Saturday, December 17, 2011

Newspeak illustrated

I have an AT&T Internet service, which gives me a YAHOO! portal to retrieve my sbcglobal e-mails.  (My, that's a interesting road, but not today.)

At any rate, YAHOO! has some of the lamest news stories.  Like the Top 10 cities for (fill in the blank).  You click on the story and it teases you to no end before it finally allows you to look at the Top 10 one at a time.  I've learned not to click on such stories.

Well, YAHOO! has a feature called Shine.  And the latest Shine story was about how the rumor that the incandescent light bulb is going away is FALSE.  (How green of YAHOO! to post a story like that.  The Gen Xers will love it.)  The intent is to calm our fears.  The government is not changing anything, they say.  Sort of.  Like FactCheck or MediaMatters or AttackWatch, they got it wrong.

As the story unfolds I get confused.  Actually, the 100W light bulb really is going away.  They've got a 72W that costs more but seems brighter.  And they don't even say anything about the CFL that most people will buy to replace the 100W incandescent that really isn't going away according to the story because you're supposed to buy the more expensive, new and improved 72W, because the government is forcing the 100W off the market.

Link here:
http://shine.yahoo.com/green/truth-light-bulb-law-200200491.html

Now, I don't think YAHOO! got the message yet that Congress pulled the enforcement funding from the New Years Day law, so the new law is DOA for now.

But this last minute courage isn't anything but election year fluff.  Companies that sell bulbs have been making plans for this change for months.  I really doubt they'll go all out to retool for the old 100W bulb just for a few months.

Ya gotta love Congress.  ...and YAHOO! for trying to spin the liberal agenda into gold.

PS- This super-secret new technology is called...Valdemort...I mean halogen.  But if the reporter had journalistic integrity she would have owned up to the fact that the manufacture of incandescent 100W bulbs was outlawed by Congress and you will need to buy 72W halogen bulbs (some of which look like the old incandescent) in the future.  But that would make it sound like government is telling us what to do with our lives.

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