Huffin' 'n' Puffin'

Every day I get the latest edition of The Huffington Post ["news blogs video community"] in my email box. And every day, or mostly every day, I read at least one of the pieces. For a couple of reasons. They almost always reflect my point of view on something, or at least some facet of my point of view, because the writers for HP are intelligent observers of the folly and outrage of contemporary American life. And HP almost always points me to aspects of the ongoing folly and outrage that in the avalanche of news (and my bounce around the web way of reading it), there's always stuff that eludes me, either because I've read it and forgotten about it, or because I'm not aware of it. This is the advantage of having a blog like the HP coming every day. So, with all that out of the way, here's what struck me today.

Arianna Huffington's lament about the absurd media circle jerk over the so-called "Balloon Boy." Are you kidding me? This is the kind of utter nonsense that our brainless cable media simply find irresistible. And it all turned out to be a hoax. They say, all these supposedly sophisticated media mavens, that all they're doing by spending hours and hours telecasting this shit is giving the people what they want. Well, that's true. The people are clueless slugs that require constant stimulation of the reptilian brain nodes. What the mavens neglect to mention is that they too love this ridiculous stuff. They only giving the people what they all want. And to think there was serious talk back at the beginning of TV--yes, I fear I am that old--of its potential to literally change humanity as a medium for dispersion of education. Arianna cannot contain her scorn today for the massive attention given to the pseudo story of the balloon boy while the 1.5 million homeless children (42% of whom are under 6 and 17% of  whom have emotional problems) are ignored.