Month: June 2005

Courts let us down again

A Washington State judge has blown the election case, sending it to the State Supreme Court (where nothing will happen), because he can’t do arithmetic, and the US Supreme Court has shown that currying favor with social conservatives and big-government liberals is more important than getting the law right. It’s instructive for some of our … Continue reading “Courts let us down again”

A Washington State judge has blown the election case, sending it to the State Supreme Court (where nothing will happen), because he can’t do arithmetic, and the US Supreme Court has shown that currying favor with social conservatives and big-government liberals is more important than getting the law right. It’s instructive for some of our readers to note that Scalia and Thomas came down on different sides of Gonzalez v. Raich (the federal marijuana case), and Thomas actually spanked Scalia’s butt big time in his dissent.

Downing St. memo no surprise

The Air America crowd is bleary-eyed with excitement over the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2002 where the pending liberation of Iraq was discussed. Their claim that the memo is some sort of “smoking gun” on secret plans to falsify intelligence is a testament to their illiteracy. Here’s the passage that … Continue reading “Downing St. memo no surprise”

The Air America crowd is bleary-eyed with excitement over the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s cabinet in 2002 where the pending liberation of Iraq was discussed. Their claim that the memo is some sort of “smoking gun” on secret plans to falsify intelligence is a testament to their illiteracy. Here’s the passage that gets their hearts pounding:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

The term “fixed” is understood by Franken’s minions as meaning “fabricated”, but it should be properly understood in its British sense as “placed”, this being a British document and all. The document is saying that Bush will furnish the evidence of Saddam’s misbehavior. There was, of course, general consensus around the world in the late 90s and early 00s that Saddam’s government would likely arm terrorist groups at some point with deadlier weapons than they could come up with on their own. This was the predicate for the Iraq Liberation Act the US Congress passed in 1998, and the basis of some vigorous anti-Saddam campaigning from Blair during the Clinton Administration. So there was no reason to believe that evidence supporting the liberation of Iraq would be anything but genuine.

The memo simply indicates that Bush and Blair had both decided that it was time to stop bullshitting and start walking the walk on Iraq. That we didn’t find a ready stockpile of weapons doesn’t really matter – they would have been manufactured as soon as the embargo was lifted, and by then it would have been too late to act.

I don’t expect this memo to bring down any governments; it was published in Britain before the recent elections that Blair won handily. Making Franken’s minions even more hungry for Ben and Jerry’s than usual is its only consequence.

Communist China continues the Tiananmen Square Cover-up

Communist China has shown its brutal and oppressive character again: A JOURNALIST considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Ching … Continue reading “Communist China continues the Tiananmen Square Cover-up”

Communist China has shown its brutal and oppressive character again:

A JOURNALIST considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China.

His wife, Mary Lau, said: “He told me that he expected to be shut up for a long time. It seems they suspect him of stealing state secrets.” Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Imprisoning foreign journalists is a step up from the Tibetan genocide, but countries that behave this way aren’t ready for full membership in the community of civilized nations. China is effectively a criminal enterprise, nearly as savage as its client state, North Korea.

“Insurgents” Massacre Sufis

Michael Totten is all riled-up over the Sufi massacre and Reuters: A person who deliberately mass-murders his fellow citizens because they belong to the “wrong” religious sect is not an insurgent. The “insurgents” are not oppressed by a Sufi regime in Iraq, nor can Iraq’s government be considered even remotely dominated by Sufis. Those killed … Continue reading ““Insurgents” Massacre Sufis”

Michael Totten is all riled-up over the Sufi massacre and Reuters:

A person who deliberately mass-murders his fellow citizens because they belong to the “wrong” religious sect is not an insurgent. The “insurgents” are not oppressed by a Sufi regime in Iraq, nor can Iraq’s government be considered even remotely dominated by Sufis. Those killed weren’t part of the government or police force in the first place.

“Insurgent” is a morally and ethically neutral term. There are good insurgents and bad in this world, just as there are good guerillas and bad. There are not, however, good mass-murdering terrorists.

At this week’s Portland liberal hawks drinking club meeting, Sufism was discussed in some detail in connection with Friedman’s claim that Islam needs a reformation. My recollection of history is that the Sufi Muslims were at the center of Islam’s Golden Age, so what they really need is to return to their roots. Apparently these murdering terrorists agree that the Sufis are way too civilized for current events in Iraq.

Tom Friedman should think this over.

Amnesia International

Amnesty’s wild claim that Gitmo is a regular ole Gulag prompted a nice response from the ultra-conservative New Republic: Gulag: For the most part, Gulag prisoners provided labor for the Soviet system. Treatment varied widely, but most prisoners lived in overcrowded barracks, and prisoners occasionally killed one another in an effort to find space to … Continue reading “Amnesia International”

Amnesty’s wild claim that Gitmo is a regular ole Gulag prompted a nice response from the ultra-conservative New Republic:

Gulag: For the most part, Gulag prisoners provided labor for the Soviet system. Treatment varied widely, but most prisoners lived in overcrowded barracks, and prisoners occasionally killed one another in an effort to find space to sleep. Deadly dysentery and typhus outbreaks were common. Prisoners often had inadequate clothing to protect themselves from the elements, and most camps lacked running water and heat.

Guantánamo: A recent Time magazine report found that “the best-behaved detainees are held in Camp 4, a medium-security, communal-living environment with as many as 10 beds in a room; prisoners can play soccer or volleyball outside up to nine hours a day, eat meals together and read Agatha Christie mysteries in Arabic. Less cooperative detainees typically live and eat in small, individual cells and get to exercise and shower only twice a week.” Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups have collected firsthand testimony from prisoners alleging abuses, including the use of dogs, extended solitary confinement, sexual humiliation, and “stress positions.” An official investigation uncovered only minor abuses, and most detainee accusations have not been verified.

Amnesty – which we’re calling Amnesia on account of their sense of history – has some other interesting claims on their web site. Did you know that violence against women is the “greatest human rights scandal of our time?” Amnesia does. Never mind that 60% of violent crime victims in the US are male::

During 1994 men experienced almost 6.6 million violent victimizations; women experienced 5 million. For every 3 violent victimizations of males, there were 2 of females.

…or that 77% of murder victims, or 99% of military deaths, or that women resort to violence in relationships as often as men – when momma ain’t happy, Amnesia ain’t happy and that’s just the way it is.

The current leader of Amnesia, Irene Zubaida Khan, has clearly run it off the rails.

H/T John Cole.

Here’s a good linkie-winkie: Shamnesty International via Protein:

Al Qaeda knows better than any organization that its success depends on peeling both Muslim-world support and U.S. public support away from the Bush administration’s war on terrorism. Consider the quasi-reasoned tone Osama bin Laden adopted in a recording he allegedly made last November, calling on the “people of America” to drop their support for the president. The recording was full of contemporary and historical allusions, as is the training manual. If Al Qaeda’s savvy enough for that, it’s savvy enough to know that civil liberties – even the civil liberties of accused bad guys – are a hot-button issue in the U.S.

In the U.S. alone, there are 65-plus lawsuits claiming abuse of detainees at American hands. There are still more legal demarches overseas. We’ve seen inaccurate Koran-desecration stories send Muslim crowds raging in protest. We have regular accounts of arrested terrorism suspects being sent to third countries where they face torture-driven interrogation. And, as if on cue, we have Amnesty International calling the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “the gulag of our time.”

Naturally, the Bush administration is berating the organization for such a ridiculous comparison. After all, Guantanamo Bay’s guards are under the microscope of human-rights lawyers all the time. The inmates are fairly treated. The guard-throws-Koran-in-toilet story was false. And claims that the inmates’ detention oversteps the boundaries of international law have been responded to at the highest levels. Besides, the 500-600 Guantanamo detainees wouldn’t be there if Al Qaeda hadn’t killed 2,948 Americans and others on Sept 11, 2001.

The cottage industry stuff is spot on. Read it and see.

High Definition TV Technologies

High-definition TV is probably confusing to most folks, so I’m going to lay out the basics in the interest of world peace and harmony and explain the technologies currently duking it out for your consumer dollar. First, lets understand that high-definition TV is digital, but not all digital TV is hi-def. DVDs, for example, are … Continue reading “High Definition TV Technologies”

High-definition TV is probably confusing to most folks, so I’m going to lay out the basics in the interest of world peace and harmony and explain the technologies currently duking it out for your consumer dollar.

First, lets understand that high-definition TV is digital, but not all digital TV is hi-def. DVDs, for example, are digital, but they don’t qualify as hi-def because there’s no more detail in the DVD picture than in a good standard def, analog TV image. Digital TV programming can take any of several formats, defined by their image geometry and the frequency with which the picture is updated. The high end of the scale of these formats is hi-def, the low end is standard def, and the middle is called Enhanced Definition TV or EDTV. Nobody is currently broadcasting in the best format, an image geometry of 1920 pixels x 1080 lines, progressive scanned at 30 frames/sec. The popular formats are 1280 x 720p and 1920 x 1080 interlaced. “Interlaced” means that the video picture is formed out of pairs of images, one consisting of the odd-numbered lines and the other with the even-numbered one; this is a trick that fools the eye and uses only half as many bits as progressive scan. Digital TV at 480 lines progressive is EDTV, and 480 interlaced is standard def, SDTV, the format used by DVDs.

Size and Shape

Hi-Def TV monitors are generally larger and wider than Old-Timey TV (OTTV). The screen shape has a ratio of 16:9 (width:height) compared to 4:3 for OTTV. This is handy when you’re watching movies, but for normal TV programming it means you’re going to have black bars on the left and right sides of your picture. So if you’re used to watching a 27″ set, you would need to get at least a 34″ widescreen HDTV to see an image of the height you’re used to (17″) when you’re watching shows that aren’t tailored for the wide screen.

The main advantage of HDTV is its ability to fill large screens with crisp images that aren’t grainy or otherwise funky-looking, so if you don’t get at least a somewhat larger screen than the normal OTTV screen you’re kind of missing the point.

Geometry

When you’re looking for an HDTV monitor, bear in mind that very few of them are capable of displaying the largest formats directly, pixel-for-pixel; that is, they’re all capable of receiving 720p and 1080i, but they typically do some image processing to display the images on a screen that has somewhat different geometry. For example, most HDTV plasma panels have a native resolution of 1024 x 768, just like crappy computer monitors. But they have image processing capability that allows them to “scale” 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080 images onto their native geometry. Since the image changes 30 or 60 times a second, and there may not be a whole lot of difference between any two adjacent pixels, these panels produce fine images up to a certain size, depending on how demanding you are, and are better looking than regular TV in any event. But you’re still going to be better off with a display whose native geometry is perfectly matched to HDTV formats, or one that has flexible geometry like an old-fashioned picture tube, because you’ll avoid weird image processing defects that plague all but the most expensive of plasma sets. That being said, this WalMart wonder is a nice TV set, and nobody knows TV like WalMart shoppers.

The alternative display technologies are LCD (just like computer displays) and a couple of variations on LCD for projection TV, DLP and LCoS.

LCD

Like plasma, LCD is a direct-view, panel technology that produces screens four or five inches thick that you can hang on a wall like paintings. LCD can be had in HDTV geometries, but some of it uses computer geometries as plasma does, so you should read the fine print. As with all of this stuff, you can pay nearly as much or as little as you want for an LCD HDTV, as these two examples show: BenQ has a 37″ monitor with native resolution of 1920 x 1080 (just what you want) for $2000 at Crutchfield. And Sharp has some smaller 32″ sets for twice as much.

DLP

Digital Light Processing is a nice, fairly inexpensive projection technology that’s used in medium-sized rear-projection TVs (typically from 46″ to 60″). DLPs use a chipset from Texas Instruments with 1280 x 720p, so these sets do have to scale 1080i down, but it’s pretty straightforward exercise as each 4 lines of input produce 3 lines of output. DLP TV have a single gun, and get the three colors that TV pictures are made from by shooting it through a “color wheel” that spins at 10,000 RPM or so. It’s a clunky process, but the images are acceptable. This Toshiba is a good example of a DLP set.

LCoS

Liquid Crystal on Silicon is a brilliant concept that JVC developed for video editing systems and has recently adapted for home entertainment, and it’s my bet as the winning technology in this area as it’s both cheaper and brighter than either LCD or DLP. The trick behind LCoS is that the beam of light that shines through a liquid crystal in LCD or DLP bounces off the LCoS crystal, which gives the colored light more intensity. These sets also use three guns so you don’t have a clunky color wheel, and the geometry is HDTV-oriented and not a carry-over from computers. JVC makes the best LCoS sets, but you can also get them from Philips and others, and the prices are reasonable.

CRT

OK, we’ve covered all the new technologies, but what about good, old-fashioned CRTs? It turns out they have a couple of natural advantages over the fixed-pixel-arrays that we’ve mentioned, flexibility and cost. CRTs form images by shooting an electron beam on a phosphor coating inside the tube, using electromagnets to direct the beam, which sweeps the screen from top left to bottom right 30 times a second, more or less (29.97, actually) . They can adjust resolution by altering the speed that the beam travels and by changing the number of times it turns on and off to form picture elements (pixels). It’s not really as flexible as all this at the high end, where a shadow mask is placed in between the beam source and the phosphor to sharpen the dots, but the general principle still applies. And CRTs are cheap to make because we’ve been making them for so long. The LCD companies are having to build brand-new and very expensive factories to produce the larger panels they need at a low cost, and somebody has to pay for them. Sharp is building their own, LG and Philips are collaborating, Sony and Samsung are collaborating, and the Chinese Army is building one with slave labor.

The down sides of CRT are size – they top out at 34″ – and the weight, about 200 pounds for a 34″. Old projection TVs also used CRT guns, but that’s a downer. Good sources for HDTV CRTs are Toshiba and Sony.

OK, that’s that for displays, there’s a lot to be said about HDTV recorders and programming, but that’s for another post.

Bye-bye European Constitution

Dutch voters were even more forceful than the French in their rejection of the EU Constitution today: AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Dutch voters rejected the European Union constitution on Wednesday, exit polls showed, deepening a crisis in the bloc and possibly dooming the treaty after fellow EU founding member France rejected it on Sunday. Interview/NSS projected … Continue reading “Bye-bye European Constitution”

Dutch voters were even more forceful than the French in their rejection of the EU Constitution today:

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Dutch voters rejected the European Union constitution on Wednesday, exit polls showed, deepening a crisis in the bloc and possibly dooming the treaty after fellow EU founding member France rejected it on Sunday.

Interview/NSS projected the “No” camp had won 63 percent of votes based on an exit poll to 37 percent for the “Yes.”

What’s a poor bureaucrat to do?

It turns out that this loss of confidence in a united Europe has affectd the currency as well:

The euro fell to its lowest level against the dollar for more than seven months on Wednesday and has lost almost 10 percent since March when polls turned negative on the treaty, which needs the approval of all members to go into force.

Some of my friends who’ve been selling the dollar short against the Euro must be hurting right now.

H/T John Cole.

Re-evaluating Nixon

During Watergate, I was as anti-Nixon has anyone, completely convinced that he was a lowlife, a scumbag, and a liar. But since Nixon, we’ve had presidents like Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton, so I think it’s appropriate to re-evaluate Tricky. That’s what former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein does here: Can anyone even remember … Continue reading “Re-evaluating Nixon”

During Watergate, I was as anti-Nixon has anyone, completely convinced that he was a lowlife, a scumbag, and a liar. But since Nixon, we’ve had presidents like Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton, so I think it’s appropriate to re-evaluate Tricky. That’s what former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein does here:

Can anyone even remember now what Nixon did that was so terrible? He ended the war in Vietnam, brought home the POW’s, ended the war in the Mideast, opened relations with China, started the first nuclear weapons reduction treaty, saved Eretz Israel’s life, started the Environmental Protection Administration. Does anyone remember what he did that was bad?

Oh, now I remember. He lied. He was a politician who lied. How remarkable. He lied to protect his subordinates who were covering up a ridiculous burglary that no one to this date has any clue about its purpose. He lied so he could stay in office and keep his agenda of peace going. That was his crime. He was a peacemaker and he wanted to make a world where there was a generation of peace. And he succeeded.

Comments on the connection between Mark Felt and the Cambodian Genocide follow. What is it with Commies and genocide anyway?

Changing the balance of power

Check the transcript of a debate between Hitchens and several commies on the liberation of Iraq: Andrew Marr – And you’re still cast-iron certain, that despite the large numbers of deaths in the post war Iraq, and despite all the problems of putting together that democracy, that we will end up with a much more … Continue reading “Changing the balance of power”

Check the transcript of a debate between Hitchens and several commies on the liberation of Iraq:

Andrew Marr – And you’re still cast-iron certain, that despite the large numbers of deaths in the post war Iraq, and despite all the problems of putting together that democracy, that we will end up with a much more tolerable, decent and peaceable country?

Christopher Hitchens – Well, it doesn’t take much of a cast-iron certainty, Andrew, to do that because we know that it could not possibly have been worse and that proposition was given a very solid test. I would say that the possibility of defeat of this enterprise exists in Iraq, partly because we left it so long and the country became so beggared and ruined. But it’s not the kind of defeat that it would have been if we’d left it to be deeded to the Uday-Qusay succession and that was the alternative offer that was being made by the peaceniks.

More than that I think Iraq will be remarkable. We’re going to live to see great things. We already have in Lebanon. We’re about to I think in Egypt, with the reopening of the Egyptian democracy. The Ba’ath party in Syria in my judgement will not be there in two years time And there will be extraordinary, are already extraordinary developments in Iran which I have just come back from. And so the essential point of the Blair-Bush policy, which is to change the balance of power in the Middle East, that has already been conclusively vindicated.

Indeed it has been conclusively vindicated, which is more than many of my friends on the Left can bear.