— Postulation itself contradicts what our heros Hoffman and Redford showed us in such a proverbial fashion. Kramer got paid to just “retweet” mainstream rss/atom feeds coming from the mainline wall.street. Ergo, his entire worldview could have never perceived it becoming a carcinogen—granted I just recycled a com modified piece of wisdom—hopefully with some humor. Now, granted the financial system has a greater magnitude of reach than, say, some “Techcrunched”-startup-now-a-http-redirect-to-a-germane-company-with-funding, the same cycle seems to always happen. The wisdom from this, and precisely on target, is covered by Taleb’s works. If you research the five years leading up to all of his, he went from “idiot moron with ideas contrary to what works” to “How did you know so far before?”. While a poor analogy, I recall Einstein had similar attenuation with his ideas…

Being old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, I’m amazed that the news outlets (particularly television) have been satisfied with the military ‘embedding’ for reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m confident that the Vietnam anti-war effort would never have materialized if we had not been fed a constant stream of images from the front lines. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been completely sanitized for our consumption, and I think we’re the worse for it.

Frankly, I don’t know where to turn for real news. I guess the New York Times is about the best we have, but even they have fallen short in recent years. It think the situation is going to get worse before it gets better. Hopefully, observers and commentators will continue to draw attention to the problem, and someone smart will figure out a market for real news in a post-newspaper era.