Back in the Saddle

Well, the Sleepykid website and blog is back up and running. I will be posting there until something else goes wrong:

www.sleepykid.org/blog

Spiders on Drugs

E.J. Dionne

LINK:

In my view, the new media forms are answering a great need that traditional journlism was not answering. Though as a consumer of blogs from left to right, I often get important and accurate information from their work, they do not exist primarily to inform. They exist to engage citizens in the obligations and magic of politics. They draw people into the fight. They have made millions of people feel that their voices will be heard somewhere and, when aggreghated together, can have a real influence on the outcome of policy debates and elections.

In fact, the opinionated forms of journalism are not new to the media or our public life. They take us back in our history to a time when most journalism was partisan and raucously engaged on one side or another in our political battles....

If there is a problem with traditional, just-the-facts-m'am journalism and its twist-your-self-into-a-pretzel effort to appear non-partisan or bi-partisan, it is that such journalism was in many ways demobilizing. Because journalists could not declare that they were Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, they often went out of their way, sometimes unconsciously and unintentally, to sell a variety of ideas that actually drove people away from politics. You couldn't be partisan, so you said they were all crooks or liars. (Every once in a while, you even got the "they are all good men and women" stories.) You couldn't be partisan, so you said there was no difference between or among the politcians - or, alternatively, that they were all too extreme....

The real issue confronting modern journalism is thus a paradoxical one. There is a need to resurrect a concern for what's true---to draw clearer distinctions between fact and opinion, between information and mere assertion. At the same time, there is an urgent requirement that the media take seriously their obligation to draw people, as citizens, into the public debate, to demonstrate that the debate is accessible and that it matters. What is needed, in other words, is both a strengthening of the older professional ethic involving accuracy and balance and a new engagement with the obligations of journalists to democracy.

For all of its shortcomings, the success of opinionated journalism on the radio, cable television and the blogs reflects a public thirst for debate and argument that goes beyond the confines usually imposed by conventional definitions of news. The lesson is not that all should copy their style of argument, but that argument and engagement are very much in demand. For the established media, this will mean going back to the original debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The objective should be to salvage Lippmann's devotion to accuracy and fairness by putting these virtues to the service of the democratic debate that Dewey so valued.

In broad terms, the media need to help us recover what Lasch called "the lost art of argument."

Don't Go There

A script for an advertisement targeting black voters aired during the recent election campaigns (produced by America's PAC):

D: The night's still young! Let's head to the river and try out the slots!

M: Naw, I gotta get home. I promised Kathleen I'd help the kids with their homework.

D: You know, the Army really changed you.

M: War does that. It makes you value what you're fighting for.

D: So I suppose you want me to vote Republican, like you and your soldier buddies.

M: Not at all. You've got no reason to.

D: How's that?

M: Well, you don't work for a living. So what do you care about keeping taxes low?

D: Hey, that's cold.

M: You cheat on your wife. So why would you want an amendment to protect marriage?

D: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

M: And I know you're not going to enlist to defend your country.

D: Not everyone's as slow as you are, bro.

M: And if you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you'll want to dispose of the problem toot sweet, no questions asked, right?

D: Naw, that's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed.

M: Huh. Really? Well, maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican!

The Kinks - Father Christmas

NBA Salaries

You know the league is f-ed up when Chris Weber is the second highest paid player, making more than Shaq, Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Nowitzki, etc.

Cats

Mrs. A-train, I want a cat.

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Smart children "more likely to become vegetarians"

LONDON (Reuters) - Children with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to research reported on Friday.

A British study of more them 8,000 men and women aged 30 whose IQs had been measured when they were 10, showed that the higher the IQ, the greater the odds of being a vegetarian.

"People who are more intelligent as children, who will obviously keep that intelligence when they are 30, were more likely to say they are vegetarians at that age than those that were less intelligent," said Dr Catherine Gale, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton in England.

She added the findings, which are published online by the British Medical Journal, were consistent with other studies showing people who are more intelligent tend to eat a healthier diet and exercise more.

Global Warming

Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy.

Some ideas.