The Populist Addiction
Skimming or what people wrongly think is reading fast, leads to seeing only what we want to believe.
The first place information is placed in the brain is in the very short term less than a minute and low capacity Temporary Memory Bank. Then it goes to the hippocampus where it is processed further. Highly emotional images, events, and speech goes directly to the Amygdala and by-passes our pre-frontal cortex. Acetyl choline chemical reactions puts them into a more permanent memory bank which can stay with us all our lives. Fear seems to control conservatives and so-called independents than more liberal Democrats.
The reason we often do not remember the names of a number of new people in a crowd is that the host goes from one person to the next at warp speed. A similar incident occurs when we think we need something in the next room, but forget about it unless we think about it a little more. That explains how short term and low capacity temporary memory fails us when we skim. We all tend to filter out contrary information all the time. That is how Google Makes Us Dumb.
I found even very bright scientists and engineers do this too! Some things are not put to strict scrutiny when the conclusions agrees with our own. We tend to more critically look for flaws in others people work in science and politics. Being human, we scientists often accept beliefs and comments in the political and religious realm without much thought or confirming proof or data.
We all vote with out emotions, but to different extents and different knowledge base. The only way to fight this is to read seriously books and articles with different points of view by conservative writers and journalists such as David Brooks and
www.tnr.com and more liberals one at
www.thenation.com. As one recent article in the NY York times claimed, we vote with our emotions, not with our logic. Emotional opinions with lots of contrary information works much better than emotional combines with ignorance. In the end, all our decisions are emotional. Garbage in, Garbage out applies. Television reporting mostly is a joke.
Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are some of the few who really think and report what they think. Most television announcers have no input on what they read on the teleprompter. It is obvious that Rachel and Keith have a major input. It is not just high IQ that makes for honest and clear reporting/opinion articles. Clear thinking is what I look for even though I usually disagree to some extent with everything I read or hear. Watch how the BBC TV reporters at work. They usually ask two or three follow up questions as American reporters do to Obama's Gibbs at the Daily Briefings, but in interviews on television. Israel complains all the time about the non-PR ( propaganda) BBC reporting in Palestine.
I think while I read and don't try to speed through opinion articles. Most the editorial writers at the Times are in the worth thinking category, but my favorites are Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and David Brooks from liberal to centrist to conservative.
Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann Gives Us Real Facts to See Through the Lies of the Establishment and the Press/Media. www.prwatch.org
Hour Three: Corporations are people too?! Thom debates corporate personhood with Peter Ferrara of the American Civil Rights Union www.theacru.org Tuesday
Hour Three: American Tea Party…the new counterrevolution? Thom confronts conservative John O’Hara of The Heartland Institute www.JohnMOHara.com Book: "What Would Jefferson Do?" by Thom Hartmann, pages 94-95 #1 Progressive Talk Show Host in America
Quotes from Thom Hartmann's book gives us some clarity about how powerful corporations such as Railroads in the 1880s can even erase Supreme Court decisions and change it to something that favors corporations. Jim Kawakami, Jan 26, 2010 http://jimboguy.blogspot.com "Reality, Government is us."
..." the major innovation of the Founders was the idea that the government is us. It's owned by us, run by us for the benefit of us, exists solely because we continue to approve of it, and is 100 percent answerable to us.
This was an idea that the anti-Revolution conservatives of 1776 strongly opposed. Many of them were among the riches men in America, and to protect their wealth, they wanted the colonies to remain part of Great Britain. But the liberals of 1776 had the new idea that instead of people getting their rights from a king, they, themselves, were the sole legitimate holders of rights. And they could confer privileges on a government they could create, so longs as it behaved in a fashion that supported "We the People."
... "In 1886, conservatives tried to take control of the government by claiming that corporations should have equal rights with humans, and it seemed that the Supreme Court had gone along with it.
(Hartmann found during the 2008 campaign that the defendant bribed the court clerk in 1886 and changed the original ruling by the Supreme Court, but the Chief Justice died before they could ask him to verify an undocumented decision. The crime in the 2,000 election was also undocumented and their decision applied only to Florida because if it applied to all the states, the elections would have had to done over again! The Tenth Amendment leaves rules not in the Constitution to the States.
Jim K.)
Later, corporations began to claim human rights against discrimination and giant chain stores fought communities that don't want them wiping out local merchants by claiming that laws that guarantee rights for African Americans should also protect them. A giant chemical company claimed Fourth Amendment privacy rights to block the EPA from doing surprise inspections looking for cancer-causing poison emissions.
And corporations even asserted the First Amendment human right of free speech, including the right to give politicians campaign cash (formerly a felony in most U.S. states) and the right to lie in newscasts and defended it up through the courts, calling it a "vindication" when a federal court ruled that FCC regulations requiring truth in news reporting were only "guidelines."
But the bottom line in America is that the government is us. Conservatives, however, don't much like this idea of democracy. From trying to overturn elections by judicial process (Gore-Bush, 2,000) to using the power of corporations and corporate money, they consistently laugh at the notions of "the will of the people" or "the good of the people." Instead, they suggest, government should provide huge breaks and welfare for corporations.
"Myth: "The Founders and Framers wee impractical, idealistic Enlightenment-era dreamers."
Reality: Democracy is the most practical, stable, and normal form of governance for both nature and humans.
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