Your favorite PBS memories.

Billions and Billions of brain cells stimulated

I grew up on PBS.  Back in the olden days, there were four channels: ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS.  I know, I know, I don’t know how we survived either.  And the networks just barged in with special bulletins and Congressional hearings whenever they felt like it.  You were pretty much forced to be a well informed public citizen against your will.  It was outrageous.  But the networks were like, where else are you going to go?  So, you know, we ate our Apollo rocket launches and Watergate Hearings and we liked it.

The first community sponsored PBS station in the country originated in my hometown of Pittsburgh at WQED in 1954, which was before my time.  When I was in college, I did a couple of pledge drives at WQED and got to visit Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood close up.  Ahhh, those were the days.  My family were PBS junkies.  Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of good stuff on PBS.  Here are a few of my favorites:

The Electric Company

ZOOM!

Cosmos

Connections with James Burke

Masterpiece Theater with Alistair Cook

Nova

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Nature

Life on Earth with David Attenborough

Live from Lincoln Center

The McNeil-Lehrer Hour

The French Chef

Yan Can Cook

The Frugal Gourmet

It’s kind of incredible that PBS is even controversial.  There was so much good content on when I was a kid. It’s not just Sesame Street.  It was free and interesting and had high production values.  What exactly is the problem??

Add your own memories of PBS in the comments.

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai is a 14 year old activist living in the Swat valley of Pakistan.  Her mission is to see that girls have access to education.  She and her father have publicly defied the Taliban who have moved into the valley and now she has paid a price.

The Taliban shot her in the head and neck.  Not only that but if she lives and continues to protest, they vow to do it again because she is a “secular-minded lady”.

The NYTimes has more:

Ms. Yousafzai came to public attention in 2009 as the Pakistani Taliban swept through Swat, a picturesque valley once famed for its culture of music and tolerance and as a destination for honeymooning couples.

Her father ran one of the last schools to defy Taliban orders to end female education. As an 11-year-old, his daughter Malala — named after a mythic female figure in Pashtun culture — wrote an anonymous blog documenting her experiences for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

“I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban,” she wrote in one post titled “I Am Afraid.”

Later in 2009, the army launched a sweeping operation against the Taliban in the area, displacing many militants into neighboring districts or across the border into Afghanistan.

Ms. Yousafzai continued to grow in prominence, becoming a powerful voice for the rights of children in the conflict-affected area. In 2011, she was nominated for an International Children’s Peace Prize; later, Yousaf Raza Gilani, the prime minister at the time, awarded her Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize.

In recent months, she led a delegation of children’s rights activists, sponsored by Unicef, that made representations to provincial politicians in Peshawar.

“We found her to be very bold, and it inspired every one of us,” said another student in the group, Fatima Aziz, 15.

“She had this vision, big dreams, that she was going to come into politics and bring about change,” said Ms. Minallah, the documentary maker.

She won a national peace prize last year.  Right now, she’s in critical condition and has been transported to another hospital for treatment.  Let’s hope she pulls through so she can keep helping her friends and defy the enemies of women.

It looks like this assassination attempt, where a couple other girls were also wounded, may have just been the tipping point with the Pakistanis against the Taliban.

I’ll take Matt Stoller seriously when…

So, Matt is one of the latest Democrats to leave the party because, well, Obama let Wall Street run the country in the past four years and drones.  All very good reasons.  Suppressing the votes of fellow Democrats in 2008?  Not that important.

So, I’ll take Matt seriously as a new Democrat in Exile when he finally acknowledges that those of us who preceded him out of the party four years ago had extremely good reasons for doing so and that it didn’t matter who was running against Obama.  Suppressing the vote of any state and nullifying those votes and letting the party get away with it was the first step on the slippery slope that lead to this point and that it should never happen again even if, and I want to make this absolutely clear, even if the opposing candidate is not to Matt’s liking for whatever irrational reason he can come up with to disguise his latent sexist tendencies. What Matt and his fellow former Obama contingent liked wasn’t important.  What is important is counting all of the votes equally and protecting the legitimacy and fairness of the electoral process.  If you don’t have that, you haven’t got anything and the person you let get away with murder will assume you don’t have a problem with anything he does.

So, Matt, you’re late to the party but if you’re serious about the long, hard process of reconstituting the left, you need to embrace us and tell all your friends to stop being snooty, snobby fucktards.  Screw us and pretend we don’t exist and you’ll have a hard time getting our cooperation in the future.  We’ll know if you really mean it or not.  It shouldn’t take long.  Otherwise, we’ll just assume you still don’t get it.

We would send out your white sheets and hormone replacement therapy starter packs but we’ve had a lot of new members recently and supplies are low.