Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Where Have All The Beauties Gone?

I purely love this one:

[Miss America 2003 Erika] Harold will be a law student at Harvard this fall. But before heading off to Cambridge from her home state of Illinois, she has a scheduled stop in New York where she'll be a delegate to the Republican National Convention.

She'll be there as President Bush (search) formally accepts the party nomination. Some Republicans hope it will be the first of many campaign events for the former beauty queen.

"I would be very interested in considering the possibility of running for public office," Harold said.

P. J. O'Rourke and Ann Coulter have both noted that the "pretty girls" -- the ones who have more to offer than seething resentment and endless demands for accommodations and validation -- are nowhere to be found on the Left. O'Rourke added that we can reliably expect the country to head toward wherever the beautiful women have gone -- and if Miss Harold and the New Jersey GOP's "Republican Babes" feature are indicators, they're right (Right?) where we want the country to be.

And While We’re On That Subject…

Tony Blankley's column of today is also a must-read:

It was only after a CBS poll showed that Kerry had lost a net 14 percent of the veteran's vote to Bush -- without aid of major media coverage or substantial national advertising -- that the major media outlets began to lumber, resentfully, in the vague direction of the story. And even then, they hardly engaged themselves in the spirit of objective journalism.

According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: "Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. "I don't think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."

Can't you just smell the resentment and contempt emanating from O'Shea's statement? Blankley can. It's quite clear that O'Shea, like his Old Media brethren, regards Old Media editors as the sole legitimate judges of what "news" is and ought to be -- and most particularly, what stories deserve the public's attention. It's easy to imagine him calling for federal regulation of the Internet to preserve his barony from illegitimate competition.

But then, to an established power in his field, any competition is "illegitimate," isn't it?

A Single Life

Linda Chavez writes this morning at Town Hall that:

Four months ago, I wrote a column suggesting that critics of John Kerry who disparaged his service in Vietnam might be barking up the wrong tree. "Kerry's problem isn't whether he deserved the medals he was awarded," I wrote. "His vulnerability is his record after the war -- especially his involvement with the radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and his role as an apologist for the communists we were fighting in Vietnam." At the time, almost no one had heard of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the organization now at the center of a storm of controversy over John Kerry's record in Vietnam. The group held a press conference May 4 that received almost no media attention.

Boy, what a difference a few months and a half million dollars make. The Swiftvets are now all the rage -- thanks to a low-budget ad campaign (a small buy in only a tiny handful of states) that has dominated news coverage of the presidential campaign in recent days. The group has unhinged the Kerry camp, which has tried to censor the ads, threatened television stations that might air them, attempted to intimidate bookstores from carrying "Unfit for Command," a new, best-selling, anti-Kerry book by Swiftvets John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, and fired back with its own ad claiming the Bush campaign is behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

It strikes me as shortsighted to promote either Kerry's lies about his Vietnam record or his post-service slanders of America's war effort in Indochina over the other. They're integrated components of a single life: a life dedicated to the pusuit of power, perquisites, and privilege. Together, they demonstrate with stunning clarity why men who actively want and seek power over others are precisely the men who must be kept far away from it.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Does Race Matter?

Clarence Page seems to think so:

He's [Dr. Alan Keyes, currently a candidate for United States Senator from Illinois] also helping push black progress ahead, making it a virtual certainty that Congress will get its third black senator since Reconstruction in November, a possibility that, with Keyes or without him, already was looking quite certain. Now, that's progress.

Why? Why is it progress?

If the race of a legislator matters in any sense whatsoever, then why are those who argue for segregation of the races dismissed pre-emptively, and with extreme prejudice? What conceivable criterion makes race an indicator for progress -- or regress -- in legislative representation, but excludes it from being suggested as a reason, say, to limit immigration of certain kinds, or to outlaw restrictive covenants based on race for privately owned and operated cooperative or condominium housing complexes?

Is there any prospect, however vague and distant, of eliminating race as a political consideration in these United States? I don't mean eliminating it from private consideration; that's impossible, and will remain so for as long as there are human beings. I mean making the public policies of the nation, and the political discourse that pertains to them, truly race-blind.

Can it be done?

Declaring Intentions

"Why a blog, Fran?" rises the query. "What was wrong with the Palace?" Well, the answer is of many parts:

• The Palace is and was a worthy site, but it's complex to maintain and is fast becoming too much for my ever more limited time budget.
  
• The Palace's orientation toward frames, which has received much criticism, has defeated my efforts to replace it with something readers would like better.
  
• Many people, including Connie Du Toit (to whom I owe the design of Eternity Road) and Mark Alger, have implored me to go for a "regular" blog for a host of reasons, including ease of access, commentary, and notification of updates.
  
• This really is a lot easier for me to use -- it didn't take long to convince me -- and will support both "quick hit" blog-style emissions and the longer essay-form commentary for which I'm best known.
  
• I expect I'll get far fewer criticisms about my color choices, with Connie doing the choosing.
  
• When the Curmudgeon returns from Idaho, he won't know where to look for me!

The Palace will remain open for another month or so, while I transfer my essays from there to here. After that, I'll decommission it, invite the other still-active participants to join me here, and carry on in the style to which I've already become accustomed.

Hope you like it.

Negative But Accurate

The foofaurauw over "negative campaigning" has risen to a pitch that absolutely requires some analytical thought. What is negative campaigning, exactly? Just saying something unflattering about a candidate? Or is there a stricter standard to be met?

The more I think about it, the less substantial it seems.

There's lying, of course, which we should all deplore. Campaigns should deplore it too, for the truth almost always comes out, after which the lie becomes a net loss for the liar. But what of absolutely true statements that look just horrible for the subject candidate, yet are objectively verifiable and are made within the proper context?

I can't see anything wrong with that. Can you?

Consider all the following statements:

1. John Kerry, when detailed to Vietnam, opted for duty on the Swift Boats, which of all naval forces were the least exposed to actual hazard at that time.
   
2. John Kerry was discharged from his Vietnam tour of duty nearly eight months early, after receiving three light, easily treated, non-disabling wounds. For one of those wounds, Kerry's commanding officer refused to submit the Purple Heart application, so Kerry submitted it himself.
   
3. John Kerry has accused American soldiers and sailors in Vietnam of jointly and severally inflicting cruel and indefensible atrocities upon the Vietnamese, with the knowledge and approval of their command authorities.
   
4. John Kerry, immediately after the "Winter Soldier" hearings before Congress in which he made the abovementioned allegations of American war crimes, started running for a Congressional seat himself.
   
5. John Kerry was part of a group that pondered the assassination of certain United States Senators, and may have had continued contact with that group after the possibility was addressed.
   
6. John Kerry, while still an officer in the United States Naval Reserve, met and collaborated with Communist North Vietnamese officials, to the detriment of the American war effort and the ultimate calamity of the South Vietnamese.
   
7. John Kerry, as Lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts, wrote a policy for that state that refused all participation in federally authored preparedness measures for a nuclear war.
   
8. John Kerry, as United States Senator from Massachusetts, voted against the overwhelming preponderance of defense appropriations that came before him during his twenty-year tenure, including the $87 billion supplemental funding for Iraqi pacification and reconstruction.
   
9. John Kerry, as United States Senator from Massachusetts, collaborated in the concealment of evidence that the North Vietnamese had retained custody of an unknown number of American prisoners of war.
   
10. John Kerry, as United States Senator from Massachusetts named to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, missed 76% of all the meetings of that committee.
    
11. John Kerry, as United States Senator from Massachusetts, has consistently taken the most extreme anti-gun positions of any senator, and his votes have conformed to those positions.
    
12. John Kerry, as United States Senator from Massachusetts, has missed the overwhelming majority of Senate votes that have occurred over the past year, but is still receiving his full salary as a senator.
    

Is mentioning such things negative campaigning? Isn't it information the public ought to have about a man who seeks the office of president?

Between lies and substantiated factual allegations, we can find a broad gray zone, consisting of unsubstantiated allegations, raw opinion, emotional slurs, and other strokes. Some of these would qualify as negative campaigning by my lights.

What about yours?

If You Watch Closely, They Can’t Fool You

President Bush, responding to the demands of the Kerry for President campaign to speak against the ads being run by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, did so quite explicitly, then made a statement that saw the Kerry forces and raised them steeply.

By proclaiming that all "527" ads ought to stop, Dubya has put a very sharp sword's point against the Kerry campaign's chest. A great part of Democratic political advertising is conducted by unregulated "527" groups such as MoveOn.org, which have aired genuinely slanderous ads against President Bush, including one that compared him to Hitler. More, those groups have about fifty times the funding of the Swifties.

So far, the only response that the Kerry forces have made came from vice-presidential candidate Senator John Edwards:

"The moment of truth came and went, and the President still couldn't bring himself to do the right thing."

Are these liars and whiners really the best the Democrats can do? It is to laugh.

Monday, August 23, 2004

Back In The Early Cretinaceous Period, When A Byte Only Had Two Bits…

...there was this itty-bitty operating system for PCs, just a toy, really, called MS-DOS. Despite the name, it didn't originate with Microsoft. It had been created by a company called Seattle Computer Products, and was originally known as 86-DOS. Microsoft bought all rights to it, and made it the foundation of the most successful computer industry partnership of all time: its partnership with IBM.

But MS-DOS was too limited for people who wanted to use their PCs for serious work. Besides, the GUI revolution was starting to roll, on account of Apple's having stolen the idea from Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center. So Microsoft went to work on an MS-DOS extension called Windows, which would bring some GUI goodness to the PC while maintaining the MS-DOS environment for programs that had to have it -- which, at that time, was all of them.

Just about from the instant Windows made its bow, Microsoft was under the gun. Yes, MS-DOS was still there underneath. In theory, Microsoft had maintained backward compatibility. But there were things older MS-DOS application programs often did that would give the MS-DOS-plus-Windows combination weeping hysterics. Most of them had to do with the exploitation of direct hardware access, which Windows could not abide.

Time and change happeneth to us all, and in 1995, Microsoft announced Windows 95, the first of its GUI / multitasking systems to provide a virtual-memory environment -- "virtual" meaning "if you won't keep your greasy fingers off the hardware out of ordinary good citizenship, we'll simply pull it out of your reach." It's the only solution to software upgradability and portability, and it had been much needed. But because thousands of MS-DOS-reliant programs were still out there, Windows 95 still had to provide an MS-DOS emulation environment, complete with an emulation of the physical hardware controls in an old-style, MS-DOS-only PC.

If you've been diddling computers for any length of time, you know what came next: still more complaints about old MS-DOS programs that wouldn't run under Windows 95. Microsoft has labored mightily to answer the complaints in this domain, and has achieved som moderately large miracles in doing so, but the only thing that's brought quietus to the subject has been the obsolescence of nearly every MS-DOS program ever written.

Peace at last, peace at last...but what's this? The Service Pack 2 upgrade to Windows XP is here, and compatibility problems are rearing their ugly heads again -- because of the firewalling and enhanced security provisions in the Service Pack, the things that make it most urgent. It seems that there are some popular applications out there that can't abide a firewall.

We're talking about an upgrade that, conservatively, Microsoft has spent $100 million to prepare, and will be distributing for free. But the carpers are already massing, ready to bad-mouth Microsoft to anyone who'll listen, because their freeware communications utilities no longer work.

If I ever go back to commercial software development -- not likely -- I'm going to carry the world's sharpest sword wherever I go. The one Uma Thurman wielded in Kill Bill should be about right. Anyone who even breathes the word "compatibility" will have his head lopped off.

All part of the service, Ma'am.

It’s Obvious, Once You Understand It

From a conversation with an excessively meticulous subordinate:

He: I'm worried about this design specification.

I: Why? I know you haven't done one before, but they're not that hard.

He: What if I get it wrong?

I: Then you'll go back and correct it later. After all, who's doing the program, you or someone else?

He: Well, I am, but if I describe the design wrong, the program will be wrong!

I: Are you telling me that if you lay out a design, then discover during implementation that it can't be made to work, you'll stick to the faulty design just because you put it into a written design specification?

He: Uh, no, I guess I wouldn't.

I: Then are you telling me that you'd finish the program and get it right, but never go back to the design spec and refresh it with the corrected design?

He: No, I'd correct it.

I: Then what's the problem? A design spec is a planning document. Up front, it's used to recognize and cope with necessary changes. After the program's done, it's a guide for maintenance personnel. It's not holy writ.

He: That's all it's used for?

I: Cross my heart.

He: Oh.

The Internet Is Dying

...because of "spam."

I have a relatively crude technique for dealing with spam: everything sent to the Palace, with the exception of the mandatory web master account, is automatically forwarded to a free Yahoo account. Normally I check that Yahoo account once each day and delete everything in it.

Well, over the weekend, I neglected to do that. So this morning, I expected to find more spam than usual. I wasn't disappointed: 12,111 spam E-mails awaited me. It took nearly an hour to clear them all.

It's quite clear that this cannot be permitted to continue. I'd be willing to accept a fee of a cent or two per E-mail transmitted, if it would put an end to this.

Thoughts?