Politics
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Tuesday
We’re covered. Zoom in to satellitemap.space. The vast majority of low Earth orbit satellites (all the white dots above) are Starlink’s. Play around with the tabs. This, more than raw power, is what gives authoritarians their authority. Dana Blankenhorn has a good post on Authority. With respect to my own thoughts on the topic, there’s what’s said in… Continue reading
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Monday
Just some facts. No interpretations. This blog post got nine reads by the end of the day. This photo got about the same. The photo above has had 22,122 views, 421 faves, and 21 comments. And lots more views every day. It may also be the best photo I’ve ever taken from the window of… Continue reading
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Findings
Here's how to save what's left. Newsweek: CVS is closing 277 stores. Wipe House. Nieman Lab: No more transcripts of Trump remarks on the White House website (and the old ones are gone, too). In case you weren't wondering. Jeffrey Epstein really did kill himself. For the reading list. Olaf Stapleton: Last And First Men. It's… Continue reading
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Whether Weather
NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is the alpha US source for weather forecasting, ocean science, climate research, and much more. So, as a weather geek, it concerns me when Wired says Dismantling NOAA Threatens the World’s Ability to Monitor Carbon Dioxide Levels: The agency maintains the global backbone of measurements of CO2 and… Continue reading
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Motherings
Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One: Aaaand,,,, Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here. I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning… Continue reading
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Future Tabs
Stay Calm and Check it out. Pure libertarians are neither right nor left, nor where the extremes of both meet. Mostly they come from a sensibility outside both redstream and mainstream: one that PJ O'Roarke put perfectly in Parliament of Whores: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer,… Continue reading
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Grifting away
According to Joseph Cox at 404, the U.S. government registered the domains thetrilliondollardinner.gov, dinnerforamerica.gov, and thetrillion.gov. All of these (correct me if I’m wrong) are about enriching the U.S. president, his family, and favored friends through a memecoin scheme by which anyone (say, Putin) can buy influence. There is nothing conservative about this. Nothing republican.… Continue reading
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It’s Over
The Voice of America is silent. To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundreds of millions, listening in forty-eight… Continue reading
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Gag of America
Here is what a Google News search for Voice of America looks like right now: ‘Bloody Saturday’ at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks, by David Folkenflik at NPR, begins with this: Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to be told they had been locked out:… Continue reading
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The Blame Game
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Seventh on the #LAfires Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop their paywalls. Coverage by the best of them ranges from… Continue reading
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The Redstream Media
To identify the microphones in that river, here’s Apple: That river began with the copious red pissings of Rush Limbaugh. Now eight Rushians comprise most of the News Commentary flow on Apple Podcasts, and much of the whole podcast watershed as well. (None are so skilled as Rush, but that’s another story.) It’s not much different… Continue reading
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Now What?
It used to be When. But that was yesterday: election day in the U.S. In California, where I voted (by mail), it’s still 10:30 PM., and the Blue folk are especially blue, because the whole thing is over. Trump hasn’t won yet, but he will. I correctly predicted a Trump win in 2016, a loss… Continue reading
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Assassinations Work
On April 4, 1968, when I learned with the rest of the world that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, I immediately thought that the civil rights movement, which King had led, had just been set back by fifty years. I was wrong about that. It ended right then (check that last link). Almost… Continue reading
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We’re in the epilogue now
The show is over. Biden won. Trump lost. Sure, there is more to be said, details to argue. But the main story—Biden vs. Trump, the 2020 Presidential Election, is over. So is the Trump presidency, now in the lame duck stage. We’re in the epilogue now. There are many stories within and behind the story,… Continue reading
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On Moral Politics
I spent 17 minutes while exercising the other day, thinking out loud about what @GeorgeLakoff says in his 1996 book Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, (also in his expanded 2016 edition, re-subtitled How Liberals and Conservatives Think). I also tweeted about the book this morning here. In it I explain what pretty much nobody else is… Continue reading
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Going #Faceless
Facial recognition by machines is out of control. Meaning our control. As individuals, and as a society. Thanks to ubiquitous surveillance systems, including the ones in our own phones, we can no longer assume we are anonymous in public places or private in private ones. This became especially clear a few weeks ago when Kashmir Hill (@kashhill)… Continue reading
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The Deeper Issue
Journalism’s biggest problem (as I’ve said before) is what it’s best at: telling stories. That’s what Thomas B. Edsall (of Columbia and The New York Times) does in Trump’s Digital Advantage Is Freaking Out Democratic Strategists, published in today’s New York Times. He tells a story. Or, in the favored parlance of our time, a narrative, about what… Continue reading
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The Great Trivializer
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a fine documentary, maybe even a classic. (A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast, is a work that “can only be re-read.” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*) The movie’s… Continue reading
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Where Journalism Fails
“What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story. Or, in the parlance of the moment, The Narrative. (Trend. More about that below.) I was just 22 when I wrote my first stories as a journalist, reporting… Continue reading