75th Street

Had dinner & beer with a dear old friend and her lad Thursday evening.

75th Street has a 'wheat wine' on offer, basically a barley wine with a lot of wheat in the grist. A very worthy big beer. I had the version matured in an old whiskey cask; they also have one matured in an old wine cask. But I feared the latter would be too oaky, and oak in beer doesn't work well most of the time, IMHO.

I had a fake Kobe burger. By fake, I mean it's U.S. imitation Kobe. Same kind of cow, same diet, but domestic. It was a good burger, but I don't know if I buy all the hype about Kobe. Maybe someday I'll try the real thing and find out I'm wrong. Highland beef is also on that list.



Had great fun discussing the folly of our elected leaders. And fun discussing media bias. My friend's beau works for a metro daily and, being a 'raging liberal' (his words) he does not see the paper he works for as having much of a liberal bias. Liberal board of editors, to be sure, but because he sees people working hard to be accurate, objective, and fair, he's understandably put off by those who see something other than an accurate, objective and fair newspaper.

But I don't know if I've ever seen an accurate, objective and fair newspaper. It seems improbable if not impossible. The example I came up with in the conversation wasn't a very good one, and that kind of derailed part of the conversation. But part of it, I think, is the nature of what bias is.

Objective truth, verifiable empirical facts, are actually pretty rare. The mechanics of rainfall, what the temperature is outside, the age of a building, etc. They make shitty stories, even if you string a whole bunch of them together. That is if you don't also include subjective judgments.

Also, to hold an opinion is to make a leap of faith. Take a subjective opinion, no matter what it is, and ask yourself if you really think of it as an objective, empirical fact that no person could reasonably not agree with. If you don't think of that subjective opinion as a fact, you don't really believe it.



And it causes huge psychological turmoil for most people to run into other people who have embraced a different set of non-facts as if they were facts. Which is the tricky part about media bias. What you cover, how you cover it, no matter how careful you think you are (and I have no doubt these people are for the most part highly professional, very serious and dedicated) it's almost impossible to smell your own bias.

And if you look at the way liberals react to Fox News, it's very illustrative of this. Most media outlets are overwhelmingly liberal, and liberals tend to think of them as objective because there's no turbulence for them when they listen or read. A network that puts liberal and conservative commentators to work drives them nuts.

I thought, after the fact, of the perfect example. I mean, some things are obvious, like the inclusion of 'analysis' in news pages, a sneaky way of getting an editorial on the 'news' pages to my way of thinking. But the perfect example is Al Gore and T. Boone Pickens.

I've thought a lot about natural gas autos before I heard of the 'Pickens Plan.' CNG is carbon based, so if global warming is real (not an objective fact, sorry man), and if it is caused by man (ditto, even if it is happening it's not necessarily a causal link), so liberals generally hate it. This is the perfect being the enemy of the good.

It's a good idea to have domestic energy supplies when the imported ones are controlled by dangerous people. And don't kid yourself, Hugo Chavez and the heads of state of every OPEC nation I can think of are far more dangerous than even George W. Bush. And that is saying something.

And that's a subjective judgment. Maybe we would all be better off if the Saudi royal family was in charge.

But I've heard liberals say that T. Boone Pickens is just trying to get rich, that he has natural gas investments that will pay off big-time if we start driving some natural gas cars.

Fair enough. He's a rich bastard, and probably a greedy one. This doesn't mean I wouldn't be better off in a CNG car. I'm sure he will get richer if I am, but if I keep driving a gasoline car, other rich bastards will get even richer. In fact, I think T. Boone Pickens gets richer either way, I'm pretty sure he has lots of oil investments.

It's good to know the potential conflictive interest.

But what about Al Gore? He's been championing his own rescue of our supposedly endangered planet. He goes before Congress and basically says that we can't take time to figure out if his proposals are any good because the planet is a sick baby with a fever that will surely perish if we don't act quickly.

And the only press coverage I've ever seen of his extensive investment in technologies that will only be profitable if his proposals are adopted was an NPR piece about how smart he was to invest in these companies.

The way the press handles an Al Gore (treating him as some sort of messianic figure who slaves away for the good of the people who 'really' elected him President) and the way they handle a T. Boone Pickens (mostly to ignore him except for the advertising sales department) are way different. Both are rich men selling solutions to problems that might or might not exist (I tend to agree with one more than the other), and both will get richer if we agree to implement their plans.