Fake News As An Under-Appreciated Art Form

I've begun to contemplate an under-appreciated art form, and as hipsters and collectors will assure you, the time to get in on an under-appreciated art form is NOW RIGHT NOW before the market gets too hot and you can't get anywhere near it, believe me, and then you want to UNLOAD just before it goes mainstream and becomes widely accepted.

Let's talk about fake news as an art form. Pittsburgh recently went into a tizzy over a faux FOP press release; it seems to have accomplished exactly what its creators desired. The Onion is all about fake news. Also, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Fox News have all done well for themselves with fake news.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a doozy of a fake news story by Holman Jenkins, purporting to be from the year 2061, when litigation regarding the Japanese nuclear power plan problems is still continuing. The title: What GE Was Thinking in 2011.

I urge you to read it for yourself. Key moments include:

• Recovery Strategy: Sell Nuclear Business to Comcast.
• Japanese bloggers call GE's 1960 reactor design the "third nuclear attack on Japan"
• Nobody at GE needs to be reminded that there is no natural private market for nuclear reactors. All our customers are governments.
• a disturbing new correlation: Whenever President Obama endorses an energy option, disaster promptly ensues. His ringing support of expanded offshore drilling came just weeks before the BP oil spill. The Japanese reactor mess followed not long after he lauded nuclear energy as a weapon to fight global warming.

Timing is everything.