12-1-12 Hodgepodge
Saturday, December 01, 2012
The Trap that Arik Built
Via HBL, I have learned of Caroline Glick's spot-
on analysis of Israel's current foreign policy and strategic bind:
Over the weekend, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood held what the media claimed was a stormy meeting. Its members were split over what to do about Israel. Half wanted to go to war with Israel immediately. The other half called for waiting until the Egyptian military is prepared for war. In the end, the voices calling for patient preparation for war won the day.For this, the media praised the backing they received from the Obama Administration. Also notable are Glick's descriptions of Ariel Sharon's betrayal and suppression of those who elected him to not surrender the Gaza Strip, and the collapse of American conservative backing of Israel not negotiating with its terrorist neighbors. Read the whole thing.
Weekend Reading
"By piously preaching to others, the hypocrite is trying to wish away his or her problems." -- Michael Hurd, in "Hypocrisy Is Hard Work" at The Delaware Wave
"It really should not be surprising that when we divorce benefits from costs -- a person's consumption from his production -- as Medicare does, bankruptcy looms." -- Rituparna Basu, in "It's Time to Unplug Medicare's Third Rail" at The Daily Caller
"The very concept 'outcompete' makes no sense on a national scale." -- Harry Binswanger, in "No President Obama, We Can't 'Outcompete' Other Countries" at Forbes
My Two Cents
It was hard to do the Binswanger article justice with a single teaser quote. Suffice it to say that the article does a fine job of demolishing the whole silly idea of nations "competing" with each other economically -- and of introducing the Law of Comparative Advantage to our political discourse.
Red Hot News!
How on earth did a Chinese news outlet party organ deliver a straight-faced report that North Korea's Kim Jong Un had been named "Sexiest Man Alive"?
"[S]tuff gets circulated a lot more widely because you don't have intellectual property restrictions on articles that you would in the U.S. for example," [media researcher Jeremy Goldkorn] said. "So when you mix that up with this culture of no fact-checking and not really having a news editor whose main job is seeking truth, then what you get is The Onion being taken seriously in the People's Daily."No regard for property rights or facts: In other words, this attempt at propaganda actually managed to offer an accurate, if extremely tame, example of the results of Communist ideals being put into practice. This would be even funnier had American voters not kept a fellow traveler in charge during our last election.
--CAV
Updates
12-2-12: Corrected "keep" to "kept" in last sentence.
4 comments:
Sexy Kim? Totally believable!
After all, Great Leader's inspiration have led his scientists to discover a unicorn's lair.
Wow! Why hasn't South Korea acknowledged this "proof" and unilaterally surrendered already?
Yo, Gus, I think the story's been garbled in transmission: the Chinese "unicorn" is what the Japanese beer Kirin is named for. Clearly, this story obviously refers to them finding a secret Kirin brewery. Man, those Japanese are penetrating every market--and even non-markets!
Seriously, this isn't the first time Chinese news outlets have been duped into reprinting Onion stories as the truth. Oh, wait, that fact is mentioned in the article you linked to:
In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the capital's biggest tabloids at the time, published as news the fictional account that the U.S. Congress wanted a new building and that it might leave Washington. The Onion article was a spoof of the way sports teams threaten to leave cities in order to get new stadiums.
And here are some other examples of people being duped by The Onion. My favorite:
An Iranian news agency falls for an Onion story in September about a fictional survey that showed that most rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama. The English-language service of Iran's semiofficial Fars news agency republished the story, copying the original word-for-word. The Fars report even included a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident who says he'd rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."
One wonders if the staffers who write such spectacular successes get bonuses. They should, you know.
You said it!
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