Critcher's Centennial Campus

Hey, this is pretty exciting. But don't the folks over at Critcher's Auto Parts have a bit of a head start? From newsobserver.com:

State planning a plug-in car hub

Research center to work on battery

North Carolina is joining the national effort to develop an electric car battery that can travel more than 100 miles before being recharged.

The state, N.C. State University and North Carolina's two largest electric utilities will join to create a plug-in car research hub on Centennial Campus in Raleigh, Gov. Mike Easley said Tuesday.

"The future is going to be to replace the gasoline engine," Easley said in announcing the plan on the closing day of the university's Emerging Issues Forum, this year devoted to energy.

...

Easley and utility officials said they hope to develop a prototype within five years that can go 40 miles between recharges. That distance would be sufficient for most daily commutes, allowing drivers to recharge their cars at work. Researchers would seek to improve the design until they broke the 100-mile mark.

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Maybe the folks at the Centennial Campus will take a field trip to Boone?

Full article here.

P.S. We'll keep showing Who Killed The Electric Car--it's our second most-popular film, right behind The Future of Food.

Waive If You're Happy!

Media General is a pretty big player on the regional corporate media scene. How big? Well, they own:

1) WJHL TV, Channel 11 in Johnson City
2) The Winston-Salem Journal
3) The Bristol Herald Courier
4) The Hickory Daily Record
5) The Statesville Record & Landmark
6) The Morganton News Herald
7) The McDowell News
8) The Concord & Kannapolis Independent Tribune
9) The Eden Daily News
10) The Reidsville Review

It's good to know that the FCC gave them a huge present the other day--an interesting thing called a waiver. From stopbigmedia.com:

On Feb. 4, the Federal Communications Commission finally released the details of the devastating rule change it voted on back in December. These new rules would allow one company to own both a major newspaper and a radio or TV station in the same media market – tossing out a ban on “cross-ownership” that has been in place for more than 30 years.
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The final text makes clear the extent to which the FCC has abandoned its mission to protect the public interest.

Not content to open the door for massive media consolidation in the future, Martin snuck in a series of controversial waivers that take effect immediately. These waivers amount to a “get out of jail free” card for Gannett and Media General, which have been violating the law for years. In several cases, these companies already own the top-ranked stations in a community. Allowing them to own the daily paper gives them a monopoly over the largest media outlets in a given market. This represents a real threat to the diversity of voices and the quality of the local news in these communities.

...

...Martin portrayed the new rules as a modest change while building in enormous loopholes that put communities across the country at risk of greater media consolidation.

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Just days prior to the FCC’s vote, a bipartisan group of 26 senators sent a letter to Martin warning that if he proceeded with these changes they would act swiftly to overturn any new rules the FCC established. In the week after the vote, more than 200,000 concerned citizens signed on to an open letter calling on Congress to follow through on that promise. Now that the rules have been published, we’ll be working hard to be sure they do. You can help by signing the letter today and telling your friends.

Full article here.

Condi & Zeli Up In A Tree...

We certainly didn't plan on it, but our free screening of 9/11: Press For Truth couldn't have been timed any better. Why, it's as fresh as today's headlines, as they say. From rawstory.com:

The widows whose political activism was largely responsible for the establishment of a commission to investigate the September 11 attacks say a new book revealing the backstory of the 9/11 Commission proves that their initial concerns about its executive director were correct and demonstrate the need for another investigation.

Philip Shenon, who covered the proceedings for the New York Times, has written a new book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, which was released Tuesday. The book reveals the close ties between commission executive director Philip Zelikow and White House advisers Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice.

The Commission also reveals that aside from one staff member, no one on the 9/11 investigative panel reviewed what was perhaps the most robust treasure trove of pre-9/11 intelligence on al Qaeda -- records from the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance and codebreaking for the US Intelligence Community.

"General Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA at the time, was eager to cooperate and share what his organization had with the 9/11 Commission, but Executive Director Zelikow was not interested," 9/11 widows Patty Casazza, Monica Gabriellle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken said in a statement reacting to the book.
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Full article here.

Come on out for a great film at 12 noon on Saturday, February 16th, at Watauga County Library in Boone.

Weekend Video Salon: Meet Edward Bernays

The term "public relations" rolls so easily off of our tongues. But what it really is--is propaganda. So, meet Edward, the father of modern propaganda--oops, we mean PR. Enjoy!

A Market In Decline

A couple of weeks ago, we had a free screening of the movie Outfoxed, a documentary which examines Rupert Murdoch's Fox News operation. Recently, we came across this article over at mediamatters.org, which lays bare the problems facing Fox News after so clearly aligning themselves with the neocon movement:

Bottom line is that Fox News is in for a very rough 2008. And the umbrella reason for that is quite simple: Eight years ago the all-news cable channel went all-in on the presidency of George Bush and became a broadcast partner with the White House.
...
The most obvious signs of Fox News' downturn have been the cable ratings for the big primary and caucus votes this year, as well as the high-profile debates. With this election season generating unprecedented voter and viewer interest, Fox News' rating bumps to date have remained underwhelming, to say the least.
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For instance, on the night of the big New Hampshire primary, CNN, which habitually trails behind Fox News in the prime-time race, attracted nearly 250,000 more viewers than its top competitor, marking a changing-of-the-guard of sorts.
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Oh, and we can't forget the wildly hyped launch of the Fox Business Network, which, News Corp. execs bragged, would dethrone longtime cable business news champ CNBC. Of course, that might happen one day. But the early ratings for Fox Business Network have been unbelievably weak.

After two months on the air, Fox Business Network, available in 30 million homes, was attracting, on average, just 6,300 viewers on any given weekday, according to Nielsen Media Research. That was good for a nearly invisible .05 rating. (By comparison, CNBC during that period was attracting 265,000 viewers.)

...

UPDATE: Fresh Nielsen numbers show Fox News' ratings woes continued over the weekend. During Saturday night's 8-10 p.m. ET coverage of the Democrats' South Carolina primary results, Fox News not only got trounced by CNN among viewers 25-54, but lost to MSNBC as well.

Sheesh. Looks like Rupert may need a good old fashioned FCC bailout--more consolidation anyone?

Full article here.

WATA 1450 AM & WXIT 1200 AM

Folks are pretty lucky in Boone and Blowing Rock. They get to listen to Neal Boortz twice a day. Mr. Boortz claims to be a libertarian. Does his libertarian faith somehow explain the comments he made on his radio show on January 30th? Via mediamatters.org, here's what Boortz had to say about the victims of Hurricane Katrina:

"When these Katrina so-called refugees were scattered about the country, it was just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage." Boortz also described New Orleans as "a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves."

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"The primary blame goes on the worthless parasites who lived in New Orleans who you -- couldn't even wipe themselves, let alone get out of the way of the water when that levee broke."
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"Cries of the downtrodden, my left butt cheek. That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden; that's the cries of the useless, the worthless."
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You had a city of parasites and leeches, and that's George Bush's fault? So, boy, I need to slow down. I'm saying too many of the things I actually believe today."

Since most of us around here have jobs, it's a good thing that Boortz is aired on WATA 1450 AM and WXIT 1200 AM later in the evening. That way we can make a list of the local sponsors of his show. We'll send out the list once we've finished.

Full transcript and audio of Boortz's "libertarian" views here.

Weekend Video Salon: The Story of Stuff

We all have it, but we rarely ask where it came from, what the cumulative impact on the environment will be from making the stuff, who makes the stuff, or what will happen after we throw our stuff out. Out of sight out of mind? Not quite.

Here's a short film by Annie Leonard, titled "The Story of Stuff" that helps put the pieces together. And here's a little about Annie:

Annie Leonard is an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, with more than 20 years of experience investigating factories and dumps around the world. Coordinator of the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption, a funder collaborative working for a sustainable and just world, Annie communicates worldwide about the impact of consumerism and materialism on global economies and international health.

During the 1990s, Annie visited countries throughout Asia to track exported waste from the U.S. and Europe. She documented her findings in many articles and testified before the U.S. Congress in 1992 on the issue of international waste trafficking, in an effort to ban US waste exports to the Third World.

Since our free screening of The Future of Food was so popular, we thought we'd continue the discussion on sustainability. Enjoy!