The Dead Zone

Bitter Angels

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:33:19 GMT

How time flies...posts made on that other blog recently:

- Volkswagon-sized asteroid collides with the atmosphere

- The terrorism myth: Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn

- Mixed up thoughts about beer

- How to save the world through environmentalism, with a note about those light bulbs

- My Spore verdict, some 20-20 hindsight advice for Will Wright, and pointers to great space games

- Stop the economy so I can get off: Good sources on what happened and what we shouldn't do next

- I hate to quote Orson Scott Card more than you can possibly imagine, but...

- I taste dead people

- Still alive, with an undead mouth and a philosophical inquiry

- I was a bad gamer: The mindset of gaming and contemplating an insane game blogging project

- End of Civilization Watch: Ezra Levant is my first favorite committer of hate crimes against humanity

- Fighting the urge to join the dark side: The call of another Star Wars MMO

- Stardock on DRM and the Gamer's Bill of Rights

- No means No: An important message for Castro Halloweeners

- Freeing Fallout: How to play this classic game without killing yourself

- War of the Worlds: The unknown story

- Seasteading: Welcome to Rapture!

- Good Old Games Done Dirt Cheap

- Lord British goes to space: Richard Garriott's trip to the international space station

Every post guaranteed DRM-free!

It doesn't matter where Obama was born

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:00:02 GMT

There's a bit of buzz about the "October surprise" that Barack Obama was allegedly not born in the U.S. and has never become a legal U.S. citizen, therefore is not legally a Senator and could not be President.

Here is a video about this:

And here is a website that gets into excruciating detail.

Believe it or not, the same concern has been expressed about McCain -- the New York Times covered the question, and here is a forum post taking the question seriously.

My response is: Knock it off, people.

It’s a technicality…I suspect if you held a vote on this birthplace requirement today, a reasonably large majority would overturn it.

Where Obama was born has absolutely no bearing on his ability or right to hold these offices other than the fact that there are a couple of rules about it. Rules enacted at the Presidential level, if I recall correctly, for starkly partisan reasons to keep a particular person from being able to run for President, not out of any general belief that being born somewhere else somehow means something significant.

It’s true Obama used technicalities to get other people thrown out of a race so he could run unopposed, but that doesn't make this right.

The proof of the unworkableness of such a requirement is that we currently have two Presidential candidates who both, potentially, can be challenged based on their birth place. It’s ridiculous and destructive.

Personally, I just can’t support pursuing an avenue like this that has nothing to do with Obama’s qualifications or the vote of the people. Denying the majority the candidate they chose (if they do choose him) through such a path is wrong and dangerous. The backlash may be unimaginable.

To win through this kind of technicality is to lose, and lose big time.

HT: Bookworm...

This is how the Ayers family has matured

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:05:11 GMT

In comments on this blog, on multiple occasions, people have said in some form that what Bill Ayers did as a terrorist was a long time ago, doesn't apply to him now, and he's a respected educator these days.

For now, let's forget about any Obama connection and just delve into this question of whether Ayers has atoned for his crimes. And let's not forget to include Ayers' wife and partner in terrorism, Bernadine Dohrn. We'll go chronologically, to see how the thinking of this American couple has developed.

Here is Bernadine in 1969, when, per David Horowitz in his book The Professors, she has this to say (emphasis mine):

At a 1969 "War Council in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman "fork salute", she said of the bloody murders recently commited by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" The victim of the fork attack was Sharon Tate. The "War Council" ended with a formal declaration of war against "AmeriKKKa," always spelled with three K's.

As documented on her Wikipedia page, her husband has said she was being ironic. But about this, Horowitz says:

"In 1980 I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership. Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious".

In 1970, per the New York Times, Ayers was said to sum up the Weatherman [terrorist group] philosophy as:

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at."

Ayers now says that was "a joke". Around the time he made that joke, he was involved in bombing the NY City Police Headquarters, the Capital, the Pentagon, and around a dozen other locations.

Funny stuff. Can't imagine why his statement would be taken seriously.

But that was a long time ago, for both of them. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and see what they had to say as mature adults.

Here is what Ayers and his charming wife had to say to Connie Chung in 1998...a time when the planning for 9/11 was probably underway by some other terrorists:

For the video-phobic, a transcript:

Connie Chung: "A lot of people out there are probably saying, 'I would love to hear them say we were young, we were idealistic, we were foolish and we were probably stupid; we made mistakes and we're sorry about it. We're grown up now."

Bill Ayers: "I would say we were young, we were idealistic, we were romantic, we were foolish, we made mistakes, and I would do..."

Bernadine Dohrn: "And we'd do it again. I wish that we'd done more. I wish we'd been more militant. I wish a lot of things. But taken as a whole, we were so lucky to be born into that moment in history."

Aren't they such a cute couple?

A couple of years later, Bill Ayers did that interview in the New York Times, which happened to run on the morning of 9/11/2001, which relates the following:

"I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough."

Would he do it all again?

"I don't want to discount the possibility," he said.

But hey, 1998 and 2001 were a long time ago. Maybe one of them has grown up now?

Here Bernadine is a year ago, November 30, 2007:

"My experience traveling the last ten years has been that the majority of people who are activists have stayed the course in a way, in a variety of ways, devoted to overthrowing everything hateful about this government and corporate structure that we live in; capitalism itself, herself, himself, and determined to try to keep open and figure out how to move on...

We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast, it again means not that it's the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster."

Maybe one day she and her husband will finally get their way, and find a way to overthrow capitalism and kill the beast, the monster, that is America.

HT: Hot Air and iperceive...

Angels on the head of a post

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:28:46 GMT

Here are the recent non-duplicate posts from my Better Angels blog -- good stuff, if I do say so!

• On Writing

• Story: Maya

• Naomi Klein: Agree or disagree with her politics, you have to admit she's a lying liar

• Story: Down the Hell Hole

• My ancient gay workplace column

• I forgot my mantra: In search of a blog obsession

• Hello, Bookworms!

• Economic myths from the land of my people: Sweden

• Did someone hold an election and forget to invite me?

• Home Invasions by Police

• Strategic Petroleum Reserve

• Explaining complicated financial history in 90 seconds

• Podcasts and audiobooks: Changing life as I know it

• End of Civilation watch: Tricking women into blowing themselves up

• The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

• In Defense of World War II

The disappearing SNL skits

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 08:16:15 GMT

While much of the media has been pretty clearly "in the tank" for Obama (I've documented several instances), Saturday Night Live has been a show that has occasionally bucked the trend.

During the Hillary/Obama fight in the primary, SNL was the first to land any kind of hit on Obama, by doing a skit about a Hillary and Obama debate, in which Hillary was asked obscure foreign policy questions and Obama was asked if he wanted a pillow. This struck something for people, and may have resulted in, the next week, the first time the press actually tried to question Obama about something difficult to prove SNL wrong -- his Tony Rezko connection, which caused Obama to flee a press conference:

After this, Obama refused to meet with the press for nine days.

I wanted to link to the SNL skit that started all that...but it's gone. Can't find it on YouTube or NBC's site (if you can, let me know!)

This week, SNL did a skit including the Democrats involvement in the Fannie/Freddie stuff...and it's been pulled from YouTube and NBC's site.

However, you can see it here.

If that video is pulled, Michelle Malkin has the transcript and screenshots here (you don't know how much it pains me to link to her...Malkin is someone I try to avoid, but in this case she's got the info, so...)

I don't know why these videos have been pulled. Plenty of other SNL videos are available, especially on NBC's site (no doubt you've seen the Tina Fey as Hillary skits that manage to remain available (I particularly like the Hillary portrayal in that one...)

Whatever the reason, check em out.

About that whole winning thing

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:04:36 GMT

I've found it rather odd recently that it's been considered some kind of stinging rebuke in the comments here to say: "McCain is going to lose, you know" in some form or another.

Yeah, if nothing changes from today, he's going to lose.

Heck, I posted about some of the reasons he's gonna lose if they don't change their strategy (in just the last day they starting taking some of my advice -- you're welcome, Senator McCain!)

I've had many a losing candidate before, and will have many again.

For one side or the other in any election, their candidate is going to lose. Pointing this out does not further the underlying conversation, and is in fact a rather immature way to indicate you've run out of arguments on your end.

The only way it's interesting to make this an argument is if you believe in siding with whoever is going to win (which is something a percentage of the electorate does).

But if you actually, you know, believe in stuff, then a Presidential election is a chance to talk about, oh, the stuff.

As has also been pointed out in comments here, my vote "won't matter" given where I live, and it really won't matter for those who are citizens of strange foreign countries that we will someday invade -- but for this few months, it's a chance to figure out what you believe and what kind of person you can believe in, if any.

In a few weeks someone will be elected and this opportunity to have a conversation that the whole world can understand and participate in will be gone or at least reduced for a few years, because there will no longer be a binary choice between A and B, there will just be lots of stuff going on that will be harder to get a handle on.

And then this will be a blog about lolcats again.

What's the definition of overwhelming again?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:13:55 GMT

Dewey Defeats Truman!

Andrew Sullivan still going

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:51:39 GMT

This post isn't anti-or-pro anyone but Andrew Sullivan. That, at this point, he could still be going on about this conspiracy theory...words fail me:

This guy is an actual mainstream journalist...it's, well, it's...damn.

UPDATE: Here is the unpregnant Palin in 2008 -- I can see how Andrew Sullivan is still confused about this:

UPDATE 2:

We erred in our judgment

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:57:12 GMT

While providing links to ugly statements about Palin from the left in comments yesterday, I had this entry:

YouTube: Fox News: CBC's Heather Mallick: (actual column has been removed, so transcript from this blog, one of many that saw the original): Palin was not a sure choice, not even for the stolidly Republican ladies branch of Citizens for a Tackier America. No, she isn't even female really. She's a type, and she comes in male form too.

Turns out the reason I couldn't find the article is that the CBC was too embarrassed to leave it up:

More than 300 people have taken the trouble this month to complain to the CBC ombudsman about a column we ran on CBCNews.ca about Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Sept. 5.

The column, by award-winning freelance writer Heather Mallick, was also pilloried by The National Post in Canada and by Fox News in the U.S. Despite its age — it is three weeks old, several lifetimes in web years — this posting remains a subject of fascination in the blogosphere.

CBC Publisher John Cruickshank. (Rich Hein/Associated Press)
Vince Carlin, the CBC ombudsman, has now issued his assessment of the Mallick column. He doesn't fault her for riling readers by either the caustic nature of her tone or the polarizing nature of her opinion.

But he objects that many of her most savage assertions lack a basis in fact. And he is certainly correct.

Mallick's column is a classic piece of political invective. It is viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan.

And because it is all those things, this column should not have appeared on the CBCNews.ca site.

Healthy restraint

On the whole, the CBC News policy handbook takes a very anxious view of any mixing of opinion in with the news business. It sees the two as nitro and glycerin, innocuous on their own but explosive together. This is a very healthy restraint for a public broadcaster.

But every news organization needs to have an opinion dimension. Access to different viewpoints helps readers, listeners and viewers make reasoned choices, especially during an election campaign.

As a public broadcaster we have an added responsibility to provide an array of opinions and voices to complement our journalism. But we must do so carefully. And you should be able to trust us to provide you with work that's based on solid reporting and free from the passionate excesses of partisanship.

We failed you in this case. And as a result we have put new editing procedures in place to insure that in the future, work that is not appropriate for our platforms, will not appear. We are open to contentious reasoned argument but not to partisan attack. It's a fine line.

Ombudsman Carlin makes another significant observation in his response to complainants: when it does choose to print opinion, CBCNews.ca displays a very narrow range on its pages.

In this, Carlin is also correct.

This, too, is being immediately addressed. CBCNews.ca will soon expand the diversity of voices and opinions and be home to a diverse group of writers with many perspectives. In this, we will better reflect the depth and texture of this country.

We erred in our editorial judgment. You told us in no uncertain terms. And we have learned from it.

My sincere appreciation to them for recognizing that they, like so much of the media right now, had slipped into a disreputable sewer, and I truly respect that they, unlike the others, decided they don't want to be there, and even more so that they publicly acknowledged the situation.

I have no problem with a paper printing ugly and even untrue things about politicians, and I see no reason a paper has to have diversity of thought -- if they want to flat out say "This is what we believe and how we approach things", that's legitimate (many papers in Britain are this way, I understand).

However it's not acceptable to pretend to be a neutral journal and to then engage in this sort of behavior.

My only quibble is that I don't believe they should have removed the offending article -- that's trying to change history. It should be left in place for archival and historical purposes (with an appropriate note attached).

I can't wait for the Sarah song!

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:30:34 GMT