Tag Archives: Fox News

Slow Learners

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Us Democrats.

Did you see the story about the Mad King and drug prices? Here’s an overview from (cough, cough) Fox Business News.

“President Donald Trump used the story of an overweight friend getting weight-loss medication at a much lower cost overseas to illustrate why he’s working to cut prescription drug prices for Americans. 

Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity earlier this week, the president said one of his ‘slightly overweight’ friends purchased what Trump called a ‘fat shot’ in London for significantly less money than in the U.S.

‘He called me and he said, ‘Hey, strange thing happened. I just bought a drug, same company, same plant, same everything, everything was the same. In one case, I paid in New York $1,300 and in London, I’m paying $88,’ Trump recounted. ‘He said, ‘What’s going on?’”

I heard multiple Demo opinion leaders rip the MK for flippantly using ‘fat shot’. They probably preferred “weight control injection”.

More important is what Fox left out of its own reporting on its own interview. At the end of the story, the MK smirked and added, “I told my friend, it’s not working.”

Demo opinion leaders were appalled. How dare the MK call his friend fat. They were genuinely upset. Uncouth. Not presidential.

I wondered, were they asleep from 2016-2020?

The Mad King’s secret sauce is the contrast with all the politicians who came before him who said exactly what they thought everyone wanted to hear, not necessarily what they were thinking. And his contemporaries who regularly measure their words too closely to connect with anyone.

People dig the Mad King for saying things no one else will. Telling his friend his “fat shot” was not working harkens to the middle school nature of my friends’ group text.

Sometimes I wonder whether some Demos have had their sense of humor surgically removed. Telling his friend his fat shot was not working was rude, crude, and funny. People like that it’s unexpected and not at all presidential. That’s the point. That the Demos still don’t get.

Some Demos are trying to get it by using the “f” word more often. I agree with Michael Adam’s take on that.

“I think that in the case of the Democratic candidates … the swearing reflects their sense of crisis,” said Michael Adams, a lexicography expert and author of the book “In Praise of Profanity.”

The Mad King’s calculus is “If all of your peers are trying to appeal to the largest possible audience, do the opposite.” Talk like and to non-elites, who greatly outnumber the humorless, and too polite for their own good elites.

Fear Of “X”

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Scientific literacy is in short supply these days so this FOX “News” article, “New York plastic surgeon’s viral TikTok video warns of exercise he says causes premature aging” probably shouldn’t be surprising.

I challenge you to find a worse “science” story. Whenever there’s no control group, the findings are highly suspect. And there was no control group. It’s all smoke and mirrors, by which I mean intuitions and anecdotes.

This embarrassing story is perfectly in keeping with Fox “New’s” modus operandi. Be afraid, very afraid of among many, many other things: immigrants, criminals (not white insurrectionists and fake legislators, just dark skinned ones), liberals, gays and transexuals, women, California (especially San Francisco), anti-gun advocates, non-whites, environmentalists, taxes, and the public sector. It turns out, fear sells. Really, really well.

Whenever you see FOX “News”, know that the “FOX” stands for Fear of “X”. And be afraid, very afraid of even seemingly salubrious things like exercise.

Sentence To Ponder

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From “How Trump Coins Became an Internet Sensation“.

Some context. Watchdogs have warned that Telegram a Facebook and Twitter-like social media platform exercises far less moderation than its rivals.

“In one post, a fake account for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican closely aligned with Mr. Trump, shared a fake story on a fake Fox News website about a fake tweet by a fake Elon Musk, falsely claiming that Tesla’s chief executive would soon accept Trump coins as payment.”

Heaven help us.

How Not To Care

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If you look even a little bit, the growing population of homeless men, women, and children in Olympia, Washington are easily visible; mostly you’ll find them close to the social service agencies they depend upon, like the Salvation Army and the Thurston County Food Bank. An enormous tent and tarp community stretches all along the western edge of Capital Lake on Deschutes Parkway SW. It looks like a refugee camp you might find in Northeast Africa, but worse because there’s no UNHCR to create some semblance of order. More accurately, picture Miami post Hurricane Katrina. Many more live in tents and tarps among the trees that line the Woodland Trail and the I-5 freeway.  

The classic argument between the Individual Responsibility folks, “they have to take responsibility for their bad decisions” versus the Systemic Forces folks, “the growing numbers of homeless who succumb to combinations of poverty, addiction, and poor mental health are entirely predictable given our ‘winner-takes-all’ economic system coupled with our anemic social safety net” shows no signs of abating. Nearly all of the Individual Responsibility folks respond to  homeless men, women, and children with a mix of resentment and anger. At the same time, a gradually increasing percentage of the Systemic Forces folks are exasperated as some natural areas are lost and downtown grows less clean and safe.

So why, as the population of homeless men, women, and children rises; does it seem like our collective empathy decreases? Even among a lot of decent people who have demonstrated empathy in their past for others less fortunate than them?

Mired in resentment and anger, we leapfrog caring about our fellow citizens’ pain and suffering because we don’t know any homeless person’s story. We don’t know where they’re from, what their childhood was like, what hardships they’ve had to endure. Not knowing any of those things makes it much easier to assume they’ve made a series of bad decisions. And that until they start making good ones, they get what they deserve. 

Local papers don’t have the resources to tell their stories anymore. And even if alternative papers tried, would we read them when we don’t even really look at our homeless neighbors? As if they have leprosy, the best we can do, it seems, is a quick glance.

The secret to not caring about the homeless is not knowing anything about any one homeless person. Not learning their names and not looking at them helps too, but mostly, it’s avoiding learning how and why and where things went off the rails. 

Irrespective of one’s religious views or politics, it seems increasingly common to castigate “the homeless”. Because they remain an abstraction. 

This proven strategy works equally well in other contexts too. For example, the same approach to not caring works for the growing number of Central American immigrants gathering at our southern border. Many Fox News hosts are absolutely giddy over what the gathering numbers of desperate immigrants mean for Biden’s approval ratings and the midterm elections because they don’t know any of their stories. There are laws to be enforced and political gain to be made, nevermind their pain and suffering, their humanity.

Yesterday, I screwed up. And mistakenly read this story in the New York Times.

A Violent End to a Desperate Dream Leaves a Guatemalan Town Grieving

In doing so, I was introduced to Santa Cristina García Pérez, a 20 year old, one of twelve Comitecos who were massacred by Mexican police near the U.S. border. I learned Christina was one of 11 siblings who hoped to make enough money in the U.S. to. . . 

“. . . cover the cost of an operation for her one-year-old sister, Angela Idalia, who was born with a cleft lip. . . . 

She wanted to save Ángela Idalia from what she thought would be a life of ridicule, relatives said.”

I doubled down on my mistake by taking my time to truly see all of the Comitecos mourning their friends and family. Powerful images of profound loss, one after another. Including one of Ricardo García Pérez, Cristina’s dad, placing a bottle of water next to her casket. . .

“. . . so that Ms. García’s spirit did not suffer from thirst on its journey to the next life.”

I wasn’t the only one learning about the Comitecos. The Times explains:

“The killings have stunned the community, spurred a wave of international media attention on Comitancillo and an outpouring of financial support for the victim’s families. Among other acts of largess, donations from nearby communities in the region and from the Guatemalan diaspora have paid for Ángela Idalia’s first surgery to repair her cleft lip and have enabled the García family to build a new house.”

That’s one more vivid example that when most people see someone suffering, look into their eyes, learn their name, and something about their life journey; they can’t help but care. And help.

In contrast, the homeless in my community remain an abstraction. An abstraction most of us are determined to keep at a comfortable distance. Given our mounting resentment and anger at this abstraction, we keep asking, “When is someone going to do something?” 

 

“I’m The President, Really!”

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John Gruber on a Mike Allen Axios story about President Trump telling friends he wants to start a digital media company to clobber Fox News and undermine the conservative-friendly network.

“There is not enough popcorn in the world if Trump goes to war against Fox News. Fox News’s undeniable success is built on a coalition of sane conservatives and wingnut kooks. Guess which half Trump might peel off.”

More likely, he ends up the guy in the senior citizens home who keeps telling everyone he’s the President.

Get Rich Or Become Politically Irrelevant Trying

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From ‘Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose‘ by Jane Mayer. 

“Two of the investigations into Trump are being led by powerful state and city law-enforcement officials in New York. Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, are independently pursuing potential criminal charges related to Trump’s business practices before he became President. Because their jurisdictions lie outside the federal realm, any indictments or convictions resulting from their actions would be beyond the reach of a Presidential pardon. Trump’s legal expenses alone are likely to be daunting. (By the time Bill Clinton left the White House, he’d racked up more than ten million dollars in legal fees.) And Trump’s finances are already under growing strain. During the next four years, according to a stunning recent Times report, Trump—whether reëlected or not—must meet payment deadlines for more than three hundred million dollars in loans that he has personally guaranteed; much of this debt is owed to such foreign creditors as Deutsche Bank. Unless he can refinance with the lenders, he will be on the hook. The Financial Times, meanwhile, estimates that, in all, about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets—or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. But, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s properties—especially his hotels and resorts—have been hit hard by the pandemic and the fallout from his divisive political career. “It’s the office of the Presidency that’s keeping him from prison and the poorhouse,” Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale who studies authoritarianism, told me.”

This explains why Jim Jordan is STILL on Fox News as a Trump super surrogate. And why so many others in the media or government are consciously going down with the ship. Every Trump acolyte has one thing in common—like their leader, they’re most interested in their own self-preservation. So why continue riding the Trump train when it’s hours from jumping the track?

Because, as others have speculated, the only way out of Trump’s financial and legal nightmare is for him to start a media company. And hope like hell it’s his first business success. 

What does this have to do with Jim Jordan and all the other True Believers? To answer that, one has to understand Jim Jordan’s financial situation. He makes $174,000 a year and this is Ballotpedia’s estimate of his past net worth:

Screen Shot 2020-11-01 at 8.00.40 AM

When he’s blabbering on Fox News, he’s not trying to tilt the election, he’s auditioning for a top job at Trump Network with the expectation of making ten times more money. And the same for McEnany, Sarah Sanders, and Charlie Kirk. Don’t be surprised to see Ingraham and Hannity switch teams if the money’s right. 

 

 

Personal Life

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I hear someone super smart on a podcast. I read about an unsuspecting athlete inspiring lots of other people to vote. I watch Savannah Guthrie give Fox News hosts a tutorial on how to interview the President. I read an absolutely beautiful essay about the arrival of fall in Twisp, WA.

And I want to know more about these people. So I google them and in a few seconds I’m skimming their wikipedia pages (or in the case of the essay writer, their personal website).

And when I skim someone’s wikipedia page, I always start with “Personal Life”. Is that because I’m a nosy bastard or because it’s human nature? What, dig this, they live in Ojai, CA; they’ve been married a few times; they have three children; and they raise llamas.

I wonder whether this phenomenon, which I think is human nature, partially explains higher education’s irrelevance in most people’s day-to-day lives. Higher education is always looking itself in the mirror and saying “This is the year I’ll become a public intellectual. This is the year I’ll make my work accessible. This is the year I’ll engage with the Deplorables.”

But why don’t the changes ever take? I propose it’s because academics, intellectuals, scholars, pick your preferred term, never ever talk about their Personal Lives. The unspoken agreement is that it detracts from the seriousness of your scholarship. The thinking being that one’s ideas, if they’re persuasive and original enough, should be sufficient to garner attention.

And how’s that working out?

Maybe higher education needs to look in the mirror and say “This is the year I become human. This year I’ll reveal something, hell anything, about my life off campus. This is the year I’ll crack the curtains on my Personal Life.”

Tucker Carlson Thinks You’re Stupid

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The New York Times* reports on how. . .

“. . . a right-wing media world that typically moves in lock step with the president has struggled to reconcile Mr. Trump’s surprise escalation with his prior denunciations of open-ended conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Adding:

“Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, said that he and other supporters of the president were still hunting for an effective defense. ‘This is a very complicated issue, and the people who support President Trump, from Tucker Carlson all the way to Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, are really trying to work through this,’ Mr. Bannon said on Monday. ‘What you’re seeing now — live on television, live on radio — is people working through what this means.”

Carlson broke ranks with his fellow Fox News nutters this way:

‘It’s hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, most people didn’t consider Iran an imminent threat,’ Mr. Carlson said at the start of his Monday show, going on to mock Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for saying intelligence agencies had identified an undefined Iranian threat. ‘Seems like about 20 minutes ago, we were denouncing these people as the ‘deep state’ and pledging never to trust them again without verification,’ Mr. Carlson told viewers, eyebrow arched. ‘Now, for some reason, we do trust them — implicitly and completely.'”

The Times summarizes:

“Just as the political world was caught off guard by the killing of General Suleimani, so was the conservative media complex. As reports of the missile strike in Baghdad that killed the general emerged on Thursday, Mr. Hannity phoned into his Fox News show from vacation to offer vociferous praise. That same night, Mr. Carlson warned his viewers that ‘America appears to be lumbering toward a new Middle East war.'”

Credit where credit is due, it’s nice that Carlson occasionally demonstrates independent thought.

But all is not well with him. The Times again:

“After his Monday segment on General Suleimani, he introduced a five-part series, ‘American Dystopia,’ chronicling urban decay in San Francisco.”

Because I find it weirdly entertaining, I watch an occasional Fox News segment. Lo and behold, Monday night I caught the first part of “American Dystopia”. Granted there is a lot of competition for this, and I am only a sporadic viewer, but the segment may very well have been the low point in Fox News television history. At least I nominate it for that.

It was only about 7-10 minutes long. It consisted of an interview with a policewoman who was repeatedly asked what would happen if particular crimes were committed in San Fransisco. Her default answer “you’d be issued a citation” was supposed to highlight the utter failure of progressive social policies. Other viewers and I were supposed to be disgusted by the lax enforcement of criminal laws, but anyone who has paid any attention to what the most informed people working with addicts have to say knows that criminalizing drug use has proven totally ineffective.

Carlson intimated that if we just incarcerated every heroin user the problem would be solved.

The video footage was something you’d expect from a crew of middle school students reporting on urban decay. . . repeated close ups of syringes and repeated close ups of human feces. Over and over to give the impression the entire city was overrun by needles and human waste.

No context was provided for where the footage was shot, how big of an area it was, and whether it was even close to representative of the entire city. Viewers were supposed to conclude that every block in San Fransisco has an assortment of troubled drug addicts on its sidewalks, who, along with other people, randomly shit on the same sidewalks.

It’s weird how San Fransisco’s real estate is among the most expensive in the country when all of its streets are lined with syringes and shit.

Of course, in this case, Carlson is carrying the President’s water, using absolute bullshit reporting in an attempt to tarnish the Speaker of the House, who continually gets the better of the President.

I’m sure Pelosi would be the first to admit that San Fransisco isn’t perfect and that homelessness is a tough, tough challenge. That’s just demonstrating a firm grasp of reality, something Fox News, Carlson more often than not, and the President find difficult.

*sorry Domingo