This article has nothing to do with technology, at all. Just me talking about a couple of things in the news that have caught my attention.
Our Biased Media
I saw a headline on CNN the other day, "McCain adviser Fiorina: Palin not ready to run a corporation." The headline is a blatant slam against Palin, which of course is not unusual. Now, I don't think Palin is infallible, but she does seem to be getting a biased amount of subjective criticism from the press. I read the article though, to see what it was about, and by the time I got done reading it, I felt sick to my stomach. Here's why...
The article starts off with this:
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO turned top John McCain aide, said she doesn't think Sarah Palin is qualified to run a major corporation. For that matter, Fiorina said, McCain, Obama and Biden aren't capable of that kind of job either.
So in actuality, Fiorina didn't say that Palin isn't ready to run a corporation, but rather she said that none of the 4 candidates on the major presidential ballots are ready. Why didn't the headline read, "McCain adviser Fiorina: None of these candidates are ready to run a corporation?" I'll tell you why; for the same reason that Us Weekly ran their famous cover about Palin. This is completely despicable.
Reading the full article is what made me sick though. Even though Fiorina said that none of the candidates is ready, the entire article talked about how McCain and Palin aren't ready. In fact, the article quotes the democratic campaign:
If John McCain's top economic adviser doesn't think he can run a corporation, how on Earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis?" said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. "Apparently, even the people who run his campaign agree that the economy is an issue John McCain doesn't understand as well as he should."
Yeah, there's the slight mention of Obama not being ready, or Biden, but that's at the beginning of the article, and then the rest just bashes the republican ticket. By the end, all you remember is that McCain and Palin aren't ready, and you don't recall that Obama and Biden aren't ready either. This slant just makes me sick.
What's going on with air travel?
"They" always say that traveling by plane is the safest way to travel. And I remember hearing and reading about very long spans of time between plane crashes. But man, recently, it's been crazy-bad. It seems like every day there is another report of a deadly plane crash. Something's going on it seems, because there just shouldn't be this many plane crashes.
Tonight, I saw another report. There was a missing plane the other day. There was the Spanair crash that killed 154. There was the Russian crash that killed 88. And many more. I started to notice the trend on July 25, when a plane had a huge chunk break off during flight. My mother-in-law was actually here at that time, and she's had some bad flights before, so I didn't say anything, since she would be flying back home a week later. But I started to take note of the repeated reports of plane problems and crashes.
I ended up finding www.planecrashinfo.com and their Recent Accidents page. It's scary to look at all of the recent problems, with a bunch of problems since June. Then tonight, I found the Aviation Safety site and their list is a bit more comprehensive. Check out the list and look at how many problems there have been since June. It's hard to not get anxious about flying back to Ohio for Christmas.