Posts Tagged ‘black box voting’
Tuesday Morning Links!
* The University of Wisconsin-Madison Mellon Postdoctoral Program invites recent PhDs to apply for its three two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The theme for 2017-2019 applicants is Translation, Adaptation, Transplantation.
* A message from the Marquette administration: Milwaukee, our home. And a letter from MUPD. Decades of grievances come to a head in Milwaukee after police shooting. The “unrest” in this city began decades ago. The Racial Segregation And Economic Devastation That Made Milwaukee A ‘Powder Keg.’ Powder keg. Decades in the making. Decades in the making. Ongoing tensions. Not a surprise. No one can deny. Outsider agitators! The radicalism of Black Lives Matter. “What can I do to help Milwaukee?” What It’s Like To Experience Black Pain In Milwaukee. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails.
* Scientists say the US is facing the strongest hurricane season since Sandy hit the East Coast. California is in flames right now, with fires fueled by historic drought. A first-strike against climate change is the only solution.
* The 10 Most Overly-Specific Supervillains in Comics.
* The story no one asked for will finally become the series no one can watch. And when I made that joke on Facebook a friend reminded me of the goddamn forehead ridge thing that will be totally inescapable.
* I told you, Dad! New research from the Journal of Health Psychology seems to supports the theory that intelligent people spend more time being lazy than people who are more active.
* Racial Politics After Obama.
* Insurers say they’re losing money under the Affordable Care Act and are fighting for double-digit rate increases. This week Aetna announced it is pulling back from most exchanges.
* When the Hospital Is Covered but the Health Care Isn’t.
* Why the Next President Should Forgive All Student Loans.
* Area Man’s Wife Achieves Lifelong Dream Through Dedicated, Drive, and Incredible Physical Prowess. It gets worse, my friends. (It gets better too.)
* Juanita Broaddrick Wants To Be Believed. Right wing ratfucking though it may be, the cognitive dissonance required to simultaneously honor contemporary norms about sexual consent and the 90s-era “none of our business” defense of Bill Clinton’s predatory behavior seems increasingly difficult to sustain.
* The amount of effort this took was the most alarming thing given his history,” the guy told the Post. Anthony Weiner’s Back at It Again With the Saucy Twitter DMs. I’m still saying it:
* This Andrew Cuomo fan fiction is now totally my head canon.
* Comedy Central Cancels Larry Wilmore’s Late-Night Show. Comedy Central’s decision this week to cancel “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” was a surprise. The reason it was a surprise is that Wilmore isn’t the real problem with the cable channel’s late-night offerings. Wilmore gone, but Comedy Central’s late-night problem is Noah.
* The Life Aquatic’s Seu Jorge Announces David Bowie Covers Tour. Chicago on (the day after) my birthday!
* NeverEnding Story Returns To Movie Theaters For Limited Run. I wish my kids were just a little bit older so we could do this.
* The Election Won’t Be Rigged. But It Could Be Hacked.
* How Cuba’s greatest cartoonist fled from Castro and created ‘Spy vs. Spy.’
* Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act.
* Hidden Figures really does look good.
* Suicide Squad and the bitter future of the DC Cinematic Universe.
* Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s.
* How to make your office gun-free. Why, it couldn’t be simpler!
* “People think a computer could run index funds—and they’re so wrong,” says Brian Bruce, a former index fund manager who’s now chief executive officer of Hillcrest Asset Management in Plano, Texas, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Index Investing. Five years, tops.
* The rise of neuroprosthetics.
* Augmented reality games and ethics. And just for instance: Mich. couple suing Pokémon Go for ruining their quality of life.
* It is easier to imagine the end of dads than the end of capitalism.
* How legroom on major airlines compare to one another.
* “People don’t realize there is effectively no regulation of cosmetics.” Their Hair Fell Out. Should the F.D.A. Have the Power to Act?
* Don’t Bring Your Dog to Work.
* Donald Once Turned Down a Million-Dollar Bet on “Trump: The Game.” Trump Could Sweep Toss Up States And Still Lose The Election. Right now polls show Donald Trump losing every single swing state. The kids are all right. Hell, even their parents are all right. The Great GOP Divide.
* Technology and Liberty in French Utopian Fiction.
* Taken in cumulative, these data suggest two unusual possibilities:
A. Karl Marx is the single most important, influential, and far-reaching thinker who ever lived, and his empirically attested syllabus presence accurately reflects this extreme degree of influence that he has over virtually all aspects of human knowledge.
-or-
B. Karl Marx enjoys a grossly outsized presence on college syllabi relative to his importance as a thinker, owing to a similarly disproportionate affinity for his thought among university faculty and particularly those faculty outside of the economics profession.
I really think you could make a halfway legitimate case for some version of (A) — bracketing religious figures like Christ or the Buddha, and limiting the scope of influence to the mid- and post-20C milieu — but the later observations about the Manifesto as a kindergarten lesson probably poison that possibility.
* A genetic mutation that has been found to cause people to act outrageously when they’re drunk also appears to lower the risk of certain metabolic disorders such as diabetes and obesity. Peculiarly, the mutation has so far only been found in Finnish people, and is thought to affect around 100,000 people in the Nordic country.
* You’ll Get to See the Documentary About Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four This Fall. And keep your eye out for For the Love of Spock.
* Why I’m loving No Man’s Sky.
* Weird futurism watch: in the future, should everyone be a twin?
* And this is basically just a panel from The Flash.
Thursday Night
* Eric Cantor’s report of a bullet fired at his Richmond office appears to have been significantly exaggerated. Infamous liberal David Frum has apparently been fired from the American Enterprise Institute for violating the 11th Commandment. White powder has been sent to the offices of Anthony Weiner. And Tea Party supporters are threatening the Senate parliamentarian, as well as planning a protest outside his residence.
* Is the anti-health-care lawsuit essentially frivolous?
* The verdict has come back in United States v. Russell Cletus Maricle et al., the first voting fraud case to involve electronic voting machines, with all defendants found guilty.
* Geoengineering: “A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come”?
* And it had to happen someday: George Michael vs. Ann Veal in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Monday Night
* Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to donations to the Republican National Committee. But they really weren’t supposed to say that last part out loud.
* The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted its annual report on violent extremism on the right. Via MeFi. Immigration reform should be just the thing to cool these tempers down.
* Oscar-winning animated short “Logorama.”
* Benen and Klein remind everyone who needs reminding that health care reform is a major progressive victory. There’s never a final end to struggle; we take what’s here and start again.
* Lessons of a $618,616 death.
What I couldn’t know then was that the thinking behind my request—along with hundreds of decisions we made over the years—was a window on the impossible calculus at the core of today’s health-care dilemma. Terence and I were eager to beat his cancer. Backed by robust medical insurance provided by a succession of my corporate employers, we were able to wage a fierce battle. As we made our way through a series of expensive last chances, like the one I asked for that night, we didn’t have to think about money, allocation of medical resources, the struggles of roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, or the impact on corporate bottom lines.
Terence’s treatment was expensive. The bills for his seven years of medical care totaled $618,616, almost two-thirds of which was for his final 24 months. Still, no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life.
* Elections have consequences: “Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly.”
* Every “Holy ______, Batman” from Burt Ward’s Robin.
* Conspiracy theory of the night: Did Leno add a laugh track to Sarah Palin’s appearance? Related: Was Palin indoctrinated as a child while receiving medical treatment from Canadian communofascists?
* And the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired the papers of David Foster Wallace. Book your flights now.
Wednesday Links
Wednesday links.
* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.
* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).
* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.
* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!
* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.
* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?
* Solitary confinement as torture.
* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can’t think past a single business cycle?
* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I’ve said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don’t think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax “bonus” is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.
* David Brin wants to “uplift” animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don’t take science fiction seriously; it’s totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn’t even work…
Late Night Links
Late night links.
* Here comes your Seinfeld reunion. God bless Larry David.
* You won’t have Dr. Sanjay Gupta to kick around anymore.
* From My Unfinished Doctoral Dissertation on Breakfast Cereal.
* The artist-less art of Tim Knowles.
* …each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. I had no idea I was so deeply disliked. (via MR)
* The headline reads, ‘Diebold Voting System Has ‘Delete’ Button for Erasing Audit Logs.’ No way that could be abused. Via MeFi.
Common Sense in Pennsylvania
A judge in Pennsylvania has the common sense to rule that backup paper ballots must be provided in the event of extensive voting machine failure.
A federal judge has sided with Pennsylvania voter groups and ordered election officials to provide paper ballots if half the machines break down Tuesday. The state had provided paper ballots only if all machines at a polling place broke down.
Why, oh why, are we using these things at all? The voting machines don’t work.
Politics Monday
Politics Monday.
* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann’s now desperately trying to backpeddle.
* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.
* West Virginia electronic voting machines don’t work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.
* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?
* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn’t working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.
* Or, you know, don’t: John McCain doesn’t really seem to mind losing. A lot of “moderate” conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.
* It turns out McCain’s also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.
* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.
* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.
* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.
* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates’ health, McCain’s in particular.
* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its “Building the New Energy Economy” theme.
* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.
Live Free or Diebold
Eight years after the Recount, the voting machines still don’t work. Via MeFi.
Hooray for Mondays
Hooray for Mondays.
* Yesterday we went to New York to see After Nature at the New Museum and Rififi—the film that singlehandedly gave birth to the very idea of French film noir, according to a quote Ryan saw in the newspaper—at the Film Forum’s French Crime Wave series. I officially pronounce both things Worth Doing™, with an extra-special deliciousness shout-out to Kate’s Joint at 58 Avenue B in the East Village.
* YouTube video tribute to Jack Kirby, king of comics. Via MeFi.
* I’ve already made what I consider the definitive comment on election polling, but in case you need more I recommend Matthew Yglesias’s post today on tracking polls:
Or maybe none of that happened. As everyone knows, there’s sampling error associated with polling. As a result, if you poll 1,000 people on August 1 and then you poll 1,000 different people on August 2 you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results differ by several percentage points even in the absence of any change in the underlying public opinion. Beyond that, doing one poll per day throughout a long campaign would mean that you’d expect to see one or two relatively rare outlier results per month even under circumstances of total stasis. And as Alan Abramowitz points out if you look at the daily results this is actually what you see — incredible volatility with Obama’s lead oscillating violently around an average of 3-4 points. Since it’s not plausible that the public mood is really swinging anywhere near as rapidly as a very naive reading of the Gallup daily results would suggest, people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race.
But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.
I’ll only add that given the extent to which polls serve as a bulwark for functional democracy and accountable elections, the increasing sensationalization of polls as a means to drive news ratings rather than to reliably monitor public opinion is a very, very disturbing trend.
Polls should be boring. They should be so boring no one cares what they say.
* And Jesse Taylor has the best hypothetical history of the presidential primary I’ve seen:
Any number of things could have swayed the primary. But at the end of the day, Clinton apologizing for her Iraq vote (or just not having voted that way in the first place) would have guaranteed her the nomination. Or her running for Senate in Illinois.
I really think that’s right. If she’d decided to run for Senate in Illinois rather than New York, she’d have had it.
Gerry Canavan 