He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Confucius

Thirty years ago, the diversity of the world's news media was broad. In 1983, some 50 companies owned "the media" in the US and the world; obviously, with so many companies vying for listeners, viewers and readers, competition was intense -- not just for audience but for advertisers as well.

Fast forward to 2014: That field of media companies has been winnowed down to just a half-dozen companies: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom (formerly CBS) and General Electric-owned NBC.

In a word, that's pretty scary

Natural Health News

These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day. They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest.

Michael Snyder - Economic Collapse Blog Visit the link to see who owns what…

Fighting for the Truth

Coincidence is merely the puppeteers’ curtain, hiding the hands that pull the world’s strings.
Kaleb Nation

http://youtu.be/-0G6z0qGhZI

The Age of Information, Has turned out to be the Age of Ignorance.

Mark Crispin Miller

More on Mark Crispin Miller

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue

Albert Einstein

And right now, in this endless sea of b.s., where every website is asking us to click on worthless information so they can sell advertising, where Buzzfeed is lionized and idiots actually care what Arianna Huffington has to say, someone has sneaked upon the scene to change everything.

That’s the power of television.

That’s the power of Shane Smith.

That’s the power of Vice.

Bob Lefsetz

http://www.hbo.com/vice#/

Cultural hegemony in America

After several days of hullaballoo regarding Phil Roberson's comments, A&E's resulting suspension, threats of the family to walk, indignation from the PC crowd, Conservatives rising in defense, point, counterpoint, and arguments about rights or lack thereof, one can see with some clarity what it means to embrace the progressive virtue of "tolerance." This Newspeak term has become a buzzword to suggest that we should all simply tolerate people, lifestyles, beliefs, actions, and the like that are different from our own, because from a value standpoint they're basically all the same. In the ideal, this would mean that people from all walks of life can come together and sit down at the utopian table of progressive brotherhood, free of power structures and hungry for a cruelty-free feast. In practice, tolerance and other PC-buzzwords, like equality, are used to subvert culture and encourage relativism by infiltrating otherwise fringe and radical ideas into the mainstream.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/phil_robertson_gramsci_and_tolerance.html

It pushes the fringe into the mainstream and dissuades people from expressing traditional views, else suffer the social consequences. As a result, the First Amendment begins to acquire a caveat which suggests that freedom of speech and religion only apply to people who abide by the counterhegemonic, relativistic, and progressive forces.

Clarence Vindex

The private and the public

Why Muslims Kill

by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

The murderer is the new celebrity. He emerges out of nowhere with a rags to mass murder story, and is swiftly accorded all the trappings of fame. Reporters track down anyone who knew him to learn about his childhood and his main influences. Relatives and friends both contribute fuzzy anecdotes, mostly indistinguishable from the ones they would present if he were competing on American Idol or running for president.

The disaffected form fan clubs around him. The experts discuss what his rise to fame means. Books are written about him and then perhaps a movie. And then it ends and begins all over again.

The Tsernaev brothers, the living one and the dead one, are already receiving that treatment. Like most murderers they have already become more famous than their victims. More famous than the rescuers. The original Tamerlane is better known than any of his countless victims. The new one is already eclipsing his victims. Before long one of those Chechen bards whose videos he tagged into his playlist on YouTube will write a ballad about the Boston massacre and the circle will be complete.
That ballad, murderous and vile, will still be more honest than most of the media coverage about the two Chechen Muslims has been. The media's coverage is weighed down by its old fetish of murder as celebrity. The media covers murderers and celebrities in the same way. It writes exhaustively about them, but rarely meaningfully. The murderer, like the celebrity, is famous for being famous. And fame clips context and suppresses meaning. It becomes its own reference. A thing is famous for being known. It is known for being famous. It enters the common language as a reference. A metaphor.

In the case of the Tsernaevs, the surface coverage, the endless rounds of interviews with friends and relatives, with anyone who ever met them or retweed them, is mandatory because it avoids the more difficult question of why they killed.

Sultan Knish

Give it Arrest

Check out the graphic on misinformation: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cluster-fuck.jpg

Never regret

PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

Peter Norvig

Don't Blame PowerPoint! It's just a vehicle

View more presentations from Clear Presentation Design

When misused, PowerPoint becomes a drug: addicting, expensive, and made by bad people; too bad it doesn’t require a prescription.

Never regret.

If it's good, it's wonderful.

If it's bad, it's experience.

Victoria Holt

Control is an illusion

From Washington's Blog on failure of the media

All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed. The courts . . . the jury's not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring....

Seymour Hersh

When you think you control something, you’re wrong.

It’s amazing how often we think we’re in control of something when really we aren’t.

Control is an illusion

http://zenhabits.net/control/

Are we controlled by the machine?

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press.

Mark Twain

The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.

David McGowan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4ekpKsKWpk&feature=player_embedded#at=192

The current moguls understand that true media power lies not in firing up our outrage, as Hearst did, but in befuddling it or tranquilizing it with new toys. The idea is to render us passive so that they can exercise their power to sell us a bunch of stuff we mostly don't need and mostly don't want.

Richard Schickel

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection.

Thomas Paine

A couple if items for today.

The first...Tea Party Renaissance

Tea Parties are today's protest medium for the conservative class. Did you realize that the first tea party was a protest over a Reduction in taxes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

It's a shame that the Boston Tea Party museum is closed for renovations, especially in light of the surge in interest. Seems like a waste of a decent museum: http://www.bostonteapartyship.com/

Stop the Pike Hike is a citizen group in Massachusetts that has organized to fight Gov. Deval Patrick’s proposed toll hikes.

Gov. Patrick has a Twitter account.

In addition to supporting Tea Parties throughout Massachusetts, the people at Stop the Pike Hike are asking Twitters to participate in what is believed to be the first “Twitter Protest”
If you’re on Twitter, you’re asked to tweet “STOPTHEPIKEHIKE @massgovernor” any time tomorrow.

The intersection of tea party and twitter is twilight zone like...

The second...I Twitter Immoral?

Twitter and Morality

Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people's sense of morality, claim brain scientists.
New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people's brains.

A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the 'moral compass' of the brain to process. The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering' because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people's feelings.

US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.
But they show it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality.

The study raises questions about the emotional cost of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter. The impact could be most damaging for youngsters whose brains are still developing.USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said 'For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection. 'If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1169788/Twitter-make-immoral-claim-scientists.html?printingPage=true

If you aren't familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

Eric Nuzum, Author of The Dead Travel Fast

But once you start using it, you realize how totally ridiculous and stupid it is, no matter what other self centered, immoral, vacuous people think. Kind of like blogs...

Quotefish, driven to distraction