WAHHHHHHHHHH

I just read this TRIPE in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Given the zeal with which federal prosecutors reportedly are investigating Barry Bonds for possible perjury and tax evasion, there is a chance the Giants' standard bearer will be indicted. If so, it could happen soon.

So speculates Bonds' lawyer, Michael Rains, who told KTVU (Channel 2), "It's only a guess. I don't have proof of this, but if they're going to try to indict, they're going to try to indict by July because the U.S. attorney's reappointment comes up again in July and, as I say, I think politics still are at the root of this case."

Should Bonds be indicted, the greatest impact will be on his family, for no matter what one thinks of Bonds, he has a wife, a mother and three children who care for him. Should he be indicted during the season, the impact on his baseball family could be profound, too.

Let me just reiterate, WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! WAHHHHHHHHH! (Those are crying noises.)

Barry Bonds, who made his millions by being a fraud and a cheat by using illegal steroids, may get indicted (and rightfully so), but I'm supposed to feel sorry for his wive and kids that care for him? Please!

While I personally don't give two shits about baseball or overpaid steroid-using players, I think Bonds and everyone else in Baseball that uses steroids should sit down and shut the fuck up, and stop carrying on with the laughably unbelievable lie that he didn't know he was taking steroids. You know, all men's muscles naturally triple in size and strength when they're in their late 30's.

The steroid mutants ruined baseball and many other sports for their own short-term greed, they broke records through cheating, and set a pretty shitty precedent: Don't even bother trying to compete in Baseball or any sport using your own natural abilities. Natural abilities are for suckers. Just cheat the easy way with illegal steroids. The new contest is who can cheat the hardest and fastest and pump the most steroids without dying.

I don't care whether someone uses drugs or not. But if they're going to use drugs in the furtherance of an illegal act, then I think that is pathetic and should be stopped.

If baseball wants to separate itself out into two leagues, one of normal people and one of steroid injecting pseudo-human mutants with giant bulging veiny muscles and shrunken nuts and man-tits and cancer, then fine do it. But don't tell me that a normal person and a steroid mutant are supposed to be competing against eachother, that's just rediculous.

(A)sshole (P)ress strikes again

The Christian Science Monitor usually posts thoughtful, well researched articles. But today, I came across an article that was picked up by the AP that's so jam-packed full of bullshit that I don't even know where to start.

In 'docu-ganda' films, balance is not the objective

Let's not read the article just yet, I can't even get past the headline. According to the jackass that wrote this article, documentaries are now called 'docu-ganda', implying that movies released as documentaries are actually propaganda.

This may be true (it's not), but the author (Daniel B. Wood) posts no evidence whatsoever to support this vapid terminology.

Next, the writer states "balance is not the objective". What the fuck is that supposed to mean? When Al Gore shows us a picture of a glacier melting, is that somehow unbalanced?

When Michael Moore shows footage of Disaster Monkey reading My Pet Goat with a blank/drugged stare on his face while the nation is under attack, is that unbalanced? What exactly would balance that, a picture of that school we keep saying we built in Iraq?

Let's just knock that term out right now. When a Republican says something is unbalanced or "biased", what they're saying is: "This is truthful and makes us look bad", where as Fox News is called "fair and balanced" because they lie and make Republicans look good. See how that works?

Let's go through some excerpts of the article now:

These two follow in the footsteps of other recent movies in the same nonfiction genre: last year's "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," "Sir! No Sir!" (about the G.I. antiwar movement during Vietnam), "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," and 2003's "Super Size Me" (about obesity and fast food).

All deliver on the promise to tell an "untold" story, but is theirs the full story? Or even the true story?

To answer the author's Rumsfeld-esque questions, YES these movies are truthful, and yes they tell the whole truth (although I haven't seen Sir no Sir or the Enron Movie). McDonald's food is bad and makes people fat. Wal-Mart sucks money and jobs out of communities and exports it to China.

Is that a surprise or something? If these movies aren't telling the truth, what aren't they telling us? If you're going to blast out an AP article to the whole world accusing documentary film-makers of lieing, shouldn't you take the time to gather evidence? Obviously not.

Don't count on it, say media experts. The days when "documentary" reliably meant "inform the audience" - rather than "influence the audience" - are no more. The makers of such films today see their cinematic contributions as an antidote to media consolidation that, they say, restricts topics and voices to the bland and the commercial. As such, they feel little or no obligation to heed documentary-film traditions like point-by-point rebuttal or formal reality checks.

"We need to clarify that this new wave of 'documentaries' are not, in fact, documentaries," says Christopher Ian Bennett of New School Media, a communications and public-relations firm in Vancouver. "They fail to meet the Oxford Dictionary definition, in that they editorialize, and opine far too much. They are entertaining.... But they can be dangerous if viewers take everything they are saying as the whole truth."

First off, fuck the dictionary. If your whole argument rests upon the definition of a word in a dictionary, you have a really weak argument that you know doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Here, the writer says documentaries don't tell the truth or the "whole story", and says "media experts agree", but then he only quotes one person!

I'm sure I could find one person to quote saying the world is flat or that we found weapons in Iraq, but that doesn't make it true. Taking a false hypothesis and then stating it as fact because a single person agrees is fraudulent journalism.

The so called expert Christopher Bennett says that documentaries are not documentaries, but doesn't cite a single example or give any evidence to support his claim.

I agree that documentaries such as Supersize Me and fahrenheit 9/11 will influence people, but so what? How does that make them not documentaries? How does that make them "dangerous"? If they are dangerous, how are they dangerous?

The "expert" says that a documentary is supposed to have "point-by-point rebuttal or formal reality checks", but who made that rule? What constitutes a formal reality check? If something is true and can be proven true, what other reality check do we need, and who gets to decide whether something is real or not? Certainly not the AP.

The expert's last sentence about documentaries "editorializing and opining" is just too funny when you consider this article is coming from the AP. I don't think I need to explain why.

The author then goes on to state that Fahrenheit 9/11 was "about the Bush administration's march to war after the 9/11 attacks", which demonstrates that he never saw the movie. Fahrenheit 9/11 was about how George Bush stole the 2000 election and allowed the attack of 9/11 to happen, and then prevented any investigation and so on.

One problem with such "docu-ganda," say some media experts, is that the films risk limiting their audiences to those who agree with their premises.

"One concern I have about such films is that they are merely preaching to the choir. You're not going to have a fellow with an NRA [National Rifle Association] bumper sticker walking into [Moore's] 'Bowling for Columbine,'" says Matt Felling of the nonpartisan Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, which studies news and entertainment media. "[Former US Sen.] Pat Moynihan was famous for saying, 'Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but they're not entitled to their own facts,' " says Mr. Felling.

Here he goes again with that tired and pathetic anonymous sourcing, "some people might say", "experts agree", etc. This is what writers do when they can't find anyone to quote, or when they only have one person to quote and want to make that position seem accepted or mainstream.

If you think that Bowling for Columbine is anti-guns (and therefore Michael Moore is anti-guns), you haven't seen the movie! Who does this jackass think he's fooling? Bowling for Columbine was about the culture of war, violence, and killing in America, not guns.

I'm not sure what's the point of that little quip about people not being entitled to their own facts. I guess when your article has little or no facts and almost no substance, you might as well fill space with bumper-sticker slogans.