A day late but not a dollar short (remember you get what you pay for). Here’s the Monday Mash-Up, delivered on Tuesday.
- Another kind of AMC
- Animating the Bayeaux Tapestry (h/t A&I)
- If you’re reading this you probably won’t be surprised that a recent Pew Survey Finds Most Knowledgeable Americans Watch ‘Daily Show’ and ‘Colbert’– and Visit Newspaper Sites
A new survey of 1,502 adults released Sunday by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans’ knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little. For example, only 69% know that Dick Cheney is vice president, while 74% could identify Dan Quayle in that post in 1989.
Other details are equally eye-opening. Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot — with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.
Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.
Told that Shia was one group of Muslims struggling in Iraq, only 32% of the total sample could name “Sunni” as the other key group. - Child Mortality in Iraq 150% worse than in 1990. But it’s more than Saddam starving his people:
“Some 122,000 Iraqi children died in 2005 before reaching their fifth birthday. More than half of these deaths were among newborn babies in the first month of life,” Save the Children said, listing “armed conflict and social instability” among the principal reasons for Iraq’s child mortality rate.
Remind me again how we achieve moral legitimacy over a population that is suffering like this?
- Air Force Fleet Wearing Down
Compared to 1996, the Air Force now spends 87% more on maintenance for a warplane fleet that is less ready to fly. The average Air Force warplane is 23.5 years old.
- Trying to bring the fight home to American bases
Very neat rendition of the Norman Conquest — I liked the videogame special effects.Watching it, I thought about the Normans, how a small group of French-speaking invaders could conquer land ranging from England and Sicily. Insurgency was a fact thousands of years old by then, so what happened?
It seems to be that the Normans, foreigners with no hope of winning hearts and minds, did not even try. Instead, they used more reliably weapons: land and gold.