Ex Oram Fatuus
Thursday is my day to listen to Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Out Time” and Jesse Brown’s “Search Engine” at gym. I save the best for last. The IOT ‘cast dealt with the Anabaptists and the Siege of Münster. The SE ‘cast dealt with the incarceration of the Iranian ‘Blogfather’ and the inaction of the Canadian government. The commonality here is rather obviously the tyranny of organized religion.
In and around this I was watching Reynard News on the Electromagnetic Imager with part of my attention span. I find that I can’t keep my balance on exercise machines, even recumbent bicycles, if I close my eyes, so I have to look at something and since the electromagnetic images are (somewhat) dynamic all saccades converge on them.
The selection of Reynard is like American politics, the least bad of all no good alternatives. In this case my other choices are a sports network (amazing the intellectual similarity to soap operas but so vapid of content variation as to decay into boredom for anyone literate, calculate, or computerate in about a hundred seconds,) and infoporn (overly long advertisements disguised as advice and counseling for penile, mammary, piliary, or income enhancement, or adipose or acne reduction, all infantile, and fantastical.) So at least Reynard News offers a more abundant source of humor.
From this my scanning revealed several things:
- If Pat Robinson says something is bad, is this a necessary and sufficient condition that the thing is actually good, or just a very high probability (P > 0.9) that it is?
- The opinions of the consumerate are more inaccurate the more overwhelming they are. This leads to the question of whether human stupidity is an example of a Bose-Einstein condensate? Which in turn leads to the question of wether it is humans or just their mental processes that obey Bose-Einstein statistics?
- My old model for judging the merits of movies also applies to the media, especially the radicalized media like Reynard. If TIME magazine gave a movie zero or four stars it was a movie worth watching, 1-3 stars and it was a dog dead for weeks. The same now develops as holding for television journalism. If something is reported excellent or abysmal, it is good. If in between these states, it is bad.
- We spend a lot of attention on pretense these days. People who have false credentials cited on their resumes, people who claim to have a degree never awarded from a shul never attended in a discipline never studied. It seems that the greatest pretenders of all are journalisms/mediasts and because of this they are blind to anyone else who is pretending to be something or someone. The case in point is the recent shootist at Ft. Hood.
