He's back, with all his contempt for the media intact. Now Donald Rumsfeld is proposing a “21st-century agency for global communications” that would use blogs, social networks and talk radio to visit verbal shock and awe on Muslim extremists.
Addressing an "information warfare conference" co-sponsored by such defenders of free speech as Boeing, Lockheed and Curtiss Wright, Rumsfeld said the US is “sitting on the sidelines” in a global battle of ideas and "barely competing.”
When Sharon Weinberger of Wired asked what his new agency would do, the former Secretary Defense referred nostalgically to the good old days when the Army paid locals to plant stories in the Iraq press until American media spoiled the fun by reporting about it.
Rumsfeld insisted that his new propaganda ministry would not interfere with traditional journalism.
“It doesn’t mean we have to infringe on the role of the free press, they can go do what they do, and that’s fine,” he said. “Well, it’s not fine, but it’s what it is, let’s put it that way.”
What the architect of the Iraq war wants to do now is “tell the story of a nation that was carved from the wilderness and conceived in freedom” to those benighted souls who live under regimes that don't respect our First Amendment, as he does.
Showing posts with label social networks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social networks. Show all posts
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Can Facebook Make You Fat?
If absence makes the heart grow fonder, proximity can make the whole body fatter.
The Harvard Medical School suggests obesity is a virus transmitted by friends and family. A study of more than 12,000 people over 32 years finds social networks are crucial to putting on weight.
The influence apparently goes well beyond getting together and ordering pizza. According to the researchers, when one spouse gets fat, the other is 37 percent more likely to, compared with other couples. Brothers of obese men have a 40 percent higher chance of blimping up, too.
The risk is even greater among friends, between 57 and 171 percent, even when they live far apart, leading to the conclusion that “new social norms can proliferate quickly.”
Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School, who led the study, to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded, “We are finding evidence for a kind of social contagion."
So the answer to keeping weight down is obvious: Stay away from sumo wrestlers, and hang out with fashion models.
The Harvard Medical School suggests obesity is a virus transmitted by friends and family. A study of more than 12,000 people over 32 years finds social networks are crucial to putting on weight.
The influence apparently goes well beyond getting together and ordering pizza. According to the researchers, when one spouse gets fat, the other is 37 percent more likely to, compared with other couples. Brothers of obese men have a 40 percent higher chance of blimping up, too.
The risk is even greater among friends, between 57 and 171 percent, even when they live far apart, leading to the conclusion that “new social norms can proliferate quickly.”
Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard Medical School, who led the study, to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded, “We are finding evidence for a kind of social contagion."
So the answer to keeping weight down is obvious: Stay away from sumo wrestlers, and hang out with fashion models.
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