Propaganda
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2008I've noted before that the background to the 'culture wars' is that white, male, Christian (often Protestant) is no longer the cultural default setting. Regarding religion:
The greatest con theopolitical conservatives ever pulled was getting their religious views defined as the cultural 'default setting' when, in fact, most people aren't fundamentalist Christians. And the way they did that was by lying.
By way of skippy and Pacific Views, I came across this interesting observation by Christine Wicker (italics mine):
The 25 percent of Americans who say they are evangelicals don't go to church…
mikethemadbiologist | June 30, 2008In a very good post about elitism and Republicans, Maha asks:
John McCain's recent mangling of Barack Obama's famous "bitter" remark is also illustrative:
"We're going to go to the small towns in Pennsylvania and I'm gonna to tell them I don't agree with Senator Obama that they cling to their religion and the Constitution because they're bitter," said McCain, who might have been referring to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. "I'm gonna tell them they have faith and they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope... That's what…
j7uy5 | June 5, 2008After the
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/27/AR2008052703679.html">release
of Scotty McClellan's book, What Happened: Inside
the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception,
there was a big media/blogosphere splash about the supposed failure of
the media to examine critically the Administration's case for the war
against Iraq. There have been
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-haimowitz/master-media-manipulation_b_105529.html">accusations,
href="http://wcbstv.com/politics/couric.iraq.coverage.2.734446.html">mea
culpas, and…
j7uy5 | May 25, 2008Despite a chorus among citizenry and punditry to end oil company
subsidies, it turns out that yet another has been foisted upon us.
What is worse, it was created under the guise of a populist
program:
Households will spend about $90 billion more this
year on gasoline if fuel prices remain at current levels, according to
a forecast by economists at Credit Suisse Holdings in New York. That
will consume about 80 percent of the more than $110 billion in rebate
checks the government is sending out.
So most of the rebate money will end up in the pockets of big oil.
It will not boost spending. …
mikethemadbiologist | May 24, 2008I had no idea how deeply involved nepotism was in the New York Times' decision to hire William Kristol as an op-ed writer. From the Greenwald:
The NYT should be very proud of itself. Of course, Kristol was hired at the NYT because his dad, Irv, was really good friends with former NYT Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal, whose son, Andy, currently runs the NYT Op-Ed page. Andy and Bill followed in their dad's footsteps by becoming good friends (and in every other sense), and Andy then hired his friend, Bill (son of his dad's friend), as the new NYT Op-Ed writer. So this is typically what one gets…
mikethemadbiologist | May 23, 2008So in my blog inbox I received a long piece of propaganda decrying the Universal Service Fund. I like the USF, although I'm sure some improvements could be made. But look at the list of people who sent the letter (italics mine):
National Taxpayers Union is the nation's largest and oldest taxpayer group, with 362,000 members nationwide. NTU is a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizen organization founded in 1969 to work for lower taxes, smaller government, and economic freedom at all levels. Note: For further information about NTU, visit www.ntu.org.
Americans for Tax Reform (http://www.atr.org/) is…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2008I originally posted this over two years ago. Moral of the story--don't believe every breathless medical breakthrough drug development story you read. (and if it were really good, they wouldn't be telling anyone about it):
From Chemical and Engineering News:
Enter The Mannopeptimycins: New class of antibiotics offers hope in treating resistant infections by Bethany Halford
Mannopeptimycins, a family of antibiotics recently mined from a decades-old research effort, could give doctors the weapon they've been looking for in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections. The compounds…
mikethemadbiologist | March 16, 2008...at least some of the time. While there has been much gnashing of teeth and wailing about the political press' recent socializing with John McCain (and appropriately so), let's not forget that this is hardly the first time the press has knelt before power instead of confronting it. Rewind to Guatemala, 1954.
In 1954, at the behest of the United Fruit Company, the CIA organized and backed the overthrow of democratically elected President Arbenz. From Peter Chapman's Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World, here's how the political press behaved (boldface mine):
[United…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2008There's not much to add in terms of rebutting intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells' latest misappropriation of science that Larry Moran, Orac, and Ian Musgrave didn't already write. But Wells' latest screed demonstrates just how pathetically low intelligent design creationism has sunk. An argument that stupid is a tacit admission of defeat.
Essentially, Wells' argument can be summarized as "if evolutionary biology isn't cited in every single biology paper EVAH!, then evolutionary biology isn't relevant to biology." Never mind that every step in genomic biology involves…
mikethemadbiologist | March 6, 2008...if he weren't a fucking moron. One of the books that has gone missing in all of the criticisms of Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous Democrat-bashing screed Liberal Fascism is Wolfgang's Schivelbusch's Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939.
Schivelbusch correctly notes (as does Goldberg) that were similarities among the U.S., Germany, and Italy between 1933-1939: the state did become more involved in the economy, there was state propaganda--which was informed by what people wanted (at least superficially), and each society was…
mikethemadbiologist | February 20, 2008By way of maha (and also Roger Ailes the Good), I came across this screed from the conservative National Review's website (italics mine):
... Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City--a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but…
mikethemadbiologist | February 20, 2008Tristero came up with a list of thirteen things that the rightwing media does to craft its message. I've 'repurposed' and changed them for creationists. Here's the list with some commentary:
1. Highlight a quote from the opponent out of context from a speech or interview. (unchanged from original)
Do I even need to comment?
2. Use loaded terminology to describe evolution.
Describing evolution as 'godless', when, in fact, all scientific disciplines which, by definition, explain physical, not metaphysical, phenomena are 'godless.' They don't seem to have a problem with 'godless' geologists…
mikethemadbiologist | February 16, 2008The NY Times asks about Peter Peterson, "Can the co-founder of the Blackstone Group who has scored riches from a controversial tax break emerge as a credible voice in favor of fiscal constraint in Washington?" Of course, he can. He just has to be clever about what he means by "fiscal constraint" (italics mine):
On Friday, Mr. Peterson will unveil the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and announce his plan to allocate his newfound billions to projects that will increase public awareness of fiscal imbalances, Social Security deficits and nuclear proliferation.
To assuage his guilt--let's call him…
mikethemadbiologist | February 1, 2008Because they don't understand stuff. To wit, Mike Allen in The Politico:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail traffic of suspected terrorists, expires on Friday. After that, any monitoring that's currently authorized could continue, but no new surveillance could begin.
Actually, what is set to expire is the Protect America Act ('PAA'). The reason the PAA is set to expire is that the retroactive immunity provisions for law-breaking companies in the new PAA are opposed by the Democrats, but the Republicans refuse to pass a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2008I'm posting about this because I want Orac's head to explode. Apparently, the first episode of the ABC legal drama, "Eli Stone", involves the protagonist taking up the mercury militia, anti-vax cause:
While police and legal dramas often use ripped-from-the-headlines topics as the basis of episodes, rarely do broadcast networks allow themselves to stray into the middle of heated debates that contain such emotional touchstones for large segments of their audience, if only because another big segment of a network's audience is likely to be on the other side of the debate.
With "Eli Stone,"…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008According to the NY Times' John Tierney, post-Sept. 11th fear of terrorism might be detrimental to one's health:
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people's fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely…
mikethemadbiologist | January 10, 2008You might have heard of push polling. But is there now 'push focus grouping'? Push polling is where you call up voters, and ask faux-poll questions that are actually designed to smear a particular candidate. For instance: "If Candidate X were to have had sex with farm animals, would you be more or less inclined to vote for him?" A bit over the top (not by much), but you get the idea. Other push polls are designed to push a political agenda in the same way.
Onto focus groups. In focus groups, you recruit people and ask them questions, the goal being to elicit detailed, longer answers…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2007That would be William Kristol, their new op-ed writer. It's nice to see that stupid people are being mainstreamed into society. Of course, I never thought of them as a historically oppressed minority...
mikethemadbiologist | December 20, 2007Driftglass is organizing a letter writing campaign to the advertisers on Chicago's hate radio station WIND. If you live in the area, help him out. Here's why:
Remember, if you choose to contact any or all of the organizations on the list;
1. Polite but firm works best to accomplish what you are trying to do.
2. This is not a Free Speech issue. Like any other American, Michael Weiner Savage is free to vomit his lunacy in letters to the editor, or on his preferred street corner, or on a blog, or scrawled in his own shit on his bedroom walls.
Instead this is about Disinvestment. This is about…
mikethemadbiologist | December 13, 2007If you visit ScienceBlogs regularly, you've probably read about ScienceBloglings Sheril Kirshenbaum's and Chris Mooney's proposal for a presidential debate about science. There's a lot I like about this proposal, but the reality of what could happen bothers me. First, what I like about the idea.
For much of the last two and half years, I worked at a non-profit organization that focused on infectious disease policy and programs. Science policy--and politics--are important. The idea that every political candidate would actually have to devise a science policy, and perhaps even be judged by…