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Long Live Web Publishing: Too Bad About the Death of Print

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Have you ever thought you lost something and then discovered it wasn’t lost after all? That’s how I felt Wednesday night winding down for sleep after watching a show on Netflix. Checking the calendar on the iPhone, it occurred to me it’s coming up on 10 years…

Welcome to Botville: An Uncertain Computerized Future

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Connecting the Dots –  By Glynn Wilson – Computer hacker-programmers have been creating bots to do various things since the 1990s. Bot is short for robot, although these bots don’t look like the robots from science fiction going back to the 1950s. If you use any search engine to ask “what is a bot?” you…

A Story Told is A Life Lived

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“A story told is a life lived.” – Unknown The Big Picture –  By Glynn Wilson –  CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – If the story of the 21st century is just going to end up being one hellscape disaster after another, until most of the countries of the world live under tyrannical dictators who ignore all…

Letters: Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

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Editor’s Note: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” is a line from an editorial by Francis Pharcellus Church. Written in response to a letter by eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asking whether Santa Claus was real, the editorial was first published in the New York newspaper The Sun on September 21, 1897. “Is There a Santa…

Part 3: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams and Journalism

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — One of the themes that emerges from this life analysis is that kids need heroes to inspire and emulate. That’s why it’s so important for young women to have role models, along with African Americans and other minorities in America. All I can do…

Part 1: On Unfulfilled Hopes, Shattered Dreams

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The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — A person with character may pickup a few nicknames in a life. A famous Baptist preacher once called me “Cowboy,” and it stuck. That worked for a couple of decades, and I was locally famous as the only drummer to ever wear a cowboy…

The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance: How Authoritarian Leaders Mutilate Reality, History and Culture

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“The first thing every totalitarian regime does along with confiscation and mutilation of reality is confiscation of history and confiscation of culture.” – Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran The Big Picture – By Glynn Wilson – Introduction WASHINGTON, D.C. — When I first walked into the administration building of an Alabama community…

The American Crisis: By Thomas Paine – 1776

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Editor’s Note: We publish this here today in honor of President’s Day, and especially to honor George Washington’s brilliant plan to cross the Delaware River and attack the British Red Coats at Trenton, New Jersey on the night of December 25, 1776, which turned the tide and gave the American Revolution the public opinion boost…

Common Sense: By Thomas Paine – 1776

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Editor’s Note: We publish this here today in honor of President’s Day. This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of…

Bipartisan Support for Regulation of Big Tech Means It’s Coming in 2023

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By Glynn Wilson — WASHINGTON, D.C. — Elon Musk of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the methhead hacker/programmers at Google and YouTube and their lobbyists in Washington, as well as their Republican friends in the House, do not want to hear this. But there is little doubt that more government regulation of social media is…

Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World

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By Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies – ProPublica – Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the…

Blue Monday: The Day Facebook Went Down

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By Glynn Wilson – WASHINGTON, D.C. — For millions of people around the world, Facebook is simply another toy on the internet. Many people simply log in now and then and scan what’s on the home page news feed on their smart phones, maybe hit like on a post or video, and don’t engage on…