Useless Musings

     Old memory came back to me: I went to Hunstville, Texas / Sam Houston State for a Criminal Justice meeting while in college. You could do one of three tours as part of your stay: The death chamber where inmates are killed, death row in prison, and something like a work farm. I chose a tour of death row at the Ellis Unit. "clean dishes, early september" by cafemama is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0       Anyway of all the interesting stuff I saw, inmates got to go outside if they volunteered to clean pots and pans. So they sat under a gazebo outside, no soap or water, just lightly scrubbing a pan with steel scouring pad while they talked and looked around, because I guess you wanted the pan cleaning to take the entire amount of time they were out there and the didn't have water that far away from the building.       Another highlight of the trip, besides death row:  We were on ...

It hit me as I was reading a New York Times article on left wing rioters "needing protection" by police from right wing persons who choose to themselves for their own protection because the police and mayors of cities are doing little: "This sounds familiar." Some described the article as "gas lighting."  To me, it reminded me of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent."  Of course, they were railing against the right.  They propose that the mass media of the United States "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion."  This  sounds like the left media today, if not all of the media today.   If you simply replace or add (highlighted) a few words from quotes from Manufacturing Consent: “Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely spon...