Liberal loopiness

Here's a really profound (but inconsistent) loop (the best kind):

Why are those Americans who are most distrustful of the U.S. government, and so eager to undermine it, the same ones who are most desperate to give it control over their own lives?

I'm not sure if Abe Greenwald's answer is the right one: 

This paradoxical political posturing resembles nothing so much as middle-class adolescent rebellion.

Rather, I wonder if this might be an insight into the ultimate paradox of liberalism -- it is fundamentally inconsistent and/or incomplete: a judgment that does not require a Gödelian proof. 

Strange Loops in Wordle

Allowed Wordle to evaluate Strange Loops:

 

Other Wordle graphic analyses:

Plate Frames

Diaconate Ministry

R and R's T and T

Not quite a loop...

But getting there:

Honor and humility

From India:

So we were honored to visit the residence where Gandhi and King both stayed--Mani Bhavan. We were humbled to pay our respects at Raj Ghat. 

Via: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/11/027679.php

In one case honor, in the other, humility. Could they have been reversed?

Peer Review

An article in Physics World describes an "experiment" in peer review and its effect on the quality of published scientific research.

Just a small number of bad referees can significantly undermine the ability of the peer-review system to select the best scientific papers. That is according to a pair of complex systems researchers in Austria who have modelled an academic publishing system and showed that human foibles can have a dramatic effect on the quality of published science.

....

While the concept of peer review is widely considered the most appropriate system for regulating scientific publications, it is not without its critics. Some feel that the system's reliance on impartiality and the lack of remuneration for referees mean that in practice the process is not as open as it should be. This may be particularly apparent when referees are asked to review more controversial ideas that could damage their own standing within the community if they give their approval. 

The PW article is referenced by a shorter article on the Sante Fe Institute (SFI) website:

Just a small number of impartial, complacent, or incompetent referees can significantly undermine the ability of the scholarly peer-review system to select the best scientific papers.

SFI External Professor Stefan Thurner and collaborator Rudolph Hanel, both of the Medical University of Vienna, created a model of a generic specialist field where referees fall into one of five categories ranging from always correct to impartial.

Note that the first sentence of the SFI article is identical to the first sentence of the PW article (to which the former article links). But, the PW article is about research by an SFI-affiliated scholar. Neither article provides a link to a document describing the original research.

The PW article concludes with these two paragraphs:

When asked by physicsworld.com to offer an alternative to the current peer-review system, Thurner argues that science would benefit from the creation of a "market for scientific work". He envisages a situation where journal editors and their "scouts" search preprint servers for the most innovative papers before approaching authors with an offer of publication. The best papers, he believes, would naturally be picked up by a number of editors leaving it up to authors to choose their journal. "Papers that no-one wants to publish remain on the server and are open to everyone – but without the 'prestigious' quality stamp of a journal," Thurner explains.

This research is described in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server. 

arXiv is itself a preprint server. (Count the fractals - even strange loops.)

I tripped across the SFI article from a link on mantleplumes.org (accessed November 17, 2010):

11th Sept. 2010

Dear WM, I would like to bring your attention to an interesting article posted on the website of the Santa Fe Institute "Modeling shows scientific peer review system sensitive to bad refereeing"– Romain Meyer

I found the article apparently referred to: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1008/1008.4324v1.pdf

So, if you're looking, too, here it is.


Cross posted at: http://maxfrac.blogspot.com/2010/11/peer-review.html.

Meta fractals are fractals

Books and articles on fractals reference other such books and articles. The resulting patterns are themselves fractal.

Project

VDH:

It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast... The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democratic.

[E]vidence ...

The loop is this: the President, funded by the very, very rich, attacks the Republicans for "protecting" the very rich by GOP unwillingness to go along with his program.

• the preponderance of Wall Street money that went to Obama over McCain in 2008, 
• the liberal voting patterns of the high-income blue-state congressional districts, 
• the anecdotal evidence of a Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or 
• the ease by which an eco-populist like Al Gore buys estates and creates corporations, or 
• the rarified tastes of men of the people like John Edwards of two-nations fame, or 
• John Kerry of multiple estate residences. [bullets are mine]

Follow the loop from beginning from home to the end; it terminates (no it resumes its revolution) back at home. Freud and Jung called this "projection." Is anyone fooled?

Pink Affair

Christopher Hitchens reviews a new account of the Dreyfus Affair. But, why do we find this (emphasis added) in the middle of his text?

[Alfred Dreyfus] was disgracefully railroaded from the moment in October 1894 that he was summoned to the office of Commandant Armand du Paty de Clam (a name so Clouseau-like that Art Buchwald would have shrunk from inventing it) and tricked into writing a “dictation” that supposedly matched the handwriting on a secret letter recovered from the wastebasket of the German embassy. 

Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering and periodically insane supervisor/commissioner beginning with A Shot in the Dark was an imaginary "Dreyfus - Charles," namesake of another, actual Charles Dreyfus, distant relative of the unfortunate, all-too-real-life Alfred Dreyfus.

I've wondered for some time how Blake Edwards and collaborators came up with "Dreyfus" for the afflicted fictional commissioner. But Hitchens has looped into a separate mystery. And, don't forget, Clouseau always got his man, if not the woman.

Oops

Romney staff versus Palin staff...

“For Washington consultants to sit around and personally disparage the governor anonymously to reporters is unfortunate and counterproductive and frankly immature,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Be careful, team; anonymity cuts both ways, anonymously [he wrote, semi-anonymously].

Living with Abortion

John McCormack writes:

Congressman Bart Stupak issues a statement blaming "conservative groups" for spreading "misinformation about whether or not pre-existing condition insurance pools will use federal dollars for abortion services":

The President’s Executive Order makes clear that federal funds may not be used for abortion under the Affordable Care Act – including the pre-existing condition insurance pools currently being implemented in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and other states across the country. 

Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress is quoted:

"In fact, when the Executive Order was signed, it was widely seen as simply reiterating what was already in the PPACA and current law. ... Abortion opponents who participated in the [executive order] bargaining did not raise concerns about high risk pools or other specific potential sources of federal funding, and they should be able to live with the deal they made."

So abortion opponents "should be able to live with the deal," but, of course, those who are aborted because of the new law won't.

M-M-M

James Taranto writes:

[Dave] Weigel has a curious post titled "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show," the gist of which is that Fox News Channel pays too much attention to the New Black Panther Party. The inspiration for the post is a much-circulated video depicting a Kelly interview with Kirsten Powers, a liberal Fox News contributor, which quickly turns into a shouting match.

After quoting Weigel's description, he continues...

Weigel reports that a Nexis search finds at least 35 Fox News Channel appearances by the New Black Panther Party's Malik Zulu Shabazz in which Shabazz is usually "brought on to act as a foolish, anti-Semitic punching bag." (MediaMutters.org puts the count at 51, though it includes other NBPP representatives as well.) As an example, Weigel cites a 2008 interview with Sean Hannity in which Hannity asked Shabazz for his views on Jeremiah Wright, then-Sen. Barack Obama's America-hating then-pastor.

"This isn't journalism," Weigel opines about the Hannity interview. "No one cares what the NBPP thinks about anything. This is minstrelsy, with a fringe moron set up like a bowling pin for Hannity to knock down." [my emphasis]

 More Taranto...

Further, Weigel's invocation of "minstrelsy" rankles. The headline's reference to "Megyn Kelly's Minstrel Show" seems completely out of place, since neither Kelly nor Powers (nor an unidentified brunette who makes a cameo) is wearing blackface. Now maybe Weigel didn't write the headline and meant only to suggest, as he does in the text, that Shabazz, in the Hannity interview, was acting as a minstrel.

Which reminded us of an April column by the New York Times's Charles Blow, in which he describes a Tea Party rally in Dallas that featured "a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism" and a black comic who "performs skits as 'Zo-bama,' " Blow summed his impressions up this way:

Thursday night I saw a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance. I was not amused.

Liberals have different reasons for wanting to diminish black conservatives and black supremacists. By doing so in both cases using a label, "minstrel," that has implications of black inferiority, they belie their own professed belief in racial equality.

Taranto's observation that [many?] liberals want to diminish both black conservatives and black supremacists. To do so they invoke a term, minstrel, that invokes generic inferiority, which, the writer notes, contradicts the racial equality they profess.


Another strange loop, indeed.


The embarrassing phase of black-face in Thirties/Forties musicals invoked a strange loop as well. Typically, African-American actors, singers, or dancers, did not appear as peers of the principal characters. But a Fred Astaire or a Bing Crosby might appear in black-face. Judy and Mickey could appear in their own version of a minstrel piece. (e.g. link); Critics quite legitimately bemoan the effect such discrimination had on such talents as Lena Horne. The policy seemed to be: no realistic black characters, but principal actors could take on a black facade.


Update (7/16/2010):
Matt Labash, in a review of another version of liberalism for dummies quotes Mencken:  “Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.” (According to Google, Mencken wrote this in American Mercury, Jan-Jun, 1924, p. 505.)

What? Past or Passed?

A screenscrape of Comcast listings, July 10, 2010:

Click the graphic for a larger image.

The text reads: 

Murder by the Book

Michael Connelly

Sat. Jul 10, 10:00p – 11:00p

071 TRUTV

Michael Connelly taks about how he past as an investigative reporter gave him material for his novels.

2008 | TV14 | 60 Mins

Who writes for Comcast (or TRUTV)?

Maybe a little detective work is in order....

Go to TRUTV's schedule

Scroll down...

Click Murder by the Book...

Oh, no: “No programming information.”

Back-up and click Michael Connelly.

Same page – no info.

OK, let's try TV Guide.

Aha! TV Guide's description reads:

Michael Connelly: Author Michael Connelly discusses the case of Christopher Wilder, who was wanted by the FBI for his alleged roles in rapes and murders involving 11 women in eight states. Wilder accidentally killed himself as the police tried to arrest him in New Hampshire.

Who wrote the mangled text in Comcast's description above? And, are the two captions for the same episode? There's more info in the TV Guide blurb than in Comcast's. Where TVG get it? If TRUTV, then I suspect Comcast gets the blame for the garble.

A bit more investigation: Checked the TV listings for the Denver Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, NY Post, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. None had any description  for this episode.

For example, from the Denver Post:

Nada.

A Bing search produces, besides duplicates of some-of-the-above:

http://tv.yahoo.com/murder-by-the-book/show/39581/season/53766

There's the infamous text!

Click Full Episode Info...

More info, but no indication of the original source...

Somewhere, deep in the hidden recesses of listing information is the originator of the incoherence first shown. 

But where?

Feeling Good or Doing Good...

Synchronicity: A screen capture of my Yahoo mail window includes this week's emailed Goldberg File accompanied by an ad for Boys & Girls Clubs. The ad is part of the Yahoo interface, not the emailed newsletter.

(Click the pic to see a larger version.

Then click the back button to read the rest of this post.)

The initial section of the File reads:

By now everyone knows about the NASA [chief] propeller-head who never seemed to think twice (until this week, at least) about the fact that he was hired to be the Stuart Smalley of remedial-math-and-science students in Sudan. "Listen up, little Muhammeds [sic], as the head of NASA, let me tell you: You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, we rocket scientists like you."

What I'm hoping is that Charles Bolden, a decorated Marine, just sucks at diplomacy and was basically making it up, because it's actually a little scary to imagine that the president of the United States actually told the chief administrator of NASA any such thing. Did he tell the head of the Social Security Administration to remind gays of their rich history of interior design and keen fashion sense? Has the poobah of OSHA been informed that his foremost priority is to buck up Chinese living abroad about their entrepreneurial achievements?

What's so weird about Bolden's statement is how condescending it is. It sounds like a compliment, but it's actually something of an insult. Bolden's charientism [link added-RP] can't possibly win him much good will from the Muslim world, because the people paying attention in the Muslim world already know about their scientific legacy and telling them that they've forgotten it really comes across as a lecture about how they aren't living up to it.

I mean, would it ever occur to Bolden to remind Israeli kids of the Jewish history of excellence in math and science?

Alas, that's not a very long list. Boston's not much of a college town, either. 

The ad reads "Be Great" while NASA's new charge appears to be "You were great once."

I suspect that we can expect much better from B&GC than NASA.

Are Yahoo ads synched with email content in the same way the Google ads are tied to key words in Blogspot posts?

For more of JG's NASA take: click.

Sources: LeBron decision Thursday

(headline on: http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=5359255)

LeBron James is planning to announce the team with which he will sign during a one-hour special on ESPN Thursday night, ESPN The Magazine's Chris Broussard has learned through independent sources.

So, unnamed sources tell ESPN the mag's reporter, who posts on espn.go.com that LeBron will reveal his decision on ESPN.

Almost makes one disney while contemplating the media circus. 

Welcome to Strange Loops

A now and again citation of profound to mundane examples of Strange Loops.