Quotulatiousness

March 22, 2010

Doubting the story about the runaway Prius

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Michael Fumento looks at the public details about the “runaway” Prius:

Now let’s recap just one of my findings in the Forbes.com piece that the CHP report doesn’t deal with because it concerns later events.

The 911 dispatcher, as you can hear on the Web, repeatedly begs Sikes to either stop the engine with the ignition button or put the gear into neutral. Sikes refused to do either, later giving various bizarre reasons. “I was afraid to try to [reach] over there and put it in neutral, he told CNN. “I was holding onto the steering wheel with both hands — 94 miles an hour in a Toyota Prius is fast.”

Yet:

# We know Sikes spent most of the ride with a cell phone in one hand.

# Sikes claimed at a press conference that he reached under the dash and yanked on the floored accelerator. I’m thin with arms the average American length, but fell three inches short. Sikes almost certainly can’t do what he claims, but nobody’s asked him to repeat the motion. In any event, it can hardly be done with both hands on the wheel.

# Finally in the 2008 Prius the shift knob is mounted on the dash expressly to allow shifting by merely reaching out with a finger.

Just what exactly does it take to convince the press?

Personally, I found the timing of the event to be a little too perfect for a certain narrative: exactly as the Toyota CEO was being subjected to the Star Chamber treatment by US lawmakers. A few days before or after that, I might have been willing to believe it was a genuine event, rather than (as it certainly appears now) a staged hoax.

Full disclosure: I’ve owned several Toyota vehicles, currently including my own Tacoma pickup truck and (as of last Wednesday) Elizabeth’s Matrix sedan.

March 10, 2010

Mr. Miller’s media gotcha

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 18:30

March 4, 2010

QotD: The problem with modern journalism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:44

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.

Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.

This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’ The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.

Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!” They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.

Walter Russell Mead, “Treason is a matter of dates”, The American Interest Online, 2010-03-03

March 2, 2010

SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:

. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.

Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.

Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.

The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.

February 20, 2010

The editors at the National Post have the reverb setting too high

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:19

In two different articles I looked at today, there appears to be a slight problem with repetition. For example, in Rex Murphy’s piece on the on-again, off again boycott of oil from Alberta by BB&B, he appears to be trying to make some sort of point by repeating the company’s abbreviated name:

It cannot be very encouraging if one of the most dynamic industries in our recession-plagued country is operating in a state of mental waywardness. And if Bed Bath & Beyond, with an assist from Whole Foods, have rescued the captains of our oil industry from unknowing mental distress, why then this apparent BBB BBB BBB boycott would be worth its weight in stacked linens and whole sacks of the finest nickel-plated multiple-nozzle shower-heads.

[. . .]

Bed Bath & Beyond “clarified” in a press release: “Characterizations that we [BB BB and B] have ‘rejected’ any particular fuels are not accurate as we are not in a position to do so” (emphasis mine). Which is a little ambiguous since it leaves open the thought that were BBB BBB BBB in “a position to do so,” they would. So Albertans might take home the message that Bed Bath & Beyond have distanced themselves from the idea of “rejecting” oil sands fuel, not to spare Albertan sensibilities, but because there is no way for them not to do so. They’re just stuck with it. A little lacking, wouldn’t you say, in grace and tact?

[. . .]

My guess is the wavelet of backlash from Alberta at the ForestEthics press release was sufficient to haul the monks of BBB BBB BBB out of the eco-choir. BBB BBB BBB may have thought that sending a little incense to the Al Gore contingent of The Science is Settled and The Himalayan Glaciers are Toast Church of Global Warming (pre-Climategate Division) would titillate the balance sheet among the eco-fervent. But they quickly thought better of it. Oh that old Gloria Mundi. How Sic it Transits.

[. . .]

The IP IP CC has less prestige now than the Golden Globes, and bears no little resemblance to that farce’s incestuous relationship with its “industry.” The IP IP CC chairman is a rude, busy man who writes erotic novels — his muse, apparently, Jacqueline Susann.

(Emphasis mine). I decided that I just didn’t get the joke, until I looked at the lengthy criticism of the Liberal Party’s insistence on incorporating abortion rights into the government’s plans for targeting foreign aid to mothers and children, where Conrad Black seems to stutter over the acronyms, too:

Canada should tax provincial transactions and elective energy sales, the sale-of non-essential goods, and reduce income taxes and abolish capital gains taxes on sales by Canadians of Canadian securities. We should reintroduce private medicine alongside the public health system, as most advanced countries have done. Our health-care system should not be a model for the United States of what not to do, as it now is. We should be proposing drastic reforms to the UN UN , NATO NATO NATO NATO and the IMF, and building our defence capacity. An army of 19,000 is a scandal for a country as important as Canada. We should assist the private sector in making Canadians owners of a serious automobile manufacturer, and in the fair and advantageous repatriation of more of our industry. And the stocks, if not the lash, should be restored to deal with Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest for fouling our nest by criticizing the Alberta oil sands at the most futile international conference, Copenhagen, since the Defenestration of Prague.

February 18, 2010

QotD: Where are the (American) media?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:19

If it’s true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn’t that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren’t these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren’t you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying “What’s up with Watt’s Up With That??” One way or another, this is a huge story.

Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they’ll find it going the other way.

Brian Micklethwait, “Making the US old media notice Climategate”, Samizdata, 2010-02-17

February 17, 2010

Is “Own the Podium” the end of Canadian niceness?

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In another common refrain, Canada’s “Own the Podium” slogan appears to be doing irreparable damage to our international image . . . according to a few bored reporters. Again, it seems to shock and dismay people that Canadians might actually want to compete and win in the Olympics — apparently that’s not “Canadian”. Dahlia Lithwick looks at some of the “we can’t believe it” coverage:

Someday, someone is going to explain to me why it is that journalists so frequently speak about Canadians as though we are all about 2 feet tall and 7 years old. See, for instance, this exceedingly strange New York Times piece about how those tiny little Canadians are building a “giant laser” or some such thing, in order to bring home more Olympic medals than ever before. Look! Look at all those funny little Canadians in their funny little hats, trying to be good at sports! Look at them spending their whole allowance on a top-secret program to create a human slingshot for speed skaters and “super-low-friction bases for snowboards and [to find out] whether curling brooms really melt the ice.” The Seattle Times describes this effort as “Canada’s non-nuclear Manhattan Project.”

It was bad enough when they were calling us “un-Canadian” and “inhospitable” just for wanting to win medals. It got uglier last Friday when Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was tragically killed in a practice run. The Canadians’ decision to limit outsiders’ use of Olympic facilities before the Games began — a maneuver that every other host country pulls — got spun as “an unfortunate nationalistic impulse” that put patriotism ahead of safety. The subtext: When Canadians care about winning just as much as the rest of the world, can there be any more warmth and goodness left in the universe?

The flip-side of all this is . . . the world barely even knows that Canada exists. Why do we get all worked up about how the world “sees” us? More evidence that Canada still needs to grow up a bit and get over the teenage angst. It’s unbecoming in teenagers, but it’s much worse for a nation.

Of course, this effort to caricature Canadians has been aided most of all by Canadians. You know you’re suffering an international feistiness deficit when your prime minister begs his fellow citizens to show the world a little more testosterone. “We will ask the world to forgive us this time,” declared Stephen Harper in an effort to rouse Canadians into showy displays of patriotism, “this uncharacteristic outburst of patriotism and pride, our pride of being part of a country that is strong, confident and stands tall among the nations.”

What’s strange about all this deep Freudian analysis is that Canada has done pretty darn well on the hardware front in recent years. It jumped from 13 medals in 1994 to 24 at Turin in 2006. Canada ranks seventh overall in winter medal wins. Not bad for a country of 33 million people where per capita spending on Olympians has historically been a fraction of what some other countries spend. Is it possible that Canada has been doing just fine at the Winter Olympics but nobody ever bothered to notice?

However, I have to take issue with one thing she writes:

It has always seemed to me that sweeping efforts to identify a Canadian national character are pointless. It’s a vast country built on compromises between French and English, Canadians and the British. The nation differs so fundamentally from east coast to west that, Olympics notwithstanding, it’s hard to know what a Newfoundlander and a British Columbian might find to talk about.

Get two Canadians together from different parts of the country, and they’ll immediately have something to talk about: their shared loathing of Toronto . . .

January 20, 2010

If you wonder why it’s nicknamed “The Grauniad” . . .

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:13

This is the sort of thing they were notorious for:

You wonder why those “Crotians” and the “Sebians” can’t get along . . .

Amusingly, they got the national names correct in the article’s URL.

January 13, 2010

“times online commenters absolute RETARDS”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

The headline is the ever-nuanced Giles Coren expressing his opinion about the folks who left comments on his Times Online column on climate change:

Right, there is something that is going to have to stop right this second, and that is people making jokes about “If the globe is warming up then where did all this snow come from, eh? Eh? Tell me that?” Because it is driving me crazy.

And when I say “people”, I mean mostly columnists, cartoonists and comedians. I know there is nothing else to write about at the moment (God help me, I’m writing about people writing about the snow) and I grant that it was a nice little coincidence that the Copenhagen summit happened just as it started snowing, but please, people, stop making jokes about the weather in relation to climate change. Stop pretending to be surprised that you had to put a scarf and hat on this morning when the world is supposed to be warming up. The two things are not related. Nobody who understands the science is claiming that global warming (if it happens) is going to make Britain hotter in the long run.

January 5, 2010

QotD: What will be the big inane fears of the Twenty-teens?

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

What will be the great hysterical fears of the coming decade? By definition, such worries need to be simultaneously undocumentable and just plausible enough to convince politicians, celebrities, civic do-gooders, captains of industry and media types that our very society hangs in the balance.

For a classic example, think back to the 1980s, when Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Sen. Al Gore, helped form the Parents Music Resource Center and addressed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation regarding the pressing topic of sexual, violent and occult imagery in pop music. As Mrs. Gore wrote in her best-selling (and now hard-to-find) 1987 book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” “By using satanic symbols on the concert stage, and album covers, such as those used by Ozzy Osbourne…certain heavy metal bands lure teenagers into what one expert has called ‘the cult of the eighties.’ Many kids experiment with the deadly satanic game, and get hooked.”

It is probably only thanks to the intervention of the Gores that we managed as a country to wrestle free both of Beelzebub’s and Ronnie James Dio’s bony grasp. Which, it’s worth adding, might have been preferable to that of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner.

Nick Gillespie, “Don’t Fear The 2010s! Embrace the coming decade’s new distractions and overblown worries”, Reason, 2010-01-05

December 17, 2009

The Tiger Woods affair: the failure of the paparazzi

Filed under: Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

Kerry Howley says that the biggest disappointment of the whole convoluted Tiger Woods situation has been the embarassing performance of the paparazzi:

It’s not clear to me that the enduring interest in Tiger even needs explanation. For a while there, every time we looked away, a new woman emerged with an even better set of semi-sordid details. The story propelled itself forward. The gift kept on giving.

Since the above should make it clear that any cultural analysis of Tiger tends toward projection of one’s personal anxieties, I’ll refrain from using the universal “we.” I feel let down not by Woods, but by the paparazzi on whom we all depend to keep us abreast of these things. The man was with 11 women over how many years and not so much as a snapshot surfaces? Where were you, X17? Where were your swarming, flashing hordes, your ravenous stalkerazzi instincts? Does any photographer show up anywhere without a knowing tip-off from the entourage? My faith is broken.

November 26, 2009

QotD: How AGW became the majority view

Filed under: Environment, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions — capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) — and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.

Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists — 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 — were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal — and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.

Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.

James Delingpole, “Climategate: what Gore’s useful idiot Ed Begley Jr doesn’t get about the ‘peer review’ process”, Telegraph.co.uk, 2009-11-26

November 11, 2009

Murdoch’s brilliant, evil master plan

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Lore Sjoberg has cracked the secret plan that Rupert Murdoch appears to be following:

The audiences for traditional newspapers are getting older, more crotchety and increasingly dead. Most people don’t want their news to come with such hassles as a cover price, ads or dissenting opinions. How to bring in a younger, hipper audience that’s willing to spend money just to prove that they have money?

Murdoch, that crazy mad genius, realizes that the only way to attract this lucrative demographic is to establish street cred. He’s going underground, reinventing news as an exclusive club that you can’t find just by entering a search term.

Presumably, Murdoch’s New York Post, for example, will be renamed to something hip and enigmatic, like Velocity or Unk. The new URL won’t be publicized. To get it, you’ll have to know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, or show a lot of cleavage. There will be a long line outside the website, just like an exclusive club or World of Warcraft right after an expansion release. A moderator will check out your online presence and won’t let you in unless you’re a mover, a shaker, a player, a spender or showing a lot of cleavage.

Once inside, the website will be dark, noisy and disorienting, just like an exclusive club or a MySpace page. There will be a two-drink minimum. I’m not sure how that will work, actually, but if anyone can force people to buy $10 beers while browsing the web, it’s my man Rupert. People will pretend to be reading stories about police standoffs and Knicks games, but they’ll actually be looking around to see who else made it in. And all that affectation and posing is like unto money in Murdoch’s pocket.

November 3, 2009

Obscure band discovers controversy is cheapest advertising

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

The Guardian reports on the umpteen-thousandth demonstration that controversial material gets more column inches than good music:

San Francisco band Girls have made sure their music video won’t be played on MTV — by filling it with “gay porn”. That’s how they describe the “Hardcore XXX Edit” of their Lust for Life video, which features phallus-flaunting footage that is itself a toned-down version of the original idea they sent to their label.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group’s new video is not safe for work, children or anybody with a delicate disposition. Over the song’s joyous shuffle, there are nude girls in bathtubs, men putting on lipstick and, er, singing into penises. Certainly it won’t be showing on MTV any time soon, but according to guitarist Chet “JR” White, the Hardcore XXX Edit is “not even the [real] hardcore XXX version”. “It got cut,” he told Pedestrian.tv. “I’m kind of upset [the original] didn’t get put out, actually.”

“There’s a gay porn version we were really pushing for that was incredible, like nothing else. But at the same time, it’s really beautiful — about two people who love each other. We’re from San Francisco, so it’s not a surprise to us.”

The only difference with this manufactured “controversy” is that they’re not even trying to pretend that it’s anything other than a publicity grab. In a way, that’s kind of refreshing.

October 21, 2009

Canadian press freedoms slip a few notches

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Reporters Without Borders (known by their French initials, RSF) show Canada’s press is less free this year, compared to other countries:

Canada fell to 19th place this year from 13th last year on Reporters Without Borders’ index of freedom of the press. The analysis covers print, broadcast and online journalism in 175 countries.

The Paris-based group, also known by its French acronym RSF, says court challenges to journalists’ rights to protect their sources precipitated Canada’s drop six spots from last year’s ranking.

Lawsuits intended to silence critics under the weight of the hefty cost of a legal defence — known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP suits — also factored into the drop, said Dennis Trudeau, a spokesman for Reporters Without Borders’ Canadian chapter.

“There are issues like real protection of sources,” he said.

“Where a reporter could theoretically face jail or a fine for not revealing his sources is in our view, especially when we’re dealing with public issues, a unreasonable restriction on freedom of the press.”

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