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It’s Not Me, It’s You: Blaming the Public’s “Perception of the Economy”

April 26, 2024

It’s Not Me, It’s You: Blaming the Public’s “Perception of the Economy”

If you think you spent twenty years being ripped off while a generation of rent-seeking scam artists was showered with public subsidies, experts agree: your “perception” needs correcting

You only think eggs cost too much.

“People are really tying Bidenomics and their perception of the economy to the inflation rate,” said Matt Monday of Morning Consult, in a new Bloomberg story titled, “Biden’s gains against Trump vanish against deep economic pessimism, poll shows.” It’s the latest entrant in an intensifying campaign to describe voters, especially in key electoral swing states, as morons and partisan haters who’ll deny reality itself out of political spite.

This campaign has been weirdly perverse in its mockery. Seattle Times cartoonist David Horsey recently tossed off a visual of the reality-denying swing voter, rendering him as a pudgy, confused hominid in the mode of Monty Python’s duncelike Gumbys. Having negative feelings about “the best performing [economy] in the world” is equivalent to denying who won the Super Bowl:

Left, the Swing Voter. Right, Gumbys.

When the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data,” I thought the “It’s not me, it’s you” framing had to be ironic, a spoof of these increasingly numerous “perception of the economy” pieces. Nope:

Noting that 74% of respondents in a recent poll said they felt inflation in the “past year” was going in the wrong direction, author Greg Ip noted flatly “it’s not true,” adding:

I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Self-Genocide of the West

December 27, 2018

The Self-Genocide of the West

Stephen Cohen and I are branded “Russian dupes” and “Putin agents,” because we object to the highly orchestrated and false portrayal of Russia as a threat to the West, a portrayal that is leading to war. The purpose of this orchestration is to prevent President Trump or any future president from reducing the dangerous tensions between nuclear powers that have accumulated since the Clinton regime. The military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy. The Democrats have an interest in the villification of Russia as “Russiagate” explains Hillary’s loss of the 2016 Presidential election and gives Democrats hope of removing President Trump from office. The media lacks independence, knowledge, and integrity and is the tool used by the military/security complex to control explanations, a prostitution of the media that has made the term “presstitutes” an accurate description. As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby.

All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security. See for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/opinion/trump-mattis-syria-afghanistan.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion

The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Syrian War For Dummies – Three Versions

March 17, 2018

Syrian War For Dummies – Three Versions

As the Ghouta campaign continues to unfold, we should expect that both politicians and mainstream media will give us – in the words of philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr – “necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications” intended to shape our perceptions of events.

It goes without saying that such “emotionally potent oversimplifications” on Syria have formed the dominant paradigm through which the American public has received its information over the past seven years of war. From the State Department officials to think tank “experts” to the Graham/McCain axis to CNN panelists to the neocon twitterati and all the usual interventionistas who cast everything in terms of Manichean good vs. evil, darkness vs. light, bloodthirsty tyrants vs. noble populace – we’ve had to endure and fight seven years of a constant stream of propaganda on Syria.

Image source: Thierry Ehrmann via Flickr

This worldview is what BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis accurately characterized as a ‘goodies and baddies’ dualistic vision of global eventswhich keeps the Western public under the illusion that its own political leaders are perpetually driven by concern over human rights, defending the weak and oppressed, and spreading democracy over and against the unenlightened megalomaniac dictators of the world who are simply bent on brutalizing their own people.

The BBC’s Curtis concluded of the “humanitarian” wars that followed in the wake of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ (especially Libya and Syria) :

The question at the heart of this whole story is – Who was the ventriloquist? And who was the dummy? Maybe we were the dummy? By allowing perception management with its simplifications, falsehoods and exaggerations to create a simplified vision of the world – we fell into a fake universe of certainty when really we were just watching a pantomime. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The (Mind) Games People Play

February 9, 2018

THE (MIND) GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

Fair warning! This is a long and dense read and not intended for the faint-hearted

While most of us would accept there are two states of mind when it comes to perceiving reality, belief and disbelief, I posit there are three. And this third state of mind, the suspension of disbelief, is employed by nearly all of us most of the time when interacting within our own perceived reality.

If we are to recognize the prevailing global cultural insanity as a long duration event, meaning it started many centuries ago and will last many centuries beyond today, being logical and rational, while an essential component of survival, can only be viewed as a significant disability when trying to make sense of an insane world.

This is particularly true when we closely examine group and individual psychology and how it affects everything from culture to money to politics and all the prevailing memes in-between. Any sober assessment of the human condition leads to one conclusion only. Everyone is insane, including you and me. It is only a matter of degree, not if.

That said; for the sake of this article let us assume one can be sane enough to recognize his or her own insanity. While nearly all will point to the actual behavior of the insane as proof of the illness, I tend to focus on the driving force behind the behavior. My experience shows this to be our horribly distorted belief system(s) which propel us deeper and deeper into our madness.

But belief is a misnomer for what actually occurs in the real world. The word belief implies action, intent and effort, as in a verb or adjective. However this should be differentiated from passive belief, which is a subconscious and conscious embrace of a thought or idea which we embody in whole and absolutely.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Failure of Imagination

October 26, 2015

A Failure of Imagination

Simply stated we create our own reality……although it is a ‘reality’ strictly limited to the range and scope of our beliefs and imagination. Thus if we can conceive of a world no different than what we believe actually exists, which in turn is based solely upon our present day (deliberately) limited perception, then this is exactly what we shall (co)create, maintain and interact with.

This concept is staggering in its simplicity and self evident when we consider it from all sides and with an open mind. Of course, it follows then that those of limited imagination, either by way of training, conditioning, ignorance or denial, will see my statement as nonsensical and ridiculous, thus perpetuating their (and our) own narrow, stagnant and self destructive reality.

It is my contention we are all conceived as perfect reality creators, though not yet fully formed and completely untrained, who are hijacked and sidetracked into a slave culture reality designed to serve others and not our ‘selves’. This process has so twisted our natural human impulse for free and unique reality creation the end result expresses as individual and collective insanity. Sadly, tragically, we are all terribly insane and getting worse by the moment.

Ultimately this deeply implanted and completely alien subversion of our mind, spirit and body acts as a lingering virus or infection which, while not deadly (yet), is extremely debilitating and exhausting. This serves to further reinforce the inner insanity while also undermining defensive devices employed by our inner ‘self’ in order to recover from what we subconsciously ‘know’ deep within is an externally applied alien abomination.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change: a clash of epistemologies

October 2, 2015

Climate Change: a clash of epistemologies

In a post published earlier this year, Ugo Bardi explains that the debate on climate change is going nowhere due to a fundamental incommunicability – or a ‘clash’ as he calls it – between different types of epistemologies over climate change. In his post he refers to some exchange between scientists and a newcomer – not any newcomer, actually the vice-president of the Italian Coal Industry Associations –which happened on the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry (SCI). The newcomer used this section to attack climate science and climate scientists. The latter fully felt the attack and reacted as if their own persona had been aggressed. Apparently, the exchange degenerated in assorted insults and personal smears.

Quoting Ugo, “stiffen up and look offended when someone belittles climate science is not useful.” Indeed, it is not. But as I dare reading through the lines of Ugo’s post, the reason why it is not has nothing to do with the consequences of such insulting exchange – certainly the newcomer has not changed his mind on climate change; it has to do with the reasons of such incommunicability between different categories of individuals, one which raises conflicts rather than mere disagreements. To understand such conflicts Ugo mobilises the idea that the two groups – the scientists and the newcomer – are endowed with opposite epistemologies, that is, opposite ways of knowing and believing the world. The discrepancy goes beyond differences in perceiving the world and understand it accordingly; the discrepancy concerns the way the world is analytically constructed and given a sense.

I am sure that Ugo would have appreciated the concept of ‘epistemological rationality’ used by Alban Bouvier, a French social epistemologist, with reference to discursive exchanges between reciprocally suspicious interlocutors, in which each party considers that the arguments of the other rely on false or unreliable knowledge.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Darwin’s Casino

July 9, 2015

Darwin’s Casino

Our age has no shortage of curious features, but for me, at least, one of the oddest is the way that so many people these days don’t seem to be able to think through the consequences of their own beliefs. Pick an ideology, any ideology, straight across the spectrum from the most devoutly religious to the most stridently secular, and you can count on finding a bumper crop of people who claim to hold that set of beliefs, and recite them with all the uncomprehending enthusiasm of a well-trained mynah bird, but haven’t noticed that those beliefs contradict other beliefs they claim to hold with equal devotion.

I’m not talking here about ordinary hypocrisy. The hypocrites we have with us always; our species being what it is, plenty of people have always seen the advantages of saying one thing and doing another. No, what I have in mind is saying one thing and saying another, without ever noticing that if one of those statements is true, the other by definition has to be false. My readers may recall the way that cowboy-hatted heavies in old Westerns used to say to each other, “This town ain’t big enough for the two of us;” there are plenty of ideas and beliefs that are like that, but too many modern minds resemble nothing so much as an OK Corral where the gunfight never happens.

An example that I’ve satirized in an earlier post here is the bizarre way that so many people on the rightward end of the US political landscape these days claim to be, at one and the same time, devout Christians and fervid adherents of Ayn Rand’s violently atheist and anti-Christian ideology.  The difficulty here, of course, is that Jesus tells his followers to humble themselves before God and help the poor, while Rand told hers to hate God, wallow in fantasies of their own superiority, and kick the poor into the nearest available gutter.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The coming “tipping point” of the climate perception: enough to solve the problem?

June 16, 2015

The coming “tipping point” of the climate perception: enough to solve the problem?

Recognizing the existence of world scale problems takes time. For instance, the above Google “Ngram” search show that world hunger was not recognized as a serious problem until relatively recent times. However, starting in the 1960s, considerable efforts were dedicated to increasing agricultural yields (the “Green Revolution”), with a certain degree of success. But was the problem really solved? Or was it only postponed – or even worsened – as a result of agriculture becoming totally dependent on fossil fuels? Something similar may happen in the future for the problem of climate change; it may be recognized, at last, but that doesn’t mean it will be solved. 

Apart from a small number of diehard deniers, most people are perfectly aware that we have a serious problem with climate change. The public is just confused by a bombardment of contradictory statements pushed in the media, but probably that all what is needed to change the terms of the debate is just a push in the right direction. The pope’s encyclic on climate – expected for this week – could do just that, reaching a “tipping point” in the general perception of the problem.After the tipping point, a consensus may be reached that the idea that climate change doesn’t exist or is not caused by human activity is not just wrong, but positively dangerous for society. Something comparable to such ideas as – say – that there is really no evidence that smoking causes cancers, that wearing a seat belt while riding a car is useless, and that crack is no more dangerous than coffee as a recreational drug.

Of course, we can’t be sure that the pope’s encyclic will have this effect; but, suppose it does, then what can we expect to happen? Optimistically, we could think that most of the work is done and that, from then on, something serious and effective will be done to stop global warming. Unfortunately, things will not be so easy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

A Kept Culture | Two Ice Floes

November 3, 2014

A Kept Culture | Two Ice Floes.

My thinking on a variety of subjects has changed over time and I expect my understanding will continue to evolve as new information, knowledge and propaganda enters my orbit. Contrary to popular belief this is a good thing because it means my mindset is not as static and rigid as some, though it is most certainly worse than others.

One of the great questions of the ages is why we, and by ‘we’ I mean anyone other than ‘they/them’, tolerate the abuse we receive from the hand of our masters. While the mistreatment is most often handed down on an individual basis, “We the Abused” outnumber the abusers by at least 10 to 1. And I count among that ‘1’ all those who enable, support and carry out the abuse. So why do we tolerate something we can clearly stop if we so wish?

Earlier on in my ongoing awakening, a never ending process of self reflection and discovery, I would sometimes use the derogatory term ‘sheeple’ to describe both a people and a condition. I was grasping for a simple all encompassing answer to a complex problem, and believing that the vast masses were blissfully ignorant while passively grazing upon an array of consumer goods satisfied my need to understand what to me at the time was incomprehensible.

This is not to say some are not exactly as described. In fact at one point in my life I fit the bill perfectly, totally consumed in my naval gazing and mostly oblivious to not only my own lot in life, but those around me. As a single parent raising my boy alone for seventeen years, I was righteously indignant if anyone dared to question my focus. After all, I was doing it for the child(ren).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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