"...What happens in a meadow at dusk?"

Media Time Bomb

So, you think your discerning intellect is enough to insulate your mind from those who would try to change it?  Do you really believe that the daily onslaught of divisive memetic psychobabble, expectorated upon us all by the lurching Hollywood sideshow that we call "Mainstream Media", doesn't sink in?  In one ear, out the other, right?

You may want to think again.

A recent study conducted in the U.K. indicates that even critical, educated, cynical consumers of corporate "news", government "news", or "infotainment" (or hideous mutations thereof) are susceptible to influence, nay, manipulation over time.  The results of said study suggest that public opinion (a metric which includes those who claim they don't "trust" said sources of information) is swayed over a period of time by the consumption of "slanted, one-sided" news pieces.

One group was fed a diet of primarily "good news", and the other, "bad news".  Immediately after the experiment, the participants completed questionnaires.  Not surprisingly, the opinions of these attentive citizens were largely unchanged.  But a follow up questionnaire, six months later, revealed that "without exception" the attitudes of  both groups had been shifted in the direction of the suggestive news stories.  (This is the so-called "time bomb effect".) 

The study was conducted in the U.K., and was superficially concerned with U.K. citizens' attitudes towards a unified Europe.  But it does raise very interesting questions concerning the effect of a perpetually polarized media culture, in which networks such as FOX and MSNBC peddle differing opinions and battle for ratings.

Read the study abstract here.

Read the article about the study here.

If you are what you eat, does it then follow that you are what you read and watch and hear?

"Science"

First off, I will say that I haven't read this book, and I very probably won't.

I had been harboring a sneaking suspicion that the chapter pertaining to climate science, which includes the controversial 'geoengineering' proposal, is largely bullshit.  Now I'm sure of it.

According to SuperFreakonomics, we should seriously consider spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby mimicking a massive volcanic eruption.  This will maybe (maybe not) offset the warming trend of the atmosphere, so that we can go ahead and burn the rest of the hydrocarbons on the planet without reservation.  This, they claim, is both simpler and more desireable than using solar, wind, and geothermal technologies to generate clean energy.

I presume the rest of the book is brimming with helpful suggestions, like "If you are drunk, it is safer for you to drive a car, rather than walk," and charming statistical inferences along the lines of "the reduction of crime in the 1990s was due to the legalization of abortion roughly eighteen years prior."  That's some Bestseller shit.

We have Elizabeth Kolbert to thank for exposing co-authors Levitt and Dubner for the psuedo-scientists they are (at least in terms of climate science), in her informative and entertaining piece in the New Yorker:

"Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years."

 "But Steve, I'm a journalist, not a scientist.
...For that matter, neither are you."

"I know that.  But listen, I'm a 'rogue economist'."

"Fuck yeah buddy, we're going to get rich."

The Beginning of History

H.R. 3962

One of the only members of the U.S. Congress who has not been bought out by some special interest or another, Rep. Dennis Kucinich has written a concise and coherent explanation of why he voted against H.R. 3962, a.k.a. The Affordable Health Care for America Act.

Why I Voted NO

(Kucinich has been keeping it real for decades)

Goldman Sachs: "Doing God's Work"

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein stated recently that he's just "doing God's work."  Yeah.

(Incidentally, Pastor John Hagee says the same about his own work.  And then , of course, the Blues Brothers and George W. Bush were all on self-proclaimed "Mission[s] From God... look at the fucking mess they made!)

Another Goldman executive recently floated this little zinger, to a congregation in London:

"The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest," Goldman's Griffiths said last month in St Paul's Cathedral. "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all."

Now that's an impressive contortion of semantics!  It's so... I can't even really understand how that is supposed to make sense.  He must have meant "Christian" in the "I am acting like Jesus and loving my neighbor in that I am accumulating massive amounts of wealth, and keeping it all for myself" sense.

Hey peasants, why so glum?

"[Blankfein] insists we should be celebrating his bank's success, not condemning it. 'Everybody should be, frankly, happy,' he says. Can he be serious? Deadly. Goldman's performance, he argues, is the firmest indication of a nascent economic recovery that will benefit not just him and his firm but all of us. 'The financial system led us into the crisis and it will lead us out.'"

Matt Taibbi reacts to this bogus shit, and tries to understand why anyone would think like this, much less say such things out loud, into a microphone.  Here's an excerpt from his rant:

"Nothing else explains people like Alan Greenspan and Megan McArdle and all those other idiotic Ayn Rand devotees, big and small, who continually go out there in public and flog pseudo-religious beliefs about the self-correcting free-market as a cure-all for anything and everything, even as evidence to the contrary rains down from the sky like volcanic ash.  These people actually believe this shit and they believe it with the imbecilic ferocity of teenagers, even the ones who are 190 years old like Greenspan (who incidentally finally conceded a “flaw” in his thinking, but only after the entire world exploded and even all the reality-proof friendly data sources he had relied upon for his whole life told him his ideas were fucked), and it’s nearly impossible to get them to let so much as a sliver of their belief systems go."

Update:

I don't normally do this sort of thing, but... I happened to read about a little biblical detail that is rarely mentioned, and I think it's relevant:

Allegedly, this Jesus guy was seriously bummed about the money-changers in the Temple.  So bummed, the story goes, that he actually fashioned some sort of whip, with which he managed to convince them to scram.

Not bad.

(Boris Olshanksy - 2006)

Tattooed Under Fire

"Director Nancy Schiesari's riveting documentary, "Tattooed Under Fire,"  about the River City parlor in Killeen, Texas, and the soldiers who patronize it, was already being hailed as one of the great unreleased films of the year when it finally got picked up to air this month on PBS. But in a grim piece of poetic timing..."