Smoliar’s Corner!
The BBC Tries to Diagnose the US Government Shutdown
From time to time, the BBC News Web site runs articles under the rubric called Viewpoints. The basic idea is to take a critical issue a source out a wide variety of perspectives on the state of play. I am not sure that the BBC always does a good job of providing a representative sample of opinions, but there is still value to the exercise.Yesterday afternoon’s Viewpoints article was based on the question “Is American politics broken?” For the most part the contributions were reasoned, reflecting a variety of points of view
Illicit Reading
Apparently, The New York Times Book Review, once the most austere section of that newspaper’s Sunday edition, it planning a Sex Issue for the coming weekend. I was struck by the following sentence on the paper’s Web site today promoting that issue: A select group of writers, including Nicholson Baker, Alison Bechdel, Rachel Kushner, Geoff Dyer and Jackie Collins, will share their memories of the first illicit thing they ever read.
Politics By Terrorism?
One of the more interesting issues raised by HBO’s The Newsroom involved the decision of the news anchor character to refer to the TEA Party as the “American Taliban.” This was his way of venting his disgust at the way in which a well-financed minority had succeeded in hijacking what had previously been a rather wide class of values embraced by those who called themselves Republicans. The script for The Newsroom made it clear that the financing is in the hands of a few individuals who cared little for the values of TEA Party constituents themselves but simply (and selfishly) realized that those individual would be the perfect pawns for the large game they wished to play. Indeed, as has been recently observed, the best way to get the pawns to move is to exploit their feelings of “racial resentment.”There was thus some justification to that Taliban metaphor
Another Way Apple has Forgotten About ‘The Rest of Us’
At the end of last year, I wrote one of my frustration-with-Apple pieces based on what I called “my long-held conviction that ‘computing for the rest of us’ has now totally devolved from one of Apple’s core values to a myth remembered only by older generations (such as my own).” That post was called “Apple’s Loss of Significant Values: An Affirmation.” These days, between the fallibility of the Weather widget and a map tool that directs you onto the middle of an airstrip in Fairbanks, Alaska, that proposition hardly requires reaffirmation.
Time for Another Jesse Owens Moment?
I just finished reading an article of BBC News that begin with the opening summarizing sentence: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said a Russian law banning “homosexual propaganda among minors” does not breach the Olympic charter. It did not really surprise me.
A Pope Who Knows His Priorities
I do not know how many spin doctors prepare Papal addresses. However, those driven by dogma are probably wringing their hands in agony when Pope Francis decides to go “off script” and start improvising. Consider some of the off-the-cuff remarks he made to the faithful today in Sardinia (where the youth unemployment rate happens to be 51 percent), as reported by Al Jazeera English: I find suffering here…
Bringing Some Lens Cleaner to the Rose-Colored Glasses
This morning Technology Reporter Jane Wakefield filed a story on the BBC News Web site with the headline “Tomorrow’s cities: What’s it like to live in a smart city?” Overlooking the fact that this involved little more than fantasizing that probably belonged in the Entertainment department, rather than Technology, this turned out to be the world seen through three sets of rose-colored glasses, one by Julia Michaels, an “Author and blogger” living in Rio de Janeiro. As a result of those credentials, I did some background checking and discovered that Wakefield’s piece of fluff was actually a followup to the one she wrote last month entitled “Tomorrow’s cities: Do you want to live in a smart city?” That article also read like a Chamber of Commerce pitch for Rio, leading me to write at that time about how those rose-colored glasses had so efficiently managed to obscure any view of the favelas in that city
Legislation By ‘Racial Resentment’
Michael Tomasky’s article about prevailing mentalities in our nation’s capital, “Our Town,” in the latest issue of The New York Review concludes on a disquieting note.
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