Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law attorney, is now a contributing writer at Salon.com. He is the author of a number of books. His most recent book is titled Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

Greenwald, a severe critic of the American media, discussed the state of the media with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org. One focus of the discussion was the recent presidential debate sponsored by ABC. Based on the lack of substance of most of the questions by the ABC moderators, Greenwald alleges that the media now specializes in insipid substance-free personality-based attacks. The ABC debate was only one example of what is done constantly. Progressives are portrayed as weak, ineffectual and not patriotic, whereas conservatives are portrayed as stable, strong and moral. The evidence is irrelevant to these portrayals.

[Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News]

The media reporters claim that the people want to hear these sorts of questions that amount to character sniping, but (according to Greenwald), the politicians don’t hear these sorts of shallow questions back home from their constituents. Instead, constituents want to hear about solutions to the many serious problems now facing America.

In sum, Greenwald argues that the mainstream media is “rendering our political process toxic.”

The interview (available through video or audio) is about 20 minutes long. I highly recommend this discussion by two of the media professionals I trust the most, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald.

BTW, Jon Stewart has also ridiculed the ABC debate. You can see his five-minute segment here.

One last thing. Here is a great illustration of the mindset of the American media. Just listen to the neocon talking points spewed out by this FOX reporter:

Contrast the shallow questions of the reporter to the thoughtful responses by this priest (his name is Michael Pfleger and he is, indeed, an impressive and patient man). BradBlog has more background on this captivating discussion involving FOX and Pleger.  BradBlog also describes the personal crusade by Bill O’Reilly against Pleger.

[Note from Erich: DI publishes cartoons, including the cartoon posted above, pursuant to a license from Cagle Cartoons. We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists. ]

The new Ben Stein movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” opens today. It is only showing in Wehrenberg Theaters farther out from the city. (Movies.com link). Before today, it has only been seen by fundamentalist congregations, hand-picked audiences, and selected legislatures.

If you’ve read my earlier post and long comment thread about it, you know that I am not suggesting that you go and pay them for producing this piece of nominally documentary film.

In brief, the movie is about the theological Darwinist conspiracy to keep seekers of truth out of academia. There are plenty of clips of Nazi atrocities interspersed with quote-mined interviews with actual scientists. It apparently makes Michael Moore productions seem fair and balanced.

It has been shown to closed door presentations to legislatures as bills were being discussed to include or allow “alternate theories” to scientifically established ideas in science classes in several states, including Florida, Texas, and my own Missouri.

If ever there was a Dangerous Intersection between faith and society, this film is on that cusp.

In about 300 B.C., Epicurus eloquently summed up the problem of the existence of evil. It has come to be known as the Riddle of Epicurus or the Epicurean paradox. It was translated by David Hume in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion:

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to
Then He is not omnipotent.

If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.

If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?

If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?

Should one actively crave knowledge? Here are two extreme opinions:

Oh, my greed! There is no selfishness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands—a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” –Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism #249

The second truth is that suffering is caused by craving and aversion. We will suffer if we expect other people to conform to our expectation, if we want others to like us, if we do not get something we want,etc. In other words, getting what you want does not guarantee happiness. Rather than constantly struggling to get what you want, try to modify your wanting. Wanting deprives us of contentment and happiness.

The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism

Questions for Bush
Dario Castillejos, Dario La Crisis

Flag Lapel
Keefe, The Denver Post

Cerdo del Ethanol en SUV
RJ Matson, The New York Observer

Justice
Ares, Caglecartoons.com

Juicy Campaign Scandals
Nate Beeler, The Washington Examiner

Third Age
Ares, Caglecartoons.com

[Note from Erich: DI publishes cartoons pursuant to a license from Cagle Cartoons. We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists. ]

Tom Shales of the Washington Post describes the rot that our national media has become:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with. . .

Obama was right on the money when he complained about the campaign being bogged down in media-driven inanities and obsessiveness over any misstatement a candidate might make along the way, whether in a speech or while being eavesdropped upon by the opposition. The tactic has been to “take one statement and beat it to death,” he said.

Here are excerpts from Robbins’ controversial keynote address at the National Association of Broadcasters show.

How bad is the economy?  In the May issue of Harpers Magazine, Kevin Phillips cuts through the numbers in an article entitled “Numbers Racket:  Why the economy is worse than we know.” The revelations Phillips makes are shocking.  The U.S. government has been consciously cooking the books for decades.

How do you make inflation look lower than it is?  Just remove some items from consideration and create value out of thin air (e.g., “product substitution,” “geometric weighting” and “hedonic adjustments”).   Truly, you’ve GOT to read the details to believe what has been going on.  If you think that inflation is running between 2% - 4%, think again.  Using honest accounting methods, it’s more like 12%.  If CPI had been honestly reported for the past couple of decades, Social Security checks would be 70% greater than they currently are.

We have an official unemployment rate of 5%.  The government arrives at that nice low number by simply not counting all of the people who want jobs.  If you really counted those people, the U.S. has an employment rate of about 9%.

Who profits from these fake number of low inflation and low unemployment?

Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?

Don’t forget the utterly ridiculous concept of “imputed income,” one of several forms of phantom income, which constitutes 15% of GDP.

Phillips see nothing but trouble resulting from the use of these methods of cooking the national books. An honest accounting “would reveal a nation in deep difficulty not just domestically but globally.”

The undermeasuring of inflation is especially insidious:

[I]t hangs over out heads like a guillotine.  To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt(from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy . . . The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the euro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.

What John F. Kennedy would, indeed, say to George W. Bush:

I wrote an earlier post about describing yourself in six words. Today, I spotted this Youtube video that required the numerous subjects to describe themselves in one word or phrase. This is fun to watch on many levels. I can’t help but want to think that I know many of these young adults just by their mannerisms and expressions. On that basis (is it a reliable method?) it seems like many of the adjectives seem appropriate.

Here it is:

An Obama response to some recent Clinton attacks . . .

There’s a TED video making the rounds to some high acclaim these days. The video features Jill Bolte Taylor giving a video presentation entitled “My stroke of insight.”

Here it is in a nutshell. Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in 1996. She has recovered quite well from a serious challenge, as you can see from the embedded video. Her topic is one that fascinated me, and I watched her video with undivided attention. If you decide to watch this video, you might also be especially interested in her description of the struggles that she faced at the moments during which she was actually having her stroke. She describes experiencing the successive losses of her abilities to interpret visual and auditory input. Written words began to look like meaningless scribbles. Things became even more surreal when she “realized” that she couldn’t understand simple conversations.

It pains me to write what I am about to write , because I really want to believe that Bolte Taylor is accurately portraying real-life events. What she is describing is fascinating and her narrative is gripping. I am relieved to know that she has made a fantastic recovery and I admire her for stepping into the public eye in an attempt to provide a unique personal perspective regarding strokes. I have serious doubts about her narrative, however. I am concerned that Bolte Taylor is confabulating. I have several reasons for suggesting this.

The first thing I noticed was Bolte Taylor’s absolute lack of doubt or hesitancy regarding any of the claims she is making. Her story sounds too well rehearsed and her presentation appears to be too much like an acting performance. Can the human mind accurately process, remember and then describe the experience of a stroke? This is highly debatable among reputable scientists. People are prone to all kinds of perceptual and memory distortions during illnesses, even illnesses that are much milder than strokes. For instance, I recently had an experience where I fainted for a couple seconds when I was sitting a few feet from a doctor. He is certain that I fainted (briefly) based upon what he saw. I have no recollection of losing any consciousness at all, however. I have no reason to doubt my doctor, because he was there and he attended to me when he saw me slipping away. I trust his observations more than my own, because my mind was in the process of shutting down at the critical moment. Even though I fainted, I would be an accurate witness only to the events leading up to fainting, not to the act of fainting itself.

I’m not suggesting that Bolte Taylor was unconconsious. But even when people are fully conscious and not suffering massive strokes, there are severe limitations to using instrospection. It is highly unreliable in many cases of self-diagnosis.

Memory is highly prone to distortions. Remembering something is not at all like hitting the play button on a tape recorder. There are thousands of studies demonstrating this fallibility of human memory. Some of these studies concerns flashbulb memories, where people who were certain that they knew the details of where they were and who they were with during major tragic events, turn out to be quite mistaken regarding many of those basic details. When there are extraneous reasons to believe (including, potentially, the attention one might receive by touring from place to place to give a talk that is well received by gentle audiences) the risk of confabulation is even greater.

We all have heard claims of of patients that they started floating down tunnels with a glowing light in the distance. (more…)

 Are you Bitter Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?
by John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

Corn Ethanol and Pig-Cars
Simanca Osmani, Cagle Cartoons, Brazil

by Pavel Constantin, Romania

[Note from Erich:  DI has a purchased a license from Cagle Cartoons to publish these cartoons.  We are proud to support the work of these cartoonists. ]

Tell them what Architecture 2030 says about coal:

Because coal is the only fossil fuel plentiful and supposedly cheap enough to push the planet to 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.  Because reaching 450 ppm (or possibly less) triggers potentially irreversible glacial melt and sea level rise.

Because 53% of Americans live in and around coastal cities and towns and, beginning with just one meter of sea level rise, many of these cities and towns will be inundated.

Scientists are forewarning that at approx. 450 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, we will trigger potentially irreversible glacial melt and sea level rise “out of humanity’s control.” We are currently at 385 ppm, and are increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at approx. 2 ppm annually.  At this growth rate, we will reach 450 ppm in 2035 . . .

In the US, there are over 600 existing coal plants and 151 new coal plants in various stages of development.

Tell them that there is a smarter and better way.   And a cleaner way.  Tell them that mining coal is not only ugly, it’s dangerous for miners and everyone else.

Tell them to take a close look into a train car full of coal (as I did yesterday) and to ask themselves if coal looks like the fuel of the future. 

I thought about coal as I noticed a train loaded with coal go by (I took these photos).  I thought about how little most people know about coal yet how politicians and their constituents don’t have the dangers of coal on their radar.   Some of these dangers are set forth in my earlier post, The Banality of Burning Coal.   

I’ve been told by a man who works with the biggest electric company in St. Louis that each coal burning plant eats an entire train full of coal each day.  That is confirmed by Wikipedia:

Coal is delivered by highway truck, rail, barge or collier ship. A large coal train called a “unit train” may be two kilometers (over a mile) long, containing 100 cars with 100 tons of coal in each one, for a total load of 10,000 tons. A large plant under full load requires at least one coal delivery this size every day.

Most people I speak with resist serious energy conservation as a matter of principle.  Many conservatives belittle conservation, as though it is a matter of weakness.  They scoff at conservation.  When I bring up global warming, they deny it.  When I bring up peak oil, they have no logical response.  They resist energy conservation as if they were 3 year olds whining that they don’t want to try a new sort of food that their parents put on their plates.   It’s an irrational emotional resistance (not that emotions are always irrational) that is endangering our economy.  Conservation is one-half of the solution out of this big mess. (more…)

This site thinks so. 

If you hunt through the categories, you’ll see many ideas better than occupying Iraq while incurring tens of thousands of U.S. troop casualties.

…this would be one of my questions: if, as you claim, God expects unmarried people to practice sexual abstinence, and expects teenagers to benefit from abstinence-only sex “education,” then why can’t your own ordained Catholic priests manage to practice it? Isn’t your demand for abstinence a bit like declaring that God expects people to fly and will condemn them as sinners for not doing so, unless they join (and donate money to) the Catholic church?

Philosophy majors are not getting rich, but they’re able to buy enough food to allow them to sit around and ponder things.   Truth be told, philosophy majors are at the bottom of the list in starting salaries.  As someone who majored in philosophy, I found these statistics to be of interest.   In my junior year of undergrad, majoring in philosphy, I panicked. What was I going to do next?  My brother-in-law (a lawyer) suggested I go to law school.  This didn’t sound like a good idea at the time, because my self-image didn’t involve wearing a suit or carrying a briefcase. 

Nonetheless, I ended up going to law school, which is not uncommon for philosophy majors, according to this article. [I don't actually wear a suit or carry a briefcase as much as I worried I'd be doing.  Most work days, even for trial lawyers like me, occur back at the office, not in court.]  If you don’t want to go to law school, here are some other things you can do with a philosophy degree.

Despite the potential financial drawbacks, I’m glad I majored in philosophy.  To the extent that I’m able to think clearly, I attribute some of that ability to my training in philosophy.  There are many sites that describe the various benefits to studying the allegedly “worthless” subject of philosophy, including this page from the website of the University of South Dakota:

Philosophy is in a sense inescapable: life confronts every thoughtful person with some philosophical questions, and nearly everyone is guided by philosophical assumptions, even if unconsciously. One need not be unprepared. To a large extent one can choose how reflective one will be in clarifying and developing one’s philosophical assumptions, and how well prepared one is for the philosophical questions life presents. Philosophical training enhances our problem-solving capacities, our abilities to understand and express ideas, and our persuasive powers. It also develops understanding and enjoyment of things whose absence impoverishes many lives: such things as aesthetic experience, communication with many different kinds of people, lively discussion of current issues, the discerning observation of human behavior, and intellectual zest. In these and other ways the study of philosophy contributes immeasurably in both academic and other pursuits.

The long-range value of philosophical study goes far beyond its contribution to one’s livelihood. Philosophy broadens the range of things one can understand and enjoy. It can give one self-knowledge, foresight, and a sense of direction in life. It can provide, to one’s reading and conversation, special pleasures of insight. It can lead to self-discovery, expansion of consciousness, and self-renewal. Through all of this, and through its contribution to one’s expressive powers, it nurtures individuality and self-esteem. Its value for one’s private life can be incalculable; its benefits for one’s public life as a citizen can be immeasurable.

In spite of the above benefits, I must admit that articles in modern philosophy journals tend to drive me batty.  These authors too often publish for the sake of publishing rather than writing because he or she is passionate about the topic.  A clue that I am correct about this is to notice the incredible amount of esoteric hair-splitting characteristic of such articles.  And do we really need the 180,000th article about Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative?  This is especially frustrating in that several professional philosophers have confessed to me that they don’t ever refer to the teachings of moral philosophers when deciding personal moral challenges.

For me, the challenge has been to learn to apply the critical thinking skills in practical ways to real world problems.  In short, I refuse to think that the study of philosophy itself is the end game.  My faith is that there are real-world applications and consequences for those classroom lessons.  Even if trying to apply one’s philosophy readings and writings to the real world is like emerging from the academic Cave and being blinded by the bright light of the real world. 

I’ve stewed on this one for a while. I couldn’t decide whether it made for an interesting post or a snide, judgmental complaint. I think it will ultimately fall somewhere in between.

Last fall, I took an introductory Anthropology course at my large public university of choice. The class fulfilled a general science requirement, so a wide range of students ended up in the course. Near the end of the quarter, as topics had moved through human evolutionary history, we arrived at the topic of race. My instructor, in an attempt to paint race as a meaningless classification, a social construct of sorts, asked students to list all of the different races they could name.

The resulting list proved so mind-blowingly misled that I have wanted to share it with the folks at DI for quite some time. We’ve discussed American ignorance and the failure of our education system frequently on this blog (for a recent post on the subject, see here), and I think this “list of races” serves as another anecdote in the same vein. Each of the following came from a real, honest-to-goodness Anthropology class of around 50 people, all of whom had at least taken basic college biology.

List of Races:

Asian
Italian
African American
Latin
Indian
Spanish
Caucasian
African
Catholic
Arabic

The first thing I notice: Asians and Africans have the misfortune of all being lumped into one race, respectively, regardless of where on each continent they originated. Meanwhile, Europeans received detailed designations such as Italian, Spanish, and so on. The second thing I notice: Native Americans and South Americans have gone totally neglected. The third thing: these students think Catholic and Arabic are races?! And what do they mean by “Latin” and “Indian”? Why “African” and “African American”? Of course, the issues with this list go on and on. The frightening implications go on even longer.

Most of you probably already know that more than 35,000 people are killed in the U.S. *every year* (more than ten times the number killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack) by drivers who are impaired by alcohol. But you might not know that, since the 9/11 attack, drivers who run red lights at intersections have killed more people than were killed in the 9/11 attack. For example, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), more than 800 people were killed in 2005 alone by red light runners. That makes red light runners a greater public safety threat than global terrorism.

Now, be honest: in the 6+ years since the 9/11 attack, have you ever run a red light at an intersection? If so, then maybe you should consider yourself a serious threat to national security, because, face it, you and your kind are a greater threat than global terrorism, at least according to the number of people you kill. And from my (admittedly limited) observations, most drivers in America seem to have, at least once, run a red light. So, if you have a driver’s license, please consider this your wake-up call: you might be a terrorist.

Barack Obama on “Who is out of touch?”

This incredible video was posted on Huffpo.    In the video, President Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley (who was appearing on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos) repeatedly confused Nepal and Tibet.   Watching this clip, I wonder whether Stephanopoulos caught the problem.   Apparently not, so shame on both of them. 

Ignorance of the real world is the hallmark of the Bush Administration.  Nepal? Tibel? Iran?  Iraq? Whatever.  You know, those foreign countries.  

Here’s something else that got lost in the post.  Hadley is arguing that the Bush Administration is going to Beijing because it’s important to keep an open dialogue with a country with which the U.S. has heated differences.  Gee, talk with the “bad” guys to maintain a relationship in order to better work things out?   That sounds a lot like something Barack Obama said prior to getting roundly criticized by the Bush Administration.  

In 1964, when a living bristlecone pine tree in California was determined to be almost 5,000 years old, it gave Bible literalists a big scare.  After all, literalists (young earthers) believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old.  Was that bristlecone pine tree around for the “big flood?”   Not quite: young earth adherents argue that that 5,000 year old tree must have been planted right after the waters receded.  Maybe Noah himself came to California to plant it.

But now there’s a newly discovered tree that is even older than the bristlecone pine:

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Scientists have found a cluster of spruces in the mountains in western Sweden which, at an age of 8,000 years, may be the world’s oldest living trees.

The hardy Norway spruces were found perched high on a mountain side where they have remained safe from recent dangers such as logging, but exposed to the harsh weather conditions of the mountain range that separates Norway and Sweden.

Carbon dating of the trees carried out at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, showed the oldest of them first set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest known living tree, Umea University Professor Leif Kullman said.

I’m trying to phrase this carefully, now: 

This newly discovered living tree must have been planted prior to the creation of the universe! 

I don’t quite know how this tree could have been floating around in space prior to the creation of the universe, because there wasn’t even any empty space “back then.”  I wonder if it was ever watered prior to the creation of the universe . . .  If that ancient tree that was the only thing in the universe fell over, would anyone hear it fall? Did God have a treehouse in that tree? If the tree was the only thing in the universe, how would it know which way to grow up?  So many questions. 

This unfortunate discovery of a very very old tree now forces our hands: It’s time to revise the Bible to indicate that the universe is more than 8,000 years old.  That will fix things as long as we don’t discover any 9,000 year old trees and as long as we ignore all of the  scientifically established methods for showing that the earth is actually billions of years old.

[Here is an explanation of why the young earth folks are absolutely wrong when they attack the validity of Carbon-14 dating and here's an extensive list of reputable articles on radiometric dating]

Last year, the Bush Administration told us they wouldn’t withdraw American troops from Iraq because there was “too much violence” in Baghdad; this year they’re telling us they won’t withdraw troops because “the surge is working” and they don’t want to “jeopardize the security gains of the past several months.”

So, here’s my question: if they won’t withdraw troops when violence goes up, and they won’t withdraw troops when violence goes down, then is it not self-evident that their policies in Iraq have NOTHING TO DO with the situation over there and, instead, depend entirely on something else…such as, continuing to butter the bread of the Bush/Cheney neo-con constituency (e.g., Halliburton, Exxon, Blackwater, etc.) and other special-interest groups within the American military-industrial complex?

Bush’s goal has been to be to keep boots on the ground no matter what, and that smells more like self-serving politics than like military strategy. Strategy is about achieving goals; politics is about rewarding supporters. We don’t hear much from the Bush Administration about achieving goals in Iraq, but we sure do see a lot of rewards going to his supporters. Do the math.

In the April 3, 2008 addition of Nature (available online only to subscribers), an article entitled “Architects of a Low-Energy Future” indicates that we can do a much better job in building energy-efficient structures.  This opportunity is critically important (as discussed in an earlier post regarding architect Ed Mazria of the highly accomplished non-profit Architecture 2030) because buildings worldwide account for approximately 45% of total energy consumption, more than “all the world’s cars and trucks put together.”

How much better can we design buildings?

The most efficient of the structures are almost completely passive, meaning they require very little, if any, traditional heating or air conditioning.  Yet the overall comfort they provide is, if anything, superior to existing buildings.  Nor is there necessarily a cost penalty: these ultra-energy-efficient buildings are often no more expensive to build than conventional structures, and they work out far cheaper if energy bills during their occupation are taken into account.

The hurdles to building these energy-efficient structures do not involve engineering challenges or lack of materials.  The major impediments to developing energy efficiency in buildings can be found in “our institutional barriers and market failures rather than technical problems.”

Another big problem is that high energy efficiency is too often not on the client’s radar, and architects are geared to simply giving the clients only what the client wants.  This is a shame, as the article points out, because “the biggest payoffs will come from new buildings, where ultralow energy can be designed in from the beginning.”  If it is not designed in from the beginning, the work of trying to make the building energy-efficient is much more difficult.  Retrofitting generally has to rely upon “bolting on energy intensive air conditioning, heating, and artificial lighting.”

Reading this article, I was astounded by how much energy a good building design can save.  Take, for instance, heating and cooling.  Most people pour lots of energy into their heating and air-conditioning systems.  It was eye-opening to learn that most of this cost is not necessary.  With high efficiency installation, glazing, and “thermal bridges” to prevent wasteful energy transfers to the outside, high-efficiency buildings show their “impressive gains in negawatts.”

The building can get its heating from the solar gains through glazing as well as through waste heat from appliances and even our bodies.

Another key technique for temperature control and passive houses is that first counterintuitive: simply let fresh air and from the outside.  A pump draws fresh air through a grid of pipes several meters underground, where the temperature is relatively constant throughout the year, 10-14 degrees centigrade . . .  When this fresh air arrives at the house, its temperature has already been modulated–warmed up or cool down by the ground, depending on the season . . . this system of air base cooling and ventilation not only saves energy by recycling heat, but vastly improves air quality.

Jeff Christian is the head of buildings technology Center at the Oak Ridge national laboratory.  His job is to design cheap and energy-efficient homes for low income families.  He is convinced that “cheap, low energy houses will take off in United States only if the government steps in:  “The financial incentives we need to drive this are not in place.”

Getting highly efficient buildings actually built sounds like another place where the invisible hand needs a hand.

It must be very important that “LiLo” is going to “lose her clothes,” in an upcoming movie, because this story about her nakedness is one of the top headlines on today’s homepage of MSNBC.  Here’s the essence of this important “news”:

Set to play a “nymphomaniac waitress” in “Florence,” Lindsay purportedly countered the producers’ request for a topless sex scene with a “full frontal” offer. “She is fully aware of the potential of her body,” a Tinseltown pal insisted. “Lindsay wants to build up an image as a mature, responsible actress.”

Why is Lohan’s nudity so worthy of this prominent headline?  Is it because she is pretty?  MSNBC includes this photo in case you need to see her to comprehend the story:                                

Yeah, she’s pretty, but pretty women can be found in many places and most of those sightings are not newsworthy.  Is all of this media attention occurring because Lohan is a woman who will be appearing naked?   No, seeing a naked woman is cheap and easy (for instance, I’ve heard that one can Google “naked women” and find lots of photos and videos of naked women on the Internet. Caveat: In no way am I suggesting that all of the naked women you might find on the Internet are also pretty). 

I think this media attention regarding Lohan is because a lot of people will be “getting what they covet” when they see Lindsay Lohan naked.  I’m reminded of being in high school, where one of the guys brags to a big group of guys that he had sex with one of the cheerleaders.  If the guy didn’t have high social ranking before that, he would then.   For men watching Lohan’supcoming movie, it might be akin to getting a chance to have sex with that pretty cheerleader who had, until that moment, ignored you (I’m speaking to all of you out there who were not the quarterback on your high school team).  

The media makes money by presenting Lohan in such a way that many of her fans feel that they know her.   The media has now announced this “gift” to many of her male movie fans, who will soon be able to brag:  “I saw Lindsay Lohan naked last night.  I was “with” her at the movie theater.”  Or, at least, that is how the imagination will conjure it. (more…)