Is Google making us stupid?

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace  anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

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Musical Innerlube: Sweet Georgia Brown accompanied by a tractor

Three guitars and a tractor.

Senate slips huge $488 billion Pentagon war funding bill under the radar

By Tommy News

The Senate has acted against the will of the American people and caved to the Bush Administration yet again. US Senators donned their Harry Potter invisibility cloaks and under the cover of darkness late Saturday night, with the smoke and mirrors distraction of the Wall Street bailout, quietly voted on and passed a huge, outrageous spending bill that gives an additional $488 Billion dollars to the Bush Administration and The Pentagon for funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There has been a near media blackout of this vote, and we need to get the word out that this outrageous warfunding is quietly continuing while the news media is being distracted by the gigantic and horrendous Wall Street bailout bill.

While we have all been preoccupied with the staggering $700 billion bail-out of wall street, boggled with the size of the dollar amount, having to raise the National debt limit and borrow money from foreign nations to fund it, late Saturday night the Senate passed a bill of a comparably huge dollar amount which made little news, but gives $488 Billion to the Pentagon for the continued funding of the the war, There has been a near media blackout of this vote, and we need to get the word out that this outrageous warfunding is quietly continuing while the news media is being distracted by the gigantic and horrendous Wall Street bailout bill.

The Pentagon is in line for a record budget. In addition to $70 billion approved this summer for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Defense Department would receive $488 billion, a 6 percent increase. The spending bill was bundled in with a bill which also offers aid to victims of flooding in the Midwest and recent hurricanes across the Gulf Coast. The total cost of the spending legislation exceeds $630 billion.

Such a huge bill usually would dominate the end-of-session agenda on Capitol Hill. But it went below the radar screen because attention focused on the congressional bailout of Wall Street.

The bill was quietly rushed to Bush's desk to be signed into law, and John McCain rushed quietly back out of Washington and yet again avoided having to vote on another controversial spending bill. When the roll call on final passage occurred, McCain was at his campaign headquarters in Crystal City, Va., only five miles from the Capitol. McCain has missed a staggeringly huge number of Senate votes.

With the election fast approaching, I want to give you a breakdown of the 78-12 Senate vote as recorded in the Congressional Record. I urge you to take this outrageous spending vote into strong consideration when you cast your votes on November 4th.

*From the Congressional Record:*

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?
congress=110&session=2&vote=00208

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Stop Funding The Occupation of Iraq!

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

Tommy News is an internet peace and equal rights activist in New York.

~ Organic Consumers Association ~

Paris Hilton gets presidential with Martin Sheen

Paris seeks the advice of the most esteemed fake president of our generation.

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

'Apathy, ignorance, sloth, and cheap malt liquor'

So when Chris gave the Dixie Chicks documentary a glowing review, I put it at the top of my list. "Shut Up and Sing" is an account of the controversy from The Comment, and the ordeal the trio went through on their journey back to the top of the charts. While playing a show in London during the run-up to the Iraq War, Maines mentioned to the crowd that she was "ashamed that President Bush is from Texas," the home state of all three Dixie Chicks. The crowd cheered, but as soon as The Comment was reported in the world press, rednecks everywhere lost their shit.

I wrote a column about the controversy a year and a half ago, when the Chicks won a butt load of Grammys for their album "Taking the Long Way," and how it was a major vindication for their artistic integrity, as well as a big score for freedom of speech.

But that was before I saw the movie. The cameras followed the women and their families around for three years as the Chicks endured everything from a boycott by country radio, to mass CD smashings and a chilling death threat delivered to Maines on the eve of their Dallas concert. Holy Zapruder, Batman!

Barb and I always had thought that country radio refusing to play the Chicks' music was a major overreaction to a throwaway comment made onstage, but when we saw the hatred, the vitriol, the saliva-flecked bellowing coming from the mouths of conservatives and war-mongering knuckle-draggers over this, we were blown away. But I also noticed that these flag-wrapped rednecks who decried The Comment and demanded that the Dixie Chicks' music be wiped from the airwaves displayed more than a little hypocrisy in their patriotic fervor.

[...]

Toby Keith, by simply acknowledging the Dixie Chicks and voicing his displeasure about their refusal to fall into lock-step with the bomb-Iraq-to-the-stone-age crowd, became the de facto standard-bearer for the backlash. His smug countenance was suddenly everywhere, on talk shows and entertainment shows, bragging about how he wrote that "boot in your ass" song all by himself, and that Natalie Maines "isn't a songwriter." But this film had me seeing the ex-wrestler-turned-faux-cowboy in a whole new light.

Even though Toby Keith's sub-hat doo-rag may be a bit too tight, causing an imbalance of air pressure in his head, he just might be exactly what this country needs in the White House during these turbulent, divisive times.

Obviously, more than half the country didn't mind the way Bush/Cheney was having their way with us and the Constitution in their first term, and reelected them for a second. These voters were like a woman in a shitty marriage, who's getting constantly slapped around by her unemployed husband who drinks too much and is screwing the landlady. But she's decided that it's just too much trouble to start over with somebody else. So it would seem that rational thought has become less and less a part of the election of a new president.

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