Jan 05 2014
The team of All In with Chris Hayes puts out a daily request on Twitter asking their followers to send them the things they find most interesting on the internet. These are their finds for January 2, 2014
1. “Hold ma hand, just want you to hold my hand”
2. Why did the wild turkey stalk the mail delivery service man?
3. When your leading lady is a dog.
Jan 01 2014
Dec 28 2013
The team of All In with Chris Hayes puts out a daily request on Twitter asking their followers to send them the things they find most interesting on the internet. These are their finds for December 26, 2013
The good, the bad, and the bizarre: Chris Hayes revisits the best Click3 clips from a very eventful year in Internet videos.
Dec 28 2013
Cross posted frpm The Stars Hollow Gazette
At the end of each year Salon’s Alex Pareene gives us his list of his top ten journalistic hacks. This year Alex has ranked the columnists that are President Barack Obama top reads. As, he points out in the article, the Internet has made the conversation more “democratized” than in the past when everyone relied on the print media. Today it isn’t so much how many people read a columnist, it’s who.
But as a Politico editor could tell you, it’s not how many you reach, it’s who. Among Friedman’s readers: much of the nation’s executive class. Among Allen’s? Nearly everyone who works in any capacity for every member of Congress. That’s why it’s necessary to criticize them. They really do “drive the conversation,” to use a particularly odious Politico-ism. Both what is considered politically possible and politically desirable in this country depend in large part on what a handful of mainly older, mainly white and overwhelmingly male columnists and pundits say. Who is let into that conversation and who is left out of it has consequences for all Americans. That was made clear 10 years ago, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, which the nation’s premier political opinion makers (what we once called “Thought Leaders”) almost universally supported. The Bush administration was aware of this, too, and devoted more efforts to convincing them than to trying to win over what we vaguely call “the people.”
President Barack Obama. Barack Obama loves newspaper columnists. He reads them, because he thinks they offer smarter commentary than one hears on cable news, and he invites them to the White House regularly, so he can influence their writing.
There in lies the problem, as Alex lays it out. Of the columnists that Pres. Obama has said are his favorite reads and who he has invited to the White House, none are women, all but one is black, most are older than 50 and most supported the Iraq war in 2003.
These are the men whose opinions the president “favors”
12. Eugene Robinson, Washington Post.
11. Jonathan Chait, New York magazine.
10. Josh Barro, Business Insider.
9. Ezra Klein, Washington Post.
8. E.J. Dionne, Washington Post.
7. David Brooks.
6. Gerald Seib, Wall Street Journal.
5. David Ignatius, Washington Post.
4. Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg View.
3. Joe Klein, Time.
2. Thomas Friedman, The Davos Herald-Register.
1. Fred Hiatt, Washington Post Editorial Page editor.
Who do you think the president should be reading more? Why?
Dec 27 2013
Thursday began the start of the seven day festival of Kwanzaa, a celebration of Black family, culture and community, that features traditional food, music, dance, story telling and a lighting of symbolic candles each of the seven days.
The folks at Huffington Post put together a video that explains the festival and it core precepts.
Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba-the seven principles of African Heritage), which Karenga said “is a communitarian African philosophy,” consisting of what Karenga called “the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world.” These seven principles comprise *Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition and reason. Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:
Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Kwanzaa symbols include a decorative mat (Mkeka) on which other symbols are placed, corn (Muhindi) and other crops, a candle holder kinara with seven candles (Mishumaa Saba), a communal cup for pouring libation (Kikimbe cha Umoja), gifts (Zawadi), a poster of the seven principles, and a black, red, and green flag. The symbols were designed to convey the seven principles.[8]
Dec 25 2013
In an old city bar
That’s never too far
From the places that gather
The dreams that have beenIn the safety of night
With its old neon light
It beckons to strangers
And they always come inAnd the snow it was falling
Neon was calling
The music was low
And the night Christmas EveAnd here was the danger
That even with strangers
Inside of this night
It’s easier to believeThen the door opened wide
And a child came inside
That no one in the bar
Had seen there beforeAnd he asked did we know
That outside in the snow
That someone was lost
Standing outside our doorThen the bartender gazed
Through the smoke and the haze
Through the window and ice
To that corner streetlightWhere standing alone
By a broken pay phone
Was a girl, the child said
Could no longer get homeAnd the snow it was falling
Neon was calling
Bartender turned and said, “Not that I care
But how would you know this?”
The child said, “I’ve noticed
If one could be home, they’d be already there”Then the bartender came out, from behind the bar
And in all of his life, was never that far
And he did something else that he thought no one saw
When he took all the cash from the register drawerThen he followed the child to the girl across the street
And we watched from the bar as they started to speak
Then he called for a cab then he said, “J.F.K.”
Put the girl in the cab and the cab drove away
And we saw in his hand, that the cash was all gone
From the light that she had wished uponIf you want to arrange it
This world you can change it
If we could somehow make this
Christmas thing lastBy helpin’ a neighbour
Even a stranger
To know who needs help
You need only just askThen he looked for the child
But the child wasn’t there
Just the wind and the snow
Waltzing dreams through the airSo he walked back inside
Somehow different, I think
For the rest of the night
No one paid for a drinkAnd the cynics will say
That some neighbourhood kid
Wandered in on some bums
In the world where they hidBut they weren’t there
So they couldn’t see
By an old neon star
On that night, Christmas EveWhen the snow it was falling
And neon was calling
In case you should wonder
In case you should careWhy we on our own
Never went home?
On that night of all nights
We were already there
Dec 24 2013
Remembering all our ghosts tonight