memfree @ memfree @beehaw.org

Posts

100

Comments

314

Joined

2 yr. ago

Thank you the delicate handling of the grim truth. We understand that he may die much sooner, but the part he worries about is the possibility of lingering so long that his wife is left with a pile of bills and no remaining funds. Whether home or in care, he will absolutely have oxygen.

Thank you for this :-)

https://stanrogers.net/the-music/song-archive/the-mary-ellen-carter/

https://piped.video/watch?v=fT-aEcPgkuA&t=01m16s

Inspirational, but it also makes me cry

This confuses me a bit because I have a fading half-memory of some story from ages ago -- maybe a Nature episode? -- about how striping the cork from trees was highly stressful and the trees were going to be endangered if we didn't stop using so much cork. There was some hope that if consumers would accept screw-top wine bottles, perhaps the cork forests could recover, but as long as there was a strong market price for cork (which was more expensive than screw tops, but marked a wine as better quality), people would keep stripping trees.

I have no idea where I heard all that, but it was so long ago that I've surely confused the details. Regardless, I wonder what happened between then and now.

Replying to myself: the last time the news mattered in my daily life was this week when I considered flying to Fairbanks, Alaska and discovered that prices are significantly higher than a year ago. I suspect the hike relates to the grounding of planes as seen from that video of the door plug failure and the FAAs subsequent grounding of that type of plane (and possibly a second type now, but last I heard that was not yet a hard grounding, but only inspection). This gives me a general idea that perhaps prices will drop when the planes are back in service and I'm better off waiting until then.

This op/ed is heavy with claims and light on proof. Is it anything more than an advert for the author's book? It seems reactionary for no reason.

A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash (if he survived). But that is all irrelevant. What's relevant? The structural stability of the bridge.

Yes. Humans are fragile and we need to make sure they are not in danger before we then -- later -- investigate the engineering components. Is there news out there that does not worry about the stability of bridges after such events? The same goes for earthquakes, floods, and the like. First we worry about survivability, and later we look at what engineering worked and which failed.

I also see no need for news to be consumed as unquestionable gospel. The state of U.S. politics has led me to believe that yes, in fact, there are people who DO take it that way, but I know enough people who question beyond the sound bites to think that the author here is overstating the idea that consuming news reduces critical thinking. I do, however, suspect that it is harder to concentrate on heavily linked article than ones that save references for the end.

Anyone try to click the link to the study on how 'links are bad' -- the link is BAD. I got a 404 (perhaps it is a regional issue?). By cutting out the chunk, 'magazine/', I got a working link: https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-nicholas-carr/

Agreed!

They seem great for winter but maybe too hot for summer. I imagine it'd be great if you were passing down the house and furnishings in the family, but moving such a massive construction to new digs would be a pain.

I didn''t realize eels were in short supply. When I get sushi, unagi nigiri is one of my favorites, but first comes anything with masago/tobiko style fish eggs (both are tiny eggs). I'd happily trade lab-grown eel for wild. I'd be even happier to eat lab-grown eggs, but I suspect there's more of a trick to that.

How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today.

There has in recent years been an impressive growth of nonprofit media outlets, led nationally by ProPublica and laying down roots everywhere, from the aforementioned Baltimore, where the Baltimore Banner has sometimes been scooping the Sun, to my home state of West Virginia, where Pulitzer Prize–winner Ken Ward’s Mountain State Spotlight is doing terrific reporting. These outlets are welcome indeed. They do sharp and necessary reporting. But they’re nonprofits, which, under IRS rules, cannot be partisan. They have to be apolitical.

I think one of the hard issues about making left-wing spin-machines is that a large chunk of the left would reject them. Following the old adage, "Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line," I fear that you can get the right to follow any ridiculous story because they are unified in wanting their 'side' to win, but a good number of Democrats would become disenchanted by fake news and may even become turncoats if asked to believe muckraking spin as Truth. Surely there's a good number of low-interest left-leaners who would be happy to believe and follow half-truths and lies, but I doubt Democrats would get the same consensus of accepting such as good politics the way Republicans do.

FYI, the bot only summarized the first of three pages.

I give books away, so I'm out.

The "set up" is that students were NOT calling for genocide, and she was answering in regards to what was actually said (which, again, was not a call for genocide). She was saying that in the context of a peace rally, wanting Palestinians to be free is a call for equality and not the same as a call to eliminate all Jewish people -- though if you said the same thing while firing rockets from Gaza, it would be a call to violence (but then it would not be in English). And they were all completely incompetent and making that distinction for the cameras.

But isn't public speaking part of leading a University?

Yes, you are right, they were set up, but they should have been repeating over and over that much, if not all, of the speech was free from violent content with NO actual calls to kill or harm anyone. They should have made it clear that chanting "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" at a peace rally may well be a call for equal citizenship (particularly when said by Euro/American types rallying against a distant aggression) despite sounding like a dog whistle to others.

They completely failed at that.

I missed the beginning of that hearing, but caught a fair chunk of it before turning it off as awful grandstanding by some of my least-liked politicians. I noticed the news only carried the worst bits, but honestly, I didn't really hear any 'best' bits that were overlooked. I hope they had some better moments at the beginning, but while I was watching? No. As a group the University heads were just falling into traps or getting a brief reprieve without them recovering or clarifying anything.

As well as hosting the ball drop for something like 20 years, Anderson Cooper has covered war, famine, and devastation -- but the thing he can't handle is showing the viewers' back home a camera shot of cat's butt.

Per reuters, the 5 unaccounted for coast guard crew have been reported as dead: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/fire-breaks-out-plane-runway-japans-tokyo-haneda-airport-nhk-2024-01-02/

This is AMAZING!

For anyone wondering about the last line of the bot's summary, the byline for the story had two authors, one of whom died in June of 2023, but probably had written the bulk of the obit in advance (which is a common thing to do for aging notables). Reporter Alex Traub contributed the rest of the obit (probably dates and details).

I just don’t agree with your conclusions.

My conclusion was and is, "we should expect fair.org to be more credible than to make up such misleading click-bait headlines."

I'm saddened that you don't agree.

?? You are making stuff up and expect us to just go along with your misinterpretation??

You say, "it’s not Republican men who are refusing to date liberal women."

The WaPo piece says, "A 2021 survey of college students found that 71 percent of Democrats would not date someone with opposing views."

Notice it does NOT say men or women. It says "Democrats".

MY complaint is that FAIR misleads the reader into thinking WaPo said what you are saying. Honest reporting would explain how culture and language may lead the WaPo reader to infer women must change if they seek to marry while also explaining that it is never so stated. Dishonest reporting would argue that the WaPo piece absolutely says conservative men should become Democrats or that women should accept misogyny -- but WaPo never said either of those things. Instead it called out for people to open their minds and try to consider how another PoV might see things:

Unfortunately, Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate and reason across these divides. Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation. They are working, living and socializing with people who think the same things they do. Particularly on college campuses, a culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment. They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments. But people’s insight and understanding about the world often come from considering alternative perspectives that may at first seem odd or offensive.

And what do I see in this thread? People who refuse to consider alternate perspectives.