How Soon Will This Madness Stop? And How Much of a Damn Should I Give?

◼ There is other news I’d rather write about than the continued parade of idiotic What It Means remarks about Trayvon Martin, including those by the Idiot in Chief. - The Other McCain

“...Everybody wants to play Internet detective,” I told Ali, describing this ridiculous habit of the New Media age: People who had never set foot in Sanford, Florida, and who had never talked to anyone involved in the case, were attempting to “solve” the crime based on what they found online, as if every fact was on the Internet and the Fundamental Truth could be discovered by anyone with a laptop.

It would be bad enough if only stupid people made this mistake. But this mistake, which we might call the Error of Online Ontology, is commonplace among intelligent and articulate people who presume knowledge about people they don’t know in places they’ve never been, based entirely on what they gather from the Web. And on the basis of that pretended knowledge, these articulate and intelligent fools then add to our collective ignorance by endlessly repeating what they think they “know,” but actually don’t know at all....

This Week’s Episode of ‘The Obama Show’

The President of the United States is the star of the show, and the rest of us are just spectators watching the show on TV. If the producers of the show decide that this week’s episode is about George the half-Peruvian neighborhood watch captain, we watch the episode as if it mattered to own lives, which it wouldn’t, except for the fact that millions of other people are watching the same show....