There’s no way around it: Glenn Beck is just getting dull. Yesterday’s pulseless rant against Google is the lamest Glenn Beck clip I’ve yet seen. Fuckin’ Google??? How can he expect to reverse the nearly 50% loss of his audience with banal rants like this one? If Beck’s not incendiary, he’s nuthin’ and this is just limp. You can tell that he’s only reading off a script here. Even he doesn’t believe his own bullshit. The dots he’s supposedly connecting wouldn’t impress the dumbest people in his audience. And this whole George Soros thing? Give it up, dude, you’re getting no traction with it. Tides Foundation? Van Jones? Where is the rage, Glenn Beck? Have you lost your mojo, but good? It’s like someone nailed your shoe to the floor. Now you just walk around in circles, repeating the same nonsense each day.

Yup, dude needs a new schtick soon or he’s headed for the scrap heap. Who’d want to watch someone say the same shit day after day after day, like Beck does? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can’t get much mileage from Beck when he’s this dull. If even his detractors stop caring, where will Beck be a year or two from now? (Dancing With the Stars, perhaps? Raptured? Let’s hope!). Even an audience comprised of a bunch of dummies needs a little spice.

Glenn Beck’s act is feeling really long in the tooth. He’s petering out. Remember Joe Pyne and Morton Downey Jr.? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I think the trajectory of their careers is what fate has in store for Beck, too. He’s got a novelty act and novelty acts simply get tired after a few years.

Why doesn’t Fox News just go straight to the source and replace Beck with Alex Jones, I wonder?
 

 
Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber may just be a kid, and yet in a recent Rolling Stone interview, he demonstrated a level of political sophistication (not to mention common sense) that these brain-dead Tea bagger-types lack when he told journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis that he had no plans to ever become an American citizen:

“You guys are evil,” he says with a laugh. “Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

Seems like a good system to me.

However, instead of one of JB’s hits, let’s listen to BJ Snowden’s paean to our northern neighbor, “In Canada”:
 

 
Hand screen-printed “Royal Wedding Sick Bags” by British artist Lydia Leith. Obviously the first batch is already sold out, but you can e-mail Lydia about them here. Each vomit bag sells for £3.00.

 
(via Nerdcore)

 
There’s a transcript of a speech that Bill Moyers gave in January to History Makers, an organization of broadcasters and producers who make factual programs, posted at Alternet. It’s a very interesting talk, but ultimately depressing. He cites an July 2010 article from the Boston Globe that sets the tone for his remarks and I’d imagine that most of the people listening to what the saintly Texan had to say that day had the same thought “Wow, that sucks.” It’s certainly what went through my mind as I read it. Quoting Moyers:

As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency “deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.” He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.”

I won’t spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, while “most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence,” the research found that actually “we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions.”

These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary “sport” for soldiers under stress, saying on air: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?” As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune’s Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic.”

No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular - and the audiences for Murdoch’s Fox News and talk radio - are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he “may be the antichrist.”

What’s even worse is that the most misinformed people (the most gullible, the most fanatical, perhaps) are the ones who vote the most reliably. The Creationists. The people making $40,000 a year who support tax cuts for billionaires to the detriment of their own lives and their kids’ schools. People with no healthcare who protest against it at Tea-party rallies. An entire voting bloc of people who do not believe in what others would deem objective reality. THAT, dear readers, is at base, what we are dealing with in America today and it’s a problem that’s here to stay. You might say it’s the red, white and blue brontosaurus in the room that no one wants to talk about: The willful ignorance of America’s right.

The Boston Globe article that Bill Moyers cites, Joe Keohane’s “How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains” is an absolute must-read. I’m surprised that there wasn’t a bigger fuss made of this information by the liberal media when it was published last year.  Here’s a link to the entire article, and some highlights:

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

Yup. And then we vote. Yikes!

Here’s another passage from the article that will wipe that smirk off your Blue State face:

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

The persistence of these political misperceptions is perplexing, but can be summed up as “Americans, but lets get real for a second, especially those who have a tendency towards “conservative” opinions, will only listen to you if you are saying something that sounds like something they already believe.” (No, I don’t think that all progressives are open-minded, but xenophobia, homophobia, Islamaphobia, racism, being anti-science and a general “fear of the other,” are not exactly hallmarks of the “liberal” personality the way they tend to be on the right. You’d have to be Andrew Brietbart to “believe” otherwise).

What’s worse is that when someone is feeling threatened or is economically insecure, the mind closes down even more. That’s how demagoguery works. It might explain why some dumb old white people think Glenn Beck is so wonderful. It might also explain his success as a pitchman for gold coins during his program. The more threatened someone feels, the easier they fall in line, and the less likely they are to dissent from the party line when it comes to “taking back the country” from a socialist Kenyan. Fear and gullibility go hand in hand, as we see daily.

But these are the dummies, we’re talking about, right? The ignorant people. Not so fast, smartass, because researchers at Stony Brook University found that the people who were the most politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to “new” (which is to say a fact) information that challenged their belief systems, than the statistically ignorant! Quoting again from Joe Keohane’s article: “These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains (Boston Globe)
 
Thank you Steven Otero!

Yes, I know that this image is photoshopped.

As expected, the “immigration panel” at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee conference delivered in spades. Chock-full of zany pronouncements about people whose ethnicity, they, the people making them—the rich, white, Fox News-watching Christian people attending CPAC—have no understanding of, or have never personally come in direct contact with that often, themselves. Whilst not as neanderthal or freaked out as your typical Tea party rally, it didn’t let me down. And remember, these pitifully ignorant folks parading themselves around as “experts” on immigration and race at CPAC, are the “intellectuals” of the movement!

From Right Wing Watch:

If there is one message to take away from CPAC’s panel on immigration, it’s that White America is in serious jeopardy and may soon succumb to immigration, multiculturalism, and socialism. The panel “Will Immigration Kill the GOP?” featured former congressmen Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Virgil Goode (R-VA), Bay Buchanan of Team America PAC, and special guest Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA). The group Youth for Western Civilization sponsored the panel, and its head Kevin DeAnna was also a panelist. Youth for Western Civilization is a far-right group that regularly criticizes affinity groups on college campuses, especially those that represent black, Hispanic, LGBT, Native American, and Muslim students.

Tancredo, a star among anti-immigrant activists, started the event by claiming that he wasn’t bigoted against Latinos and that the majority of Hispanic Americans support him and favor Arizona’s draconian SB-1070 law. “I have a lot of people who have Hispanic last names who support me,” Tancredo told the jam-packed room, “I speak for most Americans.” The former congressman, who in 2010 received just 37% of the vote in his bid for governor of Colorado, claimed that the GOP should embrace his nativist politics because immigration is the “ultimate economic issue,” and even claimed that Hispanics supported him over his Democratic opponent, Governor John Hickenlooper.

Responding to a questioner who believed that Democrats would drop their support of immigration reform if immigrants were stripped of their right to vote, Tancredo said that even immigrants without voting rights still pose a grave danger to the country.

“No more of this multiculturalism garbage,” Tancredo said, adding that “the cult of multiculturalism has captured the world” and is “the dagger in the heart” of civilization.

Not to be out done, Goode maintained that immigration in general “will not only kill the GOP but will kill the United States of America.” He went on to say that Democratic politicians support undocumented immigration only in order to introduce “socialized medicine” and gain future voters. The Virginia firebrand maintained that the majority of Americans favor his fervently anti-immigrant views, and wanted every state to emulate Arizona’s SB-1070. He asked, “Who could really be against doing away with birthright citizenship?”

[Hmmm, just hazarding a guess here… nah. Sorry, I don’t want to interrupt—RM]

DeAnna of Youth for Western Civilization gave a much darker outlook on the success of the Republican Party, and the country as a whole. He said that the “system is stacked against” the anti-immigrant movement, maintaining that an alliance of corporate and Republican elites is preventing the party from moving farther to the right on the issue of immigration. He warned of the rising tide of multiculturalism, especially among young people. “The Left gets power from multiculturalism,” DeAnna said, and “when you lose the culture you lose the policy too.”

He also argued that the GOP is “dead” in California because of the rising population of Latinos, and said that the Democratic Party and their allies in organized labor want further immigration to strengthen their electoral clout.

Speaking as a Californian, Kevin DeAnna is certainly right on that account. But what he also doesn’t seem to realize is, that it’s not—it’s never—going to change. The GOP are the party of “no hopers” in the Golden State (just ask Meg Whitman, Steve Cooley and Carly Fiorina) and that’s going to absolutely solidify with the demographic shift. Virtually nothing that his organization wants would fly for even two seconds in the country’s richest and most populous state! [Question for Mr. DeAnna: Since you are unlikely to disagree with the proposition that California’s Latino population will continue to grow, almost assuredly outpacing the caucasian birthrate (whether these children are the offspring of legal or illegal immigrants, it doesn’t matter) what influence do you think your organization will have in the California of 2020, or 2050? On a scale of one to ten?]

But while many panelists like Tancredo and Buchanan began their speeches by saying that they were absolutely not bigoted or racist in any way, participants at the event asked many racially-tinged questions.

A questioner asked Goode how to “control immigration from the Islamic and Arab world,” and said that unless that happens there could be “more Keith Ellisons.” Ellison is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota who converted to Islam as an adult, and is not an immigrant, but Goode did write a letter to his constituents saying, “The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

Another questioner discussed how astounded he was that “in the northeast, majority-Caucasian communities” tend to back “support ‘amnesty,’” or at least pro-reform politicians. He asked the panelists how he could turn more “Caucasian communities” against amnesty, and Buchanan assured him that even voters in Massachusetts oppose reform efforts like the DREAM Act.

One member of the audience wondered if Congress could “defund the National Council of La Raza,” a Latino civil rights group, which he said was “just like the Ku Klux Klan.” Goode appeared to agree, and demanded that Congress end the organization’s funding. Asking if “it’s possible that [American] society devolves into South Africa,” one questioner discussed the declining population rate of “European Americans” and floated the idea of ethnic groups living separately [Emphasis added]. While he directed the question towards Barletta, the congressman ignored the question.

Evidently, while the panel’s speakers see unrepentant Nativism and immigrant-bashing as the way for the GOP’s electoral success, it mainly appealed to the CPAC attendees who feared the demise of White America and the emergence of a more diverse population. All four panelists agreed that unless the Republican Party embraces their hard line anti-immigrant stance, the GOP will become inextricably weakened and the country will dissolve into multicultural dystopia.

Although the panelists all said that it wasn’t about race, it’s easy to see why many audience members thought it was.

Newsweek editor Eleanor Clift, reporting at The Daily Beast, mentions a sign she saw at CPAC that read “Why are you a conservative?” * The most succinct response: “Because God is.” Presumably God is also caucasian, lives in a Red State and thinks Obama is a socialist. A heavenly couch potato Rush Limbaugh fan, if certain leaps of faith can be made about the big “H.I.M.” creating man in his own image and the blinkered belief systems of the CPAC attendees.

Below, Kevin DeAnna, the founder of Youth for Western Civilization talks to Justin Elliott of Salon.com at CPAC 2011. This guy was on the fucking immigration panel!
 

 
The Pentagon has organized a trip for a north London theater group to perform its play on Afghanistan to hundreds of its military personnel. It is believed that The Great Game: Afghanistan, a 7 hour production examining 170 years of Afghan history, will help give greater understanding to the cultural, political and historical factors involved in the war - now reaching its tenth year.

The performances have been put together by the Tricycle Theater, in conjunction with the British Council and the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, after an invitation from the Pentagon. The Great Game: Afghanistan premiered at the Tricycle in 2009 and returned last year after strong reviews.

The drama is organized into three sections, each of four plays, and takes its name from the 19th and 20th century “Great Game” played out between the Russian and British Empires for supremacy over Central Asia. The UK feared Russia would use Afghanistan as a staging post to take over India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. This led to the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1838.

The Great Game: Afghanistan is performed by the Tricycle Theater, a highly respected theater company, which has established “a unique reputation for presenting plays that reflect the cultural diversity of its community, in particular by Black, Irish, Jewish, Asian and South African writers, as well as for responding to contemporary issues and events with its ground-breaking ‘tribunal plays’ and political work.” Its director Nicholas Kent said last month to the London Evening Standard:

“I think it shows the open-mindedness of the current military both in the United States and here, that people are willing to learn and try to understand foreign cultures,” he said.

“It is very exciting because you don’t often get the chance as an actor to do something as important as that. I’m very honoured that they want us to do it.

“Anything that means these people know more about the history of Afghanistan can only help the whole intervention there. It’s very important people have knowledge of the story they’re dealing with.”

The Daily Telegraph reports that Douglas Wilson, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Pentagon, “said he faced doubts within the department that the plays would be anti-war and would deliver a counterproductive, negative message to a military audience.”

Addressing the apparent culture clash of a liberal theatre and a vast war machine, he said: “There is an assumption that the arts and our men and women in uniform are from different planets. It’s not the case,” he said.

“The arts can provide a means to discuss and explore and in this case learn about the history and culture of a very complicated country. It is tremendous food for thought,” he said.”

Indu Rubasingham, who directed half the plays, said her own “naive” anti-war views had matured while researching the subject matter.

“I realised I was prejudiced and judgmental. The international community has to take responsibility there, otherwise there will be a vacuum,” she said.

Last night was the first night of the production for Pentagon staff, and it received a standing ovation. It will be interesting to see if the play’s examination of the dangers and folly of imperialism will have any effect on current policy.
 

 
Previously on DM

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan

 
Further clips from the play ‘The Great Game: Afghanistan’, after the jump…
 

 
Gotta revolution if you want it. Click here and watch the future unfold in real time on your computer. The concept that we’re all in this together has never been truer or more immediate. Governments, Egypt’s and our own, are playing catch up. Information is power and it makes us all equal.

Blogs not bombs!

Above, Pat Toomey says it’s not the size…
 
Senator Pat Toomey, that rotten shit who is the new Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, tells the CPAC attendees his political philosophy in a form that they can all understand, that of a simple children’s story. Amazing. How does a scoundrel like this get elected to the Senate in a state so full of poor and working class people??? The man clearly hates the poor, they’re just “useless eaters” to him and his GOP buddies. Toomey even puts Rick Santorum in perspective! The sight of Toomey turns my stomach. He’s anti-gay, anti-poor, anti-healthcare reform, pro-gun, says global warming is nonsense, was against the Bush expansion of Medicare prescription benefits when he was a congressman and thinks that the economic meltdown should have been allowed to continue to the bitter end! (Oddly, Toomey supported DADT repeal. Go figure).

If teabagger Toomey—who should immediately stop dying his hair—had his druthers he would deregulate Wall Street and put a doctor who performs a legal abortion in prison, but when it comes to politics, he’s all for baby-talking to his base of buffoons. CPAC is going to be quite a show this year. These fucks are just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing a full-on symphony of hate. Non-haters need not apply to speak at CPAC. Her reasons are her reasons, but I have to say that Sarah Palin looks especially canny by avoiding this cavalcade of asshats.

Bonus: If you really want to make yourself retch, check out the video of Newt Gingrich’s CPAC entrance to the sounds of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” What a tacky little man. You have to appreciate the brain-dead embrace of this guy by Christian conservatives. Newt Gingrich, a man who left his wife while she was battling cancer for a much hotter, younger woman, treated like a rock star by these people and not a moral pariah, which would be appropriate (the way John Edwards was shunned by Democrats). Extraordinary stuff.
 

 
Now this is good TV! Ever since I stopped giving a fuck that I live in a land of lard-encrusted intellectual midgets and learned to sit back, relax and grab a good seat for the end times reality teevee show, my life’s been so much less stressful.

Why just a few short weeks ago, I’d have been apoplectic at the sight of these moronic Iowa Republicans passing judgement on Obama’s Middle East foreign policy as if even one of these ignoramuses could find Egypt on a map. The punch line happens just before the one minute mark, when all is revealed….

Here’s an astute comment from YouTube:

This is what happens when when you fail to learn how to think critically and judge the validity of your sources of information. These people feel confident in their beliefs because they never put any real thought into them.

Arguing with such people is often fruitless, because directly confronting them usually causes them to retreat further in their beliefs. To get them to question their beliefs you would first need to improve their methods of thinking, which is not an easy thing to do.

He’s right, you can’t just snap your fingers in front of an idiot’s face and say “Wise up, dumbshit!” and expect that it will happen. Even Fox New’s Frank Luntz seems embarrassed for these people, which is saying a lot.

Bonus clip, Glennspeed You! Beck Emperor:
 

 
On January 27th, 2011, two schools got together at the Oakridge Centre mall in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in honor of International Anti-Bullying Day. They are now challenging others to use social media as to spread the word.

Maybe some similarly concerned teens in Minnesota can pull off a stunt like this the next time heavy metal homophobe, Bradlee Dean comes to their hometown…

These kids are just awesome, aren’t they?
 

 
Via World of Wonder