Chris Matthews answered some questions from a CNS News correspondent at the white house correspondent's dinner over the weekend. The gentleman asked Matthews if he still gets a thrill up his leg from Obama, to which came the response,
"I'm an American. Perhaps you find that obscure."
I was struggling to figure out what he meant by this when he went on to say,
" I have a feeling about my country. When he talked about it, I was inspired...I know other people don't report that...But I had that feeling and I will report it."
Matthews is then asked if it is okay to report his feelings.
"Oh, I like to report the truth. And if you have a feeling, that's part of your reporting."
Sadly it appears the new standard over at MSNBC is that reporting the truth is reporting the truth about how you feel. Matthews goes on to say the press doesn't need to be harder on Obama, but "I think we have to question the numbers though."
" We're going to have a debt by the end of the first term that is equal to our entire economy...it's scary."
At some point the gentleman asserts that it was the content of Obama's speeches that thrilled him. At which point he is cut off by Matthews, "No, what he said. The way he said it."
So lets get this straight so we can watch hardball with some clarity from now on. Matthews will report the truth of how he feels. Which is not determined by the content of what the president says, but how he says it. Not to mention the president's actions and policy decisions, which apparently are not really connected to Obama since he will not be tough oh him, just the numbers. No doubt due to the fact, or should I say feeling, that the former president is still the culprit. Perhaps your right Mr. Matthews. You are an Obscure American.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Last Waltz
DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w
Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh
Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w
Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh
Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia
Sunday, March 15, 2009
To Cure The Sobbing Heard
Peggy Noonan with some thoughts on...???
"To me, one of the signal signs of the times is the number of people surfing the Internet looking for . . . something. One friend looks for small farms in distressed rural areas. Another logs on late at night looking for a house to buy in a small town out West, or down South, or in the Deep South. She is moving all around America in her imagination. I asked if she had a picture in her head of what she was looking for, and she joked that she wanted to go where Atticus Finch made his summation to the jury. I don't think it was really a joke. She's not looking for a new place, she's looking for the old days."
Could it be as simple as...people are surrounded by things they don't understand. Like you said...data data everywhere and no one knows a thing. How long would people have to live this way before the biology of it all caught up?
"To me, one of the signal signs of the times is the number of people surfing the Internet looking for . . . something. One friend looks for small farms in distressed rural areas. Another logs on late at night looking for a house to buy in a small town out West, or down South, or in the Deep South. She is moving all around America in her imagination. I asked if she had a picture in her head of what she was looking for, and she joked that she wanted to go where Atticus Finch made his summation to the jury. I don't think it was really a joke. She's not looking for a new place, she's looking for the old days."
Could it be as simple as...people are surrounded by things they don't understand. Like you said...data data everywhere and no one knows a thing. How long would people have to live this way before the biology of it all caught up?
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Piggies Go to Market
Here are a couple interesting graphs representing the traffic to www.grants.gov, the site where you go to apply (buy raffle tickets? make demands?) for federal funding for... well anything you want I imagine...
There are lots of things I've been wanting to post about, they will be coming up shortly...
There are lots of things I've been wanting to post about, they will be coming up shortly...
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Removing The Blindfold
On Holder's comments...Here we go. I have a feeling like all of this is going to start reading like an episode of West Wing. The sight of our attorney general with a racial agenda spewing out of his pores means that justice is no longer blind. Now, in the form of Holder with infallible knowledge from 'the one', "justice" can see the scales and tip them to their liking.
However, I will agree with Holder in as much as race does still need to be talked about. I just wish one of those conversations would be a sit down with Heather MacDonald.
However, I will agree with Holder in as much as race does still need to be talked about. I just wish one of those conversations would be a sit down with Heather MacDonald.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Well I don't know honey, It just doesn't look like a hybrid
James Taranto's piece today is a must read, some highlights.
"The desire for distinction is not simply a problem for democracy, however, but a problem of democracy. People who have social ambitions, but not necessarily political ones, will find it gratifying to regard themselves and be regarded by others as among Wilson's "instructed few," and appalling to be lumped together with the uninstructed many. "Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," said Samuel Johnson. In our age of widespread affluence, when people can be dangerously well-fed without being rich, the desire to be numbered among the wise when smiles are shared becomes especially urgent. As Leon Wieseltier wrote about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as violent radicals, "The image was the creation of people for whom there is almost nothing more mortifying than not being in on the joke. That is the bridge and tunnel of the soul."
"The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver's virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6."
"The only status advantage to be gained by liking Disney World and Nascar comes from liking them ironically, conveying that you're in on the joke. As the author Tad Friend has argued, this desperate business of showing the world you have the aesthetically correct vantage point on popular culture "is rare among those who genuinely respect high art," since they find the alternatives to what they care about uninteresting, but also unthreatening."
"The desire for distinction is not simply a problem for democracy, however, but a problem of democracy. People who have social ambitions, but not necessarily political ones, will find it gratifying to regard themselves and be regarded by others as among Wilson's "instructed few," and appalling to be lumped together with the uninstructed many. "Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," said Samuel Johnson. In our age of widespread affluence, when people can be dangerously well-fed without being rich, the desire to be numbered among the wise when smiles are shared becomes especially urgent. As Leon Wieseltier wrote about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as violent radicals, "The image was the creation of people for whom there is almost nothing more mortifying than not being in on the joke. That is the bridge and tunnel of the soul."
"The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver's virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6."
"The only status advantage to be gained by liking Disney World and Nascar comes from liking them ironically, conveying that you're in on the joke. As the author Tad Friend has argued, this desperate business of showing the world you have the aesthetically correct vantage point on popular culture "is rare among those who genuinely respect high art," since they find the alternatives to what they care about uninteresting, but also unthreatening."
Monday, February 16, 2009
The New American Landscape
Steven Stoll in Hapers looks forward to "the specter of a no-growth world".
""There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state.”
A stationary state. The term comes from John Stuart Mill, who argued, in 1848, that “the increase of wealth is not boundless.” Economists should know, said Mill, that “at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this.”"
This is a more logical take on enviromentalism, one without sea kitten mentalities so to speak. Mckibben's Deep Economy sounds like a prominent step towards more autonomous communities, not unlike the Preservation Institute it appears.
Also, Richard Florida in The Atlantic looks at "How the crash will reshape America"
"The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.
If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem."
Now why would this aspect be left out of every conversation of the housing bubble seen on MSM television? Do they just not do their research? Are they in the tank? Or maybe it's just that they don't think the people who watch their stations are capable of understanding it? Whatever the reason, there is no excuse.
Given the fact the market did not cause the housing bubble...For about five years now I've wondered where do we go from here. It seemed like we had hit a wall, but I always conceded that I just wasn't smart enough or creative enough to see all of the posibilities for growth. So, idk, do we have to keep growing? Or is that just a Marxist ideology, as far as I know he is the only one to say it. Did any of the "classical economists" ever say things must continue to grow?
""There is nothing intrinsic in the system that says it cannot exist happily in a stationary state.”
A stationary state. The term comes from John Stuart Mill, who argued, in 1848, that “the increase of wealth is not boundless.” Economists should know, said Mill, that “at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state, that all progress in wealth is but a postponement of this.”"
This is a more logical take on enviromentalism, one without sea kitten mentalities so to speak. Mckibben's Deep Economy sounds like a prominent step towards more autonomous communities, not unlike the Preservation Institute it appears.
Also, Richard Florida in The Atlantic looks at "How the crash will reshape America"
"The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.
If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem."
Now why would this aspect be left out of every conversation of the housing bubble seen on MSM television? Do they just not do their research? Are they in the tank? Or maybe it's just that they don't think the people who watch their stations are capable of understanding it? Whatever the reason, there is no excuse.
Given the fact the market did not cause the housing bubble...For about five years now I've wondered where do we go from here. It seemed like we had hit a wall, but I always conceded that I just wasn't smart enough or creative enough to see all of the posibilities for growth. So, idk, do we have to keep growing? Or is that just a Marxist ideology, as far as I know he is the only one to say it. Did any of the "classical economists" ever say things must continue to grow?
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