October 7, 2025


President Kais Saied of Tunisia
"Trumps" Trump

AP Network News October 3, 2025

 

https://apnews.com/article/tunisia-death-sentence-facebook-posts-president-b75f9ca0d2629fda054031f5792d502

 

Come on Donald, get moving and stop dragging your feet.  Other world leaders are taking your playbook, doing a better job and outshining you.

 

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — A court in Tunisia has sentenced a 51-year-old man to death over Facebook posts deemed offensive to President Kais Saied.

 

President Saied recently dissolved the elected parliament and started ruling by decree, nullifying the principle of judicial independence.

 

Most of Saied's well-known critics are already in prison or abroad.

Nobel Peace Prize 2025 

Here’s the headline that news editors around the world should begin preparing for October 10, 2025.  






Funding for NRP National Public Radio

Surprise — NPR never really needed all that taxpayer money in the first place!

By Becket Adams, The Hill Online Newspaper

October 6, 2026

 

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5537336-surprise-npr-never-really-needed-taxpayer-funding-in-the-first-place/

 

In July, National Public Radio’s CEO cried and hollered, claiming her organization could not possibly survive without government funding.

 

This week, however, the same news organization claimed that on its first day functioning without taxpayer dollars, it was performing as well as ever — possibly even better.

 

In other words, NPR’s critics were right all along about defunding. NPR never needed those dollars. It just wanted them.

 

“Today marks the first day in public media’s history without federal funding,” the newsgroup said in a statement on Oct. 1. “It’s the beginning of a new chapter — but we’re not going anywhere. With your help, we’ll continue to bring you honest, rigorous journalism that doesn’t bend to the interests of shareholders.”

 

The statement added, “We’ll still hold a microphone to American voices that might otherwise go unheard. And we’ll always stand behind our First Amendment right to a free press. Your donation on this historic day protects one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself, understand one another, and acknowledge that we belong to one always-changing story.”

 

In a graphic uploaded to Facebook, NPR also declared, in all-caps, “WE WON’T BE SILENCED.”

 

Newsroom staffers offered the same boast elsewhere on social media.

 

“This is the first day since NPR was founded it has not had federal support,” beamed NPR host Scott Simon. “And we’re here, strong, vital, and with an audience of millions we will keep on serving, no fees, no paywalls, and across all divisions. We hope you’ll support your local stations to serve all America.”

 

Host Leila Fadel also declared on NPR’s first day free of government funding, “We will not easily be silenced. We will continue to be advocates for the truth — for facts. We will ask the questions our listeners, the American public, want the answers to, even if those we’re asking don’t like our questions.”.  

 

First, this is a bit rich coming from an organization that had been so eager to participate in the censorship campaign against the New York Post after the latter broke the news just before the 2020 election of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, filled with corruption allegations embarrassing to former President Joe Biden.  Not only did NPR have nothing to say about the efforts to censor the Post’s reporting — which included Twitter and Facebook banning the story entirely from their platforms — but NPR went a step further, announcing and bragging even that it would not cover the laptop story at all.

 

NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride explained in 2020 that, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” For additional context regarding what NPR considers to be a “waste” of “listeners’ and readers’ time,” it once assigned three reporters to byline an 800-plus-word report on the supposedly racially problematic legacy of the thumbs-up emoji.

 

This is beside the point, though. The point is that NPR’s bragging this week should be cited forevermore to prevent any attempt by NPR to claw back taxpayer funding.

 

NPR never really needed those government bucks. It just preferred the easy, guaranteed payout. As with PBS, the funding was never essential. Like PBS, NPR always had a viable commercial product and an audience. It has always been capable of surviving on its own, more easily than many independent news organizations, despite claims to the contrary by NPR’s CEO and its supporters.

 

NPR just didn’t want to compete in the market like everyone else.

 

Taxpayers are no longer on the hook to pay for a specialized style of stilted news reporting and breathy radio commentary — as it should be. Taxpayers should not be on the hook to pay for any news, let alone reporting that explicitly disfavors 50 percent of those footing the bill. No one is “silencing” NPR. What happened to the New York Post during the 2020 election was “silencing.” That’s not what’s happening here with NPR. It is not a victim. It simply has to operate like everyone else now, competing in earnest for ratings and advertiser dollars.

 

That doesn’t make NPR different. It makes it normal.

 

But now that we know NPR can (and evidently always could) operate without government assistance, the real question is: Where do we go for a refund?

 

Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.

 

August 13, 2022

On Writing


"In my case, writing is primarily a question of patience."

--  German children’s writer Michael Ende

--  Author of "Die unendliche Geschichte" or "The Neverending Story" in year 1979

March 1, 2020

Coronavirus in Mexico



How do you combat the novel coronavirus?  If you live in Mexico, where music and dance are an essential part of everyday life, you make a song.  Enter "La Cumbia del Coronavirus" written and performed by Iván Montemayor, leader of the Mexican musical group Mister Cumbia.  Cumbia is a style of Latin dance music that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and remains popular today.  Mister Cumbia created a melody that's both entertaining and educational -- the lyrics give listeners practical tips about how to prevent the disease:

Coronavirus, coronavirus, lávense las manos, háganlo seguido.
Coronavirus, coronavirus, pónganse las pilas en lugares concurridos. 
Coronavirus, coronavirus, no se toquen la cara, evítenlo amigos. 
Coronavirus, coronavirus, usen desinfectante, eso es muy efectivo.

(Coronavirus, coronavirus, wash your hands, do it often.)
(Coronavirus, coronavirus, pay close attention in crowded places.) 
(Coronavirus, coronavirus, do not touch your face, avoid it friends.)
(Coronavirus, coronavirus, use disinfectant, that is very effective.)

Scientists say singing releases "feel good" endorphins into our bodies.  Perhaps these compounds can help us battle the virus, too.


April 15, 2019

Democrats election 2020

The democratic party is making plans for the 2020 U.S.A. election.  Should they oppose Pres. Donald  Trump because he is incompetent, because he is unpleasant?  Or should they run against him because they have better ideas for running the government of the United States?