It’s an awfully good thing the president’s a Democrat…
HDR photography and seeing
Commenter “Harold” alerted me to a type of photography I’d never even heard of before, although I’d probably seen it and not known what I was looking at—HDR photography:
High dynamic range imaging (HDRI or HDR) is a set of methods used in imaging and photography, to allow a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging methods or photographic methods. HDR images can represent more accurately the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, from direct sunlight to faint starlight, and is often captured by way of a plurality of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter.[1][2][3]
In simpler terms, HDR is a range of methods to provide higher dynamic range from the imaging process. Non-HDR cameras take pictures at one exposure level with a limited contrast range. This results in the loss of detail in bright or dark areas of a picture, depending on whether the camera had a low or high exposure setting. HDR compensates for this loss of detail by taking multiple pictures at different exposure levels and intelligently stitching them together to produce a picture that is representative in both dark and bright areas.
The photos that result are simply astounding. They seem a hyper-focused rendering of what we humans ordinarily see when we look at a scene, a sort of platonic, revved-up version of it.
It puts me in mind of the world of the main character in Jorge Luis Borges’ wonderful short story, “Funes the Memorious,” the man who sees and remembers—everything:
We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal. A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky. These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did they seem doubtful.
Here’s just a single example of HDR photography from the link I gave above. I offer it because the relative simplicity of its subject matter highlights the complexity and beauty of just about everything we look at (as Funes knew):
That 2000 Florida vote
I’d heard a lot about the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election. Hanging chads, Pat Buchanan, virtual tie, recounts, Supreme Court, lingering rage. But I’d never encountered this factoid before:
How campaigns try to sway polling results: “In a close race, the operatives are trying to manipulate the turnout through their paid and earned media. The earned media includes lobbying and trying to skew the public polls. Historically the most egregious case was the 2000 Gore campaign’s lobbying the networks’ exit pollsters for an early, and wrong, call in Florida. This suppressed the Florida Panhandle and Western state turnout.” (Polls close at different times in different parts of the state, because the state stretches into two time zones.) “In our post-election Florida poll, we found that thousands of Panhandle Floridians heard the call and although their polls were still open for an hour in a close national race decided not to vote. Panhandle voters went two-to-one for Bush. The CBS early wrong call nearly triggered a national crisis.”
I wonder: if that hadn’t happened, if Florida had gone more clearly for Bush, if the whole bitterly contested result had been resolved in the usual manner on election night, whether some of the Democratic rage would have been avoided.
I doubt it.
The above quote is from Republican pollster John McLaughlin. There’s more:
What Obama and his allies are doing now: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want. Some polls have included sizable segments of voters who say they are ”˜not enthusiastic’ to vote or non-voters to dilute Republicans. Major pollsters have samples with Republican affiliation in the 20 to 30 percent range, at such low levels not seen since the 1960s in states like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and which then place Obama ahead. The intended effect is to suppress Republican turnout through media polling bias. We’ll see a lot more of this. Then there’s the debate between calling off a random-digit dial of phone exchanges vs. a known sample of actual registered voters. Most polls favoring Obama are random and not off the actual voter list. That’s too expensive” for some pollsters.
This certainly conforms with what we’re seeing. The pollsters will argue they’re not rigging things, and that the large Democratic advantage built into the polls simply reflects reality. But they have a lot of leeway in deciding what year’s turnout to use as a model: 2004? 2006? 2008? 2010? Turnout is notoriously difficult to predict, the wild card of polling. This year it may be especially hard, but it’s also quite believable that things are being skewed in the very way and for the very reasons McLaughlin describes.
What the 2012 Republican candidate for president is up against
I’ve got a new article up at PJ, entitled “Romney’s daunting challenges.”
My original title for the piece was the title I gave to this post, because I didn’t want it to be about Romney, but about what any Republican nominee would have been facing this year. Skimming the comments section to the article at PJ, I noticed some of the commenters there seemed to think I was concern-trolling, or saying “woe, all was lost!”, or that Obama is a brilliant campaigner.
Absolutely not. But I do think (as I wrote towards the end of the piece) that this election—and any possible Romney victory—will turn on turnout. And that Obama has the built-in advantage that comes from the MSM having turned into his very own propaganda machine, plus his propensity for using dirty tricks and/or the politics of personal destruction against opponents.
So get out there and vote in November, and convince everyone you know who wants to defeat Obama to do likewise.
Romney. Taxes.
I’m in a hurry right now and don’t have time to write a post on this, although I plan to later.
But I thought you might like a nice fresh new thread to discuss Romney’s tax info release and the media’s reaction to it.
[ADDENDUM: The liberal pundits and Democrats like Reid remind me of Goldilocks—except, in their case, nothing Romney does (or ever has done, or ever would do, or ever could do) is “just right.”
There was never any question that whatever Romney released would be gone over with every bit as much care as Sarah Palin’s garbage, And few things on earth have survived as much scrutiny as that.]
Neo-neocon today
The euphemistically-named Arab Spring and its aftermath have made me think it might be time to offer a post re-explaining my brand of neocon thinking. After all, haven’t recent events proven neoconism to be bankrupt?
But before I reinvented the wheel, I thought I’d look back and see what I’d already written on the subject. And it turns out that in a two-part post I wrote back in February of 2007, I pretty much said what I’d want to say today. Some of the details are different—Egypt isn’t Iraq (unlike Iraq, Egypt was initially an ally when Mubarak was deposed, and unlike Irag, there was no US invasion).
No doubt there are a few things I’d change if I were writing the pieces today. But the general principles of my particular brand of neoconism (neo-neoconism?) are expressed in those essays from over five years ago. So I’ll just refer you to them:
Note particularly the following quote, in terms of recent events in Egypt and the role of the Obama administration:
Once the decision was made that it was necessary to remove Saddam, the US faced the question of what its role should be in determining what sort of government might replace him. These were the choices: (a) walk away and let things sort themselves out without US help (likely to result in much bloodshed and a new tyrant of some sort, and perhaps a worse one); (b) in the time-honored realpolitik manner, install a dictator friendly to us who would crack down on the opposition in a Draconian way; or (c) try to help establish a functioning liberal democracy.
The Bush Administration chose (c) as the best of a bad lot (“bad” in the case of (c) only because of its difficulty in execution), and in doing so they made the error of underestimating the murderous forces arrayed against them. But those who criticize the decision are comparing choice (c) to an imaginary ideal alternative that simply did not exist.
In Egypt, it appears that Obama made choice (a).
Anti-colonialist Obama
David Goldman takes a long, hard, and well-worth-reading look at anti-colonialist Obama:
What’s the difference between growing up in the Third World, and taking an Ivy League course in neocolonial studies? It’s about the same as the difference between sex education, and sex. I’m an unabashed globalizer and modernizer (I wrote a book warning that the extinction of most of the world’s cultures was inevitable), but some awful things happen en route to modernity. I’ve spent a lot of time in poor countries of the Global South as an economist and banker, and there have been moments when I wished I was a Communist. One sees heart-wrenching poverty and humiliation, and there are days when it would do the heart good to put some people up against a wall…
Like his senior counselor and Chicago mentor Valerie Jarrett, who spent her first five years in Iran, Obama did not merely study the colonial experience. He lived it.
For all its blemishes, the United States of America is mankind’s last, best hope. Americans are brands plucked out of the fire. We cannot save cultures that will not adapt to modernity. At best we can prevent their decline from hurting us. But Obama’s identification with the Third World, and the Muslim world in particular, is pre-rational; it is not an idea he learned in school, but an existential commitment. He will accommodate its irrationality and self-destructiveness to the point of absurdity, no matter what the cost to American security. He is no Jimmy Carter, who belatedly took a hard line against the Soviets after the December 1979 Afghanistan invasion. He has done more to undermine America’s standing in the world than any president in history, and the consequences of his re-election are horrible to imagine.
Obama says…
…my biggest failure is the Republicans’ fault.
And it may also be that I work too hard. Although actually, that’s my biggest weakness.
Or maybe it’s that I care too much.
So, do I get the job?
Editing Stephen Glass
I was searching for something or other, and I happened across an article on a different subject that caught my eye—this 1996 article by Jonathan Chait (he of BDS pride) about his fallen buddy Stephen Glass, the serial liar whose career at TNR ended in ignominy.
Chait is very angry at Glass, and rightly so. Chait’s trying to excuse/explain how he, and so many of our Best and Brightest, could have been so fooled by a sociopathic con man.
An interesting subject, to say the least.
I know a certain amount about Stephen Glass and his deceptive career. I saw the movie “Shattered Glass,” and I’ve read the Vanity Fair article on which it was based. But I couldn’t remember encountering the following facts that Chait relates [emphasis mine]:
After [Glass] was caught, I often heard it said that he should write novels. Perhaps he heard this himself and took it to heart. But it was clear all along that this notion was terribly misguided. He never had much talent for prose. When his stories read well, it usually resulted from heavy rewriting, most notably by Kelly. (Very often he would hand his stories to me minutes before they were due, and, to save him from embarrassment, I would perform a kind of emergency triage on his text, rearranging it into something resembling a coherent structure.) Moreover, his stories were interesting only because they were purportedly true. The characters in his stories, as in his novel, lack any depth or believability.
So, in addition to being a long-undetected serial liar as a journalist, Stephen Glass was a writer who could not write. And yet he was considered a wunderkind at TNR for three full years, hired at the ripe old age of 23, and also wrote for Policy Review, George, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s, and had publishers interested in a book. Say what you will about the viewpoints and thought processes presented in those publications (and I’m not familiar with all of them), most of the articles in them seem to be decently—and even well—written, at least in the technical sense of use of language and the flow of prose.
It seems that Glass’s articles were so poorly executed that they needed an almost complete rewrite, leaving just the bare bones of the idea. It’s not that such a thing is never done in the publishing world, but it’s my impression that it’s usually done for someone more illustrious, someone with a reputation and at least a modicum of fame, someone whom the periodical wishes to pamper and court. But a 23-year old kid, at what is probably one of his first real jobs as an adult? Preposterous.
So, why? Why such a heavy assist? Reading the rest of Chait’s piece, and remembering some of what I already knew about Glass, I’d say it appears that everyone’s almost overwhelming desire to coddle Glass (sort of like a kitten) and keep him around had to do with his uncanny ability to ingratiate himself with people, to entertain them, and to seem personally vulnerable at the same time. A kind of fun mascot, he was the kid brother you want to protect.
I’m not sure what this has to do with politics; perhaps nothing. But it doesn’t escape my attention that most of those enabling Glass were liberals (although the late Michael Kelly, an editor who was a moderate, was a prominent one of Glass’s champions). Make of that what you will.
Here’s Charles Lane, the editor who finally caught Glass, on how it felt to be taken in:
We extended normal human trust to someone who basically lacked a conscience…We thought Glass was interested in our personal lives, or our struggles with work, and we thought it was because he cared. Actually, it was all about sizing us up and searching for vulnerabilities. What we saw as concern was actually contempt
I like to think my radar’s good enough that I wouldn’t be taken in by a con artist. And maybe I wouldn’t—and fortunately, so far I haven’t, at least to the best of my knowledge. But I realize that everyone is somewhat vulnerable, including me, to a really good con. That’s the hallmark of the best ones; they charm and disarm their victims.
I suppose I’m writing this because I continue to think of Obama as a con artist, one much of America has fallen for—and may fall for again, unfortunately. Once the mark has been conned, it’s very difficult to break the spell. The truth has to hit that person in the face with unequivocal certainty.
Monica…
“The Obama You Don’t Know” is the Obama most people don’t care to read about
The Washington Examiner has a multi-part series of short articles called “The Obama You Don’t Know,” debunking some of the myths of Obama’s “narrative.” It punctures such tales as the one about how poor Obama’s family was when he was growing up, and his stellar reputation as a law professor, as well adding whole bunch of unpleasant details about the Chicago political machinations of his earlier days.
You can send a link to people you know who voted for Obama last time but have become dissatisfied with his record in the last four years, especially those who might live in swing states. Perhaps they’ll read it, and perhaps they’ll even care what’s in it.
I have my doubts. I freely admit I could be wrong (and I hope I’m wrong), but I think the reaction to this information of most people who supported Obama in 2008 will be either to say it’s all right-wing lies, or to say he’s changed, or to give a big shrug and say who cares. My gut feeling is that if a person was able to resist all the information that was out there already in November of 2008—Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, Alinsky, and the rest—this stuff is certainly not likely to sway that person now, at a much later date.
A greater challenge would be to get them to learn about the Romney they don’t know. The irony is that every misstep Romney has ever made in his life (and some he hasn’t, but that have been manufactured) has been quite well-aired by the MSM, and few of his many many pluses have seen the light of day. It’s exactly the opposite of what’s happened to Obama. The press on the right has been trying to reverse the trend (and of course the Washington Examiner is part of that press on the right), but it just doesn’t reach that many people. If you want to try to do so yourself, I suggest sending people a link to the videos on the right sidebar of this page, which have the advantage of being from a very liberal rag, the Boston Globe. Or even lend or give them this book, written by two Globe reporters.
Time’s a wasting.
There’s another problem, too, one well-stated by Robert Stacy McCain:
Obama seems presidential, and vast numbers of Americans have lost the ability to distinguish between seeming and being.
That’s certainly part of it. Another part (which I believe was one of the things Romney was trying to get at in his 47% remarks) is that “vast numbers of Americans” have become dependent on the welfare state, and/or see nothing wrong with the country becoming more like Europe. The Fabians and Gramscians have been very, very busy all these years, and their work has borne fruit.