Mass-Media Nonsense! – The Shroud of Turin

The Pope recently stopped in to have a peep at the Shroud of Turin. He apparently liked what he saw, and knelt and prayed in front of it.

For those seven people who don’t know, the Shroud of Turin is a fascinating bit of fabric that appears at first glance to be your basic funeral shroud. These things were quite fashionable and to a point still are (we cover corpses with sheets when nothing else is available, though why white is always used is a mystery to me. I’m sure some of the stains are a bitch to shift).

This particular shroud was apparently made sometime between 1260 and 1390 (which is, conveniently enough, around the same time that it first appeared on the world scene). It’s largely un-noteworthy, aside from being very old, except for one unique property: when photographed in a certain way it shows what appears to be the image of a man. Said man appears to have wounds that might, maybe, be indicative of crucifixion.

“Jesus!” people called when they saw this. “It must be our Lord! His image is burned onto the cloth! Sing hosannas! Pray for the sinners! Give the priests some children to ‘play’ with!”

Well… ok. Sure. I guess it could be the image of Jesus, though why it would only show up when photographed in a certain way is something I’m not quite clear on. I’m also not quite clear as to how a fabric from the 13th or 14th century could’ve wrapped up Jesus’ body.

Besides, there’s a lot of nonsense here. We have no reason to believe this is anything other than a fake and if it’s a real person we have no reason to believe it was Jesus. He’s far from the only person who was crucified by the Romans and others throughout history. There are many, many theories about the Shroud, but no absolute proof.

Yet the media, when covering it, largely treats it as “probably” Jesus’ shroud. Oh, they’ll usually make a few token comments but they don’t ever say anything like, “According to all known science this thing is a fake.” Instead, since they don’t want to offend an audience that largely thinks it believes in Jesus and such, they dance around the issue.

It’s part of a larger problem with the media’s coverage of religious issues in general. They like to pretend, for example, that there’s two equally valid viewpoints as to how life arose in the universe (slow and steady evolution vs “God did it!”), and that both should be given equal weight. Of course, there’s reams and reams of information and evidence showing the validity of evolutionary theory and none supporting the “God did it!” theory, but the media still likes to behave like they’re equal. It’s silly and disingenuous and does a great disservice to the audience.

Anyhow, this shroud is almost certainly a fake. There’s no evidence that points to it being anything else. Sorry, believers. I won’t deny that it’s an interesting archaeological thingamabob, but it’s not really anything else and the media needs to stop pretending it is until there’s some proof otherwise.

Mass Media Nonsense – The Uncanny Valley

We all know that everyone gets very creeped-out by robots that look and act human. We know this, despite the fact that 99% of us haven’t ever seen robots that look and act human, because the media tells us it is true. They talk about the concept of the uncanny valley and how it explains this discomfort.

The concept basically runs like this: things that look almost totally human but aren’t, and things that act almost totally human, but aren’t, are something that’s going to creep us out for reasons we can’t quite explain. This concept was basically just made-up by a Japanese robotics guy named Masahiro Mori.

From what I can tell there’s no real evidence that this is true, but it appears to be accepted without any skepticism from the masses (bearing in mind that these are the same masses who believe in creationism rather than evolution and the lack of understanding perhaps makes sense). Evidence often cited includes poor box office receipts from movies like Beowulf (which I rather liked), The Polar Express, and Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within, (though one of my favorite whipping boys, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, did quite good in sales and is left off the list). What’s not usually mentioned is that these, frankly, weren’t very good movies and that might’ve played a larger role than anything else in their failure.

I think the uncanny valley concept is basically an excuse people like to use for why various products, including those movies, failed. It also doesn’t explain why other products, like Disney’s Hall of Presidents, are a success.

Ultimately this appears to be something that someone made up without any real evidence and that the media now accepts without any question. With the rise of things like Poser porn (you can search for that on your own; I’m not linking to it while at work!), I think this concept is pretty-well debunked.

Mass-Media Nonsense! – Swine Flu

Beware! The swine flu is coming! Yes, it’s out to get you! People have died already, you know, and will continue to die! Maybe even someone you know will die! MAYBE YOU WILL DIE!

Or, possibly, it’s a bunch over-hyped, over-inflated, mass-media nonsense.

Like bird flu and SARS, this is a virus that has seemingly come out of nowhere and people are understandably concerned. I have no problem with folks paying attention or with the media informing us of what’s going on with the disease. I don’t even have any problem with the CDC issuing a warning.

The swine flu's gonna get ya!

What I do have a problem with is the media hyping this to death and doing wall-to-wall coverage. All that does is scare the public and, of course, increase ratings, which is the real reason they cover it endlessly. If the news says “watch our program or you will die!” you will watch it.

Keep in mind that swine flu isn’t much of much so far. Yes, as of this writing 149 people have died out of a total of 2150 or so cases. That’s about 7%. That’s kind of high, but we also have to remember that all 149 of those have been in Mexico. Now Mexico is a fine place with many good things to recommend it I am sure, but I rather strongly doubt that a quality medical system is one of those things.

Meantime we also need to keep in mind that according to the CDC, about 36,000 people a year die from the “regular” flu. That’s just under 100 people a day each year or, to think of a different way, about one 9/11 attack every month. The 149 who are dead so far aren’t close to that number. Hell, that’s only a day-and-a-half of normal flu deaths.

It’s good to be aware of disease and it’s good to practice basic hygiene, like washing your hands a lot. But please have some perspective!

Oh, and one last thing. Every time something like this happens, including now, we get pictures of people wandering around wearing medical masks. To anyone out there who might have medical knowledge: does this do any good?

Mass-Media Nonsense! – Flight 1549

Eventually you'll see Christian glurge talking about how people in this pic are walking on water and were saved by God. It's a wing, you fuckers!

This may be the shortest turn-around time ever for me on something involving the media acting like a pack of morons. Yes, I’m going to be talking today about Flight 1549, which ditched into the Hudson River the other day.

First off, let me state that the pilot of the aircraft deserves every bit of kudos and praise he’s getting, as does the rest of the flight crew. Water landings are, at best, dodgy and being able to pull off one where no one is even seriously injured is damn impressive!

So impressed am I by that that I find myself pissed when the media refers to it as “The Miracle on the Hudson” or variations thereof. There’s a couple problems I have with this and the first is, why do we need to brand every story? Why not just tell us about the damn thing without giving it a title?

Second, what miracle? It was incredibly good training and no small amount of luck. If you want to talk about miracles, look at the fact that not one, but both engines of the plane were apparently nailed by birds. The odds against that are pretty good, but no one calls that a miracle. As the recently knighted Terry Pratchett once put it, “Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle.”

Third, of course, we have the wall-to-wall coverage of the story for a full twenty-four hours. Look, CNN and the rest, just tell us what happened, call in a couple aviation experts and then spend some time talking about other things. Unless there’s nothing else more important going on anywhere else in the world, you should not spend this much time covering a story like this. It’s soft news at its most annoying, especially given how many other more vital things are happening.

But I know better than to expect anything to change. I can dream, though. I can dream.

Mass-Media Nonsense – Past is Not Prologue

Do the elections in the past matter today?

CNN has been saying, about twice an hour, that Ohio, one of the major toss-up states, has voted for the winner in the last eleven Presidential elections. I saw them once saying something similar about Missouri.

Interesting fact: It doesn’t matter.

See, just because a particular state has picked the winner in the last few elections, or because the stock market has done something particular, or because the Washington Redskins either won or loss, or because the groundhog saw his shadow, none of this matters! It’s mildly cute and very slightly interesting, but it doesn’t make any real difference.

What matters, and what makes a difference, is how many votes are cast for each particular candidate. That’s it. It doesn’t matter that Ohio has “picked the winner” in the last eleven elections. If they go for McCain in this election, but basically any other toss-up state goes for Obama, he wins. Hell, all the toss-up states except North Carolina could go for McCain and under current polling Obama would still wind up winning!

So when you hear the media going off on something like this, just ignore it. It’s trite and silly and a distraction, and whatever you do, don’t let it influence you in the voting booth!

Mass-Media Nonsense – The Large Hadron Collider

No, the world is not going to end on September 10th. Yes, you still have to go to work.

Some people, who apparently have too much time on their hands, have decided, in the face of all evidence, that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland (mostly… part of it is in France), is going to somehow destroy the Earth. Apparently people are worried that black holes will be created which will devour our planet. As usual, the media have mostly been reporting on the controversy rather than reporting the, you know, facts behind the story.

Now, credit to CNN in the article I linked to. They spent four, count ‘em!, paragraphs debunking the fears about the collider. That’s four more than lots of other media outlets seem to want to devote to it.

I haven’t much more than a layman’s experience with science. I don’t recall finishing high school physics, for example, but I’ve balanced that failure out by reading a lot of sciency things and watching programs like The Universe. From such sources, I’ve learned a few things. For exmaple, black holes take a great deal of energy, mass and gravity to sustain themselves. Without those things, they collapse and never amount to much. They are caused by stars collapsing, people. These aren’t the sort of things we can generate at a level that will cause any real harm or threat to our world.

Predictions of the end of the world are a fun and easy thing for the media to report on. They don’t really have to do much other than fan a few flames of fear and point their cameras at a couple talking heads. After they’re done whipping people into a frenzy, the reporter can just shrug, give a little wink and say, “Well, I guess it’s up to our viewers to make up their own mnds!” It’s extremely lazy.

Anyhow, not a lot more to say on this issue. The world isn’t going to end because of the LHC. Instead we’re going to learn a lot about the universe. To those who believe otherwise, and especially to those who are making money by saying otherwise, get over yourselves. If you really believe this is a threat, then sell everything you own, give the money away and go hide in a cave.

Mass-Media Nonsense! – A G-G-G-Ghost!

First, check out this link. It’s a CNN video from station WSPA in South Carolina. It shows a mysterious shape in front of a security camera! Is it a g-g-g-ghost?!

You know, I like CNN. I really do. When they cover actual, you know, news, they tend to do a fairly good job of it. This, however, isn’t news. It’s bullshit of the first order. There’s no effort at actually explaining what people are seeing on the screen; it’s just presented as “Oh, look at this thing that no one can explain!”

Well, someone can. Have a look at the video below:

CNN is really disapointing me with this crap. It mean, it’s not like there was anything important going on today that needed to be covered (or even stuff that’s just more interesting). No, it’s perfectly fine for them to waste time showing shit like this.

CNN has, sadly, become one of the largest distributors of this kind of bullshit this side of Oprah. Larry King alone does all sorts of programs on UFOs, talking to the dead, ESP and crap like that. None of it has any proof to it. All of it is crap. None of it belongs on CNN, unless they’re debunking it.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but when a network like CNN devotes much time to covering a local news story like a missing little girl, I’m really not surprised. I am, however, very disapointed. I can’t even say I expected better, cause sadly I didn’t. This is par for the course.

I’ve bitched about this before, of course, but it remains ever more true. The job of the media is to inform us, not entertain us. They need to be telling us things we should know, not lazy crap like this (and don’t even get me started on the coverage of the so-called Montauk Monster. For a real explaination of it, click here. It’s much more informative than any of the news networks I saw who didn’t even try to look into what it might be).

As I said, it’s the job the media to tell us what we need to know. For what we want to know, we can turn to the tabloids (print, internet and TV versions), and entertainment programs, like Entertainment Tonight. Let them do the crap. The other media needs to do the news.

Mass-Media Nonsense: Vaccines and Autism *UPDATE!*

I wrote a few months back about how vaccines do not, in fact, cause autism. It got quite a few comments, which was a nice ego boost.

Well, I read online today an article from Michael Shermer who, in addition to bashing nicely on wheatgrass, has some things to say about the vaccine issue. Have a look!

Mass-Media Nonsense: Vaccines and Autism

So apparently we’re in the midst of Autism Awareness Week, or some such stupid tripe. Pardon me for not getting overly interested, and spending most of my time rolling my eyes at CNN’s coverage of this.

Austim is a very odd sort of condition. From what I saw on the news between my eye-rollings there were some people who had it and seemed quite functional, while others were snapping and bitting at everyone. It’s a very weird thing, really, and worth studying.

But despite what you might be hearing on the media, no, it’s not caused by vaccines.

I can understand why some people might want it to be. If it’s caused by a vaccine, then it isn’t anything that is even remotely their fault. Not even genetically their fault! No, they’re completely innocent and it’s the evil vaccine that caused the damage!

Well, not quite.

The study that first proposed a link between austim and vaccination was publised by The Lancet in the UK in 1998. There were doubts about the assertions the article made from the outset, and they got even stronger when it was revealed in 2004 that the author of the study had received £55,000 from a group of lawyers who were trying to get evidence of wrongdoing against vaccine manufacturers. The Sunday Times then apparently found evidence of payments of another £400,000 from another group that was trying to prove vaccines were dangerous. Not surprisingly when someone is paid to find a result in something, they usually find it.

The problem is there is, as it were, no proven link between autism and vaccines, and as a result of the scare, there have been parents refusing to get their children immunized. Thanks to that, there’s been outbreaks of things like measels and mumps, which can leave children, you know, sterile or worse, dead.

People don’t really remember what it was like before we had mass-vaccination. Imagine being terrified that your child would die before the age of ten from smallpox, polio or a host of other diseases that today very few people, if any, actually get. I think as a result we’ve developed a sense of complacency and that’s not good.

If you’d like to read a longer article debunking this particular myth, I suggest you check out this link and this other link, which both have very good articles on the topic. Enjoy!