Death Panels: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Although a figment of the fevered, paranoid, Republican–well, let’s just leave it at Republican–imagination, death panels are in fact a great idea. Of course, they need to be screening the right group of people.

Posted at 11:07 pm on September 14, 2009 | leave a comment | Filed Under: Historical Analysis, The Stupidity Chronicle | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | read on

It is Official: Humanity Abandons All Self-Respect

When I first heard about Twitter I assumed that it was a novelty act that would soon (mercifully soon) disappear from our cultural consciousness. Much the way that. . . .well, to be honest, I’m having trouble coming up with a comparison here because it is now apparent that like all too many tragically idiotic human inventions–nuclear weaons, Ann Coulter, monster trucks, Miley cyrus, the Patriot Act–Twitter is now here to stay.

Posted at 7:10 pm on March 2, 2009 | leave a comment | Filed Under: Brave New World, Dulce et Utile, The Stupidity Chronicle | Tagged: , , , , , , | read on

About

It’s a funny old word, “blog.” The popular belief is that the word is a contraction of “Web log.” This, however, is incorrect (and it is a mistake that even the venerable Wikipedia makes). In fact, the origin of the word is a matter of some dispute, with two people claiming to have independently invented the word in the early 1990s. The claimants are Howard Josephowitz, a professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Maggie Cocharane a former writer for Wired and later head of the Freedom In Literacy Education (FILE) Foundation. Interestingly, the roots of the neologism that each claims to have invented are similar: for Josephowitz the word came about as a combination of “boring” and “clog,” while Cocharane claims to have merged “banal” and “slog.”

Blogging, in short, is the Pox Populi of our time.

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