Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2013

April 1st meets scientific illiteracy in Florida

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Did you know that there is dihydrogen monoxide streaming out of the water taps in Fort Myers, Florida? Apparently a lot of radio listeners thought this was a very bad thing:

Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly worse over a successful April Fools’ Day prank. They told their listeners that “dihydrogen monoxide” was coming out of the taps throughout the Fort Myers area. Dihydrogen monoxide is water.

The popular deejays are mainly in all this trouble (potentially of a felony level) because their listeners panicked so much — about the molecular makeup of their drinking water, however unwittingly — that Lee County utility officials had to issue a county-wide statement calming the fears of chemistry challenged Floridians.

March 13, 2013

The problem isn’t media bias, it’s failure at ordinary journalism

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

In the Huffington Post, Steven Greenhut discusses the old conservative hobby horse of “media bias” and suggests the problem isn’t bias at all:

In my talks to conservative bloggers and activists who want to understand and influence the media, I downplay the “liberal bias” meme. Sure, most reporters I’ve encountered in my years working for newspapers have a liberal worldview that influences their story selection and coverage. But most are reasonably fair and professional, so I encourage conservatives to try engagement before vilification as they pitch their story lines to reporters.

But my recent experience on the receiving end of a series of supposed exposes has left me rethinking my tendency to cut fellow journalists some slack. I’ve been appalled by the shoddy reporting techniques used to try to embarrass the organization where I work — frustrated by reporters who don’t get the other side of the story and who seem uninterested in investigating anything, but merely want to play a game of “gotcha.”

I’ve been saddened to watch notable publications — the Guardian and Columbia Journalism Review, in particular — republish the hyperbolic reports of left-wing activist groups without bothering to interview the subject of the investigation before publication or doing basic fact-checking or even allowing a rebuttal.

My beef isn’t with these publications’ ideology or biases — bias is an inescapable part of being human — but with their lack of standards and ethics.

September 4, 2012

US Army’s JTRS program a poster child for development failure

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Strategy Page has the details:

It’s been eleven months now since the U.S. Army cancelled its 15 year effort to develop the JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System). This program cost over $6 billion and has been a major embarrassment for the U.S. Department of Defense. Actually, JTRS still exists, on paper, but its goal, to provide better combat radios, has been accomplished by adopting civilian radios that do what the troops needed done and calling it JTRS. In the time the army spent working on JTRS some $11 billion was spent on buying more radios using existing designs, and a lot of off-the-shelf equipment incorporating stuff JTRS was supposed to do.

JTRS was yet another example of a military development project that got distracted, and bloated, trying to please everyone. There was, in a word, no focus. There’s been a lot of this in the last decade. That’s what killed the Comanche light attack helicopter, the Crusader self-propelled howitzer, FCS (Future Combat System), the Seawolf SSN, the DDG-1000 destroyer, B-2 bomber, F-22 fighters and several military space satellite projects. In all cases some of the technology developed was put to use in cheaper systems and sometimes a few of the cancelled systems were built (three Seawolfs, three DDG-1000s, 21 B-2s and 187 F-22s). These cancellations and cutbacks saved over half a trillion dollars. That goes a long way towards paying for projects that were not cancelled and are nearly half a trillion dollars over budget. But overall these failures were expensive and embarrassing.

JTRS, however, was the poster child of what usually goes wrong and how it impacts the combat troops. After all, radios are something personnel in all services use a lot. The main problem with JTRS was that the troops needed digital (for computer stuff) and analog (traditional radio) communications in one box and it had to be programmable, in order to handle new applications and the need to communicate with other radio types. That’s what JTRS was supposed to do but it never happened. The procurement bureaucracy and government contractors consumed over six billion dollars but never quite got anything useful out the door.

June 24, 2012

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

April 8, 2012

L. Neil Smith’s Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:44

From today’s edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith’s open letter to Rush Limbaugh:

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

I began listening to you early in the Clinton Administration. For years you’ve said you’re playing with half your brain tied behind your back “just to make it fair”. For the same number of years, I’ve been saying (admittedly to a much smaller audience), that if you ever untied and started using the other half of your brain, you’d be a libertarian.

That was all in fun (although I do believe it). But what I have to tell you now is intended quite seriously. I’ve been involved in the libertarian movement for 50 years, since 1962, when I was 16 years old — almost before the word “libertarian” was in common currency. In all of that time, we libertarians have learned to handle the Left, better, I think, than the Right does. Partly that’s because we aspire to many of the same things that they do — except that we really mean it.

(more…)

March 13, 2012

El Neil on Limbaugh’s “show of weakness”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

L. Neil Smith weighs in on the Rush Limbaugh “apology” to Sandra Fluke and the media feeding frenzy it perpetuated:

Please understand that I am not a conservative of any kind. As a more or less lifelong libertarian, and a proud, battle-scarred (and, I like to think, highly decorated) veteran of America’s 1960s Sexual Revolution (which actually began in the 1920s), I’m very much in favor of individuals finding joy, and generally doing whatever they desire with their own lives. Love (or whatever floats your boat) is such a rare commodity that they ought to revel in it whenever they can. What I am vehemently opposed to, however, is making other people pay for it.

But then, despite the basic truth behind what he’d said about her, Limbaugh decided — far more likely it was decided for him — to apologize.

John Wayne became famous, among other things, for declaring, in several of his movies, “Never apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” Mark Harmon has said it, too, in the role of Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS. And there’s a basic, Darwinistic truth in what they’ve both said, as illustrated by what happened next to the Formerly Fat Flumpus.

When his ideological enemies began screaming about what Limbaugh had said, if he’d told them to stick it where the sun don’t shine and break it off, their screaming would have subsided and finished with a whimper.

But the minute he apologized, the minute he rolled over on his back, sticking his paws in the air and exposing his belly, they fell on him like wolves. With the ladies and gentlemen of the evening who constitute our news media cheering them along, public figures called for removing him from the air the way they had Don Imus — and Imus, true to the sad, broken figure of Winston Smith he had become, joined in.

“Do it to Limbaugh!”

Meanwhile animals and barbarians of all kinds showered Limbaugh with death threats and other worst-wishes, and the Internet writhed like a pit of snakes with vile, anonymous accusations of every kind against him. Clearly free speech in this country is supposed to be reserved to the creatures who call themselves “progressives” because they’ve dirtied the word “liberal” to the point it can’t be used any more.

March 6, 2012

Michael Kinsley: Of course it’s insincere

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:25

I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and I’m not likely to start listening in the near future, so my concern about “Slutpocalypse” is neither deep nor lasting. Limbaugh used the term “slut” to describe a Georgetown law student who was pleading for free or subsidized birth control. He then was forced to apologize, and the apology was deemed insincere by media commentators far and wide. Michael Kinsley points out that they went about it in the wrong way to garner a sincere apology:

The people who want to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air are not assuaged or persuaded by his apology over the weekend. They say he was not sincere: He only apologized, for calling a Georgetown University law student a “slut” and a “prostitute,” because of pressure from advertisers.

Well, of course he wasn’t sincere. And of course he was only apologizing to pacify advertisers — who were getting pressured to pressure Limbaugh by these very critics. Oh, there might have been a political calculation, too, that he’d gone too far for the good of his ratings or his celebrityhood. But any apology induced in these circumstances is almost by definition insincere. You can’t demand a public recantation and then expect sincerity along with the humble pie. If they wanted a sincere apology, Limbaugh’s critics would have had to defend his right to make these offensive remarks, and then attempt to change his mind using nothing but sweet reason. Go ahead and try.

[. . .]

Of course, the insincerity is on both sides. The pursuers all pretend to be horrified and “saddened” by this unexpected turn of events. In fact, they are delighted. Why not? Their opponent has committed the cardinal political sin: a gaffe.

A gaffe, as someone once said, is when a politician tells the truth. This is a bit imprecise. The term “politician” covers any political actor, certainly including Rush. And the troublesome statement needn’t be the truth, as it certainly wasn’t in this case: more like “the truth about what he or she is really thinking.” The typical gaffe is what they used to call a “Freudian slip.” But, with all due respect to Freud, why should something a politician says by accident — and soon wishes he or she never said, whether true or not — automatically be taken as a better sign of his or her real thinking than something he or she says on purpose?

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

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