Celebrities and politicians have always shared a symbiotic relationship with journalists. Actors and actresses need people to write about their movies and other projects to gain publicity, which prompts people to see them, which is how they make their money. Journalists need stories to write to appease the people who read their publications and want to know every little sordid detail about their favorite celebrities. It’s even worse with politicians. They need the media to further their agendas and gain votes. Meanwhile, the public is always waiting for at least one shoe to drop in the form of affairs, illegitimate children, or some other scandals in the papers, magazines, and on the Web. But now it seems that politicians and celebrities have found a way to either justify the things they really want to say, or to shirk responsibility when they say something they shouldn’t have—they blame the journalist. Full story »
In the “you’ve got to be kidding department,” Savannah, Georgia area Girl Scouts and brownies can no longer sell their cookies in front of the Juliette Gordon Low Home. Low was the founder of the Girl Scouts of America.
Why? Because under a Savannah ordinance, the cookie sale is considered street peddling, a violation. The ordinance reads: “Sec. 4-1001. To be used for public purpose only. No person shall use the streets, sidewalks, lanes or squares of the city for private purposes of any sort. They shall be used only as public ways and for the public purposes for which they are intended.”
I took my family to the aquarium in Mystic last week, because it was Presidents’ Day. I’m lying. I took them because I like the aquarium. True, the price of admission is steep, the fish all look small and terrified, and the over-priced food isn’t very good, but we enjoy the beluga whales, and I can‘t look at penguins without cracking up. A penguin is Nature’s stand-up comic. But at the end of the day, I had to balance the joy of penguins by facing the horror of the gift shop.
“Dad? Can I have this stuffed shark?” Joey asked.
“No,” I said. “How much does it cost?”
“Only $44.95,” he said.
“Oh. Then I’ll change my answer. From no to Hell No.” Full story »
When physicists realized most of the universe was missing, they suddenly knew they had a major problem on their hands—the biggest problem imaginable, actually.
Problem was, they hardly even know how to imagine it.
They started looking, using a series of ultra-sensitive experiments. One of them included a set of data-gathering devices buried deep beneath the bedrock of northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. The devices fed their data into a computer system, and teams of scientists around the world gathered together to look at the results simultaneously.
“The time had come to look inside the box,” writes author Richard Panek.
The data revealed two dots. But those dots didn’t represent periods punctuating the conclusion of their scientific search. Indeed, each dot more accurately resembled the dot at the bottom of a question mark: Why can we only account for about four percent of the universe? Why can’t we find the rest of it? Full story »
The Mathematics of Sin
the time I did not turn the other cheek
the time I fought an unjust war against
a herd of vampire bats in suits and ties
the time I said, “The Devil is an ass”
the time I lied like the Egyptian midwives lied
the time I stole to study poetry
the rainy night I rested in your arms Full story »
The original thought in writing this piece was to “resurrect” Reith, better to point to the problems that beset the BBC today – problems that are not just about politics but more importantly about philosophical purpose and the walking away from some fundamental ideas laid down by Reith and his BBC which went far beyond the traditional concept of educating, informing and entertaining, important though these remain. In a sense, though, Reith needs no resurrection since given the lingering presence and dominance of his great creation, the BBC, he never went away. He also remains present through his own writings, the biographies, Andrew Boyles’ Only The Wind Will Listen, (9) Ian McIntyre’s The Expense of Glory (10) and Roger Milner’s curious but amusing and insightful Reith: the BBC Years. (11) Full story »
For America, especially American companies, The People’s Republic of China is like a wild west for the modern day: a vast, untamed opportunity for companies and all Americans with an ideological missionary impulse or anyone who salivates at the largest single-state market in the world. That’s why Google represents such an interesting fulcrum in the battle of the hearts and minds of the People’s Republic: Google is both an economic success story and an ideological entity with its motto: “Don’t be evil.” Indeed, “that’s why China hits the American mind so hard. It is a country whose scale dwarfs the United States. With 1.3 billion people, it has four times America’s population. For more than a hundred years, American missionaries and businessmen dreamed of the possibilities—one billion souls to save, two billion armpits to deodorize” (Zakaria 87). Full story »
The heart of the fight in Wisconsin is the threat to public employees’ right to unions and collective bargaining. Newly elected GOP governor Scott Walker’s proposal to limit collective bargaining rights for public employees has generated a firestorm of protest. For now the governor is holding firm, saying the state can’t afford the benefits and retirement packages negotiated by the unions for its members.
Other newly elected GOP governors and state houses elsewhere, including Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana and Iowa, are considering similar measures.
The issue resonates particularly in Michigan where thousands of UAW and white collar automotive workers lost wages and benefits over the past few years as two of the former Big Three toppled into bankruptcy. Big Three retirees lost some of their health care and other benefits secured previously by labor contracts. Full story »
Editor’s Note: S&R is broadening its reach and mission so as to present our readers with more in the way of thoughtful cultural fare. Today we launch part one in a series by University of Colorado Media and Cultural Studies scholar Dr. Michael Tracey. This essay presents a critical reconsideration of the BBC’s John Reith, one of the most important figures in the history of broadcasting. While much of the story Dr. Tracey addresses is uniquely British, it nonetheless raises issues about the proper and productive role of media and capitalism in a society, issues that can’t help being uncomfortably familiar to contemporary Americans. As it turns out, the kinds of conversations that intelligent people have daily about our media gone to hell have been taking place for quite some time.
Preface
It is not difficult to find arguments about the problems facing public service broadcasting in the digital age, of how, over the past two decades, an institution which had previously been relatively stable has been buffeted by new technologies, new politics and new economics which taken together present an existential threat. Full story »
Some time back I mentioned that a group of us dirty hippie libruls have started a sports talk blog (because we love sports as much as we hate your freedom). Now, the same cast of ne’er-do-wells has launched an actual political site called, simply enough, Dirty Hippies (democracy, unwashed). Several of us here at S&R are members, and the site will feature a variety of fare from some of the finest thinkers, writers, agitators and wiseasses in all of Blogistan.
Posted on February 23, 2011 by Russ Wellen under Freedom [ Comments: 3 ]
Note: An earlier version of this post mistakenly attributed Roland Watson’s quotes to David Tharckabaw. Apologies to all concerned.
At Dictator Watch, Roland Watson asks, “Why Are There No Protests in Burma?”
Thus far Burma’s military dictatorship has been immune to the uprisings to which the world has been witness to — or engaged in — elsewhere. Perhaps that’s because Burma comes in a close second to North Korea as the most merciless administration in the world. You think Bahrain and Libya have been barbaric in their responses to protests? One shudders to think how North Korea (where, actually, an opposition movement is unimaginable) and Burma’s ruling junta would react. Watson, though, sees a ray of hope. Full story »
So, who got the better of the deal? We’ll know for sure in two or three years, but that’s no reason not to pontificate a bit now. There are all kinds of opinions, as you’d imagine. Many people think New York gave up way too much, especially since they believe that the Knicks could have waited and signed him as a free agent this summer. There are problems with this view, though – mainly, waiting could have cost Anthony $40-50 million, depending on the new collective bargaining agreement. Full story »
If you care about music at all, you’ve probably got a few tunes that are agony to listen to. Tunes that you just can’t listen to, or that are so compelling that you can’t change the channel or hit “skip” no matter how much your brain screams. Tunes that remind you of times in your life you suffered more deeply than you thought possible. TunesDay today is an homage, if such a word is appropriate, to some of the music from such periods in my life. I hope that some of you are willing to share with the us some of your music, too.
I love, and hate, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. The first time I saw it, it was with my sister, and it was a profound moment of awakening for me. I didn’t get it all, of course, I was only in junior high, but I got that Pink was a seriously screwed up dude right off the bat. And based on my first watching, I concluded that The Wall was one movie that everyone should see at least once, an opinion I still hold. I also went out, bought the album on cassette, and proceeded to listen to it so much that the cassette stretched and distorted the music. Full story »
When the Huffington Post was sold to AOL for a small fortune (very small, speaking in Mark Zuckerberg terms) typical of the comments heard was that it had been “built on the backs of bloggers” who went unpaid for their efforts. According to the infamous phrase that co-founder Ken Lerer once deigned to impart to the barbarians at the portal of the metablog, paying contributors is “not our financial model.”
In fact, Huffington Post’s administrators wouldn’t even make an exception for Mayhill Fowler. You remember Ms. Fowler — she broke the campaign-trail story about candidate Barack Obama speaking about Pennsylvanians to wealthy patrons at a fund raiser. To refresh your memory, he said, “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Full story »
So on Saturday I wandered over to Imperial College, because the student science fiction association was putting on its annual fest, Picocon, complete with invited writers. And I really wanted to hear Paul Mcauley, of whom I am a fan. I don’t know how many Americans have hung out at Imperial, but it’s the functional equivalent of hanging out at MIT or Cal Tech. Now imagine the kids there who read lots of science fiction, and you’ve got the idea. The day went well, except for, well, the other writers, of whom there were two. Each give a little talk for an hour, and Mcauley’s was the most interesting–writing a novel backwards. He described how he came to write his two most recent novels–The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun (both highly recommended). What he did was start out looking at all those great pictures of Saturn’s moons that were being sent back from the Cassini Solstice Mission. So Mcauley started wondering how could people live on these moons? Full story »
On January 24, Mark Boslough of the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories wrote an op-ed in the Santa Fe New Mexican in which he criticized the Heartland Institute and Harrison Schmitt, a former astronaut and retired geologist turned climate disruption denier. In response, the Heartland Institute ran several posts on their blog and submitted an op-ed to the New Mexican from the Institute’s president.
The blog posts and the op-ed each contain multiple errors and misrepresentations that are in character for an organization that has a thoroughly documented history of manipulating facts and misrepresenting science to serve their ideology. Full story »
by Caroline Ruddy
Editor’s Note: S&R is broadening its reach and mission so as to present our readers with more in the way of thoughtful cultural fare. Today we launch part one in a series by University of Colorado Media and Cultural Studies scholar Dr. Michael Tracey. This essay presents a critical reconsideration of the BBC’s John Reith, one of the most important figures in the history of broadcasting. While much of the story Dr. Tracey addresses is uniquely British, it nonetheless raises issues about the proper and productive role of media and capitalism in a society, issues that can’t help being uncomfortably familiar to contemporary Americans. As it turns out, the kinds of conversations that intelligent people have daily about our media gone to hell have been taking place for quite some time.
If you care about music at all, you’ve probably got a few tunes that are agony to listen to. Tunes that you just can’t listen to, or that are so compelling that you can’t change the channel or hit “skip” no matter how much your brain screams. Tunes that remind you of times in your life you suffered more deeply than you thought possible. TunesDay today is an homage, if such a word is appropriate, to some of the music from such periods in my life. I hope that some of you are willing to share with the us some of your music, too.
So on Saturday I wandered over to Imperial College, because the student science fiction association was putting on its annual fest, 
On January 24, Mark Boslough of the