If you put a train horn onto a car, you could drive around making people jump--literally. I confess that I couldn't stop laughing at this juvenile prank. It will cost you $375 to buy a cheap one. I wish it would be practical to put a train horn on my bicycle.
At Huffpo, social scientist Steven Bryant points out what the media needs to do if it wants to become respectable. The key is that "journalism needs to become journalism again":
The news media - and not the opinion side, but the reporting side - must start reporting which side's argument is correct... and stop reporting only the argument between the two sides itself. The inability of the media to act as "the umpire" - the referee - between the two sides of our political "reality fight" is as astoundingly detrimental a development in our civic culture as the freedom corporations now have to spend as much as they want to influence policy development and election results . . . Imagine a future America in which - no matter how artfully one side used language to lie about the other side's position - our journalists didn't just interview those making such fanciful claims but called them out for being liars! Imagine how you would feel if that was what you saw on the news! To those journalists who say "I can't call people liars when I report on them," I say "It's called fact-checking. Try it. You'll like it." Imagine if the evening news didn't just report the debates going on in Congress - (as if the debates were news just for being debates... news because "people not getting along" has become newsworthy in unto itself)- but reported that "In today's debate on (fill in the subject of your choice), Senator XXX lied about what would happen if this bill was enacted."Of course, to do this, the media would need to hire experienced and intelligent (i.e., relatively expensive) reporters, providing them with fact-checking crews. And viewers would need to invest more energy watching, because the stories are going to often be longer and more contentious, at least at first. Perhaps reporters will be required to warn their guests to get honest or get back on topic. Perhaps some guests won't, and reporters will need to give them the hook, perhaps right in the middle of broadcasts. But after awhile,wouldn't there be a big payoff? Wouldn't the talking heads and political con artists eventually know that they will be exposed, and therefore more often show up ready to discuss what to do about real problems facing the country? I agree entirely with Bryant, but I suspect that the media know that there is currently no financial incentives for distilling and providing useful information rather than the infotainment and the "conflict pornography" that currently pass as news.
In a short Rolling Stone article called "The Way Out for Obama," Matt Taibbi compares the Democrats and the Republicans:
Democrats and Republicans are basically the same on a lot of issues: They both voted for the Iraq War, they both love pork and useless weapons programs, they both lift their skirts for Wall Street. But they have one major stylistic difference: Republicans are unafraid to exercise power, while Democrats try to run government like one of those pansy-ass T-ball leagues, where every kid gets to have a hit, nobody loses, and nobody has to go home with an ouchie or hurt feelings. Well, T-ball is over. If Obama wants to pass any kind of [health care] reform — even one as riddled with industry giveaways as the current measure — he is finally going to have to take a swing in anger. If he doesn't, it may well mark the moment when our government conceded that it can never force any powerful industry to accept any kind of change, no matter how minimal.
Colin Beavan ("No Impact Man") discusses progress:
2009 had cooler cell phones than 2008. 2010 has cooler cell phones than 2009. 2011 will have even cooler cell phones than 2010.
That won't be progress. Year in, year out, we have cooler cell phones. If it's the same year in, year out, how can it be progress? Because it's not actually progress. It's more of the same . . .
Far away from us, one billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Because of this, far away from us, a child dies of diarrhea every 15 seconds . . .
Ask the average person: Do you want to watch TV on your cell phone or save the world's children from dying of diarrhea? I know what they'd say. People are good . . .
What would be real progress? . . .
When we find a way to concentrate on bringing clean drinking water to the billion people who don't have it instead of looking for a way to bring better TV reception to our cell phones.
Tonight, the parents of my children's school were given a chance to view and discuss the 2009 Chris Rock movie: "Good Hair." As you can see from the following YouTube trailer, the film is characterized as a "comedy," and there were certainly many lighthearted moments throughout the film. On the other hand, the subject of the film is also tragic, in that it is the story of millions of African-American women who have been convinced that their natural hair is not beautiful. Chris Rock documents the extreme lengths that many African-American women go to to cover up their African-American hair. The story starts when one of Rock's young daughters asked him, "Daddy, why don't I have good hair?" What can an African-American woman do when she wants to have "good hair"? The options include the use of highly caustic sodium hydroxide for straightening the hair (with its potential for painfully scalding the skin). I knew about that particular practice, but I had no idea that so many African-American women have actually covered up their own hair with "weaves," straight dark human hair grown by women from other cultures. Rock traces some of the most sought-after weave hair to India. Many Indian women periodically give up their hair (having their heads shaved completely bald) in religious ceremonies called "tonsure." From those temple rituals, that hair somehow ends up in the United States, where it is purchased by African-American women at prices ranging from $1,000 on up. It's even more amazing to consider that so many women of modest means work so hard to cover up their hair with weaves. Several of the women stated that an African-American woman simply cannot succeed in the business world without hair that has been straightened or covered with a weave. Many of the women featured in the film indicated that taking care of a weave is extraordinarily difficult--no swimming for these women, and many of them wouldn't dream of ever letting a man touch their delicate fake hair, even their lover. I had no idea that so many women would go to such extraordinary lengths to have "proper" hair, or that so many women consider it to be more "natural" to display hair that is not their own natural hair. Watching this film was a wonderful anthropological journey for me; this story is thoroughly about people and in the lengths to which they will go to display themselves in what they see to be culturally appropriate ways; it's not just about hair. I truly enjoyed viewing the delightful interviews of the many people Chris Rock artfully stirred into his vivid mosaic. The broader lesson is not about hair, or even about African-Americans. It seems to be about consumerism and the deep need of humans to display their traits to each other in expensive ways.