The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK is a notoriously unreliable tabloid devoted to scandal and sensationalizing so everything that appears in it should be treated skeptically. But like the National Enquirer in the US with which it shares some similarities, it does on occasion get real scoops.
The paper today says that it has received leaked secret cables from the UK Ambassador in Washington to the Foreign Ministry that paints a damning portrait of the Trump administration.
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Last month I posted about the fascinating Studio 360 public radio show on the making and impact of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey that led me to read a detailed book on the subject Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, And The Making Of A Masterpiece by Michael Benson. Today, Studio 360 had the second part of the show, this one focusing on how the film’s computer HAL portrayed Artificial Intelligence and technology, how its predictions compare with the reality now, and the impact the film had on subsequent science fiction films.
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Currently Julian Assange sits in a British prison after being unceremoniously ousted from his asylum situation in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. The US has indicted him and seeks to extradite him to the US to face charges. Assange arouses strong feelings. Some people detest him for some of the things he is accused of in his personal capacity while some journalists hate him because he exposed government secrets in ways they do not approve of. But Matt Taibbi argues that whatever we may feel about him, we should be very concerned about the implications for journalism as a whole contained in the indictments.
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Professional comedian Conan O’Brien was sued by someone who claimed that O’Brien had copied the jokes he had sent on Twitter. O’Brien settled the case but said that it did not mean his writers had used other people’s material without attribution. He said that pretty much everyone was sending out jokes on the same topics and it was inevitable that there would be coincidences.
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There has been some controversy over the issue of whether Democratic candidates should appear on Fox News programs and on the ‘town halls’ that they sponsor, where their hosts interview candidates before an audience. Some have chosen to do so while others have declined. Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg have chosen to appear but Elizabeth Warren was particularly stinging in her rejection of their invitation, calling Fox a ‘hate for profit racket’. The Democratic party has said that they will not allow Fox to sponsor any of the debates of their candidates.
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Social media has been blamed for spreading false stories that can inflame tensions and has led to great violence in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. After the recent bombings that killed 253 people in the latter country, the government shut down nearly all the social media platforms to prevent retaliatory violence. It later lifted the bans but yesterday briefly re-imposed the bans following violence between different group in one of the regions where a church was bombed on Easter Sunday. Schools are due to re-open today but bomb scares, the heavy security presence, and ongoing searches have made the atmosphere tense and people are being urged to avoid gathering in large numbers.
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We are familiar with the ‘express checkout lines’ at supermarkets and elsewhere meant for those with fewer that a certain number of items. People who violate this rule can arouse a great deal of hostility. Some violate the spirit of the rule by claiming that multiple items of the same product should count as one. But there is a difference between ten cans of tuna and ten bananas in a single bunch. Most people would think that the former consists of ten items and the latter one item. But what if you have ten bananas in two bunches? Should that be considered one item or two? Would it matter if the two bunches are weighed and rung up separately or both placed on the scale at once and rung up as a single item.
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The original Netflix business model was clever. You would queue up the films you wanted. They would mail you a DVD of a film that you would mail back after watching. It was easy. There were no due dates and no overdue fees. All it required for them was to purchase DVDs and stock a warehouse with them, with little other overhead since once you purchase a DVD, you can rent it out as many times as you like. It is little wonder that these low overhead costs drove the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster out of business.
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Katie Halper interviews Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Aaron Maté of The Nation about how much of the mainstream media glommed onto the Trump-Russia collusion story, predictably called ‘Russiagate’, for so long to the exclusion of many other important stories, and left themselves wide open to the kind of blowback that they are now experiencing because of the Mueller report seemingly saying (at least as far as the released short summary goes) that there was no such collusion. The entire interview is well worth reading but here are a few excerpts. (MT refers to Taibbi, AM to Maté, and KH to Halper.)
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There are periodic protests by fans of some TV shows when they are canceled. The latest is about Netflix canceling the series One Day At A Time after three seasons because it said it attracted an insufficient audience. I had not heard about this show until the cancellation protest and people wrote in support of the show saying that it was well-written and funny. It is a reboot of a show of the same name that I watched when I was in graduate school and had the same general outlines of a single mother raising two children, and it even had the same theme song and the same name for the building supervisor. Part of the reason for the protest is that the reboot was one of the rare shows that featured a Hispanic cast, in this case a family of Cuban origin. An added bonus was Rita Moreno as the grandmother.
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