The Age of the Database

"But they had the most opaque obstacle in the world between them and the truth: money."


"because computers cannot come to us and meet us in our world, we must continue to adjust our world and bring ourselves to them. We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can “understand.” Their dumbness will become ours. "


This, friends, is the Age of the Database. If you own a phone, or a computer, or go to the store, or go to the bank, or interact with the government, or utility company - in short, if you are a human being - they influence and undergird your existence as much as any phenomena in human history. You interact with them constantly, and your behavior is in turn tracked by dozens of databases a day. They way the computers handle all of that data is fascinating - in an Orwellian fashion. The people who have figured out the best ways to collect, process, and leverage that data are the modern titans of commerce and influence.


Read more:     The Stupidity of Computers

Cogito ergo sum ​​liberum

From the 2012 Texas Republican Platform: "We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs that ... have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."


There you have it. The GOP has officially opposed thinking. 


Anyone who follows the modern Republican Party know that this has been their de facto position for some time. This simply puts it in writing and extends it to their children.


You can't make this stuff up.




Read more:       Texas Rejects Critical Thinking Schools for Schools

Killing Creativity

As the U.S. plows, obliviously, towards more standardized testing, standardized curriculum, and one size fits all lunacy in our schools, the rest of the world is reengineering their schools to be creative, collaborative, project based institutions. One hopes that American education leaders soon wake up and see that we must change course quickly in regards to the focus of our schools. As India and China join the modern world and make it more competitive than it has ever been, it is vitally important that our young people are trained to think in terms of creativity and innovation and collaboration - rather than being trained to regurgitate disconnected facts and ephemera.


Their is a better model for our schools, Finland is pioneering it, and the rest of the world, unburdened by the through the looking glass dissonance of no child left behind, are following Finland's lead. 


"creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”


It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”


Read more:     The Creativity Crisis     Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman     
Read more:     Finland as a Model for U.S. Education
Video:      Schools are Killing Creativity     Sir Ken Robinson's TED Lecture

Some of the most remarkable research these days involves the disconcerting possibility that we crystalize beliefs  in advance of gathering proof to support those beliefs. Books like "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt, and "The Believing Brain", by Michael Shermer all touch upon this phenomena. This research mirrors Schopenhauer's assertion that reason isn't what drives us, but rather emotion and desire.


Political Operatives have taken note of this research and are using it to manipulate you to vote for their candidate. Would you expect anything less?

Born This Way

The new weird science of hardwired political identity.

• By Sasha Issenberg
•  Published Apr 8, 2012

• 
  

Afew weeks before the 2008 election, Democratic strategists were running out of ideas for how to help Al Franken. His race against incumbent Minnesota senator Norm Coleman was a stubborn one: Even after some of the country’s highest ever per capita spending, the contest remained close, with a small number of undecided, seemingly unbudgeable voters.

The job of pollsters in these situations is to figure out who the undecided actually are and what could make them move. Often, they focus on demographics (playing to older suburban women) or issues (talk of school reform). But one pollster working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Mark Mellman, felt it might pay to look for more primal distinctions.

Mellman added to his Minnesota polls a battery of questions inspired by research in psychology and neuroscience, borrowed from personality tests and designed to separate those with more rational processing systems from those who relied on emotion in their decision-making. Here polls did discern a latent split: Franken led Coleman by one point among those they identified as “feelers” but lagged by seven points among “thinkers.” The committee changed its ad strategy in response. Highly stylized television spots, like a movie spoof that showed Coleman as a fugitive fleeing George W. Bush, were replaced by messages that were “a little more flat, a little more factual, a little more sourced,” Mellman said. One defended Franken against Coleman’s charges with a calm narrator reading off a checklist of straightforward rebuttals under the words “The Truth.” Franken won, after a long recount, and in 2010 Mellman used the same battery of questions to shape media strategy for Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer.

That kind of science may seem alien to the war room, but Mellman’s hunch, that the differences in how people process politics may be more innate than we’ve thought, is becoming the default assumption in research labs worldwide. There, over the last decade or so, scientists have been extending to politics the imperious insights of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology that have so shaken other social sciences.

At the vanguard of this movement is Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist whose best-selling new book,The Righteous Mind, collects his own experiments—testing biases, prejudices, and ­preferences—and the work of like-minded colleagues to unmask much of our political “thinking” as moral instinct papered over, post facto, with ideological rationalization. We may tell ourselves that we believe welfare is just or that abortion violates the sanctity of life, but we’re really using borrowed language to express much more visceral attitudes, oriented around one of six moral dials—harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, liberty, and sanctity. Much of what passes for the daily scrum of electoral politics, he says, is merely an effort to find language that can help citizens justify these instincts. “Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix,” Haidt writes. “They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere.”

But the new science of primal politics goes quite a bit deeper than psychology. Over the past few years, researchers haven’t just tied basic character traits to liberalism and conservatism, they’ve begun to finger specific genes they say hard-wire those ideologies. If that work is to be believed, it would mean that an individual’s path to a political identity starts not with a series of choices but with long-ago genetic mutations, and that our collective experience of politics may be less a battle of ideas than a Darwinian contest in which we are all unwitting participants. After a team of geneticists claimed in a 2005 American Political Science Review article that they had evidence of DNA’s influence on politics, Duke political scientist Evan Charney rebutted that their findings “would require nothing less than a revision of our understanding of all of human history, much—if not most—of political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, as well as, perhaps, our understanding of what it means to be human.”

The thing most in need of revising may be our reflex for self-flattery. We revel in the idea that personal politics are perfectly deliberative, never more than in a year when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney—two dispassionate rationalists with great confidence in their skills of persuasion—will cross the country to win over their fellow citizens’ hearts and minds. But the comforting metaphor of a grand national debate to determine where the swing voters will end up has never seemed so out of sync with trending science. After all, what is the point of everything that happens between now and November 6 if our wiring dictates how we vote?

Read more:       Born This Way      Sasha Issenberg   NY Magazine

If You Think This Wasn't Predictable, You Live in a Fantasy World

I am old enough to remember the terrible atrocity at My Lai. American soldiers, essentially driven mad by the demands of their role on the ground in Vietnam, butchered scores of innocent men, women, and children. It played no small role in turning the citizenry against the war.

That war was a bit more egalitarian than the current wars. Men from a broad spectrum of American life were drafted to fight in that war (excepting a handful who gamed the system because they had "other priorities"), and they usually only served one tour in the steaming jungles of Vietnam.

Now volunteer soldiers, mainly representing working class Americans, man the front lines of our wars. They often serve multiple tours in war zones, returning after being wounded, after multiple concussions, after being promised they wouldn't have to go back to the daily horror of warfare.

When Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and all of the other Neo-Cons decided to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade one of the most unsettled places on earth, when they chose to massage intelligence to create a pretext to send our troops into a country having nothing to do with 9/11, they let the genie out of the bottle and it will never go back.

They betrayed our fighting men and women for political and personal psychodramas.

A soldier with concussions, grievous wounds, a shaky job, a shaky marriage, an underwater mortgage - all the result of his repeated tours in the middle east, on his 4th tour in a war zone snapped. Innocents were butchered. I bet Bush and Cheney and all the rest are sleeping like babies each night. This is the predictable harvest of what they sowed.

Blame Shared by All
By David Horsey - LA Times

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of murdering 16 villagers in Afghanistan. It is alleged he quietly walked from his base to two nearby villages and, unprovoked, started killing innocent human beings, including nine children.

This atrocity appears to be the act of one man, but the blame can be shared from coast to coast.

Our all-volunteer Army has been fighting for a decade in Afghanistan, and in Iraq as well, for most of that time. The burden of battle has fallen mainly on a tiny number of Americans -- men like Bales, who was on his fourth combat deployment. Multiple journeys into the hell of war have taken a terrible toll. The number of suicides among service members has skyrocketed, and incidences of post traumatic stress disorder among returning soldiers are so common they seem almost the norm.

As a society, we have tried to make up for the fact that so few of us share in the killing and dying by putting our troops on a pedestal. They are warriors, we say. They are the best of us. They are heroes, every one. We slap stickers in the shape of yellow ribbons on the backs of our cars and trucks, ribbons trailing the message, "Support Our Troops." Any president can win a standing ovation from Congress with a single mention of "our men and women in uniform."

Yet all this adulation and easy rhetoric conveniently glosses over the harsh truth. These men and women are not a warrior class. They are not uniformly heroic. They are not necessarily better than those who do not don a uniform. Excluding singular exceptions -- the Navy SEALs, for example --  our soldiers are people not all that different from any of us. They are well trained, but they are human, and war can and does sear the human soul and subvert the sane mind. Coping with brutality, fear, constant danger and hideous forms of death can change anyone and the longer a person is exiled in a house of slaughter, the harder it is to come back.

According to men who served with Bales, he was not an aberrant person. In a Facebook message quoted by the Seattle Times, Capt. Chris Alexander asked that Bales be kept in people's prayers. "I know his alleged crime is terrible, but he is not terrible," Alexander wrote. "He is one of the best guys I've ever served with."

If one of our best can snap and commit such a terrible crime, we should all ask ourselves if the soldiers who come from among us are being pushed to sacrifice far too much while the rest of us sacrifice nothing at all. A volunteer Army lets us off the hook. Even worse, it makes it too easy for the politicians. They speak with bravado about standing up to tyrants and bearing any burden for the sake of liberty. And then, to make good on their bold words, they find another place to take the nation into war.

Except it is not the nation that goes. It is a few men like Robert Bales, and all the yellow ribbons on all the pickup trucks in America cannot save him from the horror he has seen and the things he has done."

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-killings-in-afghanistan-20120319,0,7608832.story

I Wish I Could Speak Like Newt

News Headline: "52% of Mississippi Voters Think Obama is a Muslim"


The GOP propagandists have long had a conscious, well defined strategy of turning harmless descriptors into pejoratives. Years ago, Newt Gingrich, surprise, came up with the idea of sending cheat sheets to GOP officials and operatives with a list of inflammatory words to use when discussing Democrats. As today, most conservatives had a script to operate on, and gladly let someone else put words in their mouth. I recall tracking how the word "liberal" went from a proud label to a slur. Thus a man with the ethical standards of biblical scoundrel simultaneously undermined our language and the body politic.

These folks don't use words to effectively communicate ideas - like Orwell's villains they use them as weapons. In the south, where AM radio is still listened to by the masses on a daily basis, and where local stations play little besides the cheap content provided by Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, and the other right wing hate mongers, a critical mass of "up-is-down" true believers has been achieved. 

Let there be no mistake. The conservative meme makers know that Obama is not a muslim. But they also know that many uneducated denizens of the deep south can't publicly call him the name they want to call him. Muslim as a pejorative just happens to be an acceptable slur to post 9/11 mouth breathers, a substitute for the slur that even the worst among us know is unacceptable. 


From New Gingrich's GOPAC organization tapes, circa 1995, providing a lexicon for GOP candidates and operatives. Ground Zero for the Newt Gingrich's perversion of American Ideals:


"As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We Are a Majority," Langauage is listed as akey mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates, we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

That takes years of practice. But we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.


This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that, like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used....

Contrasting Words

Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

decay... failure (fail)... collapse(ing)... deeper... crisis... urgent(cy)... destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal... they/them... unionized bureaucracy... "compassion" is not enough... betray... consequences... limit(s)... shallow... traitors... sensationalists...

endanger... coercion... hypocrisy... radical... threaten... devour... waste... corruption... incompetent... permissive attitudes... destructive... impose... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs... pessimistic... excuses... intolerant...

stagnation... welfare... corrupt... selfish... insensitive... status quo... mandate(s)... taxes... spend(ing)... shame... disgrace... punish (poor...)... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... machine... bosses... obsolete... criminal rights... red tape... patronage

Optimistic Positive Governing Words

Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!

share... change... opportunity... legacy... challenge... control... truth... moral... courage... reform... prosperity... crusade... movement... children... family... debate... compete... active(ly)... we/us/our... candid(ly)... humane... pristine... provide...

liberty... commitment... principle(d)... unique... duty... precious... premise... care(ing)... tough... listen... learn... help... lead... vision... success... empower(ment)... citizen... activist... mobilize... conflict... light... dream... freedom...

peace... rights... pioneer... proud/pride... building... preserve... pro-(issue): flag, children, environment... reform... workfare... eliminate good-time in prison... strength... choice/choose... fair... protect... confident... incentive... hard work... initiative... common sense... passionate."

International Woman's Day, ALEC Style

One of the most unsettling aspects of the current political environment is the remarkable attitude towards women the conservatives are openly expressing. Rush Limbaugh recently called a young woman whose politics he disagreed with - someone's daughter, someone's sister - a slut and a prostitute and suggested that she film herself having sex for his, and other's pleasure.


Limbaugh is a bully and a clown and a pervert. But he doesn't create legislation like his conservative brethren in elective office.


Laura Bassett has written an article in which she notes that state conservatives, in 2011, introduced more than 1,100 bills affecting women's reproductive rights, enacted 135 by year's end.


Incredibly, some of these bills involved contraception for women. In the year 2012.


It is not a coincidence that all of these bills hit all of the states at the same time. It turns out the much, if not most, conservative legislation and the state and federal level isn't written by elected officials in office. It is written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an influential conservative group that writes legislation for conservative politicians so they don't have to do any heavy lifting. Or thinking.


We know that most politicians today are wholly owned subsidiaries of special interest groups, not the least of which are the billionaire patrons unleashed by the Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling. What many voters don't know is that the legislation these bought and paid for officials introduce is written for them by an organization funded by, you guessed it, the special interest groups and billionaires that put them in office.


And they aren't just concerned with making women second class citizens. If there is a bill in a statehouse that eviscerates unions, rapes the environment, undermines consumer rights, favors big Pharma, marginalizes public education, or gives a big FU to working people anywhere - it came from ALEC.


This land is your land.


Conservatives have been revealing their attitudes about women in dreadful ways. Do they realize that half of all voters are women? And that today is International Woman's Day?


Read more:     On International Woman's Day, Congress Debates Measure to Limit Reproductive Rights
And more:      Ending Oppression and Empowering Women and Girls Around the World
More:              Whose Really Behind Legislation GOP Introduces?
More:            ALEC Exposed