Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing comments on a NY/NJ ferry rider hassled by security morons, who threatened to confiscate a Dungeons & Dragons book as “inappropriate.” Fair enough. Increased security precautions do in fact seem to have emboldened the Cop Lite types that make up some security forces, and who have long loved to harass citizens, perhaps to make up for other deficencies. But then Mark goes on with aa gratuitous slam on Republicans - “Thanks to the RNC, there are manditory bag searches happening on the NJ-NY Ferry.” Now, maybe he’s arguing that the bag searches are to clear a path to the convention scheduled for next month, but that seems a real stretch. Would he have blamed the DNC for ridiculous security requests at Logan airport in July?
The Elder from Fraters Libertas posts from Amsterdam, where he had encountered some Americans before and after touring a museum dedicated to the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation, who seemed to believe that they “saw parallels between the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and what they believe is occurring today in John Ashcroft’s Amerika.”
What are you going to say to people who have abandoned the realm of rational thought? People who believe that Bush is a puppet in an evil conspiracy orchestrated by either Dick Cheney, James Baker, George H. Bush, or all of them working together? People who believe that the Democrats are playing the role today that the NSB (a Dutch National Socialist Party that collaborated with the Nazis) did in the Netherlands during World War Two? People who believe that the Democratic National Convention was a frightening display of war mongering, but support John Kerry because he speaks French? People who believe that the entire world is counting on the American people to remove Bush from office? People who believe that if, by some fluke, Bush is re-elected he will be impeached early in his second term? People who believe that if Bush is re-elected the level of “national resistance” (whatever the hell that means) will escalate?
It is, if anything, worse than that. Hardly anyone but me reads this blog, but I’ve still been called a fascist for daring to condemn Michael Moore. I’ve seen claims that Bush would cancel the 2004 presidential election, claims the he would “suspend” the Constitution. Of course, instead of demanding that John Kerry distance himself from the lunatic fringe, the body politic focuses instead on the connection between the far more reasonable Swift Vets group and the President.
Must be something in the Kentucky water, because I had this conversation with the BlogSon last night:
Him: October is the best month.
Me: Why’s that? [thinking my birthday, or Halloween, or something]
Him: That’s when basketball starts.
For a 5 year old, that’s pretty impressive. He remembers that last April, I told him there would be no more college basketball until about October 15 (actually midnight October 16 this year). He didn’t show much interest until we relocated to the Bluegrass. Of course, he insists his favorite teams are Mississippi State and Duke, so we clearly have more work to do on that front. I figure he has three valid choices.
Two posts on BuzzMachine today on the subject of media bias that are a little frightening. First is a report that 38 members of Congress want to meet with Rupert Murdoch to complain that Fox News is too biased:
“The responsibility of the media is to report the news in an unbiased, impartial and objective manner,” the letter reads.
As Jeff points out, this assuredly is not the responsibility of “media,” which includes both news and things like Rush Limbaugh and Fahrenheit 9/11. More important is the implied threat:
A spokesman for Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said there were legislative avenues that the group could pursue as a secondary measure but declined to speculate on what those might be.
What exactly are they proposing here? A reimposition of the Fairness Doctrine, which didn’t apply to cable even when the FCC enforced it? Something more onerous, like an obligation for news programming to be “objective”? Government certainly shouldn’t be in the business of defining what an individual or corporation can and cannot say. I’d argue that CBS and CNN are just as biased as Fox in their own way, so one would expect these 38 Congress members to be balanced by 38 on the other side of the aisle. I understand being frustrated with negative coverage, but don’t bring out the threat of legislative action to assuage your sensitive egos.
Second is a report that John Kerry is on the anti-media-consolidation bandwagon:
…Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said he would reimpose the ban on same-city ownership of broadcast stations by daily newspapers.“I’m against the ongoing push for reducing restrictions on media concentration,†Kerry said, echoing the question by Forbes Senior Editor Brett Pulley. “It’s contrary to the greater goals of democracy for the country.â€
Kerry had to, of course, include a plug for Outfoxed, the anti-Fox “documentary” produced by MoveOn. I’m frankly just not that concerned about media consolidation. In the time since the rules on ownership of media were relaxed, it seems to me that the options for accessing information have exploded. And not just the move away from the Big Three TV networks, either. I now get very little of my news from traditional “news” programming, and the number of available alternatives is almost overwhelming. I do sometimes wish ClearChannel didn’t own so many radio stations, but that issue is easily rectified.
It’s also not clear, as with so many of Kerry’s proposals, how he thinks the solution will address the problem. The reason the networks didn’t carry more of the convention (including Mrs. Heinz-Kerry’s speech) wasn’t because ownership of media is consolidated, but because the convention was so dreadfully dull and devoid of actual news. And is the problem really that Rupert Murdoch can own the New York Post? Isn’t Kerry’s problem with Murdoch the same problem that Bernie Sanders has, that Fox isn’t saying the right things (or is too often saying the wrong things)? If Murdoch sold off all of his other U.S. holdings but kept Fox News the way it is today, would Kerry be satisfied? I certainly don’t think so.
I think I agree with Jack Shafer at Slate, who can have the last word:
In the long run, competition and the dynamism of markets keep any five media conglomerates from dictating “what most citizens will learn.” But corporate ownership of media so rankles Bagdikian that I doubt the variations of who’s on top and who’s slid into corporate oblivion make much difference to him. I’m sure my testament that for all the news media’s faults, its quality and variety have never been greater, sounds Panglossian to Bagdikian. But I challenge him to name a time in America’s history when the news media did a better job than it does today. Who longs for the days of William Randolph Hearst? Of three broadcast networks? Of the days before the Internet?
Russell Roberts predicts a G.W. Bush victory using the Which Candidate Would You Rather Have A Beer With test:
Which candidate do you want to see walk through the door and join your group? Which candidate is going to add to the liveliness of the conversation, spice it up with some humor, get philosophical as the evening winds down and offer sympathy for your problems? Which candidate will be best at saying something witty or profound, where profound means profound in a bar, not in a classroom? Which candidate can be the life of the party and still make you feel good about yourself? Which candidate tells the best stories?Bush or Gore? Bush. Clinton or Dole? Clinton, by a landslide. Clinton or Bush the elder? Still Clinton. Bush the elder or Dukakis? Bush. Reagan or Mondale? Reagan. Reagan or Carter? Reagan. Carter or Ford? This is the only tough one. Neither one really makes the cut. But give it to Carter for his accent. Nixon or McGovern? Nixon. Nixon or Humphrey? Nixon by a long shot. LBJ or Goldwater? LBJ in a cakewalk. Kennedy or Nixon? Kennedy by about a mile. Eisenhower crushes Adlai Stevenson twice. Generals always beat intellectuals. Story-tellers always beat earnest preachers who want you to eat your peas. Charmers beat dullards.
Good theory, but I think he’s wrong about Carter/Ford. Bush also wins the “Which candidate’s wife would you rather have chili at Wendy’s with” test.
In no particular order, a few new tech products and services I’ve been enjoying lately:
- Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3: I’m no moz evangelist, and I don’t have huge problems with IE, but there are some nice features in Firefox. Tabbed browsing is nice, allowing me to have multiple pages open in a single window. The built-in popup blocker is nice, too, although the one in the Google Toolbar for IE works pretty well. I do especially like that it’s a small download (unlike IE) and free (unlike Opera).
- Gmail: 1000 MB of storage space, large attachment file size limits, Google searching of messages, keyboard shortcuts, no annoying sign-in-every-30-days-or-we-delete-your-account rules like Hotmail. What’s not to like? Most desktop email programs are more robust, even Outlook Express, but it’s a lot better than Hotmail or Yahoo, and it’s accessible anywhere with a web connection
- Flickr: I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever use the service, but I like the idea. Web-based chat and real-time photo sharing among small groups. rather than throwing up a gallery for all to see, choose which photos to share during a conversation in real time.
- BitTorrent and Etree. BT is a peer-to-peer protocol designed to allow transfer of large files (in non-geek terms, you break a large file into many little pieces, and while you’re downloading pieces, others can upload the pieces you already have, which distributes the server load and allows faster transfers). Etree is a site that traffics in live concert recordings of bands that encourage taping (so heavily concentrated on the Grateful Dead and Phish that you can exclude those two from your searches). I’ve grabbed recordings of My Morning Jacket and String Cheese Incident and put them on my iPod.
- My 3G iPod + iTunes: yeah, it’s a generation old and has a relatively small capacity, but I have plenty of empty space and love it at the gym. Now if only I could set it up to use in the car, I’ll be set.
- Bloglines: this is a web-based RSS aggregator. Most weblogs, including this one, publish an RSS feed of headlines and stories, which you can grab in an RSS reader. So I can see all 60 or so sites I occasionally read without visiting each to see if there’s anything new. Bloglines is nice because I can see the feeds from any computer. It doesn’t have the post-to-blog features that the desktop readers do, but they’re working on it.
So what new stuff are you using?
I see this as a great repurposing of technology. LeapFrog is donating 20,000 interactive women’s health books, built with the company’s LeapPad learning system technology, to Afghanistan to assist the largely-illiterate (thank a lot, Mullah Omar) women there to learn to read and learn about personal health subjects including diet, childhood immunization, pregnancy, breastfeeding, sanitation and water boiling, treating injuries and burns, and disease prevention.
For the non-parents in the audience, the LeapPad in its native form is an electronic book (for lack of a better term) that uses interchangeable cartridges to teach kids reading, math, science, etc. The user touches special places on each page of a spiral-bound book with a stylus, which causes the device to say the highlighted word aloud or other appropriate action. It does seem an appropriate way to teach an illiterate or subliterate population important topics, and the interactivity of the device may make lessons stick. Tommy Thompson seems a little gaga about it though - I doubt we need a mass distribution of LeapPads to teach American kids not to eat Big Macs. I also hope the Dari and Pashto versions are more reliable than the English versions the BlogSon has had - we’re on LeapPad number 2, and both stopped working properly after a while. They also get a little strange when the batteries run down.
William Hyde is a professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University. Dr. Hyde describes his specialty this way:
The central theme of my research has been the modeling ice ages, past and present. This has lead to the investigation of more general climate problems, such as the influence of Milankovitch forcing on the ocean circulation, the accuracy of coral paleotemperatures, and research into climate change in recent centuries.
Not sure I understand all of that, but suffice it to say, he’s a smart guy who knows a lot of stuff about paleoclimatology. Dr. Hyde complained about depictions of climatology in science fiction, and stated that he wouldn’t review The Day After Tomorrow unless someone paid him $100. Someone calling himself Dreamer called his bluff and kicked in $5. Others contributed and urged contributions to the “Send Dr. Hyde to The Day After Tomorrow Fund”. The Fund collected $100.50. So Dr. Hyde went to the movie, and posted a review. It’s very, very funny, at least to me. Read it.
Dean Esmay likes this line:
In short, This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery.
The review starts off good
Paleoclimatologists are also notoriously handsome/beautiful, indeed, the envy and despair of other scientists (because frostbite gives the skin such a youthful appearance). I cannot fault the producers for failing to cast realistically good-looking people in these roles (Dennis Quaid barely qualifies as handsome enough) but I suspect that there just aren’t enough good looking actors in Hollywood to populate a typical paleoclimatic working group.
and gets geekily better:
Now, kudos to the producers for getting the words “thermohaline circulation” into a movie, but even they must know that much of North America and Eurasia was inhabited, indeed, *during* the last ice age. By people without central heating, for that matter. And while we all learned, incorrectly, in school that “Europe would freeze except for the Gulf Stream”, I don’t recall reading anywhere that, say, North Carolina just doesn’t get enough sun to keep warm (looks out of window - well, it *is* cloudy).
Which brings up the question of just what *is* powering the three Arctic hypercanes which bring on the new and improved ice age. As they spend much time on land, the ocean heat loss can’t be doing the job. They are more avenging angels than storms. Actually, could all that fluffy white cloud (seen from space) be intended to evoke an angel’s white robes? Which would explain why the storms stop at borders, freezing out the evil, polluting Americans and Europeans, while not touching Mexico or North Africa (the Atlas mountains are snow free, Spain covered). Cyclonic avenging angels.
It reminds me of the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics page, which points out that, among other things, action heroes must be really strong:
First, let us point out that the thirty-round magazine in a Mac 10 will be expended in a mere 1.8 seconds of sustained fire! If our shooter blazes away steadily for a total of only 3 minutes, his or her Mac 10 will spit out around 3000 chunks of lead at roughly 15 grams a piece. This amounts to 45 kilograms or a little less than 100 pounds of lead. And that doesn’t account for the weight of the 3000 cartridge cases or 100 empty magazines scattered on the ground.
[Three degrees of blog separation:Kottke –> Colby Cosh –> Dean Esmay –> me]
