The President of the United States
on the Sony hacking
in his Dec. 19 press conference:
"But let’s talk of the specifics of what we now know.
The FBI announced today and we can confirm that
North Korea engaged in this attack. I think it says
something interesting about North Korea that they
decided to have the state mount an all-out assault
on a movie studio because of a satirical movie…."
This post was suggested in part by the contemptibly
misleading remarks of Carl Sagan in his "Cosmos"
TV series (see yesterday's Colorful Tale) and by the
following remarks in a Presentation Zen piece dated
March 11, 2014, "More Storytelling Lessons from 'Cosmos',"
praising Sagan's vulgarizations —
"Good storytelling causes the audience to ask questions
as your narrative progresses. As the storyteller you can
ask questions directly, but often a more interesting approach
is to present the material in a way that triggers the audience
to come up with the questions themselves. And yet we must
not be afraid to leave some (many?) questions unanswered.
When we think of a story we may think of clear conclusions
and neat, clear endings, but reality can be quite a bit more
complicated than that."