Fox News…the new Pravda

Really, just shocking….

And there is a debate if Fox is a ‘real’ news agency?  Where’s the evidence supporting that ridiculous proposition?

 

Big blobs of mystery goo floating off Alaska coast

This headline has everything you could possibly want:

• It’s big (don’t listen to the propaganda – bigger is better.  If it wasn’t you’d pay extra for ‘mini-size’ portions of fries and your local McCrap.
• It’s got a mystery (everyone loves a mystery)
• Goo is quite popular with the kids (who seem to love all sort of digusting things, especially if they are associated with bodily functions).  After 18 years in the Army I’m quite confident in saying that a large portion of the male demographic (regardless of age) also find goo and bodily excretions hilarious.
• There’s a blob.  Who doesn’t have fond memories of the 1958 movie?
• It’s fun to say.  Go ahead, read it out loud to your significant other and I defy you to not repeat it or strike up a conversation about it.  Who cares about the details of the story, the headline is so fun the story can’t be anything but a letdown…

…or the end of the world in which case you’re probably better off having a laugh anyway.

Uh Oh…this can’t be good.

Who the heck is approving this sort of project?

“A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.“

Hello! Am I the only guy who’s seen the Terminator movies?  Or the Forbin Project?  Or any stories about sentient computers looking to become our evil overlords?  Now we’re making robots that can eat us???

Oh, it gets better.

“Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment [uh...I think that's code for humans.  eds.], as well as use conventional and alternative fuels…when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.”

“Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship”

Hey, an even better idea!  Let’s not only let these robots eat us but let’s give ‘em the ability to scoot around where ever they want and put guns on them.  Yeesh…

Let the sycophany begin

I’m going through the current issue of The Atlantic (full disclosure:  I receive nothing for this shameless shilling despite driving thousands, scores, well, ok maybe one person to get a subscription) and it continues to do good work.  I especially recommend the article called ‘Quick Fixes‘ which offers 15 ‘big’ ideas.  Some I like (allowing people heading into forclosure the ability to stay in their homes by paying the fair-market rent, privitizing ocean fishing rights), some I don’t (eliminate corporate tax, using the stimulas money to fund artists), and at least one faithful readers of this blog would have seen here a long time ago (consider a decentralized Afghanistan).

UPDATE:  The powers that be obviously responded to my positive feedback by jumping into motion and creating a “Thinking Big” blog.

Jumping on the bandwagon

There’s been a lot of criticism of the major networks and their lack of coverage over events in Iran and while I don’t have any brilliant insight I can describe my experience.

I woke up early to get ready for National Guard drill on Sunday and figured I’d find out what happened over night in Iran.  I turn the TV to CNN and see what the producers and editors thought the American people wanted to see.  A rebroadcast of a Larry King show.

But wait.

That isn’t even the worst of it.  It was a Larry King show where people got to ask Larry questions.  The first (and only) one I saw involved asking Larry what condiments he put on his hot dogs and hamburgers.

Really?  That was more important that events in Tehran?

If you’re going to waste my time with unitesting people asking uninteresting questions of an uninteresting TV host, please don’t add insult in injury and at least make it a live show.

Just following orders

You can read the memos that represent probably the darkest stain on our national honor in my lifetime here.  I haven’t read them yet but fear my suspicions of the past eight years will gather more evidence.

I understand the concept behind not prosecuting individual torturers employed by the federal government because they were supposedly operating in ‘good faith’ that their actions were justified by law but weren’t the soldiers in Abu Gharib operating in good faith as well?

Quite honestly, if you’re over the age of 18 and need a lawyer to tell you that drowning another human being crosses the line you need some professional help.

Someone should face justice for this.

UPDATE: I just read the first memo.  Comments after I take a shower to remove the slime.

UPDATE 2: Well, I’ve waited too long and now I have nothing new to say.  I recommend Andrew Sullivan on this issue.  Particularly these posts.

How can we allow people to get away with these sorts of acts and chastise those who commit similar crimes?

Too much time and money…

Foreign Policy has this article about American and British tourists going to…Iraq.

You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me.

I’m all for physically and mentally challenging yourself on vacation.  I certainly don’t find anything appealing about laying about on a beach like a lump waiting for some underpaid lackey to feed and position me like some well fed veal calf.

This, however, is ridiculous.  If you’re 79 years old and seriously have to consider getting ‘hostile environment training‘ before going on vacation, you really should reevaluate your life choices.

I suspect this is a symptom of the ‘Disneyfication’ of our society.  People just can’t seem to wrap their pretty little heads around the fact that the world is dangerous.  Case in point:

And none of the group seemed very concerned about security.

“It never occurred to me to think it was a risk,” said the 77-year-old archaeologist from north London, Bridget Jones.  “I’m an optimist. I think it’ll never happen to me.”

She admitted she had heard “a couple of explosions”, and then she told me that she would prefer to be killed by a car bomb than die in a hospital geriatric ward.

Former probation officer Jo Gilbert, from the US, agreed there was a danger of being kidnapped and murdered.

But, with a nervous laugh, she said she was prepared to take that risk.

I wonder if they’d be so flippant if they were kidnapped, bombed, shot at.  And wait, let me guess…who would be responsible for rescuing them if they were in danger?

What a bunch of maroons…

Economic jocularity

Think economics is all about gloomy forcasts and talk of the Great Depression?  Well, after you’ve had enough purusing your 401(k) statement and contemplating you declining value of your home this weekend, cehck this out for a bit of light hearted economics:

What’s your point?

I was recently forwarded this (very lenghty) story which purports to show how a cabal of “venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times” along with all sorts of organized crime figures.

After a few pages of the document I’m not quite sure what to make of it.  Given the complexity of the financial system we have I suspect that you can string together any number of associations and ’smoking guns’ to advocate your own particular theory of what’s to blame, who’s profiting and how we’re getting the wool pulled over our eyes.  I can’t, however, discount the argument either.  Hey, they may be right.

Unfortunately, this document makes it very difficult to assess the central argument.

As I was thinking about it, I was reminded of another case where the writer was attempting to change the paradigm of how we think the United States works in the world today but seemed to miss the mark: ‘Armed Madhouse‘.  Both suffer from similar problems that undermine their attempt to convince a skeptical audience (assuming they just don’t want to listen to themselves talk or preach to the small group of people who agree with them yet either don’t have the will or ability to change things).

1. Tone: The authors come dangerously close (and I’m being generous here) to reminding the reader of that crazy guy on the street corner with a shopping cart filled with tin cans and fishing lures warning everyone about the giant extraterrestrial seed pods that are going to take over the world.  It’s a fine line between passionate patriot and tin foil hat wearing kook and when you’re arguing that everything your reader thinks about how the world is run is wrong you need to (at least appear) like you’re a rational, calm and wise person.  When you’re threatening to overturn conventional wisdom most people’s default setting is to discount them.  Therefore you need to make them think ‘Hey, this guy doesn’t seem like a crank.  Why would he say something like that?  Maybe there’s something to it.’
2. Style:   I assume that in an effort to capture the attention of the reader regarding what could be regarded as some dry subject material, the authors elected to write in a very informal style.  That’s great in some formats (particularly blogging) but, again, it can make you appear less authoritative.  After all, even I have a blog and you wouldn’t trust me, would you?    Narratives can be compelling and help you get your point across but ultimately, if you’re trying to push an argument the narrative has to be subordinate to your central theme.
3. Organization:  The Deep Capture document is, quite frankly, a mess in this regard.  It’s as if the writer(s) had 15 minutes to disgorge everything in their minds or lose it forever.  If a document was ever in need of graphics (event timelines, association diagrams, commodity flow charts, etc) this one has to be it.
4. Overreach:  If you’re going to claim that your nemesis is a sociopath, do yourself a favor and back it up (he’s certainly a terrible financial adviser but that does not qualify as a symptom in the DSM).  Name calling reduces the strength of your primary argument by both getting you off your message and making you appear that personal grievances are your motivation, not any idealistic concern.  If we really are facing the extinction of the United States or the undermining of the constitution, why should I care if Person ‘X’ was mean to a little old lady five years ago?  No matter how personally satisfying it may be to label your foe as a ‘coke head/psychopath/terrorist’, if you can’t back it up, your readers will begin to wonder what else you’re exaggerating.  If you’re going with the flow of conventional wisdom you’ll have more wiggle room here.  You can call the heads of oil or tabacco companies ‘amoral and lacking in any virtuous human qualities’ because most people, at some level, buy into that stereotype.  It may not help your argument but it won’t damage it as much as leveling those same comments at Amnesty International without exhaustive proof.
5. Focus:  These works try to do too much at one sitting.  If you want to make someone into a hero then run with that.  If you want to warn people of a danger to their freedoms and encourage them to rise up then do that.  If you want to heckle your personal enemies then do that.  It takes a skillful master to do all of those simultaneously however and chances are you don’t have the skills to pull it off.  So…just do one thing at a time.
6. Evidence:  I have a couple of rules I try to live by:

• Never trust anyone who insists on exclusively using a nickname that has nothing to do with their given name.  One good indicator of this is if they put the nickname on their business card.  For example:  Joe ‘Sheriff’ Watson or Laurie ‘Bud’ Shirinsky.  They’re all shifty and this point has absolutely nothing to do with this post.
• More relevant to the discussion here:  Never trust anyone who says things like:  ‘I examined the facts with a completely open mind and let the facts speak for themselves.’ Or, ‘I came at this problem trying to disprove the very proposition I’m now fanatically advocating.’  Those tend to be among the most close minded people you’ll ever find.

Of course, I guess you could argue that perhaps these works were written with these faults intending to discredit the arguments they purport to advance.  Put the truth out there but in such an unpalatable way that people reject it out of hand.

Hmmm…where IS that tin foil?

No better time for those tin foil hats

Wow, I really seem to be ahead of the news curve lately.  Just days after my incredibly brilliant post on the value of tin foil hats it appears that I’m living in the epicenter of UFO sightings this year.  My favorite report:

On June 23, a woman reported seeing an “alien entity” in the JCPenney’s men’s section.  “He was standing by a clothes rack,” the report said. “She described him as being male, no hair, gray skin, almond black eyes with a lumpy heavily wrinkled face.” The alien appeared to be shopping and had a “pleasant smile” for ladies in the store.

That certainly sounds shocking.  Unfortunately, I think I’ve seen hordes of beings fitting that description in every WalMart I’ve ever been in.

Still, perhaps we might be able to tease out more about these creatures if we only knew where they originally came from…

What started with a single UFO sighting over a Middletown Mexican restaurant Jan. 26 has turned into a science fiction sensation.

Oh no…Quick!  someone call Lou Dobbs!  Remember, even an extraterrestrial alien is an illegal alien, taking away jobs from good, hardworking American spacefarers.  If we paid Americans an honest wage for harvesting the Martian bauxite fields we wouldn’t have these creepy gray guys buying all of our discount men’s ties and cufflinks.

American cufflinks for American workers!  Well, Chinese cufflinks anyway…

UPDATE:  Argh!  A quick review of my blog reveals that I haven’t yet published my opus on tin foil hats.  Rest assured it’s in the queue and will be published soon.  My only excuse is that I’ve been preoccupied with all the ducks in the area that have begun wearing hats.  Where on earth is the insane haberdasher who is responsible for this outrage?