Well, I was going to trackback this post, but Nancy doesn’t have that enabled, so I’ll just comment here. Much anger in this one.

The problem with raging about radio is that it’s a *free* service. What do you pay for the time you listen to the radio? Now, of course ClearChannel is pop pap and there’s a lot of consolidation happening in the radio business, with generally negative impacts on quality. Don’t blame CC–they’re just reacting to the mandates of the market. (Your media can be free, diverse, or equal, pick any two.)

If you don’t like that-which-was-KTCL, blame the government for taking a public good and whoring it out without thinking about the consequences or having any more justification than ‘the market always does right.’ If there’s one thing we should have learned from the last couple of centuries, it’s that while capitalism may the least of the evils, it’s still evil. Of course, this isn’t a new thing.

I was at a friend’s house a few months ago and ran across a copy of Harper’s magazine. I’d read it before, mostly in dentists’ offices and such, but I read this one cover to cover. There was an especially hilarious piece, Beware of Dogg by Dr. Ninjaforkian, in the Readings section (which has apparently been posted on /. and MetaFilter). Since then, there’ve been bits on ClearChannel, the food chain, Korean sayings, and the coming election. Eclectic, no?

I just found out that one of my favorite sections is online: Harpers Index displays fascinating facts and gives you the source for every one. Just what you need at parties!

“Percentage of Chinese exports to the U.S. accounted for by merchandise sold at Wal-Mart : 10 [Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.)/Department of Commerce (Washington) ]

Number of factory jobs that China has lost since 1995 : 25,000,000 [Alliance Capital Management Corporation (N.Y.C.) ]”
from Feb 2004

“Number of Canadian prison inmates who overdosed in March on fellow prisoners’ methadone-laced vomit: 2 [Saskatchewan Department of Corrections (Regina, Canada)]

Number of inmates charged with drug trafficking for providing the vomit: 3 [Saskatchewan Department of Corrections (Regina, Canada)]”
from Sep 2003

I didn’t see the sources online, but they’re there in the HTML source, and hence in the cut-and-paste above (I don’t really understand why they weren’t showing up; neither Mozilla nor IE displayed them). Go ahead, read them all.