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(part 1):
New shopping, new life: (Which is intended to help Your Correspondent supplement his disability benefits, for the most part, as well as Some Good Causes, foremost among them being Reduction of the U.S. National Debt):
(part 2):
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(Actually, more like Motherdear back in Caledonia, to be honest about it. Dinner likely to be taken with brother Dennis, the closest relative she has to her house in Caledonia; that depends on plans he may have.)
In any case....
(UPDATE, as of Friday, 21 April, 20h16 CDST/Saturday, 22 April, 01h16 UTC: Dennis will pick me up afterlunch tomorrow to drive me over to Motherdear, spending overnight and returning after dinner Sunday.
(Hopefully, I should have a report Monday on developments.)
In any case, accept this as The Exaggerator's best wishes for a happy Easter to all of you.
As Yates's Wine Lodge's motto has it, "moderation is true strength." I hope you can remember this with your Easter dinner, never mind where you may take it.
IT WAS GEORGE ORWELL'S NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR AS INTRODUCED THE NEWSPEAK WORD "PROLEFEED" INTO THE LANGUAGE, referring to such news and information as was, by design, false, inaccurate or otherwise misleading for deliberate dissemiation to the Lower Classes.
In other words, serving no value than pacifying the poor, undereducated and easily-influenced as a cheap opiate to distract attention from The Bigger Issues affecting their socioeconomic situation.
Think Progress has an interesting item about just how far gone into prolefeed Fox News Channel is:
[On Monday, 17th inst.], the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) put out its annual report on the "State of the News Media." While the 2008 presidential campaign and the debate over Iraq were overwhelmingly the top subjects of cable news, the networks still devoted a substantial amount of coverage to celebrity affairs. For example, the death of Anna Nicole Smith received more coverage than the Valerie Plame scandal, the U.S. attorney purge, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Fox News led the cable networks in the most amount of celebrity coverage and the least amount of Iraq war coverage. PEJ notes:
MSNBC, at least in terms of time spent, was indeed the place for politics in 2007 — by nearly double over its rivals in the percentage of time studied (28% vs. 12% on CNN and 15% on Fox News). Fox, in turn, spent less time on the war in Iraq than the others (10% vs. 18% on MSNBC and 16% on CNN). And it was more oriented to crime, celebrity and the media than its rivals (28% vs. 19% on MSNBC and 16% on CNN).
A look at the Iraq coverage of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC:
As ThinkProgress reported in March 2007, three weeks after Anna Nicole's death, Fox News and MSNBC still devoted more time to the late celebrity than to the Walter Reed scandal. Fox gave Anna Nicole roughly 12 times more coverage.
Fox may not be ashamed of PEJ's latest findings. Last year, Fox News's John Gibson defended his celebrity coverage by accusing reporters—such as CNN's Anderson Cooper—of "news-guy snobbery." Gibson claimed that people were "a little weary" of war coverage" and wanted "a little something else."
(In other words, what the Lower Classes really want in their news coverage is sugar-coated distractionary having little, if any, realistic news or informational value, as if implying where the audiences in Podunk Centre and Doo Wah Diddy "can't handle the truth." Which, come to think of it, could be further used to justify the dumping of infomercials by certain FreeVee outlets without access to sports programmes or "good"--er, trashy--movies.)
Reinforcing this lack of disregard for "real" news on Fox Prolefeed's part, as above summarised, is this item from the ConWebWatch blog:
Analysts at the Media Research Center have studied TV news coverage of the Iraq war from the beginning, even before the first bombs fell on Baghdad in March 2003. The record shows the networks have trumpeted bad news—setbacks for the U.S. coalition and allegations of misdeeds by American troops—while minimizing good news such as the success of the 2007 troop surge and acts of heroism by U.S. soldiers.
But nearly all of the 11 studies Noyes cites are focused only on the broadcast networks or a specific network--twofocus only on ABC (one of those solely on ABC anchor Peter Jennings), twofocus only on NBC (one solely on then-NBC reporter Peter Arnett). One study focused only on cable news coverage. None offer a comprehensive look at all "TV news coverage of the Iraq war."
Why so little focus on cable news? Perhaps because it doesn't want to be put in the position of having to criticize conservative-friendly (not to mention MRC-friendly) Fox News. MRC, after all, has a historyofrunning to Fox News' defense.
The lone cable news-focused MRC study of Iraq war coverage, in December 2006, made Fox News look good: It claimed that, unlike MSNBC and CNN, Fox News "was better able to balance the bad news with more optimistic news of U.S. achievements in Iraq," unashamedly rehashing Fox News' "fair and balanced" slogan. The study does not state whether news events in Iraq from the period of time studied warranted the "balance" that Fox News provided and the MRC lauded.
One MRC study, issued Feb. 28, claimed that "[w]hen U.S. casualties began to steadily decline, TV coverage of Iraq dramatically decreased" on the TV networks. That study, like nearly all of the others, excluded cable news coverage, and it uncritically repeats Bush administration talking points claiming that "the President's surge strategy is well on its way to succeeding."
The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media 2008 report, however, showed this trend of declining coverage was not limited to the purportedly liberal news networks: It found that Fox News "spent less time on the war in Iraq" than CNN and MSNBC, and it was "more oriented to crime, celebrity and the media than its rivals." (h/t Think Progress.)
The MRC does not mention this, nor does it note Fox News' previous hostility toward airing negative Iraq war coverage:
John Gibson claimed that those who criticized news channels for obsessive coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death while minimizing Iraq war coverage (like Fox News) were suffering from "news-guy snobbery."
Bill O'Reilly, responding to a previous PEJ study with similar findings for Fox News, defended the lack of coverage of negative Iraq war news by asserting that it does not "highlight every terrorist attack because we learn nothing from that. And that's exactly what the terrorists want us to do." O'Reilly also asserted, without evidence, that "CNN and MSNBC are actually helping the terrorists by reporting useless explosions. ... I'm not gonna cover every bomb that goes off in Tikrit, because it's meaningless."
These studies are not unlike a lot of other MRC studies--they are driven too much by the MRC's conservative bias to be trusted without question.
Which just goes to show that Fox Prolefeed's theme music should more correctly be "It's Good News Week!" by Hedgehoppers Anonymous, vintage 1965, what with its inherent lyrical irony:
It's Good News Week! Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere, Contaminating atmosphere And blackening the sky....
It's Good News Week! Someone's found a way to give The Rotting Dead a will to live, Go on and never die....
Have you heard the news? What did it say? Who won that race? What's the weather like today?
It's Good News Week! Families shake their need for gold By stimulating birth control, We're wanting less to eat....*
It's Good News Week! Doctors finding many ways Of wrapping brains in metal trays To keep us from the heat....
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*An alternate version of this verse hath it:
It's Good News Week! Lots of blood in Asia now; They've butchered off the sacred cow, They've got a lot to eat....
EVEN WITH HIS FRAUDULENCY'S RATHER PATHETIC AND LAME-O REMARKS JUSTIFYING THE SOCIAL COST OF THE UR-RAHOWA AGAINST TERRORISM in the five years of same, he may have unwittingly planted the seeds of America's destruction thanks to a subtle "guns-before-butter" mindset excusing ur-RAHOWA @ the expense of Society.
And sought to justify such as necessary to prevent further infamous acts of terrorism in the 9/11 stylee, even insisting that taxes needed to be kept all the lower for the sake of creating jobs and social order. This unaware that same may have planted the seeds for the current socioeconomic meltdown, or clear and present danger thereof.
Which should be a warning sign that we "morally superior" Americans could be in clear and present danger of socioeconomic and soverign collapse thanks to the Great Within's delusion which insists that the American Colonial Occupation of Iraq should be considered as being in perpetuity.
The whole expected to be supported by takes kept ridiculously low, in turn justifying wholesale corporatisations not seen since Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher, never mind its risk of crossing the line into an unwitting brand of Fascism.
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SO, YE WHO FEAR THE ONSET OF THE "EVIL EMPIRE" YOU CALL THE "NEW WORLD ORDER" IN DEFENCE OF AMERICAN SOVERIGNTY "ANTIENT AND PECUILAR," you may want to ponder the possibility that a post-Reaganist America may be heading down the same path as the Ottoman Empire did.
Which, come to think of it, encompassed some rather substantial territory across portions of Europe, northern Africa and the Near and Middle East @ its heighth in 1683, as this map from Wikipedia shows:
The which, in any case, would no doubt be done in by the general incompetence of the sultans ruling the Ottoman Empire in its later years of decline; increasing nationalistic sentiment in many parts of the same (especially so in the Balkans, Palestine and along the Black Sea) affecting Ottoman hegenomy; demands for democratic reforms which the sultans were unwilling to accept (and led to several uprisings); general socioeconomic lethargy precluding the serious expansion of modern technology and infrastructure throughout--and the last nail in the coffin, so to speak, being World War I, when the Ottoman Empire sided with the losing Central Powers.
Its death certificates, so to speak, were the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918, barely two weeks before the Armistice ending World War I came about) and the later Treaty of Sèvres, which saw the Ottoman Empire's Middle Eastern territories (including present-day Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia) becoming British or French Mandates, portions of Anatolia coming under Italian control, Greece controlling Thrace and Smyrna (the latter becoming a Greek Protectorate), the Sea and Straits of Marmara under control of the Allies, and Armenia recognised as a soverign state in her own right.
Concurrently, Istanbul and Izmir were placed under Allied Occupation, giving rise to the Kemal Ataturk-led Turkish War of Independence as would see occupying Greek, Italian and British forces as "interlopers," reclaiming such areas lost in the Treaty of Sèvres to Armenia and Allied control, and, in due course, would force Sultan Mehmed VI to abdicate his throne; the Republic of Turkey established under the Treaty of Lausanne; and the abolition of the Caliphate.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire can be attributed to the failure of its economic structure; the size of the empire created difficulties in economically integrating its diverse regions. Also, the empire's communication technology was not developed enough to reach all territories. In many ways, the circumstances surrounding the Ottoman Empire's fall closely paralleled those surrounding the fall of the Roman Empire, particularly in terms of the ongoing tensions between the empire's different ethnic groups, and the various governments' inability to deal with these tensions. In the case of the Ottomans, the introduction of a parliamentary system during the Tanzimat proved too late to reverse the trends that had been set in motion.
(By one estimate, all or parts of some 40 soverign nations were carved out of the former Ottoman Empire's remnants.)
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NO DOUBT SOMETHING WORTH THINKING ABOUT, especially as Indecision 2008 draws all the closer and the race turning all the more into a nasty and filthy Katzenjammer likely to be exploited by elements weird, unwholesome and potentially dangerous.
Not the least of which are John McCain (a/k/a The Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang) and the Pseudoreligiopolitical Right, rather than the so-called "forces of homosexuality" they get so ballistically paranoid about.
In other words, the Religiopolitical Right and its forces should start to realise the imminence of--and, for once, accept--the likelihood of a Secular-Progressive State not unlike post-Ottoman Turkey. And like it.
PEROUSING YOUTUBE RECENTLY FOR CHOICEST SPECIMENS OF TV SIGN-OFF SEQUENCES, as I am fond of thus seeing every now and again, Your Correspondent came across this clip of the cult TV animation hit Pinky and The Brain which parodied a commercial recording session involving Orson Welles--with Welles' angst-laden comments to the producers replacing the original episode soundtrack (Welles doing The Brain and the original producer doing Pinky).
Watch for yourself and see if this isn't a gem right there:
