As IF Times The Anti Fake News

link Italian court ruling sends chill through science community | Reuters.

In today’s “you can’t make this stuff up” arena, comes this story about scientists being imprisoned for not predicting an earthquake.  In most jobs, if someone screws up, they get two week’s notice and then shown the door.  In Italy, apparently they are held to a higher standard.  The article tells the story of these unfortunate scientists who gave the town an all clear signal but then only 3 days later, the big one hits.  Talk about shaky forecasts.  What they should have done in hindsight was to recommended to the village what they do in this part of the world; that is tell everyone the big one will most certainly hit any day and to purchase as much disaster insurance as possible.   What’s the downside? Tell everyone the worst.  This medieval court outcome should send shivers to anyone exposed to the prediction racket.  I’m sure Italian stockbrokers, doctors and even weather forecasters are just a little bit more nervous today.  Imagine a stockbroker making a bad market call  and then phones home to tell the wife that he’ll be home… in about 3 to 5 years.

Well if they’re going to put scientists in the clink for not predicting disasters, maybe there will be a push to call journalists out for not exposing BS from politicians.  If we apply the logic of this Italian court ruling to these shores, maybe some reality gets forced back into the media business.  If media knew that political pronouncements were whoppers and failed to warn the public of such, then perhaps there should be consequences. The very reason for the majority of the scribblings on this site is because of the proclivity of media to promote stories that range from subtly coercive to outright pants-on-fire untruths.  Of course when politics are concerned, there’s an expectation of fabrication or exaggeration, but the media are not supposed to be complicit.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal,  Dorothy Rabinowitz for example illustrates the kind of guffaw provoking fairy tales that are pushed out for public consumption every day.  As she artfully points out, the fibs are not even subtle any more, they’re Bunyanesque in their affrontery.  We quote at length  from her article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443684104578067041987322754.html?mod=googlenews_wsj here:

“…In the 1967 film “A Guide for the Married Man,” a husband, played by a peerless Walter Matthau, is given lessons in ways to cheat on his wife safely. The most essential rule: “Deny! Deny! Deny!”—no matter what. In an instructive scene, he’s shown a wife undone by shock, and screaming, with reason: She has just walked in on her husband making love to a glamorous stranger.

“What are you doing,” she wails, “who is that woman?”

“What woman, where?” the husband serenely counters, as he and the tart in question get out of bed and calmly dress.

So the scene proceeds, with the distraught wife pointing to the woman she clearly sees before her, while her husband, unruffled, continues to look blankly at her, asking, “What woman?” Confused by her spouse’s unblinking assurance, she gives up. Two minutes later she’s asking him what he’d like for dinner.

For much of the past four years, the Obama administration’s propensity for asserting views of reality wildly at odds with those evident to most rational citizens has looked increasingly like a page from that film script.

All administrations conceal, falsify and tell lies—this is understood—but there’s no missing the distinctive quality of the prevaricating issuing from the White House in these four years…”

As we said, we expect politicians to have big noses, but it’s supposed to be the job of media to point that out.  There are still naive people in this day and age who think that if something is in print or on TV, it must be true.

And speaking of BS, the greatest whopper still getting mileage is the fiction of Global Warming.  Exactly the opposite of the Italian scientists, the GW crowd are predicting doom and extinction every time a penguin goes missing.  We still experience ‘respected’ scientists and of course politicians who are beating the “we’re all going to die” drum.  The narrative is that, despite millions and millions of years of the earth’s existence, the influence of man in the last blink of time, in geologic terms,  will be the undoing of the planet.  Somehow through the ages, the earth has survived earthquakes, great freezes, meteor strikes, bad weather and shifting of tectonic plates, but now, because we’re running a few cars, the earth will collapse and extinction will come to all life.

All we’re saying is that if scientists can be imprisoned for acts of omission, things they have no control over, then we should also incarcerate people for acts of commission, in which perps had complete knowledge of their duplicitous stories and still pushed them out.  This is all backwards.  Let’s fire the incompetents, but jail the liars.