Saturday, November 20, 2010
Sleeping through Nothing
[Title is a sequel to this, this, and this.]
Back in August, after the cable TV box was zapped by a power outage, I decided it was time to quit cable, time to remove the constant and addictive irritant of the fake "debate" between Soros Red Label and Soros Blue Label.
After a brief period of re-appreciating the offerings of plain old network TV, I gradually stopped watching altogether, ending a 10-year spell of TV habituation.
Now the TV only lights up for one hour on Sunday night, for the one program that is still worth watching: AFV. I'll sometimes try to watch local news at 5 PM while eating, but I can only take a few minutes of the concentrated triviality.
What started the addiction in 2000? Partly it was 9/11, with the urgent desire to see what's going to happen next. Partly it was AFV, which was available every night in 2000, but later dropped back to one night a week. Partly a variety of interesting trash shows (Springer, Ricki Lake, etc) which later disappeared entirely.
What ended the addiction? I can pin this down precisely.
First the murderous "Global Warming" super-crime, constant and overall, infecting every millisecond of entertainment and news.
And then three specific strikes:
Strike 1, the Duke false accuser case.
Strike 2, Balloon Boy.
Strike 3, the BP oil spill.
In each of these four stories, all "sides" conspired to expand a blazingly and transparently false premise, causing real injury.
This is not the same as tabloid sensationalism. Tabloids expand a basically true but trivial story into a soap opera, wasting paper and bandwidth but not really hurting anyone. These stories did real damage to people and reputations, and of course the "War On Carbon" continues to destroy millions of jobs and kill thousands of people.
CNN is the worst, and Anderson Cooper is the worst of the worst. During the BP spill, CNN (followed by Fox and MSNBC) spread the false notion that the Gulf Coast was a solid mass of "toxic" oil several feet deep, or maybe several miles deep. (Measurements don't matter in a myth.) Cooper then had the monumental chutzpah to visit the coast, commiserating with the business owners whose livelihood he had personally destroyed for the sole purpose of his own sadistic glory.
That was the final straw. ¶ 5:36 PM
[Title is a sequel to this, this, and this.]
Back in August, after the cable TV box was zapped by a power outage, I decided it was time to quit cable, time to remove the constant and addictive irritant of the fake "debate" between Soros Red Label and Soros Blue Label.
After a brief period of re-appreciating the offerings of plain old network TV, I gradually stopped watching altogether, ending a 10-year spell of TV habituation.
Now the TV only lights up for one hour on Sunday night, for the one program that is still worth watching: AFV. I'll sometimes try to watch local news at 5 PM while eating, but I can only take a few minutes of the concentrated triviality.
What started the addiction in 2000? Partly it was 9/11, with the urgent desire to see what's going to happen next. Partly it was AFV, which was available every night in 2000, but later dropped back to one night a week. Partly a variety of interesting trash shows (Springer, Ricki Lake, etc) which later disappeared entirely.
What ended the addiction? I can pin this down precisely.
First the murderous "Global Warming" super-crime, constant and overall, infecting every millisecond of entertainment and news.
And then three specific strikes:
Strike 1, the Duke false accuser case.
Strike 2, Balloon Boy.
Strike 3, the BP oil spill.
In each of these four stories, all "sides" conspired to expand a blazingly and transparently false premise, causing real injury.
This is not the same as tabloid sensationalism. Tabloids expand a basically true but trivial story into a soap opera, wasting paper and bandwidth but not really hurting anyone. These stories did real damage to people and reputations, and of course the "War On Carbon" continues to destroy millions of jobs and kill thousands of people.
CNN is the worst, and Anderson Cooper is the worst of the worst. During the BP spill, CNN (followed by Fox and MSNBC) spread the false notion that the Gulf Coast was a solid mass of "toxic" oil several feet deep, or maybe several miles deep. (Measurements don't matter in a myth.) Cooper then had the monumental chutzpah to visit the coast, commiserating with the business owners whose livelihood he had personally destroyed for the sole purpose of his own sadistic glory.
That was the final straw. ¶ 5:36 PM
