Is "Crazy" Rick Perry Pinky or the Brain?

Although it's only August of the year before the 2012 presidential elections, the air is, as they say, heating up.  I fear from the rhetoric it's going to be a particularly nasty campaign, which given the way 2010 went, is saying a lot.

The governor of Texas, the unctuous Rick Perry, has apparently tossed his ten-gallon hat into the ring, and I have to say, I am shocked by the reaction of the Democratic party noise machine to the announcement.

Perry is behind at least a couple of other candidates in the GoP (most notably, the ideologically pliant Mitt Romney), so it's odd that the mouthpieces are focusing on him; more to the point, not so much that they are focusing on Perry, but how they are focusing.

In reading political blogs, editorials in mainstream newspapers, and listening to broadcast and cable news, the apparent meme that is going to be deployed against Rick Perry is not that he's done a bad job in Texas, or that his performance is somehow disqualifying, or that he lacks experience.  Or even, for that matter, that the current president deserves to be re-elected because he's done such a bang-up job.

No; what has been said, over and over again, is that Perry is not wrong in his thinking, but that he is "crazy."

Several friends and peers on social media have picked this up and run with it.  One friend actually wrote that Rick Perry is "bat shit crazy."

"Bat shit crazy?"  That's not something I've ever seen in the DSM-IV manual, a book that I use in my job in neuroscience research frequently.

What exactly has Rick Perry done to provoke this diagnosis?  Well, among other things, he proposes to repeal the 16th and 17th amendments.  The former, of course, empowered the federal government to levy income taxes; the latter took the election of senators from the hands of state legislatures and provided for direct elections by the people. In the words of the writer, Perry is crazy because he wants to "bake his personal opinions and bias into the Constitution."

Now, setting aside the absolute and frank irony that "baking his opinions" into the constitution here is in fact overturning amendments that themselves were the result of a previous person's "baking his opinions" into the Constitution, I don't see how a person, seeing an obvious problem, proposing to follow the laws set out by the framers to alter the Constitution as it was meant to be amended is "crazy."

Perry may be wrong; but it apparently is no longer enough to argue that the opposition is simply wrong.  They are insane.  They are wild-eyed, bigoted lunatics sort of like cartoon characters Pinky and the Brain.

Governor Rick Perry, Wild and Crazy Guy

This particular line is being used not just on Rick Perry, but other Republicans (Michelle Bachmann recently appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in a particular example of extreme yellow journalism, in a photo plainly chosen to fit the theme that she, like Perry, is simply as mad as a March hare.)

I expect we're going to be treated to this for the next 15 months - the GoP candidates and their solutions are not wrong per se, but just too nutty to even consider.  We're going to hear over and over how they are "anti-science" (whatever that means), irrational, crazy, raving lunatics.  We'll hear about how they are climate-change "deniers" (a very carefully chosen and market-researched term to parallel the lunatic fringe who deny the Holocaust).  That they believe in "intelligent design," and reject "evolution," which is a truly bizarre attack, given that a President's belief in the origin of the species seems to me to have nothing to do with the powers he or she has as the chief executive.

To those who have studied history, it is worthwhile to recollect that, during the Soviet era, "enemies of the state" were often put away based upon phony charges of insanity.  Rather than sending political dissidents off to prison, they were "diagnosed" as crazy (not sure how you translate "bat shit crazy" into Russian) and put into mental hospitals.

You see - if you "denied" that the status quo wisdom being offered by The Party was the right course, well, that was ipso facto evidence that you must be out of your tree.

I reckon in the 2012, the Democrats will rely on this line not because they are communists (itself a laughable attack one hears from the right), but because they frankly have nothing else to say.

President Obama can hardly run for re-election based on how well he has handled the country.  He cannot point to Texas, which according to an analysis of the data here show the state to have stood apart from the employment collapse of the rest of the country and argue how that disqualifies Governor Perry.  He could try to argue that the governor doesn't really affect job creation, but then the whole argument propping up his tax and spend agenda of never-ending stimulus collapses.

So what's left then is to smear Perry with a lot of emotional, if dubious, attacks of the sort we are now seeing.

Swing and a Miss

The Philadelphia Phillies seem well on their way to another NL East title, largely due to an incredible pitching staff.  (Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Roy Oswalt).  Their number four starter in his career averages a 16-9 record, with a 3.21 ERA.

That is damned impressive.  One could debate whether there has been a better staff in the past to years (Atlanta, 1995? Maddux, Smoltz, Glavine, Avery.  The 1971 Orioles boasted four twenty-game winners, though not sure Pat Dobson is the equal of Oswalt.)

What I find most interesting though, is the Phils' set-up man and lefty specialist, Antonio Bastardo.  Aside from the obvious intrigue of his unfortunate sur-name, Bastardo has quietly racked up some unbelievable stats this year.

To wit: in his 50 appearances, covering 46 innings, Bastardo has allowed 18 hits.

That's not a mis-print.  18 hits in 46 innings.

That figure works out to 3.5 hits per nine innings.  The league is hitting .118 this season against him.

To put it into context, Nolan Ryan, the owner of six career no-hitters, in his best season (1972) allowed 166 hits in 284 innings, a rate of 5.26.  Ryan allowed fifty per cent more hits per nine innings.  Oh, and he also tossed in 157 bases on balls, so Ryan - in a great season - allowed 323 baserunners in his 284 innings.

Bastardo has walked 16, so he has allowed 34 baserunners in 48 innings.

Tom Henke was another guy who could come in and simply blow hitters away.  In his best season (1987), The Terminator gave up 62 hits in 94 innings, or 5.94 per nine innings.  Henke walked 25, so his runners per nine innings was better than Ryan's (87 runners in 94 innings), but again, not close to the numbers Bastardo has put up.

And Henke, as a relief pitcher for a team that collapsed, in an epic fashion, received MVP support for his efforts.


It's a relatively small sample size, of course, but the almost complete failure of National League hitters to hit Bastardo is truly remarkable; it's sufficiently low that I wonder, has there ever been a guy who put up seasonal figures like that, tossing a minimum number of innings.

Paul Meier, RIP

Chances are pretty good you've never heard of Paul Meier.  But if you've taken an FDA-approved medication, or purchased life insurance, your life has been affected in a profound way by his work.

This weekend, read the announcement of the passing Dr Meier, who was one of the true giants of mathematical statistics.  In my opinion, his work with Edward L Kaplan (put the two names together, and perhaps if you've trained in stats or clinical research, you may be closer to recognition) has had more impact on clinical research than any other statistician, and perhaps more than any clinician of any other scientific discipline.

In 1958, Drs Kaplan and Meier submitted to the Journal of the American Statistical Association a manuscript titled "Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations," in which a method for estimating life expectancy and mortality from data including missing or censored observations was outlined.

It's safe to say that there is almost no pharamacological research programme today that does not involve Kaplan-Meier curves.  From cancer survival to outcomes of heart surgery, this single paper is pretty close to fundamental in clinical trial design.

That same year, Dr Meier also authored a paper called "Clinical evaluation of new drugs," which was published in the journal Annual Review of Medicine, in which he argued that randomised controlled trials (RCTs) were essential in establishing the safety and efficacy of new medicines.

It's hard to fathom nowadays that there actually was an argument for assigning to random placebo and treatment arms patients to assess the effectiveness of a potential treatment, but it was quite controversial at the time.

Modern medical research is based upon the RCT, and countless lives have been saved/improved as a result.

RIP.

Skin in the Game

In the recent roiling of the nation over the ludicrous deficits we face, I came across the following commentary by John Derbyshire at National Review.

The notion that we should all have some “skin in the game” by paying federal income taxes strikes me as profoundly un-conservative, and to be resisted. We have “skin in the game” by virtue of being U.S. citizens. The nation’s misfortunes are our misfortunes. I have never heard that being American requires payment of an annual fee, like a golf club membership.

Mr Derbyshire's post is, as usual, provocative.  He's got a mathematical background, so I am reminded of one of the controversies of the 20th century in mathematics - the so-called "axiom of choice."  To make a long story somewhat less boring, arguments in mathematics are more or less soluble once one accepts a set of axioms from which to begin.

Here, the problem inherent is that Mr Derbyshire assumes as an axiom that the income tax need not exist.  In fact, the income tax is, I would think, a permanent element of our society.  If we could do away with the income tax, I think his argument makes sense.

But given that the income tax exists, and will continue to exist, his argument I think collapses.  A system where 50% plus one of the population do not pay any visible income tax,  where a sizeable chunk get government "services," and where we swim in waters where the message of tax-funded assistance is "compassionate" is ambient - well, such a system is fundamentally ultimately unsustainable.

In economic terms, the perceived demand for something without a perceptible cost is unbounded.  Unlimited.  The comments of the Georgia governor on his state's ratification of the 16th Amendment are instructive:

When asked why his state legislature had ratified, he replied that it was a matter of no importance to Georgians, since nobody in the state made enough to qualify for the income tax.

Thus the real question barking around the edges of Mr Derbyshire's column are, "What limit is there to the tax rates on the minority of citizens who pay them for ever more government freebies?  What do I care if someone else has to pay 35, or 50, or even 90 per cent of his income in taxes if some "essential" programme is at stake."

It's really the root of the divide and rule messages we hear constantly from Mr Obama and his enablers at MSNBC and the New York Times that he ought to let the tax breaks "for the rich" expire to help reduce the deficit, when their own data show that the relative share of the deficit that tax cuts for the $250,000+/$250,000- segments represent are $700BB and $3,100BB.

Those numbers were printed in the Sunday Times this past week in an editorial.  The "middle class" share of the hated "Bush Tax cuts" is more than 80%

It's not about "deficit reduction" at all.  It's about pure power politics.  Period.

Mr Derbyshire is right philosophically that citizenship should not be measured by whether one has economic "skin in the game."  But unfortunately, reality intrudes, and thus precisely that is necessary to keep the nation sustainable.

Incredible Stat of the Day

The Blue Jays have used a pretty motley crew at 3B this season: Edwin Encarnacion (initially, the regular, but his glove work was so bad, it lead people to believe "Encarnacion" must be Spanish for "throwing error.") and Jayson Nix. Nix quickly proved he could neither field nor hit, with a .169 BA, and OPS of .554.

Not quite panicking, RF Jose Bautista has been shifted to the hot corner.

Incredibly, it's NOT the worst in the league. Chone Figgins, before he was benched, put up a .186 BA, and .234 (!!!) slugging pct. He has an incredible OPS of .481.

Green and Red: Not Just for Christmas Anymore

Came across this article in a recent New York Times edition, titled as "Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy."  The alpha and omega of the story is that many urban governments in Europe are intentionally adopting policies designed to make it difficult to use a car within their cities.  Apparently, it's part of a conscious effort to discourage the use of cars and steer people towards public transit, walking, and/or bicycle use.

It's all ostensibly part of the so-called green agenda, you see.

European Union countries probably cannot meet a commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions unless they curb driving. The United States never ratified that pact.

Now, whilst I tend to be pretty right-wing in much of my politics, I here put some distance between myself and many of my fellow-travellers, in that I accept the science that indicates that climate change is real, and that there is a very, very good chance that human activity is at the least a significant factor.

I believe that the goal of reducing pollution is a good one, and I support improving the quality of life in our cities.  People should make the effort to walk more for their own health, and the more people on buses, trains, and other public transport, generally, the better.

But this story indicates to me a couple of things.

First, the "green movement" in no small part mixes significant amounts of red into the tint; and by that, I mean much of what it is attempting to accomplish is less about the environment, and more about giving government more control over our choices and behaviour.

As he stood watching a few cars inch through a mass of bicycles and pedestrians, (Zurich's) city’s chief traffic planner, Andy Fellmann, smiled. “Driving is a stop-and-go experience,” he said. “That’s what we like! Our goal is to reconquer public space for pedestrians, not to make it easy for drivers.”

In the San Francisco Bay area, the city of Menlo Park has for decades used similar thinking to hobble traffic flow and block development.

Second, I live near New York City, where automobile transport is essentially impossible, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying for some time to implement "congestion pricing" to drive up the cost of bringing a car into Manhattan (note: it's ONLY Manhattan, and ONLY upon entering Manhattan, so if you live in an expensive converted loft in TriBeCa, the toll would not apply to you).  We also recently returned from London, where just such a scheme already exists.

I wonder if there is a somewhat subtle subtext here about turning urban centres such as Central London or Manhattan into sorts of Disneylands for self-selected urbane elites.

Put simply, as it becomes increasingly difficult to get into and around city centres (whether to work, shop, visit a cultural attraction), there will be increasing pressure on the housing stock in or near these attractions.  I am sure that there are many, many people who would LOVE to ride a bicycle to their jobs in lower Manhattan or walk around shopping in Knightsbridge.  If you happen to be Leonardo Di Caprio and can afford to live in TriBeCa, that's an option.  If you're a mid-level manager, it's not.

No; you will have to ride two hours from your affordable suburban home.

Walkable cities is a terrific idea in theory.  But far too often, putatively "enviromental" restrictions such as zoning laws are pushed quietly behind the scenes by people who own land and property that will be made more valuable.  It's a sort of perverse win-win: the government gets more control.  The connected get more money.  And the elite get to filter out the people from their urban playgrounds whom they deem as undesirable.

All for the good "of the planet," of course.

300: A Good Batting Average

The oddball season for the Toronto Blue Jays continues.  I wrote in this post a few weeks ago that the Blue Jays were (at the time) 3-13 during day games, and 12-6 at night.

The Jays yesterday lost their fourth straight in the final game of a three game sweep in Atlanta (by the Braves).  It was, no surprise, a day game.  (As an aside, the Blue Jays amassed a total of 2, 5, and 5 hits, a 12 for 93 performance in the series; that's a nice .129 batting average, prompting number one starter Ricky Romero to pop off).

The Jays are now 9-21 during day games.  That's a .300 winning percentage, not bad for a batting average, but would, over the course of a 162 game season, approach the record for the worst in modern history.

Toronto continues to essentially appear to be two different teams between day and night, posting a 27-18 record during night games (which includes two of the three losses in Atlanta).  That computes as a .600 winning percentage.

If the Sunlight Blue Jays were to compete in a division with the Moonlight Jays, the standings would look like this:

                  W    L     PCT   GB
Moonlight    27 - 18 (.600)    --
Sunlight        9 - 21 (.300)   10.5

Over the course of two hypothetical 162 game seasonS, the Moonies would finish with a 97-65 record, perhaps competing for the AL East crown.  The daytime bunch would finish with a 48-114 record, a shocking 49 games behind.

Neither team would hit with runners in scoring position, so at least that would remain stable.

Stanley Cup to Remain Hostage in US

Boston blanked Vancouver last night, 4-0, to wrap up the Stanley Cup and deny its return to Canada for at least another year.  Though it's Boston (ick), at the least, this year it was one of the Original Six, and not a team in, say, South Florida who got to hoist the Cup this year.  Still, as a Canadian, it was a sad outcome.

Some reflections on the playoffs:

1. The seven game series really was among the most lop-sided ever.  Vancouver won its three games 1-0, 3-2 (OT), and 1-0.  Three wins by a total of three goals, with one of the games ending in regulation at a tie.  The Bruins won their four games 8-1, 4-0, 5-2, and 4-0.  That adds up to a 21-3 goal differential.  It really wasn't close, and Tim Thomas was remarkable.
   
2. It was ironic that, on the day of Game 7, an ESPN headline reported that the Boston PD were adding additional police offers in anticipation of potential trouble should the Bruins win and the Boston revellers get out of control.  History was on their side, given the violence that followed the Red Sox World Series titles in 2004 and 2007, which resulted in the killing of a student (2004) and numerous fires and overturned vehicles (2007).  This year, it was the fans in Vancouver who burned cars, smashed windows, and looted, perhaps undermining the generally accepted wisdom of Canadians as orderly and polite.
   
3. It was sort of a nice touch to see Marc Recchi get one more championship and get to retire on a high note.  Recchi is older than I am by a couple of years, and I honestly had thought he had hung up his skates already.  My five year old has this winter started to learn to play (which at this point, largely means learning how to skate around with a stick, and to keep his focus on the puck and not randomly wobble around the ice), and I had told him about "The Wrecking Ball," a nickname that has obvious appeal to a five year old boy.  Of course, in the world of five year old hockey, they're all more or less "Wrecking Balls" on the ice - meaning that one will crash into the rest, usually clustered in front of the goal, and knock the lot over like an old building that is being razed.
   
4. The 2010-2011 season marks the 44th consecutive year that the Maple Leafs have not appeared in the Cup finals, which is by far the longest streak in the NHL.  Better still, the team did not even make the playoffs, extending that streak to 7 seasons.  The Leafs' last appearance in the Cup finals was the year my parents got married (1967)....

A Statistician Raises the White Flag

I love baseball.  I enjoy numbers.  I make my living with mathematics.

So naturally, combining the three seems a natural interest.  But there is an old saw that goes something to the effect of the following apocryphal story:

Two Hollywood producers are brainstorming over a new movie idea.  One says to the other, "Hey; everyone likes Abe Lincoln.  Everyone likes dogs.  Everyone is interested is fascinated by movies about doctors.  So let's make a movie about Abe Lincoln's doctor's dog."

But like the story above, the three often make for a nauseating combination.  And as a statistician who watches baseball games wherein we are inundated with cobbled-together and often meaningless meta-statistics, I raise the white flag.

Enough.  No more stats about how a hitter hit against a pitcher in a certain count in a certain inning, in road games, during a full moon.

Last night, the Toronto Blue Jays beat Baltimore, 6-5 in 11 innings.  (As an aside, thank God for the Baltimore Orioles, who year in, year out can be counted on to provide soft-landing cushion to keep the Jays out of the AL East cellar).  The game ended when Adam Lind hit a homer to lead off the 11th.

Sure enough; the ESPN laughing boys chattered about how Lind had hit a "walk off home run" to end the game.  The ubiquitous use of cliches like this are chronicled in a rant here about LeBron James over at National Review, but needless to say, this term (like many others) is well past its sell-by date.

But the folks at ESPN are not satisfied just to bore us to death with idiotic cliches like "Walk Off" this, that, or the other, the headline today for the game blared:

"Lind Ties Jays Record."

Hmmmm... The team is in the midst of its annual battle with mediocrity, so that's not the likely "record" they speak of.  Lind's homer was his 12th of the season, and sad as the team has been of late, that's not close to any sort of significance.

So, what 'record' did he tie, exactly?

Well, it's the third "walk off" homer of his career.

Boy, I wish I had been at the game and saved the ticket stub for posterity.  I could show my grandson in 40 years the evidence that I had been in attendance the night Adam Lind tied the team record for "walk off home runs."

It's a 'record' he now shares with Jesse Barfield, George Bell, Joe Carter, Carlos Delgado, and Vernon Wells.

I wonder if Cooperstown want the ball?

Dr Strangeglove: The 2011 Remake

Toronto beat the Yankees last night at Yankee Stadium to even the season series at three and three.  It was an unremarkable game, really; final score 7-3.

That's not to say it was totally uneventful.  Toronto third baseman Edwin Encarnacion (I don't speak Spanish, but it looks remarkably like a translation of "Second Coming of Butch Hobson") made his 11th error, booting a ground ball.

Encarnacion has split his time between third and first base, starting 16 games at the hot corner.  In those 16 games, he's committed eight errors.  For those whose maths skills are roughly the equivalent of E-squared's fielding skills, that's an error every other game, a remarkable feat.  The most errors committed at third in the past 100 years is 43, a record that EE would not only break over a full season, but bury the pieces.

How bad is EE's glovework?

ESPN had a list of other Strangegloves who have played third (e.g., Butch Hobson, who made the aforementioned 43 miscues), and their abysmal fielding percentages were generally between .850 and .899.

It's awful to have a FA below .900 (meaning you boot one of every ten plays).

Encarnacion's fielding average this hear is below .800 (.784).  This means that one of every five balls hit to Encarnacion results in an error.

That's not particularly good for someone playing in Pony League.

Oh - for good measure, E-squared has made three errors in 60 innings of play at first base.