Enticing pieces of journalism, real news and editorials, to read and get inspired to Rant and Rave!

Editor's note: Everyday, I cull through dozens and dozens of new sites looking for stuff that catalyzes my Ranting and Raving juices. There are too many to write about. So, I thought it would be fun to, occasionally, rather than trying to write about them all or some such nonsense, rather to summarize and provide the link. Hopefully, others will read, comment, or take up the mantle of writing about them in detail.

Title: Is Donald Trump Bankrupting the GOP?
Author: Gloria Borger | link

Comment: Some people have theorized that the Donald is making a fuss about possibly running simply to drive up his ratings. Others think he's worried Obama won't win a second term, and this is his way of making certain. Gloria Borger doesn't attempt to get inside the mind of Donald Trump, rather she suggests that he and other candidates in previous elections such as Alan Keyes, Ron Paul, and Dennis Kucinich were nothing but distractions. Rather than giving solid debates on issues, these men all distracted voters within their parties from legitimate candidates. The result was a diminished process that became more about the people and less about the issues.

Title: Apple®, Google® Collect User Data
Authors: Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-Devries | link

Comment: The WSJ reported that smart phones of the iPhone™ and Android™ lines are collecting user's locations and transmitting them back to Apple, Inc. and Google, Inc. A lot of people are now suddenly up in arms about this as if to imply that cell phone companies don't know the exact location of your cell phone at any moment in the first place. The suggestion is that both companies are using the data to build massive databases they can exploit. Oh my! I guess my biggest complaint is as usual, and that is they take / mine data but give me nothing for it. If they want to add data to their data base from my phone, they should have to give me a credit. We need a law!

Title: Last Supper was not Jesus's Last Supper, Researcher Says
Author: Mitchell Landsberg | link

Comment: A British researcher has muddied the waters by analyzing calendars and star charts to ascertain the validity of the chronology used to set the most important religious dates in the Christian calendar. Sometimes, aren't certain things just best left alone? Why shatter the dream?

Title: What's Up with US Gas Prices?
Author: Ken Cohen | link

Comment: Have you ever noticed that, usually buried in the middle of the page, more and more eNewspapers have a box of news stories? Not sure? Here's an example from the Seattle Times. If you scroll down to the middle of page below the main story, you will see box with the headline, "From the Web" in big bold face, with the terms, "selected for you by a sponsor" below in very faint typeface – you know, so as not to draw much attention to it. Well, the story for this post was one that showed up for me. Realizing of course, this was an advertisement, not a real news story from the paper or another paper, I figured, why not click something of interest and see where it went. First, it submitted the proper tracking code to the web server so the paper would get paid for the click. Then, it took me to a fascinating 'news' blog published by ExxonMobil of all places. ExxonMobil has a blog of news with comments! Hooray. Glad to see they are putting that $3 billion a quarter in profits to good use. This particular story was published in January of 2011 making it all the more ironic given the cost of gas today in late April 2011. The story explains that the rise in the price of oil is right in line with the rising costs of other publicly traded commodities like corn and copper both of which are also up at the time of writing. What the story never says anywhere is that in the USA, oil trading and oil speculation are unregulated unlike these other two commodities, and it was speculation that was responsible for the huge rise in the middle of the George W. Bush term. At the time Congress was moments away from legislation to regulate, when the prices fell drastically leading many to conclude falsely that oil prices had simply been subject to supply and demand. Unfortunately, at the time, demand in the USA was way down. With demand down, shouldn't prices have been falling not rising? In any case, those are other topics. This topic is really about the concept of companies who don't like the news or the truth or what the rest of the world thinks are obviously resorting to simply making their own news, writing their own stories to tell people what they want to tell them to convince them to believe what ever they want people to believe. It's quite an industrious endeavor. Why wait for news outlets to do what you want, just self-publish your dogma? What's sad is that in order to keep alive, eNewspapers are actually sending readers from their site to other sites that might seem like news but are really corporate grandstanding.

EMAIL||FLAG THIS POST