"The Million Moron March"

Image courtesy of Mario PiperniRiffing off John Batchelor's column ("The Festival of Fools") and John Avlon's column ("I Have a Nightmare"), both for the Daily Beast, I too came up with a pithy title for this post on the most recent Tea Party event (because that's really what Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" march on the Washington Mall is.  The demographic is exactly the same.)  I generally agree with Batchelor that this particular march is a non-issue:

The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.

The trick here may be that Beck’s event, which will feature the celebrity Sarah Palin, is not about anything at all. It is a farce of an event in the way the bookish Karl Marx meant it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

However, I disagree with Batchelor's contention that we should take Beck's idiocy at face value: and I have a few general qualifications for the "Tea Baggers are morons" crowd.

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More on the Burlington Coat Factory Non-Mosque

I was pretty short on material for today, so I decided to see what the good folks over at National Review were up to, and saw that Charles Krauthammer himself had weighed in on the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Culture Center controversy with a piece called "Moral Myopia at Ground Zero".  I was not particularly impressed by this one, and I have been impressed by Krauthammer before.  Basically, he lumps the standard liberal argument into an effigy of straw to be sacrificed to the god of conservative caricature. 

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July 2010 News Time Capsule

This is from the EconomistI decided to celebrate the birth of my second daughter with a rehashing of news stories from the last time I really kept a continuous link with civilization via the mass media: here is July 2010 as a time capsule of our civilization's most idiotic component.

In the Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the famous fire hydrant experiment in which subjects were shown increasingly less blurry pictures of a fire hydrant until they were capable of identifying the object.  The experiment concluded that subjects were more likely to correctly identify the object sooner if they were shown fewer pictures.  Taleb interprets these counterintuitive results as proof that if we have discontinuous, intermittent exposure to something, we are more likely to understand that something.  He particularly discusses how intermittent exposure to news stories makes one more likely to know what's truly going on in the world than those who voraciously follow the news.

As an American living in Japan and returning to the U.S. twice a year on average, I sympathize with Taleb's premise (another post), but I think this particular overgeneralization is one of very few glaring faults in his book.  Either way, I'd like to present a news roundup of sorts.  I receive "the Slatest" everyday from Slate Magazine, which basically offers snapshots of news stories, and so I'd like to present some selected Slatest stories, and offer my visceral two cents.  Here it is:

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