Pun Salad

I've mentioned the late Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, numerous times over the years. He may be gone, but his relevance never seems to fade. The motto for his publication was a quote from Ben Jonson:

“Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous.”

Shorn of sexism, that was brought to mind via this Facebook entry:

Vernon Smith updates Ben Jonson more succinctly.

Also of note:

• Watch out, she's packing. We counted 77 occurrences of "small business" in Kamala's "New Way Forward for the Middle Class" campaign document. Now comes Will Swaim to claim her affection is somewhat kinky: Kamala Harris Loves Small Business to Death. As it turns out, there's a variety of small business that she has a history of wanting to destroy:

  Take freelancing, which often requires a fairly universal type of start-up capital: human consciousness, a body with a brain, expertise, entrepreneurial energy, and an ability to work with others. You and I might call this capital the human person. Much of this generally comes with the privilege of having been born. Following California’s lead, however, earlier this year, the Biden-Harris Department of Labor changed federal rules to limit freelancing. It’s still pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would nearly ban the practice. The PRO Act remains stalled in Congress, but Harris has made the passage of the bill a key part of her campaign.

  Julie Su, the White House’s acting secretary of labor, is running point on the effort to kill independent contracting — just as she did in California. Back then, serving as the state’s secretary of labor, Su was responsible for implementing the disastrous anti-freelancer law known as Assembly Bill 5. A.B. 5 crushed hundreds of thousands of California business owners — those who operate as independent contractors as well as those who employ or otherwise rely on them. Now, Biden, Harris, and Su are working overtime to impose that malignant policy on every corner of the republic.

  For some reason, Oprah failed to ask her about that.

• Polling, how does it work? Well, it's tricky, and nobody knows that better than Nate Silver. He (with co-author Eli McKown-Dawson) recently asked Which polls are biased toward Harris or Trump?

  We’re 39 days out from the election and people are starting to freak out about the polls — and unskew them using some less-than-rigorous methods. Could a bad poll for your favorite candidate just come down to sampling variation? Nope, the poll must be broken because recalled 2020 vote among Hispanic women with college degrees who live in rural areas and make more than $100,000 a year looks weird. Needless to say, you shouldn’t pay attention to this stuff.

  Some election watchers also have strong opinions about how election forecasts weight each poll. A common critique of the Silver Bulletin model goes something like this: “poll X has more influence on the model than poll Y, but I think poll Y is better than poll X. Therefore, the model is bad and/or wrong.” Mostly this reasoning is used by people who are upset because we’re bearish on their favored candidate, but it’s sometimes used to justify outright conspiracy theories.

  Silver and McKown-Dawson display the "house effect adjustments" they use for each pollster, either biased blue or red. Interesting!

  And, yep, the UNH Survey Center is in the list, with a 0.4 percentage point bias for Harris. I assume based on past results.