Kier's Delicious

Jacob Soboroff just happened to be passing through town on the same night our DC Media Makers meeting was taking place. He showed up and talked a bit about video blogging and the Why Tuesday? project. I remember hearing about Why Tuesday? on the news, back during the last election. If nothing else, it's a great example of what can be done with the technology we all now have readily at hand and a bit of effort. Is the finished product smooth and glitzy like a PR firm produced PSA? Nope. And that's one of the things that makes grass-roots journalism and activism work. We're all sick of being sold to and told what to do. Better to let our own voices be heard, no matter how rough around the edges they may be.

Gathering together around 150 years of photo manipulations, some better than others, this page helps put things in a bit of perspective. First, it's nothing new. For almost as long as there have been photographs, there have been people willing and able to make them misrepresent objective reality. More importantly, it's getting worse because it's getting easier. You really can't trust what you see unless you're seeing it first hand. Today anything that's reproduced anywhere could very well be Photoshopped or otherwise manipulated to support an agenda. Be critical of your media and don't even begin to trust your advertisements.

It's about time someone did this. For at least the past decade and a half I've been wondering why there wasn't a bigger push for nuclear power. The only answer I could ever come up with was irrational fear and outright ignorance of just how tenuous our power situation was becoming. As long as the NIMBY crowd and the the ever present "we're against it just because they're for it" groups don't get in the way, this should help. And, perhaps even more hopefully, Southern Co won't cut corners to save a few bucks and leave the world once again thinking nuclear power is a bad idea shortly after the plants go online. (Oh, and where's the push for more research into fusion... that would be much better in the long run than our regular fission plants.)

Most politicians I've known will take whatever chance they can to get in front of the public and pitch their plans. The only thing that keeps most from stumping at funerals and christenings is some innate sense of decorum. The same is true when it comes to potential conflict of interest situations. Decorum prevents what hard legal limits will not. Obviously, not all politicians have that sense of decorum. Is it surprising the Fox News is an apparent haven for Pundit Candidates? Nope. Not at all. When it comes to decorum... well, let's just say I don't expect it from anything in the Fox family, most especially its "news" channel. The worst thing, of course, is that the target constituents of these future candidates won't see anything at all wrong with what's going on.