4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Ann Althouse on John Kerry’s “horse in the stream” metaphor:
We’ll never hear the end of this horse in the stream business. It just keeps getting new frills. So we need a “taller horse,” because the current horse “drowning” as we go into “deeper waters.” And now we’ve added a waterfall. So I guess we need a special kind of horse that’s especially good at surviving a precipitous drop, which you’d really want in a situation where two horse were simultaneously going over a waterfall and you decided your horse was less crashworthy and that it would be a good idea to try to get onto the other horse while you were still in the waterfall. That’s quite the metaphor.
As Ann put in in an earlier post, “[t]he man isn’t a poet, he’s a windbag!” I think Allah needs to do a Photoshop of a taller, waterfall-proof, mid-stream-changing horse.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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From Boing Boing, I see that a manufacturer of rubber presidential fright masks says sales figures of masks during election year Halloweens successfully predict the winner of the upcoming presidential election for each year since 1980.
Currently, Bush leads Kerry in mask sales, 56% to 44%. It got me to wondering how the mask totals correlated with actual popular vote totals. It appears to overstate the results for the electoral college winner, by an average of about 3 percentage points, although some of the elections skew the numbers.
So the mask model predicts Bush, with about a 53-47 lead. Here are the 1980-2000 results, which include third party candidates to get to the popular vote % where the mask numbers don’t add up to 100 points:
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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I am essentially permanently attached to my Blackberry 6280, which operates on the Cingular GSM/GPRS network. I don’t often use the WAP browser on the device, but last night at my son’s soccer practice I needed to get some details on the Adam Matthews Balloon Festival scheduled for this weekend in Louisville. So I fired up Google, and should have received this result. Instead I got this result:
No pages were found containing “Pictures of p*rn”.
Search entire web for ‘Pictures of p*rn’
Go to URL
New Search
That’s just bizarre. No screenshot as it’s on the Blackberry, at least not until I get to my digital camera.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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From the Google Blog, I see that Google has improved Google Local, one of the several interesting beta search products:
We may be able to roam the globe online, but what about finding a locksmith - or a Thai place that delivers - when you need it? Meet Google Local, our local search service, which we’ve just enhanced with some new features. We beefed up the technology that delivers more precise results. We cleaned up the design a bit, so the maps you see with the results show the location of your find. We link to more information than before - business home pages, and ratings, reviews. And now you can zoom and pan the maps without reloading the page.
I ran some test searches, and it seems to deliver the goods as promised. Now I know a few additional comic book shops in Louisville, and options for wi-fi and coffee other than Starbucks.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Reading an ABC News article on ethics-plagued CBS Producer Mary Mapes (via INDC Journal), I was intrigued by this bit:
John Carlson, a former commentator at KIRO-TV who is host of a conservative radio talk show in Seattle, remembers Mapes as a talented producer with whom he often argued politics in the newsroom.
Mapes was “quite liberal” and disliked the current President Bush’s father, he said.
“She definitely was someone who was motivated by what she cared about and definitely went into journalism to make a difference,” Carlson said. “She’s not the sort of person who went into journalism to report the news and offer an array of commentary.”
Carlson spoke with Mapes about the National Guard story a week ago, and said that he believes she “put so much time into it that she wanted something to come of it.”
“This was a woman with a good reputation,” he said. “The mistakes she made were so obvious. This was a story that was rushed because they clearly believed it was true. They wanted it to be true.”
So is the first story Mary Mapes ran with because she wanted it to be true? Note that Mapes came to CBS in 1989 via KIRO TV in Seattle. In 1988, Seattle police shot and killed 41-year-old Erdman Bascomb during a raid on Bascomb’s apartment as part of a series of raids on suspected crack houses. The building was so drug-ridden that neighboring residents took to hanging signs to protect themselves:
Neighbors complained that the block was infested with drug dealers and users. On the doors of apartments next door to the address to be served were hand-painted signs reading “No rockstar’s at this apartment!” or “No crack sold here. Don’t even ring my bell.”
Rented by Erdman Bascomb, apartment C had been raided Dec. 18 by the anti-crime team. Seven people were inside the small two room unit and $1,200 in cocaine was found.
This time, however, as detectives drew up their plans, the word from a “confidential informant” was that there might be a gun in the house.
Bascomb was shot and killed February 17, 1988. An inquiry began April 11, 1988, and focused on two primary issues: did the police provide a warning before knocking down the apartment door, and were police justified in shooting Bascomb, who turned out to be holding a remote control, not a gun. On April 14, 1988, KIRO TV broadcast an interview with a alleged witness, who claimed that the police did not announce their presence:
Last-minute testimony from Wardell Fincher, who isn’t on the official list of witnesses, also appears headed for some dispute because the account he is now giving conflicts with what he told Seattle Post-Intelligencer newsmen at the scene of the shooting.
Fincher also told a KIRO-TV news crew Thursday that he witnessed the raid and is certain police gave Bascomb no chance to open the door. He contended officers didn’t identify themselves as policemen until they were running at Bascomb’s door with a battering ram.
David Allen, attorney for the Bascomb family, said yesterday that Fincher will be subpoenaed to appear at the inquest on Monday. He said he expects Fincher to say essentially the same thing that he told the television newsmen.
Fincher was not available for comment yesterday, but P-I staffers who were at the scene of the fatal drug raid said they talked to Fincher shortly after the incident.
P-I photographer Gil Arias talked to Fincher at the scene and said Fincher asked him what had happened at the Bascomb residence. P-I reporter Michael A. Barber said that when he interviewed Fincher, the man said he didn’t know what had happened.
“To my best recollection he told me nothing that indicated he knew anything about the raid,” Barber said yesterday. “In fact, he asked me questions about what went on.”
Barber and Arias, who accompanied police on the raid because they were working on a story about narcotics trafficking, were subpoenaed to appear at the inquest. Both testified that police did knock, identify themselves, said they had a search warrant and waited for a brief period before forcing their way in.
Just to reiterate: KIRO TV news, led by producer Mary Mapes, broadcast a story two months after a controversial police shooting and one day before the inquest was to end, featuring a bombshell witness who gave testimony that contradicted not only the other witnesses in the inquest, but also the witness’ own contemporaneous statements to both police and other journalists who were actually on the scene. KIRO did so without adequately researching their witness, who, as it turns out, only found out what happened because he asked members of the media what went down. Sounding vaguely familiar?
When Mr. Fincher testified, he didn’t come off very well at all:
Wardell Fincher, 22, testified yesterday “there was no pause” before police bashed open Bascomb’s door with a battering ram. He added that it was mere “tenths of a second” from the time the door was forced opened to the time he heard police fire the shot that killed Bascomb as he stood in his living room with a television remote control device.
“It was like somebody just going in the house and just shooting somebody,” Fincher said, echoing similar earlier testimony from neighbors.
But Fincher’s self-described witnessing of the scene clashed with police accounts as well as testimony from two Seattle Post Intelligencer staff members. Reporter Michael Barber and photographer Gilbert Arias, who had accompanied police on the raid for a story on narcotics trafficking, testified that Fincher had told each one of them separately that he (Fincher) had seen nothing. Both were recalled to testify yesterday.
“I asked a general question (of Fincher), ‘Do you know what happened?’ ” Arias said yesterday. “He (Fincher) said he didn’t know what happened. He walked away . . . ”
Fincher seemed to contradict himself when he told jurors, “I asked the P-I guy (Arias) what happened and asked ‘Who got shot?’ ‘Who shot who?’ “
In the end, the inquest jury ruled the shooting was justified, and disagreed with KIRO’s star witness:
Police said they waited five to 10 seconds before deciding Bascomb wasn’t going to open the door peacefully.
However, the jurors’ finding that police waited up to four seconds conformed with testimony from Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Michael A. Barber and photographer Gil Arias who were with police on the raid.
What goes around, comes around. And sometimes it comes around to bite you squarely in the butt.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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What kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t offer my gmail invitations to the world in order to artificially increase my hit count? Anyway, I currently have six, and will hand them out to the first six creative responses to this analogy:
Dan Rather:integrity::________:________
I need full names and a valid email address. Click the “Email me” link in the upper left sidebar to enter.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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I’m beginning to think Mrs. Heinz-Kerry is still a Republican, secretly working for Karl Rove. First she suggests good samaritans not send clothes in hurricane care packages because, after all, “Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids.” Now, she says the reason the girls don’t like her more is because she didn’t treat them like animals:
“I thought, ‘I love kids, kids love me, I’ll be fine.’ Baloney,” Teresa said. “You have to treat stepchildren like pets. You’re nice to them but you don’t get too close or they chew you up. Well, I did it the other way.”
Pets, of course, don’t even need clothes (well, sometimes they do need a wedding dress or tuxedo), so I guess it’s logically consistent.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Ernest Miller has the Share This
4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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A Broader View, manufacturers of The Global Puzzle have an interesting Geography Challenge, which asks you to locate ten randomly selected countires (from 192) on a world map. Normally, I’d say what my score was, but I’m a little embarassed. I clearly have trouble with Africa and the pacific islands. I’m sure you can do better.
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4 years, 2 months ago,,
by Fred (,
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Is this really what we’ve devolved to? A major news organization receives documents which appear to be fraudulent (perhaps from a clear axe-grinder), runs them by a passel of experts, but apparently doesn’t give all six documents to any particular expert and doesn’t give certain of the documents to certain reviewers until after the broadcast about the documents is aired, gets negative feedback on the authenticity of the documents from some of the experts (including a quite accurate description of the s*** that would hit the fan if they ran the piece), doesn’t do adequate due diligence on the source or the veracity of the documents (such as interviewing the alleged memo-writers secretary until a week later, and even then failing to ask her what office equipment she had at her disposal), stonewalls for a week, and then presents a defense that the documents were, as the NY Times characterized it, “Fake but Accurate”. Do I have that right? If so that’s sad.
Take the logic to its inevitable conclusion. Can a prosecutor unable to locate documents he believes to have existed at one time create bogus documents as long as they are “accurate”? Can a rich man’s mistress create a fake will for her sugar daddy based on her understanding of his intent if sugar daddy doesn’t write one of his own? If this is an acceptable defense for CBS, I don’t see why not. We have a longstanding tradition in this country that authenticated documents can be used to establish the veracity of the statements contained therein. CBS has now officially turned this on its head (actually, considering the circularity of the logic, it did a complete circle before landing on its head), concluding that fake documents can be used to substantiate a story as long as the fake documents are consistent with the story they are used to substantiate. After typing that, I feel dizzy from the circularity of it all. How exactly did we get here?
There actually is a path, I suppose. We have the postmodernists and deconstructionists insisting that there is no real Truth, no real Aesthetics, no real Beauty. No person is objectively more talented than any other, no performance objectively better than any other, no measure of success that would support granting accolades or benefits or reward. The Constitution has no true meaning because it is a living document. Literature has no objective because it must be viewed through the eyes of the reader or the societal norms of the time. The begets the Michael Moores and John Kerrys of the world, who feel justified reenacting scenes from Vietnam or creating movie sequences from whole cloth because it’s never wrong to Speak Truth To Power or use a falsehood to address Inner Truth.
We’ve entered the Age of Inner Truth, where what one actually says or does or shows is not as important as the underlying meme. I say this is wrong, that there is objective truth, and one simply should not use a lie or forged documents or docudrama on the grounds that it serves a Higher Purpose.
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