Midweek Miscellany

We frequently see or hear quips about the older generation's fumble-fingered efforts with new (to them) technology - here's a chance for those of us of "a certain age" to have a little snigger at the younger generation:

"Are we supposed to pick up the phone and then do it?' Fun footage shows two teenagers completely baffled by a rotary telephone when given four minutes to make one call:

Teacher wears same dress for 100 days to teach students a lesson

By Hannah Frishberg

Teacher Julia Mooney dressed to impress her earthy beliefs on middle school students.

To prove that you are not what you wear, Mooney, 34, donned the same gray, button-down dress for 100 days in a row, washing it only “as needed.”

She didn’t tell her young charges what she was up to in the beginning — but slowly they caught on that she was rocking the roughly $50 frock “through ceramics projects, blizzards, whatever.”

“I was a little bit fed up with the cultural expectation to go shopping and spend all this money for other people to approve of me,” Mooney told “Good Morning America” back in November, when she launched her minimalist mission. “There is no rule that says I cannot wear the same thing every day if I choose to, so I thought, why not.

Fast-forward to February: By buying into the buzzy “fast fashion” trend, Mooney says we are cultivating what she describes as a “culture of excess” that hurts the environment — and young people.

"This is something they deal with every day as 12- and 13-year-olds,” she tells TreeHugger. “As they try to define themselves, they are often identifying with brands or superficial things like their social media presence. Many seemed excited to have a reason to talk about how silly all of that really is.................“Let’s use our energy to do good instead of looking good,” Mooney advises on her @oneoutfit100days Instagram account, where she posts about the importance of sustainability and the evils of fast fashion.

Do read the full piece (linked at the title) where there's a photograph of Ms Mooney, and the dress.

Cartoon by Mad John Peck (1971) - the idea never gets old!

A movie "coming soon"- actually at the end of June 2019, is said to offer a new slant on Beatlemania, with a spoonful of sci-fi added.

A failing musician finds himself the only person in the world who remembers, after a weird world-wide sci-fi type event, the Beatles and their music. Guess what a failing musician might do next in such circumstances!

If the movie hadn't been written by Richard Curtis (from a story by Jack Barth) I'd probably be very wary of its potential, but Curtis has written such delights as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Love Actually (2003)... Yesterday is directed by Danny Boyle.

This coming movie has to be worth a look (keeping disbelief suspended!)

Official trailer:

Where is THE LEFT in the USA?

I've been saying for years, to anyone who'll listen, that "there's no proper political Left in the USA". In 2015/6 at election time, Bernie Sanders' campaign proved that there is plenty of support for more left-leaning policies, more pro-working class policies, more support for the ordinary people of this vast country. We all know what happened...don't we? Media in general denied him the space given to ...well just about everyone else involved in that General Election.

Ted Rall has a very good piece up at Counterpunch this weekend, it highlights one major reason why the Left in the USA remains largely hidden, year after year:
The Left Will Never Thrive Without a Well-Funded Left Media Organization

A few snips:

On Sunday, October 23rd “About 1,500 women and allied men marched on the Pentagon on Sunday to demand an end to perpetual war and the funding of education, health care and other social needs instead,” reported Joe Lauria of the progressive website Consortium News.

Mainstream/corporate journalistic outlets memory-holed the event with a total media blackout.

One commenter on Facebook bemoaned national priorities: what does it say that so few attended the Women’s March on the Pentagon? More than 200,000 people crowded the Washington Mall for comedian Jon Stewart’s inane 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” a piss-take parody of protest, literally and by the definition of its organizers an apolitical march for nothing!

Cindy Sheehan, an activist who made national news by protesting her son’s death in the Iraq War at George W. Bush’s Texas ranch, responded on Facebook that people should show up rather than sit at home criticizing those who did on their computers.

......................Our real problem is that there isn’t a real, bona-fide Left journalism outlet in the United States.

One that’s smart, i.e., well-managed. Not in the derpy leaderless consensus style that destroyed the Occupy movement, but top-down by brilliant Machiavellian can’t-be-bought leftist schemers who know how to motivate and build an organization.

One that’s well-funded. Not by some control-freak billionaire who can petulantly renege on his big promises after he loses interest or gets corrupted, but by generous ongoing crowdsourcing that guarantees editorial independence to an uncompromisingly left-wing team of editors with big budgets to hire kickass investigative reporters, back out-of-the-box journalists, humorists and editorialists. Give me $50 million a year (wonder if the person who won the $1.6 billion MegaMillions lottery is progressive?) and I could build and run an operation that could change the world. It’s not impossible: Bernie Sanders raised $100 million from small donors in one year..........

In the 1960s the corporate mainstream media allowed antiwar, pro-civil rights and other anti-establishment journalists and pundits to disseminate their views on TV (Cronkite criticizing the Vietnam War), on the opinion pages of major newspapers and in bestselling books. And they covered protests.

No more. The Left has been ruthlessly purged.

Not one single opinion writer or staff columnist or cartoonist employed by an American newspaper is a real, bonafide leftist—not a single one even supported Bernie Sanders (whose politics are basically McGovern in 1972 and was supported by half of Democrats) during the 2016 primaries.
Not one single TV or major radio talk show host is a real, bonafide leftist. None supported Bernie.
The same goes for “liberal” outlets like The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, etc.
It’s censorship. It’s systemic. It’s killing the Left.

(Highlighting is mine.)

Do go read the full piece at Counterpunch. But...what can we ordinary people do about this problem? We can spread the word wherever we can, in conversations on social media, blogs, real-life chit chats and debates. Shine a light on the problem - that's what we can do at present, as well as supporting people such as Ted Rall who are able to shine a brighter light, with a much longer beam than our own.

Saturday and Sundry Thoughts on Communicating Massively

There are still a few of us around who are able to recall life before computers, and therefore before the internet. Heck - I can even remember life before television! Mass communication, in those days, came via newspapers and radio, and to a lesser extent via film and newsreels at the cinema. First time I saw a TV working was for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. A few neighbours, my parents, grandparents and I piled into the home of a local business woman who had the only set in the village where my grandparents lived.

I do remember when the very first mention of computers reached my delicate ears, in 1966/7. I'd been working for a few months for a local Devonshire (south-west England) 'bus company in the accounts office. One of the senior employees had been sent on a training course, on his return he regaled us with tales of the binary system leaving our brains limp and imaginations reeling. All we had to work with in those days were very basic mechanical adding machines, one step up from the abacus. Having, out of necessity, trained my non-mathematical brain to add long columns of figures in hotel ledgers during the few years previous, I often opted to "do it in my head" rather than tackle the awkward adding machine.

None of us could have possibly envisaged the amazing developments we've seen during ensuing decades. Online banking, shopping, social networking, the dreaded Facebook, smartphones, ipads..... spam, porn sites, viruses, malware, Twitter - the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. I am well aware that my own life turned in a very unexpected direction, all due to the internet, for it was through the net that husband and I met.

There's a downside to these developments and changes though, there's always a downside.

Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
Alan Kay

Over roughly the same time span: from TV sets becoming commonplace, followed rapidly by computer development, up to the present, corporate power has risen in tandem. Now multinational corporations own media, at least they do in the USA and have tentacles worldwide. TV has become a major arm of the corporations' mass brain-washing system. Oh, they'd been doing it before TV, but the opening up of mass communication made it so much easier! As more time has passed evidence has continued to emerge that we are under constant surveillance. Recent developments relating to Facebook's gathering of personal information is disquieting to say the least. Perhaps nobody senses danger if all the stolen information is used simply to target a few adverts for shoes, bandages, bras, toasters - whatever it was we were searching for online last. But the feeling that there could be other, darker, uses for the information gathered is not a happy one. Facebook is currently at the centre of discussions on this front, but Google and others are also quietly gathering our personal data, and have been doing so for years.

The solution? For ordinary souls such as I, and passing readers who do not wish to divest ourselves completely of access to television, computer and internet, all we can do is be aware of the potential "weaponry" in our living rooms, remain vigilant, never forgetting possible sub-text, and remember to keep in mind, always, this question: who is "paying the piper"?

When discussing this topic, several years ago, and before Facebook became the monster it now is, a friend observed that as we become increasingly under cyber influences, man-made (or manipulated), the structure of the human psyche will probably transform - over time. Sensibilities will increase and entirely new avenues might open up. Aquarian Age stuff to come?

My view: humans will, almost certainly, evolve psychologically due to the highly technological world they've been born into. We are at the slimmest end of the science fiction wedge of that eventuality right now. It must be happening, week by week, year by year, decade by decade.

My husband's opinion:

"Follow the money!" You can tell which industry is making the most money by the number of TV spots they are running. These ads can cost as much as a million dollars a minute. Cars, pharmaceuticals, insurance, smartphones, political candidates; who’s on top tonight?

I read a piece about the rise and fall of a country once. The one thing that I remember most is that the aggressor took over mass media first. Radio, newspapers, television...town criers to internet... mass communication is first to go. So, money has taken over our mass media. Have we been conquered?