peristaltor

Just a few days ago I mentioned a comment I made to my local NPR station. A few days after, I actually received a reply!

Your email conveying some concerns about business support of public broadcasting in general and (our station) specifically was forwarded to me. I would be very glad to speak with you and answer any questions that you may have.

Cool!

I've been putting in extra hours at work lately, so I didn't get a chance to sit down and compose a reply to J. until just now. I outlined my concerns about how corporate and business sponsorships cause what I call the Sugar Daddy Effect; even without direct threats of withdrawing support, sponsorships lie in the back of a reporter's mind, perhaps subtly steering the inquiry of any ongoing investigation away from a sponsor's interests. No reporter wants to wear the label of That Guy Who Costs Us Millions With His Big Mouth, do they?

Here's one paragraph, for a taste:

For example, consider the local television news and the overwhelming ad saturation provided by automobile dealerships. I've notice very few minutes from those outlets devoted to, say, tackling fuel efficiency requirements, something (your station) does very well by comparison. Considering the poor efficiency of most new vehicles, and the tendency for auto shoppers to notice this right away should they be made aware of it, this SDE makes perfect sense.

Here's the funny part, though: I had about five paragraphs lined up outlining what I see are the dangers of news organizations receiving corporate support . . . when I realized the guy receiving this email would be the station's Director of Corporate Support.

The farmer got letter of concern noting that hens might be disappearing, and they sent the fox to investigate.

I realized my gaffe, that I have probably been punked, and asked in a final paragraph for this guy to forward my notes to someone without so glaring a conflict of interest. I'll keep you posted if I receive anything else.

Ah, that grand time of the year when the local public stations staff the phones and wait for you to call in your donation, all the while interrupting the otherwise fine programming they constantly tout with outright begging more befitting of the Calcutta poor. I did my duty. I sent in my pledge. Later, I will actually fill out and mail the check.

This year, though, something new! A comment box, one that appeared just after I gave my info in the Required Fields.

Why not? Here's what I wrote:

I am very concerned that the PBS system -- your station included -- has eroded its integrity as an entity free from commercial influence by agreeing to air "enhanced sponsorhips," what should be called openly "commercials."

At what level would we have to donate to rid the local air of this corruption? To whom would I speak to even broach the topic?

And yes, I am serious.

You see, public radio and television used to be, well, ( public. )


Addendum, October 14, 2009: There are many reasons to separate commercial interests from our source of news, chief among them Faux "News":

It's clear that in 2009, Fox News is no longer in the business of journalism. Fox News isn't trying to inform people, it's trying to misinform them. That's not journalism. It's propaganda. But as long as the press continues to hold up the façade of journalism, Fox News will try to hide behind it.

Fascinating.

To the rabid optimists: Put down the pom-poms. Step away from the pink megaphone. You aren't helping.

Please read this. Without knowing it, without being able to articulated it as well, this has been my philosophy for decades.

Decades ago I dated a chess player, a very good chess player, one who trained with chess masters and knew first hand many of the names in competition at that time. One day in the smokey basement pub where chess players meet to play, she came back from a game downright pissed off.

She had lost. Now, she was very good, but people win and lose all the time. I asked her why she was so upset. Her explanation stumped me: "He played like a fish," she said.

Huh?

I had her describe what it meant to play "like a fish." She explained that fish make wild, unpredictable moves, that their play doesn't fit any recognizable pattern.

"But he won," I said. I suppose comments like this are one of the big reasons we haven't seen each other in almost 20 years; but I was honestly then trying to understand the difference between a truly great player who wins and a "fish" who wins. To me, they both win, so what's the difference? After all, if a master sat me down and schooled me in the ways of the board, I wouldn't know if I was undone by a lost Fibunacci Bishop or a Pawn's Gambit or the Flirty Queen. I would only know that I lost. Checkmate.

Out on a walk last night, I finally reasoned why the term "fish" might be used. Hook a fish and drag it out of the water, and it flops about madly on the deck or the dock without getting anywhere. A chess "fish," therefore, might be someone whose play seems erratic and pointless. They don't seem to be getting anywhere, or going anywhere. Ah, but the schooled opponent of the fish is judging the fish's moves on a learned pattern, the movement of one who walks on dry land.

Let's take this fish analogy a bit further and suppose that the fish player is actually playing by rules applicable in the water. Those spastic arches and flops across the board make no sense to us dry-landers; but put us in the drink and we shall see the fish's twitches move it across great distances with an admirable economy of effort. We walkers, on the other hand, slap and kick and flap about and barely get anywhere in the water. (I have a video of myself scuba diving in Hawaii, if anyone needs images of an amateur diver for comic relief.)

All this led me to reconsider a word upon which I've been stumbling quite a bit lately: ( Heuristics. )

solarbird gives what appears to be an excellent (but way over my head) analysis of the current market rally in her journal today. One of the many links had the quote in my subject line, Mark To Myth Losers: Americans posted by Karl Denninger.

He gives a frightening run-down on how many losses from foreclosures and defaults the banks are failing to report, often against the regulations requiring such reporting:

The bottom line here folks is as I have been hollering about for over two years: Banks and other institutions are carrying paper at FAR beyond its reasonable fair-market value - or that which it will EVER realize under any reasonable set of assumptions going forward.

Bluntly, we have institutionalized accounting fraud and the so-called "regulators" that are supposed to put a stop to and even prosecute these acts are willfully and intentionally ignoring them. The cities and towns across America are the big losers where these practices cause blight through intentional neglect while these "banks" claim to be in far better financial condition than is in fact the case.

In addition, this willful disregard for the truth means that these bankrupt institutions remain in the system as "zombies", unable to perform their critical role in credit intermediation. (Emphasis, this time, by the author)

This can't end well. My question is simple: Why is this info hidden only in the bowels of the intertubes? This indicates our current economic troubles are going to be far worse than the cheerleaders on the telly are suggesting.

A book I loved, Annie's Box by Randall Keynes, has been made into a movie, Creation. It tells Charles Darwin's story through his and his families personal writings, giving deep insight into what happened in a life that lead to probably the most influential scientific theory of all time.

I will not, though, be seeing it in the theater as I had hoped, at least not in the United States:

US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

The distributors have pussied out. Who cares what other people believe? Let those that want to see the movie see the fucking movie. Nope.

The end of the Telegraph article says it all:

Early reviews have raved about the film. The Hollywood Reporter said: "It would be a great shame if those with religious convictions spurned the film out of hand as they will find it even-handed and wise."

Well, we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

I've just heard a pair of interviews on the Skepticality podcast that illustrate for me very clearly what might be happening here in the United States, something that seems to be all but absent elsewhere. We here in the States can't miss it without forgoing any and all media reporting. There's a frenzy of folks up in arms to resist the "socialization" of health care (like we did to fire and police protection generations ago) by (as they confusingly put it) a Nazi President, one who may or may not have been born in Kenya, one who many of those same protesters are sure is either an closet Muslim or (worse) an atheist. Just about all of the most vocal are convinced he is a racist.

I am convinced this is not happening in a vacuum. Phenomena this wide-spread never do. They are helped along by people who know what they are doing, who know exactly what buttons to push and how often. Don't be fooled: This is a power struggle backed by millions of dollars with many more billions of dollars at stake. On that most can agree.

What is less clear is how this is happening.

To illustrate what I feel is happening now, I'd like to mention a few facts about the Columbine High School incident ten years ago, facts I found startling and surprising. Did you know:

-- Bombs were supposed to be the main killing weapons, not guns.

-- Harris and Klebold were not members of the Trench Coat Mafia.

-- Harris and Klebold were not quiet "outcasts" picked on by "jocks."

-- The morning they and so many others died at their hands, the two did not go bowling.

Surprised at any of these revelations? I was. It's amazing to note what happened ( verses what everyone outside of Littleton thinks happened. )

Some shit rag called the Investor's Business Daily put themselves on the front page all around the English-speaking world when they suggested that physicist Stephen Hawking probably would have died had he been from the UK, since socialized medicine is, as they write, an exercise in rationing:

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

That above link, though, has been sanitized by this little introductory tidbit: Editor's Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.

Oopsie-daisy. Turns out that iconic Hawking accent is simply due to the fact that his voice synthesizer was built here in the States. Oh, no one was happy about the mistake -- especially Prof. Hawking. "I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS," Hawking told The Guardian. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

So with that little dust-up so very fresh in the news, how does our own home-grown media treat the same disease that all but felled the Professor? Why, they avoid the issue altogether. Here we have a local woman whose friends have to put together a non-profit foundation and arrange fund raising activities to help "pay for medical treatment and support."

That's right. People have to raise money themselves or rely on the charity of their family and/or friends if they want to get adequate medical treatment. And what of people who refuse to -- or more likely, simply cannot, due to their relatively unknown status -- whore themselves to the alter of public sympathy? Why, I suppose they can suffer and/or just fucking die.

And, despite the very timely nature of the story's airing, nowhere in the local commercial media do we see even a mention of Prof. Hawking's more civilized medical care brought to him thanks to the more ethical and enlightened policies of his home country. Nope, the coverage is all "rah-rah, let's help Melissa with her bills by eating and drinking" while pointedly ignoring the obvious solution, bringing the US out of the Dirty Dark Ages.

Without good reporting, without the good, accurate and useful information we need to make informed decisions as individuals and as a country, we find ourselves continually fucked harder and deeper and longer. It makes me down-right stabbity angry.


Addendum, September 1, 2009: Though slightly off-topic from the rant, I like this video.

So, years ago The Wife and I win a new paper shredder at a picnic raffle, a "cross cut" shredder. It was much nicer than the old $10 special, but cut differently; instead of just slicing the paper into full-length ribbons, it both ribboned the paper and cut the ribbons lengthwise every few inches. I further noticed something on the recycling bin -- no cross cut paper allowed. Long cut, yes; but cross cut paper fibers, I read, were too small, on average, to be of much use when the paper is re-pulped, mixed and pressed.

So I thought of this the other night during one of The Wife's commercial TV bouts when some product or another comes out with the promise of "fiber." Thing is, they showed the fiber being added to the product (a clear beverage, IIRC) with a spoon. Fine, seemingly granulated stuff hit the surface of the product and was stirred into the mix only to disappear. No visible strands!

Ah, but . . . years ago, I was told the benefit of fiber in one's diet was biomechanical, not chemical. The long fibers in fibrous foods kept their length, more or less, through the digestive process. Imagine the intestines. Peristalsis squeezes food downwards like fingers squeezing a toothpaste tube. Many foods, especially rich, doughy foods like cheeses and breads, tend to both stick together and stretch, thus confounding the peristaltic process. Blobs of these foods stretch under peristalsis only to rebound when pressure relaxes, at least until the foods chemically break down. Extreme cases can cause constipation.

One therefore had to eat "roughage," as it was called back then by folks like my parents and grandparents. Think of bits of hempen rope added to the intestinal Silly Putty that used to be a cheese pizza. The fibers don't stretch. When mixed with the pizza-esque goo, that added structural cohesion forms globs of mixed digesting foods that don't stretch and rebound, and thus do move along when the rings of intestinal muscle squeeze them on down the line.

But what good would tiny bits of non-stretchy foodstuff be? Uninterrupted lengths make a rope; little chunks make a mess. Don't believe me? Try tying a bundle using string cut into 1" bits.

Such chopped fibrous material would, at best, simply mix with the dough and mozarella. It would be like adding sanding grit to taffy, creating an infinitely stretchy blockage-in-the-making with a sandpaper surface.

So what's going on?

I suspect the FDA has allowed use of "fiber" as a beneficial additive without considering the minimum length of any given fiber needed for digestive efficacy. After all, most truly digestive fiber comes from natural sources -- greens, roughly-cut whole grains and brans -- all with random (but mostly longer) lengths. Without being able to quantify those lengths, there must be no body of peer-reviewed medical research showing any quantifiable efficacious qualities (or lack thereof). Therefore, that same fiber that helps truly move the poop train along can be legally cut into useless lengths -- but far smoother, far more tasty and digestible lengths -- and added to foods legally allowed to tout their "Fiber!" as a beneficial supplement.

Then again, I'm not a doctor, medical researcher, nutritionist, or anything professional or medically trained who can render a decision. I'm just some guy who thinks enough about peristalsis to name his LJ handle (and most of his Diablo characters) after the snake-squeeze of digestion. Anyone know if this notion is in the medical reality ballpark or not? alobar, got your ears on?

A fascinating article outlines our nation's long history of conservative outrage:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

I really had no idea the froth and blather reached as far back as the article mentions. I should have known, though. I really should have known.

I have an iPod. Not the fancy, wheel-controlled or touch-screen equipped money pits, but a simple iPod Nano (without the proprietary DRM earbuds). It does what I want of it. It provides audio content while costing less than my $60 limit, the amount of cash I am willing to spend on any gadget I bring to work.

When new, this little gadget did all that was promised and more. Funny thing though: Its functionality ( stopped right at the threshold of 'more.' )

Addendum, the next morning: Oh, and I completely forgot the strangest part, the part that leads me to believe there is a programing error in the pod's OS. There are only two slider switches on the Nano, Power On/Off and Shuffle On/Off. Shuffle off plays items roughly in the order you select on the sync page (see entry for infuriating limitations) -- but plays MP3s, then MP4s, Apple's proprietary format. Switch to Shuffle On -- you're going to love this -- and the unit only plays MP4s, ignoring any MP3s currently loaded.

What's more, this is the second Nano I've owned. I mentioned the shuffle switch weirdness (and some other strangeness) at the Mac store to a floor guy, prompting him to take my old one to the back and declare it FUBAR in ways no one in the back claimed to understand. He gave me a new unit . . . which does exactly the same thing.

Once I can write off as a unit malfunction. Twice and we have a design flaw.

Major Addendum, August 17, 2009: It looks like the latest iTunes upgrade (to 8.2.1(6) ) has corrected the ordering problem! By gum, the darned thing is now playing the order I want!

Now to get them to fix that podcast Autofill and we're on the verge of normalcy!

A friend of mine did something noteworthy the other day, and forwarded me a copy. He wrote his local eatery with a complaint:

Why does the Bothell, Washington Qdoba have Fox news on the only TV? I would think that offends more people than it pleases. The food is good, but I can't eat in a place with that contemptuous and contemptible garbage on.

They responded (to their credit), but without saying anything (to their detriment):

Thank you for your e-mail regarding Qdoba #2089. We appreciate your taking the time to provide us with your feedback and will be following up with the restaurant management to assure they are aware of your concerns. Please don't hesitate to contact our Guest Relations department at 1-888-497-3622 anytime you have a comment or concern you want us to be aware of. Our representatives are available Monday through Friday, 7am to 4pm PT.

I guess they did say they would contact management, and that might be something. The local Qdoba nearest my work plays something other than Faux. Maybe programming decisions are left to the local management. Maybe that will change. One can hope.

---

This morning, though, I realized that he noted the wrong problem. The issue isn't with Faux News on the tube, ( it's the fact that there is a tube to watch. )

Okay, folks, I'll be honest; I've been waiting for a device like Amazon's Kindle for quite some time. Small, portable, readable, and -- perhaps best of all -- connectable directly to the internet for content. It's cheaper than a laptop, uses less power (I assume), has a direct-light readable screen, and could solve one of the nagging problems faced by the newspaper industry today: It could lower the high cost of printing papers.

According to an episode of On The Media, however, ( the Kindle might be destined for the dustbin. )

This one isn't easy for me to write simply because it involves people I know personally, people who, for one reason or another, are killing themselves ( in ways our society finds somewhat acceptable. )

General Motors will soon be bankrupt. I'm not saying this out of spite, out of schadenfreude, out of a need to lash out at the auto behemoth. Rather, my judgment stems from a realization that the monster has become not only too big to turn its business practices around, but is further infected with a corporate culture that lacks the initiative to even attempt such a reversal of practices and fortunes. Anyone can see this to be the case. All you need to understand are the concepts of corporate culture and how they differ from business to business, from culture to culture. Right now, the biggest three auto making countries are the US, Japan and Germany. (Other car making countries like Korea, China and India are growing in importance, but their products and histories are not really available for me to judge, so I'll stick with the big three as I tick off the elements of each that give my argument some weight.)

Let's start briefly with Germany. ( Years ago, I worked with a deckhand/diesel mechanic named Jack. )

I've always wondered why folks have for years been down on Social Security. Everyone who slams the Depression-era social backstop seems to ignore that it only had to exist because the traditional market-based systems failed so dramatically. What gave them the idea that market-based solutions would work after this spectacular fail?

Turns out this has all been an elaborate long-term marketing campaign by the Cato Institute:

In the Summer of 1983, smarting under what they called the "fiasco of the last 18 months", i.e. the Greenspan Commission and subsequent 1983 Reform, the Cato Institute convened a conference in Washington DC and subsequently published the papers in their Fall 1983 Cato Journal under the title Social Security: Continuing Crisis or Real Reform. One of those articles had the intriguing title of Social Security Reform: Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy. In that article was laid out the long term plan alluded to in my comment quoted above, which plan focused in large part on convincing younger workers that Social Security just wouldn't be there for them. Cato not only accepted that plan it institutionalized it in what was then known as the Project on Social Security Privatization but now known as the Project on Social Security Choice. (Note the domain name: http://www.socialsecurity.org/about/index.html - they have staked a claim to Social Security itself)

(Emphasis from the article.)

It's going to be hard to reverse the active marketing work -- read, propaganda -- done quietly over a quarter decade, but that's the only way to fix SS's funding problems without throwing the program out with the bathwater. Otherwise the bastards win. On the evil propagated by Cato, the author well notes: "Even paranoids have real enemies."


X-Posted to the_recession.

A quick note: Thomas Jefferson noted that country-wide education ". . . is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power," the only way a democracy can thrive.

For those who've been hiking in Patagonia or sunning themselves on Phuket beaches this last week, cable shows have exploded with recriminations that culminated last Thursday night with Jon Stewart grilling CNBC's Jim Cramer and then raking the seared flesh with salted broken glass. (cieldumort gives a great linkage synopsis over at the_recession.)

Folks, what CNBC did over the years was entirely predictable. Why it was predictable, though, Stewart never really mentioned.

Yes, Jon accuses the network of knowing about instabilities in the financial markets but not reporting on them, of sucking up to and glorifying the very CEOs who created this mess with excess and unchecked leverage. What he does not do: Note that if the network had hired some deep investigators and run stories years ago that could have brought down the more profitable practices and many of the CEOs who practiced them, they would have quickly lost ad revenue from those firms and access to those same CEOs. CNBC's very business model forced the compromises that caused it to avoid confrontations unavoidable to true journalists.

What happens next? Because of this business model, CNBC cannot turn on a dime into the Washington Post of financial journalism. They can't afford to. What happens next becomes a poignant question when one considers that NBC affiliates have decided to keep the matter quiet. This whole thing might just blow over.

If that happens, if CNBC continues to bill itself as something other than a financial syncophantic monolith and chooses to ignore its ethical responsibility to educate and inform its viewers, this country will have no tools to correct the excesses that caused this financial clusterfuck and will continue its ignorant sink into fiscal oblivion.

Ben Goldacre shared this breathtaking document on the pitch for the revised Pepsi logo. It consists of 27 pages of intricate designs, extrapolations of historic logo patterns to isolate the "geometry of perimeter oscillations," comparing the earth's geodynamo to the Pepsi logo's "energy fields," and divining the Pepsi Golden Ratio.

It starts, prophetically enough, with this:


Clickee to Embiggenate

An actual pitch document revealing the extent to which marketing firms must spin pseudoscience to make a sale, or a more simple hallucinatory hoax? Either way, it's worth a glimpse.

Looks like the bad ol' banks were just providing the services then so very much in demand.

Just sayin'.


X-Posted to the_recession.