Category Archives: 5×7

Short posts, sometimes condensed from other posts.

The Ides of September

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The President has been speaking for about five minutes.  It’s way too early for the “early returns” on his speech, but I have a prediction: I think that his high-handed yet empty rhetoric about what he will and will not tolerate or allow, and all the rest of his claptrap is going to bang hollow in a silent room.

I do believe that I am not alone in being spectacularly unimpressed with this moron upon the occasion of this part-campaign, part-lecture.  Now I have never been for the man, but tonight marks a special moment.  I have never heard him more urgently condescending, as if he must somehow pound his elementary knowledge into the heads of a bunch of retards (that would be us) before heading out for … Continue reading →

Reading Graphs

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There’s a blog, Political Calculations, which is immensely satisfying to a highly political data junkie such as myself.  So it’s a good blog, but the proprietor really hoses his interpretation of this graph:

[government spending] has literally “gone vertical” during the last two years.
In mathematical terms, that’s the sort of thing you see when you divide any number by zero. Applied to the chart above, that means that the relationship between the change in total government spending and the typical income earned by an American household from year-to-year is now “undefined.”

The problem is that this is a bivariate graph, and the concept of slope in terms of dy over dx does not apply.  More precisely, it has little meaning, and manifestly … Continue reading →

Inequality In Equality

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The DoD briefs that it will not create a new data category for sexual orientation, that it will not require personnel to identify sexual preference.

Fine, but then where does that leave all the bean-counting for race, sex, religion, and “ethnicity”?  Either data categories are necessary to ensure fairness or not.

Conversely, either a some behavior is protected just like immutable characteristics or not.  I understand that the DoD is complying with requirements handed down from above, but this implementation seems to carve out a zone of preferential treatment for homosexuals.

If the argument is that the behavior connected with sexual orientation rises to the same level of protection as genuinely immutable characteristics such as sex and race, and constitutionally protected behavior such as religion, then all of … Continue reading →

Nuclearabia

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Germany has announced that it will go nuke-free by the year 2022.  Switzerland by 2034.  On the other hand, France, Spain and the Czech Republic are forging ahead with partnerships and research.  France is set to virtually corner the market on non-military nuclear energy production, research, and technology.  Not that I think the Germans will successfully de-nuclearize.  Economics won’t let them.  I figure the only way they get off nuclear power is if riots over energy prices drag the whole country back in time to the point that they heat their homes with the flaming skulls of their enemies.

At the same time, demographics in France are such that if you have ever wanted to use that high school French you learned, you should probably hurry.  Muslim immigration … Continue reading →

Newt Gingrich Unhorsed

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Newt Gingrich was an overpowering force on the Op-Ed pages, and could have provided crucial support over the next two years.  He was always an establishment man, but his personal baggage meant that he could not return to the front.  He cast away an important back-bench responsibility in pursuit of a post more glorious but impossible to attain, and is now hopelessly on the defensive.   Newt is already defeated, because he should not have run.

For some reason, he chose to denigrate a damned good plan and along the way, to wound a man who is under a sustained personal attack from the other side, even from the President himself.  Gingrich now says that he supports “improving the plan”, but for a man who has had twenty … Continue reading →