-
Music to wage a cold war by
John Halle sets former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan’s top secret 1948 Policy Planning Staff memo #23 (“Review of Current Trends, U.S. Foreign Policy”) to music. Kennan’s political realism continues to guide US foreign policy to this day. “…we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming… We need not deceive ourselves ...
-
Over 70% of pirated music comes from offline sharing
Interesting. In 2011, over 70% of pirated music came from off line trading (hard drive trading, burning/ripping from others). That’s up from almost 65% in 2010. So claimeth the RIAA in an anonymously leaked presentation. Via Torrentfreak.
-
Atheists and Politics
How do atheists break down by political party and ideology? Here’s what the 2008 Pew Religious Landscape Survey found.
-
Texas GOP: “We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills…”
Gah! You can’t make this shit up.
-
Scout tells you when lawmakers are up to no good
Finally! A tool that tells you when lawmakers are monkeying around with issues you care about.
-
Recommended Links from the Week of May 21st
A weekly roundup of worthwhile reading online, mostly from my Instapaper Liked articles feed. Friends should share, so feel free to include links to anything that tickled your fancy this week in comments.
-
Recommended Links from the Week of May 14th
A weekly roundup of worthwhile reading online, mostly from my Instapaper Liked articles feed. Friends should share, so feel free to include links to anything that tickled your fancy this week in comments.
-
Who knew there was no authoritative edition of Mein Kampf?
Most surprising thing I learned from On The Media’s coverage of the forthcoming expiration of the copyright of Mein Kampf? There’s no authoritative version in the first place, and nobody really knows what Hitler originally dictated. Solution: The German government will publish its own annotated edition. German media professor Niklaus Peifer explains, “There is no ...
-
Censored by TED: Who are the true job creators?
The TED Talk that TED didn’t want to show you.
-
Why Warren Buffett bought local
If you’ve been wondering why Warren Buffett would invest in local newspapers at this time when the industry is widely viewed as being in its death throes, CJR’s Justin Peters serves up a sensible sounding reason. “…they are largely entrenched, long-lived dailies and weeklies that draw their advertising from local businesses. The Southern communities they ...
-
When your readers piss you off
Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review offers up 10 things to remember about your readers, when they start to tick you off. All of his advice seems eminently practical, but the last item in particular resonates with me personally. If your bad feelings about the audience you’ve cultivated ever become too much, even ...
-
Who knew Kodak had a working nuclear reactor in its basement?
How fascinating! Back in the early 1970s Kodak had an interest in neutron imaging, and chemical testing (neutrons can be used to determine chemical composition) so they somehow acquired themselves a californium neutron flux multiplier. It wasn’t dismantled until 2006. Of course, here in Fort Wayne in the 1960s, we had a working electrostatic inertial ...
-
Recommended Links from the Week of May 7th
A weekly roundup of worthwhile reading online, mostly from my Instapaper Liked articles feed. Friends should share, so feel free to include links to interesting posts, or articles, that tickled your fancy this week in comments.
-
How to add a shortcode to highlight text on your WordPress blog
I wanted to be able to on this site so I wrote a quick shortcode to perform the highlighting. Now whenever I want to highlight text I can simply type [ highlight color="x" ]text to be highlighted[ /highlight ], without the extra spaces. x is 1, 2, or 3 and indicates the CSS rule I ...
-
The media has a curiously narrow definition of “working class”
The media and some politicians often use a very narrow definition of “working class” that minimizes both the numbers of working class individuals, and their political importance.