Comments

Episode-20- From Home to Homestead — 2 Comments

  1. In your presidential campaign minute, you said a couple things that I would like to comment on. First, the new york times didn’t refuse to run McCain’s op-ed piece. They asked him to edit it to clarify some points (for example, they asked him to define what he meant by “victory” in the war in Iraq), and he refused to edit it. Obama’s op-ed was put under the same scrutiny by the NY Times editing staff, with the only difference being that Obama agreed to edit his piece and was thus published by the NY Times. At best, this is a testament to McCain’s arrogance and belief that he has the right to publish unedited material in one of the world’s largest newspapers. At worst, he went into it deliberately trying to get rejected so that he could point to the “liberal media bias.”

    Also, it’s patently absurd to treat “the media” as one homogeneous amalgamation. There are aspects of the media that are dominated by conservatism (like talk radio) and other aspects dominated by progressivism (like blogging). I happen to think that it all more or less evens out to be pretty fair overall, but that’s just me.

    Awesome podcast, by the way, keep up the good work!

  2. Jack,
    An interesting and wide ranging podcast today (I haven’t listened in the past couple of days, so listened to this one, the one on guns and the one prior to this all this afternoon).
    To the topic of media, I would agree with David that it’s not a homogeneous situation; you have Fox media and it’s angle on things, you have NPR and it’s respective one; you have the small local stations that have their own angles. I would suggest to anyone reading a newspaper, reading on the internet, listening to radio or watching a news broadcast, that the best way to get informed is to inform oneself on as many viewpoints on the topic as possible (as you would agree, based on both the balanced way you present the podcast and in emails you and I have exchanged).
    I have been “practicing” the smaller home concept within my own family as well as starting to turn my house into a home (and thence to have it start to produce (ideally food and energy). I have a fascination with making every nook and cranny work for us (my wife and I) to have the home feel more cozy and at the same time work better for us. Food storage, less clutter, whatever else, it’s a case of doing more with what one has. The Devraes are an inspiration and though I don’t have as much space (nor would I want to dedicate as much as they have), I hope to produce between 1/3 to 1/2 of the vegetables for our home per year by gardening well from what we have.