Christmas, 1929 by Robin Tanner

Christmas, 1929 by Robin Tanner

Click to enlarge.

History

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Supermarket Visit that Changed the World, i.e., the day Boris Yeltsin visited Randall’s in Houston, Texas, and realized at that moment that communism had failed.

A true cause for celebration! pic.twitter.com/SzPGhS3UeJ

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) September 16, 2024

 

A pit bull on a leash

 From Life is a Joke, 100 Life Lessons by John and Gordon Javna.

—52— Get in Line

“A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal.”

—Francis Bacon

A young woman is walking home one day when she spots an odd funeral procession on its way to the cemetery. A black hearse is being followed by a second hearse. Behind that is an older woman walking with a pit bull on a leash, followed by a hundred women walking single file behind her.

The young woman watches for a few minutes in wonder, and finally approaches the woman walking the dog.

“Excuse me,” she says, “I’m sorry to bother you in your time of grief, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Whose funeral is it?”

“My husband’s,” the older woman answers. “He’s in the first hearse. This dog found him in bed with his girlfriend and killed both of them. She’s in the second hearse.”

The young woman says, “Oh, I’m sorry” . . . but then smiles and adds, “Say, can I borrow your dog?”

“Get in line,” the woman answers.

An Insight

REVEALED: Both Individuals Involved in Trump Assassination Attempts Identified as ActBlue Donors

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who fired at Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and Ryan Wesley Routh, who made an apparent assassination attempt against Trump in Florida, have both been… pic.twitter.com/VFfbA8kGZj

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) September 17, 2024

 

I see wonderfulthings

This stunning, large electrical storm during the first hours of the Calbuco volcano eruption

[📸 Francisco Negroni, long exposure] pic.twitter.com/16jSkHHIZ7

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 17, 2024

Offbeat Humor

Hezbollah terrorists this morning adjusting to their new reality. pic.twitter.com/y5lgGbBe1y

— The Mossad: Satirical and Awesome (@TheMossadIL) September 19, 2024

 

Data Talks

Remember, every time you see a viral chart you should think:
Does this replicate? Is the sample size big enough to generalize from? Has the data been fairly represented? Did someone just make this up?

9 times out of 10, it will fail at least one of those tests https://t.co/xYgaGDpTP5

— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) September 17, 2024

 

The polls don't ell us what voters think. They tell us what data scientists suspect voters might think. Based on data scientist's unvalidated assumptions.

From Here’s What My Gut Says About the Election. But Don’t Trust Anyone’s Gut, Even Mine. by Nate Silver.  He's warning everyone about the closeness of the polling and that polls cannot tell us who will win because the election is 50:50.  If the electorate is in reality 50:50, then more and more accurate polling will only increase the confidence that it is indeed 50:50.  It won't give a winner.

A fair point.

But he makes a different point which I think is important.

Instead, the likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.

Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.

For polling to work, you have to have 1) a sufficiently large responding population who 2) are RANDOMLY selected.  The first requirement is rarely met and the second is never met.  You cannot compel people to respond to a poll and therefore, straight out of the gate, you are having to deal with the issue of self-selection - Are the people who choose to participate in a poll fully representative of those who choose not to do so.  Virtually never.  

Further, polls, for a variety of reasons, have historically oversampled Democrats.  The pollsters have compensated by extrapolating results from the undersampled portion of Republican respondents, dramatically exacerbating the error rate, especially when the overall sample size is insufficient in the first place.  

Over the past few election cycles, polls have become more and more expensive, respondents have become fewer and fewer (0.4%), and sampling is less and less random.  As much effort is now spent manipulating the data produced from the polling as spent on conducting the polling itself.  

The polls are no longer polls.  They do not tell us what a random selection of voters think.  They tell us what data scientists suspect voters might think.  Based on data scientist's unvalidated assumptions.  The link to reality has been completely broken.  It is all Garbage In Garbage Out.  

Boats at Shinagawa, Night, 1950s by Tsuchiya Koitsu

Boats at Shinagawa, Night, 1950s by Tsuchiya Koitsu

Click to enlarge.

History

Native Americans in 1908. Photo taken by Edward Curtis. pic.twitter.com/2HyOb0v8Q3

— History Defined (@historydefined) September 17, 2024