There is a new post up over at newmediatheory.net about Chez Pazienza who got fired by CNN for blogging! Otherwise Yankeewombat remains on vacation in Florida enjoying his grand kids and family.

At the end of a friendly exchange on the subject of conspiracy theory or ‘counterknowledge’ between Richard Landes and ShrinkWrapped which was started by Landes’ review of Counterknowledge by Damien Thompson there is the following commentary by Landes on the final paragraph of Shrinkwrapped’s post: (I’ve labeled who said what for clarity. Both quotes are [...]

I began buying the New York Times regularly in 1956 at Fletcher’s on the Square in Bellows Falls Vermont when I started high school. The Times had always been around the house because my father subscribed to it off and on and I must have developed the habit of reading it regularly by ’56. Nothing [...]

I was recently happily surprised to see a US presidential candidate – any candidate would do – show an awareness of the nature of the new media environment created by the Internet and in particular its darker side. I ran into this exchange near the end of this Pajamas Media interview of John McCain by [...]

Peter Magnusson is engaged in a project to try to pin down Quality on the Web. He points to the crux of the matter thus: “on the Internet, everybody can see if you’re an idiot, they just can’t do much about it.” He does not disclose exactly what he is trying to do about it [...]

I just finished David Bellavia’s House to House, an infantry Sargent’s account of the second battle of Fallujah in November 2004. In personal terms it is about one man’s struggle to come to terms with his own shortcomings as a soldier and even as a father and husband. In military terms it is a detailed [...]

A semaphore tower – courtesy Wikipedia Riepl’s Law, put forward by the German newspaperman Wolfgang Riepl in 1913, states that when new media emerge old ones don’t simply go away, they adapt and change. A contemporary German media CEO, Mattais Dorphner put it in contemporary terms this way here: …..new media do not replace existing [...]

In the fifties 5% of America’s population produced it’s food. The Soviet Union 50%, China 90%. Now the US does it with one half of 1% – farming, once ubiquitous, is now rare. Worldwide farmers are, for the first time in 5000 years, a minority. See here and here. We still have to eat, but [...]

Extreme Mortman nails the Washington Post for a bit of MSM gratuitous snark toward bloggers which seems to me to demonstrates the self wounding cluenessness of the established media in understanding the Titanic nature of their predicament or even the basic power of bloggers to widen the hole in their bow. The mainstream media keeps [...]

I was gossiping with my friend Griselda about a couple of very successful Australian businessmen we know for whom Communism/socialism represents good and America evil. The overwhelming problem they see in the world is America and believe that it must be stopped without for a moment recognizing any connection to their own genuine skill in [...]