They’re winning. They’ve been winning for a long time. They’ve convinced us that the national conversation is not about a contest over power and control but rather about twisted definitions of patriotism, morality, the rights of the individual, property rights, and family values. They’re winning because they are ever more in control of the vocabulary of that conversation. They have invested heavily in winning memes — ideas and beliefs parasitically encoded into the politically and culturally unaware.

They recognized long ago that those who control the definitions of words rule the conversation. They know that rigorous repetition of their memes is akin to selling any product — advertise, advertise, advertise. That meme machine, usually cranked up biennually, now operates full time. In 30-second, televised chunks, the memes spew forth in every market. The messages are paid for by political organizations and single-minded groups quietly but heavily underwritten by those who wield wealth and power as a blacksmith’s hammer, bending comprehension by the electorate over an anvil. In hour-long, prime-time, broadcast soliloquies, their public voices ritualistically denigrate that which does not serve The Meme.
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In case you’re wondering, that’s a whole lot of cash. My latest for Raw Story:

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats’ massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found. [...]

Gary Jacobson, a campaign finance expert and political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the healthcare industry saw the writing on the wall and sought to “protect their interests.”

READ THE FULL STORY

The New York Times ran an interesting article about Roger Ailes a couple of days ago. Ailes is the head of Fox News at News Corporation, owned and run, of course, by Rupert Murdoch and various offspring Murdochs. Ailes is one of the most important people in the United States, by virtue of his re-creation of the concept of television news, morphing from something that vaguely resembled news into something that is indistinguishable from right-wing propaganda. And it has had enormous impact on television news in general, and on US political, and broader, culture, as anyone who has seen Outfoxed knows.

It turns out that not everyone in the Murdoch family is happy with Mr Ailes. Full story »

Captain America is dead. Long live Cap!

He’s as Amer-iconic as Uncle Sam and the Lincoln Memorial. He’s bigger than life while still as down-home as hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball.

And for the past two years, he’s been dead.

As everyone knows, though, in the superhero world nobody stays dead forever. This month, Marvel Comics is bringing back the red-white-and-blue Avenger in a storyline called “Captain America Reborn.”

But that’s perhaps the best part about Captain America: He’s been reborn and reborn again, as the times dictate, ever since his creation back in 1941. Full story »

Something wicked this way comes.

• Item: Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino says “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”
• Item: GOP apologist Mary Matalin says President Bush “inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.”
• Item: Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says “We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we’ve had one under Obama.”

There are a number of problems with these assertions, not the least of which is that when Saudi terrorists started flying hijacked jets into large buildings on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush had been president of the United States for the better part of eight months. The lapses in memory noted above are all striking, but especially so in the case of Giuliani, who was, from September 11 until he dropped out of the presidential race on January 30, 2008 (a span of roughly 2,332 days, if my math is accurate), unable to say so much as “hello” without somehow shoehorning “9/11″ into the conversation. Full story »

My friend Dawn wrote a post worthy of a Sunday; please read it:

On Considering Compassion

Well, as one who can dish out vitriol with the best of them, i can feel a finger pointed at me. I also know better…which obviously doesn’t mean that i act better.

I’m familiar with the Bodhisattva’s vow: self-sacrifice for the sake of compassion towards all living things, to practice until every blade of grass attains enlightenment. (i differ with it there, the grass is already enlightened)

The fear-anger-hatred continuum is the strongest metaphysical force in the universe because it is easy; it does not take self control. It’s dangerous because it is easy and because it is self replicating and communicable.

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You’re going to find this outrageous.

Last week, the wife and I went out for dinner to a new restaurant in our neighbourhood.  The food was awful and the service insulting.  Afterwards a few of the patrons gathered outside.  One man was particularly engaging and inspired us to take action.  We formed an angry mob, set fire to cars in the parking lot and threw stones and burning wood through the windows of the restaurant.

A few days later we went back to the restaurant and – this is the bit you’re going to find outrageous – their service had NOT improved!

Afterwards I led the riots.  We destroyed nearby shops and looted what we could.  Next week we’ll go back and see if they’ve recognised our concerns. Full story »

One Sunday night last year, I decided to try my hand at some of the math I didn’t understand when I was a high school student. Right away, I came face to face with a long-forgotten nightmare called the distributive property. If I read it correctly, the distributive property says that an expression such as 4 x (2 + 3) is equal to 4 x 2 + 4 x 3. Wondering if such an insight would ever prove beneficial to me, and deciding that it would not, I left the math book on the table and went to watch some television. But my timing was bad. Nancy had the remote control, and despite the pitiful stares I cast toward her, she wouldn‘t share it.

“What are you watching?” I asked. “Because the Patriots are about to play the Cowboys and they’re both undefeated.” Full story »

“You just pick up a chord, go twang, and you’ve got music.” Who said it? Full story »

Did anyone expect this Obama character to be such a card? I seem to remember speeches and quips about judgment and its importance in leadership. No quibbles about that, it’s true and i would take a man of good judgment over one of ossified, bureaucratic experience in most cases but especially situations of threat or upheaval. As an American, i should be well-trained in this game; i’ve eaten enough Big Macs to know that they look nothing like the advertising picture used to entice me. Lukewarm, grey “meat.” Ah yes, move over Big Dog, Big Mac is running the show now.

I think that i’m supposed to be comforted by his “surge” of federal air marshals. What is it with this guy and surges? See that problem, a surge will fix it. Hell, only a surge will fix it. I feel the same way about hammers, but i don’t act on it.
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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Paul R. Hill was an aerodynamics scientist who led some key projects for NASA. Also, like moon-walking astronaut Edgar Mitchell, he believed in UFOs, in part because of two personal sightings. In fact, Hill marshaled his aerodynamic and mathematical expertise to the task of determining what made them fly. . . and stop on a dime. . . and change directions in a heartbeat. The book that was the result of his labors, Unconventional Flying Objects (Hampton Roads Publishing, 1995), is one of the most respected works in UFO lore, as well as great fun to read (despite all the equations).

Hill determined that their means of propulsion were — no surprise — an anti-gravity force field. Of course, he wasn’t able to conceptualize a working model. Had he been, NASA would no doubt have yanked him out of retirement and become involved in a tug of war with the Pentagon for his services. Full story »

So…

If you’ve ever watched a Chuck Lorre produced show (Grace Under Fire, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) you may have noted the text cards at the end of the credits sequence. They flash by so quickly it’s impossible to read them, but fortunately they’re all archived online.

At the conclusion of this evening’s Two and a Half Men rerun they displayed vanity card #135 and we paused the TV to read it. What fortuitous timing, given all our recent carping here at S&R about the decline of the press. Here’s what it said: Full story »

It being 12th night and all, we’re waiting for another bout of snow to hit London, getting ready for the feasting and partying to mark the end of the Christmas season (except in the Armenian Orthodox church, which celebrates Christmas today, and other Orthodox churches, which celebrate it tomorrow). The wild boar is roasting away merrily, and everyone’s mead cup is full. So here we are. This will be the last post on this series for this Christmas season. There’s quite a lot I didn’t cover—Renaissance Christmas music being the most gaping omission. Still, one of the great things about Christmas music is that there’s always more of it. Whether it’s new songs being written by contemporary composers, or thousand year old chants being rediscovered, there’s more music out there all the time. Every year I stumble on an unexpected delight—this year it’s been an album by the Netherlands Chamber Choir, conducted by the erstwhile Paul van Nevel, called Mirabile Mysterium, mainly a bunch of little known but nonetheless stunning choral pieces, mostly from the 15th and 16th centuries. Particularly noteworthy is the title piece, by Jacobus Gallus (1550-1591), as well as a whole raft of Spanish Renaissance songs. And next year I imagine there will be something else equally captivating.

But that’s only if the dim bulbs still running the music industry haven’t killed the industry dead at that point. Full story »

The AEJMC News jury has rendered its verdict: As a print journalism professor, I am a dinosaur. I suspect many professors like me — bred through long newsroom careers and leavened, in many cases, with doctoral education — feel the same. Outdated. Web 3.0 inadequate. Multi-media insufficient.

In the past year, had I sought a professorship to teach print news reporting, writing, and editing, I’d be hard-pressed to find a job despite my two decades of experience and a really expensive piece of PhD parchment. A reason: Several thousand highly experienced, talented print journalists have been shitcanned by their newspapers in the past two years. But print professorships are few, making it a buyer’s market, writes Joe Strupp at Editor & Publisher.

But there’s another reason: Journalism schools, at least in terms of their job postings, may be shifting identities.
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Ten years ago, at the turn of the millennium, Nostraslammy took a stab at predicting the 21st Century, with a promise to check back every ten years to see how the prognostications were turning out. Odds are good I won’t be able to do a review every ten years until 2100, but I figure I’m probably good through 2030, at least, barring some unforeseen calamity. And if you’re Nostraslammy, what’s this “unforeseen” thing, anyway?

Let’s see how our 22 articles of foresight are holding up, one at a time.

1: Researchers will develop either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS by 2020. However, it will be expensive enough that the disease will plague the poor long after it has become a non-issue for the rich and middle classes (although this is one case where political leaders might fund free treatment programs). The end of AIDS will trigger a sexual revolution that will compare to or exceed that of the 1960s and 1970s (unless another deadly sexually-transmitted disease evolves, which is certainly a possibility). Full story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — “We declare that Iran respects the [Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty], despite all the flaws the treaty has,” said Ali-Akbar Salehi, director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Iran’s Press TV. “I believe that some Western countries, which are unfortunately affected by international Zionism, are trying to force Iran to withdraw from the NPT so that they can create an anti-Iran climate in the international arena.”

While invoking the NPT — that talisman of a treaty — on his way to the moral high ground, Salehi stumbled and took a header. Like his president, he just couldn’t keep his thoughts about Zionism to himself. Nor did he help himself or his cause by adding “we hope that the wise part of the West will overcome its irrational part so that it can seize the opportunity offered by Iran to end the current situation.” Full story »

Well, it’s the 11th day of Christmas by my medieval calendar, so I can get in another two posts on this before Christmas officially ends. And, purely by coincidence, it’s more medieval Christmas music, but from countries other than Germany. Actually, there are only a couple of them—France, Italy, the low countries, England—that’s pretty much it. There’s surprisingly little from Spain, at least that’s been recorded. One explanation is that there isn’t that much of it, largely because much has been lost. Another, and more likely, explanation is that when Moors and Jews were expelled from Spain in1492, they took their music with them—and much of it resurfaced elsewhere, particularly in Italy. The Catholic Church wasn’t particularly interested in multiculturalism at that time—quite the reverse, in fact.

But what we have is enough. Full story »

Pulitzer- and Emmy-winner William Henry‘s famous polemic, In Defense of Elitism (1994), argues that societies can be ranked along a spectrum with “egalitarianism” on one end and “elitism” on the other. He concludes that America, to its detriment, has slid too far in the direction of egalitarianism, and in the process that it has abandoned the elitist impulse that made it great (and that is necessary for any great culture). While Henry’s analysis is flawed in spots (and, thanks to the excesses of the Bush years, there are some other places that could use updating), he brilliantly succeeds in his ultimate goal: crank-starting a much-needed debate about the proper place of elitism in a “democratic” society.

Along the way he spends a good deal of time defining what he means by “egalitarianism” and “elitism.” Full story »