Risk and the Ape

It's no secret that a sizable number of people are very concerned about the risk of Ebola and that either as part of the cause or part of the effect, the media are obsessive in their coverage, grasping for any aspect of the disease, its history and its treatment, that can be talked about by an ever-changing cast of experts as well as the same familiar faces.  They may pause to cover a plane crash, a shooting, but the business of the day is Ebola: those who have it, those who may get it and those you might get it from whether you're in Bayou Sorrel, Louisiana or Braggadocio, Missouri.

How do we choose what we worry most about?  What scares us the most?  Psychologists like Slovic, Lichtenstein and Fischoff  have done studies about the public perception of risk.  The public, they argue, will assess  the danger of death from disease as equal to death by accident as being equal, but disease is 18 times as likely to kill you as a gun or a car or certainly a policeman.  Death by lightening seems less likely to those in their studies than the risk of death from botulism, although lightening is 52 times more likely to get you.

"The Lesson is clear:"  Says psychologist Daniel Kahnemann. "estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy.  The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but are also shaped by it"  

Rare and unusual occasions make good press in the competitive news and entertainment game and when the supply runs low and the demand high, the more commonplace or quotidian may be dressed up for the prom.  Have you turned on CNN recently?

"The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality"

says Kahneman, understating the obvious. People make judgements and assessments of risk by consulting their emotions and not by examining the numbers.   A scary and unusual or gruesome thing looms larger than the Flu which may be millions of times more likely to kill you than Ebola. That Tylenol overdose accounts for 33,000 hospitalizations every year and hundreds of deaths simply doesn't enter the equation when we hyperventilate about the "risk" of Ebola or international terrorism or disease-carrying Mexican immigrants. And we don't feel fear when taking it or even read the label. 

Enter affect heuristics, the snap judgement mode under which we asses risk based on quicker, emotionally biased and less accurate calculation. .As Psychologist Jonathan Haidt said:

 "The emotional tail wags the rational dog."

If this doesn't seem pertinent to you, consider the studies of Antonio Damasio with people who do not, usually because of brain damage or abnormality,  display "appropriate" emotional responses.  They tend not to make decisions as well or as beneficially as others.  Indeed one's feelings do seem to enter into decisions we think of as truly rational. Asked to assess risk Vs. reward for specific technologies, one's feelings toward technology seem to determine the outcome. If you don't see genetic engineering as having any benefit at all, if you see danger in using Ammonium nitrate from the factory over  nitrates from manure, it's probably because of your bias against or lack of knowledge about science. If you tend to overlook real dangers from nuclear power, you probably already enjoy and understand technology and science. 

Is this a terrible thing?  Does it spell some disaster in that humans cannot expect to make the right decisions based on objective reality?    The public, says Slovic, actually makes finer distinctions than  the experts who assure us that you won't get Ebola from a certain person or by breathing the same air.  Finer distinctions between random, unpredictable fatalities and fatalities, like automobile accidents, that come from voluntary decisions. From this he concludes that  we should resist the "rule" of experts. 

Others look at examples where relying on experts might have prevented  popular excess, popular emotion from entering into public policy as with the expensive fiasco in 1989 about Alar and apples, where people were so afraid of apple juice they were taking it to toxic waste dumps and making terribly unreasonable claims of conspiracy based on nothing. Popular sentiment quickly snowballed or cascaded out of hand and beyond the universe of fact and reason.

Some psychologists like Timur Kuran and Cass R. Sunstein speak of  an Availability Cascade, A  mechanism through which biases flow into public policy, a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs, when explaining things from the Love Canal incident which somehow didn't kill us all or even some of us, yet had a colossal affect on public policy and public spending.   Does it explain demonstrations that insist that "we can't go the movies any more" because there was an isolated shooting?  In truth, choking on milk duds poses a greater risk but our minds see some qualitative difference between those deaths. 

Can it be part of human nature that we either ignore small risks because they are small risks -- or invest them with incredible imminence and attach tremendous fear to the point where we abuse the innocent, the non-dangerous as though we were running from a burning theater with evey man for himself?  We ignore or we panic and there are no other choices.

So perhaps we're overreacting in a predictable and intrinsically human way when we see immense danger from someone who might have been exposed to Ebola but who, we are assured, isn't contagious?  Are we asking ourselves for something we are not really capable of: a rational nature?  We evolved in a world where overreacting or reacting without much thought can save our lives but doesn't do much harm if the danger was less than expected. So if this is not exactly a critique of pure reason,  I'm still  not arguing that we should or even can throw out our inbred nature and I'm suggesting that  we accept the ape even while we keep him under close supervision.

The story of the day.

Bleary-eyed, the zombie turns on the TV, holding the antidote, the cup of coffee in one hand hoping to see whether UK retains it's U.  "After the break we're back with the story of the day" says the talking head, or the panel of happy-talk bobbleheads.  The story of the day, of course is the new iPhone.

The latest thing from Apple, the news from McDonalds, the celebrity "selfie" of the day. No point in checking the Benghazi channel. It's back to Al Jazeera where I get my answer and am reminded of the size and complexity of our world.  All sorts of things going on, scary stuff, important stuff Americans never hear about unless it happens to coincide with the story of the week, which seems to be the NFL and domestic violence.  We'll be clucking and squawking about something else as the flock follows next weeks' theme. Some other occurrence will convince us that something which is actually getting better is getting worse or that some one in a hundred million happening means we can't go outside anymore -- at least on the side of the news I watch. On the other side it will still be Benghazi and the milquetoast Muslim tyrant and how he's mishandled this or that.

In the trade, they call it "native" advertising.  The movie where the ultramacho hero always drives a Audi or BMW, news stories straight from the press releases of  video game vendors, the latest shake from McDonalds or of Miley Cyrus' ass.  And of course most of the news network's day is advertising and most of the actual news has to be sufficiently sensational, captivating, outrageous or otherwise sufficiently fetching to make the other glassy-eyed zombies sit through the endless bits of theater where toady, underpowered souless and boring econoboxes are made to seem like race cars and other products are equally misrepresented as the goals of all your pathetic worldly aspirations.

Scotland?  Oh yeah, they're still part of the UK for the time being and some 80 or 90 percent of the voters showed up at the polls. I guess those people don't have anything better to do in their sad little world.

Shit-kicker conservatives?

If there's anything as loathsome to me as racism, it may be the way that many and perhaps most of us like to use stereotypes to demean a group, arguing ad lapidem or using a stereotype designed merely to unite a disparate group for the purpose of disparagement. It's one of the things Bill Maher does sometimes, that Rush and Hannity and others do all the time. It's a sin few of us are free of.

If he's right in saying that many small groups can, often with the assistance of the fair and balanced media achieve a level of influence that belies their small membership, I'd prefer that he'd do so without the cheap stereotypes. 

"From the NRA to “One Million Moms, powerful conservative lobbies that don’t reflect the values of the American people can somehow dictate what politicians on both sides are willing to stand for." 

Well yes, but so can lobbies in general, that's what they're for -- and so can lobbies that don't "kick shit"  but can and do kick the facts around just a bit. I don't think we can assume for instance, that because the NRA has only four million members  it doesn't reflect something similar to what a great deal more than four million voters believe to an extent -- rightly or wrongly.

I have severe misgivings for instance,  about the facts behind many of the pet straw men of the right and left  and sorry, there's no shit on my boat shoes -- besides, the greater issue is far too non-funny to treat in this way.    There are fewer opportunities for burlesque when describing what may be a larger plurality in America -- the moderates, the centrists, the pragmatic and the analytical.  And so we either ignore them or try to force them into a category we know how to mock, because too often mockery, hyperbole and stereotypes  are all we have.

If there's humor in the street theater we get instead of news, I'd have to bring up the crowds waving angry signs and shouting slogans like "no weapons on airplanes" in response to the TSA's decision to allow golf clubs and tiny knives so small that a diminutive Gerbil could carry an 'arsenal' in one cheek.  One "fact kicker" activist found it worthwhile to wave around a large and lethal  hunting knife for the cameras recently in hope that the sort of liberal Maher characterizes as never having met a regulation they didn't like, would identify one with the other and fail to ask how someone would take command of a jetliner with a putter or lacrosse stick much less a "weapon" hardly big enough to sharpen a pencil.  Are these people a majority or would they all fit into a VW beetle?  They'd like to make you angry enough so that you won't ask.  Does it help to dismiss the right wing faithful as "shit kickers" while we bang on the ban drum about making soft drinks illegal and prosecute parents for photographing their kids in the bathtub?  They don't miss a chance to stereotype us and we make it easy for them.

Will it take some sort of Buddha to remind us that there is a middle path, that Agnew was wrong and extremism is pretty much a vice all the time, that mockery is as much the tool of the bigot and racist and liar and crook as well as of anyone, that cynicism and sarcasm and the throwing of stones are dangerous techniques for those not beyond reproach?  Maybe, maybe not and perhaps that Buddha would risk crucifixion -- it happens.  

Fox fight

Perhaps you're old enough to remember Dick Tracy and Pruneface; perhaps not, but the current leader of the Pruneface lookalike race may also be the most powerful man in America. He's got superhero powers you see, and is able to create reality from scraps and leavings and imagined things. Some might prefer to call it a Frankenstein power however, but hoping the monster he's created may eventually destroy him is, more than likely, an ephemeral dream.

Still it's nice to see him stood up to. DirecTV is threatening to dump Fox programming as of November 1st because the network is demanding a 40% price hike. Fox in turn is playing the "I'm shocked -- shocked!" card because the largest Satellite provider has gone public about the dispute. Perhaps Fox has come to believe they can do whatever they please and expect no argument, but although I would miss House, I wouldn't miss the cartoon news: the polemics, the lies, distortions, polemics and fables; the temper tantrums, the self-contradictory political stances or the zealous zombies in pancake makeup.

But real life isn't Dick Tracy and the bad guys tend to win far more often. Still it would be fun to see that invisible hand of the market slap the wrinkles off that old prune, wouldn't it? It's always a good time to let Cox know how you feel anyway.

Falling Fox

When one has come to instinctively mistrust the judgment of his countrymen, it comes as a considerable and pleasant surprise to see public sentiment shift back toward agreement. Of course where I live, it still seems like the Gospel according to Beck and no one thinks he's rewriting history by pretending Tom Paine was a Christian nationalist, In fact support for the network whose scripts are faxed in from the GOP and which makes million dollar contributions to GOP candidates has only fallen marginally, but according to Public Policy Polling, amongst the public in general, Fox has fallen from the pedestal, down to the level of CNN and PBS is now seen as the most trustworthy. No wonder many Republicans want to get rid of it.

Do I doubt those results? Hell no, it's just too much like Christmas in January to want to ruin the buzz.

Must be a slow news day

Best and worst lists are a bit like kidney stones. Some magazines are prone to having them and they keep coming back at inoppertune times as painful as they may be. Perhaps Time.com is taking a breather from stories about airhead beauty queens and governors and its other obsessions, but for whatever reason, they've launched into another one of their short sighted, opinionated and irrelevant exercises: 50 worst cars of all time, 10 biggest tech failures, etc.

It's fun to go back a few years and read about the things journalists rave about that eventually seem to have had little merit other than advertising revenue, but it's less funny to endure the spectacle of a journalist imposing an ill informed, narrow minded view of history on people who know more and know better. The phonograph, for instance, must be a crude and laughable thing because it isn't an iPod, you see.

Of course there are always enough people who submit to critics to allow them to make a living, but that that brings up my second opinion of the day: nobody likes critics, not even other critics and that's probably the reason so many of them make a career out of being vindictive.

So what's the first car on the 50 worst of all time list? The 1909 Ford Model T. "A piece of junk" says Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive critic and syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

It was also the best selling car of its day, being ideally suited to the roads of America and the budgets of Americans. Faster, lighter, more efficient, vastly easier to drive and priced at a small fraction of the competition, it changed Western culture.That in itself is a negative to Neill who thinks we'd be better off without cars at all, it seems.

"with its blacksmithed body panels and crude instruments, the Model T was a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day."

That hardly fits with the fact that it was an unprecedented commercial success, produced for 20 years and that Ford sold 15 million of them, nor with the fact that the body panels in 1909 were in fact made of wood and that in the absence of speed limits, you didn't need a speedometer. Of course it engendered such an aftermarket that you could purchase countless accessories if you really needed them. In truth, its monoblock 4 cylinder engine was more advanced than cars that cost many times as much but had one or two cylinders or even bolted together two twin cylinder blocks to make a four. Its semiautomitic transmission was the ancestor of today's automatic -- nobody else had one for many years afterward.

Was the Edsel one of the worst cars ever because it didn't sell well -- or did it just not sell very well because people like Neill made it a giggling point? They're worth a fortune today and are no more bizarre looking than other cars of the day. Was the 1934 Chrysler Airflow a terrible car, or was it that aerodynamic efficiency wasn't selling any better in 1934 than it does in our box obsessed era? Again, they're worth a lot of money today.

So what then do we make of Time's ten most "collossal" tech failures? Not much in my opinion. To be listed, a product had to clearly miss the mark of living up to the potential that its creators expected, and that the public and press were lead to believe was possible. Nice, so we're looking at things that are failures because tech editors with journalism degrees didn't really understand what it was all about or that disappointed the inventors. If we used these criteria universally, the printing press and the telephone were failures and nearly everything else from Velcro to radio was too.

One has to wonder whether or not the entire print media would fall prey to some future "worst failures" list when Time's time has past. Everything is crude in the beginning, few things become immediate successes and immediate success is no indicator of continued success and the opinions of critics, including this one, mean very little in the long run.

One by one

Printing things on sheets of paper and using an army of planes, trains, automobiles and sometimes bicycles to carry tons of printed material all over the country in order to keep the public informed is an increasingly anachronistic process. More ironic is the need to pay other people to collect, remove and recycle all that paper.

Even the most anachronistic technologies can take a long time to die. Decades after the advent of the telephone, it was still necessary to cajole a fearful and suspicious public into realizing that they needed one and of course the habits we make using outmoded processes are hard to break. People older than I am often cite the Sunday morning ritual of coffee and three pounds of newsprint as a high point of the weekend, but people younger rely more and more on the Internet, with it's vastly greater diversity of information, constantly updated and always available.

Television never was the threat to printed paper that the Internet has become. Around the clock news coverage has devolved into the constant mastication of a small handful of stories and is increasingly limited to local and sensational news and sometimes outrageously biased propaganda. The Internet has few limits.


The venerable and respected Christian Science Monitor has now ceased to use the wood pulp technology and has gone to the Web. Virtually all the print media has a Web presence. Advertising revenues are falling substantially and it's hard to think that we're not seeing the accelerating demise of the newspaper as we have known it. The Chicago Tribune has filed for bankruptcy, Detroit papers may soon curtail home delivery, publishers of local and regional papers are laying off staff.

Of course we will lose something intangible along with our very tangible piles of paper. When has there ever been change without loss? I'm guessing that one thing we will lose is the credibility of mainstream sources relative to the blogs, the fringe web sites, the loony bloviators and the special interest propagandists. Just who will the reporters at tomorrow's presidential news conferences represent?

Some seem to be making a joyful noise at the prospect; irresponsible polemicists for profit like Ann Coulter, for instance. Those who thrive on half-truth, fabrication, slander, slur and sleaze might well prosper in an Internet sea of smaller fish, where established entities aren't as easy to differentiate from crackpot sites and propaganda sites and blogs with plain old irresponsible reportage. Such places have little to lose when exposed and can change names and re-emerge. The New York Times cannot and it's far easier to hold reporters and editors who use real names accountable.

Still I won't mourn the inevitable extinction; the gains far out weigh the losses, but still -- if Ann Coulter likes it, it can't be all that good.

Enough already.

Is anyone else as annoyed with the CNN coverage of the tragedy in Mumbai? It's not just the total eclipse of every other story in the world, it's the obsessive attempt to tie this to al Qaeda. Sure it's possible, but at this stage all kinds of things are possible, yet we have Wolf Blitzer inter alia, asking one "expert" after another and getting the same "uh, we don't know, it could be anyone."

Blitzer: Yes, but they're all saying these people had combat training

Expert: But of course India and Pakistan have been fighting in places like the Kashmere for decades and both sides have many, many combat veterans; many groups have many reasons to want to hurt India.

Blitzer: yes, but they're organized - like Qaeda. They have funding, like Qaeda.

Expert: So? The Boy Scouts are organized and it will be weeks or longer before anyone knows who they are.

Blitzer: Qaeda, Qaeda, They could attack us. Qaeda, Qaeda. Oh the humanity!


And on, and on all day long while the "Possible al Qaeda connection" banner scrolls across the bottom of the screen. It won't be too much longer before I have to conclude that these people have no other agenda than ratings and no scruples about fomenting fear and hysteria.

Screening room

I spent much of yesterday afternoon in a hospital waiting room with CNN blaring on the small screen and after reading everything from half a dozen elderly Field and Stream issues to the current Working Mother Magazine, I had to give up on the printed word and pay attention to the blather. I rarely watch CNN any more and if you wonder why, it's because in three hours, all I heard from them other than advertising, was about "John McCain's vision for the future" and the terribly, terribly important overturn of a gay marriage ban in California again and again like some fast paced version of Groundhog Day.

"Many people are concerned that we need more conservatives in government so that we won't have judges who decide this way" was nearly the entirety of the commentary, the balance was the observation that it was the Constitution (hence not the judges) that stood in the way of preserving the "sanctity" of marriage. Regardless of the now apparently reduced sanctity of my own marriage, I continued to wait for my dear wife to have her X-ray with undiminished dedication.

Sanctity, of course is indeed a subject that our Federal Constitution excludes from the business of government. Establishing religious rules or laws based on religious rules is specifically forbidden and not applying any laws in a discriminatory fashion, whether based on religious taboos or not, has long been established in the law. What does CNN mean to imply here: that we should get rid of that nasty secular Democracy thing so we can all be holy? What else can we infer?

And then there was John McCain's vision for the future. It seems rather blurry even for his 71 year old eyes, but then any serious predictions of a brave, new Republican World had better be blurry lest it appear too much like the cowardly old Republican World we've been suffering through at length. The "war" will be "won," sayeth John, quoting from the Gospel of Nixon. Of course he's right, since the war was won 5 years ago. What continues is the occupation of a hostile country and occupations are never won but maintained only at tremendous and usually increasing cost.

None of this seems to have left a trace, at least on CNN or CNN.com. Perhaps it's because of some fleeting sense of embarrassment or perhaps there are so many new inanities and so little time, but my sense of despair remains. No story hits the street save through such sources and no story is told without the Greek Chorus of hysterical idiots making it into something to stir the primitives to frenzy.

Maybe the public isn't as stupid as they appear. Perhaps the West Virginians John Stuart featured Wednesday night who told us they wouldn't vote for Obama because "we've had so much conflict with the Other Race" or "I've had enough of Hooooo-sayn" or "He's a Moslim" don't represent the rest of us, but the fate of old optimists like me is to become an old pessimist like me.

The devil and Mr. Jones

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

-Bob Dylan-

I have to admit I don't know either and I suspect the market analysts of the same confusion. My morning perusal of the news includes a glance at Bloomberg.com and the leading headlines today were:

• Citigroup has $5.1 Billion loss, cuts 9000 more jobs.
• Stocks in US rally on Citigroup.

It might make a skeptic think that perhaps these stories overlook something or that nobody really knows what the hell is going on but need to say something in order to get a paycheck. Or maybe it's the same old prophylactic optimism by which they've been trying to ward off disaster with a smile, a shuffle and a little shuck and jive.

Perhaps the same thing applies to the political gigglefest. Are voters really going to change their minds at the possibility that Obama gave Clinton the finger - are they even going to believe it? But they have to say, to print, to televise something and childish nonsense is far easier to sell and more distracting than any serious discussion; particularly a serious discussion about a truly unworthy Republican.

Cogitamus asks us the trenchant but rhetorical question of how the media would treat either Democrat if they had had checkered careers like McCain. Frankly I think the entire Media-as-propagandists truth is laid bare here.

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks

Something is indeed going on, but all you're going to hear is that everything is all right: we don't need to change anything.

Freakolitics

Freakonomics was such a big hit, I had to wonder why nobody has published Freakolitics, but of course in our America, that's probably redundant. Still, that all these weird parallels and weirder contradictions go past us without remark seems worth talking about.

John McCain's medical records, for instance. He used to give us straight talk and his medical records were open for inspection - until after 1999 when he was treated for Melanoma, a very deadly skin cancer. Now, despite promises, no records are forthcoming. Freaky coincidence? Maybe.

But nobody can really accuse Americans of foolish consistency; it's our inconsistencies that distinguish us. Republican owned media generally encourage people like Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to cross boundries of decent behavior and the public laps up the idea that they are rebels against a Liberal minority, yet it was the real liberal media; namely Air America that booted Randi Rhodes off the air for calling Hillary a whore. Ann seems only to have benefited by calling Edwards a "fag." We still hear about he Liberal Media bias.

The boot licking Bushites still insist that people who don't believe we should have invaded Iraq; that don't believe Saddam had no WMD, that don't believe Saddam helped blow up the WTC, that don't believe Saddam wasn't training insurgents for al Qaeda - even if at one time or another the very government that thought up these things has admitted they weren't true, insist that it's only a Liberal Lunatic fringe who disagree. Recent polls show that the lunatic fringe is over 80% of the public.

I was resoundingly chastised for mentioning in several blogs, the loud boos the President received the other day. I was reassured that it was only a "vocal minority" as Nixon used to call the vast majority of us. Perhaps though, the stands were packed with historians. Crooks and liars details a poll of historians that overwhelmingly ranks Bush as the worst president ever. Tell it to the bleachers.

Another loss for the home team

Even though their last attempt in 2003 was shot down by a Federal Appeals Court, the GOP controlled FCC under Kevin Martin has decided, despite public and congressional disapproval that we need less diversity in the media and as of yesterday has made it far easier for the handful of heavily Republican near monopolies that own most of the newspapers, TV and radio stations in the US to move toward unobstructed media consolidation in all markets. In the cases where such cross ownership isn't allowed by the rules, waivers will be granted and if there is no preference for "conservative" viewpoints, I will be amazed.

There's still hope that a wrench can be thrown into the machine once more and another handover of public property to the corporate barons prevented, but we have to let our senators know and we have to do it now. 25 of them have already pledged to overturn this outrageous ruling but we need more - unless of course you really want a country where all you can read and hear is Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and lyin' Bill O'Reilly.

Murdoch's Ministry of Information

What if one company owned the daily newspapers, the weekly “alternative” newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in your city -- in your country, asks John Nichols, blogger at The Nation? Is there anyone but Rupert Murdoch who thinks the public interest is served or rational democracy enabled by allowing such a thing to happen?

Yes, there is; he's FCC Chairman and Smirkmeister Kevin Martin, a product of an administration that would like to hand everything from the airwaves to the air itself over to the highest bidder, if not the highest contributor. The New York times tells us the plan is for sweeping deregulation that would finally put to rest the idea that an information monopoly is a bad thing and that the broadcast spectrum is a natural resource, access to which requires an obligation for public service. Let the biggest dog have the only bark in town as long as they support the Republican Corporatocracy!

There seem to be no plans for the customary public hearings and we may be handed the dismemberment of yet another important public protection by December of this year. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is already the largest media empire in the world. It's only the beginning.

Under the Bush administration, the function of the venerable agency has become to apportion public resources amongst media moguls without any regard for public interest. They have, as a matter of policy, routinely refused to protect licensed spectrum users against encroachments from large corporations and has been accused by the GAO of collaborating with corporate lobbyists; using secret meetings to pass them the information they need to avoid congressional actions and others have accused them not only of stifling entrepreneurship but of stifling minority ownership of radio broadcast licenses.

The idea of a free and open internet where bloggers can at least offer opposing viewpoints and cover items deemed unworthy by Murdoch or Clear Channel may soon die a similar death. Can anything resembling democracy fare any better?

And another thing

Jesus of Nazareth has no legal immunity to criticism, be it genuine or slanderous and in fact, a cornerstone of our republic is my right to say what I please about him. But you can't tell that to the cringing, timorous bastards of the media or the bombastic, peremptory theotwits who insist on badgering us about blasphemy while buggering kids and stealing from the alms box.

After receiving her Emmy last weekend, Ms Griffith said:

"a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus."

That's absolutely true and since it's a bit of a joke at her own expense, it's funny. The question of whether Jesus or any other god has a sense of humor is of course moot, but the people who pretend gods exist for power and profit do not tolerate humor and they have bullied the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences into bleeping and redacting her speech. Catholic League President Bill Donohue, called it a "vulgar, in-your-face brand of hate speech" yesterday. Bill doesn't know what hate speech is. This is hate speech: "Fuck you Bill - and the Bible you slithered in on."

Bill doesn't seem to know that we don't have and may not legally have blasphemy laws in the US and he doesn't seem to know that someone who does not exist can neither be harmed by anything or protected by law. Bill seems to think he has an invisible bodyguard. Fuck him too.

Of course they have every right to air what they want but the right is mine to decide to ignore their tawdry events as well.

Poison food from. . .

Am I beating this story to death? Yes, I am because it deserves to die. Metz Fresh LLC of King City, California has recalled over 8000 cases of bagged fresh spinach after Salmonella contamination was discovered. This comes about a year after a similar case involving bagged spinach from California and in spite of allegedly improved precautions.

About 40,000 people get sick from this bacteria commonly found in American produced chicken and eggs and vegetables. That's about 40,000 more than have been made sick by Chinese fish or Mattel toys with faint traces of lead in the paint.

Obviously we should boycott everything coming from California.

Little Big Horn, here we come

If it's really true that the Mainstream Media are reporting only bad news as some would say, I'm at a loss to explain today's article in the New York Times entitled Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive. Apparently there were some gentlemen of Qaeda in Baquba and American troops preparing to drive them out or do them in have heard that they have somehow found out about the plan and have got themselves out of Dodge.

We're told that this is good news. We are told that the "enemy" are cowardly for not aligning their troops like tin soldiers to trade lead with American troops. I'm not making it up.

When will we end the dimwitted attempt to force the occupation of a partially demolished country filled with hostile and well armed bands of guerrillas into some classical model of warfare? I believe that General Custer was likewise impressed with his own might as the Indians fled before him - at least for a short while. When Xerxes burned Athens it was largely empty, but the men who had fled weren't cowards, they were simply refusing to play the Persians' game as the Iraqi insurgents are refusing to play ours. So perhaps it's gratifying to the warped egos of the remaining war supporters to call it so, but it isn't any more a victory than the escape of Osama from Tora Bora was.

What it does indicate is that either we are becoming as predictable to the insurgent leadership as Custer was to Crazy Horse, or that we are telegraphing our next move while we attempt to create "positive news."

So if this is going to portrayed as a victory, the Times has carefully to avoid the word Pyrrhic. The egos of the brass need to remain polished and with the fourth of July so near, we need to have things for the high school drum majorettes to strut over.

Dobbs, Hobbes and snobs

Don't try to make too much sense of that - I just can't resist a rhyme.

But speaking of nonsense, ever notice that Lou Dobbs never mentions the world's most populous country without the epithet Communist? I suppose one might, if one were of the right political persuasion, call the island of Taiwan by the name Republic of China, but when we talk about China, we usually think of the big one, the one that owns enough of our debt that we're afraid to do much more than make useless gestures of disapproval, like Lou Dobbs does.

At this point in our history, it really isn't necessary or necessarily accurate to call it Red China or Communist china any more than it's useful to say Socialist Sweden, Capitalist Mexico, Royalist Saudi Arabia, Dictatorial Pakistan or Theocratic Vatican City. It's a gratuitous pejorative when used to describe a still totalitarian country tripping over it's own shoelaces in its haste to get rid of government ownership of the means of production and become capitalist.

Lou seems happy to find an external scapegoat, as indeed many are, now that we don't have the Soviet union to kick around any more. China bashing is a popular sport with left and right and with Dobbs and since the label Communist still has a lot of punch to it and isn't going to be around forever, he's happy to use it while he can. To be sure, there have been enough recent incidents with tainted cat food and plastics that contain enough lead to make us worry about our children, coming from China and now with ethylene glycol being sold as pharmaceutical grade glycerin and poisoning people, we can't ignore the safety of our imports. It's hard to see however that Communism has anything to do with greedy, unscrupulous capitalists and unregulated free markets in China. It seems to me, in fact, that what we are seeing are the results of massive deregulation of a magnitude that would make Ronald Reagan weep with joy. What we are seeing is a need for regulation and inspection in our country whether or not it annoys big corporations like Wal-Mart.

The notion that free markets are self regulating and that unregulated industry will automatically, as if by an invisible hand, steer toward the public good has done a lot of damage in the US and the lack of adequate inspection of imported food and pharmaceutical substances is an example. China is expanding its free market economy so rapidly that the ability to control corruption and greed has not caught up. The US is not experiencing the growth, yet is still under the sway of the Great Deregulator's voodoo; still being led by people who think inspecting food is kind of pinko and inspecting incoming freight will cut into profits.

And while I'm picking on Lou, I have to mention his tirade about the Martin Luther King Memorial using a Chinese sculptor to supply a statue of Dr. King. It's a bit amusing to watch people like Tucker Carlson and Dobbs howling about how it should be made by a "Black" artist so that the world could see what King stood for. No amount of reminding that he seems to have stood for the idea that race shouldn't be a factor in judging a man or employing him, seems to sway the opinions of these wealthy white men about what black people should do. 90% of the hundred million it will take to build the memorial is private money, and it will be built of American stone by American workers. The statue is one small part of the whole. Using interviews of people on the street, CNN launched into a crusade to make it seem as though there was public outrage. What the effort revealed is that the public either doesn't care - and in some instances thought the monument was to be built in China - or lacks the background to have a worthwhile opinion. Seems to me that Tucker and Lou who don't see the irony in their lecturing the "colored folk" about how to memorialize Dr. King, aren't far behind.

As to whether American monuments need to be constructed 100% of American materials, designed by Americans and built by Americans for the benefit of Americans, I have one answer: The Statue of Liberty. And regarding the nativist crappola about building anything in Washington DC, don't forget the Frenchman, Pierre L'Enfant, who designed it.

Soft landing?

It seems perhaps that there really were whores involved in the Don Imus implosion and that they didn't play basketball. An interesting extraction from Imus' contract with CBS posted on the Anderson Cooper 360° blog today shows that the network did more than tolerate the abrasive and outrageous commentary, they encouraged him to step over the line.

"Company [CBS Radio] acknowledges its familiarity with the program Conducted by Artist [Imus] on the station [WFAN] prior to company's ownership thereof and it, and its familiarity with the reviews and comments, both favorable and unfavorable concerning Artist and his material by critics, reviewers and writers of the various media both in New York and nationally. Company acknowledges that Artist's services to be rendered hereunder are of a unique, extraordinary, irreverent, intellectual, topical, controversial and personal character and that programs of the same general type and nature containing these components are desired by Company and are consistent with Company rules and policies."

Could be that Imus' fall will be cushioned by landing on the $40 million remaining due on the balance of his contract with CBS if his wrongful termination suit goes his way.

The times they aren't changin'

I'm getting a bit annoyed by Lou Dobbs' one man Crusade against illegal aliens. It's hardly on the top ten list of things that are making things worse in the US and it's not going to make rational or humane action any more likely.

Yes, it is possible that the allegedly massive influx from Central America and Mexico is holding down wages, and making it harder for citizens to find jobs, but that trope is one of the many assumptions he makes that seem as undocumented as the workers he rages against. I'd like to see some facts please.

I do know several local businessmen who have hired undocumented Guatemalan workers to mow lawns and paint houses. I do know they were praised as the hardest working, least problematic employees these business have had and it was hard, I'm told, to replace them at any price with anyone other than other immigrants when their papers turned out to be forged. If you think it's easy to find people to fix roofs in the Florida Summer, you're wrong. If you think you can find someone to do it faithfully and with a smile for twice the wages, you're very wrong.

I do not know that it has become harder for local citizens to find jobs doing such grueling things as cutting sugar cane, fixing roofs, cutting lawns, digging holes, washing dishes and the like. I do not know, nor has Dobbs really shown me that there is in fact any negative effect on the US economy and I have seen figures that suggest the opposite: that there is a net gain. We have nothing but his undocumented word that Mexicans are pushing "real" Americans out of fields like scraping plates and cleaning grease traps. We do have evidence that much of what lower income people can afford to buy or to eat wouldn't be so affordable if we were quite so scrupulous and legal minded as Mr. Dobbs would have it. We do have solid evidence that engineering, technical, manufacturing, customer service, secretarial, software development and executive jobs are being legally exported in increasing numbers and that this hurts us much more than does the lack of potato frying technicians born in the USA.

In his article for CNN.COM today, Dobbs stresses the fact that May first is Law Day and seems to be arguing that the sheer illegality of working in the US without a visa makes it something to go to war about, but to judge by what I see every day on the highway, legality and illegality are not questions that excite Americans unless there is some other agenda - like bigotry. I'm simply not offended that someone waves a Mexican flag, as so many Dobbsians seem to be. I'm far more offended at people who dress like leprechauns and drive drunk on March 17th and mostly puzzled by those who wear "Kiss me, I'm Polish" T-shirts and pretend to ethnicity when they are 5th generation Americans who don't know where Poland is. The screams of "Illegal - illegal" simply don't move me as much as does the lawless government we're subject to.

Dobbs also mentions that of course, May 1 is the international Labor Day as though an argument for opening or providing a path to citizenship for those who live, work and have families here had anything whatever to do with socialism or Communism. Are we just playing Pin the Sin on the Mexicans here?

Dobbs, of course didn't comment on the video I've seen of Darth Vader clones beating hell out of Mexicans that reminded me so much of what I saw all the time during the 1960's. Of course there is much else to remind us of that period, including the blind hatred stirred up by patriotic warmongers and haters of freedom. What differs the most is that once we thought we were fighting successfully against what we now have become. If the times have changed at all, they've changed for the worse.

Puff the magic Dragon

Is it a coating of non-stick Teflon that keeps things from sticking to Rollicking Rush Limbaugh, or is it just ordinary slime he's covered with? Perhaps, if he bothers to explain himself at all, he will tell us that public figures like Barak Obama are fair game for race baiting while college girls are not, but I'm waiting to see the kind of reaction we got to Imus' comment. I'm waiting in fact to hear any update on the story that appeared in Crooks and Liars last Friday much less the racist barb he tossed at the Illinois Senator last January. It may be a long wait.

Rush playing "Barak the magic Negro" to the tune of the silly Peter Paul and Mary song from the 60's on his radio show is only the latest in a career of ugliness, pettyness, maliciousness and malignant bullying that should have ended years ago. Whether it's blatant racism or whether it's calling an adolescent girl a dog on nationwide TV, there have been too many incidents egregious enough to have him fired and black listed -- and yet here he is, smelly phallic cigar in his fat mouth, stinking up the pristine Florida air and the public airwaves.

It's time the media stops hiding behind a disclaimer and fires the bastard.

Cross posted at The Reaction