Over at Michelle Malkin’s site (a really great site).  The study purported to show that people in congressional districts that voted more heavily for President Bush also tend to have more bias against black people.

There are many criticisms that can be made of the study, even before it’s published.  Hope on over to Michelle Malkin’s post on this.  She quotes some criticisms of the study from a Stanford Ph.D. in statistics.  They are very salient, and they are also good in a general sense – i.e., that it is very difficult and tedious to do a truly significant statistical study.  The methodology has to be flawless and rigorous.  It doesn’t appear to be the case with this study, but we’ll find out more when the methodology and results are fully published.

To anyone who wonders why I categorized this as “Math & Comp. Sci.”: it’s because the criticism is a very good outline that should be applied to every statistical study, regardless of content.  Most people don’t understand statistics and what makes them useful, and this critique is a good way to get a clue.

BREITBART.COM – Chevron’s 4Q Profit Soars to Record High

This article is really just news, but there are shadows of arguments that Democrats and people otherwise confused about economics will try to make. As for the Democrats, they will twist this information for political gain. They will try to argue that Big Oil companies are evil, and that they are greedy, and that they are sucking the life right out of the American people because of high prices, and sucking the life right out of the environment. Evil all the way around.

But it’s a sham. read more »

I recently got a promotion in the mail (snail mail) sent out by a local Nissan dealer. It had phrases on it like “scratch and match” and “$1000 shopping spree”, etc. The idea was that you scratch off some stuff to see your number, and if the number is on the reverse side of the letter, then you win something! The prizes are:

1. $5000 cash
2. A new flat-panel television
3. A sea-doo recreational-vehicle
4. $100 cash
5. $1000 shopping spree

Sounds great! Oh but wait…my wife caught something interesting. The odds of winning each prize were printed in the fine-print (I’m sure it’s required by law, otherwise they wouldn’t do it). Anyway, the odds of winning 1-4 were 1/42,500. The odds of winning #5 were 42,496/42,500.

Sound fishy? That’s because it is. I searched the web a little bit for this stuff, and I found several blogs that describe promotions that were very similar to this one. It’s a deceptive way to get people to come to your event. We even tried to call ahead to find out what we’d won, but we were told that we had to come in person. So I went. I showed a salesman my letter, and the first thing he asked was “Are you looking for a car?” I told him that we weren’t, and he showed me the posterboard with the winning numbers on it, and then he got me this gift certificate:


And then he promptly left me alone. Note to self: if you ever want to just get out of a conversation with a car salesman, the quickest way to do it is just to tell him you’re not even looking for a car.

Anyway, the website on this certificate, woarewards.com, is a total scam. It’s an online catalogue with a poor selection of really low-quality products. The $1000 gift certificate goes toward these things, but what happens is that they nail you with “processing fees” and shipping costs (overcharged, no doubt), and so you end up paying more for the products than you would have if you had gone to Wal-Mart and bought higher-quality equivalents.

It seems that I forgot to back up the posts from my old blog, “tail -f /dev/mind”, and I’ve already terminated my service with that hosting provider. I suppose it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a shame because there were several lengthy articles in there that I thought were fairly good or interesting.

Oh well. Life goes on.

Check this out: a sychophantic ranting about infanticide and why no one should care. Warning: graphic language.

I hope everyone in America reads this post over at Kos. It’s really, really sick and disgusting – but it’s honest. Don’t you know that what this woman wrote is actually one of the core principles of the Democratic Party?

This is the beginning of the end of the era of Roe. Watch as all the moonbats at Kos go nuts as they are no longer able to impose their views on the nation via judicial fiat (it’s okay to impose one’s views, but it’s supposed to be done through the legislative process).

FOXNews.com – U.S. & World News – Texas Officers Involved in Standoff at Border

Is Mexico trying to start a war? Their military crosses our border to keep us from enforcing our laws 20 times a year (i.e., nearly every other week), and Michael Chertoff says it was probably a mistake?

Is it any wonder why citizens in Texas are forming militias to protect our borders? Our political leaders flatly refuse to do so. No political issue irks me as much as this one; the question of what to do about illegal border crossings does not seem like a difficult one to me. There is no political (or very minimal) risk involved in enforcing current laws at the border. Where is the president on this? Where is Governor Perry?

I now go to find out what Carol Keeton-McClellan-Rylander-Strahorn “One Tough Grandma” (more like 4 tough Grandmas, given all her marriages) has to say about the matter…

Is there something that prevents us from writing complete sentences in inline comments?  I just got through spending nearly an hour trying to figure out why some code was setting up DMA transfers in a distributed system only to get to the bottom of things and find a comment that looks like someone took a comb through the paragraph and knocked out ever other word.  Seriously.  Someone thought it was okay to describe a subtle bug with a complex workaround by saying things like “if thread 0, xfer for 8, in case not and see 4 where xfers aren’t there”.

Would it really have taken much longer to write in complete sentences?

Drudge had a picture of President Bush up today that I liked:

City Journal Winter 2006 | Ronald Reagan’s Unlikely Heir by Steven Malanga

This article is a must-read about Ken Blackwell, mayor of Cincinnati and candidate for the Ohio governorship. He is a black Republican with a fascinating background and great ideas. This article is a must-read. He is slightly reminiscent of Lt. Gov. Steele of Maryland.

I listened to the Mike Gallagher show on WBAP this morning on the way to work (only about 10 minutes, including waiting in line at the bank). Anyway, he was soliciting calls on the topic of giving in-state tuition discounts to illegal immigrants. The topic came up because a state legislator in Kansas is now trying to revoke a 2001 provision that allowed the practice (or mandated it, I’m not sure which) of giving the discounts to illegals as long as they had either a) lived in the state for some period of time or b) attended a Kansas high school for at least 3 years.

Anyway, Gallagher’s position is that the law is the law is the law, and we shouldn’t be rewarding people for breaking the law, and especially not by giving them priveledges that many, many American citizens don’t get.

One caller, a bleeding-heart liberal pagan (she actually said she was a practicing pagan), wanted to argue that “they’re already here. Why don’t we educate them and make them productive members of society?” She also thought that all education should be free.
Another caller, an immigrant from Honduras (I think…I didn’t catch all of what he said) argued that if we allow the illegals to attend high school, we ought to let them attend universities and give them in-state tuition.

Another caller made a good point: if one of the primary arguments against enforcing immigration laws and/or restricting further immigration is that our economy depends on illegal immigrants doing jobs that Americans won’t do, then why do they need college educations?

The last caller was the only one that I thought made any sense (albeit, you can’t really tie a generalized argument made by lots of people to a specific policy made by people who may or may not have been arguing the above). One thing that struck me as particularly salient is that the purpose of giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants isn’t:

• that we want them to have a college education because we care. If that were the case, then we would be offering the discounts to Americans.
• It’s not to acheive some fiscal goal, because it’s definitely a money-loser to the state.
• It’s also not a cynical attempt to “buy” votes on the part of Kansas lawmakers – illegals can’t vote, and hispanics don’t vote in very large numbers even in the general election, nevermind the local elections.

No, the reason is because the state doesn’t want to deal with INS (…er, USCIS) or enforcement, or investigating backgrounds, etc, etc. They don’t want to get caught with their pants down if the federal government ever cracks down on illegals in various ways. All the illegals who applied to be admitted to a university will have their background checked for residency. The university doesn’t want to have to differentiate between “legal” and “illegal” so that when the feds come knocking, they can just say “gee, officer, I didn’t know”.