All the news that's fit to print, after some consideration

I want to see a news publication that only covers events at least a week or a month old. There's too much noise in the news. It's distracting. A news organization that waited a week or a month before it even started writing would have the perspective to tell what mattered and what was just the vacuous jabbering of attention-seeking idiots (not that it's necessarily hard to tell the latter). They'd save massive amounts just on printing costs. And my head wouldn't be filled with so much junk.

kudos for the pun

The collapse of an underground salt dome earlier this week is starting to eat away at Daisetta, TX. Some residents have begun calling it "the Sinkhole de Mayo." Whoever came up with that deserves the Nobel Prize, or at least the Medal of Freedom. Never mind that it didn't happen exactly on May 5th.

One more for Eight Belles

One more thing from the article about horse-racing brutality. The article said of the trainer of Eight Belles:

He also refused to concede the point that horse racing is an extremely dangerous sport, saying that these types of injuries occur in any sport.

Except the most important thing of all: the participants in other sports are all human, and they all have a choice about whether they can play.

nasty reporting from the Washington Post

In an article summarizing the Kentucky Derby results:

For [trainer Richard] Dutrow, the victory by Big Brown confirmed everything he and jockey Kent Desormeaux believed about their horse. Dutrow, a top New York-based trainer with a checkered history of personal drug use and drug violations in his horses, had insisted no horse in the field had shown the ability to beat Big Brown. He had appeared startlingly boastful of the first horse he would ever run in the Kentucky Derby.

The whole paragraph is obnoxious, with the drug use comment being the cheapest shot in a salvo of cheap shots. I never even heard of Richard Dutrow until yesterday; he could be Stalin for all I know (given he forces horses into danger daily, he's not exactly a nice guy). It's not relevant. It's just plain mean.

But how much?

More Mothers Breast-Feed, in First Months at Least. This hits a pet peeve of mine:

Studies have shown that children who are fed formula have increased risks of ear and respiratory infections, obesity, diabetes and even cancer.

How much of an increase? From what baseline? Did it go from, say, a 2% risk to a 2.1% risk? 0.007% to 0.07%? 0.001% to 50%? The breast is best, but it's not always possible or practical. You cannot make good decisions without knowing the degree of risk you're inflicting on your child. Maybe it's worth it, maybe it isn't. You have no way of knowing from that article.