Preparing for missile attack

New round of insanity. Preparing for missile attack by blowing our infrastructure money: The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday backed construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, rejecting Pentagon arguments that the facility is unnecessary and Democratic complaints that the nearly $5 billion project amounts to wasteful spending in a time of tight budgets. Won't they soon say that they need a West Coast Plan too, and a Southern Plan? The military-industrial complex will never have enough.

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Time to break up the mass media

At Reader Supported News, Carl Gibson makes a good case for breaking up the six big enterprises that constitute most of our media:

The reason the bulk of the most important information won't ever reach the exact people the Occupy movement is reaching out to is because 90% of all media Americans consume is owned by six corporations. To put that in perspective, 232 executives at GE, NewsCorp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS are deciding what 277 million Americans will watch, read and listen to every day. That's one media executive for every 850,000 subscribers. There's an easy fix that doesn't involve new legislation or Constitutional amendments: make the government do its job. Since 1995, the FCC forbade any company from owning more than 40 stations. Currently, Clear Channel owns 1,200 radio stations. We have antitrust laws already in place that broke up colossal monopolies like the kind Standard Oil had in its heyday. Why should big media monopolies be exempt from those laws?

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Fighting singers

Who wants to see a bunch of good singers performing? Not so many hands. Who wants to see a bunch of good singers competing, with the losers sent home and the winner crowned as champion? I see lots of hands, and you people might be big fans of a TV show called The Voice, which just completed it's finale for this season. A man named Jermaine Paul was the overall winner, and everyone else from a huge field of singers, was not the winner. The stage from one of the earlier shows says it all. The singers were competing against each other in a boxing ring. They are hitting each other with notes. This is the art of war. The image at the right was from one of the early shows this year. I saw a few of the shows, and my family kept me posted about the shows I missed. Although this post is about singing, it could have been about most anything in America. We are a country that insists that we rank things from bad to good and that we need to have a best, a winner. To have a winner, we'll need some dejected competitors, some sad tears. [caption id="attachment_22546" align="alignleft" width="218" caption="Image from The Voice"][/caption] I thought of The Voice two weeks ago, when I attended a poetry reading by 50 seventh graders chosen by their schools to present their work. No, they didn't compete against each other at the reading. They merely stood up (many of them nervously) and read their work. We in the audience applauded them all because they were all admirable. To keep most people interested in anything, however, you need a good overall story. World class art hanging in a museum doesn't get loud applause. It turns out that conflict provides its own story. All you need is two people struggling over something, even something stupid, and you've diverted attention toward the struggle from every angle, like laser beams. While at work today, I glanced at the TV in the lunch room--it's always on and it forces me to see what corporate garbage (not always, but often enough) is pouring out. I glanced at the tube in time to see the beginning of the Wolf Blitzer "news" show called "The Situation Room." The opening graphics appeared to a series of images from around the world viewed through a gun site from a fighter jet. I suppose this isn't too surprising, given that the show airs in a country that is always at war, and would lose any sense of identity were it not at war. Our national anthem fits us well. Just keep giving us enemies or else we'll create them. If we weren't currently obsessed about the Middle East, we'd be demonizing China (actually we already are demonizing and provoking China). Would a TV show that simply featured excellent singers singing get good ratings? Not likely, but this is true even if the performances were much the same as one would see on The Voice. That is my assumption, and I based it on the powerful and highly addictive effect of gratuitous conflict, of conflict pornography.

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U.S. media ho-hum when U.S. drones kill five more kids from Afghanistan

U.S. drones kill five more kids in Afghanistan. The mainstream media keeps wondering why anyone would want to kill a U.S. soldier. Glenn Greenwald points out that these mental blockages tell us a whole lot about our warped view of the world:

To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
Today it was announced that authorities had foiled a plot to blow up an airplane. It was clearly stated that the plot never got off the ground, because the "attacker" was an informer working for the U.S. What dominated the news today? You guessed it. I'll quote Glenn Greenwald once more:
Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).

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Our conflicted selves

At Edge.org, Neuroscientist David Eagleman points out some of the many ways human animals are conflicted. According to Eagleman, "The elegance of the brain lies in its inelegance." This conflictedness is one of the main ways that the brain is not like a desktop computer, which is programmed to follow the code given to it, without internal conflict. Computers don't struggle over whether to eat cake:

The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem. As a result, we can get mad at ourselves, argue with ourselves, curse at ourselves and contract with ourselves. We can feel conflicted. These sorts of neural battles lie behind marital infidelity, relapses into addiction, cheating on diets, breaking of New Year's resolutions—all situations in which some parts of a person want one thing and other parts another.
Eagleman then takes a look under the hood. Memory, for instance, comes in two flavors. Most everyday memories are consolidated by the hippocampus. Emotion-laden memory, though, is stored "along an independent, secondary memory track" that have a unique quality to them; the amygdala is in charge of those. These two types of memory are so different that Eagleman declares that "unity of memory is an illusion." There are also two versions of decision-making.
[S]ome are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there's no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum.
This division of decision-making into two basic types comports with Daniel Kahneman's bifurcation in his most recent book, Thinking: Fast and Slow. What other conflicts are there in the brain? Eagleman notes that even "basic sensory functions" like the detection of motion are determined in the brain by "neural democracy," thanks to the existence of several distinct neural mechanisms. The two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, compete. We know this from the famous split brain experiments. There are other internal conflicts I could add. We are all subject to massive conflicts of interest. Who wins when we are conflicted? Me or society? Present me or future me? My appetite or my intellect? The part of me that wants to take chances or the me that prefers to stay the course? Somehow, despite all of our inner conflicts many of us get along well enough . . . Note: Eagleman's short article was his response to the 2012 Annual Question of Edge.org: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

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