Staying sane..........................

 One way to stay sane yet also stay informed is in your head add the words, "In accordance to the prophesies" in front of any headline you read. So for example, "In accordance to the prophesies, Joe Biden will be forgiving $10,000 in student debt." Life's more fun this way.

-Chris Lynch

Feels about right..................

 

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"facts".....................

      In the crazy early days when the Covid-19 coronavirus went global, Scientific American admonished journalists, 'facts about this epidemic that have lasted a few days are far more reliable than the latest "facts" that have just come out, which may be erroneous or unrepresentative and thus misleading . . . a question that today con be answered only [by] informed belief may perhaps be answered by a fact tomorrow.'  Sound advice, and not just for journalists but for citizens too.  So however much news you choose to read, make sure you spend time looking for longer-term, slower-paced information.  You will notice things - good and bad -  that others ignore.

-Tim Horford, How to Make the World Add Up:  Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

A sign of the times................

 more fun here

fun with the language here

Wisdom...................................

 . . . the only questions on anybody’s mind now are “What is the Market Up To?” and “Why?”

Don’t look to Television for your answers: This morning, the chyron read “Ukraine, Fed Hikes, Uncertainty drive stock rout” when markets were down 3%; after the losses were recovered, the chyron read “Stocks close higher in wild day.”

TV chyrons know everything and nothing…

-Barry Ritholtz, from this post

Don't remember reading this...............

 

As my Sweetie likes to say..............

............................about the worst thing that ever happened to television, and this country, is the 24-hours news channel.

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A breath of fresh air...........................?

 

Can I get an............................

 ..................................................Amen?

dead media walking................

     The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story.  Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders.  On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance.  From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking.  From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

News...............................

     Professor C. John Sommerville, author of How the News Makes Us Dumb:  The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, saw this coming two decades ago, in 1999, when "tweeting" was still something only birds did:  "If news were just one of many things we read each day, it wouldn't have the same impact.  If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today's events."

-Ben Sasse, Them:  Why We Hate Each Other—And How To Heal

Ed. Note:  A short cut to all that reading would be to just check in regularly with these nice folks

Worry is not mandatory.....................

"There will always be something to worry about because good news is gradual while bad news is a headline."

-Ben Carlson, from here

This is asking a lot...............

These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?

-from this Althouse post

On the importance of alibis....................

……………………………...Unfortunately, I don't have one.

No me..............................

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Ah, history.............................

More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy.  A "consultation" here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex  (the year was 1906)

Desperate.......................

Also, there is nothing to write about. Covington? Northam? If we have the luxury of turning these stories into headlines, then we are either doing very well as a country or else we are desperate for distractions from whatever real problems we have.

-Arnold Kling, from this blog post

Now that you mention it.........................

On self-scrutiny...............

"The election of Donald Trump can be said to have demolished the intellectual foundation of the news business.  The pretense of objectivity had been abandoned for a higher cause.   The claim to furnish 'all the news that's fit to print' was now refuted by the failure to grasp the shape and outcome of the contest.  No one who followed the news understood the forces at play.  None guessed what was coming.  Continued consumption of the news seemed to lack any justification, other than amusement or habit.

"Dazed and demoralized, people in the media sought haphazardly to explain the disaster.  They were not good at the game:  a profession that is literally in broadcast mode shouldn't be expected to excel at self-scrutiny."

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt Of The Public

I'm usually asleep before...............

........the Late Show starts, but this is certainly watchable:



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