News misreporting isn’t news, but these hit so quickly that I figured it might be worthwhile to combine them into one post.

From the “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” department

Hat tip to the Vodkapundit. Folks, if it’s a “Top Story” on CNN, it isn’t “closely held”. The phrase you’re looking for is “widely spewed”. Honestly, what do we pay editors for these days?

Modern Times

I try not to read the New York Times for the same reason I try not to eat artificial cheese. It isn’t real; all it does is block the good stuff, whether food or facts, from getting through. Here, for example, they don’t appear to have realized that air support is something that infantries want, and it isn’t a failure of land forces if they get support from the air (no matter what the air force jocks say at the bar).

Hat tip to Dafydd at Big Lizards, who does a much funnier job of explaining why the Times has no clue:

Let’s rephrase the sentence above. Suppose some reporter heard about an American action in which soldiers on the ground called in an airstrike against an enemy position:

“But the airstrikes by the [Air Force] after a four-day stalemate in [Upper Iguana] suggested that the [Army Infantry] has not, on its own, been able to rout the militias, despite repeated statements by [Pentagon] officials that [the Infantry’s] fighting capabilities have vastly improved.”

Do you see why this statement is absurd? It’s not a failure of the Infantry when they call for airstrikes from the Air Force, the Marines, the Navy, or even an Army aviation unit; that’s how modern warfare has been conducted for decades. It’s what distinguishes a modern army from a pre-modern one… coordination between different branches.

The end Times are here

Speaking of the paper of record, has the Times gone so far into paranoia that they no longer recognize true honest-to-God nutcases?

I mean, ignore the opening paragraph about mortgages. While there are people who bought houses they could afford but have hit bad times, the subprime mortgage crisis isn’t being caused by them. It’s being caused by people who bought houses they never could afford, under the assumption that continually-rising house prices would magically bail them out or that variable interest rates wouldn’t vary. It is probably wrong to prop-up artificially-high house prices, as this penalizes people who only buy a house if it’s within their budget. Okay, so I didn’t do a very good job of ignoring that opening paragraph, but try to do better, because Asking a Judge to Save the World, or More has nothing to do with its opening line.

No, this article is about the end of the world. The real end of the world: the New York Times has joined forces with the sandwich-board crowd. Look on page two:

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Wait. Time theory? Is New York Times logic the new bistromathic drive? A quick search of Google indicates that it is. On physforum.com, a Luis Sancho wrote:

However languages deform truths. So inversely when we use logic, the true language of time, to describe space, space becomes a mere dimension of time, the so-called present, a darma that quantic time advances towards the future.

Which leads to Mr. Sancho’s Unification Theory web site, where he describes it even less clearly:

Each species of the Universe creates many times, one for each of its dimensions and cycles of Existence, as it follows the arrows of organicism. When you feed every day you create a cycle of time based in your feeding arrow. When you read every morning the newspaper you create a cycle of time based in your informative arrow of organicism. Every year you feel your reproductive arrow peaking in spring.

An entity shapes a cycle=form through a path that the being repeats constantly because it is associated to one of its cycles of existence. Yet abstract clocks simplify such complex concept of multiple organic cycles of beings, into a simple number, measured by a standard metal clock-time.

Those organic forms become numbers that say nothing about the why of the form traced.

Right. What he appears to be saying is that everything is alive and intelligent, including rocks, the universe, and your rhubarb:

Why if all is organic, and perceptive we do not see organicism in stones and plants?

The answer is an error of human perception. The rhythms of organicism and perception vary, and men only consider organic the rhythms similar to themselves.

In reality the Universe is organic, only that each species has a different rhythm of Perception and organicism, a different Language of knowledge, mind and capacity to react in the Universe, a different speed of times.

That didn’t make it into the Times article. They probably decided it wouldn’t be balanced. It reminds me of Douglas Adams and the science of restaurant checks:

“On a waiter’s bill pad,” explains Slartibartfast, “numbers dance. Reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible.”

The same can be said for words in mainstream news. They dance, and reality and unreality collide on a fundamental level. Anything is plausible, as long as it sells newspapers.

Comparatively, Walter L. “Cosmic Truth Seeker” Wagner is much more reasonable. Wagner definitely understands the scientific use of words like “implausible” and “unlikely” to mean “no”:

I seriously doubt that any ‘Atlantis’ civilization was technologically advanced on par with modern civilization. Possibly, IF an ‘Atlantis’ existed, they had electro-plating batteries (as might have been the case many millenia ago in Babylon, etc.) and mechanical devices that to non-civilized people were wonders. They certainly weren’t drilling for oil and mining for coal.

Unless he entertains the possibility that Atlantis had technology on par with modern civilization, “seriously doubt” is the same as “no”. He seems to have forgotten that in his and Sancho’s lawsuit against CERN.

But this post of his from a thread about faking the moon landing is ironic:

What this thread does represent, however, is the fact that a large factor of our society are technological idiots, more interested in their superficial needs to look for ‘ill’ in society, than doing anything positive themselves to make society better.

You could say the same thing about the lawsuit—and about the New York Times. Remember this the next time a New York Times expert writes about Iraq or the mortgage crisis. The expert might seem reasonable in the Times, but underneath they believe that your mortgage is a perceptive organicism. The problem isn’t that people buy things they can’t afford. The problem is that their house hates them.