Neti Pots: Better Than They Sound

by Cassie Murdoch

Chances are someone you know has raved about using a neti pot or at least you've got an idea of what they are. But maybe you think washing out your nose sounds gross or scary, or perhaps you’ve been intrigued but are too nervous to try it? I was once like you. I’d been told how great they were for years but resisted because I thought it would make me feel like I was drowning. Then one day I went to a new doctor who ordered me to start using one, and I caved, and now I am a full-blown neti pothead. I guarantee that using one is not nearly as hard or nasty as you think it’ll be. Plus, flushing out all the slime from your nose can be satisfying in the same way that cleaning your house can be. You’ll walk around feeling light and accomplished because your sinuses are so sparkling and fresh!

So what exactly is a neti pot? It is a cute little pitcher that’s usually shaped like what I imagine a genie’s lamp looks like. You fill it with salt water, and then pour the water into one nostril, which is easier and less terrifying than it sounds. Gravity then pulls the water through your sinuses and it comes pouring out of your other nostril, along with a bunch of goop it’s collected along the way. Yes, it may sound a little unpleasant, but I promise it doesn’t hurt, and once you get the hang of it, it actually feels good! It’s a practice that has been used for centuries in India and has become ever more popular in the United States. (Dr. Oz even talked about it on Oprah, so you know it’s legit.)

Why would you want to flush your sinuses out with salt water? Lots of reasons: it helps clear congestion during a cold (and can make them go away faster), it can prevent and treat sinus infections, reduce allergies, help you breathe more easily, and just generally keep your respiratory system in better health. Neti pots work because they remove the dirt and bacteria and the dried mucousy clumps which like to hang out in your precious nasal caves and cause problems. The water can reach places you can't get clear simply by blowing your nose or reaching in with your finger (which you would never do, of course). So even if the idea of pouring water into your sinuses sounds icky, just remind yourself that tiny bacteria making a nice home in your face is even ickier. Hey, you clean your mouth and your ears out, why not treat your sinuses with the same respect?

Atchafalaya - The Control of Nature

By John McPhee

Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river. In evident defiance of nature, they descend as much as thirty-three feet, then go off to the west or south. This, to say the least, bespeaks a rare relationship between a river and adjacent terrain—any river, anywhere, let alone the third-ranking river on earth. The adjacent terrain is Cajun country, in a geographical sense the apex of the French Acadian world, which forms a triangle in southern Louisiana, with its base the Gulf Coast from the mouth of the Mississippi almost to Texas, its two sides converging up here near the lock—and including neither New Orleans nor Baton Rouge. The people of the local parishes (Pointe Coupee Parish, Avoyelles Parish) would call this the apex of Cajun country in every possible sense—no one more emphatically than the lockmaster, on whose face one day I noticed a spreading astonishment as he watched me remove from my pocket a red bandanna.

“You are a coonass with that red handkerchief,” he said.

A coonass being a Cajun, I threw him an appreciative smile. I told him that I always have a bandanna in my pocket, wherever I happen to be—in New York as in Maine or Louisiana, not to mention New Jersey (my home)—and sometimes the color is blue. He said, “Blue is the sign of a Yankee. But that red handkerchief—with that, you are pure coonass.” The lockmaster wore a white hard hat above his creased and deeply tanned face, his full but not overloaded frame. The nameplate on his desk said rabalais.

The navigation lock is not a formal place. When I first met Rabalais, six months before, he was sitting with his staff at 10 a.m. eating homemade bread, macaroni and cheese, and a mound of rice that was concealed beneath what he called “smoked old-chicken gravy.” He said, “Get yourself a plate of that.” As I went somewhat heavily for the old chicken, Rabalais said to the others, “He’s pure coonass. I knew it.”

If I was pure coonass, I would like to know what that made Rabalais—Norris F. Rabalais, born and raised on a farm near Simmesport, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. When Rabalais was a child, there was no navigation lock to lower ships from the Mississippi. The water just poured out—boats with it—and flowed on into a distributary waterscape known as Atchafalaya. In each decade since about 1860, the Atchafalaya River had drawn off more water from the Mississippi than it had in the decade before. By the late nineteen-forties, when Rabalais was in his teens, the volume approached one-third. As the Atchafalaya widened and deepened, eroding headward, offering the Mississippi an increasingly attractive alternative, it was preparing for nothing less than an absolute capture: before long, it would take all of the Mississippi, and itself become the master stream. Rabalais said, “They used to teach us in high school that one day there was going to be structures up here to control the flow of that water, but I never dreamed I was going to be on one. Somebody way back yonder—which is dead and gone now—visualized it. We had some pretty sharp teachers.”

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image credit:

Michael Marsicano

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Rich Returns

Imagine if you could invest $100,000 to control a $200 million asset for three months and sell it back to the owners for $10 million—tax-free. That's the Somali pirate way.

by Robert Young Pelton

Tucked behind the shouting dockworkers and fishermen cleaning their nets at the wharf in Bosaso, on the Gulf of Aden, there's a row of decrepit gray skiffs and patrol boats. Strewn with rusted antiaircraft shells and old mattresses, these dead ships look more like floating homeless shelters than vehicles of terror. Out on the water, though, they played a starring role in a booming criminal enterprise. These are the impounded attack vessels used by Somali pirates to hijack passing cargo ships, private yachts, and even massive oil tankers.

Drive a few hundred yards west along the beach, and there, just past the presidential compound, is a well-worn and crowded jail, with 248 pirates among its 400 prisoners. Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, the president of Puntland, insisted that I visit the prison to prove that his tough stand on maritime kidnappers was not just talk. (Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991; Puntland is one of the country's seven autonomous regions.) Minutes after entering the prison, I was face to face with 51-year-old Farah Hirsi Kulan, or "Boyah," the unrepentant John Dillinger of the Indian Ocean.

Halfway into an eight-year sentence for piracy, Kulan—an arrogant, flash-tempered stick-insect of a man—lounged outside a packed cell block with another famous bandit, Omar Bagaley. A newly arrested 13-year-old, Saynab, sat wedged between Bagaley's knees on a concrete slab. Back in November 2008, Kulan was the first public face of Somali piracy. Not only was he the region's chief scoundrel—he had coordinated the seizure of 25 ships, as he boasted to the BBC in 2009—Kulan began a second career as a "reformed" pirate, advocating for pirates to quit, stop the violence, and go to the mosque. Some believed him, until Kulan was apprehended while fleeing a major pirate planning meeting in Garowe, Puntland's central city, and thrown in jail.

Our conversation was brief and loud. Bagaley stabbed the air with his finger, warning me and my interpreter to back off, while Kulan declaimed, insisting that he had ceased to be a pirate before his arrest and, anyway, he was merely a fisherman, enlisted to repel poachers. What money he earned, he shared with friends. This is a common refrain among Somali pirates: that they're just poor fishermen taking up arms to defend the seas from the predatory practices of foreign poachers—the real piracy, in their view. Some will tell you they go to sea to prevent toxic dumping, too, à la Greenpeace.

It's a romantic angle—and it's wrong. The U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia estimates that only 6.5 percent of the attacks by gangs of Somali men have been against fishing vessels. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a London-based nonprofit specializing in global commerce, the estimated $150 million to $300 million in ransom money paid out last year was provided to free the crews of bulk carriers, container ships, and other vessels carrying unglamorous (and lightly protected) cargo. Some of that was paid to recover private yachtsmen. And while a pirate's take may trickle down to friends, President Farole said most burn through cash conspicuously on Land Cruisers, lavish parties, and a steady supply of qat (a mild stimulant chewed like tobacco and imported from Kenya).

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Profiting In Misery

"God Help You. You're on Dialysis."

by Robin Fields

In October 1972, after a month of deliberation, Congress launched the nation’s most ambitious experiment in universal health care: a change to the Social Security Act that granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income.

It was a supremely hopeful moment. Although the technology to keep kidney patients alive through dialysis had arrived, it was still unattainable for all but a lucky few. At one hospital, a death panel—or “God committee” in the parlance of the time—was deciding who got it and who didn’t. The new program would help about 11,000 Americans for starters, and for a modest initial price tag of $135 million, would cover not only their dialysis and transplants, but all of their medical needs. Some consider it the closest that the United States has come to socialized medicine.

Now, almost four decades later, a program once envisioned as a model for a national health-care system has evolved into a hulking monster. Taxpayers spend more than $20 billion a year to care for those on dialysis—about $77,000 per patient, more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the United States continues to have one of the industrialized world’s highest mortality rates for dialysis care. Even taking into account differences in patient characteristics, studies suggest that if our system performed as well as Italy’s, or France’s, or Japan’s, thousands fewer kidney patients would die each year.

In a country that regularly boasts about its superior medical system, such results might be cause for outrage. But although dialysis is a lifeline for almost 400,000 Americans, few outside this insular world have probed why a program with such compassionate aims produces such troubling outcomes. Even during a fervid national debate over health care, the state of dialysis garnered little public attention.

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Bearly Room

via:

Gonna Get Louder

[ed.  ok, don't say I didn't warn you]
via:

A Perfect Vacuum

 

check out the details here:

Three From Cannes

Midnight In Paris

Woody Allen's love affair with France, which goes back at least 30 years, finds its consummation with "Midnight in Paris," the latest of Allen's tourist-board brochures from foreign ports of call, which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. (His next movie will be made in Rome. Yes, really.) It's no surprise that premiere audiences here ate up this lightweight, rather silly fantasy about the eternal allure of the City of Light. But the good news is that Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.

Of all the leading men Allen has hired to stand in for him as the awkward, lovelorn, fatally talky writer-type hero since he stopped appearing in his own movies (a list that includes Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Josh Brolin and, unhappily, Larry David), none has seemed less suited to the role than Owen Wilson. As Allen explained to the press corps here, he cast Wilson as frustrated Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender -- who sees a Paris vacation as a chance to start over -- precisely because Wilson was a "California beach boy" who didn't remind the director of himself. However it works, it works pretty well; Wilson may not possess immense range or dramatic technique, but I've always enjoyed him. He's masterful with subtle, slow-burn comedy and can be a gentle screen presence in a way Allen never is. Gil is a naive, almost feral creature, wonderfully unfazed by the farcical and magical adventures that befall him.

Gil is in Paris with his insufferable fiancée, Inez (a truly thankless role for Rachel McAdams, who can do nothing with it), and her even worse parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), rich conservatives from who-knows-where who talk dismissively about French politics, wine and culture but don't blink at dropping 20 grand for some antique furniture to decorate their daughter's Malibu beach house. Fortunately these people only appear in a few scenes, because they're more like a New Yorker cartoonist's line drawing of what Republicans might be like than the real thing. Allen has never had even the vaguest idea of what sort of life may be found west of the Hudson; if he really wants to go exotic he could get off the Grand Tour and try making "Vicky Cristina Tuscaloosa."

full review:

Strange Fruit

[ed.  Following up on the previous post by Glenn Greenwald ( below).  If laws are situational and applied unevenly, where does that leave us?]

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

That Was Then, This Is Now

By Glenn Greenwald

Benjamin Ferencz is a 92-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, American combat soldier during World War II, and a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where he prosecuted numerous Nazi war criminals, including some responsible for the deaths of upward of 100,000 innocent people. He gave a fascinating (and shockingly articulate) 13-minute interview yesterday to the CBC in Canada about the bin Laden killing, the Nuremberg principles, and the U.S. role in the world. Without endorsing everything he said, I hope as many people as possible will listen to it.

All of Ferencz's answers are thought-provoking -- including his discussion of how the Nuremberg Principles apply to bin Laden -- but there's one answer he gave which I particularly want to highlight; it was in response to this question: "so what should we have learned from Nuremberg that we still haven't learned"? His answer:

I'm afraid most of the lessons of Nuremberg have passed, unfortunately. The world has accepted them, but the U.S. seems reluctant to do so. The principal lesson we learned from Nuremberg is that a war of aggression -- that means, a war in violation of international law, in violation of the UN charter, and not in self-defense -- is the supreme international crime, because all the other crimes happen in war. And every leader who is responsible for planning and perpetrating that crime should be held to account in a court of law, and the law applies equally to everyone.

These lessons were hailed throughout the world -- I hailed them, I was involved in them -- and it saddens me to no end when Americans are asked: why don't you support the Nuremberg principles on aggression? And the response is: Nuremberg? That was then, this is now. Forget it.

To be candid, I've been tempted several times to simply stop writing about the bin Laden killing, because passions are so intense and viewpoints so entrenched, more so than any other issue I've written about. There's a strong desire to believe that the U.S. -- for the first time in a long time -- did something unquestionably noble and just, and anything which even calls that narrative into question provokes little more than hostility and resentment. Nonetheless, the bin Laden killing is going to shape how many people view many issues for quite some time, and there are still some issues very worth examining.

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Death To High School English

by Kim Brooks

Like so many depressive, creative, extremely lazy high-school students, I was saved by English class. I struggled with math and had no interest in sports. Science I found interesting, but it required studying. I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility -- no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading. I spent so much of my adolescence feeling different and awkward, and those first canonical books I read, those first discoveries of Joyce, of Keats, of Sylvia Plath and Fitzgerald, were a revelation. Without them, I probably would have turned to hard drugs, or worse, one of those Young Life chapters so popular with my peers.

So I won't deny that I owe a debt to the traditional high-school English class, the class in which I first learned to read literature, to write about it and talk about it and recite it and love it. My English teachers were for the most part smart, thoughtful women who loved books and wanted to help other people learn to love them. Nothing, it seemed to me at the time, could make for a better class. Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I've begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

I've stared at the black markings on the page until my vision blurred, chronicling and triaging the maneuvers I will need to teach them in 14 short weeks: how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb, how to organize their paragraphs around a main idea, how to write a working thesis statement or any kind of thesis statement at all. They don't know how to outline or how to organize a paper before they begin. They don't know how to edit or proofread it once they've finished. They plagiarize, often inadvertently, and I find myself, at least for a moment, relieved by these sentence- or paragraph-long reprieves from their migraine-inducing, quasi-incomprehensible prose.

Sometimes, in the midst of this grading, I cry. Not real tears, exactly -- more a spontaneous, guttural sob, often loud and unpleasant enough to startle my husband or children. There's just too damned much they need to learn in such a short period of time. It seems almost too late before we've begun.

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Friday Book Club - The Living

by Carol Anshaw

From the first pages of this epic debut novel by the author of the "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," we are thrillingly dropped into a time that stands in exact opposition to our own. We living at the end of this millennium have been made acutely aware of our imposition on a planet we've all but used up. Annie Dillard's characters, settlers opening up the Pacific Northwest in the middle of the 19th Century, are conversely faced with abounding nature--dense, treacherous, daunting and capricious--that begs to be thrashed through, cut down, burnt out, brought to heel by these new arrivals, who view this unfettered landscape as both home and adversary.

Dillard focuses on the settlement of Whatcom and its environs on Bellingham Bay, high up in the northwesternmost corner of the country, a territory that will eventually become the state of Washington. Here cedars and firs choke the ground, grow so thick it takes a day to walk half a mile. The early white settlers--the Rushes and Fishburns and Sharps--come from the East and South, depleted by their long and arduous journeys. Ada and Rooney Fishburn have already lost a child along the way; their boy Charley "fell out of the wagon and their own wheels ran him over, one big wooden wheel after the other, and he burst inwardly and died."

Soon others drop away--Lura Rush in a carriage accident, her oldest boy of "the putrid sore throat." Rooney Fishburn falls dead on his spade in a well hole when he hits a pocket of lethal gas rather than the water he was looking for. Chot Harshaw is cut in two by a fall of slate from a coal mine roof. "Death mowed the generations raggedly, and out of order," the book's narrator informs matter-of-factly, often noting the passing of main characters in a mere phrase. "It was in May that the Sharp family met with an accident; they drowned, except for John Ireland." Later, "It took three months to clear the logjam on the Nooksack and Eustace Honer drowned doing it."

It is in great part by death that these living define themselves; they can't help but be aware that time might run out on them at any moment. Living in the constant presence of peril brings on an exhilarating adrenaline rush. For both the men and the women, this is a great adventure, living on the brink of the new, making it up as they go along, living utterly in the present because so little of their past applies. Every day must be figured out from scratch.

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Why I Hate Self-Help Books

by Mary T. Kelly

What I’m about to say may be considered shocking, blasphemous and puzzling given what I do for a living. But I’m going to say it anyway. Granted, it may be a temporary phase, but I pretty much hate most self-help books. Yeah, despise them.

But I also want to make it clear that I don’t hate ALL self-help books. I’ve been helped by many a self-help book and there’s plenty of times I recommend them to my clients. Many years ago, my journey to waking up and becoming a conscious human being was through the narrow pathway of a self-help book.

My first “self-help” book was, “The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck. The first line in the book was, “Life is difficult.” It may seem simplistic, but the flood of relief I felt when reading that very first line helped crack open a heart that had long been held captive by dogmatic religious beliefs and the constant self-pressure to be the best Christian/wife/friend/mother I could humanly be. I was in a world where if you didn’t have a continual broad smile on your face, you would be questioned and “admonished”. “Trust in the Lord, Mary” was the simplistic answer as I grappled with my well-loved father’s recent diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor, a mother showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, witnessing the painful agonizing screams of an AIDS patient who had been abandoned by his family in his final days, and the constant activity of four small children who were like eager young puppies making messes and trails of destruction wherever they went.

Reading that “self-help” book nudged me into a much-needed journey of self-excavation. I immersed myself into professional therapy and as a supplement, read many self-help books to serve as guides on an emotional road that took me up, through and over steep and treacherous internal passes. These books were powerful and bold sources of influence and motivation that encouraged me to change, break out of my repression-shrouded cocoon and begin to cure the deadly disease of the highly contagious and deeply ingrained “Good Girl Syndrome”.

Oh how I soaked up those books, the books that contained the Permissions to leave the church, the unhealthy relationships and the expected roles. They were influential in teaching me to do the hardest of all tasks...learning to love myself.

So how I can I say that I hate self-help books? The first reason is that I’m over them. They had a time and a place in my life and I will be forever grateful for much of the wisdom I garnered from them. But I’m tired of self-improvement, the miniscule constant psychoanalysis and inventories of my various faults, patterns, wounds, and ego variations, ad nausea. This “new” me just wants to scream, “WHATEVER! I’m a human being. This automatically means I am not perfect, will never be perfect, and in fact, the thought of perfection makes me feel bored and depressed."

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We'll Be Back

For regular readers of this blog, I apologize for the disruption in new posts.  Blogger went down about 30 hours ago and all posting services were suspended.  Worse yet, posts from the last couple of days were all deleted (Google continues to say this is only a temporary situation, but I have my doubts).  I'll try to reconstruct what I can but can't guarantee everything will be restored.  In the mean time, I hope you'll take this opportunity (?) to browse through some earlier posts.  There are still many cool and relevant things to check out.  Thank you for your patience.

Duck Soup

May 13:  Google Update

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored.  Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation.  We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.  We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers.  We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger


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News From Everywhere

The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism," a new report on digital news economics from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  [ed.  This is a long read -- book length -- but well worth it.]

In early 2005, a researcher at the Poynter Institute published a column that was instantaneously read and—by many—misunderstood.

Rick Edmonds, who studies the financial side of the news business for Poynter’s website, speculated about how long it would take for online newspaper revenue to match the dollars brought in by the print side. He estimated that digital ads accounted for around 3 percent of the total revenue for an average U.S. paper. Edmonds assumed an optimistic online growth rate, around 33 percent a year, and what seemed then to be a reasonably sober estimate of print growth, around 4 percent.

Given how low online sales were at the time, Edmonds noted it would take fourteen years for digital revenue to catch up to that of print. As he wrote, these calculations provided “little cause for cheer.” He also noted “there isn’t any reason to believe any of these numbers will remain steady state over time.”

His disclaimers were lost on many readers. At several conferences later that year, participants pointed to the study and cheered one of the presumptions in the column—that digital revenue would grow by a third every year, as far as the eye could see.

For a few years, it seemed as if this scenario might be realistic. Newspapers’ online revenue grew by more than 30 percent in both 2005 and 2006. But growth slowed the next year, came to a halt during the recession, and still hasn’t fully returned to what it was in 2007. Meanwhile, print revenue hasn’t grown at 4 percent a year since 2005; indeed, newspapers’ print revenue in 2010 was less than half what it was in 2005.

Fifteen years after most news organizations went online, it is clear that old media business models have been irrevocably disrupted and that the new models are fundamentally different from what they once were. What made traditional media so vulnerable to the web? Or perhaps the better question is this: Why has digital technology, which has been such a powerful force for transmitting news, not yet provided the same energy for companies to maintain and increase profits?

Mainstream news organizations had already started losing audience before the Internet became popular. Broadcast network news programs have been sliding steadily since 1980 and now reach slightly over 20 million viewers a night, down more than half in three decades. Newspapers began to experience significant circulation declines decades ago. Total daily newspaper circulation has fallen by 30 percent in twenty years, from 62.3 million in 1990 to 43.4 million in 2010, as people found other sources, particularly local television news, to be an adequate substitute.

Revenue, however, held steady or increased for mainstream news outlets, even as audiences shrank. This was true in the early days of the web, too, thanks in part to an advertising bubble spawned by the Internet boom.

To begin to understand the disruptions of the digital transformation, it is important to appreciate the circumstances that made the news business—whether in broadcast, cable, magazines, or newspapers—so profitable for so long. The commercial heyday that buoyed the fortunes of American newsrooms in the last half-century had its roots in changes that began much earlier.

by by Bill Grueskin, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

The People vs Goldman Sachs

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn't exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What's more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

But Goldman, as the Levin report makes clear, remains an ascendant company precisely because it used its canny perception of an upcoming disaster (one which it helped create, incidentally) as an opportunity to enrich itself, not only at the expense of clients but ultimately, through the bailouts and the collateral damage of the wrecked economy, at the expense of society. The bank seemed to count on the unwillingness or inability of federal regulators to stop them — and when called to Washington last year to explain their behavior, Goldman executives brazenly misled Congress, apparently confident that their perjury would carry no serious consequences. Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history.

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The World As We Know It

[ed.  The Michael Stipe (R.E.M.) interview earlier made me think of this.]

Helicopters and Lawnmowers

Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child's or children's experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. The term was originally coined by Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay in their 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility, although Dr. Haim Ginott mentions a teen who complains, "Mother hovers over me like a helicopter..." on page 18 of the bestselling book Between Parent & Teenager published in 1969. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not. In Scandinavia, this phenomenon is known as curling parenthood and describes parents who attempt to sweep all obstacles out of the paths of their children. It is also called "overparenting". Parents try to resolve their child's problems, and try to stop them coming to harm by keeping them out of dangerous situations.

Some college professors and administrators are now referring to "Lawnmower parents" to describe mothers and fathers who attempt to smooth out and mow down all obstacles, to the extent that they may even attempt to interfere at their children's workplaces, regarding salaries and promotions, after they have graduated from college and are supposedly living on their own. As the children of "helicopter parents" graduate and move into the job market, personnel and human resources departments are becoming acquainted with the phenomenon as well. Some have reported that parents have even begun intruding on salary negotiations.

The term "helicopter parents" is a pejorative expression for parents that has been widely used in the media; however, there has been little academic research into the phenomenon. Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay coined and defined "helicopter parents" very precisely in a section on "ineffective parenting styles" in their 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility. It gained wide currency when American college administrators began using it in the early 2000s as the Millennial Generation began reaching college age. Their Baby Boomer parents in turn earned notoriety for practices such as calling their children each morning to wake them up for class and complaining to their professors about grades the children had received. Some of these parents had chosen their child's college and hired consultants to help fine-tune the application process.  Summer camp officials have also reported similar behavior from parents.

The rise of the cell phone is often blamed for the explosion of helicopter parenting — it has been called "the world's longest umbilical cord". Parents, for their part, point to rising college tuitions, saying they are just protecting their investment or acting like any other consumer.

The Fifth Dimension

With its time-bending twists and all-pervading paranoia, new box set reveals Rod Serling's classic is in a dimension of its own

by Phelim O'Neill

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition and it lies between the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call … The Twilight Zone."

Now, that's how you start a television show. Those words were first heard coming out of TV sets across the USA on 2 October 1959. In the decades since, The Twilight Zone has become shorthand for anything offbeat, with that spooky four-note theme ("do-dee-do-do") an instant signal that something unusual is about to happen.

While the short story with a twist ending has always been a staple of storytelling, it was Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone that refined it to an artform. It deservedly casts a long shadow in popular culture: if you stick together "The Time Element", where a man repeatedly "dreams" he's waking up in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, with "Where Is Everybody?", which contains images of a flight-suited army pilot in a capsule, you've pretty much got Source Code. Then there's "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge", based on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story where a man about to be hanged in the American civil war escapes the noose, ventures across country to rejoin his wife and child and realises this has all been a dream condensed into seconds as the noose breaks his neck. Expand on that "dreams with time distortion" routine and you'll eventually hit Inception. The Simpsons still riffs on TZ episodes, particularly in their "Halloween Treehouse Of Horror" specials, and there's not an episode of Futurama that passes without some reference. Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's bizarre oddity "The Box" was based on "Button, Button", a Twilight Zone episode from its 1980s revamp. Once you get into the Twilight Zone you'll see writers and directors such as M. Night Shyamalan as less remarkable: what is The Sixth Sense if not a half-hour Zone episode stretched out to over an hour and a half?

Watching The Twilight Zone today, it's striking how complex, satirical and thought-provoking it all is. While the tales include such fantastical imagery as a stopwatch that can stop time, department store mannequins coming to life, or a child whose dreams take corporeal form, you can clearly see that they're really about the early-60s: an era of race riots, assassinations, crooked politicians and the Vietnam war, when communism and nuclear bombs were palpable fears. People were confused, scared and paranoid, yet so little of the television of the time reflected this mood. Sponsors, executives, salesmen and producers were in charge of the networks and they didn't want viewers distracted by big issues when they should have been thinking about what products to buy. It was in this climate that 34-year-old writer-producer Rod Serling devised The Twilight Zone. After having almost all the contemporary political references excised from an early drama about a crooked senator, he hit upon the idea of using science fiction and fantasy to smuggle in more controversial elements, in plain sight of the moneymen.