View from the North 40: OK … but what aren't they saying?

My bar for evaluating news content is pretty old-school: Is it factual, truthful and unbiased? Sometimes, though, I desire more of this than is provided in article, not in the sense that “Oh, that has inspired me to know more on the topic,” but rather wanting to know “What in the heckfire aren’t they telling us, here?”

WSAZ News Channel 3 out of Huntington, West Virginia, reported Tuesday that police in Anchorage, Alaska, responded to a call from a concerned citizen in the city’s Fairview neighborhood about a pig standing on the side of the road. The pig “looked cold.” The responding officer discovered at the scene that the pig was friendly so he loaded it into the back seat of his patrol car, found the owner and delivered the pig, whose given name is Elvis Pigsly, back home.

A photo, originally posted on the Anchorage Police Facebook page, of the pig in the patrol car is included in the article.

It’s a cute story and all, but it begs a lot of questions like, how did the officer get the pig loaded in the car? Did the pig leave a mess in the vehicle or is it potty trained? How far from home had that Elvis Pigsly roamed? Did he live in a straw house, a wood house, a brick house or an igloo? Was he actually cold or just faking it to get a ride all the way home?

And on the backside of that story: Why was this Alaska story hot news in West Virginia? WSAZ had their article online an hour-and-a-half after the info hit Facebook. Are Huntington and Anchorage sister cities? Does WSAZ troll for police news? Or does it troll for swine-related news?

And that’s just the start of my questions. In the interest of time, though, we have to move on to the next news byte.

The Associated Press published an article Feb. 1 about a U.S. company that has raised $225 million to fund its “ambitious plan” to bring back the dodo bird and the woolly mammoth — as well as to develop new tools to “tweak several parts of the genome simultaneously” and to develop what is essentially an artificial womb.

This inspires so many questions that I don’t have space to even get started on them, except maybe this one: Did they not see “Jurassic Park — The Lost World,” where Jeff Goldblum’s character says about bringing back extinct dinosaurs: “Oh, yeah, ‘Oooh. Ahhh.’ That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming,” huh?

I do need to point out that the article includes comments from detractors who said that the extinct animals may be brought back to life, but they’re most likely destined for a life of captivity only, and the money might be better spent preserving species currently living.

Ben Lamm, a co-founder and CEO of the company, Colossal, told AP that bringing back the dodo isn’t expected to directly make money. “But the genetic tools and equipment that the company develops to try to do it may have other uses, including for human health care, he said.”

That seems all reasonable — until you get to the part of the article that says investors in the company include “In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm which invests in technology.”

Now I’m all, the CIA is involved? Thee CIA? What the shirting heckfire? When did the CIA get a venture capital firm? And why does “The Company” need DNA genome mapping and artificial womb technologies? Or a dodo bird, for that matter.

I got a million more questions, believe me. No answers, though, so to get beyond the angst I’ll point out that the only positive takeaway here is this: If one of the government’s top covert entities is still seeking the ability to basically produce clones, then we can be assured that the current president is likely the real deal and not some cheap knockoff whose stutter came from a glitch in the programming.

To help calm your inner being further, I’ll leave you with this comforting news from Spain: The Spanish high court in Madrid ruled in favor of a man who was protesting his fines for walking naked through the streets of Aldaia, the town in which he lives.

Reuter’s Feb. 3 article says 29-year-old Alejandro Colomar, who has been walking around Aldaia nude since 2020, told the court in his appeal that he has been unfairly fined for exercising his right to ideological freedom.

“The fine makes no sense,” he told USAToday, which also reported that public nudity has been legal in Spain since 1988. “They accused me of obscene exhibitionism. According to the dictionary, this indicates sexual intent and has nothing to do with what I was doing.”

The court ruled that Colomar “had limited himself to staying or walking around naked in two different streets of Aldaia at different times” and his behavior did not imply “an alteration in the security, tranquility or public order of citizens.”

Photos accompanying both articles show Colomar enjoying the great outdoors with only a pair of hiking boots on.

So unless this guy is hiding a nasty case of toe fungus in those boots, everything is out in the open, and I got no further questions here today.

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I’d say this column is a wrap, but I don’t want to infringe on Colomar’s right to keep himself aired out at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .