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).

Today's fish story

Over the weekend, a tuna boat from Gloucester caught and released a six to seven foot shark on Stellwagen Bank. Stellwagen is an area of shallow water in outer Massachusetts Bay roughly the size of the land mass of Rhode Island. Six to seven foot sharks are about as common there as jaywalkers on Tremont Street in Boston.

Except that this was a Great White Shark.

OMG!! Reach for the panic button! Abandon the beaches! Head for the hills! In Massachusetts, this pre-adolescent shark and the barely post-adolescent fishermen who caught it, were today's lead for much of the questionably adult local media. What else was happening? Let's see: opening of Elena Kagan's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a high-speed police chase from downtown Boston onto the Mass Turnpike, breakup of a Russian spy ring including two local people... all below the fold, as us dinosaurs used to say in the days of print. Nope, nothing happened today that could possibly be as interesting as a teenage shark caught over 20 miles from the nearest beach.

This is the sort of coverage that makes one abandon all hope that reason and good judgment may one day prevail, and snatch journalism back from the jaws of the tabloid media. Holy crap, it's a shark too small to eat its primary food, seals! There were sharks off this coast before Jaws was filmed, and they may be there after it's forgotten, if humans stop slaughtering them for Asian delicacies and out of reckless panic. It's been 70 years since the state's last shark attack. The fact that the broadcasters all covered this information did nothing to slow down the flow of breathless, panicked leads. Oh, and outside of Hollywood, your chances of being attacked by a Great White are about the same as being struck by lightning as you're being run over by a 1929 Duesenberg immediately after learning that you've won both Mega Millions and Power Ball.

I was going to give props to the Boston Herald for it's factual, emotionless headline earlier today, but I just checked out their Web site to find that they too have bought into the panic party. I'm grateful for the Russian spy arrest, though: it should push little Brucie out of the headlines by the morning.