Deconstructing the media
When I went to work as a copy editor for the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, I was informed of its explicit policy of crime coverage. If a crime occurred in the black ghetto of West Baltimore, we ignored it unless at least two people died, but any serious crime in the middle-class or wealthy areas of North Baltimore rated a full story, sometimes on the front page.
This kind of media bias, which used to be accepted with little more than a cynical shrug, has become the focus of a social movement called media literacy.
A small but notable Albuquerque organization, the Media Literacy Project, has been pursuing such issues for 20 years during which it has spun a widespread web that has taken executor director Andrea Quijada to such far-flung outposts as Venezuela, Tunisia and, most recently, Uganda...
New Mexico uranium and mini-reactors
Mention nuclear energy in New Mexico, and many of us get a cold shiver. Despite all the claims that nuclear energy is clean and safe, what it means to New Mexico is a long history of dirty – very dirty -- uranium mining and processing and the cancer that it brings.
So the thought of the federal government subsidizing the development of hundreds of mini-reactors to stimulate a new American nuclear industry that could generate thousands of portable nuclear power plants for export around the world, and use in our own backyard, has unnerving reverberations here...
Disaster’s false dichotomy
We differentiate between human-made disasters and those caused by nature. I believe this is a false, and ultimately misleading, distinction.
If a building housing sweatshops collapses in Savar, Bangladesh, killing more than a thousand workers, we assess blame to the architect who approved the plans (undoubtedly for monetary gain), a government that cannot establish building codes or, if it has them, refuses to enforce them (plenty of kickbacks there as well). We can blame the clothing brands in the US and other Western countries, which reap exaggerated profit and have never been serious about improving the facilities where their clothing is made...
400 parts per million
As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?
Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition...
Social Security and the brat named Sequester
One of the greatest and most intractable problems we face these days is what to do about our exploding population of oldsters. Some Progressive nitwits have suggested things are just fine and Social Security will not run out of money anytime soon. Conservatives know better and they have always raised the cry of alarm striking fear into the hearts of God-fearing people everywhere.
“The trust fund will go bust in the next few months if we don’t make radical program changes in the next fifteen minutes!” They intoned. “God wants us to do the right thing for future generations. Amen." ...
Who’s surprised by the AP phone records seizure?
The recent seizure of Associated Press reporter’s phone records by the Justice Department has raised a modicum of virility in an agency that covered civil liberty breaches by the last two administrations with a distant gaze. Gary Pruitt, AP president and CEO, stated in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.” Indeed that spirit of objection would have been welcomed by the millions of Americans caught up in dragnet digital surveillance by a national security state run amok for more than a decade...
The rape of a five-year-old
Almost lost amidst the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon was the news a few days later of a five-year-old girl raped and left for dead in New Delhi, India. Only four months earlier, a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus; she died of her injuries. Much of the world’s attention focused on that faraway country, on its startling number of sexualized power crimes against women and girls, and the failure of its authorities to take such crimes seriously.
But this is not an Indian problem. There is really nothing unusual about men raping or otherwise sexually abusing women and young girls...
Governor’s terrible indiscretion revealed
The scandal has gone on almost a year. Gov. Martinez and her super minions in state government were exchanging state business, but doing so in private e-mail apparently to avoid public scrutiny.
Just recently Attorney General Gary King, who will run against Martinez in the upcoming gubernatorial election, seized these communications. And guess what: a hideous breach of trust has been revealed in one of the gov’s communications. Yes, Susana Martinez has been caught red-handed e-mail ordering undergarments from some Internet purveyor...
The stupendous week that was
If you are President Obama surveying the scene from the Oval Office, here is what you might have seen last week:
• A House of Representatives committee finally negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and doing so at the 11th hour just before negotiations would have collapsed.
Although it differs substantially from the bill moving through the Senate, the deal goes a long way toward assuring that some kind of immigration reform will eventually emerge from the congressional sausage factory.
• Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan, authoritative judge of all things budgetary, saying the unexpected strength of the recovery has increased tax receipts and reduced expenditures to a major degree...
Big foot and the tea party
New Mexico paranormal investigator, journalist and filmmaker Tony Della Flora has heat-imaging evidence Big Foot has been hanging around in the Valles Caldera. Not many people know this, but Sasquatch is the Grand Poobah for New Mexico’s Tea Party and he’s really pissed off. It seems the IRS has been asking a lot of vague questions about the NM Tea Party re. their 501 (c) (4) status.
Big Foot and his Tea Party friends want to edumuhcate New Mexicans about their ideas that are anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-immigration, anti-econ. stimulus, and anti-16th and 17th amendment. New Mexico’s Tea party wants to audit every family in New Mexico for constitutionality and purity. That’s why they can’t understand why the IRS wants to audit them about their non-profit status.