As IF Times

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.

link Dinosaurs farted their way to extinction, British scientists say | Fox News.

The implications of this ‘news story’ are mind boggling.   While I am certainly not in a position to scientifically question the astounding conclusion of this study, if these scientists’ claims are valid, some big changes are going to happen to our society.

The very first thing that comes to mind is the concept of being a vegetarian.  As astute readers of the article will notice, most of these behemoth monsters were actually vegetarians, consuming mainly plants and trees, albeit by the acre, Michael Moore-like.  As most consumers of beans and legumes are aware, consumption of such stuff can lead to embarrassing moments in crowded elevators.  Apparently, the dinosaurs had the same issues millions of years ago and they gassed themselves to extinction.  Logically, we can only extrapolate that vegetarian humans are actually harming our present environment and therefore they should be stopped immediately before it’s too late.

If we were able to monitor the air over San Francisco, Los Angeles or Vancouver, there’s a certainty that the air quality would show higher than the normal measures of toxic gases, which we can now trace  to rampant vegetarianism among their populace.  People may be forgiven who had thought that BS emanating from these cities were responsible for the bad air.  Of course, this gas issue is already known by those who are participants in Yoga classes.   They should immediately form an organization called STOP generating annoying smells, or STOP GAS.

If human vegetarians are a menace to society, then so are all herbivores.  For years, there were theories that cows were in fact the greatest contributors to global warming due to their release  of methane gas from eating grass.  Now, the fickle finger of blame is zeroing in on these dangerous animals.  This dangerous list of herbivores will include goats, sheep, deer, elephants and giraffes too.  All of these creatures are hastening the doom of mankind.  It turns out that eating meat is not only tasty, it’s also green and socially responsible!  Eating broccoli is bad after all!

Another implication of this story is that scientists seem to have the ability to discern the cause of events looooong past their occurrence by persistent and ingenious sleuthing.  Even though dinosaurs died off a few million years ago, apparently the cause of their demise is evident even now, as if it were a slightly cold CSI case and the chalk outline was in clear view.  It’s hard to believe that the dinosaur conclusion wasn’t arrived at sooner.  It was right under our noses; all that was needed was to stitch a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces of evidence together as if it were a Mississippi trial.   This should scare all criminals.  The truth will come out eventually, although perhaps a few million years down the road.  It will only be a matter of time before they apply modern science to unravel some of the true puzzles of modern life; such as the mystery  of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance or how they get the caramilk in a caramilk bar.