Media
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A fawning portrayal
I read this article about Fidel Castro in the Toronto Star. I honestly don’t know how it could be more sycophantic.
He lives to learn and to put his knowledge in the service of the revolution. For Fidel, revolution is really a work of reason. In his view, revolution, when rigorously adopted, cannot fail to lead humanity towards ever greater justice, towards an ever more perfect social order.
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His intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found. He is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything.Combined with a Herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes Fidel the giant that he is.
Those who bite the hand that feeds them will lick the boot that kicks them. 47 years of tyranny can be washed away instantly. HT: Tom Palmer.
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Annoyances from the New York Times
This time it’s about “Men who never marry“. It was more patronizing than usual.
Choice Quotes
She speaks from experience. She married her high school boyfriend right after graduation, a 2-week-old baby in arms. But her husband, who never graduated, was unemployed for most of their marriage, and the couple broke up after six years.
Determined to find a man who had better prospects, Ms. Rudolph entered a relationship with a basketball player and had three children with him. It ended when she learned he was married to someone else, a revelation that left her badly shaken.
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Joe Callender, 47, a retired New York City corrections officer and a father of four, has had long-term relationships with two women but has never married. One obstacle, he admits, has been his own infidelity.
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Mr. Cunningham, 41, a sanitation worker, seems to defy any theory about why he is single. He has, he said, simply not met the right woman.
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He is a tall, athletic man with cropped, George Clooney-style hair who projects a kind and upbeat persona; surely a catch to some women in Fort Collins.
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When he walks in the front door after a weekend trip or a run or a bike ride, he often puts a commemorative baseball cap on his coat rack, and now, about three dozen hats cover the rack, with no apparent space for a purse or a diaper bag.It’s an interesting read. They start from the position that marriage is some inevitability that one must exert great effort to avoid (it’s not). They also don’t take into consideration the happy loner theory, nor active misanthropy. They all but call women genetically programmed golddiggers.
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Things that have vanished from the media
- Bush’s approval ratings – these used to be big news, now they’re nowhere to be seen. If they had improved the usual retinue of hacks would have been vocal about that.
- Japan – there’s very little news this country
- Massacre at Beslan/Chechnya in general – it’s just disappeared, no post-mortem investigation, no obvious revenge attacks by the Russians, nada
- Conflict in Kashmir
- Outsourcing to India
- Former VP candidate John Edwards
- Genetically modified foods
- The South Central LA farm where Daryl Hannah was arrested
- UPDATE: Also, Bird Flu
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Saturday rapid fire
- Make a timeline of your life – it could be cool, but too revealing
- Time Maps
- Top 10 Signs You’re Made to be an Entrepreneur 6.
You spend more time and energy looking for easier, faster, cheaper, more effective ways of accomplishing something than if you just did the task outright.
- Prosopagnosia – The inability to recognize faces. Or the way of the Steve.
- A good wrap up of the Goldstein – Frisch battle by Wendy McElroy. I still find it odd that Fox News employs a Canadian anarchist as a columnist, but she does seem popular there.
- The Agitator’s Fox column about Swat Teams and no-knock warrants. It would seem that the best way to fix the problem is to assign liability to Judges who sign errant warrants, though I don’t think anyone has suggested that yet.
- A very good post on why the current world situation is NOT World War III.
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Random thoughts
It’s time for the MySpace fad to be replaced by something else.
Real college professors get fooled by fake reality show. I’ve seen one episode of the show and it doesn’t seem that good.
Another Video Blog. I like them better than podcasts.
The most vapid article on CNN.com in quite a while is Tattoo nation — the U.S. is getting inked.
The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that’s almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.
“Really, nowadays, the people who don’t have them are becoming the unique ones,” said Chris Keaton, a tattoo artist and president of the Baltimore Tattoo Museum.
They quote contradictory surveys; then assure us that 24% is close to 25%. Later they have the stats on the survey, which is
The telephone survey on tattoos included 253 women and 247 men and was conducted in 2004. It has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.
Which seems to make it a weak basis for drawing strong conclusions.
The photos from last night will be up soon.
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A couple of classics
News anchor slips up, in a very funny way. And surprisingly, this page of Emo Phillips quotes.
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Quick Round Up
- A cheaper hybrid in the works
- Media format by political affiliation
- Dave Chappelle is quite brazen to be offended that Comedy Central might show some of his unfinished shows. And I would imagine that Chappelle Theory.com is a total crock.
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Conspiracy thoughts
If I were partial to the intentional fallacy, I would think this:
- Dick Cheney does his interview with the MSM/Fox the same day that more Abu Ghraib photos come out. The photos don’t actually add anything to the case mind you, but they are more fuel on the fire. The Cheney story seems to have trumped the photo story.
- The whole cartoon controversy is ginned up by the establishment regimes in the middle east as a way to shut out Western influence. By making a mountain out of a molehill via artful use of rent-a-mobs they can freak out the West by seeming totally crazy by Western standards and only a little crazy by Middle Eastern standards. This puts pressure on economic and cultural ties between the two regions, and will do a lot to pressure European governments to limit immigration from the Muslim countries. This keeps Western thought out and lets the weird combination of monarchies and theocracies in power.
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Quick round up
- An excellent article on Muslim immigrants in Sweden. Maybe we didn’t win the cold war. Combine cultural separation with the welfare state and you get some ghastly results. It would be interesting for someone to do an article comparing American Muslims with Europe’s. Everything I’ve seen states rather convincingly that American Muslims are slightly better on all of the social metrics (income, higher education, etc) than native born Americans, whereas Europe’s trend very poorly.
- Senator Reid (D-Nevada) linked to Abramoff. We all knew that was coming I suppose. What is it going to take for term limits to make their come back? Maybe after more gains by the Republicans in November (my current prediction). If not, nothing will.
- I am reflexively against anyone who declares that politician x is “playing the —– card”.
- Quote of the moment – Mickey Kaus with “McCain is to pundit shows what lesbians are to Howard Stern.”
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Pathetic
Apparently CNN expects us to take them seriously when they run a headline of
“Give me an O! U! C! H! — Cheerleading injuries on the rise“. The preceding sentence is on their main page, not the article page.A cost of story would be the greatest thing for news possible. Not perfect sure, but an improvement.