Friday, October 23, 2009

Well, now I'M sick!

With all of this hype in the news of late, I'm getting sick. I'm getting sick, not WITH H1N1, but OF H1N1! It appears that the media "hype machine" was switched on high and somebody broke the "off" switch!

With all of this ridiculous overblowing of the whole "swine flu" thing, I see a pattern in the media that goes back longer than I've been using oxygen. As a History major back in my first shot at college, I learned about the news media of the early 20th Century and the move into "Yellow Journalism", which involved blowing stories completely out of proportion in order to stir up emotional responses and, mainly, sell more "rags". Old William Randolph Hearst really started something back then!

Now, it seems that every time something new, and usually bad, comes up, somebody in the media decides to scare the hell out of the general populous. In the 1970's, it was the "fuel shortage" that was hyped into a big mess.

Today, we get bombarded with crap about this H1N1 thing. Every day, the news seems to drone on about new "recommendations" and the "sheep" who tend to believe everything they see on TV just eat this shit right up. Just tonight, on the national news on NBC, there was a story saying that people shouldn't shake hands! And, on my local station, there was something said about hospitals recommending that kids shouldn't visit hospitals. I'm sorry, but if I'm a kid and Grandpa or Grandma is in the hospital I'm going to visit them! They show people with surgical masks on and gloves, using hand sanitizer every time their hands touch something. Give me a damn break! What's next? Are we going to have to all go outside in Hazmat suits tomorrow?? This is getting real stupid. But, alas! It gets worse.

I was looking at something on an online news site last night that made me shake my head, and resist the urge to run it into a wall. I read a story about a movie coming out about 2012 and the fact that NASA said there is no reason to believe that the world is actually going to end in a tad over two years. Duh! This is proof positive that the general population is collectively retarded! These are probably the same morons who thought that "The DaVinci Code" was a work of gospel non-fiction! The whole 2012 thing was something that was apparently interpreted, or misinterpreted, by conspiracy nuts who thought they could decipher a big rock that was carved by the Mayans around a thousand years back, or so.

But, in the defense of dumb, people did believe the "War of the Worlds" thing was real back when that happened. So, it appears as though sheep-like stupidity isn't a new phenomenon!

This blog entry was brought to you by the Institute for the Abolition of Complete Human Stupidity.