It's Not A Threat, Nancy!

You might want to have an ice pick handy with which to use to stab out your ears when you listen to the clip below. What we have is the insufferable Nancy Grace, who still has a cable TV show for some reason. If you're unfamiliar with this woman, her show goes something like this: She doesn't listen to anything that anyone has to say. She will argue with her 'experts'. She has no intention of presenting both sides of any story. And she also seems very pleased with her own act. She seems to be a horrible woman, which is why I don't watch her show.

But I did run across the clip below where she is arguing with a one Bernie Rayno who is the senior meteorologist (take that for what it's worth) at something called Accuweather.com. (As I perused their FAQs, I learned that they have ads on their website to keep their content free. That's normal. I also learned that they feel that there is nothing wrong with 2 pop-up ads every five minutes. That's not so normal.) He is trying to assure Nancy Grace that there is no reason for people on the California coast to be panicking about any radiation from the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan making its way over here in harmful amounts. She does not want to be reassured. She wants to instill fear into the hearts and souls of those softheaded individuals who are actually watching her show and listening to what she says. The interaction between the two is below.

I do enjoy how the weather guy seems to know that she isn't going to want to hear anything that he has to say if it would involve calming the fears of people who are so out of touch with reality that they are actually afraid of something like this. And as for her declaring that the governor of California has declared a state of emergency, Mr. Meteorologist hit the nail on the head (though I wish he could have hit her on the head) when he exclaimed, "For radiation?!" And alas, his disbelief is warranted, as the state of emergency was issued because of excessive rainfall in some areas. I'm not quite sure what she gains from setting off a minor panic amongst the dullards of this world, but she seems to really enjoy herself.

Sunday TV News FAIL + New Animation(s)

Why on earth do I waste any time watching the Sunday morning and afternoon TV political shows?  If the definition of madness is doing something you know to be wrong again and again--

To give just one example, I stomached about two segments of Candy Crowley's CNN show State of the Union, by which I mean I was able to stomach two consecutive doses of hard-right-wing propaganda before I started commenting loudly back at the screen, and C suggested I turn it off. In the first, billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman and multimillionaire Steve Forbes represented the ideological range and diversity of opinions on the current economic crisis. As you might imagine, their responses to Crowley's non-sequiturs-as-questions had little to do with the reality of the world most of us live in. Zuckerman, on a "deficit" hysteria high, ranted about business leaders being very unhappy with (business-friendly) President Obama and the failure of the stimulus, and suggested that we needed fewer regulations so that businesses would be happy, and lower taxes for the "middle class" to turn things around, while Forbes suggested that we needed a three-year "moratorium" on the new health insurance reform bill and financial regulations, and of course, a continuation of the massive deficit-increasing W. Bush tax cuts, and like magic, the economy would be booming again. Oh, and both slammed Obama for the 9.5% unemployment rate, which resulted in part from businesses' "uncertainty," and not the fact that they were sitting on cash, that bailed out banks weren't lending, or that the vicious cycle of unemployment, tightened credit and financial distress meant no return to the consumerism of the last decade and a half.

Crowley noted that from her (wrong) understanding of economics, "raising taxes" (i.e., allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire) on the wealthiest Americans during a tough economic period like this would be the worst thing we could do, in line with and to the approval of Forbes, but Zuckerman, to his credit, disagreed with her and noted that in fact, the slightly increased tax burden on the rich wouldn't be that much of a burden, really, before quickly returning to his mantra of cutting the deficit and having fewer regulations. After several rounds of this, with Crowley offering no serious challenges to anything they were saying, including Zuckerman's non-response on rising foreclosures--he went on about the "bubble" and the failure of people to buy houses--she effusively thanked them for their expertise (!?), and then proceeded to her next guest, former Bush CIA director Michael Hayden, who, when questioned tepidly by Crowley about the host of deeply troubling allegations in the recent multipart Washington Post series by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, "Top Secret America," on the dangerously secretive, inefficient and possibly unconstitutional National Security-Military Industrial complex, graciously responded by emphasizing that an attack on Iran was "inexorable"....

I'm aware that quite a few people no longer watch these shows, and that they exist primarily to reinforce the echo chamber in Washington, but I guess that's what disturbs me most, that echo chamber effect and its ramifications on the policies that emanate from the White House and Congress. It's not enough that corporations, their lobbyists, and the megarich have the ears (and pockets and throats) of those in power, but they also have this self-reinforcing medium to propound and pound, day in, day out, their propaganda. One might argue that it does offer a window directly into what their aims and preoccupations are--more wars; more secrecy; more corporate socialism and wealth transfers to the rich; more shredding of the already threadbare social safety net; etc.--but the cynical and frustrating aspects of this include the inability to directly challenge them or force them to change course. And speaking of courses they're on, high among their priorities is slashing Social Security, with this President's and Congress's direct help.

And speaking about the successes of disaster capitalism, in Detroit, they're getting skilled labor for a song. Now, I ask you, did any of the GM or Chrysler executives pay back any of those bonuses or the compensation they received during the years they were running these companies into the ground?  Were they forced to, by the government, the courts or anyone else?

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Shifting gears, here're two newer animations, the first on soccer (I created it the night Spain won the 2010 FIFA World Cup), the second on the theme of art. And speaking of soccer, welcome Thierry Henry!

Golazo!


Art

Men Love Their Penis

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Men are awfully fond of their penises. I mean that collectively, not like any one guy has plural penises (penii?). I hope.

The clip below is from a newscast out of New Orleans. It's hard to tell exactly what the topic was, but I'm guessing it had something to do with with women receiving some form of enjoyable sexual fulfillment. Regardless, the male newscaster couldn't help but take this opportunity to be extremely proud that some woman out there received some pleasure in some form from some other man's penis. Penis.

Penis.

P.S. Yeah, it was a really slow news day. But you can always find a story about a penis! At least it's good for something!

Rhymes With Boy Schism

Some things are just better left unsaid. Forever. Just don't ever say them. Case in point would be the suggestion that one one Rosanna Scotto came up with during an on-air debate. Better left unsaid, I'm telling you.

Here's the situation: The issue at hand was phrased by the aforementioned Rosanna Scotto as "Should milk that's not from a cow be called milk?" Apparently, the milk industry is having issues with other things being called milk. Whatever. Have they just become aware of this? Apparently. Anyway, that was the question posed.

One of the ingenius newspeople there responded with "Sure. We call mother's milk 'milk' and it's not from a cow." Wait. What now? Yeah, it's not from a cow, but it's still MILK, you moron. What a weak argument. That's the best you could come up with? So far...yes.

The person who phrased the question responded with "They're talking about things like soy milk. You know, rice milk." OK, I think we're clear here. While those two things, the soy and the rice, don't necessarily excrete milk as defined, they do excrete a milky substance which I would think would qualify as milk. I mean, come on. If something is labeled "soy milk" am I really expecting that the soy in that instance came from a cow? Am I going to be surprised to learn that soy milk did not come from a cow? I don't think that I am.

Anyway, the genius who made the mother's milk analogy piped in with "Yeah, what else are we going to call it? Soy juice?" And here is where the problem began.

Apparently, Rosanna was on some sort of a roll with what else to call the juice that is not from a cow, but that is still milk-like in substance. And she blurted out the uncouth answer of....well....the video is below.

Wow. Did she really say that? I think she did. I don't know if I can actually type those words out. I know I don't want to. How about if I just say that the name that she suggested for the soy milk was "Soy something". Let's just say that it rhymes with "boy schism", OK? How's that? Yes, I know. It's terrible? Really, ma'am? You felt it was OK to just blurt that out, did you? Is this really what we've come to? (No pun intended.)

The State Of The Media

It's hard to explain the state of media reporting these days. It's just so...so...bad. I mean it's just bad. You know what I mean. You've seen it. You've heard it. It's bad. And the folks over at The Onion have summarized the state of the media quite well with the video below.

That's Not Curling

When the Winter Olympics roll around, I'm always fascinated by the whole sport of curling. It's like someone heaves a cement Roomba down the ice and then two other guys go after it with Swiffers. I think of it as the tidiest of all Olympic events. It's quite odd. And I guess that over there in Australia, two of the news anchors on Channel 9 were explaining and/or demonstrating the finer nuances of curling via the Wii console. Yeah, see, the thing is that if you're watching them while they're playing the game, it doesn't look so much like they're involved in curling. No, it looks a little bit more like they're doing something else. And I found it to be highly amusing.

News Navigation Narration

It's been an extremely long day over here. Long, long, long. Anyway, enough about me. Let's get on with the news.

I don't have much to say and the video below pretty much says it all, really. A one Charlie Brooker is apparently a columnist for guardian.co.uk. While I don't typically think of The Guardian as any sort of humorous publication, this Brooker fellow is one funny guy.

The quality which our reporting media continues to strive for is at depths that are lower than most of us could have ever imagined. That is to say, it sucks. It sucks so bad that we're not sure if it can suck any more. But then we realize that it can. But fortunately, there's the wonderful Charlie Brooker to help us navigate through some of those potentially confusing newscasts and understand exactly why it is that we're seeing what it is that's being reported to us. Nice job, Charlie! There might be a glimmer of hope out there yet. Maybe.