Medium, not rare or well done

It may surprise some people that the mission of the U.S. Infantry is not to kill people...

That salient fact completely slipped my mind.  The only infantry training I experienced was half-assed, at best, during my first few months at Ft. Polk.  I remember they always referred to a non-specific "enemy" and not any specific group but once in a while they'd mention "Charlie."

Uncle Ken may not make a distinction between different types of killing but the law sure does; big difference between murder and involuntary manslaughter.  In both cases a life is lost but the penalties differ dramatically, which is small comfort to the family of the deceased.

Since much of the moral code of western civilization is derived from scripture I think the God of the Old Testament couldn't make up its mind.  On the one hand the life of Cain was spared after the murder of Abel but there was no problem commanding the chosen people to slay their enemies.  But this topic has already been chewed on, hasn't it?

-----

I agree that the media generally give us what we want.

They also give us what they think we want.  If they see an uptick in circulation because of a frog story you can bet that there will be more frog stories until public interest wanes.  I don't think they really know what will sell and they are willing to try anything as long as the sponsors and advertisers aren't offended.  Controversy always sells, as long as it doesn't go too far, and the public is fickle.

I wish I still had my copy of Marshall McLuhan's book Understanding Media.  The phrase "the medium is the message" is eerily prescient and I wonder what he would have thought of today's social media and the evolution of traditional mass media.  Could he have foreseen something like The Drudge Report, or the abundance of content posted to YouTube?  Everybody and anybody can be a content creator and grab millions of eyeballs and shape public opinion, for better or worse.

But a lot of the content is ephemeral and has no lasting impact; attention spans have gotten significantly shorter.  Last month's big story is already forgotten; eclipsed by today's big story.  This is what bothers me so much about stuff being in "the cloud."  They say that once something is posted online it never disappears, but I'm not sure about that.  Magnetic media (of any type) is not archival; if you really want to keep something for the long term you had best produce a physical copy.  Paper still works very well and has stood the test of time but I don't know how long the inks in today's inkjet printers will last; some dyes aren't too stable and are only guaranteed for 100 years (according to what I learned while working at Kinko's).

I used to print out an awful lot of stuff, mostly reference and technical stuff, but not any longer.  While going through some of my piles of stuff I realized that once an item was printed it was put aside, usually never to be read again.  The info is still good, if a little dated, but my interests have changed over the years and those printed pages are no longer relevant except as curiosities.

-----

There are a lot of commercials that allow you (for a fee) to track your DNA and I wonder what you guys think of that.  I remember one where this guy thought he was German and discovered that his lineage is mostly from Scotland.  Suppose his siblings were also tested and they found out they were mostly Greek; that would make for some interesting family discussions, good fodder for an appearance on Maury.