Infuriating.

It is without question infuriating to watch mainstream news media mislead and in general misreport, skew and bungle facts and deceive the entire population at large. In an AP story, as reprinted on Yahoo.com, the reporter claimed over 100,000 people were involved in a march against the current administration. Yet, the headline they chose to use said "tens of thousands protest." Deliberately misleading, when the facts in the story state over 100,000. Tens of thousands is 50 or 70. 100,000 is...well, obviously the AP can't do the math, so I'll give them a hand. It's over 100,000. It's more than 10,000. By an entire decimal place. A factor of 10, if you will.

Aside from that deliberate mislead, the facts are wrong. How do I know this? I struggled for 3 hours to walk 10 freaking blocks! That's how crowded seventh avenue was. If you line up people body to body across the breadth of seventh avenue and then stretch them the length of seventh avenue, you get more than 100,000 people. Especially when you stretch that over the course of 20 blocks.

I was also very impressed with the near Beirut style barricade technique that the NYPD employed as the street approached MSG. It was quite claustrophobia inducing, and felt very much like a blind trap of sorts, winnowing the parade/march into a thinner and thinner street, as if to pen in any possible protest. Or escalate the opportunity for violence. I wasn't sure which. I was glad to have been represented...oh, I'm sorry -- MISREPRESENTED -- by the thoroughly incompetent and highly specious mainstream media that reports on the event. Still, it was worth going. I dont' think a convention has ever been protested with that kind of volume.

I also must say that the reports I hear from the critical mass (which I very nearly attended and would probably be scratching this missive out from a sludge covered jail cell, had I done that) are disturbing at the minimum. It sounds as if the police (as they did when critical mass was at it's most influential in SF several years ago) DELIBERATELY set out to create conflict and foment violence. Nice. I guess they learned that a good offense is the best defense. That ought to be the Republican's motto. It seems to fit all too perfectly in everything they do. They are, without question, patently offensive.