1h

I’m not entirely sure this will catch on at all, simply because it is a very long and muddled story. But if it fleshes out, it shows that the Conservatives are no stranger to backroom deals and shady business in Quebec either. From Globe and Mail:

A spokesman for the Prime Minister and a Conservative fundraiser made separate backroom interventions in favour of a real-estate firm that  faced losing a $50-million complex to the federal government in 2006, sources told The Globe and Mail and Radio-Canada.

I wonder if this will flesh out enough to sort out what was really going on. I think I have a good gist of it, and it looks really really bad for the Conservatives if it is true. However, that news story is the most muddled thing I have read in a long time, so I could be misinterpreting it.

1h

I took and break and hit this quote:

“Is”, “is.” “is” — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don’t know what anything “is”; I only know how it seems to me at this moment. - Robert Anton Wilson.

Such a true statement.

1h

Well, if journalism isn’t getting dumber and dumber, it’s trying to serve a political purpose more and more every day. Today’s installment of “How is this news?” is a asinine story from the CBC about some random person in Newfoundland who believed he saw his premier on the phone…. While driving!

From the CBC:

Saw premier use handheld phone in car, N.L. man says

If you read the story you learn a couple of things. One, this must have been a really fricken slow news day for the CBC to place this type of local bullshit news in the national news category. And two, that there simply wasn’t a news story here. It seriously comes across as a hit piece against Premier Williams because some guy claimed to have seen him on his cell phone while driving. The guy went to the cops and complained and they probably simply told him that without a photograph or something of the sort they couldn’t do anything. He freaked out because the cops weren’t taking him seriously, so he tries to turn this into a news story instead of actually realizing that seeing someone do something illegal while driving is not enough to get them a ticket for $100 from the cops. Especially since he doesn’t have firm proof it was Danny Williams and to be honest it’s a $100 ticket.

Yet, somehow this is news? why? because it serves a political purpose by attacking Danny Williams and playing to the news story meme of “Politicians are all evil and don’t ever get punished for anything they do.”

News isn’t news anymore, it’s storytelling. This, simply put, is not news, and the CBC should be ashamed for publishing it on their national stories page.

1h

It’s amazing. Journalism simply gets dumber and dumber every day. They find a storyline that sells and then tries to shoehorn their story into it. Today’s storyline is “famous celebrity (or at least a celebrity that we will make famous through endless news stories) has a big fall into drugs, etc.” I’m betting this one will end with her either converting to Christianity (see Stephen Baldwin) or dying of an OD (see Anna Nicole Smith). In either case, the media will have a field day documenting every aspect of their life at the expense of real news reports.

From the BBC:

Winehouse ‘filmed smoking crack’

I didn’t know who Winehouse was about 2 months ago, and really didn’t care. However, the general media has decided that because she’s famous and a huge addict it is worth column space for them to detail every fricken aspect of her life. Mostly because they have discovered that I personally don’t give a flying flip whether or not Winehouse has ever taken crack, or hell if she bloody mainlines crushed tostitos into herself. It is simply not news, and the BBC should be ashamed that they even published it.

1h.

1337hax0r

For people who frequent the VLWC, they may seen a few new buttons show up around the text: and . These are new buttons to allow people to better sort out their viewing experience while at the VLWC. The first one has two features. If it is next to a specific story, it will minimize that story so it need not take up the entire page, and should survive a reload of the page if you have cookies on. If the first one is next to a country or (in the list of blogs for a country) a blog name, it will minimize all blog stories from that country or by that blog. This is to allow people to block stories that simply do not interest them. Note, the minimized stories can always be brought back by the second button above. That way, if a title interests you, it is easy to bring it up and read it without being forced to view all entries by that person/country.

Note: This is not working in the latest version of IE yet, I am working on a fix. Hopefully it will be working in the near future.

As well, due to some work by a friend in the ISW, there will likely be new sections of the VLWC beyond leftist propaganda, and perhaps even a facebook-esque user system with a true guarantee of privacy.

This should be an exciting year for the VLWC if everything comes together. I hope you enjoy.

1337hax0r

I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy successful making it around to the sun to a random point which is not actually in the right spot every year.

Hopefully, we’ll all make it here again next year.

1337hax0r