Remember Zimmerman on FOX News? Remember Marissa Alexander? Remember Ralph Wald?

Edit: Though I got Marissa Alexander’s name right in the post, I somehow screwed up and had “Marissa Thomas” in the post title (where did THAT come from??). I’m changing the display title, but as I already have incoming traffic on it, and I’m not about to SSH into the server and make an htaccess 301 redirect to fix one blog post on my personal blog because that’s stupid, I’m not changing the post slug.

In the wake of George Zimmerman being declared not guilty in his actions of following, confronting against orders of the 911 dispatcher, then shooting the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, I want to remind you that he had an interview about eleven months ago on FOX News. During that interview, he told every one paying attention what would happen when tried by a jury of his peers in Florida.

It was God’s will that Zimmerman ignore the dispatcher, follow the teen and confront him. It was God’s will that Zimmerman shoot and kill Martin. Therefore Zimmerman doesn’t need to have any remorse.

Remember, also, black Floridian Marissa Alexander firing a warning shot at her aggressively-approaching abusive husband and getting twenty years?

Remember also Ralph Wald, 70 year old white man, shooting and killing his wife’s lover in a crime of passion, and getting off scott free?

It doesn’t seem to matter the circumstances of the shooting or who was the aggressor. It matters, it seems, only whether or not the shooter and the victim were white.

There is no justice in this. This is an absolute miscarriage of justice. And Zimmerman has zero remorse because he — like so many others — believes that everything he did was in service of a god that we’re almost certain doesn’t exist.

This Stand Your Ground nonsense, selectively applied to hurt only black folks, disgusts me. Floridians, for allowing that law to exist, and for acquitting a man who was most certainly guilty of being the aggressor in a confrontation with an unarmed teenager, disgust me too.

Remember Zimmerman on FOX News? Remember Marissa Alexander? Remember Ralph Wald?
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"Who wrote THAT? Are you kidding me?"

When even FOX News personalities scoff at the headlines they’re forced to read, you know there’s a problem with the network. At least pretty well everyone present guffawed heartily at the assertion that the Constitutional Law Professor-In-Chief doesn’t believe in the Constitution. I’m guessing because there’s an amendment to the constitution that forbids sensible regulations applied to your civilian militia? As though the 2nd Amendment was so hard to interpret!

Yeah.

And that’s not to mention the mockery of Te’o at the beginning of the clip.

Via Media Matters.

"Who wrote THAT? Are you kidding me?"

Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

I could not ask for a more perfect bit of compare/contrast. The mainstream American media is stone-silent about Sergeant Justin Griffith of Rock Beyond Belief fame, with the obvious exception of Fox News. The only news you’ll get about this atheist-in-a-foxhole Stateside is the fact that one of the acts for Rock Beyond Belief once did a music video that included images of a church burning, in a song denouncing sectarian religious violence, and Fox News spun it all to hell and back as though it was military-sanctioned encouragement of violence against religions.

Meanwhile, across the Pond, the BBC has covered Justin and our shared fight asking if the US army can embrace atheists. Their answer is significantly more reality-based than Fox’s, of course.
Continue reading “Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast”

Justin Griffith covered by Fox News and BBC: an exercise in compare/contrast

The good news is that FOX news is not news

The better news — though not so much for FOX news — is that it’s about to become OLD news. It is now officially losing in the ratings to a comedy show, thanks in no small part to an aging audience. Their average viewer is 65+, and every important demographic for long-term viability slipped.

“Red Eye” was the only Fox News show to post ratings gains in 2011. Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and On The Record With Greta Van Susteren all lost viewers. In the morning, Fox and Friends remained flat. Fox News still showed its dominance by having the top 13 rated cable news programs, but a certain program hosted by a comedian that Fox News loves to hate on Comedy Central blew past most of the Fox News shows in the ratings.

Continue reading “The good news is that FOX news is not news”

The good news is that FOX news is not news

potholer54 on science media

Using an example of FOX “News” science reporting, among other such examples, potholer54 (aka Peter Hadfield) explains how to dig for information in science media. He also takes the media to task for their incomplete, inaccurate, or otherwise suspicious interpretations or misrepresentations of actual science. Use this as a primer on how to debunk the Cliff Clavens of the science blogosphere.
Continue reading “potholer54 on science media”

potholer54 on science media

This is what grassroots looks like

The thing that makes the Tea Party so execrable, so foul and unpalatable and disingenuous, is that it was built by FOX News using FOX News money and directed by FOX News executives. It started as astroturf, as a simulacrum of grassroots, and after it reached a critical mass of people duped into believing they were fighting for lower taxes for everybody, the movement picked up steam.
Continue reading “This is what grassroots looks like”

This is what grassroots looks like

Fox makes fun of scientists, NASA, and climate realists in one fell swoop

Fox News gets it wrong, on purpose, again. I know, I’m shocked too. They breathlessly title this article Aliens Could Attack Earth to End Global Warming, NASA Scientist Frets — having obviously been edited from “NASA Scientist Claims” (check the URL) because that was insufficient sneering.

First, let’s make this clear — the panel was asked to come up with scenarios why aliens might attack us. They were asked to come up with “neutral”, “unintentional harm” and “intentional harm” scenarios wherein we make first contact with aliens. Among the reasons aliens might decide to attack us are: 1) to enslave us, 2) to eat us, and 3) to strike preemptively before we wreck their shit.

Extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) “could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us. ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us. We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet,” it warns.

One such scenario is the stuff of many a Hollywood blockbuster, a “standard fight-to-win conflict: a war of the worlds.” But another might resonate more with fans of Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient truth.”

It speculates that aliens, worried we might inflict the damage done to our own planet on others, might “seek to preemptively destroy our civilization in order to protect other civilizations from us.”

The reason they might clue in to our presence to begin with? Well, we’re kinda in the process of wrecking our own environment, in ways that might be detectable from light years away via the same methods that we’re using right now to figure things out about exoplanets’ atmospheres. The fact that once, we had very little CO2 in the atmosphere, and now we’ve got a lot more (like double!), might be a big old warning flag to these extraterrestrials that something is happening on our planet and it might be worth checking it out. They might realize that we’ve entered the industrial age but haven’t matured past rampant capitalism, and that has arrested our ability to actually do something about having destroyed our only life support system. They might well be concerned that we’re spacefaring, and that we might spread our self-destructive habits to other niches in the cosmic neighborhood, maybe even threatening their own planet with our backward and self-centered ways.

But the scientists were asked to come up with sci-fi scenarios why they might attack us. This ain’t “oh those crazy liberals think we’d better stop that imaginary global warming that Al Gore invented or else some aliens will wipe us out”. This ain’t about the conservative ideals of profit-first, sustainability-never. This is speculation based on a specific request made of these scientists and it’s not all that far-fetched given that our own level of technology allows us to determine things about planets that are hundreds of light years away that might just tip us off that something big was changing on those planets too. This is barely science fiction. And yet Fox News takes the opportunity to craft the perfect headline, the one that’ll make sure us crazy liberals are laughed at for our crazy ideas.

There’s nothing objectionable about the study you’re sneering so hard at, Fox. I’d advise you stop sneering soon or your collective faces might freeze like that.

Fox makes fun of scientists, NASA, and climate realists in one fell swoop