Search


Blogroll

Media and the Brain

By Bruce | October 29, 2008

Popular culture has become as sulfur-smelling shit hitting the fan — specks of bad yuk all over everything.
Spreading across the face of modern life like a thick, wet blanket, obscuring vision, hampering and dominating, culture is just a waste product from the engine that’s the media — and media the word carries a definition created from an almost-endless list of particulars from TV, movies, books, art, anything written, spoken or sang, to science and engineering.
A whole shitload of shit.

(Illustration was found here).

Modern media’s nefarious influence originated the day before Halloween, Oct. 30, 1938 — 70 years ago Thursday.
Reality and fiction became one and the same for a big chunk of the US public when Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air created a radio-induced panic by adapting H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as a news broadcast.
Welles and his group adapted all kinds of literature for its weekly radio show — just the week before, they’d presented Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days — but War of the Worlds turned out to be more than just another production.
A shit-fire erupted. Listeners who failed to catch the opening disclaimer about it being a radio play, had to wait 40 minutes before another explanation was made — more than enough time to panic and become irrational.
Although there were stories of mass panic — people cowering in basements, roads full of cars, fleeing a horrifying Martian fireball landing near Grovers Mill, New Jersey — it has all proved to be highly exaggerated by newspapers the following days.
The big mess came from tons of panic telephone calls to police, fire and radio stations, newspapers, hospitals and the like.
A good account of the incident can be found at National Geographic.

In the wake of the Munich, Germany, bullshit with Hitler only a month before and Welles’ efficient use of realistic-sounding news operations put a naive public quickly on edge.
As noted journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote at the time, Welles’ little exhibition had political consequences:

No, the mega-talented Mr. Welles did have something at hand — the great, unknown fear factor in human nature.
Media attacks the brain.
Joseph Goebbels had a knack for using media to fearmonger, or manipulate media to scare, to obtain a certain goal, the media a vehicle/means to an end, so to speak.
In fact, Goebbels founded and was the principal editor of the official Nazi periodical Der Angriff — “The Attack.”
And nowadays, we have Karl Rove, who really was an inbred follower of Lee Atwater.
Bush’s brain attempted to manipulate America, and in some cases, and for awhile, did just that, twisted and kneaded facts from lies, half truths and just plain plain bullshit.

(Illustration found here.

And, despite all the techno-marvels available nowadays, silence can be more than effective.

Indeed, silence on the most-all-consuming of all media — TV.
Television’s affect/effect is enormous, its influence on everybody pretty-much total — no one is immune, nobody gets out of this one alive.
Dreamy, fantasy-fueled kids, such as I in the late 1950s (and still today in grown-up form), are the easiest victims for TV’s long-lasting, potent and enchanting facade, which by now has produced a twisted-madness view of life.
One doesn’t have dwell in the ethereal, however, to have succumbed to TV’s wiles — sons of insurance salesmen and sons of farmers or teachers or big-rig drivers, all have been stamped in the brain by a television set almost all the time somewhere in the near vicinity.
Fiction and reality are practically fused nowadays with cable, satellite, blow-back online TV like YouTube, subtly blended and seamless, patched together in the twinkle-blink of an eye.
TV is an apparatus so much a part of life this past more-than 50 years, it’s taken completely for granted. Albeit the TV screen might cover a wall, it’s still an appliance so-well-blended, so-always-there, it’s near invisible.
The instrument of TV, in itself, is just like a toaster, but way different.

Despite all the chatter, all the options on TV nowadays, bullshit is still bullshit even when spoken with less than a whisper.

Case in point: Ignorance by a huge chunk/swath of America to the New York Times much-detailed expose of the Pentagon’s propaganda program.
The huge Times piece (11 pages) outlined how Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon created a legion of retired military types to hype the war on TV.
Of course, in the wave of hyper news the past three months, especially with the worldwide financial blow out, along with the politics, Sarah Palin and like junk, the revelation of Pentagon mouthpieces on TV news shows lying about how the Iraqi war was proceeding has slipped far, far afield.

Although the story appeared in April, and there was much play online, television went total black on the whole affair — TV was a co-conspirator.
Only one TV network, PBS, reported on the Times story and the Pentagon operation.
As Think Progress noted in early May;

The Pentagon has apparently gotten away with it — at least for now.

Another media quiet moment is the back-story on John McCain.
Rolling Stone magazine earlier this month presented a description of a self-centered hardcase McCain — a lifetime thing.
And if even a third of the article is true, McCain has very serious mental problems.
And this:
In September, counterpunch.org published a letter describing an encounter a woman had with McCain while on vacation in Fiji prior to the 2000 election.
I made mention of the incident on my blog and continued on my way.
Last week, I spied another story on HuffPost which sounded very similar, but different.
The first story can be found here:

And this from HuffPost:

The problem is we didn’t know who he is — apparently a badly deranged individual — because the news media, the mainstream news media, never told the truth, never revealed McCain’s problems.
Apparently reporters covering McCain looked upon him as a granddaddy or something akin to that as witnessed by a story Tuesday in the LA Times:

The reporter, Maeve Reston, then hit McCain with an awkward moment as seen here and the sweet, Straight Talking Express went into the cold, ugly gulping ‘Do You Know Who I Am?’ bullshit.

Does Tom Brokaw know McCain’s real persona?
Mainstream journalism has become way-lucrative for some that past couple of decades, just look at Ted Koppel’s estate jumping.
Control is to govern the TV.

(Illustration found here).

Technology has shifted the TV from just the so-called ‘living room’ to practically anywhere.
The Internet and all the little gadgets associated with it has caused a revolution in how we view the boob tube, maybe rearranging the impact of TV’s influence.

Last March, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of “Family Guy,” a Fox animated comedy that ranks among the most popular online shows, told the International Herald Tribune a long-time familiar fixture might soon be gone from our lives.

An idea evoking nostalgic sadness for an inanimate object.

My first TV memory is of the set itself — an image really, really faded of this enormous cabinet-looking thing with a small glass front sitting on the back of a delivery truck, circa summertime, 1955.
I was a bit younger than seven — I hadn’t started to school just yet — and the set belonged to neighbors, owners of a hardware store in downtown Enterprise, Ala.
My family didn’t get our own TV for another two years, and after that, always had one.

TV appears a product of a near-obsessive desire to eliminate distance between people, places or things. No one guy invented TV.
A shit-load of brainiacs over near-two centuries, probably starting in 1837 with studies on electromagnetism, contributed in one way or another to advancing the product further toward the TV system we have today.

As a perception, this technological wonder most likely completed its purpose on April 7, 1927.
On that day the first long-distant television signal was broadcast between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover gave a little speech at the event.
Hoover was a rich, progressive, too-big-for-his-britches nit wit.
A mining engineer by trade, he was elected president the following year, but blown out of office in 1932 by not understanding, and thus failing to figure out the Great Depression — his name now synonymous with an era of catastrophic disaster, as back in “Hoover times.”
In his comments at the TV-signal exhibit, Hoover lavished lofty words on the significance of the occasion, but also inadvertently revealed the inherent disaster of human-evolved technology:

Human genius…?

(Illustration found here).

Television today is a morphed-marvel of a medium.

In digesting TV, a human uses primarily the senses of sight and hearing.
The core of this is the sensorium, where all this shit comes together.
According to Wikipedia, sensorium (plural: sensoria) refers to the sum of an organism’s perception, the “seat of sensation,” where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives.
The term originally enters English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century. In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind’s organ.
This so-called mind’s organ — the brain — contains a person’s total character, which is based on an awareness by the individual of the unique and changing sensory environments around them. Our senses gives us sensation, perception and also provide interpretation.

Communication has always influenced cultural society.
A gaggle of experts, from Harold Dwight Lasswell and Harold Adams Innis to most likely the best-known of the media-studies-writers, Marshall McLuhan, sometimes referred to as the “Oracle of the Electronic Age,” predicted the onslaught of media and its effect on humanity.
McLuhan was a serious student of the inherent problems with media.
In fact, his most studious work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), warned “there can only be disaster arising from unawareness of the causalities and effects inherent in our technologies.”

However, McLuhan is perhaps most popular and a semi-cult icon for his phrase turned into book title, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.
He believed just about everything was “media” — including even a light bulb, that “creates an environment by its mere presence.”
He was so well known, Woody Allen used him as a rebuttal prop in Annie Hall.

In this modern age with a near-overload of information, the human brain is toiling overtime to digest and understand it all, a near total barrage of shit thrown as if from a techno fan and striking everybody between the eyeballs.
As this insane, unprecedented presidential election rockets to its conclusion, now only days away, the Wall Street shit-storm seems to never end, wars and way-more than rumors of wars keep nerves on edge and the global warming meltdown gets worse by the hour, just remember the words of one, Homer Jay Simpson:

Yeah, but sometimes I feel like them folks in 1938 New Jersey: Freakin’ shit! Now it’s Martians!

Topics: Articles | No Comments »

Obama and the Strange Current of Change

By Bruce | June 4, 2008

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — most peculiar, mama
— Nobody Told Me, John Lennon

The final ‘Tuesday primary’ passed into history yesterday as this most-strange of presidential elections continues to stimulate the mind and move the bowels.

Although Barack Obama last night finally reached that noted, mathematical line in the political sand, Hillary Clinton still persists in being petulant.
Despite the numbers on the board, despite Obama’s now-obvious, phenomenal grasp of a kind of celebrity status, as Rupert Murdoch crowed “rock star,” and has led a rolling-thunder-revue across the America this past 18 months, Clinton continues to hang like a tenacious bulldog.

US politics has rarely fostered any thing close to a “rock star” persona.
One could be stretching the idea a bit with Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Of course, Jack Kennedy in 1960, Bobby Kennedy in 1968, along maybe with Eugene McCarthy (”Clean for Gene”) — the last year of any real ground-swell-tidal wave of enthusiasm and popular support for any candidate near Obama’s appeal.
The French have a flair for it, sometimes in the Latino countries, but never hardly-ever in the US.
Hillary Clinton can’t see it, or doesn’t want to see it.

In a little speech last night at Baruch College in New York City, Clinton congratulated Obama on “for all that he’s accomplished,” but wouldn’t call it quits.
She was going to wait “24 to 48 hours” to make any kind of public decision, one she had to have known before she crawled up to that podium.
A shame in the face of tsunami reality.

Later in the evening, Obama revealed the curl of the tide.
In a talk before 17,000 or so supporters packed into the very-futuristic-sounding Ecel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn. — appropriately and ironically where John McCain will accept the Republican mantle at its convention in September — Obama became a part of history:

A lot of ground in such a short space. Forty years after Martin Luther King’s death — one simple Biblical generation — and a black man is a major candidate for president.
In 2008, the big issues of race and gender came together and after all didn’t seem to matter.
The major concept here is change.
Not because Obama is black, or Clinton is a woman, but because change is the single most-important topic, especially among the young, who can see beyond the political bullshit.
A case in point: Photo on a political blog site of a white, intelligent-looking young boy at an Obama rally wearing a t-shit proclaiming “I trust Obama with my future.”

And Clinton acted like a spoiled brat.
According to the New York Post, “He (Obama) tried to call her twice following the speech, but got her voicemail. She finally returned the call as his plane was about to fly out of St. Paul to Washington.”

And to Washington and face the strange.

McCain’s speech last night in New Orleans is prime, pure strange.
Universally panned, Rolling Stone called it the “Worst. Speech. Ever,” as McCain tried to tighten down the hatches, but just continued to make matters worse.
Via the Associated Press — McCain tried to strong-arm the atmosphere by a strange, reverse osmosis: “The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again. I have a few years on my opponent, so I am surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas.”
Failed ideas?

If the past 18 months is any indication, and if the overall, general disgust with the George Bush administration continues, McCain and the GOP will get slaughtered in November.

The big blank space, however, is the modern-era office of the president.
In The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, writer/editor Gene Healy describes the post of chief executive as having way out-grown what the Constitution originally intended.
And the current sitting president has sucked up governmental powers at a rate never before seen in American politics.
Healy warns of those powers and the pressure keep them would be hard to resist “even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.”

Change is good.
Strange days indeed, mama.

Topics: Page One | No Comments »

Skulking in the Eavesdrip: FISA And Intelligence

By Bruce | April 15, 2008

Intelligence is not always in the eye of the beholder.

Everyday, walking-around people need some kind of intelligence to at least pay bills, or open closet doors; the intelligence to at least make it through life. Does intelligence and just old, plain common sense go hand-in-hand?
What’s an ‘intelligent’ choice? 
Is intelligence geared to knowledge?

Another form of intelligence, but yet is still supposedly wedded to having enough sense to comprehend consequences, is that of the military. This intelligence, which leans away from common sense and into the ether of war, has appeared to become near-rabid-important nowadays to reportedly keep America safe.
In warfare, intelligence, or ‘intel,’ is a life-and-death, serious situation. Knowledge of the enemy and the battlefield is essential — good intel is worth its weight in gold (and human life-and-limb).
All armies since the very-first war way back in the ancient, deep-shadows of the past — and conducted most likely around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq — depend on military intelligence.
Spying has been around awhile. The Biblical Joshua sent two spies into Jericho before commencing military operations.
In the jargon, it’s called reconnaissance, both a military and medical term indicating a search conducted to gain information, which in early warfare consisted only of scouting parties or reconn patrols. Currently military reconnaissance is just about everywhere, from the lowest-level foot/vehicle reconn patrols in Baghdad, to satellites, unmanned drones and aircraft to electronic tracking and eavesdropping.
It’s the grunt on the ground, however, who has to suffer the consequences of bad intel.

One of the early good users of reconnaissance was Alexander, the historical-famous warrior. In 331 B.C., he led his army out of Egypt and east into the Persian Empire. King Darius, who would eventually get his ass kicked, had gathered a huge army which collided with Alexander’s forces on a vast plain east of the Tigris River between the villages of Gaugamela and Arbela, now called Arbil, a good-sized city about 50 miles east of modern Mosul, Iraq.
Alexander wasn’t called ‘the Great’ for nothing. Although his army was far outnumbered, Alexander implemented some daring tactics during the heat of battle and routed the Persians, causing Darius to flee like a scalded dog.
Use of intelligence prior to the battle didn’t hurt.
The following is from The Anabasis of Alexander: The Battle of Gaugamela (Book III, 7-16), written by ancient Roman historian (and a warror himself) Lucius Flavius Arrianus, who is called Arrian in English. (Translated by EJ Chinnock, courtesy iranchamber.com/history):

Ah, the good old days. Just checking to see if there are any ditches or stakes in the ground.

Today’s warfare is slightly more complicated, to say the very least, but yet remains a much-more bloody business.
The concept of “total war,” in which there are no non-combatants, has been around since the dawn of warfare, but really didn’t come into its own until the 19th century — America’s Civil War is considered an early example. World War I and II were both fought as total wars — carpet bombing of entire cities and regions in the latter conflict, slaughtering thousands of civilians, became an acceptable norm. And then, there’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki — now seemingly seen near-60 years later, the bomb were dropped only to flex muscle and test equipment.
Apparently, as mankind supposedly became more civilized, waging war went in the opposite direction, becoming less and less humane, a trend regrettably lead by the US. Although the horror is buffered by the words “collataral damage,” the carnage is from power and might, not necessarily right.
Intel is more-than-extreme difficult to gain from groups involved with ‘ethnic cleansing,’ an old term with new horrors attached, a movement once practiced/still going on in areas from the Middle East to the Balkans to Africa — all over the globe. A kind of World War, but different.
And in this modern era, war is not only total, but is now shaded by shadow.

In 1978, when the world was still a bit naive and carried somewhat-well-placed boundaries — The Soviet Union was still intact and the Cold War was still active — the US Congress passed the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, or FISA.
The Act itself was a result of Dick Nixon’s Watergate nonsense. All kinds of suffering shit came retching out of the Senate’s 1973 ‘Watergate hearings’ (”there’s a cancer growing on the presidency“) and one particular turd was Nixon’s use of federal agencies for sordid purposes, such as spying on political and activist groups — direct violations of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Senate investigations into all these goings-on led to a means of providing judicial and congressional oversight (and supposedly more supervision) on the federal government’s stealthy observations of its citizens who talk to foreigners, while also allowing for high-levels of secrecy.
The Act fixed physical and electronic procedures for surveillance, and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and/or “agents of foreign powers.”
FISA allowed warrantless surveillance within the US for no more than a year unless the “surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.”
If a US citizen is involved, a judicial warrant is required within 72 hours after the spying operation had started.
FISA also created the 11-judge FISC — Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — where federal authorities get their warrants against suspected foreign agents inside the US. The whole FISA scheme works in near-total secrecy.

In fact, FISA appeared to have performed so well the past near-30 years, few people outside the intelligence community, maybe a few journalists, among others, even knew for certain such a program existed. The every-day, walking-around guy in the street hadn’t a clue.
Until December 2005: The New York Times revealed President George W. Bush’s administration, in conjunction with the National Security Agency, had been operating its own warrantless eavesdropping program for two years, or longer.
Although FISA was available, the Bush people circumvented it and established procedures outside of any oversight whatsoever in the name of national security.
Any claim that US agents have to move quickly to get the ‘intel’ without being hampered by procedure is bogus as FISA has that 72-hour window to get a warrant “after” surveillance has been instigated. President Bush and his team appear to equate fear with national security.

FISA was amended by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 to include terrorists not specifically backed by a foreign government.
Last August, Bush signed the Protect America Act of 2007, but the bill expired in February without gaining support in Congress. The Protect America Act was to refurbish FISA, but the entire scheme seems to be the Bush administration attempting a version of the old CYA — ‘Cover Your Ass’ — to try and close any investigative/legal doors on the program.
The question of immunity for all those telecomp companies for participating in an outlaw surveillance program for nearly five years is the heart-of-the-matter in the dangling Protect America Act: Bush and team want immunity.
FISA is fine. And it’s federal law.
(After Bush is out of office next year, as they’re sued, the telecoms can regroup their losses by then suing the living shit out of citizen George W).

The real fright is not terrorists, not Osama bin Laden, but the federal government as it has been hacked and corrupted these past seven-plus years. 
Terrorists seemed to be extremely smart at using very-low-tech devices. And its been difficult to gain usable military intel about those so-dubbed ‘terrorist organizations,’ from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, because these guys are way-tight lipped.
According to a group of US and European intelligence officials, who gathered for a conference last month in Barcelona, Spain, the al-Qaeda network has been harder to penetrate than the Kremlin during the Cold War.
A different kind of enemy, a different kind of war, a war students of military call “asymmetric warfare,” where unconventional tactics are used against a much larger and better-equiped adversary.
Vietnam should have been a learning experience for the US, but apparently the lesson wasn’t taken to heart. 

And now President Bush has called for surveillance everywhere. Last week, Michael Chertoff, director of the Department of Homeland Security, announced the unwieldy and incompentent DHS will soon have its own domestic satellite surveillance office connected to the NSA courtesy of a quietly-ordained order by Bush in January.
The NSA seems to have its fingers in all kinds of ’surveillance.’
One cannot imagine Chertoff, probably the least-secure acting guy in government, running any kind of sensitive spying process. He’s claimed the DHS program will not intercept communications.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), feels rightfully a slight twitch from such ideas.

And to add to the good intel on America’s government and also from the Washington Post: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States — and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.
The operation “allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive..”
Sloppy, near-criminal work of government.

 An example of the absolute failure of the Bush adminstration’s attempt at gathering military/national security intelligence, as it is referenced by FISA (gaining intel by torture as referenced this week by President Bush and all his top-advisors, from the vice president on down, is another totally-different-but-all-the same can of worms) has to be the recent performance of US Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
And Mukasey’s recital allows a peep-hole into an arrognant, incompetent mindset with it comes to gathering intelligence.

Mukasey is just another Alberto Gonzales or a David Brown or a Donald Rumsfeld or a Scooter Libby. He’s waffled on issues before, from waterboarding to Bush’s stonewall-stand on executive privilege, but last week he confessed to lying.
In March, during an appearance at a San Francisco public affairs forum, Mukasey remarked that a telephone call made prior to Sept. 11, 2001, from the Middle East to the US could have the factor in saving lives.
He was making a pitch, of course, for the passage of Bush’s Protect America Act, which if in place during the summer of 2001, the attack on the World Trade Center could obviously been prevented. Mukasey’s act was high drama: “We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went…”
And he appeared to almost start crying: “We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said. (News reports indicated he then ’struggled to maintain his composure’).

Just an act for an act.

The Afghan phone call was bogus. There is no record of any such communitication in 9-11 Commission files. No record of any such call. And last Thursday, Mukasey appeared at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing and again waffled away the remark.
Although the exchange between Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mukasey didn’t make news, the incident displayed both the use of law and FISA.
(The following courtesy of legaltimes.typepad.com, April 10)

Eavesdropping actually comes from the literal. The eavesdrop or eavesdrip is the width of ground around a house or building which receives the rain water dropping from the eaves, so, if anyone found lurking about the eavesdrip was most likely up to no good — listening in on a private conversation, or spying through a window.
Ancient Anglo-Saxon law punished eavesdroppers, those found/seen creeping along the eavesdrip of another’s man’s home. The guilty were slapped with a fairly-good-sized fine. Those were the days of ‘a man’s home is his castle.’

No more.

 

Topics: News, Page One | No Comments »

« Previous Entries