RE: OT reducing your carbon footprint

["Dave Gallaher" <micdave@hiwaay.net>]

If one is watching ANY single ‘news’ source regularly, one is no longer certain of recognizing spin. 

 

Respectful suggestion:  try giving up the news for six months.  You’ll still get the latest happenings from friends and acquaintances through conversations and email, but you’ll get less spin.  When you encounter an item that suggests you would profit by investigating it, then follow up via papers, internet or television for that one item, and try to find more than one source, including foreign media.

 

Four things you will discover:

 

1. The news is damned hard to avoid these days.  It has become so pervasive in the US that escaping it--the paper pinned to the wall over the urinal, the TV in every airport/restaurant/bar/mall/hotel/waiting room/childcare center, the endless spin-radio broadcasts, headlines that run under entertainment and sports programs--is quite an accomplishment.

 

2. You will still be informed.  You may not be the first to know all current events, but neither will you be the first to be spun into a position desired by a partisan publisher, or misled by the inaccurate and/or partially-informed reporting that is so frequent these days, due to the pressure to be-first-with-anything to feed the 24-hour catalog that poses as information.

 

3. You will not automatically be offended by other persons’ viewpoints that differ with yours.  Partisanship will actually become less of a factor in your judgment of others.

 

4. You will actually be a happier person yourself, in most cases.  Perhaps a true news junkie in writhing withdrawals would be an exception.

 

If you ever return to regular watching, you will be flabbergasted at the audacity of corporate reportage, and by the disdain and lack of respect it holds for its consumers—at first.  Then you will subjugate yourself right back in.

 

Nationalism (and its sub-vortex, extreme partisanship) is a lens that filters all information.  This was covered well in the following quote: 

 

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.  There is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians—that does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side.  The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

 

--George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism, 1945

 

While our ‘carbon footprints’ may require long-range retooling of our commercial lives, our ‘community footprints’ are accessible and adjustable on a daily basis.

 

 

dave

 

 

 

less influence than you think....like Howard stern.... 

BS on both sides of the fence....they need to put up the Disclaimer

"For entertainment purposes only" although the closer to my grave i move

I'm becoming less "tolerant" of BS

in ether camp 

--- On Wed, 9/3/08, blixton <blixton@aromabar.com> wrote:

From: blixton <blixton@aromabar.com>
Subject: Re: OT reducing your carbon footprint
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2008, 4:46 PM

People think fox news is biased..They ought to listen to Limbaugh. I 

think he is way way way more influential