In recent years, I've noticed more and more of sites like medical adoptions.com or the now defunct coincidencedesign.com.
They are in essence the intellectual heirs of Swift's A Modest Proposal and many of them are just as impressive. They employ the same tactics and produce the same results. Some people see right through the hoaxes immediately, but many are outraged and quite credulous. In the end, the fact that people are willing to believe, even momentarily, that the proposal in question is being seriously put forward, is an excellent commentary on humanity's opinion of itself.
In Swift's case, he was showing how dehumanizing was the alleged humanism of the supposedly enlightened ruling classes of his day who offered what were seemingly humane solutions to society's ills. Yet, upon further inspection, such ideas were actually patronizing and monstrous policy positions that were ghoulishly hateful of the people they claimed to protect.
A site like medical adoptions does pretty much the same thing, showing enlightened (usually white) adults caring for (usually brown) children in a cute and charming way, but the children are really commodities that exist to supply spare organs for the adopting parent. There's a certain banality-of-evil factor at work here, and is somewhat reminiscent of the the image of a doctor at an insane asylum who assures you he is looking out for your best interests right before lobotomizing you.
A marvelous observation from the prominent Macintosh developer Brent Simmons:
"I was on the ground in Indianapolis..."
I love it when TV People — newscasters, analysts, politicians — say they were "on the ground" somewhere.
It's a good and welcome reminder that they normally live in the clouds, in heaven, up with the angels. Not on the ground with us, where things are mysterious and messy.
Gosh they’re lucky. Good and lucky.
See the other three parts of this fascinating show here.
As a wise pundit recently pointed out somewhere - it's not that so many people keep voluntarily cancelling their subscriptions. It's just that paid subscriptions expire when the readers do. Newspapers are now a commodity for old people, and the clock is ticking for newspapers and their readers.
Here is how the major newspapers have fared with paid subscriptions over the last year:
-- The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper's daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256.
-- At The Washington Post, daily circulation decreased 3.5% to 673,180 and Sunday dropped 4.3% to 890,163.
-- Meanwhile, daily circulation at The Wall Street Journal grew a fraction of a percent, up 0.3% to 2,069,463 copies. At USA Today, circulation inched up 0.27%* to 2,284,219.
-- The New York Post lost over 3% daily and more than 8% on Sunday.
-- Daily circulation at The Orange County Register plunged 11.9% to 250,724 and Sunday fell 5.3% to 311,982.
-- In Los Angeles, the Times lost more than 40,000 daily copies. Daily circulation there was down 5.1% to 773,884. Sunday declined 6.0% to 1,101,981.
Also Top 25 Sunday Newspapers here - all in decline.
John Hazelhurst from the Colo. Springs Business Journal pointed out these facts from Editor and Publisher's other recent news -
- The core audience of daily newspapers consists of adults 50 and older. Between 2003 and 2007, 8.4 million Americans in that age range died.
- in the large metro areas alone, as many as 1.4 million of the 2.35 million newly dead were daily newspaper readers.
Now they're gone and not coming back.
New Jersey Senate candidate Murray Sabrin (who's running for the Republican nomination with Ron Paul's endorsement) takes on John McCain. Video here; text here (scroll down).
Writes an American in Japan: “I've been an ex pat for 16 years, so it's rare for me to hear native English being spoken by real people anymore. Sometimes I watch Hollywood movies or US television, but those don't count, since people in movies and television (including TV news) are not real.
“One day at a coffee shop in Tokyo, a conversation in English cut through the background of Japanese. A young American man was giving an older Japanese man an English lesson a few tables away from me. I tuned back out, but embarrassingly eavesdropped again when I heard the older man ask about America. He said that he knew little about American history and culture and asked the young man if he could teach him a little about them. The young man perked right up, saying that he fancied himself to be a history buff. He became very animated and started writing dates on a paper, then began his outline on American history, adding dates to his list as he worked his way from 1776 to the present.
“The young man presented American history as a continuous series of wars, in chronological order, one after another, war after war. There was the Revolutionary War, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, the Creek War, the Mexican-American war, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Bosnia, the Iraq War, and he ended with the War on Terror. There were a few other wars in there that I can't recall, so he certainly knew his wars.
“The older man sat in silence. I felt a little uncomfortable, too, like I was listening to a dark comedy. Finally, the old man said, ‘That's many wars.’
“He asked the young man, ‘And American culture?’ The young man was dumbfounded and stumbled for an answer. He offered up television and sports, but the old man said every country had that. His final answer before changing the topic was that ‘foreign countries had culture.’"
Writes a friend: "In Ninja Reflex, a game about learning to think and move faster, many of Sensei's lessons are apt for the Paulian Revolution:
"'The Way of the true Warrior is not in destruction, but in preserving peace.'
"'Tomorrow's battle is won during today's practice!'
"'He who lives with virtue may be compared to the North Star, which keeps its place while all other stars turn towards it.'"
At least that is the claim of the semi-socialist UK Independent.
"I bought 41 copies of The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul," says one respondent. "We need a man with sound monetary policies in office to prevent things such as this stimulus check from happening again."
The ghost of Dishonest Abe, that is. (Courtesy of Butler Shaffer).
Surely this one takes this week's Most Moronic Government Intervention award.
Brooklyn raw milk enthusiasts are crying over the loss of their supplier - a horse and buggy-driving Amish farmer from Pennsylvania.Mark Nolt of New Line, Pa., was arrested and shut down last Friday for selling the contraband.
The Brooklyn outcry came after six Pennsylvania state troopers raided Nolt's farm and confiscated his illegal dairy.
"They swooped in on Friday morning like a bunch of Vikings, handcuffed me and stole $30,000 worth of my milk, cheese and butter," Nolt told the Daily News.
Nolt is a devout Mennonite who sells raw dairy products at his farm and has them transported by truck to customers in Delaware and across New York City, where the raw goods are illegal.
It is a violation of federal law to transport raw milk across state lines with the intent to sell it for consumption. Nolt was arrested for not having a permit to sell the goods in Pennsylvania, where they are allowed.
What free market? What free trade?
Ron Paul has never stopped running for president, because his campaign is about changing the party and the country. Jesse Benton talks to WaPo.
It's the backs of these shirts I like. It's the book cover from you know what.
