Wolf’s the Man

I was slightly worried last night about Hillary but Wolf got her through intact. He really didn’t do any of the stupid horserace stuff like Russert. All Hillary needs is an even playing field and she’ll cruise through the primaries to the nomination…so long as the media knows their place.

The Wolf hunts in a pack.

Good Job Teen Wolf!

Update: The AP reminds us of what a badass Hilary is:

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - When the hostages had been released and their
alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of
calm in the face of crisis.

Also being modest I'm sure Hillary swore Glen to secrecy after she snuck in through the back to "negotiate" with the bomber with a gun taped to the back of her pantsuit only to castigate him with voice as cold as Krupp steel sucking the hope of success out of his very soul.

Aww, isn't he just the sweeting thing?

The pitch […] presents him as deeply sensitized to the needs and
aspirations of women, raised by a single mother, “a man comfortable with strong
women in his life,” [..] committed to the issues they care about.

Conlict of Interest

I do want to expound a bit on my objection to the Public Broadcasting public/private funding model.

Imagine one day Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke walks into his office and is like “This job is bull crap! I know I have a charter from the federal government to use all the financial tools at my disposal in an impartial way but I make the same amount as that Citibank-guy-who-golfed-all-day’s executive assistant and I can now only invest in T-bills. I’m going to get sponsored!” He then dons a NASCAR suit and peppers his Fed minutes with Excedrin testimonials as the “Chairman of Headache Relief”.

Ridiculously inappropriate right?



Well this is precisely what NPR has been doing since their financial crisis in 1983; using their government supplied pedestal to hawk other wares; albeit in a manner far less gauche. Instead of acetaminophen and caffeine they compliantly push the agendas of primarily leftist advocacy groups.

These agendas may be perfectly valid just as Excedrin may be the best product for relieving headaches but both should have the same barriers to the marketplace as their alternatives.

The only option to resolve this clear conflict of interest is to either move public broadcasting to 100% public funding or defund entirely.

Defund!

There are many studies like this. Many of them have better methodologies. What makes this one unique is that it comes from the journalism institution journalists respect most.

Mainstream news sources are biased and that’s okay. I believe the market is in the process of sorting this out. However there is one institution that is outside the market. I again come back to the question: Why am I compelled to fund -- with my income taxes – an overtly political organization? Why can’t an angel investor like George Soros take over NPR and make it the slightly more reasonable cousin to Air America listeners want it to be?

UPDATE: Here are the exact findings as they pertain to NPR:

NPR—Morning Edition – more time for the Democrats
Like the media overall, the first 30 minutes NPR’s Morning Edition produced more stories about Democratic candidates than Republicans (41% vs. 24%). What was different was how little negative coverage Democrats received, especially compared with all other media. Stories about a Democratic candidate were more seven times more positive than negative: 41% positive vs. 6% negative. The majority of coverage, 53% of stories, was neutral.
Looking at specific candidates, stories about Barack Obama carried a clearly positive tone two-thirds of the time. Not a single Morning Edition story was negative. Furthermore, 43% of Hillary Clinton’s coverage was positive vs. 14% negative.
Stories about one of the Republican candidates was more evenly split in tone: 30% positive to 20% negative and 50% neutral. Similar to its public broadcasting counterpart, the NewsHour, NPR devoted more attention to lesser-known candidates. Mitt Romney, the candidate running third for the GOP nomination in most national polls, was the most covered Republican figure, tied with Mike Huckabee, a mostly unknown candidate at the time. Often considered the GOP front runner, Rudy Giuliani, only had one story devoted to him and John McCain had none.
NPR was also the one outlet where there was a marked difference between the total amount of airtime vs. total number of stories. While 24% of the campaign stories were about a Republican candidate, just 15% of the total airtime was spent on them. This suggests that stories about the Republican candidates were brief, creating an even greater gap in the total coverage of Republicans and Democrats.

Update: Fox News and NPR are equally biased

By a margin of 33% to 16%, Americans say that CNN has a liberal bias. The nation’s adults say the same about NPR by a 27% to 14% margin.
There is one major exception to the belief that media outlets have a liberal bias—Fox News. Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans say it has a bias that favors conservatives while 15% say it has a liberal bias.
When it comes to delivering news without bias, 37% believe NPR accomplishes that goal. Thirty-six percent (36%) say the same for Fox and 32% believe it’s true of CNN. As noted earlier, just 25% believe the major broadcast networks deliver news in an unbiased manner. Results for other media outlets will be released over the next week.

Mrs. Mohammad Farooz

My Mom has quite a few friends not unlike Mrs. Farooz. I’ve found that by and large they are usually pathetic, wholly unimpressive people that are seemingly driven by nothing other than a poor understanding of feminism and an undesirable hormone situation that belatedly take a misguided but committed stab at finding purpose.

You’ve come a long way baby.

Murdoch vs. Sulzberger

French Still Sucking

Exhibit 1:
- one million French citizens never brush their teeth
- half of all French do not brush their teeth in the evening
- 57% of French children under five have never brushed their teeth
- the average French citizen uses between one and two toothbrushes in a year

Exhibit 2:


I'm at a loss for words. Really

They don’t know how the world works…

“yet tell us how it ought to work”. A quote from Mort Zuckerman, owner and contributor to U.S. News & World Report, The Atlantic and the New York Daily News, about journalists in the July 27 issue of the New Yorker.

It’s this combination of ignorance and arrogance that so irritates me about journalists. There has been no issue that better illustrates this than climate change; an unfathomably complex problem trivialized into good vs. evil by self-righteous idiots. This was in plain view in Newsweek’s last issue which Robert J. Samuelson, a Newsweek contributor, took them to task for.

NEWSWEEK's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story. NEWSWEEK implied, for example, that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn't have lent it respectability. (The company says it knew nothing of the global-warming grant, which involved issues of climate modeling. And its 2006 contribution to the think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was small: $240,000 out of a $28 million budget.)

Exacerbating the problem is that the typical journalist, steeped in obsolete Marxist orthodoxy in college, becomes calcified in this manner of thought when surrounded by those nearly all think the same way. This causes a maddening blinders effect to data that doesn’t support the original narrative.

Take for example this new study from the journal Science:

Abstract

Previous climate model projections of climate change accounted for external forcing from natural and anthropogenic sources but did not attempt to predict internally generated natural variability. We present a new modeling system that predicts both internal variability and externally forced changes and hence forecasts surface temperature with substantially improved skill throughout a decade, both globally and in many regions. Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.

Anyone with an open-minded, fully functioning brain can see that the conclusions of this study are somewhat ambiguous. The study acknowledges that previous models excluded such non-trivial factors such as the Ocean (oops) but produced new better models that suggest that AGW will kick in for real in 2009 – never mind that such claims of better model accuracy get made on a regular basis. Every researcher thinks they’ve figured it out until the model doesn’t fit.


Reuter’s predictable take on the subject.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Global warming is forecast to set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the five following years expected to be hotter than 1998, the warmest year on record, scientists reported on Thursday.

Except that new data that Reuters should have been aware of was available before this article was written that shows that 1998 was not “hottest year on record”. Sloppy work from NASA was discovered which skewed recent temperature data and has been officially corrected.

We’ll never see it reported though. Our self-anointed, under educated fixers of the world have predictable, simplistic narratives to write elsewhere.

It's so sad that things like this have to exist.

No Comment

Tethered for a cause
South Bend -- A 19-year-old college student spent 12 hours chained to her family's porch Saturday as part of a national protest against confining dogs for long periods of time.
Jenny Lawson wore her dog collar from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. as part of a national "Chain Off 2007" event that involved 99 people in 32 states.
Protesters chained themselves to doghouses or in yards, according to Dogs Deserve Better, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that campaigns against chaining or penning dogs for long periods of time.
Lawson, a sophomore at Earlham College in Richmond, said she collected pledges and planned to donate the money to the advocacy group.
"I kind of didn't want to do this at first because I didn't want to seem crazy, but then I realized it's about all I can do for chained dogs right now," she said.
Lawson said friends stopped by to keep her company, and she did allow herself to go inside for bathroom breaks.
"I'm not crazy," she said.

Like a Humanities Discussion

In The Know: Is Our Wealth Hurting Africa's Feelings?


I wish.

900-odd Philipino Prisoners do Thriller

And they're pretty good at it to boot.



Link, via Boing-Boing/PoeTV

Share your playlist!

Wow, two posts in one day!

This is pretty interesting, Boing-Boing noted a beta program by Simplify Media that allows you to share your iTunes tracks or view/listen to a friends music when online. If yer a pal and you're interested, lemme know, I'd be eager to try this out.

Simpsonize yourself

I just found this (via Wired) and it looks pretty amusing. Go to simpsonizeme.com and simply upload a picture of a person's face (according to the article, you should use a hi-ish res straight on head-shot), and voila. I haven't actually tried this, but figured I'd put it out there to see is anyone would.

Empty what is full. Fill what is empty. Scratch where it itches.

If you can, see "Rescue Dawn" by Werner Herzog and featuring Christian Bale. Over the past few weeks I've been re-newing my appreciation for Werner's films and found myself incredibly excited at the idea of seeing him in narrative mode again.

I'm going to post a series of video clips that, with any luck, will clearly demonstrate why I think Werner is an amazing filmmaker/storyteller and general bad-ass.

First, an interview with Bale on Charlie Rose where they discuss Bale's career, Rescue Dawn and Werner.

Antioch College 1852-2008

If ever there was any doubting the expression “don’t let the patients run the asylum” one only has to look to G.L.C.A. member Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH. Like most institutions founded for the greater good it had a noble charter. It was one of the first colleges that codified gender equality for both students and faculty. Also like most institutions created for the greater good its idealism often came at the expense of practicality. The school had chronic enrollment problems and was forced to operate on a shoestring until the middle of the 20th century.

Parasitism always involves a certain degree of opportunism frequently in the form of selecting hosts uniquely weakened or compromised in some way. Being dirt poor with a history of bucking convention made Antioch a perfect host for the post WWII communist academics and their Marxist ideology. Under this banner Antioch was remade into the preeminent source of leftist student radicalism in the country. When investigated by the House Unamerican Activities Committee they responded:

“freedom begins not in suppressing unpopular ideas but in holding all ideas up to the light”

This sort of thing was extremely popular in the 60’s and enrollment soared to over 2,000 bringing financial prosperity for the first time. Unfortunately this didn’t result in the improvement in the curriculum which to this day has students create their own study plans which are not graded and remains almost entirely focused on social activism.

The school degenerated into a freak-show in the 90’s attracting national attention when under pressure from feminist activists imposed "Sexual Offense Prevention Policy" which enforces severe penalties on male students if explicit permission isn’t received at each stage of sexual activity. “Do you want to have sex?” is far too ambiguous.

The goal is 100 percent consensual sex, and it works like this: it isn't enough to ask someone if she'd like to have sex, as an Antioch women's center advocate told a group of incoming freshmen this fall. You must obtain consent every step of the way. "If you want to take her blouse off, you have to ask. If you want to touch her breast, you have to ask. If you want to move your hand down to her genitals, you have to ask. If you want to put your finger inside her, you have to ask."

Then in 2000 it had convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal give the commencement address.

Today with funds nearly dried up and only a few hundred believers remaining the college announced its closing but is leaving open the possibility it may reopen:

The school hopes that alumni will provide financial help, that it will attract investors and that it can develop more partnerships with the Yellow Springs community, said Mary Lou LaPierre, vice chancellor for university advancement.

Yeah I'd love to be making those Alumni fund raising calls. Talk about blood from a rock.

UPDATE: Here's a good NYTimes Op-Ed from an NPR reporter that went to Antioch in its heyday that comes to the same conclusions:

Each semester, the college seemed to create a new program. “We need to take education to the people” became a mantra, and so satellite campuses began to sprout around the country. Something called Antioch University was created, and every faculty member whose marriage was going bad or who simply couldn’t hack living in a village of 3,000 people and longed for the city came up with a proposal to start a new campus.
“It was liberalism gone mad,” a former professor, Hannah Goldberg, once told me, and she was right. The college seemed to forget the pragmatism that had been a key to its ethos, and tried blindly to extend its mission beyond education to social reform. But there were too many new programs and too little cash reserve to deal with the inevitable growing pains.

Cool Map

States are renamed as countries with similar GDP.

Russia, India and China don't really fit any State but for for comparison's sake Russia and India are closest to Florida but about $100 Billion smaller. China is currently equal to the sum of California and Nevada ($2.5 billion trillion).

Germany's economy, despite having less than 8% of China's population is still $350 Billion larger than China's.

Left not so honest with Macroeconomics either

Earlier this week NPR had a story about Argentina’s once abysmal economy roaring back with 8.5% annual GDP growth crediting the resiliency and innovativeness of the Argentine people in creating a booming export market. The individuals profiled were a boot maker with less than 10 employees and a member of a collective of seamstresses. Both had found relative prosperity in the foreign market for their goods. As I was thinking about what a great comeback story this was I heard the following which naturally made me suspicious.

"..Neighborhood assemblies, leftist parties and the militant students inspired us. I learned about Marx and Trotsky, and workers' control."

NPR is notorious for having a soft spot for leftist Latin regimes and frequently skew their reporting on economic issues based on the regime in power. For example continued emphasis will likely be placed on Mexico’s economic failure now that free market oriented Felipe Calderón is in power while successes are more likely to be featured for those with leftist leanings. This story is no exception and demonstrates cherry-picking in the tradition of Walter Duranty.

Argentine President Nestor Kirchner is highly regarded in leftist circles for replacing two right wing justices with women on the Argentine Supreme Court – one an Atheist no less – and rejecting the market liberalizing recommendations made by the IMF during the economic crisis. Instead of advancing policies making trade easier Kirchner is an unapologetic protectionist boasting:

"We had our own recipe," President Nestor Kirchner said last week, verbally thumbing his nose at those outside Argentina, such as the IMF, whose prescriptions he has rejected. "If we had followed ... the Fund and all the rest," he added, "we know how we Argentines would have faired."

What is that recipe? NPR would like us to credit the policies of this plucky Socialist but in reality they are little more than a speed bump to the colossal market forces projected by China.

Two years after hitting rock bottom, Argentina's economy is on the rebound.
Although the 10-month-old government led by President Nestor Kirchner has taken
credit, economists are praising the soybean — a small, round legume packed with
protein that is at the margin of Argentina's beef-heavy cuisine but at the heart
of its economy. Soybean prices have soared to their
highest levels since 1988, bringing in billions of dollars in foreign currency
and powering the economy's 8.7 percent growth last year. Taxes on soybean exports, meanwhile,
have been a godsend for the cash-strapped government, providing a huge chunk of
its budget surplus. In recent years, soybeans have swept
across Argentina's vast plains, replacing other crops and cattle to become the
nation's top export. The nation's once formidable
industry is still in ruins, and widespread unemployment in sprawling, urban
slums remains, but the small towns that dot the sparsely populated pampas are
bustling. An emerging group of soybean-growing
businessmen equipped with cell phones and sport utility vehicles is driving the
boom. They have amassed huge tracts of land, building expansive agro-industrial
operations that have begun displacing the region's gauchos and small-scale
farmers. But a growing chorus of economists, agronomists
and environmentalists is warning of the dangers of the soybean bonanza, which is
occurring to a similar degree in neighboring Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Never before has Argentina's agricultural production
been so concentrated in one crop, a tendency observers say is favorable only as
long as soybean prices remain high.
From sugar cane to coffee, monoculture
economies historically have spelled ruin in Latin America, as boom inexorably
has been followed by bust. In addition, Argentina in
recent years has become increasingly dependent on imports of other agricultural
products, from milk to potatoes. Agronomists, meanwhile, caution that the
expansion of soybeans is leading to deforestation and causing soil depletion as
many farmers neglect to rotate the legume with other crops.
Argentina is the world's third-largest soybean producer
behind the United States and Brazil. Most of the soybeans are exported to China
and other Asian countries, where they are crushed into a meal used as feed for
livestock.

In short Argentina’s economy is a one trick pony being buoyed solely by China’s ravenous demand for cattle feed. Soybeans can grow almost anywhere and it won’t be long before much greater supply comes online, reducing soybean prices and reversing Argentina’s fortunes. When this happens I’m sure we can look forward to another hit piece on the perils of globalization rather than the short sighted protectionist economic policies of a socialist regime.

more on poverty and inequality

On the subject of poverty and inequality, here's a good article about the value of early childhood education in reducing them.

The article pretty much echos the conclusions that I reached (using the same data, largely) from a research project last year on the role of the education system in reducing or perpetuating poverty and inequality.

Another Stupid Pew Study

The Pew Charitable Trust just released a study recently that shows that median income for those in their thirties has fallen generation over generation for the first time in modern history and concludes that it shows that the “American Dream” is imperiled by “CEO salaries” and “income inequality” -- among other things -- and that our only salvation is through government intervention.

My goodness! Imagine a lefty think tank concluding that! That’s like the oil industry being opposed to climate change legislation. Its no wonder every major news source will reprint the report’s conclusions without an iota of skepticism.

It goes without saying that the economists working at a think tank like Pew believe capitalism unchecked will invariably end with the great many of us serving a few thousand czars that own everything; that no matter how well read or credentialed they become they still see the world with the same lazy Marxism they were first exposed to by the hacks teaching their first freshman survey courses.

While I think there is plenty in the study that leaves room for concern I also see a great over-eagerness to again take a single negative metric, frame it in such a way to be “unprecedented”, suggest that it demonstrates that market freedom imperils us and through intellectually dishonest slight of hand and a stupid, complicit media transform correlation into causation. I defy anyone to explain how Steve Jobs getting paid $260 million dollars this year directly depressed any thirty-something’s income. It’s simply a retarded conclusion.

A more realistic, less ambitious explanation for the income drop is that people are simply starting their careers later. This is a very well known phenomenon and has been reported on by NPR on several occasions. Microeconomics is basically the study of how people make decisions. Until our generation the decision to work was largely driven by necessity. The unprecedented wealth of our parents now makes work more optional. Many 30 something’s have used this additional discretion to do things such as acquire more education (or be lazy) that would have been economically unfeasible in previous generations.

In short the same argument lefty econs use to explain away the income discrepancy between the US and Europe can be employed here: the same or greater opportunity to make money exists; they are just choosing to work less.

Rest in pieces

I just read the best obit of Jerry Falwell that I could imagine, by Christopher Hitchens. A taste:

"The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled "credulous idiot." The first such category consists of those who expected Falwell (and themselves) to be bodily raptured out of the biosphere and assumed into the heavens, leaving pilotless planes and driverless trucks and taxis to crash with their innocent victims as collateral damage. This group is so stupid and uncultured that it may perhaps be forgiven. It is so far "left behind" that almost its only pleasure is to gloat at the idea of others being abandoned in the same condition."

It only gets better from there.

For a complete(ish) listing of Hitchens articles, look here, it's some good readin'.

Save us Plankton!

On the theme of climate whatnot, I recently came accross an interesting article in Wired about a new method of modeling phytoplankton which should have quite an impact on the long-term climage change predictions. I.e., make those predictions less of a wild-ass guess. Faster please.

Which reminds me,Plankton farming strikes me as a reasonable way to take care of that CO2 we're pumping out, keeping this in mind of course:

"Some Silicon Valley technocrats are betting that it just might. In an effort to ameliorate the effects of global warming, several groups are working on ventures to grow vast floating fields of plankton intended to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. It is an idea, debated by experts for years, that still sounds like science fiction — and some scholars think that is where it belongs.

But even though many questions remain unanswered, the first commercial project is scheduled to get under way this month when the WeatherBird II, a 115-foot research vessel, heads out from its dock in Florida to the Galápagos and the South Pacific...

The idea is similar to planting forests full of carbon-inhaling trees, but in desolate stretches of ocean. “This is organic gardening, not rocket science,” said Russ George, the chief executive of Planktos, the company behind the WeatherBird II project. “Can it possibly be as easy as we say it is? We’re about to find out.”

For Mr. George, this is not just science and environmentalism but business, possibly big business. Around the world, new treaties and regulations are forcing corporations to look for ways to offset their carbon emissions, and Planktos and its competitors may be able to charge millions of dollars for their services."