Hugh Hewitt interviewed John Burns of the NY Times on his blog earlier this year in February. The following exchange jumped out at me: HH: Are you aware of the work of Michael Yon and Bill Roggio? JB: I’m not. Tell me about them. HH: Well, they’re independents who are out embedded with troops in [...]

Browsing in my local library just at closing time, the last chapter of Owen Harries’, Benign or Imperial?, entitled “The Illusion of the Anglosphere” caught my eye. I must confess to harboring a few Anglospheric thoughts so I found my animus piqued. I didn’t have time to finish the chapter, but I was able find [...]

In my last post I talked about the the way the media – especially TV – pushes emotionally manipulative material on us in an attempt to both control what we feel and think and eventually believe. The emotional side tends to be less obvious until something increases our awareness of it because we are naturally [...]

I learned something yesterday about the Internet and TV visiting a friend’s place. The news came of the TV: first up the Virgina Tech shootings. My friend asked if I had seen the tape sent by Cho Seung-Hui to NBC. I replied. “Absolutely not, though I certainly have had plenty of opportunity.” Being a psychiatrist [...]

Bill Roggio reports the latest suicide bombing offensive in Iraq. This is the opening paragraph: After a relative lull in major, mass casualty suicide attacks inside Baghdad, al Qaeda in Iraq has gone on a major offensive inside the capital city. Al Qaeda’s latest suicide offensive began on April 13; the last major bombing inside [...]

Since the beginning of the ‘surge’ the Iraq government has changed it policy toward the Shiite militias and the US has changed its rules of engagement so that it could go after the Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias and death squads. Having Sadr in the government made it unlikely, perhaps impossible, that any [...]

I’ve only heard Don Imus on American radio a few times in the car while visiting the States. He struck me as a small town put down artist. He recently went too far – as shock jocks sooner or later do – and referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team a “nappy headed hos.” The [...]

Well, here is the down side (you knew it was coming) of Easter from Lizard’s point of view.

Oliver Kamm – with whom I usually agree strongly – had a quite severe attack on political blogs this week in the Guardian here. His concluding paragraph gives the flavor: The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life [...]

My son wrote on his personal blog about a media experience which struck me as something that Marshall McLuhan would recognize as tending to confirm his ideas about the kind of mentality print media – in this case newspapers – creates in its users as opposed to the mentality created by electronic media. He talks [...]