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In honor of April Fool’s Day, we have the top April 1st 10 hoaxes from Museum of Hoaxes.com. Plus there’s a link to the top 100. Here’s number 10;
1976: The British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
Continuing with the theme, Kimberley Strassel tells us about the items GOP senators made the fool Dems vote for.
…reconciliation allowed Republicans to bring up unlimited amendments. Because Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could not allow the reconciliation bill to be changed in any way—which would send it back to the House—his party was obliged to vote down every one of those amendments. And every one had been designed to make even hardened pols whimper.
Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) offered language to bar the government from subsidizing erectile dysfunction drugs for convicted pedophiles and rapists. Democrats voted . . . No! Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) proposed exempting wounded soldiers from the new tax on medical devices. Democrats: No way! Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) wanted to exempt critical access rural hospitals from funding cuts. Senate Democrats: Forget it! This was Republicans’ opportunity to lay out every ugly provision and consequence of ObamaCare, and Democrats—because of the process they’d chosen—had to defend it all.
And so it went, into the wee Thursday hours. All Democrats in favor of taxing pacemakers? Aye! All Democrats in favor of keeping those seedy vote buyoffs? Aye! All Democrats in favor of raising taxes on middle-income families? Aye! All Democrats in favor of exempting themselves from elements of ObamaCare? Aye! All Democrats in favor of roasting small children in Aga ovens? (Okay, I made that one up, but you get the point.) Aye! …
John Hinderaker, of Power Line says that Paul Krugman always qualifies as a fool.
One thing about Paul Krugman, he always gets the memo. You can count on his column in the New York Times to echo the Democratic Party’s talking points of the moment, whatever they are. Thus, his current column accuses Republicans of threatening violence against those poor little Democrats. It’s a dumb claim, so it suits Krugman perfectly. His “evidence” is lame beyond belief. After referring to “the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers”–no mention of Eric Cantor’s office being shot at, death threats against Sarah Palin, etc. …
‘…The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.”‘
This is downright funny. Krugman, in his usual dishonest-but-ineffective way, forgets to mention the whole point of the RNC fund-raising appeal, i.e., “Fire Pelosi.” …
…Now, Paul, let’s take this slowly, and try to follow along: “Fire Nancy Pelosi” means to cause her to lose her job as Speaker of the House. That will happen if the Republicans take the majority of the House in November, see? So the flames aren’t an incitement to burn Ms. Pelosi alive, they are a pun on the word “fire.” Get it? And Steele’s reference to putting Pelosi on “the firing line,” while perhaps infelicitous, obviously referred to the theme of the campaign: Fire Pelosi, not to assassinating the Speaker of the House. …
Continuing with the NY Times, the Gloria Center publishes a piece on just one Times article on the Mid-East. Barry Rubin finds four major errors. If you depend on the Gray Lady, you’re a fool.
In my entire life I have rarely read an article which simultaneously showed the need to be well-informed before reading a newspaper and the shocking shortcomings of mass media coverage of the Middle East than this minor piece about the reopening of the Cairo synagogue. I’ve never said this before but will now: If you want to understand the Middle East’s reality and how it is distorted in the media, read the following analysis. …
…I am not focusing on an individual reporter here, especially because I don’t know how his original piece was edited. But what is important is the product. In this one article, the Times deserves an “F” for journalistic competence and it has failed to inform readers of some of the most important aspects of the contemporary Middle East.
In these respects, I cannot imagine a better example of what’s wrong with media coverage of the region-and much more.
To quote George Orwell on a similar situation in 1945 (when the correspondent of a left-wing newspaper was criticized by readers for revealing how badly Soviet troops behaved toward civilians), once you accept the idea that the media should support “good causes” rather than just report accurately: “It is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.”
Now we have a look at people who are hard to fool. In Air and Space Magazine, Stephen Joiner gives us a fascinating look at serious repo guys. That would be the men (and women) who repossess large jet airplanes; like 747′s, etc.
…Jennifer Barlow, the company’s project planner, masterminds a repossession’s complex logistics. There are conference calls with banks and insurers and opinions from lawyers. Then, Barlow says firmly, “We decide what needs to be done.” She does not mean putting a strongly worded reminder in the mail.
She begins compiling a three-ring binder called the Repo Book. It includes affidavits of default, power of attorney, and all the legalese required to satisfy international treaties governing the process: everything that will give the crew the rights of a lawful owner.
Sage-Popovich also makes a determination whether the repo will be “friendly” or “non-friendly.” (Barlow estimates that defaulting airlines cooperate in the repossession of their airplanes less than 20 percent of the time.) In a non-friendly repo, “they’re probably going to try to hide the aircraft from us,” she says. As the airline continues to use the aircraft to make money, it may juggle routes and schedules to frustrate recovery. Charter aircraft, which don’t fly set routes or on timetables, can be particularly elusive. One outfit (Popovich wouldn’t identify carriers presently operating) repeatedly gave the repo men the slip by exploiting Egypt’s loose enforcement of financial covenants. Sage-Popovich arranged for a go-between to charter the desired airplane under the guise of a lucrative U.K. tour-group contract. The eager operator flew the airliner out of its Egyptian haven and landed in repo-friendly Britain. “We just watched and waited until the crew checked into their hotel,” Popovich says, “then we grabbed their plane and flew away.” …
…During a repo in the mid-1980s, both sides got physical. A U.S. financier had hired Popovich to snatch a Boeing 720 from a tour operator in Haiti who was in default. Though the aircraft had a book value of only $600,000, an airport manager refused to release it unless a million dollars was deposited in a Swiss bank account. Having made arrangements with an entrepreneurial Port-au-Prince airport employee, Nick showed up around midnight with an air starter (720s lack an onboard auxiliary power unit to start engines). The field had been closed for hours when the team fired up the big turbofans. As he began adding power, Popovich says, “I saw the first tracer rounds streak over the top of the airplane.”…
And we close with information on another hoax. That would be man-made global warming. In American.com, Stephen Hayward says that we owe this latest discovery to a meteorologist and the volunteers he recruited.
…The Marysville temperature station is located at the city’s fire department, next to an asphalt parking lot and a cell phone tower, and only a few feet away from two air conditioning compressors that spew out considerable heat. These sources of heat amplification mean that the temperature readings from the Marysville station are useless for determining accurate temperatures for the Marysville area.
Indeed, the Marysville station violates the quality control standards of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA admits that stations like Marysville, sited close to artificial heat sources such as parking lots, can produce errors as large as 5 degrees Celsius. …
…To the contrary, 89 percent of the 860 temperature stations surveyed fail to meet the National Weather Service’s site requirements that stations must be located at least 30 feet away from any artificial heat source. …
…Who performed this revealing audit of these important data-generating instruments? NASA? NOAA? The Government Accountability Office? The National Academy of Sciences? A congressional committee perhaps? No to all of the above. Meteorologist Anthony Watts used the Internet to recruit an army of 650 volunteers to photograph weather stations around the country and send him the results. Watts posted photos of dozens of the worst offenders on his website, surfacestations.org, and is adding more all the time.