Hollywood's Bold Strategy: Punt

Everything related to Hollywood is worthy of a Jon Stewart joke... except its recent box-office numbers. Their catastrophic slide -- along with declining newspaper circulation rates and mainstream TV Nielsen ratings -- points to a serious disconnect between middle America and the Coastal Elite. And maybe it's not so much a disconnect as it is a yawning, gaping chasm. Perhaps it's related to Hollywood's activist stance on social issues long since settled while studiously ignoring everything that's occurred in the world since, oh, 1978.

...George Clooney’s triple Oscar nominations are said to be a significant moment in the life of the nation, and not just by George Clooney, though his effusions on his own “bravery” certainly set a high mark. “We jumped in on our own,” he said, discussing Good Night And Good Luck with Entertainment Weekly. “And there was no reason to think it was going to get any easier. But people in Hollywood do seem to be getting more comfortable with making these sorts of movies now. People are becoming braver.” Wow. He was brave enough to make a movie about Islam’s treatment of women? Oh, no, wait. That was the Dutch director Theo van Gogh: he had his throat cut and half-a-dozen bullets pumped into him by an enraged Muslim who left an explanatory note pinned to the dagger he stuck in his chest. At last year’s Oscars, the Hollywood crowd were too busy championing the “right to dissent” in the Bushitler tyranny to find room even to namecheck Mr van Gogh in the montage of the deceased. Bad karma. Good night and good luck...

Go ye therefore hence and read it all, for it is good.

Mark Steyn: Clooney Tunes

Chris Matthews: Bush "Sneaks" Into Pakistan "Like a Drug Dealer"

The invaluable Newsbusters gang captured the loathsome Chris Matthews wearing his full Democratic Party regalia:

Matthews asked ex-Clinton aide David Gergen and security expert Roger Cressey about the heavy security surrounding Bush’s visit [to Pakistan]. Matthews asked Cressey: “This is extraordinary, isn’t it?” Cressey replied that “it’s typical for what happens when you bring the President into a very high risk country, very similar to what we did when President Clinton went into Pakistan in 2000.” Matthews cut him off: “But he’s coming in like a drug dealer. I mean, having to sneak in like that, with the lights off, with the windows slammed shut on the plane. Is this a security question, really, or is it a problem of that government? Is it a problem that within the security service in Pakistan there are people out to hurt the President?”

If Matthews' political preferences were any more obvious, he'd bray rather than talk. Perhaps Matthews would prefer that the President arrive in Karachi by landing a glider in front of the Lyari Mosque during morning prayers.

The costs of appeasement

If there's one thing history makes clear, it is the costs associated with inaction and appeasement. The most notorious example, of course, is Hitler's ascent, left unchecked by the ostensible leaders of Europe. Consider another painful event, brought to you by Mark "The Genius" Steyn:

...the first attack on American sovereignty was not... on American soil, was not 9/11. It was the Iranian Embassy, and we should have dealt with that problem then. When history comes a-calling, you never have a choice between good or bad options. They're only between bad and much, much worse options. And the reality of today is that we're dealing with problems that could have been, would have been easier to settle twenty years ago. If we don't settle them now, they'll be much more difficult, if not impossible to settle in ten years time.

Got that, Jimmy Carter?

RadioBlogger: Mark Steyn Interview

BlackBerry 8700G Review - Executive Summary: Wow

I've just replaced my BlackBerry 7290 with an 8700G and had a couple of days to play with it. One word: wow. The difference between the new screen and the old is the difference between HDTV and conventional television: brightness, clarity, and contrast are all so much better that it's just hard to put the differences into words. Suffice it to say that when I showed several folks Google's local mapping application (google.com/glm) running in satellite view, they were stunned at the detail.

Along with the screen, the web browser is equally improved. Pages that refused to render in the 7290 now work fine (e.g., baseball-reference.com) and, of course, the close-to-broadband-speed EDGE network significantly improves the browsing experience. No more surfing to a page and then holstering the device while you wait for it to load. A page that would load in 20-30 seconds before might load now in 2.

The green and red phone buttons provide quick access to phone features, just the way a conventional mobile phone user would expect. For an experienced 7290 user, this is a bit disconcerting, but most will get used to it quickly.

A couple of nits: the dial-by-name feature doesn't work the way it did in the 7290. If you've gone to phone mode and start typing, nothing happens unless you hit numeric keys. And I've not figured out if this is a settable option - needless to say, it's highly annoying. You have to select a menu in order to dial by name.

Battery strength seems a tad weaker than that of the 7290, probably due to screen brightness, which is automatically adjusted and most often set to "son of a... that's bright!"

In short, I had a really good BlackBerry week: I was among the first to get an 8700G in North America and the next day the patent dispute was settled. It doesn't get much better than that for fans of convergence-devices.

DHS and FBI rely on LAMP

I'd missed this article the first time around, but it's worth calling out. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI depend heavily upon LAMP to drive a highly scalable multi-agency alerting system called ERN:

[The] ERN (Emergency Response Network) Systems maintains a low profile. When you ask the CEO, Jo Balderas, for references she politely says, "the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Homeland Security". That's quite an impressive list, and it represents only a few of the company's clients... When you ask for a technology snapshot Jo says, "currently we use an enterprise open-source software stack known as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). We also use an appliance to support rapid deployment and to minimize total cost of ownership. Our roadmap has us integrating the OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) version 1.0 and Justice XML standards within six months..."

LinuxJournal: DHS and FBI rely on LAMP

Getting technical advice from USA Today

The estimable Kim Komando has some advice for readers who want to ensure hidden data is removed from Microsoft Word documents before sharing them. She mentions a couple of approaches that aren't simple. In fact, they vary based upon the version of Word you have.

Here's an elementary -- and universal -- way she forgot to mention. Use Edit, Select All to select the entire document. Use Edit, Copy to copy it to the clipboard. Use File, New and open a blank document. Then -- yes, you guessed it -- use Edit, Paste to create the document, sans hidden data.

That'll serve you no matter version of Word you have.

USAToday: Remove hidden data in Microsoft Word documents

The Implosion of the Drive-by Media

EIB featured a great summary of what they call the "drive-by" media:

Treat the news [...as a] packaged product. People that put it together every day have a reason for choosing what's in the package and what isn't. They want it packaged a certain way, and they're trying to tell you that this is all you need to know that happened today, and we're not embellishing anything, but clearly their news judgment's gone to hell, too. You still have people at CBS saying that the forged documents are real. And you know why? Because nobody's proved they're not! Under that standard, you could make any assertion you want, and unless somebody can [disprove] it, then it's true. So you can put up forged documents about Bush's National Guard service, and despite the fact that people proved that the documents are forgeries, if somebody can't come along and prove the story is wrong, then that's the standard. Mary Mapes has even said this. You have to understand the context in which these people are operating and understand that they are losing.

The product is fatally damaged and that's precisely why mainstream media's ratings are in the toilet and circling the flush-hole.

The latest of many examples is this piece of packaged dung from the AP, which Powerline's John Hinderaker shreds in marvelous fashion:

In a sweet victory for the administration, the Senate voted 89-10 to renew the Patriot Act. Only Democrats opposed the measure. Harry Reid, who once boasted proudly of having "killed" the Patriot Act, now voted meekly for it. Note, though, how the Associated Press does whatever it can to insert pro-Democrat themes into a story about a Bush triumph: The 89-10 vote marked a bright spot in President Bush's troubled second term as his approval ratings dipped over the war in Iraq and his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. What does any of that have to do with today's vote? Nothing at all; the AP just threw it in. Then there is this: For months, their tough-on-terror image has been tarnished by the revelation that the president authorized a secret domestic wiretapping program. The report in December gave Democrats ammunition for their charge that the Bush administration had run amok in its zeal to root out terrorists. Huh? How did the secret wiretapping program "tarnish" the administration's "tough-on-terror image"? It didn't. It enhanced it, and the public has solidly backed the administration's position. And what's this about Democrats charging that the administration has "run amok"? I don't recall any Democrats saying that; I think the AP reporter, Laurie Kellman, is speaking for herself.

Given two articles without bylines, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between an AP "news" article and a Democratic Party press release.