Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive People are having a grand time writing the obituary for CBS News under Bari Weiss. Six months in, they say, the ratings are in freefall—flagship broadcasts bleeding viewers, historic lows, the whole thing a slow-motion collapse. Maybe. But six months of ratings don’t prove a newsroom overhaul has failed. They prove something far … [Read more...]
Colorado River faces a day of reckoning
By Jonathan Thompson/Writers on the Range We are two and a half decades into the Southwest’s most severe drought of the last 1,200 years, and this winter’s snow dearth is one of the most extreme on record. Without an April-May miracle, human-caused climate change likely will finally catch up with the Colorado River—and the 40 million people who rely on it—in the form of … [Read more...]
Can This Once Great American Church Hold The Middle Ground?
I’ve been increasingly critical — very critical to be honest — of my beloved Episcopal Church. Here’s the latest: Buckle Up, Bishop Hirschfeld. Here’s another: The Bishop’s Power Trip. And another: The God Gap. But today, as the old Monty Python device used to say, and now for something completely different. I present to you, in a horribly … [Read more...]
Properly Subversive: Episcopal bishop needs to fish or cut bait
I’m not sure whether to see the Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, above, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, as a naive priest caught in the net of his own silly words, or a political flamethrower out to ratchet up Le Resistance against the deportation of illegal aliens. About a week ago, he addressed a small crowd attending a vigil for Renee Good on the … [Read more...]
Why the sub-teacher shortage at WCSD?
By Bob Chidester Special to the Sparks Tribune After teaching middle school for 20 years full-time in the S.F. Bay Area, I retired, and my wife and I moved to Sparks. The Washoe County School District (WCSD) has daily shortages of dozens of substitutes. For the past 6 years, I have successfully substituted in a dozen WCSD middle schools. For almost that entire … [Read more...]
Word games to belittle achievements
Sherman R. Frederick/Properly Subversive This may seem like a minor writing point, but it’s significant, and it is happening right now in the mainstream media. News organizations have taken to substituting the president’s name for what would generally be called actions taken by the federal government. Consider the alleged civil rights violations at Columbia and the … [Read more...]
Abortion: Debate with clarity
If it takes a comedian to get us talking in clear terms about abortion, then so be it. On April 13, Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time said this about abortion: “Pro-lifers think it’s murder, and it kind of is. I’m just okay with that. I am. I mean there’s 8 billion people in the world. I’m sorry. We won’t miss you. That’s my position on that.” Thank you, Bill Maher. … [Read more...]
What happened to us?
Did we do something when we should not have? Did we do nothing when we should have? Anyway you slice it, this world is the result of its dominant species, at once both awesome and awful. Immersing myself in media the past few days, I generated enough notes for three or four columns. Love, hate, reason, superstition -- all well-represented. Then I saw the photo of … [Read more...]