Auto-Tune the News
Reply
Monthly Archives: June 2009
A collective response to slavery?
The Senate unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution. Click here for the WaPo story.
“You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), lead sponsor of the resolution, said after the vote. “It is important to have a collective response to a collective injustice.”
I like what Professor Bainbridge has to say about Harkin’s comment:
Memo to Senator Harkin: We had a collective response. It was called the Army of the Potomac. Not to mention the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and decades of affirmative action.
Disappointment with Obama’s Handling of the Iran Situation
I’m disappointed with how the President is handling the situation in Iran. James Taranto does a good job of explaining my problem with the President’s tack:
Obama goes on to disclaim U.S. "meddling," to express his "hope" that the regime will behave in a civilized fashion, and to reiterate his commitment to "tough diplomacy"–though the timorousness of his own public comments, here and elsewhere, belies the adjective.
But we think it is very telling that the very first point he made is that there isn’t a rial’s worth of difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Let’s stipulate that he’s right: The election was a contest between Evildee and Evildum. We said as much Friday in arguing that an Ahmadinejad victory might be preferable because the reasonable-seeming Mousavi would be more likely to lull the West into complacency. Obama doesn’t need to be lulled; he’s already so heavily sedated that on Friday he was praising the "robust debate" between the candidates he now finds indistinguishable.
Our Friday analysis was predicated on the supposition that one of two outcomes would obtain: Either Mousavi would prevail in an orderly-conducted travesty of a sham election, or Ahmadinejad would. Once the regime decided to make a mockery of its travesty of a sham, it foreclosed both these possibilities. Thus Obama’s analysis made no sense on Tuesday, even though it was substantially identical to ours on Friday.
Speaking very broadly, there are two possible outcomes in Iran now. The regime may succeed in crushing the opposition, enhancing its own power at the expense of whatever pretense of legitimacy it might have had a week ago. Or it may fail to do so and be weakened or overthrown. The free world has every interest in encouraging the latter outcome, and someone ought to bring the leader of the free world up to speed on the events of the past few days.
Obama and Inspector General Walpin
Obama wants to fire Gerald Walpin, the Inspector General of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Walpin doesn’t like getting pushed around by Obama for political reasons. Check out the bolded quote:
"I am now the target of the most powerful man in this country, with an army of aides whose major responsibility today seems to be to attack me and get rid of me," Walpin said.
Facing bipartisan criticism for the firing, Obama sought to allay congressional concerns with a letter to Senate leaders Tuesday evening explaining his decision. In the letter, White House Special Counsel Norman Eisen wrote that Walpin was "confused" and "disoriented" at a May board meeting, was "unduly disruptive," and exhibited a "lack of candor" in providing information to decision makers.
"That’s a total lie," Walpin said of the latter charge. And he said the accusation that he was dazed and confused at one meeting out of many was not only false, but poor rationale for his ouster.
"It appears to suggest that I was removed because I was disabled — based on one occasion out of hundreds," he said.
"I would never say President Obama doesn’t have the capacity to continue to serve because of his (statement) that there are 56 states," Walpin said, adding that the same holds for Vice President Biden and his "many express confusions that have been highlighted by the media." Obama mistakenly said once on the campaign trail that he had traveled to 57 states.
Silliness from Ken Rockwell about the awesomeness of Macs
I like what Ken Rockwell has to say about cameras and photography. He’s amusing and frequently informative. But his blind love of Apple computers gets a little old. He recently wrote:
American businesses lose billions of dollars a year to lost productivity from using windows computers for business, instead of computers that work, like Apple.
The only reason I mention this again is because I had to stop what I was doing (formatting my recent Northern California photos to share) and help my wife get her P.O.S. windows computer, provided to her by her multi-billion-dollar employer, to print something. Whatever crappy Microsoft software she was running stopped, and we both wasted another half an hour doing what Apple always just does.
…
In case you were wondering, I never have to restart my Mac, while of course the fix for my wife’s P.O.S. was to restart it. My Mac runs perfectly for months on end. I only turn it off if I go away shooting for a week.
Ken might have a point–if Apples actually were better. I should know. My work computer is a MacBook Pro. I like it a lot. In fact, if it broke, I would ask for another MacBook Pro. But after using it for the last year, I can honestly say that Rockwell doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he says that Apples “just work” any more than Windows computers “just work.”
I have no idea why Rockwell couldn’t get his wife’s computer to print. I can’t think of having a hard time printing with a Windows computer as long as you download the correct driver and that has been very easy since the beginning of the Internet age.
Rockwell’s claim that billion are lost a year from using Windows instead of Apples is a strange and unsupported claim. And it is ironic since my Mac experience has been far from error free or “just working”. Rockwell claims he never has to restart his Mac. This is not my experience. My Mac has become unresponsive many time and I had to remove the bettery to restart it.
A while ago, I reinstalled the operating system because while my Mac claimed I was the computer Administrator, it didn’t give me Administrator privliedges. That’s the sort of thing that supposed to “just work” you know. If you are the Administrator your computer should give you Administrator priveledges.
Also, like Rockwell’s wife’s Windows computer, my Mac have a printing problem. My Mac wouldn’t print PDFs from Adobe Acrobat. You would think that if there were a company outside of Apple that would make a programs that would work well with Macs, it would be Adobe. After all, postscript drivers were created by Adobe and first shipped on a Apple printer.
To get my Mac to print PDFs from Adobe Acrobat, it took multiple emails to our Apple-centric computer consultant and multiples trips by him to our office (he didn’t make the trips to our office to just fix this problem, but that’s beside the point). We don’t have a complicated network at work (for example, we don’t use a Windows domain server, or anything at all complicated).
In my experience, my Mac doesn’t “just work” and it doesn’t save my employer any money to have me and two other guys on Macs. If anything, it had cost us extra money becuase of incompatibilities between Macs and Windows computers.
Hopefully Rockwell will someday make a decent argument about why Macs are so much better than Windows computers. But I don’t see that happening soon, especially becuase Windows 7 does many things better than OS X.
Stupid quote of the day: NY Times edition
An article about how smartphones are becoming must-have items includes this silly quote:
“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”
I’m sorry, but this is just plain silly. It’s the perfect quote if you are a reporter and you want aquote to make your point about how smartphones are taking over, but it is pure silliness. For example, some of my best friends have Blackberries. If I email them and they don’t answer in an hour, or two, or all day, I don’t think they are out of it socially, I think they are focusing on work and not paying attention to social emails.
Even at work, it is similar. Sometimes there are important, time-sensitive emails, but people can’t be tied to their Blackberries and forced to answer every email after work hours within a short time span. That’s silly.
Should the new head of GM know something about cars?
I don’t know. I’m just asking if the new head of GM should know something about cars. He admits, “I don’t know anything about cars”.
I don’t doubt he knows business well and can do a good job, but it’s a strange pick and makes me wonder how many billions of dollars the American taxpayer will have to flush down the toilet to see GM make a profit.
Who knew Yoga was so powerful?
All the world needs is Yoga apparently:
How can Yoga change the world?
If we can just find ways to be at peace in our own bodies, that eliminates a lot of the aggression. It eliminates a lot of the dominating parts of the human spirit that unfortunately lead to warlike civilizations, that lead to people doing unjustifiable things such as invading countries that they have no business invading, creating economic policy and trade policy that exploits other counties, and making bad decisions about how we interact with our planet Earth.
–Lacy MacAuley, full-time activist who is helping to organize the Sacred DC festival.
So how do we get Obama and Kim Jong-il to do some Yoga together?
GM–Money Wasted
Today, GM is worth about $7.3 billion. At its peak, it was worth $56 billion (in 2000). The U.S. government has thrown $50 billion at GM. That is not a sound “investment.”
This “investment” is especially not sound because only 42% of people who currently own a GM car are likely to buy one as their next car and 43% of current GM owners are not likely to buy another GM car. That does not bode well.
Who is going to buy these new GM cars approved by the President’s people?
This is one of the real problems caused by the government take-over of GM. conservatives are going to be less likely to buy GM cars and a good percentage of the country is conservative.
Where in the world is my wife? Pretoria, South Africa
