For the Record

Winter is Coming

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Thursday, October 27, 2011 — Winter is coming. This will make the Occupations — which can now be declared a success — more difficult to sustain. We believe the current physical Occupations can and should be transformed into an unprecedented free media space, uninfluenced by and impervious to corporate power, and covering the entire nation. Properly done this plan would not only extend the presence of the Occupation everywhere, but would give the people of each district a powerful tool to dislodge Members of Congress who do not serve them. There are about 100 million households in the U.S, and 435 Congressional Districts. Each district …

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Who are OccupyMARINES? Who is Xervarian?

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Monday, October 17, 2011 — Anyone who has read our coverage of the Occupation knows we’re not objective. We’re for it. And we don’t want anything bad to happen to it. Which is why we’re concerned about Twitter user @OccupyMARINES. In a world where nobody on the Internet knows you’re a dog, things are not always as clear cut as we might like. Take occupybaltimore.com and www.occupyparty.org, for example. No doubt there are many former service members present at the Occupations whose intentions and actions are above reproach. But to unquestioningly assume that everyone is who they say they are would be reckless. Take this …

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435 Hohners — Our Simplistic Solution to the Nation’s Most Intractable Problem

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Friday, August 19, 2011 — In his New York Times column this morning, Paul Krugman points out that the dominant ingredient of the federal government’s response to our economic situation is “awesome wrongness.” Krugman did not explain why that is, but on the Diane Rehm show this morning, John King did. He argued that the voters bear substantial responsibility because they put enough Tea Partiers in Congress to dominate that body, after having put a Democrat in the White House. King made no mention of the role, if any, that the national news media might have played in the electorate’s decision-making process. We would posit …

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The Future of News is the Future of Civilization

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Tuesday, August 9, 2011 — BusinessInsider recently invited the Editor of this paper to be one of a group of “thought leaders describing their vision of the future of news.” Here is his response, followed by some elaboration. (The alleged Editor of the Gazette, and Glenn Beck: together at last. Who’d a’ thunk it?) The future of news is the future of civilization. Current media practices distort the democratic process in ways that favor those who are already far too powerful, as the recent debt ceiling imbroglio amply demonstrates. Humans distracted by the newest technologies tend to overlook powerful mature technologies; low-cost web offset printing …

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Happy May Day, America

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Sunday, May 1, 2011 — Today is May Day, and in many parts of the world people are celebrating the rights of workers. Here in America, we do things a little differently. The way things are going right now, perhaps it’s just as well — celebrating the rights of working men and women while they’re being actively subjugated would be in poor taste. Even in America, though, there is something to celebrate today: the 21st Anniversary of the reappearance of The New Hampshire Gazette in tangible form. The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper™ had last been seen in print in January of 1960. Published every Saturday, in …

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Tet Plus 43 Years

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Monday, January 31, 2011 — Today marks the 43rd Anniversary of the start of the Tet Offensive, the most catastrophic success in U.S. military history, and Vietnam’s most successful military failure ever. In the early morning hours of January 31st, 1968, more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong troops carried out hundreds of attacks on almost every significant city and town in South Vietnam. No one was more surprised that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), the Pentagon’s headquarters in Saigon. The most shocking attack was on the U.S. Embassy, less than 6,000 yards southeast of the MACV compound, where Embassy personnel …

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