07.18.12

Chronicles of Annoying Pests

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:46 am by George Smith

The Atlantic magazine has a racket with the Google news team. The mag fills up its blogs with the most intelligence-insulting drivel it can push onto the web at network speed. And Google, taking some cash money bribe, immediately posts the material as “featured” material, guaranteeing views.

In this way we are given the short idiot ramble of one Nicola Twilley, someone who writes for the publication, featured in a magazine sponsored video musing that someday we might be able to end hunger by eating twigs. This as part of a special series called “The Future of X”.

No kidding.

“We Could Use Bacteria to Feed the Starving” read the title on Google. And it was reasonably interesting, as a teaser.

But when you went to it, this is what you got — some callow young girl without a science education or even much indication she really was interested in knowing anything about such, saying:

[We] could spray out bacteria in a dust … We could expand what we’re able to digest — maybe we’re inhaling bacteria that help us digest foods that are not currently digestible … Rather than growing more food to feed more people, maybe what we say is, ‘you know what? We can actually chew on a twig instead.

It’s the equivalent of spam blogging by and for The Atlantic.

If you search Twilley’s blog or her writings you will find nothing to show the vaguest interest in basic science. Which is what one needs a bit of to not come off as a smiling ninny going on about eating twigs.

This is what makes The Atlantic so mercilessly bad. Its editors defiantly and rather proudly publish the musings of the most senseless and therefore fit for the job on such subjects. As with its relentless pummeling of the Higgs Boson story.

This would not be so bad if it were just some run of the mill blog or delivered as some random nerd’s home video series on YouTube.

But no-o-o-o-o, that’s not the casel. The magazine, in conjunction with the giant of search, shoves this material daily onto the featured spaces of Google’s news tab. It is the worst kind of whoring for eyeballs. Indeed, if Google actually applied its own “guidelines for content developers” for not peddling SEO-tricked up trash to itself and The Atlantic, much of the latter’s blogs would be marginalized off the web.

As for a future of eating twigs after being seeded with unique microbial flora by city municipal services, one would no more spend time arguing down Twilley than one would have a dialogue with a can of paint.

Nicola Twilley, what made you think human beings are just like, uh, ruminants or termites? Not a trick question. Mother Nature took a long time to make them that way.

The “eat twigs” thing at the Atlantic.
A Google editors’ pick.

“Got paper?” asks Nicola Twilley.

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