Friday 12 March 2010
Do Blog Readers Self-Segregate or Deliberate? ☀
Apparently, all of you people out there aren’t reading much that disagrees with positions you already hold. At least this is the conclusion reached by Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell in the latest issue of Perspectives on Politics.
Are you just being lazy or did you try it for awhile and realize that reading something written from the opposite side of the political spectrum made you too angry every morning?
My Google Reader subscriptions tally to 1,769 feeds. While I cannot give an accurate calculation of the ratio of various political spectrums nor guarantee that’s an even 1:1:1:1 ratio, I can assure you that reflected in the contents are voices from all political persuasions. From radical Chomsky loving leftists to paleo-conservatives at the American Conservative. From adulatory Ludwig von Mises lovers at Lew Rockwell to up and coming hopeful conservatives at the Next Right. From liberal leanings by Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman to the crunchy Cons at Front Porch Republic. From the staunchly conservative neo-reformed Christian crowd to progressive people of the way.
About the only material I actively discriminate against is the Jay Rosen termed “church of the savvy” stylings of mainstream pundits like David Broder, Richard Cohen, George Will, etc.… Or the party propaganda orchestrated and espoused by loyal apparatchiks, on either side of the American party duopoly.
But, then, I’m such a political outcast that I find some level of agreement and disagreement in just about everything I read.
Before you can tear down an argument, you must be able to deconstruct it. And to deconstruct it, means you must learn and study it first. To see the perspective from an devoted, heartfelt advocate of such a plank.
Cellphones and Brain Tumors ☀
The health hazards posed by cell phone usage are getting increasingly hard to ignore. They include, but are not exclusive to, an increased risk of brain cancer for people who have been using the phones for more than a decade. Numerous European countries, Israel and Canada are already pursuing guidelines for safer use of cellphones. A year ago a group of surgical neurologists at the University of Pittsburgh called for access to industry data. Even the FCC is beginning to drop hints of a problem.
I was shocked to learn that this past November (following close on the heels of an epidemiological review confirming a link between long-term cellphnone use and brain cancer in the journal of Surgical Neurology) the FCC quietly issued the following statement regarding concerns about radio frequency (RF) exposure from cellphones: “Keep wireless devices away from your body when they are on. Do not attach them to belts or carry them in pockets. Use the cell phone speaker to reduce head exposure. Consider texting rather than talking.” A link to this statement is now published in the fine print that accompanies a new cellphone, but any thinking citizen has to wonder, why has this crucial health information not been publicized?
Separating fact from fiction in the debate over health risks posed by cellphones has not been easy. On one hand a growing body of solid scientific evidence links long-term heavy cellphone use to an increased risk for brain cancer, especially when a person begins using a cell phone prior to age 20 (as much as 5-fold increased risk of brain cancer.) On the other hand there is a rather rabid group of nuts who excoriate cellphone usage along with most other modern conveniences even as they travel along the extraterrestrial highway spotting UFOs and little green men. These competing messages leave the average purchasing public feeling confused and ready to tune out the naysayers in favor of unbridled access to cellphones.
The debate, however, is beginning to be dominated by evidence-based science. There are several large peer reviewed analyses of data from as far back as 2007 (in the well respected Journal of Occupational Health) and as recently as September 2009 (in the gold-standard Journal of Surgical Neurology) establishing a link between heavy cell phone use of longer than 10 years and increased risk of brain tumors. While there are many telecom sponsored studies that show no correlation between short-term use of cell phones and brain cancer, there are no studies that refute the link between long term cell phone usage and brain cancer.
America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of the a city. As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment they tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society. They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation’s story. Glenn Beck: Man of the Seventies ☀
The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful. Decoding The Language Of Social Control ☀
[John] Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl. Sprawling Misconceptions ☀
Thursday 11 March 2010
The fact that people become heroes and sheroes can be credited to their ability to identify and empathize with “the other.” These men and women could continue to live quite comfortably … but they chose not to. They make the decision to be conscious of the other — the homeless and the hopeless, the downtrodden and oppressed. Heroism has nothing to do with skin color or social status. It is a state of mind and a willingness to act for what is right and just. Maya Angelou ☀
The average American encounters 3000 commercial messages each day. Whether this is a radio commercial, a magazine ad, a logo on the side of a coffee cup or a billboard we pass on the highway, these images and messages are designed to cause to you think of your life as incomplete, and desire the product they are selling to make your life complete again. A standard formula used in many commercials is twofold: 1. To illicit a thought in the viewer that there life is not satisfactory and then 2. To convince the viewer there life could be made satisfactory with the introduction of said product. If you hear theses messages 3000 times per day, your brain becomes programmed to think in this pattern. Rather than being satisfied, a person begins to believe there life is lacking, whether it is actually lacking or not. The idea is to convince you that you aren’t going to be happy unless you purchase something. And make no mistake, this is a powerful manipulative tool. Some experts have referred to advertising as the “relentless propaganda on behalf of goods in general.” R. Crisp argued in an article in the Journal of Business Ethics that advertising overrides a consumer’s autonomy of decision making in the creation of desires, correlating an unbreakable link between products and the fulfillment of stimulated desires.” In other words, advertising is designed to hijack your brain by dictating what you desire. Donald Miller ☀
A very noxious brew is being cooked up here. First, the elites, lurking in the shadows behind a neutered government, squeeze the vast majority of citizens, workers, and students, moving their jobs overseas, foreclosing on their homes, looting their savings, stealing their hopes and dreams. When they rebel, they are gassed, tased, shot with rubber bullets, and have their nervous systems attacked with high-tech non-lethal weaponry. If they persist in their protests, they will be jailed (according to a new report cited by David DeGraw on Alternet, “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America”) without habeus corpus or rights to trial. They can then be detained indefinitely in camps. They can even be disappeared. Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg ☀
Porn: Good for us? ☀
Scientific examination of the subject has found that as the use of porn increases, the rate of sex crimes goes down.
The Way to Stop Prison Rape ☀
When Laura Berry told the Arkansas corrections officer who had raped her that she thought she might be pregnant, he forced her, according to the commission’s findings, to drink turpentine and quinine, hoping that would induce an abortion. After Kenneth Young was raped at knifepoint by a cellmate in Pennsylvania, he flooded the cell to attract the attention of officers, and as punishment was put in a “dry cell” for ninety-six hours, with no access to running water, a shower, or a toilet—forced “to live in his own excrement,” as a court later put it. Alisha Brewer told our organization, JDI, that she was raped by three different corrections officers as a twenty-two-year-old prisoner in Kentucky; she reported the last two incidents, and was punished with more than four months of punitive segregation and loss of sixty days of good time on her sentence. Another prisoner who wrote to us, and who for obvious reasons prefers to remain anonymous, quoted the male officer who was abusing her: “Remember if you tell anyone anything, you’ll have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life.” We get letters like this every day.
A GNT creation ©2007–2010
