Messages that survive and not die on the message vine are those that are: 1 Simple, brief as possible but still profound; 2 Unexpected, sufficiently surprising to catch the attention of the audience; 3 Concrete, detailed examples based on real life experiences; 4 Credible, delivered by someone the audience can trust; 5 Emotional, makes audience feel as well as think, and 6 Tells a Story, in a narrative that can be remembered and retold to others.
More than a millennium before print, Seneca criticized “those who displayed scrolls with decorated knobs and colored labels rather than reading them,” noting, “it is in the homes of the idlest men that you find the biggest libraries.” And before there were coffee-table books a 1962-vintage replacement for “grand-piano books”, “furniture books” had already attracted scorn. An 1859 article of that title compared bibliophiles who cared more about bindings than about words to lovers who “think more of the jewels of one’s mistress than of her native charms.”Lord Chesterfield, writing in 1749, agreed. “Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside,” he pronounced in a letter to his son, “is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books.” A century later, an evangelical magazine contrasted the good child who “puts books into his head” with the lazy child whose books are “only on your shelves.”Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personas.
Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor who’s an expert in police decision-making and use of force, said the video left him “astonished, amazed and embarrassed.”
“Unless there’s something we don’t know, that’s one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Unless there’s a threat that you can’t see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force.”http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/scarce/occupy-oakland-videographer-shot-police-rub
This is alarming rhetoric…
His message drew hearty applause from the audience, many of whom feel literally under attack. But it worries American Indian tribe members, fisheries regulators and environmentalists in a legal and policy fight to protect salmon. They say the rhetoric might inflame a tense situation, leading to possible retaliation from those who might take Lopey’s message too far.
Lopey, a retired Army Reserve colonel who served in Afghanistan, likened efforts at dam removal and restrictions on irrigation water and access to public forest land to friendly fire. The crowd cheered when he said he was sworn to protect the U.S. Constitution and the citizenry from all enemies, “both foreign and domestic.”
“We are, right now, in a fight for our survival,” he told them. “We are fighting not only for ourselves. More importantly, we’re fighting for the survival of our counties, of our local communities and our children and our grandchildren. If we don’t save things like agriculture and we let them take our water and land and push us off, we won’t have any public safety. We’ll have no quality of life. We’ll have nothing.”
http://www.redding.com/news/2011/nov/05/lopey-siskiyou-klamath-scott-shasta/
Finally it begins to register…
At least three women have accused Cain of sexual harassment from his time as the restaurant industry’s top lobbyist. Cain has given conflicting accounts of the cases since the news broke a week ago by news website Politico. He insists the claims were baseless and that he was wrongfully accused.
But a woman who received a cash settlement from the restaurant association in response to her harassment claim rejected Cain’s denials on Friday. She said through her lawyer that she was the victim of a “series of inappropriate behaviors and unwanted advances” by Cain in 1999.http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7A04CW20111106?irpc=932
Well this is depressing:
The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
“The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing,” said John Reilly, co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2098671,00.html?xid=tweetbut
Photojournalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff was wearing media credentials and “was clearly not part of the protest” when city police arrested her Wednesday near the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, reports The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. A police spokeswoman said Wentz-Graff “never identified herself as a journalist to officers.” It’s the second time in the past two months that Milwaukee police have arrested a working photojournalist.