sisu

Media uncoverage

The Protest Warriors' un-p.c. signs at yesterday's anti-RNC demonstration "took some time for processing and often held up the protest as the far left attempted to engage all brain cells to decipher the signs and determine if we were for or against their cause," reports Frank LoPinto of The Cool Blue Blog. Once the humorless lefties realized the Warriors were having fun at their expense, they started chanting "Fascists, leave our march!" and physically assaulted Frank and his group.

"I watched the coverage. They did something called mainstreaming," U of VA professor of politics Larry Sabato told Brit Hume on "Special Report" last night, reports Rather Biased:

HUME: When I picked The New York Times this morning I read about soccer moms, and other nice people, middle class people, people like you and me who had come to express and protest their president, and express their views in a peaceful way.

SABATO: I saw a very different protest. I saw lots of obscenities, not just on the banners but also hurled at almost anybody who looked like they might have been a delegate or anybody connected to the Republican convention. And you know, I tell you Brit, I saw much worse on the other major networks. I watched the coverage . . . They were very careful to pick out a couple of Iraq War veterans, a little old lady had who attended her first convention and a married couple. A middle-class married couple who had very moderate things to say. Now that may have been 10 or 20 percent of the protesters but I can guarantee you, having watched a good part of this demonstration, that was not representative of the demonstrations.

Just the latest embarrassing example of the national press's "laziness, [anti-Bush] bias and ineptitude [that] have combined to produce a media meltdown this election year," as Glenn Reynolds writes in a must-read Tech Central Station column:

The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they've spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they're left floundering now that competition is exposing their faults. Like the folks at GM who couldn't understand why people were buying Toyotas all of a sudden back in the 1970s, today's Big Media folks are shocked to see ratings and circulation numbers falling while readership for Internet sites skyrockets. And, like the auto executives, they're even starting to mumble about the need for protection.

The free marketplace of ideas rules.

Update: Well, looky here. The Times removes its rose-colored glasses, albeit a day late and a dollar short:

Although the organized protests yesterday and Sunday have been largely peaceful, there has been a starkly different tone to smaller incidents in Midtown and elsewhere: angry encounters and planned harassment of convention delegates as they go out on the town.

When marchers approached the Garden, a police detective was knocked off his scooter. He was then repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by at least one male demonstrator, the police said.

The heavy police presence at the Garden apparently inspired the coordinated plan by anarchists and other radicals to strike out at the delegates at their hotels, breakfasts, parties, and on the streets.

"The French have forgotten"

"Let me tell you that the French, despite all the noise they make -- 'We don't want war!' -- will shortly have to fight the terrorists," says Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi in an interview with the leftist Le Monde, translated by Gregory Djerejian of The Belgravia Dispatch:

The French, like all democratic countries, can't content themselves with adopting a passive position. The Americans, the British and other nations that are fighting in Iraq are not only fighting to protect Iraqis, they are fighting to protect their own countries.

"France is clearly in shock -- partly because they are confronting the fact that non-participation in Iraq doesn't guarantee security for its citizens . . . Also doubtless alarming, it is dawning on some in France that Chirac and de Villepin's hysterical policy of contain-America-at-all-costs looks increasingly amateurish and incompetent in the face of existential perils," comments Djerejian. Now that terrorism has hit home in the recent kidnapping of two French journalists by thugs demanding France revoke a new law banning Islamic head scarves in French public schools or else, the editors of Le Monde seem to realize that their leaders' vocal opposition to the US invasion of Iraq is no protection against the barbarous tactics of Islamic extremists:

No one is safe, no diplomacy can pretend to constitute a Maginot line that will protect us better than our Spanish or Italian neighbors from this willingness to die which is at work since 9/11. We have touched the limits of anti-Americanism that seems too often to take the place of a French foreign policy.

Inauspiciously, notes Wretchard of Belmont Club, "Since France has ruled out rescinding the headscarf ban to preserve the appearance of amour propre, the obvious alternative is to make someone else make concessions. That someone will probably be Iraq":

Paying tribute is all part of the nuanced foreign policy of former great states. But whether the French ante up with secret political concessions or payouts, the result will be the same. More Americans and Iraqis will die as the price of French appeasement.

Yet the French will not escape the carnivorous attentions of the terrorists in the end. Promises by blackguards are made to be broken. The trick is to know that and the French have forgotten.

[via InstaPundit here and here]

All toads are actually frogs

They've been out there these many years. We've heard their chirping for decades. But this is the first time we've ever seen the gray tree frogs of York County.

That was no toad on the control arm of the Anderson window at Goomp's kitchen sink yesterday. Its mottled coloration fooled our careless eye into thinking it had a bumpy skin, but no. The skin was smooth and silky. It's a gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor). Tuck just spotted another one on the window sill over on the other side of Goomp's house. Note the large, sticky toe pads:

They will often cling to windows of houses at night.

Google search didn't bring up anything we would swear by, but this site says "Most are surprised to hear that all toads actually are frogs!"

The growing phenomenon of cat blogging.*

Tiny takes center stage, hamming it up for the camera (note Baby all but obscured by Tiny's tail)

Orange tigers Boo and Spike are hosting the 23rd Carnival of the Cats over at Watermark. All the usual suspects plus some nifty newcomers.

*Ed Moltzen, Late Final

An improbable literary triumph

"One can feel for the families' loss, but being a victim's relative doesn't qualify a person to advise on how the disaster might have been prevented," writes Judge Richard A. Posner of the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals re the holier-than-thou, Solomonoid silliness of the 9/11 commission in a review of their best-selling report in the New York Times Book Review [via Buzz Machine]. Former swiftboat skipper John Kerry, you may recall, "was quick to endorse all the recommendations" upon release of the report without debate. Writes critic Posner:

The document is an improbable literary triumph.

However, the commission's analysis and recommendations are unimpressive. The delay in the commission's getting up to speed was not its fault but that of the administration, which dragged its heels in turning over documents; yet with completion of its investigation deferred to the presidential election campaign season, the commission should have waited until after the election to release its report. That would have given it time to hone its analysis and advice.

The enormous public relations effort that the commission orchestrated to win support for the report before it could be digested also invites criticism -- though it was effective: in a poll conducted just after publication, 61 percent of the respondents said the commission had done a good job, though probably none of them had read the report. The participation of the relatives of the terrorists' victims (described in the report as the commission's ''partners'') lends an unserious note to the project (as does the relentless self-promotion of several of the members).

. . . And pressure for unanimity encourages just the kind of herd thinking now being blamed for that other recent intelligence failure -- the belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

. . . insistence on unanimity, like central planning, deprives decision makers of a full range of alternatives. For all one knows, the price of unanimity was adopting recommendations that were the second choice of many of the commission's members or were consequences of horse trading.

We were horrified with the commission's shameless political grandstanding during their public hearings -- as blogged here early and often -- and particularly offended by chairman Thomas Kean's snotty advice to us little people with our pesky enquiring minds:

Tom Kean, head of the 9/11 commission, was asked what he thought of Congressman James Sensenbrenner's calling for the resignation of Commissioner Gorelick on the grounds of multiple conflicts of interest. Glaring with contempt at the reporter for even asking such a question and trembling with righteous indignation, he answered:

She is one of the most decent and hard-working members of the committee . . . So, uh, people oughta stay out of our business.

Then there was Kean's gratuitous snickering aside to the press -- as the President and Vice President prepared to testify before the 9/11 committee behind closed doors in the Oval Office last spring -- that "Well, we recognize that Mr. Bush may help Mr. Cheney with some of the answers."

Thomas Kean is not the elder statesman he imagines himself to be . He's just a same-old, same-old member of the Old Boys' Club preening before a national audience. He gives the Republican party a bad name.

Sailor take warning?

Moody blue sunrise at Camelot-by-the-Sea this morning

"Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor's delight" goes the wisdom of the sea.* We learned it at The Old Salt's knee, and checking out the NOAA forecast, we note that today's meteorologists, with their cutting-edge technology, come to pretty much the same prognostication:

Patchy morning fog. Otherwise considerable clouds with a 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms. Some storms this afternoon may contain strong gusty winds. Highs around 80. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph.

An hour or two after sunrise, blue skies are starting to break through the dissipating fog. As we used to say in our salad days cruising Down East -- and now often repeat ironically on days when we know the fog is here for the long haul -- "Typical summerish. It's going to burn off."

*The scientific explanation, from PageWise:

A red sky at night means dry weather is on the way. The sky is red because the sun is shining through dust particles being pushed ahead of a high pressure system bringing in dry air. If you see a red sky in the morning, be sure to take your umbrella when you leave the house. The red color in a morning sky is also caused by sun shining through dust particles, but the dust is being pushed out by an approaching low pressure system that is bringing in moisture. This particular weather lore goes back to biblical times.** Check out Matthew 16:2-3 in the New Testament of the Bible to see for yourself.

Update: **Lordy heavens:

1 The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would show them a sign from heaven. 2 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. 3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? 4 A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.

None of them know one half as much*

This precious little toad was sitting on the control arm of the Anderson window at Goomp's kitchen sink this noon. Goomp noticed just in time and stopped winding. Sister, sister arrived, and we had an awesome cookout with rib eyes and baked haddock and all the fixin's, but still the toad held its course. Finally we went out and plucked the cutie off the bar it was on and set it down in the well of the twin oaks out front so we could wind the window back in to protect us against the gathering storm. The toad's coloration seemed designed to make it invisible against the bark of the red oak, so we think we did the right thing . . . No idea how it got onto the bar of the Anderson window. Why do nature's creatures have to be so cute and earnest?

*Kenneth Graham, Toad of Toad Hall:

The clever men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent Mr Toad.

Now the hungry lion roars*

Photoshop montage of Tiny and Baby in the night kitchen at Goomp's with last night's waxing gibbous moon, one day short of a Full Fruit or Barley Moon

The Algonquin names Full Fruit or Barley Moon were reserved only for those years when the Harvest Moon is very late in September, says Farmers Almanac. As we noted in our post re the July 31 Blue Moon, this is, indeed, one of those years, when the Harvest Moon appears September 28. Full Moon tonight, 29 August 2004 at 10:22 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

*Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1:

Now the hungry lion roars,
And the wolf behowls the moon;
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,
All with weary task fordone.

Yah, but when are you going to serve breakfast, Grandma?

"My wrath did grow."

"A new book being released this fall called Irritable Male Syndrome suggests that there may be an epidemic of bad temper among U.S. men," reports Canada's Globe and Mail:

But why are some of us prone to fits of rage and others more Buddha-like in the face of provocations real or imagined? . . . Is a hot temper all about brain chemistry or hormones, or is the way we express anger mostly learned?

Until now, very little attention has been paid to the biology behind hot tempers. But a team of researchers at McGill University has found that hotheads -- particularly male hotheads -- may indeed be playing with what that road rager called "a different deck." The work of Simon Young, Debbie Moskowitz and Marije aan het Rot suggests that people with short fuses may suffer a shortage of serotonin, a brain chemical involved in regulating mood. Their research offers help -- in the form of a prescription drug based on the amino acid tryptophan, which can boost serotonin levels . . . Tryptophan is naturally found in most proteins we eat, like beef, chicken or fish. But diet alone can't boost levels of the tryptophan because it has to compete with all the other amino acids we consume to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain . . . The McGill experiment used a purified form of the amino acid . . . it causes fewer side effects than antidepressant drugs such as Prozac or Paxil, which are also believed to boost levels of [serotonin].

There was already a significant body of evidence that suggests serotonin plays a role in aggression in animals. Monkeys with low levels of serotonin fight each other more. Those with higher levels start grooming each other more and become more agreeable . . . Sure enough, the McGill researchers found comparable results in humans . . . In the animal kingdom, serotonin also plays a role in determining where an individual fits into the social hierarchy. Vervet monkeys with higher levels of serotonin are more likely to become dominant, because they are more adept at forming alliances with high-ranking females. Even a locust with low serotonin will not be a dominant bug.

Anger management has boomed in the United States over the past decade, fuelled by government and corporate worries about civil liability should an employee "go postal" and kill or maim co-workers . . . Anger can also be used to mask other emotions, such as shame, embarrassment and hurt.

But just as the anger-management professionals are skeptical about the promise of tryptophan, Dr. Young wonders if there is any evidence that counselling actually works. And as it turns out, no one has done a significant study assessing whether anger management can change behaviour. Hotheadedness is probably a mix of nature and nurture, of biology and learned behaviour, Dr. Young says.

[via MonkeyWatch]

Being not unfamiliar with road rage and keyboard bashing ourselves -- not to mention Seasonal Affective Disorder, where serotonin levels dip during the low-light-level winter months -- we find the biological explanation compelling. Deep breathing and other diversionary tactics may avert episodes of flying off the handle, but we suspect a genetic predisposition. As for there being an epidemic of bad temper among our fellow American males, we're wondering whether if indeed there is one, it might be more about nurture than nature, one of those unintended consequence of misguided Marxist/feminist attempts to will away the differences between girls and boys via childrearing and educational propaganda foisted upon parents and teachers during the last decades of the 20th century? As the Globe and Mail article reminds us, "anger can also be used to mask other emotions, such as shame, embarrassment and hurt." That dynamic could explain a lot, not only about angry American males, but, more importantly, about angry Islamic extremists.

I was angry with my friend
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

-- William Blake, A Poison Tree

A total mystery

"Kerry citation a 'total mystery' to ex-Navy chief," Goomp and Tiny

"It is a total mystery to me. I never saw it. I never signed it. I never approved it. And the additional language it contains was not written by me," said former Navy secretary John Lehman re a Silver Star citation displayed on John Kerry's campaign web site. The citation appears over Lehman's signature.