The Thought Shopper has bloggeritis đÂ
I’ve been using Twitter lately; nearly entirely because the mouse clicks are easier.Â
is tomorrow a beginning?
“All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way. Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent, now, completely.
“The individual computing laboratory in every 12-year-old’s pocket is being locked down. If you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves, you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.
“The goal of the network operators is to attach every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment that she can’t learn from, can’t study, can’t understand, can’t whet her teeth on, can’t do anything with except send text messages that cost a million times more than they ought to.”
More notes at Memex…Â
“Eben Moglen’s ‘Innovation in an Age of Austerity’.
If you watch nothing else this week, watch this.”
romney money
words-R-industries
âgyre âfire âstory âallegory âsupercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Go ‘see’ how you can ‘hear’ a sound file for each of our words. Click below.
https://ssl.gstatic.com/dictionary/static/sounds/de/0/YOURWORD.mp3
neato pictures of skin
Your skin âthe largest organ of the bodyâ weighs about 9 lbs, releases up to 3 gallons of liquid each day, and sheds about 30,000 cells every minute.Â
falling newspapers and their revenue
George Orwell: ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.’
more and more often lately
“I close my eyes, whistle, and send the dogs off into the brush to see if they can scare up any words.” – Brad Zellar
each is a very good year
The therapist, Barry Michels, told him to close his eyes and focus on the things he was grateful for. The first time he did this, in the therapistâs office, there was a long silence. âWhat about your dog?â Michels asked. âO.K. Iâm grateful for my dog,â the writer said after a while. âThe sun?â âFine, the sun,â the writer said. âIâm grateful for sun. Sometimes.â 
some rants are literature
It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today.Â
Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal.
Itâs no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nationâs most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesnât look to me as if we do.
The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.
An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.
Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon.
For starters, thereâs more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.
a vacuum occupied by myth
Deciphering Ernest Hemingway, er, with a twist:Â
The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, thatâs because he set it up that way, signing himself âOld Masterâ when he was barely 18.
He made the fiction true, including the fiction of himself, and then struggled to keep up with it.
costs per patient discharged alive
1) The cost per patient discharged alive reflects the times.
2) Since 2001, mortality has been level while the cost per patient has escalated dramatically.
3) The post-2000 era, however, seems to be characterized by diminishing returns, with growth in costs far outpacing reductions in inpatient mortality.
and then it all went awry
rape is our invisible war
1) Today: Lawsuit claims rape, misconduct at D.C. Marine Barracks
2) The Daily Mail: 8 female Marines claim gang rape at Washington Marine Barracks
3) CNN: Female service members sue US Military for alleged rape, sexual assaultÂ
4) Democracy Now! ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Rape, Sexual Assault Epidemic Military
5) Reuters: ‘The Invisible War’ Exposes Wide-Spread Rape in U.S. Military
6) LA Times: ‘The Invisible War’ Sheds Light on Rape in the MilitaryÂ
7) Salt Lake Tribune: ‘The Invisible War’
8) Associated Press: ‘Invisible War’ Examines Rape in the U.S. Military
9) Forbes Women: Republicans Betray Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence
as we learn today’s propaganda
A comment from Goin’ South sums it up:Â
âWhat is truth,â Pilate asked.Â
In this age when the brains, tongues and typing fingers of scientists, academics, journalists and ‘public intellectuals’ are for sale, itâs quite a challenging question.
The truth is whatever you can pay to make it.
Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have launched the S.H.A.M.E. Project, which stands for âShame the Hacks who Abuse Media Ethics.â
Its approach is to provide information about the background and funding sources of well-recognized journalists and pundits so that the public will be in a better position to recognize bias and hidden agendas in their reporting and analysis. You can find a S.H.A.M.E dossier on Gladwell here.
cram your screen with revenue
True search results are far below your screen.
Google is now become synthetic advertising. 
