Kerry's Rising Star
"I say to you tonight: A new day is on the way," John Kerry told a crowd of cheering supporters last night in West Virginia. This is another example of Kerry's sophisticated, nuanced approach to the world, which makes him so popular among intellectuals and Frenchmen.
The brainy Massachusetts Democrat clearly has thought through what statisticians call the "sunrise problem." One can make estimates and issue pronouncements with high degrees of certainty, as the Rev. Thomas Bayes illustrated in his classic paper, "An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances." From the appendix by editor Richard Price (link in PDF, passage begins on page 18):
Let us imagine to ourselves the case of a person just brought forth into this world, and left to collect from his observations the order and course of events what powers an causes take place in it. The Sun would, probably, be the first object that would engage his attention; but after losing it the first night he would be entirely ignorant whether he should ever see it again. He would therefore be in the condition of a person making a first experiment about an event entirely unknown to him. But let him see a second appearance or one return of the Sun, and an expectation would be raised in him of a second return, and he might know that there was an odds of 3 to 1 for some probability of this. This odds would increase, as before represented, with the number of returns to which he was witness. But no finite number of returns would be sufficient to produce absolute or physical certainty.
The probability that one can "say to you tonight" that "a new day is on the way" is (x+1)/(y+2), where x is the number of observed sunrises and y is the number of days. Kerry was born on Dec. 11, 1943, and he announced his prediction of a new day 22,011 days later. Thus he spoke with 99.995457% certainty when he predicted that a new day was on the way--as indeed it turned out to be. (As we write, it's overcast where we are, but there's no doubt it's daytime.) With that level of confidence, even Kerry can take a clear position.
This is the kind of high-powered intellect John Kerry would bring to the White House. And President Bush? Well, as the New York Times sniffed in an editorial last September, "it is worrisome when one of the most incurious men ever to occupy the White House takes pains to insist that he gets his information on what the world is saying only in predigested bits from his appointees." Not like Kerry, who has carefully analyzed his personal observations of thousands of sunrises, including more than 100 in Vietnam.
Then again, Bush's supporters might counter that for their man, y>>1. Or, to put it in terms Joe Six-Pack can understand, he wasn't born yesterday.
Making Flippy Floppy
"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."--John Kerry on funding the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, quoted in the Boston Globe, March 17
If Only He'd Shut Up, He Could Get His Message Out
"Kerry Comment Detracts From Message"--headline, Associated Press, March 17
He Served Where?
John Kerry is promising to be a "veteran's veteran," according to a headline in USA Today. We're not quite sure what that means or what it has to do with being president, but we did learn one thing from the article: Kerry served in Vietnam. But USA Today buries its lead, not mentioning the Vietnam revelation until the seventh paragraph of the story. Isn't it just like the liberal media to try to downplay the Democrat's involvement in an unpopular war?
Meanwhile, blogger Steve Sturm doesn't believe Kerry's story, which we noted yesterday, about his pet dog in Vietnam. "One day as our swiftboat was heading up a river, a mine exploded hard under our boat," Kerry claimed. The crewmen discovered the mutt was "MIA," but it turned out to have been "catapulted from the deck of our boat and landed confused, but unhurt, on the deck of another boat in our patrol." Here's Sturm:
Kerry's boat was "heading up a river," which means the boat was moving. I assume Naval doctrine in those days called for ships to maintain a minimum distance from one another in order to minimize damage and casualties in the event one ship draws hostile fire, hits a mine, etc. How far away from Kerry's boat was this other boat--20 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards? Even if they weren't strictly adhering to doctrine, there ought to have been some separation; there's no reason I can think why one boat would be running upriver with another boat tied to its stern.
So, we have Kerry claiming that his ship hit a mine that generated enough explosive energy to propel this dog . . . some 40 yards or so through the air, without hurting the dog? Unlikely.
Now, what are the odds of the dog being catapulted from Kerry's moving boat and landing on another moving boat? It must have been the perfect combination of launch angle, distance, explosive force, trajectory and the like for that to have happened. I know for a fact that this is no easy thing to do: think how hard it is to win that silly carnival frog game--and that's from a stationary platform. Maybe this happens in the movies, but not in real life. Wait a minute, in the remake of Starsky & Hutch, they tried launching a car into the air trying to land it on a moving boat. They failed miserably. So, I take it back, it doesn't even happen in the movies.
And, Kerry's account refers only to "picking ourselves up" after the explosion. There's an explosion so forceful that it launches the dog into near earth orbit and all Kerry and his crew have to do is "pick themselves up"? Again, I'm no physics major, but wouldn't it reasonable to think that an explosion with that much force wouldn't have seriously damaged the boat? What about his crew--granted they're all likely to have been bigger than the dog, and perhaps better able to absorb the shock, but none of them were hurt, knocked out, knocked overboard?
Is this a case of the tale wagging the dog? Stay tuned. |
