Funky, Funky

So, anyway:

• Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast on ignorance, stupidity, and what the media pushes.

  I understand why people might want to be ignorant of current affairs. When you have kids that you're going to try to put through college when an in-state school is going to cost you six figures over four years; when your house is worth less than you owe on it after taking an equity loan to remodel the kitchen four years ago; when your spouse lost her job last year and now yours is on shaky ground; when the little you've been able to squirrel away for retirement is now showing minus signs again because the markets panic every time someone says "Boo!"; when being informed means having to confront the realities of the Middle East and what nuclear power means, and half of Japan being obliterated, and this winter's weird weather being not just a fluke but an ominous sign of things to come; when it costs you forty bucks to gas up a Honda Civic but you can't car-pool because you never know how late you're going to have to stay at the office; it's not surprising that people would prefer to stay ignorant and just watch Dancing With the Stars.
  
  But to do so is to participate in the continued handing over of our country to the oligarchs. And when we are all scrambling for the scraps left after the oligarchs can't stuff themselves with another bite, perhaps Americans will wish they'd paid more attention instead of watching Extra every night.

• Jill also pointed me at Sardonicky, which has further information on the NY Times' digital subscription scheme (I wonder if converting to single page is considered two articles--probably not, but one never knows.  I'm also trying to train myself to go to the site only once a day) and why it's not such a hot idea.
• The Republic of T on being the face of same-sex marriage and the future.

  Like I’ve said before, it makes a difference on the street where we live, and in countless other communities where our neighbors witness us going about our lives as a family, with the same ups and downs that any other family experiences. When we chat with our neighbors and with parents of our kids classmates and playmates, we talk about the things that any other family talks about. We talk about work, or the economy, or schools, and often about parenting as we exchange stories and advice, or just share experiences.

• Via Daisy's Dead Air, Lotus-Surviving a Dark Time (aka Whoviating) analyzes the Republican efforts to destroy our way of life:

  That what, the something that is under attack, is sometimes called The Commons. I'm using the term here in a somewhat broader sense than its more usual economic understanding of referring to shared resources; rather, I'm thinking of a philosophical Commons, a social Commons, of the idea of a public sphere wherein all can participate, all have a stake, all have a part - and all have some responsibility. That space of socially shared and mutual duty, of what is or at least by rights should be equally available to all.
  
  It's true that that sense of The Commons has always been under attack from the elites of our society; indeed, that is likely true of the elites of any society, who tend to care neither for the idea of all having a stake nor for the idea of they themselves having responsibilities to others other than those self-imposed ones of noblesse oblige, the true purpose of which is to demonstrate that elite's superiority. But the intensity and range of the attack we are seeing now is nearly if not totally unprecedented here.

• Brief comic relief:  The CBC's arts section's roundup of New York reviews for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert misstated the name of the reviewer for the New York Times.  It's Charles.  Not Christopher.  (Also, the comment section for that article is closed already.)
• Yesterday, by way of several abandoned blogs, I found some Bugs Bunny cartoons.  I spent an hour or so there.  Yay, Bugs!