Showing posts with label free. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Shame on our own national news media! CBS NBC ABC

2010
With all the news that's not fit to print or broadcast, why is the significance of Cordoba not getting out to the people?

"I was watching the news the other day and noticed a familiar occurrence."

A reporter was talking about new parking meters in Los Angeles and that there would be tens of thousands of them going up in the next few months. His emphasis was on the technology; card readers in the machines, you don't even need cash or coins anymore and there is a sensor that will send a signal out to a central processor when the time expires that will get a parking enforcement officer over to write up a ticket.

What he failed to mention at any time was that right on the meter there was a big label, "$3 for each 15 minutes"! Nowhere in the story was there any mention about the cost to park. Luckily I don't need to go to Los Angeles and fight for parking. I don't really know how much it costs today or if the $3 per each 15 minutes is a new increase. It wasn't reported.

It's what isn't mentioned in the news that is getting my attention more and more, especially when part of the story is right there in the background or foreground or hanging around in the ether. Not that some stories are not getting aired, but the stories are incomplete

I don't know if it's a carryover from the Dan Rather debacle where the news was being manipulated, as well as outright fabricated, by the news organization or that there is still too much political correctness going on and they are just afraid to bring out the whole story. Most of the news on TV and in the newspapers is so skewed to the left, mostly, or at least leaning that way or over the top to the right, occasionally, that there are hardly any newscasts or newspapers worth watching or reading. The news should be balanced and fair, or maybe justified, but certainly not steered. That's mainly why I don't watch the national news broadcast on CBSNBC, or ABCThey are not interested in both sides of the story. It's also why I don't read the Los Angeles Times or New York Times or any of the big newspapers. All of the current national newscasts and newspapers are blatantly biased. Those big stories will get out somehow, on the internet, where you can decide how much to read, but most of the real story on any national news broadcasts will be lost in the bias.

It's kind of ironic that when an event happens that will impact not only the local region but broad reaching enough to tug at the heartstrings of America and possibly the world, the national news stations will broadcast those stories all day, every day for a week or more, until the next "big headline news event" comes up. Even news stories like the oil spill in the gulf, airplane disasters, the kidnapping of a child or finding the kidnapped child, trapped coal miners, devastating storms and the downing of the World Trade Center in New York City, are "sold" to the audience in how they are told, or not told. Questions go unanswered by both the news media and the government. It's so very interesting that with all the competition for the audience of viewers and readers that the news media is trying to attract, they don't even understand how to make shock media work for them. They certainly know how to make it work against them. How many times do you see the nauseating effort the media takes to make you see someone cry on national TV or invading someone's privacy with an army of reporters and news vehicles camped at a victim's or suspected criminal's house, yet alone someone convicted of a crime.

Just think how more time could be given to real news stories if all that was said was "there was a drive-by shooting in Los Angels or New York or Detroit today, but no one died"read about it on our web site", or some other quick 3 second blurb, and then get to real important news. 

No one cares about the celebrities and superstars on again off again escapades or lack of social grace. It belongs in its own news show or program. Olbermann, Stewart, Beck, Limbagh, and O'Reilly aren't news people, they're news entertainment pundits disguised as political news activists, but that’s where people are forced to go if they want the rest of the story that started on national news and was left unfinished on local news. We shouldn't be relegated to getting our national news from CNN or Fox News and no one watches MSNBC anyway. Although Olbermann, Levine and Savage may be in the basement of the political pundit tower, the elevator isn't going anywhere worth stopping. if you are looking for the real story behind those "breaking headline news" stories. There isn't one local or national newscast about bad things that happen to good people that should be longer than 30 seconds, or better yet if each event was cut to one sentence. Then you could get to the news that actually impacts the city, state, nation or world, from the national news programs (ABC, NBC, ABC) that both the left and the right should be watching.
Where's the GOOD NEWS being reported by the news media?

If the National news really wanted viewers to flock to their broadcast, they would let the news happen, give a short summary and then ask the question everyone wants to know, and then go looking for the answers. There are far too many news stories about drive-by shootings and minor crimes that are allowed way too much airtime. We glorify gangsters and criminals, even overpaid unappreciative super stars, by making them the headline in the news, so much so, that 80% of the news is either negative or driven by entertainment gossip. In fact, victims should, BY LAW, be given 3 times more airtime than criminals, and the story should never be more than 6 seconds long. If there needs to be more time, they should be directed to a 'special' news program.

News stations and newspapers will see a resurgence of listeners and readers, if they took a more proactive, but unbiased, approach to the real news. News stories should be politically unbiased, as well as editorially unbiased. Most news organizations are politically bentthey all need to straighten up, or at least announce they are the voice of the left, or right, and see how their audience responds. That way we could have some fantastic news media battles that may actually get the whole story out and let the audience decide, or at least let them be informed enough to decide if they care enough to watch or read tomorrow's news.

Ask a politician a question, and the last thing that will come out will be the answer, which won't be understood by anyone anywayPoliticians always ignore the question. Their main objective is to get THEIR message out first, because air time is so short and costly to them. Usually the question never gets answered and the news reporter on the scene or the interviewer in the studio, also short on time, lets them off the hook. The first sound a politician should make when asked a question, must be about the answerGive them 3 seconds to start the answer or cut them off. You could then have a standard disclaimer, "another long-winded politician that can't get to the answer". The politicians will be screaming, but it should be, answer first - stump second. Everyone knows the news anchor is just really an overpriced news reader anyway; give them something they can sink their teeth into. Congress is currently trying to silence the news that everyone wants, under the guise of "equal air time", anyway, let the battle begin. Politicians would then get more air time than they would probably want, if they had to answer the question first, then stump, because there would always be questions that need answering.

The news media could easily put the challenge on politicians, government officials, superstars or the Corporate CEO, and drive up interest in viewing or reading their news. All they have to do is say, "We invited so and so to come on and answer these perplexing questions, but they have declined our offer", and keep repeating it every day. When they do come on, then it's, one question - one answerstump later, if there is time. There would always be some important news going on in-between the hard hitting world and national catastrophes that occur. The news stories wouldn't have to be dragging on ad nauseam until the next "breaking news" happens.

So with all the news that's apparently not fit to print in our fine national newspapers or broadcast on our upstanding national news broadcasts, why is the significance of Cordoba not getting out to the people?                                         

And it took a non-American to point it out!
Shame on our own national news media! 
Shame on CBS, NBC, and ABC.

APR. 30, 2014
Developer Sharif El-Gamal says he has downsized his plans for the $100 million, 15-story Muslim Community Center near the World Trade Center site that became a lightning rod amid the national controversy; he says he will now build a smaller, three-story museum dedicated to Islam, and has commissioned French architect Jean Nouvel to design the building and make the plan more attractive to neighbors. NOW CALLED PARK 51

Sharif El-Gamal is an American real estate developer. He is the chairman and chief executive officer of Soho Properties, a Manhattan-based real estate company.

The Story of the Statue of Liberty


The French, Egyptian and American connection.


The Story of the Statue of Liberty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty


While on a visit to Egypt that was to shift his artistic perspective from simply grand to colossal, French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi was inspired by the project of the Suez Canal that was being undertaken by Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who later became a lifelong friend of his. He envisioned a giant lighthouse standing at the entrance to the canal and drew plans for it. It would be patterned after the Roman goddess Libertas, modified to resemble a robed Egyptian peasant, with light beaming out from both a headband and a torch thrust dramatically upward into the skies. Bartholdi presented his plans to the Egyptian Khedive, Isma'il Pasha, in 1867 and, with revisions, again in 1869, but the project was never commissioned because of financial issues then troubling the Ottoman Empire.

Soon after John Wilkes Booth was killed by one of his captors, Frédéric Bartholdi (according to legend) was enjoying dinner with friends in Paris. Commenting how good it was that the U.S. Civil War was over and how terrible it was that Lincoln had died, one of Bartholdi’s friends (Edouard de Laboulaye) had an idea. What if the people of France, gave the people of America, a monument to commemorate liberty? And ... what if they gave such a gift during 1876, the first centennial of American independence? France, after all, had played a key role in helping America to win her revolutionary war. Enthused with the idea, Bartholdi visited America and ultimately sketched his conception of such a monument.

The first small terracotta model was created in 1870. It is now exhibited at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon. The first reduced scale bronze replica was given to the city of Paris by Americans residing in the French capital on May 13, 1885; the statue was originally located in the Place des États-Unis and was moved to the Île des Cygnes in 1889. It was agreed that in a joint effort, the people of the United States were to build the base, and the French people were responsible for the statue and its assembly in the States. In France, public donations, various forms of entertainment including notably performances of La liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty enlightening the world) by soon-to-be famous composer Charles Gounod at Paris Opera, and a charitable lottery were among the methods used to raise the 2,250,000 francs ($250,000). In the United States, benefit theatrical events, art exhibitions, auctions and prizefights assisted in providing needed funds.

Meanwhile in France, Bartholdi required the assistance of an engineer to address structural issues associated with designing such a colossal copper sculpture. Gustave Eiffel (designer of the Eiffel Tower) was commissioned to design the massive iron pylon and secondary skeletal framework which allows the statue's copper skin to move independently yet stand upright. The good-looking French widow of an important American, Isabella Eugenie Boyer, the wife of Isaac Singer, the sewing-machine industrialist, was called upon to be Bartholdi's model for the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886 and was designated a National Monument on October 15, 1924.

The Statue of Liberty functioned as a lighthouse from 1886 to 1902. As a lighthouse, it is the first in the United States to use electricity. Birds, attracted by the original torch, sometimes became disoriented from the light of the flame. It was once discovered that more than a thousand had been fatally injured in a single day.
The bronze plaque in an exhibit on the second floor of the pedestal is inscribed with the sonnet:

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
' With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

It has never been engraved on the exterior of the pedestal, despite such depictions in editorial cartoons. The first two lines refer to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes. The bronze plaque in the pedestal contains a typographical error: the comma in "Keep, ancient lands" is missing, causing that line to read "'Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she", and noticeably altering its meaning. The name "Mother of Exiles" was never taken up as the statue's name.

In 1889, Americans who were living in Paris gave that city a smaller version of Liberty. The thirty-five foot monument is located near the River Seine and faces west, toward its sister.
http://www.awesomestories.com/movies/national_treasure/national_treasure_ch6.htm

Hundreds of other Statues of Liberty have been erected worldwide. A smaller replica is in the Norwegian village of Visnes, on the island of Karmøy, in Rogaland County where the copper used in the original statue was mined.

A Statue of Liberty replica at Odaiba, overlooks the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo Bay. There is a sister statue in Paris and several others elsewhere in France, including one in Bartholdi's home town of Colmar, erected in 2004 to mark the centenary of Bartholdi's death; they also exist in Austria, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Brazil and Vietnam; one existed in Hanoi during French colonial days. During the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, Chinese student demonstrators in Beijing built a ten meter image called the Goddess of Democracy, which sculptor Tsao Tsing-yuan said was intentionally dissimilar to the Statue of Liberty to avoid being "too openly pro-American." At around the same time, a copy of this statue was made and displayed on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C., in a small park across the street from the Chinese Embassy.

The sculptor James Alexander Ewing's most prestigious commission was for the carving of the Glasgow City Chambers' Jubilee Pediment, its apex group of Truth, Riches, and Honor, and the statues of The Four Seasons on the building's tower. The figure of Truth also is known as Glasgow's Statue of Liberty, because of its close resemblance to the similarly posed, but very much larger, statue in New York harbor.

The Statue of Liberty is located in the harbor of New York City, on the Jersey side (but that's another story), on what was originally called the Oyster Islands, which includes Ellis Island, Liberty Island, and Black Tom Island. Both Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty have become powerful symbols of the freedom and opportunity that awaited millions of men, women, and children when they legally immigrated to America from around the world.


Don't Be Blue

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Quotes on The Cost of Freedom


"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."
"If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it."
Norman Thomas (1884-1968)
U.S. Socialist Presidential candidate

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968)
American clergyman, activist

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963)

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing"
Edmund Burke (1729-1797),
British statesman and philosopher

"All religious leaders need to take a stand against Satan's followers.
Any terrorist who wages war for their God has fallen away from the teachings of their church, synagogue or mosque and is now in league with Satan, the god of evil, the god of hate."
ME
"Neither a wise nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."
"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog."
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."
George S. Patton (1885 – 1945)

"Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it.... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week."
Will Rogers (1879-1935)

"There are good men and bad men of all nationalities, creeds and colors; and if this world of ours is ever to become what we hope some day it may become, it must be by the general recognition that the man's heart and soul, the man's worth and actions, determine his standing."
"Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace."
"A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards."
Theodore Roosevelt

"I don't know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"In time of war the first casualty is truth."
Boake Carter (1899-1944) aka Harold Thomas Henry Carter,
American national news commentator

"The Americans will always do the right thing... After they've exhausted all the alternatives."
Winston Churchill, Sir (1874-1965)

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thank the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among human creatures."
Abraham Lincoln (1830-1861)

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
American inventor, journalist, printer, diplomat, and statesman


"I'm not afraid of the man who wants ten nuclear weapons, Colonel. I'm terrified of the man who only wants one."
                                           from the movie 'The Peacemaker' (1997)

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832
German writer and polymath

"There is nothing more dangerous than stubbornness and arrogance in action."
ME

"For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt."
Lillian Hellman (1905 – 1984)
American playwright

"None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free."
Pearl S. Buck (1892 — 1973) aka Sai Zhen Zhu,
American writer

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988)
American science fiction writer

"Freedom is not enough."
Lyndon B. Johnson

"There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires."
Nelson Mandela

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."
Sigmund Freud

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
James Madison

"Power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression."
Malcolm X

"Freedom is a right ultimately defended by the sacrifice of America's servicemen and women."
Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose ~~~ nothing ~~ if it ain't free"
Kris Kristofferson


Have an Awesome Day!

DON'T BE BLUE