If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here are about ten thousands words’ worth of photos for you. A few months ago, I bought a small camera that I try to take everywhere I go. The plan was to make myself look more careful at the world around me, which I actually do when I’m thinking of taking photographs.

It’s been a week where I’ve seen all kinds of unusual things. These days, life is thick with memorable images. Take a look and maybe you’ll agree. For starters here a baby giraffe and his mother (at the St. Louis Zoo). It’s really hard to believe that this huge animal is only about 10 days old.

Quick! What colors are zebras? Wrong! They are brown and white all over. Here is a sample of zebra fur up close, thanks to one of the volunteer educators at the zoo.

Here’s a photograph of my cousin. Really.

Rats? Almost. This is a capybara, the world’s largest rodent. I learned about capybaras by watching “The Tick,” the cartoon superhero. The Tick adopted a capybara as a pet and named him “Speak.”

And speaking of pets, have you seen the latest in treats for your dog? I took this photo in my local grocerey store. This new product is called Frosty Paws, a frozen ice-cream like substance made largely out of wheat and soy. Only $4 per box. Let’s see . . . what else do dogs supposedly need? I wonder what desperately hungry people would think of this.

The floods are still around in St. Louis. I took this photo from an airplane flying over St. Charles County. Lots of farmland is under water.

Tonight, while one of my daughters and I were cycling through Tower Grove Park (in south St. Louis), we happened to run across some civil war re-enactors. This cannon is not original equipment–it is a replica, because these fellows like to actually fire them.  They “work” as an artillery unit–about six soldiers operated a single cannon.  During the civil war, the soldiers who operated the cannons were often highly educated guys (unlike the soldiers who fought in the infantry). This particular type of cannon comes with a sight that works well enough that an expert artillerymen could nail a carriage from 1/4 mile away.

This is a piece of stone that was being thrown away by a local granite and marble kitchen shop (I was told that it is slate). I salvaged it because I thought the colors were striking. I hung it on my office wall on Friday. People come by and take a look because they wonder what I’m doing with the Ten Commandments hanging on my wall. I didn’t shape the stone at all, however. That’s a “natural” Ten Commandments shape (in a take-home-stone-that-a-merchant-is about-to-throw-away sort of way).

And yes, there are still lots of people covering their cars with bumper stickers.

Finally, my family’s refrigerator broke today and a neighbor kindly let us put some of our food into his extra freezer in his basement. I couldn’t help noticing all the butter. Hey, Joe, WTF, man! I wondered whether he was stocking up for End Times or whether he just (really really) loves butter. He says it’s the latter. Now I know what people do with those extra refrigerators in their basements.

I hope you enjoyed the little show.

In an article entitled “The Crowd Within,” The Economist has commented on some recent work that has expanded on the earlier and well-publicized counter-intuitive findings of James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds” (2005). Surowiecki found that the aggregated guesses of non-experts were often startlingly accurate. The averaged guesses of non-expert crowds were often more accurate than detailed predictions by individual experts.  Here’s a more detailed description of Surowiecki’s surprising findings.

That’s where this new research comes in:

That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question like “how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus” and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called “the wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.

It appears that having a single person wait for awhile and then make a second guess tends to create a situation where that person’s mind is wiped relatively clean of the first guess, so that the second guess can be somewhat independent of the first, such that averaging the two guesses together allows a phenomenon similar to that of having two people make independent guesses.

The above summary of the finding that there can be “intelligent crowds” residing in a single person’s mind reminded me of a thought that that has repeated occurred to me. I have long suspected that religion is driven by social needs, not dogmatic and certainly not intellectual. Why is it, then, that so many scientists don’t feel compelled to follow a religion or to adopt religious beliefs? My speculation is that scientists follow the crowds in their own heads, so that they are immune to the charm of real life external crowds. They thus don’t feel the need to be joiners or to espouse beliefs for the sake of pleasing crowds. Why? Scientists excel at being self-critical. They need to be self-critical or else they will be horribly embarrassed (or even have their careers destroyed) when some other scientist comes along and disproves their favorite theory.

Good scientists have the courage and skills necessary to test their own theories by attacking them inside of their own heads. They brutally challenge their own ideas to an extent that would horrify many people. The best way to get to the best idea is to cultivate lots of voices and perspectives (again, scientists excel at doing this in their own heads). The skeptics’ strategy is thus that one shouldn’t muzzle the voices in one’s own head. It’s not wise to adopt “group think” in one’s own mind, to impatiently homogenize one’s own mental narrative. Instead, good thinkers allow the voices in their heads to have free reign, at least until objective findings (especially those based on experiments) silence some or all of the alternative viewpoints. This has been my own version of “The Crowd Within.” When done well, it is an exhausting endeavor, but potentially rewarding. This way of thinking is not for the faint of mind.

Today we biked over to see the 2½ hour long gay pride parade. “You’re here, you’re queer, we’re used to it.” About 40,000 other people came to see the parade along the edge of my neighborhood today.

You can see the crowds looking down Grand Boulevard. Many people were festively dressed. There were many couples of every gender combination, and many pets and some children.

See Mayor Slay at the head of the Gay Pride parade, waving under a mural of Jesus on the Messiah Lutheran school.

Did you ever notice the yellow lilies in the median on Grand? Here, the throng standing on the southbound side watch the bees in the northbound lanes.

And it is no surprise to have a heavily cheered and well attended block of Obama supporters in this parade.

Yes, there were beads, beads, beads!

And the scattered showers failed to scatter the crowds:

Even unsheltered riders in the parade were undeterred by the rain:

And the rain passed, and a good time was had by all:

And after the parade, there were the stage shows and the booths. Food, drinks, finance, churches, travel, home improvement, wearables, and more.

It was a colorful day in one of our landmark parks, this 28^th annual Gay Pride Festival in Saint Louis, Missouri. On the eastern edge of this “red state”.

I’m aware that McCain is different than Bush on a few issues.  But these are areas in which McCain has stumbled over a very low bar, indeed.  For instance, McCain has the intellectual brilliance to admit that we are terribly screwing up our environment and that energy is an issue that needs attention.   These are positions that any intelligent person would have taken at least 20 years ago.

Moveon.org has prepared this video to show some of the similarities:

After watching this, also ask yourself whether McCain is even similar to himself.

Under a bill to be introduced soon in Utah, sex education teachers would be criminally liable if they “deviate from state law governing sex education, which requires that it focus on physical and emotional development of adolescents, healthy relationships and the threat and prevention of diseases.”

The bill is being prepared in response to a recent allegation of alleged impropriety:

The Jordan School District is investigating allegations that a seventh- and eighth-grade health teacher violated the sex education statute by responding to questions from students about topics beyond the core curriculum, including homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation.

What are we coming to?? How dare a sex ed teacher talk about homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation!

It’s difficult to watch hecklers, even when you agree with them. On a superficial level they are rude. By interrupting formal speeches they are preventing the officially designated speaker from delivering his or her message.

But what alternatives do we have when modern-day powerful politicians carefully exclude people who disagree with the speaker? Here’s the modern formula for political mind-control:

1.    Inept/corrupt politician talks to a large audience; and
2.     Audience warmly applauds the long stream of BS.; and
3.    There is no hint of any dissent.

This combination has worked wonders for George W. Bush.  Time and time again, he speaks only to a pre-filtered and therefore friendly audience that, in reality, represents only 20% of America.   And consider that Bush almost always speaks before private audiences, where dissenters can be excluded even more easily.   When Bush dares to stray out in front of an audience that he has not hand-picked, he gets roundly booed.   John McCain is now picking up where Bush left off by giving most of his speeches before highly screened audiences.

I’d like to take this moment to appreciate the efforts of at least some hecklers.   First of all, take a look at this video of John McCain being heckled at the recent conference of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.  The hecklers were accusing McCain of being a war criminal.  Admittedly, these are harsh words, truly.  And, again, this is a rude display.  But there are good reasons to think that anyone supporting military action in Iraq did so illegally and that these illegal acts have caused hundreds of thousands of people to die and millions of people to be permanently displaced from their homes.  Hence, the accusation “war criminal.”

Consider what happens at events where there are no hecklers while McCain touts his war-monger ideas.  Consider, first, that humans are a species of animals that run in herds. We are emotionally attracted to people who appear to be liked by lots of other people.  Consider, also, that polite silence appears to constitute approval.  When ideas are stated repeatedly yet unopposed, we see them as even more credible than they are.

And here is a point that is critically important:  when even a single member of a group speaks up in dissent, it makes it much less likely that an audience member will feel pressured to fall in line with the other members of the group. This effect was thoroughly demonstrated in the 1950’s through a series of experiments by social scientist Solomon Asch.

Excluding potential audience members, a trick at which conservatives excel, works a fraud on everyone attending the speech and everyone viewing it later on a video.  What else would you assume when a huge audience graciously listened while McCain promoted war-mongering?  We presume that audiences constitute a cross-section of the public at large.  This fraud is further perpetuated when we are not also shown videos of the numerous techniques used by political operatives to pre-filter an audience to make sure that the audience was thoroughly friendly?

Finally, notice how the television commentator framed the people protesting McCain in the above video. Perhaps “protester” would be the most neutral word for someone who shouted words of protest at a war-monger who tried to exclude people of dissenting viewpoints from his audience.   Instead, the commentator used the word “heckler,” a word that suggests incorrectness, and it suggests that most of the people who sat quietly agreed with McCain’s speech.

For the grand finale, of course, the “heckler” is usually escorted off the stage by law enforcement officials, suggesting that the heckler is a law-breaker, even when the heckler is often bravely and patriotically making sure that we don’t fall prey to the illusion of the “thoroughly happy audience.”

Too bad we can’t heckle the corporate broadcast media.  How different things might be if someone could pop up next to a television news desk and yell a few words of dissent . . .

I’m learning a lot about honeypot ants. They are incredible little creatures.  Also known as repletes or storage ants, certain members of these ant colonies serve as living storage jars for the nectar gathered by the other workers.  Their abdomens extend many times bigger than the ant originally was, such that each of these living vessels looks like an ant with a grape stuck on its butt.

Image by Greg Hume

As I learned from reading an article called “Sweet Dreams,” in the April, 2008 issue of Natural History Magazine, repletes “hang from ceilings of domed chambers in the underground nest.”  The other worker ants fill up the repletes with nutrients.  The repletes get so large that they are forever trapped inside the nest, hanging from the ceiling.  What purpose do repletes serve?  “During time of scarcity, repletes regurgitate nectar to colony members, an especially valuable asset in arid environments.”

My question, then, relates to the dramatic onslaught of obesity in humans. If viewed traditionally, obesity is life-shortening and often deadly.   In fact, it’s senseless.   What if it’s not senseless, though?  What if the many huge people among us are sacrificing themselves for the well-being of those of us who are not huge?   What if the numerous humans who are obese are actually storing up nutrients to aid the rest of us in times of scarcity?

I know that this theory of human evolution might strike some as absurd and, indeed, it is (and I do speak as a former fatty).  Yet this is the image I had while reading about honeypot ants.

A group called Birth Control Watch is suggesting that we ask the following questions to the candidates:

1. Do you support couples having access to safe and effective birth control options, including emergency contraception?

2. Do you agree that for women to achieve equality, they must have access to family planning services, including birth control and contraception?

3. Do you support requiring health insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to cover birth control and contraception?

4. Do you support expanding current federal funding for Title X and Medicaid so that women with low incomes have more access to birth control options?

5. Do you support requiring pharmacies to dispense birth control to patients without discrimination or delay?

6. Do you support comprehensive sex education being taught in schools that includes information about abstinence, contraception and how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS?

7. Do you support the Prevention First and Access to Birth Control (ABC) Acts?

John McCain would hate to answer any of these straightforward questions.  His policy toward birth control is incoherent when it doesn’t outright seek to invade the private sex lives of Americans.

This article at Alternet (”The Real Pro-Life Candidate”) makes it clear that Barack Obama is the true pro-life candidate.  Why?

Study after study suggests the right to life approach, which McCain has helped execute for decades, is actually the root of the problem: leading to more abortions and later ones too . . . The data show that the pro-choice approach is more effective at achieving what the American public views as “pro-life” goals — i.e. reducing the number of abortions, preventing late term abortion — than the so-called “pro-life” approach.

By the way, who is likely to support freely available birth control pills?  Almost everyone:

Obama could remind the voter that only 11% of sexually active women don’t use contraception and from this 11% comes 50% of the nation’s abortions. Ninety-one percent of the American public strongly favors contraception because of this very reason.

The only people not favoring birth control are those who seek to encourage unplanned pregnancies.  That’s a great policy in a world of dwindling resources, right?  Who are such nuts?  People like this .

I agree with the writers of the Alternet article.  It’s time to cater to 89% of sexually active women, thereby recognizing the right of women to control their own bodies and simultaneously decreasing the number of abortions.  For much more on the wacky resistance of a highly vocal minority to birth control pills, see here.

This testimony by John Yoo is disgraceful on many levels.   Yoo was commenting (or, rather, refusing to comment) on his previous “work” in Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.  Of course, in this Think Progress video, Yoo is doing his best to uphold the disgraceful actions of his former boss, George W. Bush.  He’s doing this by refusing to answer a simple question.

Andrew Sullivan adds this footnote.

I caught this video at Funny or Die:

Why grow grass when you can eat your front yard?   Grass is no longer cool, according to this article in Time:

The problem, as [architect and founder Fritz] Haeg sees it, is that the “hyper-manicured lawn” is looking increasingly out of date. In the 1950s, when suburbia first began to sprawl, a perfectly trimmed front yard embodied the post-war prosperity Americans aspired to. Today, amid rising fuel costs, food safety scares and growing environmental awareness, a chemically treated and verdant but nutritionally barren lawn seems wasteful, he says.

Haeg has also published a new book:

The publication of Haeg’s new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, marks the beginning of a concerted national campaign to dramatically overthrow an American institution, the front lawn.

If you’re curious, visit the Edible Estates site. Invite me over when the tomatoes growing in your front yard are ripe . . .

Here’s a terrific article by Tim Karr of Free Press.  Why not exert some intelligent political will and make certain that blistering high-speed broadband is available to anyone who wants it at a reasonable price?   Karr’s article comes with some disturbing statistics:

Access to broadband today is held in the grip of the cable and phone cartel. This duopoly controls access for more than 98 percent of online American homes. And it’s the main reason why American pay far more for much slower speeds than what’s available in the rest of the developed world.

It has put us at a tremendous disadvantage - one that has been widely documented. But what’s alarming is new information about the demographics of access - the so-called “digital divide.” According to new analysis by Free Press (my employer), only 35 percent of U.S. homes with less than $50,000 in annual income have a high-speed Internet connection.

Not having access to broadband means that one is left out of the national conversation.   And with Web 2.0, it has become a two-way conversation for those of all of us who really care.  As Amy Goodman often says, that conversation should involved everyone in the community–she imagines it as a big kitchen table, where everyone has a fair opportunity to have a seat and have a say.   That’s not how things are turning out, and there’s no reason for not doing better, at least for those of us who believe that actually doing something, rather than waiting for the “free market” to take care of everything important.  Consider Lawrence Lessig’s comment on the free market:

“What’s bizarre about where we are in the history of building infrastructure is that this is the first time we have tried to undertake the building of fundamental social infrastructure against the background of a Neanderthal philosophy, which is that you don’t need government to do anything.

“That Neanderthal philosophy has governed for about the last eight years, and it has allowed us to slide from a leader in this field to an abysmal position. And it’s about time when people recognize that of course the private sector has a role, a central role, maybe the most important role, but it’s never enough.

Karr makes it clear that making reasonably priced broadband available will make the U.S. stronger, smarter and more efficient.   With every passing month, it is also becoming more of a moral issue.

Climate scientist James Hansen has recently argued that “fossil fuel “CEO’s should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature”. Why?  Because they know exactly what they are doing.  They are profit-fueled deniers, just like those big corporations who still push cigarettes while denying the well-known strong link between cancer and smoking.

Here are some of the wretched techniques of the fossil fuel corporations, according to Hansen:

Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.

Kirk Murphy of Firedoglake sums up Hansen’s latest statement nicely.   Here’s Murphy’s conclusion:

Thanks to Dr. Hansen and thousands of other honest scientists around the world, we know what to do. For twenty years, we’ve known about the problem. We can all be part of the solution, and part of the changes required to preserve our living world in a form that will support the wonderful diversity it supports — including our children and their children. Part our work is to support the 100% carbon tax and whenever possible, shrink our personal carbon footprints. Part of our work is to shut the climate change deniers out of mainstream discussion — in precisely the fashion civilized people now shut Holocaust deniers out of mainstream discussion and mainstream media.

Does money buy elections?  After reading this 2008 paper by “Just $6,” you’ll have no doubt.  What is Just $6 about?

Congress would only have to spend $6 per citizen per year to publicly fund each and every election for the House, the Senate and the White House. When you consider that “pork barrel” projects cost every one of us more than $200 last year alone, it’s no contest.

Think of it. With public funding, wealthy special interests and their hired lobbyists would no longer have a commanding influence over our politics and government. Instead of begging for campaign donations, candidates would spend their time communicating with voters. Once elected, our leaders would be free to focus on our nation’s challenges rather than having to worry about financing their next campaign. And there’s no doubt that more of our most able leaders would run for federal office when the ability to finance a campaign isn’t such a daunting obstacle.

How can your average item of food travel 1,500 miles to your plate?  Cheap oil, that’s how.  But be careful how you count the carbon generated by the delivery of your food.

The amount of “oil in our food” suggests that we will be eating a lot more local food, rather sooner than later.

It’s incredible that to be a candidate for President of the United States, you need to know more than how to run a country.   You need to know the Bible.   Oh, and this is only true if you’re a Democrat (I would love to see a shrewd reporter hit John McCain with an impromptu pop quiz on the Bible).

There’s a spirited exchange going on between the Reverend James Dobson and Barack Obama. Looks like Obama is winning.  But just in case, a phalanx of Bible-toting preachers has now come to Obama’s assistance.

Dobson, as is well known, serves as the center of morality for the entire country.   Here’s his take on lesbian sex, for example.

I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial should be taught in science classes.

I have read much by Pournelle, starting with his collaborations with Larry Niven in the 1970’s and ’80’s, and then his columns in Byte magazine, and his solo novels more recently. There is a strong Libertarian feel in his recent works (such as “High Justice”), where big corporations are the good guys and “liberal” governments merely stumbling blocks to progress or even survival. But he does write some great adventure stories. I was only mildly put off by the contention in “Fallen Angels” that embracing the global warming hoax would lead into international Luddism. I figured that it was just a plot device.

But now I see that the writings of Pournelle reflect an overall feeling that Nature and Man are but players on a stage that no mortal can understand. Perhaps it has something to do with his recurring close brushes with mortality. If you read some of his other columns at JerryPournelle.com, you’ll see that he champions all manner of oddball challenges to “Mainstream Consensus Science”. Sooner or later, one of these challenges may turn out to be valid. But historically speaking, successful challenges to the well established theories of thermodynamics and quantum theory are far between.

I’m currently reading a new book by Susan Linn, The Case for Make-Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008).

The main point of the book is that modern parents tend to over-schedule their children and otherwise deprive them of time for creative play.  For instance, many parents are letting their children get addicted to two-dimensional screens (television and computer screens) and many of us are inundating our children with toys that deprive them of creative play, toys that “aren’t designed with the goal of engaging children for years, or even months.  They are designed to sell.”  The net result is that creative play “is in danger of extinction.”

Why is this loss of time for creative play important?  Because children use play to cope with “the greatest of human challenges, including life-threatening illness, death and loss.”  Play is much more than momentary fun.  It is “a fundamental component of living a meaningful life and essential to mental health.”  Linn was motivated to write her book to encourage readers to ensure that their children are given ample opportunities for creative play.

It seems as though Linn’s subject matter, creative play, might also extend to adults in a critically important way.  Such application would have the potential for shedding light on religious rituals.  Although Linn’s book doesn’t dwell on this possibility, it is certainly acknowledged.

Linn speaks of the transitional objects of childhood, the blankets, bears and other “cuddlies” that are crucial for a child’s comfort.  Sometimes they “seem to be even more important than actual parents because children cannot bear to be parted from them.” As Lynn observes, children invest these objects with “special meaning.”  Such objects help children feel safe.  The children “create the blanket’s meaning.”  Furthermore, the power of these transitional objects flourish “because adult caretakers accept the importance of their significance to the young owners.”  (75)

The phenomenon of transitional objects is nearly universal.  Such objects “live at the intersection of inner experience and outer reality.”  Lynn notes that as children grow up, these transitional objects “fade in importance.”  At the same time, however,

the psychological space they occupy remains and [it's] in that space that creative play takes place.  Our childhood experience of what D.W. Winnicott calls “transitional space” as children affords us access as adults to a rich panoply of experiences that are neither wholly internal nor wholly external, but somehow both.  Religious and patriotic symbols, like a cross, a star of David, or a flag, for instance, have meaning beyond their physical properties that vary depending on your experience.

Though the growing children eventually put their stuffed animals away, these animals “teach” the children symbolic meaning.

What remains, for the rest of our lives, is the capacity to experience a kind of psychological space that is simultaneously internal and external, real and not real, me and not me–a transitional space.  In that space, once occupied by beloved transitional objects, people continue to assign personal, powerful meaning to objects from the outer world and to mold and shape these objects to give tangible shape to dreams, ideas and fantasies.  [I]n play, not unlike artists, we express real feelings by using ideas or objects that are symbols of real objects.

Based on Winnicott’s account of transitional objects, Lynn concludes that “we play in the service of a dream.” (80)

It doesn’t take much imagination to see religious and governmental rituals as extensions of the creative play of childhood. The objects of a ritual can be seen as a “transitional objects” that bridge the gap between often times disturbing real-life experiences and one’s hopes and fantasies.

I’m not claiming that all religious believers engage in rituals because they are in some way “infantile” or as a conscious attempt to extend childhood play into their adult lives; rather, they might be (unconsciously) extending the important benefits of childhood play into their adult lives.

I believe that people are “religious” for numerous reasons, and many “religious” people are not much into rituals.  On the other hand, it would seem as though the creative play of childhood could enable children to engage in religious or civic rituals. Or, at least, the lack of creative play as children might cause adults to struggle to understand religious and civic rituals.

The objects of  adult rituals  might serve to bridge the gap between what actually exists in the world of adults and the things for which  religious adults hope and dream.

I’m not finished with Susan Linn’s book yet.  I’ll be looking to see whether she comments further on this potential adult application of the function of creative play.  I would also be interested in knowing whether adults who get lots of time for creative play as children are more (or less) likely to feel fulfilled when participating in religious and civic rituals.

When Barack Obama opts of out pubic financing for his campaign, the media screams bloody murder.   Why isn’t the corporate media admitting that John McCain has done the same thing?   Arianna Huffington explains:

Cut to Super Tuesday, when McCain had the Republican nomination all but wrapped up. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be bound by that $54 million limit, so his campaign did a 180 and opted back out of the public financing system.

But as David Mason, the Republican-appointed chair of the FEC, has pointed out, you can’t just unilaterally opt out — especially after securing a loan based on having opted in. The response of the McCain campaign is quite simply to ignore Mason. And because the FEC currently lacks a quorum (thanks to stalling tactics by that human roadblock to reform, Mitch McConnell) that’s where things stand, pending a ruling on a lawsuit filed by the DNC.

Yet few in the Swift Boat Media saw fit to point out this glaring contradiction in McCain’s cries about broken commitments made to the American people. Indeed, as Media Matters points out, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the CBS Evening News, NBC’s Nightly News, Fox News’ Special Report, and CNN all dutifully reported McCain’s “Big deal” claim without mentioning McCain’s campaign finance chicanery.

This was the third year I attended the National Conference for Media Reform sponsored by Free Press. This year’s conference was held in Minneapolis. As in previous media reform conferences, I was reminded about many of the hurdles faced by those American citizens who are attempting to get serious and coherent coverage of the news. By “news,” I mean the type of information that is critically important in order to prepare us to make good decisions as citizens (i.e., voting). One of the most distressing things one learns from attending the conference is that very little news is available to those watch local TV “news” and read their local “news”papers.

One of the fundamental principles of Free Press is that there cannot be a healthy democracy without a vigorous news media. The problem is that our news media is sickly, poisoned by rampant commercialism. The modern corporate media is over-consolidated to such an extent that it reflexively kowtows to political power and repeatedly refuses to challenge abuses of that power.

McChesney/Nichols - Part I

Topics covered in Part I:

• Is the media reform movement paying too much attention to Bill O’Reilly and FOX?
• The basic aims of the media reform movement.
• More on Free Press and the reason for the media reform movement.
• The problem with over-consolidation of the media.
  

Free Press stands for the proposition that there is no stark divide between journalists and citizens. Rather, there are also citizen-journalists, those of us who take media issues seriously and want to contribute important information as well as being consumers of information. This outlook dovetails nicely with the basic premise of Web 2.0. Free Press offers bloggers like me the opportunity to register at the convention as “Press.” I took advantage of that option this year (as I did last year). This allowed me several opportunities to attend sessions specifically geared to “The Press.”

This year, one of those special sessions consisted of a presentation of many of the concerns and principles of the media reform movement by two of the primary founders of the movement, Robert McChesney and John Nichols of Free Press.  Robert McChesney, a professor of Communications at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana, is widely regarded as one of the foremost media historians in the United States. Author John Nichols is a founding board member of Free Press.

I brought a cheap camcorder and a tripod to that session and I recorded the entire interview. I have now finished editing the session by summarizing the questions with title screens and breaking the session into four 10-minute segments (YouTube limits video submissions to 10 minutes or fewer).

McChesney/Nichols - Part II

Topics covered in Part II:

• Citizens versus consumers.
• Concerns regarding pharmaceutical advertising.
• Media reform and campaign finance reform.
• The kind of political candidates Big Media takes seriously.

The first half of this presentation by McChesney and Nichols occurred in a conference room; the session then spilled out into the convention center hallway for more questions. I needed to set up in a hurry for this impromptu session on the hallway. You can see that the video is not always of the highest quality (I struggled to get a clear straight line position to McChesney and Nichols), although the audio is fine and Nichols and McChesney were happy to take numerous additional questions out in the hall.

McChesney/Nichols - Part III

• Who attends media reform conferences?
• The anticipated role of big media according to the media reform movement
• The closing of foreign news bureaus.
• Candidates and media reform.
• Media and wars

This informal presentation of important media issues will be especially accessible to anyone who is new to the media reform movement. As you can see from these videos, McChesney and Nichols speak in plain yet thoughtful language (they are also terrific writers, co-authoring several recent books on the media reform movement, such as The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas.

If you’d like to get a good intuitive grasp of the media reform movement, I would recommend that you watch all four of the these segments (this will take approximately 40 minutes). For those who wish to zero in on particular issues, I have indicated the topics addressed by each of the four segments.

McChesney/Nichols - Part IV

• The lack of media coverage regarding the National Conference for Media Reform.
• The lack of media coverage regarding media reform in general.
• The need for public broadcasting networks.
• The desperate need for noncommercial programming for children.

If you find that these issues ignite your interest in the media reform movement, you can learn much more about each of these issues by visiting Free Press or visiting any of the other media reform websites listed on the homepage of Dangerous Intersection. You’ll also find numerous posts about media reform a dangerous intersection under the category “media.”

Many of the videotaped presentations from the 2008 conference are available at Free Press. Insightful articles have resulted from the 2008 conference.

I have already posted on several of the other sessions from the 2008 conference. One of those sessions concerns Phil Donahue’s new movie, “Body of War.” Another post concerns another superb documentary regarding media and the war, “War Made Easy” (this post includes an extended interview with the co-director of “war made easy,” Loretta Alper. Last but not least, the topic of the rampant commercialization of children’s programming is addressed in this post, which includes a two-part interview with Josh Golin of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

The topics addressed at the 2007 conference also remain relevant. I’ve filed about a dozen posts on the 2007 conference. Each of these DI posts is listed and described in this single DI post.

If, after watching these four videos by Bob McChesney and John Nichols, you feel distressed by what has been going on regarding Big Media, this is your opportunity to know that you are not alone and that we can truly change the entire media industry, acting together. The problem with Big Media has gotten so out of control that interest in media reform has become bi-partisan, as John Nichols comments in Part I.

Reforming the media is not a pipe dream. It is becoming more of a reality with every passing month because of the concern and oftentimes modest contributions of people like you. In fact, the theme for the 2008 conference was “Media Reform Begins with Me.” That applies to you and me and everyone else we know.

It is often observed that girls do not perform as well as boys in mathematics. This difference is often overstated and it’s cause is often highly debated.  Many people have suggested that the basis for this difference is essentially biological.

It is now well established that a society’s attitude toward gender will significantly affect the performance of its girls in mathematics.  That was the result of a study described in the May 30, 2008 edition of Science (available only to subscribers online) in an article called “Culture, Gender and Math.”  That study attempted to analyze the cause of the “gender gap” (the difference between the scores of boys and girls) in mathematics.  The conclusion of this comprehensive study is that “Social conditioning and gender biased environments can have a very large effect on test performance.”

The study examined cultural attitudes regarding women in various countries and compared them to math achievements of girls in those same countries.  It found that the gender gap in math tends to disappear in more gender-equal societies.

The authors of the study commented that the math gender gap has been narrowing over time in the United States.

These conclusions dovetail well with the concerns raised by Mary Pipher, in her book, Reviving Ophelia.

What happens when the executive branch is allowed to operate in secrecy and without constraint? This was answered in 1976, by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church:

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty. Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which ‘keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

The three main departures in the intelligence field from the constitutional plan for controlling abuse of power have been: (a) Excessive Executive Power.

In a sense the growth of domestic intelligence activities mirrored the growth of presidential power generally. But more than any other activity, more even than exercise of the war power, intelligence activities have been left to the control of the Executive.

For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency.

Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such Executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.

(b) Excessive Secrecy.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. Obviously, public disclosure, of matters such as the names of intelligence agents or the technological details of collection methods is inappropriate. But in the field of intelligence, secrecy has been extended to inhibit review of the basic programs and practices themselves.

Those within the Executive branch and the Congress who would exercise their responsibilities wisely must be fully informed. The American public, as well, should know enough about intelligence activities to be able to apply its good sense to the underlying issues of policy and morality.

Knowledge is the key to control. Secrecy should no longer be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from the American people themselves.

(c) Avoidance of the Rule of Law.

Lawlessness by Government breeds corrosive cynicism among the people and erodes the trust upon which government depends.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

As you can see, the Committee pointed its finger at the government, the public and the press.  Attitudes needed to be changed all around.

This is yet another parallel between modern times and the the Vietnam War era (I realize that that war had ceased by 1976).  Many other parallels were detailed by the movie “War Made Easy.”

The above passage is analyzed in more detail at Common Dreams.

With the high price of gasoline, more people are now riding trains then ever before.  I hadn’t before seen any fuel efficiency numbers for Amtrack, but here are some from the NYT:

Oil costs hurt Amtrak, too. Fuel is projected to reach 11 percent of Amtrak’s budget this year, up from 6 percent in 2004. The railroad is not radically more energy-efficient than other means of travel. Amtrak can move a passenger a mile with 17.4 percent less fuel than a passenger car can, and about 32.9 percent less than an airline can, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear yet another Republican claiming that the “surge” is working in Iraq. And see here and here.

If the surge is really working, let’s see daily videotape showing Western reporters strolling freely through Baghdad’s neighborhoods, outside of the Green Zone, chatting with Iraqis.   Better yet, let’s celebrate the “surge” by having a parade in downtown Baghdad. Perhaps George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and John McCain can lead the parade.  Let’s count the number of McDonald’s in Iraq.  Let’s consider the number of Westerners going to Iraq for vacations.  Consider, also, that strong-arming the Iraqi government to build 58 permanent military bases in Iraq. That’s our long term “solution.”  Isn’t that like saying domestic violence is a “solution” in an abusive relationship?

More important, let’s count the number of Iraqis who have been permanently displaced.  If the surge is working, why are so many Iraqis still living in places like Syria?  Consider this report from DemocracyNow:

Refugees International estimates that up to five million Iraqis have been displaced since 2003. That’s one-in-five Iraqis who have had to flee their homes since the US-led invasion of their country. Two-and-a-half million Iraqis have been internally displaced, and an equal number have managed to leave the country to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf States and, most of all, Syria, which hosts 1.5 million Iraqis.

Consider, too, how the “surge” is working. You won’t see this in the American corporate press.  You’ll hear a host of lies, including lies from the mouth of John McCain.

American citizens are now being conned about the “surge” just like they were conned about WMD.  Here’s the truth about the “surge.”  If we dared to freely publish photos from Iraq for only one week, that “war” would be over and the American soldiers would be on their way home.

In 1964, Rudolph Dreikurs wrote a child psychology book that is still considered a classic by child psychologist: Children: the Challenge. Dreikurs argued that using punishments to change behavior is inefficient.

No amount of punishment will bring about lasting submission. Confused and bewildered parents mistakenly hope that punishment will eventually bring results, without realizing that