampling post?
Well I managed to find a copy, because the internet is forevah.
And you can read it below the fold. But why would Nate pull such an innocuous, innocent post? Because it utterly debunks the screams of "dem oversampling" coming from conservative pundits. Read More

Richard Dawkins, the Uninvadable Strategy, and the Four Trillion Dollar Church

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Sunday July 10, 2011 · 7:28 AM PDT

2011/07/10 · 07:28

Recently there was a blogstorm in the online atheoskeptic community, originating from Rebecca Watson's encounter with Creeper Elevator Guy at a conference.
Richard Dawkins then entered the discussion with this curious comment at Pharyngula.

Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard

Now, the issue has been debated and analyzed at multiple blogsites. Bad Astronomy and Pharyngula both have thousands of comments on their threads.
But my question is...why does Dawkins hate Islam so fervently that his scornful "Letter to Muslima" was the first thing on his mind in this controversy?
Read More

American Taliban Watch week 2

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Thursday October 14, 2010 · 5:37 AM PDT

2010/10/14 · 05:37

My mission every week is to find supporting evidence for Kos' book American Taliban. This week we need look no farther than NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino.
In any population there is a low IQ segment of the population that is extremely permeable to fundamentalism (Religion Explained-- Pascal Boyer). In America, christian fundamentalists fear blacks, browns, women, homosexuals, immigrants and muslims for example.
That fundamentalist substrate usually remains dormant in populations...but..there is always the environmental trigger.
Like the islamic fundamentalists became radicalized by western meddling and colonialism, the American Taliban became...erm ....switched on by Obama's election,
cause-- effect-- extremism.
And Paladino is a treasure trove of empirical data.

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Thursday October 07, 2010 · 1:17 PM PDT

2010/10/07 · 13:17

I have seen a lot of pundit discussion equivalencing American Taliban with Liberal Fascism. This is a falsehood. Liberal Fascism is a universally panned ahistorical polemic, in the Pee Wee Herman style of discourse so prevalent in contemporary 'conservatism'.

i know u are, but what am i?

There is a lot of scientific and historical validity to American Taliban, as well as a lot of empirical data, much of which Kos draws out in the book.
I would like to make this a weekly feature, of supporting empirical data.
Feel free to add more data in the comments.

Poll

42 votes Show Results

What is the difference between the Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban?

42 votes Vote Now!

What is the difference between the Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban?

American Taliban are paler and fatter and older.

5 votes

Women can be in the American Taliban.

5 votes

Afghan Taliban can spell.

2 votes

all of the above

30 votes

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Why Protein Wisdom is Voting Romney

Is Benghazi-gate a Black Swan?

Dear Condi

Holy Kurtosis! JayCost Gets Twitter Stomped by Nate Silver

Taking Back the Chair: Why Conservatives Don't Understand Culture

Bibi and the Black Swan

Romney Embraces the Sailer Strategy

Obamas Pole Position in the Horserace

Who Asked Nate to Pull His Sampling Post?

Richard Dawkins, the Uninvadable Strategy, and the Four Trillion Dollar Church

American Taliban Watch week 2

American Taliban Watch-- Week 1