Politblogo

We'll meet again

Hello.  I haven't posted here in a couple of weeks, but I've been posting comments to blogs and boards.  However, I'm going to Asia for the next three weeks, and I don't know what Internet access I'll have.  I might, I might not.  So if you're wondering where I am, I'm away.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for them?

I don't get it. In the general case, most of those people moved there willingly and became willingly complicit in what the Israeli media euphemistically calls "creating facts on the ground."  This is the most self-indulgent sob story I've seen in Ha'aretz on the subject in a long time, although admittedly I haven't been keeping up with it lately.

I got booktagged

I got tagged by AradhanaD at Leftist Looney Lunchbox.

The instructions:
Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

This was a little difficult.   I had three nearest books, and one of them was a dictionary.  I chose one of the other two.  Here's the quote:

Theorem 6.4 can be quite useful in conjunction with upper bounds on the binomial distribution, such as Lemma 6.1.

A bound on the right tail can be determined similarly.

Corollary 6.5
Consider a sequence of n Bernoulli trials where success occurs with probability p.

The book is the first edition of Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest.  This book should be familiar to anybody who has spent more than a couple of years studying computer science at a university level. It's a giant tome and one of the most useful "theory" books in computer science.  It was a little hard to pick out what was the "fifth sentence" because prior to what I quoted, there were several equations.

The quote comes from chapter 6, "Counting and Probability," which is one of the introductory chapters giving background/remedial mathematics.  (The book is about 1000 pages or so.)  It's basically talking about what happens at the far ends of the so-called "bell curve."

Anyway, I usually don't do this to people, but I'll make an exception: I tag skdadl, Craig, and Violet, since they are all so literate.

Liberal Party dodges a bullet

I'm willing to bet that most of us, especially the Tories among us, only recall a recent and embarassing period of relatively recent Canadian history as though it were a rather surreal dream or nightmare.  Yes: I am indeed talking about the time of Stockwell Day.  It seems so distant and bizarre now, but I remember when newspapers all the way through TV promoted him as enthusiastically as a spammer touting PeNNi ST0X.  From embarassing, obsequious glamour photo shoots to fawning interviews to the grotesque but hardly unusual effusions of Ezra Levant ("stockaholic!"), we were treated to images of this dashing (huh?) sportsmanly conservative, ready to reinvigorate poor old Manning's dead-end party and bring it to the pinnacles of political power.

And not whispered but shouted was the absurdly earnest comparison of Day's obviously forced vigor and playfulness to that of one P. E. Trudeau, as though by wishing loudly enough it would make it so. 

One practically hear the Liberals covering their mouths with their hands and choking while trying to stifle giggles. "Oh please,. oh please," they prayed as quietly as they could, and their dreams came true: he was selected leader of the Reform Party or whatever transparently dishonest nominal variation they had invented at the time.  Then when it came time for an election, the Liberals gleefully opened Warren Kinsella's little cage, and the rest is history.

I basically agree with Kevin's assessment here.  It's bizarre enough that the Liberal Party almost fell into such a transparent trap as is embodied by The Ig.  At least Stockwell Day had a base: wingnutty troglodytes on one side and the more conservative wing of resentment-laden alienated Westerners on the other, as I recall.  Who was Iggy's base?  Were they thinking that Iggy could court the massive pontificating sophist vote? 

The real sign of political emptiness is when you major selling point happens to look like this: "The next politician X!"  It's even more obviously bad when X happens to be PET.  As Day, absurdly, was to be the heir of Trudeau's fun-loving side, so The Ig was supposed to be the heir of Trudeau's intellectual side.  If that's your major selling point, it's a sure sign that you have nothing to offer than a weak comparison to the memory of a dead politician.  And it became painfully obvious when Iggy brought up the Matter of Québec but couldn't follow through.  Too soft, too easy, too empty.  No wonder that there was an "anybody but Iggy" movement, and the Liberal Party should breathe a sigh of relief that it won.

Liberal leadership excitement: I don't get it

My mother just called me from Canada to tell me how exciting the Liberal convention is.  Now, I recently visited Toronto and southwestern Ontario, and I'm a news junkie, and I know that there's a lot of excitement.  And the ProgBlogs site is going wild with pollerific pollishness about it.

But I don't get it.  We have

• a tedious pontificating sophist.
• a failed Ontario premier who sold out principle for power in the deepest and most obvious way.
• a man who is so tainted by the ideology and behaviour of the previous Liberal regimes that he cannot get a majority in his own province.
• a gaggle of no-hope nobodies (some of whom are admittedly well-meaning).

And who is this Ken Dryden guy, and why do I care?  Seriously, is the convention that interesting?  Well, I suppose if you're into horse races...