I’ve lost count of the number of alarming notices I’ve gotten from Go Daddy over the last few months, telling me over and over that Your Domain Name is About to Expire!
Email, snail mail… about all they haven’t done was send somebody around to knock on my door.
Finally, last week, being told yet again that bradwarthen.com would expire on March 13, I double-checked with Gene to see if I actually needed to do anything. After all, in my account at Go Daddy, it said in black and white that I was set to auto-renew.
So I sat tight. Today, I got this via email:
We just want to let you know we’ve automatically renewed the following items according to our agreement…
Which means they’ve taken the $11.62 cents out of my bank account for another year. “According to our agreement,” the one we’ve had all along…
I really don’t see the need for all the unnecessary anxiety each year. Yeah, they want my money earlier if they can get it (I guess). But is it really worth all that trouble?
The Pub Politics episode scheduled for tonight has been canceled due to the show’s camera being broken. Unfortunately, the problem is one that cannot be repaired before airtime.
The show’s producer will be taking the camera to a shop to be fixed so that next week’s Pub Politics can continue as planned.
Phil and Wesley are sorry for the inconvenience, but hope you understand and will be patient for next week’s show.
For those who still wish to come to The Whig and hang out with the Pub Politics crew, we’ll be there for $2.50 pints.
Pub Politics is a weekly political show featuring Phil Bailey, SC Senate Democratic Caucus Director, and Wesley Donehue, SC Senate Republican Caucus Director, talking to various SC legislators and other leaders. For more information, please visit www.pubpoliticslive.com.
Dontcha just love the New Normal? Instead of the imposing MSM with its vast resources for bringing us news and commentary, we increasingly rely on new media, which is very catch-as-catch-can, very bailing-wire-and-broomhandles, so close to the edge of viability, that a single camera breaking down puts you out of action.
Sort of like what happens to my blog when the laptop acts up.
Except that Mal, mercenary that he is, would demand to know how he was going to make money off of it. And we New Media types haven’t figured out how to do that any more than the MSM has figured out the same problem going forward. If we had, we’d have more than one frickin’ camera…
I think I have it straight, now: if you disagree with Brad’s position, you are guilty of being over-emotional. If you agree, you are being rational. Brad, you really need to let this one go. You like to talk about “left and right” and position yourself as someone in a calm, unemotional, rational center, but the truth that you have opinions on various issues just like anybody else. They tend not to divide in a partisanly-predictable way, which indicates that you think for yourself on each issue, and that’s certainly admirable. But we are all human, and every considered opinion by every truly thinking citizen (and you certainly are that, as are almost all the commenters here) is a combination of emotion and reason, at least as that individual sees it. You’re not immune from that combination of factors, and it’s argumentatively lazy to just dismiss someone’s disagreement as saying, in effect, “well you’re just emotional and I’m rational, so the argument’s over.” You were off base on the other thread on jfx’s comment, which was no less a combination of emotion and reason than your own reasons for endorsing our invasion of Iraq. Most conservatives who criticize Obama are NOT nutty “birthers” and practitioners of Obama-Derangement-Syndrome; and most who think Blair was a slick prevaricator on the war can’t be dismissed as purely emotional BDS-ers. (That would be at least half the planet in that case.)
I certainly don’t pretend that my opinions are devoid of an emotional basis: and for the record, going back to Mr. Schiller, my point was not that the right wing or the left wing is more prone to emotionalism or even rhetorical over-the-top-ness; but that anti-intellectualism per se is (at least at this moment in American history) a cudgel wielded in particular by the right. It’s inexact for you to say that Mr. Schiller was equally guilty of “the worst kind of anti-intellectualism”: that would mean he would be doing such things as criticizing Tea Party leaders for “sounding like a professor,” just one of the gibes (meant to be an insult, I guess) directed at our current President. Schiller was guilty of a lot of things, stereotyping and overgeneralization among them, but anti-intellectualism is a very different and very specific thing.
I’ve been running from meeting to meeting today, which is why I hadn’t posted anything until a few minutes ago. But I was here for about 15 minutes right after Phillip posted that, so I wrote a medium-length reply, and just as I was about to save it and run out… Google Chrome shut down. Then Firefox shut down. Then EVERYTHING ELSE I had open shut down, spontaneously. And my laptop started restarted itself, and just as I ran out the door screaming, I saw it was adding insult to injury by running CHKDSK.
When I get back, ol’ Hal calmly informed me that he had taken it upon himself to download the following::
– Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems
– Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems
– Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter
– Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems
I’m betting none of it was necessary. And I don’t see why the blasted machine couldn’t give me heads-up first.
Of course, everyone here at ADCO will tell me that’s what I get for insisting upon being the only person in the office who doesn’t use a Mac. On that subject, and having just mentioned HAL, you might enjoy this Apple ad.
Anyway… if I can remember, here’s what I was going to say to Phillip… But first, I’m going to “Save Draft”…
OK, here goes…
Phillip, your initial observation — “if you disagree with Brad’s position, you are guilty of being over-emotional. If you agree, you are being rational” — is slightly off the mark. That’s not a hard-and-fast law of the universe. It’s more like a useful rule of thumb.
Insert smiley-face emoticon.
But you were dead-on when you said, “you have opinions on various issues just like anybody else. They tend not to divide in a partisanly-predictable way, which indicates that you think for yourself on each issue, and that’s certainly admirable.”
Absolutely! Thank you for getting that! Of COURSE I have opinions! This is an opinion blog!
And thanks particularly for the “admirable” thing.
But to elaborate… as I try over and over to explain here, I am repulsed by the left and the right, Democratic and Republican, as they are currently constituted — because I DO think hard about each issue, which means I don’t accept the pat, off-the-shelf packages that the two predominant ideologies offer.
It’s like cable TV. The thing I’ve always hated about cable TV is that they won’t let me choose, and pay for, only the channels I want. Not because it’s technologically difficult, but because it doesn’t fit the cable companies’, or the networks’ and channels’, business model. They force me to take channels I don’t want in order to get the channels I DO want, because they make more money that way (I think; if that’s not the motivation, someone please explain it to me).
Same deal with the political parties, or the two main competing ideologies. Both Column A and Column B offer some ideas I like. But each of them also offers ideas I utterly reject. There’s no way I can buy either package and be honest with you, or with myself.
The problem is, our shared marketplace of ideas lacks a vocabulary for speaking of the way I think. I try hard to come up with a vocabulary of my own, using ordinary English words, but they so often run up against the problem that certain definitions and delineations are now assumed to be true by everyone, and my ideas don’t connect, even with very smart people. That’s because 24/7 we are bombarded with the political equivalent of Newspeak. If you’ll recall, the way Orwell conceived it, the goal was to reduce language so that it was impossible to express (and therefore, to a great extent, impossible to think of) ideas that were incompatible with IngSoc.
Well, today, the terms that most of us use for expressing political ideas are very limited terms handed to us by the two parties, their attendant interest groups, and increasingly simplistic news media, led by 24/7 TV “news” and the Blogosphere — all of whom find it in their interests to boil everything down to two choices — actually, two SETS of predetermined choices, so that once you pick one, everyone else knows what you think about everything.
I find this appalling. And I continue to resist it. And even though I’m not bad with words, I find it hard, like Winston trying to write half-formed heretical concepts into his diary, just out of sight of the telescreen. Only I’m publishing mine.
But it’s sometimes hard to express. And even when my friends and regular readers UNDERSTAND it, it’s hard for them to describe, because of our lack of that common vocabulary. So when Phillip says I “position yourself as someone in a calm, unemotional, rational center,” I know what he means, and he’s right to say it. But the fact is, I’m not in the center at all, although you’ll occasionally see me acquiesce to being called a “centrist,” just as a convenient shorthand.
But the problem with that term is that it implies that one MUST be on that one-dimensional line between left and right, and that if you ARE neither left nor right, you must be in the “center.” But I’m not. Sometimes I agree more or less with the left, and sometimes with the right. And sometimes neither the left nor the right is far enough out on its own wing to suit me. To paraphrase Billy Ray Valentine, when it comes to the political spectrum, I’m all over that place, baby.
I’m made this point before, such as on this post, and even back in my initial UnParty column. And in a variation on that theme, the Energy Party is all about taking the best ideas from left and right to do all we can to attain energy independence.
OK, I just went on at far greater length than I did on my failed comment earlier — perhaps out of frustration. And as I’ve written every word, I’ve been cognizant that if anyone is patient enough to read it all, he or she is likely to say, That Brad Warthen just thinks his thoughts are so far above everyone else’s that no one else is smart enough to understand him.
But that’s not it. If I were smart enough, I’d be able to explain it better, I suppose. I just get frustrated, because our common vocabulary HAS been reduced by people who have found it to their political advantage to do so, just like Big Brother, so I struggle to express what I truly think. Most people who are as uncomfortable as I am with the either-or paradigm just give up, curse politics, and walk away from it all. I don’t feel like I can do that as a citizen. I have to keep trying, whether I succeed or not. (And whether I get paid a salary to do it or not.) Which is why I’ve written all these millions of words over the years.
I will never ever sell my Tweets. Yes, 3-4 times a day I do an Amazon link, with any income going to help my site.http://on.wsj.com/dRm3FN
OK, so it wasn’t MUCH of a stand, what with the Amazon exception (as Jubal Harshaw said, “”So? Minds me of a wife who was proud of her virtue. Slept with other men only when her husband was away.”) I mean, I’m inferring here — I’m not sure what “Amazon links” he’s referring to.
But at least Mr. Ebert, whose Tweets I follow and enjoy, is drawing a line somewhere — unlike Charlie Sheen.
Personally, though, I’m not inclined to close off any potential sources of income, and not only for my own sake. The most important question hovering over the future of journalism in this country is this: How are we going to get paid to keep doing this? The old business model — letting mass-medium print and broadcast advertising pay for it — has collapsed. The new model has not yet emerged. Sure, there are national blogs and websites making money and employing people, but that’s because of the scale of what they’re doing, and the broad appeal of national politics (and yes, celebrity “news”).
But no one’s figured out how to pay people, going forward, to really cover state and local politics, something that is critically important to keeping the electorate connected to what’s going on in their communities. The MSM have scaled back such coverage dramatically, which makes some of the more marginal, shoestring operations look better by comparison than they once did. But no one has really figured out a model for financing the kinds of newsrooms you have to have to really cover a community every day.
Will paid Tweets be the mechanism for doing that? I doubt it. But until we figure out how to link the demand for such coverage (which is as great as ever) to an effective business model, I’m not inclined to close off potential lines of innovation.
Unless, of course, you can argue a compelling argument for why Twitter, in particular, should be sacrosanct. But to me it’s a Wild West medium thus far, and “Twitter” and “integrity” are two words you seldom see in the same sentence. To me, it’s a laboratory, and journalists are still figuring out how it serves their craft, beyond being a headline alert service. Perhaps one of the ways the tool will be useful is as a way of contributing to the revenue stream. I don’t know. But within the fundamental bounds of journalistic ethics (such as, say, telling the truth), I think there’s room for experimentation.
Not that he said all sorts of disgusting, vicious, antiSemitic things.
No, I’m going to the shocking fact that existed before any of that. The one I discovered when I heard of him for the first time, a couple of days ago, and I went “who’s that?” and I looked to see, and was totally stunned that somebody — a name designer house, in fact — was paying this person to design clothes.
I can’t post any picture to support my shock here, because I can’t seem to find anything in the public domain. So I will refer you to pictures of him elsewhere, courtesy of Google Images. Such as this one. And this one. And this one. And this one.
And now, if you’ve looked at any of those links, you’re wondering the same thing I am — having had a look at his own, personal expression of taste, who would pay him to design anything?
Dior, apparently. But why, I don’t know.
That’s a whole universe that I just do not get… and I don’t think I want to. You want answers to fashion and stuff like that, check with my friend The Shop Tart.
Last week, I saw this interesting piece in the WSJ that I meant to pass on, and I will now, in case there are some of you feeling terribly inadequate (as a species) because “Watson” won on “Jeopardy.”
The headline and subhed state the case well:
Watson Doesn’t Know It Won on ‘Jeopardy!’
IBM invented an ingenious program—not a computer that can think.
But if you read on, you get a better explanation of why one would not say that “Watson” thinks:
Imagine that a person—me, for example—knows no Chinese and is locked in a room with boxes full of Chinese symbols and an instruction book written in English for manipulating the symbols. Unknown to me, the boxes are called “the database” and the instruction book is called “the program.” I am called “the computer.”
People outside the room pass in bunches of Chinese symbols that, unknown to me, are questions. I look up in the instruction book what I am supposed to do and I give back answers in Chinese symbols.
Suppose I get so good at shuffling the symbols and passing out the answers that my answers are indistinguishable from a native Chinese speaker’s. I give every indication of understanding the language despite the fact that I actually don’t understand a word of Chinese.
And if I do not, neither does any digital computer, because no computer, qua computer, has anything I do not have. It has stocks of symbols, rules for manipulating symbols, a system that allows it to rapidly transition from zeros to ones, and the ability to process inputs and outputs. That is it. There is nothing else….
All the same, as in the original Chinese room, the symbols are meaningless to Watson, which understands nothing. The reason it lacks understanding is that, like me in the Chinese room, it has no way to get from symbols to meanings (or from syntax to semantics, in linguistic jargon). The bottom line can be put in the form of a four-word sentence: Symbols are not meanings.
Feel better? Whether you do or not, it’s useful from time to time to stop and think about what computers actually are.
It’s quite a hoot, and I thought that with everyone talking about the “Tiger Mom” book these days, y’all might appreciate having your attention drawn to it with a separate post.
Mind you, by posting this, I’m not just totally making fun of the blonde Mommy character, as it might seem. We started having kids in the mid-70s, and we lived across a tiny side street from a natural food store (“The Pumpkin Seed”) and we were totally into natural. My wife was a member of the La Leche League, so of course our kids were all breast-fed for as long as possible. And yes, we used real diapers, not disposables, for the sake of the Earth. And no soda or anything junky like that. And we ground our own baby food from fresh cooked (but alas, unseasoned) food. I say “we” — but the truth is that my wife did almost all of it. She was at home, I was at the newspaper.
Of course, we relaxed a bit on some things with our later kids, as the older ones will complain — although not on the breast-feeding or the real diapers. By the late 80s, we really stood out on the diaper thing.
But on most other things, we were pretty cool. And the intensity of middle-class parents today toward their kids is scary, which is why I like Lenore Skenazy’s work.
It’s not just scary, though. It can also be funny.
Meant to post this a couple of days ago. Lenore Skenazy had a good piece in The Wall Street Journal in Tuesday’s paper, striking another shrewd blow in her epic battle to beat some sense into the parents of America. This one was headlined, “Parents Are Taking the Fun Out of Toys,” and here’s an excerpt:
Remember when a ball was just a ball? Now it is a tactile stimulating sensory aid that helps develop gross motor skills.
Really. Strolling through the international Toy Fair at the Javits Center in New York City last week was like walking through the brightly painted halls of a children’s hospital—at once cheery and sad. Cheery were the shiny bikes and busy ant farms. Sad was the way the marketers made it sound like they were peddling early intervention in a box.
Take “Baby’s First Construction Marble Raceway Set” from Rollipop—a very cute plastic set of chutes and curves that any marble would be delighted to loop through. It looked ready to delight any kid, too, and better still keep him occupied while Mommy checks her BlackBerry. But according to the box copy, this was no mere diversion. It was an educational show-stopper that “encourages hand-eye coordination,” even while “visually stimulating” the brain and developing “fine motor skills.”…
And so forth. I know exactly whereof she speaks.
The Twins adore the Wonder Pets (and their younger cousin is getting into the show, too), and I save episodes on the DVR for when they’re at our house, and sit and watch with them. This little prologue always gets me:
Wonder Pets encourages preschoolers to make music to express themselves, to explore the diversity of the world around them, and to share and care by supporting social and emotional development.
Are you kidding me? I’m trying to imagine Captain Kangaroo feeling the need to spell out a self-justification like that before an episode of Tom Terrific. No way! (Mr. Green Jeans wouldn’t stand for it, I’m sure.) I mean, set aside the painfully PC therapeutic-jargon lingo (“make music to express themselves,” “explore the diversity of the world,” “share and care,” “social and emotional development”), why is ANY sort of mission statement or whatever necessary before a bit of light diversion for toddlers? Do they feel obliged to go that far to expiate the parents’ guilt (guilt that’s exacerbated, or should be, by the fact that apparently the parents don’t sit with their kids and find out for THEMSELVES what the show is like)?
Are young parents today really that demanding, or insecure, or fretful, or, I don’t know, anal-retentive? Maybe so, but I hate to think it.
This stuff just floors me…
Come on, people! They’re little kids. Just let them play, or enjoy a moment’s entertainment when they take a break from play. Not every moment needs to be like an admissions interview for Harvard. Sheesh…
Over lunch, I got my 1,000th follower on Twitter. Unfortunately, it was @TargetCardz, rather than some regular local person to whom I could offer a Nice Prize. Such as breakfast at the Cap City Club. Or a beer, or two, at Yesterday’s. Or anyplace else where I, personally, like to hang out — allowing that lucky follower a taste of the bradwarthen.com lifestyle, which I know is what all my followers yearn for. (Hey, the bradwarthen.com prize budget is modest, but I’ll stack those up against any other 1,000th-follower prizes in the metropolitan area…)
Well, the first 1,000 wasn’t so hard. Let’s see where it goes from here…
Stan Dubinsky sends out a lot of cool stuff to read via e-mail. You should ask to be on his list — if you’ve got time to read the stuff. I don’t really, but I do tend to glance at the headlines to see if anything draws me in (which, Journalism 101 here, is what headlines are for). And “What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness” definitely did the job.
And the piece was worth reading. An excerpt:
What Happens in Vagueness Stays in Vagueness
The decline and fall of American English, and stuff
I recently watched a television program in which a woman described a baby squirrel that she had found in her yard. “And he was like, you know, ‘Helloooo, what are you looking at?’ and stuff, and I’m like, you know, ‘Can I, like, pick you up?,’ and he goes, like, ‘Brrrp brrrp brrrp,’ and I’m like, you know, ‘Whoa, that is so wow!’ ” She rambled on, speaking in self-quotations, sound effects, and other vocabulary substitutes, punctuating her sentences with facial tics and lateral eye shifts. All the while, however, she never said anything specific about her encounter with the squirrel.
Uh-oh. It was a classic case of Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century. Squirrel Woman sounded like a high school junior, but she appeared to be in her mid-forties, old enough to have been an early carrier of the contagion. She might even have been a college intern in the days when Vagueness emerged from the shadows of slang and mounted an all-out assault on American English.
My acquaintance with Vagueness began in the 1980s, that distant decade when Edward I. Koch was mayor of New York and I was writing his speeches. The mayor’s speechwriting staff was small, and I welcomed the chance to hire an intern. Applications arrived from NYU, Columbia, Pace, and the senior colleges of the City University of New York. I interviewed four or five candidates and was happily surprised. The students were articulate and well informed on civic affairs. Their writing samples were excellent. The young woman whom I selected was easy to train and a pleasure to work with. Everything went so well that I hired interns at every opportunity.
Then came 1985….
Undergraduates… seemed to be shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language, such as air quotes—using fingers as quotation marks to indicate clichés—were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness….
We all note, and many of us decry, what social media have done to (and for; there’s an upside as well) effective and elegant use of language. But I found this piece interesting because it went far beyond that, and identified an insidious enemy not only to communication, but to clear thought as well.
Here, finally (not that I’m complaining, Wesley), is the video from my record-setting appearance as the first five-time guest on “Pub Politics.” This episode was taped in front of a sizable and enthusiastic studio audience (with whom you’ll see us interact a bit, even though, alas, you can’t see them) at The Whig last Wednesday night, Feb. 16, 2011.
The boys of Pub Politics meet up in the basement bar known in Columbia as The Whig for a subterranean night. Political blogger and former journalist Brad Warthen and WACH Fox news director Bryan Cox jump on for segment 2 to the intersection of the Internet and journalism.
Just look who is desperately trying to be relevant and up-to-date… Mary Worth, the lamest, least-excusable “comic strip” in newspaper history.
Did you see her jumping the shark Sunday? I’ve meant to mention it ever since…
Mary Worth, fretting about Twitter. What next?
By the way, I don’t mean to mock ACTUAL older folks who are befuddled by new media. And indeed, younger folks getting lost in a virtual world, at a time when their brains are still forming (teens, early 20s) at the expense of their ability to function in the analog one is a legitimate concern.
But I’ve got a long-standing beef with Mary. As a newspaper editor, I have wanted so many times to replace that nothing-happens strip with something decent, perhaps something actually amusing — only to get turned back by Mary’s loyal fans, drat them.
Oh, but just to show I’m not entirely snide, and can show some human concern for a fictitious character, even one who has occupied space that I have wished for decades was better used…
Is Mary about to fall off that stool and break something? Or is the panel just badly drawn, with distorted perspective?
Well, this is a first for me. You don’t usually see me holding forth on fashion; I leave that to the Shop Tart and other respected experts. But I couldn’t resist making this observation (OK, really, I couldn’t resist writing the Ferris-alluding headline).
A Peek Inside the Closets of Shoppers Who Pay Full Price for Designers’ Latest Runway Looks
After Ana Pettus, a 42-year-old mother who lives in Dallas, watched a gold minidress with a plunging, fringed V-neck go down the runway at the Balmain show in Paris last year, she knew she had to have it.
She bought the piece—she wears it as a tunic instead of a dress—along with three others from the fall 2010 collection at the Paris boutique of the luxury French fashion house. Price tag: €55,150, or about $74,000.
The Balmain pieces now hang in one of Ms. Pettus’s four closets, joining styles from Alexander McQueen and Yves Saint Laurent, as well as a $50,000 voluminous black-and-white gown with a giant picture of Marilyn Monroe on the skirt by Dolce & Gabbana. “I buy what I love,” says Ms. Pettus, who is married to the owner of a construction business. “They are beautiful pieces. They’re not mass-produced. You pay for that.”…
But then, I realized that what it was really saying was, these women actually pay full price to wear these clothes, straight from the designer.
And I thought, “How can anybody waste money like that?”
It puzzles me greatly. Maybe it’s because I’m not the kind of person who would ever become rich in the first place, but I’ve always thought, even if I were a billionaire, I would be reluctant to just waste large amounts of money.
OK, I might be tempted to buy one of those choice little Lexus sports cars, or a vintage Corvette. But I wouldn’t even think about a Maserati or a Lamborghini. I mean, it would just be wasting money, spending far more than any practical use I would get out of the thing could possibly be worth.
And even with the Lexus or the ‘vette, I know I’d feel considerable guilt before, during, and after the sale. Because I would be so conscious of how much more good that money would do, I don’t know, building a Habitat house, or inoculating several thousand kids against a deadly disease, or providing earthquake relief somewhere.
And in that story in the WSJ, well… it’s just a frickin’ DRESS; it’s not like it’s anything cool. It won’t go fast or anything. Spill coffee on it, and it’s ruined. What insanity! And what possible difference could it make that it’s unique? Does it clothe one’s nakedness more than something from Steinmart? No. Are the materials stronger, more stain-resistant, warmer, softer? No! The only difference is a completely meaningless intangible.
As I’ve said before, if I had great wealth, I would buy a newspaper, and run it right (which would be a novelty in that industry), and explore ways to make journalism pay in the 21st century. Maybe that sounds exorbitant, but hey, I think I could pick one up at a pretty good price these days (a small fraction of what I thought it would have cost when I wrote this)…
I continue to occasionally get press releases like this one:
MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT SCOTT M. STRINGER
TO CELEBRATE GEORGE WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY
AT NY’s FACING HISTORY SCHOOL, FEBRUARY 15, at 10 AM
(New York, NY) To mark the Washington’s Birthday holiday, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer will read and discuss George Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, RI of 1790 with students at the Facing History School, 525 West 50th Street, on February 15, 2011 at 10 AM. Washington’s Letter, which promised that the government of the United States will give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” is one of the nation’s clearest expressions of religious freedom and separation of church and state. Stringer is encouraging all schools in Manhattan and the other boroughs of New York City to read and discuss this important document.
Stringer’s visit is part of a multiyear project called “Give Bigotry No Sanction” created jointly by the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom (www.GWIRF.org) and Facing History and Ourselves (www.facinghistory.org), an international organization that delivers classroom strategies, resources and lessons that inspire young people to take responsibility for their world.
Founded by John L. Loeb Jr., the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom supports efforts to educate students about religious liberty and separation of church and state through an exploration of Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, RI of 1790. In this historic letter, Washington promised that in the United States, “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The Institute supports educational programs for scholars, public figures, students and teachers who want to learn about and discuss religious freedom in America.
A former U.S. ambassador to Denmark, John L. Loeb Jr. has long advocated for interreligious understanding. Regarding Borough President Stringer’s visit to the Facing History School, Loeb said, “Even New York, the world’s most diverse and tolerant city, has recently been divided over the issue of freedom of worship. The nation’s first president made it clear that religious liberty was not subject to majority opinion, but is an ‘inherent natural right.’ Every student, every American, should read Washington’s Letter to the Hebrew Congregation.”
Why I get them, I don’t know. Some Mad Men must really be indiscriminate, and send their publicity materials to everybody in the country who have ever worked in, or consumed, news media. Weird.
We are writing with some very exciting news. As you will see if you click on the HuffPost home page, The Huffington Post has been acquired by AOL, instantly creating one of the biggest media companies in the world, with global, national, and local reach — combining original reporting, opinion, video, social engagement and community, and leveraged across every platform, including the web, mobile, and tablets.
Central to all of this will be the kind of fresh, insightful, and influential takes on the issues of the day that you and the rest of our bloggers regularly deliver. Our bloggers have always been a very big part of HuffPost’s identity – and will continue to be a very big part of who we are.
When the Huffington Post launched in May 2005, we had high hopes. But we would have been hard pressed to predict that less than six years later we would be able to announce a deal that now makes it possible for us to execute our vision at light speed.
The HuffPost blog team will continue to operate as it always has. Arianna will become editor-in-chief not only of HuffPost but of the newly formed Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all of AOL’s content sites, including Patch, Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, PopEater, MapQuest, Black Voices, and Moviefone.
Together, our companies will have a combined base of 117 million unique U.S. visitors a month — and 250 million around the world — so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national and global conversation. That’s the only real change you’ll notice — more people reading what you wrote.
Far from changing the Huffington Post’s editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, it will be like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.
Thank you for being such a vital part of the HuffPost family – which has suddenly gotten a whole lot bigger.
All the best,
Arianna, Roy, David, and the HuffPost Blog Team
Forgive me, Arianna, but I’m failing to get excited. That’s like saying your site is being sponsored by Geritol (that’s a Boomer reference, youngsters), or you’ve formed a strategic alliance with “The Lawrence Welk Show” (ditto, kiddies — this was the very essence of grandparents’ entertainment in the ’60s).
AOL? The Aztecs had AOL. Any edgy cred the HuffPost once had, if it had any, has now evaporated.
Folks, help me remember this memo to self: When I sell out, it will be to somebody cool… unless, of course, the money is just offensively ridiculous.
Alas! poor Blackberry. I knew it, Horatio; a device of infinite usefulness, of most excellent fancy; it hath borne me on its back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! ... Where be your emails now? your Tweets? your texts? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the Blogosphere on a roar?
To switch or not to switch, that is the question…
Get thee to a Verizon, go!…
Something is rotten in the state of 3G…
Neither a Twitterer nor a blogger be…
My hour is almost come
When I to sulphrous and tormenting flames
Must render up my PDA…
OK, so none of those work as well as I’d like. But the thing is, my Hamlet-like indecision caused me to miss out on the first wave of iPhones being offered by Verizon, so I will not be one of the cool kids (I’m sure this amazes you). I was thinking about making the move today, but then I see that they’re all gone. There will be more next week, but that’ll be like being the 27th man in space, instead of the first. And now that the first rush of lust for the new gadget has been disappointed… I’m wondering if I should wait a bit longer than that.
Here are the facts, which I’m sure Shakespeare could render more beautifully, but I will stick to plain prose:
I work in an office full of Apple people. All the computers in the office are Macs. For my part, I bring my laptop PC into the office every day, and work from that. Yeah, I get it; Macs are cool. But my fingers do all the PC commands so automatically that I find the Mac functions awkward, laborious.
Some of these people I work with are fanatical about their iPhones (and their iPads, etc., but that’s not what this is about). And over time I’ve seen what their iPhones can do that my Blackberry Curve can’t, and how beautifully they do those things, and I’ve thought that if I could have one, I might want to.
My entire extended family (and I have a large family), except for one of my sons, is on Verizon. Several of us are on the same family plan, which is economical. I just couldn’t see getting an AT&T device. So for the last year or so, I seized upon every rumor that Verizon would get the iPhone.
My Blackberry has been acting up for months — losing the data signal and having to be reset (by turning it off, taking the battery out, putting it back in, and waiting a long time while the hourglass spins before it works again) several times a day. Lately, it’s started turning itself off completely, and refusing to come back on unless I go through the whole reset routine.
I was due for an upgrade as of January. Miracle of miracles, that’s when Verizon and Apple made the announcement that the longed-for day had come.
I figured I could spring for an iPhone at the upgrade price ($199) from my blog account. I would need to, because it would not fit into our new, super-tight, post-England household budget. Besides, Mamanem, who pays the household bills, does not believe anyone needs such a gadget, even though I do. (I’ve tried to explain the critical importance of having constant, excellent connection to my blog readers, Twitter followers and Facebook friends, but she looks at me like I’m babbling in Sanskrit. She thinks of me as being the Dad in the commercial, Tweeting “I’m… sitting… on… the… patio…“)
I started worrying that another barrier could lie in my way: What if the monthly cost of data access was greater than with the Blackberry? No way I’d get that through the family Ways and Means committee.
Last week, I went by Verizon (that is to say, made the trek out to Harbison at the end of a long day) to ask some questions about the upcoming iPhone, asking specifically whether it would cost more per month, and no one knew. All they knew was that I could order one starting Feb. 3. So I left, figuring they’d know more then.
Meanwhile, asking around, I learned to my shock that my friends with AT&T iPhones were only paying $25 a month. This kind of ticked me off, because I was paying $45 a month (part of a family plan account costing well over $200 a month). They had a better device and were paying less for it, which seemed to me outrageous. I began to wonder whether I should secede from the family plan and go with AT&T after all. AT&T had been tempting me with an offer for a TV/internet/landline deal that sounded better than what I had with TimeWarner; maybe I could save even more by adding mobile…
Then someone told my wife that I was probably paying more than the usual because when I got the Blackberry originally, in January 2009, it was on a corporate server (you know, “Corporate Server” is on my list of potential names for my band). This hassle sort of ticked me off at the time, because up until that time I had had a company phone, but now the paper was making people go buy their own phones, and then be reimbursed a set amount that, of course, would not match the full monthly cost of the device. Two months later, I promptly forget that enormous injustice when I learned of another innovative cost-saving measure — I was laid off. No one at Verizon ever told me that I was paying $45 a month because I was initially connected to a corporate server. Nobody at Verizon noticed that I was no longer connected to anything of the kind. So for almost two more years, I paid $15 too much a month.
Last night, it being Feb. 3, I went back to Verizon, hoping for some answers. I was happy to learn that an iPhone would NOT cost any more a month for the data. Then I told the guy that I suspected I was paying too much a month already, and he looked it up, and said yes, I was. So he fixed it, and said from then on I would only have to pay $30 a month for data. I asked him whether I would be reimbursed for all those overpayments. He said no, quite flatly. This was one of those techie sales people who makes you feel like all your questions are stupid and an imposition on his valuable time (every question I asked, he answered with a tone and a look that said, “Are you quite done bothering me?”), so the cold look in his eyes as he let me know what a stupid question the one about reimbursement was was in no way a departure from the rest of our conversation.
He said if I wanted an iPhone, I’d have to order it online, and that the first day they’d have them at the actual store would be Feb. 10, but that if I weren’t in line by about 5 a.m., I probably wouldn’t get one.
I had thought that the new iPhone would work on the new 4G network when that rolled out, but he said no, it wouldn’t.
Then he raised a new problem… he mentioned, in passing, that in moving to an iPhone I’d lose some data — such as old voicemails. Well, I didn’t care about that, but it made me wonder: Would I lose any of my 2,044 contacts I’d accumulated over the years, starting in my Palm Pilot days (and when I say “contacts,” I mean several phone numbers and email addresses each, street addresses, extraneous notes about each person — the crown jewels to me, and quite irreplaceable) or my calendar, and would it still sync with my data on my laptop? (As you may know, I lost access to it all on my computer for several months after a disastrous Outlook crash.) My stuff was all on Google now, connected to my gmail account (which is what [email protected] is), so surely it would work, right? He said he didn’t know. When I insisted upon knowing, he wearily passed the question on to another Verizon employee. She didn’t know either. So I asked the clerk whether he thought I should get a Droid instead, since it is built on Google. He shrugged. I asked him what he would do. He said he had a Droid, and showed it to me. I asked whether he was thinking at all of getting an iPhone instead, and he said, no, not unless they gave him one. Which they wouldn’t.
To me, there is little point to a PDA — Twitter and email and all aside — if the contacts and calendar don’t sync smoothly with something also accessible via laptop. Might as well have an ol’ dumb phone as that.
Lose all my contacts, or even not be able to sync them smoothly? Must give us pause: There’s the respect that makes technological indecision of so long life. I was 99 percent sure that there was no way Steve Jobs would make something that wouldn’t connect smoothly with gmail data. But that wasn’t good enough. Sure, I could go home and order an iPhone online, but I wouldn’t be able to get my questions answered first. Even if I could chat with a person online, to what extent could I trust their assurances? Wouldn’t I need it in writing? And no online salesperson would have time for that — there were millions of others who wanted to buy the thing without asking stupid questions and making demands.
So I began to wonder whether I should do the equivalent of what I do with movies — not rush out and see them in the theater, but wait for Netflix. Patience is, after all, a virtue. Maybe I should even wait until 4G was out, and the rumored iPhone 5, which (maybe) would run on the new 4G network. Maybe, after a few million people actually start using Verizon iPhones, I could find out from some of them whether they sync well with Google. Or I could just go with a Droid. But I’ve looked at both, and like the iPhone SO much better.
I had also learned that a new Blackberry Curve would only cost me $29. So if my old Curve was dying (and it seems to be), maybe I could get one of those now, and wait for more info on how the iPhones actually work. Except that that would use up my upgrade. And without the upgrade, the iPhone would cost more than $700. Which might as well be 7 million. So that’s out.
What to do, what to do? I was too tired to figure it out last night. Today, I had a busy morning of meetings with clients and such. Twice during the morning, I had to reboot my device to check my email or the web. Once, it did that thing where it dies completely, and has to be force-reset. So I’m going to have to do something.
And every time, I am deeply underwhelmed with GM’s lack of enthusiasm for its new product.
You know what it sounds like to me? It sounds like when Nikki Haley tells everyone that her children attend public schools. And then hastens to add that in her Lexington County district, the public school are like private schools. Kind of spoils the affirmation.
What ad wizard decided to say, in effect, “We know you don’t want an electric car any more than we want to make one for you. So rest assured, this is nothing cutting-edge, it’s way more like the sucky cars we’ve made in the past.”
While others out there get the idea that Americans (and the rest of the world; after all, it is a global economy) kind of like something new, something better — take Steve Jobs, who totally gets that people want something better than what they’re used to, something original and even exciting, something that enables them to do things they couldn’t do in the past — GM wants to make sure you don’t think they have any such notions.
The Chevrolet brand name is a major problem. Chevrolet stands out in the mind as a classic American brand. In its heyday, they built big steel cars that looked great and endlessly chugged gasoline. In fact, not even two years ago Chevy was running an awesome billboard campaign to reinforce this perception for a powerful and classically American car. Yet now the consumer is supposed to associate Chevy with a small car that can sip gas ever so slightly and still be great.
I doubt that that will happen, especially with the Volt’s current positioning strategy: “More Car Than Electric.” That positioning hardly screams out “Chevy is a small, fuel-efficient car.” Instead, Chevy is attempting the impossible task of fighting deep-rooted perceptions, specifically that small (and electric) cars are not powerful. For consumers, small and powerful are conflicting qualities in a car. Any consumer making judgments on vehicle horsepower or toughness will make a strong determination without even hearing so much as the sound of an engine. A simple eyeball test will tell them that a Chevy Volt is not “more car” than the significantly larger vehicle it’s parked next to. Trying to convince the American consumers otherwise is an exercise in futility.
I have been waiting for the Volt since it was announced in January 2007. From what I have been able to read through October 2010, all of GM’s buzz about the Volt has been positive. So I was flabbergasted and deeply annoyed that GM should choose the slogan, “It’s more car than electric”, as their lead advertising catch-phrase. What a negative way to advertise GM’s outstanding engineering achievement!
One university student who knows my Volt advocacy — I wear a Volt tee-shirt during the summer — has asked me, “Is GM apologizing for this car?” Another asked, “Why would anyone want to buy it a Volt if GM is ashamed of the engineering that makes this car both unique and ecologically appealing?” I can’t answer them because this phrase is so out of character for the group that made this car and for potential customers like myself who have been cheering on GM since January 2007. Did this phrase arise from a focus group packed with folks who’d rather be driving a Cobalt or a Cruze?
Yeah, I get it that they’re thinking an electric car won’t have the range, or the pickup, that their 2000 Buick Regal with the supercharger (which I mention because, well, I own one) has. But it completely ignores that people likely to buy an electric car are looking for something completely different, something that gets them from point A to point B more efficiently, cheaper and without the harm to the planet and national security. People like that — or at least, like me — don’t even care if that something is a “car.” We actively, ardently want something different.
This approach is made even more ironic, sounds even more tone-deaf, because I hear it during the sponsor breaks on NPR news shows. Like you’ve got to apologize to that audience for making a break with the internal combustion engine. What ARE these people thinking?
(Oh, and why do I, the founder of the Energy Party, drive a 2000 Buick Regal with a supercharger? Because I could afford it, when I suddenly needed a car after my last truck spontaneously combusted one day on I-77. I could NOT afford a Prius, much less a hybrid Camry, which is what I really wanted. Of course, a fully electric car would have been even better. But I’m not likely to be able to afford one of those until someone comes out with a mass-production one and sells a LOT of them, and the technology keeps improving, and the prices drop, so I can pick me up a used one. In the meantime, I take my solace where I can — such as enjoying the sweet way my Regal zips around trucks on the Interstate when I engage the supercharger, which works the way the afterburner on a jet works, by dumping a lot of extra fuel into the burner. Primitive, and wasteful, and foolish, but also exciting — sort of like tossing a water balloon full of gasoline onto a campfire.OOPS, I did it again — another error. It’s corrected below, in the comments…
But GM doesn’t get the likely customer for an electric car. And I wonder whether it ever will.
Personally, I was struck by how nonintrusive security was on my recent flights across the ocean and back. You’d think that on an international flight to and from a country that’s as involved (as target, and as combatant) in the War on Terror as the UK, you’d see security as tough as anywhere (with the possible exception of Israel).
The only sign I saw of really heightened security during the whole trip was when we went to see Downing Street, which is totally barred off and heavily guarded, with at least one submachine gun being wielded up close and personal so that the tourists can’t miss seeing it. But at least we could see something — I couldn’t quite make out the famous door of No. 10, although I could see the famous railings in front of it (which is how I could tell that was it, and not another black door that was at a slightly more advantageous angle for viewing — perhaps the chancellor of the exchequer’s abode; I don’t know).
But, after all the talk about invasive, intrusive new TSA procedures in recent months, what we experienced was not noticeably different from any other trip I’ve taken over the last decade or so. The only hassle I remember at all was the rigmarole of having to reclaim our bags in Atlanta after getting back, and then having to recheck them for the flight to Columbia. That was highly irritating at the end of a day (actually, the worst thing was that it WASN’T yet the end of the day) when we’d already been up for 18 hours, and had just stepped off a 9-hour flight. Without that drill, we might have made our connection in spite of our flight from Heathrow having been delayed. Delta quickly got us onto another one — although our bags didn’t follow us until the next day.
But all that stuff about futuristic x-ray machines and being groped by the TSA? We didn’t encounter any of that. I was ready for it, and all prepared to shrug it off (why people get so worked up about such things I still don’t understand), but then it just … didn’t happen.
Still I can enjoy a joke as well as the next guy. So when a friend who closely follows such issues showed me the above video, I just had to share it with y’all…
Near as I can tell, this video comes courtesy of buckhowdy.com.
The only obviously stepped-up security I saw the whole trip was at the end of Downing Street, where it runs into Whitehall.
One of the miracles of modern information technology is the fact that one can maintain calendar, contacts, e-mail and so forth on one’s PDA, and have it automatically update on one’s computer, and vice-versa. I used to use Outlook for this, but after a major Outlook meltdown from which I never recovered, I switched to Google, which works fairly well for me.
But, as we Catholics well know, miracles tend to be accompanied by mysteries. And one of the mysteries attending this miracle is this: For some reason, my Google calendar takes note of some people’s birthdays, and not others. What I mean is, it does this spontaneously. There are some — families, close co-workers — whose birthdays I’ve entered onto my calendar, with the annual repetition feature. Others just crop up on their own. This has something to do with the interface between Calendar and Facebook on my Blackberry, but why it picks SOME people’s birthdays to take note of and not others, I have no idea. Probably something to do with the way they set their profile settings on Facebook, but as I say, I don’t know. That’s why it’s a mystery.
Another mystery is this: Sometimes these folks’ birthdays appear on my calendar more than once. Why, I don’t know. I finally figured out that when you reload your contact files onto a platform (because of technical problems such as the aforementioned Outlook meltdown), the contacts will sometimes duplicate. And weirdly, it’s only SOME of the contacts. Some of them will only be there once, others will be double, and still others will appear five or six times. Another mystery.
But I take note of this today because a record has been set. When I came back from England and started trying to get my calendar for January in order last week, I couldn’t even SEE the calendar items for this week, because the entire laptop screen was taken up with repeated notifications of Sammy Fretwell‘s birthday. In fact, “Sammy Fretwell’s Birthday” appeared 45 times at the top of my calendar — I counted them as I deleted them (or, all but one of them — wouldn’t want to forget your birthday, Sammy).
Fortunately, I caught this before the reminders started going off on my Blackberry. Previously, when I’ve had multiple notices of someone’s birthday, I’ve had to click “dismiss” on every one of them, one after the other, before I can use the device.
Now, Sammy and I are buds, and I’m happy for him that it’s his big day. But I really didn’t need to be reminded of it 45 times. Why did this happen? It’s a mystery.
Now that I’ve typed this, one more thing to do: I need to go say “Happy Birthday” to Sammy…
A reader this week reminded me of something that I may have known, but had forgotten — that long before he was the funniest deadpan comic actor in America, Leslie Nielsen was … “The Swamp Fox” on TV. She wrote:
I occasionally post on your blog as Abba. Would you consider posting this clip from YouTube showing Leslie Nielsen, who died this week, as South Carolina’s Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in Disney’s series from the early 1960s – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vvQJ7ZDg1Y. Here’s a longer version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGN1pDzYAY&feature=related. Leslie Nielsen never looked so good! This clip has the catchy theme song that I remember so well from my childhood. We used to play the Swamp Fox on the playground at school, and many of the boys in my class had tri-cornered hats with fox tails attached. Hear the song once, and you’ll be humming it all day long! A fitting tribute to Leslie Nielsen from our corner of the world, I think.
I loved that show, which ran from October 23, 1959 (right after my 6th birthday) to January 15, 1961 — hardly more than a year.
Like the far, far more successful “Davy Crockett” series and generally forgotten “Gray Ghost,” these shows inspired me and other very young kids to run out and play at being actual figures from history. (Anyone remember that goofy, overly elaborate way Col. Mosby saluted? I thought it was cool, and used to go around imitating it. Wouldn’t you like to see video of that?)
Actually, to take that a bit farther… to this day, whenever I hear the words “Tory” and “Patriot,” I think of first hearing them used on “The Swamp Fox.” So while my understanding of the term was to grow and expand later, I actually had a minimal working knowledge of what a “Tory” was at the age of 6. If I ran into a 6-year-old who used a term like that today, I’d be shocked. But it was common currency among fans of “The Swamp Fox.”
I can also remember a conversation I had with my uncle about “The Gray Ghost.” I was confused about the whole blue-vs.-gray thing (especially since I was watching it in black-and-white), and I asked him during one show, “Are those the good guys or the bad guys?” My uncle, who was only a kid himself (six years older than I) could have given me a simplistic answer, but instead, he said, “Well, they’re both Americans…” and went on to suggest that a case could be made for both being good guys. That sort of rocked my world. There was no such ambiguity on the Westerns I watched. This was my introduction to the concept that in war, in politics, in life, things can be complicated, that there are many shades of gray. Perhaps the track that set mind on has something to do with why I don’t buy into the whole Democrat-vs.-Republican, left-vs.-right dichotomy that drives our politics. After all, they’re all Americans. And in the wider world, they’re all humans. Even the Nazis. (Of course, this doesn’t keep me from understanding that when humans’ actions go beyond the pale — as with Nazis, or terrorists — they must be opposed, with force if necessary.)
Also, while at first I didn’t think I remembered the “Swamp Fox” theme song, as I listened to it repeated over and over on that clip above, I had a dim memory of being struck by the odd syntax of that second line, “no one knows where the Swamp Fox at” — I didn’t know WHY it sounded odd (I was just learning to read, and hadn’t gotten to grammar yet), it just did.
In other words, these shows — which presented very simplistic, often inaccurate glimpses of history — not only helped feed a lifelong interest in history, but helped foster the ability to think.
So… TV doesn’t actually have to be junk, although it’s often hard to remember that these days.
