Yet Another Miss For the Media

As I have stated many time before, I really despise how the line between entertainment and news has blurred. In the past couple years I have even felt that tabloid trash and actual news have basically become the same thing. It simply amazes me the trash that makes it “above the fold” when other much more important stories are floating around.

Today I jump on my news feed and I have to scroll for sometime to get past all this Miley Cyrus crap to find anything worth reading. Even funnier is the shear number of posts analyzing a damn picture of a 15 year old as if they are surprised. Am I surprised that a teen girl is being sexualized? No, not one bit its been going on forever. America is like a teenage boy whos ashamed of his porn stash. This country is so pent up on pretending we are a non-sexual wholesome country it pathetic. If bloggers and parents really were concerned about this picture they would boycott or publicly burn the magazine…not give it millions of dollars worth of free exposure.

When I see something I think is wrong I do my part to minimize it, it may have no affect but thats not the point. Case and point, my sudden laps in election coverage. Its not by accident, it is very intentional. In the couple of months leading up to the Pennsylvania primary where content went out of the campaign completely and was replaced by total b/s posturing and negative ads I stopped paying attention to the whole process. Heck I most likely won’t come back to it now until the general election.

For me the same goes with entertainment news, I ignore it nearly completely except what I see in passing. I also almost never write about it. Generally its all trash, the lowest form of news. Yet people continue to watch TMZ,Extra, ET, and buy into all these stories about the “stars” shit-show lives. I don’t care about the actors, all I care about is their products. By products I mean movies, and TV shows..not babies, sex tapes, pictorials, or what they had for dinner. I don’t care if George Cloony is smoking crack with Kim-Jong il while fucking a baby cow, all I care is that his movie Michael Clayton was awesome. If they break a law let the cops take care of them and keep it off my TV unless they do something important like shoot George Bush. Now theres a headline I would care about “Hannah Montana Shoots the President of the Free World!”

While everyone was paying attention to yet another crap Hollywood story the Supreme Court backed the administrations attempts to role back Civil liberties in the name of “security”. Ya, clearly we have to worry about Osama coming out of Pakistan and voting, As if Real ID wasn’t bad enough.

Was that last part cryptic? Ya, thats because your not paying attention to what really matters.

I call them as i see them, and the bottom line is you are what you read. Information is the brains fuel and if all your reading is trash; that makes you trash too.

The people that consume entertainment “news” are more of a problem then the stories themselves especially in our tech-savvy society where things can so easily be perpetuated.

I’m tired of this low-brow crap snowballing because Americans would rather watch and talk about a train wreck than enrich themselves and their country.

end rant

A Lesson For Microsoft

History really does move in circles, and I really can’t wait for the current one to be over. Vista has been out for about a year now and I’ve already repaired more Vista systems than XP systems in that short time, which is nuts if you take into consideration that XP has been around since 2002.

Vista runs terribly on really good hardware, its patches are full of holes, and in general it is a giant pain to use. Consumers are pissed, IT is pissed, hardware makers are pissed, and as a former computer repair guy that likes to still help people out I refuse to fix these systems pro-bono just because of the effort that goes into it. But this isnt the first time I’ve been in this place with a Microsoft product, no sir!

Windows Vista is Widows ME redux! The driver problems, hardware incompatibility, the forced upgrade of perfectly good apps, and terrible support/patches were the same issues that I faced with ME. Interestingly Microsoft lost me as a customer with Windows 98se and I haven’t owned a new computer with Windows on it since then; though i have had some legacy systems for short stints from time to time. Really the only thing that has kept me in the Windows loop over the years are the lines of people that bring their systems to me to fix.

What i’m getting at here is that Microsoft better get off its ass right quick to retool Vista, strip it down and make it more reliable or they are going to loose lots of customers like they did in the horrible year that ME was on the shelves.

Another idea I have played with in my head is the idea of “Windows XP Service Pack 4″ where they take all the niceties  they were trying to push in Vista, build them into a upgrade on top of XP, and then just shit can Vista all together.

Of course my ideas are based on logic so I’m guessing that Microsoft will create a whole new generation of computer users like me that would rather fire up a Tandy then own a modern Windows system because logic is one of those things not in the Microsoft philosophy.

end rant

Would The App thats Actually Useful Please Stand Up?!

For the past year Web 2.0 has really taken center stag, and there are sooo many apps out there, but I ask you…is that a good thing?

I’m actually wishing we could go back to the days where the only ways people could communicate online was email and chat. With all the social networking utilities, and apps offered by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others it makes what used to be easy terribly hard.

Now instead of one email account I have 3, instead of one chat client I have 2 (and thats only because I tell friends on other networks to bite me), Instead of having just a basic webpage or blog (think Anglefire, Geocities, and Liverjournal) I have a Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Wordress, Flickr, and then like 5 others I never check unless I get an email notification. Id also like to note that I have the least number of total accounts than anyone in my social circle of 20-somethings.

With all those accounts youd think my web-life would be a breeze, it’s not. My friends are divided into three camps on any one social networking subdivision. For pictures there is the Flckr group, the Photobucket group, and then everyone else. For networking my friends are spread out like this: 40% on Myspace, 40% on Facebook, and 10% spread out on networking like Livejournal and others. Then with newer stuff like news sharing, bookmark sharing, document/webpage collaboration everyone is all over the map….which makes it hard to share and collaborate… which is kind of the point of the applications in the first place.

For me its all very daunting and hard to manage…never mind keep up with, and regularly contribute to. I put the blame for this squarely in the lap of the ISO and non-web 2.0 software makers.

Plain and simple we need standards and applications to go with those standards, or as I lovingly call it the “Pidgin Effect”. Like with office documents there needs to be one or two stardards that most major applications can use simultaneously. The future is in aggregation.

Instead of logging into both Yahoo and Aim I use Pidgin and do both in one screen, it can do more but thats the last thing I need. Why can’t that be done for Social Networking? Why can’t I log into one screen and manage the same content over multiple pages? I can do it to read information with my news aggregator, why not the other way around?

There are a couple promising pieces of software out there but I’ve found that due to lack of standards I find myself saying “they do everything but…”. I look at computer based apps like Flock, and web based apps like Plaxo and have hope for the future…but no cure for the headache I have right now.

Gaza needs a Wal-Mart

The latest aggression by Israel toward Gaza is simply deplorable. The more I read about Israel and write about it, the more I dislike the countries policies. It makes me further question the need to support them, because clearly they are pretty good at keeping people down without our vast knowledge on the topic.

As long as people in Gaza are desperate they will look to people (like Hamas) for swift action. Any road map to peace needs to give Palestinians a reason to have hope. Simply put: they need a Wal-Mart, and no I’m not joking.

One of the best ways to improve the situation is to give the people steady regular access to supplies, as recent events prove. Further an injection of jobs certainly wouldn’t hurt either. This can’t happen at the local level because at one point or another Israel will close the boarders preventing supplies coming though killing any business upstarts. But, if a western company (like Wal-Mart) came in with its corporate lobbying power I’m sure some deal could be worked out.

If people had jobs, necessary supplies, and some consumer goods confidence would go up which would hurt support for extremists. Bottom line: if you cage people like dogs without food and other supplies, they will act just like a hungry cornered dog. You get more with a bag of groceries, then you do a tighter cage.

I’m Proud!…of Kucinich?! A Message To All Long Shots.

Being a Libertarian i know what its like to support a long shot. Non-mainstream candidates often have a very hard up hill battle. Just getting on the ballot is a hard task and can often suck up the majority of the campaigns meager funds. Then there is the advertising, as well as building a good support network of campaign offices. Really its not easy if you choose to stand for a higher moral fiber by not selling your soul to PAC’s, special interests, and lobbyists. All that work and you’ll be lucky if you pull the 5% needed to get some extra funds from the government next time around. Really the only one to do it in modern times was Ross Perot, and heck he is a very, very rich man.

Due to these insurmountable odds I can never fathom why the networks and major campaigns always play bully. They exclude candidates even during the primary debates, do everything to make it hard to get on the ballot, and then poke fun at any even remotely quirky ideas the long shot guy has had like some kind of child. As if some of their ideas aren’t totally off the wall too, they can just afford the air time to spin it so people will believe their stupidity is really intelligence.

Now I know what everyone is thinking: Nader. Nader split the vote in 2000 which caused a long shot candidate to ruin the election for Al Gore. In that one instance David beat Goliath and we all got screwed….right?…WRONG. In 2000 Nader failed to even pull a FRACTION of a percentage point, for a whopping total of popular votes less then 3 million FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY, and NO electoral votes. Now seriously people if your running for office in an election that covers the entire U.S. and you winning hinges on less than three million popular votes…pretty much you’ve failed to deliver a message worth a damn. In 2000 (and 2004 for that matter) we were forced to pick between dumb and dumber and many choice option C, and thats their right.

I do have a big complaint about long shot campaigns though, they actually think they can behave like a front runner and expect everything to be handed to them. Whats worse they don’t turn lemons to lemon aid and stand up for them selves. They get excluded and they whine about it instead.

If your a little guy and your backed up against a wall you have two choices: 1) Stand by and get eaten by the wolves wasting your time and the time of your supporter, or 2) Draw a line in the sand and fight like a bastard. Well the Vegan from Ohio has chosen the later and im hoping that others are taking notes!

After being invited to a debate in Nevada that was then rescinded the same week, Dennis Kucinich threw down the gauntlet and sued….and WON. Just like in NH where he demanded a recount he has continued to fight back in the name of the little guy.

In many ways everyone that has ever supported a long shot should give Dennis a big thank you because hes showing us how it should be, and has to be done to get noticed in a land where money talks and ideals are worthless.

Whats more in the notion of “turning lemons in to lemon aid” I propose that all the long shots running Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Gravel do a bit of excluding themselves and have a series of debates to highlight why America should give a damn about their campaigns. I think it will make the front runners crap themselves, and that alone is worth it.

Comments

Every now and then i receive a comment that is totally not worth posting, but at the same time i feel the need to write a post about it. Now i receive several comments daily but because this is my blog not all of them make it up here. When deciding if a comment makes the muster i ask myself three questions:

1. Does the comment directly engage the post.

2. Is the comment something that will add to the blog or is it just a statement that can’t be engaged.

3. Is it totally out there b/s?

Now because its election season there are certain candidates i only write about when absolutely necessary because I know they have a legion of crazy people for supporters that have some pretty nutty ideas. One such person is Mike Gravel and since he is really the only one left that has supporters that leave ridiculous comments this is an open letter to them:

Dear Mike Gravel Supports,

I understand that your guy is having a rough go of it and is being excluded, I think that just bites. I also understand that he never really had a strong campaign to begin with and that most of the media including bloggers are totally ignoring him.

Here at the WingWidget I try to cover things from all angles so i feel that any candidate that is running a nation wide campaign deserves press time including Gravel. There for i say to you his supporters as long as he is on the ballot i will cover him, he may not be a huge part of the article but he will be in it. I do have a request though.

Please stop the comments about “9/11 truth” and if your going to post links please explain them and your motivations for posting them in the first place. The whole 9/11 conspiracy thing is a fringe belief that i do not subscribe to and will not support. Also if you are supporting a fringe candidate like Gravel having mindless links that most people wont click on does not help your guys chances. Instead i invite you to write comments that are empowered, on point, and really highlight WHY anyone should give Mike Gravel the time of day this late in the game.

Thank You,

Your Red Eyed Insomniac

Screw the Writers Guild

For the most part I buy into the notion that we “should shoot” our TV’s. I think its all mindless dribble and humanity would be better off without it. That said i have always been a huge fan of the late night talk scene. My favorite show is Late Night with Conan O’Brien, but I do occasionally catch the other fair offered up by Leno, Ferguson, and even Carson Daly. Really the only one I won’t watch is Letterman because he hasn’t changed at all since his days hosting Late Night, and is largely a snore to watch. So as you can imagine my late night lifestyle has sucked because of the Writers Guild Strike.

Well that all ended last week when all my favorite hosts to the world of insomniacs returned. I think ive really missed them too because Im going out of my way to make sure i can watch all of the shows by showing up to work early with my sling box in tow. I have noticed that the shows have changed without writers too, but unlike most of the crazy writers out there i think its for the better.

The shows are less predictable, and a lot more funny. Scripted jokes lost their appeal years ago, these past few days have felt like a begining of a new golden age to me. Honestly having to fly without a net has forced the late night hosts to use improv and other real talents. Even better it seem the quality of the guests has gotten better too, it might have to do with the fact that there is more time for the guests thats not filled up with dumb scripted characters now.

In closing I think the late show producers should say “screw you Writers Guild, we have a better product without you” and just fly without a net from here on out.

Much Ado About Nothing

Today I did something I almost never do, watch the news on an actual TV. It didn’t seem to matter what station I was on they were all talking about the same thing: the New Hampshire Primary.

I mean this does make sense since it happens in less then eight hours, but what i was surprised at was the use of polls. I have never put much stock in them and still don’t but it seemed like every station had their own poll to throw around.

Now, the reason i never put much stock in political polls is simply the sheer number of them, with every interest group and news outlet armed with their own poll they do nothing but confuse the electorate. Indeed most voters would be better off to ignore them entirely.

Tonight on one station i believe it was New England Cable News had Obama leading Clinton by 9 points, and then on MSNBC it was Obama by 20 points, AND now CNN is saying their neck and neck. Its a similar story on the republican side between Romney and McCain, though apparently Guliani is closing the gap. See how confusing it all is ?

Now when i was in college one of my concentrations was Sociology which a major portion of the work is taking and analyzing polls and surveys. I think this is another reason why I don’t like political polls because i know that they meet no standard of accuracy. LOL I remember i had this one teacher that would ostracize anyone that even considered using a Gallop poll in their work.

Tonight i found it so amusing that NBC had a poll for the Democrats that they talked about for like 10 minutes that had Obama 17 points ahead of Clinton. At the end of the program they announced the numbers for the poll…they had only surveyed 349 people…and then had the audacity to say their poll had a 5% margin of error. A 5% margin of error for what? They only surveyed 349 people, any idiot knows you need at least three times that to even come close to a useful sample. I am also sure that they selected voters from all over NH from every age group, evenly divided for sex, and that every race, religion, and sexual orientation were represented in proportional numbers to NH’s total population…… riiight.

Taking a poll is very hard work and can’t be slapped together in a day. Your best bet on New Hampshire is to wait for the only poll that matters…the Exit Poll.

The Prime Example Why States Rights Matter

States Rights have often been the rallying cry for Republicans, but as the years have passed the number of asterisks after that belief have grown. The latest attack by this Republican administration on this tried and true belief is courtesy of the EPA.

On Wednesday the EPA had suit filed against it by a coalition of states led by California because the Nixon era agency denied a waver for California (and victoriously any state that has adopted the California emissions standards, which currently is totaling 14 states) to have tougher emissions standards than the rest of the country. This is the first time ever the EPA has denied such a waver.

This is simply the most ridiculous thing Ive seen in some time. The fact that the EPA denied more stringent standards to several states under a clause of the Clean Air Act seems to just stink to me. The fact that the administration is actually listening to the auto makers just shows how lacking in smarts Bush&co really are.

U.S. Auto makers are getting their collective ass kicked buy foreign companies because they have massively under estimated how important fuel efficiency is to Americans. Now that Ford has been deposed by Toyota for the number two sales spot in the U.S. market and seems to be posed to over take GM as well it makes you wonder how long it will take Washington to realize Detroit is broken and that they should stop listening to them.

In the Consumer Reports’ Annual Car Owner Satisfaction Survey domestics got knocked around like a feather weight in the ring with Mike Tyson. Of the satisfied portion of the survey Toyota dominated and domestics got only a piddly 7 out of 39 models on the list, heck even the Korean cars are starting to make the list before domestics. But dont worry plenty of demostics made the survey! 20 of the 22 least satisfied owners had domestic cars…oh wait never mind. But the key here is that the two top cars were the Prius and a BMW both of which have excellent gas mileage.

States see that fuel efficiency is important for their people in their daily lives, and are trying to do something about it. The California emissions standards are directed at the global warming crowd but they do much more than the Fed is doing to promote fuel independence which is why other states are jumping on board with it. Fuel efficiency is also the reason Toyota is rising to the top very fast. The bottom line is that the California emissions standards represent the serious kick in the pants Detroit needs in order to remain relevant for years to come.

Third Party Rant

I received a comment I just had to respond to in a separate post. It goes like this and is in response to my “Why Do People Think I Care about The Primaries” post in which I talked about my Libertarian Party alliance.

“A Libertarian may be able to vote for local candidates and may occasionally have a vote in congress but by not supporting a main party you will basically be throwing your votes to the wind and in some cases like one I remember a few years back, a third party can help get a lousy candidate elected by splitting the vote. Do we really want that to happen again? Research the candidates. We all have an opinion and the right to support the candidate we feel is best but please before you make a decision do research on every candidate and look at them at all angles. Do not just trust main stream news media to pick your candidate or give you all of the information. We have a problem with fighting among congress right now. We need to elect a candidate that is most likely to bring the parties together and get congress working together.”

 

I can’t even begin to describe how totally illogical these kind of comments really are. If it were true that by some divine right we could only have two major parties our country would look a lot different today.

First we would still be choosing between the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist, and none of our modern parties would have ever existed….because they used to be a third party at one point or another. The list of successful “alternative” parties goes on and on! There were the Wigs and the Democratic/Republicans both of which held the presidency on more then one occasion. Even those parties/groups that failed to take the government had enough power to change the course of this country. Groups like the Anti-Masonic, Progressive, Temperance Movement, Civil rights, and of course the Reformists of the 1990’s… all made a huge impact on how this country has evolved. Some even forced the “main stream” parties to drastically change their stance to remain relevant. Indeed without third parties our major political realignments would have never happened.

Third Parties being popular are a giant red flag that the main parties have failed their people. They show discontent and anger. Sometimes like in the years of the Great Depression the main parties listen and they make changes, don’t forget that the idea of Democrats being liberal is less then 80 years old. Also sometimes the discontent makes a multitude of third parties that coalesce into a single new entity, Thats how we got the GOP less then 150 years ago or so. The GOP is “The Party of Lincoln” and started out as a liberal party that housed discontents from all over the the political map, but most of its power came from the several third parties and party remnants that it absorbed.

So now we come back to this comment. First and fore most I am not “throwing my vote to the wind”, I’m sending a message. I want the main parties to fall on their face, I want people like Bush to get elected so they can show how backward our political system really is, and most of all I WANT THEIR TO BE A SPOILER because I don’t want either “side” in power. Honestly does anyone really think Al Gore or John Kerry are less incompetent then Bush? I am not going to vote out of fear of who might win, but rather vote my conscience and know that I stayed true to myself. Most Americans lack the moral fiber to make the distinction, and it would make the founders sick.

Now, as far as I’m concerned there are really only two reasons someone makes the “spoiler” or “split vote” comment:

1. It’s a tactic by a main party loyalist to scare people into voting for their substandard candidate, it’s intentional, and in the case of Ralph Nader it worked. But no one that jumped ship on Nader thought twice about how they were being manipulated by the dim witted Al Gore camp because they needed votes due to the fact that he ran a horrible campaign, debated like and undergrad and a State College and not the Vice President, and of course made the fatal mistake of under estimating his opponent. Al Gore deserved to lose, and shame on the people that bought in to this tactic. Politics is a dark art and you have to be ready to stand your ground when spells like this one are cast.

2. The person saying it has no clue what they are talking about and is just repeating the programed responses that parents, the church, friends, coworkers, and of course the media ingrained into their head. For these people please wake up and think for yourself for once, or at least stop voting.

I actually have respect for the first group because being able to control peoples decisions with nothing more then rhetoric and your wits is just an amazing feet.

Finally the whole “Research the candidates. We all have an opinion and the right to support the candidate we feel is best but please before you make a decision do research on every candidate and look at them at all angles.” part of the comment I will say this:

Actually I have researched the candidates and because of my beliefs I am very disappointed, with the exception of Ron Paul. Now if Ron Paul by some miracle gets nominated I’ll vote for him, but I’m not jumping parties to make it happen. Further, I’m a Libertarian there fore no big government Democrat is ever going to get my vote. Democrats don’t even give voice to Libertarian issues, especially the ones running this cycle. As for the GOP my party EXISTS do to discontent within the GOP ranks. Back in the 70’s what we now call “Reagan Republicans” started courting the religious right and became took over the party. Along the way they abandoned the ideas of Small Government, States Rights, Individual Liberty, Low Taxes, and a Notion of non-interference in foreign governments….oh and they also used followed the Constitution. Sure they still talk about these things, but they do something much different once they are in office. Really Ron Paul (a Former Libertarian that was our party nominee in 198 is the last throws of real conservatism left in the GOP, a party now populated by Bible Thumping Freaks, Neo-cons, and Fascists. Thats why I think It’s time to let someone new try their hand, sticking with the status quo only guarantees failure.