Posts Tagged → satire

Greedy Teachers and Diane Ravitch

Jon Stewart does another great job of putting the greedy demands of teachers in context compared to those poor, abused hedge fund managers.

Of course, those talking heads whose clueless pronouncements were used in the piece are only listening to themselves, and on occasion, to each other.

Stewart’s guest on the same program was Diane Ravitch.

This is a voice that needs to be heard frequently on those channels claiming to present news and information, not just for eight minutes on a half-hour news satire show.

Playing Zookeeper

This interview with Jon Stewart on the NPR program Fresh Air illustrates exactly why so many of us trust the Daily Show analysis of the news more than any of the commercial media outlets.

But I have become increasingly unnerved by the depth of corruption that exists at many different levels. I’m less upset with politicians than the media. I feel like politicians – the way I explain it, is when you go to a zoo and a monkey throws feces, it’s a monkey. But when the zookeeper is standing right there and he doesn’t say, ‘Bad monkey’ – somebody’s gotta be the zookeeper.

Stewart, the correspondents, and their writers may be doing fake news, but it’s genuine, honest analysis.

Winning at the SAT Game

Sound advice (and some far-too-close-to-reality satire) about the SAT and test prep companies from last night’s Colbert Report.

If you take enough of their math classes [Princeton Review], you may even learn their formula for turning children’s fear into cash.

Some English teachers may not want to hear what Stephen has to say about essays.

How To Be An Expert Without Actually Knowing Anything

By way of io9, the geeky science fiction (or is that redundant? :-) blog, comes The Evil Futurists’ Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong.

So what advice do they offer for those who want to have a career in spouting predictive BS?

Be certain, not right.
… no matter what you do, no matter what you believe, be certain. As Tetlock put it, in this world “only the overconfident survive, and only the truly arrogant thrive.”

Sounds like advice for anyone running for public office as well.

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Claim to be an expert: it makes people’s brains hurt.

And research proves it!

No expertise, no problem.
… knowing you’re not an expert should make you more confident in your work. And confidence is everything.

One simple idea may be one too many.
Having a single big theory, even if it’s totally outrageous, makes you sound more credible. Having a Great Idea also makes it easier for you to seem like a Great Visionary, capable of seeing things that others cannot.

Get prizes for being outrageous.

Does calling something “award winning” have any meaning these days?

There’s a success hiding in every failure.

Don’t remember your failures. No one else will.

Fact checking is a lost art that desperately needs to be revived.

The author claims “The citations are all real. But no, I don’t really mean a single word of it.”.

I’m not so sure. Maybe he will in the future.

Image: Future City by ILMO JOE, used under a Creative Commons license.