The Disaster Has Already Happened, cont...

April 10th, 2012

The Earth is full... via CNN

The Continuing Decline...

July 29th, 2011

In spite of the fact that millions more Americans are now paying attention to GOP's sabotage of our country, the broader public is still just not that into politics. Let's hope, if worst comes to worst and we do default next week, a few more urgent topics start "trending."

All screencaps taken from 4:25PM CST to 4:28PM CST 7/29/2011.

The important topics to Americans on Yahoo

The important topics to Americans on Twitter

The important topics to Americans on Google

Oops...

July 23rd, 2011
by F. Grey Parker

Well. Yesterday sure was an interesting day. First, we were all subjected to the worst speaker of the U.S. House in living memory refusing to take the President's phone calls. Debt limit crisis? "Phooey," said commander booze-tan. Second, we endured the spectacle of Mr. Waterworks holding a damage control press conference. It was a train wreck in which he utterly failed to explain himself.

The News Corp Crisis NO ONE Is Talking About

July 22nd, 2011

The hacking story is a big deal. The closing of NOTW is very big deal. The denials by Murdoch and son that they "knew nothing" about multi-million dollar payouts and a potentially international conspiracy to encourage official impropriety are so wildly implausible that only a devoted ideologue could accept them at face value. The death under mysterious circumstances of Sean Hoare, the whistle-blower who first broke the story just prior to Parliamentary hearings on the matter certainly has a greater smell to it than anything the rabid dogs in Murdoch's own little empire had to go on after the Vince Foster suicide.

All in all, this dynamite. It is both an astounding public relations disaster and a sordid criminal affair. And it is far from over. But, in my humble opinion, none of this is as interesting as some very simple and very public information that has gone utterly ignored.

The ratings of News Corp's giant, right-wing American libel machine, Fox News... are in a free fall. Across the first two quarters of 2011, FOX lost nearly 15% of its prime time viewers. Not only are they not the "most trusted name in news," they are no longer even close to being "number 1."

Here's the bottom line from the 2011 Q2 report via Mediabistro:

"CNN reached a cumulative Q2 2011 average monthly audience of 100.4 million, Fox News followed with 83.2 million and MSNBC trailed with 80.3 million."

via

These numbers would spell doom at any other news network. There would be time-slot shuffling, talent firings, producer replacements and major design alterations. However, Fox is not any other network.

Andrew Sullivan put it succinctly a few days ago when he wrote, "I don't put Fox in the category of biased media. it is, rather, propaganda, which is always indifferent to the truth, because its ultimate allegiance is to power."

As an essential tool of the hard, corporatist right wing, Fox isn't going away anytime soon. But the audience is.

Fuel Rods May Have Partially Melted In 3 Reactors

Mar 14th, 2011 9:58am CST
PLEASE DONATE to the relief efforts on behalf of Japan

From Bloomberg:

"Fuel rods at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant may have melted when water levels fell, Japan’s top government spokesman said.

 

Rods in the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 reactors may have melted, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said to reporters in a briefing today. Molten rods would increase the risk of a meltdown.

 

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the nuclear power plant, stopped pumping seawater into its Nos. 1 and 3 reactors earlier today because it needed to use the one working water pump on the No. 2 reactor to cool it down, said Nishiyama Hidehiko, director general at Japan’s trade ministry."