Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Keith Olberman discusses whether there are multiverses right here in the USA.

Remarkable, a real live news anchor actually comparing official’s words with their actions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen clip juxtaposition like that except on the “fake news” daily show.

For more of what happened when, see the timelines at Think Progress and Talking Points Memo.

Sometimes the matter of race in America is so blantantly and stupidly awful that I just have to laugh. The only other option is to cry, and I’m done doing that for now.

The Onion does a nice parody of some of the type of reporting we saw last week during the New Orleans tragedy:

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans “looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses.” “I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I’d managed to find,” said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. “Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers.” Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

Other excellent headlines from that same link:

God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again

Louisiana National Guard Offers Help By Phone From Iraq

-cvj

(Via Boing Boing)

Watching the grilling that Tony Blair has received from the British media since his decision to involve Britain in the Iraq war, one cannot help but make comparisons with the kid gloves approach of the mainstream U.S. media to the outrageous behavior of the Bush administration.

The BBC is now carrying a viewpoint article, titled Has Katrina Saved the U.S. Media? (OK, I wasn’t particularly imaginative with my title, I know), which emphasizes this point. The article suggests that the outrage seen in such unlikely places as Fox News may signal a turning point in this trend, and that the gloves may now come off in the coverage of our government’s incompetence.

One interesting part of the article is a very succinct explanation of why many people view the mainstream U.S. media with such suspicion.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

It’s an interesting suggestion. However, I can’t help but be cynical and expect that it won’t last, essentially for the reasons in the first few paragraphs, which I don’t expect to change. But I guess we’ll see.

The independent UK thinks Americans might have questions. In an article entitled “The questions a shocked America is asking its President”, they ask:

• Why has it taken George Bush five days to get to New Orleans?

• How could the world’s only superpower be so slow in rescuing its own people?
• Why did he cut funding for flood control and emergency management?
• Why did it take so long to send adequate National Guard forces to keep law and order?
• How can the US take Iraq, a country of 25m people, in three weeks but fail to rescue 25,000 of its own citizens from a sports arena in a big American city?

A BBC correspondent has some thoughts on that, starting with:

The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have responded better.

Meanwhile, CNN has a new article up on “The Big disconnect on New Orleans” which compares official statements of the crisis to CNN reporting over the past couple of days.
UPDATE: Now on CNN, meterologists discussing what they were forcasting for last friday, 2-1/2 days before the Hurricane hit land. They were forcasting a Category 4 hurricane, which was widely predicted to completely flood New Orleans.

Also worth reading: Salon has up several pages of reader contributed stories from people who were in the area.

Well, here I am in China, being treated wonderfully by gracious and polite hosts and learning first hand about some of the wonderful science being done by Chinese researchers. Today, for example, I heard a very nice talk by Ping He, who described a large-scale computational project to understand the distribution of the dark baryons in the universe. It is impressive work.

To come to China to take part in this exciting exchange of ideas and approaches, I needed to obtain a Chinese visa. I did this through a company, a representative of which walks your application to the embassy and gets it processed. The entire procedure took about a week, most of which was taken up by my passport being FedExed to the company and back to me. It was, obviously, very easy.

So you can imagine how embarrassing it is to read, in The New York Times, about how hard it can be for Chinese researchers to get their visas to visit the United States. Those of us in academia have been dealing with this problem for the last three or four years, encountering long delays in getting visas for excellent graduate students, for postdocs, for faculty and for visitors to conferences.

However, this particular story is even more embarassing because it concerns Xiaoyun Wang, a Chinese mathematician, who last year

…shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

In other words, Dr. Wang’s visit was undoubtedly going to help us with national security, as well as representing the free exchange of scientific knowledge that we should expect and which provides important common ground between the two countries.

The Times continues:

The visa snag angered organizers of the annual meeting of the International Cryptology Conference, who argued that restrictions originally created to prevent the transfer of advanced technologies from the United States are now having the opposite effect.

“It’s not a question of them stealing our jobs,” said Stuart Haber, a Hewlett-Packard computer security expert who is program chairman for the meeting, Crypto 2005, being held this week in Santa Barbara. “We need to learn from them, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

And we should be hopping mad about it!

Despite my earlier remarks about certain frustrating aspects of the political process in the UK, I do remain impressed with other aspects. One of them is the fact that the politicians are expected to take part in extremely penetrating live interviews, where they have no (detailed) advance warning of the subject or the questions. The other thing I like is that fact that the morning radio - in particular the Today Programme on the BBC’s Radio 4 - is the primary medium for this sort of serious political discussion, and as a member of the government, politicians in high office have to rise to the challenge of being interviewed in this format on a regular basis. And oh yes, it can be a bit of a blood sport sometimes listening to a politician’s arguments being dissected live on prime time morning radio. One of the most skilled - probably the most skilled - surgeons in this realm of journalism is John Humphrys. (Pictured above right in a photo I cheekily lifted from the BBC site, but only to point back to it.)

Today, the 8:10am interview on Today was with John Reid, the Defence Secretary, and the interviewer was John Humphrys, and the subject? Iraq, the National Assembly, and the constitution. John Reid started out by talking about the “positive” things that have been going on in Iraq as a result of the invasion and Humphrys (sometimes a bit hasty to draw blood, but in classic form) sets out at a running pace - questioning and probing relentlessly. John Reid rallies well in places, too, and so it is not all one sided. It becomes one of the most heated and passionate interviews on the subject I’ve heard for a long time, (informed with recent concerns like the London bombings, the ongoing insurgency attacks and civilian casualties, and broadened out to discuss connecting issues; and with mention and discussion of some of the statements of the late Robin Cook), since journalists seem to have forgotten how to ask hard questions about these matters over here in the USA. Come to think of it, they seldom ask the politicians anything remotely like a hard question over here (which includes putting it again and again until they get an answer).

This is just great stuff. Important stuff.

Please listen, if only to remind yourself what it really should be like: That we should have people asking hard questions about what’s going on in our name. Do listen, if only to pretend that you’re asking some of those questions. It’s as close as most of us will ever get to putting these questions directly.

This is the audio stream, and this is a direct download of an mp3, and here’s the podcast link to get the regular daily (Mon-Sat) 8:10am interview. If these links eventually die, find links to some archives, and also to the 8:10 interview link, on this page for the Today Programme.

Finally, please download or podcast it soon because the dear old BBC still are deciding to just what extent allow you access to much in the way of archives, and so I’m not sure how easy it will be to find the program after 24 hours. But do try to find it in the Today Programme’s archives if you see this late.

I hope that you find it interesting.

-cvj

I’ve been a “card-carrying member” of the ACLU for years now, although I admit that I’ve not always been diligent about paying my dues. But now I have more incentive to get that check in on time: to piss off Bill O’Reilly. Radley Balko explains, via the Poor Man.

It’s easy to join.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that another excellent radio program I love is NPR’s On The Media, that you can alos podcast, stream, or download.

Last Friday’s program was interesting and funny. Actually, it always is. The first part had an interesting discussion about terrorism, sparked off by the fact that the folks in the White House have decided to rename the “War on Terror” to “The Global War Against Violent Extremism”. [update: It’s actually “The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism”; the presenters misspoke.]

The next segment was hilarious, even though in a serious and definitely non-funny context. There was an observation that there were two almost identical defiant quotations over a week apart from random unidentified Iraqi citizens about two separate insurgent attacks. So they had an interview with Mr. Unidentified Iraqi, who seemed unable to say anything else in the interview other than the identical words of the quotation again….

Then there’s excellent discussion of how the media seem to have problems reporting properly on “difficult numbers” (such as just how much is spent on international aid) on various issues, and a very intersting segment about the appalling state of journalism on health issues. (e.g. more time is given by the major TV networks to weather “news”, and training of weather news journalists than is given to health news. And this is where people get most of their health information…..)

There’s also another excellent segment about media coverage failings in important educational matters: Even though heat waves kill more people (more…)

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Internet pioneer Al Gore has been simply experimenting with facial hair while others talk him up for another Presidential campaign. No, he’s been hard at work launching a new TV network: Current TV, scheduled to debut today.

This is no video Air America, a liberal counterpoint to the RNC propaganda machine at Fox News. No, the hook here is style, not substance. From Current TV’s manifesto:

There’s plenty to watch on TV, but as a viewer, you don’t have much chance to influence or contribute to what you see. This medium - the most powerful, riveting one we have - is still a narrow vision of reality rolled out in predictable 30-minute chunks. It’s still a fortress of an old-school, one-way world.

We want to bust it open.

We’re rethinking the way TV is produced, programmed, and presented, so it actually makes sense to an audience that’s accustomed to choice, control, and collaboration in everything else they do.

So, we’re creating a network in short form. Whenever you tune in to Current, you’ll see something amusing, inspiring or interesting. And then, three minutes later, you’ll see something new. It’ll be a video iPod stocked with a stream of short segments and set to shuffle.

Oh good. Because, when I turn on TV, my overwhelming impression has been that the typical American’s attention span has become too darn long. Contemporary television encourages a contemplative, thoughtful mood, and it must be stopped. Far too many oppressive 30-minute chunks of programming to sit through. In the future, nothing will be longer than the length of an average pop song!

In academia, just to take an example, the consequences will be substantial. Forget about students taking four courses per semester that drone on for hours at a sitting — they will sift through two hundred distinct iLectures each week, on topical and exciting subjects of their own chosing, none over five minutes long and many taking just a single minute! Physics conferences will have twenty talks per hour, in which each speaker can choose to show either one picture or one equation. To ensure that the field doesn’t grow stale and predictable, professors over the age of 35 will be hauled out back and shot. And the Harry Potter septology will be the last of those long-form “books” to be popular — in the future, written materials will be prohibited from overflowing a single page. And will be printed in an oversize, “edgy” font.

Also, in the future the only kind of food to be served in restaurants will be candy.