This is an important story, that the news media tried to just sort of … slip past, without dwelling on it. But it’s an important indicator of how and why our political media has become such a mess. Of course I believe it has always been a mess – for example, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded a newspaper [wik] as a self-propaganda arm against the federalists, and it has just gone downhill from there.
I am contemptuous of the stupidity of anti-vaxxers; anyone who studies the merest whiff of epidemiology and virology is going to understand that vaccines are a really good thing. All you have to do is ask anyone you know who has suffered from smallpox. Oh, you don’t know anyone who has had smallpox? End of discussion.
From the “nobody should be surprised but everyone should be shocked” department, Israel has apparently decided that it’s going to keep the Golan heights.
Congress ought to be holding hearings to investigate the FBI’s non-competence as it sat around with its thumb up its butt while a nearly successful coup brewed. Remember, the FBI is the organization that is responsible for domestic counter-terrorism – the organization that notoriously spends a great deal of time creating terrorist plots so they can arrest the people who fall into their snare – their job is to do things like, well, stopping coups. The US people and government have placed an inordinate amount of trust (and money) in the FBI and we ought to be investigating the monumental incompetence of the agency.
When I encounter wildly different perspectives, I freeze in place like the proverbial rabbit in headlights. My brain just locks up for a couple seconds then starts running furiously trying to re-establish some kind of understanding of what’s going on. Sometimes, I reach for meta-understanding, i.e.: “I don’t know what’s going on but this is really messed up.”
If I hear one more unoriginal journalist hack out the phrase “everything changed” – related to 9/11, I’m going to scream.
Trying to figure out if this is “stupid cultural appropriation” or just plain stupid.
I know you know I hate the FBI. They’re not just a stealth “secret police” they’re really bad at it. Basically, they had such a great self-promoter in J. Edgar Hoover, that they got a great public relationship through media manipulation and they have been coasting on it ever since. You know “we got John Dillinger” [Which was done by getting a tip-off and showing up and peppering him with machine-gun fire]
When I was a kid I went through a period where I was interested in nautical disasters. Perhaps that has something to do with my general fear of being on a boat out of sight of shore.
One of the US military’s less endearing characteristics is that it classifies its failures, which effectively puts anyone who discusses them at risk for prison time.