How to fail

The Lala Times, having seen the splendid success that the New York Times paywall has been (i.e., the NYT has gotten less than $1M worth of revenue out of it despite spending over $40M on it, and there's a *reason* to read the NYT, unlike the Lala TImes), has now decided that such a splendid success requires emulation. At which point I say, WTF? The LA Times is not a "Newspaper of Record". Their quality level has always been somewhere down around that of a major suburban newspaper. I mean, even the San Jose Murky News has better coverage of Los Angeles in many cases than the LaLa Times does! After all, they both get their news from the same place -- the AP news stringers. But the Murky doesn't chop the AP stories to confetti.

Baffling. Utterly baffling. It's like the entire newspaper industry has a death wish. At this point simply accessing AP directly would keep me better informed, because that's where all the content of the newspapers comes from anyhow, *not* chopped to shreds to fit some editor's notion that newspaper readers have the attention span of gnats (if that were true, we wouldn't buy newspapers, we'd just watch the evening news, DOH!).

Note that subscriptions have *never* covered the cost of publishing a newspaper -- at best subscriptions have defrayed the costs of delivering the newspaper to subscribers, but the actual content has always been paid for by advertising. The traditional business model of the newspaper industry is that the content's entire purpose is to bring in eyeballs to see the ads. Sort of the Google business model, now that I think about it. So why can Google execute on this, but not the newspapers, who *invented* this business model?

-- Badtux the "Brains! They need brains!" Penguin

Matt Drudge wants you to read his web site...

unless you're a government employee, at which point I guess you give up your right to read his web site.

Look. There are times when I post things that have folks from unallocated IP addresses stop by. (That is, there is no official entry in the ARIN reverse lookup database for these IP addresses, there's No Such Address, read the initials ;). It's called GOOGLE. Some of those folks are dropping by because it's their job. Some are dropping by because they're on their lunch break. Either way, they typed in something like, say "B-1 crash afghanistan" to Google and came to my blog. That's how the Internet works. That's how it's always worked, all the way back to the early webcrawlers that required you to be really creative to actually find things.

So we are left with two options here: Either Drudge really believes that becoming a government employee means you lose your right to use Google to find articles of interest to you or your employer, or Drudge is a cretin. I report, you decide.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

False equivalencies

One of the things the right wing likes to do is false equivalences. This ties into the so-called media's propensity to report on "both sides" of a story even when there isn't another side. If the Flat Earth Society held a press conference, our lame-stream media would dutifully report "the Flat Earth Society today presented scientific proof that the Earth was flat. Other opinions differ." Err, except it's not an opinion, the Earth is *round*. Or at least sorta ovaloid.

So anyhow, a lot of us have pointed out that the Teabaggers and their poster child, Michelle Bachmann, are, to put it bluntly, batshit crazy. I mean, what else can you say about people who go around ranting "keep your government hands off my Medicare"?! So the teabaggers fire back and say that calling them crazy is exactly the same as calling Barrack Obama a nigger.

Uh, excuse me? Err... yes, Barrack *is* black. And that matters... why? In the meantime, the fact that Michelle Bachmann is nuttier than a bag of peanuts does matter. Saying that President Obama has curly hair is focusing on something irrelevant to his ability to perform the duties of the Presidency. Saying that Michelle Bachmann has crazy ideas utterly divorced from reality is focusing on something very relevant indeed to her ability to perform the duties of the Presidency. To say that calling attention to the color of the President's skin is exactly the same as calling attention to Michelle Bachmann's tenuous connection with reality is like comparing the fact that Charles Manson is a murderous creep to the fact that President Obama has big ears. The former fact -- that Charlie is a deranged lunatic who wants to kill people -- is quite important in making a decision about what his proper fate should be. The size of the President's ears... uhm, what does that got to do with anything?

Yet the Republican Party commissars keep spitting out these false equivalencies, and the lamestream media dutifully reports "Democrats claim that Michelle Bachmann is crazy, while Republicans point out that Obama has dark skin" as if those are equivalent statements. They're not. One statement directly addresses Bachmann's fitness for office. The other is irrelevant to anybody except racists and bigots. And you'd think that people would quit falling for these false equivalencies, but, alas, 50% of all people are below average, and average ain't so smart nowadays...

-- Badtux the Equivocal Penguin

Polls

52% approve of God's job performance.

That's what passes for journalism in today's media. What next, a poll asking whether people approve of the Easter Bunny's job performance? Siiiiiigh.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Random thoughts

I like reading mysteries. I tend towards the more hard-boiled edge of the genre, not the cozy side, because that has the most opportunities for exploring the underbelly of society and the mysteries of human nature. That said, I cannot stand most of the series mystery books out there. No series that has a murder in every book should ever be longer than two books, three maximum, unless your protagonist is a special investigator for a big city police department. We have a word for folks who accumulate a pile of dead bodies in their background. We call'em "serial killers" :).

Note that this is why I haven't tried to make a living as a writer, not that it's possible to do so anyhow in today's world, where a typical midlist writer sells 20,000 books total, worldwide, period, and most books don't break the 5,000 mark, and about $1 per book actually gets to the writer. You have to go "series" and accumulate an audience before you can start moving up the sales list in the mystery genre, and the longest "series" I can come up with has three books in it, and in that one the protagonist is a serial killer of sorts, or at least not a very nice person. (Though most of the dead bodies are not directly caused by the protagonist, who does, however, have a touching scene while standing in the middle of a field strewn with dead bodies).

Oh yeah, back to the Weiner "sex scandal": Uhm, wouldn't there have to be, like, actual sex for there to be a "sex scandal"?

• John Ensign (R-Nevada): actually, like, poked his mistress.
• John Edwards (D-North Carolina): Actually, like, poked his mistress.
• Dave Vitter (R-Louisiana): Actually, liked, poked a bunch of prostitutes while wearin’ diapers.
• Anthony Weiner (D-New York): sent a photo of his poker.

Which of the above is not like the other?

Next up: Some right winger will tell me that a photo is the exact same thing as the actual act. Hmm. So if I deliver to him a photo of a pizza, it’s the exact same thing as actually delivering pizza to his apartment. So he has nobody to blame but himself next time he orders delivery and receives a photo rather than the expected food, because the photo is the exact same thing as the food, right?

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

War

No time for blogging about it, but read this. CNN commits an act of journalism. Too bad that's the exception and not the rule.

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Why does paper X publish always-wrong pundit Y?

Because he says what their millionaire owners and advertisers want to hear. Duh. It's called "capitalism", as in, "serves capital, not the public." The notion of the press as watchdog is a fairly recent one, and itself was manufactured by the same media owners. Before recent times, it was widely accepted that the press served its owners, not the public, and newspapers generally wore their biases and affiliations on their sleeve in much the same way the UK press still does (so you have the blatantly socialist Independent, the blatantly Tory Times, the blatantly Labour Guardian, and so forth). I must say that the PR effort has been fairly successful in producing the notion that the press *should* serve the public, but that's never been the primary purpose of the press, ever, in this nation's history. The first purpose of the press has always been to serve its owners, the second purpose has always been to serve its advertisers, anything else is just gravy used to sell newspapers or get people to watch television or etc.

So the question you should ask, when you see, e.g., nearly-always-wrong Thomas Friedman (of the famed Friedman Unit) published in the NYT, "In what way does publishing Friedman serve the interests of the New York Times' owners and advertisers?" Insofar as publishing him helps promote views that benefit them, why *should* they care that what Friedman serves up is a bitter stew of straw? Does it drive away readers? No, they just go on to read Krugman. So what's the *downside* to publishing Friedman, for the owners and advertisers of the New York Times?

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Idiots

CNN discovers, to their horror, that atomic weapons are easy to build. If you have access to weapons-grade uranium, that is. Which sorta like saying that becoming a billionaire is easy if you have access to a billion dollars. Weapons-grade uranium or plutonium is the whole *point* of a nuclear weapons program, not the actual mechanical construction of the bomb, which is ridiculously easy if you enrich the uranium enough. If you have the enriched uranium, sure, building a bomb is easy -- crap, you don't even need a detonator if it's enriched enough, just have your poor sod suicide bomber pull two lumps of U-235 out of separate lead caskets, slap'em together, BOOM! But pulling enough U-235 out of uranium ore, which is mostly U-238 (i.e., useless for weapons purposes) so that you can build a bomb... now *that* is a chore, and ain't no trucker gonna be doing *that* anytime soon.

But CNN breathlessly proclaims "The sky is blue!" in a yellow journalism haze of exuberance, and then acts like it's news. No wonder Ted Turner is disgusted with today's CNN and says "I should have never sold it"... it's turned into total bullshit.

-- Badtux the Scientific Penguin

Because only black people loot

That's why, according to Faux News, there's no looting going on in Japan right now, while there was looting in New Orleans after Katrina. Oh, they don't outright come out and *say* that. There's a lot of winkin' and noddin' goin' on. But you don't have to be a psychic to figure out what they're *really* saying.

Of course, it's not true. There *IS* looting going on in Japan. But Faux certainly isn't going to let little things like "facts" get in the way of a perfectly good racist meme, right?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

He was a liar

A lot has been said about David Broder due to his recent death but I have just one thing to say: He was a liar in the service of Republicans. His lie about Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine supposed breaking down in tears helped Nixon win in 1972, and his vicious attacks upon Democratic politicians over the years helped the election efforts of many a Republican. He was, in the end, a lying hack. And, alas, not unusual as such.

- Badtux the Media Penguin

NBC, Comcast, and Olbermann

So Keith Olberman's been fired from MSNBC. In case you're wondering whether he was fired due to poor ratings:

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 2,918,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 2,079,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,940,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 1,786,000
FOXNEWS BECK 1,780,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 1,460,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,106,000
CNN PIERS 1,025,000
MSNBC MADDOW 976,000
MSNBC O'DONNELL 855,000
MSNBC SCHULTZ 760,000
CNN COOPER 740,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 700,000

In short, while MSNBC is a poor also-ran to Fox News, Olbermann's show had more viewers than any other show on CNN or MSNBC. So it's not ratings that led to Olbermann being fired. If it were ratings, administration hand job boy Tweety Mathews at Hardball would be looking for a new job, not Olbermann.

Some liberal bloggers are speculating that Comcast is behind Olbermann leaving. The question is... why? Comcast is a for-profit corporation. They're not Rupert Murdoch's not-for-profit right-wing propaganda network, all they care about is money. Olbermann was pulling in ratings. That's money. It just does not make sense. Neither does the notion that Olbermann left because he didn't want to work for Comcast -- he'd actually tweeted that the Comcast merger would be *good* for MSNBC, because MSNBC would be back on basic cable again and Fox News pushed to "Premium" status (MSNBC was pushed to "Premium" back in 1997 because for-profit GE charged more for MSNBC than Rupert Murdoch's News Corp charged for Fox News, which Rupert designed as a propaganda organ rather than as a for-profit venture).

My best guess: The folks at MSNBC who are going to get cleaned out by Comcast, especially Phil Griffin, decided to sharpen their knives and take out Olbermann, who they detest, before they themselves end up on the street. That's the only thing that makes the least bit of sense. In that case, we might see Olbermann back on MSNBC again at some point in the future... it just depends on how fast Comcast moves to clean house.

Not that I'll watch Olbermann of course. Frankly, I found him to be too strident for my taste. Rachel Maddow in my opinion does a better job of eviscerating right-wing nutjobs, she does it with a smile by maneuvering them to impale themselves on their own knives. Still, there were a lot of people watching him, and wherever he ends up, that will likely still be true, because in these times an honest voice is just damned hard to find...

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Angry vs. violent

So the tighty righties as usual are trying to say that the shooter of a liberal judge and a liberal Congresswoman was, err, a liberal, and they probably are going to convince their echo chamber of gullible people who shout "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" of this "fact". So what, nobody outside their echo chamber of morons, cretins, and venal evil sons of bitches gives a shit anyhow.

But our so-called media is really missing the boat when they focus their sights upon "angry" rhetoric. Look. There's plenty of shit that makes me angry. It makes me angry that in the richest land on the planet, the amount of money that Sheriff Joe Arpaio wastes losing lawsuits over violating the civil rights of his prisoners every year would have saved the lives of at least two people murdered by Republican governor Jan Brewer's death panel. I am angry that my tax dollars are used to kill women and children in Afghanistan. I am angry that every effective method of ending the current recession by creating jobs via government action is stymied by a Republican Party that is more focused on scoring political points in some sick game of one-upmanship than upon the good of our nation.

What I am not, however, is violent. I do not state or imply that entire classes of people are vermin who should be exterminated, the way that mainstream Republican pundits on hate radio and Faux News regularly expound. I do not advocate taking up arms against our democratically elected government. I do not advice killing people, which is what the right wing is saying when they talk about "watering the tree of liberty" -- they're talking about murdering people who don't agree with their ideology. I don't "joke" about killing the staff of the New York Times the way that Ann Coulter "joked", I don't advocate violence in any way or form other than as delivered by the justice system after a fair trial before a jury of one's peers in a duly constituted court of law.

And that is the fundamental difference here between right-wing rhetoric and left-wing rhetoric. Left-wing rhetoric is often angry. But for all of Keith Olbermann's angry rhetoric, can you point me to one instance -- even ONE instance -- where he advocated violence? NO. Because lefties simply do not advocate violence. Even the more radical lefties I know, the ones who wanted George W. Bush hanged for treason, were quick to clarify "after a fair trial in a court of law that finds him guilty" when I cornered them on that statement. Can you point me to *one* mainstream left-wing voice that has ever advocated violence? Hello? Hello? Is anybody out there?

-- Badtux the Nonviolent Penguin

False equivalency

Whenever some right-winger does something violent such as shoot up the Holocaust museum, shoots up a church, blows up a day care center, kills a doctor, etc., the press is quick to say "there's extremists on both sides of the political spectrum!"

At which point I ask one simple question: How many incidents of left-wing violence has there been over the past 30 years? No no, you moron trying to point to something that happened in 1963, I'm talking about 1980 onward. How many left-wing nutcases have shot up day care centers? How many left-wing nutcases have tried to bomb the Olympics? How many left-wing nutcases have gone on shooting sprees where they kill random people of another race?

Hello? Hello? Anybody got an answer? (Crickets).

Uhm, yeah. That's what I thought.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

"Messages" from election

The MSM is rushing to say that there's "lessons" to be learned in two Democrats winning House seats (including one who ran in a district that hasn't elected a Democrat since the founding of the United States) and two Republicans winning governorships. It's nonsense. Utter nonsense. All politics is local, and these folks won their respective elections because of local issues. Corzine was booted because of corruption, the two Democratic Congressmen won because their opponents were out-of-district Republican crazies who didn't speak to the concerns of the district, and the Democratic candidate in Virginia lost because he was a rural candidate when the majority of Virginia Democrats are urban so the Democrats voted with their seats -- they stayed home.

Of the races, only the governorship in Virginia was perhaps a statement, and that statement is that white Democrats from rural districts who run on a conservative platform don't turn out the predominantly liberal youth and minority votes needed for Democrats to win. Deeds was a horrible candidate for the governorship -- he was from a part of Virginia that hasn't voted for Democrats in state-wide elections for decades, he was a rural candidate when the majority of Democratic voters are urban, and he ran a race that was basically indistinguishable from his Republican opponent. So Democrats stayed home, independents said "why vote for a fake Republican when we can vote for the real thing?" and of course the Republicans would have voted for a red dog if the red dog had an (R) by his name.

But of course the punditry is going to spin all of this one way or another. The simple fact is that in each state, either the opposing candidate was incredibly weak (yes, Corzine was incredibly weak -- the man was as corrupt as a $3 bill) or the winner had an organizational and money advantage that was hard to overcome. The political party only vaguely entered into it, even in Virginia the urban Democrats stayed home as much from geographical reasons ("why would I bother voting for some inbred hillbilly from western Virginia?") as for party reasons.

-- Badtux the Elections Penguin

The villagers are nervous

Safely ensconced in their ivory towers at the New York Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets, the Villagers have happily joined in on assisting the rabble rousing and sideshow screeching that characterizes the modern Republican Party in the aftermath of Obama's victory in November. They haughtily proclaim that they're merely reporting, not inciting, but you can almost see their hands rubbing in glee at the notion that they can create controversies to report upon and therefore justify their existence.

But the Villagers, like Dr. Frankenstein, are now starting to look upon their creation -- a rabid right-wing rabble that is becoming increasingly rowdy and perhaps even violent -- with alarm. Even Thomas Friedman of "Friedman Unit" fame, most famous for being the world's dumbest pundit due to his pronouncement every six months since March 2003 that "the corner has been turned and in six months Iraq will be paradise", is expressing alarm. And when The World's Dumbest Pundit acknowledges the obvious -- that these right-wing lunatics are, well, nuts -- then you know it's obvious.

But will the Villagers ever accept their own responsibility in winding up the right by faithfully reporting nonsense like "Death Panels" and "free healthcare for illegals"? Of course not. They're the Villagers, after all, isolated in their insular Village where nobody has to take responsibility for anything because, well, they just don't, that's all. Responsibility is for the little people, not for them. So it goes in the United States of Irresponsibility, where it's always someone elses's responsibility -- not ours.

-- Badtux the Nervous Penguin

Walter Cronkite

I haven't talked about his death because reality is that American TV journalism died when he retired in 1981. Today, the buzzards of sycophantic government and corporate ass-kissing who replaced him celebrate Cronkite's career while spitting on what he did. And what he did was real, and true: He reported the truth. Not the government's truth, not corporate truth, not radical's truth, but the truth as he saw it based on the data that he and his reporters gathered.

We don't have that today. What we have today from TV "news" is propaganda from government and corporate shills thinly disguised as "news". If not for the Internet, there would be no outlet for real news in America today.

And that's the way it is.

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Saturday Musical Social Commentary

I hiked a lot of miles today so I'm tired. I'm heading to bed.

This song reminds me of a song I need to record called "Hypnotize me." It starts, "hypnotize me mesmerize me dirty up my mind/tell me what I think today and tell me what I feel/ Tell me who to hate today and tell me who to kill / Welcome, to the United States of Delusion / Where every day's an illusion / Bathe me in your cool blue glow and tell me what to think and know / Welcome, to the United States of Illusion."

Or something along those lines. Same basic theme anyhow. Now you know why I don't own a TV. Voluntarily submitting myself to be mind fucked simply is not something this penguin has any desire to do.

-- Badtux the Orwellian Penguin

Of crapflooding, flying monkeys, and pony chokers

Crapflooding is a good ole' USENET term from back in the day, when people would render newsgroups unusable by flooding them with, well, crap, so that you couldn't pick out the few usable posts from amongst the heaps of reeking turds that seemed plausible just scanning at the title lines but turned out to be nonsense when you actually opened them. I've used the term before to explain how the Rethuglicans exploit the he-said she-said "journalism" of the so-called media. When an unpleasant truth comes around, they unleash their hoards of flying monkeys to screech and howl and throw piles of monkey shit all over. They hide the truth underneath so many piles of flying monkey shit, so many reeking lies that you need a map to figure out the truth. And the so-called press refuses to give you that map, claiming that telling you what is a lie and what is true would be "analysis" rather than "news" and thus Is Not Their Business. Which is why the so-called press is going out of business -- because, in a land covered with reeking piles of flying monkey shit, somebody has to provide a shovel, and if they're not going to do so, then someone else will. More young people get their news from Jon Steward than from CNN, and that's for a reason -- Jon isn't afraid to call flying monkey shit, well, shit.

But I have found now a better description of the Rethugs' tactics when it comes to economic policy: They're pony chokers. Go read.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Newspaper industry on verge of collapse

At least twelve major big-city dailies expected to collapse within the next year.

The problem with the newspaper biz is that they're not selling a product the public wants. Newspapers view their biz as selling advertisements. The rest of the newspaper exists only to sell ads. As a result, what passes for journalism in a typical daily newspaper is "he said she said" stenography that is calculated to not offend advertisers (not that this is handed down from the management, this is what's taught as "reporting" by schools of journalism). But the product that the general public wants is truth. If politician A says that a new Medicare drug benefit will cost $1 trillion per year, and politician B says no the new drug benefit will only cost $200 billion per year, the public wants to know who is telling the truth. But newspapers don't tell people that. Newspapers only regurgitate politician A and politician B's words, and refuse to tell people which of these two politicians is telling the truth because that would be "analysis" rather than "reporting". So people turn to alternate sources to try to find truth, whether it's talk radio, the Internet, Faux News, or whatever, eventually cancel their newspaper subscription because if they're getting their truth elsewhere why bother with the newspaper, and newspaper circulation is down 20% since 1990, to the point where fewer Americans read the newspaper today than did when JFK was elected. Which is a shame, because none of these alternative sources have the track record of journalistic integrity that newspapers traditionally had, but if newspapers refuse to give people what they're looking for...

So I'm not seeing much good ahead for the newspaper industry. But this isn't really a problem caused by the economy (except that the economy is causing a reduction in ad spending and thus newspapers don't need as much content to sell the fewer ads that they're getting), and more a problem with an industry losing its way, much like the U.S. auto industry lost its way. My advice to new journalism school grads today: Learn how to blog, and figure that your job is going to be much like a musician's in the future, where there's a few superstars who make a living at it and everybody else has to work a "day job" to make ends meet.

-- Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin

Best election coverage blog post

Is the Rude One's comment about CNN's elections coverage. The punch line summary: "This ain't news. It's Blitzer in the sky with diamonds."

Bwhahaha! Almost makes me want to go out and buy a television, heh!

-- Badtux the TV-less Penguin