Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 477 Editor's Choice: 5
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TIME, Doubleplusgood duckspeakers and the end of history
[Read the article: Demand answers from Time magazine]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn, excellent article as usual, but hardly "news" not even in the Orwellian sense. As a reader of Time since forever, I never had any respect for this rag.
For decades when I wanted to convince someone that what passes for News in America is simply propaganda; I would ask them to go to the library, get a history book on America and then compare it to the Orwellian swill that TIME was flogging at the time. The dichotomy is shocking, at least to people like Glenn who apparently still believe that you can call an editor and "sort things out". The editor's response was all the answer you'll get Glenn, there is no truth, there is only the big lie, oft repeated. TIME has always been at odds with the facts - at least where the facts contradict what the permanent government in America would have the proles believe.
You see I have this nasty habit of remembering things. I remember all the TIME articles about the brave Green Berets and how they were "helping" the Vietnamese (while killing 3 million of them). And I remember how Russia was the evil empire complete with picture after picture of their ugly women, and evil men. And then I remember how the Sovs suddenly (and briefly) became our friends. The Sovs did not change, but the goals of TIME and their employers did, and the story lines followed.
TIME is only useful in the sense that Pravda was; if you want to know the truth - just reverse everything. So if in Pravda you read that there was a bumper wheat crop in the Ukraine, you could count on a million or so serfs dying of starvation. Just like today in TIME where you can read "fascist occupiers" in Iraq where they say "liberators", or "fanatical Zionists" where they say "Israeli settlers".
Glenn, the democratic country with a free press, that you seem to think you live in, does not exist, it never did. It's true, I read it in TIME magazine. Read it between the lines anyway.
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Know thy enemy...
[Read the article: Demand answers from Time magazine]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Painton
And the "truth" from the organ of the permanent government itself... http://www.time.com/time/mediakit/1/us/timemagazine/press/bios/painton.html
Her greatest accomplishment (other than hanging up on a real journalist)? "She and her team produced that year’s (2002)“Person of the Year” cover on George W. Bush." - from her TIME bio.
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Books are dead and good riddance. Alternate title - I Love my Buggy Whip
[Read the article: Amazon's Kindle won't spark your e-book fire]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The kindle is not an ebook anymore than a model T was a car, or an MP3 player circa 1999 was an iPod.
In time someone will address all the concerns expressed here. For now I will say that the Kindle is extremely ugly and I won't reiterate its many deficiencies. Having said that though, I will say that the day of dead tree data is over. Killing a tree, grinding it into a pulp with poisonous chemicals, then packaging it with yet more dead tree boxes, shipping it thousands of kilometers with giant polluting trucks, storing them in the huge museums that some people call libraries or book stores, until they are worn out, and then packing them up in more paper boxes and burning them or burying them somewhere is beyond stupid - it is criminal.
As far as paying 10 dollars for a book, this is theft, it is too much. The only true value of a book is in its IP. The ultimate goal is to cut profiteers like bezos right out of the loop.
For those dinosaurs who still love the smell and feel of books you can always recycle by collecting some old newspaper and wrap your kindle in that. That way it will even dirty your fingers - just like a cheap romance novel. Get over your bad archaic habits, and help save the environment. The kindle of the future will hold hundreds of thousands of books! And in no way will the paltry power requirements, and this tiny bit of plastic be worse than all that trash. Besides it will be solar powered. Why do we still have newspapers? It is insane! Megatonnes of waste so some dino can get his sports scores! I do not think so.
Think about students who will be able to download the latest textbooks for cheap - assuming that we can get greedy billionaire thieves like Bezos out the loop. Impossible you say? They are already doing it in Korea, a country apparently not crippled by the turgid thinking of stuck in a rut bibliophiles.
A book is a terrible way to acquire data, you cannot look up a word, check a reference, resize the text, and you sure as shit can not read your email in between. In 20 years there will, thank god, be no books. Just like you cannot buy a ridiculous film camera anymore. And good riddance to an outdated, polluting technology. Oh, there may still be specialty books such as coffee table books and the like for a while, but even those will be superseded eventually by superiour storage and display technologies.
I do not love books, but I do love the stories and the information. And I do not love the dry dead corpses of what were once living trees that breathed, shaded, and were homes for animals.
Get over your selfish attachment and understand that this so called love you have for books is simply a dendritic pathway that you have built in your brain, a habit, and a bad one. Just because you have a bad habit, does not make it right. Save a tree, save the environment, and buy an ebook, just do not buy this one. It is ugly and bezos has enough money. Most of it stored electronically by the way, not on paper - yeuch.