Month: August 2008

CC Static

A bit from Michael Erard’s 2001 article on closed captions:

Although Clark accepts the inevitability of real-time gaffes, he deems any avoidable error in the pop-on format unacceptable, and he is easily vexed. He criticizes the sans serif fonts typically used for captions as "typographically debased" (among other things, the spacing of their letters cannot be adjusted, and they cannot render many accented letters and other unusual characters), and he complains that to a foreign viewer, the standard U.S. and Canadian practice of using all capital letters "makes everyone seem like they’re shouting."

Faces Of The Day

Gayrepublicans

The reader who sent this in notes:

I collect 19th century imagery of gay couples, same sex affection, drag, etc. I recently acquired this cabinet card. 

Can’t say for sure whether this is an actual gay couple as many males expressed themselves like this in nineteenth century photography but it’s fun to think about. This is J. H. Short and J. W. Shanklin, co-owners of The Daily Republican. This cabinet card was made in February 1889.

Tainted Evidence

Radley Balko and Roger Koppl highlight problems with forensic science:

Crime labs, DNA labs, and medical examiners shouldn’t serve under the same bureaucracy as district attorneys and police agencies. If these experts must work for the government, they should report to an independent state agency, if not the courts themselves. There should be a wall of separation between analysis and interpretation. Thus, an independent medical examiner would, for instance, perform and videotape the actual procedure in an autopsy. The prosecution and defense would then each bring in their own experts to interpret the results in court. When the same expert performs both the analysis and interpretation, defense experts are often at a disadvantage, having to rely on the notes and photos of the same expert whose testimony they’re disputing.

Walzer On Russia

Worth a read:

The invasion may not turn out to be a victory for Russia. The most heartening moment in the last week was the arrival in Tbilisi on Tuesday of the presidents of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, and Poland to stand in solidarity with Saakashvili. They are not ready to accept the reassertion of an old-fashioned Russian “sphere of influence.” And their public presence and resistance are more important than any American or European statements.

International Equilibrium

Jeffrey Tayler, writing from Moscow, has a smart dispatch on the war in Georgia. His thoughts on NATO:

…that the United States would even consider proposing Georgia for membership in NATO reflects a blindness to the consequences of the first two rounds of NATO expansion and defies elementary strategic logic.

Leaving aside how enrolling a tiny, technologically backward nation located in the remote Caucasus region jibes with NATO’s treaty-adjured mission to “promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area,” the next round could kill what remains of Russia’s strategic cooperation with the West—cooperation the West will need, for example, to fight Islamic extremism in Central Asia, contain nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, and control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And Russia, with vast reserves of oil and gas, its arsenal of ICBMs, its million-strong conventional forces, its advanced arms industry, and its close relations with states like Iran, Syria, and North Korea, retains considerable capacity as a maker or breaker of international equilibrium. The West needs Russia on its side, much more than it could benefit from admitting Georgia to NATO, and even more than it would profit from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan and Baku-Supsa pipelines. Moreover, NATO’s previous encroachments into formerly Soviet terrain, in conjunction with NATO’s 1999 war to prise Kosovo from Yugoslavia (an historic Russian ally and fellow Orthodox Christian nation) ignited in Russia the very anti-Western passions that have propelled nationalistic Vladimir Putin to sustained approval ratings of between 70 and 80 percent and threaten a new cold war.

How Pernicious Is Rick Warren?

It’s perhaps the most depressing fact of this campaign so far that the first major encounter between McCain and Obama will be presided over by a mega-pastor and in a church. Here’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with the man who is taking American politics one step further away from the vision of the Founding Fathers. Take this particular piece of blather:

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he’s making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It’s entirely appropriate for me to ask what is their frame of reference.

The entire basis for Western secular government, which rests on the capacity of people to distance absolute truth from political affairs, is based on idiocy or lies? I wonder if Warren has ever read Locke, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli or would even understand the term secularism if it knocked him square off his pedestal. Then here we have full-on Christianism in foreign policy:

 

RW: People say America is not the policeman of the world. We may not be, but the Bible says, if you have been blessed, then you are to care for people who can’t care for themselves, you are to speak up for people who can’t speak for themselves, and to defend the defenseless.   

JG: Some people argue that we’re not so great ourselves. 

RW: The difference is that there are no death squads in America. The worst you can get here is that you can get blogged, you can get Lewinskied, on the Internet. There is a difference between that and living under oppression, living with fear for your life. That’s why whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage, you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.

America exists to defend the defenseless. Really? All of them? Now? And foreigners as much as Americans? And then we hear it simply doesn’t matter that a war launched as a matter of self-defense was based on false pretenses. If a dictatorship exists, if rulers are raping a country, it is America’s moral duty to stop it. Why have we not invaded North Korea and Zimbabwe and Burma and … well, you get the picture.

When you have had the kind of Christianity that Bush represents in power for so long, maybe it’s only inevitable you will end up with thinkers of the caliber of Warren actually holding debates for presidential candidates. And even worse: have presidential candidates who will agree to attend.

How It All Began

From Michael Dobbs’ excellent and even-handed piece in the WaPo:

It is unclear how the simmering tensions between Georgia and South Ossetia came to the boil this month. The Georgians say that they were provoked by the shelling of Georgian villages from Ossetian-controlled territory. While this may well be the case, the Georgian response was disproportionate. On the night of Aug. 7 and into Aug. 8, Saakashvili ordered an artillery barrage against Tskhinvali and sent an armored column to occupy the town. He apparently hoped that Western support would protect Georgia from major Russian retaliation, even though Russian "peacekeepers" were almost certainly killed or wounded in the Georgian assault. It was a huge miscalculation.

Putin’s aggression was massively disproportionate, but the US definitely played into his hands by championing Saakashvili so hubristically. And I didn’t know this:

It is true that he has won two reasonably free elections, but he has also displayed some autocratic tendencies; he sent riot police to crush an opposition protest in Tbilisi last November and shuttered an opposition television station.

Wise leaders show a steady hand and a calm posture in dealing with these events. McCain has done neither. Once again, the most impressive figure in all of this has been Robert Gates.