What's wrong with the mainstream media. Well fuck, what's right with it?

First off, a little back story. You know the main stream media, right? Those boring people that you get on the television between american idol and gossip girl? The ones that make a nice writing surface for that overprice crossword puzzle you get sent every sunday? (I'm assuming. I have neither. And won't. I have nothing but contempt for this dilettante leechfuck rable. As you will too once you've finished reading this post.)

Weeeeelll. They seem to have a little bit of trouble with blogs. You know: like this one. Apparently, bloggers just copy all their hard research, and work, repackage it, and then bask in the public glory of it all.

Here, let me show you how it's done: instead of trying to write this post myself, I'm just going to crib a few other people's writing. Simpler, easier, and filling just as much space on the page.

Over the past months, I've heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a "parasitic" medium that wouldn't be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.

I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It's not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.

Well, boo hoo. Let's see how amazingly well these fuckers cover the news: maybe I should be going straight to the source after all. Another blogger's post, I rip off below:

This post may be a statement of the obvious, but it’s an observation I had this morning. As is typical, I skimmed the Kindle versions of The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal on my subway ride to work. I thought it was very interesting how the three papers described the audience at President Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire last night.
First up, The Boston Globe:

Obama’s audience at Portsmouth High School gymnasium was tame. The bleachers teemed with Obama supporters… The president wound up preaching to the choir, which applauded wildly at his calls for action on healthcare – at one point breaking into a chant of “Yes we can!”

Next up, The New York Times:

Unlike many of Mr. Obama’s town-hall-style meetings, usually filled to the rafters with supporters, Tuesday’s meeting included skeptics from whom he sought out questions. At one point he asked that only people who disagreed with his approach raise their hands to be called on. There were plenty who responded.

Finally, The Wall Street Journal:

Inside Portsmouth High School, Mr. Obama faced a friendly crowd, so much so that he sought out some tough questioners.

And just to round it out, I checked out Fox News once I got to work:

Obama faced no disruptions at his meeting, instead taking questions from supporters who soft-balled him opportunities to knock down criticism.

….and The Huffington Post:

The encounter was so friendly, in fact, that by the end Obama was even asking for skeptical questioners to come forward – to no avail.

Well, well, you little sacks of shit with your fedora hats and your pencils at the ready: go run to the payphone and phone in your scoop. You couldn't report yourself out of a paper bag full of flaming dogshit, and yet you complain when people report on your reporting? Your writing and your point of view would benefit a great deal from a strong dose of objectionism, delivered with a swinging blow to the back of the head.

Aliens; it's worse than I thought.

The world hasn't ended, yet. But it certainly could. At any moment, with no warning, and in a whole bunch of creative ways. Consider the following.

1. Enormous geomagnetic storm
2. Geomagnetic polarity reversal
3. Gamma ray event
4. Methane clathrate release
5. Rogue black hole

Those are five ways that Earth or life-on-Earth-as-we-know-it could end in the blink of an eye with no warning. Some of them are hypothetical---no one has ever observed a black hole to exist, but they are highly likely---and some of them are real. All of them would be disastrous, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. Take geomagnetic storms for instance. In late August and early September 1859, during the Carrington event, Earth was bombarded by energetic particles from the sun. The bombardment caused wild fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field, which in turn induced electrical currents to flow. The currents caused telegraph offices to catch fire, electrical transformers to explode, and generally wreaked havoc on anything that could function as a current path. If a geomagnetic storm the size of the Carrington event happened now, pretty much everything we use would break. Our power grids are synchronized using GPS signals, but those satellites would get blasted early in the flare, so our power grid synchronization would collapse over the next few minutes. A large part of the world's electrical power grid would turn off, melt, or explode. That would be pretty bad for a lot of the people in the world.

A really terrifying possibility is a gamma ray event. If there were an intense gamma ray burst in the local stellar neghborhood---or even in our galaxy, it could cook half the planet's atmosphere. Maybe nobody would die from the gamma ray exposure, but since this would destroy the ozone, you might just die as a result of the cascading mass extinctions. And if that didn't get you, the cancer caused by the gamma rays would eventually catch up to you.

In addition to the five things listed above, there are numerous other ways that the world could end with different degrees of probability and different amounts of warning. Plague, global war, ecological collapse, asteroid impact, and a host of human-caused possibilities.

Or, of course, aliens could invade.

The biggest wet blanket to date.

Don't bother with the back story - it's just there so you know I didn't pull this out of my ass. Just read the last line - the one in bold.

John Williams of www.shadowstats.com notes that official US deficit statistics do NOT include net present value of unfunded social security OR Medicare expenses. A lot of folks have made a big deal about the US running a $1 trillion deficit this year. Well, if you included the net value of those unfunded Social Security and Medicare expenses we cleared a $1 trillion deficit in 2007, a $5 TRILLION deficit in 2008 and are on course to clear a $9 TRILLION deficit this year.

To give you an idea of how big a problem these deficits are, consider that the US government could tax its citizens 100% of their earnings and NOT have a balanced budget.

Let me explain in simple fucking english for you:

The US government could tax its citizen at 100% of their earning and NOT have a balanced budget.


What? You want a picture?



For fuck's sake. Shit like this makes wet blankery no fun at all.

Seeking Alpha: the coming economic collapse

What's wrong with politics, mainstream media, democracy and everything else.

Ok. So, what's wrong with the picture to my left? Look closely.

Give up? THERE'S A DOUCHEBAG IN IT.

What's more, he's in the picture thanks to the lovely work of people like the ones sitting next to you right now: other douchebags. The thing is, they prefer a can-do,damn-the-torpedoes,good old american boy over someone, or rather, anyone with the slightest amount of brains,intelligence or expertise. Here's the science:

EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice. The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

...

So if honest advice risks being ignored, what is a responsible scientific adviser to do? "It's an excellent question, and I'm not sure that I have a great answer," says Moore.

Actually no. If someone asks a question you don't have an answer, you respond by saying,

"SHUT THE FUCK UP, NEWBIE. I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. U.S.A!! U.S.A!!!"


After all, it's what they want to hear.

New Scientist: Humans prefer cockiness to expertise.*









* Correlations exposed may be subject to cultural variation, though they don't point that out in the article I point to. In other words, AMERICANS MAY BE THE ONLY ONES TO HAVE THIS STUPID ATTITUDE. I fucking hope so, because otherwise I'll have to stop hoping all together.

Ok, this is stupid science.

This is stupid science. This is also stupid journalism. And, ultimately, it's just stupid.

To succeed in academia, you need to publish results. And, those results need to have a result, or you can't publish. In other words, if you don't find anything, you can't publish. This might make sense, but it is actual fact, a narrow and artificial criteria. Why? Because it means that if your hypothesis isn't proven, you through out all your work. And so someone else might have the same idea as you, and instead of reading your paper and not doing all the work, they just go through all the work again. There are more stupid things about this, but essentially academia is capitalism run amok in a socialist system. I won't elaborate.

To succeed in journalism, you might think you need to seek out significant emerging events and describe them, which is pretty much exactly >not< what journalists do. The problem is this: new stuff is generally not very well known. Things that are unknown need describing. And frequently that might go further than having an extended back story. It might even need research that goes further than the pages of your newspaper. And who benefits if people do that? Not the advertisers, and not your paper, and so neither do you.

And besides, people don't buy newspapers in order to read! How the hell did you get that idea? They buy the newspaper in order to, in unequivocal order of importance:

- be titillated
- have something to say to their coworkers and spouse to prevent the icy silence of broken dreams
- feel better about themselves
- be informed about stuff

So, what you need is news that pertains to hot button, titillating topics that reaffirm people's self esteem and sense of superiority, while being work-safe friendly in order to prevent outbreaks Naughtiness In The Work Place. of already have people excited about. A good example of this would be video games, and, more specifically, how horrible they are for you. Say, causing you terrible, life threatening problems such as staying-up-all-night-to-finish-that-last-level-on-a-school-night.

For your edification, here is a press release that meets all the above criteria. Apparently, staying up late and playing video games causes a lack of sleep.

I am amazed. I had no idea. Should this being the DSM-IV? I'm sure that, back when video games didn't suck, I had this disease in a most horrible way.

Computer/console gamers who play for more than seven hours a week and who identify their gaming as an addiction sleep less during the weekdays and experience greater sleepiness than casual or non-gamers, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies

Results of the study indicate that excessive gamers have significantly poorer sleep hygiene and sleep less on weekdays than other gamers; a significant positive correlation was found between the hours of game play and sleepiness. Gamers who reported that their gaming interfered with sleep slept for 1.6 hours less than other gamers, while those who claimed to be addicted to gaming slept one hour less on weekdays.

Woah. I had nooooooooooo idea.

Science Codex: Playing games late in the night makes you sleepy

Because I'm too fucking lazy to actually write anything for you to read, here's a sweaty goth.

I'm going to post a post from someone else's blog, with a picture from their blog, about a paragraph and half of pointless self reference and followed with a pithy open question. I'm doing this in order to fool you into thinking that I am contributing anything to this exchange more than 'L@@K!! OVER HERE!! AT WHAT I FOUND!!!!!'

This is a most excellent day. Not only did I just find a blog devoted to pictures of sweaty, uncomfortable sunburned Goths, but I've also discoverd the secret to professional blogging: don't actually write anything.

What do you think?

I thought I was bringing the world a much-needed service with this blog. And then I found THIS http://www.gothcruise.com. These uber-Goths are actually living the nightmare! I could write for hours about how superb this is, and how we all, each and every Goth on the planet, should attend this irony-laden event, but my words pale into insignificance in the face of such awesome Gothness. I choose a quote from their marvellous FAQ, which sums up the very essence of my mission: "We find that the people who most enjoy the cruise are those in the scene who aren’t terrified by the ‘daystar’ and/or are comfortable using “Goth Block” (SPF 30,001) to keep from getting an embarrassing tan... This is vacation after all. You aren't expected to be uncomfortable 24/7."

Goths in hot weather

GREETINGS AND KINDEST FELICITATIONS, PEOPLE OF AMERICA, MY NAME IS BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AND I WRITE TO YOU WITH GREAT SORROWNESS IN MY TIDINGS

GREETINGS AND KINDEST FELICITATIONS, PEOPLE OF AMERICA,

MY NAME IS BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AND I WRITE TO YOU WITH GREAT SORROWNESS IN MY TIDINGS. DUE TO AN UNFORESEEN ACCIDENT OF A CALAMITABLE PROPORTION, THE ECONOMY IN MY COUNTRY IS IN GREAT SHAMBLES AND WE ARE IN A TIME OF GREAT TROUBLES.

HOWEVER THROUGH CALAMITY COMES ALSO PLENTIOUS OPPORTUNITIES. THROUGH MY GOVERNMENTAL POSITION, I HAVE ACQUIRED ADVANCED KNOWLEDGE ON NUMERABLE EQUITY POSITIONINGS THAT ARE GUARANTEED TO RISE IN VALUE OVER THE COMING TIMES TO AN AMOUNT OF 500% (FIVE HUNDRED PERCENT, UNITED STATES PERCENTAGES), THAT I GREATLY WISH TO PASS ON TO YOU, IN ORDER THAT YOU MAY PROFIT AND PROSPER FROM MISFORTUNE OF OTHERS.

BUT, THERE IS, IN MY PATH A PROBLEMATIC ISSUE THAT COULD PREVENT ME FROM PASSING ON THIS VALUABLE KNOWLEDGE WITH WHICH I REQUIRE YOUR COLLABORATIVE ASSISTANCESHIP. TO THIS END: THE LIST OF EQUITIES (STOCKS) THAT WILL BE ON THE UPRISING IS SO LARGE THAT I NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT IN PAYING FOR THE LONG PHONE CALL THAT IS REQUIRED TO INFORM YOU OF THE PENDING INCREASE IN THEIR VALUE.

TO HELP ME, PLEASE WIRE DEPOSIT 700 TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THAT I WILL BE IN THE ACCESS OF USING THE FEDERAL UNION TRANSFER WIRE TRANSFER, IN ORDER THAT I CAN ACQUISITE THE REQUIRED FUNDS TO PAY FOR THE EXTENDED LONG DISTANCE CALL TO YOU FROM MY LOCATION.

OF NOTICE TO YOU (ATTENTION PLEASE) - I AM NOT IN THE COMPLETE UNDERSTANDING OF THE AMOUNT IN WHICH I WILL NEED IN ORDER TO MAKE THE CALL TO YOUR LOCATION. AS SUCH I AM IN THE CHOOSING OF 700 TRILLION DOLLARS BECAUSE I WISH TO CHOOSE ‘A SUITABLY LARGE NUMBER’, AND SO FORTH ANY LEFT OVER FUNDS WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU WITH PROMPTNESS AND GRATITUDE. ALSO I MUST SAY, THOUGH I AM CERTAINLY MOST ASSUREDLY POSITIVE THAT IT WILL NOT COME TO PASS, BUT I MAY BE IN THE NEEDING OF MORE FUNDS IN ORDER TO COMPLETE THE TELEPHONICAL CALL TO TELL YOU OF THE EQUITIES (STOCKS) IN WHICH THERE IS SURE TO BE A 500% RISE.

PLEASE REPLY TO MY HOTMAIL ADDRESS WHERE INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO DELIVER THE MONIES TO MY FEDERAL RESERVE ACCOUNT BANK, SO THAT I CAN BEGIN THE DELIVERY OF THE NAMES OF THE EQUITIES (STOCKS).

I WAIT IN HUMBLE SUPPLICATIVENESS FOR YOUR GENTLE RESPONSE.

THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS YOU AND KINDLY PLEASE YOU.

BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

(written in response to Obama’s statement that “now may be a good time to buy stocks”, a month or so ago. You are thinking 'ooh but look at all the green shoots! He was right! Yeah? Well go talk to you grandmother about how things felt before it all fell apart in 1929. No, fuck that: talk to her about the stories she was told by >her<>real< great depression)

Obi-wan Kenobi is a dick.

Obi Wan Kenobi is a dick.

I came to this conclusion while rewatching Star Wars an hour ago.

Let's say your sketchy neighbour tells you that the father you never met is actually a really great guy, who was killed by James Earl Jones. Or not James Earl Jones, but some big nasty mean corporate asshole who goes around grabbing people by the throat and generally being unpleasant to work for. Really unpleasant.

So, you go after this guy, naturally, since he killed your dad, and in his dying gasp, he tells you he was your dad all along, and Ben never bothered to tell you.

If you are like me, you would be pretty pissed at Ben. He's a dick.

Pothead