burchismo

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

MEDIA, OLD AND NEW

I got an angry email this morning from the most leftward of the Ancient Mariners on my email list of Old maritime lawyers. He was railing against the phenomenon he encountered of other older friends of his forwarding silly emails to him that contained political "quotes" that were easily demonstrated to be fakes with a simple check of Snopes. I replied:

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As an extraterrestrial anthropologist (I'm almost finished with my final report -- I promise! -- I just need to polish off the "Recommendations" sections at the end), I find this phenomenon fascinating. One of our number (ahem ...) was notorious for forwarding this kind of thing around the office. Interestingly, the frequency of his sending of these kinds of emails has decreased substantially as he has repeatedly encountered "snopes-ing" from younger folks.

Naturally, I have a theory about this. Here it is: This phenomenon correlates closely (but not entirely) with age. It's much more common with people whose cultural sensitivities predate a certain point in the evolution and proliferation of electronic media. I believe it is possible that these older folks, whose perceptions of how information is disseminated in the wider world was formed in the age of much more concentrated, pre-electronic mass media, have not fully internalized the qualitative difference between media in those ancient days and how it functions now.

Before some time in the 1980s, distributing information widely was HARD and EXPENSIVE. Now it's EASY and CHEAP. In the days of newspapers and broadcast radio and television, there were multiple layers of filters between the origin of some text or image and the final stage of receipt of that image by a large number of people. This tended to weed out the most obvious fakes and frauds. Now, any idiot can type, photoshop, cut, paste and post ANYTHING for EVERYONE for essentially NO COST.

For those whose world view was formed in the age of Hearst and Murrow, if you saw something in print, heard a voice on the radio or saw an image on a TV screen, it had a HUGE implication of legitimacy. It takes a while to fully internalize that this phenomenon has not only completely disappeared, but that we're moving rapidly in the opposite direction. This has given rise to Burch Aphorism #327: "The Internet is the most effective amplifier of stupidity ever devised by man."

Now, there is a corollary of this set of phenomena that is often visible on the opposite side of the political spectrum from the one upon which you comment, Philip. This is the residual tendency to perceive the traditional mainstream media as a paragon of reliability. Recall that one of the essential elements of Old Media was the necessary inclusion of multiple layers of filtering that went into the process of its functioning. These filters certainly did act as checks on information quality. But they also imposed biases on information. The relative trickle of information that made it to the final stage of printing and broadcasting in Old Media (compared to the firehose of data -- good and bad -- spewed by the Interwebs thingie) had been massaged and spun and skewed before it was offered up to media consumers. The product delivered by the beloved, avuncular, honey-toned voice of a Cronkite was very much a highly processed product.

I have perceived a tendency among some people (again, typically those whose word view was formed in the age of Old Media) to be unaware of or at least highly discount the processed nature of the product offered by the struggling dinosaurs of the Old Media. Since, prior to the coming of the Murdoch, Old Media in America was primarily an organ of the middle-brow Left, this tendency to be unaware of the filtering in Old Media products tends to be more common among older folks with Red, or at least Pink, political and cultural values.

Thus, for instance, when Cronkite's anointed successor, Dan Rather, based a "60 Minutes" "story" on documents about Shrub's National Guard service that were easily-demonstrable, crude forgeries, many older folks on the left simply couldn't accept it. Rather said it, CBS wouldn't make such a stupid mistake, it must be true; thus went the straight-forward syllogism for these people. Ironically, the simple method of demonstrating the forgeries arose from the very computer technology that was swiftly undermining the business model of the Old Media strangle-hold on our culture.

Likewise, the gross leftist bias of the New York Times is simply invisible to a substantial (but rapidly shrinking) segment of the population. The fact that there is a pipeline of cultural indoctrination that leads from undergraduate journalism school straight to the newsroom, and that is enforced with a social filter at the hiring and promotion stage within the newsrooms of the non-Murdoch Old Media is to these antiquated news consumer like water to a fish -- so all-pervasive that they are unaware of it. They only become aware of this phenomenon when the nature of the "water" changes -- thus they can see the filters at work at Fox, but don't see it at the NYT, CNN and MSNBC.

I hope this helps. This subject will be treated at greater length in my final report.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 6:26 AM

THE ANSWER

If anyone cares, the clear answer to every single energy issue is THORIUM. If you look at the figures in the linked article, you'll see that a fraction of the money wasted on the "stimulus" could have put us on the path to safe, clean, abundant energy. And we would arrive at that destination in less than two decades.

These are facts. One other simple fact becomes crystal clear when you consider these facts. The geniuses who are our "leaders" don't have a clue. This would include our Nobel-prize-winning Energy Secretary. And our Nobel-prize-winning President. You know, the "smart guys."

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 5:11 AM

Friday, August 20, 2010

UNICORNS and RAINBOWS

One of my law partners sent a link to a George Will piece to an email group of ancient maritime lawyers that I now qualify to be part of, in an attempt to find common ground between me and one of our number -- a retired government lawyer who happens to be (very) Jewish and (very) typically left-leaning:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/18/AR2010081804691.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

I wrote a response to the group this morning:

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Will's closing paragraphs, which set out simple facts that the anti-Israel left simply ignores:

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The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

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The fantasy that there is some magical diplomatic formula of concessions that will "bring peace to the Middle East" will never die, so long as those in power in the civilized world ignore simple facts like this and the reality that there is a fundamntal cultural divide between the civilized world and those who cannot help but wish to destroy it.

I recently came across a brief little article written by an American living in Turkey about some of the elements of the culture she's observed there. I HIGHLY commend it to those who continue to indulge in the comforting delusion that "we're all basically the same, and everyone really wants the same things:"

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/articles/2010-JulyAugust/full-Berlinski-JA-2010.html

Unfortunately, we have performed a cultural lobotmoy on oursleves that makes it impossible for us as a society and a polity to come to grips with the implications of the reality described in Ms. Berlinki's essay. This makes it inevitable that we will postpone the day of reckoning, but with the only result that it will be even more bloody ... and destructive to us.

As for the looming elephant in the room that we are attempting to wish away with sanctions, I note that the official organ of the peace-loving left, the NYT, has this morning published an article describing how our keen intelligence services (you know, the ones who thought Iran wasn't working on a bomb just three years ago) are now telling the Israelis to calm down because the Iranians are much further from "breakout" to nuclear capability than the nasty hawks like me have been saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/world/middleeast/20policy.html?_r=1&hp

I find it comical that this item is premised on the conceit that we could have the kind of certainty that Israelis must bet their lives on in the face of Iran's stated official policy of destroying Israel and committing genocide against Jews. If I were an Israeli policy maker, my response would be to make a noise to the effect of "That's nice" -- and reach for my gun.

While its flaws as a source of intentional disinformation and agitprop planted by the Mossad and IDF are well known, the well-informed might want to check out what the notorious Debka has to say about this:

http://www.debka.com/article/8983/

The truth probably lies somewhere between the rainbows-and-unicorns view of the NYT and the apocalyptic image one gets from Debka ... but who knows -- maybe for once the unicorns will make an appearance. We can always Hope for Change.

GB, THHotA

posted by Greg 8:57 AM

Sunday, August 08, 2010

MORNING WALK

I saw seven blue herons and three great white egrets along a one-mile stretch of bayou this morning -- all splendidly healthy -- along with at least three medium-sized raptors and countless songbirds, including what amounted to a flock of mockingbirds. This is in a HEAVILY urbanized area in the fourth largest city in the United States, whose major industry is the hated, earth-killing oil and gas business, and which is infamous among our city-planning betters for having no zoning laws and a notoriously "pro-business" legal and social climate.

What's up with that?!?!?!

posted by Greg 8:04 AM

Friday, August 06, 2010

IN THE BLACK

I got an email from an in-law who is notoriously susceptible to "conspiracy" thinking. Attached was a photo he'd taken of a sunset that seemed to contain an image of one of those infamous "doughnuts-on-a-rope" contrails. Was it "Aurora," he asked? I responded:

Nobody would like to believe in Aurora (and even more so, "Brilliant Buzzard" a/k/a "Blackstar") more than I would. I've read just about every word available on the subject. There was a time when I leaned slightly in favor of believing Aurora was real. Back then (five or six years ago?), one of the weaker lines of evidence to which I gave SOME credence was the donuts-on-a-rope contrails. BUT, there is a perfectly "normal" explanation for them, as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Instability

Meanwhile, just about every category of "evidence" for Aurora has little by little evaporated, to the point where there's probably only three or four items still in the "things that make you go hmmm" category. A whole lot of what seemed quite compelling ten years ago or so has fallen to "prosaic" explanations. For instance, it now seems pretty clear that the "trailhead" of the Aurora story -- the actual "Aurora" line item on the ... what was it ... 1982 or so? ... black budget was in fact a cover for B-2 development money. In the last few years, those budgets have been gone over with a fine tooth comb by people who REALLY know what they're looking at, and the money for BOTH B-2 development and something like Aurora and/or Blackstar just doesn't seem to be there. Many of the line items that appeared and disappeared mysteriously WERE shell-games that the black project accountants were doing to hide money -- no question. But a project the size of Aurora, much less Blackstar, just can't fit.

This isn't to say that there absolutely have been and continue to be black projects that have been and continue to be amazingly successful in terms of hiding the ball. The "Beast of Kandahar" is the most recent example of that. I read about this stuff VERY closely, and I "knew" about the Beast only a few months before the general public did. The ENTIRE project was developed -- AND FIELDED -- COMPLETELY in the black. That's pretty amazing in these days of Internet discussion boards full of people like me ... But the Beast was a project one or even two orders of magnitude smaller than something like Aurora or Blackstar would have to be.

For what it's worth, I'll close with two open ends. First, there ARE still a few indications of a large black project dating back to the 1980s that involved exotic propulsion and/or ultra-high speed and altitude technology. These haven't been explained away yet, so I still put a SMALL possibility on the chance we'll someday learn that something really high and/or fast was flying back then that we didn't know about. And, finally, there is solid evidence that there is a CURRENT substantial black aerospace project in a much earlier stage of development -- that big new hangar at Area 51 with the big pile of dirt to block the view from ground observation sites is for something.

GB

posted by Greg 7:58 AM

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

MORNING WALK

Two egrets:
slowly,
silently,
in the dawn,
at the water's edge.
No time here;
it's always sunrise.

posted by Greg 7:28 AM