Posts tagged News
Ten Years Later by Tony Piro (Calamities of Nature)
Enough is enough. No matter your nationality, religion or beliefs; please contact your local politicians and urge them to remove their troops from this pointless war.
Life is too precious to fight over oil, or to argue over who has the best god.
Let’s focus on what’s important for once.
Young Americans look to Jon Stewart for news | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian
In things that have been true for a decade and therefore should not be news: this headline.
How is any of this news? If I wanted entertainment or celebrity gossip crap, I would subscribe to the LifeandStyle feed.
Guardian, I really expect more from you.
“ For anyone who witnessed or monitored the successive stages of protests and repression in communist Poland, the analogies are glaringly apparent. So are the intensely contradictory emotions they evoke. At one moment, there’s a sense of exhilaration that people are rising up in a highly dignified fashion to claim what should be rightfully theirs. At the next moment, there’s that feeling of near despair as the violent crackdown takes its toll, people are understandably intimidated, and the government is able to continue its charade, insisting that it truly represents the will of the nation. Poles experienced all of this before, but it doesn’t make watching what is happening in Iran any easier.”
“ Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily”
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
(via iamdanw) (via mikehudack
)
This is actually exactly what I want. Tip to partisans: do something interesting.
(via zachrose)
This is already happening with FaceBook (far better than via Twitter, I’d argue).
“ The Onion lampooned previous presidents, of course. No prizes for guessing who inspired the headline “New President Feels Nation’s Pain, Breasts”, or who regaled dinner guests with an impromptu oration on Virgil’s minor works. What sets the Onion apart, however, is that Mr Obama has not blunted its barbs at all. On the contrary, the way more serious journalists fawn over the new president offers an irresistible target.”
Lexington: Read it and weep | The Economist
And that’s why news satire like The Onion and The Daily Show (and my recent obsession, Charlie Brooker’s NewsWipe) are so essential: they are the jesters in the kingdom, masquerading as entertainment when in fact they’re the only ones speaking the truth.
“ Tuning into the news can be like stumbling across episode 908 of the world’s most complicated soap opera; a soap with an immensely labyrinthine plot which has been unfolding for centuries. It’s a backstory I’m not familiar with. Unless you strain to pay attention, or are naturally addicted, it’s easy to fall behind, to lose track of current affairs, and be left with a fuzzy sense of what’s going on; a smudge of images and headlines and buzzy phrases: Carbon Footprint, Credit Crunch, Broken Britain, Quantitative Easing.”
Charlie Brooker on new series Newswipe | Media | The Guardian
The secret is having an internal filter, but even then it can get incredibly overwhelming.
Caped superhero vows to clean up crime in Cincinnati - Telegraph
It makes sense that when the world is in economic turmoil, with a nuclear threat (though from a different region) present again, that life begins to resemble art…
The best part, however, is the following: “Shadow Hare has written on his MySpace blog – all superheroes have a blog – that ‘criminals and corrupt people will run out of places to hide’ now that his group has formed.”
And the second protest of the day involved the NATO conference taking place today and tomorrow in Krakow. The ironically well-organized Anarchist Federation staged this anti-summit, which took over the Market Square momentarily before marching on to the site of the conferences.
The funniest part of all this is the fact that the anarchists marched together with the Socialist Party and the Polish Workers’ Party, proving that they are just as much a political movement as any other - much like the miltant atheists that annoy me nearly as much as the Bible-thumpers.
Big day in Krakow. First, the uniformed services are staging a protest country-wide, as the Polish government is considering raising the minimum years of service required to retire (currently 15) to 25.
The sign says: KRAKOW Today a demonstration - tomorrow evacuation!
