Saturday, October 24, 2009

The Fox and the White House

Everybody's talking like the President is attacking Fox News, when all the White House spokeslady said was that until Fox starts acting like grownup news professionals the Pres is not going to treat them like it just because they own a lot of stations. My nine-year-old nephew is a pro at computer race car driving, but I ain't giving him the keys to the Caddy.

The other networks, they're not really worried about Fox . What the White House said was the plain truth. And that's the problem right there: it was the truth. From the White House no less. What's gonna happen in American politics if your elected officials start telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Reporters won't have anything to do but report. Where's the ratings in that?

To me, honesty is a great moral issue that has guided my life. I don't think you should have to pretend somebody else is what they're not unless you're getting a diamond bracelet or a new car out of it. If there's no incentive, or you do it out of fear, it's creepy. Oh, you're so smart to a boss who's a stupid jerk just so's you won't get fired. Yuck. Oh, you're so considerate to a co-worker who spreads lies about people she don't like. Icky yuck. I don't want my President doing that. I don't mind him flattering a little to get Russia to sell Iran non-bomb nuclear stuff so the ayatollahs got no excuse to keep enriching uranium. Keeping nuclear bombs out of Iran is worth a little ick in the truth department.

But the idea that everybody deserves to be treated like a real newscaster just cuz they say so is how Bush ended up with a male prostitute being a key member of the previous White House Press Corps. Gannon had no press credentials. How do you think he got in? The other news networks are more up in arms about the statements about Fox than they were about a prostitute newsman. Is it because they're too much the same thing?

Monday, October 19, 2009

BROADCAST WAKE-UP CALL

Listening to complaints about your Air America Radio and your MSNBC, it sounds like people think it's just embarrassing for cultured, open-minded people to be so ... so direct. Nobody's making nice and your middle-class types want nice, you know, in that middle-of-the road nice way. The fundamentalist right wing, they love their loud talk radio and tv because that means they only hear their songs of right and wrong, and being right is the whole point. It's even safe for them to talk about Jesus while they attack the nicey-nice liberals because everybody knows that nobody is really that nice unless they are Mother Teresa and then they'd be in Calcutta and staying out of the Republicans' way in the first place.

So now you got liberal talk radio that's talking smack about them lyin' cheatin' low-down varmints in Congress and they are putting those loud liberals on the tv and even the President pointing out how some new reporting is not respectable so don't expect the Pres to lie down with the dogs, and what can the poor Republicans do? If liberals stop being namby-pamby, it could change the face of America's politics. It changed the face of America's President.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

DNA MATTERS

How can it still be news that men are simple? This is why we love them. If I want complex, I go visit my mother.

Studies every day come up that shows men's chromosomal lacks when compared to the female. (here and here ). It's fine that science is proving our superiority, but it's always bad taste to be both better than someone else and to brag about it. Hopefully, though, your average male, will not notice. Only your handful of very verbal males who chose the hotbed of language will notice, though they will be the ones who write about it. The rest, like Lawrence Summers has pointed out, are so crowding the maths and sciences with their linear simplicity and lack of nuance that there is little room for women who have a talent for numbers. Pity Larry for describing it as women's lack. It's like saying a humans are not as good as dogs at seeing things in black and white. Your dog doesn't have the brain for understanding fuschia, much less creating an academic discipline in design that would include it. So they do their lovely line drawings and even sumi-e paintings. And women, who get tired of suggesting that maybe a little green would be make the grass nicer and getting that blank or dismissive look, find a field where the palette is richer.