22 January 2017

Sunday roundup

The claim that 10,000 marched in Helena yesterday must be independently verified. Never trust the crowd size estimates of an event’s organizers. They have a vested interest in the biggest number possible. Even when trying to provide an honest estimate, they may highball the number by making unreasonable assumptions, or by employing dubious metrics and evidence.

As explained by Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic, the size of large crowds can be measured from overhead imagery. Depending on the imaging technology employed, and on-the-ground variables, the width of the error bars for the estimates vary, but the science and art of counting is well established.

Satellite images of the march in Helena may be available. There may be imagery from drones. Law enforcement may have photographed the march from a small aircraft. Perhaps Helena’s news media, which are not going broke, pooled resources to charter a small aircraft from which high resolution images of the crowd were made.

When I cover an event in the Flathead, I hold my camera overhead to shoot a series of overlapping frames that I convert to a panorama for counting. For small events, say just a few hundred, this works well. For very small events, I also count the people I can see. I also ask the organizers for their count, but if the organizers’ count significantly varies from my count, I use my count.

What does “Values unite us, issues divide us,” mean? More and more Democrats — most recently Amanda Curtis and Brian Schweitzer — are using this conclusory phrase, but they define neither values nor issues, and they provide no argument supporting their conclusion. Instead, the phrase is delivered as a universal truth that requires no explanation. To me, however, it’s just psycobabble.

A challenge. I will accept from a Democrat using the phrase an essay of approximately 500–1,000 words explaining what “Values unite us, issues divide us,” means and publish it on Flathead Memo.

Left wing thugs in Seattle threw bricks at police who were protecting everyone’s First Amendment rights. A man with the dubious adornment of a tattoo of a swastika with a red slash through it, a tattoo described as an anti-hate tattoo, was critically shot by another man who thought the tattooed guy was a racist. These violence loving, free speech opposing, leftist fools, are helping Trump make the case for a police state crackdown on political dissent. If the wounded man survives, he’d be smart to have that idiotic tattoo removed.