Today I saw the cover of their new cover with the big headline, “The Decade From Hell.” After wretching a bit, I wondered that the fuck was wrong with them. Seriously, maybe — just maybe — the 1930s, or maybe even the 1940s were just a little bit worse. Do the Great Depression or World War II ring a bell?
If this is hell, then someone please sign me up and put me at the top of the list.
From NYT:
If large majorities of Americans favor increased government support for clean energy, as polls suggest, why are so many people reluctant to back such programs when it comes to paying extra themselves?
I won’t call that a stupid question. But I will call supremely ignorant any adult who can’t figure out the answer in under 2 milliseconds.
It isn’t uncommon for me to hear people rave about the British TV show Top Gear, the “award winning car show.” But in the few times I have watched clips, I have failed to see what the fuss is about. What I have typically seen is a show where they go out of their way to be unimportantly correct. For example, this clip [thanks Fark]where it’s claimed that “Prius More Enviromentally Damaging Than BMW M3.”
In the clip, they compare fuel economy of a Prius driven at top speed with that of an M3 that followed it around. The test isn’t remotely fair and leaves false impressions. But eventually they get to the bottom line that “[i]t isn’t what you drive that matters, it’s how you drive it.” They cleared up false impressions by lying. The real bottom line, of course, is that it’s both what you drive and how you drive it that matters. Smart as dipsticks those Top Gear hosts.
Since my move, I’ve effectively been without television (I’m waiting for the owner to approve the installation of lines in rooms where I actually want to and have put my TV). This is actually not too big of a deal since I haven’t been home much, since there aren’t any important sports on TV right now, and because I have many DVDs plus my roommate just bought the first seasons of Mad Men and Entourage. Plus there’s a mega theater right near by so I was able to see the new Harry Potter over the weekend. Here are some of my thoughts on these three titles.
Entourage: I watched the first disk (the first four episodes) and I nearly gave up on this show. Actually, if there had been anything else to watch I would have given up on it. It’s a show about dumbass assholes who have good things happen to them. Sorry, but that’s just not compelling television to me. Fortunately, the episodes on the second disk were actually well written and entertaining enough that I wasn’t stuck focusing on the dumbassery assholishness.
Mad Men: I’ve already seen a lot of these episodes, so I watched the DVDs to help fill in the gaps. I still like watching it, but right now I’m wondering if the show is actually going anywhere. The 60’s era novelty is likely to wear off, so I hope they make the new season the last one and go ahead and tie up all the loose ends.
Harry Potter: I’m not Mr. Harry Potter fan. I’ve not read the books (although I did end up listening to two of them in audio book format. I have seen several of the movies. What I’m trying to say is that I really don’t know the ins and outs and the tiny details of the series. That also helps to make me a bit less biased, or at least biased in another direction. On that note, the latest movie just isn’t that good as movie. This is not to say it wasn’t fun to watch; I found it to be fairly entertaining. It was good that it strayed a bit from the formula used in the first several movies and that it was a bit less childish. However, and maybe the books don’t reveal this problem, it seems like the creators lost focus, or interest or both. It all felt a bit lazy. Ultimately, once it was over I realized that I just paid to see 2 1/2 hours of, basically, filler material meant only to set people up for the remaining movies.
At this point, you may have seen or heard CNBC’s Jim Cramer appear on the Daily Show with John Stewart. I’ve not seen it because I’m actually trying to avoid it. However, while driving Friday night, I heard on the Mike O’Meara Show some clips of the interview. In it Cramer defends his defense of Lehman Bros. from months back by saying he knew the Lehman CEO, that he trusted the Lehman CEO, and that the Lehman CEO lied to him. Stewart hits back suggesting that journalists have some obligation to actually check out what they’re being told. It’s a good point. What good are journalists if they’re just blindly relaying to the public whatever some company wants the public to hear. Cramer didn’t have a good comeback.
However, this appears to be endemic at CNBC (if not everywhere else). Silicon Alley Insider noted in January an instance where a blogger was challenging CNBC and their Silicon Valley bureau chief’s reporting of Apple and Steve Jobs’ health — an instance where CNBC was pretty wrong. The video of the encounter does little to inspire confidence in journalists/reporters.
The bureau chief defends himself by saying that he believes his sources and that the sources believe what they told him. He seems to feel no obligation to investigate whether or not they’d actually have access to the real information. One of the CNBC talking heads adds points like:
The dirty secret of journalism is you have to believe most of what your told.
and
He reported what he was told and that’s what every journalist does.
How’s that for inspiring confidence. And to think that some people trust this information and use it for making investment decisions.
