Monthly Archives: April 2005

Lying Liars at the Heritage Foundation

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As you might guess from reading my anti-animal rights website I am very much pro-hunting. On the other hand, I’m also very pro-truth, which is why this pack of lies from the Heritage Foundation is so annoying. There’s enough things to hang the anti-hunting movement with; conservative groups don’t have to go out and lie about proposed legislation that might impact hunting.

In this case, Heritage’s Trent England and Steve Muscatello lie by omission. They selectively quote a bill introduced by New York State Assemblyman Alexander Grannis to make it appear as if Grannis wants to ban ordinary hunting (emphasis added),

New York has a large, vibrant hunting community outside its metropolitan areas. Assemblyman Alexander Grannis, who is from the nation’s largest metro area, has drafted a bill that could, if passed in its present form, make all hunting illegal in the Empire State. The text of New York State Assembly Bill 1850 reads, in part: “A person is guilty of aggravated cruelty to animals when … he or she intentionally kills … an animal or wild game [or] wild birds.” You don’t have to be a National Rifle Association die-hard to see the danger in a bill that makes pursuit of game, “so as to capture or kill,” a felony with a minimum one-year prison sentence and a $5,000 fine. Advocates, of course, claim this is merely a means to criminalize the torture of animals. But the phrase “intentionally kills,” in this context, clearly could apply to hunters as well as those who would mistreat animals for fun.

Now compare the text of the bill’s language that England and Muscatello quote compared to the full text of the bill, (emphasis added),

A person is guilty of aggravated cruelty to animals when, with no justifiable purpose, he or she intentionally kills or intentionally causes serious physical injury to a companion animal, OR WILD GAME AND WILD BIRDS AS DEFINED IN SECTION 11-0103 OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION LAW, with aggravated cruelty. For purposes of this section, “aggravated cruelty” shall mean conduct which: (i) is intended to cause extreme physical pain; or (ii) is done or carried out in an especially depraved or sadistic manner.

So the bill doesn’t call for prosecuting people who kill wildlife, but rather people who kill wildlife “with no justifiable purpose” with the intention of inflicting extreme pain or killing in an extremely depraved or sadistic manner.

Rather than focus on “no justifiable purpose” or “in an especially depraved or sadistic manner”, England and Muscatello deceive readers into thinking that the bill applies to any intentional killing of wildlife, such as hunting.

This is an outrageous distortion. The last thing those of us who oppose the animal rights movement and its anti-hunting agenda need are people like England and Muscatello adopting PETA-like tactics and distorting the truth.

Source:

Hunters in the Crosshairs. Trent England and Steve Muscatello, Heritage Foundation, March 31, 2005.

Typical Bullshit from the Local Newhouse Rag

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On Friday, the local Newhouse rag, The Kalamazoo Gazette, fired reporter Craig McCool and photographer Mairin Chapman over a story the two contributed to about alcohol usage by local college students (guess what — they drink a lot).

McCool and Mairin went to a party to report on beer drinking games. Now McCool did one thing that was unethical — he wrote about his experience as if it occurred in one night when, in fact, the details were a composite of two nights attending parties. Not the most serious of ethical lapses, especially given how common composites like that are, but not a good habit to get into and McCool deserved some discipline for that.

But the Gazette didn’t fire him over that. No, they fired McCool and Mairin because they consumed alcohol at the parties they attended.

Publisher Jim Stephanak says that their transgression was becoming part of the story,

There are some basic principles guiding journalists. One of them is to remain free of associations and activities that may compromise our integrity or damage our credibility. This principle has been clearly violated and cannot be tolerated.

Hmmm . . . so you need to maintain a distance from the subject to avoid conflicts of interest or lack of credibility?

For example, when the Kalamazoo Gazette built a new $33 million printing press, it could have gone to the City of Kalamazoo — which it covers extensively, after all — and asked for a special property tax abatement for the improvement. But, of course, doing that might be an “association or activity” that might make people wonder about the future credibility of Gaztte coverage of the City. Of course our glorious Newhouse rag, which would fire a fine reporter and photographer for daring to legally consume alcohol, would never even think of such an activity, now would it?

Oh, wait a minute, that’s exactly what they did, because when you’re only pulling in an estimated $4 billion annually in revenues like the Newhouse chain is, you’re counting every penny!

Idiots and (worse) hypocrites.

Hitachi Releases More Details about 500gb HD

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In January, Hitachi anounced that it would release a 500gb hard drive sometime this year. In late March it released more details, announcing that the drive would be released sometime in the second quarter and come in both ATA and SATA versions at $500 and $520 respectively.

In its article on the announcement, PCWorld notes that due to the limits of logitudinal recording, drives like this will top out at somewhere around 250gb per platter or 1.25tb on a 5-platter 3.5″ drive (PCWorld optimistically projects 1tb drives by the end of 2006).

They quote IDC’s Jim Buttress as claiming that disks featuring perpendicular recording methods should be show up for the desktop sometime in 2007. Toshiba’s perpendicular-based 1.8″ drives are almost certainly going to appear in larger-capacity iPods later this year, so that may not be far off.

And it can’t come soon enough. Currently I’ve got about 1.5tb in my home computer, and I still have to regularly archive stuff to DVD+R. How long till we can expect to see 100tb HDs?

The BBC and Dead Journalists

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The BBC runs a lot of stories which are little more than rewriting some organization or another’s press release. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, except when they can’t be bothered to be even slightly circumspect about being accurate when they are doing so. I mean, if all you’re doing is rewriting someone’s press release, how hard can it be to get things right?

Apparently, its rather difficult for the BBC. Take this story from January 2004, for example, about a report on the number of journalists killed in 2004. The story notes in alarming language that 129 journalists were killed last year according to the International Federation of Journalists — the most ever since that group began keeping such statistics.

Here’s how the BBC describes the deaths of journalists,

The IFJ said that in almost every corner of the globe journalists were targeted and killed by the enemies of press freedom.

Another dangerous place to work was the Philippines where 13 journalists were murdered, many of them for reporting on corruption, crime and drugs trafficking.

The IFJ said governments have a duty to do more to protect journalists and to find out how and why they died.

Working conditions, particularly for local investigative reporters, were becoming more and more risky, the group added.

The clear implication is that journalists are being murdered right and left for trying to report the truth — which, to some extent, they are. But the BBC deceives by not bothering to repeat the IJF’s clear caveat that its stats on dead journalists include quite a few who died accidentally.

For example, it includes in those 129 deaths several individuals who died after their plane crashed while trying to get a perfect shot set up for a photographer. It also includes cases of reporters who died in car accidents while heading to cover a story. It even includes the tragic death of a young Texas reporter who died when the large boom antenna on a mobile broadcast van hit powerlines and the journalist was electrocuted.

All tragedies but hardly representing the persecution of the press that the BBC implies that all 129 deaths represent.

Source:

‘Deadliest’ year for journalists. Chris Morris, The BBC, January 18, 2005.

Science News on Stylometry and Oz

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Ran across this 2003 article from Science News about stylometry — using mathematical models driven by computers to determine authorship of disputed works.

For example, two years after L. Frank Baum died The Royal Book of Oz was published and billed as Baum’s final Oz novel. But stylometric analysis of the book suggests that it was probably written by Ruth Plumly Thompson, which Oz fanatics had long suspected.

According to Science News,

Binongo’s work on The Royal Book of Oz is a good example. He started by collecting other samples of Baum’s and Thompson’s writings and breaking the samples into 5,000-word chunks. He then found the 50 most frequently used words in the body of texts and counted how often each word appeared in each chunk. This process distilled each chunk to 50 numbers.

Just as two numbers specify a point in two-dimensional space, and three numbers a point in three-dimensional space, the 50 numbers associated with each chunk of text specify a point in 50-dimensional space. Any differences in the scatter of Baum’s and Thompson’s points could be potential clues to the writers’ different styles.

. . .

There’s no guarantee that a pattern will show up in this plane. In the case of the Oz books, however, a pattern leaps out. The Baum texts cluster in one half of the plane, while the Thompson texts sit in the other half, showing what Binongo calls a clear “stylistic gulf.”

When chunks of The Royal Book of Oz are plotted in the same plane, they all land squarely in Thompson’s half.

“With this unerring consistency, we have confidence in our identification of Thompson as the author of the 15th book,” Binongo said in the spring issue of Chance.

The article details other such finds, along with a good outline of both the strengths and weaknesses of using this sort of stastical model to establish authorship (essentially, the more undisputed material by an author and the better preserved the text-in-question, the more reliable the technique is).

Source:

Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries. Erica Klarreich, Science News, December 20, 2003.

That Phone Would Be So Far Up Someone’s Ass . . .

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I have to say that the father mentioned in this story displayed an extreme amount of self-control.

If I showed up at school to learn my daughter had been sexually assaulted and a) school authorities had failed to contact me or the police, and b) the school authorities urged me not to call police, I’d be finding alternate uses for that phone.

The NYT story is truly appalling,

One of the three assistant principals, Richard Watson, said he had found the videotape and then viewed it with other administrators. Their conclusion, they told investigators, was that there had been no coercion.

. . .

One witness’s statement said a boy pulled the girl onto the auditorium stage, ordered her to be quiet, pushed her to her knees and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“If you scream, I’ll have all my boys punch you,” the boy told her and then hit her in the face, causing her mouth to bleed, a student told the investigators.

As my wife put it, what did they think the bleeding mouth indicated she liked it rough? WTF is wrong with these people? And why was the principle the only one fired? Dick here is simply being reassigned. He should have been fired for crap like this,

Another special-education teacher, Lisa Upshaw, told the investigators that administrators did not call the girl’s father immediately after learning about the attack.

When Mrs. Upshaw took it upon herself to call the father, Mr. Watson urged him not to come pick up his daughter until after the end of the school day “to avoid a confrontation with the suspects,” Mrs. Upshaw told the investigators.

When the father arrived, he asked whether the school administration was going to call the police, Mrs. Upshaw said in her statement. “Mr. Watson said, ‘No, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want the police,’ ” she told the investigators.

. . .

Mr. Watson and other administrators told investigators that the principal, Regina B. Crenshaw, had also advised the father to avoid calling the police, the investigation report says. Mrs. Crenshaw recommended that the father return the next morning and report the incident to a police officer who was usually stationed at the school but who was not there on March 9, the report added.

The auditorium is now a potential crime scene you halfwits! The father returned later with police who secured the auditorium and presumably gathered evidence there.

Its so weird that you see students getting suspended for drawing vaguely horror-themed pictures, but a genuine sexual assault is brushed off like it was nothing.

Source:

Principal Fired for Failing to Report Sex Assault Case. James Dao, The New York Times, April 13, 2005.

Typical Sean Hannity Behavior — Coaches Guests During Commercial Breaks

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According to The New York Daily News, comedian Harry Shearer played an audiotape on his Le Show (which is available via podcast format) of Sean Hannity up to his usual tricks on Hannity & Colmes.

On March 31, Hannity & Colmes featured two women who had formerly worked as nurses taking care of Terri Schiavo. Both of the women claimed that Schiavo was not in a persistent vegetative state and made the absurd claim that Schiavo said things like, “Help me, mother.” When Hannity pointed out that the judge said they weren’t credible, the nurses launched into the patented right-wing attack on Judge Greer.

Anyway, Shearer played a tape of Hannity talking to the two women during commercial breaks. According to the Daily News (emphasis added),

Between commercials, according to an off-air audiotape obtained by investigative comedian Harry Shearer for last Sunday’s episode of his weekly radio program, “Le Show,” Hannity coached the women on exactly how to respond when liberal co-host Alan Colmes cross-examined them.

“Just say, ‘I’m here to tell what I saw,’” Hannity can be heard instructing his guests. “No matter what the question, ‘I’m here to tell you what I saw. I’m here to tell you what I saw.’”

Hannity adds helpfully: “Say, ‘I’m not going to be distracted by silliness.’ How’s that? Does that help you? Look into that camera. Look at me when I’m talking.”

On the air, Iyer performs beautifully. “I don’t have any opinions or judgments. I was there,” she declares

After the segment ends, Hannity gushes off the air to the nurses: “We got the points out. It’s hard, this isn’t easy. But you did great, both of you. Thank you, guys. Those nurses are powerful, aren’t they?”

On his radio show, Shearer injected: “Yeah, especially when they do what you tell ‘em to do. Very powerful when they follow instructions from the host!”

Gee, why didn’t Hannity just hand Iyer a script beforehand?

Source:

Fox News host: Repeat after me. The New York Daily News, April 15, 2005.

Does the NYT Have Another Jayson Blair On Its Hands?

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On Friday, the Boston Globe fired one of its freelance writers, Barbara Stewart, after it was discovered that Stewart fabricated large parts of a story she wrote about the Canadian seal hunt.

In her article, Stewart described Tuesday’s hunt in vivid detail, describing how hundreds of Canadian hunters in boats shooting seals until the waters in the area turned blood red.

The only problem is the hunt never happened — the weather was too bad on Tuesday, so the hunt didn’t get underway until Friday. Stewart apparently called an official to confirm when the hunt would actually begin and then just used her imagination to fill in the details.

The Globe, of course, is owned by the New York Times. It turns out that before turning to freelancing, Stewart was a reporter at the New York Times for 10 years.

Jayson Bair, Round II?

Source:


Globe suffering tough Times: Fabricating freelancer came from N.Y. paper. Brett Arends and Jay Fitzgerald, The Boston Herald, April 16, 2005.

Paper apologizes for fake seal hunt story. Reuters, April 15, 2005.