Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

This is how realignments happen…

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

People are complicated. Love is not.

What fresh hell is this?

Usually wrong but never in doubt

We have all the best words.

Not all heroes wear capes.

No one could have predicted…

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

Just a few bad apples.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The math demands it!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

I’m going back to the respite thread.

All this crying. this is why i don’t click on stuff.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Open Thread: Media Villagers Demand We Stop Mocking Them

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If Marc Tracy is actually mocking EvenTheLiberal New Republic‘s standard deference towards authority, this is kinda brilliant:

Perhaps the thing that inhibits people from understanding Alan Rusbridger is that the editor of the Guardian, the English-speaking world’s foremost left-wing newspaper, is constantly forced to think like a capitalist. At a truly shameful interrogation before a U.K. Parliament committee yesterday—at one point, Rusbridger’s patriotism was questioned; at another, an M.P. credited the British with creating the Enigma code (it was Britain who cracked Enigma, a Nazi code)—Rusbridger had to defend his paper…

But the Guardian’s longtime steward has more jejune concerns as well…

Yet these concerns, though seemingly base—and undoubtedly ironic for a left-wing newspaper—ought not embarrass Rusbridger or the Guardian. Capitalist self-interest is precisely the engine that drives a robust free press, and always has been. The desire to break scoops and embarrass governments has historically been related to a desire to sell copies (and, now, digital banner ads)… Though all the U.S. Founding Fathers’ writings insisted upon the importance of a free press, the Constitution doesn’t require one—it doesn’t, say, require Congress to fund an independent ombudsman. Rather, the First Amendment merely guarantees that any press that does exist will be free…

Jonathan Chait, in NYMag, mocks Poltico founder Mike Allan’s negotiable affections:

In the fifties, a bunch of rock stations got caught taking money from music producers to give their artists airtime. The “Payola” scam, as it was called, was sufficiently outrageous to become a major national scandal. Last month, Washington Post reporter Erik Wemple reported that Politico‘s Mike Allen is running a similar scam — accepting lucrative payments from advertisers and lending his editorial voice to hyping, and sometimes parroting, their agenda. Given the relative importance of national politics vis-à-vis rock music, this struck me as a potentially career-ending revelation. Instead, Politico has ignored the report and carried on as if nothing at all were amiss…

Now, one possible defense of Allen is that what appears to be simple payola is actually a more sociologically complex phenomenon. Allen, as Wemple reports, has personal friendships with many of his sponsors, uses them as sources, and generally shares their point of view on most issues even while failing to acknowledge he has a point of view at all. This is less a defense than a concession that Allen is so hopelessly embedded within the Establishment that he can’t cover it in a remotely fair way. (This is exactly the argument I made.)…

And now Kos has gotten into a full-scale twit-war with Ron Fournier on “Failing Beltway 101“:

You might remember Ron Fournier for such hits as “failed Beltway political startup HotSoup.com”, almost quitting his reporter job to go work for John McCain’s presidential campaign, and “sending email to Karl Rove encouraging him to ‘keep up the fight'”…

… Hacks are a dime a dozen in the media world. But what makes Fournier particularly interesting is that he’s the editorial director of the National Journal, a respected Beltway publication with a subscription price of over a grand a year. So, you know, you’d expect the person running its newsroom to know a thing or two about politics. But what he lacks in basic political knowledge, he more than makes up in love and affection for Third Way and, not coincidentally, hatred of me…

***********
Apart from rooting for injuries, what’s on the agenda this evening?

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On Orchestrating Less Violence

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Concerning yet another sad, unnecessary incidence of gun violence, Esquire‘s poltical milblogger Lt. Col. Robert Bateman had some most excellent thoughts:

… My entire adult life has been dedicated to the deliberate management of violence. There are no two ways around that fact. My job, at the end of the day, is about killing. I orchestrate violence.

I am not proud of that fact. Indeed, I am often torn-up by the realization that not only is this my job, but that I am really good at my job. But my profession is about directed violence on behalf of the nation. What is happening inside our country is random and disgusting…

[F]rankly speaking, I am embarrassed by our Supreme Court…

You do not have to read this full Supreme Court ruling, it is a supplemental. I can spell it out for you in ten seconds.

Five of the nine members of the Supreme Court agreed that the part in the Second Amendment which talks about “A Well Regulated Militia, Being Necessary To The Security Of A Free State…” did not matter. In other words, they flunked basic high school history.

The lengths to which Justice Scalia had to go in his attempt to rewrite American history and the English language are as stunning as they are egregious. In essence, what he said about the words written by the Founding Fathers was, “Yeah, they didn’t really mean what they said.”…

Guns are tools. I use these tools in my job. But like all tools one must be trained and educated in their use. Weapons are there for the “well regulated militia.” Their use, therefore, must be in defense of the nation. Shooting and killing somebody because they were not “upset enough” over the loss of a college football team should not be possible in our great nation….

Lt. Col. Bateman proceeds to offer a half-dozen excellent suggestions towards reducing the number of ‘accidents’ and ‘unfortunate incidents’ caused by too many highly efficient killing machines circulating among us. I particularly liked this one:

4. We will submit a new tax on ammunition. In the first two years it will be 400 percent of the current retail cost of that type of ammunition. (Exemptions for the ammo used by the approved weapons.) Thereafter it will increase by 20 percent per year.

Yeah, it’s an old Chris Rock routine, but then again the Second Amendment fetishists are convinced That Man in the White House is doing this already, so why not?

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Do one in four scientific papers contain bogus data?

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In a story about a new watchdog catching a serial fabricator in Italy, the journal Nature included some startling allegations (bolding mine).

in 2008, [Enrico] Bucci, a molecular biologist, founded BioDigitalValley in Pont Saint Martin, Italy. Its services include pulling out all published images of gel-electrophoresis analysis — which separates and identifies large molecules such as proteins and sequences of RNA — that are relevant to a particular disease or tissue.

Bucci and his team created a database hosting all accessible biomedical papers published since 2000.

[…] The list ran to more than one million, so he looked only at Italian scientists. Using in-house software that could isolate images of, for example, gels, and check them for simple features such as possibly duplicated portions, he ran an automatic check of all the papers the Italian researchers had published. He focused on highly cited researchers for whom the automatic check had revealed multiple papers with anomalous images.

[…] Now midway through the analysis, he estimates that around one-quarter of the thousands of papers featuring gels that he has analysed so far potentially breached widely accepted guidelines on reproducing gel images. And around 10% seem to include very obvious breaches, such as cutting and pasting of gel bands. Some journals were more affected than others, he says. Those with a high impact factor tended to be slightly less affected.

A month ago The Economist posed a troubling riddle: why do more and more scientific studies fail to reproduce? To answer that puzzle you might ask Enrico Bucci or other other self-appointed watchdogs like the now-defunct Science Fraud blog or the psychology-oriented “data whisperer”. It is easy enough to crap on the usual range of science critics that we link around here. However, unlike creationists and climate whores these guys do a real service by policing science from the inside.

As for why we need these guys in the first place, I think it is essential to understand a little bit about real scientists and the human beings who do it. Science is about learning things, but the unit of progress is the peer-reviewed paper. We measure each other by our papers, we use them to determine whether a student is ready to graduate and, with grant success, we use paper output to choose whether junior faculty have done enough to earn tenure. Your ideas can thus be brilliant or a bit dull but they only matter if you can package them in a format that a meaningful journal is willing to publish. It thus gets more and more frustrating when you approach what feels like the finish line for a paper and one important control or line of inquiry refuses to work.

Now, here is the line that separates believers from the kind of skeptical mindset that is too rare even among scientists. Most of us have a story that we plan to tell before we pick up a pipettor. In fact hypothesis testing being the soul of good inquiry, it takes a pretty poor scientist to go into a study without an outcome that matches some combination of what they know and what they hope to be true. Some few of us even have the combination of foresight and luck to finish a paper without leaving some or all of that original story in bin where trash goes, along with a bit of your ego. And that is good! If we knew what would happen before we did it then we would be engineers.

The ego thing is not a trivial problem. A lot of people, too many, will over invest in an idea that they published already, dig their trenches too deep in a dispute with competing labs, or they just hate to let go of that project diagram they sketched out on day one. Of course these problems get worse the closer you get to the finish line. After the other data all seemed to fall in place without any shoehorning, that one last misbehaving control experiment can drive you batty. Sometimes the equipment really is misbehaving, but sometimes that niggling problem points to an alternative story that you either overlooked or refused to consider*. Everyone wants to be rigorous, but just as much you need to get that paper out NOW NOW NOW because [X] is ONE MONTH AWAY, where [X] is a grant deadline, deadline for revising a paper, graduation date, conference presentation, faculty review, postdoctoral job interview or any other of the countless urgent events that litter scientific life.

We often feel too rushed to step back and take a hard skeptical look at that misbehaving control experiment, but we need to do it anyway. The big risk of course being that when you ‘make it fit’ you might guess wrong. Then, at best, someone fails to replicate the work and the offender moves on. In a sense that is part of the back and forth that has characterized science since forever. On the other hand folks like the offender in the article above cannot or will not walk away, and these guys end up with the Marmion problem (“Oh what a tangled web we weave…”): they have to play increasing games with their data to keep up their side of the argument. I sincerely hope that folks like Bucci will short-circuit those destructive cycles and, better yet, convince would-be fudgers to step back and deal with their annoying experiments before they make that first mistake.

(*) Not that you will hear me complain. The latter left an opening in my field that I drove some very high-profile papers through. Never underestimate the value of looking at a problem through semi-naive eyes.

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I drunk myself blind to the sound of old T. Rex

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I watched the movie “Velvet Goldmine” over Thanksgiving. It’s about a Marc Bolan/David Bowie character and an Iggy Pop/Lou Reed character. I enjoyed it, though I didn’t understand it.

It got me thinking: what are the best movies about music? Let’s throw out the Chris Guest ones (though I love them) as well as actual musicals. I loved “The Commitments” (you probably couldn’t make a movie about Irish people singing soul music that I wouldn’t love) and “School of Rock”. Documentaries could be a separate part of the genre — I love me some “Behind the Music” and liked “Only the Strong Survive”.

Update. Forgot “The Harder They Come”. Jimmy Cliff isn’t so convincing as a gangster, but this studio scene is great.

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The past, happening over and over again

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American politics is primarily about race. Full stop.

Good on semi-serious person Jonathan Chait for telling it like it is in this excellent piece he wrote after seeing “12 Years A Slave”:

While its depiction of physical torture has commanded the most attention, I found the psychological torture more disturbing. To make a person a slave requires making them complicit in their own subservience, through rituals of degradation, such as forcing them to clap their hands to mocking songs, dancing for their masters, or being stripped, or compared to animals.

[….]

Conservatives have made endless jokes based on the strange premise that Obama is unable to express coherent thoughts unless reading from a teleprompter, defined health-care reform as “reparations,” imagined a Reagan-era program to subsidize telephone use for the indigent is actually “Obamaphones,” or complained when black entertainers or athletes socialize with the First Family.

What’s most frustrating about reading American political pundits is all the pretend bullshit about how people are motivated by Burkean pragmatism or fiscal restraint, when it’s really all about slavery and its aftermath. The only civil war ever fought here was fought over slavery and the biggest political realignment in memory happened because of Civil Rights. Case closed.

Update. There’s a bit of an argument in the comments about class versus race dominating American politics. I’d say that many (but not all) policies are class-based — in terms of being about hurting or helping working people versus taxing or giving more money to our Galtian overlords — but skin color (I’m not crazy about using the word “race”, though I know I did earlier) has a massive impact on voting patterns. Working-class whites vote 60% Republican, working-class blacks vote 90% Democratic.

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Jumping thru hoops to vote shows grit and determination

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Republicans must be feeling some pre-election jitters because they’re rolling out the zany rule changes:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) chief election official issued new rules Monday night that could hamper absentee voting, just months before Floridians in the state’s 13th Congressional district take part in a special election to replace the late Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R). The seat was held by Republicans for decades, but is now considered a tossup.
Under the new rule, Floridians will be prohibited from dropping off their absentee ballots at “libraries, tax collectors’ branch offices and other places” and will only be allowed to mail-in their selections or deposit them at local election offices.
Detzner claims that the rule change clarifies established statutory language and establishes “uniformity,” but some supervisors fear that it could have the effect of suppressing voter turnout.
“I was surprised, to say the least,” Ann McFall, Volusia’s Supervisor of Elections told ThinkProgress. “I just have one office and no ‘drop boxes.” Under the new rules, “people who like to save postage and drop it off at an early voting site” could no longer do so. “Why create a problem when none currently exists?” she asked.
Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark had a similar reaction. She told The Tampa Bay Times, “I’m very worried about this. I’m just stunned.” Pinellas county “has used dropoff sites since 2008 and used 14 in the 2012 general election,” when 42 percent of the county’s absentee ballot total were left at dropoff sites.

Now one of the county election administrators says she’s defying the order and she plans to retain her drop-off sites and a lot of her fellow county election chiefs are backing her up. Florida Senator Bill Nelson has also weighed in:

Nelson said he’s concerned that the new rule is an attempt at voter suppression.
“This is so obvious that it’s making it harder to vote for the average folks, whether Republican or Democrat,” he said.
Some elections supervisors agree.
Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer said he has 15 sites where voters can drop off their ballots prior to election day. If he were to follow the new directive, 13 of them would be closed.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” Latimer said. “I was flabbergasted when this memo came out.”

Conservatives have been pulling the last minute election rule change trick for a long time, and this isn’t the first time that local Florida election administrators have rebelled:

Detzner has a history of limiting voters’ access, however. In 2012, the state created a voter purge list full of suspected non-citizens, which was mainly comprised of Latino, African and Asian Americans. The list was full of mistakes, targeting U.S. citizens because of a misspelled name or outdated address. County election supervisors refused to go along with the purge, and the Justice Department sued over possible racial discrimination. Detzner eventually apologized for the effort.

It’s good to remember that free and fair elections can be subverted in a lot of ways. Small rule changes that make it more difficult for certain people to vote can do a lot of damage. It’s just completely unnecessary to make this process so difficult and confusing. Competent, consistent election administration is really important and local officials can be the last line of defense for voters. Of course, local officials are also the people who will hear all the complaints if ballot drop-off locations are closed, just as local officials took all the heat when Florida conservatives recklessly purged thousands of legit voters prior to the 2012 election.

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