The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sock-Puppet Software

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 23 Comments

Maybe the weirdest news of the day:

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage “fake people” on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues. The contract calls for the development of ‘Persona Management Software’ which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online.

Great: ConsensusBots and TrollBots. What won’t they think of next? Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the Internet!

(Via Instapundit.)

Category: Blogging

Kristi Noem: ‘She Is Legit Hot’

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 13 Comments

The freshman Republican from South Dakota is a 39-year-old mother of three who has, alas, been objectified:

Recently rated “hottest freshman” in Congress by Huffington Post readers, a throng of photographers greeted her at the airport when she first arrived in the nation’s capital. “She walked right into a hornets’ nest — there were paparazzi at the airport!” Hustead said.
With a beaming smile and big, Western hair, Noem is attractive enough to provoke frequent references from male Republican operatives. “I hear you’re working on a Kristi Noem piece or are you just trying to get a piece of Kristi Noem???” one GOP press secretary e-mailed out of the blue. . . . Another aide said he has seen her up close in the Capitol and “she is legit hot.”
Noem does not relish that brand of attention. Of the Huffington Post story, she said in an interview, “I thought that was kind of an unfortunate distraction, I guess, when that came out. I don’t think about that too much. I’d rather they were talking about my solutions for our country rather than that, but we’ll get there.”

It has been said that Washington is “Hollywood for ugly people” and, given that women in Congress have often been grim feminist battle-axes like Bella Abzug and Barbara Mikulski, a genuinely attractive female face on Capitol Hill is somewhat rare.

(Via Newsalert.)

Category: Congress, Republicans, South Dakota

Syracuse Post-Standard Portrays Buerkle as Supporting ‘Massive Budget Cuts’

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 6 Comments

Freshman Republican Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle is the most vicious, reckless, wild-eyed budget-slasher in American history, according to the largest newspaper in her district.

The editors of the Syracuse paper — evidently picking up the “slash-and-burn” theme used by the New York Times — obviously think their readers are idiots who can’t do math. If Obama has proposed a budget with $1.65 trillion in deficits, how big a slice is $61 billion?

Having seen many previous examples of biased reporting in her local paper, The Lonely Conservative addresses herself to their reporter:

Note to Mark Weiner and the Post Standard: We’re broke! What part of that don’t you understand? Are you hoping we turn into Greece so you have a big story to cover? I’m beginning to wonder.

Category: Ann Marie Buerkle, Budget, New York, The Lonely Conservative

What Ace Said

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 7 Comments

A post he did five days ago just got a huge “Heh” yesterday, and perhaps you see why:

On the other hand, goddamn if I am not weary of a barbaric desert nomad culture of rape and outrage while carrying around a ton of chip-on-the-shoulder arrogance-hiding-profound-insecurity about it all.
Oh right, a thousand years ago they invented algebra. So, like, they should keep doing victory laps over that.

Nostalgia for the glorious good old days when you were top dog, and the loser’s smoldering resentment of winners . . .

Honestly, I don’t understand how any society could succumb to such hateful temptations. Much better to invent Coca-Cola and NASCAR, become a dominant powerhouse in college football, wait for the invention of air-conditioning and Interstate highways, and then sell Yankees quarter-acre lots in the piney hills for outrageous prices.

First, of course, you need the courage to start a war so the Yankees have a good excuse to burn your asses to the ground.

Category: Ace of Spades, Egypt, Islam

If This Is Monday, It Must Be Time for Another ‘Death of Blogging’ Story

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 33 Comments

A few weeks ago, it was “The End of Blogging.” Now the New York Times offers the latest reiteration of this year’s hot meme, “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter“:

Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills.
“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”
Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation. . . .
Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.
Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging — to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats — that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004. . . .
Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval. . . .
Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. “It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.” . . .
Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking. . . .
“There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”

(Via Memeorandum.) So what is being explained in this week’s “Death of Blogging” story is that people who just want to post videos or photos or whatever, for a readership composed primarily of their personal friends, are using Facebook or Twitter instead of blogging software. But casual cat-blogging and social networking (i.e., creating a personal site to tell your friends what’s going on in your life) have nothing to do with the kind of news/politics/current-events aggregation, commentary and citizen journalism that made “blog” the Word of the Year in 2004.

If blogging is dead, how come the traffic at this blog keeps steadily increasing? Shameless blogwhoring, that’s why. Schneider’s comment about “using several mediums to get a large amount of [blog] traffic” is something I’ve been doing from the get-go. This post will go out via Twitter and Facebook, and there’s a “share” function at the bottom where readers can send it to their own networks.

But I’ll also use that Web 1.0 technology, e-mail, to send the link to Instapundit, whose blog is neither dead nor on the wane.

UPDATE:Dan Riehl says:

The [New York Times] wants blogs to go away so badly, they consistently look for ways to suggest that’s the case. Having been out here for 7 years, the reality is, they are doing better than ever. The medium is simply maturing.

An analogy about “wheat” and “chaff” might come in handy here. Dan links Scott Rosenberg at WordYard, who says:

The technology press has been keen on the “blogging is dead” (or “dying”) meme for some time now, but it’s tough to find actual data or evidence supporting the notion.

As with previous iterations of this meme, a lot hinges on what you mean by the term “blog.”  The New York Times seems to be using a rather narrow, specific meaning — a personal site using blog software — when that definition doesn’t fit, for example, Red State or Hot Air. If there is less blogging about “look at these silly pictures of my kitten” because Facebook is now getting the silly-kitten-photo action, OK. But that’s not “the Death of Blogging.”

I’m looking forward to “The Death of ‘The Death of Blogging’ Articles.”

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Refutation is so easy.

UPDATE III: Bruce McQuain at Q&O gives the NYT a good pimp-slapping.


Category: Blogging

You May Be Surprised by This

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 12 Comments

Or maybe not:

The federal government gave $669.6 million to the public schools in Wisconsin in fiscal 2008, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That is more than 20 times as much as the $30 million that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is trying to save in the current fiscal year by asking state employees, including teachers, to pay for a fraction of the cost of their own pension packages and health-insurance premium.

The ramifications of the fight in Wisconsin are beginning to be noticed elsewhere:

The battle in Wisconsin over public employee unions has left President Obama facing a tricky balance between showing solidarity with longtime political supporters and projecting a message in favor of deep spending cuts to reduce the debt.

And still more ramifications:

Senior Senate Democrats slammed Republicans on Sunday for a “reckless” threat to shut down the government as political posturing intensified on both sides over federal spending and the budget deficit.

The GOP hasn’t made any such “threat,” which is a scarecrow being used by Democrats (and their media accomplices) to frighten ignorant old folks into thinking Those Mean-Spirited Republicans™ will take away their Social Security checks. However, Mark Hemingway asks a relevant question at the Weekly Standard:

The obvious point here is that if it’s so “reckless” to shutdown the government, why have Wisconsin legislators, the President and the DNC all supported the government shutdown in Wisconsin?

Exactly: If shutting down government in Wisconsin is good, why is shutting down government in Washington bad?

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom: “Turns out you don’t have to live in Wisconsin to pay the benefits of Wisconsin teachers.” Now a Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE II: I’m sure you’ll be shocked — shocked — to discover that liberals are engaging in dishonest, irresponsible demagoguery:

Video via Heritage Foundation.


Category: Budget, Wisconsin

Maryland: The Silly State

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 9 Comments


I live near Hagerstown, in the hills of western Maryland, about 15 miles north of West Virginia and about 10 miles south of the Pennsylvania state line. West of Hagerstown, near Hancock, is the skinniest part of Maryland’s panhandle. And a bit farther west of there, on I-68 . . .

GRANTSVILLE — Bryant Bunch, who came from Prince George’s County to attend college here at the far end of the Maryland panhandle, first saw the sign on Interstate 68 while traveling with a carload of friends a few years back.
He remembers their reaction: Does that say what we think it says?
Maxine Broadwater, born and raised on a farm outside Grantsville, and the town’s librarian for three decades, recalls the first time she ever gave the name a second thought. It was the early 1990s, and people passing through had stopped at her library to ask about it.
Her thought: Why would that bother anybody?
Those disparate reactions to “Negro Mountain,” the name that 18th-century settlers gave to the Garrett County landmark, have found their echo in Annapolis, where a Senate panel will begin debate this week on whether it should be changed.
Several Baltimore lawmakers are pushing to retire “Negro Mountain” as an outdated relic of a less sensitive time. Legislators from Western Maryland, who say the name honors an early African-American hero, want it left alone. A Senate hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
The debate highlights a divide between rural and urban lawmakers that frequently rears up in the 188-member General Assembly.
“How about they take care of Baltimore’s crime and drugs, and leave the mountains to us,” said Del. Kevin Kelly, an Allegany County Democrat. He says to rename the mountain would be to rewrite history.
Historians believe Negro Mountain, which crosses the border into Pennsylvania, was named in the 1750s in honor of a black frontiersman who died in the French and Indian War while defending white settlers in a fight with Native Americans.

Of all the things that the Maryland state Senate could be doing, they’re holding a hearing about the name of a mountain in Garrett County, in order to pacify a bunch of busybodies from Baltimore.

Maybe I should move to New Hampshire and start a protest.

UPDATE: Two weeks ago, Inside Charm City noted: “A federal naming committee upheld the name Negro Mountain more than 15 years ago, concluding that it was not applied in a derogatory sense.”

State Sen. Lisa Gladden, the Democrat who wants to rename Negro Mountain, also wants to rename Polish Mountain in Allegany County. At least she’s consistently silly.

Category: Maryland

Libya: Qaddafi’s Son Speaks
UPDATED: Qaddafi on the Run?

Posted on | February 21, 2011 | 9 Comments

From the BBC:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, has warned that civil war could hit the country.
His comments came in a lengthy TV address as anti-government protests spread to the capital Tripoli, and were brutally countered by security forces.
Saif Gaddafi offered political reforms, and admitted that the police and army had made “mistakes”, but said the death toll was lower than reported.

The most interesting thing about the story in the New York Times is that it was filed with a Cairo dateline:

A five-day-old uprising in Libya took control of its second-largest city of Benghazi and spread for the first time to the capital of Tripoli late on Sunday as the heir-apparent son of its strongman, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, warned Libyans in a televised speech that their oil-rich country would fall into civil war and even renewed Western “colonization” if they threw off his father’s 40-year-long rule.
In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 200 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt” — the neighbors to the east and west that both overthrew their veteran autocrats in the space of the last six weeks.

Here’s video from the Associated Press:

UPDATE: So much for the tough talk:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is believed to have fled the capital Tripoli after anti-government demonstrators breached the state television building and set government property alight.

The economic impact:

Spreading unrest in Libya shut down 6 percent of oil output in Africa’s No.3 producer and prompted a host of energy firms to pull out international staff, sending oil prices to above $105 a barrel.

Category: Libya
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