Obamulous

Barak Obama's interview with the Politico folks is well worth watching. Especially if you're a fan.

Black History Month

Just something I happened to stumble upon...

"'Movie People' might intermarry [but] good people, upright
people didn't do this", a remark suggesting that the college was as concerned
about its reputation as Cunningham's.

New song

Here's a song I just finished making for my mom's 60th birthday.

For those interested, there are 5 tracks total in the song:

1. Upright bass (plucking)
2. Upright bass (using a bow)
3. Banjo
4. Guitar
5. Dobro

Happy listening,

Mark

Hugo, call your office

Most people seem to dislike Hillary Clinton because of some perceived character flaw; that she’s too ambitious, dishonest, artificial or just plain mean. While all these things may be true I think it would be a pity if they were the cause of Hillary not being elected.

No, what should keep her out of all positions of power are her appallingly bad ideas.

I heard about her most recent plan on my way home from work and almost blew a red light trying to comprehend the sheer stupidity of it. Basically she wants to freeze mortgage rates for 5 years.

She might as well battle the high price of milk by capping the price below market value.

This fortune article sums up the consequences of such an idiotic plan:

Interest rates on new mortgages would skyrocket - perhaps past 8 percent, as the
mutual funds, pension funds and other investors who typically provide capital to
the mortgage market shift their money into other investments where the
government isn't impairing returns. With higher mortgage rates eroding buying
power, the downward pressure on home prices would only increase. Lower home
prices would lead to even more defaults, as more folks who'd lost the equity in
their homes choose to walk away from their mortgages.

In short, if you are cool with not being able to sell your house for at least 5 years Hill might be your gal.

Thought Crimes

People from both ends of the political spectrum have long (and often sloppily) made allusions to 1984 when accusing the other side of using state organs for political persecution. But this is simply amazing.

It’s like the whole country is being run by a university administrator run amok.

Simply Profound

If I were president, he would be my speech writer.

Now I like Obama and think he’s a smart and nice enough fellow – certainly to the degree of the current President – however up to now his political proposals have been little more substantive than your typical beer commercial. In the coming days he needs to fill in the policy holes New Hampshire voters perceived (and Iowa voters didn’t) and risk taking more controversial centrist positions (school choice?) to reassure independent voters that despite his troubling liberal pedigree he is the best “agent of change” the Democrats have.

Hillary’s already done these things but will never get an NBC man (or woman) crush.

Gag me

This morning NPR had an interesting story about how uneven care for the mentally ill is within US territories. Basically, if vacationing to the Virgin Islands, you should wait to get home before going crazy because they’ll just park you in a jail indefinitely if you do; even though doing so has resulted in the territory repeatedly being held in contempt in US federal courts.

Good information. The kind of fact based, objective reporting that allows me to tolerate the gentry liberalism of NPR.

But of course NPR never stops with just the facts. Knowing that their listener base generally has an impaired capacity for reason, NPR proceeded to communicate the “emotional truth” of the story with all the subtlety of a (fair trade) double espresso.

Naturally the fact that the most sympathetic victim* of these unjust detentions does not speak is no problem to these artisans of advocate prose who so routinely conjure the hopes, dreams and wishes of similarly communicative glaciers and polar bears:

He's wearing a red T-shirt. He looks unremarkable, one face among thousands of
young black men in prison — except for his eyes. They are like the weather
changing — going from clear, to foggy, to dark and raw, to soft and then clear
again.

His smile is like lightning, a bright flash out of nowhere.

Yes, freaky weather eyes and spontaneous smiling really highlight the human cost for me. Thank you Libby Lewis. Why don’t you just finish that bodice ripper we know you’re working on and leave information collection – what I’m paying you for -- to people with brains that haven’t degenerated into flaccid, sentimental mush?

*So this guy is essentially a mute who’s greatest advocate – his sister – is terrified of his capacity for violence. Just how non-radio-friendly are the other guys?

If you don't already like Obama...

watch this.



Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan.

Greatest political ad ever or greatest ad ever?

At least I now know that Mike Huckabee has a sense of humor.

Most amusing.
(Hat Tip: Ezra Klein)

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.