Here's Why I'm Going to Miss John Stewart

When John Stewart leaves The Daily Show sometime this year, this is the kind of thing we are going to miss:

I'm not at all sure that the new guy can deliver this kind of acerbic commentary on the American political scene. I wish him the best of luck and I will give his show a fair chance. But I gotta tell ya, I'm major-disappointed with Larry Wilmore's show. I hope Trevor Noah will be able to pull it off.

Damn "Gotcha" Journalism

Rand Paul thinks he needs to "mansplain" things to a CNBC interviewer who practices "gotcha" journalism. You know, the kind of journalism where "reporters" ask "questions".

Wonkette has the the whole sordid tale, along with the full video interview that shows Rand Paul's bubbly personality and total sincerity and complete consistency in his stated views over the years.

Oh, and vaccines are good unless they are bad and parents should have the choice to let their children die from preventable diseases. Because, duh, freedom!

Plus, as Wonkette points out, he's being kind of a dick about it.

How Do We Know What We Know?

The short answer is that we don't really know what we think we know. I've written about false memories before a couple of times, most recently in my February Book of the Month post, and now we have an almost textbook example of it in NBC's Brian Williams.

His story illustrates almost perfectly how a false memory can be planted, watered, nurtured, and allowed to come to full bloom. It's pretty easy to dismiss Williams as a lying liar warrior-wannabe and an example of "big media" and its lying liars who lie, but I don't think it's as simple as that.

There's an excellent article at rival network CBS called Brian Williams and the false memory phenomenon" that is worth taking a look at:

"I was kind of amazed by how insistent and quick people would say he was liar when there was another plausible interpretation -- that he had a false memory," Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor the at the University of California, Irvine, and an expert in human memory, told CBS News. "Mostly these false memories develop and people are not even aware of why they happen."
Loftus calls Williams' circumstances a "teaching moment." She says it's a perfect example of how a false memory can subconsciously slide into a person's psyche until it becomes their version of the truth. Williams defines his mess-up as a the "fog of memory."
Loftus explains that a false memory occurs when a person comes to believe something happened that didn't; they may have adopted an account they heard or made up, perhaps based on details that are distorted and loosely based on the truth. "Brian Williams is sort of a combination of this," says Loftus.

How many times has something like this happened to you: Two people who were both at the same incident will talk about it later and realize that they disagree on the details so radically that an independent observer will come away thinking that they were witness to two different incidents?

This kind of thing happens between me and She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed all the time. It makes for some interesting ... "discussions".

It's a phenomenon that should be more well known, which is why so-called "eyewitness testimony", while it has a lot of seeming credibility in a courtroom, is the most unreliable testimony. And yet people are routinely sentenced to death because of it.

And of course, Jon Stewart has his own unique take on the whole Brian Williams saga.

Joni Ernst's Fact-Free Response to the SOTU Speech

Jesus, you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Joni "Nutcutter" Ernst, the earnest junior senator from Iowa, had the hearts thumping and the dicks jumping over at Faux News after her maiden speech (full text here) to the nation following Obama's State of the Union address last night (which, as an aside, William Rivers Pitt described as twenty pounds of shit in a ten pound bag. But never mind that; we kind of expect that in our SOTU speeches. Dubya was famous for it.).

She kinda-sorta-but-not-really pissed and moaned about her hardscrabble life on the farm, where she had to plow the fields (in an air-conditioned tractor, no doubt, but never mind those nitpicky kind of details), her family couldn't afford but one pair of shoes for her, and her mother had to wrap her little farmer-girl tootsies in bread bags to keep her feet dry. No word as to whether she actually had to use a privy for her personal ablutions, or walk to school ten miles in the snow, uphill -- both ways! and we were glad to do it! -- because in those deep dark years of her childhood, when Ronald Reagan was president from the time when was 10, life was hard. And it's still all hard and stuff, and Obama just doesn't get it. So there.

But there was no indication from her that the "hardscrabble farmers" who comprised Ernst's family actually received over $460,000 in Federal farm subsidies over a ten-year period. You also won't find out that fact from the major media. Not Faux News, of course, but none of the others are seeing fit to talk about it.

Oh, and she never used the accepted term "Islamic terrorism" in her speech, either. But still, Faux News loves them some Joni Ernst -- she is a Republican, she is a rare female Republican, and especially she's proud of the fact that she cut her some hog nuts once upon a time. That in itself was enough to make Faux News totally fall in love with her.

Oh, that and her shoes.

Who Killed Gary Webb?

The other day, when I wrote about the Crimes of Ronald Reagan, Constant Reader Yellow Fringe asked if I had seen the movie or read the book Kill the Messenger. I hadn't done either one, so I went to Netflix and put it into my "want" list -- it won't be released on DVD until Feb 10 -- and then I scouted my local library and was able to get a copy of the book.

It is, to give it its full title, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, by Nick Shou. It tells the story of investigative reporter Gary Webb and how he was destroyed by the very media he worked for, print journalism.

Webb was in the investigative reporter game for many years, with several different papers. Along the way he picked up a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on a California earthquake, but that "shaker" wasn't the biggest one to hit Gary Webb. It was his three-part series "Dark Alliance" in the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996, about the CIA-Contra-crack cocaine connection, that blew up in his face.

Even though Webb never said that the CIA was behind the sudden crack cocaine epidemic that hit the US, and especially Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, the mainstream papers climbed all over him. Leading the charge was the LA Times -- smarting over the "scoop" Webb got on them, no doubt -- which vilified Webb and fed into the other papers "discrediting" Webb, for claiming something that he did not claim.

All Webb did was ask a few pointed questions about some curious connections between the CIA, the Nicaraguan "contras" and the drug shipments that were coming into the US from Latin America. The CIA of course denied any participation in, or knowledge of, any thing of the sort, and their lackeys at the LA Times and the Washington Post bought the whole story. Back in those days, even after Watergate(!), big media were still in bed with government, and, according to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, especially the CIA. It likely still goes on.

It wasn't until several years later that a CIA internal investigation established that, yes indeed, whoops!, there were some connections, the same ones that Webb had `questioned. The report was "coincidentally" released the first weekend that our old friend Monica Lewinsky made the news, and even then the neo-yellow-journalism papers were slavering over reports of a sex scandal involving the president of the United States, and not so eager to follow up on some boringly tedious report from an "uninvolved" government agency.

Reading this book, I was constantly reminded of the whole "Rathergate" incident from 2004 -- never mind the content of the story; instead make the story about the reporter covering it. Dan Rather vanished into oblivion, and we never did manage to settle the whole question of G.W. "Baby Doc" Bush's alleged military service.

I've heard it described as "censorship by noise". If one person is telling the truth, let him, but drown him out with a thousand people calling him a liar. Kill the messenger.

And that's what happened to Gary Webb. His life was ruined and he spiraled into depression and unemployment (no one was willing to hire a "disgraced" journalist, even if he did have a Pulitzer), and finally in 2004 he was found dead from two shots to the head. It was ruled a suicide.

So who killed Gary Webb? It is possible that it was a legitimate suicide; he may have pulled the trigger himself but it was his fellow journalists in the media, along with the shadowy government world of the CIA, and the contras, the amoral "founding fathers" of Nicaraguan death squads, who loaded the gun.

Highly recommended for its insight into a very ugly slice of our history.

The Whole Story on Bowe Bergdahl?

In this 15-minutes-of-fame world, where we want it all and get it now and instant gratification takes too long, the story of Bowe Bergdahl is so yesterday that a lot of people won't even recognize his name.

Bergdahl was the US soldier in Afghanistan who somehow wandered off from his remote outpost and was taken prisoner by the Taliban. Five years later he became the subject of intense scrutiny when his release was engineered at the exchange rate of five-to one for Talibani prisoners of war detainees held in Guantánamo.

It's an extremely interesting story, and Robert Young Pelton has written a lengthy but incredibly detailed article on it, "Finding Private Bergdahl", over at Vice.

Because the details of Bergdahl's leave-taking and the five years he was held captive are still not clear, and because his name and his face bear a more-than-passing resemblance to those of the traitor/Islam-convert/terrorist Nicholas Brody, the former US prisoner of war held in Iraq, in the HBO series Homeland, it was easy for the nonthinking wingnut media to conflate Brody with Bergdahl and paint him as a traitor as well.

They are still at it. A Google search for the words "Bowe Bergdahl traitor" yields nearly 80,000 hits, the vast majority of them from wingnut sites. You know, the usual suspects: World Net Daily, Breitbart, Western Journalism Review, et al.

Will we ever know all of the details? Probably not, but Pelton's article likely comes the closest to describing the circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance and the Byzantine governmental -- and non-governmental -- machinations behind his ultimate release.

Some New Years Eve Ramblings

Quick, what do you see here?

If you say "three circles and a line" then you are technically correct. You are also in a very small minority. Most people, even if they consciously try not to, will see a face. Go ahead. Try not to see a face there.

We are a pattern-recognition species, and that stood us in good stead as we were evolving. Those who saw some seemingly random lines but did not see the sabre-tooth tiger behind those lines were likely to have their lives end rather abruptly and would not pass on their genes. Those who saw some random lines and thought, "OMG that's a sabre-tooth tiger!" and ran away, got to live. Even if those random lines were not really a sabre-tooth tiger, they made a clean getaway anyway. "Better safe than sorry" is not just a glib cliché -- it was a way to live (and keep on living).

Apophenia is the experience of finding patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. More specifically, a subset of apophenia is called Pareidolia and deals with seeing or hearing things that aren't really there, such as the "face" above, or the so-called Face on Mars.

Because we have evolved to see patterns, apophenia is something that we all have to guard against, and as the old saying has it, there is a fine line between sanity and madness. Most of us take great pains to ignore that line. Probably because we see it as the first step on the stairway to crazytown.

I have a close family member who has taken that stairway. He is a diagnosed shizophrenic and he sees patterns in everything. And I mean everything, including an (to him) infinitely higher than average number of white Honda cars. It's an easy step from there for to believing that all of the white Hondas are part of a larger -- but hidden -- plan, that they are following him around and spying on him. To what end is never a question that enters the equation. It's enough that they are there, all around him, everywhere, all the time. And, because he refuses to take his meds ("I don't like the way they make me feel"), it is an untreated mental disorder and his long-term prognosis is not good. He has crossed that line from apophenia to paranoia.

The main function of propaganda, and its non-political arm, advertising, is to subtly and not-so-subtly encourage us to see the patterns where they don't exist. Nobody knows this better than Faux News. They are the hands-down experts at placing a semi-transparent grid over reality, where everything they want you to think is pre-patterned out for you. Who else could make a connection between the constitutionally-mandated legal representation of an indigent client accused of a crime and the supposed "socialist" views of someone who is now being considered a presidential candidate? (Hint: It's Hillary Clinton, who was raked over the coals for once acting as a court-appointed defense attorney in a rape case.)

And it's not just Faux News. Pretty much the entire right wing is guilty of it. How else to explain shit like the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya meme, or the Loontown Express that was Benghazi?

An admission: For a while there, many years ago, I was fascinated/obsessed with the concept of "subliminal messaging" in advertising (which is apparently a real thing), having read a couple of books by the notorious Wilson Bryan Key, and started seeing the letters S-E-X in every print ad that I saw. After a while pareidolia took over and I was able to see the letters in randomly textured things like pebble-grain leather, "popcorn" ceilings and towels. Finally I'd had enough and stopped looking for them. But amazingly enough, every so often I still "see" letters in those kinds of surfaces. They are not the infamous S-E-X these days (may be something to do with my age...), more like a random scattering of letters, but my mind can still project them. Weird.

The movie Conspiracy Theory starring Mel Gibson back before he became the living embodiment of Jerry Fletcher, his character in the film, is an example of apophenia. But in this movie, there actually were patterns but only he could see them. Maybe that's a bad example...

So I don't know. Maybe the patterns are there all the time and we are socially conditioned to NOT see them. Or not talk about them if we do see them. Or something...

Or maybe I need another drink. Or two. It is New Years Eve Day after all...

See you all in the new year and thanks for reading.

Further Reading: Programming the Nation?, Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, Confirmation Bias, Cherry Picking, Denialism.

Killer on the Road, Part II -- Charles Starkweather

After my first post on this topic the other day, I did a little more thinking about the whole "killer on the road" phenomenon. Billy Cook was certainly not the first embodiment of the Killer on the Road, and he certainly wasn't the last, but he sank into obscurity faster than the musical career of The Hollywood Argyles.

So why did his crime spree fall into oblivion while that of Charles Starkweather, almost exactly seven years later and similar in a lot of ways, become world famous and develop such a lasting endurance that he would be the topic of eight movies over the next 30 years -- including the Martin Sheen-Cissy Spacek vehicle Badlands from 1974 and the "eighth most controversial film of all time", Oliver Stone's neo-noir Natural Born Killers from 1991, not to mention the 1982 moody Bruce Springsteen hit, "Nebraska"?

Aside from Starkweather's first killing, on Nov 30, 1957 (which no one even connected with Starkweather until he confessed after his arrest), his killing spree lasted only eight days, from January 21 to January 29, 1958. His body count was higher, but not all that much higher -- only eleven people as compared to Cook's five. That's kind of paltry when it's compared to later killers such as Ted Bundy (at least 30 victims)  or the now forgotten "I-5 Killer", Roger Kibbe (also known as "Roger Who?"), whose suspected number of victims also runs into the 30s.

So how did Charles Starkweather pull off that notoriety when Billy Cook couldn't? What happened during that seven year interim to make Starkweather's story develop the"legs" to be such a long-lasting part of our culture, our psyche?

Part of it goes to the breathlessly-reported sordid detail that Starkweather had his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, with him the whole time, after first murdering her entire family (shades of Mickey and Mallory Knox!), and the fact that they had terrorized and then murdered a wealthy local industrialist along with his wife and their maid, in their own home!. To the media, a wealthy person's violent death, especially in a home invasion, is worth far more than that of the "Poor White Trash" represented by Caril Ann's family, and consequently that crime gets way more air play and more column inches in the reporting. But that's only part of the story.

What happened in just seven short years comes down to two things: The advent of universal access to television by "the masses", and rise of the Juvenile Delinquent.

In 1951, when Billy Cook made his run, television was something that only the well-to-do had. TVs were expensive, there were relatively few broadcasters, and the general feeling in the entertainment world was that after the novelty wore off, no one would really watch television -- in the words of movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, people would soon get tired of staring at a plywood box in their living rooms. By 1957, however, everyone except a few Luddite curmudgeons and cousin-marryin' moonshinin' backwoods-livin' peckerheads had a television set, and it was rapidly becoming THE source for the news of the world. Including news of a violence-prone Juvenile Delinquent serial killer roaming the highways in search of victims.

Anyone who lived through the 50s remembers the archetypal Juvenile Delinquent: Black leather jacket, Levi's, engineer boots, ducktail haircut, long sideburns, bad attitude, lack of respect for authority, cigarette dangling from snarly lips, etc. No, not the emasculated sitcom version epitomized in the pseudo-cool of Henry Winkler's "The Fonz" on the Happy Days TV series. The real JD was dangerous, unpredictable, bristling with switchblade knives and and bubbling over with barely-contained violence. According to the media's stereotypical portrayal of him, anyway.

It was also the media's frantic obsession with "Troubled Youth" (and coincidentally the market share it represented). Starting in the early 1950s, analyzing and explaining the Troubled Youth of the nation became a kind of cottage industry, and television coverage of youth crimes only served to exacerbate that trend.

First comic books were blamed -- they were solely responsible for the increase in teenage delinquency, an accusation that came from the questionable "science" of one Dr. Fredric Wertham and his crusade to have all comic books banned.

Then it was movies. Then it was television itself. Every print media outlet, from The New York Times to Life Magazine to Reader's Digest was wringing its collective editorial hands over the sudden juvenile "crime wave" that had swept up American Youth in its ugly paws. Even the newspaper comics' Dick Tracy got into the act in 1956, in a story arc concerning a punk named "Joe Period" who fit the classic mold -- ducktail haircut, black leather jacket, etc. -- which immediately morphed into a story concerning the murderously violent teenage genius offspring of one of Tracy's most classic villains, 1944's Flattop, one Flattop Jr. by name.

The 1955 release of Nicholas Ray's homage to rebellious youth, Rebel Without a Cause, starring the very symbol of teenage angst, James Dean (despite the fact that he was 24), hit the youth culture like a tidal wave combined with an earthquake  combined with a meteor strike. Charles Starkweather even started modeling himself after the rebellious Dean.

The media were, naturally, quick to pick up on this trend and a ton of Teen Rebellion movies were produced, from the middle-of-the-road Blackboard Jungle to quickie crime-car-culture exploitation films like Hotrod Gang and its cult-classic sequel, The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, all of them cashing in on the perceived personal danger inherent in just being around a teenager in 1950s America.

So in 1958 it all came together, and a nation was glued to the little screen for over a week in late January, following the "exploits" of America's new favorite Juvenile Delinquent/spree killer, Charles Starkweather.

Sorry, Billy Cook. Timing is everything.

Oh, and that sudden increase in crime by "Juvenile Delinquents" in the 1950s? It never happened.

Marco Rubio the Self-Styled "Cuba Expert"

The boy's making quite a name for himself by vehemently opposing the normalization of relations with Cuba. Hmmm... Do I smell some presidential aspirations in the air?

Okay, he does have a right to his opinion, but did you notice that damn near every media story identifies him as having parents who fled Castro's Cuba. He even has not been above claiming that himself on occasion.

It makes for a compelling personal narrative, the kind American politics just loves. But it's time for some truth: Marco Rubio's  parents came to the US in 1956. Castro came to power in 1959. So shut the fuck up, media. (Okay, to be fair, if the media talking heads are being generous -- and extra-honest -- that day, they will say the parents fled "pre-Castro Cuba", as if that even means anything -- my German forebears fled pre-Hitler Germany ... in 1749.)

Nevertheless, his opinions on the current Cuban government have no more cachet than anyone else's who came to the US before Castro.

Like oh, I dunno, Ricky Ricardo, for example.

I think it's high time we normalized relations with Cuba. Finally I'll be able to smoke some unsmuggled Cuban cigars. My friends going on vacation to the West Indies or Mexico have been complaining lately about my "suggestions" that they might like to bring me back a small present or two.

Do Dogs Go To Heaven?

I can't believe what passes for "news" any more. Especially after watching the demise last night of one of my favorite television series of all time, The Newsroom.

Now there's this big controversy about whether the Pope believes that dogs go to heaven. One Pope did, apparently, but the current wearer of the Pointy Hat remains silent on the subject, even though somebody may have interpreted something that he may have said to mean that maybe animals do go to heaven.

Jesus, with all the problems in this world, this is what people think "news" is? Somebody in a funny hat may have said something that somebody else may have...blah blah blah.

BTW, wasn't there a movie that answered this question in its very title?

Well, to mildly misquote the great American humorist (and fellow Oklahoma boy) Will Rogers, if there are no dogs in heaven then I don't want to go there -- I want to go where the dogs went.

I mean really. What kind of god allows people to bond with animals that they love, rips them away to an early death and a lonely grave, and then won't allow them to join up with us again in the "paradise" of the afterlife? These are not the actions of a kind and loving and benevolent god. These are the actions of a cruel and sadistic tyrant.

Not that there's much chance that I or anyone else will ever get to learn "the truth" about it. For an insight into my religious proclivities, see other posts on this blog too numerous to mention, typically this rant on the Post-Rapture Emails.

The UVa Fraternity House Rape Case -- Something Happened

It's been all over the news in the last few days, and I'm afraid that it's another one of those things that we will never get to the bottom of.

I'm willing to stipulate that something happened to UVa student "Jackie". But, since she did not go immediately to report it and get swabbed with a rape kit, I'm not willing to conclude exactly what that was, except that her rape story seems to be coming unraveled.

One of the problems with the original story in Rolling Stone, and how it grew "legs", was that there was hardly a person in the country who was not able believe that members of a college fraternity could be involved in something like this. Anyone who attended a major university is familiar with the whole frat-rat "Greek" culture, and how they tend to come off as a bunch of snobby self-important entitlement-elitist exclusionary assholes. Anyone except the members themselves, of course.

Couple that with the cultural-shift backlash that has happened over the last few years to counter the traditional "blame the victim" mindset that had afflicted the police, the courts, university administrations and (according to some) the whole male half of the population, and it's a fertile field for the kind of sensationalism that the original Rolling Stone article, aided and abetted by the "if it bleeds it leads" media, was willing to plant, till and nurture.

Now that counter mindset has become institutionalized in our culture, to the point where anyone who even tries to raise any reasonable doubts, or even concerns, about facts in a particular case is dismissed as a blame-the-victim reactionary.

If it turns out that "Jackie" was not telling the whole truth about what happened, then that will give inestimable aid and comfort to the old blame-the-victim crowd. Remember the Duke University lacrosse team case? It happens that people sometimes make up stories. In other words, they lie. And sometimes the alleged perpetrators are, in fact, innocent.

If in fact, "Jackie" is not telling the truth, then what will that do to the people who are still being raped and victimized? Are they going to be so willing to come forward and level charges in the face of this onslaught of disbelievers? Go through that battery of semi-invasive and humiliating medical tests? I think if I were a woman, I'd have to think twice about it: Victimized once, then victimized again. Uh, no thanks...

And on the flip side of this, how many rapists are going to be emboldened by this story? They can claim that the sex was consensual, that "the chick was asking for it the whole night" and then got an attack of moral conscience afterwards and is lying about the rape, and they will have a good chance of getting away with it.

The whole sordid mess raises some questions that are not easy to answer. Rolling Stone itself has taken a big hit in credibility with this, and it will suffer for it as well.

It's a lose-lose-lose situation for everyone, from the victim to the administration to the police to the courts to the media. And the bigger it becomes, the more play it will get in the slavering-for-a-scandal media, and it's these big cases that people will remember. Look at Duke Lacrosse -- eight years later it's still be used as a example of wrongful prosecution that defense attorneys can pull out of their bag of tricks.

We've Had Quite Enough of Kim Kardashian

Jeez, let's just stop with all this Kim Kardashian crap. She has eaten up enough bandwidth already. (For those of you who have been living in a cave in Tora Bora, she is of course the poster girl for being Famous for Being Famous and nothing else.) Now apparently she has felt her fame slipping a bit, so she's come up with a new hook. Nakedity. Nudeness. Full frontal and full backal nudity. Showing off her butt and boobs with the hope of "breaking the Internet".  

"Breaking the Internet"? Really?

But I guess if it's all you've got going for her,  you go with what you've got.

Over at theGrio there's an interesting story about this cheeky display, called Kim Kardashian doesn’t realize she’s the butt of an old racial joke (ha-ha) that puts that famous-for-being-famous ass of hers in a little historical perspective.

Consider this: Black women with extremely large derrieres were quite the vogue in sideshows and freak exhibits (yes) in the 19th century, and Kim has -- wittingly or unwittingly -- brought that racist concept back into focus.

Read the whole story for a round and firm and fully packed insight into this. It's even got pictures (nudge-nudge, wink-wink)...

BTW, the Urban Dictionary has an apt (if marginally offensive, but hey, it's the Urban Dictionary...) appellation for Kim Kardashian and her ilk: Celebutard.

O'Donnell "Pwns" Birther Wackjob Orly Taitz

I'm still on a break, but I had to share this Lawrence O'Donnell clip of him slapping down Obama Derangement Syndrome Poster Girl Orly Taitz on his show last night.

This is what the news media needs to be doing a lot more of.

Is it just me, or does Orly Taitz look like a guy in drag in that still? Maybe we ought to be demanding to see her birth certificate.

I'll be back next week.