Your chance of death, YOUR CHANCE OF DEATH, is 100-percent, regardless of what lifestyle behaviors you pursue. You will die. You will not die twice or even three times. Just once. But definitely once. No matter what.

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This seems like a classic case of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” overwhelming a traditional business model. An old-school enterprise has to maintain its old-school practices in order to keep its reliable cash cow alive. As soon as they try to switch up what they’re doing, they risk starving the cow and having nothing to show for it. Shareholders won’t stand for *that*. The problem comes when people start overwhelmingly preferring soy milk and you’re entirely invested in dairy cattle. At that point the game’s just over and your job is to maintain your dignity and go out as a good loser.

I don’t see the benefit of expending energy to “save newspapers”. People want news, others want to provide it, but why does the NYT (or any other old-model business) need to profit from the exchange? Organizations are what they are and when they try to change their DNA, they usually fail (like when United Airlines decided they were more than just an airline and bought Hertz and Westin and started calling themselves “Allegis”). If an organization doesn’t start out with adaptation and evolution at its core, it risks getting innovated out of existence by better, later substitutes.

From a business perspective, I think the best course of action for the daily newspapers is to downscope in order to stay profitable as long as possible and when the reaper finally comes for them (next year?), be dignified enough to just curl up by the fire and quietly pass on. I’m guessing, instead, of course, they’ll start lobbying congress to keep them on life support and prop up their antiquated models and then we’ll all get to endure story after story on NPR about how society is toilet-bound due to the struggles of major newspapers. Or I suppose I could just turn the radio off.

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Really? On edge? The entire world?

 

Interestingly, in the previous issue, the Economist, the most influential “newspaper” in the world, demanded that the US House pass the $700B bailout. Now? Not sure it’ll work (so tremble in fear you morons).

 And how is it that the media now views falling oil prices as bad and rising oil prices as good? Didn’t that used to run the other way around? Like two weeks ago?

 

“Plunge”, eh? Nah, that’s not editorializing, sensationalistic, or overtly alarming for the sake of generating reader interest.

How about this for a headline: “Recessions Are Normal and Cyclical” and then as a sub-head “Similar economic figures seen five years ago” (And “careening”?! Why is this one “careening”?!)

The article’s premise is that deregulation — and not monkeying with monetary policy — caused the current recession. And that the way to fix bad government is with more government. Newsweek delenda est. And no, they don’t deserve italics.

Although the article talks about how what really happened is that most people didn’t realize that the economy was tanking when, in fact, it was — that’s not exactly how the headline link comes across.

Although, to be fair, everything sounds calamitous in German.

People who profit from inciting fear should be hung from their skin. Probably. And we certainly never pulled crap like this when I was at sportsTALK*.

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* = Just the 2000-01 parts.

There, I said it.

And it’s amazing how well the Discovery Channel has perfected the art of cramming four minutes of content into a 41-minute run time (packaged around 19 minutes of commercials). Someone’s going to Hell for that.

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7. The nice thing about the Irish armed forces is that everything moves at such a relaxed pace — not even the helicopter rotors are in a hurry. It’s concerning that the medics are so deliberate, but — well, it’s not like the Irish are getting shot at all that often anyway.

6. India is a very straightforward culture. How many other countries can recruit soldiers by showing them getting shot and killed? (This was the only country *I* found.)

5. Crucially, this Lebanese ad points out that there are some good looking women in Lebanon. Assuming they’re not actresses from Syria (although Syrian actresses *in* Lebanon would still count). And I’m guessing the soldier in the ad would prefer they give him a *different* kind of salute. (Wouldn’t we all…?)

4. Taekwondo in the rain? Inspecting delivery trucks while wearing haz-mat suits? I’m in! I like that the Czechs don’t promise too much. I don’t get the impression they’re expecting to take over the world, they’re just trying to — I dunno — pick a side and see how it goes I guess.

3. And if the Finns took on the Irish, that’d be the slowest war in history.

2. Join the Russian army and you’ll get hot chicks and go dancing. Things are hard in Russia — in the US you get the same reward just for drinking the right brand of beer. And if this is how Russian soldiers are treated by the hot-looking locals, why are they all turning up in Liberty City? (Because Liberty City is Ukranians. I know.)

Every time I watch that one, I’m hoping she’ll push him over the railing and into the water. But she never does.

1. Say what you will for the Israeli army, they know how to speak the international language: awkward shame.

That’s it. Tune in next time when I point out the flaws in how Webster defines “insouciant”.

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• Not that many enlisted personnel enjoy being in the navy.
• Officers seem pretty okay with it. (So did the NCOs for that matter — but were they happy because they were NCOs or did they become NCOs because they were happy?)
• Navy fighter pilots are frat-boy braggarts — the flight wing’s CO and XO made Top Gun seem true-to-life, at least in terms of the over-the-top egotism of its main chars.
• It seemed like most of the officers were in favor of the war, while enlisted personnel were more split.
• Most of the naval personnel who talked about the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror” had opinions no more erudite or well-considered than anyone else’s.
• Most naval personnel seemed to regard the navy as a job.
• Based on what was shown in the series, marines on the other hand view the Marine Corps as a way-of-life (and their opinions on the war seemed more deferential: “I’m a marine, it’s my job to obey orders, not to have opinions”).
• There are some sucky jobs in the navy. Looks like if you find yourself enlisting you should get language put into your contract that prevents them from ever making you a cook, a janitor, or a grease monkey.
• Getting catapulted off the carrier deck looked pretty fun. Rendezvousing with a tanker to refuel looked pretty irritating.
• For all the griping in the show, it didn’t by a long shot kill the romantic notion of navy-as-adventure.

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Anger, despair in main Myanmar city as prices soar

“Main Myanmar city”, eh? “Main Myanmar city”? So is Angkor Wat “that famous, weird stone temple-looking thing you might have seen a picture of and that’s in that one Asian country”? How about Reuters gives us a dateline of “that place where Kim Jong Il lives most of the time”? Back when I was working in “main United States city on the east coast, but not the capital”, could I have referred to our office address as “920 That One Street Where All the Musicals and Theaters Are and Times Square Is, but in a Totally Different Neighborhood from That Stuff”? I used to like picking up the R train at “station named after a street famous for being the location of a well-known stock exchange” as it was arriving from “that part of the really big American city where people talk funnier than in some of the other parts of that same city”.

Anger, despair — screw food prices, they’re angry and despairing because western journos think so highly of their country they can’t name the freakin’ capital. Or just don’t want to because it might confuse someone. Or just don’t want to because it might fail to entice people into read the story. Heck, there’s only 6,000,000 people who live in that main city. Then there was that whole “fast moving wind situation that moves around like a gigantic whirling funnel” that kind of wrecked the place. Maybe that made them angry too.

And in the news today, I hear that “black man who wants to be president and gives nice speeches” did well in “state where tobacco comes from” today, but it doesn’t look like “white woman who wants to be president and whose husband used to be” has conceded the nomination yet after her “non-losing effort” in “state where they have that one main car race”.

After work tonight, representatives from “the main company that has a really popular website that a lot of people use in order to find other stuff on the internet and that’s really well known” took us out slick-track racing. That was cool. The place was located in “kind-of main city in the small, prosperous local county where there are some office buildings (and a slick-track place)” just off of “street with the funny sort-of Dutch-sounding name”. And afterward, after hanging out a while at the track, I took “big road with eight lanes with a 65-mph speed limit that runs sort-of along the coast from foothills north of main American city on the southerly part of the west coast all the way to the southern-middle part of the small, local, prosperous county” home. I actually merged with another freeway along the way, but I don’t want to get into that.

“Yangon” or, in the old rendering, “Rangoon”. Six million people.

I wish someone could tell me whether (a) the world’s getting dumber or (b) I’m just becoming more aware of how dumb it’s always been.

Pray for Mojo.

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Here are the problems I found (from top of the article to bottom):

1. That being convicted of “killing a migratory bird” is punishable by up to a year in prison.
2. The quote: “It’s just senseless when people kill wildlife when they are doing nothing but being themselves.” So when I have a cougar trying to get its jaws around my throat, I should just, what, relax and enjoy the ride?
3. The idea that eyewitnesses actually counted how many attempts the golfer made to kill the bird. Did *every* eyewitness say it was ten?
4. The fact that he was doing a spot for a video called “Play Like a Pro” — so if I really want to play like a pro, I guess I need to learn how to target-drive balls at migratory birds…
5. That there’s someone in the world that thinks that a good way to scare off a noisy bird is to start hitting golf balls at it.
6. The idea that adopting three cats necessarily qualifies one as a lover of all animals, including birds.
7. That the copy-editor let this get through: “300yards” (without the space).
8. Presenting the sound engineer who was also the guy responsible for turning the golfer in for the incident as an objective arbiter in deciding whether the bird’s sound was “extreme”.
9. That the golfer made the film crew wait 10 minutes for him to try and scare the bird by hitting golf balls at it.
10. The fact that the writer of the article didn’t source the “10 minute” time period.
11. The fact that neither the writer nor her editor seem to know that you need to put a space between the numerals and the units when giving distances: “75yards”. Buy an AP Style Guide, I’m pretty sure that’s in there.
12. That the 152nd-ranked PGA golfer made $471,000 last year.
13. That the writer also failed to source the $471,000 claim…
14. The idea that someone would (or did) yell the sentence “I didn’t think I would hit it”. Most sentences with two verbs or more remain un-yelled.
15. The amount of melodrama that the sound engineer managed to pack into this statement to “wildlife officials”: “The bird was on his back, bleeding from his nostrils, his mouth was opening and closing slowly, and it was looking up at me as people ran over. I saw its eyes slowly close, and I was pretty sure that the bird had died.”
    

    I took his pulse — it was faint, but his heart was still beating. “C’mon, little bird,” I said slowly, but I knew he wouldn’t make it. I stroked his feathers and he opened his eyes again, called to me weak and pleading: “kee-aah … kee-aah”. In the distance, I heard the screeches of other hawks, the family of the fallen, scanning the treetops in hopes of finding their loved one, their brother, their friend. If only they knew. If only I could tell them. If only they could be here with him. One. Last. Time.

    A tear fell slowly from my face and onto his beak. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “For what we’ve done. Please forgive me. Forgive my kind.” The bird stared at me, furrowing its brow and licking its lips, then nodded. You, I forgive, it seemed to say. You I forgive. It nuzzled my wrist and I scratched its belly and as the warm Florida wind bent the bluegrass and the sun’s red rays stretched across the horizon, my animal friend coughed once, turned its head, then closed its eyes. One. Last. Time.

    So I killed the golfer with a chainsaw.

16. That any part of this is considered newsworthy.

Humanity’s only hope is colonizing the asteroids. Hurry.

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• 157,400 Americans died of lung cancer (that’s 431 PER DAY — half-mast 13.1x per day anyone?).
• 42,443 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents (116 PER DAY — and we haven’t yet banned railroad crossings?!).
• 40,600 Americans died of breast cancer (111/day = 3.4 NATIONWIDE FLAGS HALF-MAST per freakin’ day).
• 31,500 Americans died of prostate cancer (btw, ratio of money spent to research breast cancer cure to money spent for prostate cancer cure is 9:1).
• 31,000 Americans died from bad reactions to prescribed drugs (84/day — and pharmaceutical companies are still allowed to advertise?).
• 30,602 Americans committed suicide.
• 20,308 Ameicans were murdered (that’s 56 people PER DAY, most of whom don’t live in Blacksburg — where are their half-masted flags?).
• 19,250 Americans died from hypertension.
• 17,000 Americans died from the use of illicit drugs.
• 14,175 Americans died from the effects of AIDS/HIV (39 people. Every. Single. Day. Half? Mast?).
• 14,078 Americans died from poisoning.
• 7,600 Americans died from taking aspirin.
• 5,555 Americans suffocated to death.
• 3,300 Americans died of gallbladder cancer.
• 3,281 Americans died from drowning.
• 2,986 Americans died from terrorist attacks (note: this was 2001 — and compared to all the other people who died that year, this wasn’t a significant number either).

Don’t get me entirely wrong. What happened at Virginia Tech was an absolute tragedy — for the friends and families of those who were murdered (sincere condolences, AW). Made-for-TV or not, by any rational perspective, it was not a national horror. If we’re going to fly flags at half-mast every time 32 people die without deserving it, we’re going to need to build way more flag poles.

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(PS: Stop Watching TV News.)