Posts Tagged → BBC
Why I do not have a podcast, and won’t
Couple years ago, a longtime older friend, financially successful and politically active, asked me why I do not have a podcast.
“I see all these podcasts online, and I think, Wow, Josh would be great at that You should do it.”
And to me, even though I am not going to be a podcaster or have a podcast, what a great and appreciated compliment that is, for several reasons.
The most important being that discerning thinkers — people who more carefully consider the information they consume — are increasingly tied into podcasts. Both Left and Right, and a lot of Americans in the middle, are hungry for information that breaks from the worn out, politically partisan, and openly fraudulent mainstream legacy media outlets like the New York Times, ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-NPR-BBC, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.
These mainstream legacy media organizations are not fair-minded arbiters of accurate information. Rather, they are highly tuned political activism outlets. And it is no “conspiracy theory” to say this; they proudly flaunt their partisanship every single day. At this point, there is no material, substantive difference between the New York Times and Mother Jones magazine, other than the NYT is living off the fumes of its once great reputation and the closed circuit dopamine high that leftists live in (“I only read information sources that align with my values” said an old friend to me several years ago, deliberately not self-aware about how self-defeating such a non-diverse, mono-syllabic approach to information is to those people, especially, who pretend to consume only the very best and purest of information).
The NYT masquerades as a serious place, whereas Mother Jones has been a gleeful juvenile bomb thrower for decades. Both are far-left America-hating Marxist activism proponents who abuse their masochistic audiences.
And yes, I have the hands-on experience with both of these outfits to speak authoritatively about them. Suffice it to say that we all have a family…
And so, in this general vacuum/absence of accurate news i.e. mainstream media’s deliberate misinformation fake news, podcasts have opened up huge opportunities for people genuinely interested in learning the actual factual truth. And market demand has been met by market supply; podcasts are now such a thing that plenty of Americans run for office or commit public displays of strangeness, just to get enough of a following to launch a podcast.
Today, there are an awful lot of podcasts available. It seems like every would-have-been college professor and wingnut and ex-CIA officer and ex-combat veteran with loads of ink on his arms has started a podcast. A podcast is what serious would-be “influencers” do. The actual “influencers” just seem to post brief TikTok videos of themselves in various stages of undress, or eating messy sandwiches in an expensive car while wearing expensive clothes.
I would say most of the podcasters on the right are pretty careful thinkers, not all, but most. People who kind of defined conservative podcastistan for a long time (long by podcast terms), like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, have largely discredited themselves by abandoning facts and rigorous thinking for nonsense only slightly better packaged than the trash at the New York Times or Mother Jones.
This is the beauty of the podcast world today: Dip your toe in the water and check it out. Jump in for a swim and lap up all the many flavors of individual opinions you like. It is a much richer, more diverse, more interesting, more informative place than all of the monosyllabic legacy media outlets put together.
So given my positive view of podcasts in general, why did I not start a podcast of my own? Several simple reasons: I do not have the time to do it; I am not narcissistic enough; though I am a very strong public speaker, I enjoy writing much more than talking; and I do not know how to do the necessary selfie videos, which feel socially awkward to me.
Too many podcasters really scramble to stay on top of the wave, every day, which can lead to some humorously foolish, or sophomorically high schoolean, dis-believable grasping at straws. Publicly. Which I am old enough and old school enough to feel self-conscious about. So, no thanks. This blog is a satisfying enough outlet for me. And I am not in the information “business” or in this for money, i.e. note the absence of advertising on this website.
I write because I feel compelled to write. It is an undeniable energy that wells up inside me all the time, and it is part of the reason I had at one time aspired to be an academic. If you do a search of “Josh First Harrisburg” outside of Google (which is not an honest broker about accurate information, but rather has made itself highly politicized with inaccurate search results), you will find dozens and dozens of essays and articles I have written over the past 25 years, as well as news reports and interviews on my various land projects and on some of the political races I have run in.
What emerges from that resulting morass of printer’s ink, I think, is the clear image of a guy who has strong opinions about a lot of subjects, who enjoys public speaking and writing, and who has several feet in several different worlds simultaneously.
And I am most happy limiting that all to writing one or two essays a week in my blog here, which fits in with my busy work schedule. No podcast necessary. No podcast desired.
But I will give credit to the conservative podcastistanians, whose overall grand number, high volume, interesting topics, and really wide intellectual diversity shows us just how important the First Amendment is, even as the legacy media try to hog that all to themselves, and to discredit and take it away from anyone who does not march in lockstep with their leftist narrative.
I recommend that anyone with an ounce of interest in starting a podcast do so. Explore it. Be your best self. And if you fail, that is OK. At least you will have checked it off your list. Take comfort from knowing that I will not be able to do that, because I am just too lazy.
Watching BBC, PBS Anti-Republican Theme
Sitting here watching WITF, the local public TV station with my wife, as BBC reports all about Obama, failing to mention Romney at all. Obama evidently visited New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but Romney never did.
Fact is, Obama changed his schedule last second to catch up to Romney there.
Then we move on to the Tavis Smiley Show, where musician Ry Cooder debuts his “Mutt Romney Song.”
His song is all about how Mitt Romney had a dog on his car roof in a dog cage.
Ry Cooder didn’t write a song about how Barack Hussein Obama actually ate a dog.
Tavis laughs. Calls Ry’s music “inspiring,” and asks for Ry to explain his political views.
Then we listen to Ry Cooder insult Republicans and conservatives, joking about his songs that make fun of the people he disagrees with.
Apparently, Republicans are a threat to his free speech rights. Never mind that he is on publicly-funded television taking a harshly partisan attack to his opponents, he still feels threatened.
Well, ol’ Ry ol’ buddy, I feel threatened by the mis-use of my public funds for one-sided political messages being spread by NPR, BBC, and PBS. If these outlets were balancing their reports with equal demonization of Democrats and Liberals, then it’d be fair and balanced, so to say. But it’s not. This is unfair, un-American.
And then Ry and Tavis begin complaining to one each other about how unfair it is that they get held to and accountable for their statements by people on the Internet, and how unfair it is that they have to defend themselves against critics who find their messages on the ‘Net. All while these two guys are on publicly funded television, enjoying their own monopoly on spreading a political message.
Ry is supportive of the Occupy Wall Street, radical unions, Marxist activists, and others, he’s against gun ownership, self defense, and whites, and he just can’t understand why others disagree with him. He’s truly surprised that so many people don’t share his foolish, juvenile views.
WTF, WITF?
“Climate Change” Takes a Stake Through its Heart
Once again, recently unearthed emails from publicly funded climate researchers in Britain provide bomb-grade damage to the claims of global climate change.
Not only do these newly revealed, previously secret emails show collusion among researchers to overcome problems with their data, suppression of evidence that defies their claims, and their private doubts about global climate change, they also explicitly show what critics have claimed for years: The BBC news service has secretly colluded with the researchers to exclude their critics from getting air time, to match BBC reports with unfounded, essentially political claims by the researchers, and to cast aspersions on their critics.
In other words, the BBC is a willing tool to deceive the taxpayers who underwrite the BBC.
This is exactly the situation that America has with National Public Radio, a news service captured by politically partisan activists.
Like BBC, NPR also advocates for unfounded claims of global climate change, like today’s (6:30 PM on 11/29/11) interview with the US envoy to the United Nations climate change group, which ignored the recent bombshell reports (see below) and instead gave an unchallenged platform for a global climate change evangelist.
And what bothers me is that there are genuine, real, measurable environmental problems that need attention and funding, but which are undermined by the false issue of the sky-is-falling crisis of global climate change.
Read more at
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2066706/BBC-sought-advice-global-warming-scientists-economy-drama-music–game-shows.html
…and more at
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2066240/Second-leak-climate-emails-Political-giants-weigh-bias-scientists-bowing-financial-pressure-sponsors.html