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.

Austin Plane Into IRS Building A Fake?

I'd like to make a prediction based on today's tragic news story about Joseph Andrew Stack, a software engineer who updated his blog, torched his house, then took off in his Piper Cherokee PA-28 single-engine airplane (aircraft registration N2889D) and flew the plane directly into an IRS office building to express his rage at the machine.

Prediction: he was not in the airplane. It's a fake, a ruse to allow him to run away and try to establish a new identity. (Life imitates art: see the movie Hopscotch.) Stack is a software engineer, and even puddlejumpers are driven by GPS and autopilots these days.

I expect that savvy Federal Agents will lure him out of hiding by sending a voucher for a free Google Android phone to his residence; all he has to do is go to the Austin Texas Radio Shack to claim it, wink wink. No software engineer could resist that.

If I'm right, and in ten days they find this technomage living under an assumed name in a flop hotel (with WiFi) living in the cash economy, I want my Fake News Predictor value increased to +20.
If I'm wrong, and in ten days they announce DNA identification of the charred remains, I reserve the option to allude to a obfuscating conspiracy involving President Obama's Kenyan wetnurse, who was once in a relationship with Vince Foster. This Birther/Truther crossover niche demands an inquiry, and the American people deserve no less.