Category: Blog

New CEO at NPR: Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

So the new boss–for now–at NPR is a former financial industry lobbyist who is a regular donor to Republican politicians, with ties to two prominent conservative think tanks. When NPR finds a new boss, he’ll continue to be a member of NPR’s board.

Click to read full article

Web Reading List #1 [9-11-2013]

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

The Last Chance to Stop the NDAA
~
Why the NDAA is Unconstitutional
The NDAA Makes It Harder to Fight Terrorism
~
ACLU’s NDAA page
~
The 1 Percent Have Won 95 Percent Of The Recovery, So Let’s Cut Food Stamps!
~
Low-paid Germans mind rich-poor gap as elections approach
~
This chart shows why $270 billion in housing aid hasn’t solved homelessness
~
THE LUCKY COUNTRY: Index Shows Australians Need To Work Least To Buy A Big Mac

Rare Recording of Controversialist, Journalist and American Literary & Social Critic, H.L. Mencken

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

Mencken

Click anywhere to listen to interview.

Quotes from the interview (don’t read if you want the pleasure of first hearing them from the proverbial horses mouth):

“So called experts are just ordinary men at bottom.”
– H.L. Mencken

“I think beer is a cheap and excellent drink.”
– H.L. Mencken

“The reporter with literary ambitions is one that I always respected.”
– H.L. Mencken

“In my time, a press agent was looked on as a loathsome creature. Nobody paid any attention to him and there was a rule on the [Baltimore] Sun for many years that if a man ever became a press agent he never could come back to the Sun…The thing that distresses me about press agentry [and PR] is a simple one: I have seen so many good men become press agents of one kind or other, and there’s a subtle corruption of their minds that they never get over, they simply can’t recover from that horror they’re engaged in. If they’re a good journalist – some of ’em are, remember the worst men men didn’t become press agents, but often the best – and, oh, they know deep in their hearts that the thing is not a dignified trade and they rationalize their necessities in one way or other, but they don’t rationalize them enough to get rid of them.”
– H.L. Mencken

“I think [television] is a curse to newspapers and I wish it could be separated from them. I am sorry that the Federal Communications Commission did not prohibit ownership of radio stations [or TV stations] by newspapers. I don’t think it’s a good thing, in a public sense, for any one agency to control rival news sources. They ought to be kept separate and in active rivalry. That’s one objection to it. Secondly, human nature being what it is, as soon as a television or any kind of radio enterprise gets into a newspaper, an enormous number of men – including some of the best men – become radio crooners, not newspaper men, actors. They get stage struck in brief, that’s the truth, and it shows in the newspaper instantly. The way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better newspapers. They can always keep miles ahead of these other agencies which haven’t the machinery for doing what newspapers can do. Newspapers ought to print better papers. They’re going downhill and anytime you find a newspaper that’s got a radio department, you’ll find a newspaper deteriorating.”
– H.L. Mencken

“…[A] fine restaurant…is one of the greatest of all human enterprises, one of the most socially useful things. A man that runs a good eating house is a valuable citizen.”
– H.L. Mencken


Click anywhere above to listen to the interview and get more links

Greg Palast exposes Larry Summer’s evil memo

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

GP_LarryS_Memo
Click pic of memo or text above to read story.

ThisIsHell
Click “This is Hell” banner above to listen to #762 Podcast where Greg Palast gives the back story to this memo leak and hear Thomas Frank expound on the general state of affairs brought about by our venal deregulated financial/governmental culture.

NB: Palast and Frank both went to University of Chicago and rubbed elbows with the “masterminds” our “reigning economic doctrine” – essentially neo-liberalism.

The “This is Hell Radio” show is one of the best shows out there. I highly recommend listening every week.

Fascinating: On Civil rights, the march, debates, discussions, historical footage – Multimedia

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

mlk
Click picture above to go to The Guardian’s multimedia presentation

Click here to go to Davey D’s multimedia presentation. Must see discussion panel with Malcom X and civil rights leaders. Fascinating that with hindsight Malcom X ended up being the most wrong and the most right: wrong about racial separation and right about almost everything else, including the racism and hypocrisy of the establishment – and most americans.

yet more news links

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

The Worm Is Turning on School Reform
~
Philly’s Ultimatum: Adequately Fund Our Schools or Face City-Wide Boycott
~
SIM Cards Have Finally Been Hacked, And The Flaw Could Affect Millions Of Phones
~
Monsanto Virtually Gives Up on Growing GMO Crops in Europe
~
Return of long-absent bumblebee near Seattle stirs scientific buzz

Why Life in America Can Literally Drive You Insane

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

It’s not just Big Pharma.

“The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” ( New York Review of Books, 2011),
Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discusses over-diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, pathologizing of normal behaviors, Big Pharma corruption of psychiatry, and the adverse effects of psychiatric medications.

While diagnostic expansionism and Big Pharma certainly deserve a large share of the blame for this epidemic, there is another reason.”

Click on the text to go to article

The Violence of Organized Forgetting by Henry Giroux

~ 21st Century Poet ~ Leave a comment

Forgetting-Giroux

Click the picture above or the excerpt of the article below to read more.

“Since the late1970s, there has been an intensification in the United States, Canada and Europe of neoliberal modes of governance, ideology and policies – a historical period in which the foundations for democratic public spheres have been dismantled. Schools, public radio, the media and other critical cultural apparatuses have been under siege, viewed as dangerous to a market-driven society that considers critical thought, dialogue, and civic engagement a threat to its basic values, ideologies, and structures of power. This was the beginning of an historical era in which the discourse of democracy, public values, and the common good came crashing to the ground. Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States – both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism – announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished. Large social movements fragmented into isolated pockets of resistance mostly organized around a form of identity politics that largely ignored a much-needed conversation about the attack on the social and the broader issues affecting society such as the growing inequality in wealth, power and income.

What is particularly new is the way in which young people have been increasingly denied a significant place in an already weakened social contract and the degree to which they are absent from how many countries now define the future. Youth are no longer the place where society reveals its dreams. Instead, youth are becoming the site of society’s nightmares. Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble.”