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.
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.
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.
At least I now know that Mike Huckabee has a sense of humor.
Most amusing.
(Hat Tip: Ezra Klein)
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 pitch […] presents him as deeply sensitized to the needs and
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?
aspirations of women, raised by a single mother, “a man comfortable with strong
women in his life,” [..] committed to the issues they care about.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
And they're pretty good at it to boot.
Link, via Boing-Boing/PoeTV
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
