English Majors

James Hudnall blogs about The Fear Factor in a most telling post.  Read and be edified.

What really captured my imagination is his quote of John Stossel's:

Newsrooms are full of English majors [emphasis mine] who acknowledge that they are not good at math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming “crisis” and the coming of bird flu.

Bird flu was called the No. 1 threat to the world. But bird flu has killed no one in America, while regular flu—the boring kind—kills tens of thousands. New York City internist Marc Siegel says that after the media hype, his patients didn’t want to hear that.
“I say, ‘You need a flu shot.’ You know the regular flu is killing 36,000 per year. They say, ‘Don’t talk to me about regular flu. What about bird flu?’”

Let's face facts, the American Media is comprised of journalists and others who were mostly average students in school.  Under a stultifying, stupid American educational system as it is now, "average" is nothing to boast about.  It's a wonder they can type out an article without the help of Microsoft Word's grammar and spell check features.

That these very same people would have an opinion related to the Hard Sciences is beyond me.  Yet, without batting an eyelid, we are force-fed journalistic opinions about ... insert present fear and crisis here (it just happens that Global Warming is the flavor of the month).

Stossel has an example:

What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.

Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Without the requisite tutelage in the specific Mathematical and Scientific areas, much less Economics and Statistics, even I, with my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering, would be hard-pressed to proffer an opinion on Global Warming, yet these genius-fools run where Angels fear to tread.  God save us from English Majors.

It just proves that Great Lie: one is most certainly NOT entitled to one's opinion.