* News Channel Reports factual data
* During the commentary/analysis period, the data is interpreted to draw a more meaningful/slanted conclusion to the benefit of the station, political bias, commentator, ratings, etc.
* During the next NEWS period, the conclusion is reported as breaking news about the original story citing experts, sources, etc.


You know, somebody should write a book about that kind of BS: About how mass media attempts to pass off crap as news.

And about how Internet news aggregation sites bust their ankles tripping over themselves to overflow the cesspool.

And dedicate their sites to nurturing and coddling professional sociopaths who increase the news aggregators' site's deceptive market numbers by doing nothing but prolifically and blatantly irritating normal people into responding to patently insincere provocations.

That might be a good book.

It's early Saturday morning, and I'm reading a mostly coherent discussion on logic and reason on FARK? WTH? Drew got drunk and dumped Thorazine in the server?

IlGreven: unicron702: The sad truth we must all realize is that there is no way to prevent this from happening. No one could have predicted that a madman would shoot up a movie premiere.

You had me until here.

Every time someone dismisses a sniper and/or mass murderer as a "madman" or "just some crazy", those people, in their own way, enable the next sniper shooting and/or mass murder. You say "there's no way to predict this", except for the many, many prior incidents where a "madman" or "just some crazy" committed the same acts. By dismissing them as "madmen" or "just some crazies", you close the door to possible analysis and predictive capabilities of the acts themselves. And I'm not talking about the "news desk analysis" that TFA was ranting about; I'm talking about research from people trained in this kind of thing using months out of their time to help predict how someone with similar signs might do.

But no, no one could prevent or predict this. Because vigilance is hard. Placing blame and armchair analysis after the fact is easy.

On April 24, vote "Yes" on the national Pre-crime Initiative.

I had this on TV this morning as white noise. My 12 year old daughter came downstairs and started watching, I thought it would be unfair to change the channel to try to shield her from the news so I let her watch and when she had questions or needed explanations, (the town we live in is named Aurora also, but not in CO). I explained to her as well as I could that sometimes people do things for no explainable reason and that very rarely, really sick people do really sick things, again for no explainable reasons.

But the best part of our conversation came about 20 minutes after she came downstairs and she called BS on the Today show for showing the same video clip and saying the same information as they did earlier. "Why are they saying this again dad?" she asked. I told her why - "because they have no more information yet so they just say the same thing over and over" I told her. My daughter then got up from where she was sitting, walked across the room to where I was and although there was no contest involved, she looked at me like she had beaten me in a game and grabbed the remote and changed my white noise from the Today show to something on the Disney Channel.

Can't say I missed any news though, so I suppose if it was a game, she did win didn't she?

REO-Weedwagon: He sounds like one of the pseudo-intellectual types we see on Fark who have exotic sub-categories for a fallacy. "Oh, you're committing an Inverted Heliographic Jigowatt Fallacy of Diminishing Retroactive Returns."

You know what you sound like?

He sounds like one of the pseudo-intellectual types we see on Fark who have exotic sub-categories for a fallacy. "Oh, you're committing an Inverted Heliographic Jigowatt Fallacy of Diminishing Retroactive Returns."

My brain hurts now. I need to go back to a Penn State thread.

A buddy just wrote this, and I have to share.

For all of you out there who may be thinking, like Congressman Gohmert, that had one or more of the members of the audience for The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado been armed that he would have been able to successfully neutralize the attack, I would like to remind you of this:

On March 21, 1981, Ronald Reagan, The President of the United States, was shot while surrounded by the best trained bodyguards on planet Earth, all of whom were armed with the very best weaponry and other equipment available. The shooter, John Hinckley, Jr., was not fired at. In fact, he got punched in the head and pulled to the ground by Alfred Antenucci, a Cleveland, Ohio, labor official, who happened to be standing near to Hinckley when he opened fire.

My point, and I say this as a supporter of the right to keep and bear arms, is that other people with guns don't necessarily equal stopping the bad guy or preventing loss of like, The Secret Service didn't open fire on Hinckley because they were in a crowd and they considered the risk of hitting innocent civilians to be too great. Again, these are some of the best trained marksmen on the planet and they think taking shots in that situation is too big of a risk. Why then do these people assume that Joe Citizen should take risks that vastly more qualified individuals would refuse to take and that said risk would pay off?

The sad truth we must all realize is that there is no way to prevent this from happening. No one could have predicted that a madman would shoot up a movie premiere. Or that a kid would shoot up his university, or a high school. There are the acts of madmen. Banning guns wouldn't have stopped it, and armed citizens in the theatre weren't likely to have stopped it either. We don't want to admit this because it's a scary truth. But remember that even though the news coverage will be constant and playing up the fear, the statistical likelihood of being caught in a shooting spree of this type is still infinitessimal.