Fear of Facts Endangers the Nation

PETER MICHAELSON FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

What may be hurting our country more than anything is a thick-skulled mentality that refuses to face the facts.

Sad to say, people don't necessarily change their minds when their erroneous assumptions are corrected. A University of Michigan study found that misinformed people, particularly those loyal to their politics, rarely change their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. Instead, they often become more strongly set in their beliefs.

This restriction of intelligence may be America's most baffling and self-destructive problem. The nation's complex challenges won't get solved by all the dead brains cells insisting that President Obama is foreign-born, death-panels are coming, and gun controls destroy liberty.

While we're at it, let's deny the fact that the carbon we're producing from oil, gas, and coal is causing global warming.

Why are many of us so obtuse? [...]

Read on...

Wallflowers at the Revolution

Daddy Frank on Americans' media-fed ignorance about Egypt and the Middle East:

A month ago most Americans could not have picked Hosni Mubarak out of a police lineup. [...]

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

Al Jazeera English, run by a 35-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Company, is routinely available in Israel and Canada. It provided coverage of the 2009 Gaza war and this year’s Tunisian revolt when no other television networks would or could. Yet in America, it can be found only in Washington, D.C., and on small cable systems in Ohio and Vermont. None of the biggest American cable and satellite companies — Comcast, DirecTV and Time Warner — offer it.

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

The consequence of a decade’s worth of indiscriminate demonization of Arabs in America — and of the low quotient of comprehensive adult news coverage that might have helped counter it — is the steady rise in Islamophobia. [...]...it’s no wonder that Americans are invested in the fights for freedom in Egypt and its neighboring dictatorships only up to a point. We’ve been inculcated to assume that whoever comes out on top is ipso facto a jihadist.

Our media and pols figured out long ago to treat us like mushrooms - keep us in the dark and feed us shit and we will think(?) the way they want us to.

Puff up another one!

This guy was stupid before he puffed up his first fattie:

... As Daily Intel writes, Michelson was interested in growing his own plants—he even bought all the seeds and materials needed for it online. But something was itching at him still. So he called 911 ...

Blogroll Amnesty Day

Late to it this year (thanks to the flu) so I'm directing you to other folks' pages who've found some great blogs you might not know about.

Skippy: Here, here, here, here, and here.

Nucks: Here.

Jill: Here.

Vagabond Scholar: Here.

Left in the West: Here.

Pruning Shears: Here.

Cookies in Heaven. Here.

Mike Finnigan/C&L [our pal Michael Stickings filling in]: Here.

That should hold ya for the better part of the morning. Chelsea v. Liverpool in a couple hours. Don't bother me. Heh ...

Switzerland ...

It's beautiful this time of year*:

GENEVA (Reuters) - Former U.S. President George W. Bush, under fire from human rights group over allegations of ordering torture, has canceled a visit to Switzerland where he was to address a Jewish charity gala.

Bush was to be the keynote speaker at Keren Hayesod's annual dinner on February 12 in Geneva. But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the Alpine country.

...

Aside from the fact Obama should have the CIA "disappear" him to Geneva, it says something that our former leadership (Bush, Cheney, and cabinet members) can't travel abroad for fear of arrest.

Update:

Stolen from Maru:

*Great thanks to our pal Montag for the link.

Varmint Dancing

Whether you like cowboy music or don't like it yet, if you ever get the chance to see Riders In The Sky (wiki) in person, go. They put on a Cowboy Themed Multi-Media Music & Comedy Show that will knock yer socks off.

I am not endorsing their product because I know nothing about it, but thanks to 00YellaWood00.

Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

From America's Finest News Source:

Repealing the act, which opponents have branded 'Obamastroid,' has been the cornerstone of the GOP agenda since the law's passage last August. Throughout the 2010 elections, Republican candidates claimed that the Democrats' plan to smash the space rock and shield citizens from its fragments was "a classic example of the federal government needlessly interfering in the lives of everyday Americans."

"This law is a job killer," said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who argued the tax increases required to save the human species from annihilation would impose unbearably high costs on businesses. "If we sit back and do nothing, Obamastroid will result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, which we simply can't afford in this economy."

Many GOP members have also criticized the legislation for what they consider pork-barrel spending, claiming the act includes billions in "giveaways" to NASA, nonperishable food manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies contracted to produce mass volumes of vitamin D supplements in the likely event that dust from the asteroid's impact blots out the sun for a decade.

In an effort to counter Republicans' claims, Democrats have asserted that the long-term benefits of preventing the United States from being incinerated by an explosion several billion times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb would far outweigh the initial monetary outlay.

Repugs would see the prevention of the destruction of the human race and maybe the planet as a victory for Obama and Democrats and are therefore against it.

More.

Headline of the Day

Son Says Reagan Would See Today's GOP as 'Mean-Spirited and Stupid'

Perhaps he would, in a rare moment of lucidity. And he'd be right.

I'm glad all this Fatted Calf Reagan Worship is happening on a weekend so it doesn't fuck with the important shit.

Debunking the Reagan Myth

Paul Krugman on Ronald Reagan, who wasn't really a President but did play one on TV and whose addled reign we still suffer from. This is from January 2008:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.

[...] The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

For it did fail. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. [...]

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.

The right’s ideas don’t work, and never have. You can't change their minds. Bring up the record, they just trot out the folk tales they always use and call you a commie.

A Mid-Winter's Tale

Today is the mid-point of winter. It's half over. Most of our snow has so far sailed over our heads and landed on a lot of you. It's been extreme for some of you folks so I thought I'd try and cheer ya up. Here's an article from yesterday's Sierra Sun, my local paper, by noted area historian Mark McLaughlin about the most severe winter around here ever. I hope it makes you feel better.

Weather patterns were erratic during the winter of 1938, Tahoe's biggest winter. Heavy rain in December 1937 caused major flood damage, but by mid-January there was less than a foot of snow covering the high country. Colder storms finally ripped into the region at the end of January, blasting residents with 12 feet of snow in less than a week. It was the opening salvo of an epic three-week storm.

In February, severe blizzards buried Tahoe communities with more than 9 feet of snow in seven days. At one point, Tahoe City was completely isolated with no automobile traffic and all communication cut off. For 10 days the overwhelming snow shut down Southern Pacific's horse-drawn, express mail and passenger stageline between Truckee and Tahoe City. Small towns throughout the Sierra were inundated by the snowfall. Tahoe City and Truckee residents endured in relative safety, though those areas received 17 feet of new snow within 16 days. There were no mail deliveries to the North Shore for more than a week and no fresh food for twice that long.

By Valentine's Day, the snow was 20 feet deep on Donner Summit. During a rare break in the weather, the steamer that regularly circled Lake Tahoe with mail and deliveries arrived back in Tahoe City. The captain mentioned if anyone wanted some horsemeat, it was available at Glenbrook, Nev. Apparently a caretaker there shot a horse due to injury and was willing to share the meat if anyone was interested. The story spread to San Francisco and even Los Angeles that snowbound Tahoe residents were running out of food. On Feb. 17, the San Francisco Examiner quoted Tahoe City Constable Harry Johanson as saying he was “holding in reserve 1,000 pounds of fresh horsemeat, should the situation get serious and the need for fresh meat become acute.”

California Governor Merriam was alerted and the San Francisco Call Bulletin newspaper enlisted United Airlines to organize an emergency food drop at Tahoe City. Local residents built signal fires in the middle of the Tahoe City Golf Course and that night two airplanes swung in low, dropping 10 boxes of bread, meat and vegetables. Half the boxes shattered when they hit trees, but the remainder was retrieved by cross-country skiers and distributed around the community.

The winter of '38 started late, but made up for it with powerful storms in February. By May, a record 67 feet of snow had buried Donner Pass, the greatest snowfall in Tahoe history.

67 feet of snow "made up" for a "late start" to winter! Sometimes I think we're fuckin' crazy around here. Heh.

This year, we had an early start to winter but there's not much snow* left at my house and the weather has been very nice and I hope that pattern will continue for you as well.

*Coupla feet or less on the ground, bare ground around the trees. "Not much" can turn into "waaaaaay too much" overnight of course, but like the fellow who jumped off the 30th floor said as he went by the 15th floor, "so far, so good".

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Emmylou on the Hank Williams Snr song

Emmylou Harris ~ Half As Much

Thanks to 1000Magicians, UK.

A right-wing combo plate of stupidity, insanity, and talking points, with sides of conspiracy and apocalypse

You must go see the Guardian UK's take on Miss Becky and some of the other right-wing nutjobs' reaction to the unrest in Egypt.

To cut to the chase, a new caliphate will emerge in the Middle East and push further east until China, as Beck puts it, says "Knock it off guys" and takes over India, reaching some way into Pakistan. The caliphate will then push north, which is when it will absorb the UK:

What happens to the overwhelming radical population of the UK, of radical Islamicists. What happens? Do they just sit around on their hands or do they see an opportunity? When you take the Marxists and you combine them with the radical in Islam the whole world begins to implode

So there you have it, an "Archduke Ferdinand moment" which will split Europe, the Middle East and Asia into Chinese and radical Islamic zones. In the full Beck, he also introduces Bill Ayers (who Sarah Palin had in mind when she accused Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists"), Hizbullah and Code Pink, a feminist antiwar group. But that's enough for now.

We useta say that the most dangerous man in the Marine Corps was a 2d Lieutenant with a map and a compass, but when it comes to getting lost nobody, but nobody, is the equal of Miss Becky with a blackboard and a piece of chalk!

There is so much to quote in this beautifully distilled lump of what's wrong with unlimited garbage free speech that I can go no farther. The last line offers a jewel:

And then there are more non-partisan positions, such as Glenn Beck's Egypt protest theories show he's finally lost the plot.

From the link:

Of course it’s all connected. The media won’t tell you the truth. Only Glenn Beck will.

The man has finally blown a gasket. His pattern-recognition machine is spewing smoke and shards of metal.

Out his ears. His 'brain' done blowed up from no oil pressure. Heh.

Don't miss these. It's fun.

Gipperfest!

The Rude Pundit on the upcoming 30th anniversary of Reagan's and our nation's Alzheimer's. Links at site:

[...] It's the centennial o' the birth o' the greatest President that ever Presidented in Presidentin' history. Ronald Reagan, motherfuckers. The man who knocked down the Berlin Wall with a single swing of his mighty dick while finger-fucking Margaret Thatcher and taking a shit on Grenada. He would have been 100 years old had he lived to see this coming Sunday, but who needs the birthday boy when you can have all the cake you want?

Fuck, yeah, let's drag his bones outta the ground so we can ground them up and freebase the dust so that we can shoot it straight into our veins so we can feel some of that Reagan morning in America high one more time, fuckin' A, that shit's like the finest heroin. You get that in ya and you feel that brief buzz, that warmth and delusion of goodness and rightness that tricks your brain into believing that the high is reality and reality is just the buzzkill. No wonder Republicans are addicted to it. No wonder so many Democrats wanna get stoned on it, too.

You can come up with your own ways to celebrate that don't involve shooting up. Like:

1. Go to Best Buy and max out your credit cards on the most extravagant, useless shit you can find, like 3-D TVs and smart phones that you can implant in your brain so you can only think in Google searches and text messages. Make sure it's expensive. Then, when you're tens of thousands of dollars in debt, make sure you die so that your kids have to pay for all of it.

Hey, it worked on the Soviet Union!

Here's one for Grenada Vets:

2. If you're pissed off at your neighbor, but he's an ex-boxer, go to the local day care center and kick the asses of the children there. Declare that you win, even if no one knows what you were fighting for.

More. Go.

(Bonus way to celebrate: Read the Rude Pundit's "tribute" to Reagan upon his death in 1994. It's the finest way to skullfuck the memory of the awful, cruel, incompetent puppet of a man who set the nation on its current path to doom and demise.)

Fear ...

Not the ginned up, scary A-rab fear of our current generation that sent thousands of our young men and women to their deaths needlessly "fighting for our freedom", but the real, existential fear that was quite legitimate in 1942:

...

That terrifying [Axis] momentum was felt most keenly in the United States, which until recently was half convinced it could sit out this world war on the sidelines. Now a reluctant belligerent, America saw itself caught between two hostile, agressive powers, one over each coastal horizon.

In those early days after its involuntary entry into the war, panic must have been a palpable feature of the nation's mood. While it mobilised for the best, America feared for the worst. In its March 2, 1942 issue, Life magazine distilled that national anxiety into six maps, each portraying a different scenario for Axis invasion.

...

If you look over the maps at the link, you'll see we weren't worried about a couple goat humpers in a cave the press turned into supermen with super powers but large armies of industrial powers who'd already conquered major parts of two continents. They had a right to be scared. That is what "fighting for our freedoms" means. In the "War on Terror", we have more to worry about, in terms of losing freedoms, from our own government than we do from al-Qaeda.

If you don't know about Frank Jacobs' Strange Maps site yet, you should take the time to go through it. I always find it intriguing.

Co-opted press ...

NYT v. Guardian. A good read from Marcy Wheeler:

...

Under cover of off the record meetings with top national security officials, the NYT collaborated with the government, at the least on damage control, if not their investigation of WikiLeaks. The Guardian, by contrast, was unwilling to do more than warn State what general topics they’d cover on a day to day basis.

...

Just another example how the "free press" is no longer, very much by their own choosing. I believe we saw that before the balloon went up in Iraq.

And another point that Marcy touches on is the fact Bradley Manning is their only suspect in the leaks:

... Geoff Morrell’s press conference last week made it clear that they still only consider Bradley Manning a person of interest in the leak of the larger dump, meaning that if he leaked them, they haven’t identified how he did so ...

When they know there's someone else (link NSFW) out there too. How? Document security:

...

Now we get to the good part. The feds have made it clear that they are looking for other leakers (aside from BM). Meatballs now know why.

Not all the State Dept cables obtained by WikiL bear the SIPDIS header tag.

...

I'd even suppose there are more than one. Whether we'll see anything Earthshaking in American papers is yet to be seen (maybe McClatchy) but I'm sure the rest of them will "cooperate" with the US government in fear of reprisal or some other such motivation. We'll have to look to the foreign press to learn anything of substance, probably, and the corporate news media won't touch it at all unless they're trying to skewer Assange.

I don't know ...

Why I bother but it has to be called out for what it is (but they haven't invented a word to describe the immense amount of stupid in Sean Hannity's body):

...

Now Fox host Sean Hannity has proclaimed that in the entire history of the world, only one democracy has ever arisen out of an uprising — Iraq.

...

The stupid, on several levels, is detailed at Pensito Review.

It burns ...

In light of this winter ...

This is believable:

Stunning his handlers, from the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, as well as tens-of-thousands of fans and spectators who make the pilgrimage to this tiny Pennsylvania berg, the infamous prognosticating groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, saw the shadow of the abdicating, half-term former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, which spelled out we are in for winter, extending through 2012.

...

I still have a base of snow (3" of ice now) in the yard from Christmas plus everything that fell on top of it. The way it looks now, it will be 2012 before it melts.

Great thanks to J. Thomas Duffy for the link.

Are you serious?

It's not like the balloon went up yesterday. We've been there a decade and this piddly shit hasn't been ironed out yet? What. The. Fuck?

Drugs, swearing and a sometimes insurmountable language barrier are just some of the cultural problems facing US troops striving to hand security to their Afghan counterparts by 2014.

Americans are infuriated by Afghan soldiers smoking hashish while Afghans hate the often florid swearing of US troops, soldiers told AFP in the Zhari and Arghandab districts in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan.

...

We gotta go. If we're still dealing with dope smoking and cursing, it'll be 3 lifetimes before they get it together. These people love fighting too much for us to leave them unsupervised.

...

Although drugs are banned in the Afghan National Army (ANA), many still take them, according to both sides.

"If I don't, I fight with the other soldiers twice a day. It relaxes me," explained Munawar.

...

"I'm bored, let me beat up one of my buddies." Or "It's 1600, time to kick Sarge in the ass."

Shit, I'd give them all opium, tell them which direction to shoot, and then split before the dust settles.

What a fucking horror show. We. Have. To. Go. NOW.

Policing themselves ...

Or, "No shit":

The Senate Ethics Committee's decision to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation into activities surrounding Sen. John Ensign's (R-NV) affair with a political staffer is raising age-old questions about the panel's relevancy.

Members of Congress are the first to admit that they hate serving on the Ethics Committee, and policing their peers puts them in an unusually awkward position. If that's the case and the panel has to farm out its work to true professional investigators, then why have lawmakers investigating their colleagues misbehavior in the first place?

...

And we all know that if you're a Republican, the odds of having to be accountable to anything are slim to none. Has self-policing ever worked?

It's a theme today ...

Well, a dual theme. A mashup of "Insane Clown Posse" and "Guys in Funny Hats meet Aliens" ... something like that.

Anyway, I mentioned in comments to Gordon on my planet post that all of "God's Mouthpieces" would shit themselves when having to revise our place in the Big Scheme of Things if we discovered (or they discovered us) intelligent life on one or more of these new planets they found.

... Wouldn't somebody's Good Book have hinted that He put His children somewhere else too? Wouldn't "God's representatives" have some inkling of His grand plan, being they lecture us all the time on how in touch with the Big Guy they are?

So that said (the "Guys in Funny Hats" part), we get to the "Insane Clown Posse" part. Amanda has a thoughtful post up (and gives BillO the Clown a kick in the process) about why the religious folks have a problem with gravity:

...

I sometimes still find that people on the liberal, or at least thoughtful, side of the fence still think that global warming denialism and creationism are discrete things borne out of an emotional need not to believe either in global warming or evolution, and while that’s true, I think it’s deeper than that. I think that science itself is under attack, and that the reason that conservatives are so eager to lash out against it has to do with an anti-modernist bent. This is especially true when you understand that science really is a threat to religion. A lot of people say it’s not, because science doesn’t address "spiritual" needs, but said folks are really overrating the importance of spirituality for most people---or assuming that this urge isn’t better scratched by loving others and enjoying life. Religion really draws its power from explanation. It gives order to the world. And science is poaching that territory rapidly, which pisses off authoritarians, because they rightfully understand that if they lose the power to create facile goddidit explanations for everything from gravity to the problem of evil, they will lose their power over people. Thus, the attack not just on specific scientific theories, but on science in general, and most of academia, as well.

...

Conservatives of any stripe, be they from the church (all of 'em) or of the political bent, can only survive if people are kept in the dark. Knowledge is power they have to keep the public ignorant. History holds many examples of this and now science and religion are rubbing against each other in more places than ever. Won't see it in my lifetime but it would be nice to see what humanity can do once they shrug off the crutch of religion.