Back in the day, an uncle who had become my only local relative, used to invite me to his house with his kids for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. True fact: I’ve never had a TV; these times were my only exposures to television throughout the year.
And the magic box used to transfix me. Continue reading Jennifer Aniston’s charisma
(Originally posted 05/28/12 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 03/26/14.)
Garbage in, garbage out.
There is a certain futility to talking about
people you never talk with.
Here’s a name you’ve never heard of. Continue reading Jackson Beck: Hero and role model
Brandy Felci is homeless by choice.
It could be a lot worse. Some people get barred out of every shelter in town because they refuse to follow any of the rules, or are extremely belligerent.
As to the headline, it doesn’t matter much: On my Yahoo! News feed, it’s changed three times since I first logged on this morning. Someone assigned this reporter to do the mandatory Christmastime piece on homelessness, that’s all.
Related: Who are the homeless?
Related: Housing the homeless ain’t that easy
Related: Choose your name
Related: Names in the news
Atlanta mom charged with murder after allegedly putting 2 young sons in oven
Maryland shooting suspect arrested after killing 3 at his job
Judge denied ex-employer’s request for protection from Edgewood, Md., shooting suspect
How did he get that name?
Baltimore teens charged for allegedly attacking elderly man, driving over him with his own car
Ohio man accused in rape, murder of girlfriend’s 13-month-old daughter captured in Pennsylvania
If you don’t want the child
enough to get married,
you don’t want the child
enough.
Alternative Fact of the Week: Chicago as gun grabber paradise
The William Tell Show faces an uphill battle.
In any marketplace, one can only buy what’s made available for sale. Someone makes decisions about what’s made available for sale. In the marketplace of ideas, if the decision-maker is lacking in wisdom, emotional maturity, or emotional intelligence, then ALL that’s made available for sale is likely to reflect those same deficiencies. And such is the situation in the media today: Americans have few good role models for responsible, adult free speech.
Phrases like “mindless regurgitation” have no place in a serious piece that desires to be taken seriously.
Related: Free Speech Handbook Guideline #5: Avoid pejoratives.
Related: Free Speech Handbook Guideline #6: Avoid sarcasm.
… is a slim volume for $24.99. The description on inside front dust jacket concludes it “may well be the most important book dealing with race to be published in recent decades.” That strikes me as presumptuous. The front matter includes a list of the author’s other titles, from which it appears he seldom writes about anything else.
Yet the portions I browsed remind me of something I want to do on my own show. The preface examines in some detail changes in public opinion polls between 2008 and 2010. I don’t attach the weight to these facts that Cose does. But if, for example, the President’s approval rating rises with one group and falls with another group in the same time frame, I would like to find out from listeners whose opinions changed and why; to examine with listeners how their thinking works, and on what bases their opinions change.
(Originally posted 05/12/12 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reposted 01/22/14.)
09/25/17: The most clear-cut case ever of North Korea’s decades-old practice of (a) accusing the U.S. of some provocation that never happened, as (b) pretext for escalating their own belligerence.
10/11/17: North Korea appears now to have backed down from that stand. They appear merely to have completely misconstrued a Trump tweet. Other reports have indicated they find Trump’s tweets totally baffling and are energetically seeking help to make sense of them.
Which may make them no different from any of the rest of us.
(1) He’s in for, in the words of the Led Zepplin classic, a “whole lotta love.”
(2) The AP seriously misstates the situation, in saying this scandal may have destroyed Hilary’s candidacy. It did no such thing. For the first time ever, I am left to wonder how much such baseless assertions in the media affect our thinking.
Stereotypes have basis in fact.
(Originally posted 2012-07-28 at Trojan Horse Productions. Note that this was after Aurora and prior to Sandy Hook. Reposted 2014-01-11.)
I don’t have the wherewithal to actually buy and read newspapers; at the convenience store, I merely read the headlines. I found this article by doing a news Google on “Crofton massacre” — which fact illustrates the point I’ll make below.
The English word “scandal” comes from the Greek skandalon, which literally means “stumbling block;” as in Matthew 18:6, where in the King James Version it is translated as “offense,” and Matthew 13:57, which would be translated literally, “They stumbled at him.”
We find that scandals make two different kinds of people “stumble” in two different ways.
Continue reading “Scandal:” The meaning of the word
