Friday Morning News: Somewhat Self-Centered Edition

It’s Friday again, Conflucians. Sorry your breakfast post is so late this morning. Time is passing too quickly for me these days! I just have too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Sorry about being so late with the news this morning. Anyway, my lead story is a local one that stems from a huge national issue–the concentration of control of our media in the hands of a few giant corporations. Obviously, I’m really an old geezer, because it’s a story that made me really sad this week. I need to wallow in my nostalgia a bit this morning, and I hope you’ll forgive me for that.

This week–the week that marks the 40th anniversary of Woodstock–also saw the death of Boston’s legendary radio station, WBCN. The station went on the air in May of 1968, a year after I moved here–and it changed everything.

‘BCN was one of the first FM stations in the country to begin playing free-form progressive rock. But they played all kinds of music! The DJ’s were free to play anything they wanted, and would respond to all kinds of requests. I remember once late at night a friend of mine had an irresistable desire to hear Bill Monroe playing “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray.” He called it in to ‘BCN, and the DJ dug out the record and played it.

WBCN also covered politics. Like the underground newspapers that were popping up in the late ’60s, ‘BCN represented a decidedly “underground,” anti-establishment viewpoint. If an important political action was happening, you heard about it on WBCN. This week, WBCN was silenced, and apparently this is part of a national trend.

WBCN signs off the air in Boston radio shakeup

From Rolling Stone in July: “The Rock of Boston” WBCN Falls Victim to Rock Radio Decline

For the third time this year, an iconic rock radio station in a major city is shifting formats: Boston’s 104.1 WBCN, “The Rock of Boston,” will leave the airwaves on August 13th. The rock station had been broadcasting for 41 years. According to Billboard.biz, WBCN was a victim of CBS Radio’s desire to launch an all-sports talk radio station on the FM dial. The company’s Adult Top 40 Mix station will make the jump from 98.5 to 104.1, with the sports station taking over at 98.5.

From The Boston Globe: The glory days of the rock of Boston

THE YEAR was 1968. Young Americans were dying in an unpopular war halfway around the world. Protesters were battling police on campuses and in the streets throughout the country. A national upheaval was underway involving the anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements. These revolutions would forever transform the nation socially, culturally, and politically. But you would never know it from listening to the radio, where fast-talking DJs played ads for acne cream along with Top 40 pop ballads like Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid.’’

And then came WBCN-FM….WBCN began broadcasting from the back room of the Boston Tea Party [legendary Boston live music venue] on March 15, 1968. From the moment it hit the air, the station helped define, as well as promote, popular culture and politics in Boston for the ’60s/boomer generation in a way that nothing had before. And its impact quickly spilled over nationally….its role in launching music careers, including The Who, The J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, and U2, has been widely cited. But WBCN was more than a cultural innovator. It was a social and political force as well, particularly from 1968 to 1975, when, long before Facebook or MySpace, the station served as the social medium that connected a generation in Boston.

The Liberal blog, Down With Tyranny had a a long blog post about WBCN awhile back: WBCN: The thrill is long gone. Corporate mindlessness proudly kills another iconic radio station.

What set WBCN apart was not just the good taste of the people who worked there; it was its innate irreverence and humor. When I moved to Boston, I got to experience BCN firsthand for many years. Those qualities were a perfect match for the overwhelmingly youthful population (thanks to what seems like hundreds of colleges in the area) it served. Notice the word “served.” FCC licenses used to be granted to radio stations so that they could serve the community. Such a notion is still in the bylaws of the FCC charter, but it has been ignored and rendered meaningless by Washington slimebags who hold a different agenda. BCN was inspired radio as opposed to the paint-by-numbers, devoid-of-humanity radio now imposed on us by polyester-draped corporate yahoos who spend their days throwing buzzwords around, somehow convincing themselves that their joke lives have meaning. BCN arrived in the days when you could still tell the makes of the cars on your street apart without having to look for some damn logo that the car company paid someone a million bucks to “design.”

[….]

Listening to BCN in the early ’70s was like listening to The Daily Show, with music, and, you never knew who might drop by, often unannounced and unhyped. It could be anyone from David Bowie to guru Baba Ram Dass. It was just peer-to-peer conversation. You could even think of it as a cult. To its audience, BCN was an integral part of the day. To the straights or fearful repugs of the day, it was a vaguely menacing foreign-language station.

OK, enough of my self-centered wallowing. Now to the news of today.

The Health Care

The “Death Panels” canard is really taking root in the public consciousness.

Finance Committee to drop end-of-life provision

The Senate Finance Committee will drop a controversial provision on consultations for end-of-life care from its proposed healthcare bill, its top Republican member said Thursday.

The committee, which has worked on putting together a bipartisan healthcare reform bill, will drop the controversial provision after it was derided by conservatives as “death panels” to encourage euthanasia.

“On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. “We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

Chuck Grassley is nuts, but President Obama still wants to work with him, according to Sam Stein at Huffington Post

Undaunted by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s declaration that the Democratic health care agenda might empower the government to “pull the plug on grandma,” President Obama still hopes to achieve a bipartisan reform bill, his spokesman said Thursday.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs chose his words carefully on Thursday when asked to respond to comments made by Grassley, who is one of three key Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee tasked with crafting compromise legislation. Despite being heavily wooed by the White House, Grassley took up the fundamentally dishonest “death panels” line of attack at a town hall meeting on Tuesday.

Gibbs suggested the Iowa Republican talk to his Republican colleague, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska who deemed the death panel rumor an offensive myth designed to “gin up fear in the American public.”

The New York Times today says that the “death panels” attacks come from the same groups that defeated Bill Clinton’s health care initiative: False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots

Why are all the “death panel” discussions in the press focused on the “end of life counseling” portions of the bill instead of the parts of the bill that establish a panel of government and insurance industry “experts” to decide what will be covered? Would it be a good idea to try to get some representatives of the people on that panel? Will there ever be an end to these distractions?

Never mind, that was a rhetorical question.

At his health care town hall in New Hampshire this week, President Obama insulted doctors who treat diabetics.

Asked about government panels that could restrict medical treatments, Mr. Obama said a panel of doctors and health experts would set guidelines for the most appropriate methods of care, and that is needed to eliminate wasteful practices.

He used the example of diabetes patients, saying currently insurers will only pay a “pittance” for a family doctor to monitor medication and diet of diabetes patients that can prevent costly problems later. But he said the insurance companies do not hesitate to pay $30,000 for a foot amputation for a diabetic who does not get good preventive care.

“Why not make sure we are reimbursing the care that can prevent the amputation?” he asked, saying changes are needed in medical reimbursement policies.

The President also insulted the U.S. Postal Service (see below under other news).

Politico:

Are Democrats losing August?

Massive Campaign for Obama Hits Air

New treatments for cancer in the offing?

New Screening Could Lead to More Potent Cancer Drugs

Compound Targets, Destroys Cancer Stem Cells in Mice

Hillary Clinton’s “Meltdown”

The NYT Lede Blog tries to tell the truth about Hillary’s response to a stupid question.

It always seemed unlikely to The Lede that a translator working for Mrs. Clinton would make such a large error with a question asked in French — or that an African university student would say “Mr. Clinton” when he meant “Mr. Obama” — and my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman reports in Thursday’s New York Times that “further inspection of the audio recording of the event indicated that the translation was fine; the student had indeed said ‘Mr. Clinton.’ ” A second reporter traveling with Mrs. Clinton, a friend of your Lede blogger’s who is a magazine journalist, said the same thing in an e-mail exchange on Wednesday night, that a French-speaking colleague who was in the room confirmed that the student “did ask the question that way: ‘the mind of Mr. From the lips of Mrs.’ ”

Given that it now appears that the question was translated correctly — and that the male student wanted to know not just what Bill Clinton thought of Chinese relations with Congo but also what the former N.B.A. star Dikembe Mutumbo, who was present at the event, thought, too, but expressed no interest in the perspective of America’s female secretary of state — is it possible that Mrs. Clinton has gotten a raw deal from commentators in the United States for her angry reply?

Will anyone pay attention? Never mind, that was another rhetorical questions. BTW, MABlue says the big story in Germany is Hillary’s fight to end the use of rape as an instrument of war in the Congo. Whatever. For the U.S. media the only story is that Hillary is a “mad bitch.”

An Eclectic Selection of Other News

This is scary: US Report: NASA Can’t Track Deadly Asteroids

A new U.S. government report says the U.S. space agency does not have enough money to find asteroids that could destroy life on Earth.

The National Academy of Sciences said Wednesday that Congress has yet to give NASA the money it needs to build telescopes to track the potentially deadly space objects.

(h/t Dakinikat)

Air traffic controller suspended, was chatting on phone with girlfriend during Hudson River crash

President Obama insulted postal workers while pushing health reform in NH (h/t Stateofdisbelief)

The President and the Postal Service

Can I get one of these to catch the little field mice that keep sneaking into my kitchen?

BBC: Giant ‘meat-eating’ plant found

A new species of giant carnivorous plant has been discovered in the highlands of the central Philippines.

The pitcher plant is among the largest of all pitchers and is so big that it can catch rats as well as insects in its leafy trap.

A window into the brain: Researchers use MRI to track memories

When we absorb new information, the human brain reshapes itself to store this newfound knowledge. But where exactly is the new knowledge kept, and how does that capacity to adapt reflect our risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of senile dementia later in our lives?

Will universities soon start following paper newspapers into irrelevancy?

How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

MIT’s courseware may be free, yet an MIT degree still costs upward of $189,000. College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation’s students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world’s most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. “Colleges have become outrageously expensive, yet there remains a general refusal to acknowledge the implications of new technologies,” says Jim Groom, an “instructional technologist” at Virginia’s University of Mary Washington and a prominent voice in the blogosphere for blowing up college as we know it Groom…coined the term “edupunk” to describe the growing movement toward high-tech do-it-yourself education….

The edupunks are on the march. From VC-funded startups to the ivied walls of Harvard, new experiments and business models are springing up from entrepreneurs, professors, and students alike. Want a class that’s structured like a role-playing game? An accredited bachelor’s degree for a few thousand dollars? A free, peer-to-peer Wiki university? These all exist today, the overture to a complete educational remix….”If universities can’t find the will to innovate and adapt to changes in the world around them,” professor David Wiley of Brigham Young University has written, “universities will be irrelevant by 2020.”

Gel condom to empower women

A new gel could make a “vaginal condom” that would physically entrap semen and anything it contains, including sperm and viruses such as HIV.

The gel is liquid as long as it is in contact with the acidity that is normal in a vagina, but will turn solid when it encounters semen, which is slightly alkaline. Any particles wider than 50 nanometres – including sperm, HIV and other viruses such as the herpes virus and the papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer – are trapped, so the gel could double up as both a protectant and a contraceptive.

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