Fantasy Outrage

With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.

-Tom O'Bedlam-


America's already tenuous grasp on reality is constantly being tested and we are constantly failing that test while moving ever closer to hysterical fugue.  Hark, hark, the Trump does bark and the outrage peddlers have driven us mad

Modern awareness contains a galaxy of causes: some real, some imaginary and most are struggling for attention over all the others by ginning up outrage and pulling us into one dark circus tent or another.  Reality makes us fear, but the game is in fantasy outrage and a thousand pipers whistle their tune for us all to follow -- and so we do.

The NRA is a very skilled user of outrage, having convinced millions of people that the major objective of ever politician who doesn't march to their piper is a demon out to get your guns.  They have little to do with having created America's traditional love affair with weapons, but they have made firearms into a fetish, a flag, a symbol of all our dreams of liberty.  Some simply can't conceive of being a free country without unlimited access to firearms.  It's a religion of sorts and nothing fires up the imbecile like threatening his religion. It works.

What politician doesn't wish he could enlist the outrage of the masses to make himself  the hero, the Hercules, the Sampson, the Gilgamesh who can lead us to vote for him and protect us from every enemy his imagination can conceive of?

Enter Donald Trump, or adventavit Asinus if you prefer.  Obama is going to grab your guns he says - the same thing his party's bilge rats have been squeaking since he first ran for office. Some of us watch aghast as he says  things designed to attract the confused and angry and focus their power with his daily outrages.  In fact he can predict things that never happen, he can demonstrate total ignorance of things that are all important for an American president but none of it matters to those all in a perpetual rage against all those who seek to grab their guns.  It doesn't matter that no one has yet tried, just as it doesn't matter than prophets have warned us of impending apocalypse since the dawn of politics. Every tomorrow is the end of days and any Democrat is the end of your guns and you can certainly fool enough of those good folks all the time.  It doesn't matter than there was no secret hidden in Obama's birth certificate or that any of his claims to secrets have come to nothing.  It's all about the guns. No one ever went broke predicting the Gungrabber Apocalypse.

So are you surprised that that immigrant-bashing grandson son of immigrants is warning us of an imminent executive order by the Devil Obama to grab your guns?  Illegal, can't be done, won't be done, but it's not about reality and never was.  No politician has a good chance of winning anything if he's seen as a gungrabber and any accusation is as good as a death sentence to anyone challenging the Dark Knight, the NRA..

I wonder if Hillary has grown so arrogant as to ignore this, with suggestions of Federal buybacks, the kind of program that's been a waste of time up until now, or a promise to "go after" manufacturers whose legal products are used illegally - something she should know has no legal grounds.

But of course there's that outrage addiction on the other side too and perhaps she thinks she will be seen as a savior for the real phobics and magic thinkers who somehow claim they're liberals and aren't interested in compromise or in restricting legislation to the possible and rational.

So does this last gungrabber plot prediction suggest Trump is running out of  fake outrages and is now at the bottom of the barrell?  Could be, but do we want to bet on it?  Are you feeling lucky?

Of Cops and Kindergarteners

There's a reason we will never have that "discussion" about gun control and other hot topics in America: we're not allowed to.  There are so many entities whose job it is to grab out attention, to sell us on their products, to agitate us into fear and outrage and to enlist our support -- and in that pursuit of power,  truth, fact and objectivity are impediments. Any thoughts, proposals, arguments or  even unadorned facts are going to be drowned out or ignored. Swallow or be swept aside and damned.

Indeed it's often possible that someone who sees a bigger picture might be beyond the reach of the captious arguments and emotional smokescreens that typify American politics.  And of course everything in America is politics -- even the weather. Hardly anyone here is trained or experienced in noticing bad or weak or deceptive arguments.  We see numbers we like and we accept them and we like them only because they flatter our principles -- by which we mean our prejudices.  So what if you, as I did, got this in your in-box?

If you're a "Eeeew guns, get them away, get them away" person, there's little doubt that you'll see a stone tablet given us by Moses calling for immediate elimination of a threat. If  you're an NRA paranoid zonbie, you'll look for a way to debunk it or simply deny it in a frenzy of denunciation and because there are so many disparate and unrelated "gun cultures" there will be as many rationalizations, affirmations and denials as there are "gun cultures" and anti-gun cultures.  So what does the rational man do with yet another outrage bomb?

Perhaps if you've been taking your vitamin Cynic pills, you'll wonder whether those figures, if they are true, apply to more than one year, whether there's a trend, upward or downward or whether an unusual period is being used deceptively to look like a rule.  Can one really look at 2013 and say "each year" without blushing?

 Well a somewhat cursory look at the CDC figures shows that the numbers for age 4 and under  shootings, they've at least been in the same area since 2010 and although we don't yet have a number for this year, let's, for now assume they're true even if it's obvious that the purpose of the NY Times article was to scare you and enlist your support for as yet unspecified measures.  Snopes, one of my go-to sources when someone hands me an emotional argument seems to think the numbers are good enough for the purposes of argument, but points out what most of us won't pay attention to: These are absolute numbers not relative numbers.  Yes, it's not more dangerous to be 4 than to be a cop. There are more than 23 million kids 5 and under.  There are about 760,000 full time sworn officers.

So Mr. Rational will likely say "that's too many shootings" but might just be a little less friendly toward an article trying to make it seem worse, which is how I feel about virtually all I'm subjected to when it comes to many matters of safety and sociology. It's more dangerous to be a cop than a kid. Why would an honest person make the reverse seem true? Does a good cause sanctify a bad argument? Why do you need to do the Twist if the facts are on your side?  Why are you mumbling about unspecified gun controls when someone needs to start teaching people not to leave guns around - loaded or otherwise and do it today!. Now ask yourself who is actually attempting that and who isn't even though they all claim to be all about safety?

I got a "survey" from MoveOn.org with a predictable rant about the NRA and steering me toward the desired answer "Yes I'm a gun owner and I support gun control"  The other possibilities would suggest that I was a lunatic or a monster or worse.  Although I am and I do, I'm not replying since there's no possibility of asking "what do you mean by gun control and how would it be enforced?"   Surveys such as this one, and they're used by opposing sides with much success, allow the big players to claim support they don't actually have.  How many claims to have the majority on some side are based on false-choice questions, false dilemmas and vague language?  Many, I suspect.

It's insulting because it presumes I'm unaware that there is a whole mountain of existing gun law, that I'm in such a state of panic that I'll vote for anything and that all that matters is passing laws and there's no need to look closely at what they say and whether they can be enforced fairly and equally..

No, there's no discussion, no conversation, only a lot of  manipulation and deceit  - and the packaging of selected facts and shady arguments: a lot of dimly lit agendas and lots of statements of broad principle. which liars do I listen to?  I'm left only with the option of  blogging to the four winds or ceasing to give a damn, which is not an option.  You can't be heard over the howling and the hate. You can't hope to inform people whose personalities are anchored to falsehoods because you'll readily be identified as a puppet of the "Liberals" the NRA, the NAACP, the Illuminati, the Zionist conspiracy and the Devil himself.

You have a hard time really knowing whether mass shootings are on the rise or whether there's a pattern for all the groups trying to tailor the data.  More shootings of 4 or more people are family related, but all the energy is being spent proving school shootings are on the rise and have only to do with the ease of buying weapons and the proliferation of them.  Can we ever know what the truth is. Some graphs make mass shootings look sporadic with isolated clusters, others try to make it look like a steady increase.  Like Procrustes' bed, reality gets stretched or trimmed to fit into it.  From all sides we're told to be afraid of the other side: afraid of guns and government and minorities and racists, of Christians and Muslims and Obama and the list is long. Outrage is everywhere and you're only choice is to listen to us!

Outrageous!

It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.

-Daniel Kahneman-

When I stop writing about American culture,  and it will be soon, it will come from being tired of the hot and cold running outrage that passes for discussion and social criticism and news reportage.  No more do we hear rational and dispassionate discussions, everything is outrageous, everything is about how outrageous the actions and inactions of the "enemy" are and there's always an enemy:  the Liberals, the Tea Party, the NRA, the ACLU, the "politically Correct, the Secular Humanist -- there's always an enemy to inspire actions whether or not they're appropriate, effective, moral or legal. Some of the worst outrages never happened yet they inspire wars, riots, lynchings and civil disobedience.

Whether you're Republican or Democrat or Libertarian or Bullmoose or Whig, everything our opponents do is an outrage and it's easier to fabricate the appearance of outrage now than it ever has been.  Outrage -- it's what's on the news.  It's how we manipulate opinion and inspire action and suppress thought.

Modern life is the battle among activists and activist organizations, and it's all about winning, about success and not much about reason.  A girl hears a song in a club that makes her feel uncomfortable?  OUTRAGE!  Something must be done! Don't think, ACT NOW! Someone claims to be the victim of racism?  It's an outrage and will be portrayed as such if it requires fiction and libel and lying.  It's about furthering the cause and the cause is just winning.

Hear a story that supports "our side" and you'll believe it, you'll forward it, you'll write a passionate blog entry and you'll blame it on the bogeyman of reference long before you'll check the facts, analyze the plausibility of your response or of the accusation.  Is that radio station in Alaska a plot to change the weather or sniff out underground things on the other side of the planet? Will you bother to ask the experts on radio or the weather or those in the know about ELF communication with submerged submarines? Do you know the D layer from the Nightime F2?  Have you some data on connections btween them and weather?  Hell no, we just know there's a secret agenda despite what we know about the subject and you'll forward the story to everyone and they will pass it along like a virus.  Give me a bogus outrage upon which to stand and I will move the Earth.  


In his book Contagious, Jonah Berger explains how outrage sells, how it inspires people to share it, pass it along, promote it and use it to sell us beliefs.that have little or no factual support while valid information just sits there like leftovers in your refrigerator.

Want to create an outrage?  First pick a "Goliath" says the American Council on Science and Health.  

"If you examine the most popular activist groups, they all operate according to this formula: they pick an enemy they can depict as the arrogant “Goliath”,  a corporation that cares only about profits, then they find an issue or product simple enough to be understood by the people who read sites like Natural Resources Defense Council or Environmental Working Group (ideally something people eat or use daily, so there is first-hand experience with it) and then they ‘reveal’ an outrageous fact about it."

And "fact" of course hardly has to be one to let us play to the popular fancy - food faddists for instance.  You feed their fear that we're eating poison and you blame the bogeyman.  Alar on apples -- they're trying to kill you! -- "studies show!"  only they actually didn't.  Milk causes phlegm, vaccinations don't work, wheat gives you "grain Brain" and gluten is poison only none of it is true. Nearly anything you'll read in the popular press or see on Dr Oz or in those ads that pop up on line is false. Who bothers to question it when it's too damned much fun to be outraged?

As Daniel Kahneman said of  raising false fears: all you need is something plausible to the non-expert and an anecdote. Very few will ever bother to investigate, calculate odds or learn anything about chemistry, biology, statistics or any kind of science. What we believe is what we want to and that's that.  None of us are immune to the power of outrage and all of us, from brilliant to dull are lazy when it comes to what we believe.  Outrage is addictive.  Outrage is fun and if the outrage monger offers a way to "solve" what may not be a problem we will take it.  We'll make noise in the street, sign petitions, burn neighborhoods, write passionate letters of outrage long before we'll look at valid statistics with a keen eye for deception.

Rile them up, feed the righteous indignation and give them the way to the egress and they will do your bidding, whether it's to libel a candidate, see insignificant things or non existent things as outrageous and you will prevail.

And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the emotional tail wagging the rational dog, tired of the outrage and the percieved need for action being confused with a solution. I weary of the same old truth by assertion and repetition, the outrage of the day and the hortatory calls to be afraid.  In fact I fear the fear mongers and outrage shouters far more than anything they warn us of and prophets always lie, even when the prediction comes true.

Nehil Novus Sub Solis

How many times have I said "here we go again"  in the last year?  I suppose everything else said about this latest school shooting will be as predictable, as overused and as useless.  Here we go again.

Will we hear more statistical gymnastics arguing that rampage shooting is on the increase because of this factor or that factor alone and has nothing to do with the successful promotion of the genre as a way to go out in a blaze of "glory?" Is there something about our society that produces a generation of  existentially challenged young males? Is it really all about a fictional increase in gun ownership or a fictional increase in the deadliness of modern guns and ammunition?   Ask at your own risk, you're either a gun-grabbing Communist or  a crazed gun nut to anyone who disagrees.  Here we go again in hopelessly polarized America, demanding that we "have a conversation" where I shout and you shut up.

Will anyone stop to ask why, if violence is exploding, is it so concentrated in the schools? With everyone shouting and yelling has something gone wrong with American culture? Will anyone ask if there are other factors other than that modern guns look more threatening than equally deadly older guns?  Will we look at handguns in general or press the repeat button and replay the "semi-automatic" recording?  Will we do anything different at all?

Why aren't we asking about the apparent increase in drive-by and gang related shootings in certain areas and the apparent decrease in other areas?  Is it that we don't want answers but only a stage on which to act out our our little dramas?  Children are being shot on the streets in West Palm Beach but peace reigns in my nearby community.  Why?

This is horrible, of course but I have to ask whether the response is more about sloganeering, wishful thinking and hysteria than anything helpful.  Everyone wants answers, or so they say, but I suspect they only want answers that support their prejudices and opinions.  I want more questions. I want that conversation many people pretend they want.  I want someone to ask why the flurry of post office shootings started and then stopped rather than continued along the trend line people were drawing.  I want to know why no one is showing us graphic representations which, from what I see argue that over the last century there are many peaks and many troughs in school shootings.  In no case does any extrapolation prove long lived.  Regression to the mean seems to be the law. Can we talk?  Can we look at the numbers?

I'd like to know why we never seem to get past the "something must be done"  and "something must be done by the Federal Government" and rarely ever propose something that's legal and possible and doesn't rest on the fatuous presumption that laws stop lunatics, that bans make a difference? Can we propose that life in Manhattan has different needs than life in Kodiac Station?   Suggest that crime and violence have multiple and complex etiologies demanding  complex and multiple approaches which may take a long time to work and you're a pariah.  "when do we want it - now!"  Some things never change.

Will this story be hijacked by the "War on Christianity?"   Will we have to endure weeks of self-pitying, neo-Babylonian lamentations?, with tired and vague demands?  Of course. There's nothing new.

We continue and we continue with jibber-jabber about types of ammunition and the devices that hold it, we rattle on about "style" and we continue to frame everything in the most extreme, hyperbolic, inflammatory, fear inspiring and inaccurate  terms.  As with so many emotionally driven and emotionally rationalized themes in America today, no one is interested in working with any one else.  Taxation, public debt, Racism, addiction, disease and vaccination, Secularism versus the Christian State.  Laissez faire Vs regulation -- it's all Hobbes' universal war: me against you, my action committee against yours, it's the struggle for primacy, not for a solution.

" I will not name the shooter,”  

said  Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin and I share his feelings.  We've made folk-anti-heroes of  some deadly and deranged misfits who have problems with schools and students and teachers and can't think of any other way to air their grievances, but to kill themselves and take others with them just like all those sad miscreants around the world who shoot up public places or blow themselves and others up with home-made bombs or fly airplanes into buildings.  Everyone has a straw man to punish - mad bombers, mad shooters, arsonists as well as all those who demand that something be done, but my thing and my way, of course.

Banning booze didn't reduce alcoholism, banning needles and banning drugs made it worse, reducing highway speed limits didn't save lives or slow anyone down nor did the fraudulent "assault weapons" ban have any affect on anything.  I suspect that nothing we'll hear in the coming days about how this or that changes everything will be different.  Ban this, ban that. Take polls with forced choice questions, loaded questions, false dilemmas and  loaded terminology: extrapolate trends and think most magically about gun control.

Showcase This!

Oh great, it's not enough that privacy in America is dead, here's a chance for an even greater level of exposure.  It's called PEEPLE and it allows you to rate and berate people the way you can post ratings of businesses on Yelp.  Of course you have to sign up for the public laughing stock but to my horror it seems someone can do that for you without your knowledge and consent.  If you've looked at Yelp, you may share my opinion that it attracts cranks and trolls and I've read the most outrageously spurious and unfair ratings of places I have first hand knowledge of.  Will these same creeps be rating someone in your family?  If you're on Facebook, ll they need is your cell phone number and judging from the calls I get, everyone knows mine, including Facebook.

How many suicides, how many murders will ensue?  How many mortified teenagers will take dad's gun to school?  How many adults for that matter, will take the notion to hunt down and kill some drooling dirtbag who spends his afternoons posting spurious libel about people he doesn't know. Imagine waking up one morning to find that 4962 posters insist that your mother does Dallas?

And of course as the lawsuits begin to pile up by the millions, won't there be a cry against the assault on "Freedom of speech?"  The founders of this abomination have raised a mountain of cash and apparently are exited that we can all now "showcase your character” online.  Really?  Well here's a good reason to get the hell off Facebook, if that's even possible, to toss the phone overboard and make sure I have plenty of  5.65 X 39 available.

Showcase this!

Liquid Water on Mars - But No Signs of Intelligent Life on Earth

Planetary scientists recently detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Horowitz crater, corroborating their original hypothesis that the dark streaks on Mars are indeed formed by liquid water.

On Monday, NASA announced the results of a new study showing that salty liquid water flows seasonally on Mars, giving the red planet one of the essential ingredients for life.

The study focuses on the mysterious recurring slope lineae, or "RSL" -- narrow, streaky features on the planet's surface spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

The RSL are typically about 15 feet in width or smaller, and appear on slopes during the planet's warm seasons. They fade during cooler seasons, then reappear the following year as the planet gets warmer again.

In the same newspaper, I read about the American conservative movement, for whom facts are subordinate to politics. I read bizarre conspiracy theories about birthers, death panels, undocumented workers, and imaginary voter fraud.  I read revisionist accounts about how GWB kept us safe, or why supply-side economics creates jobs – despite all evidence to the contrary.

I read about Donald Trump ("Mexicans are rapists and criminals"), Ben Carson ("no Muslim is fit to be president"), Carly Fiorina ("babies writhing on a dissecting table"), and Ann Coulter ("How many f*#king Jews ...").  Rampant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny ... the GOP has morphed itself into a HATE GROUP!

Then I read about how Super PAC money distorts representative democracy, and why any Republican who violates party doctrine can expect a primary challenge funded by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers. 

I want to go home to the peace and quiet of a Martian landscape.  There is no intelligent life on Earth.

The Pope, Climate Change, and Brother Schlubb

Jeb Bush, or Brother Schlubb of the Shrub family as I would prefer to call him, says Pope Francis should not discuss climate change because the pontiff is “not a scientist.”

Brother Schlubb is a politician, not a scientist.  Crusty Christy, a Roman Catholic, says the pontiff should “stay away from politics.”  Rick Sanctimoniously Stupid Santorum, also a Roman Catholic, says the pontiff should “leave science to the scientists.”

None of these quack politicians are scientists. Yet, all share these traits in common: All are Roman Catholic who privilege themselves to speak against climate change, but think the Pope has no right to join the conversation. 

Here’s an inconvenient truth:  Pope Francis holds a degree in chemistry and worked in a lab before joining the Church.  The Pope, more than any of these hacks, has the education, experience and qualifications to understand climate science.  Yet, here is another lame excuse by crackpot politicians to marginalize another voice.

DO ANY OF THESE CRACKPOTS HAVE ANY SELF-AWARENESS ABOUT HOW INCREDIBLY HYPOCRITICAL, SELF-SERVING, AND STUPID THEY APPEAR!

Something You Don't Like About Capitalism?

 "Because we can get away with it."  is essentially the answer given by Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO to the question of why the company raised the price of  Darapram, a drug that's been around for 62 years  by 5000%.  That's not a typo.

Turing acquired the drug by purchasing the company that made it last month, and greed being good, decided to flaunt it.  One pill now costs 750 bucks, up from $13.50. No really, that's not a typo and it's not unique.  It's not, it seems,  that these things didn't make a profit, the development costs having been payed back long ago. It's just that Medical care in America is about making the rich richer, about Turing paying for the company they bought by screwing  the sick and screwing the Insurance companies who pass the cost  on to you and me - because they can and because the Republicans made a deal while calling objectors Communists.

The cost of  existing medications that some people need to stay alive has gone up by hundreds and hundreds of percentage points and not because they cost more to make. It's because they can get away with it and if you don't have insurance, your option is to decrease the surplus population.
And the idiots like Sarah Palin insist that Obamacare has death panels while "buy or die" has replaced free market competition.  Republicans are for free markets, right?

Now if you do have insurance that covers prescriptions, the cost is picked up by the premium payers: us, our employers or Medicare thanks to the Idiot Bush who worked out a deal with the drug companies that forbids any bargaining or competition.  It's one of the reasons they can sell drugs in the US at the highest prices in the world. Turing CEO Martin Shkreli said the price increase brings Daraprim more in line with other drugs for rare diseases, not that that stinks of collusion and price fixing, and is a polite way of saying it's OK for Turing to gouge the sick because everyone else is doing it and besides with all that money we could maybe develop some other drugs you might like -- or increase the size of the corporate jet or hand out bonuses, or whatever.  Hey, it's Capitalism. Something you don't like about Capitalism? You're some kind of Commie?

Is Climate Change Real? Or Just a Delusion Created By Liberals?...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

At one time being a skeptic of climate change (global warming) is what seemed to be a reasonable position. It even sounded plausible to me that left leaning scientists (most are for explainable logical reasons) were in cahoots with left leaning politicians who saw climate change as an avenue to enact legislation (cap and trade) and an pathway to exact more taxes on business. Taxes which could be used to fill the coffers of government so government could spend more on social programs that may ultimately lead to greater dependendency on government.

Sound familiar?

At this juncture in my thought process (aided by evaluating factual data) the narrative now seems more geared to preserving the bottom line profit motivation of companies whose business it is to grow exceedingly wealthy by exploiting and expanding fossil fuel consumption. Of course my re-evaluation has been an evolving process over time. But given the following (which certainly supports my new found premise) continuing skepticism just seems like the elixir of the fool.

The New Yorker - Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a Web site that has won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part exposé that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.

There’s a sense, of course, in which one already assumed that this was the case. Everyone who’s been paying attention has known about climate change for decades now. But it turns out Exxon didn’t just “know” about climate change: it conducted some of the original research. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the company employed top scientists who worked side by side with university researchers and the Department of Energy, even outfitting one of the company’s tankers with special sensors and sending it on a cruise to gather CO2 readings over the ocean. By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

Those numbers were about right, too. It was precisely ten years later—after a decade in which Exxon scientists continued to do systematic climate research that showed, as one internal report put it, that stopping “global warming would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion”—that NASA scientist James Hansen took climate change to the broader public, telling a congressional hearing, in June of 1988, that the planet was already warming. And how did Exxon respond? By saying that its own independent research supported Hansen’s findings? By changing the company’s focus to renewable technology?

That didn’t happen. Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns. (In a blog post responding to the I.C.N. report, the company said that the documents were “cherry-picked” to “distort our history of pioneering climate science research” and efforts to reduce emissions.) The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt. Lee Raymond, who became the Exxon C.E.O. in 1993—and was a senior executive throughout the decade that Exxon had studied climate science—gave a key speech to a group of Chinese leaders and oil industry executives in 1997, on the eve of treaty negotiations in Kyoto. He told them that the globe was cooling, and that government action to limit carbon emissions “defies common sense.” In recent years, it’s gotten so hot (InsideClimate’s exposé coincided with the release of data showing that this past summer was the United States’ hottest in recorded history) that there’s no use denying it any more; Raymond’s successor, Rex Tillerson, has grudgingly accepted climate change as real, but has referred to it as an “engineering problem.” In May, at a shareholders’ meeting, he mocked renewable energy, and said that “mankind has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity,” which would stand it in good stead in the case of “inclement weather” that “may or may not be induced by climate change.”

The influence of the oil industry is essentially undiminished, even now. The Obama Administration may have stood up to Big Coal, but the richer Big Oil got permission this summer to drill in the Arctic; Washington may soon grant the rights for offshore drilling along the Atlantic seaboard, and end a longstanding ban on oil exports. All these measures help drive the flow of carbon into the atmosphere—the flow of carbon that Exxon knew almost forty years ago would likely be disastrous.

We’ve gotten so inured to this kind of corporate power that the report in InsideClimate News received relatively little coverage. The big news of the day on social media came from Irving, Texas, where the police handcuffed a young Muslim boy for taking his homemade alarm clock to school; all day people tweeted #IStandWithAhmed, and rightly so. It’s wondrous to see the power of an Internet-enabled world shining the light on particular (and in this case telling) injustice; there’s a principal and a police chief in Irving that will likely think differently next time. But we badly need the same kind of focus on the long-lasting, underlying abuses of corporate might. As it happens, Exxon is based in Irving, Texas too.

No doubt the rightwing corporatists, and politicians who are getting well greased by corporate money, will deny this and point to it as just another leftwing lie and attempt to manipulate the perception of the general public. These folks know a great deal about manipulation. They've been doing it for decades.

Quacks Like a Duck - Affirming the Consequent

We're liberals, aren't we? So we're primed to believe stories that fit a certain mold without question and often with a good deal of desperate enthusiasm.  An "unarmed child" is shot in the back while kneeling and begging for his life,  a kid is arrested for taking a clock to school. We don't bother with the facts, because after all, there is a history of minorities being treated unfairly and therefore we assume that if B follows A, B implies A.  It doesn't and there's a name for the fallacy.

A kid brings an apparatus in a briefcase to school, made out of clock parts and looks to me very much like the bomb timer you see in so many movies that counts down the minutes to the explosion.  If I were a teacher or Principal, I would have called an expert too and I have a background in electronic engineering. It looks very much like something the movies have conditioned us to see as a countdown timer for a bomb. Did he "invent" a clock and put it in a "pencil case" that looks like it came out of a
James Bond movie or did he take apart a clock and stuff it in something chosen to look suspicious? Your assumptions here mean a lot. The way it's framed means everything.  As many on both sides of the political divide seem to agree:  "It looks like a f*cking bomb!"

But because police have a history of  abusing minorities, any arrest is abuse and because the kid is a Muslim, we, as dependably bigoted and privileged white people are to be presumed acting from bigotry. It must be an act of racism, for are we not white? It must be racism for is he not Muslim?

The thoughts of Liberals seem to be steered by the same sloppy, emotional and instinctive pseudo-reasoning as those of Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists and for all I know, professors of mathematics.  Go ahead, you blue eyed, blond Norwegian Lutheran - put some clock parts, a battery and a mess of wires in a briefcase and try to get on a plane so you can claim the TSA is profiling Scandinavians.

Hands up!  Don't Shoot!  It was just a clock! The knife was Military Style!   Devious uses of the Framing Effect litter the ground and every thing we read, see and hear are attempts to manipulate opinion, but  even the huge, gilded Rococo monstrosity of this frame seems to escape our notice. Even our experienced knees jerk when tapped by the professionally wielded little hammer.

Are we, as liberals combing the news for examples and when the supply is low, are we so relieved to find yet another juicy one that we suspend disbelief, squint our eyes a little bit and react a little too passionately?