[mdlug-discuss] [mdlug] Is MS bribing bloggers?

[allen]

Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>> From: allen
>> Ingles, Raymond wrote:
>>     
>>>  As I said, it was stupid.
>>>       
>
>   
>> Nope. Dan Rather, whatever his shortcomings, isn't stupid. He's 
>> arrogant, unprofessional and petty but he's not stupid. Minimizing the 
>> transgression by ascribing it to stupidity doesn't properly encompass 
>> the scope and seriousness of that transgression.
>>     
>
>  Even very intelligent people can make stupid mistakes. Look at Nixon.
> On the other hand, one good thing about the U.S. is that, at least
> sometimes, stupid mistakes by those in positions of authority actually
> have lead to negative consequences for them. Nixon had to resign, and
> so did Rather.
>   
As I wrote; arrogant, unprofessional and petty. Applicable to Rather 
when he was finally caught as Nixon unless you're using the Forrest Gump 
definition of "stupid".

You ought to read the links you dig up though. Since the subject under 
discussion is the left-wing slant in the mainstream media, the 
information that:

"The findings in the Thornburgh-Boccardi report led to the firing of 
producer Mary Mapes; several senior news executives were asked to 
resign, and CBS apologized to viewers."

suggests that Dan Rather's condition, whether stupidity or "stupid is as 
stupid does" was catching around CBS.
>  Not according to this:
>
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathergate
>
>  "The initial skepticism appeared in posts by Buckhead also known as Harry W.
> MacDougald, an Atlanta attorney who had worked for conservative groups such
> as the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Foundation and who had
> helped draft the petition to the Arkansas Supreme Court for the disbarment
> of President Bill Clinton.
>
> >From there, the story was picked up by the Drudge Report and broke into mass
> media outlets, including the Associated Press and the major television news
> networks, as well as getting serious attention from conservative writers such
> as National Review Online's Jim Geraghty. The first newspaper article questioning
> the documents appeared in The Washington Post on September 10. However, the
> September 9 edition of the American Broadcasting Company's Nightline made mention
> of the controversy, along with an article on the ABC News website."
>
>  The CBS broadcast was on September 8th.
>
>   
Hardly a comprehensive review of the episode. The Wikipedia article 
doesn't, for instance, identify whether it was Dan Rather's professional 
misconduct, the validity of the documents or the temerity of mere 
bloggers that the Washington Post was covering. *One* controversy, as I 
recall, was whether pajama-wearing bloggers were inherently noncredible 
regardless of the quality of their journalism and evidence and 
microphone-wearing journalists were unquestionably credible.
>> "Positive evidence"? Would that be the sort of evidence that 
>> would prove innocence beyond a reasonable doubt? Objection, your honor!
>>     
>
>  Y'know, my phrasing there was ambiguous. There are two interesting types
> of evidence here. The allegation is that "Bush did not complete his National
> Guard duties statisfactoraly but was honorably discharged anyway."
>
>  1. As I stated, there's no actual evidence of Bush doing so. The kind of
> paperwork that the vast majority of Guard veterans can produce... he can't.
> This is negative evidence. Despite a strong political motivation to produce
> it, it just hasn't appeared.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush_military_service_controversy
>
>  2. Rather was looking for positive evidence of Bush failing to fulfill his
> duties - that is to say, evidence of *not* doing so rather than a lack of
> evidence of doing so. He was stupid about how he vetted such evidence, though,
> and he was conned because he failed to check his facts properly.
>
>   
I didn't find your phrasing ambiguous at all. Bush is guilty and it's 
just a matter of finding something, anything, that'll stick to him.

If you can't find forgeries that are sufficiently well-wrought to obtain 
a conviction for misdeeds then an insufficiency of documents proving 
that President Bush hasn't done something wrong will have to do. If you 
can't find proof that Bush did something wrong, charge him with not 
having enough proof that he did everything right.
>> You're kind of missing the point. AP would like to present themselves as 
>> credible, even-handed, thorough. But that goal's hardly achieved if 
>> they're no better as a source of information then the U.S. military 
>> which is not a news agency.
>>     
>
>  Ah, but we haven't established that they are not. The police lieutenant
> actually exists and has been confirmed. Other witnesses to the burning have
> been produced. Not all the facts in the original story appear to be correct,
> I agree.
>
>  However, I do *not* see evidence of a deliberate attempt to falsify stories
> or even a lack of normal fact-checking here. I've had first-hand knowledge of
> a few events that have made it into a news story. In *no* case were the events
> as reported 100% correct. What's your experience in this area?
>
>   
That's because you're suffering from a self-induced misconception. News 
organizations, being made up of human beings indistinguishable in any 
important regard from "the masses" don't get the presumption of 
innocence, i.e. accuracy and objectivity. Whatever credibility they 
enjoy is conferred by a skeptical public and is contingent upon ongoing 
evidence of accuracy and objectivity or, where that's not possible, the 
absence of evidence of bias.

The only defense news organizations have against charges of bias, or 
should have, is punctilious adherence to the canons of the profession. 
That defense was obviated for some considerable length of time as TV 
news concentrated short-cycle news-disseminating power in the hands a 
very few news organizations and that built upon the dilution of the 
journalistic ethic by the promotion of advocacy journalism as typified 
by Walter Duranty and later, Walter Cronkite.

You don't have to defend your credibility when the truth is whatever 
comes out of your typewriter or out of your mouth.
>>>  "Jordan's admissions drew criticism from commentators, both liberal and
>>> conservative."
>>>   
>>>       
>> Nope. The guy's like a bad cop or a pedophile priest, trading on the 
>> authority and trust that comes with the office for personal gain, to 
>> escape personal responsibility, without regard to the damage the 
>> transgression does to the entire profession. Like the two examples I 
>> cited, Jordan has no place in the profession.
>>     
>
>  Uh, gee, and "liberal and conservative" alike *agree* with you.
>
>   
Who cares what commentators agree about? The man has a job in the 
profession. That he does is a mark against the profession although that 
clearly doesn't trouble those who chose to hire/deal with him. If 
liberal and conservative commentators agreed that a bad cop done wrong 
we can all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. That's not the same thing as 
drawing the conclusion that the theoretical cop or the very real Eason 
Jordan has no business plying their previous trade. In both cases 
they've proven themselves unqualified.
>> If you want to throw Fox into that group you'll have to provide examples 
>> of similarly egregious behavior.
>>     
>
>  I know of no other major news organization that has defended *in court* their
> right to distort news and outright lie:
>
>  http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/11.html
>
>   
No, actually, Fox News didn't defend their right, in court, to distort 
the news and outright lie so you're still in need of some case of 
similarly egregious behavior. And please, no more sites like the one you 
linked. I spend some time on these replies and crudely propagandistic 
sites such as the one you linked suggest a lack of regard for that effort.
>  None that I know of. But if we didn't need the oil there we wouldn't have
> to care. Supporting Israel is like building a greenhouse to plant roses in
> Antarctica. One has to wonder at the expense, and whether the benefits
> justify it. We might help them out of humanitarian impulses but, well, we
> don't have a great record there. I mean, it's a shame Darfour doesn't have
> any oil...
>
>   
It would be nice if you could point to some connection between support 
for Israel and access to Mideast petroleum rather then establish 
causation via repetition. It's not as if Israel shares a border or has 
ever invaded an oil-producing Arab nation. If anything, the "it's all 
about the oil" argument directs U.S. interest to side with Arab, 
oil-producing nations, not Israel. At no time since the founding of 
Israel have Arab oil fields been under threat from the Israeli military 
or from the U.S. military.

As for the aside about Darfour, perhaps that exemplar of international 
community, the U.N., could organize a some modest effort on behalf of 
the residents. Of course, the U.N.'s pretty busy running prostitution 
enterprises utilizing desperately poor children. That's got to keep 
those U.N.'s piece keepers busy.
>  I don't wish Israel ill per se but I don't see why (aside from convenient
> bases near the oil) *we* need to pony up the kind of dough (not to mention
> political capital) we have been to maintain them. If their situation is
> that untenable, well, like I said they could probably buy a *lot* of land
> in South America.
>   
You ought to read a bit of history then. The mideast has been 
strategically important since before the advent of petroleum 
industrialization and continues to be strategically important for 
reasons other then the presence of petroleum in the general, geographic 
neighborhood of Israel. If anything, the presence of Israel has served 
to maintain peace in the Mideast since, as a lightning rod for 
traditional Arab enmities as exemplified by the current Sunni-Shiite 
problems in Iraq, Israel has prevented more widespread conflict from 
erupting.

As to Israel's military tenebility, that issue's laid to rest by 
left-wing bleating about that big bully Israel, with its seven million 
citizens and zero natural resources, beating up on three hundred million 
helpless, peaceful Arabs and their 40% of the world's exportable 
petroleum reserves. If the cost of, relative, peace in the Mideast is 
American dollars and Israeli blood then both are well spent. Among the 
potential disasters facing the human race, widespread disorder in the 
Mideast is right up there and Israel serves as an excellent safety-valve 
to regional pressures.
>   
>> The only other nation in the area with a passing acquaintance with democracy
>> is Egypt and that'd be a pretty tenuous acquaintanceship. For the rest it's
>> a choice between a moderately repressive monarchy, a virulently repressive
>> monarchy, a repressive theocracy or various flavors of "people's" republics.
>> There's simply no other nations in the region with which to have a friendly 
>> relationship.
>>     
>
>  You're right, but we support those regimes anyway, because they have the oil.
> We cozy up to thugocracies like, say, Iraq in the 1980s. We organize coups to
> overthrow democratically elected governments to install unpopular monarchies
> like, say, Iran. (Boy, *that* sure paid off for us, didn't it?) We support the
> Saudi regime even as they violently repress their own population and work to
> redirect the blame toward us. (And gee, that really paid off for the people in
> the World Trade Center, didn't it? What nationality were 15 of the 19 hijackers
> again?) 
>   
You're free to deal with the geopolitical realities as they existed, 
with the limitations on information, political scope of action, military 
realities extant and without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight but on 
balance I don't find all that much to fault. The U.S. no more overthrew 
the democratically elected government of Iran then a shout is an 
avalanche. Given the history and proclivities of communist regimes, 
unignorable even then, not only did the CIA save hundreds of thousands 
of Iranian lives but the lives of those a communist Iran would have 
killed as part of the process of establishing a people's paradise in the 
neighboring countries.

And yeah, overthrowing the communist regime in Iran did pay off quite 
well for us for quite a while. Of course, there's no victory so total 
that it can't be undone by an incompetent and Jimmy Carter was every bit 
of that.

You've already supplied the reason for support of the Saudi regime: 
petroleum. If it's a good enough reason to support Israel then it's a 
good enough reason to support the House of Saud which is at war with 
Israel.
>> Are you proposing that nations actively undermining or barely tolerant 
>> of U.S. interests be treated no differently from the single nation in 
>> the region with which the U.S. does share values and goals?
>>     
>
>  They'd have a lot less ability to mess with us if we weren't giving them
> hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And they wouldn't have quite the same
> motivation if we weren't helping to 'stabilize' the region by supporting
> violent thugocracies.
>
>   
Which doesn't really answer the question.

Does your notion of evenhandedness require that the U.S. treat nations 
engaged in actively undermining or barely tolerant of U.S. interests the 
same as the single nation in the region with which the U.S. shares 
values and goals?

>  By the by, *don't* try to twist this into some claim that I'm 'justifying'
> the terrorists those regions spawn. Here, let me pop another .sig quote in
> here:
>
>  "U.S. planes have thus far showered defoliant on more than 200,000
>   acres, killing not just coca plants but entire ecosystems: damaging
>   legitimate crops, poisoning water supplies, killing fish and livestock,
>   uprooting entire villages, and causing people to suffer fevers,
>   diarrhea, allergies and rashes.
>
>   And that's why they hate us: because, to keep drugs out of Bobby
>   Brown's glove box, we kill peasants in Putumayo. If we did this kind
>   of thing to the Arabs, they'd actually have the kind of beef with us
>   that they think they do."
>
>       - Bill Maher, "When You Ride Alone You Ride With bin Laden"
>
>   
Of course you're justifying the terrorists those regions spawn. How else 
would you characterize your views?

And you don't do yourself any credit by quoting Bill Maher. Whatever the 
shortcomings of the anti-drug policy of the past few decades, and they 
are manifold, they won't be redressed by smirking mirror-gazers like Maher.

>  I just think it'd be awfully nice to produce the kind of tech that would
> drastically reduce our dependency on oil. Such tech would spread, too. And
> then we'd have a similarly drastic drop in the price of oil. At that point
> I'd like to see how well people would like an Islamic theocracy in a poor
> economy. I figure within a decade the whole area would look like Afghanistan
> under the Taliban.
>
>  Read this article I quoted at Aaron five days ago on this list:
>
> http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/27/no_win/?page=full
>
>  See below for some ideas to keep in mind when you read about the
> "Manhattan Project" proposal.
>
>   
I don't. The Manhattan Project made sense in the context of a world-wide 
conflict but other then survival the only reason to develop technology 
is to make an honest buck. Since all these tedious "alternative" energy 
projects are elevated far above vulgar considerations of profit and 
there's no war in the offing, the only reason for the development of 
alternative energy sources are the conceits of the wealthy. When the 
technology makes sense, i.e. it solves a problem people don't have to 
have their arm twisted to acknowledge, subsidies, penalties, trading 
credits and regulatory agencies won't be necessary. People'll be lining 
up to get access to the technology waving fists full of dollars, euros 
or renminbis.
>> As for reducing our dependence on oil, I suggest you take a trip up to 
>> Mackinac Island to revisit the halcyon days that preceded that dependence.
>>  I'm somewhat flummoxed here. Do you *really* believe that the only alternative
>> to the Hummer is an agrarian economy? On the other hand, I find it hard to
>> credit that you'd use so clumsy a rhetorical ploy. I really don't know what to
>> think, to be honest.
>>     
(friggin' mailreader editor....

The agrarian economy *is* the alternative not to the Hummer but to free 
enterprise which results in, among other things, the Hummer.

The single source of wealth in the world is capitalism and the extent to 
which freedom of choice is circumscribed that's the extent to which we 
move back toward the doubtful benefits of an agrarian economy.


>>  Let's make things clear. I am not a Luddite, and I while I've enjoyed visiting
>> Macinac Island many times and hope to take my kids there again in the future,
>> I don't plan on living there. However, I can visualize quite a few alternatives
>> that let me keep my computer and car, but still drastically reduce our dependence
>> on foreign oil. Consider, for example, a quote from one of my .sigs that went out
>> when I quoted that boston.com article to Aaron:
>>
>>     
One of the things that's wrong with Mackinac Island is that it's so 
drastically sanitized so as not to be too offensive to delicate, modern 
sensibilities. If you want to give your kids an idea of how delightful 
cars are you'll have to find someplace where the urine-soaked horse 
manure is three feet thick.

With that, you should pardon the expression, foundation, you can 
experience the full effect of a muscle-powered economy. I recommend 
cooler weather for those of a more delicate constitution but for the 
full effect a week or so of wet weather is necessary - the ubiquity of 
board sidewalks in TV western towns takes on a whole, new importance - 
followed by a couple of weeks of warm, dry weather.

I recommend "The good old days--they were terrible!" by Otto Bettmann. 
You won't ever look at a covered dish the same way again.

>>  "Improving our overall fuel efficiency by just 2.7 miles per gallon
>>   would completely eliminate our need for oil from the Persian Gulf."
>>       - Bill Maher, "When You Ride Alone You Ride With bin Laden"
>>
>>  We had austerity programs in WWII. Why not in the "War on Terror"?
>>
>>     
We also had enemy alien internment camps during World War II. Just how 
far do you want to go with the metaphor?

Besides, Rocket scientist Bill Maher probably hasn't heard the news, but 
GM thinks there's enough consumer interest in plug-in hybrids to make it 
a paying proposition. It might even be but it'll be GM money being 
squandered if GM is wrong. Since GM enjoys the mind-concentrating 
benefit of (organizational) hanging they'll be much more inclined then 
some ecological paladin to cut off a project that makes no economic sense.

I'll let you in on a nifty secret about plug-in hybrids that ought to 
set the hearts of all the greenies you know, aflutter.

One of the big problems with all of the various alternative energy 
schemes is that they're periodic, unpredictable or both. The sun rises 
and you get electricity, the sun sets you don't. The wind blows, you get 
electricity, the wind stops, you don't, etc. The dog that never seems to 
bark is what to do when the sun goes down, the temperature stays up and 
the wind stops blowing. That's when all the money that wasn't spent on 
energy storage, because it's so expensive, starts to pinch.

But, if you've got all those zillions of plug-in hybrids - look a couple 
of paragraphs up - drinking up electricity during the day you've got 
bags of electrical storage capacity for "free". Not really for free of 
course but available for any number of uses other then making the family 
jalopy putter silently around town.

Extend the utility, increase the value. If you can "top off" the buggy 
during the day when the sun's shining then you a way to market at least 
some of that periodic, unpredictable or both, electricity. Maybe even 
enough to make all those icky Arabs poor again not that I'm particularly 
thrilled by that.

>>  But we can go much further than this. How about investing in nuclear power?
>> Consider pebble-bed reactors which are *extremely* safe and scale well, even
>> in a modular fashion. What about more daring (at least politically, though not
>> in any engineering sense) ideas like using this (read the whole article for
>> full effect, including the note about disposing of the nuclear waste):
>>
>>  http://www.nuclearspace.com/a_liberty_ship7.htm
>>
>>  to launch these:
>>
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite
>>
>>  (Note that recent advances in solar cell technology have dramatically
>> increased the efficiency beyond the 28% quoted there. Also note the wikipedia
>> article assumes chemical-fueled lauch costs, not nuclear.)
>>
>>  These kinds of things were seriously proposed, and designs worked on, back
>> in the 1970s. We could do them *much* better now.
>>
>>     
Yeah, I've been reading about them for a while. There's quite a bit of 
development going on with gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors. Periodically I 
look up the Matsushita PBR that's supposed to go into operation in 
Galena, Alaska. Haven't heard anything about it for a while but it does 
look interesting.

As far as powersats goes, it's a matter first, of efficient orbital 
transport. That problem seems to be resolving itself although we're 
still pretty early on the development curve. Still, with the successful 
winning of the X-prize by Rutan, Alan ( no relation dammit) and company 
and the point-to-point pretensions of Richard Branson, along with the 
recent, successful flight of Blue Origin, Richard Bezos reprise of the 
late, lamented Delta Clipper, thins are, you should once again pardon 
the expression, looking up.
>>>  Does that make me a neo-anti-Semite?
>>>       
>> Yup.
>>     
>
>  Ah. Not giving unconditional support for Israel equals active dislike of
> Jews. Right...
>
>   
It doesn't cost me anything nor do I court any danger in denouncing you 
so why not?
>> The move from disdainful intellectual to fictional swordsman as a source 
>> of quotes is a move in the right direction but that's more a function of 
>> how poorly you started then how far you've come.
>>     
>
>  Well, as long as we're being snide, how about one more disdainful
> intellectual... :->
>
>  Sincerely,
>
>  Ray Ingles                                    (313) 227-2317
>
>  "Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do."
>                     - Bertrand Russell
>   
Russell would have been a great deal more convincing if he'd displayed 
immortality or used the word "we" at the appropriate place.

Allen

Uncle!