CT Blue

Here’s some fun reading. An allegedly scientific, or at least quasi-scientific study of the predictions of pundits and others in the national eye. According to the study, liberals are far more likely to be accurate prognosticators than their conservative brethren, and lawyers are less likely than others to get it right.

Paul Krugman comes out way on top, and deservedly so. Not only is he almost always right, but his predictions are often made months in advance, so it’s not like he is predicting the obvious.

The study, on the whole, I fear, must be taken with a massive grain of salt. While the discussions of individual pundits point out that some predictions are slam dunks, the study itself, so far as I can see, does not factor in the obviousness of any particular prediction. If a pundit predicts that the sun will rise tomorrow, and it does, it appears that pundit gets a point. As to the lawyer factor, in which I have an obvious personal interest…well, there are lawyers and there are lawyers. The subset of pundits being examined does not necessarily include the most astute among us, so while it may be true that lawyer pundits who make it to Fox are not good at making predictions, it does not follow that one can say the same about lawyers as a class.

Still, fun reading, and one really can’t argue with the other finding-that liberals are right more often than conservatives. Conservatives live in a fact free present, so it’s not surprising that their futures are also fact free. It’s also the case that we need more of this. Every pundit on television should be given a report card now and then, and perhaps their grades should be disclosed each time they get to open their mouth on the television.

Well, I’m back from vacation and it’s time to inflict more punditry into the world. As I have nothing to say about royal weddings, I will ease back into harness by mounting an old hobby horse, in fact somewhat along the lines of a post of a few days ago where I noted the mysterious fact that Pat Robertson and his ilk have not discerned the hand of the Lord in the devastation in the deep red and holy state of Alabama.

My wife pointed this article in the Day out to me, knowing it would set me off, which it did. She found it among the piles of old newspapers awaiting us on our return, but its still timely, even though it relates to last weeks visitation, as distinct from that of a few days ago. I couldn’t find the article on the Day’s web site, but the article I’ve linked to is the same AP article. In the Day, the lead blares out, in large type “‘Grace of God’ cited for why no one died in tornado”, not, as one might expect, “Delusional fools thank alleged author of destruction for not killing them”. The sub-lead, in smaller type, almost as if in parentheses: “Weather warning also helped save lives in Missouri.” (Emphasis added).

How do we know that God was looking after his beloved children? Because a minister from a whack-job Church and an idiot mayor say so.

Now, at face value this adds some weight to my argument that God must have really had it in for the people of Alabama, as he apparently withheld his loving grace from them, since the added death to destruction. But I will not belabor that point. Let us instead look at what God, in his solicitude, poured forth upon his favored people of Missouri:

Entire subdivisions were destroyed. Cars were tossed about like toys, roofs tossed hundreds of yards and 100-year-old trees sucked out by the roots.

County officials said during a news conference Sunday that 2,700 buildings were damaged. Gov. Jay Nixon said Saturday that up to 100 were uninhabitable. The damage clearly will cost millions of dollars to repair, but a more precise estimate was unavailable Sunday.

The twister destroyed two of the homes John Stein owns on a street in the city of Berkeley, and damaged five others. “Everything you’d find in a war zone except the bodies,” Stein said.

Residents in nine communities and unincorporated parts of St. Louis County were still sorting through the rubble Sunday. Ameren Corp. had about 2,000 workers seeking to restore outages that affected 47,000 homes and businesses immediately after the storm. The utility said 18,300 were still without electricity on Sunday, and it could be several days before all power is restored.

It’s clear from the article that the reason no one died is that government-you know, those bureaucrats and other slimeballs with which we’re afflicted-worked. People were warned, with-can you believe it- real warnings that they could understand, not the kind that God tends to give, that you can only understand in retrospect. Yet, according to the Day’s editors (they write the leads for the AP articles they print) the people who actually prevented all those deaths placed an also ran second to the loving and merciful god who chose to wreak all that destruction in the first place.

I know there are people who believe this garbage, but it has always been my understanding that it’s the job of a newspaper to report facts. It’s a fact that people were warned about the hurricane. It is not a fact that anyone can prove that God in his mercy decided to wreak senseless destruction on thousands of people without killing one of them, an act which, by the way, had it been committed by a mere mortal would have constituted a crime against humanity. The fact that people believe such things might be an appropriate subject in an article about the prevalence of mental illness, but it has no place in a report on the aftermath of a devastating storm.