Your Once and Final Supreme Double Impeachee

[only_human]

John Baez's crackpot index has been modified to score media content.
He says:

The Crackpot Index for Media Content

It was bound to happen eventually: my "crackpot index" has been adapted for use in news reporting. I like it!

The Crackpot Index for Media Content

In 1992, mathematician and physicist John Baez created The Crackpot Index, which he called "a simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics."

Baez's work has obvious implications for fields other than physics. With some minor adjustments, this same index may be applied to media outlets, pundits, or individual news stories. While other indices may focus on media bias or other problems, the Media Outlet Crackpot Index measures the potential credibility -- or the lack thereof -- of a given media source. The higher the score, the more likely it is that the story or media outlet is the work of one or more crackpots.

With apologies to Baez, here is The Crackpot Index for Media Content: A simple method for rating News and Opinion.

[kladner]

That's really funny, but scary, considering how much of such stuff is flying around these days.

[ewmayer]

Yes, pretty good, but I gotta take issue with #9 - calling the MSM the corporate/establishment/DoD flunkies they are seems to me to be more among the lines of the "in a time of universal deceit" saying (variously attributed to Orwell and others, I've found no definitive reference to the originator) than some crackpot thing to do. I wonder how Baez would score, say, the NYT's "Iraqi WMDs!" propaganda which helped Bush, Cheney et al lie us into a war whose price is still being borne today? That was about as mainstream as it gets ... but hey, it cost us only several $trillions and a million dead Iraqis to put the lie to that story, and the NYT sure learned its lesson! /sarc

------------------

Democrats, Liberals Catch McCarthyistic Fever | Daniel Lazare, Consortiumnews

Has a link to Robert Parry's latest piece, as well ... Lazare calls out Glenn Greenwald's piece on the Deep State's deep-sixing of Flynn for its hypocrisy (as in, GG thinks that in *this* case, the spooks' usage-without-publication of selected alleged wiretap data to blackmail the government is perfectly justified) ... I actually considered linking to said piece in my previous post's links-collection because it did also make some good points, but decided against it for more or less the same reason.

Also disappointed to see that Bernie Sanders appears to have completely bought into the evil-Rooskies propaganda: https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/st...13992373288961

[kladner]

I'll try to get back to you, Ernst. I have gotten news-averse, though I know I have to keep track of the clown-car-train-wreck in progress in the super-power which we inhabit.

I am afraid to look at a Parry article, though I contribute to Consortium , and I have trepidation in opening our hard copy of The Nation. I know it's far from perfect, but The Guardian is often all I can stand. I won't pay for the NYT or the WaPo, and the "good sources" that I have lead ever deeper into the Slough of Despond.

[ldesnogu]

It'd be nice to stop arguing and spend some time to commemorate the death of Swedish people in the terrorist attack committed by strangers.

Or perhaps we should spend some time thinking how to push the clown to the asylum where he belongs.

[Brian-E]

Originally Posted by ldesnogu

It'd be nice to stop arguing and spend some time to commemorate the death of Swedish people in the terrorist attack committed by strangers.[...]

According to Jeanna Skinner, at least IKEA has profited from the terrible event by selling out of these:

[ldesnogu]

Originally Posted by Brian-E

According to Jeanna Skinner, at least IKEA has profited from the terrible event by selling out of these:

Love it!

The #lastnightinsweden hash tag is a lot of fun to read. Swedish people have a lot of humor it seems

[only_human]

Over the last couple of days I happened across articles about translators vexed by president Trump's speeches.

Donald Trump confuses French translators with mixed-up speeches

“Trump’s vocabulary is limited, his syntax is broken; he repeats the same phrases over and over, forcing the translator to follow suit," she said.

“It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”

Japan’s interpreters struggle to make sense of ‘Trumpese’

The difficulty translating Trump, they say, has little to do with his use of language.

In fact, it is no secret that “Trumpese” — as his phraseology is called — is by and large simple, characterized by repetition, easy grammar and elementary-level vocabulary.

A “readability analysis” of presidential campaign speeches by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI) revealed last March that Trump’s lexical richness was the lowest — at seventh-grade level — of his rival candidates and past U.S. presidents.

The study also described his grammatical level as grade 5.7, the second-worst after George W. Bush, who barely topped the fifth-grade level.

Particularly symbolic of this characteristic, Tsuruta said, was Trump’s inauguration speech, which she said was peppered with everyday vocabulary, perhaps with the exception of “carnage.”

In addition, the businessman uncharacteristically used a teleprompter and read from a script, which made the Jan. 20 speech flow coherently enough, the professor noted.

But it’s when he speaks off-the-cuff, Tsuruta said, that interpreters are most likely to find themselves scratching their heads, with Trump frequently jumping from one topic to another and gravitating toward insults and vulgarities.

Miwako Hibi, a broadcast interpreter of more than 20 years, said it was “very hard” to follow Trump’s logic — or lack thereof — particularly his tendency to mention proper nouns out of context.

She still remembers the dread she felt as she was translating live Trump’s victory speech on Nov. 9, when the president-elect — apropos of nothing — made a reference to “Reince” and “secretariat” without spelling out who and what they are.

“When he suddenly said ‘Reince is a superstar,’ I was literally thrown off. Only after the camera zoomed in on the face of a ‘Reince’ did I realize who Trump was talking about, and I hastily added, for the sake of the audience, that it’s actually ‘Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman,’ ” Hibi said.

“The convenient thing about the Japanese language, however, is that it tends to do away with a subject in a sentence, so in this particular case, I first translated ‘superstar’ without clarifying who Trump was referring to, and carried on like this until I got a fuller picture.”

But she wasn’t so lucky with “secretariat,” which she mistakenly thought was Trump’s alternate way of referring to Reince.

“I mistranslated that one,” Hibi said. “It didn’t even occur to me that he was talking about a race horse. … It’s really hard to follow his train of thought.”

[kladner]

What fools these CPACs be! They don't know a Russian flag?

The president might not have directly addressed the Russia scandal, but liberal activists trolled CPAC attendees into making it visible during the speech by handing out Russia flags with “TRUMP” emblazoned on them.

The activists behind the flags are Americans Take Action members Jason Charter and Ryan Clayton.

Reached for comment, Clayton, using a Borat accent, told ThinkProgress that “I’m for strong leader like President Trump — that’s why Putin picked him!”

[ewmayer]

Liberal Hypocrisy, “Late-Shaming,” and Russia-Blaming in the Age of Trump | Paul Street, Counterpunch

[ewmayer]

Hail to the Chief? Scuppering White House Press Corps Traditions | naked capitalism