Category: News Stories

Dennis Kucinich’s wife is a year younger than I am.

When reading or watching the news, beware the phrase “a new study today revealed,” or its myriad variations. One of the many sad things about the news media today is that they will go out of their way to find studies to get you freaked out. What’s particularly sad is not the goofy science they find (studies that only correlate things, which the news media then present in such a way as to assume causality), but the alarmism that the newsfolks want to generate, because that’s what makes them money.

Let this be your mantra: correlation does not equal causality. If a study finds that eating baby seal liver is linked to a longer lifespan, it may only mean that the experiment was conducted using Eskimos, who just happened to be eating a lot of fish oil or something else that gives them a greater life expectancy. You don’t know the methods because the articles often conveniently leave them out.

What I’m noticing even more today is that, as all these studies proliferate and contradict each other over time (1980: margarine is great, butter sucks! 2000: holy crap are you still eating margarine?), people trust science and scientific studies less, when the people they really need to stop trusting are the alarmist/money-grubbing news media who profit by your fear. Scientific studies at an individual level will always produce varying results, and only over long spans of time do we really gain knowledge that we can rely upon with confidence. So the next time you read about a study that links an activity with a particular outcome, don’t assume that one causes the other. They may just be correlated somehow.

As if to underline my “you never know” statement about the Virginia Tech[1] shooter, along comes a story about some weirdness at the Dallas Press Club, where recently departed President Elizabeth Albanese turns out to be the center of a scandal involving potentially nonexistant awards judges, a history of mental illness and an interstate rap sheet.

I have worked with Elizabeth for the last three years on the website for the annual Katie Awards, honoring excellence in regional journalism and media. She was one of the better clients I’ve worked for; she always seemed to keep a lot of plates spinning without complaint or error. She was always pleasant and positive and appreciative. I never would have suspected that she might commit fraud. The article is long and informative, so I’ll leave that up to you to read. Suffice it to say that it looks like she’ll be in a heap of trouble and the Katie Awards may be devalued right out of existence.

You just never know.

1.) Notice I didn’t say “VT,” because I keep reading that as “Vermont” when I see it, and suddenly in my mind the pastoral tranquility of Vermont is shattered by more random violence.

So, another rampage in the US by a heavily armed nerd. Like Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before him, Cho Seung-hui has been described as an outcast, someone who apparently held a significant grudge against the upper caste of his social environment. The pundits, like the rest of us, are trying to figure out what causes this sort of thing, what are the warning signs, how can we prevent this in the future? Is there a causal connection between the video games and the music and the movies and this aberrant behavior?

I think the truth is, you never really know. You can look at a guy’s life and point to particulars and try to connect the dots and run the numbers, but lots of equations start with nerd + violent games + heavy metal, and thus far only a handful have equaled multiple homicide. From my group of friends, that equation has equaled doctor, lawyer, and cheese specialist/film editor (or whatever the hell Flounder is up to these days).

You can look for outward signs, but our interior lives are our private universes and most people probably have things they’ll never tell another living soul, ever. Even blogs only hint at people’s secrets. If you happened upon a typically nerdy blog entry like this, you’d never guess the author was a confessed rapist, murderer and would-be cannibal.

We’re just going to have to deal with the fact that sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes there are no signs. Sometimes people just crack.

Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky has been quoted as saying he intends to finance the overthrow of President Vladimir Putin. He admits to having spent $50 million on the Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” of 2004. He expects the coming revolution will cost him around half a billion dollars.

Pause for a moment to consider that Russia spent much of the early 20th century having to contend with working-class proletariat revolutionaries, and now at the dawn of the 21st century it has to deal with a billionaire. What can we glean from this? The irony runs deep. It tells us that capitalism has worked for some folks in Russia, and while communism is fairly well dead in the former Soviet Republics, the people may yet be freed from the ruling iron fist of Putin by a member of the super-bourgeoisie.

While we’re on the subject of Russian history, check out these amazing propaganda posters from various phases of Russia’s history.

My Pittsburgher bowl cut sister from another mother posted this breath of fresh, fiery air regarding the Don Imus teapot tempest that I have to pass it along. It is a column by Kansas City Star writer Jason Whitlock, and this provides a nice summary of his rant:

“I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.”

Anna Nicole Smith was offed by the CIA to draw the public’s attention away from the war. I also suspect that Britney Spears had her Red Bull spiked with LSD to continue the diversion.

Searching on “miserable failure” in Google no longer brings up the Bush biography at whitehouse.gov. In fact, whitehouse.gov no longer comes up at all for that term. Google was the first search engine to really focus on link text, regarding them as “votes” for particular site. Yahoo and MSN followed suit, and indeed, searching on “miserable failure” still brings up Bush’s biography at #1 in both of their engines.

Google insists that it has simply made adjustments to its algorithm to somehow counter the effect of these “Googlebombs” (events like “miserable failure” where the term itself has no literal bearing on the content in question, it’s just a concerted effort by Netizens to express their opinions via links). I’m not enough of a mathematician to know how this could be accomplished but this thing just smells fishy. Of course, a search on “waffles” no longer brings up johnkerry.com (still there in Yahoo and MSN). Still, the paranoid schizophrenic in me thinks they’ve made specific exceptions.

Las year I wrote about the New Economy, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark just provided me with another enormous example of what I think is an emerging economic paradigm shift:

“We’re just motivated by the same values we all learn in Sunday school or the equivalent,” he says. “The Golden Rule and that it’s more important to help people.”….

The company that is indifferent to money, therefore, gushes profits.

Read the full article here.

As with any big step forward in technology, I am simultaneously excited and scared. Lockeed Martin’s High Altitude Airship seems like the perfect Big Brother technology[1]. It’s an unmanned craft capable of observing over 600 miles from above 60,000 feet up, unseen to the naked eye. Surveillance seems to be its main job. Hmm.

1.) Comic book fans may remember the same idea from the Watchmen in the 80’s.