The actor and comic died yesterday, an apparent suicide, the cause of death whose reasons are often completely inscrutable. In his case, he apparently suffered from depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol, a deadly combination.
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My nomination for that would be its ‘national security reporter ‘ Dina Temple-Raston whom I have long castigated for being an unapologetic propagandist for the organs of the national security state. Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of her breathless and uncritical coverage, this time of claims made by the CIA and its front organizations.
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I could never get a Yo-Yo to obey me. It would roll down the string and stay there despite my best efforts. So I am impressed with the skills of world champion Gentry Stein who won the title in Prague in 2014.
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There has been an orgy of remembrances about Richard Nixon’s resignation as president because the 40th anniversary was on the 9th. I am not a big fan of these retrospectives but I found the following video clip intriguing. It is from a TV series called Nixon’s the One that has not yet been broadcast in the US. It is supposed to be an accurate verbatim portrayal of events based on transcripts and notes of those present.
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There is a curious thing about death. We all know it is inevitable, that we will all experience it some day, but yet our own death is a subject that we recoil from contemplating. While death, often violent, is a common feature of our entertainment culture, as can be seen by its ubiquity in the storylines in books, films, TV programs and even video games, few people like to think about their own mortality. They are more comfortable talking about the death of others because then death can be talked about in the abstract, not as something real.
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I find that directly facing the fact of one’s eventual death to be extraordinarily liberating. It makes one realize that life is precious and should not be wasted. It does not matter at all how much money or possessions you have when you die. Now that my own children are grown and educated and no longer dependent on me, there seems to be no point at all in accumulating more wealth or possessions. In fact, the opposite is the case, I have consciously started reducing the amount of things I own. I try not to buy anything that I don’t really need or that does not serve some fairly direct purpose. My main indulgence is books which I still continue to buy.
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(This clip aired on July 24, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
In an extremely important and positive development triggered by Edward Snowden, Yahoo announces that like Google they will begin to encrypt email. It was clear that the only way that government spying could be thwarted is if the big companies started including sophisticated encryption methods into their software and made it easy to use, because ordinary people would be too intimidated by what is required to do so on their own. We cannot depend upon Congress to rein the NSA in.
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Last evening saw the opening ceremony of Gay Games 2014 in my hometown of Cleveland. The games have been held every four years starting in 1982. In 2018 it will be in Paris. I must say that I am proud of the city for offering to host the games and working hard to put out the welcome mat. The institution where I work (Case Western Reserve University) is hosting some events at its athletic facilities. And from all reports, the opening night festivities seemed to have gone well.
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I have heard the phrase “get your ducks in a row” but I have never seen it done literally with live ducks. This is pretty impressive. If he could do the same thing with cats, he might make obsolete the ‘herding cats’ metaphor for something that is impossible to do.
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