Shipwrecked & Comatose

It makes me sad to think kids these days will never know the thrill of being chosen by the teacher to run the filmstrip projector in class.  There you were, hand eagerly poised on the knob, listening for the sound of that beep on the tape recorder.  Oh to feel the joy of such heavy responsibility! Why will people never understand that if you're going to put something out there on the internet, it's fair game for commenters?  Don't publicly post something controversial and then say, "I didn't ask for your opinion."  Don't say, "Don't judge me."  If you put it out there, you are giving an implicit request for opinion and judgment.  The advantage of the internet is that it gives us all a forum to make our voices heard.  That's also the disadvantage of the internet.  Not everyone is going to like what you have to say.  That means you need to make a choice.  You have every right to live in your own echo chamber and keep your posts to groups

"I don't know what to believe anymore" - Various friends on Facebook The First Amendment comes first in the Bill of Rights for good reason.  The free exchange of ideas is one of the most important ways we preserve our democracy.  We take our free press for granted.  It is how we stay informed and keep the government accountable.  Without a free press, it would be easy for the government to manipulate us.  We can't all attend the speeches.  We can't all be in the war rooms and board rooms.  We can't all be on the battlefields.  We can't all be in the Capitol watching sessions of Congress.  We rely on the press to do these things for us and honestly report what it sees so we know what's going on. Imagine the United States without our free press.  Imagine if the information presented to us was censored by the government to make the itself look good.  Imagine if we had no press at all.  Think of Congress passing bills and creating laws that we never k

Yesterday I was mindlessly scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came across a link from one of the groups I belong to.  It was a link to an article in Medium by a woman named Caren White.  (The article itself was deleted later that day due to the amount of pushback it received from readers, but it was lampooned on Wonkette .) White was on a soapbox about how hobbyist bakers are depriving her and her family of their rightful share of organic flour.  White went shopping one day and found the ingredients she needed to bake bread were no longer available.  She seems to be a walking stereotype of the entitled, clueless, narcissistic white liberal. (Even the name, Caren White, screams "Stereotype me!") You see, she needs to make everything from scratch because she doesn't trust any food that is ready-made.  Also everything her family eats has to be organic.  This means she has to have a steady supply of home-baked bread made from organic flour, because she has high stand