GIFs have made increasing rounds on the Internet recently
and some links to other Internet World Wide Web sites where you might be able to see some GIFs, if you are lucky.
Also the comments are pretty good.
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Doing your own GIF is fun. There have been websites for a long time that allow you to DIY. GIF is popular recently for sex, of course. It took them a while to discover it.
First of all, it must have been a long time since I went to the USA Today website, because good lord, it is awful.
Second, I think I have bitched about CNN's iReport thing before, where CNN just posts stuff that they didn't write, and it's like "Oh yeah, maybe this is news, or maybe it is a crazy person? It's CNN." USA Today does that too, with this dumb "Newser" thing.
The underlying story is marginally interesting, although this article is more or less silent in terms of relevant facts. This post is motivated by the first sentence, which I will post here under spoiler tags, so that you may choose whether or not you wish to rage with me.
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Sometimes, archaeologists discover a sweater; other times, they uncover entire towns.
And the second sentence is also p. good:
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The latter turns out to be the case in Israel, where a town has been found — and it could be one mentioned in a well-known Bible story.
Here we see evidence of the idiocy of the caveman. "It's not too cold out," he was heard shouting at his cavewife, "I can be out here all day if I want!"
Granted, PolitiFact has its own long history of shitty "fact-checking", but this is even worse.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
So true! Unlike headlines which are almost always complete crap. I've stopped visiting Huff post because I got tired of their pointless or old stories hidden behind useless headlines to get a click (Since none of their writers are paid, I've wonder if there's a single paid editor who's job it is to rewrite headlines).
I only caught part of it, but today's Diane Rehm show featured an interview with Thomas E. Patterson called "Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism."
Patterson pointed out the irony that it's so easy for partisan organizations to manipulate the media and use them to disseminate false information. He noted the buildup to the Iraq invasion and the "controversy" regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming as two issues on which Americans have been grossly mis-informed, and how the deliberate spread of misinformation has shaped U.S. policy.
One problem, he argued, is that journalists often know little or nothing about the subjects they're "reporting" on, and thus are not in a position to know when they're being lied to by their sources. Nor are they able to ask useful or insightful questions of their sources.
I'll have to listen to the whole thing when I get the time.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
I haven't listened to that yet, so maybe they mention this. Journalism is one of those jobs that's overrun with people working for free or inexcusably cheap. Remember that story about Bustle, the well-funded startup website for ladies that was paying freelancers $100 a day for recent journalism graduates and up to $200 a day for those with lots of experience? I think it's relatively uncommon to see pay like that for such a well-funded, high profile publication, but that guy is explicitly known for getting people to write for free or close to it. I suspect it's that business model that was responsible for the VC moreso than the stated focus of it being the first website for ladies or whatever. (It sucks either way, though.)
That's what's happening. People willing to work for free or cheap are saturating the market with high churn "content." It's not really their fault that they suck, but it is collectively their fault for dragging down the market.
This is seriously a Fox News-level misleading graphic. Everyone who took elementary school maths would expect this to be saying murders decreased after SYG was passed, but of course if you actually read the numbers it's saying the opposite. Great job Reuters!
Business Insider helpfully provided a corrected version of the chart:
Still not great because it's not clear what's being defined as "murders" (for instance, if it's referring to murder convictions, then it's tremendously unrepresentative since, as cases like Zimmerman and Dunn probably reveal, many people are not convicted of murders under Stand Your Ground who are nonetheless clearly murderers), but it's a hell of a lot better than Faux News Reuters' shitty version.
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Still not great because it's not clear what's being defined as "murders"
True, and in fact the first time I saw this graph, I didn't notice the inverted vertical axis (but I was primed that it was misleading) and I assumed the "drop" was caused by SYG's redefinition of the word murder.
Maureen Dowd ran a story about how she went to Colorado and ate an entire pot bar and had a bad time. She left out the part where her guide explicitly warned her not to do that. Because she is an "opinion columnist", she will probably not be fired even though this is a very clear breach of journalistic ethics, especially since this is not the first time she has made something up (see the link for more examples).
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
At any rate, she's not the only one who's made that mistake, and at the very least she's right to say that they should have better warnings and labeling, especially on edibles which have a delayed effect increasing the chances that you'll have way too much.
I've made that mistake myself with brownies (although my reaction was not as severe, it mostly just made me feel very, very sluggish and gave me a slight headache). But those were homemade so it's not like they could've been labeled.
I think the correct response is not that she's full of shit (even if she was warned on a tour, not everyone who tries those candy bars is going on a tour) but that the issue is minor and can be fixed.
Yeah, I didn't think what she said was that bad, really. Edibles can be pretty potent, and they are not as self-regulating as smoking or drinking, which you're normally going to do more gradually so you feel the effects as they come on. With edibles, you can overdo it pretty easily in one bite, plus they're almost always sweets, which a lot of people have trouble resisting even when they know better.
I've been a little worried about kids and pets getting into people's stashes that way, too. It's kind of inevitable that if people have sody pops and cookies and candies around, their kids are going to find them.
I don't think that means they need to be banned or anything. It is something people should know about, though.
With dogs too. I was giving a New Year's party with some friends a long time ago and we had spacecake and this guy took his dog and it ate half the cake
It was basically in a coma for a couple of days with the guy going nuts and screaming at us on the phone. It fully recovered in the end but yeah, not a good combination.
Re: Why the Mainstream Media Really Sucks
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