Parity Violation

Think Progress sums up the way the mainstream media has embraced self-described “war critics” Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack’s. However, it’s well-documented they have been war cheerleaders since 2003 or before. Glen Greenwald has the most extensive debunking of their credentials and credibility - they’ve been pro-Bush, pro-War since it began. Yet, of course, the MSM treats them as credible, “serious”, experts.

How many times does someone have to be wrong before the mainstream press letting these people on the air? Apparently, never.

Greenwald today calls the press mindless in how they put Pollack and O’Hanlon on every talk show calling them “critics” of the war when in fact they have been consistent cheerleaders. As he wrote yesterday, there are these little things called “computers” and the internet that record what people actually said in the past. When someone says they’re a war critic you can go actually check if that’s true or not.

Well, it’s good and it’s bad - my iBook G4 had yet another hardware problem. This time, something very wrong with the ethernet. I unplugged the ethernet cable the other day and it froze up, and subsequent efforts to get it to reboot properly also led to freezing. Just to recap, I always buy Applecare (the 3 year extended warranty) on Apple laptops, because repairs on them are so expensive and since I work my laptops pretty hard, they tend to break down. So, after talking to Applecare on the phone and reproducing the problem from the various startup CDs/DVDs, it was clear it was a hardware issue, probably the logic board.

And, this is the umpteenth hardware issue I’ve had. I’ve been through I think 4 optical drives and one hard drive issue, so this time around instead of asking for a fix, I asked for a replacement. So, after looking over the iBook’s repair history, I was granted a replacement. AND, it’s a much newer machine - a Macbook. They were going to give me the $1099 retail price model (2.0GHz,80GB hard drive,Combo Drive), but I paid $200 to get the next model which has a slightly faster processor (2.13GHz), a bigger hard drive(120GB), and a DVD-burning “Superdrive”, as Apple likes to call them.

I’m also buying Applecare (the extended warranty) on this model, which also means that my old Applecare on the iBook G4 will be pro-rated refunded to me (it has 6-7 months left on it.) So, all totaled I’m dropping $400 or so but still - I’m basically getting an $1100 trade-in for an almost-3-year-old machine. Wrap it up, I’ll take it.

Of course the problem with the Macbook is still what I complained about when it first came out, which is to say it has a craptastic graphics card. There’s no point in using boot camp to run windows to play games on this thing. But, it’ll be adequate for Starcraft and Warcraft I suppose, which is all I ever play these days. I think I’ll need a new machine for Starcraft 2, however, when that comes out in … 2009? Who knows.

Anyway, I think it’s a happy ending. I dropped the old, broken iBook to Fedex yesterday (they emailed me a label) and once it was scanned in by Fedex, my Apple replacement agent sent me a notice saying he had placed the order, and would follow up with a tracking number soon. So, hopefully I’ll receive it by Friday.

Check out this rubbish. This is a story? How Hillary Clinton dresses? I’m waiting for stories on all the GOP candidates’ outfits. Front page, please. The mainstream media is failing our democracy every day. Who gives a flip about what Clinton is wearing?

I don’t know when this happened but the mess that was installing Adobe Reader seems to be better. I just had to reinstall, and when I went to download 8.10 it was a .dmg with an installer that … only installed Reader, no downloading of managers to install installers to then install Reader or whatever mess it used to be. It still should just be drag and drop from a disk image, like … pretty much every other Mac program, but at least it’s better now than for 8.0.

Pope: Other Christians not true churches - Yahoo! News. This unfortunate document on other churches represents a real step away from Vatican II, which stated that the church “subsists in” the Catholic church, but is not equal to the Catholic church. That language was deliberate, but conservatives never liked it (nor Vatican II itself), and now another document giving the conservative spin on Vatican II. This is the sort of thing that made Benedict’s election as pope such a troublesome event.