No News is Good News

My on-going disgust at the lack of journalistic news ethics is apparently nothing new:

Charles Dickens: "They(newspapers) are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat."

Humorist Goodman Ace: "I keep reading between the lies."

Thomas Jefferson: "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers."

George Bernard Shaw: "Newspapers are unable seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."

Charles Baudelaire: "I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust."

H.L. Mencken: "A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."

Marshall McLuhan: "Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials."

Adlai E. Stevenson: "Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff."

and my personal favorite:

General William Tecumseh Sherman: "I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all, there would be news from Hell before breakfast."

Saving the Kittehs

While looking at LOLcats, I came across this great story:

Saving Kittehs in the Midst of War

 Kudos to U.S. Marines: Brian Chambers, Chris Berry and Aaron Shaw, as well as to the British Royal Marines who started Nowzad  in 2007, an organization dedicated to rescuing stray and abandoned animals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

H/T: Icanhascheezburger.com

Saving the Earth

The Glastonbury Festival in England is an annual music spectacle whose "worthwhile causes" are Greenpeace, Water Aid, OxFam (climate change), and various local causes.

Here's Glastonbury before:

During:

And after:

Perhaps we need to save the Earth from music festivals.

It's Business

The furor over LeBron James leaving one basketball team to play for another basketball team... with sportswriters calling him a traitor ... and men actually crying about it ... just boggles the mind.

Professional sports are a business.

Professional athletes are businessmen (and women), very highly paid ones at that.   Overpaid, in my estimation.

If you were offered a job in a different city making more millions that you were currently making, would you turn it down?    Of course not.

Independence Day

"For those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know." -- Unknown

"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
-- John Stuart Mill