San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted to essentially decriminalize marijuana by making it the lowest police priority. Henceforth let it be known that you may grow, sell and consume marijuana in San Francisco, but don't spit on the sidewalks or the cops will bust your ass.
San Francisco's Board of Education kicked out the 90 year old JROTC program from City schools at the behest of anti-war activists and Viet-Nam era draft dodgers. 1,600 students now have no real reason to stay in school because Dan Kelly and his ilk think that the military is "bad". The same article also notes as a sideline how the Board of Education also introduced racist quotas to school assignments in the same meeting.
I've been seeing a fair amount of comparisons lately between the proposed fence seperating Mexico and the United States and the old Berlin Wall that seperated East and West Berlin during the Cold War.
There's only one problem: The East Germans built their wall to keep their people in.
According to MSNBC, voter turnout for this mid-term election was just slightly over 40%.
Think about that for a minute when you hear people trumpeting about how this election signals anything about the will of Americans be it disatisfaction with Iraq, the President, the economy, whatever.
40%
Why did the Democrats take control of the House? Easy. They voted (or there was massive voter fraud on their part...oh wait, I forgot, that's the Democrats line whenever they lose anything ;) ).
So, on YouTube, some guy posted a video claiming that the Whitehouse had edited President Bush's speech on the USS Lincoln to hide the "Mission Accomplished" banner. He claimed that there a "black box" at the bottom of the video was evidence that the video had been stretched and squished upwards to hide the sign.
Let's look shall we?
Wow, he sure seems impressive. And that black box is weird huh? Was it an evil edit by the Chimpy McBushitler?? Of course not!
The "evil black box" he posted about is actually just a placeholder for CLOSED CAPTIONING text!
It's hilarious. Just use Real Player and tell it to open the following url: [Note: you will probably have to copy it and paste it into the "open" dialog in Real Player
That is the video link contained in the .smil file which is used to layout the form for Real Player in the link from the Whitehouse video server site.
The details:
.smil files are used to describe the layout of the Real Player viewer. And that's just what happened here.
In the .smil file there is a section titled "<region>" with an ID of "textregion". This is the "black box" in the video
<region id = "textregion" background-color = "#000000" top = "190" left = "0" height = "50" width = "320"/>
Notice the size spacing etc are all consitent with the "evil black box" It is defined as a place holder for closed captioning information.
To confirm this go into Real Player and choose "Tools | Options" this will open the options window. Go to "Content" on the left hand side and then look at the "Accesibility" section. In that section choose "Use supplemental text captioning when available". Apply that setting and watch the video again. Lo and Behold the "stretched video" is placeholding for the captioning and the captions appear in the "evil black box". [Note these are instructions for Real Player 10, your instructions may vary]
You can also confirm this by checking the .smil file from the Whitehouse web server. Near the bottom of the .smil file there is the following entry
<switch> <textstream src="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.v.rt" region="textregion" system-language="en" system-captions="on" title="President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended" alt="President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended"/> </switch>
It's a block region tag for the closed captioning text stream. See how it refers back to the "textregion" id? This tells Real Player to run the closed captioning stream in that section. Removing the "textregion" block and the closed captioning block will remove the black box completely.
Why is that there? Simple. The feds operate under very strict accessibility rules and this was probably done to be compliant. How damned evil of them!
The moral of the story is don't listen to technically illiterate fools on the internet.
Moral for the guy who posted the video ("Mike Mcintee"): Understand the techonology involved before you go off an make a video making yourself look like a paranoid nut job on the Internet.
A Republican in San Francisco (Yes, he's under deep cover) relays his tales of interest...
...ok, "interest" is a strong and subjective word but you get the point.
Location: San Francisco, California, United States
I shall know but one country. The ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's and Truth's. I was born an American; I live an American; and I shall die an American.
-Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
