Keith Olbermann is a jackass

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2010/05/13/echo-chamber-olbermann-calls-idiot-woman-palin-coward-refusing-com

This is a link to News Busters, which has a transcript of Olbermann that reads, in part:  ”That woman is an idiot” when referring to Sarah Palin. This is misogynistic.

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2010/10/keith_condemned.php

This is a link showing Keithy boy getting all pissy about Breitbart using an out -of-context clip to get Shirley Sherrod fired, then using an out-of-context clip himself to rail against Bill O’Reilly. I guess it’s ok when Olbermann does it.

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2006/12/keith_olbermann_2.php

The many lies of Keith Olbermann, cira 2006

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2007/12/keith_olbermann_71.php

The many lies of Keith Olbermann, circa 2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mHhTFmRiaw&NR=1

In this clip, Olbermann implores Joe Leiberman to kill himself. That’s not a directive for murder, but it’s damn close. It’s a little before the 7 minute mark.

This is darling Olby saying he wants Hillary to go into a room and not come out, ostensibly beaten to a bloody pulp and left there.

http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/04/olberman-calls-for-clintons-murder.html

Blog post dealing with the above from a Hillary supporter.

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2008/02/keith_olbermann_79.php

Sweet lil’ Olby comparing the right to the Reich. Over and over and over again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW6h__dRST0

Olbermann displaying a shocking lack of realization of his own Nazi analogy-love.

Olby’s endearing racism.

Olby lying about seeing a tape in order to sound better on his show….mild, really, but lying still.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/29418530#29418530

Yes, the only women who will respond to Rush Limbaugh are people like Eva Braun or women who like prisoners and Charles Manson.

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2009/02/olbermann_readi.php

Another many instances of Olby hypocrisy.

http://www.olbermannwatch.com/archives/2009/02/olbermann_repea.php

Outright lies about Fox News.

Olby about calling people fascist.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Waxing long on the healthcare reform bill. This is from before the bill is passed, from December 2009. He tells certain people that this is none of their Goddammed business and that you can just brand him a lawbreaker because he won’t buy insurance. He’s advocating threatening people to get something passed. He’s bloviating hard and tipping ever so slightly into histrionics, mongering fear over what will happen. He now supports this bill which passed in the form he froths against here. Oh but wait! He’s saying the same things that Rush Limbaugh is saying!!! Horrors!!!

This does contain a rather freaky ability to see the future for the Dems with a primary challenge if this bill passes.

Olby never accuses without facts and evidence, oh no…..

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4164249/the-one-thing-423/

This is a long clip from the Glenn Beck Show, but about 10 minutes in is where you find the nugget with Keithy. If you can manage to make your way through this, it’s a beautiful piece about sedition and speaking out against the government.

This is all I have for now, but should I need to, I can get more. Thoughts?

Editorializing in the Media

We’ve all read opinion pieces, and it’s pretty clear that journalism has changed drastically in the years since President Johnson lamented “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Journalists are supposed to report the news, not give an individual spin. “Just the facts, ma’am” is supposed to be the driving force of the day. However, in these days and times, we’ve got everything from your normal run-of-the-mill desk jockey writing up blurbs for the local news station all the way to Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann reporting the news as they see fit. Is this how it should be? Of course, Beck doesn’t set himself up as an actual journalist, he’s merely a pundit. A voice screaming from the rooftops that the news you hear isn’t the news you’re supposed to hear. Olbermann tends to act as though he’s not a pundit, but that’s another blog post for another day.

Is this the way it’s supposed to be? Have we gotten to the point that news is simply another form of entertainment instead of how we know fact from fiction?

Here’s the article that precipitated my blog post today: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41575.html “Obama blasts lies, disinformation”

Near the end of the article lies this statement: “The president, a harsh critic of the Bush administration’s sluggish response to Katrina, bristled when asked if the BP Gulf oil spill was his administration’s Katrina – because of a failure to act quickly enough.”

The part that got me was this: “…bristled when asked…” Should that have been reported? Let me know in the comments.

What is the solution to this? Is there one? Can we ever, in this day and age of 24/7/365 news, entertainment, and voices screaming ever louder that their way is the only way, get back to actual reporting? Why should we not trust the people to take facts at face value and make their own decisions?

The military

Have you ever wondered why the military is run the way it is? 

Believe it or not, the sissification of the military is a HUGE problem. Being allowed to give out “stress cards” if you feel your drill sergeant is being too rough on you, they can’t talk rough to you, not as many push-ups, that sort of thing……

The military takes a regular guy off the street, breaks them down, and then builds them back into a soldier. Here’s why that’s necessary:

They kill people.

That’s the long and the short of someone in the military. You’re not getting in there to bring peace and goodwill to the world. You’re going there to defend and protect your country, and if you bring goodwill and whatnot then great. But you WILL KILL PEOPLE. That will screw with your head if you give it too much thought, ergo the breaking down of the mind and building it back.

Have you ever heard of a sniper talking about his kills? He doesn’t refer to “yeah we took out old Johnny MacTurbin back in Iraq yadda yadda yadda….” He talks about neutralizing the target, because if you allow yourself to remember you’re taking a human life, your brain goes AWOL. It really gets to you, and if your drill sergeant and others training you to be a killer aren’t allowed to get under your skin in Basic and screw you up then, you aren’t going to make it once you actually have to do something horrible.

Do you know why Dr. House is such a good doctor (ficticiously speaking, of course)? He almost never meets the patient, doesn’t refer to them by name, and does what he has to do to solve the puzzle. The various times he’s actually met patients and developed a relationship with them, it ended badly almost every time because he wasn’t mentally able to treat the patient as an experiment.

I guess the gist of it is that we’re removing the mental capacity of our soldiers to deal with the stress by allowing them to slack during Basic and in other times during their training. The military is hard, and it’s supposed to be. It exists (according to the Constitution) to protect this country. To do that you have to kill people. To do that effectively and without blowing up your own brain, you HAVE to be able to separate out those parts of yourself that are human. Otherwise, you’re doomed as a person and when you come back you can’t function.

 

We’re not trying to create a brigade of sociopaths. In the military they are taught to compartmentalize everything, from their guns all the way up to their emotions. It’s what is necessary in order to be human when you come home from war.

 

Allowing our fighting men and women to fall for the “sissification” of America and allowing them to pander to their own emotional distress instead of being shown how to deal with it is creating a fighting force that can’t push back emotional distress long enough to get the job done.

 

I said all that to say this: We need better training for our military. We need to allow the drill sergeants to get back to creating a fighting force worthy of the victories in the past, and we need to show our men and women in uniform the proper way to deal with their emotions. If that includes having a staff psychologist on hand for any distress a soldier feels, have at it. That is certainly an important part of a soldier’s training. But let us not mince words here. We cannot let our men and women be crushed under the weight of war by allowing them to get a pass when it counts.

 

(apologies for the format of this post. It was transferred from a comment section on Facebook )

Islam and Christianity

I was on my way to work today, listening to the radio. There were two people on the show arguing about Islāmic sharia law and jihad, and what that means in terms of the Muslim religion. The topic was whether or not a mosque should be built within feet of Ground Zero.

Listening to these people argue back and forth, one for the mosque, one against, it began to dawn on me that I’d heard these types of arguments before. The man arguing FOR the mosque was saying that a few fringe types can’t possibly be indicative of a religion as a whole, and the lady arguing AGAINST used the premise that the Quran teaches that ALL Islam must be a certain way…..

I said that to say this: We’ve had issues and arguments before about Christianity and the fringe groups involved, and it’s been spat at me that Christianity never has to apologize for the entire group as a whole the way that Islam does. The more I think about that, the worse it bothers me. All I as a Christian do nowadays is distance myself from what people call the “fringe” of the group….the abortion bombers, the rock throwers, the idiots living in the woods calling themselves “Warriors of God.” Christians have to apologize daily for the idiots in our midst, whether that be a high-profile pastor getting caught in an infidelity, a man screaming about the sanctity of life as he pushes the pin on a bomb in a clinic, or the Catholic Church abusing altar boys.

We’re lumped into two groups, us Christians: to those not “of us” we’re either Catholics, or some type of Baptist out to ruin your life by condemning you to Hell. Either way, the Christians are out to inconvenience those who aren’t Christian by wishing you a blessed day, a merry Christmas, or offering to pray for you even though you don’t believe in our God. And Heaven forbid that someone do something stupid in our midst…..for the next 6 months we’re all scrambling to identify that person as a radical or a fringe member, and not standing for what the rest of us believe in.

It’s frustrating, it’s maddening, and it’s disingenuous of those on the outside of Christianity to lump us altogether as one when it’s not done to those following Islam. I actually heard the pro-mosque guy say that the lady arguing against him was using a misinterpreted version of the Quran to make her arguments. How is it ok for a member of Islam to say that, especially when the Quran is set up so that further works added to it supercede the previous statements (completely unlike the Bible), when it’s NOT ok for a Christian to take the Bible, show where it’s been taken out of context or misinterpreted, and try to show what the actual meaning of the verse is?

I guess I’m pissed about being lumped altogether and told to suck it up since Christianity is a majority religion in the United States. I should be happy that I’m allowed to practice my religion, I’m told. I should be thanking my God that I’m even allowed out on the streets in public. And I should never ever ever say anything bad about Islam or call their religion terrorist because that’s unfairly lumping them altogether when the religion is one of peace.

…

Whut??

…

I realize I’m rambling. I’m trying to get these thoughts out of my head as orderly as possible, but this has bothered me for a while now. I’ve been told so many times that Christianity never finds itself defending against the fringe or having to apologize as a whole, but that’s all I find us doing lately. One of ours is given the label “Christian” regardless of whether he actually follows Christianity or adheres to the religion, and the rest of us get smeared along with him and have to immediately regroup to “cast him out”, so to speak. The Catholic Church has done a LOT of damage over the last 2000 years, and is constantly having to apologize for it. As a Christian not even associated with the Catholic Church, I’m thrown into that group by default. You’re either Christian (Catholic), or you’re some other religion in the world.

I’m not sure when this point of view is going to change. Christians have had to fight for everything we have since the beginning, and I don’t see an end in sight for that. The only thing I know to do is stand tall, proud, and strong, and not let those who would distort our words get away with it.

Signups

I’m going to transcribe some conversations verbatim as they happen.

We’re signing people up for our company 401k plan. (Italics are me speaking. Regular text is the hapless employee who is walking a fine line. Parenthesis are my thoughts)

~

“So, if you want to put 5% into the plan, check this box.”

“So how much is 5% going to be?”

“…” “It’s 5% of your check that week.”

“Yes, but how much money is that in dollars?”

“The amount changes depending on how many hours you work that week.”

“…” “But I only want to put in $4 a week.”

“This only works with percentages, not dollar amounts.”

“…” “So how do I put in $5 a week then?”

(internal screaming)

~

“Ok, so fill out the date ’5-1-2010′ right there…”

“Five…one…twenty…is this a date?”

“…” (must…..not………stab……..)

~

“What’s today’s date?”

“4-19.”

“4, 19, ten? Eleven? What year is it?”

“…”

~

“Wait, what’s my date of birth?”

“…” (I dont’ know, February 31st?)

~

“Ok…..location. Where are we at?”

(Hell, apparently)

~

(while looking over stock options) “I do not recommend international stocks…”

(you wouldn’t recognize an international stock if it jumped up and bit you in the kneecap)

~

“Now, you need to sign and date this…”

“This is like flying an airplane. You can fly around and dust crops, and you’ve got to focus on what’ you’re doing.”

“…..” “Ok, so, you want to sign this…”

“I used to have a wife…people ask me if I miss her….I say I miss my dog.”

“…” “Sir, you want to sign and date this paper…”

“I had a car once. Now I just pay cash for everything.”

(visions of leaping across my desk and throttling someone)

Waiter, there’s a context in my soup!

How important is context? Is it merely a throwaway concept that doesn’t mean much in the face of the small snapshot that we see? Here’s an example:

What is this? Any ideas? Can you tell from the small part shown exactly of what this is a picture? I’ll let you try to figure it out for a bit.

Here are some quotes I’d like you to consider:

“True genius is always inborn and never cultivated, let alone learned.”

“…you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps – even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.”

“By keeping costs under control, expanding access, and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America’s health care the best in the world.”

Who is the speaker in these cases? Does it matter who said them or the context in which they were said? Don’t go Google search these quotes, think about them for a minute and try to decide for yourself what kind of man or woman would say them.

Tell me in the comments if you’d figured out who said what, and when.

Did you figure out the picture?

It’s a sunflower. Could you possibly have known that from the tiny snapshot you see here? Can you discern the yellow petals, the green stalk, the overall beauty of the flower just by seeing a small part of the inner part of the flower? And if not, does it matter?

To me, context is everything. You can take something out of context and make the speaker say anything you want them to say. Taking the larger picture that includes where they were, the audience to which they were speaking, and the overall message will give you a clearer picture of the intent of the speaker. After all, even Hitler had some good ideas.

New rules

I would love to be the kind of blogger who has a well thought out piece that could be turned in for a grade in a PoliSci class. A blog that takes two or three differing opinions, thoughts, and facts and brings them together in a beautifully written, cogent piece that ties up all the loose ends at the end. But let’s face it, I got good grades in English and Lit because I’m extremely good at regurgitation and bull crap in a paper. The thesis just ain’t me.

So let’s embark on a journey, shall we?I’ll start something in this blog, and we’ll all finish it out together in the comments. Encouragement and hate Mail are welcome.

Let’s start out with something small: the industrial revolution was neither industrial or a revolution. Discuss.

In all seriousness, I really want to do well in reaching a lot of people with this blog. I can’t do it if I’m psyching myself out by feeling as though I have to turn in a research paper every time I post. So let’s get started!

What do you think about the fact that President Obama giving a 17 minute answer at a simple question? Do you feel this is the proper way to deal with the press, or is the president so enamored with the sound of his own voice that to shut up or answer a question succinctly would be an affront to his sensibilities?