Guilt By Dissociation

For years now I've been preaching fire and brimstone when it comes to the dangers of trusting the press to do the job of law enforcement or allowing it to do the job of the courts. While I admit to not always being successful, I generally try very hard to take a deep breath and think twice before buying wholesale into the immediate media narrative whenever a story breaks or even as it develops. The reason for this is simple: In the middle of a feeding frenzy blood gets everywhere, nobody can tell what's what, important details get lost, and the animal mentality can completely block out rational thought. What you then get is, well, Richard Jewell.

Remember him? You should. You should remember him solely as a hero who saved lives in the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta back in 1996, but thanks to the media's rush to judgment and the public that let them get away with it for far too long without asking questions, you probably know him as a guy who was falsely accused of causing the Olympic Park bombing. Or worse, you don't even know about the correction the press was forced to choke on or the bullshit hand-wringing and soul-searching that followed it and you still think Richard Jewell was the man who killed one person and injured more than a hundred others in an act of homegrown terrorism. Jewell went to his grave in 2007 still dealing with the effects of being wrongly tried and convicted in the shameful court of public opinion that sprung entirely from the fevered mind of the media.

The worldwide press should've learned from that and so many other of its sins. Unfortunately, as the Boston Marathon bombing coverage proved, it hasn't learned a damn thing.

Cracked, which regularly traffics in brilliantly addictive listicles, catalogs the media's failures and counts them down for you.

Cracked: 6 Insanely Reckless Media Accusations That Ruined People's Lives/7.8.13

Screenshot of the Day

My prayers are answered.

The ad server that determined that I'm the right person to target this kind of banner ad toward is seriously fucked.

Tech Support

Bad news first thing on a Monday morning, kids. My laptop is having serious issues -- and by serious I mean that it's pretty much dead. (I'm writing this on my phone.)

Bottom line: It's probably going to be barren around here today while I get the computer checked.

An update soon.

Picture(s) of the Day

Mountain Dew decided to crowdsource the name of its newest God-awful drink via an online contest.

The 4Chan kids, as it turned out, were more than happy to give them some suggestions.


The contest has since been taken down.

God I love the internet.

Picture of the Day

Who knows whether this is for real or entirely made up. Either way, it's a nice little commentary on the dangers of instantly making millions of people who know nothing more than what they read in a two line blog post or see in a two-minute YouTube video outraged experts on a complex issue. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the slacktivist herd-mentality.

Wreckquiem

I'm not even going to bother picking apart the latest "bombshell" the conservative media shriekers are unleashing against President Obama. Suffice it to say that the big story that Andrew Breitbart was working on just before his death -- the one that had been hyped as a potential game-changer in the 2012 presidential race and was trumpeted by some particularly unhinged paranoiacs as being so terrifying to the White House that Obama had Breitbart killed for it -- turned out to be, well, nothing. A videotape of Barack Obama saying something nice about and embracing -- figuratively and literally -- a Harvard professor who was taking a stand against institutional racism on campus two decades ago.

It's not that it's not hilarious. It's, again -- nothing. Nothing at all.

My first reaction when I heard about it, saw the videotape, and witnessed the insanely passionate outrage surrounding it coming from the usual suspects on the right was, to be honest, pity. It's almost sad that this is the best they can do when it comes to uncovering -- or even manufacturing -- a scandal against this president.

This is all they've got.

It's like I can picture Breitbart lying mortally wounded on the floor of the USS Reliant's bridge, hissing at his obsession, President Obama, "From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!" But at least Khan had the Genesis device. It turns out Breitbart had nothing. And that gets to be his final epitaph.

Just for a laugh, though, watch Soledad O'Brien obliterate Breitbart flunky Joel Pollack over the big "scoop."



Adding: You know what? Maybe there is something worth saying about this "scandal." Breitbart's people's argument seems to be that this clip somehow proves that Obama wasn't "vetted," not because there was one piece of video that hadn't gotten what they feel is the proper amount of media attention but because that video, in their delusional minds, purports to show Obama engaging in racially divisive politics. Except that it doesn't show that at all. What it shows, what it proves, is that Barack Obama is black. That he's a black man who accepts that racism is very real and that those like him have generally come up on the losing end of it, and therefore it's incumbent upon him to speak out against it and support others who do. And guess fucking what? He's been vetted as black. We knew he was black years ago. And even if we didn't or if we'd somehow forgotten, trust me, you assholes in the conservative media have spent almost four solid years reminding us over and over again. Because as far as your audience is concerned, being black is what automatically disqualified Barack Obama from being president and what still does.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"He's like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He just knows how to stay alive. He's running through the jungle, fighting back, shooting from the hip, takes a lot of hits, stays angry the entire time, and he is giving a voice to a lot of people out there whose lives have been completely upended."

-- Tom Brokaw on Rick Santorum, during MSNBC's coverage of the Republican primaries last night

Where to even being. It's this kind of nonsense that frustrates the hell out of anyone looking for intelligent, responsible political reportage and analysis on cable news. No, Tom, Santorum isn't like a character in a movie, nor is he a horse in a race; he's very real and his rhetoric and proposed policies have the potential to impact the entire country. And the people he's largely giving a voice to -- the ones whose lives have been "upended," mostly by the frightening march of progress -- are those who believe that we need to return to the 19th century when it comes to our politics and pervading beliefs on subjects like religion and women's rights. He says the separation of church and state makes him sick, that a college education is for snobs and those willing to be indoctrinated by liberal thinking, and that Satan, the father of lies, is behind this country's troubles. But instead of parsing the policies and views of a man running for President of the United States and the way they could affect each and every one of us, Brokaw can only sit back and marvel at Santorum's supposedly ferocious tenacity.

This is why no one with a mildly functional brain gives a shit about anything the TV news networks have to say about politics anymore.

Yeah, Tom -- Santorum is like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He's Brad Pitt's delusional mental patient Jeffrey Goines from 12 Monkeys. And if you don't have the balls to at least notice that because you're too busy clinging to some horseshit illusion of objectivity, then no one should be listening to you.

Picture of the Week (Honorary Gilbert Gottfried Edition)

The Language of Love

True story: So last night, while in the process of getting some work done, I was having a nice little text conversation with a very attractive young woman I know. Nothing dirty or overly flirtatious, just -- nice.

As the back-and-forth wrapped up, she let me know that she was heading off to bed.

And so I typed into my phone, "Sleep well," then followed it with a somewhat innocent "xoxo."

I was a millisecond away from hitting the send button when, thank God, I happened to look down and see what was actually in the text she was about to get.

Turns out my phone didn't recognize "xoxo" which means that the auto-correct feature kicked in and turned it into a word it did recognize and I suppose closely associated with "xoxo."

The message read: "Sleep well. Cock."

I'm not sure what this says about me, but it's probably not good.

Picture of the Week

From MSNBC, which apparently didn't see the irony in asking whether Kate Middleton is the "New Diana" while simultaneously covering a live car chase.

Dearth of a Nation

Chase Whiteside is back -- and at this point he should be wearing a cape or something. For those who haven't been following along, Whiteside is the whip-smart young journalist who's now twice exposed the tea baggers and Palinites (who, let's face it, are largely one and the same group) as the painfully uninformed yet astonishingly self-certain dipshits they pretty much are. He's done it through nothing more impressive than simply pointing a camera at them, asking a couple of very respectful and measured questions, then letting them hang themselves with their own ignorance.

It's always entertaining as hell to watch -- so it goes without saying that Whiteside's trip to the April 15th "Tax Day Tea Party" in D.C. is worth taking ten minutes out of your day to watch.

Sunday Sacrilege

You take one look at the basic premise and think to yourself, "This couldn't get any funnier." And then you click the "Members" link.

Fashion Models for Christ

(h/t Christian Nightmares)

(Why a picture of Carrie Prejean with her right breast hanging out? Somehow it just seemed perfectly representative of the inherent irony. Yes, that's the reasoning I'm going with.)

Sunday Sacrilege

"Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in in things like that it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving, our's has a start and an end. God created the world He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay Rock and Minerals but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.”

Literally, fail. At everything: school, work, life -- you name it.

Panic Attract

Two columns that are completely on-the-mark in their assessment of the unnecessary pants-peeing terror hype we've seen in this country in the wake of the failed "underwear bombing," and how the drama-addicted media, as usual, are largely to blame:

"We're doing these things even though this particular plot was chosen precisely because we weren't screening for it; future al Qaeda attacks rarely look like past attacks; and the terrorist threat is far broader than attacks against airplanes.
We're doing these things even though airplane terrorism is incredibly rare, the risk is no greater today than it was in previous decades, the taxi to the airport is still more dangerous than the flight, and ten times as many Americans are killed by lightning as by terrorists...

The Underwear Bomber is precisely the sort of story we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare events. Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we've had to deal with throughout most of our species' existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks modern society forces us to face. We exaggerate spectacular rare events, and downplay familiar and common ones...

I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying."

CNN.com: "Stop the Panic on Airline Security" by Bruce Schneier/1.7.10

"Islamic extremists can't invade the United States or cripple its armed forces, can't heavily damage the nation's infrastructure or productive capacity, can't impair the nation's functioning nor undermine its government. All they're capable of -- and the Flight 253 episode shows them not terribly good at that -- are mass murder atrocities, the purpose of which is to terrify Americans into doing stupid things that sap our morale and damage ourselves.

Things like invading Iraq, resorting to using torture, abandoning the rule of law and demanding authoritarian solutions that provide a false sense of security to people quivering with media-amplified fear."

Salon: "Terrorized by the Media" by Gene Lyons/1.6.10

Crap Shoot

If you were one of those people who enjoyed it when the auto-complete algorithm at Google search first started finishing the sentence "I am" with "Extremely Terrified of Chinese People" a few months back -- as in, type in "I am" and the first suggested search you get is "I am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People" -- you're gonna love this.

The folks over at Failblog have apparently gotten their readers to Google bomb the search engine with a new specific phrase, so now whenever you type in the words "Why won't," the very first auto-completed sentence (and potential search) that pops up is "Why Won't My Parakeet Eat My Diarrhea?"

This is pretty entertaining. You know what's even more entertaining, though? The fact that in screen grab above, it sort of looks like the Google logo shows a little girl saluting a giant brown penis.

Interlude

Interlude

Sunday Sacrilege

I Dare You To Poke Her

Is this once again the work of the merry pranksters at 4chan? Wouldn't surprise me -- but it's darn amusing either way.

(h/t Oliver Willis)

Sunday Sacrilege