Fish and scum

Brucie's back. Now we have the Coast Guard weighing in on this week's shark frenzy with a shark advisory. Here's a little bullshit advisory from the Uncle man. It's summer; there's salt water; there will be sharks, and some of them will be big. Just a note that in my experience, most of the big sharks you actually see on our coasts are basking sharks. They are "filter feeders" and about as dangerous as cows. I think the Coast Guard should tell its lawyers to take a Prozac and stop coming up with this crap.

I'm reading Charles P. Pierce's Idiot America. More on that when I finish it, but I was slapped in the face with one of his premises of idiocy tonight, when the PBS News Hour presented a "debate" on extending jobless benefits. One side was represented by an authentic dinosaur from—wait for it—that famous source of objective academics, the Heritage Foundation. In the course of a few minutes he managed not only to slander every unemployed worker in America (we'll all find jobs when benefits end because we're having such a great time living on them) but also their families (who are also living high off the hog on $300-$400 a week and so have no incentive to work). There was inevitably a rebuttal: this is PBS after all, not Fox...yet. But the damage was done. Putting this clown on the air as if he actually knew jack about the present recession just enables the rest of the wingnuts in the Senate in their endless refusal to come to grips with reality.

This happens to be one of Pierce's points. In idiot America, every question has two sides, and both of them must be right, or they wouldn't get on the air.

I'm all for putting Congress on the same health plan as everyone else. In addition, when Congresspeople get voted out of office, they should go on unemployment instead of getting a lifetime pension or a fat lobbying job, so they can live it up on their benefits instead of looking for a job. While we're at it, let's close down the Heritage Foundation and see if the creatures who survive now in its artificial atmosphere can contend with the real world. Hmm, maybe this has happened, and that's why the Coast Guard finds it necessary to warn us against prehistoric predators.

Coda: How is it that Canada manages to combine humanitarian social programmes with a generally ethical and conservative financial policy in public and private sector? Are they smarter than we are, or is it something in the beer? I'm drinking Moosehead this week to find out (also because it was on sale).

One more: Guard What?

OK...let me see if I have this right. The Coast Guard holds a routine drill. CNN, obsessed with the idea that terrorists are as obsessed with anniversaries as the broadcast media, is listening in on police scanner frequencies and overhears the drill.

Without once checking, or even considering, the possibility that the data might support some other conclusion, CNN goes on the air with breathless commentary about terrorists in the Potomac. And somehow, this is the Coast Guard's fault.

CNN, there is in fact a moral low ground lower than that occupied by Fox, and you've found it.
This farce rates an F in any journalism course I ever had, and you know it. Now cowboy up and admit it.

The obvious conclusion is that nobody is supposed to be ready to protect anything if it interferes with America's driveling sentimentality and its enablers. I'd ding the Coast Guard for saying anything on any frequency not indescribably Top Secret, and I'd cut off umpteen dozen perqs for any media outlet that acted as blindly as CNN has in this matter: not for security breaches, but for sheer stupidity followed by middle-school arrogant denial.