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Much Quieter
I finally installed my new case fan and it works very well, the entire workstation is much less noisy than before.
What an exciting life I lead.
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Thursday rapid fire
- Shoplifting as Social Commentary – We truly have it easy and are getting soft when we (the West that is, not the US) this happens. Germany should sentence them to live in Darfour for a year as punishment.
- E-Machine Shop – It would seem that Instapundit’s era of cottage industry here. Originally from a Wired article (not online yet). You can design something entirely online, they fab it and ship it off.
- Men Smarter than Women in Australia – The article doesn’t actually provide much useful information on the distribution. It also doesn’t address Paulos’ notion that the reason women aren’t at the good end of the Bell curve is a matter of personal taste and habit (i.e. they are more likely to occasionally clean (taking up valuable time) and maintaining personal relationships whereas men are more likely willing to live in filth and lose everyone in their lives in the pursuit of a goal.)
- Cars, PHEV, and Green Tuning
- Another superb article + photos from Michael Yon always worth reading
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New Gallery Uploaded
I recently visited historic Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta, some of the shots turned out okay.
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Boaz on PBS
From a good article by Cato’s David Boaz
Sometimes the bias is not quite so obvious. Rather than imbalance within each report, the bias is reflected in the choice of topics. A careful listener to NPR would notice a preponderance of reports on racism, sexism, and environmental destruction, but very few reports on the burden of taxes and regulation, or the unconstitutionality of most federal programs, or the way that state and federal governments increasingly abuse the rule of law in going after unpopular defendants such as tobacco companies and Wall Street executives.
Anyone who got all his news from NPR would never know that Americans of all races live longer, healthier, and in more comfort than ever before in history, or that the environment has been getting steadily cleaner.
In the past few weeks, as this issue has been debated, I’ve noted other examples. Take the long and glowing reviews of two leftist agitprop plays, one written by Robert Reich and performed on Cape Cod and another written by David Hare and performed in Los Angeles. And then there was the effusive report on Pete Seeger, the folksinger who was a member of the Communist Party, complete with a two-hour online concert, to launch the Fourth of July weekend.
The real problem is not liberal bias but the inevitability of bias. Any reporter or editor has to choose what’s important. It’s impossible to make such decisions without a framework, a perspective, a view of how the world works.
Something else to bean in mind is that by subsiding an “independent media” the government can ensure that while having representation of the left or right in the media, they can make sure that the people they actually fund are lightweights who pose no threat.
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Thoughts on Gaza
For the past few generations Israel has occupied the Gaza strip (and other areas) and the Palestinians have been doing their intifada and generally becoming resentful. Now the Israelis are pulling out and leaving them their own area. The generally cited reason is that this shorten the Israeli security perimeter and makes it easier to defend.
After decades of occupation the main Palestinian “natural” skill would seem to be rock throwing and suicide bombing. What if the Israeli end game is to give the Palestinians what they want, and then let the various groups compete for dominance in bloody fashion? This keeps them divided and busy for years and the Israelis could offer weapons and intelligence and weapons to keep the fight going (like they supposedly did during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s). All this would leave Israel relatively secure with the Palestinians taking themslves out of the picture.
Just a thought.
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Still!
I’m still doing data recovery. Still! I have no idea why all this crap is taking so long.
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Curses
So, it would appear that my data drive has joined the choir invisible. I think I only dropped about two days of data, but most of that was two days worth of editing Silver Photos AND all of my time tracking stuff, which totally sucks.
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The natural life cycle of American causes
They begin in tragedy and end in farce.
Joan Baez performs for Crawford War protesters.
While there are many actual events happening (see Michael Yon and a A Day in Iraq for more), here in America we concetrate more on aging baby boomer nostalgia, taking the form of listing ways that Iraq is similar to Vietnam (oddly never comparing it to the Philippines, where we also fought a Muslim insurgency.). We’re also careful to take note of both opinion polls and posturing, specifically this article which had the quote:
The protesters at “Camp Casey” can claim some victory for forcing Bush to talk so extensively about the military deaths when he’d rather focus on indicators of progress in Iraq. The campers’ call to bring the troops home now dominated news coverage out of Crawford this week while Bush stayed on his ranch with no public events.
A fixed date withdrawal deadline vs a benchmark withdrawal deadline? Can we live with Hyper-federalism or an Islamic republic in Iraq? How far are we willing to go to capture bin Laden, and what if we’re wrong? What kind of error rate in military endeavors are we willing to live with?
All these things pale in comparison to such gripping matters as the exact verbiage of a speech and who is on vacation.
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Quality from the East
I’ve always enjoyed analysis of world events from Asia. Der Spiegel has an insightful interview with founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew.
SPIEGEL: How do you explain that China is spending billions on military modernisation right now?
Mr. Lee: Their modernisation is just a drop in the ocean. Their objective is to raise the level of damage they can deliver to the Americans if they intervene in Taiwan. Their objective is not to defeat the Americans, which they cannot do. They know they will be defeated. They want to weaken the American resolve to intervene. That is their objective, but they do not want to attack Taiwan.
SPIEGEL: Really? They have just passed the aggressive anti-secession law and a general has threatened to use the nuclear bomb.
Mr. Lee: I think they have put themselves into a position internationally that if Taiwan declares independence, they must react and if Beijing’s leadership doesn’t, they would be finished, they would be a paper tiger and they know that. So, they passed the anti-secession law to tell the Taiwanese and the Americans and the Japanese, “I do not want to fight, but if you allow Taiwan to go for independence, I will have to fight.” I think the anti-secession law is a law to preserve the status quo.
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A fine post from Steve Levitt
Solid work explaing why the “Peak Oil” notion is wrong, a summary quote.
So why do I compare peak oil to shark attacks? It is because shark attacks mostly stay about constant, but fear of them goes up sharply when the media decides to report on them. The same thing, I bet, will now happen with peak oil. I expect tons of copycat journalism stoking the fears of consumers about oil induced catastrophe, even though nothing fundamental has changed in the oil outlook in the last decade.
Curiously unmentioned is that oil demand usually peaks in the month of August (it’s lowest in February). I actually read all of the comments thread, which wasn’t terribly illuminating. Few addressed the point in the post. It was surprising how attached people are to particular doomsday scenarios.