Saturday, April 20, 2013

Back from the American Southwest

Well, I just got back from Route 66 and there are a couple things I wanted to note.  First of all, at virtually every store or restaurant we visited there's a sign at the entrance reading something like: "Please don't bring firearms in."  It was a subtle reminder that while issues like gun control and immigration don't resonate for many Americans in the Northeast, they're a prime concern in the border states.

Also of higher concern (I imagine) is the price of gas since the distances between destinations can be vast.  As somebody who grew up in New Jersey where gas stations are spaced out by the football field, I started to worry when I didn't see a gas station for a hundred miles.

The Grand Canyon is as breathtaking as promised.  This is a school vacation week across Massachusetts and I think everybody there was either from the Bay State or another country.  I heard every language under the sun except Latin: French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Italian and others unplaced.

Naturally, everybody wearing a Nantucket T-shirt or a New England Patriots sweatshirt was following the events in Boston from Monday through the end of the week.  Neither the Internet sources nor the mainstream media demonstrated much integrity reporting on the manhunt but the so-called "professional" journalists completely beclowned themselves.  I'm looking at you, CNN and the New York Post.  Remember, we bloggers who didn't go to a fancy-schmancy J-school, are the ones who are irresponsible for sure.

Speaking of an "Army of Davids," Boston was brought to a standstill as hundreds of police officers swept the city looking for Suspect #2...who was found when some guy went out to his backyard for a smoke.

2 comments:

https://twitter.com/dbrauer/status/324596406360891392/photo/1 said...

Let's not forget that the "Army of Davids" also used their flat and decentralized crowdsourcing skills to misidentify the two bombers as Mike Mulugeta and missing student Sunil Tripathi, among many, many other false alarms, while congratulating themselves that Reddit had become the new FBI.

If all of the "so-called professional journalists" had failed equally, we wouldn't be laughing at CNN and the Post.

As for bloggers vs. beclowning, Glenn Reynolds floated the stupid proposition that the Post may have been *tricked* into running its libelous "BAG MEN" front page because cops "may have been playing the media deliberately to give the real suspects the impression that their identities were not yet known.” Even though no other mainstream source was so "played," only the Post, even though authorities were repudiating the Post photo as soon as it appeared, and even though the correct photos were released just a few hours later. Maybe Instapundit could profit by auditing some fancy-schmancy J-school courses.

Eric said...

That may be true. If you'll note by the gap in my posting, I was largely off the Internet during my vacation (and I don't have a smartphone.)

All I do know is that every night I went to bed based on what CNN or FoxNews said and every morning I woke up to hear them say "Never mind what we said last night."