15 minutes of fame reduced to 10 seconds:
This lady made it to the second question:
And from the French version of the show. The question is "What is it that orbits around the Earth?":
Don’t be surprised that the audience got the answer wrong as well. Unlike the US "Millionaire" audiences, the audiences in foreign countries often intentionally give the wrong answer to mess up the contestent.
In a nutshell: Joe Klein printed something in Time about the FISA bill that was clearly objectively wrong. Rather than read the bill and report what it actually said, he transcribed what a Republican told him it says. Klein originally wrote:
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Got that? Klein is reporting that, under the proposed bill, surveillance of suspected foreign terrorist’s calls requires an order from the FISA court.
But the proposed FISA bill actually says:
‘CLARIFICATION OF ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE OF NON-UNITED STATES PERSONS OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES’
Sec. 105A. (a) Foreign to Foreign Communications-(1) IN GENERAL – Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.
In short, Klein said something that was clearly and demonstrably incorrect. It was false.
When called upon his egregious error, he wrote five follow-up columns in which he admitted to possibly making a mistake, but never bothering to correct the mistake because he lacked "the time" and "legal training". Of course, he had the "time" to talk to a Republican operative and get the original misinformation, he had "time" to write the original article, and he had the "time" to write several follow-up articles trying to defend himself. But he apparently didn’t have time to actually read the FISA bill which is written in plain English and doesn’t require legal training to decipher.
Time has finally issued a "correction" to the article which, like Klein himself days before, doesn’t actually make any correction. It reads as follows:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
This is what is wrong with journalism today. Nowhere in the article is the actual language from the FISA bill printed. Instead, what is reported is the "he said, she said". It’s stenography; not reportage.
Atrios puts the Time approach to journalism to the test here:
Democrats believe that Rick Stengel (richard_stengel@timemagazine.com) and Mickey Kaus have regular threesomes with a goat, while Republicans believe Mickey has a strictly monogamous relationship with his goat.
What is the truth? Well, the moden media outlet would just throw up its hands and say, "Hey. We’re only reporting what we were told!"
Here’s Greenwald:
Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.
All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?
That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.
In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.
Greenwald goes even further, noting that this is not only stenography, but BAD stenography:
I worked for years with highly professional stenographers in hundreds of depositions and court proceedings. Their defining trait is that they have a fierce devotion to transcribing accurately everything that is said and doing nothing else. It’s not uncommon for lawyers, in the heat of some dispute, to attempt to recruit the stenographer into the controversy in order to say who is right.
Stenographers will never do that. They will emphasize that they are only there to write down what is said, not to resolve disputes or say what actually happened — exactly like Time Magazine and most of our press corps. If someone in a court proceeding voices even the most blatantly false accusations, stenographers will faithfully write it down and publish it without comment — exactly like Time Magazine and most of our press corps, at least when it comes to claims from the government and its GOP operatives.
But there’s a fundamental difference: stenographers are far better at their job, since they give equal weight to what all parties say. But Time and friends exist principally to trumpet government claims and minimize and belittle anything to the contrary, and they pretend to "balance" it all only when they’re caught mindlessly transcribing these one-sided claims and are forced to do write down what the other side says, too. The bulk of our establishment journalists aren’t merely stenographers. They’re bad stenographers.
Better media please.
Another must read — Jon Swift’s satirical 20 Rules For Joournalism.
There’s a joke or pun to be made.
Can’t seem to get the bat off my shoulders though.
Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes misspelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as "eye-contact implying ‘after you…’". A more literal approximation is "ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other".
It’s a good concept that really needs a word. I think we can do better than "mamihlapinatapai" though.
I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "…based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."
So says the Mormon who wants to be President of the United States. (Mormons account for 2% of the U.S. population, whereas Muslims range from 0.5 to 1% of the U.S. population).
Walked right in to that one, Mitt.
MORE: Ezra Klein sez:
Romney, of course, is a Mormon, and has spent much of this campaign begging the electorate not to allow his membership in a cult harm his presidential campaign. For Romney to now turn on Muslims is like the fifth least popular kid on the playground trying to help his status by stealing the lunch money of the few losers beneath even him.
When whales are rescued, they get tagged. They also get a rather unimaginative name — something like "Willy" (from Free Willy).
Greenpeace has a poll where you can name the next rescued whale.
Most of the choices are very earthy and multicultural. For example:
Aiko – means ‘little love’ in Japanese
Gana – means ‘song’ in Hindi
Kigai – means ‘strong spirit’ in Japanese
Nurani – means ‘conscience in Bahasa Indonesia
Talei – means ‘special, rare or extremely valuable’ in Fijian
They also through in one joke-y name. Well, with the polls almost closed, guess which whale name is prevailing:
Looks like a runaway for Mister Splashy Pants, although you can still vote.
Real journalists hate bloggers. From today’s Washington Post:
Citizen journalism is bringing folks, young and old, into the public square, giving voice to those who, in the pre-Internet era, may have felt voiceless.
But some challenge the value of all this citizen involvement. Questions pop up. Is it really "journalism"? Are "they" really "journalists"? What’s the difference between citizen journalists and bloggers who write about politics?
"The term ‘citizen journalist’ has an Orwellian ring to it," says Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur," who’s criticized the Web 2.0-Wikipedia world, where everyone can become their own editors.
"People are becoming Big Brother, either with a camcorder or a keyboard, and following the candidates around. It’s ridiculous. You can’t just be a great journalist, the same way you can’t be a great chef or a great soccer player."
Journalists, he continues, "follow a set of standards, a code of ethics. Objectivity rules. That’s not the case with citizen journalists. Anything goes in that world."
And sometimes the facts go out the window.
Sadly, that criticism of "citizen journalists" would carry much more weight if journalists did their jobs.
Take, for example, Joe Klein, the political columnist of Time magazine. He writes about the House FISA reform bill and the controversy about what it means, and what it will change. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty. My only point is that within Klein’s column, at the end, he writes:
I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.
Don’t have the time to provide the facts about what an important bill actually means?
Why, thank you, professional journalism!
And over at "Tapped", the bloggers there note something interesting. They cited articles in both The New York Times and the Washington Post over a squabbling between Romney and Guiliani over Romney’s crime-fighting record as Governor of Massachusetts. What’s the one thing that BOTH articles failed to mention?
If I were an editor at one of these fine papers, and my reporters turned in one of these stories, I’d tell them to figure out whether Romney or Giuliani is telling the truth. You won’t find it in either story. So which is it?
My curiosity piqued, I did something crazy: I typed "Massachusetts crime statistics" into Google. And you know what I found? This! A page on the state’s web site with their crime reports!
***
Was that so hard?
Here’s the thing: Politicians lie. The only thing that will keep them from lying is if they know they’ll pay a price. And the only ones who can make them pay that price are the reporters whose job it is to tell us what’s going on.
So I’ll accept that bloggers (aka citizen journalists) aren’t REAL journalists who don’t perform REAL journalism. The problem is that — a lot of the time — REAL journalism is nowhere to be found, even among the elite media establishments.
UPDATE: More on Joe Klein’s recent journalism embarrassments here and here.
The Hollywood writers are still on strike; the stagehand strike talks broke down.
This is the discovery from last summer:
The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.
The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.
Astronomers don’t know why the hole is there.
Now we turn to Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). [SIDENOTE: I think it’s just great that she can do physics and manicures at the same time!].
She and her team have looked into this giant hole in the universe dealeo, and they think they know what’s going on:
The Mersini-Houghton team, however, says it is another universe at the edge of our own. They looked at string theory for the explanation. In string theory, 10500 universes (or string vacuums) are described, each with unique properties. They contend that the largeness of our universe is due to its vacuum counterbalancing gravity. This counter-gravity of the vacuum keeps our universe very large (rather than shrinking due to gravity)—larger than the other multitude of universes. The team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of this interaction they are seen by us.
The team predicts that another giant void will eventually be found. The already found void is in the northern hemisphere. They contend another one will be found in the southern hemisphere.
Okay, I’m not sure I follow that. You see, I thought the "universe" definitionally meant, well, everything. There can’t be another universes "at the edge of our own". Fortunately, a Slate article from a few years back addresses this:
Before getting to why you should or should not believe in multiple universes, there’s a semantic point we ought to deal with. If the universe is, as the dictionary has it, "all existing things … regarded as a whole," then isn’t it true by definition that there is only one such thing? (After all, uni- is built right into the word itself.) Well, yes. But when physicists and philosophers talk about different space-time domains being "two universes," what they generally mean is that those regions are 1) very, very large; 2) "causally isolated" from each other (meaning that an event in one cannot have an effect in another); and hence 3) mutually unknowable by direct observation (since observing something means causally interacting with it). The case for saying the two domains are separate universes is further strengthened if 4) they have very different characters: if, say, one of them has three spatial dimensions (like ours), whereas the other has 17 dimensions. Finally—and here is the existentially titillating possibility—two domains might be called separate universes if 5) they are "parallel," meaning that they contain somewhat different versions of the same entities, like your own alter ego.
Now, thanks to my Star Trek watching days, I can understand the concept of parallel universes. It’s the universe where everything is exactly like it is here in this universe and there’s a duplicate of each one of us, except we wear slightly different clothes, and the men wear goatees.
Of course, that’s just one possible "parallel" universe. I prefer to think of a parallel universe which is just the same as ours, except everyone, including animals, drives an AMC Pacer.
Anyway, this whole thing hurts my head.
Bo, the big one, apparently decided he had had enough of the little one’s antics. Arrow is now missing 1/3rd of his right ear. He is bandaged for a couple of days, and has to wear a lampshade until Wednesday.
Arrow doesn’t mind the missing ear part. He minds that bandage a little. But he really HATES the lampshade. He keeps snagging it on wall corners, the floor, his paws. Here he is planting himself, intending never to move again unless he carried from point A to point B.
I’m not sure if this is a one-time incident, or a major problem in the making. It apparently happened when I was out of the house (although I can’t be sure it happened the way I described it; I never did find the ear part. It could have been a neighbor’s dog or maybe Arrow snagged it on a fence). Anyway, Bo is in the doghouse (metaphorically speaking) and I’m keeping an eye on the two of them.
UPDATE: Maybe he needs one of these from now on.
Dear ,
I start off my open letter with "Dear ," for one reason: because that’s how you addressed me in your latest email, in which you notified me that I was "recently appointed as a biographical candidate" to represent my "industry" in Madison’s ("Not-To-Be-Confused-With-Marquis’s") Who’s Who Among Executives and Professionals, and to let me know that you want me for "inclusion into the 2007-2008 Honors Section of the registry".
I understand that you probably invite hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people to be honored in the Who’s Who registry. Apparently, all that is required to get in your registry is a first name, a last name, an email address, and an ego from the recipient. So it must be hard for you to notify all of potential honorees. Still, I think an esteemed publication such as yours could invest in a decent mail merge program so that your salutations come out as something other than "Dear [blank]".
That said, I must respectfully decline your kind invitation. I honestly do not think I deserve it. How could I possibly stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of, say, Graham Norris, a director of Sharif Group — a company which (as far as I can tell) ships stuff. Mr. Norris "utilizes expert judgment and creativity in the analysis of complex issues involving data from multiple sources and variables." I don’t know what that means, which clearly means that he is made of more whos-who-worthy material than me.
Same too with Nicholas McLean, who encourages "a culture which upholds the highest standards of integrity, quality and transparency, he provides an attractive and rewarding work environment for his staff" andr Tony Karitzis, who encourages "a culture which upholds the highest possible due diligence, quality and transparency in all transactions, he has gained the confidence and respect of his colleagues and peers." Seems that "encourging cultures" is big with you people, and since I don’t even know what that means, I probably don’t fit in with the rest of the club.
While I get invited a few times every year to join somebody’s Who’s Who registry, I realize (as you apparently do) that there are a lot of Who’s Who scams out there. I have developed a simple method for ferreting out real Who’s Who offers from bogus ones, and it’s quite easy to apply. I call it the Groucho Marx Method Of Who’s-Who Scam Detection (GMMWWSD) and it goes something like this: I wouldn’t register with any Who’s Who publication who would have me as a member.
In short, you asking me to be honored only lends to your illegitimacy, according to my litmus test. And the fact that you sent me a form email addressed to "Dear [blank space]," only makes me more suspicious.
I hope to copyright the GMMWWSD test, and give it wide publication. Perhaps that way I can gain noteriety for my significant contributions to mankind, if only by making the general populace aware of the silliness of Who’s Who publications in general. And maybe someday, I will then be honored with a Who’s Who listing.
In the meantime, thanks for including my name in your somewhat shoddy and no doubt voluminous mail merge program, and hitting the "Enter" button.
All the best,
Ken [Blank space]
With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.
Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.
The short-term American targets include passage of a $48 billion Iraqi budget, something the Iraqis say they are on their way to doing anyway; renewing the United Nations mandate that authorizes an American presence in the country, which the Iraqis have done repeatedly before; and passing legislation to allow thousands of Baath Party members from Saddam Hussein’s era to rejoin the government. A senior Bush administration official described that goal as largely symbolic since rehirings have been quietly taking place already.
and in Afghanistan:
A White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan has concluded that wide-ranging strategic goals that the Bush administration set for 2007 have not been met, even as U.S. and NATO forces have scored significant combat successes against resurgent Taliban fighters, according to U.S. officials.
The evaluation this month by the National Security Council followed an in-depth review in late 2006 that laid out a series of projected improvements for this year, including progress in security, governance and the economy. But the latest assessment concluded that only "the kinetic piece" — individual battles against Taliban fighters — has shown substantial progress, while improvements in the other areas continue to lag, a senior administration official said.
This judgment reflects sharp differences between U.S. military and intelligence officials on where the Afghan war is headed. Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.
There will come a day when we eventually leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and significant numbers of people will declare "victory". Kind of easy to do when you define down what one means by "victory". As Josh Marshall says: "Squint hard enough and it kind of sort of maybe looks like victory."
By the way, remember when war critics complained that Bush was going to try to set up permanent bases in Iraq, and they were called wacko conspiracy theorists? Well…
Iraq’s government is prepared to offer the U.S. a long-term troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments in return for an American guarantee of long-term security including defense against internal coups, The Associated Press learned Monday.
The proposal, described to the AP by two senior officials familiar with the issue, is one of the first indications that the United States and Iraq are beginning to explore what their relationship might look like, once the U.S. significantly draws down its troop presence.
Actually, jokes aside, this dance by a one legged ballet dancer, with his one-armed partner, is really beautiful. They recently won a dance contest on Chinese TV.
Okay, well. It’s the day before Thanksgiving and everyone is gearing up to go to Grandma’s house, or to get up at zero o’clock so you can drag giant Shrek balloons down Manhattan, or to do things that will stay in Vegas, or to spend a few days of much needed down time before tech week (that’s me), or to sing along with Legally Blonde, or whatever.
In any event, nothing much will happen, at least nothing blogworthy (as opposed to the things I write about? Hmmmm)….
Happy T-giving, yo.
