Death Cat's a Cutie

Oscar the cat knows when you're going to die.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Consider the Alternative

I must agree with Josh Marshall--the only possible explanation for the fact that Alberto Gonzales remains Attorney General of the United States is that, were he to resign, his successor would surely feel compelled to do at least a minimal amount of investigating, which would inevitably lead to prosecution of numerous high-level administration officials, and the president is not about to let that happen.

In other words, the President George W. Bush is choosing to allow the ongoing public exposure of the fact that the Justice Department of the United States, during his presidency, has become a gross, exaggerated caricature of incompetence and corruption because the alternative would be something even more embarrassing.

At this point no other explanation makes sense.

“an azimuthally equidistant projection showing all the countries in one circle,” flanked by crossed olive branches

It had never occurred to me to wonder who was originally responsible for that logo we've all seen thousands of times. Now, thanks to Michael Bierut at Design Observer, I know his name: Donal McLaughlin.

In other news, 15% of Americans think the voices in their heads have a liberal bias.

So this morning I had a look at Instapundit (don't ask me why I keep doing it) and noted that Mr. Reynolds was shocked (shocked!) to see the findings of a recent Rasmussen poll:

By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.

That proves it, right? There really is widespread liberal bias in the media!

But wait a minute. How good are people at evaluating bias in news reports? Do these numbers really tell us anything meaningful about actual bias in the news media, or does this tell us more about the ideological lenses through which people view the media? Here is what Rasmussen Reports has to say about that:

Not surprisingly, there are huge partisan and ideological differences in the data. For example, among self-identified liberals, all of the media outlets are believed to have some net bias in favor of conservatives. . . .

Conservatives throughout the nation see things entirely differently. Sixty-two percent (62%) see a liberal bias at the major broadcast networks and 55% say the same about CNN.

So, believe it or not, biased people tend to see evidence of bias in the media! Conservatives and liberals can look at the very same news networks, and liberals will see conservative bias, and conservatives will see liberal bias! Astounding!

Is there bias in the media? Of course there is. Anyone who looks hard enough can find evidence of both liberal bias and conservative bias. But the really sad thing is not that there is bias in the news media, but that we are slowly but surely losing our sense of what unbiased journalism is even supposed to look like. We have been led to believe that balanced journalism means giving liberals and conservatives equal time to try to spin the facts their way. If we add the 39% who see liberal bias to the 20% who see conservative bias, we learn that 59% of Americans see pervasive bias of some sort the news media. And once we see begin to distrust the media, we are less likely to believe actual facts that might contradict our political beliefs; we can just dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable as yet more evidence of bias. We will have forgotten that somewhere out there there are actual facts, facts that are not biased one way or the other, just plain old facts.

There is one more thing worth noting in the Rasmussen poll results, something truly astounding.

There is one major exception to the belief that media outlets have a liberal bias—Fox News. Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans say it has a bias that favors conservatives while 15% say it has a liberal bias.

Yes, you read that right. Fifteen percent of Americans believe Fox News is biased in favor of liberals.

Objectivity is dead.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

President Bush says, "I strongly believe that democracy will trump totalitarianism every time."



That's a fine thing to believe, but how is that relevant to the current situation in Iraq? Yes, our democracy made mincemeat of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime, but that regime is long gone. What replaced it was neither democracy nor totalitarianism, but chaos. The current situation is, according to the best information I can gather, a free-for-all. Whoever has the most firepower in a given locale controls it, but only for as long as they remain. The U.S. could arguably keep the peace in any given Baghdad city block indefinitely by keeping a sufficient number of troops there, but our troops can't be everywhere at once, and by all accounts chaos returns the moment they move on to the next block.

I know that Bush would like to frame the issue in terms of fighting totalitarianism, or "Islamofascism," but that's not what we're fighting in Iraq. We're fighting anybody and everybody with a gun or an improvised explosive who feels like taking a shot at us. And Bush consistently fails to give us any indication that he understands this. He wants to fight totalitarianism, and while a totalitarian regime may eventually emerge from the chaos of Iraq, there is no totalitarian regime there today. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we must deal with the enemy we have, not the enemy we wish we had.

Rock may beat Scissors every time, but we're not fighting Scissors right now.

As seen from the perspective of those who speak "crooked head."

Via Haydesigner at Chaos Digest: "A very lengthy, but absolutely fascinating, article about a very isolated laguage from The New Yorker." Well worth taking the time to read.

John Leonard

I once received an email from "spam" with a subject of "subject". Some people are not even trying.

The email had an attachment, a .gif file named "return nuclear". My antivirus software tells me there's nothing nasty in there, but I'm still afraid to open it.

The text of the email was gibberish, of course, and repetitive gibberish at that. However, as is frequently the case with spam email gibberish, some of it was rather amusing. The best bits were as follows:

To return nuclear gay marriage among ballot? Leader, install, new pm in, two weeks, ustop news.
Hosts poop, says nkorea, agrees to return.
Spam bots you need javascript enabled view it send.
Is being protected spam bots you!
Nkorea, agrees to return nuclear gay. Topnewscom contact top module empty main feeds latest newsmiami.
Leader install new pm in two. Issuesnew judge, expels defiant saddam from, genocide trialthai. Send, an enter your name. Spam bots you, need javascript enabled, view.
Ballot, issuesnew judge expels defiant. An enter your name message subject back copy. Nkorea agrees to return.
Install new pm, in two, weeks ustop. Enabled view it, send an, enter?

Several thoughts, with varying degrees of relatedness:

• The gibberish texts of spam emails often resemble the writings of William S. Burroughs, particularly those he produced using the cut-up techniques he developed with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. For those with any interest in the topic, I recommend reading Burroughs' essay "It Belongs to the Cucumbers," which can be found in his book The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. In that essay, Burroughs noted similarities between the writings produced by such techniques, texts transcribed by Konstantin Raudive of so-called "electronic voice phenomena," dream speech, words spoken in delirium, and the speech patterns of those suffering from schizophrenia. Had Burroughs lived to see the age of spam emails, I wonder what he would have thought of them.
  
• Spam gibberish also resembles poorly-translated text ("Somebody set up us the bomb!") and the jokes of Yakov Smirnoff ("In Soviet Russia, protected spam bots you!")
  
• It occurs to me that spam emails would be an excellent way for people to pass coded messages to each other. One could send a message that looks like spam to thousands of recipients, but only the intended recipient (for example, a deep-cover CIA agent stationed in Berzerkistan) knows to look within for his instructions ("Install new pm, in two, weeks ustop.") to topple the government and make sure a new, US-friendly prime minister takes office within two weeks. Or maybe the message carries instructions destined for a terrorist cell. Who would suspect?--It's just spam. And even if the authorities were wise to this technique, with thousands or millions of spam emails being sent each day, and with thousands or millions of people receiving each spam email, distinguishing the code-disguised-as-spam email from all the others and then finding the one recipient the email was actually intended for would be a nearly impossible task for any counterespionage agency or an anti-terrorism task force.
  
• If anyone from the CIA, FBI, NSA, or any of the other three-letter agencies is reading this: Dudes, I just thought up that last bit on my own. I'm not a terrorist or an agent of any kind, so don't go disappearing me. If you want to round up the spammers and indefinitely detain them in one of your secret prisons, though, that's fine by me.
  
• Spam emails could also be messages from dead souls drifting in limbo. I wonder what Raudive would say about this.
  
• An enterprising con-artist could probably make a nice chunk of change by convincing the public that spam emails really are messages from dead relatives. I can imagine the TV ads now: "Is there an email from beyond the grave in your inbox? Forward your spam emails to Miss Cleo! She will interpret the messages from your loved ones in the afterlife! Only $3.99 for the first five emails!"
  
• I hereby coin the term "spamomancy" to describe divination, the telling of fortunes, or communing with the dead by use of spam emails.
  
• This blog has featured posts on many diverse topics since its birth nearly two years ago. Increasingly, this has resulted in people arriving at this blog via Google search results that happened to pick up on an odd phrase or other that was used here only once. This post will surely do much to contribute to this trend.

Is there an entomologist in the house?

Despite having a cockroach as an occasional coblogger, I know very little about insects. So I need your help in identifying the pesky pests that staged a large-scale invasion of my house yesterday. Do you know what these are? How do I get rid of them and discourage them from returning?

Yet more evidence of pro-dog, anti-human media bias.

New York Sun editor John B. Bogart once said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."

Everybody knows that al Qaeda is made up of bad guys. Really bad guys. Guys who hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, killing thousands of innocent people. Guys who recruit young men and women to be suicide bombers. Guys who kidnap people, gruesomely behead them, and videotape the whole thing just so they can show the whole world how bad they are. There is ample reporting in the media of the evil things that they do. The fact that al Qaeda is made up of evil people who commit evil acts is, frankly, not news.

So consider the case of those who allege that some news organizations are biased because they didn't give sufficient coverage to a particular piece of evidence of how utterly evil al Qaeda is, and, in the same breath, imply that the media overhyped evidence of torture of prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Such people are morons.

I'll try to make this as simple as possible, for those who still don't understand.

When the people who are supposed to be the good guys do bad things, it is something that we the people need to know about. Reporting such things is not evidence of bias. It is just reporting, plain and simple. Such stories naturally get a lot of attention because people expect the good guys to act like good guys, and we are shocked and disappointed when they don't.

When bad people do bad things, that's newsworthy too. But when we read repeated accounts of the same bad people doing yet more bad things, we might be saddened, but we are not shocked or disappointed, because it is not so surprising to learn that people we already know to be bad have done bad things yet again. And when the news is already full of stories about the same group of bad people doing bad things over and over again, the failure to report on any particular horrible act is not evidence of bias. To allege otherwise not only reveals your own bias, it also reveals you to be an idiot. So you should stop making such foolish allegations, for your own good.

The Moustache of Understanding

Bask in its insane glory.

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"

You don't think, you know, we care about our open society? You think, this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?

Well, Suck. On. This.

Okay.

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.

(The quoted section starts about 5 minutes in.)

Via Atrios.