CNN's dumbest news question, evar

I thought CNN was consumed by a black hole shortly after the Gulf War.

As an occassional trainer at work, I have always had the attitude that the only stupid question was the one that was not asked.
Journalists continue to prove me wrong …

EU committee rejects deal to exempt foreign flights from CO2 charges
LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) – The European Parliament’s Environment Committee (ENVI) voted on Wednesday to reject a deal to exempt long-haul flights from paying for carbon emissions until the end of 2016, aiming to prevent the European Union from bowing to foreign pressure…
https://www.pointcarbon.com/news/reutersnews/1.4546149
19 March: NYT: Coral Davenport: Obama Turns to Web to Illustrate the Effects of a Changing Climate
As part of an effort to make the public see global warming as a tangible and immediate problem, the White House on Wednesday inaugurated a website, climate.data.gov, aimed at turning scientific data about projected droughts and wildfires and the rise in sea levels into eye-catching digital presentations that can be mapped using simple software apps.
The project is the brainchild of Mr. Obama’s counselor, John D. Podesta, and the White House science adviser, John P. Holdren…
The effort comes as Mr. Obama prepares to announce a set of aggressive climate change regulations aimed at limiting emissions from coal-fired plants. Although a poll by the Pew Research Center last October found that 67 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, a Pew poll in January showed that Americans ranked global warming as 19th on a list of 20 issues for Congress and the president…
Some major software and mapping companies have already expressed interest in using the climate data. Chief among them are Google and Esri, a Redlands, Calif., company that supplies mapping and geographic information systems software to federal agencies, including the C.I.A., and city and local governments. Company executives say they anticipate a strong interest in the data. “There’s a market for this,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri’s chief executive, who joined Mr. Podesta and Mr. Holdren at the White House. “We’re excited to use it. Reading climate data in real time is unusual.”…
“What if we could make information about sea-level rise, extreme heat and drought as simple to digest and interactive as using Google Maps to get directions?” said Rebecca Moore, the engineering manager of Google Earth, who was also at the White House. “That is not possible, but we think it’s possible to get a lot closer. There’s the possibility to create a living, breathing dashboard in a way people can understand and relate to.”…
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/us/politics/white-house-to-introduce-climate-data-website.html?_r=0

http://www.deadline.com/2014/02/february-cable-news-numbers-fnc-logs-146th-consecutive-win-cnn-tumbles-msnbc-hangs-on/
Any questions?

13 mins 25 secs: 19 March: Southern California Public Radio: Airtalk with Larry Mantle: What will make Americans care about climate change?
Guests:
Bjorn Lomborg, (Ph.D. in Political Science), adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (a think tank that specializes in development spending); Lomborg was named on Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers
John Abraham, Professor of Thermal Sciences at the University of St Thomas, St Paul Minnesota
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2014/03/19/36560/what-will-make-americans-care-about-climate-change/

I still think you have to go a long way to beat that “meteor caused by global warming” question. That is the single dumbest thing ever. Even asking if the meteor came out of black hole is less dumb.

PS. If this is the plane then we should know more about why it changed direction. It would be very sad that the pilots where in someways incapacitated and the plane was on auto pilot and just kept flying until it was out of fuel.

No one got the quote from Mary Schiavo? The Former Inspector General U.S. Department of Defense!
“A small black hole would suck in our entire universe. So we know it’s not that.”
Phew! I was worried there for a second. LOL

This is so upsetting at so many levels. I am afraid we must let the ignorant suffer their self constructed prison.
We have no means to help these people.

Jim B says:…….
Quite so.
The lady is a little confused.
This universe is a naked singularity, there may be others but if so we know nothing of them. As we know nothing about the elsewhere whence our universe came.
We do know that our universe had a beginning and will end but not how it will do so.
We do know that black holes are singularities within our universe and therefore are subject to the arrow of time, in effect they obey the second law of thermodynamics. They too have a lifetime and a shorter one than the universe itself in which they exist.
So fear not and indeed LOL.
Kindest Regards
.

Oops, correction, that is the video on the linked WUWT article, it’s video is missing now. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/11/why-we-dont-take-cnn-or-bill-nye-seriously-anymore-asteroid-meteor-global-warming/

I daren’t look. Did Bill Nye say yes ??

Comments like this one made by CNN must be ruining business over at The Onion.

Jim –
i was tempted to post the latest on the plane, but got caught up in the John Abraham interview on public radio, so u beat me to it. hope the mystery is resolved, for better or worse, soon.
meanwhile –
20 March: Guardian: Posted by Dana Nuccitelli: A remarkably accurate global warming prediction, made in 1972
A paper published in Nature in 1972 accurately predicted the next 30 years of global warming
John Stanley (J.S.) Sawyer was a British meteorologist born in 1916. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1962, and was also a Fellow of the Meteorological Society and the organization’s president from 1963 to 1965.
A paper authored by Sawyer and published in the journal Nature in 1972 reveals how much climate scientists knew about the fundamental workings of the global climate over 40 years ago…
Sawyer’s paper was followed by similarly accurate global warming predictions by Wallace Broecker in 1975 and James Hansen in 1981.
This research illustrates that climate scientists have understood the main climate control knobs for over four decades. Perhaps it’s about time that we start listening to them…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/mar/19/global-warming-accurate-prediction-1972

Why such a valuable piece of property as Boeing 777 (not to mention human lives) couldn’t be equipped with a coordinates-transmitting device that cannot be switched off from inside? In the case of a black hole, of course, even that wouldn’t help…

As a convinced “d-e-n-i-e-r”, I naturally prefer the conspiracy explanation. The black hole was of course provided by the aliens.
(/sarc, if you really hadn’t realised)

@RogerKnights
I would shy away from attributing to the pilots without solid evidence. Note the tie in with politics in Malaysia which means a tie-in could be real or it could deliberately be spun as such.

This clip is just one of the reasons I’ve totally cut myself off from the MSM. When one thinks the MSM has plumbed the depths of stupidity, it just keeps on digging. CNN is one obnoxious station that I make a significant effort to avoid but Atlanta airport seems to have all of its multiple TV’s tuned to CNN only and at a loud volume. Just one of the reasons I hate long waits between flights in Atlanta.
From online sources I’ve learned that CNN seems to be covering this missing plane story to the exclusion of just about anything else; WWIII potentially starting in the near future yet what bills itself as a news source seems transfixed with a single missing airliner which was likely hijacked by the pilot. Considering that the pilot was highly skilled, had his own 777 simulator at home combined with significant developments in Malaysian politics occurring the day of the flight, one probably has a terrestial explanation for the disappearance.
I must admit that I didn’t watch the full video as the idiotic answer by the first woman to reply that a black hole would have swallowed the universe was a signal that I had watched enough. Obviously she hadn’t read much of physics since the 1920’s. Someone with a modicum of physics knowledge would have answered that, yes, a microscopic black hole could certainly have downed the airliner, but the radiation signature of the black hole as it sucked up air molecules and spewed out gamma rays during its travels through the atmosphere would have created a radiation signature which would have set off alarm bells on all of the radiation monitoring satellites which are designed to detect nuclear tests on earth. Given the absence of such a signal one would have to rule out the tiny black hole hypothesis. Of course, the black hole theorists would likely counter that there’s an international conspiracy to suppress such data which can be checked out easily; if there’s a sudden upsurge in international interest in constructing human habitations on the moon or at Lagrangian points, then governments must be aware of a black hole at the center of the earthy greedily ingesting the earths core. A meteorite hitting the aircraft is a far more likely possibility than a black hole, but then we’re dealing with individuals who have basically zero knowledge of science and an audience who has lost the ability for critical thought. The scary thing is that Putin might be forwarded this clip as part of an assessment regarding the US’s ability to counter his moves which would likely make him overconfident.
My personal, albeit non-scientific surveys, of individuals demonstrate an inverse correlation between the amount of TV that people watch and their scientific knowledge. Such individuals may possess detailed knowledge of some area gleaned from one of the “scientific” programs that appear on some cable TV channels, but most often they have no framework within to place that datum. The longer I go with absolutely no exposure to the MSM, the more difficult I find it to engage in non-medical conversations with patients as many of them will ask me about show x and character y neither of which I have ever heard of. People make analogies between behavior of character z and some event and I have to inform the patient that I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. Similarly, I bring up material I’ve seen on WUWT and other reputable climate sites and these seem to be just as foreign to patients. It appears that we’re rapidly becoming a society of the ignorant who are totally unaware of their degree of ignorance and a diminishing number of the population who have a good basic knowledge of the sciences. Given that school is now primarily about “self esteem” and science has been so dumbed down that it’s unrecognizable, the future would seem to lie with those countries who still believe in a rigorous science education for everyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
CNN have just had their, Jump The Shark, moment.
Forever more, Black Holes will be the reason for all things non understandable:
– Why has there been no global warming? Because Black Holes sucked all the warm air away.
– Why doesn’t Obamacare work? Because Black Holes keep ruining the economics of it.
– Where did all the Bitcoin money go from Mt Gox? Black Holes swallowed them up.
– Why are CNN ratings so poor? Because a Black Hole’s gravity is keeping them down.
– Why are Democrates so stupid? Because they each have a Black Hole instead of a brain.
– Why are Republicans so ignorant? Because gravitational lensing effects of Black Holes keep distorting reality.
– Why can’t Congress do anything right? Because the thermodynamics of so many Black Holes close together are still yet not understood, so we have to wait for more stupid theories of Black Holes to be created, thus Congress, sits around just looking at all the Black Holes in the room.
And here’s the Big One! Since Black Holes are just theoretical, and that is, NO ONE, has ever photographed or discovered a Black Hole, and that we still don’t know if they exist. Kind of like the stupid nonsense of Global Warming. Once again, we take theoretical concepts, computer simulations, and Hollywood SFX, and make them fact.
I thought science was all about the Scientific Method.
Very interesting how people selectively choose when to use the Scientific Method, and when to not choose it. Like deGrasse Tyson’s ridiculous Cosmos fantasy and science-fiction vacuous sojourn, go unnotice and cause more harm to Science than anything a complete blubbering imbecile on CNN can do.
Nice to see once again, how wattsupwiththat.com has its priorities right again.
So my question is where are the real Black Holes?

I only believe what the National Enquirer publishes. Until it’s in NE, I’m not believing anything.

“…including people noting the eerie parallels to Lost and The Twilight Zone…”
Actually, it reminded me more of the Bond film “Thunderball”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderball_(film)

I see the word ‘evar’ was used in the headline, correctly I might ad. But I prefer the word ‘evah’, it sounds just a bit more mocking in some obscure way.

CNN is enjoying a momentary resurgence on this issue, so they will milk it for all they can. The sad part is they look exactly like a broadcast version of “The Globe” or some other hysterical rag. I guess they found their niche. The National Enquirer of broadcast TV.

We know that our news sources have reached rock bottom, when they post twitter comments as part of their newscast. I don’t give a flying fig what someone on Twitter thinks.

You wake up lost , in an empty town
Wondering why no one else is around
Look up to see a giant boy
You’ve just become his brand new toy

The only thing missing was Candy Crowley confirming the black hole theory.

I think people don’t really realize that news isn’t really news, it’s entertainment. They throw in the word “black hole” because the general public is sufficiently ignorant and rather than immediately jumping at the stupidity of the statement, instead finds it a little curious.
Always remember that
“News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising”
The entire climate change hoopla is based upon the above quote.

Think fire in the cockpit and take it from there.

J. Philip Peterson says:
March 19, 2014 at 9:35 pm
“He was reading many twitter theories.
He did not say “is it preposterous to consider a black hole as a possibility?” (Watch the video)
Hate to defend him, but the “quote” is misleading & not accurate. Watched most of that segment, and the reading of many of the tweet theories – some were outrageous but some were plausible.”
————————————————————————————————————————
Yes he was reading tweets but he did actually ask the question.
I happen to agree with Julian in Wales (March 20, 2014 at 2:55 am) who says:
“I suppose that if there is a popular rumour that the plane was swallowed up in a black hole it is reasonable for the presenter and experts to stage the question in order to cap the rumour from spreading? That would be a reason for deliberately asking a dumb question…if one were kind.”
However the response was even dumber by Mary Schiavo, a former Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Transportation, who said, “A small black hole would suck in our entire universe….”
I now watch AM local news as my morning comedy show, it is actually funny to see how many dumb remarks are made by the hosts or other people in the news. Just yesterday a story about the cafe at MOSI in Tampa Fl revealed it was shut down for infestations of coach roaches and rat droppings. A spokes person for the cafe told health officials that they were “taking aggressive measurements” to quickly rectify the problem.