Daily Archive: May 18, 2016

No video (apart from lyrics), but if you only listen to one Guy Clark song, I recommend this one: This is one of his more popular songs, with a video:

And when it comes to the staleness of recent political conventions, Trump is (gulp) right. Calling them boring is like saying one of his xenophobic policy proposals is controversial. The conventions are overly scripted affairs that are devoid of drama not by accident; they’re intentionally crafted to avoid drama in the first place. (They’re not offering substance in place of showmanship either.)

Trump’s secret, meanwhile, isn’t that he’s promising an unscripted event, only that it seems like he is. He isn’t planning a convention where anything could happen; he’s planning one where it feels as though anything could. I believe this is called “reality TV.” As another Trump campaign source put it: “Announcing the vice presidential nominee before the convention is like announcing the winner of Celebrity Apprentice before the final show is on the air. This is one of the only opportunities to create tension and drama in the whole show.”

From: Donald Trump’s plan to make the GOP convention must-see TV.

Analyses showed that even after statistically controlling for background factors, such as age and gender, more frequent use of pornography in 2006 was related to lower religiousness in 2012. This was true even after...