The Cellar - The sky is falling! News at eleven!

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The sky is falling! News at eleven!

This is exactly what I've been saying for years when people talk about the news. Not a bad piece by a sports journalist.

Quote:

Remember acid rain? It was a popular cause of mild hysteria in the 80s before global warming and its newer, more refined relation, climate change, became the fashionable apocalyptic scenario for people to pretend to be really quite bothered about.

Acid rain was going to dissolve buildings, pollute rivers, and make the earth too acid to grow anything. It was so bad Peter Gabriel even wrote a song about it.

But you never hear about acid rain anymore. Whether the rain is still acid or indeed if it ever really was, I have no idea. But clearly, the media have left it behind in favour of even more apocalyptic environmental eco-babble.

Similarly, its not many years ago that we were regularly subjected to doleful news reporters standing next to dried-up reservoirs proclaiming that this was the new super-heated, bone-dry future and definitely not just the a few dry years the like of which anyone who lived through the summers of '75 and '76 would recognise.

They would drag out someone who they'd assert is an 'expert' to say the water table is so depleted it would take two years of solid rain to top it up and as that would never happen we'd have to get used to water shortages and possible desertification of the south-east. The reporter would stare through the screen at us as though we had all been given a death sentence.

and a bit more.

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Here's the current news agenda - everything is worse than it was, everything is in crisis, everything is the worst ever, down-right bad and/or out of control. Most stories are geared to fit this notion.

You rarely hear anyone proffer the notion that actually, things aren't historically bad at all and actually by and large most of us live relatively peaceful, prosperous lives that have never been more full of leisure time, sport, education, culture, art, orgasmic sex, low slung over-driven guitars, lovely chicks in tight pants and top-notch bottles of Chablis, not because this is not true, but because that would contradict the news agenda of negativity.

The whole story found at football 365.com

Yeah, and I never saw one damn Killer Bee. However, our bees are terrified and in hiding.

Acid rain has been very unkind to New England's Maple trees. Legislation to clean up the smoke from coal powered plants, in the rust belt and southern Canada, was killed because of a filibuster by Mrs Butterworth. I swear!:angel:

People are always saying "It isn't the same world that we grew up in" etc.

Why isn't it? Or, what proof do you have that it isn't?

The only thing you know about 99.9...% of the world is what you see on TV or read in the paper. What people are describing as different about the world is that we have greater access to more information (and in fact are bombarded by it) and that the nature of news coverage has become more sensationalistic.

Human nature is just the same as it has always been. It can be quite ugly, at rare moments which are and have always been the extreme exception.

we actually have proof that life was better before. 99.99% rickroll free link

It's understandable that one would look at all the alarmist media stories and think that every new alarm that is raised is a false alarm, but you know how the boy who cried wolf ended. The last alarm was a real one. To dismiss each alarm without examining it foolish.

Acid rain was real, but isn't in the news much lately because scrubbers have been installed in coal plants and there are reductions in emissions now. Acid rain is still a a problem, but there are no easy solutions to fix it. Installing those scrubbers was the only easy answer and the next step would require us to turn off all the lights.

Mad Cow disease scares have cause changes in the practice of raising cattle. Beef is safer as a result now.

Y2K bug turned out to not cause civilization to shut down. But did all the preparation cause the problem to never happen?

Pit Bull stories and shark stories are basically false alarms though. I'll give you that. And killer bees are real, but a more gradual problem.

What might have happened if we hadn't prepared for Y2K is exactly what did happen when congress spontaneously changed daylight savings time.

For me the point is not that a problem does not exist, but rather is the problem of the catastrophic, earth shattering, we'll all die in our sleep tonight sort? That is what the media does.

Acid rain? yes, a real issue was identified and then was blown all out of proportion as being an unsolveable end to humanity. and then a fix was found and we pretend the frenzy never happened.

Global cooling? I remember being taught this in school. Nothing today.

Global warming/Climate change? Yeah, it is a real situation, but it is wrapped in so many layers of political and agenda driven BS that we really don't know what the truth is.

War in Iraq? Are we about to be chased from the country by hordes of angry Iraqi citizens or are we just putting the finishing touches on a done deal?

The article isn't so much about the actual events as it is about the reporting of the events. The public gets whipped into a frenzy and then ______ and it all goes away. who is profiting from the frenzy?

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Originally Posted by Flint (Post 467406)

What might have happened if we hadn't prepared for Y2K is exactly what did happen when congress spontaneously changed daylight savings time.

A handful of kids were run over by cars walking to school? That is all I remember about that.

They started trying to scare us about killer bees approximately 33 years ago. In fact, the Killer Bees were the first recurring characters on SNL. At the time, it was like: The Killer Bees are coming, the Killer Bees are coming. Hence lookout's reference concerning media mania. Now, our local news is foretelling impending doom via The White Death (snow) or The Liquid Death (rain.)

Windows had patches to correct the OS time, but everybodies software with it's own timestamp reacted a little differently. I had stuff off by an hour in both directions, and (somehow) some stuff that went off by 12 hours, flipping AM and PM. It was a major pain-in-the-ass.

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Originally Posted by Flint (Post 467411)

A-freakin-men, brother.

[quote=Flint;467391]People are always saying "It isn't the same world that we grew up in" etc.

Why isn't it? Or, what proof do you have that it isn't?

The only difference I see is here in upstate NY, there are no elm trees left. I grew up amidst their magnificence.
All the rest was overblown.