Tom McMahon

The Strict Objectivity And Rigid Nonpartisanship Of The American Media

From RealClearPolitics:

Q: The last time we spoke, you told me you're routinely misquoted by newspaper reporters. What are a couple of the more egregious examples? Why does this happen?

Ann Coulter: It happens so much, I don't even keep track of it anymore. The last one I remember was when I said "cutting the tax rate on capital gains seems to have increased tax receipts for fiscal 2006, just as supply-side economics predicted it would." It came out in the paper as, "I worship Adolf Hitler and share all of his goals, especially the 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem.'"

I have no idea how it happens, given the strict objectivity and rigid nonpartisanship of the American media.

The Taint Of 1968

Via Sykes, an excerpt from Rich Lowry:

The freedoms fought for in the student revolt soon curdled into the opposite: free speech became speech codes; sexual liberation became the regime of sexual harassment; civil rights became quotas. Meanwhile, Mark Rudd and a fringe of the New Left spun off into the Weather Underground, which took the destructive spirit of the campus protests to its logical conclusion in a campaign of terrorist bombings. Jonah Goldberg reminds us in his book "Liberal Fascism" that the radical left committed roughly 250 attacks from September 1969 to May 1970.

If the academics gave in, another segment of the parents resisted. They were the Nixon voters, reacting against the disorder and cultural radicalism with which liberalism became identified. Republicans held the White House for 28 of the next 40 years, and the alternative history of the 1960s is the rise of the right. Even now, with Barack Obama dogged by his association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the Democratic Party's challenge is to free itself from the taint of 1968.

Xmod Wireless: Play All Of The Music From Your PC Wirelessly In Any Room

Xmod Wireless: Play All Of The Music From Your PC Wirelessly In Any Room

 

The blurb:

The Xmod Wireless streams all of your digital audio to the receiver in any room. You can listen to any type of audio including movies, music, Internet radio, podcasts, subscription music, iTunes songs and audio books. The Xmod Wireless plays all copy protected or rights managed music because it acts like an external sound card. The Xmod Wireless will stream any and all audio coming from your computer to the receiver. ...

Use the remote controls with the Xmod Wireless transmitter or the X-Fi Wireless Receiver to play, pause and skip through your music. The remote control will work with all the major music players including Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp and Real Player. You don't even have to be in front of your PC.

Lapel Pin: Peace Sign

Lapel Pin: Peace Sign

Just A Couple Of Things

• I saw an ad for one of those credit counseling services and it said you needed a minimum of $12,000 in credit card debt to use their service. If you only had $10,000, would it be worth it to blow through the extra $2,000 you need to qualify?
• When I take one of those "What Is Your Life Expectancy?" tests you see on the internet, the number they come up with is always less than my age now. Should I be concerned?

Virtual Painter: Rusty Jones

Virtual Painter: Rusty Jones

Dickie Goodman

Excerpts from eMusic:

Imagine a single that sampled U2, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana and a bunch of others — without permission — and then hit #3 on the Billboard charts, selling more than a million copies. That's right, you're imagining the mother of all lawsuits. You're also imagining something that pretty much already happened — in 1956.

That was when 21-year-old Dickie Goodman, along with partner Bill Buchanan, recorded "The Flying Saucer," parts 1 and 2, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, parodying Orson Welles' infamous War of the Worlds broadcast with a frenetic, freewheeling skit about an alien invasion, brazenly incorporating snippets of hits by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Bill Haley and about two dozen other musical giants. ...

No one had ever done this before. It would be five years before electronic music pioneer James Tenney cut up Elvis Presley's version of "Blue Suede Shoes" on the musique concrete classic, "Collage #1 (Blue Suede)." No doubt about it, Dickie Goodman saw far beyond the curve. He was basically sampling and mashing up hits of the day to concoct manic melanges of sound years before the members of Public Enemy were even born. In the process, he pioneered the fine art of sonic copyright infringement.

Some 17 record labels sued Buchanan and Goodman for poaching their music, but being the wise-ass punks they were, the duo responded with yet another of what they called a "break-in record": "Buchanan and Goodman on Trial," which bit Nat King Cole, Little Richard, Elvis, the Dragnet theme and a bunch of Martians. They got slapped with an injunction, but New York State Supreme Court Judge Henry Clay Greenberg deemed the work a parody and therefore subject to fair use laws; Buchanan and Goodman, the judge opined, "had created a new work."

Advice From Mauritius: Chant Hare Krishna And Be Happy

   
Advice From Mauritius: Chant Hare Krishna And Be Happy

 

Cornelia Fort, The Real-Life Flight Instructor Depicted in Tora! Tora! Tora!

 
Cornelia Fort, The Real-Life Flight Instructor Depicted in Tora! Tora! Tora!   

 

From the PBS series Fly Girls:

On December 7th, 1941 Cornelia Fort, a young civilian flight instructor from Tennessee, and her regular Sunday-morning student took off from John Rodgers Airport in Honolulu. Fort's apprentice was advanced enough to fly regular take-offs and landings and this was to have been his last lesson before going solo. With the novice at the controls, Fort noticed a military aircraft approaching from the sea. At first that didn't strike her as unusual; Army planes were a common sight in the skies above Hawaii. But at the last moment, she realized this aircraft was different and that it had set itself on a collision course with her plane. She wrenched the controls from her student's grasp and managed to pull the plane up just in time to avoid a mid-air crash. As she looked around she saw the red sun symbol on the wings of the disappearing plane and in the distance, probably not more than a quarter mile away, billowing smoke was rising over Pearl Harbor. The disbelieving Fort had just unwittingly witnessed the U.S. entry into World War II. A little more than a year after this near miss, Fort would be flying military aircraft for the U.S. and a mid-air collision would tragically make her the first American woman to die on active military duty. ...

Fort flew for her country for just a few brief months.  On March 21, 1943, she was one of a number of pilots, both male and female, who had been assigned to ferry BT-13s to Love Field in Dallas Texas.  During the course of that mission, one of the men's landing gear clipped Fort's airplane, sending it plummeting to earth.  Fort didn't have time to parachute to safety.  Her commanding officer, sent a compassionate letter back to the young pilot's mother: "My feeling about the loss of Cornelia," wrote Nancy Love, "is hard to put into words -- I can only say that I miss her terribly, and loved her...If there can be any comforting thought, it is that she died as she wanted to -- in an Army airplane, and in the service of her country."

Despite the words of sympathy, Fort and the other 37 female pilots who died flying military planes during the war, received no military recognition.  The army didn't even pay for their burial expenses because the women were considered civilians.  Fort's achievements as a military pilot are commemorated by an airpark named after her that was built in 1945 near her family farm.  Her own words on an historical marker at the site simply and modestly sum up her wartime contribution: "I am grateful" she wrote, "that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country."

In Tora! Tora! Tora! Cornelia Fort was played by actress Jeff Donnell, not Vivian Vance as I had previously posted.

Money And Happiness

Excerpts from Arthur C. Brooks:

In 1972, 30 percent of Americans said they were very happy, and the average American enjoyed about $25,000 (in today’s dollars) of our national income. By 2004, the percentage of very happy Americans stayed virtually unchanged at 31 percent, while the share of national income skyrocketed to $38,000 (a 50 percent real increase in average income).

The story is the same in other developed countries. In Japan, real average income was six times higher in 1991 than it was in 1958. During the post–World War II period, Japan was transformed at unprecedented speed from a poor nation into one of the world’s richest countries. But the average happiness of a Japanese citizen, measured on a scale of 1–4, stayed exactly the same at 2.7. ...

But once countries get past the prosperity level that solves large-scale health and nutrition problems, income disparity pales in comparison with other factors in predicting happiness, such as culture and faith.  For example, compare Mexico and France. The cost-of-living difference between the two nations is vast, so economists don’t compare raw income; rather, they compare the “purchasing power” of citizens. In Mexico—a nation in which most people live above the level of subsistence but still are much poorer than residents of the United States or Europe—the average purchasing power was about a third what it was in France in 2004. And yet Mexicans, in aggregate, are happier than the French. In Mexico, 63 percent of adults said they were very happy or completely happy. In France, only 35 percent gave one of these responses.

It might be tempting to dismiss the happiness of Mexicans as delusional or a reflection of the fact that most Mexicans have no idea what life with material wealth is like. But this would be a mistake: There is simply no evidence that Mexicans lack an understanding of true happiness compared to the French. A more reasonable conclusion is that Mexican happiness—and French unhappiness—are caused in large measure by forces other than money.

American communities are like countries when it comes to happiness. Like happy Mexico and unhappy France, the happiness of American communities—all of which are above the level of subsistence—depends very little on their comparative prosperity. There are abundant examples of unhappy high-income communities and happy low-income communities. Take eastern Tennessee (which includes the cities of Chattanooga and Knoxville, but is mostly rural), where people are 25 percent likelier than people living in tony San Francisco to say they are very happy, despite earning a third less money on average. Obviously, it is more expensive to live in San Francisco than it is to live in Tennessee, but San Franciscans still enjoy more than 30 percent more disposable income.

Nazi Rainbow Pride

Nazi Rainbow Pride

 

A depiction of the infamous Bauhoff Color Putsch of 1928.

The Great Myths of Organic Food

Via The Corner, an excerpt from Britain's The Independent:

Myth four: Pesticide levels in conventional food are dangerous

The proponents of organic food – particularly celebrities, such as Gwyneth   Paltrow, who have jumped on the organic bandwagon – say there is a "cocktail   effect" of pesticides. Some point to an "epidemic of cancer".   In fact, there is no epidemic of cancer. When age-standardised, cancer rates   are falling dramatically and have been doing so for 50 years.

If there is a "cocktail effect" it would first show up in farmers,   but they have among the lowest cancer rates of any group. Carcinogenic   effects of pesticides could show up as stomach cancer, but stomach cancer   rates have fallen faster than any other. Sixty years ago, all Britain's food   was organic; we lived only until our early sixties, malnutrition and food   poisoning were rife. Now, modern agriculture (including the careful use of   well-tested chemicals) makes food cheap and safe and we live into our   eighties.

Minnie Minoso vs Jackie Robinson vs Larry Doby

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

	Jackie Robinson	Larry Doby	Minnie Minoso	Average HOFer
First Black Player In ...	Major Leagues	American League	Chicago	n/a
Seasons	10	13	17	n/a
Batting Average	.311	.283	.298	n/a
Hits	1518	1515	1963	n/a
Home Runs	137	253	186	n/a
Black Ink	8	18	15	approx 27
Gray Ink	121	124	189	approx 144
HOF Standards	38.0	29.2	34.8	approx 50
HOF Monitor	98.0	73.0	87.0	> 100

Both Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby are in the  Baseball  Hall of Fame. Minnie Minoso isn't.   
 

Lapel Pin: Milwaukee Flag

Lapel Pin: Milwaukee Flag

 

Ward Cleaver 16

 
Ward Cleaver 16

Barbara Walters: Hanging On Like Hillary

A short excerpt from David R. Stokes:

When President Richard Nixon went on his ground-breaking trip to China in 1972, Barbara Walters went with him.  She wasn’t a star at the time, but as one of only three media women on the trip, she was on her way to fame and fortune.  Never mind that she had to fly over in “the zoo plane,” as the Pan Am Boeing 707 carrying the photographers and technicians would be dubbed.  Forget about the fact that, by all accounts, she was not in the best of moods as she occasionally looked up out of her window to see another 707, this one operated by TWA, carrying the big guns and good old boys of the major media du jour.  She would be an important player one day.

That day has come - and gone.