Celebration of Ignorance 

Death of Truth, The War on Smart

 

Carl Sagan was smart. Very smart.

 

Carl Sagan Was born in Brooklyn New York in 1939 and died in 1996 in Seattle, on my birthday. Not that this date is relevant. He was an American scientist and astronomer who spent a lot of time thinking about science and explaining science to ordinary folks and simpletons, like me. He did not shy away from controversy.

 

He attended the University of Chicago where he earned  bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy and astrophysics. He became a Professor at the University of California Berkely and later  Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

 

But he became for his work popularizing science and making it accessible to ordinary people. His most famous work was with his wife Ann Druyan, called Cosmos. I actually never saw the original series but saw the later update, also called Cosmos by Neil de Grasse Tyson, another famous scientist turned popularizer.  Both men tried hard to educate the public about science and the importance of science.

 

It used to be that the United States was respected around the world for the greatness of its great universities.  Sadly, in the last year that great reputation has started to decline largely because of the work of the current president of the United States and his gang of merry Trumpsters. That is a huge shame and the longer that degradation continues, the worse it will be for not just the United States but the world. Together they have led a concerted attack on smart.

 

Sagan knew the dangers of ignorance.  Most of us are not so clear on that. In the last few years, led by the right-wing in America, appreciation of knowledge has been seriously eroding. This is what he said:

 

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

 

 

Carl Sagan was so smart he thought this might happen. Most of us thought it was inconceivable. We were wrong. dead wrong.  This is what Sagan said,

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

That is the part that really concerns me.  Americans, led by their president have celebrating how ignorant they are. That is truly shocking. And disturbing. This could, as Sagan said, “blow up in our faces.”

 

Sagan called his book from which these quotes are taken, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  We have to remember exactly that. without science and knowledge we truly are in the dark. That is nothing to celebrate.

 

More Mass Shootings in America

guns

 

We have all heard about the tragic recent death of 2 young students at a Minneapolis school. This was the 31st mass shooting in America in the month of August. It was also the 280th mass shooting event in America this year. That is more than 1 mass shooting every day so far this year.

 

Other countries have had mass shootings and quickly acted to control guns and take other measures to control the shootings. Those actions were successful. Australia was one of those countries.

 

But the United States does nothing significant. They offer thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims and those have not helped.

 

Can the richest country in the world not do better? Mass shootings there generate a lot of weeping, but no real action.

 

Do Americans like it that way?

It is just hard to fathom how many mass shootings happen in the United States and yet they do nothing to stop them.

 

 

If it’s not famine, what is it?

Trump, War Between Israel and Hamas

 

A lot of people have been talking about “famine” in Gaza.  The Israelis and their champions, the United States vigorously deny this. Though it is worth noting that Donald Trump talked about people there starving.

The BBC described what Trump said this way:

“There is “real starvation” in Gaza, Donald Trump has said, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted there was no such thing.

 

Asked if he agreed with Netanyahu that it was a “bold-faced lie” to say Israel was fuelling hunger in Gaza, the US president replied: “I don’t know… those children look very hungry… that’s real starvation stuff.”

Speaking during a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, Trump said: “Nobody’s done anything great over there. The whole place is a mess… I told Israel maybe they have to do it a different way.”

I agree with Trump. No one has done anything great there, but Israel controls it. Isreal is therefore responsible for what happens there. And starvation is happening there.

 

The group of experts called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, had said half a million people in Gaza were known to be experiencing famine and the numbers could be higher because they did not have enough information from some parts of Gaza where Israel was not allowing information out and was not allowing international press in.

David Miliband, President, International Rescue Committee did not share the view of the US and Israel that it was outrageous to say famine was occurring in Gaza. He was asked if the IPC who came up with the clear statement was a trustworthy organization to comment on the issues. Miliband said,

“Well, today is a horrible milestone marking a true moral and political scandal, because the IPC are a technical, technocratic, small-C conservative body that are very careful in determining the question of famine.

They have only declared three other famines in the whole of the 21st century, and they have to pass three very tough tests just to pick up the third test. Two deaths per 10,000 people per day in Gaza means that 400 people a day are dying of starvation in Gaza.

And they do this work on the ground with reputable sources, with their own people, making sure that they are not taken away by rhetoric, but focus on the facts on the ground. The fact that they should have declared this famine, this is what they call a manmade disaster of the famine in Gaza, carries extra significance because of the credibility and seriousness of which they do their work.”

 And conditions in Gaza continue to get worse. Miliband said the deterioration in Gaza was the direct result of

“the tourniquet that has been applied to aid flows. The blockage on aid flows that was announced by Prime Minister Netanyahu in the middle of March has had its effect. And in the previous reports of the IPC, they pointed to “some of the dangers. Of course, the war is ongoing, so that adds to the problem.”

 

That tourniquet was of course the blockade of all aid established by the Israel Defense Forces.  That blockade was actually worse than most people realized. As he explained, even those families that had received aid of beans often could not cook those beans because they did not have cooking oil. Displacement of people from their homes also made things worse. In fact, the vast majority of people in Gaza are displaced from their homes. He also said IPC reports are usually a “lagging indicator, not a leading indicator,” so things were likely far worse than we realized.

 

Israel has claimed that its policies are to stop famine.  Miliband did not accept this interpretation. He said when Israel stopped interfering the policies of preventing famine by his organization and others worked. Israel was the problem he made clear. As he said, “And so the policy of the Israeli government is very clear. It’s to restrict aid. And that has its consequence that you’re seeing today.”

 

Miliband said five tons of food were “stuck on the wrong side of the border.”  And that border is controlled by Israel not Hamas. And, of course, Israel is the only authority in the region that is capable of allowing aid in or stopping it from coming in. No one else could be stopping it.

 

We must also not forget that around 1,200 people from Gaza have been killed in the vicinity of the food distribution points controlled again, by Israel. In other words, they have been killed trying to get food. Often shot by Israeli forces. The humanitarian groups are not allowed by Israel to do their job and the result is the people of Gaza are starving while food rots at the Israel controlled border. Whether  you call it “famine” or not, this is a moral catastrophe. And it is fully supported by the United States!

 

A friend of mine told me today he was actively joining protests in the US because, if his grandchildren asked him someday what he did to stop the famine, he did not want to say “nothing.”  Some might say that is doing nothing, but at least we must denounce what is going on.

 

 

Is Gaza in the midst of famine?

Genocide, War Between Israel and Hamas

 

I don’t know what the technical definition of famine is. I am not sure it is very important.  To me at least. What I do know is that what is happening in Gaza is horrible. No matter what Israel or its shield, the United States, says, what is happening in Gaza is horrible and to permit it to continue is incomprehensible. No civilized society should permit it to continue. To continue to support Israel in implementing what is going on is unconscionable or a civilized society.

 

Of course, both Israel and its main supporter claim it is not famine and is caused by Hamas and not them. They were both outraged at those who said otherwise. But Hamas is all but destroyed. It has always been a pipsqueak compared to Israel, but after nearly 2 years of war it is much less than that. It is completely helpless in the face of the Israeli assault. This can no longer be blamed on Hamas with any credibility. It is no longer a threat and it has been punished enough. There is no point to any more death.

 

For the first time, since the war in Gaza which started nearly 2 years ago the international organization that monitors and categorizes hunger crises around the world has declared that parts of Gaza are in famine.

 

As Nick Schifrin, a highly respected reporter for the Public Broadcasting Corporation in the United States said, “The experts group is called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. And it’s concluded that, after 22 months of war, the half-a-million people living around Gaza City face famine.” Think about that for a moment. In Gaza 500,000 people are in the midst of famine while nearby is food brought by humanitarian organizations that Israel refuses to allow into the country! Israel would rather let the people including men, women, and children,  all starve than allow food to come in to the country. This is a moral outrage created by people who receive billions in aid from the United States.  This is a disgrace that will haunt Israel and its unwavering ally, the United States, forever.

 

As Amna Nawaz, PBS News Hour host said,

 

“The U.N.-backed group of international experts said today that half-a-million people in Gaza, one-quarter of the population, are facing — quote — “catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution and death.” And they warned that famine would spread within weeks without a cease-fire and a massive infusion of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

 

In other words, unless aid is allowed in things will get even worse.

 

Tom Fletcher the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator and United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs said this:

 

“It is a famine; the Gaza famine. It is a famine that we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel. It is a famine within a few hundred meters of food.”

 

In fact, all members of the United Nations Security Council, except the United States said that Gaza was experiencing famine.

 

Does it really matter whether this is technically a famine or not? Does it matter whether this is a war crime or not?

 

What matter is that this must stop. Now.

The Big Lie: One of the Tactics of Brain-washing

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism, Trust and Distrust

 

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad,  found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing  that could result in profound changes in people.

 

One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  This is what the history scholar, now in Canada, Timothy Snyder, called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler told such lies. So did Donald Trump. The bigger the lie the better it worked.

 

Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never provided evidence to support that claim. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough.  And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.

 

Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology  pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if it is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed

 

Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people  nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:

 

NPR

Sunday Show,

Daily Show,

CNN,

MSNBC,

No News,

Fox News

 

You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all!

 

I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.

 Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent research on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far- fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to the version of Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or panel of advisors.

 

I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience,  is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. For what it’s worth that is my opinion

 

 

Addicted to Anger

Extremism, Hate, Right-wing Extremism

 

Jen Senko said her father “seemed to be addicted to these strong emotions. It seemed as if he just couldn’t wait to shut himself off and  listen to Rush Limbaugh for 3 hours and get all pissed off.”  Anger was his drug, as it is to so much of the American right. It is an irrational but intoxicating anger off of which they get high. And the adherents, like Senko’s father, Frank Senko, were truly addicted to the anger. Addicted to fury.  Sometime are not happy unless they are angry.

As John Montgomery a professor of Psychology at SUNY said,

“If you watch something that makes you very angry, you can get addicted to that because as you get angry that drives stress response, and endorphin is the main pleasure chemical in the brain. The tricky thing is its mostly unconscious. People get tricked like in the case of your (Jen Senko’s) father.”

 

So Senko was onto something here. The addiction is real. Senko understood that the media has a profound effect on us, particularly of course, those who watch it a lot because they are addicted to it. Like her father, Frank.

 

Senko was interested in studying whether or not there are specific techniques right-wing media uses to get people to change their belief systems as her father had done. How did they do it?

 

In his case he was turned “against the very core” of who he was. He was turned so much that he voted against his own interest. This is a phenomenon that others have notice noticed. Like the Appalachian White American I read about  who was in the hospital and so sick he was going to die because he could not afford the treatment just because he didn’t want African Americans to get the benefits! He didn’t want free medical care if it meant African Americans would get it too. He was willing to die instead.

 

 

Brainwashing or Hyperbole?

 

In the film the Brain-washing of My Dad, when Jen Senko saw how her father turned from a kind and gentle bleeding-heart liberal into a vicious hateful conservative, she wanted to see how that could happen. Was this actually brain-washing? Wasn’t brainwashing what Communist governments did to their prisoners of war by bombarding them with images, lights, and sounds on a 24-hour basis?

 

Senko knew how her father and many others were swept up in a general movement to the right that was supported by new right-wing media. Would this amount to brain-washing? Or is that hyperbole?

 

As a result, she consulted with an expert on brain-washing Kathleen Taylor a neuroscientist from Oxford University in London. She has written a book on modern brain-washing. Taylor pointed out to Senko in her interview how there are two ways of looking at brain-washing. One of them was the traditional way that people were subjected to

 

“this forced psychological torture where people are put into situation where they are put through horrors and brow-beaten into believing or pretending to believe something new. That is brain-washing by force…Then there is brain-washing by stealth which is where they are not forced to believe stuff but all of the information that comes at them is pushing a line. So there is no alternative in terms of information. If you control the information that goes into a brain, you control to a great extent  what that brain will do and what that brain will believe.  You are not forcing them to believe anything, but you are making it difficult for them to think anything else because their horizons are narrowed.”

 

Reminding me of the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant,  George Lakoff told her, “You can only understand what the neuro-circuits of your brain allow you to understand. Any fact that does not fit that will be ignored or rejected…They don’t know their brains are being changed.”

 

Taylor added, “The information is familiar; you don’t have to think about it. If those beliefs are very passionately held, you may find that any belief that threatens these is rejected out of hand.’

Dr. Taylor said there are 5 factors in this kind of belief change:

 

  1. Isolation
  2. Control
  3. Uncertainty
  4. Control
  5. strong emotions

 

That is the matrix for effective brain-washing technique. If these are present, brain-washing works! How does that apply to right-wing media such as Fox News? That’s for my next post.

 

The War on Christmas

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism

 

Fox News had millions of devotees. Many of them were not just fans, they were zealots for Fox. In her effort to understand her father whom she had felt had been brain-washed, Jen Senko interviewed a bunch of them in her film. And the interviews were telling.

 

One young man Matthew Saccaro author of I was a Teenage Fox Robot. He had been a fan of CNN until his grandfather turned him on to Fox. His grandfather explained to him that CNN and CNBC were just liberal propaganda.  He saw Bill O’Reilly as the champion on the rights for little people. Now he considers that “totally ridiculous.” According to Saccaro O’Reilly taught him that the  American Civil Liberties Association, (the “ACLU”) was a terrorist organization that was trying to take away all their rights. If you think this is an exaggeration, consider this headline to one of O’Reilly’s stories: “The ACLU aiding Al Qaeda. This is an amazing story that you most likely won’t see anywhere else.’ Well of course you won’t see it anywhere else because most media outlets have journalistic standards, and don’t just offer far-fetched right-wing propaganda uncritically. It was like saying the January 6th riot at the capital was just a bunch of tourists.

 

Saccaro now knows this was “as big a lie as you can get,” but at the time he was convinced that finally there was someone on TV who “gets it.” He also thought “if we can’t say merry Christmas we are as bad as the terrorists.” Now Saccaro says, “this is the insane kind of bullshit that Fox News gets people to believe.”

 

Fox had another ratings ploy that garnered a lot of attention. This was the alleged “War on Christmas” by the Left-wing in America. Roger Ailes told his people, “Let me think. 90% of people love Christmas. So CBS, CNN, and MSNBC can take the other 10% and we’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ and make all the money.” Of course, the so-called “war on Christmas” was pretty tame stuff, typically hyped and exaggerated by Fox in order to enrage their own viewers. And it worked. Americans on the right loved it. That is a common tactic on Fox. Get the viewers enraged.

Steve from Paris found his father acting in similar ways after he got hooked on Rush Limbaugh. He said, “It doesn’t make any difference how many facts you put out there, it’s all about the emotions of anger, hate and fear.” Those are the emotions that get one’s attention engaged. The more engagement, the more revenue for right-wing media. Hate sells.

 

One interviewee named Chuck explained how he had dated a nice loveable woman. He called her a “sweet lady,” but after they broke up, she started watching Fox News around 2004 during the presidential election and got a steady diet of right-wing propaganda. In his view it was propaganda. And then

 

“that sweet loveable likeable person was gone and was replaced by Fox and corrupted by Fox into this intolerant willfully ignorant compassionless individual. I tried to steer her away from Fox to anything else but Fox and she got sucked into that fox hole and now that sweet little person I once knew is gone. And I miss my friend and wish she would come back.”

 

As Bill Reilly said, “He was not going to say Happy Holiday. He would say Merry Christmas to everyone even if they were standing by a synagogue.” Those wicked liberals were not going to steal Christmas from him and his family.

 

Merry Christmas.