News for November 16th, 2007
Can you smell it in the air? There’s an odor on the wind, very faint. Not much to it yet. I’m only getting a little whiff of it here in the studio. Are you guys picking this up? No, no, it’s something else. It smells like… fermented human waste, which can only mean one thing.
Yep, you guessed it, we’re barely over one year out from the 2008 Presidential election. The long-anticipated primary season is about to start just as soon as New Hampshire and Ohio finish strutting like a couple of bantam gamecocks, and finally get around to setting a date for their legally-mandated first primary of 2008– which may happen in 2007 if the rest of the country doesn’t stop screwing around with their own primary dates. Florida, I’m looking at you.
If it seems as if we’ve been talking about the 2008 Presidential for a long time, it’s because we have been. In fact this very program, the Timothy Jordan Show News, did its part for the listening public all the way back in February by beating the competition to the punch and calling the 2008 Presidential election for Barack Obama. That’s right, we’ve gone ahead and scooped everyone else in the media because we’re already on top of the biggest news story of 2008, future facts be damned.
Despite our bold and self-sacrificing attempt to short-circuit the election process and spare the American public another twelve months of kissed hands and shaken babies, the other candidates still insist on pretending that they have a chance to capture our nation’s highest office.
The New Hampshire primary will kick things off. It’s the frosty New England starting gun for campaigns to shift into high gear. All of those Public Relations staffers across the country are already breaking out the hoses and working some slop into their favorite mud-slinging pits in anticipation of the back-stabbing, face-punching, and occasional Supreme Court intervention that has come to characterize modern American Presidential politics.
Beware of Young Republicans in elevators.
A few weeks back we promised to offer some proposals to spice up the campaign season. Apparently we’re stuck with another year of campaigning, even though Obama’s going to win anyways, and so we may as well find some way to enjoy the next twelve months of political crapulence.
A Presidential Forum on Science, proposed two weeks ago, is about as likely to happen as the Presidential Swimsuit Competition. The first one terrifies the candidates, and the second terrifies us. Instead we’ll be looking to suggest some things that are slightly more likely to happen.
With the writers’ strike in Hollywood there’s all sorts of opportunity for reality programming. The television studios are only a few weeks away from running out of material and are desperate for content. How about some shows featuring the Presidential contenders? Can they sing? Can they dance? Can they live in the same house, Big Brother-style, while their campaigns trade the most foul insults imaginable during those daytime television commercial breaks?
It’d be worth staging if only to see Bill Clinton hit on Fred Thompson’s young trophy wife, Jeri.
If not reality TV, then how about talent shows? Some good old fashioned talent shows for the candidates. But not one of these slick, managed media productions that we’re used to. I say that we hold them, one for each candidate, at different High Schools across the country, and let the kids run the whole thing. No press handlers or professional hair stylists allowed, just kids doing the whole thing.
It would give the presidential pretenders a chance to show their support for education, and throw those stoned theater students running the damn things a chance to sneak some f-bombs onto broadcast TV.
How long can Fred Thompson spin a dozen china plates? Will Edwards awe everyone with his tap dancing routine? Does supposed über-Italian Rudy Guliani know how to make a ragu sauce from scratch? Is Hillary the trick-shot billiards queen? And can Dennis Kucinich tow a loaded semi with his unnaturally large member?
These are the unasked questions that American voters would want to see answered, if they knew they’d been asked. We’ll do it on Pay-per-Vew, with the proceeds going to the schools that host the talent shows. Everybody wins: the candidates get airtime, direct access to a demographic painfully underrepresented in every election, schools get cash in the bank, and a few kids might just get interested enough to participate in electing the next leader of their country.
That is if they’re not too busy taking each others pants off. They are teenagers, after all.
We aren’t teenagers anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sympathize. This is the Timothy Jordan Show News, coming to our listeners pants-less once again, on this fine November 16th of Ought-Seven.
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The shocking, shocking fact that teenagers like to take their pants off in the company of other teenagers, or just about anything with a heartbeat, was in the news recently. We’re running this story when it’s slightly less topical because it’s still damn important.
A review of teenage behavior and sex education programs was released by an organization called the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy earlier this week. Here’s a quick summary of the review’s conclusions, which is certain to surprise all of our listeners: When teenagers spend time together, they have sex.
The blindingly obvious aside, the overall results being reported are good, with several studies indicating a continuing decline in the rates of teenage pregnancy since the mid-1990s. This is likely due to high reported rates of contraceptive use among teens. Up to 90% of sexually active teens claimed to have used some form of contraception during their last frisky naked encounter. This is also linked to an overall decline in sexually transmitted diseases.
As for the effects of sex education programs themselves, the report was more divided. Highlighted in media reports on the study were the conclusions drawn about those abstinence-only sex ed programs most favored by the Bush administration.
Every story, and I mean every story, in the mass media about this report has said that it’s highly critical of abstinence-only programs. Well, that’s not really true. While Emerging Answers 2007 does say that, “there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex…”, the review’s authors caution that very few rigorous studies of these programs have actually been done.
They do point out that one program may have delayed the initiation of sexual activity in middle school kids. Possibly, but it seems more likely that the general physical awkwardness of the middle school kids themselves would be enough to deter sexual activity. Pimples, pubescence, and questionable personal hygiene? Yeah, that’s sexy.
As for older teens, “there is strong evidence from multiple randomized trials demonstrating that some abstinence programs chosen for evaluation because they were believed to be promising actually had no impact on teen sexual behavior.” Fortunately, the report’s authors say that for the most part, “they did not have a negative impact on the use of condoms or other contraceptives.”
Only one of the programs reviewed was shown to have much causal effect, and not for the better. “Postponing Sexual Involvement, was significantly related to significant increases in both pregnancy and STD rates.”
So the lesson there is that they looked at the most promising abstinence-only programs and were able to determine that at best, the programs didn’t have any impact on teenagers, and in one case increased risky behavior. While the report doesn’t say that abstinence-only programs are completely ineffective, they do warn that more rigorous study is needed before any expansion of existing programs.
An unexpected conclusion from the report is that part-time jobs lead to increased sexual activity, earlier initiation of sex, and more partners. Really? If true, and knowing the kind of after school jobs that teenagers usually land, this news should probably make our listeners reconsider ordering extra special sauce on that next burger.
• Emerging Answers 2007 PDF (5.7MB)
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We’re hoping that the majority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are staying away from the special sauce, because they definitely don’t deserve it this week.
They’ve earned some respect from the Staff here for submitting their version of the Intelligence Authorization Act, a version that does not include retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping program.
Defenders of the program have said in recent weeks that the major telecoms deserve protection from ongoing lawsuits because they’d been preforming a service for the government in time of war.
That may be, but they may also have been helping break the law. The argument for wiretapping apologists seems to be that the telecoms were assured by the government that the program was legal, and were therefore absolved from guilt.
It’s an argument utterly lacking in legal merit. The law is the law. A member of the government cannot arbitrarily give permission for one person to break a law that applies to everyone else.
The thing is that AT&T and the other defendants should have known this. They and the companies which preceded them have been working with the government to spy on communications from the very beginning. Spying happens, and there are times when it needs to happen. That’s why we have a 4th Amendment to the Constitution and a system of legal precedents that allow the government to acquire information about U.S. citizens. If a judge agrees that the government has a legitimate need to gather information, a warrant is issued.
No warrants were issued for the wiretapping that began soon after President Bush assumed office. AT&T and the other defendants should have known better.
The other version of the Intelligence Authorization bill, passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, does have an immunity provision for the telecoms, and it isn’t yet clear which version will be taken to the floor by Majority Leader Reid.
President Bush has promised to veto any bill without telecom immunity.
• Statement by Chairman Leahy on telecom immunity
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And despite vocal opposition from those same companies as well as the U.S. government, San Francisco-based Judge Walker Vaughn last week ordered that the defendants in Hepting v AT&T Corporation preserve all, “writings, records, files, correspondence, reports, memoranda, calendars, diaries, minutes, electronic messages, voicemail, e-mail, telephone message records or logs, computer and network activity logs, hard drives, backup data, removable computer storage media such as tapes, disks and cards, printouts, document image files, web pages, databases, spreadsheets, software, books, ledgers, journals, orders, invoices, bills, vouchers, checks, statements, worksheets, summaries, compilations, computations, charts, diagrams, graphic presentations, drawings, films, digital or chemical process photographs, video, phonographic, tape or digital recordings or transcripts thereof, drafts, jottings and notes.”
Phew. That list appears to cover everything but scribbles on the bathroom wall. I see nothing about scribbles.
What the order means is that Judge Walker remains serious about keeping this case open. The defendants and government have so far failed to persuade him that the third rule of illegal wiretap club is to destroy all records of illegal wiretap club.
• Judge Vaughn’s order to preserve records, via the EFF PDF (24.4KB)
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In other news of document preservation, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington won a legal skirmish against the White House over allegations that the Bush administration used private email servers in an effort to avoid Congressional oversight.
Judge Henry Kennedy, Jr. simply ordered the White House to preserve all media relating to the case, apparently confident that an order to preserve all media would suffice to cover every cabinet, hard drive, dog house, and man-sized safe in the White House’s possession.
• Document preservation order PDF (32.8KB)
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Our goal is to get the hell out of here and pretend for a few hours that there isn’t any work to be done tomorrow, but before that can happen, it’s…
The Internet is a small repository of knowledge buried under a steaming mountain of stupidity. For every useful email that’s sent, there are a thousand offers of herbal viagra following behind it.
The proliferation of blogs, and the comments on blogs, hasn’t helped one bit. Let’s face it, there are a lot of stupid people out there saying a lot of stupid things.
What we need is a way to filter them out, a stupid filter. Well our winners this week are trying to bring that about. As the authors describe it:
“The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.
It’s time to fight back.
The solution we’re creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we’re collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.
Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like.”
They have built a database of over 225,000 comments, garnered mainly from YouTube, that will be used to refine their filter. They hope to have an early public build available by the end of the year.
For their efforts to filter a little stupidity out of the world, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are this week’s winners of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
And that has been the Timothy Jordan Show News for the 16th of November in the year of two-thousand and zero seven.