Unbiased journalism

Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists
Establishment journalists are creatures of a highly ideological world and often cause ideology to masquerade as neutral fact.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objectivity

Poor Glenn. So much dysfunction, so little time to express outrage.

This was interesting on several levels. I didn’t watch the debate (since didn’t watch the Romney/Obama debate either (didn’t want to have to buy a new TV) why bother with this totally pointless VP debate?) but have read several commentaries on it. What stands out on this article is that the focus is on the so-called objective moderator rather than whatever idiocies are emitted by the two blithering debaters. While there is certainly no guarantee that having good questions asked would result in clear, unambiguous and meaningful responses, you can be confident that without asking good questions there will be no opportunity. As Glenn so eloquently points out, Iran is absolutely no threat to the US whatsoever. None, zip, nada, zero, any other description of nothing you can slip in here. Neither was Iraq, of course, but that didn’t stop us from pissing away a trillion dollars (of borrowed money!) and killing at least 100K Iraqi civilians. So, the world’s only superpower is being threatened by Iran? How ludicrous! Still, as pointed out, that subject was not even approached, let alone discussed.

Also, as Glenn pointed out, the nonsense about social security and medicare. SS is fully funded if we accept that the US’s IOUs are worth anything (the world seems to think so, our government’s borrowing rates are at historical lows), though those IOUs, naturally, have to be paid back with borrowed money because we have a Congress that refuses to let the Bush tax cuts expire or close any loopholes (the ‘carried interest rule’, no matter how trivial the increased revenues would be, is a _very_ sore point for me!), so can’t pay back with actual revenues. Medicare is only ‘insolvent’ if one accepts that there is nothing we as a nation can do to get a handle on the spiraling costs of health care (why is it that other countries pay less, per capita, than we do, yet have better outcomes? sure seems to me we have room to improve!), if we can get the rate of increase to match inflation then suddenly there isn’t any problem at all.

Why is it that ‘objective’ journalists never ask these questions? As Glenn says, it is because they are neither objective or unbiased, but are instead completely captured by the elite in parroting whatever nonsense the oligarchy want to feed the sheeple.

And the sheeple eat it all up and ask for more!

About face!

I have largely left off any comments here on my blog regarding doping in general and doping in cycling specifically (though there is at least one exception), but feel compelled to comment based on the USADA report (I am not going to provide a litany of links, but if you are curious, this one should get you want you need: http://rant-your-head-off.com/WordPress/?p=3354). I have been a strong critic of the USADA and WADA (the international version of the US Anti-Doping Agency) ever since closely following the Landis case. Even when Landis admitted to doping my lack of faith in the system was unchallenged because I had very closely followed the science and it was (is) crystal clear to me that Landis’ ‘conviction’ was entirely politically motivated and had _nothing_ to do with science or doping. Quite a few cases that I have looked into since then seemed very clear to me to be witch hunts to aggrandize the agency and seemed to be intent on destroying the careers of some excellent athletes. I also was very convinced that the dogged pursuit of Armstrong was also politically motivated, I believed Armstrong when he says he is one of the most tested athletes in professional sports and has never tested positive.

However, all that has changed now (at least with respect to Armstrong), and I feel the need to chow down on a bit of crow because of it. While I haven’t read any of the report, I have read reports by other people I trust to accurately report on the report and it seems quite unambiguously damning to me. Armstrong is a bald faced liar, cheat and bully and has gamed the system (in cycling, certainly; I got to believe life in general now) to his great advantage. Of course, if ‘everyone’ dopes then not doping puts you at a serious disadvantage, at least psychologically, but I believe that the vast majority of doping ‘enhancement’ is due to nothing more than the placebo effect so it is entirely possible (even likely in my mind) that Armstrong could have achieved the exact same results clean. While I don’t expect my attitude to change dramatically regarding the so-called science of the anti doping industry and I have no more trust or love for the personalities involved, in this case it really seems that they made the right call and are taking down a ‘monster’ (of course, this is all about sports, no one died or even lost much money, hence the quotes around the term monster). Lance is certainly as much of a dick and asshole as any other personality involved and I expect my crow-eating experience will be followed by a few big namers soon (_particularly_ Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin).

This doesn’t change any of my comments or attitudes in my earlier post, just my attitude about Armstrong and his lyin, cheatin and stealin. The big problem is all this endless negative press regarding cycling obfuscates the fact that baseball and football are _at least_ as dirty now as cycling was at its worst, yet somehow I doubt anyone actually cares about it. Cycling would have been much better off if it never joined WADA/USADA, like baseball and football; the doping could have continued without all these spotlights on it.

Now that I think on it, perhaps there is a bit of something to the enhancement of the drugs if one considers recovery rather than on-road performance. Lots (and lots!) of top level cyclists these last couple of years (probably the cleanest period of cycling ever) have had serious troubles competing and many observers have commented on the lack of power evidenced in the mountains. Maybe the drugs in those tiny amounts were just enough to accelerate the recovery to the point where the athletes could get closer to their pre-race level even in the third week of a 3,000 mile race. That, undoubtedly, would have to be considered ‘performance enhancing’, so maybe there is some ‘there’ there after all. Of course, the thing to do is actually measure the effect in a scientific manner in a double-blind study, as I recommended, but somehow I doubt the anti-doping agencies really want to know, them being right about Armstrong notwithstanding.

Am I just making excuses?

An earlier post outlines my interest and intent on creating an on-line game. I have been thinking steadily about this project since then, but, perhaps unsurprisingly given my past issues on earlier projects haven’t got a damn thing written (well, code/database wise, I have a document I started to record my thoughts; it is four pages and over 2K words so far). Part of the problem is, no doubt, analysis paralysis. I am confident on the large structured elements, but as soon as I start peeling back the layers to reach implementation suddenly I find myself without the ability to make decisions.

The first major issue was how to represent the interface. I had already decided that plain text wasn’t going to be the direction, text on a smart phone or tablet is just about the worst possible interaction method. My plan was to use simple graphics to represent the state of the player in the game environment, though defining ‘simple’ has not been very simple at all. I thought for a bit that I would just focus on the mechanics of dynamically creating compressed gif images (I have done a wee bit of image processing to create a web page counter) but even there I got lost in decision making. The open source libraries that are available are way too complex for what I need and, since they are packaged as libraries, it isn’t that straight forward to cut out just the bits I want to use. I studied the gif specification for a while, but just wasn’t interested in recreating, for undoubtedly at least the 10,000th time, an implementation, so passed on that. After a few more days I decided to shift focus onto the text game play as at least that could be alpha tested by people on PCs.

In contemplating my extension to the ADVENT database I had developed the idea of a somewhat conversational interaction with so-called non-player characters (NPCs). What I had envisioned initially was a sort of key word look up method in that I would parse what the user typed in, strip out ‘noise’ words (like ‘the’, ‘if’, etc.) and then do a query to find a pre-programmed sentence that would score most highly as a likely response. This, of course, would require a great deal of thought on my part to provide responses and prompting keywords and, if you haven’t caught on to that yet, I am a really lazy person, so just couldn’t get over the activation energy. So, it wasn’t that long before I gave up on that approach and started to do some Googling on natural language processing (NLP). I had looked briefly into NLP several years ago when I was interested in building a spam filter, so know it is not trivial or for the faint of heart, but when I started to learn about chatterbots I figured I had something that would go along way toward what I wanted to accomplish. However, it seemed upon further research that they would be too general for me and not provide the specificity I needed without a huge amount of customization (back to having to work! damnit!). I tried searching for some sort of database of conversations I could parse apart and use as a baseline and found this really interesting post “The Dynamic Conversation Engine Concept“. However, I wasn’t able to find much more (the document is very interesting, though) and didn’t find any contact info for the author (of course, it might be blazingly obvious; I am notorious for not being able to see things right in front of me) so that seemed like a dead end.

The conversion I started on the ADVENT program is incomplete (it doesn’t even require you to have the lamp on to go underground!) and I thought about working some more on that, but just can’t seem to get the activation energy. I have grown increasingly tired of the IT industry over the years, no doubt that has influenced my ennui, but I really like the idea and spend a lot of time thinking about it. I just can’t seem to translate that into action. Am I just a whiny procrastinator who talks a good story (presuming, naturally, you consider any of this a good story)? I used to be able to ‘do things’ programmatically. I still ‘do things’ with my hands, I build greenhouse/pools on the weekends, but there really isn’t a whole lot of thinking going on there, or rather the thinking has been front-loaded (nigh on 3 years ago now) and I am sort of on autopilot. Interestingly, I guess, when I do come up against issues that need to be resolved, it is often my wife who comes up with the solutions now (of course, I married her for more than her sexy body to begin with, so this isn’t surprising to me), so I wonder sometimes if I am no longer capable of taking action on ideas any longer.

I hope this is just a phase…

Your oligarchy at work…

For-profit inspectors allow toxic food
A Bloomberg Markets investigation shows dangers of food industry taking over from FDA
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/11/for_profit_inspectors_allow_toxic_food/

We don’t want no stinkin regulation! We can self-regulate no problem!

The ironic thing to me is that the ‘for profit’ aspect is a tax on food consumers that they never see or have a chance to evaluate. At the bottom of the article is mentioned that the FDA wanted to quadruple their budget to $4 billion in order to do the inspections themselves; I flat-out guarantee you that it costs the food consuming customer way more than $4 billion for the inadequate inspections already in place. Our society could save a lot of money by having the FDA do the inspections, but taint gunna happen today!

This is the fundamental problem I have with privatizing our government. Once some organization starts to make a profit they will use that profit to expand their business and will also use it to defend their profit if threatened. At least when the government does it there is some visibility to what is going on, but once it gets privatized that money gets hidden from view.

This is America…

Congressman draws fire for calling evolution, Big Bang ‘lies from the pit of hell’
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/10/congressman-draws-fire-for-calling-evolution-big-bang-lies-from-the-pit-of-hell/?hpt=hp_t3

Broun, a medical doctor by training, serves on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

This is what he says, at least when he is standing in his church:

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell,” U.S Rep. Paul Broun said in an address last month at a banquet organized by Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”
…
“I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old,” Broun said in the speech, which Liberty Baptist Church posted on its website via YouTube. “I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”
…
In his speech to the church group, Broun called the Bible the “the manufacturer’s handbook. … It teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in our society.”

“That’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that,” he said.

So, here in America we have the most ignorant people in the most pivotal positions in government. This guy sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology (yes, I know I am repeating myself, I just got to emphasize this since it blows my mind). Of course, as I reported here before, Americans as a group do _NOT_ believe in science or evolution, so I guess we are in fact getting a representative government.

I really got to get off my duff and check the immigration policies of other countries. Perhaps Australia isn’t so damn stupid.

This is your brain on security…

Hacker cracks 4 million hotel locks with ‘James Bond Dry Erase Marker’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2213849/Matthew-Jakubowski-Hacker-cracks-4-million-hotel-locks-James-Bond-Dry-Erase-Marker.html

I think people just refuse to realize how completely vulnerable they are to any number of exploits. I guess it is the same with con artists, no one wants to think they are that gullible. The reality, though, is that while it used to take someone with expertise and a whole lot of practice to do something nefarious, it is increasingly possible (likely) that bad dewds can simply buy their way (and without necessarily spending very much!) into competence. Of course, they still have to be cool cucumbers and have non-idiotic plans, so not just _any_ idiot can make use of these tools, but unless the bad guy is a total idiot (yes, I know that there are plenty, but not all!) he just goes down to the local bad-guy shop and loads up with what he needs.

I would posit a complex government/oligarchy conspiracy to make us all vulnerable, but (my babble about the oligarchical police state notwithstanding) I know that the vast majority of these sorts of thing boil down to plain old incompetence and ignorance with perhaps a light sprinkle of apathy by those hired to attempt to institute some security but are constantly ignored (the main reason I never pursued a job as a Chief Security Officer).

Yawn. More police state from the oligarchy…

US supreme court finalizes gift of immunity to the telecom giants
Yet again, the Congress, courts, executive branch and the establishment media work together to protect the nation’s most powerful actors
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/10/supreme-court-telecoms-win-immunity

I haven’t droned on about our police state in a while and almost didn’t do so this time. When one sees the same travesty of justice over and over again with no method of recourse one gets numb to it. I try to maintain outrage, but it gets increasingly difficult. If our economy continues its slight upward trajectory, and the new administration and Congress don’t fuck it up with more austerity, then the majority of our ‘great’ country will be so happy that they can finally go to McDonald’s and pay their electric bill that they will further ignore the chronic law breaking of our government. Today there are only a few that take the time to expose the malfeasance, once the population is fat(er) and happy I predict the government will start to round up these few vocal opponents and disappear them into Guantanamo or some Siberian equivalent. Mebe I should stop posting so I don’t get on that list, eh?

OK, just one more post…

CEO emails 7,000 employees: Defeat Obama or else
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/09/news/economy/siegel-email-employees/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

One more case of biting the hand that feeds you: genius CEO David Siegel, whose company, btw, seems to have grown under our current President’s economic policies (it always flabbergasts me that these idiots fail to recall under whose watch the economy went into the toilet) is so upset about the prospects of Obama being reelected that he has told his entire staff that they might wind up losing their jobs if Obama gets reelected. What a fucking idiot! I just can’t understand the delusional universe these twits live in. I guess if you live your entire life surrounded by yes men you can’t but help believing the lies. Either that or it is the product of inbreeding, I dunno.

Our oligarchy is sliding quickly into a feudal society and as I have commented before, feudal societies are very stable. Us 99% should be getting used to living with less since it looks to me that no matter who wins the election the middle class is going to continue being screwed (I just think it will happen a bit faster with Romney vs Obama).

A manifesto for the entitled

I am a job creator: A manifesto for the entitled
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/i-am-a-job-creator-a-manifesto-for-the-entitled/2012/09/28/756f2e90-07ee-11e2-858a-5311df86ab04_story.html

I really encourage my reader(s) to look at the whole thing. I excerpted a few that I like the most…

I am the misunderstood superhero of American capitalism, single-handedly creating wealth and prosperity despite all the obstacles put in my way by employees, government and the media.
…
I am entitled to complain about the economy even when my stock price, my portfolio and my profits are at record levels.

I am entitled to a healthy and well-educated workforce, a modern and efficient transportation system and protection for my person and property, just as I am entitled to demonize the government workers who provide them.

I am entitled to complain bitterly about taxes that are always too high, even when they are at record lows.
…
I am entitled to use unlimited amounts of my own or company funds to buy elections without disclosing such expenditures to shareholders or the public.

I am entitled to use company funds to burnish my own charitable reputation.
…
Although I have no clue how government works, I am entitled to be consulted on public policy by politicians and bureaucrats who have no clue about how business works.
…
I am entitled to load companies up with debt in order to pay myself and investors big dividends — and then blame any bankruptcy on over-compensated workers.
…
I am entitled to claim credit for all the profits made during a booming economy while blaming losses or setbacks on adverse market or economic conditions.
…
I am entitled to be treated with deference and respect by investors I mislead, customers I bamboozle, directors I manipulate and employees I view as expendable.

Open mouth, insert foot, jam as hard as possible

Jack Welch: I was right about jobs report
http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/09/news/economy/jack-welch-jobs/index.html?source=cnn_bin

I had a bit of respect for Jack prior to this outburst, but it is all gone now. He had operated GE well (and was extremely well compensated, but in this case it is just possible the stock holders got their money’s worth) and, at least based on what I was exposed to, kept his idiot opinions to himself (unlike me, who broadcasts his idiot opinions to the world via this blog). However, it seems this disease that has infested the oligarchy (that somehow the Obama administration is out to get them; what the hell is in their Perrier (you know they don’t drink tap water!)?) has got to him and he now feels obligated to spout his insanity to the world. I am sure that his outburst sounded perfectly logical to his fellow members of the oligarchy, but that is because they are all infected with the same insanity (how the hell can these morons think that Obama is out to get them? Over a _trilion_ dollars in outright gifts and ultra-low interest loans and they can’t give the guy any love at all?), but now, being in his dotage I guess, he feels the need to go public with his idiot complaints.

So, when the variability in statistically collected and analyzed data shows a ‘dramatic spike’ in unemployment is he going to go public with his apology? I think not.

What a fucked up nation we have!