Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label fox news

A Momentary Disturbance

Earlier this week I read a rather disturbing story, Michael Finkel ’s “ How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die ”. Now, I dimly remember the story from early in the decade (it happened in Oregon). Interesting, from a sociological point of view. However, for me, the story went into some depth on the murder (the subject, Christian Longo, murdered his whole family). Those sorts of details tend to disturb and haunt me. Gladly, I read the thing in early afternoon, giving myself some time to disconnect. Otherwise, my night’s sleep would’ve been disrupted (as has happened after reading/hearing other such stories). This is why I generally don’t watch the news in the evening, and defiantly late at night. If I’m up in the dark of night for insomnia, I avoid both the news, but also “true crime” shows which are so popular. And I avoid all the “mystery” shows, as well as any of the crime-based dramas. Now, some would say this is due to my liberal, bleeding-heart tendencies, or some such r...

The Iranian Election, Twitter, and Popular Movements

I've spent part of the morning following the Twitter dialog (Twitterlog?) about the Iranian elections and the ensuing protests (I'm following two threads: #Iranelection and #Tehran . Even with the media black-out, these postings are coming with amazing speed. It, literally, is impossible to keep up. Hundreds of posts per minute, perhaps thousands. With this, certainly, will be a huge amount of bad information, as well as deliberate mis-information. However, within this will be solid pieces of truth. Powerful, indeed. And here lies how this medium has changed the world. A totalitarian regime can't suppress this much information. Thousands of voices, reaching out instantly. Pretty much a game of whack-a-mole on the government's end. Sadly, those "moles" who get whacked with get it hard, I'm certain. Besides Twitter, Flickr has an amazing stream of images, YouTube has videos, Digg is going crazy...so much, so very fast. Opposition now has a powerful, globa...