Advisory Bullshit

It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk … Continue reading

Voting Critically

It is getting harder every day to discuss politics, simply because the electorate is too polarized. I believe that to be on purpose, a ruse to keep people from talking about the things that matter. Politicians want this situation to be commonplace, in order that we stay disgusted with the process and don’t look at it too closely, or begin … Continue reading

Let the Games Begin

It is the day past Thanksgiving and Christmas is now fair game. We will see photos and film at eleven documenting people lined up at the doors of big box stores to begin this years shopping wars. You will see them in the middle of the night in the freezing cold at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Macys, and every other store … Continue reading

Fantasy Is Killing Us

There are many things that I do not understand, but I really don’t understand the current overwhelming attraction to make-believe. We are deeply involved in a war in which we have no business. Our President is even more deeply involved in stripping the Bill of Rights away from our Constitution. The opposition party, such as they are, seems unwilling or … Continue reading

The Writers Strike

It seems that, because of the screenwriters strike, everyone is asking what people will do without television. Given the state of television, I have been doing without it for a long time. Were the screenwriters never to return, I would not notice. If I had given any thought to most television screenwriters before the strike, my thoughts would not have … Continue reading

Underpinnings of the New Media

Just like the hardware has to improve in order to bring us the types of service we expect of the Internet in the New Media age, the software upon which it runs will need to evolve. Linux has been one of the better evolutionary steps so far, in the critical area of Web servers, just as open-source and freely distributed … Continue reading

The Reality of New Media

Writing on consecutive days about getting information from the new media and the Ron Paul campaign, a curmudgeon cannot help but reflect on how those things go together. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the (I think) questionable polling techniques of the Paul campaign, you have to admit that their grip on the Web as an instrument of … Continue reading

On The Transition of News Sources

I have been having an email conversation with a friend that owns a small string of rural Kansas newspapers. As a part of that conversation, I have come to realize even more fully that the news sources of the masses are currently in the phase that economists call “transitional.” That just means that the economists do not yet understand what … Continue reading

Sucking Up To A Search Engine

While Stumbling new pages during the last couple of days, I have run across several sites bemoaning the recent Google page-rank downgrading of a number of previously highly-rated sites . I even read one in which a blogger had decided to give up on Google entirely. There is much wringing of hands, rending of clothing, and self-loathing, with confusion and … Continue reading