"What Liberal Media?", by Eric Alterman has been out for less than a month, but it looks like it's already (or soon will be) a big part of Group 1. Haven't read it yet, but Amazon suggested I check out this guy's list, titled, "So you'd like to...become an idiot!". It's worth reading, despite a few grammatical errors here and there. (Whoops, there's the copy editor in me, slipping out again...) For instance, he says this about Ann Coulter's "Slander":

Not only is it definitive proof through liberal use (pun intended) of the Lexis-Nexis database that "the Media" is liberal, it also explains in witty invective just how stupid everyone who's a liberal is! Sure at least half of the footnotes and "research" in the book has been shown to be at best shoddy, at worst outright obfuscation, but that doesn't matter to you! First rule of becoming an idiot- claims do not have to be supported or researched or found to contain any facts to be true! If you con convince yourself "Slander" is good journalism and a book to be taken seriously, you're way ahead of the idiot curve already!

1 January 2003. Early evening. La Mesa, California. Just before the end of a ten-hour drive. Something happened.



And, no, it wasn't a Joseph Heller novel.

There's been a low frequency of posts lately... I'm working on something really big. We just dumped a sizable amount of money from our research accounts in order to get the extra space needed for my chip. Meanwhile, I'm contributing to another project that will probably make my chip obsolete by the time it gets fabricated. In fact, our new project looks like it might make a lot of things obsolete. If it works, this could be the biggest thing I've seen in my (admittedly short) academic career... and it looks like I'll get to put my name on the paper. Sweet.

New York Times headline: "Children Choose Weapons in Mideast: This Time, Snowballs". While I appreciate this attempt at wit, I wonder whose lapse of judgement caused such a seemingly sarcastic, semi-racist headline to show up on the "front page" of the NYT online edition. [link] I guess the headline is in concert with the content of the article: Israeli and Palestenian children squaring off with snowballs...

Good god. As of 1:15 PM on Tuesday, February 25th, the banner ad at the top of this page reads "Are you going to heaven? Read the surprising Bible truth about God's promises -- Happiness is Free: download two free chapters from this Amazon #1 best-selling book". Happiness is free, but only two measly chapters of the book are? So it's come to this, has it Blogger? Maybe the word "Divine" in the blog title had something to do with that choice of ad. I don't click on ads as a rule, but I checked out "Happiness is Free" at Amazon.com, and it appears that, no, "Happiness is Free" is NOT free, but you do save $4.48 off the list price. And you get to read a 196-page trade paperback about Christian pop-psychology! Hooray!

I know it's a cliche, but I think I'm getting progressively jaded and cynical as the days and weeks go by. For instance, I've convinced myself that if I think about contemporary politics for too long (like the bald-faced sham of an election that resulted in the presidency of George W. Bush that EVERYONE seems to have forgotten and forgiven long ago), I'll go crazy, so I consciously limit my thinking on that subject. Subsequently, things don't outrage me as much. The headlines in The New York Times regularly say things like "U.N. Weapons Inspectors in Iraq Find A Bent Spoon in Hussein's Kitchen; Bush Sez This Means War", and I don't even bother to read the full story. So much Republican/conservative politics is based on cognitive dissonance. All available evidence shows that society improves when women have total access to legal abortion, so conservatives say abortion's gotta go. One of the bases of the U.S. Constitution is governmental/public neutrality on matters of religion, so Republicans say we need Christian prayer in public schools. And all available evidence points to the fact that abstinence-only or vague, non-specfic sex-ed programs do not work to reduce teen pregnancy and disease, so Republicans say they're the only way to go. And it's not just conservatives in the U.S. Right-wingers in England are the same way.

"A GOVERNMENT-backed course is encouraging pupils under 16 to experiment with oral sex, as part of a drive to cut rates of teenage pregnancy. Family campaigners believe that the course, called A Pause, is having the reverse effect by exciting the sexual interest of children."

Family campaigners. What a chilling phrase. Toward the end, they quote a teacher as saying

“There was no framework for talking about responsibility or the emotional side of relationships. By following this course, I feel that teachers are implicitly supporting under-age sexual activity.”

Cognitive dissonance. Nations with comprehensive, in-depth sex-ed programs have low rates of teen pregnancy and disease, so right-wingers say vague, abstinence-only programs must work. I'll end thusly: 1) Humans enjoy fucking. 2) Teenagers are humans. 3) Teenagers enjoy fucking. But if I let myself think about it for too long, I'll go insane.