qana
boxer offers to campaign for lamont
-- I was all prepared to call up Boxer's office and give some random staffer/intern a talking to. Now I guess I should call to say "Thanks for seeing the light."
-- I was all prepared to call up Boxer's office and give some random staffer/intern a talking to. Now I guess I should call to say "Thanks for seeing the light."
rice (like powell) not of the inner circle.
your gonna miss me / now playing at lincolncenter
In a way, it's that lack of streetsmarts that allows You're Gonna Miss Me to be a beautiful film worthy of the great singer's legend. Roky is not a well man, and his own actions have combined with the actions of others to make him that way, but deep down you can see that all he ever wanted was to be a boy, play some music, and be happy. Thank heaven that Keven McAlester is the kind of documentary filmmaker who was content in showing that side of the man, and allowing that to add to his legend, rather than turning the whole thing into a freak show. Great work.discuss
Good God, I can't believe that the Lieberman "hackers crashed our website" bogus story is the lead article on the NY Times website. Fucking major media, all they know how to do is lie and recycle spin for the bad guys.
Sony Unveils Mylo Device -- MP3, messaging, VoIP, browsing, video player, video games, 1GB memory, BUT no connectivity other than WiFi
Sony to launch a new kind of wireless handheld for IM, other Internet-based communications
Sony to launch a new kind of wireless handheld for IM, other Internet-based communications
Sprint to build 4G network
Sprint to Use WiMax for 4G Network
Sprint to Invest as Much as $3 Billion in New Network
Sprint to spend up to $4.5 bln on WiMax network
Sprint to Use WiMax for 4G Network
Sprint to Invest as Much as $3 Billion in New Network
Sprint to spend up to $4.5 bln on WiMax network
DirecTV-EchoStar Merger Seen Unlikely
-- This Forbes article mentions possible cooperations on data services via the AWS spectrum auction. -- WARNING -- Hit mute before following the Forbes link. There's a talkiing pop-up of Steve Forbes. Aaaaahhhh!
bocce, bitches! hawaiian rules!
global warming a myth? NO : sea cow spotted in hudson river off 23rd st.
to clarify: it was not a spotted seacow.
to clarify: it was not a spotted seacow.
The bar employs 20 well-built men in their 20s and 30s who have agreed to be hit. Customers can specify how they want the men to appear - they can even be dressed up as women, the newspaper said.
joshs mind and soul need a two state solution.
New on the reading list ... The End of Iraq by Peter Galbraith, who previously served as ambassador to Croatia. I heard him on NPR yesterday morning. And Fiaso byt Thomas Ricks, Pentagon correspondent for the WaPo and previously for the WSJ. I caught him on Fresh Air recently.
sidesplitter.
What drives so many Democrats crazy about Lieberman is not simply his support for the Iraq war. It's that he's unashamedly pro-American.
pdq dada
LANGUAGE CONTROL PATROLmore nunberg radio... / this one from 7/31/06 discussing the book w/ brian lehrer is very good
March 3, 2006
BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. He says language is used by governments and their opponents to highlight certain features of reality and suppress others.
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Take the word "regime." People spoke of the Saddam regime, for instance, or the Baghdad regime rather than the government. And "regime" is a word that implies always a certain illegitimacy or instability. We talk, for instance, about the Latin American countries that have adopted democratic government we describe as "democratic regimes," but we don't talk about nations like France and Sweden and the U.K. as "democratic regimes." They're just democracies. Language like that always carries a point of view, and the media use the words in ways that pretty much accord with the assumptions that the government brings to them.
BOB GARFIELD: So do you believe that the media can and should be arbiters of what the right word choice is, or should we be leaving this to politicians? How do we alight on just the right word?
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: In recent years, certainly the media has been willing, perhaps too willing, to adopt the administration's usage. After the administration announced that they'd no longer be talking about "private" Social Security accounts but "personal" accounts, if you looked in the media in the two or three months after the administration made those announcements, the number of stories describing them as "personal" rather than "private" accounts doubled, which is a pretty clear indication of the government's influence. A lot of people in the media have taken to using death tax without quotation marks, without a little hedge like "so-called" rather than estate tax. The American media were extremely reluctant to use what Rumsfeld called "the torture word" after the first Abu Ghraib stories came out. And this is while the European papers, even the right-wing, even Murdoch's papers in the U.K. were using "torture" while the New York Times and the Washington Post for quite a while were dancing around that word out of a fear of either criticism from the administration or from, in particular, right-wing press watchdog groups.
BOB GARFIELD: Is it fair to say that he who controls the vocabulary really controls the debate?
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: I think that's fair to say, though I think people sometimes tend to look in the wrong place for that. I think the vocabulary that really matters here is a vocabulary about which the press is actually less aware and less sensitive than these phrases like "private accounts" or "death tax" and so on, where everybody's kind of keyed into the partisan significance of those phrases. So look, when I look in the so-called liberal media -- The Washington Post, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, L.A. Times -- in domestic political context at the word "values," I see that conservative values are anywhere to three to five times as common as liberal values. And that's not a matter of some dictat coming down from the editor of those papers, nor is it really a matter of a conscious decision. It's just that "values" nowadays in American speech evokes conservatism rather than liberalism. And you can go on with that sort of thing. But those are the usages that I think really move public opinion or crystallize public opinion, and they're ones that the media adopts, I really think, without much thought.
BOB GARFIELD: All right, Geoff. Well, thank you very much.
GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Okay. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is a linguist and author of the forthcoming Talking Right: How Conservatives Turn Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving Left-Wing Freak Show. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
ESPN and the inverse of net neutrality. I hope this doesn't work for them. Very bad precedent.
