Quotes from Alex Pareene

'Flash mobs' are reported on extensively because they're novel and can be used to stoke fears of young people and the Internet. The media, of course, have absolutely no clue what they're reporting on.

Donald Trump, an oft-bankrupt make-believe mogul clown with a television show where he pretends to fire America's saddest former celebrities, is one of the Republican Party's most prominent national figures because he is on TV and people have heard of him.

Only a small rich fringe hates Social Security for disincentivizing 80-year-olds from seeking full-time employment.

Political journalists, socially inept or no, are not nerds. Most of them can't do math, a fact that campaigns and politicians regularly exploit.

Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads.

American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business.

Obviously no one wants to give members of Congress a lot of money, because they barely do anything, and many of them are terrible, but a Congress that is made up of rich-but-not-super-rich people is going to be more corruptible than a Congress of really rich people.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to market to millennials.

Cory Booker became a millionaire because this is how the economy works for people of his class: Rich people give other rich people money to do nothing, simply because they 'deserve' it.

I love insults, devastating takedowns, things that could be described by Twitter hacks as 'shots fired,' and funny ad hominem attacks.

Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.

Medicare is expensive because we spend a lot on healthcare. We spend a lot on healthcare basically just because we want to, and doing so has been very good to a lot of people who work in healthcare fields.

If some modern-day David Brock wanted to defect from the conservative movement and write a tell-all focused solely on the financial chicanery of the entire right-wing nonprofit/think tank/publishing sphere, I would read the absolute heck out of it.

The State of the Union is less written than it is designed, structured and organized around applause prompts and camera cues.

'Simplifying' the tax code is a priority mainly for people who make enough money to want to avoid paying taxes, and who make their money by means unorthodox enough to make avoiding taxes possible and desirable.

Is there something psychologically wrong with David Gregory? No, besides the usual superhuman vanity of a television professional. He is just not a great host of a news talk show!

Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.

Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

Most politicians are vain. Many of them are stupid.

CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.

Ideally, in the future, you'll just pay your cable company for the stream, which you'll be able to watch and manipulate through whatever means on whatever devices you like.

Programs aimed strictly at the poorest Americans are always and forever under assault from a Republican Party that still has not dared to cut spending on programs - like Medicare and crop insurance - that also benefit the rich.

In our system of government, an opposition party doesn't have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up.

In case you're unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet for free.