Jack OS X works with Leopard

Jack OS X – a Jack implementation for Mac OS X: — just updated to work with Leopard. Or rather, the updates which make it work with Leopard are just now out of beta and on the front page. I took it for a spin this morning and routed a streaming story from NPR’s Flash player into Audacity, so I could make an MP3 of it. Spiffo! You gotta read the documentation though, it’s not super intuitive.
Jack is awesome. Jack is Free Software, originally developed for Linux. Yet when I actually use Linux, I never even try to use Jack, because Linux sound is so fragile in the first place that adding another possible point of failure to the mix seems downright foolhardy.

Iraq Mortality Researchers Accused Of Having Psychic Powers

Media Lens :: View topic – ALL SMOKE, NO FIRE – THE NATIONAL JOURNAL SMEARS THE LANCET:
Have you heard about the “discrediting” of the Iraq mortality reports published in the Lancet? I heard about it on NPR. One of the “discreditors” was interviewed and his conclusions were not questioned.

You see, the conservative National Journal published an article showing that the study was largely funded by a group sponsored by George Soros, who has been a vocal critic of George Bush.

They conclude that therefore the study must have been a made-up anti-Bush hit piece.

However, the NJ reporters were informed, before they went to press, of the fact that the Lancet studies were not commissioned by the Soros group. Their financial support was indirect (through MIT), started late in the project, and the researchers themselves were never informed of it. Indeed, Soros is not likely to have

So the reporters from the National Journal must have concluded that the mortality researchers used precognition, clairvoyance, and telepathy to find out that there would, in the future, be money which indirectly originated with a vocal supporter of George Bush, used to publicize their research reports.

Those psychic premonitions must have influenced them to fake their results, so as to make them something that the Soros-sponsored organization wanted to publicize.

I understand Tarot cards have not been ruled out either. Those Lancet researchers are a wily bunch.

Good thing we have conservative journals to ferret this psychic foolery out, and the mainstream media to widely, and uncritically, publicize the conservative journal’s conclusions.

“The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV”

Great article from 1995, even more relevant today than it was then:

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV:

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.