24thState

Misleading "News" Article From Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert reported on a study from the British saying ethanol is an inefficient fuel.  They claim that a flight across the Atlantic would take 30 football (soccer for us Yanks) fields a year of corn production.

Hello?  Have you seen soccer fields?  How much corn is grown on the field?  Very little.

That sure sounds efficient to me.

News Roundup

Way too much to cover with too little time, but the following thoughts ran across my brain in the last few days.

DNC liars - if you got the Howard Dean e-mail showing video of John McCain saying we should be in Iraq 100 years, congratulations!  You've officially been lied to by the DNC!  Seriously - reading Dean e-mails pleading for money is a laugh a minute.  We expect politicians to lie, but Dean doesn't even pretend to be truthful - and there's the nasty hint of collaboration between the DNC and the presidential campaigns.  It's going to be a lot nastier than 2004.

RNC internet neophytes - the RNC put up YouTube videos in an effort to be viral, and used names like asdf, and jkl;.  yep - those grassroots Republican types name asdf are the RNC's secret new media weapon.

Bob Frank's piece in the Washington Post says housing prices rose because of two income families.  The Volokh conspiracy says that bunk, and points out that the biggest increase on the middle class has been a rising share of the tax burden.  The tax burden of a family in the 2000 rose by over $13,000 over that in teh 1970's, almost double the rise in mortgage, car and health insurance combined.

Think about that for a moment.  The tax burden rose twice as much as car and house payments.  When we talk about the middle class being squeezed, how come the costs imposed by government aren't discussed more often?  Why is it that the government always wants more money, but no one ever talks about what we're getting for what we already pay?

And finally, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's Voter ID law.  It turns out that asking someone to show a photo ID to vote is not considered voter suppression, which is good news for Blockbuster, who now rents movies to people with driver licenses but not utility bills.

This is big news for Missouri, which according to Nanette Laughrey and Robin Carnahan, has no vote fraud.  While vote fraud still tends to fall into the absentee ballot and campaign worker genre, at least Missouri voters won't have to worry about undocumented non-citizens voting. 

60 Minutes: Still A Joke

I watched the 60 Minutes piece put on by Leslie Stahl a few minutes ago on Antonin Scalia, and let me just say, if this is the pinnacle of journalism - then bloggers will eat the rest of the mainstream media alive.

Leslie Stahl asked questions like a first year journalism student astounded that anyone could have opinions different than her own, and her understanding of the law was about a sixth grade level.

Let me just cover one installment. 

On the issue of torture, she brought up Abu Ghraib.  Um, Ms. Stahl?  Abu Ghraib wasn't on American soil. It was a military matter that was dealt with in the middle of war. The Constitution covers American citizens and those on our soil.  An Iraqi prison is not a consitutional matter.

She continues on, citing "cruel and unusual punishment."  Um, Ms. Stahl?  The phrase cruel and unusual punishment applies to verdicts passed against prisoners convicted of a crime. Torturing, whether it be citizens or foreign terrorists, has nothing to do with the phrase, cruel and unusual punishment. Unless, for example, after a conviction a prisoner is disemboweled, broken on the rack, and then quartered.

Just because you can say the words "cruel and unusual" doesn't mean it's unconsiitutional.  Seriously - is this what passes for journalism these days?   

There was no pretense of objectivity in her questioning on abortion.  Perhaps that was an effect of the editing, but she seemed shocked that Scalia could hold his views.

The best part was the way she would say "People say," or "Your reputation among the public..."  Um, one last time, Ms. Stahl?  Any incorrect reputation the public has about Antonin Scalia can be laid at the feet of a biased press who demonize conservatives who fail to toe the newsroom line.  Where does "the public" get their views of Supreme Court Justices?  Why, irresponsible "journalists" who publish attack pieces and biased interviews?

Maybe Dan Rather wasn't the problem. 

Universal Healthcare Will Help Me Buy A BMW

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Is Washington D.C. Is Going To Get Nuked?

After 9/11, it was common to hear D.C. veterans sharing a scary piece of information about a nuclear attack on the capitol.  10 years - 20 at the most, and Washington D.C. was going to get hit with a nuke.

There's just no getting around it. The Washington Times had a story about it the other day.

"It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion's effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years."

The Senate committee has convened a series of hearings to examine the threat and effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on a U.S. city, as well as the needed response.

Yesterday's panel stressed the importance of state and local cooperation with federal authorities in the wake of an attack, assistance from the private business sector to aid recovery and the dire need to boost the capabilities of area hospitals."

The Senate is focused on how to recover from the attack, but they're going about it the wrong way.  If D.C. is going to be nuked, it's because it's a big target.  An atom bomb blast, or a dirty nuke in D.C. would wreak havoc with all branches of government, because D.C. is the nerve center of all three branches.

As the capitol, it's hard not to be a target, but there are ways to protect the country that are better than making emergency plans, and have the additional benefit of helping break the corrupt Beltway culture.

Move the US capitol to Missouri. 

You heard me right.  I don't mean the entire thing, but D.C. is a mess, from traffic, to housing, to political corruption.  It's all a huge target, akin to putting all of our eggs in one basket.  I say, let's take some of those eggs out of the basket, and distribute them elsewhere.

Huge benefits could be derived from taking huge chunks of the federal bureaucracy and sending them out to a few states.  Like lovesick teens, sometimes the only cure for Fever (the Potomac kind), is distance. Let's start taking large pieces of the executive branch out of Washington and moving them elsewhere - say the hills and valleys around Columbia?

The pay scale for federal bureaucrats is sickening, but if we move them to lower cost-of-living areas, we'll save huge amounts in pay.  Areas hard hit from manufacturing losses in the Rust Belt, can take over Social Security and Medicare, and Iowa and Missouri can have Agriculture.  Wyoming and Colorado can have Interior and Transportation, and other states can grab other departments.

Sound like a pipe dream?  If Washington does get hit, we'll be scattering the branches anyway. Why not do it now, and reap the advantages? I'm sure the real estate developers in Columbia would love it.

Should We Be Considering Universal Preschool?

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Tax Day Approaches, And Rachel Lucas Hates It

April 15th is coming, and while the newspapers and television stations give warnings and try to make light of the pain people fell, some people look at their taxes and develop a deep loathing for government.

I'm one of those latter people, and while I may not curse as much as Rachel, I certainly understand her frustration.

Here's the reality.  Politicians are not productive members of society.  They are parasites that take money from people and give it to others.  In their speeches, it's always the poor and the unfortunate who are supposed to get government largesse.  In reality, it's the government bureaucracy and those rich enough to avoid paying taxes.

The AMT is the poster child for government taxation.  Congress decided to pass a law to catch some millionaires who weren't paying taxes.  40 years go by, and now millions of people, very few who are millionaires, are stuck paying the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax).  Congress has to pass a patch every year to prevent millions of voters from paying for a tax that was only supposed to hit a few millionaires.  Those millionaires?  Still not paying taxes - because superwealthy people fund the politicians who create the taxes.

If politicians really wanted to tax rich people - why would rich people ever give hundreds of millions of dollars to politicians? Even Barack Obama, the savior of the little man, has raised half of his money from the super-rich bundlers.  That money comes with a price.

And the price is that the most productive (and often just the somewhat productive), pay more for less.  If you can't make enough to hire accountants and dump boatloads of cash into investments, real estate, and trusts, then you're the target. 

Politicians play off your good heart, telling you that they're helping the unfortunate with your money, but the truth is they're hiring more people, and enriching themselves, and very little of our spending goes to help the needy. 

Your Social Security is an empty shell.  There is no money in Social Security - the politicians "loan" it to themselves every year, and leave an IOU for the future. 

The truth is both parties are afraid to tell you the truth, because if you knew it, you'd throw all the bums out.  And that's why April 15th is tax day.  It's a convenient six months before and after you vote.

But there's no complaining.  These people are in office because we put them there.  And if they stay in, and continue to screw us - well, it's our fault.  So pay those taxes with a smile.  It was your vote that made it all possible.

Colorado College Students Forget Punchline To Feminist Joke

It's rare that a story on the suppression of free speech by "well-meaning" adminstrators fits so cleanly into a joke, but it's true.

A couple of Colorado College students posted a satirical take-off on a feminist newsletter. 

Chris Robinson and another student at the Colorado Springs institution decided to print "The Monthly Bag" after seeing copies of a feminist and gender studies newsletter, "The Monthly Rag," in restrooms around campus.

The edition of "The Monthly Rag" that prompted action included an announcement for a talk on feminist pornography, information on gender-bending practices, and a tidbit about a myth involving male castration. According to Robinson, it was representative of what appears every month.

In response, Robinson and a friend created their flier, which provided tips on chainsaw etiquette, detailed a sexual position from Men's Health magazine and provided trivia about a sniper rifle — what Robinson called information for the stereotypical macho man.Staff members removed The Bag within hours of receiving complaints that the publication was threatening.

"It was a serious concern that this thing was posted anonymously and included in bold print the performance characteristics of a sniper rifle," president Richard Celeste said. "I had to take that as a threat."

My favorite quote came from the VP of student life (I wonder how much this guy gets paid):

A letter from Mike Edmonds,vice president for student life at Colorado College, to Robinson on March 25 called the problem "the juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality."

I imagine Mr. Edmonds has also taken the logical step of banning all versions of Jackie Brown, or any Quentin Tarantino film from the campus - seeing as the idea of women in bikinis shooting AK-47's juxtaposes weaponry and sexuality in a much more pleasing, (and graphic way).  If not, then I guess it's time for a good old fashioned DVD burning!

But the real problem here is the lack of college courses on humor.  If the students had  taken basic level courses on telling jokes, they would never have made such an obvious error.

Q:  How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A:  That's not funny.

I'm not sure which would do the nation more good - reducing the size of the government by 50%, or reducing school administrations 50%.  I look at the price of college education, and the results - and I have to say - there's a good argument to be made that all federal student loans should be abolished.

Will BlogNetNews Crumble Before A-Listers?

I'm just a little blogger. This blog is a past-time for me because I started blogging in politics, and enjoyed the airing of my opinions on the matters of the day.

But some blogs, the A-Listers, have taken their blogs and created actual publishing empires. They derive a not insignificant amount of revenue from traffic and advertisements.  We're talking about people like Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, IMAO, Michelle Malkin, Classical Values, and other like Balloon Juice, EdDriscoll, and Dean's World.

These are big names in the blogosphere.  They have names and trademarks and revenue and clout, and they have one more thing in common.  They are banded together over at PajamasMedia. 

I wonder how Glen and Frank and Dean and John and Michelle and Charles and all the others will feel about BlogNetNews diverting traffic and advertising revenue from their RSS feeds to the BlogNetNews channel called Pajama?

This is no simple question. Dave Mastio has made it clear that he believes he has the right to take our content and force us to opt-in to his website.  Most of us don't have the time, the inclination, the money, or or the GoogleJuice to fight him.

But if he starts pulling the feeds for the bloggers over at Pajamas Media down, he won't have any standing left to claim to the rest of us small fish that he is in the right.  He will be exposed as someone trying to make money off bloggers who are too small to sue him for taking our content without our permission.

So what say you, A-list bloggers?  How do you feel about someone who scrapes your content, and provides no SEO link back to your site, but instead traps that traffic on his site with misleading design and a redirect?  How will you respond to this blatant theft of content lacking in blogospheric good will?  We've done what we can.  For all of us, will you speak up?

The Most Effective Way To Stop Someone From Stealing Your Content

Aggregators that scrape content without attribution are properly named "splogs."  It's short for spam-blogs, and it's been a problem for some time.  With RSS feeds, sploggers can take your content, publish it as their own, and drive search engine traffic to their sites, so they can benefit from placing ads on their page.

Fighting splogs is tough to do on your own.  People who scrape content aren't going to respond to reasonable requests to stop - they know it's wrong, and don't care.  And as the target is usually a blogger without a lot of traffic (they don't go after big blogs because they know they'd get caught), the best way is to go to the source, the search engines.

Search engines don't like sploggers.  They take extreme measures to penalize sites that scrape content without attribution, and it's fairly easy to report abuse.

Take Google, for example.  To report someone for taking your content without your permission, simply click on this link and enter the information needed.  This generates a report with Google, who investigates the matter, and if they agree with you, they either contact the site in question, or in extreme cases, remove the offending site from the index altogether.

To be the most effective, you should have your report filled out correctly, so here's what you do.

1) Go through your sitemeter and look for searches that came to your site from a google search. Click on that link, and find out where you rank in the search result pages.  If the splogger is ranked higher than you, their site will appear above yours in the results pages.  This is what you are looking for.

2) Enter the key words, google search url, and the misbehaving site in the Google report, checking the box for duplicate site or pages.  In the comment sites, list your url with the original content, and be sure to inform Google that you have requested your site be removed, but the misbehaving site refuses to stop using your content without permission.  If you have Adsense on your page, be sure to note that the offending splogger is diverting traffic using the Google search function, which costs you and Google money.

3) Be proactive looking for search results that have your page listed below the splogger.  Each offense is another mark against the site, and by reporting it, you're "serving" the blogosphere by removing duplicate content.

4) Tell all your friends about this, to make sure that when they have their content stolen, they too can fight back without having to get lawyers involved, and without being insulted or threatened.