Monthly Archives: December 2015

The 2015 Pinocchio Awards

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The Washington Post released it’s annual Pinocchio Awards for the year’s biggest falsehoods. To no one’s surprise, the 2015 winners are all involved in politics. No one gets to feel smug; all parties and political persuasions were represented.

I’m sure lying politicians are as old as politics. What was disheartening this year was the blatancy of the lies. Fifty one years ago, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.” In 2015 we may have seen the ultimate corollary of that:  if you say it on TV with enough bravado, swagger, or apparent sincerity, some or many will believe you, regardless of facts. We, as a culture, prefer easy answers to truth.

Here are the winners:

Donald Trump for false and repeated assertion that he saw thousands of Muslims on TV celebrating the fall of the twin towers. Only in Trump’s fevered imagination did such an event play out.

Hillary Clinton for her defense of her husband’s signing of the anti-gay “Defense of Marriage Act,” with an assertion that it headed off an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. There may have been talk, but there was no momentum for such an amendment.

Donald Trump for his claims that immigrants commit more crimes than American citizens. While some on this list have cherry-picked their statistics, Donald apparently never looks at statistics at all.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) for saying in June that there have been 128 school shootings since Sandy Hook. His stats came from an anti-gun violence advocacy group with a flawed methodology that included suicides and accidents in the numbers.

Donald Trump for his claim that Obama wants to admit 250,000 Syrian refuges to the US. The number is 10,000 Syrians, and the US maximum figure for all refugees is 180,000 over the next two years.

"Freedom of Speech," 1943. In Norman Rockwell's America, truth and respect for all viewpoints mattered

“Freedom of Speech,” 1943. In Norman Rockwell’s America, truth and respect for all viewpoints mattered

John Kerry for claiming he and Al Gore organized the 1988 Senate hearings on climate change. He was not even there.

Mike Huckabee for stating that “global freezing” was a serious concern 40 years ago.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren ( D-Mass ) for proposed regulations for car dealership loans based on “wildly” exaggerated statistics.

Rudolph Giuliani, former NY City Mayor, for saying Obama has never called America a great or exceptional country. Apparently Mr. Guiliani has never listened to an Obama speech.

President Obama for “dubious” claims about the Keystone pipeline.

Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky) for claiming an elderly man was in prison for “putting dirt on his land,” when in fact he was convicted of mail fraud, conspiracy, and environmental violations such as selling land with illegal sewage systems that were likely to fail.

Democratic legislators: On the house floor, staged a demonstration of solidarity with a black youth, shot by a white police officer in an incident that various investigations determined was legitimate self-defense.

Sex Trafficking Statistics:  “There are not 300,000 thousand children at risk in the US, nor  100,000 children in the sex trade, nor is human trafficking a 9.5 billion dollar business, nor do girls become victims at an average age of 13, nor has the government arrested hundreds of perpetrators.”  All of these were claims made by “politicians, advocacy groups, and government officials” in 2015.

I’d love to feel smug and wag my finger at the politicos, but I can’t.  To paraphrase the Master whose birth we celebrated yesterday, “Let he who lives without falsehood cast the first aspersion.”

Politicians behave like this because it works for them, it gets them elected and reelected. For that, We the People are responsible.  We can do better than this…

Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

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It’s like coming home 30 years later.

Minor spoilers – nothing you won’t see in other reviews.

The Empire is gone, but the First Order has risen to menace those who would live free. A young woman named Rey lives as a scavenger on a barren planet, waiting for her family, taken by First Order when she was a child, to return.  She has little else to live for until a mysterious droid, bearing a critical message for the Resistance, appears in the desert, followed closely by Finn, a First Order defector, with storm troopers hot on his heels. The pair make a narrow escape on the Millennial Falcon, which had been sold for scrap.

Sound familiar?  It is, down to such elements as a bad-ass intergalactic bar and a woman of Yoda’s race, but it works, for the faces and circumstances are fresh, and the story of young people waking up to their courage never grows old.

And there is plenty for those old enough to have seen the original Star Wars in theaters. Leia and Han have split up, and the latter is back with Chewie in his familiar role as a rogue, sought by intergalactic bad guys for non-payment of funds. Necessity calls him back to the aid of the Resistance, however.

The Death Star is gone but a new, bigger and badder planet-killing weapon threatens all that is good.  Vader is gone, but Kylo Ren, son of a pair we know and love, has gone to the dark side and wears a mask.  The battle is joined. Rey and Finn team up to battle Kylo, but this is only the start of their fight.

In the end it is Rey who finds Luke, last of the Jedi, in exile and brings him the message, “You are needed.”

To be continued:  serious cheers for that!

The Big Lie

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“The great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one” – Adolf Hitler

“I crossed the green mountain / I slept by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head / I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up / Out of the sea
Swept through the land of / The rich and the free” – Bob Dylan

In their wildest dreams, demagogues of the past never imagined how easy television and social media would make it to use lies as means of persuasion. We can all quote our favorite absurdities from the political arena, but no one relies on the power of falsehood more effectively than the current Republican front runner and former star of a type of television that large numbers of people mistake for “reality.” The efforts of so called “fact checkers” are doomed from the start; studies have repeatedly shown that rational argument is the least effective means of persuading anyone of anything.

The lie that prompted me to write this post hasn’t yet caught media attention, but it’s one we’re likely to hear quoted more frequently as the election circus continues.

It goes like this:  “China is stealing our jobs.” The reality is, “Corporations are offshoring them for profit.”

A decade ago, when I worked at the Intel campus in Folsom, I took a half hour walk every day on my lunch hour. When it was too hot or cold or rainy, I’d walk inside, through through seven interconnected buildings, up one flight of stairs, down another, and so on. One day I noticed that an entire floor in one of the four story buildings was empty. “What happened?” I asked a manager. “Those jobs have moved to Shanghai,” he said.

I’ve had relatives and friends in different industries compelled to train their Asian replacements in order to get a severance package. A decade later it’s still going on. Beware of any politician with “a plan to create jobs” or who blames illegals from Mexico for out-of-work software developers.

This is old news. I’ve already discussed it in 2013, in a review of The Unwinding by George Packer, an account of the dissolution of the bonds of mutual loyalty that once seemed an integral part of corporate life in America. I mention it now because one of the friends with whom I ate Thanksgiving dinner this year recently saw his job move to India after a buyout.

My hero in this is a 40 something software developer named Bob who outsourced his own job to Shanghai. Working through an outsourcing company, he paid his Chinese counterpart one-sixth of his salary, spent his days surfing the web, especially cat videos, and occasionally introduced errors into the near-perfect code he received, lest his employer, Verizon, get suspicious.

When the story broke, a Verizon spokesperson simply said “Bob no longer works here.”  Too bad – he’d be a great fit in upper management.

“You can take my soul, but not my lack of enthusiasm!” – Wally, in Dilbert.