Tag Archives: Events

The 2015 Pinocchio Awards

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pinocchio

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…

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.

 

American Tragedy of Greek Proportions?

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The word, “tragedy,” is one of those words, like “awesome” that overuse has drained of meaning. It parallels the way overload has numbed us to the realities behind the headlines, so that our horror, just three years ago, over Sandy Hook has become a shake of the head and a, “Shit, not again,” as we grab our busy morning coffee. And maybe look over our shoulder at the sound of a backfire. And even listen to morons who say, “This is a hunting state,” as if that has anything to do with anything.

Yes, when I lived in Oregon, not far from Roseburg, you would sometimes see cows in the outlying fields, with COW written in big red letters during hunting season, by farmers who had no great trust in the wisdom of “hunters.” But that is another story.

To once more quote the great Walt Kelly, and Pogo, his voice, “We has met the enemy and he is us.”

gpicone's avataripledgeafallegiance

Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on December 14th, 2012 over 80,000 people in the US have been shot dead. There have been more than 140 school shootings over that span of time, and more mass shootings this year (298) than there have been days on the calendar (293).

There have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths since 1968, compared to 1,396,733 cumulative war deaths since the American Revolution. That’s 120,130 more U.S. gun deaths than U.S. war deaths. And that’s including the use of the most generous estimate of Civil War deaths, the largest contributor to American war deaths.

And even though homicides represent a minority of all gun related deaths, with suicides comprising the biggest share, that’s still a lot of people shot and killed with guns. According to CDC data, 63 percent of gun-related deaths were from suicides, 33 percent were from homicides, and roughly 1 percent each…

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The passing of a master

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His Eminence, Choden Rinpoche

His Eminence, Choden Rinpoche

It is with mixed feelings that I write of the passing of Choden Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master, born in 1933, who spent 19 years under house arrest in a windowless basement after the Chinese takeover. He has taught the dharma to thousands of students around the world since his release in 1985.

I was fortunate enough to encounter Rinpoche in 2012, and posted This summer I met a hero after attending a series of initiations and teachings in June and July of that year. I was able to study with him during subsequent summers, through June of this year, but ominously, he ended his U.S. sojourn, normally several months each year, after less than two weeks, to return to Taiwan.  Several of us wondered then if his health was involved.

In August, reports confirmed this, and a large long life ceremony was planned for him at Sera Je monastery in India, on September 11. It seemed evident to me that it was Rinpoche’s time when his friend and superior, the Dalai Lama said, at the end of August:

“This life has reached a successful completion. Death is the inevitable end of birth; in that we are all the same…Rinpoche should have no regret for his activities he has done while alive. He has made his life deeply meaningful. So relax with a happy mind. I pray and make similar inner aspirations at all times.”

Choden Rinpoche passed on September 11, at 1:30 am, India time, after completing nearly a week of end-of-life ceremonies, and reportedly telling his closest disciple of plans to carry forward his work, and details of his next rebirth.  “Rinpoche” is a Tibetan honorific meaning “Precious One,” and is given to those who are confirmed to be past masters, male or female, who consciously took rebirth to continue teaching the dharma for the benefit of all living beings.

Before leaving the U.S. for the final time this June, Rinpoche promised his students he would return. That’s the good news. The bad news of course, is that it won’t be in this life.

May we all benefit from such an example, and aspire to live and die meaningfully, with sanity and compassion, in a world that desperately needs both.

The medium is…

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Republican debate

“The medium is the message”, said Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media, 1964. Fifty-one years later, I’m still not certain we understand media, but a light bulb went on for me Thursday night regarding McLuhan’s iconic phrase. While watching the Republican presidential debate, I had a minor epiphany; that television cannot help transforming politics into entertainment.  

I am not suggesting that either party has a monopoly on show business.  Yes, the Republicans are likely to be funnier this year, with their Jerry Springer moments, and The Donald, who’s public persona is a weird combination of Rodney Dangerfield and Don Rickles.  I expect the Democrats to be far less interesting, more like infomercials on the home shopping channel.

There’s nothing new about politics as entertainment. If we believe television and movie depictions of pre-television and movie campaigns, there was plenty of bunting, and bluster, and brass bands in “the good old days.” But every now and then, wouldn’t it be refreshing to see something real happen on political TV?

The last time I saw reality break through was during the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston.  The Democrats had barred one of my heroes, the late Senator Robert Byrd, from the podium. Byrd could not be trusted to stay on script. Massachusetts Senator Kennedy invited Byrd to speak at the Old North Church, where Paul Revere worshipped, and his address was broadcast on Democracy Now. Byrd held up his well-worn pocket copy of the US Constitution and warned us that it was under attack…

Politics, of course, is not the only thing that TV flattens out. I recall several surreal moments with TV news. One early evening in college days, when I was living in an off-campus house, my roomies and I were watching a shoot out on Mod Squad on an old black and white TV. I went to the kitchen to fix a sandwich, and when I returned, the shootout had grown more intense; the house where the bad guys were hiding was on fire. But it looked different.  “Did somebody change the channel?” I asked.

“Nah, man,” said a house mate. “The news cut in. The cops are having a shootout with those guys who kidnapped Patty Hearst.” The visceral difference between watching a fictional versus a non-fiction firefight on TV was nonexistent without the dialog or voice over!

In a very real sense, that’s simply the nature of things according to both western depth psychology and Buddhist psychology. Every experience we have, noted James Hillman, begins as an event in the psyche. And Buddhist thinkers will tell you that our so-called realities are far more like the dreams we have at night than most of us dare to believe. Yet, as a practical matter, in order to make the right decisions, we have to be able to tell them apart, and that means turning a critical eye on the stuff we see on television.

I have recommended it before, but as we begin another presidential election mini-series, I can think of no better guidebook than Neal Gabler’s Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, 2000.  In it, he says:

“the deliberate application of the techniques of theater to politics, religion, education, literature, commerce, warfare, crime, everything, has converted them into branches of show business, where the overriding objective is getting and satisfying an audience.”

Unless we choose to live with the wolves, we’re going to be part of that audience, but at least we can remember that wonderful Buddhist bumper sticker:  “You don’t have to believe everything you think.”

Lest we forget

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Armenian-Genocide-

Last week, as I drove home on Hwy. 99, on the outskirts of a small central valley town, I saw a billboard similar to this one, marking the centennial of the 20th century’s first genocide. It is one of two dark centennials we will mark next week. Ones that no one wants to think of, but which we ignore at our own peril.

The Ottoman Empire had been in decline well before the start of the first world war. Their initial military efforts were disastrous. Six months after the start of fighting , they had lost the Balkans, and ruin threatened.

Well before the start of fighting, nationalist Turks and some religious extremists declared that to be saved, the Empire must purge itself of non-Muslim elements. By early 1915, as the government feared that Armenian Christians might seek a separate peace with Russia, it became policy.

On April 24, 1915, notable Armenians in Istanbul were rounded up, a move that historians agree was the first step in a wider plan of annihilation. One and a half million Armenians would die in 1915 and 1916, and the killing would not stop completely until 1922. Though headlines around the world reported the atrocities at the time, Turkey denies responsibility to this day.

No one would ever be punished, a fact not lost on a young German corporal named Adolf Hitler, who paid attention to world events. After the war, victorious nations, including the United States, found it more advantageous to seek trade agreements with oil producing nations than to seek redress for a scattered and decimated populace. The U.S. House of Representatives came close to a resolution condemning the killings as genocide in both 2007 and 2009, but Presidents Bush and Obama respectively, fended off passage of the bill, which they feared would upset our alliance with Turkey.

Denial is still the order of the day for nation states with strategic interests, but as individuals, we fortunately still have the option of recognizing the truth.

A poison gas attack in World War 1

A poison gas attack in World War 1

The other sad centennial we will mark next week is the first use of poison gas on the western front, on the evening of April 22, 1915, a day we now celebrate as Earth Day.

Seeking a tactical advantage at the second battle of Ypres, the Germans launched a two day artillery barrage. When the guns fell silent, instead of the infantry charge that usually followed such a volley, the British soldiers saw a white cloud moving toward their trenches.

One hundred and sixty-eight tons of chlorine gas wafted on the western breeze. Only when it struck did the soldiers experience the horror that hid in the cloud. Chlorine renders the lungs incapable of absorbing oxygen; the victim drowns in his own bodily fluids. Those who could ran for their lives.

The gas opened up a four mile hole in the British lines, the kind of breakthrough the warring armies always sought, but as usually happened, confusion and inept command kept the German army from exploiting their advantage, which was soon neutralized.

A British soldier with a background in chemistry, saw that the gas had turned brass buttons green. Realizing it was chlorine, he supplied the troops with an instant antidote – breathing through a urine-soaked cloth would neutralize the effects. Both sides rushed gas masks to the front, and any strategic advantage was lost.

Most casualties in “The Great War” came from artillery, but poison gas somehow haunts our imagination as we think of the conflict that opened the 20th century. Nations entered the war with 19th century illusions of bravery and heroism. Such conceits were swept away in the first few months of mechanized carnage.

For me, Earth Day, 2015 is a time to consider the warring impulses which live within the human heart. Every thought and every action of each individual matters. What can I do, now, on Earth Day, and every day, to aim in the direction of the world I would like to live in, rather then one where mass horrors on the evening news no longer cause us to raise an eyebrow?

Sources:

Armenian Genocide of 1915: An Overview, New York Times.

A Century After Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens,” by Tim Arango, The New York Times.

A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by G.J. Meyer

Does daylight savings time save energy?

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Public Domain

Public Domain

Ok, now that daylight time is here for us in the new world, and coming in a few weeks for the EU, it’s time for a pop quiz: who invented daylight savings time?

Yes, fellow Googlers, it was Benjamin Franklin who reasoned it would save candles in the colonies. It was not mandated in the US until we entered WWI, when the intent was to preserve resources.

According to Scientific American, the first study of the effectiveness of daylight savings time was conducted in the 70’s, during our first “oil crisis.” The same article notes that a study in Indiana in 2006, the year that state mandated daylight time in all rather than just some of its counties, showed an increase in energy usage.

Similar results were seen in California in 2007, when daylight time was lengthened by four weeks. California Energy Commission researchers found an energy savings of only 0.2% with a margin of error of 1.5%. Changes in air conditioning patterns as well as the pervasiveness of electronic controllers in homes and businesses are possible causes of the flat or negative results.

I, for one, enjoy the light in summer evenings. Farmers dislike daylight savings time, for it disrupts their schedules. Sports enthusiasts favor it. In the late ’90’s, for instance, representatives of the golf industry said daylight time earned them and extra $400 million in fees each year.

For it or against it, the odds of it’s changing are practically non-existent. Unless you live in Arizona, you’ve lived with it all your life. Besides, there are more pressing issues for Congress to fail to act on than this.

Daylight time is one of those things, like the Superbowl and plum blossoms, like St. Patrick’s day, and the start of baseball season, that signal the coming of another spring and summer. I’m not inclined to complain too much if that costs me an hour of sleep.