Last night on Tim Russert (CNBC) Tucker Carlson and Al Franken battled it out. If you get a chance, look for it as they repeat the show regularly. It really highlights the difference between American conservatives and liberals.

I would argue most people on the left would certainly have no problem having Franken be one of their champions. He's quite intelligent, witty, full of "facts", and at least on paper, makes seemingly compelling arguments. I would even go as far as to say that those on the left, who watched the show, would argue that Franken more than held his own against the young conservative, Tucker Carlson.

Similarly, those of us who fall right of center would probably have no problem with Tucker Carlson generally representing the right's point of view. He's articulate, witty, intelligent, and decent.

Which is why the on-air battle, which became surprisingly belligerent, between Tucker and Franken was so revealing of both sides.

Here are some of the bullet points of that engagement:

• In Franken's universe, liberals make mistakes, conservatives lie. That is, conservatives never misspeak or commit an error. Instead, those things are considered lies. If it turns out that there were no significant WMD in Iraq, it isn't that Bush/Blair were mistaken, no, they "lied to us" about the war. By contrast, the left, who loudly claimed that hundreds of thousands of people would die in an invasion weren't lying, they were mistaken. When challenged on this and asked for names of dishonest liberals he has to go back to LBJ. LBJ? Hello?? Clinton? Franken just dismissed that as a sex thing apparently forgetting the various justifications for attacking countries during the Lewinski scandal (remember the Sudan "chemical weapons plant" that got bombed which turned out to be nothing of the sort, apparently Franken's memory on liberal "mistakes" is pretty short term). It was on this point Tucker scored his home run. By demonstrating the tendency of Franken and people like him to paint mistakes by opponents as lies rather than honest mistakes, Franken, unintentionally I suspect, made his irrational hatred of his opponents clear.  From that point on, everything Franken said was fatally weakened. How can you trust someone who is this partisan?

 

• Tucker doesn't like partisans. Specifically, he doesn't like people who will twist facts to meet a pre-determined outcome. In short, Tucker doesn't like behavior like that of Al Franken.  Tucker believes that people like Franken and Moore marginalize themselves because they are incapable of influencing the mainstream or their opponents. He believes that because he feels the left's arguments are so over the top and often obviously not in line with reality that non-partisans will reject them.

 

• Franken, like many liberals, has fallen into the trap of playing games with statistics that he thinks bolsters his case but in actuality discredit him because they fail the test of common sense. For example, Franken likes to argue that if Bush had been our only President that no jobs ever created. Gee, how witty. Tucker didn't hide his disgust over these kinds of witticisms. Can Franken name a single piece of legislation that either Bush President supported that he feels caused job loss? Any? Franken argues against people. Tucker argues against principles. Rather than pointing out a policy of one of the Bush's that he feels caused such job loss, he attacks people personally.

 

• Tucker is a conservative because, simply, he doesn't like people telling him how he should live. He believes Americans should make their own decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions. He's a conservative because he wants the government to leave us alone. "I already had a mommy, I don't need another one."

 

• Franken, like many liberal commenters, demonstrates a depth of intelligence, but a shallowness of understanding.  After Tucker made an eloquent statement on why he's a conservative, Franken's reason for being liberal was essentially a list of anti-Bush talking points. No statements of principle. Just a listing of specific issue talking points that have nothing to do with any set of principles. And usually they're incredibly disingenuous talking points.

 

• Franken really likes to let statistics (especially ones he's manipulated) do his talking. "You can't argue with the numbers..." he says as he tries to say that Bush I and II have not created any jobs. Except that his numbers don't actually argue a case at all. That's because Franken seems to lack the depth to argue against a principle or policy. He argues against people.  What is it he believes Bush did to cause job loss?

 

• Tucker counters that sort of talking point nonsense by pointing out that it's not convincing. It may fire up other partisans but it's just intellectually dishonest. Which I totally agree with. I mean come on, only a total partisan would blame the current economic sluggishness on George W. Bush.

 

• Franken, working hard to be a two-dimensional characterture of the left, even lamely brought in the whole "top 1% are getting most of the tax cuts." Which, to a non-partisan with an ounce of common sense would indicate that the top 1% must be paying the vast majority of taxes. But Franken is addicted to playing with statistics as much as his most reviled opponents. As a percent of taxes cut, the middle class benefited most. But in raw dollars, sure, the top few percent benefited the most because they pay the most.  In a country in which 60% of the population pays nearly 100% of the taxes with the top 10% of the wealthiest people paying 90% of the taxes, it's pretty hard to have any tax cut that doesn't benefit those people. Franken demonstrated clearly that in the name of petty partisanship he'd stoop to saying essentially  "nearly half the population got no tax cut at all!" (because they don't pay taxes, they can't actually get a tax cut).  Which Tucker's point held true: Partisan crap like this won't convince anyone. It'll just make other partisans of your kind jump up and down. Franken, like Moore, is the kind of guy who would write a book arguing for 4 day work weeks and say "People already take off Friday in huge numbers anyway. 20% of sick days are on Friday alone!" (think about that for a second).

And so they battled it out on the air. In my view, Tucker not only came across as more convincing, he came across as more decent. Franken seemed full of anger and hate and carried an irrational dislike of his opponents. He even labeled Bush on air as "radically right wing". Yea right, the guy who wants to give prescription drugs is a "Radical" right winger. Get a grip.

The exchange really, for me, showed just how intellectually bankrupt the left has become. Franken, reduced to just parroting talking points put together by others seemed unable to think on his feet.  Bereft of any philosophical political ideals, Franken is forced into playing games with statistics that even a below average blogger could fisk.

I must say, I was truly disappointed with Franken. About half way through the exchange I realized that Franken is not much different than a mediocre left wing blogger on the net. That is, he offered no more insight than the typical venomous spew that can regularly be seen in the comments area on a blog site.  He's become popular either because his SNL fame overwhelmingly carried him or the left has become so incapacitated that they have no vigor left to put forth a set of basic principles worth fighting for.

Just got back from visiting Western Michigan University.  Next Spring will be the 10th year since I graduated. And here is one thing I learned from a day of walking campus:  I AM WAY OUT OF SHAPE.

I used to walk all over campus, every day, all day. No problem. My wife and I (we met there), were in bad shape after 2 hours. Just tired and achy.

Ironically, next Sunday we're playing paint ball with friends (both my wife and I). That's for 4 hours. If walking at a leisurely pace on campus made us tired in 2 hours, we're doomed next weekend!

 

Before anyone starts tearing a new hole into Right Wing talk show host, Rush Limbaugh for his addiction to pain killers, remember one thing: Entertainers on the left who go into rehab for illegal drugs like Cocaine, Crack, Heroine, etc. are so common they rarely get reported. But because it's Limbaugh, expect to see a lot of coverage.

Update: Yep, it's the top story on CNN right now. Sheesh.

Most people don't really give how precarious human civilization really is. That's mainly because they have better things to do than to worry about that kind of thing. I, on the other hand, don't really have anything better to do sometimes than to think and read about this kind of thing.

For example, while many people know that an asteroid nailed the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs along with most other large animals in the ocean and on land, most people aren't aware of how common smaller but civilization ending hits are.

First some perspective: Life is thought to have really gotten going around 400 million years ago or so.  Sure, there was life before the "pre-Cambrian explosion" but nothing very complex. 400 million years.

The last 65 million years saw mammals slowly rise and fill the niches left by the Dinosaurs.  Somewhere around 6 million years ago humans and chimps parted ways (though technically speaking, we're still so similar to chimps from a DNA point of view that we are really just another species of chimp but I digress).

Depending on who you talk to, only around 200,000 to 50,000 years ago to modern humans arise. The debate has to do with whether anatomically modern humans or intellectually modern humans are the same thing (why did cave painting start only 50,000 years ago?)

Regardless, from 50,000 years ago to around 5,000 years ago humans were basically running around in small tribes following herds of grazing animals across Africa and Asia other than a bunch of adventurous tribes that decided to go into North America around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago (not to mention the crazies who went down into Australia).

But real human civilization -- as in towns and cities, really only got going around 3000 years ago and that's being generous.  Rome only got going 2100 years ago.

And what I'll call hyper-specialization only got started 100 years ago or so. What's the point of this and what's hyper-specialization?

Well, hyper-specialization is basically specialization to the point where the majority of people are basically incapable of living without our modern system of logistics. If civilization came to an end, I'd be food for something pretty quickly.  Without contacts I'm pretty much blind. I can't farm. Can't hunt. Don't have any useful survival skills. In other words, I'm a typical surbanite.

And here's the bad news: Pretty bad things happen to Earth pretty regularly. Smaller asteroids strike the earth every 10,000 to 20,000 years. These hits don't wipe out the earth of course but it's certainly enough to shut down food production worldwide pretty seriously. There's 6 billion people these days on Earth. That number is only sustainable thanks to modern agricultural techniques. But take away say, sunlight, for a couple of years due to a small asteroid hit and most of us would be dead.

And there are plenty of other nasty things that happen on occasion. Super volcanoes, mega earth quakes, etc. that would be enough to completely disrupt the world economy in ways that would lead to billions of deaths. And it's not stuff that happens every 50 million years, it's stuff that our ancestors lived through already countless times but didn't know how to record these events. And it will happen again. The difference is that unlike say 20,000 years ago we have large segments of modern world that would not deal very well to the modern logistics miracles that came with the 20th century.

 

This weekend my wife and I are going to WMU which is where we graduated from. It's always fun to check out the campus and see what's changed over the years.

You guys may find this article interesting:

http://ian.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=260

Talks about the Avalon tech in Longhorn.

[Message Edited]

So people obviously want boot screens. But there's a big problem with the way boot screens are currently being (ahem) "skinned":

Everyone of them we've seen so far does it one of two ways:

Either:

A) They actually distribute the Windows XP kernel. In fact, this is what most of those boot screens being distributed are. Inside the ZIP they contain the actual kernel for both XP release and SP1. Not only is this pretty flagrantly in violation of who knows what but it also causes the file to be much bigger. Here's a hint, if the boot screen is roughly 2.2 megs, or higher in a ZIP file it's probably got the XP kernel in it.

or

They contain just the images (good) but then patch the kernel on your computer (bad). What happens when SP2 comes out and the machine fails a kernel CRC? The better boot patchers save a copy of the kernel (good). But that's still a bit much for the average joe.

But if boot screen replacing is as popular as the polls seem to indicate, there needs to be a safer, more robust system.

So we talked to people we know at Microsoft about an idea we had. What if we could do it without touching the kernel? In fact, what if we could do it without touching the kernel and then add support for animated boot screens? High color boot screens? All without having to hack the system?

We've figured out a way and hopefully will have a freeware version available (beta at first) that will take us down the path as early as next week possibly.

Stardock's "Furan" is working on this now. Check out his blog here: http://ian.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=409

What motivates bloggers? I can't speak for all but for me, I look at blogging as indie editorials. As such, I like being able to express my view on something or provide information to the public that traditionally only full time journalists were able to do.  I suspect millions of other bloggers are of the same mind. It's a form of self-expression.

If I had cats, I wouldn't talk about what Mittens did today. Rather, I like giving my two cents on pretty much everything. Not that my opinion matters really. I'm not a politician. My vote matters no more than anyone else's.  But that's just the thing. Blogging lets us all get out there and have a voice. I suspect Google feels the same way -- that maybe someday nearly everyone will have their own blog.

But blogging for those reasons can also be extremely unrewarding.  That's because most blogs go unread. I don't mean not read by more than a few people. I mean literally, no one, besides the author, reads them.  And I think that's a real shame because there's some really great stuff out there.

Consider one of my favorite sites, Parapundit. He's put together a really impressive site with great insights such as this article about the war in Iraq. But it's clear that his site isn't getting a lot of visitors.  It's not because the content isn't great. It is. It's just the nature of the web.

That's why I feel like such a fraud. Randall Parker is a true winner. Me, I'm just a tape worm. I'm cheating. While his Alexa ranking is at over 1.1 million, JoeUser's traffic is increasing steadily because 1) I have a talented development team (Pat, JR, and George all 3 working on this site full time) putting in features that help make JoeUser increasingly compelling and 2) I can write articles that get linked on sites like WinCustomize and Stardock that already get millions of visitors.

So how am I atoning for this? Well, several months ago after visiting Instapundit (I got there daily like many others do) I got the idea to expand JoeUser to have other sites. Instapundit is the most popular blog site on the net (other than maybe Andrew Sullivan). He links to stories on the net.  But he does it purely on what strikes his fancy. Which is fine since that's the whole point of going there -- to find what Glenn Reynolds finds interesting.

But on JoeUser, I wanted to take that to the next step. Let other people have their blogs here on JoeUser. And then, based on the merit of the article it would float to the top.  Some blog sites show what the newest blogs are. But JoeUser shows that plus the most popular articles of the day and then of the month (and eventually a hall of fame of some kind).  It does the same for the actual blogger sites themselves.

This is based on a point system that loosely works as follows:

You get points for # of views. You get points when people respond to your blog entries. You get even more points when someone refers to your blog on their site (i.e. links to you). And users get points too for responding and such. This isn't all fully fleshed out yet but it basically works. You can already see the referrals after an article to see if anyone is linking to it.  It's totally automated. 

We also added a top 10 referers to not just Joeuser.com's home page but on a per blogger basis. So you can see on http://draginol.joeuser.com that the referers are different than on https://www.joeuser.com or from http://adam.joeuser.com. I think this is important because let's face it, when someone links to you, they're putting some effort. Linking back to them is a nice gesture and I think encourages more people to do the same.

Anyway, under this system, rather than one agent deciding whose article is worthy to be mentioned, the point system does. It's not super cut and dry of course. What gets featured right now is based on a user's access. Which means, right now, only admins.  But we actually have several different access levels. As users go up in access, their vote on an article or user counts for more points. They will also be able to recommend an article for posting and the higher their access level the more their recommendation counts.  And access levels will be heavily influenced by their user score on the site and other contributions to the blogger community.

The goal is to provide a way for bloggers -- indie editorialists -- to be able to write worthwhile things and have it "show up" without being at the mercy of the "big blog sites", a fortuitist link, or guerilla marketing by the author. If it's an article of interest, then it should float to the top on its own.

This is what we've seen on WinCustomize.com over the past 2.5 years. The system works well on "skins" and "themes" and "icon packages". Which are, like articles, judged not by some objective criteria but on the basis of individual tastes.

I don't know if we'll ever be as popular as some of the mega blog sites but I do think we will be able to offer bloggers a lot of good (and free) opportunities to express themselves in such a way that it has a fighting chance to be read.  It's the quality of the blogging that should determine popularity, not inertia, after all.

 

It never fails. In between Summer and Fall I just get that inter-seasonal case of the blahs. I'm feeling tired, a little under the weather and down in the dumps. No particular reason, happens every year.  I know that because, like the statistics geek I am, I've graphed it over the years and noticed that when the weather starts to change from warm summers to cool Fall that I just lose all sense of motivation.

I don't write for the reasons many people do. I don't consider blogging to be some sort of personal journal. I like to think of it as "indie editorials".  One of the reasons I like blogging is that I've become very disenchanted with the mainstream media. I've taken lots of press tours and dealt with the press many times and there's nothing consistent about it. You get good journalists and bad journalists and the bad ones are far worse than the typical blogger.  That's why I like blogging, I find the editorial content to be rich, interesting, and often very insightful.

That's why I don't think it's any coincidence that it was during one of these blah periods that I started blogging. I find interacting with a gigantic group of people very uplifting. The first blog I started reading was Steven Den Beste's.  I didn't even know it was a blog back then. I don't think they had the term yet. He was my "nemesis" on the OS/2 groups.  I met him during the dying days of my youthful idealistic naiveté involving OS/2. I was an OS/2 advocate. He was an OS/2 detractor. I found his arguments against OS/2 compelling in the sense that they were effective at making his case appear stronger to neutral parties than mine were.  Those who know me know that is saying a lot as I consider myself quite good at debating. He wasn't above selective use of statistics and evidence but in a debate, it's not your job to be objective, but rather to present your case in its strongest way.  From there, I saw thousands of other sites of varying quality but nearly all fascinating.

There's so many sites out there that it's sometimes overwhelming. But it's all good.  Now, if only I could just get out of this blah feeling. There's so much to do at work which is part of the problem. I spend only around 6 to 8 hours at the office but then come home and do another 4 to 6 hours at home of work. Done long enough, one tends to not form hobbies that aren't related tangentially to work. Which is a bit of a bummer.  That's why blogging is so interesting. Hearing about the lives, opinions, and views of others, I think, is a worthwhile hobby of sorts.

As I type this, JoeUser is on an epic journey across the United States. From Georgia to California.

As a result, there will be, for the next 3 or 4 days, some weirdness and articles missing and such. They'll be back asap.