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January 31, 2005
You Read It Here First
Powerline has a post today, Blue Badge of Courage, linking to a couple of articles about the Iraqi election in the NY Post. One of those articles actually used the phrase "blue badge of courage", which I assume was the source of Powerline's powerful headline.
But you read it here first. ;>
Object Lessons
Never let success stand in the way of defeat.
While pushing for an exit strategy, Reid, D-Nevada, also said it would be a mistake to set a deadline for the withdrawal of American forces. ?That?s not a wise decision because it only empowers those who don?t want us there,? he said in a joint appearance with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.Reid might want to pull Sen. Ted over and whisper that advice in his ear. As for the "figuring out part", it isn't hard to find the exit strategy because we've been following it all along. Reid simply refuses to see it. The strategy is to continue to build from success to success, learning from errors and circumstances as they develop, and not allowing defeatism to distract from the ultimate goal of enabling a free, democratic Iraq that will a) be a potential inspiration to other Middle Eastern countries, b) not be a terror threat to the US and c) be an object lesson to other governments that support terror. It's not really that hard to figure out. When those criteria are met, the troops will come home.
In remarks at the National Press Club, Reid said that Sunday?s elections in Iraq marked ?a first step in helping figure out a way that the U.S. can get out of Iraq. ... We have to figure out a way to remove ourselves from there with dignity.?
Really, the only thing the Democrats have gotten right about Iraq since 1991 was Bill Clinton's support for regime change there in 1998. And it's an object lesson that Clinton's position, the position of the only two term Democratic President since FDR, has been so quickly forgotten or ignored.
[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam].
Destroy it some more, George
Lileks.
I?m just glad I?m stupid enough to be hopeful. I?m glad I?m naive enough to suspect Iraqis actually wanted to vote. I?m very glad I?m not so aslosh with solipsistic hatred that any success in Iraq makes me trot out a cynical riposte so the rest of my buddies on Olympus will nod in wry assent. I?m glad that a picture of a mother holding her daughter to cast the ballot reminds me that this is number two in a series. All other things aside ? which is a difficult thing to posit, I know ? I?m glad to be on the side of holding elections. In the end I?m glad to be glad. And now I will go skip through the daisies and sing happy songs about bunnies, because I am obviously a fool. What was the cover story of the Village Voice I saw in the library today? ?Bush?s plan to destroy the world.? Destroy it some more, George.
January 30, 2005
An Interesting Subtext
Leopold Stotch at Outside the Beltway has it right.
But there is an interesting subtext: over and over what Iraqis are saying is that they were ?voting against terrorism? or that they ?voted for peace.? Which means that this election went from a referendum on the American ?occupation? to a rejection of the terrorism of Abu al-Zarqawi.
Zarqawi?s Error:
As insensitive as it sounded at the time, I said over and over again in my classes that what Iraq needed was for Zarqawi to start targeting Iraqis -- because this would show Iraqis that his insurgency is not anti-American but rather it is anti-democratic. And he fell right into this exact trap; he murdered Iraqis and his terrorism was increasingly perceived as anti-Iraqi (except in the mainstream media). Of course it certainly didn?t help his cause when Zarqawi labeled Shiite Muslims ?infidels.?
Obviously the new Iraqi government has a Herculean task ahead of it, but this is a major turning point in modern history. The Iraqi people are the true winners, but the secondary winner is the American voter, who once again put US foreign policy on the right side of history. The losers: the jihadists, old Europe, and most of the Democrat party.
The Blue Badge of Courage
[All pictures Associated Press.]
January 29, 2005
The Many Uses of Beer
January 27, 2005
Suicide Also Sells
I was supposed to be done blogging tonight so I could attend to several of the nearby virgins who keep dangling grapes in front of my mouth, but I need to balance the scales amongst the ad execs, software testers, parents of aspiring comedians, and . . . and spouses of Smith graduates . . . yeah, them too, even if they also happen to be ad execs.
So without further ado, and mindful of the suicide bomber motif for the evening, if you haven't seen it yet click here and follow the "VW ad link" to view an ad parody of a VW model sold in Europe. Then check out Jeff Jarvis, who says VW is badly mistaken to be going beserk over it.
Symbolism Kills, Complexly
It's only late January but Tim Blair has found what he says may be the single most revolting comment we'll read this year. It's from Manchester University Professor of Cultural Theory, Terry Eagleton, who explains why suicide bombers are just like World Trade Center jumpers:
It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.Gee, if you look at it that way, a suicide bomber is just like a self-immolating Buddhist Monk. Almost noble, actually -- at least until a synapse fires. Yeah, it takes that long.
Eagleton goes on to explain that "Blowing yourself up for political reasons is a complex symbolic act . . . ." I wonder if he thinks that assisting the death wishes of Islamofascists by killing them first is also a symbolic act, if only a simple one at that? Nah. Another synapse just fired.
Suicidally linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
January 26, 2005
Comedy Without A Net
I've been trying to get my blog legs back and it hasn't been too tough. But what can I say, winter is great, yet in a truly sucky way. Not conducive to
Moving right along, and having ignored the particle physicists, I pander next to readers who are parents of aspiring comedians. [Isn't that software tester or ad exec also a parent of a comedian?--Ed. Get the fuck out of here, I don't have an editor!] Anyway, Johnny Carson died over the weekend, and Larry Miller, who appeared on Carson's Tonight Show 15-20 times, has some personal recollections of what is was like to perform on the show. Well worth the read, via Powerline.
January 24, 2005
Hot Time in the Old Internet Advertising Town Tonight
Yesterday I
And for those particle physicists out there who feel ignored, rest assured, you are.
January 23, 2005
Well, It IS the Nectar of the Gods
Software Woes
Since a substantial part of this blog's readership works in software acceptance testing, I thought I should link to a report about the FBI's software woe's. More here.
UPDATE: Sorry about that Chief. Link fixed.
Innumeracy
NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent takes on innumeracy in today's column. (For those who don't know what innumeracy means, it's a word that describes those who don't know what numbers mean.)
One of the appealing things about the complaints I receive about innumeracy at The Times is their ecumenical origin; when it comes to how it handles numbers, The Times is an equal opportunity offender. Like a bad cough that spreads its germs indiscriminately, numbers misapplied and ill-explained irritate the sensibilities of the right and the left, the drug company official and the animal rights activist, the art collector and the Jets fan.Okrent's just getting started, but I'll interrupt here to note that most "comfortable with numbers" sports writers couldn't count their way out of a paper bag. See James, Bill.
Number fumbling arises, I believe, not from mendacity but from laziness, carelessness or lack of comprehension. I'll put myself in the latter category (as some readers no doubt will as well, after they've read through my representation of the numbers that follow). Most of the journalists I know who enter the profession comfortable with numbers write about sports, where debate about the meaning of statistics is a daily competition, or economics, a field in which interpretation of numbers will no more likely produce inarguable results than will finger painting.
So it is left to the rest of us who write for the paper to stumble through numbers, scatter them on the page and hope that readers understand. Does it matter if many of these figures are meaningless symbols serving the interests of the parties that issue them? Take a variety of reports on some recent lawsuits: A man is suing the city for $20 million arising from charges, eventually dismissed, brought against him for kidnapping and sexual abuse. The mother of the football player Derrick Thomas, who died in 2000, is suing General Motors for $75 million. Villagers on an Indonesian island are suing Newmont Mining Corporation for $543 million. Not one of these numbers is grounded in anything more substantial than the imagination of a plaintiff's lawyer, but each is given the authority of print.Okrent has NYT links to many of these examples, but it's obviously a problem that goes far beyond just one newspaper. At least, that's what four out of five dentists told me.
No different, really, was Wednesday's assertion that Bernard J. Ebbers, if convicted of all charges in the MCI-WorldCom accounting scandal, "could be sentenced to as much as 85 years," a formulation that bears no relationship to any conceivable outcome yet serves the prosecutor's public case very nicely.
Numbers issued by those measuring criminal enterprise ("In Mexico, drug trafficking is a $250-billion-a-year industry") or the economic impact of a new stadium ("Bloomberg said that he expected the arena to generate about $400 million a year through various economic activities") don't deserve to be published without challenge; it doesn't serve agencies who want to fight drug trafficking to underestimate the problem, nor can any politician support a development project without hyping its potential benefit.
Still, The Times persists. In November, when New York City Comptroller William Thompson released a study purporting to show that New Yorkers purchase more than $23 billion in counterfeit goods each year, The Times repeated the analysis as if it were credible. Quick arithmetic would have demonstrated that $23 billion would work out to roughly $8,000 per city household, a number ludicrous on its face. (In the Web version of this column, I've linked to an excellent dissection of Thompson's report, by freelance journalist Felix Salmon.)
Last Sunday, an article on the city's proposed $1.1 billion investment in three stadium projects cited the assertion by the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation that "for every dollar invested by the city in the three projects, taxpayers would get a return of $3.50 to $4.50 over 30 years." It didn't say that the same $1.1 billion invested in a 30-year Treasury bond would return $4 for every dollar invested, and a lot more reliably, too. (Credit where it's due: reporter Charles V. Bagli did note that the $1.1 billion could pay for 25 schools housing 600 students each.)
Sometimes the absence of a number is as deflating to an article's credibility as the presence of a deceptive one. Few articles noting that President Bush received more votes than any candidate in history also mentioned that more people voted against him than any candidate in history. Quoting Michael Moore's assertion that standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C., proved that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is "a red state movie" disregards the fact that metropolitan Greensboro has over 1.2 million people; you could probably find in a population that large enough people to give a standing O for a reading of the bylaws of the American Dental Association.
Of course both Moore and the reporter who wrote that piece operate in the movie business, where records are about as meaningful as promises. "Shrek 2" is not, as an article in The Times Magazine had it in November, "the third-highest-grossing movie of all time"; if you consider inflation, it's not even in the Top 10 (and "Titanic" is far from No. 1). This record-mania has spread everywhere. "Record-high gas prices" summoned up last year weren't even close; at its summer peak, gas cost 80 cents a gallon less than it did in 1981. Says economics reporter David Leonhardt, "Treating 2004 dollars the same as 1981 dollars isn't much different from treating dollars the same as rupees. The fact that 10 is a bigger number than 9 doesn't make 10 rupees worth more than $9; nor does it make $10 from 2004 worth more than $9 from 1981." Inflation isn't the only culprit stalking the record books: "Record deficits" may not be records when they're expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, a far more reasonable measure than any raw number.
January 10, 2005
CBS News and the Pit of Despair
Preparing to write this post, I searched WCRS for "CBS" and found something like 15 or 16 entries relating to September 8, 2004's Sixty Minutes Wednesday report on the Killian National Guard documents. I was dismayed to find this post from November 23:
Still hanging in the air is the CBS internal investigation of L'Affair de Memo, a/k/a Rathergate. Considering that Rather won't actually leave the anchor desk until March and that he got a cushy landing spot at 60 Minutes, I'm guessing the results of the investigation will be more whitewash than anything else. But to be fair, I don't know why we should expect CBS to indict itself, even if that's what's called for.Having quickly reviewed some of the key parts of the Independent Review Panel report and read a fair number of blog posts by those who have read much more than I, I think it's less whitewash than not. See how easy it is to correct yourself Dan?
Indeed, much of the report is devoted to how badly CBS handled the broadcast's aftermath. But my first interest all along has been the documents themselves, and whether simply being able to reproduce them in revealing detail on MS Word would itself prove to be the foundation of their falsity. The answer to that is found in Appendix 4. Oh -- and the answer is yes.
The Report doesn't examine the host of typographic issues presented by the documents but focuses on a handful, such as the superscript "th" and the apparent font, Times New Roman. The Report did not find that the documents were forged, but concludes that they can't be defended as authentic either (all page references to the Report are to the PDF page numbering):
The Panel has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries. However, the Panel has identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content. With better reporting, these questions should have been raised before the September 8 Segment aired. [Report, p.4]The key phrase here is "absolute certainty" -- it's not a journalistic standard and it isn't a legal one either. My first question is, why is it the standard applied here? It's a good question and there's no answer to be found in the report, other than -- well speculate as you will.
Yet the Report provides an overwhelmingly basis for concluding that the documents are not authentic, and in combination with the exhaustive forensic examination of CBS's reporting and later attempts to defend that reporting, it's obviously less whitewash than more. Indeed, from my brief review it appears the strongest part of the Report is its dismantling of the "fake but accurate" defense mounted by CBS in the days following the broadcast. Well, to be fair, the defense was more along the lines of "unverifiable, but accurate", although that's not much help to CBS.
But back to Appendix 4. The Appendix relates the work of Peter Tytell, a document and typographic expert retained to analyze the documents by the Independent Review Panel. The Appendix is cited 15 times in the report, mostly in reference to whether or not the superscript "th" was available on typewriters in the early 1970's -- typewriters that might have been available in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS attempted to contact Tytell the night before the broadcast and was only successful in doing so on September 9 and 10. From page 185 of the Report:
The Panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed the documents were not authentic. A summary of that analysis is set forth in Appendix 4. The Panel reaches no conclusion as to whether Tytell was correct in all respects. The Panel observes, however, that if 60 Minutes Wednesday management had met with Tytell and heard the same information as did the Panel, it might not have continued to support so fully the authenticity of the Killian documents absent further investigation.Appendix 4 is only 18 pages long, and Tytell's findings are summarized in only the 2nd paragraph of the first page.
Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle. Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles "to some extent a subjective call." However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.The Report did not have to find the documents to be forged to reach its conclusions. And yet, if nothing else it seems pretty clear that despite some attempts to ressurect their validity (try here for the most recent, which is in some ways a rehash of earlier efforts), there's no basis to believe that they are NOT forged. Oh -- and the spirited defense of a Commenter here in my first post on the subject is - 'er - not sustained.
Anyway, there's much more to the story -- Mary Mapes's contact with the Kerry campaign also revealed in one of the Appendices, her continued defense of the story, and Dan Rather's reluctance (but not refusal) to offer an on-air apology -- and more are all there, waiting to be picked up for light summer reading. And the ultimate question -- did the serious errors documented in the report result from bias -- is one we'll all be talking about for a while.
Was there bias? Was it "liberal" bias? Well, even if the Panel had drawn that conclusion we'd still be debating it. But I ask you this: had FoxNews -- no, not O'Reilly or Hannity et al., but the news guys, had FoxNews fallen into this pit of despair, I feel confident in offering the conjecture that we'd be having exactly the same conversation.
[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]
January 8, 2005
Catching Up with the Fucknobs
I'm still catching up on things I meant to blog about last night before I started watching this DVD, which I received for Christmas. It's got a 1/2 hour "making of" documentary that's worth watching, although Mel Brooks is missing from it and that's disappointing. On the other hand, he does the director's commentary to the film. The DVD also has some deleted scenes, the first of which is a long and mostly unfunny opening scene to the movie -- the initial reading of Baron von Frankenstein's will to his relatives in Transylvania. The most interesting thing about the scene though, is that it features a lengthy "message" from the Baron, sort of an audio will reading, played for the relatives on an old Victrola -- and Orson Welles did the voice! Who knew Orson Welles was cut from the movie?
Anyway, to finish the catch-up, Cerebral Dump has a link to more Digital Globe satellite pictures of the incomprehensible tsunami devastation. And Wizbang has a video.
And finally, from Varifrank, we learn why it's sometimes good to be, in his words, "unprofessional":
Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:His response includes the wonderful word, "fucknob", so you should read the whole thing. And really, all things considered, what's so unprofessional about calling a fucknob a fucknob?
"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."
Now I'm caught up. I think I'll blog again next year too.
The Jacko Channel
Jeff Jarvis:
Just as we get rid of Scott Peterson -- well, once Matt Lauer stops airing his daily Amber Frey shows -- we will get the Michael Jackson trial and it will take over all available media, knocking the dead in the Indian Ocean off the front page and the lead story on the evening news. It will be all-Jacko-all-the-time and I, for one, am dreading it.But it gets better, or is that worse? Jarvis links to Smoking Gun's summary of the case against Jackson -- a sort of preview, if you will, of this winter's sure fire reality TV hit. I don't know exactly when the trial is due to start, but I'm surely overly optimistic to think it will only take one season of the year to finish.
Dumb and Dumberer
USA Today reports that the Dept. of Education paid Armstrong Williams, a radio show host and columnist, $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind program. In other news, the Administration will announce today the policy to secretly pay people to advocate for the government was the result of a different secret government initiative, the Hire Idiots to Work in Government program. I'm not sure who the bigger idiot is -- Williams for taking the money without disclosing it, or the responsible numbnut in the government for paying it.
Or, to put it another way, when no one, whether Democrat or Republican, whether left or right, has anything good to say about something, you can pretty much figure that something was very dumb.
January 6, 2005
Dont You HATE It When This Happens?
Via emailer Dan:
Oops: Blue Screen Of Death Interrupts Gates' CES Show
Bill Gates' keynote presentation Wednesday night at the Consumer Electronics Show didn't quite go according to plan: glitches, including a dreaded "Blue Screen of Death," interrupted the show several times.
Microsoft's chairman, who shared the stage with late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien, kept his cool when Microsoft Media Center crashed during the presentation, and an Xbox displayed the blue screen of death.
As the Xbox went down for the count, the Microsoft executive running that part of the presentation, Garrett Young, said, "This is a little bit of demo karma, sorry, I'm out of system memory apparently. Yeah, so just imagine, if you will, that I was customizing my car and doing some really cool stuff."
O'Brien played to the crowd during the crashes with lines like "right now nine people are being fired," and "Who's in charge of Microsoft? Oh."
January 5, 2005
Waiting Breathlessly
While we all wait breathlessly for the result of CBS's internal review of the Dan Rather/Bush National Guard documents debacle, the Columbia Journalism Review has an apologetic piece attempting to resurrect CBS's reputation at the expense of the blogs responsible for CBS's lack thereof.
Read it, and then Powerline's response -- Powerline, you know, the blog that Time named Blog of the Year for, well you know.
Oh, and for the CJR and anyone else still hanging onto a thread of hope for the document's validity I'll repeat myself -- if you think these documents were produced on a 1970's vintage typewriter, then by all means, reproduce them on one. Assert if you want that this font or that was available at the time, claim if you must that typewriters back then could do superscript the "th", etc. etc. But the proof is in the pudding -- do it. Put a piece of paper in one and type one of those letters so that it matches as closely as good old MS Word, default setting and all. Then you'll get some attention.
Plug Me In, Scotty?
Politicians and the Press, Ad Nauseum
Orin Kerr posts, asking "Is the Supreme Court Conservative?".
I think it's a question we often ask and rarely answer well. In public discourse regarding the Court, the media and politicians throw "liberal" and "conservative" labels around too easily without either defining what they mean by the terms or offering any real analysis of the underlying case or the significance of the Court's reasoning. An example? The Texas sodomy case from last year, Lawrence v. Texas, resulted in a finding that a Texas law criminalizing same sex sodomy between consenting adults was unconstitutional. Liberal, right? But the majority opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy, a justice rarely accused of being liberal (or complimented with that term, for that matter). What about his reasoning? A "liberal" opinion might have created a "right to sodomy" but Kennedy didn't do that. His was more of an it isn't the government's business what goes on behind closed doors analysis, which is also consistent with some conservative principals.
But liberal and conservative are black and white shorthand for folks (like the press and like politicians) who speak in easy to digest answers about questions that are much harder than they'll ever admit to.
Beyond that, there are two things I think are pretty clear about the Court. First, today's Court has some members that are identified as "liberal" but none of them come close to the benchmarks that defined that term in the first place -- that is, none of them are liberal in the way Justices Brennan, Douglas, and Marshall were liberal. Second, even though in this sense the Court is more conserative than it was 30-40 years ago, the so-called conservative Court of today has done relatively little to roll back the many liberal decisions of that era. RPS, a commenter to Kerr's post, said:
Assuming the use of conservative is meant to mirror the Republican political agenda (along with the other requisite disclamiers), this Court has been pro-abortion, pro-affirmative action, and pro-gay rights. I don't think the Court should be defined by these issues any more than it should be defined by its federalism decisions, but I do think there is a large scale perception in the country that this Court has been very conservative, which I don't think is supported by what most consider to be conservative.Finally, Kerr quotes Stephen Pomper in the Washington Monthly:
To the surprise of the legal left, the Rehnquist Court has refused to overturn Roe v. Wade and has broken new ground in protecting the civil rights of homosexuals. It has endorsed some forms of affirmative action. In last Spring's highly charged enemy detainee cases, it refused to write the executive branch a blank check for wartime detention powers. And even in its hypertechnical (and therefore less controversial) federalism cases, which concern the powers of Congress over the states, the Court has feasted less aggressively on Congress' legislative authority than might have been anticipated, contenting itself to snack on bits and pieces. In retrospect, liberal anxieties (including my own?see "The Gipper's Constitution," December 1999) about how far this Court would go in implementing the Reagan revolution are looking somewhat misplaced if not, on occasion, hysterical. [Emphasis added].Credit goes to Pomper for his admission. In the end, liberal and conservative are poorly defined and reasoned terms that are much more difficult to apply than those generally using them will ever admit. They are the tools of political rhetoric and a glib media, and we can all look forward to hearing more of them, ad nauseum, as soon a vacancy appears on the Supreme Court.
[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]