Stupid Beloit College.

Each year, they release their "Mindset List" for the incoming first-year college class. The purpose of the list is supposedly to give university professors and administrators a glimpse into the experiences and worldview of the newest crop of college students. I'm convinced, however, the real purpose is to make everyone who reads it feel old. After all, even the youngest among us remember 1989, the year these kids were born.

This year's list is pretty weak, but here are some highlights:

Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.

-What Berlin wall?
-Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
-They never “rolled down” a car window.
-Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
-Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
-They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.
-The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

Posted by: Slublog at 07:26 AM | Comments (141)
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Word to the wise if anyone in the GOP cares to listen: When your own partisans (such as myself) are actively rooting for Republican Congressmen to be arrested, you've got a problem.

Deal with the problem. Eliminate all earmarks. All of them.

And force the corrupt among you -- and you know who they are -- to retire before the next election.

Not only do actual conservatives hate criminals on general principles -- law and order and all that, remember? -- but you're no good to us compromised, able to be blackmailed due to your crimes into voting against us.

Posted by: Ace at 09:43 PM | Comments (34)
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Crisis! Police forces running out of ammo as production is diverted to Bush's illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cambodia!!

Well maybe not Cambodia yet. But I'm sure he has plans.

This was the scare story blazed all over the patiently fact-finding MSM today. Including by fair-and-balanced Shep Smith on FoxNews. (Kidding-- the guy's as liberal as the day is long; I have a feeling his contract at FoxNews is running out and he's been debuting for his next job for at least a year now.)

Blogger Confederate Yankee did something apparently the MSM didn't have time to do:

He actually called a spokesman for a major ammunition manufacturer -- a maker of military, civilian, and paramilitary police type ammo -- to find out if the story was true.

You'll never guess what he found out.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 PM | Comments (16)
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No 9/11 moment of silence for the victims of the WTC/Pentagon/Shanksberg attacks, no protest allowed against the Islamisation of Europe. Both would cause, err, "unrest." Presumably by Youths of Indeterminate Ethnic Extraction (Yowiees, as we've come to know them).

But there is one major 9/11 observation allowed. By what group, and pinning the blame for 9/11 on what other religious minority, I'll invite you to guess.

Thanks to Chad.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 PM | Comments (21)
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Seems an odd time for the MSM to lecture bloggers about the need for "the patient fact-finding of reporters."

Blogs: All the noise that fits

The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

By Michael Skube
August 19, 2007

...

In our time, the Washington Post's reporting, in late 2005, of the CIA's secret overseas prisons and its painstaking reports this year on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center -- both of which won Pulitzer Prizes -- were not exercises in armchair commentary. The disgrace at Walter Reed, true enough, was first mentioned in a blog, but the full scope of that story could not have been undertaken by a blogger or, for that matter, an Op-Ed columnist, whose interest is in expressing an opinion quickly and pungently. Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It's not something one does as a hobby.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Frank doesn't want to tell Ellie her husband is a liar, dude.

But this entire article is fundamentally dishonest. Few bloggers claim to be able to do the sort of reporting that a newspaper of hundreds, each salaried and only expected to contribute a piece or two a week, can manage. We can''t compete on that ground, and we don't claim to.

What we do is point out mistakes the media makes. Mistakes and deliberate omissions and flat-out dishonestly. And we question the judgment by which the MSM purports to assign stories news-value and by that assignment of priority instruct us upon what the relative value of a story might be. And we also question the assumptions undergirding their worldview -- and their bias.

That's what the media doesn't like, of course. They don't want to simply report facts. That is not nearly a grandiose enough job for them. They want to inform the public, not just factually but philosophically. They demand not merely that their "facts" be accepted without question (though a great many of those are in fact highly questionable), but their judgment and worldview be uncritically accepted as well. They want us not just to take their word as regards their somewhat dubious area of expertise -- reportage of facts -- but they want us to also accept their take, their spin, their belief in how the world works-- and how it should work.

All of these arguments about the need for reporters to report facts are dishonest. No one challenges this notion. No individual blogger could conceivably devote enough hours of his spare time (or his blogging time, if he does this full-time) to develop, confirm, and write a true bit of first-hand journalism once a week or so.

And the MSM knows that. They know their job on that score is secure -- simply because no one but a salaried reporter could put in forty hours a week working on a single story. (Especially because 99% of stories are not terribly important or remarkable, but still need to be reported -- but obviously no blogger could write up the Kalamazoo Crime Blotter three times a week and expect to be read by more than three thousand people as an absolute ceiling.)

What they are worried about is the decline in their influence as to matters not directly related to data-collection and not even remotely related to reportage. They're worried that they're losing their ability to shape (and mislead) public opinion in ways they find best for the public good. These people did not get into journalism, after all, to report on 3M's quarterly earnings advisory. They got into journalism to change things.

And they're desperately scrabbling to hold on tight to that bit of undeserved, undue influence by leveraging their entirely-unrelated qualifications to collect and disseminate raw information into a role they actually desire and feel they are worthy of-- a certified, credentialed priesthood of general wisdom, weighing in expertly on matters of politics, scientific and technological ethical dilemmas, foreign policy and of course military strategy, etc. They conceive themselves as Generic Universal Omniscient All-In-One Experts Without Portfolio, a highly-trained Vanguard of Information which is especially well-equipped to tell the public not only what the facts are, but which facts are important and which should be ignored entirely due to their capacity to "mislead" less highly-trained citizens, and what the public should think of such facts and what conclusions they should draw from them.

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can't say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption -- some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?

So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy -- and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they're being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

The rest of don't give a whit how steeply-discounted their dubious expertise is offered -- we didn't subcontract our thinking to them and it will be an unseasonably cold day in hell when America complies with their demands to concede that they alone are capable of doing the intellectual work of democratic governance.

And seriously? Not to harp on this, but really, guys. It's a frigging three semester degree of recent invention and dubious academic rigor. Get over yourselves already, for the love of all that's holy. You're embarrassing yourselves.

You know what you call a guy who couldn't get into med school?

Dentist.

You know what you call a guy who couldn't get into dental school?

Journalist.

I'm sorry, but it's about time you collectively took a more realistic look at yourselves and your ranking in the intellectual/academic pecking order. Graduates of the Kennedy School of Government are dime a dozen in DC, but every single one of them -- every single one -- has more policy-wonkery training and much better policy-analysis credentials than you.

PS, dentists, don't hate me. I'm not an anti-dentite, it's just an old joke I thought could be usefully repurposed.

PPS, I also apologize to the members of the MSM here, too. But you guys know I'm not talking about you.

I mean the other guys. The guys you want to throttle. Those guys.

Anwyn (one of those female bloggers who don't exist) posts on this at Junkyard blog.

I'm really tired of even responding to these idiotic bits of traffic baiting. I don't rise to the bait when a host of nitwit liberal bloggers bait me -- I don't give traffic to goofs -- and yet every time a media twit baits bloggers into giving them traffic, we all dutifully comply.

Maybe it's time to start rebutting them without providing the link.

We're all acting like chumps, easy marks. Dupes ready to give up big traffic to any small-potatoes ninny looking to prove to his editor he can write the sort of columns that get noticed.

Maybe it's about time we stopped giving the MSM a privileged position they didn't earn. Sadly, No! and Tbogg and the other idiots on the left don't deserve a response to their nitwittery; why should the rule be relaxed for some chump just because he writes a column for the LAT?

Posted by: Ace at 06:24 PM | Comments (68)
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It's not that new of course. They've been peddling the "real men are manly enough to act like women" schtick since Alan Alda and Phil Donahue.

But what is new is for patently unmasculine men to so consistently return to the same ground they really would be better off avoiding altogether. Like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper, they just can't stop themselves from flying into a rhetorical deathtrap.

Jeff Goldstein mocks a particularly hapless specimen of The New "Man" of the Left here.

Posted by: Ace at 05:56 PM | Comments (22)
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Nobody's pron collection is safe anymore now that they got dogs that can sniff out DVD's.

...The world's first dogs trained to identify optical discs by the scent of their chemicals, Lucky and Flo were loaned to the Malaysian government in March by the Motion Picture Association, a U.S.-based watchdog...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:23 PM | Comments (11)
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I'd sort of like to have myself a look at the major investors in these films.

Posted by: Ace at 04:53 PM | Comments (48)
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TheBigOldDog tipped this a while ago and I forgot to post it. But if you miss it it will of course be re-aired:

Schedule:

Monday, August 20 09:00 PM
Tuesday, August 21 01:00 AM
Saturday, August 25 08:00 PM
Sunday, August 26 12:00 AM

Guess we know what Allah's doing tonight.

He links to this enjoyable little post at Screw Loose Change, which reports that life does indeed seem to be screwing Loose Change and all its promoters.

They suck. At life.

Like their Al Qaeda pals.

Posted by: Ace at 04:39 PM | Comments (49)
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Paramount and DreamWorks dropping their support for Blu-ray.

Competing technologies is competing money. Write that down.

Lost in the mists of antiquity, the fight for the broadcasting standard for color television made it all the way to the Supreme Court. On the line, millions.

Why?

Because the cameras and systems the broadcast color had to match the technology of the television stations who received and rebroadcast the picture, had to invest in equipment, heavily, to kick out the 525 line color format. And every television set manufacturered had to be compatible. There was a lot of money on the line, across the spectrum.

So naturally it wound up in court. That's what money does.

As I recall, the Betamax fight was just a market acceptance deal.

That's what I recall. But I was in my 20s, and probably inebriated, fiddling with the goddam recorder my mom gave me when they were sick of it cause they couldn't rent shit for it to watch.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 04:14 PM | Comments (29)
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