I Like The News

I like to watch or read the news - articles about things that are happening or have happened. I get very frustrated with the news channels when they spend too much of their time pontificating and imagining what might happen instead of telling us waht's going on in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and just down the street from me. I think they miss a big opportunity to do their jobs better.

Then this from Mother Jones Blog...

[Professor Philip Tetlock of the University of California, Berkeley] studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view.

Did You Know - The Surge Is Failing

Sigh. Something so many of us have known for so long. I guess the confirmation is at least a little comforting.

A bipartisan majority of foreign policy experts surveyed say the U.S. troop surge in Iraq is failing, Foreign Policy magazine said Monday.

The magazine said two-thirds of the more than 100 foreign policy experts called for a troop withdrawal in 18 months. Twenty-five identified themselves as conservative, 39 as moderate and 44 as liberal. The surge was the additional deployment of about 20,000 U.S. soldiers, mainly concentrated in the Baghdad area, to launch offensives against insurgents.Of the experts surveyed, 53 percent said the surge is having a negative impact, up 22 percentage points in the past six months. Ninety-two percent believe the war is having “a negative impact on U.S. national security."

From UPI