Anonymous at request of author.

Response to follow up email as follows:
i have never been to turtle island (which costs $2000/day), have never met senator mccain, was a classics major (not an english literature major), and don't like pancakes.

when i received it three weeks ago the author was identified as ana (anasuya) dubey, a psychologist in san francisco. but she was not the sender of the email. i checked with the original sender who affirmed that the account is true, so i forwarded it, with full email trail information and the name of the purported author, to three friends with whom i discuss politics. it was further forwarded, and at some point i was identified as the author or as making the story public on behalf of my "friend" ms. dubey. i suspect whoever did this thought that my name and contact information would make the story more credible.

i regret any misinformation which is circulating. this is not an organized effort on the part of any political candidate.

the account is not necessarily false, however. mccain has frequently gone to turtle island, and is a personal friend of the resort owner. i have spoken to several people who know ms. dubey and vouch for its truth. snopes is investigating and lists its current status as "undetermined." i have just heard that ms. dubey is working with a reporter to substantiate her account. until the actual author comes forward, however, we will not know whether the account is valid.

theantipoet even appreciates real news.

Veterans open up with each other. "Some gave me tips to pass on to the civilian world: Don’t ask The Question (Did you kill anybody?). “Support the Troops” magnets mean nothing to them. And military culture is not big on touching: the main things civilians want to do to soldiers — hug them and get them drunk — are generally not welcome."

Fannish types: analytical versus emotional. The next time someone says "Why do you put so much energy into analyzing [insert fandom here]? Why can't you just enjoy it?", I'm forwarding them to this.

Why pro-life + anti-contraception Just Doesn't Work, especially when dealing with poor women in Africa. WTF, Administration.

Slacktivist writes about the willfully ignorant, about people who pour their mental energy into self-deception. He's talking about truthiness, and he's sympathetic and genuine and it kind of hurts to read, because this is how I feel a lot of the time. Not just when I watch the Report, either.

From the Caritas website

Caritas had provided food aid to rebel groups while the peace process that began in 2006 was in place at the request of the Ugandan government and international mediators in line with its humanitarian mission. Caritas ended all food aid distributions once negotiations collapsed and has supplied no food aid since April 2008. The Ugandan government is aware of all these steps.

Government Minister for Disaster Preparedness, Professor Tarsis Kabwegyere said on 30 September, “Caritas should stop giving food to the rebels so that they get under pressure to sign the peace agreement. But as long as they continue to get supplies, they will see no reason of ending the rebellion. There is a moral question on why (rebel leader) Kony continues to receive food. Whoever is sending food to the jungles is committing a mortal sin especially if they are Christians”.

Caritas Uganda National Director Msgr. Dr. Francis Ndamira said, “We would like to clarify this statement which is likely to mislead the public and the world which is already too anxious and waiting for that day of signing the peace agreement. Caritas Uganda is not currently supplying food and medicine to the rebels. When the (peace agreement) signing flopped, Caritas also ended its mandate.

“It is therefore surprising for Hon. Prof. Kabwegyere to make such misleading and irresponsible statements of that kind. On the contrary, he should thank Caritas Uganda and the entire Catholic Church leadership for the peaceful contribution we have made in the peace process and also the spiritual and material help which the respective Churches have given to the suffering people in Northern Uganda.”

(picture from cafe press)

"Yes, Obama, you are a terrorist-loving, anti-American Muslim, with all due respect."

Clearly, Obama did not take the bait and was prepared to go toe-to-toe with the desperate McCain. Let's talk about the Keating 5. Let's talk about McCain's reprimand in the Senate. Once again, Obama has learned from the mistakes of the past and is prepared to do things differently.

Not failing is not good enough. George Bush didn't fail...Yale. He made C's. Sarah Palin went to 5 colleges in 4 years before getting her Journalism degree. Both Bush and Palin are extremely confident. And they are extremely confident in their confidence. And that's scary.

As Palin tried her hand at "there you go again" and accused Biden of "raising the white flag of defeat", it was apparent she was acting out her carefully choreographed talking points. When Biden spoke, however, it was clear he knew what he was saying. Surely he will be chided for saying "John McCain is a good man". But I think that just shows his good character and his internal knowledge of his own beliefs.

George Bush has provided 8 years of "hokey" leadership that laughs off serious issues and labels intelligence as "elitism". Enough is enough. Restore intelligence to the White House!

He starts by asking a pretty straight forward question

How can so many people who live in the same place see the world so differently?

and uses a wide variety of examples to claim that the new forms of communication technology - blogs, YouTube, RSS feeds, etc - are creating a society in which one true reality does not exist. As Americans, we pick and choose our own version of the truth. This idea of a fractured sense of reality has been discussed before but I like Manjoo's easy narrative style.

Manjoo's examples range from the Swift Boat episode of 2004 to Oprah Winfrey's defense of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces in 2006.

The revelations (about the falsehoods in the book) were "much ado about nothing," Oprah said, suggesting that what had really happened to Frey was less important to what one believed had happened to Frey.

He obviously loves The Colbert Report of October 17, 2005 when host Stephen Colbert first coined the phrase "truthiness."

Colbert believed America to be split between two camps whose philosophies could never reconcile - those who "think with their head" and those who "know with their heart." Colbert himself was a proud knower, and "truthiness," he explained, was the quality of a thing feeling true without any evidence suggesting it actually was.

In True Enough, Manjoo basically says that Web 2.0 communication tools makes it easier for us to lie and harder for others to know the difference.

. . . when we strung up the planet in fiber-optic cable, when we dissolved the mainstream media into prickly niches and when each of use began to create and transmit our own pictures and sounds, we eased the path through which propaganda infects the culture.

New forms of communication tools are hailed as good things; taking advantage of the wisdom of crowds, providing an engine for the "everyman" to have a voice and creating a flat world. Manjoo calls this brave, new world the infosphere.

But Manjoo suggests that

it's probably unrealistic to think that we'll undergo these changes without any pain.

and goes on to suggest that the pain has already started. He doesn't deny the power of the new information technologies for good but also suggests that blogs and other forms of niche news marketing also provide the opportunity for people to

skillfully manipulate today's fragmented media landscape to dissemble, distort, exaggerate, fake - essentially, they can lie - to more people, more effectively, than ever before.

So what?

Manjoo's final conclusion is that the infosphere encourages the growth of something researchers call particularized trust. The growth of particularized trust comes at the expense of generalized trust. Generalized trust is basically a measure of how likely it is that two strangers from a given group will be willing to trust each other. In 2006, the number in the US was at 32%, down from over 60%.

Again so what?

Generalized trust focuses on how we view strangers and Manjoo argues that it plays a huge role in the general well-being (economy, health, culture) of a society. Particularized trust, on the other hand, focuses on how we feel about people who are like us.

Particularized trust destroys generalized trust. The more that people trust those who are like themselves, the more they distrust strangers. And when particularized trust outweighs generalized trust, loathsome things happen.

Big things like our current economic problems and small things such as kids in our classrooms not being willing to talk to one another because of the color of their skin or different religious beliefs.

I am a bit disappointed in Manjoo's solution.

"Truthiness" means you choose. Choosing means trusting some people and distrusting the rest. Choose wisely.

I was hoping for more.

But . . . it does put the ball back in our court as social studies teachers. We need to be much more purposeful about giving our kids opportunities to practice 21st century literacy skills, to practice evaluating, to ask high-level questions and to be willing to look at an idea from all sides before choosing.

We also need to be willing to do the same ourselves.

At the end of the day, the average citizen knows very little about how their tax dollars are spent. The average informed person knows slightly more. When our country spends money like a drunken sailor it should be no surprise that bad things are likely to happen.

The notion that "the market will take care of itself" is just plain silly. That's like a boat sailing itself. Like it or not, choices have to be made to drive the economic direction of our country. NAFTA and GAFTA and a host of other treaties guide the market and allow for expansive trade. Those deals are made by governments.

Socialism has become the new Communism - BOO! Is that scary? Many people are crying out that the bailout will amount to Socialism. That's one way of looking at it. But labels are very misleading and get people all frothy for reasons that seem misguided. We would be wise to step back and take a look around the world and see what is working and what is failing. We just need to do more of what works and quit doing the things that are breaking our banks and our ability to live life well - our freedom.

As long as we stay polarized in our ridiculous 2-party system, our politicians will always put their reelection before the people's business. And they will keep using labels to keep us divided. Don't like government involvement? Tell that to the policemen, firemen and soldiers who work for the government. Do you want to fill pot-holes in the road yourself? How about public parks?

We ARE NOT a pure Capitalist society and we never have been. Government involvement (subsidies, government trade deals, interest rate adjustments, etc.) has always been a part of our Capitalism. We are a melting pot of people, ideas and economic philosophies. Some of them work and some do not. And we should be open to things that work in other countries instead of quickly applying labels and rejection. What we have seen coming to a head in the past few weeks is unchecked Capitalism. And, to quote Bush, "it's not working properly." If it were, we wouldn't be borrowing money from Communist China.

Let's reach back into the saddlebag and take another look at an article from back in 2005 that shows you just how "liberal" the mainstream media is:

Questions of Character

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times, October 14, 2005

George W. Bush, I once wrote, "values loyalty above expertise" and may have "a preference for advisers whose personal fortunes are almost entirely bound up with his own." And he likes to surround himself with "obsequious courtiers."

Lots of people are saying things like that these days. But those quotes are from a column published on Nov. 19, 2000.

I don't believe that I'm any better than the average person at judging other people's character. I got it right because I said those things in the context of a discussion of Mr. Bush's choice of economic advisers, a subject in which I do have some expertise.

But many people in the news media do claim, at least implicitly, to be experts at discerning character - and their judgments play a large, sometimes decisive role in our political life. The 2000 election would have ended in a chad-proof victory for Al Gore if many reporters hadn't taken a dislike to Mr. Gore, while portraying Mr. Bush as an honest, likable guy. The 2004 election was largely decided by the image of Mr. Bush as a strong, effective leader.

So it's important to ask why those judgments are often so wrong.

Right now, with the Bush administration in meltdown on multiple issues, we're hearing a lot about President Bush's personal failings. But what happened to the commanding figure of yore, the heroic leader in the war on terror? The answer, of course, is that the commanding figure never existed: Mr. Bush is the same man he always was. All the character flaws that are now fodder for late-night humor were fully visible, for those willing to see them, during the 2000 campaign.

And President Bush the great leader is far from the only fictional character, bearing no resemblance to the real man, created by media images.

Read the speeches Howard Dean gave before the Iraq war, and compare them with Colin Powell's pro-war presentation to the U.N. Knowing what we know now, it's clear that one man was judicious and realistic, while the other was spinning crazy conspiracy theories. But somehow their labels got switched in the way they were presented to the public by the news media.

Why does this happen? A large part of the answer is that the news business places great weight on "up close and personal" interviews with important people, largely because they're hard to get but also because they play well with the public. But such interviews are rarely revealing. The fact is that most people - myself included - are pretty bad at using personal impressions to judge character. Psychologists find, for example, that most people do little better than chance in distinguishing liars from truth-tellers.

More broadly, the big problem with political reporting based on character portraits is that there are no rules, no way for a reporter to be proved wrong. If a reporter tells you about the steely resolve of a politician who turns out to be ineffectual and unwilling to make hard choices, you've been misled, but not in a way that requires a formal correction.

And that makes it all too easy for coverage to be shaped by what reporters feel they can safely say, rather than what they actually think or know. Now that Mr. Bush's approval ratings are in the 30's, we're hearing about his coldness and bad temper, about how aides are afraid to tell him bad news. Does anyone think that journalists have only just discovered these personal characteristics?

Let's be frank: the Bush administration has made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. Those who wrote puff pieces about Mr. Bush and those around him have been rewarded with career-boosting access. Those who raised questions about his character found themselves under personal attack from the administration's proxies. (Yes, I'm speaking in part from experience.) Only now, with Mr. Bush in desperate trouble, has the structure of rewards shifted.

So what's the answer? Journalists who are better at judging character? Unfortunately, that's not a practical plan. After all, who judges their judgment?

What we really need is political journalism based less on perceptions of personalities and more on actual facts. Schadenfreude aside, we should not be happy that stories about Mr. Bush's boldness have given way to stories analyzing his facial tics. Think, instead, about how different the world would be today if, during the 2000 campaign, reporting had focused on the candidates' fiscal policies instead of their wardrobes.

]]> http://bluffersmack.wordpress.com/?p=80 Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:52:03 +0000 bluffersmack http://bluffersmack.no.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/bailout-fails-repubublicans-put-feelings-first/ She may have said the right thing at the wrong time, but Pelosi was correct. We're in this huge mess because of massive Republican spending alongside Democratic....(what's a word for rolling over and playing dead?). She just left out the Democratic weakness part. One thing I can say about the Republicans - they will stand up for whatever they believe, or what their party believes, and they won't cave. They talk nice and play ruthlessly. The Democrats talk smack but quickly roll over on their back. That's a recipe for, well, the economy melting down.

It really doesn't matter what either party says at this point. The taxpayers are on the hook one way or another. We can try to plug the hole with a big bailout package or we can keep doing one-off cash infusions for failing institutions. We're gonna pay. The question is which method will be less painful. In a non-election year, the problem would have already been addressed. But now, with so many seats being contested, the nose will be cut off to spite the face.

After a bailout deal had reached agreement yesterday, several Republicans pulled out because Pelosi gave a speech that insulted them. At least that was the report. Republicans never blame Democrats for anything, right? Bush never calls out Democrats. At any rate, in the face of a free-falling stock market, the Republicans took their ball and went home. They quit. And because Pelosi insulted them? Sure. Poor creatures.

The stock market lost over a trillion dollars yesterday. About this much: $1,200,000,000,000. That means people's retirement accounts and investments are getting drained. And it's going to get worse. And if our Congress can't put the people's business before re-election and hurt feelings, we're all skrewed.

The truth is, I like to spent a lot of my time here, at my desk, or over there, in my bed reading a book.  Maybe drinking a Lady Grey Twinings cuppa and eating some sort of candy.  A has Hobnobs, I discovered Rivita Rye Crisp Bread with "olive oil spread" (gotta love Scottish truthiness).  I enjoy my own company because it's effortless, I like to read, and I can wear sweatpants (hell, NO pants).

But today is my 24th birthday and I got growing up to do.

If you're feeling generous, raise a toast in honour of 1984 and all that, and wish for the best.  I signed up for a new SnB here in Aberdeen and am taking the first steps into wearing real pants.

Tonight, the local.  Tomorrow, the world.

Copyright © 2008 WrappedUpInBooksBlog. All rights reserved.*

this post brought to you by the incredibly adorable baby version of me

"That's where the truth lies - right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up.

Now, I know some of you are going to say, 'I did look it up, and that’s not true.' That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works." 

- Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents Association dinner, April 2006

I believe it's Commandment #7 that tells us not to murder. I went back and looked just to make sure. Lo and Behold, there was NOT as asterisks that says, "well, don't murder unless someone tells you that there are WMD there, and they don't like you anyway. If so, it's ok to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of men women and children if it makes you feel better."

Because I told her that I did not believe many of her statements, she called me a pig and many other names, using some Biblical quotes and nice pictures to back up her assertions. You can check out her rant against me here.

What amazes me is this: Because I didn't claim to be of any particular faith, or THE faith, she instantly considered me a non-believer and unholy. And she let me know it. What was really funny is that she said that she was not being judgmental. Oh, ok. However, if I had come to her and professed that I was a Christian, she might have actually taken my questions to be something different. In other words, this woman can be swayed by someone's claims, like George Bush's, that they are a Christian. Don't look at the actions, just hear the claim, and then all is better.

I used to work in a mental hospital and I have met many who believed they were Jesus. When anyone tells me that God has told them to do something, well, I get ready to run. Because God apparently tells a lot of people that they should do crazy stuff like kill other people. Funny how that works....but I digress.

Back to the comments I made on the blog - I never resorted to name calling. And there are plenty of names that came to mind, namely "stupid" and "self righteous". But I didn't say those things mainly because this person has admitted to having "thin skin". But this is my blog and I'll say what I want. And if you want to call me out for being a dumbass, go right ahead. You wouldn't be the first. But here's a 411 - having a big mouth and thin skin usually is a recipe for some serious conflict.

If you intend to run a blog and have it as a one-way medium where you preach to people and you are unwilling or unable to receive feedback, consider writing books, and use a pen name. Because if you can't take legitimate questions to your inconsistent claims, you might consider shutting your trap or start being consistent.

The article is particularly interesting when placed into dialogue with Empire as a Way of Life, by William Appleman Williams, which I just read for Race, Empire, and Modernity. While it's difficult to claim today that any one particular event or discourse is the strongest evidence for Williams' thesis (since so much points to the imperial character of American political/social/economic ideology), Palinism is certainly a contender. Assertions of American exceptionalism increasingly ring hollow in the Internet age, when your ability means more than the color of your passport.

In his preface, Williams argues that a characteristic of the "imperial way of life" is an inability "to say no to our desires."  He quotes another historian's description of "our 'growing national disillusionment when it appears that the desires must be limited'", which is a surprisingly prescient evocation of Palinism more than thirty years before anyone outside of Anchorage knew who Sarah Baracuda was. If we take this discussion of desire seriously, it's possible to read Palinism (and the related desparation of rust belt whites 'clinging to their guns and religion') as a truly fetishistic construction. The unreasonable importance Palinists give to trivial social policy is the fetish obscuring their (dis)avowel of American decline. Only an enforced ignorance of the rapidly morphing world order could make denying gay marriage seem worth the effort.

With the financial system collapsing around us and the real vacuity of American wealth no longer ignorable, a truly international awareness is essential. Even Adam Smith's own analysis supports the need for a global approach (it's good to fight on their turf):

Riches do not consist in having more Gold and Silver, but in having more in proportion than the rest of the World... whereby we are enabled to procure to ourselves a greater Plenty of the Conveniences of Life than comes within the reach of Neighbouring Kingdoms and States

Instead of colonial plunder, today's riches are virtual: information, skill, education, creativity, etc. It's not enough for a Palinist to "know" that we're in a bad spot because imported stuff costs more, jobs are being "outsourced" in inreasingly creative ways, and people are asking to be paid in Euros. In this century, leaders need to understand education, productivity, energy policy, foreign affairs, cultural production and everything else of importance in relative terms. Thinking America is Exceptional laughs in the face of a global approach because it raises painful truths about our own value. We need our leaders to interrogate this fetishism before we wake up an irrelevancy.

What I find utterly ridiculous is that most Americans really don't know what is going on and few seem to have a memory of the past. My previous post briefly discussed what seems to be the beginning of the issues - deregulation. I recall the Republicans screaming for deregulation and saying the markets would work things out. The markets would guide the economy, not the government. Government needs to stay out! The market knows all and will fix and heal all.

Hey, the market is on the phone, they want $700 billion right now, no questions asked. Ok?

This constant call for deregulation and no oversight by the Republicans is like a 15 year old demanding utter freedom, a car, credit card and no curfew. And the Democrats are like the weak parents that consistently cave in to the yelling and boisterous behavior. So now the teenager is in big trouble. The Dems are ready to cave in again and quickly do a bail out. And the Republicans are mad. They're always mad.

A few months ago, GW Flightsuit vetoed a bill that would have given health care coverage to children. These are children that just happened to be born into a family with no money. They made no choices that would have put them in this powerless position. But $7 billion was "excessive". How does a "Compassionate Conservative" justify denying health care to the helpless while bailing out stupid people at 100 times the cost?  They just do.

"Compassionate conservative", like the "Patriot act", is an oxymoron. It's calling up down and down up. But that's for another post. Compassionate conservatives and the wave of "new" Christians who have taken up this doublespeak deserve their own special acknowledgment.

A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. The more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness.

His exhaustively detailed column also laments the cravenness of the media, pointing out that McCain received more scrutiny from the comedian Joy Behar on the feelgood "The View" than in any of his previous interviews. Where is Helen Thomas when we need her? Rich cannot comprehend why McCain's past remains off-limits despite the eerie similarity between the current subprime mortgage crisis and the Savings and Loans debacle of the 80's, a market failure catalyzed by the dissolution of Charles Keating's banks. Rich laudably is not reticent about the details of the McCain's dealings with Keating and the Keating Five scandal. That this is not a more common discourse is unfathomable; how can the media simply ignore a defining moment of McCain's senatorial career given that the crux of his candidacy is his experience in the Senate? Though of course, whenever a reporter musters the courage to question McCain's claims, rather than directly answer the charges, McCain, his cronies or the disinterested Fox News team truculently dismiss the media for its liberal bias.

Rich posits that the mercurial McCain on the campaign trail--the one that has no compunction declaring the economy fundamentally strong and weak on the same day, the one that differs so drastically from the defeated, straight talk McCain of 2000--is reminiscent of the pre-Keating, pre-penitence McCain:

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Rich also dutifully directs readers to the stories about Cindy's drug addiction and Palin's cronyism, other among dozens of other related links.

On a weekend when the courts ruled that Cheney must preserve his Vice Presidential documents, Rich assails the McCain's camp's secrecy, from their refusal to release medical and tax records to their unwillingness to address the inconsistencies in his touted, nondescript economic plan that is all promises and no policy. The people running McCain's campaign appreciate that as much as Americans now despise George Bush, the political playbook of Bush's victories will continue to prove efficacious because voters don't care about the details or even the truth:

We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

God bless America. God help the rest of us.

Andrew Sullivan, Naomi Klein and Will.i.am appear on Realtime with Bill Maher. (BTW, Maher cites polling data that's about a week out of date).

• A great summary of the universal criticism Bush's bailout bill has engendered from across the ideological spectrum.
• Frank Rich compares the lies and manipulation behind the launch of McCain-Palin to the Bush White House's run-up to the Iraq War.
• Politico: Bush bailout backlash builds.
• Opening SNL skit hits McCain for producing false and misleading ads (link here).
• Steve Katz, in an Op-ed in Seattle PI, says Palin is political junkfood for low information voters, but traditional media is under-reporting how much voters can't stomach her, because they're enjoying reporting on the novelty of her.
• Miami Herald reports on Obama's enthusiastic reception given by a huge crowd in "Republican country" of Jacksonville, Florida.
• San Francisco Chronicle:  Palin bounce declining because she's been repeating same convention speech lines for weeks, stumbled and the facts that have come out conflict with original storybook image. While she remains popular with the base, she appears to be repelling independent and undecided voters, which may explain the campaign's decision to cancel Palin campaign events for this upcoming week.

• WaPo: McCain's article on health care becomes fodder for Obama attacks, because in it McCain pledges to do for health care what deregulation did for the banking industry (oops).
• WaPo's Balz:  Obama attacks McCain on deregulation and social security in Florida.
• Joe Biden is a gun owner and proud of it.
• Judge issues preliminary injunction ordering Cheney to preserve his official records.
• NY Times:  New pact on debate will let presidential candidates spar more freely, but in return, VP debate will have a much more restricted format at the insistence of the McCain campaign.
• WaPo notes that while the time for answers was shortened, there is no limitation on the subject areas that Gwen Ifel can ask of the VP candidates.  Team Obama also sought and won a point of having Biden and Palin behind lecterns, instead of at a table together (as the VP nominees did in 2004).
• WaPo shares some inside scoop on how the two campaigns huddled with economic advisers as the crisis unfolded on Wall Street.
• In a must read, Al Giordano slams the AP's Ron Fournier's irresponsible reporting and debunks the so-called Bradley Effect.
• Sebastian Mallaby, in a WaPo Op-ed, criticizes the federal bailout as impulsive and unwise.
• Glenn Greenwald also criticizes the Bush Administration's proposed bailout legislation.

Frank Rich, The New York Times, September 21, 2008

Not until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

Read More Here

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1580095&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D24039]

How has truthiness become more relevant that truth? Why are Americans so skeptical of facts, figures, and details? Some such as professor Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, posit that Americans are genuinely hostile to knowledge. While it's common prior to an election to hear people deriding the populace as illiterate, indolent or apathetic masses glued to Fox News, perhaps people are simply suffering from information fatigue.

Take an unrelated topic like health. It seems that every few months new precept emerges about what we should eat to stay healthy; fish oil, the Greek diet, blueberries, antioxidants, Omega-3's-- I've lost track. Despite trends like the Atkins diet, the general rule that eating less fatty foods was good for the heart had remained relatively sacrosanct. Then in 2006 a group from Harvard announced that there was absolutely no correlation between fat consumption and heart disease. Now, I believe, the general rule is to limit your calories and avoid transfat. Tomorrow, this could change. Once your heart actually becomes clogged, the advice you'll receive is equally unreliable.  A study released last year showed that while cardiologists were implanting heart stents in more than a million Americans each year, most of these patients received no long-term benefit from the costly operation.

If you begin to consider the social sciences, the world seems absolutely topsy-turvy; the conventional wisdom about our economy seems to change with each new plunge of the DowJones; the conventional wisdom about voter preferences changes with each movement in the polls. Awash in a sea of conflicting assertions, how is one to decide what is or isn't true? With the internet making thousands of additional sources of information readily available, determining what's true is hardly a trivial task. Even the concept of truth is neither easily discernible nor stable; an entire branch of philosophy has been debating the nature of knowledge for centuries.

Perhaps truthiness is simply a byproduct of the conditions of modern life: the surfeit of information (the internet and google), the proliferation of choice (how many olive oils does one need?), societal disconnection (do you even know your neighbors' names?), and the accretion of quotidian tasks (who isn't familiar with the interminable to-do list?). The confluence of these phenomena have undermined the stability and wisdom of accepted cultural mores and inculcated profound anxiety in our society. Without cultural or societal rules-of-thumb, even making the simplest decision--such as what to eat--can become unnecessarily complicated. It's not surprising that some people would feel overwhelmed and simply prefer to trust their gut, and follow a leader who seems to do the same.

An article in Slate makes a compelling argument for that idea, and explores the possibility of a distinction between "bullshitting" and "lying", drawing on work by Laura Penny and Harry G. Frankfurt, among others.

The Atlantic Review covers the same topic more briefly, but also discusses the cute-sounding, no doubt under-utilised term "truthiness", apparently voted "Word of the Year" by the American Dialect Society in 2005!  

I'm not sure if I'm convinced by the distinction drawn between the verbs "bullshit" and "lie" , e.g., in the Atlantic Review article: "Excessive bullshitting can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not."  Why wouldn't excessive lying do the same thing?  

I can see how "bullshitter" is a more specific term than "liar", though - you might call someone a "liar" in relation to one lie ("you liar!") whereas a "bullshitter" would be somebody who makes lying more of a lifestyle choice.  

Unnervingly, the Slate article argues that cable tv and the internet have created favourable conditions for bullshitters as "there simply isn't enough truth to go around":

Indeed, there are some troubling signs that the consumer has come to prefer bullshit. In choosing guests to appear on cable news, bookers will almost always choose a glib ignoramus over an expert who can't talk in clipped sentences. 

If this doesn't seem too troublesome a trend, it is worth remembering that many of the world's leaders also excel at this particular mode of lying:  

Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered.  

I kinda feel like that inside...
...every nation should have it's own Colbert.

If you don't like reading, well, you are on a blog after all. But I'll keep it short. Here are the good parts:

First, this deregulation, just like Nafta and many other horrible laws, was passed with a Republican Congress and a Lewinski'd president, "An agreement between the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans, reached during all-night negotiations which concluded in the early hours of October 22, sets the stage for passage of the most sweeping banking deregulation bill in American history, lifting virtually all restraints on the operation of the giant monopolies which dominate the financial system."

What would the new deregulation mean? "The proposed Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 would do away with restrictions on the integration of banking, insurance and stock trading imposed by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, one of the central pillars of Roosevelt's New Deal. Under the old law, banks, brokerages and insurance companies were effectively barred from entering each others' industries, and investment banking and commercial banking were separated."

What would likely happen because of this? "The bill ties the banking system and the insurance industry even more directly to the volatile US stock market, virtually guaranteeing that any significant plunge on Wall Street will have an immediate and catastrophic impact throughout the US financial system."

And there we have it.

Think about it. Markets don't just take care of themselves. People and corporations do not act for the good of society but for the profits of shareholders. Love of money is a baaaad thing.

What would happen if, say, the roadways were "unregulated"? Think people would drive 55 mph? Would there be a lot more highway deaths?

We are in a society that spends hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money on weapons but the act of spending any money on healthcare is condemned. We are a society that spends billions of dollars to bail out private industry companies that made stupid mistakes because of their greed. Yet NO money is spent on the citizens who are losing their homes.

Caring for people is actually a good thing. I would much rather pay to help people out than bail out corporations. I would much rather give children free cancer treatment than put their families on welfare while they watch their loved ones dry up and pass.

An [WaPo] article last September pointed to cognitive science research showing that debunking myths can have the effect of reinforcing the very myths you’re trying to refute. That’s because the human brain is hardwired with a lot of shortcuts. One of those shortcuts: Over time, we tend to forget the "not" part of a claim while retaining the rest. So “Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction” becomes “Iraq had WMDs.”

Now, in a new article published yesterday, the Post warns again that correcting misinformation can actually strengthen beliefs in false claims, especially among those whose worldviews already incline them to believe the false information.

At one of the better political polling statistics, analysis, and mapping sites, Five Thirty Eight.com, Sean Quinn also posted an articled titled "Democrats must give voters explicit permission to like Palin". Quinn writes about how one supporter has given up on facts all together.

For example, a man at Palin's rally in Carson City heatedly told an Obama volunteer in response to his anti-Palin argument, "I don't trust the facts!" Some people hear that and think: "I cannot relate to someone who would say that." I hear it and think: "Defended around emotion and feels under attack." People under attack can't be persuaded. And persuasion is the goal, remember? You can’t reason someone out of his or her feelings. But you can validate those feelings, buy their willingness to listen, and then calmly make your logical case.

I also believe the above quote can be used to summarize many's beliefs in a multitude of concepts (especially religion and politics). One can never win an argument when one side is debating emotions and the other side is debating logic. I think this is why so many people get frustrated when talking about politics (or religion).

After reading those articles, the first thing that came to my mind was the great philosopher and human psychologist Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report.  In 2005, he invented the word "Truthiness" to describe how people typically overrule logic with emotion.

Truthiness:

1. (humorous) The quality by which something is believed emotionally without regard to evidence or rational thought. Frequently used derisively via ironic praise.
2. (humorous) The quality of adhering to incorrect concepts one wishes or believes to be true. Used as previous.

For anyone interested, Joe Miller (Fact Check.org) issued a special report in Cognitive Science and Fact Checking in 2007 that's also a good read.

Here's a few non-partisan web sites where you can find some truths/facts:

• Fact Check.org
• Politi Fact.com
• Snopes

P.S. That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously.

Update 9/30/2008
ars technica wrote an article about this a couple days after I posted my blog.