Media Bytes - Out of our heads edition

By Libby

The current events aren't doing it for me this afternoon so I'm cleaning up some old saved links that didn't get much attention and are worth archiving.

If anyone had told me ten years ago I would be feeling sorry for Poppy Bush today, I wouldn't have believed them but I saw him crying in this interview and I have to admit I found some deep sympathy for the old devil.

In my ongoing quest to find contemporary musicians that I like, I've been clicking on a lot of YouTubes lately. Atrios posted this one of what looks like a local Philly group, Matt Pond. I'm figuring it's a local band because the video quality is pretty bad but I like the song and the band has musicality. I'd be willing to pay to see them in person.

Not being a TV watcher, I haven't been following the writers strike closely but the video is interesting and I'm with them in spirit. Writers are the most undervalued workers in the entertainment industry. They deserve to get a cut of the online profits.

Your tax dollars at work. It appears our homeland intelligence came up with the bright idea to track falafel sales in order to snare Iranian secret agents. One can only hope Bill O'Reilly made the list of suspects, even though he doesn't know the difference between a veggie burger and a loofah.

This piece on Kucinich was silly but it illustrates what I've come to call the Kucinich paradox. He speaks to all your concerns but you just can't quite believe he'll be able to acheive them.

Krugman's op-ed on how populists wobble once they take a bite of the capitalist pie was worth reading.

I haven't read Ellen Goodman in ages but she nails the trouble with tethered teenagers in this column. A couple of quotes:

Teens are never really on their own. We may be protecting them right out of the ability to make their own decisions. Including their own mistakes. [...]

But there's a moment when the two-way tools of communication turn into the one-way tools of surveillance. Then the tether becomes a leash and parenting becomes stalking. We don't talk; we track. That's when it's time to say, Black Helicopter down.

I've always said the hardest part of parenting is allowing your children to make mistakes and teaching them to take responsibility for them. Too many parents either forgot or never learned that.

And finally, via Avedon, this is too ironic. Afghanistan made some progress in eliminating poppy production in certain provinces but they didn't provide any alternate means of income for the farmers so now they're back to growing cannabis and selling that thin black hash. I think that's a positive change. The hash trade is a lot less violent and man, I used to love that stuff back in the day.