The Weak In Rock

Oops

Link courtesy of Fark.

Whatever your political inclinations if you’re a halfway intelligent human being your should probably regard Fox News as a terrorist organization.

That’s right, I just put Fox News into the same category as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the IRA, ETA and al Qaeda. Why? Simple, their MO is pretty much the same - scare the shit out of people for political and financial gain.

The latest and greatest from Fox News Corp comes in the form of a contributor named John Loftus, who made a very sketchy accusation on air on August 7th. Loftus claimed that he knew the whereabouts of one of the at-large planners of the subway bombing attacks that occured in London in July. In fact, he gave an address and showed satellite pictures of the home where the alleged terrorist mastermind lived, in La Habra, California.

Trouble is, the current residents of the house that Loftus named and that FNC broadcast (and posted on their web site) are not even remotely related to the man Loftus and Fox claimed were there. The result has been significant harrassment and terror on the part of an innocent family. Some nutjub actually went so far as to spray paint “terrist” on the wall of the house. If this provides any consolation it comes in the form of a reaffirmation of what I’ve known all along - only a fuckwit whose shoe size is greater than his IQ actually believes anything they see or hear on Fox.

At the rate things are going with broadcasting in the US we might as well just fold the FCC and take the money allocated to them annually and roll it back into the budget to pay down the deficit. Were the FCC doing it’s job of policing broadcasters FNC would be staring down the barrel of millions of dollars in fines for this kind of reckless reporting that has literally endangered people’s lives. But no. The FCC only fines people for showing bare breasts or for exclaiming fine Anglo-Saxon words for fornication on the air. When broadcasters do something that is actually bad and insupportable even under the loosest interpretation of the First Amendment nothing happens.

Oh, and by the way, it goes without saying, if you continue to support and defend Fox News after this, you’re a jackass.

A couple of folks have written me to ask why I’m not ranting about gas prices. Why? Because it’s a tempest in a teapot for two reasons:

1. - Gasoline prices in the United States are low compared to the rest of the industrialized world. They’re low because our government subsidizes the oil industry significantly. I don’t think that’s a good idea. It encourages wastefulness. Even at $3 a gallon (the price posted for premium at my local filling station) we’re still getting a bargain.

2. - Gas prices haven’t actually gone up. The value of money has decreased as a result of inflation. You can see a nifty illustration of this on this here chart.

The second bit is really important. Too many people are just utterly ignorant of the mechanism of inflation. It’s happening all around them every month, every year and yet they seem utterly unaware of it. How my friends and family could be unaware of it though baffles me to no end because it’s a subject I bring up constantly. When I was in high school, 20 years ago, I bought LPs (you know, them weird flat vinyl things what music came off of when you put them on a record player - you know, record players… oh nevermind) for $6.99. The same album on CD will cost you nearly $20, a medium that requires less labor to manufacture and produces less waste (a CD master can be reused millions, if not billions of times, while the metal plate masters for a vinyl LP wear out after pressing about 10,000 records or so, just one example) so they’re a lot less expensive to produce. That’s right, they cost less to produce but we pay nearly three times as much money for them. That’s inflation (it’s arguable that this particular example is lousy because the price of CDs is actually motivated by the greed of the recording industry and not institutional inflation, but I get my licks in where I can).

Another example: Comic books. When I was in high school comic books cost $.50 (and that was an increase from when I was in grade school and they cost $.25). Today the same Spiderman comic will set you back $2.50. That’s a five-fold increase in price. Significant inflation.

Every once in awhile I’ll do what I call the “comic book adjustment” on the price of something. I love doing it with houses. One of the houses in our neighborhood sold for $850,000 earlier this year. If you assume that the five-fold increase in the cost of a comic book is your benchmark for inflation in the past 20 years then adjusted for 20 years of inflation this house is actually only worth $170,000. Neat, huh?

Here’s the un-neat part. Do the same calculation to your annual salary. Ouch. Someone currently earning $50,000 per year is really only making $10,000 a year in 1985 dollars. So much for upward mobility.

Now obviously inflation isn’t so extreme or dramatic. This is just a quick shorthand, easy to comprehend way of looking at it. Still, sort of pisses you off a bit, doesn’t it.