With an all-too familiar lack of imagination, aesthetics, history, safety and disregard for it’s own procedures City Council, in a seven to one vote (Thomas Crowder being the only renegade), sent a message about its fealty to the internal combustion engine and how easily cowed it apparently can be by a gaggle of self-indulgent youngsters staging a sit-in on the front lawn – sitting in Daddy’s cars.
[Continued below the fold.]
News is what somebody else wants suppressed. All the rest is advertising.—Lord Northcliffe
Advertising is the heart and soul of the free press.—Josephus Daniels
Regarding the decade-long, ritual suicide of the US paper and ink “news” business, seems to me the disaster is unfolding via two factors: (1) The smartest guys in the room, as is so often the case, aren’t and/or (2) there is likely some deliberate nature to this.
Other nations’ newspapers seem to be bearing up reasonably well. It isn’t so much that people don’t “like” newspapers anymore; on the contrary, surveys show that a desire for them remains high. It is simply that more and more readers are dissatisfied with today’s offerings. What is so unique about the Land of the Free, Home of the First Amendment? Newspapers are unequivocal in pointing the fingers of blame at the Internet, as if it were a vampire wolf gobbling precious advertising revenue. But sagging ad revenue is just another symptom.
Back in the old pre-crash days, my relationship with the man was never what you’d call adversarial, more professional in a perverse sort of way, merely a component of the operational conditions which occasionally didn’t go my way.
“My job is to have fun,” I told one arresting officer as he cuffed me. “Your job is to try and catch me. You caught me.” He made this sort of muffled, choking sound.
“But you’re gonna have to catch me every time!” Then he laughed. I had a good run with the not being caught part. That was the sum of my relationship with law enforcement—nothing personal, just business. The policeman’s lot is not a happy one, in part courtesy of jerks like me.
Autumn: a season of change; the death of the year; the contemplation of things undone… heralded by the swish of dry leaves, cerulean blue skies, bracing north winds and—from the outermost suburbs to the Capitol grounds, as ubiquitous as the caw of crows—the grating whine of the leaf blower commencing at seven AM, right alongside newschoppers hot on the trail of traffic shots.
Remarkable. The events of the last few weeks are deserving of that oft overused adjective. The people of the United States, in a show of wisdom and courage, elected a man who is truly and accurately an actual African-American, half Kenyan and half Kansan. In the welcome, resounding reverberations of a black man cresting the last political hurdle, we, all of us, additionally have a marvelous launching point for an open and wide-ranging discourse on the festering wound of the US race matter. The issue is not going to change immediately, of course, but the reverberations of the event have a potential to alter the nation and world, if channeled and directed with conscious effort.
Read Petrblt on New Raleigh.