A Great Day for Freedom December 15, 2003March 25, 2012 The year after Saddam Hussein gassed his own people – killing 100,000 Kurds with weapons of mass destruction – the Bush administration (not this one, that one) doubled Iraq’s credits to buy U.S. farm products from half a billion to a billion dollars. Fourteen years later, we’ve captured this monster. It is a great day – though I wish it hadn’t cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives, and the good will of so much of the rest of the world. Still, it’s fantastic that Saddam is facing trial, and I’m going to take the rest of the day off to celebrate; then get back to the job of domestic regime change. ‘I doubt you realize it,’ writes one well-known conservative political figure (yes! I have conservative friends!), ‘but – aside from the fanatic neocons and perhaps a few of the most ultra-extreme tax-cutters – virtually every prominent conservative I know is utterly appalled at the whole range of Bush’s policies, so much so that many have told me privately they’re really hoping for a Democratic victory. But it’s hard for them to do or say anything, lest the Republican apparatchiks stir up the gullible conservative base voters (who still overwhelmingly back Bush) against them. Even some of the highest ranking conservatives most closely tied to the Bush Administration and most willing to defend him in the media quietly feel this way.’ I don’t know how accurate that assessment is, but I don’t want to live in a country where we need machine guns to guard the gated communities, or a country that has lost the separation of church and state . . . so it gives me hope.
Madam, I’m Tomlin December 12, 2003February 24, 2017 Point of personal privilege: HAPPY 91st birthday, Lew! (Born 12/12/12!) HOW DISTANT SEEMS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Clipped by the estimable Alan from the December 2 New York Times: Leonid S. Mayevsky, a Communist member of the current Parliament, publicly criticized the [Communist] party at a news conference last month, saying that 28 percent of its candidates were millionaires. “Is this the party of the people or of the millionaires?” he asked. He was promptly expelled from the party. REAGAN AND AIDS Gary Konecky: ‘From Reports from the Holocaust, the Making of an AIDS Activist by Larry Kramer, I learn that Reagan’s first speech on AIDS was April 27, 1987 (page 145). At the time of his speech, the AIDS epidemic was six years old and had killed 20,798 in the USA (page 150). Reagan admitted to not reading the report on AIDS that he asked Dr. Koop to prepare for him (page 152) and did not talk to his Surgeon General about AIDS (also page 152).’ Bob Price: ‘Actually, you are incorrect. Ronald Reagan set up a council to handle the AIDS crisis and said ‘AIDS is the #1 public health concern in this country’ in 1984. Compare Patty Davis’ description of his behavior in Time to that in the movie [that CBS pulled from the schedule and moved to Showtime].” TRANSFERRING VIDEOTAPES TO DVDS Bob Price: ‘Probably the easiest approach is to buy a DVD recorder, e.g. the Phillips DVDR75, and hook it up to your videotape recorder. This works very well, is easy, and I wish someone had told me this before I started out. For you see, I started out by trying to do it on my computer. I bought a TV card, a very large hard drive, and a DVD burner. With software, that cost about as much as the DVD recorder, and it’s much harder to do it that way.’ MADAM, I’M TOMLIN Steve Tomlin writes: ‘I know you’ve been waiting for it, so here’s my holiday palindrome (remember last year’s?), this time with an international flavor: Yay! Tet! Yay. ‘Okay, that was the simple and straightforward one. [Although please notice that even the exclamation marks work. – A.T.] Too easy? Here’s a more convoluted one: The Iranian cleric in charge of religious festivities when presented with the personal demands of the chosen entertainer and, further, upon the offering of inappropriate libations on this sacred occasion, declares: YANNI GETS AT NO DAM HARP! RAHMADON! TASTE GIN? NAY! ‘Alright, a bit of a stretch, and Rahmadon isn’t really the ‘Muslim Christmas’ (there’s an oxymoron for you) so it’s not strictly seasonal, and I spelled ‘damn’ wrong [I thought it was some kind of sheep harp – A.T.], and my spelling of Rahmadon can be debated, yadda, yadda. So go back to the first one. Or try your hand at it for Pete’s sake. Your readers have two weeks to do better.’ ☞ O, No.
Transferring Joe’s Videos to DVD December 11, 2003January 21, 2017 But first . . . THEY’LL / BE HOME / FOR CHRISTMAS . . . Michael Albert: ‘You might want to tell your readers about this. American Airlines has a program where you can donate your frequent flyer miles to military personnel flying home on leave from service in Iraq. Other airlines may have such programs as well. I think it’s a great way to help out the service people who often make significant sacrifices for the people of the US and Iraq. I had a few thousand miles that I never would have used anyway. I was happy to find something useful to do with them. Here’s the URL. REAGAN AND AIDS Daniel H.: ‘Please pass along my thanks to Chip Ellis for his link clarifying that Reagan did in fact make a couple of passing references to the AIDS crisis a bit more than a year prior to the date popularly documented (Oct ’85 vs ’87). Reagan’s October ’85 comments – coming a week after Rock Hudson’s death and nearly four years after the term AIDS was coined – were probably considered somewhat appropriate given that up to that point there were more than 22,000 known cases of AIDS and more than 12,000 deaths from the disease. I was gratified to see that Ed Meese confirmed that the administration did also, in fact, have policy discussions about the disease prior to ’85. This does certainly strike me as fairly appropriate since by the end of Reagan’s second term more than 60,000 US deaths would be attributed to AIDS along with more than 100,000 full blown AIDS cases and more than a million Americans HIV infected. I’m sure that Chip’s well documented proof of Reagan’s late ’85 comments will do much to quiesce those who might feel that Reagan was silent for too long.’ BUSH AND AIDS Click here. LP TO CD Erik G. Sten: ‘Sorry for being late on this topic but I do have a terrific recommendation: Sony’s EZ Audio Transfer & Restoration Kit. I used it to transfer my LPs to CDs. It works for tapes just as well. It’s moderately user-friendly.’ VHS TO DVD Tom Grady: ‘Joe might want to visit http://www.dvdrhelp.com to find out all he’ll ever need to know – and then some – about recording various kinds of video to just about any type of shiny disc.’ Sergei Slobodov: ‘Sure you can do it yourself, but, just like cooking, it’s only worth doing if you enjoy the process. Otherwise, you can get the VHS to DVD conversion done professionally for as little as $19 per 2-hour tape (see e.g. world-conversions.com), or about $10/hour, probably less than your housekeeping lady is making.’ John Stevens: ‘There are numerous ways to convert VHS to a DVD, just as there are a bunch of ways to rip and burn music CDs. The basic process is to use a video capture card in your PC to capture the analog video to the PC and then use DVD authoring software to edit the video and burn to DVD. Most PCs don’t have a video capture card so you would have to purchase one. If you already own a Digital camcorder and have a PC with a firewire connection there is another easy solution. Connect the Digital Camcorder to you VCR and copy the VHS to the camcorder. Then connect the camcorder to you PC via firewire and you are in business.’ Matthew McClure: ‘I work for Pinnacle Systems, whose business is to provide solutions for people like Joe. Pinnacle’s Studio Deluxe comes with a breakout box that converts the analog on the tape to digital so you can store the video on your computer. Then you can use the accompanying software to edit your video. It’s easy to use: it automatically detects where each scene starts and stops, and you can just drop a thumbnail representing each scene onto the edit timeline. Editing enhancements — like 3-D scene transitions, sound effects, titles, background music, DVD menus, and video effects such as slow and fast motion, color correction, emboss and posterize – let you to add a professional touch to your home movies. Then you can save your video as DVD quality MPEG-2 files that you can burn to a CD or DVD, post to the web or email to friends and family. For more information, click here.’ Doug Simpkinson: ‘Joe could use a ReplayTV [or a TiVo]. A ReplayTV has inputs on it to allow you to hook up a VCR to it. You can then record your video tapes onto the ReplayTV, and treat them like any other show you’ve recorded on your PVR.’ AS FOR BOREALIS Sergei Slobodov [veering onto a new topic in his e-mail from above]: ‘As for Borealis, I have also looked through their patents and claims in more detail, including references to publications in refereed journals. I have also tried to find a quick proof that their original patent is nonsense (as I boldly claimed before) and wasn’t able to. There is a chance that under some conditions they can indeed lower the ‘work function’ of a material, possibly leading to some useful applications. So, just like Dana, I would also soften my original harsh verdict. It is indeed possible that the technology they developing is within the realm of possibility, although it’s definitely not nearly as innovative or groundbreaking as they would want you to believe.’
Medical Research – and More December 10, 2003January 21, 2017 A MOOT POINT What they’re saying about Iraq in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. REAGAN AND AIDS Chip Ellis: ‘Please refer your readers to this. The myth about Reagan not mentioning AIDS is now taken as fact. It clearly is not.’ Catherine: ‘In response to Bob P.’s comments yesterday and the AIDS epidemic during the Reagan administration, he should read The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett, published in 1994. Chapter 11 describes what happened in Reagan’s administration as HIV/AIDS was being discovered. There were many inside the administration that saw the findings of the CDC as alarming, but the Reagan administration was more concerned with cutting the budget. According to Ms. Garrett, CDC Director Dr. Bill Foege ‘took the epidemiology group out of the STD division,…..and hid it in his own discretionary budget’ in order to keep the research funding for AIDS from being cut (page 287). After Dr. Koop was appointed surgeon general, he was ‘flatly forbidden to make any public pronouncements about the new disease. More than five years would pass before Koop’s gag would be untied’ (page 302). ‘As Koop would later describe it: ‘The Reagan revolution brought into positions of power and influence Americans whose politics and personal beliefs predisposed them to antipathy toward the homosexual community” (page 302). Bottom line, after reading the chapter, the Reagan administration felt this new disease was strictly a gay/drug user’s disease, and therefore not worthy of research.’ ☞ And, now, a couple of decades later, the U.S. – having effectively shut down stem cell research in this country – is trying to shut it down worldwide. But good news, at least temporarily: U.S. TRIES/FAILS TO SHUT DOWN STEM CELL RESEARCH Bernard Siegel: ‘The UN voted today to delay consideration on the reproductive cloning ban for a year. We are delighted and relieved that the countries that vowed to push for a total ban blinked and therefore have allowed therapeutic cloning to continue without the immediate threat of a United Nations ban. This represents a major victory for the coalition of scientific societies, disease advocacy organizations and grassroots stem cell activists who stuffed the inboxes of the UN missions with petitions and emails. The world [led, sadly, by the United States] was on the verge of the worst setback to science since medieval times. What we need is a legal framework so that ethical scientific research for cures can proceed. Millions of sick people were given hope with the UN’s action today. No one wants reproductive cloning. Why do some countries, including the United States, have as their policy the linkage of therapeutic cloning to the known evil of reproductive cloning? It is nothing more than politics at its worst.’ COMPUTER PROGRAMMER OR SERIAL KILLER? Say you met one of these guys at a party. Would you invite him over to help you set up your new home computer network? Tomorrow: Transferring Joe’s Videos to DVD
Yet Mor-A Borealis December 9, 2003January 21, 2017 Last we left Dana Dlott – whose opinion I have come to respect over the years – his position was: ‘Borealis is a stock swindle, pure and simple. You have chosen to participate in it in the hope of making some money. It’s up to you to decide whether this is moral or not.’ (He went on to explain a bit more about why this was the case.) Well, over the weekend, he sent this: It has taken me some time to get back to you about Borealis, partly because I wanted to think more about it and part because I had to attend some meetings out of town. Let me start by saying I think I was too harsh on them and you because I mixed them up with some other outfits that are simply peddling nonsense such as energy from hydrinos and gravity shields. Borealis is a different story. They aren’t peddling nonsense, they are selling novel technologies that promise to improve the efficiencies of common processes involving heating, cooling and motion, by a little bit. Their basic sales pitch is the old, ‘If I could sell a $23 toaster to everybody in China we’d make $23 billion!’ They are saying if we could sell our coolers to every electronics company in the world, if we could sell our motor drives to every electrical company in the world, if we could sell our thermoelectric generators to every automaker in the world, we’d be rich! To analyze this pitch it isn’t really necessary to know too much science or engineering, but let’s start there. It is clearly a fact that there is a lot of improvement possible in power generation, cooling, heating, motion control and so on. Contrary to what they would have you believe, their technologies have a lot of competition. I would mention acoustic refrigerators and improved thermoelectrics vs. cool chips, a wide variety of semiconductor thermoelectric generators, fuel cells vs. power chips, and a wide variety of motion controllers and motor drivers vs. chorus motors, all being developed with much less hype but perhaps more realistic expectations. These are tough applications. It is not nearly enough to be a little bit better in the laboratory. Devices that are going to tackle these applications have to have a lot of other qualities. They have to be rugged and cheap to manufacture, have to be resistant to a variety of harsh environments, have to have a variety of political and legal properties to pass government approvals and legal challenges, and have to physically fit well with existing technologies, since nobody is going to redesign all the world’s cars and computers to fit slightly better devices inside. Lester Thurow put it very well in a speech I heard him once give (on NPR). He said that various elements of the old wisdom were turned on their heads, one being ‘if you build a better mousetrap, they will come to you.’ This better mousetrap business worked fine in the early days of Polaroid, which is the classic example, but today it is not a good proposition. Back then photography had only one monolithic giant, Kodak, and a new better approach could be a big winner. Thurow mentioned companies that invented PCs (Xerox), cell phones (Motorola) and so on and showed that the real money was made by somebody else who was able to manufacture and market the technology better, cheaper and more reliably. Not only did inventing a new technology not put you at an advantage, it could put you at a disadvantage because you spent a lot of money on the invention and by locking in the earliest designs lost a lot of flexibility. All this is once again to say if investors get caught up in the ‘better mousetrap’ (which isn’t really true in this case) and the ‘sell to China’ frenzy, this stock could do well for a while. Investors and insiders might make a lot of money on the ‘greater fool’ paradigm, but the idea that this stuff could really make billions by revolutionizing these old common areas in a highly competitive world where there are hundreds of start ups developing different variants of competitive technology is ridiculous. Technology for technology, what Borealis really has going for it is better hyper marketing. ☞ Well, this is certainly less harsh than the prior critique, and as always, I remind newcomers to this site that (a) I have a ton of this wild speculation; (b) I assume it has to go to zero if only because, if it proved real, it would be such a huge hit that – well, such things just don’t happen to me. (This was much the same way I knew, when he jumped into the race in 1991, that Bill Clinton could not be elected President – no one I knew could possibly be President.) But as inclined as I am to agree with the several very smart readers who have written in to tell me over the years why Borealis is at best an unintentional fraud, what I find so tantalizing is the possibility, however slim, that there’s something to it. On the one hand, you get Dana’s completely definitive comment last month. On the other hand, you see that Rolls Royce and Boeing and SemiKron have been willing to be publicly associated with this company – and have presumably looked at it more closely than some of our readers. And then last week I got a look at an extensive and sophisticated private research report that essentially confirmed all the company’s wild claims . . . my greedy little heart was soaring, let me tell you! . . . until I Googled the author and was taken straight to an SEC action against him for touting two high-tech stocks a few years ago without disclosing his interest. He didn’t go to jail or anything, but the two stocks over which he was gushing, I was disappointed to see, had gone to zero. The reason I write about Borealis so often is that I am just completely mystified. There are so many reasons to think it can’t be real. And yet what if Boeing, Rolls Royce and Semikron have been right to see something of possible value here? So I’m happy to think Dana is at least a little less certain the Borealis technology is bogus, and here’s what I think. I think, as always, that unless you have money you truly, truly, can lose without a moment’s remorse, you should not buy this stock (or any other speculation). But if you do have some play money, how can you resist? With its market cap still only $40 million or so (about the cost of a single corporate jet, as I keep reminding you), if it should prove real . . . well . . . let’s just leave it at that. ONE MORE ASSIGNMENT FOR YOU Joe: ‘Now that your esteemed readers have done such a great job addressing how to burn and rip CDs, how about asking them for the best way to copy all of my old VHS tapes to DVDs. My latest computer (a Gateway 200XL laptop) has a built-in DVD burner. I’ve decided to copy all of my family VHS-videos (you know, the ones I think my kids will want when they grow up) to DVD. What is the best software to use for this undertaking?’
Fun for the Whole Family – and More December 8, 2003January 21, 2017 HO-HO-[EXPLETIVE DELETED] Kathi Derevan: ‘Don’t miss ‘Bad Santa.’ It is my new favorite Christmas movie, replacing ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol,’ which is still firmly in second place. (Definitely do not wait for the airplane version – about two-thirds of the language will be missing.)’ BAD ECONOMICS (FOR ME) Gary Pollo: ‘Could you do this? Devote 1 day per week to financial advice? Let us all know what is the 1 day you will offer $ advice. Those interested in your ongoing political commentaries can read the other days. Thanks.’ ☞ But then I could charge you only one-fifth as much! Have a great holiday season. WAIT TIL YOU HEAR THE 1812 OVERTURE! Glenn Martin: ‘I just purchased and installed the Bose Mediamate speakers you recommended. The sound quality is fantastic! How Bose is able to get such true sound, including bass, out of such small speakers is beyond me.’ ☞ I feel the same way. We have the great Planet Out founder Tom Rielly to thank for this recommendation. FUN FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY This is sophomoric, disrespectful and wildly partisan. Best of all, after clicking here and here to see what I’m talking about, you can click here to create your own (even one that is pro-Bush). WATCH HOW THEY COUNT THE VOTES Peter Ludemann: ‘Check out, especially, these last few paragraphs of Robert X. Cringely’s December 4 column. Cringely knows a fair bit about technology (he correctly predicted that Y2K wouldn’t be a big deal): Now here’s the really interesting part. Forgetting for a moment Diebold’s voting machines, let’s look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can’t be audited they can’t be trusted. If they can’t be trusted they won’t be used. Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn’t it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn’t it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device? This confuses me. I’d love to know who said to leave the feature out and why? ☞ Me, too. WATCH ‘THE REAGANS’ ON SHOWTIME – SINCE YOU CAN’T ON CBS Bob P: ‘I suppose that when CBS makes a movie about Clinton featuring some true points about his life and also featuring him having Ron Brown and Vince Foster murdered, you won’t protest it? If you would, maybe you understand how people who liked and respected Reagan react to a movie with major plot points that are conceded to be false by most reviewers. For instance, see this.’ ☞ Gosh, Bob. I did read that link. (Thank you for bringing it to my attention.) And you are quite right. If CBS – or more likely Fox – planned to air a movie showing President Clinton ordering the murders of two close friends and appointees, I would protest. After all, murder is a fairly serious charge, and – as even all but the most truly insane Clinton haters would agree – there is no shred of truth to these truly awful allegations. But did The Reagans make allegations like that? What ‘major plot points’ are you talking about? I don’t know about ‘most reviewers’ conceding major plots to be false, but the link you provided – to an interview with Reagan loyalist Ed Meese, perhaps not the most objective of reviewers – didn’t persuade me even a little. The first of the 11 inaccuracies Ed Meese enumerates is that The Reagans paints President Reagan as having been ‘a second-rate actor.’ Let us assume for the sake of argument that this is unfair – that he was a first-rate actor, right up there with James Cagney and Cary Grant. Still: is depicting a first-rate actor as having been second-rate even remotely akin to depicting an innocent man as having murdered two of his friends? None of Meese’s other 10 criticisms rises remotely to the standard you’ve set, either. But let’s take #6, which is perhaps the most serious one, or at least the one that got as much play as any before The Reagans ultimately aired on Showtime: 6. The script writer for the CBS hatchet job admits that the depiction of Reagan as having a calloused attitude toward AIDS victims was something she just made up. And Meese adds that the entire issue of AIDS did not come in through Nancy Reagan. It was Surgeon General C. Everett Koop who “brought that issue to the Cabinet” and it was handled “like a whole bunch of other issues in the Cabinet.” It is a very serious charge to think that, as tens of thousands of his fellow citizens were dying – fellow citizens including his friend Rock Hudson, in 1985 – President Reagan did nothing about it, and never once publicly uttered the word AIDS, until 1987. But unlike the charge that ‘Clinton murdered Ron Brown and Vince Foster’ (which I know you are not making, except by way of illustration), this charge is actually true. So I doubt very much that the script writer would agree that she wrote a hatchet job, or that ‘she just made up’ Reagan’s lack of response to the AIDS crisis. She didn’t have to make it up. For six years of his Presidency, AIDS was constantly in the headlines. And for six years – which takes a lot longer to live than to say – President Reagan did and said essentially nothing. With tens of millions around the world now dead or dying of this plague – and hundreds of millions more likely to die – is it not worth depicting that, despite all the headlines and protests, our leader sat mute? [The Reagans is still playing on Showtime. If you’re interested in history, it’s worth watching.] Tomorrow: Yet Mor-a Borealis
Amending the Constitution December 5, 2003February 24, 2017 The year was 1861 and there was deep cultural division in the land. The South had its culture of slavery – negroes were counted in the United States Constitution as three-fifths of a person, after all – and the North was crawling with abolitionists. A Constitutional Amendment was passed by Congress on March 2, 1861, and sent by what I can only assume was an unenthusiastic Lincoln to the governors of each of the states for ratification. (You can buy Lincoln’s transmittal letter to the governor of New Hampshire for $95,000 from the current PROFILES IN HISTORY autograph catalog, from which I am lifting most of this history. You will not find me bidding against you.) The Amendment read: ‘No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service [i.e.: slaves] by the laws of said State.’ Clearly unconstitutional, if you ask me . . . but (a) no one would ever have thought to ask me; (b) how could the Supreme Court rule a Constitutional Amendment unConstitutional?; (c) Fort Sumter was fired on the following month and the states never got around to ratifying the amendment. Instead, 17 months later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This year, 2003, a Constitutional Amendment has been introduced in both houses of Congress to prevent states from granting marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, even if (like Massachusetts) they want to. If passed, and ratified, it would be only the second amendment ever passed to restrict individual freedom (Prohibition being the other, in 1919, repealed in 1933). The thing about marriage is that it makes a lot of good people nervous. Even though many people understand it’s civil marriage Massachusetts has coming down the Pike, not religious marriage, it just doesn’t sound right. Couldn’t you call it something else? And, again, I am no lawyer, but the problem with calling it something else is that tens of thousands of public laws and millions of private contracts refer to the words marriage and married. How would you ever change them all? Unless you passed a law mandating that all such references ‘shall henceforth be required to be interpreted to include [whatever we agree call it],’ calling them something else doesn’t get you to equal economic benefits and rights. So while half the country opposes gay marriage, only 20% favor amending the Constitution for the purpose of preventing states from granting gay couples equal rights. Unfortunately, that 20% largely controls the House, Senate and Justice Department, so this amendment can’t be dismissed out of hand. Thomas Jefferson had this to say about amending laws and constitutions: I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. In the current instance, this could be read two ways. One way: Look, don’t do it lightly, but sometimes you have to amend constitutions. The other way: Yes, but they need to be amended, or reinterpreted, to keep up with enlightenment and the discovery of new truths, not to hold them back. And while this is clearly a matter for dispute, many would argue that the modern world has made a new discovery: that gays and lesbians do not choose to be gay or lesbian and that, once you get to know them, they can not only turn out to be pretty decent folk (with exceptions to be sure), they can actually send real estate values soaring. Most Republicans in Congress oppose equal rights for gays and lesbians (or extending existing hate crimes legislation to cover hate crimes against us or extending existing anti-discrimination legislation to cover us). Last I looked, 61% of Republicans in Congress scored zero on the Human Rights Campaign scorecard . . . there was nothing they were with us on, not even having an antidiscrimination policy in their own offices. (And this number, 61%, was actually up from 46% ten years earlier.) Most Democrats in Congress, by contrast, do favor equal rights for gays and lesbians – 71% scored 100% with the Human Rights Campaign (and only 2% scored zero). So there’s a pretty sharp cultural divide, and some have suggested that if we are going to start amending the Constitution to conform more closely to the Bible, we should not stop with discrimination against gays and lesbians. You may have seen this whizzing around the Internet: A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5.) B. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21) C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21) D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30) E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9) F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen. 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10) G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him, tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36) I have not checked the marriage citations for accuracy because my view is that, even if they are accurate, and fairly interpreted, they are outdated. Much as Jefferson described, times change. Understanding changes. (You will recall that the Bible was long used as justification for slavery – ‘Slaves, obey thy masters’ [Colossians 3:22] ‘with fear and trembling’ [Ephesians 6:5].) But while some things change, some things don’t – love, fairness, honesty – life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness – and we should perhaps be prepared, when it doesn’t hurt us, to allow these wonderful things to others, even if we don’t much like being around them.
The Economy on Speed December 4, 2003January 21, 2017 WATCH HOW THEY COUNT THE VOTES Brooks Hilliard: ‘I’ve been a computer professional since 1965 (starting as a programmer on Air Force and NASA contracts summers and part time when I was a student at MIT) and have earned my living in the computer industry ever since. Krugman is absolutely correct. It is totally incredible to me – from a totally non-partisan standpoint – that anyone with any computer knowledge would advocate using electronic voting machines that do not have a paper trail available to audit the count. Even the best electronic security is vulnerable because there’s no way to check every potential breach (if only because there’s no way to be sure you’ve thought of every one). Thus, the only way to have even adequate security is to be able to detect when a breach has occurred. In the voting context, a paper trail combined with poll-watchers, is good protection . . . anything less than this is not. This should not be a party issue: both parties’ candidates are vulnerable to “dirty tricksters” from the other side . . . or malicious hackers from neither side. Walden O’Dell (the Diebold CEO), though partisan, is probably an honest and honorable individual. But he’s not the problem . . . latter day “plumbers” are, and our electoral process needs to be protected against them.’ THE ECONOMY ON SPEED Andrew Scharf: ‘What do you make of the recent spate of very good economic news? Specifically, is it possible that any of Bush’s economic program has caused this upturn? I’m less interested in hearing the standard Demo line (that deficits will be problematic in the long run) than knowing whether there is any cause-effect relationship here.’ ☞ Sure there is! Or I would think so, anyway. If you slash taxes, massively increase government spending, and, in concert with the Fed, offer consumers record low interest rates, you are likely to boost economic activity. And I’m very glad activity is picking up. But the boost would have been greater if the bulk of the tax cuts had been directed at the bottom 95% instead of the top 5% and if the bulk of the massive deficit we’re racking up had been for investments in domestic infrastructure (and children), not a largely unilateral invasion that has led neither Iraqis the rest of the world to greet us with flowers. As to the ‘Democratic line’ about deficits . . . wasn’t this until recently the Republican line? That we must have a balanced budget amendment? Such an amendment would have been going overboard and Democrats were right to fight it off. But the general notion of long-term fiscal moderation is a good one . . . one that the Democratic leadership has come to embrace . . . and one the borrow-and-spend Republican Congress and administration have completely abandoned. CASSETTES TO CDs I asked; you answered: David D’Antonio: ‘My brother just did this, as a tribute to my Dad who recently passed away. I had a cassette of his audition playing sax for the NBC orchestra years ago, doing improv big band jazz. My brother took this cassette over to a friend of his, who played it on a tape deck connected to the ‘line in’ of his soundcard on his computer. He recorded the segment, cleaned it up (which apparently took quite some time) and then looped it so it played twice and burned the result to CD. They also scanned in a picture of Dad at my brother’s wedding and made a CD cover and liner notes and duped up several copies. We gave these out at the funeral, the entire process taking ‘only’ about 5 hours or so. It isn’t anywhere near as easy as ripping and burning tracks, since the tape deck doesn’t have a direct connection to the computer, the way the CD drive does. But it is doable if you are familiar with music processing on computers. Note that you can do the same with a record, should you want to preserve any LPs you have against the day when finding a turntable is as hard as finding a wax player now.’ James Redekop: ‘I’ve done this a few times, but it can be a slow process. Since audio tape isn’t digital, it can’t be ripped as easily as CDs. You have to have a sound card on your computer which can take audio input; audio recording software; audio editing software; and CD burning software. What I do is play the tape on a cassette deck hooked into the computer’s audio input and record the side to a single large audio file. Then I use the editing software to break the big file into individual tracks. This can take a while. Once the large file is broken down into tracks, you can use your CD burning software to burn the tracks to CD. Some things to watch out for: * A full 90-minute tape will not fit onto a single CD. CDs are only about 74 minutes (though you can get 80 min CDs in some stores). * Before you split the large audio file into tracks, normalize it first. This boosts the volume of the file so that it fills the dynamic range available. If you do this after breaking the tracks up, each track will get boosted a different amount — quiet tracks will get amplified more than loud ones, and you’ll loose the contrast in volume that was on the original recording. * On each track, “fade in” the first quarter-to-half-second of track and “fade-out” the last quarter-to-half-second. Your edits will probably have cut a waveform at a non-zero level, and you’ll get a “pop” as your playback jumps from zero between tracks to the non-zero level. Fading in and out will smooth out this transition. Brad Hurley: ‘Since most people will probably describe how to record cassettes into your computer, I want to mention another option: replace the CD player on your stereo with a CD player/recorder. If you have a lot of cassettes or LPs to copy, the latter approach is easier unless your computer happens to live next to your stereo (or you have a laptop). CD recorders can only record on special blank CDs designated for music, but they’re widely available. They’re more expensive than regular blank CDs, but still cheaper than good-quality blank cassette tapes. The great thing about using a CD recorder is that it’s fully integrated in your stereo — you just pop a tape into your tape deck, press ‘Play,’ set the recording level on your CD recorder, and press ‘Record.’ Tracks will be created automatically as long as your tape isn’t too noisy (the CD recorder makes a new track when it hears a few seconds of silence). I’ve recorded tapes and minidiscs directly to my computer, and while that’s easy enough I much prefer using the CD recorder on my stereo. There’s nothing to set up, I don’t have to worry about hard disk space on my computer, and good-quality CD recorders will produce a CD that actually sounds better than your original cassette. If you only plan to copy a handful of cassettes or LPs, recording on your computer is the way to go. Recording software for the computer is cheap; CD recorders for your home stereo are not.’ Randy Wolff: ‘If you have a Mac, the built-in audio recording capability is too noisy to use…it will contribute lots of R2D2-type funny robot sounds. You could buy an ‘isolated’ audio interface for the Mac… I have an audio interface from M-Audio. This is the USB card they make – $179.95 list price. You just plug it in to your USB port. They make nicer ones too, but this is very good, 16 bit quality sound, like a CD. You will then have to set the volume levels and so on…it can take a while to do. Once it is digitally recorded, then you can remove noise and otherwise improve it if you wish, if you have the software. When you are done, just put the resulting audio file in ‘Toast’ or ‘iTunes’ or whatever you use to burn CDs.’ William McLeese: ‘For beaucoup info about transferring cassettes to CD’s and related topics, try this website: cdrfaq.org.’
Watch It! December 3, 2003January 21, 2017 CASSETTES TO CDs? Jeff West: ‘Now that you’ve made me an expert on using iTunes to ‘rip’ and ‘burn’ CDs, any ideas on how I can copy my cassettes to CDs?’ ☞ Not a clue. But I’ll bet if there’s a way, one of our terrific readers will enlighten us. # WATCH WHAT YOU SAY You will recall the gentleman our government is prosecuting for holding up a NO WAR FOR OIL sign in a ‘no-protest zone.’ In a similar vein, there’s this action against Greenpeace. WATCH WHAT YOU BREATHE Excerpted from Anchorage Daily News, November 26, 2003: HOMER, AK — A local businessman who had just finished testifying against a proposed smokefree ordinance collapsed with a heart attack in the council chambers and could not be revived. Robert Keys, a former smoker, told a packed city council meeting that he sat at a table of smokers every morning for coffee and conversation at a local restaurant without trouble. “It hasn’t bothered my health any,” Keys testified. . . . Keys returned to his seat in the council chambers. Less than five minutes later, gasping noises from Keys interrupted further testimony. . . . Attempts to resuscitate [him] en route to the hospital were unsuccessful. “It’s a shocking, horrible tragedy,” said Annette Marley, who attended Monday’s meeting for the Homer Alliance for Fresh Air. “We can’t make a causal relationship between his being around smokers and his death, but we know you have a 30 percent higher risk of dying of chronic heart disease if you’re a nonsmoker exposed to smoke in the workplace.” ☞ To support smokefree workplace laws where YOU live, click here. WATCH HOW THEY COUNT THE VOTES Paul Buddenhagen: ‘Paul Krugman has written the piece on potential voter machine fraud I had hoped you would write. Can you point readers to his column?’ ☞ Krugman frequently writes the pieces I had hoped I would write.
Music (and Books) December 2, 2003February 24, 2017 Mike Dominy: ‘Taking music from a CD and putting it on your computer is called ‘ripping,’ not burning. ‘Burning’ is what you do when you transfer that music back to a CD. Otherwise, you provided a very good explanation of how iTunes discovers what CD you’re listening to. The only problem is you’re probably going to receive a ton of emails from other folks about this process. Your article leads one to believe that Apple came up with this scheme when they actually used the database that was already out there in Internetland.’ James Redekop: ‘The system for determining a CD’s identity based on the number and lengths of its tracks is not an Apple invention. It was developed a while ago by a bunch of hobbyists in a project called CDDB [CD database]. They distributed a program which could create an (almost) unique id number for a CD and call out to a server on the Internet to get the information. The programmers didn’t have a big database of CDs, though; they just had their own personal collections. But the program was so useful that, when other people started using it, they would enter their own collections into the CDDB system as well (I contributed a few dozen myself), and the library grew. CD-playing software such as WinAMP and MusicMatch started incorporating CDDB clients, and the whole thing took off pretty quickly. CDDB was eventually bought out by a private business (http://www.gracenote.com/), much to the consternation of everyone who contributed, who all of a sudden saw all the work they did become a profitable piece of intellectual property for someone else. Apple most likely licenses Gracenote’s CDDB database for its iTunes lookups.’ Peter Cioe: ‘There are two CDDB services: Gracenote, a for-profit company, and FreeDB a open source service.’ Mike Mangino: ‘The CD lookup functionality of iTunes has been around quite a while. Take a look at http://www.musicbrainz.org/history.html for a reasonable history.’ Jonathan Hochman: ‘What iTunes does, in looking at the disk to see how many ‘cuts’ it has and how long each one is, is called hashing. A hash table uses a seemingly random characteristic of the data, the more scattershot the better, to create a fast index. It is widely used. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already, please treat yourself to reading Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter.’ ☞ As one Amazon reviewer put it in awarding five stars: The greatest book ever written by a human being. April 25, 1999 Reviewer: Eliezer Yudkowsky from Atlanta As pure Art, as magnificent intelligence incarnated as absolute beauty, this is the greatest book ever written by human hands. It is a terrible thing to contemplate that 150,000 people die every day without having read this book. Don’t let it happen to you. And speaking of books: Doug Jones: ‘Thanks for suggesting Lies and the Lying Liars…. I did a lot of driving for the holiday and listened to the book on tape version. It was definitely worth listening to. Now I’m gonna break down and buy myself a copy of the book.’ Janet: ‘I bought and read the book. THANK YOU. I have purchased several more copies for holiday gifts and expect to purchase many more for anytime gifts. FINALLY, someone has articulated intelligently what I have been screaming all along.’ ☞ If you want to listen to it on your iPod, via Audible.com [full disclosure: I own Apple LEAPs and Audible.com stock, and I want everyone in the world to read Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them] click here.