Yahoo!: More News That Ain't

This was prominent on Yahoo! News this morning:



So we have here a skewed appeal to authority: A "former Canadian minister of defence " oughta have some grounding in science, right?

The Minister of whom they speak, Paul Hellyer, was Minister of National Defence in the Pearson government. (1963 or so). One might consider it worth invesigating whether his current knowledge of terrestrial science was entirely up to scratch. Paul Hellyer is also 83.

I said over at Darren Barefoot's place a little while ago that a sure sign of writer senility is the appearance of the writer himself in his own work. Not an avatar, not someone whose name starts with the same letters, the actual writer.

In public figures, a similar phenomenon causes them to make increasingly stupid statements or do daft things. In both cases, political or showbiz, they have forgotten that media is a two-way conversation. They no longer remember that there's an audience out here in the dark. Age and ego stoking have convinced them that they're the most important element in the conversation.

Which makes the Ottowa Citizen, which sent "newsgatherers" to fetch this nugget of drivel, irresponsible. Yahoo! News is just foamy and bubbleheaded. Still it's harmless, and more entertaining than US foreign policy, which suffers from Alzheimer's:



This cartoon is from The Economist of last week or so. Let no-one say I do not source what I use (I was going to say "steal", but my legal advisor said not to).