- Suck It New York!

Anthony Weiner is spotted filming a campaign-style video with his wife on the same Brooklyn stoop where he announced his 2005 mayoral bid

After his spectacular flame out on twitter, we forget just what an assault on good manners this man was. He was unbelievably nasty and rude - even when he kept his private parts covered. He may be the only human alive who is even more personally obnoxious than the current Mayor, 'fun sized' Mike Bloomberg.

Even in an age when people address their own mother's with the phrase "yo bitch", Anthony Weiner was considered a monumentally offensive jerk. And let's be frank. The penis jokes will be non-stop if the man get's anywhere near the mayors office. It's difficult (that's "difficult", not hard) to look forward to that.

Information is its Own Reward

Here is a little food for thought for those who think collections of data in the hands of public officials is a benign matter. This "hate map" shows the point of origin of tweets that contain "hate speech." I have zoomed in to a few locations, and I am please to report that people in NJ are not very hateful. Where I live it's not hateful at all.  What a relief!

This map is the work of Monica Stephens, Assistant Professor of Geography at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. She had the help of three graduate students, who read the tweets and categorized them.

Here is what I find interesting. All of the tweets came from geotagged accounts. The sample is small and skewed in many ways little doubt. Put all that aside.

Look at the platform and think like a politician or law enforcement official. It makes you want to get a larger data cohort doesn't it? You can use different search queries. Maybe you can figure out how to associate non-geotagged Twitter accounts to people in a particular location. Maybe you can add email communications, if you know the location of who is writing them. Cellphone conversations with voice recognition would be a great one to add. Then you can find clusters where people are engaging in certain types of speech.

I would think that if you could get such information you might be rewarded. You might even become the Director of IRS’ Affordable Care Act office.

It's growing, but is it benign?

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/05/16/4237865/map-of-hateful-tweets-shows-hotspots.html#storylink=cpy

- Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

It's funny, but when you read a newspaper headline like this:

Tierney to introduce gun safety bill

You really have no idea what's coming. Maybe it has to do with registration. Maybe it's a ban. Maybe it's an ammo limit or a restriction on "assault mags" or some other illiterate nonsense. You honestly can't tell. You can be certain though that it will almost never actually involve anything regarding gun safety. That's because the 'disarm America' lobby calls everything that infringes on the second amendment a 'gun safety' bill.

The 'sound bite' has been focus group tested, and they're simply too stupid to try anything else.

As I've said a million times, this technology DOES NOT EXIST, and it won't exist in any meaningful way, for the foreseeable future. I for one won't embrace it until they begin issuing them to cops and soldiers.

But a silly little thing like reality shouldn't have to hold back the continual march to a liberal paradise on earth right? It's nice to see that other states have legislators as dim as ours in NJ. It satisfies my urge to kill Boris' donkey.

- Tough Guys

From the DailyMail:

Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views

- Weaker men more likely to support welfare state and wealth redistribution
- Link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in our ancestors
- Strength was a proxy for ability to defend or acquire resources
- There is no link between women's physical strength and political views

I'm 6 foot 2, 183lbs. - almost exactly the size and shape of the president. And although I think I'm probably stronger than I look, I don't think I'm particularly strong over all. On a good day I'd say I'm about average.

Ikaika seems pretty tough (in a sturdy Sicilian sort of way) - maybe 1 std above the mean tops, and Frith is (I suspect) very close to the mean in both size and strength.

So with this small sample size I'd say they are full of it. For whatever that's worth.

- Alienating His Base

The Obama administration has done something that it surely now regrets. In it's zeal to make national politics look more like Chicago politics, it's begun attacking everyone - including it's most reliable demographic, journalists.

Mark Steyn calls the Whitehouse press corps, the 'court eunuchs' of the Obama administration. I love that term. What better way to describe their complicity in the Obama agenda than as a bunch of 'less than men'. Women have their own political casus belli - different than men but no less valid. But eunuchs are detached from the world they live in, which lets them at least claim objectivity.

I don't think that says quite enough about how journalists always see themselves as the most important cog in any machine, but it's part way there. And their lack of 'stake in the game' makes them guilty of a level of vanity that few other industries manifest.

As an example, business journalists (particularly liberal business journalists) call me and my hedge fund brethren a bunch of arrogant jerks because we think we know more about markets than they do. For myself, I may be an arrogant jerk for other reasons, but I don't think that one qualifies me. In my mind I provide a service - the value of which will be determined by the people who hire me to perform it. Most of my peers (that I've discussed it with) feel pretty much the same way.

But journalists have no such objective standard. In fact, they shun such metrics. They see themselves as the guardian priests of social justice. They mostly delude only themsevles, but it's still the claim they make. Which is the main reason I found this slate piece so incredibly galling:

How Journalists Can Protect Themselves From the U.S. Government

It seems to me the easiest way for journalists to protect themselves would be to curl their tail up between their legs and do as their masters in the Democrat party command. Barak Obama never got mad at anyone for supporting his every move. Sure you'll be nothing more than the highest class of slave, but that's the role he has in mind for all of us. At least you'll all be in the front of the line right?

The IRS scandal is getting some notice because someone is going to jail over it. Benghazi is even getting some mileage now because the journalists look too stupid if they continue to ignore it in light of the evidence. But the AP scandal is getting top billing because Obama attacked his core constituency.

They are a shallow, vain, cowardly, self deluding constituency, that always thinks their the smartest people in any room - absent any objective evidence to support it. And that's what makes them so dangerous to someone like Obama. They have no first principles to ground them other than their own ego's. So when they turn on him fully, they will do so with a genuine vengeance.

I don't think we've seen the top of that market yet.

The IRS and the Two Legged Cat

I have wondered out loud here whether I am a kook.  Thanks to Charles C.W. Cooke I am buoyed by the quote, “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

In my post election deconstruction, I seized upon how the Obama campaign crowed that they had enough data on Ohio voters to take, "deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment." It was one of those moments where what I was seeing just didn't match up with how somebody with an agenda was describing it. I said then that such data, "must have been harvested from far deeper resources than an amalgam of voting lists and donor emails."

Now comes little stories like this, where the IRS demanded a list of everyone the organization had trained, or planned to train - all of whom would be students in college and high school. I understand how the parties are driving the media dialog here. The right is thumping the idea that the IRS directly oppressed organizations with "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names. This is one technique a group can use to keep a story in the news cycle.  Conflict drives news sales. But this dialectic lens keeps you focused upon parts of the story while keeping others unseen.

Much like the Google Purges seem now to be a rear guard action to keep information about Benghazi out in the a sea made of nondisclosure agreements of ruined generals, I believe there is more to this IRS story than we are now seeing. I don't know how yet.  I just have the same feeling I get when I look at incomplete parts of a big picture - like the one above that someone found on Google Earth.

- The IRS Purges Continue

You know what this reminds me of? The purges after the French revolution. The revolutionaries have won and now they have to guillotine those who show an insufficient degree of faith in the new regime.

To liberals, Obama's election was just like that - the long awaited triumph of liberalism over the evil of conservatives. Apply a little Chicago politics, and the rest (as they say) is histoire.