The Insidiousness of Conservative Talk Radio

I started following Best of MetaFilter which pointed to this post by gjc at 4:54 AM on May 9: Take a look at your foot, does it fit this shoe?

"I listen to a fair amount of talk radio, since I'm in and out of the car all day. My impression is that the talk radio listener likes to believe they think for themselves, but in the end, they just parrot what their favorite talker says.

But also, guys like Limbaugh and Hannity have absolutely MASTERED the long con, as they say. There are two games I've personally witnessed:

1- They have their one-off sound bites for the casual listener. But for the dedicated listener, they do these thematic long-arc stories that last weeks and months at a time, feeding dribs and drabs of the intended message on a limited basis so that by the end of the messaging period, listeners will have digested the full message. Hannity did this with evil aplomb as the Treyvon Martin case was ramping up. His first few shows on the issue were actually thoughtful meanders through the issues. 'Wow', I thought, 'this guy is actually treating something with respect and dignity.' But then, as days passed, the old conservative theme developed. Guests were chosen that telegraphed the message. He got two african american community leader types to debate whether this was more about race, or more about guns. But both of the guests were 'urban' sounding. Overt message: Hannity is gathering opinions from diverse sources. Subtext: black people don't talk like white people, and are also scary.

2- They conflate issues. I heard Mark Levin, I think, starting a segment with an anti-Obama rant. He was interviewing an author about a book or an article critical of Valerie Jarret. Oh heavens, she likes to shop and was mean to someone once. But the whole time, the host was asking leading questions 'so, these women, like Jarret and Michelle Obama, they really like to let power get to their heads, don't they?' And the author would answer something like 'well, I don't know anything about Obama, but these are the facts I found about Jarret.' And then Levin ended the segment with a full on rant about what dirtbags the Obamas are. The goal was plain: get the listeners to confuse the specifics about Jarret and assign them to the Obamas.

So it isn't nearly as simple as being told what to think. The best way to impregnate (pun intended) an idea into someone's mind is to tell them to think for themselves, and then offer 'facts' that lead them to what becomes an unavoidable conclusion. While also sowing mistrust in all other sources of information."

Glassblowing

Last weekend I took a glassblowing course at the Diablo Glass School. I took one about five and half years ago but this went further. Last time I just made paperweights, which doesn't involve any blowing. This one started with a small sculpture and a paperweight on the first day, and on the second day we blew some ornaments and then a drinking glass. I picked up the pieces yesterday.



The piece on the left is the sculpture. We gathered a blob of glass on the end of a solid pipe and pulled and twisted it with a large tweezer and scissors into something random. We broke it off the pipe and placed it on a blob of molten glass which formed a base. I've named this "ent".

The second piece is a paperweight as I made before. You start with a smaller blob and dunk it in some color, this was blue and yellow. You then twist it as in the sculpture and poke at it to make some holes. In this one I rolled it over what looked like a small bed of nails. You then gather another blob of glass over this and those holes form small bubbles. You then shape it into a globe, break it off the pipe and flatten the bottom by pushing on it with a flat tool.

The next day we used a hollow pipe and blew some bubbles. You need to use all the skills learned the first day to keep the pipe constantly turning so it doesn't droop and move around the shop fast enough to have time to work the glass before it cools too much. We gathered the glass, blew the bubble, shaped it, etched a narrow line to break it at and broke it off the pipe. The instructor then placed this on a molten blob to form a base or worked a smaller blob into a hook. We did this twice so I got one of each.

Finally we made a cup. This had a lot of steps and frankly I'm amazed that after just a few hours we're able to do this. You basically blow a bubble as in the ornament but leave more glass at the end of the piece. You then swing it like a pendulum to let gravity stretch it longer and blow it out some more. Then (if I remember this order right) you attach another pipe to the bottom of the piece and break it off the original pipe. Then with the giant tweezers you shape the sides of the glass, opening up the top of it (which is now not connected to a pipe). To decorate, we swirled another small blob of (colored) molten glass around the cup.

I felt pretty comfortable doing all of this though my jacklines to break the piece off the pipe weren't very straight. I might sign up for another class (or they have private lessons) and make a few more paperweights and glasses. It's pretty fun.

Obama's Historic Affirmation of Same-Sex Marriage

I'm surprised at all the hoopla at Obama's support for Gay marriage. I'm certainly glad he did it as it seems obvious, and should be obvious to him too, that civil unions are merely separate but equal. I sent him some money "to reinforce good behavior" but I'm surprised by how many posts I've seen about it and how much commentary I've seen about it. Glenn Greenwald makes a good case for this, Obama's historic affirmation of same-sex marriage.

"US media coverage Thursday has been fixated on the micro aspects of Obama's announcement: his motives, how it will affect the election, the role that internal administrative divisions played in his decision. But 20 years from now, none of that will matter. The historic event is that same-sex marriage, for the first time, now has a supporter in the Oval Office.

There are many disappointments and truly bad acts for which President Obama is responsible, but for one day at least, on this single issue, he demonstrated authentic and important leadership on a civil rights issue that affects millions."

The Chef and Restaurant Database (ChefDb)

I've been using the Internet Movie Database since the early nineties when it was a few lists on Usenet. I've been surprised and pleased when I've seen the concept move to other fields like the IBDB, ITDb, IBookDB, comicbookdb.

Today I learned about the The Chef and Restaurant Database (ChefDb). It started in Canada about 10 years ago but there are now 284 restaurants listed from Boston. Good to know.

Suicide Mission Volunteer Was Double Agent

The New York Times reports Suicide Mission Volunteer Was Double Agent, Officials Say "The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday"

"After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000. He also handed over the bomb, designed by the group’s top explosives expert to be invisible to airport security, to the F.B.I., which is analyzing its properties."

Crazy.

Commandos Now Play Digital Brain Games as War Prep

Commandos Now Play Digital Brain Games as War Prep | Danger Room | Wired.com "The system, called ‘NeuroTracker,’ was designed by CogniSens, a company spun out of the neurophysics lab of Dr. Jocelyn Faubert, a researcher at Canada’s University of Montreal. NeuroTracker has until now been deployed almost exclusively for athletic training: It’s used by several teams in the NFL and NHL, as well as at Olympic training centers in a handful of European countries.

Now commandos are going to get the NeuroTracker treatment as well. According to an announcement released last week, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) plans to purchase the NeuroTracker system in an effort to ‘improve situational awareness, multiple target tracking and decision-making efficiency’ among operatives."

The Obama Record on Jobs

Kevin Drum wrote Chart of the Day: The Obama Record on Jobs. "Employment is now officially higher than it was when Obama took office."

Is HowardLikedThis Useful?

So I've been tweeting (now over 1,000) articles at HowardLikedThis since the beginning of last year. It's what shows up in the box on the right labelled "Other Things I Liked". It's convenient for me though I don't know how useful it is to others. I only have 11 followers of the twitter account and I don't know how many read it here. If you find it useful, please let me know in the comments or in email. Thanks.

Why Our Models Missed the Financial Crisis

Ezra Klein wrote last week, Why our models missed the financial crisis. "The difference, writes Peter Orszag, is that the housing crisis took place in ‘the highly leveraged financial sector.’ And that’s why all the models missed the damage it would do: ‘The macroeconometric models used by the Fed -- like those used by the Congressional Budget Office, the White House and others -- had at best a very rudimentary financial sector built into them.’ So ‘they treated the housing collapse as if it were merely dot-com bust 2.0.’ And that’s still the case today, he says. Yikes."

There's a little more but I still think this misses the point. The reason the housing bubble collapse caused a financial crisis is because there was an unregulated shadow banking world betting on the housing market. There was (and is) no transparency in derivatives trading and no one, not even many of the banks themselves, knew how over-leveraged they were. When the bubble burst, the banks collapsed (Bear, Lehman, AIG) and most of the others were stunned and fearful of what would happen next so they stopped lending (digging themselves in deeper).

The Sun

Solar Cinco de Mayo | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine "Alan Friedman is a photographer who takes amazing pictures of the Sun. While others were out celebrating Cinco de Mayo this past weekend, he was outside taking another jaw-dropping image of the nearest star in the Universe:"

If All of Earth's Water was put into Single Sphere

Photos: If All of Earth's Water was put into Single Sphere, from the USGS Water Science School "This picture shows the size of a sphere that would contain all of Earth's water in comparison to the size of the Earth. The blue sphere sitting on the United States, reaching from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas, has a diameter of about 860 miles (about 1,385 kilometers) , with a volume of about 332,500,000 cubic miles (1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers). The sphere includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as groundwater, atmospheric water, and even the water in you, your dog, and your tomato plant."

Movie Review: The Avengers

After a couple of Hulk and Iron Man films and a Thor and a Captain America film, Marvel finally put them all together and delivered The Avengers and it's by far the best of them all. Joss Whedon, as was no surprise to any of his fans, was the perfect choice for writer/director. It's a big summer blockbuster and just a lot of fun.

I saw it in 2D and am happy with that. It wasn't filmed in 3D so I felt no need to pay for a conversion process and a need to wear glasses. Unfortunately I saw it in a packed theater with a lot of very young children and one drunk old man sitting two rows behind me snoring loudly. I got up twice to wake him up. My only complaint with the film was that it dragged a little in the middle, but that's could have been the snoring.

There's a good mix of action and humor. This is a fun movie, much less serious than Nolan's Batman films and I'm happy to have both to compare. There's no need for every comic book film to be the same, not everything has to be dark.

Each of the characters gets their own screen time and enough banter. Hawkeye is a little short changed but the Hulk is the obvious winner. Mark Ruffalo makes a great Bruce Banner and this Hulk has a couple of scenes that steal the film. I actually cheered. Robert Downey Jr. also has plenty of fun lines, a few I missed because of laughter.

Our heroes fight bad guys and fight a little amongst themselves, just like in the comics. I was impressed with how well the super-heroics worked. The fights felt like they mattered and were taking place in the real world, much more so than say Transformers. And it worked at different scales. The Black Widow, Hawkeye and Captain America operate a much different scale than Thor or Iron Man or the Hulk but it all worked in the film. I believed a guy shooting arrows could bring down a flying ship and that Thor's hammer and the Hulk's punches could bring down buildings and that Cap's shield could stop them. I suspect that was really hard to get right.

I can't wait to see it again, without a snoring drunk.

There are two bonus scenes, one during the credits and one at the very end. It's worth sticking around for them.

Scientists Close-In On Artificial Spider Silk By X-Raying The Real Stuff

Scientists Close-In On Artificial Spider Silk By X-Raying The Real Stuff | TPM Idea Lab "And as it turns out, despite the intricate and deliberate patterns woven by common orb spiders, the strongest part of their silk — the threads called dragline silk, which are used to create the scaffolding of the entire web — are mostly made up of extremely random and disordered atoms on the nanoscale, according to the results of a new study by scientists in Arizona and Illinois."

The case of the 500-mile email

The case of the 500-mile email is pretty hilarious. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. There's an FAQ with more info.

Four Fiscal Charts

Krugman posted a week ago, Four Fiscal Charts. "Here’s an exercise I did for my own edification — and to prepare for questions on book tour — but others may be interested in the results. I wanted a simple answer to the people who always insist that we must be having massive fiscal stimulus because we have a big budget deficit; my answer is that the deficit is a result of the depressed economy, but how do we show that without getting too much into the weeds?"

Wikipedia's founder will help make academic research available to all

Wikipedia's founder will help make academic research available to all:

The wealthiest university of Earth can't afford its academic journal subscriptions. Why not? Because academic journals are expensive. Now, the British government is doing its part to change that.

Yesterday afternoon, Science Minister David Willetts outlined the details of a plan that would make publicly funded research available online. Free of charge. They're even enlisting the help of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales to help pull it off. This is a huge win for the open science revolution.

(Via io9.com)

Ezra Klein Interviews Paul Krugman

Ezra Klein posted a transcript of An interview with Paul Krugman.

Straight Talk on Social Security

Jared Burnstein wrote in Rolling Stone Straight Talk on Social Security. It's the best Social Security article I've read and it's not too long.

Wasting Our Minds

In Wasting Our Minds Paul Krugman talks about the economy for the young and how Romney will make it worse.

Cute West Wing Reunion

Walk & Talk - The West Wing Reunion from Martin Sheen

Even Jimmy Carter

James Fallows is unhappy with Romney's 'Even Jimmy Carter' line. Others followed up.

What Do Springtime Polls Tell Us About the General Election?

Five Thirty Eight explains What Do Springtime Polls Tell Us About the General Election?. "The leader in national polls at the end of April in the past two elections has gone on to win. Before 2004, however, the April leader lost the popular vote more often than not."

So I feel fine not paying much attention right now.

All-Request Photos: Stanley Cup Playoffs, Ernest Hemingway, Lucha Libre ...

In Focus presents All-Request Photos: Stanley Cup Playoffs, Ernest Hemingway, Lucha Libre .... "As part of an ongoing experiment, I solicited reader requests for news photos as part of our Culture Report. I asked people on Twitter and email, 'Would you like to see a good photo of a particular subject? A high-res version of a photo you've already seen somewhere else? A photo from a particular photographer or event? If I have access and can find it, I'll try to post it.' The response was even better than the last time we did this, the subject matter was varied, and the task of finding the images and composing the entry was great fun. Images ranged from Ernest Hemingway to the Flaming Lips, taken in places from North Korea to the International Space Station. If you like this experiment, let me know in the comments, and I'll turn it into a more regular feature. To all those who made requests, thanks so much. [36 photos]"

The Illusion of Choice

Chart Porn points to The Illusion of Choice.

Agreement Groups in the United States Senate

Agreement Groups in the United States Senate "Being interested in social networks and communities, it was only natural to look at how those Senators were linked one to another and the natural community structure which emerged from their interactions. Thanks to GovTrack.us, we were able to construct for each session of the Senate an agreement graph between Senators. We then clustered the Senators into overlapping groups of agreement using a new community detection algorithm called C3 which attempts to find maximally cohesive groups in the network"



This new algorithm isn't perfect so it's worth reading the discussion below the chart on the site. E.g., "One unexplicable point remains in the data and that is the presence of 18 Democrats in the Republican group of the 108th Congress. We'd be happy to complete this discussion with some ideas of how to clarify this grouping but we haven't been able to find any political explanation."