Chris Penningroth’s Weltanschauung » Media

What do I Read After the News?

Chris Penningroth — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:50:34 +0000

News browsing evolves over the years, at least for me. Since I moved back to the States a few years ago, FoxNews is pretty much standard fare at work and I can watch it at home. It beats that conglomeration of news shows on the AFN News Channel (which was okay when it was a FoxNews show, but more often than not I found myself switching it off due to shows like Larry King Live or Countdown).
Normally I start my Internet browsing with Drudge (hat tip to Trigger for letting me on to that open secret) and I browse the “Headlines” and check out whatever seems appropriate. That goes fairly quickly.
I almost always follow that with PJMedia (what used to be Pajamas Media); the three ‘never misses’ there are Victor Davis Hanson’s Works and Days, Richard Fernandez’s Belmont Club, and Ed Driscoll’s columns. There is plenty of other good stuff there and I often find I have anywhere from 3 to 8 tabs worth of pages open before I know it.
When time permits, and naturally it almost never does, I hit National Review Online (and that way I don’t have to go over to VDH’s Private Papers anymore); then Newsmax; then One News Now. Anymore I have to have more than about 35 minutes worth of spare time to read those sites. On the rare occassions I have nothing else and I still have time to read I’ll check out a few other sites. Taggesschau figures prominently, although my German is not good enough to understand very much past most of its headlines. And at the end of the day, I like to check out AoSHQ.
Sites I rarely visit or have stopped reading are the Ludwig von Mises Institute (my libertarian streak pretty much ends at economics) and World Net Daily.
I’ve gotten a number of great suggestions over the years, generally not in the comments section but by word of mouth. You remember that method, right!? I’m grateful for the suggestions but if it seems like I’ve largely gone my own way, it’s because this is the habit I’ve preferentially developed.

History Will Be the Judge

Chris Penningroth — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:44:36 +0000

I don’t know that we’ll ever hearken back to this period in history as "The Good ol’ Days." But maybe even more than after the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, we’ll look back and realize that it might have been a whole lot worse without pretty solid leadership at the top. "Solid" doesn’t mean "Mistake-free," and there were certainly a lot of mistakes. Lucky for us, the most of the mistakes (thus far) weren’t strategic ones (I take certain points of view from certain folks in the MSM who would disagree with me as confirmation that I’m correct). The current Commander-in-Chief was no Ronald Reagan, but then as Victor Davis Hanson would point out, Ronald Reagan himself was sometimes "no Ronald Reagan."

That said, I was pleased (and not a little astounded) to read this. (H/T Uncle D)

Weltanschauung Friends in the News

Chris Penningroth — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:28:13 +0000

Weltanschauung friend Bonnie is in the Chicago media for her work helping raise funds to build a Fisher House there (one near the Hines VA Hospital and later another in northern Chicago)! Congratulations, and thank you very much for supporting Fisher Houses. For those of you who aren’t familiar, a Fisher House is a place where the families of service men and women can stay while their loved one recuperates from wounds.

Bonnie had some very nice things to say about Kevin Butler (Chicago Bears field goal kicker, rookie during Super Bowl ’85) and also about Gary Sinise and his Lt Dan Band (they played in concert to raise money for the Fisher House in Chicago). I second both, what great acts! It looks like the Lt Dan Band will be back to repeat the feat on 19 July 2008 at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, IL (Thanks also to Ms Deborah Rickert of Operation Support Our Troops–Illinois for the additional information about the upcoming concert; and thanks to Grant & Power Landscaping for helping support the overall effort)!

Below is the text of an e-mail from Fisher Houses for Illinois, Bonnie is mentioned in the second-to-last paragraph.

Debi Rickert of OSOT~IL presents a check for $75,000 to Fisher House on behalf of Operation Support Our Troops ~IL, Inc.

The following message was sent out by the Fisher House Chair to it’s Committee:

Hello to Fisher Houses for Illinois Board, Committees and Volunteers:

We have really great news to report. What a thrill and what a surprise!

Fisher Houses for Illinois received a generous contribution of $75,000 from fellow military support organization Operation Support Our Troops-IL (OSOTIL) at this non-profit’s July 21, 2007 Rockin’ for the Troops Benefit headlined by CSI:NY star Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band. These funds are specifically earmarked for the Fisher House for Hines VA Hospital.

Debi Rickert, President of OSOTIL, presented the check to Fisher Houses for Illinois representatives before 10,000 attendees at the Benefit at Cantigny Park, Wheaton, Illinois.    Added to prior OSOTIL contributions (in April 2007) for the first Fisher House in Illinois, this brings the total of OSOTIL-generated donations to $110,000.

This earns a permanent plaque for this generous donor in the Fisher House for Hines.

This organization’s volunteers have been a delight to work with from the get-go.   They are dedicated to their mission and to support the needs of our members of the Armed Forces of the USA deployed in harm’s way.

To date, OSOTIL has sent over 12,000 care packages to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, 5,000 of those in 2005. OSOTIL has also raised enough money to fund the purchase of two specially equipped vans for wounded soldiers. Supporting America’s wounded military personnel is another facet of the mission that OSOTIL is looking to expand upon in the upcoming year.

Fisher Houses for Illinois is fortunate to have OSOTIL partnering with us to help veterans in Illinois and the surrounding 16 states with the Fisher House for Hine.

Please take a few minutes to e-mail OSOTIL President Debi Rickert at d_rickert@msn.com to thank her and her tireless workers for giving the Fisher House for Hines such a huge boost.

In addition, we want to express our gratitude to the volunteers who manned the Fisher House for Illinois exhibit at the OSOTIL Rockin’ for the Troops Benefit and those who volunteered to work shifts with OSOTIL.

Bonnie Chattler, Jim Boland, Rich Flatley and Barbara Kemp were magnificent as they built awareness of our mission by speaking with hundreds of attendees and distributing buttons and brochures.

Rich Goulet and his wife, Mark Garry, Madeline Bikus and Mary Vaughn plus VFW members Vito DeSimone and Mike Henning worked shifts with OSOTIL in a number of areas from traffic control to ticket-taking and clean-up.

The New York Enquirer

Chris Penningroth — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:41:59 +0000

This may be the only thing I’ve ever read or heard from Michael Kinsley that was worth repeating. This was hilarious!

What’s fun is that I now get to find the Times’ most egregious errors, publish only their failures, claim that based on their ineptitude that their product is worthless, and call for everyone to stop reading the Times.

The parallels here compared to what they’ve been doing to us in the military with respect to Iraq are uncanny.

It’s like poetic justice.

Hat tip to HoyStory.

Let’s See if This Makes Prime Time

Chris Penningroth — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:38:12 +0000

I sent the following e-mail to a nationally syndicated television show host. The host in question seems to like vocabulary words even more than I do. Let’s see if this makes the e-mail review section!

I applaud you for disallowing tergiversation during your interviews.
I like to employ words like tergiversation* to bifurcate the
quotidian pedantic from the lucid enlightened.

Grammercy,
CLP

*(1: Evasion of straightforward action or clear-cut statement; 2:
desertion of a cause, position, party or faith), from Merriam-Webster’s
Online Dictionary http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/tergiversation)

Color Me Skeptical

Chris Penningroth — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 21:52:57 +0000

I thought el chupacabra was some sort of vampire version of sasquatch. Not this.

Interesting Thoughts on Journalism

Chris Penningroth — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 11:29:16 +0000

My buddy Matt has some incisive comments for the journalism profession in this article. Newsrooms across the country should take heed.

Stars & Stripes Goes Flying

Chris Penningroth — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 16:57:06 +0000

Here’s an interesting report from a new Stars & Stripes reporterette who got to fly at one of my alma matter squadrons.

The Air Force likes to try to make sure our Public Affairs staffs and some corresponding media personnel really understand what it’s like to operate in the aerospace environment. The best way to do that is to take them up for a familiarization orientation flight in a fighter. It looks like she got selected to on a 2v2 ACT ride, and at one point her D-model wrapped up with one of the Red Air into a BFM engagement to the floor.

Any Viper driver in the world would walk away from a flight like that with a sense of absolute ecstasy. Going all the way from a CAP to a merge and BFMing the bad guy all the way to the floor for a simulated ‘kill’ is something like the ultimate expression of what being a fighter pilot is; it’s like training for hunting a lion knowing that at the end, you wrestled it down with your bare hands.

From reading the article, it didn’t sound like our fearless writer came away with anything like that worth mentioning. I can’t really blame her, we spend over a year training for this type of flying. Still, I wish she’d talked more about the flying and less about how sick and sore she got.

Rabid Fox on FoxNews

Chris Penningroth — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:12:21 +0000

From FoxNews.com (who else!?): A five-year old took down a rabid fox and kept it from attacking six other kids. Nice going, Rayshun!

A Special Comment Just for Keith Olbermann

Chris Penningroth — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:21:42 +0000

Take your own advice.

Your basic worldview is, to put it nicely, screwed up. It’s so screwed up that it causes you to not understand events happening in the world around you. You’re not ‘misinformed’ so much as you are ‘clueless.’ What it all really boils down to is since you don’t understand the way the world works, you don’t support good causes, and therefore you don’t support the President. But you’re so rabid yourself that you can’t abide a chief executive that guides the country on morality and conscience, so you feel compelled to suggest he leave office. Your rage has unbalanced you. Your rage makes you a poor source of information. You cannot be trusted.

What more needs to be said about a clueless commentator whose show has a segment called ‘The Worst Person in the World?’