I remember reading up on the technologies referenced in the story about Connell's death, last year, and feeling at the time, given what I had, that there wasn't much there there. Now I want to read more and see what I missed. (It's also entirely possible that I'm thinking of something else.)
The additional dimension to the pirate story is interesting. Of course it makes sense that a country without a functioning navy and with high levels of corruption would be susceptible to outside powers wanting to dump illegal waste in its waters, but I hadn't realized there was ever an informal attempt to create a homegrown "coast guard."
I find myself nitpicking the list. First of all, a lot of these aren't censored, or maybe they were but the list includes no evidence of it. Censorship is when the government or some comparable authority forbids publishing something, not when someone decides not to because it would be bad for business. It sucks when that happens, and sometimes censorship contributes to that or fear of bad business is just a pretext and the real reason is more sinister, but not necessarily. "18. Ecuador's Constitutional Rights of Nature", for example. Did the government ask some media outlet, or some corporate conglomerate ask a subsidiary, not to publish this, or ordered it, or threatened some retaliation for doing so? Or was it just not taken seriously by any media outlet (any major, American media outlet) because they thought that readers wouldn't take it seriously?
"1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street"
"6. Lobbyists Buy Congress"
"14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts"
No shit, sherlock. Really? Maybe these are underreported because of a top-down, protect-our-own policy in corporate media, but then again maybe they are underreported because they're the ultimate "dog bites man" stories.
"16. US Repression of Haiti Continues"
"Continues". As in, "has been ongoing and still is". Thus, where's the news?
Rationally, I realize that my initial impulse to muddy these waters is probably just a way of coping with how depressing a lot of that stuff is. "5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products", for example. It's not a flawless article either, but the point is that American countries can no longer sell thousands of products in Europe because the EU has higher safety standards than us, so American markets get the lead-laced lipstick and stuff, our trade deficit gets even bigger, and apparently EU policymakers are more resistant to lobbyist pressure than ours. Super.
"Censorship is when the government or some comparable authority forbids publishing something, not when someone decides not to because it would be bad for business."
No, both are censorship.
I love underreported stories that shed light on how something actually works, usually with names and details. Since so few people are willing to pay for news, these will likely be few and far between from here on out. On the other hand, The Onion is now a ubiquitous free weekly in big cities in the US.
this was interesting for Afghani opium. There was a shootout between people in charge of two vanfuls of illegal immigrants and feds at the Tijuana border crossing last week. It made the news because it generated a traffic jam, not because smuggling unskilled workers into the US pays enough to attract violent criminals.
Did the "Pentagon is paying retired military news analysts" story ever get reported on for a single moment on the nightly news? Last time I heard, the answer was no.
Similarly, kudos to whoever pointed out that while the Post's ombudsman is complaining that the paper was slow to respond to the ACORN pimp story, they had run not a single mention of former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton's legal troubles.
But yeah, neither one of these is censorship per se. Just a sign that journalism is broken. (Come back, Emerson! You won! I admit it!)
5: Perhaps the solution to the Afghanistan issue is widespread adoption of methadone clinics in the importer countries. Actually, scratch "perhaps." Not that it'd be done, as it is doubly bad, bad for the Military Industrial Complex and bad for the moralizing drug warriors.
re: 7
Methadone is pretty widely used in some places, it hasn't solved the drug problem, and there are quite a lot of problems with methadone as a primary treatment method.
So I'd be pretty sceptical about that one.
a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/node/98080">You guys did not warn me:
WASHINGTON--An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.
"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing western civilization's fall into the depths of depravity. "If our calculations are correct, this complete erosion of all that is enlightened and unique will reach absolute rock bottom on the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2009."[...]
Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.[...]
According to the panel, the final event will occur at 3:32 p.m., when a tourist, believing the impressive structure to be a giant mall, will enter Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and, not finding what he is looking for, ask where "the damn Radio Shack is supposed to be." The man, dressed in Crocs and sweatpants and determined by researchers to be the final catalyst in humanity's epic downfall, will then loudly expel gas.max
yeah, 3A is one of those libertarian "its true because...HEY LOOK STALINMAOCARTER!!!"
or because of confusing the first amendment for the total universe of censorship/noncensorchip
agree with teh rest pf that post
Why does The Onion hate sweatpants?
The Onion is now a ubiquitous free weekly in big cities in the US.
I wish.
Why does The Onion hate sweatpants?
And crocs! Why, many of the physical therapists (actually, the assistants) at the place I used to haunt wore them! They must have been good.
Well, they hate Twitter as well. Yep, Radio Shack, Twitter, crocs and sweatpants.
max
['They didn't include those beer bong hats.']
I have great affection for Radio Shack. I have never, not once, gone in there and not had an extremely well-informed nice geek answer my exact question, and supply me with the right product. And they hardly ever try to up-sell you.
I think The Onion should have picked an equally ubiquitous but more maligned chain store.
IME Radio Shack is quite frequently maligned. I've only had neutral to positive experiences there, personally, but you work with the cultural tropes you've got.
Radio Shack saved my laptop from rabbit-chewed power cord low batteried doom. By which I mean a rabbit chewed on the power cord, I continued to use it for months despite the visible wires, the cord finally stopped working, and then I went to a Radio Shack around the corner and got a new cord that works fine. It's been keeping the rabbits away too.
Rabbits will chew anything. My seventh grade yearbook is ruined because my rabbit, Hobbit (he dug himself a hole, just like a hobbit, don't you see?) chewed through the binding. Can't trust them at all.
The most recent Macworld featured a barely noticed feature called diHop, which kills all rabbits within twenty feet of your power cord. What I'm piling on with is: shoulda bought a Mac, eb.
Uh, they featured a feature. Feetcher feetcher feetcher feetcher. Blah.
I just saw recently a summer internship listing that looked interesting, but required people with Mac experience.
I'm happy with my laptop so far. The 13" widish screen macs look nice, but still too small and still more expensive than what I got. My old 13" laptop in not widescreen and has a vertical height that's actually taller than this 15" laptop.
in s/b is
Also, my Radio Shack power cord theoretically works with dozens of PCs if you use the right extension - it came with over ten different types of plugs for the laptop side of the connection - but no macs.
I'm quite sure you could fake the Mac experience, eb.
I'm probably have to go over to Macs eventually (or just use both). A lot of the digital library/archive stuff seems to be more mac-based, I guess for ease of processing pictures and video.
I think I'd have troubles faking specific software, though, like Final Cut and whatever else. I can get around on "normal" software on Macs, but not so much the specialty stuff. I'm sure I could learn it quickly, but that's not usually a great line to put on your resume.
I'm very good at selling myself to employers, you see.
I do see! I have the same problem.
(But then, when I imagine how an imaginary interview would go, I'm really good at selling myself as an excellent colleague who enjoys committee work and teaching - but terrible at selling myself as a researcher. Must gain confidence.)
teo, I sent you an email, just as a warning, re: the unfogged Facebook group. Under my real name.
23-4: I cut my teeth on Macs doing work on publications, as everyone seemed to be using InDesign on Macs. Certainly, UCanadia must have some sort of journal or whatever you could help with, if you want free Mac experience at a minimal commitment.
28: I might try that. There are all sorts of restrictions on where I can work, especially for the first six months as they want to make sure you don't drop out right away, but there are some more possibilities with volunteering. Although I'm not allowed to volunteer for any duty that normally falls into the paid category.
I might have been able to learn basic Final Cut stuff a couple of years ago, had I pushed for it, but I was normally on a PC in that office and doing non-video things. But they could have used the help since there weren't that many video-trained people there. They were training more of them just around the time I left.
Oh, there was an original topic. I think Cyrus is mostly right about the word censored not quite getting at what's going on with these stories - though I lean towards a more expanded definition of "censored" - but there are certainly a lot of stories on the list that should be more heavily reported.
The Trilateral Commission article is a bit overheated.
Maybe I should actually click through on some of the headlines.
|| Video shot from a dorm, around 11 PM |>
"People just want to know, what is the white culture?"
Beck is apparently going to get the key to some city in Washington state this weekend.
35: Oh, yeah. I've got friends out at G20 even as we speak, mostly doing media. I don't have much of a feel for how the whole thing has been even with a lot of twitters and so on. It's weird, it makes you realize how difficult it is to understand a large, formless event like the G20 protests even with fancy technology. (In part I base this on my experience seeing both the tweets/video and the actual events of the RNC)
This is what I feel is inexcusable: the violence and arrests have actually been stepped up from the unpermitted march. I feel that at these events (which I've seen a lot of recently--they're different from say the early nineties protests) there is this pattern where the cops get increasingly pissed off/eager for action/vengeful and seek out the last people at a demo or the last small demo or even (like this) a bit of a random collation of people and administer the beat-down. What I've seen over and over again is that if you're the last at a big event you are in danger even if you weren't doing anything illegal. The cops follow the last people and herd them and often enough beat them. Because I'm quick and lucky and was trying to get a couple of people out I managed to sneak away from a group being herded by the cops at RNC, but it was a very, very near thing. And we were actually obeying a disperse order.
I'm surprised that so many people around Pittsburgh seem sympathetic to the people protesting. It really puts my experience at RNC in context--I feel like we got beaten and jailed illegally (horribly, with incredible physical abuse in a couple of cases) and people didn't care or they supported the police.
Also, G20 puts the RNC in context a bit more for me--that there have only been under 200 arrests and no one appears to have been seriously hurt or beaten by cops while in jail and that there have been almost no preemptive arrests like there were here--it really shows me how incredibly fucked up RNC was.
And how stupid G20 is. No one who actually represents anything even remotely like what I think gets to speak at G20.
It's interesting to me that the attendees seem concerned enough with legitimacy that they haven't all moved to ocean liners or Kuwait or somewhere where there could be no protests.
35 again: James, if you happen to know those folks tell them thanks--it's a huge deal (at least to me and I think to others) to have video out there from just folks who see something--partly because you just don't get the same results from filming in the middle of the event and partly because it really helps get everybody on the "and riot police beating people is generally bad and violent and horrible whether you agree with the people getting beaten or not" page.