Posted on 03/19/2013 12:32:00 AM PDT by neverdem
Upstate New York's Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It's where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn't changed much since he was born of Washington Irving's fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I'd fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.
About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens - sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen - suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting "gangsta'" counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today's recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC's grungy East Village. Yet I'm wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close - a television set away.
My old hinterland haunt was once place where, if you wiggled the rabbit-ear antenna just right, you could pull in one or two TV stations. And what could you see? Perhaps reruns of The Brady Bunch, perhaps the news. But about a quarter century ago came VCRs and video stores; then cable and satellite TV; and, finally, the Internet. The serpent had entered Eden.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, much fire has been directed at gun advocates in general and the National Rifle Association in particular. In response, the organization has implicated Hollywood and popular culture in general for mainstreaming mindless violence. Yet even many Second Amendment advocates part company with the NRA on this point. After all, blaming entertainment for crime smacks of blaming guns. Yet there's quite a profound difference: guns don't transmit values. But how we use guns - and knives, fists and words - on screen...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I have observed the same phenomenon--in North Dakota.
MTV. TV., things presented as "reality" which simply aren't any part of the hometown culture (Norwegian/German/Native American, predominantly).
I did pass on to a couple of youngsters that I had heard where 'sagging' started: prison inmates advertising they wanted a new 'boyfriend'.
Funny how little of that I see any more (8^D).
I have observed the same phenomenon in Winnetka, IL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnetka,_Illinois
If a well-behaved kid calls out the ghetto behavior they’re branded a racist.
“Morbid find suggests murder-obsessed gunman Adam Lanza plotted Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook massacre for years”
Naaa, that was just his ‘story board’. He was just a ‘troubled’, budding young Hollywood screenplay writer, before his life was tragically cut short...
/sarc
If media has no influence, why is it businesses pay to run commercials?
We have all heard the story of when Clark Gable took his shirt off in It Happened one Night and he was not wearing a t shirt, the t shirt industry took a big hit as men copied him.
Of course the media influences society. Up until the 1960s it was the norm for bad behavior to turn out badly, today, bad behavior is rewarded.
A society always gets more of what it rewards.
Now they are just a TWEET away!
The next revolution will ride the crest of the 'information' delivered instantly to itching ears...
....and subsidizes.
Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.
....... The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further. The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify. In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building. As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs. There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence. |
A little camera built-in that can 'play games' with the kids?
That can 'video-call' with Aunt Sally and the Cousins?
Does it worry ANYONE that the thing now has WI-FI and can access the Internet?
What OTHER capabilities does the revered information provider have that you are unaware of?
Similar demographics, too.
Colorado governor to sign gun controls into law
Published March 19, 2013
| Associated Press
DENVER Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper will sign legislation Wednesday that sets limits on ammunition magazines and expands background checks for firearms, marking a Democratic victory in a state where gun ownership is a treasured right and Second Amendment debate has played out in the wake of two mass shootings.
The measures proposed are some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and their passage comes after weeks of tense legislative battles. Republicans and gun rights supporters put up a major fight against the measures in this politically moderate state, while Democrats made them the centerpieces of a package of legislative proposals drafted in reaction to shooting rampages at a suburban Denver movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school last year.
They are known as wiggers around here.
“1984” was supposed to be a NOVEL, NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL!!!;)
There is another book around with prophetic peeks into the future.
It is also an instruction manual.
Stop complaining and obey the orders of those appointed over you!
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