28May2008
Posted by legalize under: Politics.
[Update: Neo NeoCon goes more into the MSM media bias on Iraq.]
Ralph Peters pretty much says it all for me, but I do have one personal anecdote along these lines to relate.
Remember General Abizaid? Remember when he spent something like 4 hours testifying in front of a congressional committee reporting on the state of affairs in Iraq before the surge? Here’s how his entire block of testimony was summarized by The News Hour with Jim Lehrer that day:
General Abizaid reported today that the strength of the insurgency now is the same as it was six months ago.
Gee, if that was the only important thing that Abizaid said, then things must be awful in Iraq, huh? Yet Abizaid testified before Congress for a ridiculously long time and said many things, some of which were reports of success and some of which were reports of mistakes. Normally I’m not much of a C-SPAN junkie for watching congressional hearings (mostly they consist of 50 minutes of posturing by the representative followed by 10 minutes of slanted questions at the person giving testiomy), but I did happen to watch a big chunk of this one because dammit, Iraq is too important a subject to be left to the slanted filterings of whatever media outlet happens to be on TV. Abizaid presented a lot of information and some of it was encouraging and some of it was discouraging. What did the News Hour do with all of that? They harped on the most negative soundbite they could find to stuff into their summary. Had they gone into depth on the subject, we would have seen that it was more of a 50/50 situation and not just an unmitigated failure as they would like us to believe.
“The News Hour” likes to gush forth about how its the only news program to tackle subjects in depth from both sides to make you an informed viewer. But do they really do that? I had already suspected that they harbored bias in the way they reported things, or rather the way they didn’t report things. There had been other news reports where I was independently informed of the event and knew the facts for myself and could see how the News Hour would distill and report them. Its not that they lied or overtly spun the facts, but what was more telling about the bias in their reporting were the inconvenient factoids that they simply omitted from their reporting. It was also clear that their anchors had certain chips on their shoulders that they just couldn’t give a rest when interviewing persons on the show. For instance, when Charlayne Hunter Gault was a regular talking head on the program, it seemed that she tried to make every news story a story about race, even when it seemed the only person talking about race was her. Eventually she left the program, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because I think that race is never an issue, but it isn’t always the issue either.
The bias is also shown in the people they select for their “panel of diverse opinions” when they have a group discussion. They like to pick people that are from the left as their “one side” and pick people just barely right of center for their “other side”. Gee, the average of the panel just doesn’t seem to work out to a centrist, middle-of-the-road position, does it? Whenever the Palestinians are in the news, they harp on endlessly about the Israeli response to Palestinian violence while barely mentioning the Palestinian violence that instigated the Israeli response. Somehow, the Palestinian violence is always justified (even when its Palestinians killing their own people indiscriminately), while the Israeli response is always just another data point that shows Israel to be an out of control mad dog in the neighbourhood.
Their weekly political analysis is given by the same two guys for what seems like the past ten years: Mark Shields (statist from the left) and David Brooks (statist from the right). Here are two guys that are supposed to analyze things from two opposing viewpoints, but if you pay attention you’ll see that Mark Shields gets to go on and on and on and on about whatever government program or statist move he thinks is best for the country while David Brooks occasionally speaks up to say something along the lines “I disagree that we need to have complete government control in this area because 75% government control will be sufficient.” Give me a break.
Then there is the subtle bias that is shown in the pictures they show in the corner while the talking head is recounting the news summary for the day. Have you ever noticed that they’ll show a smiling picture of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but they’ll show a grumpy looking picture of John McCain? Oh, we’re not biased, we’re objective. Honest. Then there are times when the picture being shown just doesn’t have anything at all to do with the events they’re talking about in the summary.
Fortunately with blogs, we won’t have to suffer this self-righteous facade of objectivity for much longer. With a blog, you know where the author stands because they come right out and say so. Contrary to what these so-called objective reporters will tell you, what blogs are doing is a return to the traditional function of the press in America. Did you realize that when James Madison founded a newspaper that was pro Federalist, that Thomas Jefferson funded a competing newspaper that was anti Federalist? They didn’t make any secret of what position they supported and why! That’s a marketplace of competing ideas, not a uniform sea of regurgitated AP wire reports that read identical in every single paper across the nation. Did you ever wonder why the news in the paper always appears so bland and uniform? That’s because there isn’t any real difference between papers for national news anymore. Its all been reduced to a single viewpoint: that of the Associated Press.
I’m fairly certain I won’t be hearing about any good news from Iraq on the News Hour and they’ll only bother mentioning Iraq in the news summary to update me on the American body count or to try and milk a little journalist mileage from dead soldiers by parading them at the end of their broadcast in their “honor roll”. Honor roll, my ass. The only reason you get to parade individual photos of fallen American soldiers at the end of your program one at a time is because they simply aren’t dying off in the thousands like they did in World War II, so you get to milk their portraits for as much heart-wrenching tear-jerking effect as you can manage, all the while claiming you’re “honoring” them.
27May2008
Posted by legalize under: Politics.
When I drive to work, I try to listen to a little talk radio to see what the nattering nabobs of negativism have cooked up for the day. This morning, Doug Wright opined on this morning’s program that all we need to solve our energy dependence problem (and therefore becoming more energy independent) is to form some government organization like NASA and just put the smart people on it.
And this guy calls himself a Republican? Oh yeah, I forgot. In Utah you can spend all the taxpayer’s money you want, you can grow government as big as you want, you can encroach on individual liberty as much as you want, as long as you do it all as a Republican.
But wait, doesn’t this guy call himself a Conservative, too? Oh yeah, I forgot. In modern politics, you can spend all the taxpayer’s money you want, you can grow government faster than LBJ, you can encroach on individual liberty as much as you want, as long as you do it all as a Conservative.
But beyond all of that idiocy, what’s so stupid about Doug Wright’s proposition that we just “put a bunch of smart people together” to solve this energy dependence problem? Well, it assumes several facts that are most certainly not self evident. It assumes:
- The people working in the energy industry are just plain stupid. Otherwise they would have figured out this energy independence stuff already.
- That government can solve any problem if we just spend enough money on it. (Maybe Doug Wright has been secretly shagging Hillary Clinton and is picking up nasty sexually transmitted intellectual diseases from her.)
- That “energy independence” is something that can be solved by some sort of Manhattan Project style government initiative, or worse yet a NASA style government bureacracy.
You’d think a guy that touts his conservativism and his republicanism on his radio show ad infinitum would have some idea that government is the problem, not the solution. But RINOs only know how to feed at the government trough and only know how to advocate solutions that not only compromise your individual personal liberties, but your individual economic liberties as well.
This past weekend, Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party’s nomination for the office of President of the United States. When asked why he jumped ship from the Republican party to the Libertarian party, he paraphrased Ronald Reagan by saying “I didn’t leave the Republican party, the Republican party left me”. Doug Wright’s idiotic proposal is just one more example of what Bob Barr is talking about.
22May2008
Posted by legalize under: Programming.
I’m really getting sick of web designers deciding when I need a new window, instead of just navigating to the new location in the current window.
Case in point: vespa.com makes me pick my country from a popdown list and then forces me to eat a new popup window with the site for the USA. Why couldn’t they just redirect my current window to vespausa.com? Why would I ever want to keep the original window open to their stupid site selector while I look at the web site I really wanted?
This is just another aspect of anal-retentive web designers thinking that their job is to “control my experience”. No, you’re just an arrogant jerk that thinks you know better than the customer what they wanted. If I want something open in a new window, I’ll do that myself. Its not for you to decide what should be in a new window or not. Particularly since popular popup blockers are going to refuse to open something in a new window anyway, forcing the user to go through extra hoops just to visit your site.
The web isn’t the Soviet Union, where one size fits all and daddy Stalin knows what’s best for you. If you’re a web designer, please take your head out of your ass and stop telling other people how to experience the web.
21May2008
Posted by legalize under: Politics.
Joe Lieberman writes an essay in the Wall Street Journal about the Democratic party. Its short and worth reading.
I never really identified with the Democrats or the Republicans, which is why I often refer to them as demopublicans or republicrats. To me, they just represent two sides of the same false proposition. Namely, the false proposition that I must give up half my freedoms in order to safeguard the other half. Where the hell does it say in the Declaration of Independence that I must give up my economic liberties in order to secure my personal liberties (the typical Democrat proposition) or that I must give up my personal liberties in order to secure my economic liberties (the typical Republican proposition)? Because I wanted to maximize my personal freedom, I could never really identify with those that always wanted to take away half of what I want to preserve in the name of safeguarding the other half.
I’ve always had this cartoon in my mind when it comes to demopublicans and republicrats. Imagine a taxpayer soundly asleep in his bedroom. Crouching next to the bed are two thieves holding flashlights. On the bedside table is a wallet. One thief is labelled Democrat and the other is labelled Republican. The Democrat thief says to the Republican thief: “I’ll check the wallet, you look under the covers.” That’s the kind of “compromise” we get from our politicians these days. They each want to sabotage half of our liberties and “compromise” by agreeing to look the other way when it comes to the transgressions of the other side. Did you ever ask yourself how a bill in the US Senate can be cosponsored by Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch at the same time? These guys are supposed to be mortal political enemies. You can bet your ass you’re going to be screwed whenever these two guys agree on something.
This is why I am a libertarian and a Libertarian. That is, I am a subscriber to the libertarian political philosophy and I’m also a member of the Libertarian political party. Do I kid myself that the Libertarians are going to sweep the next election? Hell no. The way the state party is run in Utah, I’d consider it a major victory if someone were elected to the state house as a Libertarian, which only takes about 6,000 votes to win my district. But I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon. Last I checked, they’re more interested in being ideologues than they are in practical steps to political change. In my engineer’s heart, I’m a pragmatist and recognize that if you want political change, you have to take steps that are realistic and pragmatic. That is why I supported Pete Ashdown in his campaign for the US Senate, even though Pete is a Democrat and I’m a Libertarian. I contributed heavily to his campaign, giving more money to his campaign in a single election cycle than I’ve ever given to the state Libertarian party in my lifetime. Pete is a “citizen legislator” in the Jeffersonian sense. While I may not agree with him on everything (and he’s heard enough earfulls from me to know where we disagree), I support him because he brings a heavy dose of common sense to government. Just like Joe.
18May2008
Posted by legalize under: Computers; Vintage Computing.
I recently learned about hugin, an open source tool for creating panorama images from a series of still photos.
I experimented with it by revisiting my lava field photographs and creating some panoramas. The camera parameters are only guesses, so these panoramas aren’t the best that they could be, but they’re pretty damn good for first attempts.
I took a large amount of “pan and scan” video footage of sculpted facades of Mayan buildings on my trip to the Yucatan. It looks to me like hugin might be just the tool I’ve been looking for to stitch those video resolution frames together into a single high resolution texture.
The hugin web site also has a tutorial for how to combine partial scans of large images into a single whole image. This will be useful when scanning vintage computing documentation containing large circuit diagrams.
12May2008
Posted by legalize under: Peaches.
30April2008
Posted by legalize under: Computers; Vintage Computing.
I met a fellow computer collector in Boulder over the past weekend. He brought me four items of interest to my collection of vintage computer graphics gear: three Tektronix terminals (models 4010, 4051 and 4114) and an Apollo DN10000 workstation. All of these machines are “project” machines, which is just a nice way of saying there’s some sort of problem with all of them. That made them a little cheaper than they would otherwise be, but all of these machines are in the “hard to find” category for vintage computer graphics gear.
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29April2008
Posted by legalize under: Administrivia.
I’m playing around with WordPress themes for this blog because I discovered that the default theme here, Tarski, doesn’t provide a link to older blog posts or direct links to the categories. So the visual appearance of this blog might be variable for the next few days….
23April2008
Posted by legalize under: Computers; DirectX; Programming; Direct3D Graphics Pipeline.
OK, I was finally able to reproduce this problem with the installer and the issue comes down to something downright weird. If I’m running dbmon or DebugView while the installer is running, then the code installs fine. If I’m not running a debug monitor, then the installation fails with no useful information in the log message (other than the custom action return code is 3, which indicates an error).
So now that I’ve found the bug, I’ll investigate getting an updated installer uploaded that corrects the problem.
7April2008
Posted by legalize under: Computers; Programming; Unit Testing.
This is a question that comes up periodically. Remember that a good unit test is one that is fast (< 100ms/test). A test that accesses files, databases or the network is not going to be this fast. But, we still have code that writes data to files or reads data from files and we want to unit test that code. So how can we do that?
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