another day, another pair of letters to the editor

The Russians were going to have come in 2010!
"U.S. and Russia in space" in the Queens Chronicle looks back at the little-discussed sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how it envisioned less tense relations between the US and the then-assumed-to-still-be-Soviet-in-the-2010s Russia.  (I should also clarify that I am not now, nor have I aver been a member of the Russian conspiracy, though I technically can't truthfully deny association with "H.U.A.C." since the "House of Un-American Activities" was the unofficial nickname for the home of some college friends back in the day.)

This image is a rerun, but so is the content it's illustrating.

"Reducing costs" in the Queens Examiner (and the other outlets in the Queens Ledger/Brooklyn Star Newspaper Group) asks free-market advocates to stop brushing aside concerns about "materialism, social inequality and economic instability" and instead start pointing out how economic freedom can address them.  If you've wondered why your local paper doesn't have quotes from 19th century left-populist free market economists, it may be because you aren't writing them in!  (And yes, this letter is basically an abridgment of one of my old C4SS pieces, but since they haven't bothered to try to get newspapers to run their stuff since 2016, I may as well follow the wisdom of Abbott and Costello: "If there's anything else I want you to do, I'll do it myself!")

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Announcing the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon

Next month, December 20, 2006 will mark the tenth anniversary Carl Sagan's passing. In his honor, I am organizing a special memorial "blog-a-thon" among Sagan's fans throughout the blogosphere. If you're a Sagan fan with a blog, you can participate by posting something related to him on or near that date. Read or reread a Sagan book and review it; discuss cool things that you've done that's been influenced by him; pontificate on one of the many topics he treated (SETI, astronomy, critical thinking, the history of science, human intelligence....), or post about something completely surprising. Contact me by email or by leaving a comment, and then when the date approaches, I will create a meta-post that links to all the stuff people are doing, providing a network of the participating bloggers. A list of Sagan stuff online that may be a source of ideas. Carl's son Nick Sagan on the blog-a-thon . Publicity for the blog-a-thon includes Cornell Univer
Read more

AOL Hometown shutting down, and taking a bit of bronze with it

Well, with the announcement that AOL's Hometown service is shutting down by October 31, one of the truly old school web hosting sites from the early days of the Web, up there with GeoCities and Tripod, and all of the websites hosted at URLs "hometown.aol.com", "members.aol.com" and "users.aol.com", will be going the way of Xoom into the land of dead bits. The shutdown is pretty abrupt; the formal announcement was only posted on September 30, and according to it, if webmasters don't back up their website files by the 31st, they'll simply be gone. All Hometown pages have one of two prominently placed banners atop the pages announcing the shutdown, one of which says "AOL Hometown is Closing its Doors. Find out how to BACK UP AND SAVE YOUR FILES before we say goodbye for good." and the other stating that "A Blogger is Always Prepared. DON'T GET LEFT BEHIND. Learn how to BACK UP & SAVE YOUR INFORMATION now." (desp
Read more

Early animated feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" screening in NYC

On November 11 and November 15, the Museum of Modern Art will screen , with live piano accompaniment, one of the earliest animated features ever made (and made by one of the earliest female animators), Lotte Reiniger's 1926 Arabian Nights fantasy The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Reiniger made films by painstakingly animating intricate silhouette cutouts, and the results are gorgeous to behold. The screening is part of a series on film preservation, and so I assume it's a restored version; I haven't been able to find out exactly how (or if) this differs from the version that has been available on DVD for a while, but the runtime given is 8 minutes longer than the DVD's.
Read more