Victorian Hair Wreath

During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:

Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.

The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a lock of her own in the wreath, but quite possibly she did not, preferring instead to be present as the sum of its parts; the invisible weaver of family ties. As a good 19th century woman, the domestic harmony she fostered was an expression of herself; her self-portrait in sacrifice.

As Helen Sheumaker describes in Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, hairwork in its myriad forms had not only established itself as longstanding tradition by the later half of the 19th century, but had become an active fashion. Husbands went to work wearing watch fobs fashioned of their wives hair. Locks from the dearly departed were mounted into rings and brooches. Ladies filled their autograph books with snippets from their friends. At a time of rising commercialism, sentimental hairwork became a way both to signal one’s sincerity and, paradoxically, to stay in style.

[Full Article and More Pictures at Victorian Gothic]

Last summer, the Danish state offered to sell a good chunk of the 80-odd-acre former military base at the edge of downtown Copenhagen to Christiania, the alternative community whose residents had been squatting there illegally for four decades. For the residents, who fundamentally reject the idea of landownership, this presented an ideological quandary.

“Christiania has offered to buy it,” said Risenga Manghezi, a spokesman for the community. “But Christiania doesn’t want to own it.”

To resolve the contradiction, Mr. Manghezi and a handful of others decided to start selling shares in Christiania. Pieces of paper, hand-printed on site, the shares can be had for amounts from $3.50 to $1,750. Shareholders are entitled to a symbolic sense of ownership in Christiania and the promise of an invitation to a planned annual shareholder party. “Christiania belongs to everyone,” Mr. Manghezi said. “We’re trying to put ownership in an abstract form.”

Since the shares were first offered in the fall, about $1.25 million worth have been sold in Denmark and abroad. The money raised will go toward the purchase of the land from the government.

after a rocky decade under a conservative-led government, during which the carless, hashish-friendly community faced threats of expulsion and a Supreme Court ruling that said the squatters had no legal right to remain on the land, the residents made a pragmatic decision to buy the property — or, as many would have it, to “buy it free.”

“People were afraid, and we had to respect this fear,” said Allan Lausten, a handyman who took part in the negotiations despite an aversion to bureaucrats.

“What was he thinking?” It’s the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn’t even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents’ basement?

Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness “Romeo and Juliet.” But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.

Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood. And our Romeos may be poetic lunatics under the influence of Queen Mab until they are well into graduate school…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.” …

Read more here.

Former Sentator Chris Dodd

From the sickening department at Techdirt:

Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what’s happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA campaign donations that they’d better pass Hollywood’s favorite legislation … or else:

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,”

This certainly follows what many people assumed was happening, and fits with the anonymous comments from studio execs that they will stop contributing to Obama, but to be so blatant about this kind of corruption and money-for-laws politics in the face of an extremely angry public is a really, really, really tone deaf response from Dodd.

It shows, yet again, that he just doesn’t get it. People were protesting not just because of the content of these bills, but because of the corrupt process of big industries like Dodd’s “buying” politicians and “buying” laws. To then come out and make that threat explicit isn’t a way to fix things or win back the public. It’s just going to get them more upset, and to recognize just how corrupt this process is. If Dodd, as he said in yesterday’s NY Times, really wanted to turn things around and come to a more reasonable result, this is exactly how not to do it …

[continues at Techdirt]

The president of the American Psychiatric Association says he is “very open” to a request from the Army to come up with an alternative name for post-traumatic stress disorder so that troops returning from combat will feel less stigmatized and more encouraged to seek treatment.

Dr. John Oldham, who serves as senior vice president and chief of staff at the Houston-based Menninger Clinic, said he is looking into the possibility of updating the association’s diagnostic manual with a new subcategory for PTSD. The subcategory could be “combat post-traumatic stress injury,” or a similar term, he said.

“It would link it clearly to the impact and the injury of the combat situation and the deployment experience, rather than what people somewhat inaccurately but often assume, which is that you got it because you weren’t strong enough,” Oldham said.

Read more here.

In the latest issue of Orion Magazine, environmental activists Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth both express their frustrations with the current environmental movement.

Jensen takes movement organizers to task for their drift towards actions that are “fun and sexy.”  ”The fact that so many people routinely call for environmentalism to be more fun and more sexy reveals not only the weakness of our movement but also the utter lack of seriousness with which even many activists approach the problems we face,” he says bitterly.  “When it comes to stopping the murder of the planet, too many environmentalists act more like they’re planning a party than building a movement.”

But let’s face it, there are a lot of people on this planet who find the issues addressed by environmentalism just too scary and depressing to deal with. The environmentalist party-planners are trying to reach these folks, who have been suckled from birth on cheery feel-good media, by presenting environmental action as fun and upbeat, rather than as doom-driven and angst-ridden.  It’s environmentalism on anti-depressants, and it fits a big swath of our population, who don’t want to dwell on anything sad or upsetting, unless maybe it’s a movie guaranteed to ultimately have a happy ending …

Read more here.

At IMAGINE, a clinic organized and run by U of T students, multidisciplinary teams provide medical care to patients who would otherwise go without.

The life of someone studying in a medical field is a busy one, but for a group of University of Toronto students, even the hectic schedule does not stop them from taking on an extra project.

They are volunteers at a clinic called IMAGINE, an acronym for Interprofessional Medical and Allied Groups for Improving Neighbourhood Environments, which runs out of the Queen West Community Health Centre (168 Bathurst Street) on Saturdays. Patients do not need a health card or identification to be seen. Most who come through their doors are homeless or are new immigrants.

The clinic is organized and run by students who see patients under the supervision of a professional in their field. Neither the students nor their preceptors get paid for their hours. They do not accumulate any school credit. But for them, the experience is worth it.

“We’re serving people. We’re serving the population that needs it most. And we’re potentially changing people’s lives and allowing them to get even that first point of access into their lives and seeing what can be changed,” explains Yick Kan Cheung, a 23-year-old student of social work who is one of IMAGINE’s current co-directors…

more on Torontoist

As the 1960s came to an end, the rapid development of the American postwar decades had begun to take a noticeable toll on the environment, and the public began calling for action. In November 1971, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency announced a massive photo documentary project to record these changes. More than 100 photographers not only documented environmental issues, but captured images of everyday life and the way parts of America looked at that moment in history. The National Archives has made 15,000 of these images available.

A 2009 study found that people tend to interpret ambiguous political satire according to their own views and self-image. This has enormous implications for satirical programs mocking democratic behavior, produced by media conglomerates that support Internet censorship. (The following is an essay that I was not able to place with a magazine, but still wanted to share with the world. Feel free to re-post on your blog or website, in accordance with the Creative Commons license. Just give me credit and link back here.)

“The revolutionaries of any decade will become the reactionaries of the next decade, if they do not change their nervous system, because the world around them is changing. He or she who stands still in a moving, racing, accelerating age, moves backwards relatively speaking.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1)

On Thursday, December 1, 2011, Stephen Colbert addressed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill currently under consideration in U.S. Congress, on his late-night political satire program The Colbert Report (pronounced “Cole-bare Ree-pore”). Fight for the Future, a group coordinating the push against SOPA and Protect-IP (a similar bill being considered; the “IP” stands for “intellectual property”), says that such a bill would allow the government to shut down websites for any copyright infringement, while making it a felony to stream copyrighted content without permission. (2) According to PCWorld, the government could also restrict access to foreign sites with the help of Internet service providers (ISPs), or block advertising and payment services from working with the sites. (3) The result, as anyone with a cursory understanding of the issue can predict, would be a drastic reduction our free speech rights and possible damage to the DNS system upon which the Internet depends.

Some critics of the proposed bills regard this Colbert episode as important national coverage. After all, if SOPA passes, it would possibly be the worst change at the federal level – by which I mean, bringing the worst consequences for our democracy, our culture, and our individual lives – since the 2010 Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate and union spending in political campaigns under the guise of “free speech.” (4) What those critics do not realize is that a large portion of Colbert’s audience probably missed the point about the proposed intellectual property bills.

A 2009 study from Ohio State University evaluated the way that political beliefs affect a viewer’s perception of both humor and the host’s intentions in The Colbert Report. The peer-reviewed journal article by LaMarre, et al, called “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” says that “conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.” (5) However, according to the authors, self-identified “conservatives” and “liberals” (measured on a seven-point range) both found Colbert equally funny.

This would come as a devastating surprise to many of Colbert’s viewers. Since his show’s launch in late 2005, when he split from his role in The Daily Show (which itself is known as a “fake news program,” hosted by comedian Jon Stewart), Colbert has built a devoted audience by supposedly pretending to be a “right-wing” or “conservative” news pundit. Such viewers see The Colbert Report as a satire program, and therefore a contribution to “progressive,” “liberal,” or “left-wing” political movements. That’s because satire involves “wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly” (6) – so a satire program about a “conservative” news pundit would inherently be produced with the intention of denouncing “conservative” views, not promoting them.

Satire has long been viewed as an important part of free expression in all societies that aspire or claim to be democratic. It’s a sneaky way of pointing out the absurdities and hypocrisies in any culture that thinks of itself as more advanced or accomplished than it really is. As the study authors point out, “governments and institutions have banned political satire on the grounds that it challenges and pushes the status quo.” (7) Of course, this isn’t just a matter of bipartisan (or bipolar) politics. Another historical purpose of satire has been to fight the consolidation and abuse of power. Thus, we live in a very strange time, when some of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world produce some of the most-watched satirical content.

In present-day America, one can easily find satire created in the highest echelons of the entertainment industry. In addition to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Comedy Central also produces the long-running animated show South Park, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in 1997. And midway through the last decade, the network had a huge hit with Chappelle’s Show, starring comedian Dave Chappelle. Furthermore, feature films have offered a consistent supply of sharp satire, often gaining international distribution due to the style’s popularity. Recent examples include 2004’s Team America: World Police (created by the same duo responsible for South Park), and the major film spin-offs of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show, 2006’s Borat and 2009’s Brüno (both directed by Larry Charles).

What sets The Colbert Report apart from some other satire is Stephen Colbert’s “deadpan” delivery, which the study authors distinguish from Jon Stewart’s presentation style on The Daily Show. A previous study found that Stewart “interjects commentary during segments, moves in and out of character, and even laughs at himself. …Stewart aids viewer interpretation by offering himself as an unambiguous source and providing external cues. In contrast…Colbert’s deadpan satire and commitment to character do not provide viewers with the external cues or source recognition that Stewart offers.” (8) This problem stems from the fact that satire is essentially a form of irony, a type of humor in which someone does not always say what one actually means.

Because deadpan satire has such ambiguous intentions and is usually presented as entertainment, it allows viewers to interpret the content based on their own political views – what the study authors call “biased information processing.” “Thus, with biased processing individuals actually see and hear different information depending on whether that information will help or hinder their personal goals and needs. Stated differently, biased processing goes beyond perceptions of whether the entertainment was realistic, or whether the media treated one side more fairly than the other…to an underlying cognitive process in which the information is interpreted, encoded, stored, and retrieved in a manner that most benefits that individual.” (9) (In my Reality Sandwich essay “Doublethink and the Mental Construction of Reality,” an excerpt from my upcoming debut book, I explore self-deception in quite a similar way.)

The results of the 2009 study suggest that ambiguous satire might actually reinforce someone’s preexisting political views, because the satire’s meaning can be evaluated so subjectively. In short, the satirist appears to be on the same side as the viewer, whichever side that is. Because of this either/or conundrum, the net effect is political polarization of the audience, which has been known since the late 1970s “to have negative consequences for our democracy,” according to LaMarre, et al. (10) But even in the 1930s, Alfred Korzybski warned (with his system of general semantics) that our either/or thought patterns disconnect us from the empirical universe and produce “un-sanity” in the world.

Knowing all this, it’s frightening to think that Colbert is more the rule of satire than the exception. What I mean is that few satirists or satirical programs break character or provide other interpretive hints the way Stewart does on The Daily Show. LaMarre, et al, cite another study from 1974 that performed a similar assessment of the television sitcom All in the Family, a show that featured a bigoted, under-educated patriarch named Archie Bunker. “It is noteworthy that the producer of All in the Family, Norman Lear, regarded the show as an effective weapon against bigotry and racism. Lear reasoned that audiences would see that Archie Bunker had convoluted logic and his counterpart, liberal son-in-law Mike, was the one who made sense. Instead, the show may have been perceived by audiences as condoning and even encouraging prejudice.” (11) Clearly the American public did not renounce Bunker, since, according to Wikipedia, TV Guide singled him out as “the greatest television character of all time.” (12)

As a child of the 1980s, I had no personal exposure to All in the Family – but based on this description (and some quick catch-up on YouTube), Bunker sounds like a template for the character Eric Cartman of the program South Park. Cartman, as the other child characters unanimously refer to him, consistently harps about “gays,” “tree-hugging hippies,” “minorities,” and other groups and cultural categories commonly considered “liberal” or “left-wing” (as Cartman might say, part of the “liberal establishment”). Similarly, he refers to his friend Kyle as a “stupid Jew,” denigrates his friend Kenny for being “poor,” and calls everyone around him “fags” and “homos.” Since South Park debuted in the fall of 1997, when I was 14 years old and just starting high school, I assumed that Cartman was a parody of close-minded people – which I would now describe as homophobes, xenophobes, “reactionaries,” “fascists,” and “arch-capitalists.” Now I’m not so sure.

The timeliest example of Cartman’s antics came in the season 15 episode entitled “1%,” which first aired on November 2, 2011. In the show, Cartman’s obesity brings down the whole school’s average fitness, resulting in a rigorous work-out program for all students – despite the fact that Cartman is the only one with a weight problem. (13) It starts as a subtle parody of the “99 percent” meme, which holds that the “one percent” of people in possession of society’s wealth – and, therefore, society’s power – has been solely responsible for the current economic recession, widespread environmental crisis, and gradual decreases in civil liberties, among other troubles. The episode’s premise, while harmless enough, soon leads to Cartman claiming that he’s being wrongfully persecuted because, as he says, “people voted for Obama, so now that everything sucks they have to blame me!” He calls the other students “the 99 percent” who are “occupying the cafeteria” (a reference to the international Occupy Movement), and argues that they “think it’s wrong to be pissed off at a black president, so you’re all just pissed off at me!” Cartman later seeks refuge with Token Black, the only African American kid on the show, because, in Cartman’s words, “in this day and age, black people are just impervious to being fucked with,” and “are somehow incapable of doing anything wrong.” Meanwhile the “99 percent” is portrayed as a psychopathic mob bent on vengeance.

In a 2006 interview with Reason Magazine, South Park creators Stone and Parker confirmed that they “hate” both “conservatives” and “liberals” (they first made a similar statement in 2001, implying that they have less hate for “conservatives” [14]), and agreed that the term “libertarian” fits their worldview. (15) In explanation, Stone said he doesn’t want anyone to “control my life” or “tell me what I should do.” And according to Parker, South Park “is saying that there is a middle ground, that most of us actually live in this middle ground, and that all you extremists are the ones who have the microphones because you’re the most interesting to listen to, but actually this group isn’t evil, that group isn’t evil, and there’s something to be worked out here.” In other words, Stone and Parker seem to believe solidly in the current dominant system of bipartisan politics. And they both certainly consider South Park an important contender in the ongoing fight for free speech, in light of the controversies caused when poking fun at sensitive groups, religious or otherwise.

Apparently neither Stone nor Parker have considered the potential negative repercussions of the kind of speech they use in South Park, wrongfully assuming that their work could, at worst, offend people. Cartman does seem to be a mostly satirical character – but it’s not uncommon for deadpan satire to mirror actual “conservative” pundits and politicians. For instance, plenty of real-life, self-identifying “right-wingers” would agree with Cartman’s (horribly ill-informed) claim that Obama could have, in his short time as President, significantly reduced the quality of life in the U.S. LaMarre, et al, note in their 2009 study that, while interviewing CNN’s Anderson Cooper on October 28, 2007, Stephen Colbert attacked global warming in similar terms used by “reactionary” radio host Rush Limbaugh. And the Colbert Report clip used in the study features Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! supporting her 2006 book Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. In the short interview, Goodman discredits the effectiveness of embedding journalists with marines during foreign combat, particularly during the War in Iraq. The researchers discovered that, after watching the clip, “individual attitudes regarding embedded journalists were fully mediated by perceptions of Colbert’s opinion regarding embedded journalists.” (16) In other words, viewers were measurably influenced by what they perceived to be the views of the authority figure.

Dave Chappelle stands as a lone example of a satirist intuiting the broader effects that his brazen comedy could have on our culture. After two incredibly successful seasons of Chappelle’s Show in 2003 and 2004, Chappelle rejected his $50 million deal with Comedy Central and – just before the launch of season three in mid-2005 – disappeared to South Africa. TIME Magazine interviewed him to find out why he fled, and to clarify rumors that he had a drug problem or had suffered a mental breakdown (both rumors were false). “The crux of his crisis seems to boil down to his almost obsessive need to ‘check my intentions.’ He uses the phrase a few times during the interview and explains that it means really making sure that he’s doing what he’s doing for the right reasons.” (17) Then, in a 2006 interview with Anderson Cooper, Chappelle elaborated by revealing that he had reacted to someone on set while filming season three of his show. When performing a skit in blackface make-up, Chappelle cringed at the way a Caucasian person near him was laughing. “The way he laughed, it made me feel like this guy’s laughing for the wrong reasons. […] It stirred something up in me emotionally that I was like, I don’t want to subject anyone else to.” (18) The incident gave Chappelle the feeling that at least some of his satirical methods were, in his words, “socially irresponsible.”

Of course, Chappelle’s Show season one had already broken the all-time record of DVD sales for a TV show, beating out The Simpsons season one by moving over 2 million units before the end of 2004. (19) Many considered Chappelle’s Show to be an important soapbox for discussing difficult cross-cultural issues in a humorous way, especially when the show took on racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry and inequality. Chappelle started off the program’s first season with a sketch about a blind “white supremacist” who doesn’t know he’s actually “black,” and that daring take on our culture’s sensitive topics set the tone for the whole series.

But even by season two, Chappelle was expressing concerns about the fall-out from his satirical comedy. In episode two of that season, he announced to the crowd, “Last season we started the series off with this sketch about a black white supremacist. Very controversial. Yes, very—it sparked this whole controversy about the appropriateness of the ‘n-word,’ the dreaded ‘n-word.’ And, you know—and then when I would travel, people would come up to me, like—white people would come up to me, like, [in a Southern voice] ‘Man, that sketch you did about them niggers, that was hila—’ [Chappelle recoils] ‘Take it easy! I was joking around!’ I started to realize that these sketches, in the wrong hands, are dangerous.” (20) He followed up in episode three: “…remember, whenever we do these racial commentaries, it’s always about the subtleties. We’re all part of the same human family. Our differences are just cultural.” (21) This was a rare case of a satirist providing interpretive clues for the audience, as LaMarre, et al, pointed out about Jon Stewart (a long-time friend of Chappelle’s).

That brings us back to Stephen Colbert’s coverage of SOPA on 12/1/2011, which seems much more ambiguous having learned about the LaMarre study. Colbert begins by quoting from news stories on the subject. With a straight face and an authoritative tone, he says, “The FBI reports that U.S. businesses lose [$200 to $250 billion] to counterfeiting on an annual basis.” (22) After a pause, he continues in a lighter tone: “And that is a shocking number, especially when you consider that the FBI admits it has no record of source data or methodology for generating the estimate, and that it cannot be corroborated.” This second line is what makes it satire, because it points to the “folly” of the proposed legislation. In other words, neither the copyright holders nor the government have a sure way to demonstrate that U.S. businesses are actually losing that amount of money due to copyright infringement (including “counterfeiting”). But because of Colbert’s “deadpan” style and advanced vocabulary, it’s not difficult to imagine that self-identifying “conservatives” simply didn’t notice, comprehend, or remember that sentence. That’s the basis of “biased information processing,” after all. LaMarre, et al, also say that understanding deadpan satire requires a high level of cognitive functioning, which is less prevalent during the passive consumption of entertainment. (23)

Colbert proceeds with some jokes about peer-to-peer file sharing that would likely be funny to both “liberals” and “conservatives” – only to finish on a note that sounds unambiguously “conservative.” He says, “Sadly piracy is just one of those crimes that everyone commits, like jaywalking or setting your ex-girlfriend’s couch on fire. But thankfully – thankfully Congress is finally taking action with the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill, which is supported by all the big media companies, grants rights-holders the unfettered power to effectively kill websites.” Next comes another joke. Colbert says, “At last, we will bring swift and sure justice to hardened criminals on YouTube,” and then the viewer sees a home video clip of three girls dancing to a pop song. This last part may have been intended to criticize the aspect of SOPA that would make it a felony to “perform” copyrighted songs on the web without permission (normally it would be protected as a “fair use”). But with our newfound ability to transcend the satirical perspective, we can deduce that many viewers left under the impression that such social media activity actually is morally reprehensible – especially since Colbert ends by saying that such “offenders” would go to jail!

In another segment from the same episode, Colbert interviews two guests – one who approves of SOPA, and one who opposes it. (24) Colbert gives the “liberal” a harder time, but generally both sides get to state their viewpoint in a calm, civil manner. However, once the program is over, Colbert has still labeled critics of SOPA – regardless of whether they actually participate in copyright infringement – as thieves, criminals, pirates, etc. The underlying implication is that they are anti-American, anti-social, ungrateful of the consumer/capitalist economic system backed by the U.S. armed forces, a heretic, a lunatic, etc. And thanks to the LaMarre study, we have scientific evidence that self-identifying “conservatives” and people who don’t understand satire probably felt convinced by Colbert that SOPA and/or Protect-IP should pass! (For more on why copyright law is already broken, please see my RS essay “CC-BY: A Step into the Belated Future”)

But we’ve passed over an essential point. Colbert says that SOPA “is supported by all the big media companies.” He doesn’t say which companies, but Viacom – the owner of Comedy Central and, therefore, The Colbert Report – is one of them; so are the other major media conglomerates included in what’s called the “Big Six.” Ordered from least to most profitable, they are CBS Corporation ($13 billion profit in 2009), Viacom ($13.6 billion), Time Warner ($25.8 billion), News Corporation ($30.4 billion), The Walt Disney Company ($36.1 billion), and General Electric ($157 billion). (25) All six (along with 353 other companies and trade groups) signed a September 22 letter to U.S. Congress calling for “rogue sites legislation” – basically what Protect-IP or SOPA would be (NBCUniversal is on the list as a subsidiary of General Electric). (26) That means that The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, South Park, Chappelle’s Show (via syndication, rentals, and DVD sales), etc., are indirectly supporting potential bills like SOPA and Protect-IP. A program like The Daily Show is less to blame because it’s less ambiguous and less open to “biased information processing.” But it’s still part of Viacom, and Viacom supports this legislation that would make so much of the social media activity that has enriched our culture in unprecedented ways so much more illegal.

Notably, Stone and Parker of South Park actually approve of people downloading their content without paying. In the Reason Magazine interview, Matt Stone responded to a question about intellectual property by saying, “We’re always in favor of people downloading. Always.” (27) And Parker said, “We worked really hard making the show, and the reason you do it is because you want people to see it.” In line with those statements, people can stream full episodes of South Park for free on the website South Park Studios (though the site is still associated with Viacom). But unfortunately, the duo doesn’t have much to offer our troubled democratic process. When we synthesize these different elements, we find that Stone and Parker have – ironically, through the effect of their content – become the very extremists that they warn against! “It’s really what Team America is as well: taking an extremist on this side and an extremist on that side,” said Parker. “Michael Moore being an extremist is just as bad, you know, as Donald Rumsfeld. It’s like they’re the same person. It takes a fourth-grade kid to go, ‘You both remind me of each other.’”

The problem there is that only a fourth-grade kid would think Moore and Rumsfeld are equivalent, either as ideological individuals or as representations of different political parties. (If Stone and Parker ever made that argument about politicians or news pundits, or wrote it into their show, they might have a legitimate point.) In short, Stone and Parker seem anchored in the very mentality that they are often assumed to be lampooning – personified by Eric Cartman, and even sometimes Stan and Kyle (the more “rational” or “moderate” ones). Stone and Parker also appear to be projecting themselves into other authority figures in the show, like the news reporters in the “1%” episode who mock the “occupation” of a restaurant that might be causing people to becoming obese (remember, it’s a parody). I would argue that the Occupy Movement is a legitimate international outcry for full-functioning democracy, to provide basic life necessities and civil liberties for all human beings on Earth – but all the creators can South Park can do is point and giggle.

It’s telling that one of their favorite targets, Mr. Michael Moore, is actively involved with the Occupy Movement around the country. Whatever your opinion of his films, Moore is working to produce the most constructive possible outcome from what started as a totally spontaneous civic uproar. The “1%” South Park episode depicts protestors as clueless sheep. On the contrary, the majority of Occupy demonstrators have, all along, had an intimate knowledge of their primary purpose: to petition the U.S. government for grievances over the private acquisition of gargantuan sums of public money during and after the Crash of 2008, and to bring to justice those responsible.

On November 22, Moore published an article under the title “Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?” that contains a clear and concise mission statement for the movement, and states “10 Things We Want.” One applies very specifically to our discussion: “Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job.” (28) As you might have guessed, every single one of the “Big Six” media conglomerates employs more than 10,000 people. (29) They range from Viacom with 10,900 employees, to General Electric with 287,000 employees (as of 2010 or 2011, in the different cases). If, for instance, Viacom’s employees elected half of its board of directors, programs that in effect encourage bigotry and harm our democratic process due to ambiguous political satire might not stay on the air very long.

I should emphasize that this is not a moral or ethical condemnation of South Park, but a socio-political and existential one. I don’t think their kind of speech should be outlawed, but we may have reached a point when such divisive media should be socially rejected. There’s even a valid argument that Viacom is unfairly influencing the American political process with ambiguous satire (though for now it’s legally protected, thanks to the 2010 Supreme Court decision) – an argument that wouldn’t exist if mere individuals distributed such content.

I’d like to close with a few other suggestions:

– Avoid using irony, sarcasm, or deadpan satire – or provide clarification (interpretive clues) after you do. The point is to say what you mean as often as possible. That means working to make your communication as clear as possible and to avoid miscommunications. After all, “free speech” only matters if we’re using it in a way that improves our democracy and the quality of all life. (Side note: seek out ways to pay creative workers directly if you support their methods, without going through “middle men” like the companies, as law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig has recommended.)

– Refuse to self-identify with political terms. The dominant bipartisan system has failed us and must be dismantled. Calling yourself a “liberal” or “conservative” allows others to define you based on their idea of what those terms mean. Try to look at every situation as unique and deserving of its own independent decision-making process. This would be in line with Korzybski’s general semantics.

– Occupy the media conglomerates! People are already protesting in plenty of ways besides just congregating in front of financial institutions. Let these media companies know that they are driving us to political extremes and harming our democratic process. Also let them know that you will not be consuming (i.e., watching or buying) their products if they continue to support legislation such as SOPA or Protect-IP, since those would make felons out of millions of otherwise innocent people. Tell them that we’re ready to grow up!

- Visit AmericanCensorship.org and follow instructions on how to fight bills like SOPA and Protect-IP!

The Reason Magazine interviewers mention that Barbra Streisand criticized South Park in its very first season, “not for showing her as a [Godzilla-like] monster but for promoting cynicism among children.” I was one of those cynical kids raised by ironists and political satirists. I’m trying to break out of this programmed mentality that says we cannot change the world or make it a better place to live. Each one of us has a responsibility to use our expressive abilities in ways will create a healthier democracy and a happier world.

Actually, the late comedian Bill Hicks embodied this transition from ambiguous political satire and cynicism to a clear statement on the reality of conscious human evolution. He would often start off very ambiguous, combining all shades of sarcasm, irony, and political satire when discussing the polarizing subjects that have dominated political discourse over the last three decades (Hicks died in 1994). But by the end of every performance, Hicks made his true philosophy unmistakably clear (and it was surprisingly similar, in my opinion, to Moore’s proposal for the Occupy Movement). That is, Hicks ensured that his overall expression was unambiguous. He said what he meant!

For the present era, at least, we might want to consider doing the same.

# # #

Nick Meador made the image at SP-Studio (used with permission) and customized it with text.

NOTES:

1. Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. p. 214.

2. American Censorship Day. Accessed on 12/4/2011. http://americancensorship.org/

3. Gross, Grant. “The US Stop Online Privacy Act: A Primer.” PCWorld Business Center. 11/16/2011. Accessed on 12/4/2011. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/244011/the_us_stop_online_piracy_act_a_primer.html

4. Tedford, Deborah. “Supreme Court Rips Up Campaign Finance Laws.” NPR. 1/21/2010. Accessed on 12/8/2011. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805666

5. LaMarre, Heather L., Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam. “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report.” International Journal of Press/Politics. Vol 14. No 2. April 2009. pp. 212-231. Accessed on 11/28/2011. http://www.democracynow.org/resources/63/263/The_Irony_of_Satire.pdf

6. “Satire.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Accessed on 12/3/2011. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire

7. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. p. 228.

8. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. p. 216.

9. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. p. 215.

10. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. pp. 225-227. Italics are mine.

11. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. p. 228.

12. “Archie Bunker.” Wikipedia. Accessed on 12/5/2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_Bunker

13. “South Park: 1%” South Park Studios. Written and directed by Trey Parker. 11/2/2011. Accessed on 12/5/2011. http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e12-one-percent. Also, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_%28South_Park%29

14. “South Park Republican.” Wikipedia. Accessed on 11/28/2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park_Republican

15. Gillespie, Nick, and Jesse Walker. “South Park Libertarians.” Reason Magazine. December 2006. Accessed on 11/28/2011. http://reason.com/archives/2006/12/05/south-park-libertarians

16. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. pp. 225-226.

17. Farley, Christopher John. “On The Beach With Dave Chappelle.” TIME Magazine. 5/15/2005. Accessed on 1/22/2011. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1061415,00.html

18. “Dave Chappelle on 360 Tonight.” Inside Cable News. 7/7/2006. Accessed on 1/22/2011. http://insidecable.blogsome.com/2006/07/07/dave-chappelle-on-360-tonight

19. Lambert, David. “Chappelle’s Show - S1 DVD Passes The Simpsons As #1 All-Time TV-DVD; Celebrates by Announcing Season 2!” TVShowsOnDVD.com. 10/19/2004. Accessed on 12/6/2011. http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Chappelles/2338

20. Chappelle, Dave. “Episode 14. 2-2.” Chappelle’s Show. Comedy Central. 1/28/2004. Italics reflect his verbal emphasis.

21. Chappelle, Dave. “Episode 15. 2-3.” Chappelle’s Show. Comedy Central. 2/4/2004. Italics reflect his verbal emphasis.

22. “Stop Online Piracy Act.” The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. 12/1/2011. Accessed on 12/6/2011. http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403465/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act

23. LaMarre, et al. Ibid. p. 217.

24. “Stop Online Piracy Act – Danny Goldberg & Jonathan Zittrain.” The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. 12/1/2011. Accessed on 12/6/2011. Italics reflect his verbal emphasis. http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/403466/december-01-2011/stop-online-piracy-act—danny-goldberg—jonathan-zittrain

25. “Media cross-ownership in the United States.” Wikipedia. Accessed on 12/6/2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States

26. “U.S. Chamber Joins Broadening Coalition in Support for Rogue Sites Legislation.” Global Intellectual Property Center. 9/22/2011. Accessed on 12/7/2011. http://theglobalipcenter.com/pressreleases/us-chamber-joins-broadening-coalition-support-rogue-sites-legislation. See the actual letter here: http://www.theglobalipcenter.com/sites/default/files/pressreleases/letter-359.pdf

27. Gillespie and Walker. Ibid.

28. Moore, Michael. “Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here?” 11/22/2011. Accessed on 12/6/2011. http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/where-does-occupy-wall-street-go-here

29. Wikipedia. Accessed on 12/6/2011. Follow the links to the “Big Six” companies on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States

According to a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of [people] age 18 to 29 view socialism in a favorable light, compared to 43 percent who view it unfavorably. What’s more, they like the sound of “socialism” slightly better than capitalism—46 percent have positive views of capitalism, and 47 percent have negative views. This is dramatically different from the country’s population overall: 60 percent say they have a negative view of socialism, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view. Young people are the only age group whose support for socialism outweighs that of capitalism.

It’s telling that the number of socialism-friendly young people is on the rise from just 20 months ago, when 43 percent of Millennials favored the word. Between now and then, Occupy Wall Street has swept the country and the headlines, and there are more unemployed teens and 20-somethings than ever. It’s not hard to figure out why our generation isn’t so gung-ho about capitalism—it has disappointed and, in some cases, straight-up failed us.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it.

The very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail …

Read the rest at Jacobin

Two Dutch television-show hosts said they had their flesh cooked by a top chef and then dined on each other before a studio audience.

“Nothing is really that special when you’re talking about the taste of the meat,” host Dennis Storm told ABCNews.com. “But it is weird to look into the eyes of a friend when you are chewing on his belly.”

Part of Storm’s left butt cheek was carved out by a surgeon, while his co-host, Valerio Zeno, opted to have a piece of his abdomen removed, they say.

“We went to the butcher, the surgeon and the studio, then we looked at each other and just ate it,” Storm said. “The special thing is, it was his flesh, of course.”

Read More: ABC News

Ok, maybe, it wasn’t a whole week but Saturday felt like a week in one day. The plan for the day, as announced, was to gather at Duarte Park at 6th Avenue and Canal Street to attempt a RE-Occupation of vacant land owned by Trinity Church, more of a real estate company than a house of worship.

For a few weeks, the Occupy Movement had been demanding that the church allow the movement to take “sanctuary” on that land. There were earlier protests and even a hunger strike that made page one of the New York Times. Police in riot gear had ousted the occupiers the last time they tried to take over the space a few weeks back, and, since then, there has been a rancorous standoff between a Church that is supported by many fat cat one-percenters and OWS’s volunteer non-violent army of outrage.

The church has repeatedly turned the movement down, despite support for the OWS demands from many clergy in New York and the most famous Episcopal priest in the world, South Africa’s Desmond Tutu,. (Tutu sent OWS a supportive message but, then later sent the Church a disclaimer of any attempt on his part to sanction violence.)

No doubt church lawyers were expressing worries about financial liability should there be any claims, but many of the their trustees had political objections. They are Wall Streeters, including, a Vice President of Brookfield Properties,the owner of the “public” Zuccotti Park that had been the Movement’s home until they were unceremoniously and violently ejected by police in the dark of night. Trinity Church may be there to serve God, but the defense of their real estate portfolio seems to come before their pretensions at social justice..

The gathering at Duarte Park was predictably surrounded by cops, some in riot gear, while what looked like a the Zuccotti Park alumni Association roamed around on a sliver of a City Park next to the unholy Trinity site. At least half of the crowd, which grew as the day progressed, appeared to be covering the other half with still or video cameras and tape recorders. The press was out in force too, no doubt hoping for a bloody confrontation. Pacifica Radio outlet WBAI was broadcasting live and its programming was played back at the crown on boom boxes.

The librarians of the People’s Library where on hand with a few boxes of newly donated books, but, despite the rhetoric, the scene seemed tired except for those who were dancing around or looking for action. A few activists and clergy were arrested for climbing over the fence while others tried, but failed, to knock it down. (There were more than 50 arrests Sarurday,)

I was pretty discouraged by the relatively small turnout and the focus on getting to occupy a new tiny land base in an area with no real pedestrian traffic nearby, instead of finding more ways to reach out to mainstream America.

Saturday was a big Xmas Shopping day. While tens of thousands of New Yorkers were flocking to stores in Times and Herald Square. I thought that if you want to hit at economic power, you should be Occupying Macy’s or Toys ‘R’ Us. All the stores were putting on new sales after Black Friday turned out to be relative bust. Why not a march by Occupy Santas?

It all seemed unpromising when announced concerts at the park by Lou Reed and others didn’t seem to materialize, or at, least I missed them. But I left too soon.

Unknown to me, the movement then launched a previously unscheduled march –but, at the last minute changed its direction and headed uptown, catching the police unaware.

The Live Stream people went with them so what happened next was shown on the Internet. One of the live streamers was busted but kept his camera-computer going from inside a Police paddy wagon. At one point, I saw coverage by three cameras. One view, in ironic counter-point, covered several cops defending the statue of the Bull on an empty Wall Street traffic junction. No one there was bullish. Bullshit anyone?

The cops attacked as the activists marched up Seventh Avenue at 29th Street, arresting some for marching when they should be walking, a crime that may soon by punishable by the crazed new NDAA measure treating the homeland as a battlefield. The crowd then broke into smaller guerilla-style groups, darting in and out of various streets, and ending up in a packed Times Square on a Saturday night at the height of the Christmas shopping season. This march was spontaneous, powered by the power of surprise. The police actually chased some out of towners out of Times Square to try to cut them off at the pass, but failed.

Before the men in Blue, led by men in White, could reassert their version of Law and Order, and while shoppers and tourists watched, the occupiers began “mic-checking,” with individual after individual shouting out “Why I Occupy,” and offering personal statements and testimony that were repeated several times.

In this way, individual members of the movement, from every class, color and gender, spoke with eloquence about their reasons for protesting—personal reasons and social reasons, national reasons and global reasons, economic reasons and political reasons reached out to thousands. They had to electrify whoever was watching, Their passion and sincerity was there for all to see.

I watched the Live Stream of the event on a computer in Harlem and was moved, at some points, to tears by how articulate and reasonable they were. They later left the square and returned to Zuccotti Park for a late-night General Assembly meeting. Not only was this the best show on Broadway on the “Great White Way” for that hour, but it proved the correctness of a political claim, asserted in one of the OWS signs written after the police raided Zuccotti Park.

It reads: “It’s So Not Over.”

Danny Schechter writes about Occupy Wall Street on Al Jazeera, Progressive Radio Network other outlets and his News Dissector blog. He made the film Plunder the Crime Of Our Time. Please email comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

There’s been a sharp increase in recent decades in the number of young Americans who report they’ve been arrested at least once, researchers report in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

While in the mid-1960s about 22 percent of Americans reported having been arrested by the time they turned 23, researchers estimate that the “prevalence rate” for arrests by that age now lies “between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent.”

Increasingly, “arrest is a pretty common experience,” Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and one of the study’s authors, tells USA Today.

According to ABC News, “Brame and his colleagues analyzed responses to a national survey of more than 7,000 young people between 1997 and 2008. … Not all of the young people remained in the study for all 11 years, accounting for the uncertainty reflected in the wide ranges of the study’s findings…

[continues at NPR]

One out of every 15 high school students smokes marijuana on a near daily basis, a figure that has reached a 30-year peak even as use of alcohol, cigarettes and cocaine among teenagers continues a slow decline, according to a new government report.

The popularity of marijuana, which is now more prevalent among 10th graders than cigarette smoking, reflects what researchers and drug officials say is a growing perception among teenagers that habitual marijuana use carries little risk of harm. That perception, experts say, is fueled in part by wider familiarity with medicinal marijuana and greater ease in obtaining it.

Although it is difficult to track the numbers, “we’re clearly seeing an increase in teenage marijuana use that corresponds pretty clearly in time with the increase in medical marijuana use,” said Dr. Christian Thurstone, medical director of the adolescent substance abuse treatment program at Denver Health and Hospital Authority, who was not involved in the study. Medical marijuana is legal in 16 states, including Colorado, and the District of Columbia.

Read More: NY Times

What if Christian theology dismissed the virgin birth and other miracles as fairy tales? What if your pastor/priest told you to flush the Ten Commandments down the toilet and instead live life to the fullest? What if Sunday service at your local church consisted in a juicy orgy? All of this could have happened had Carpocrates had his way.

Carpo … who? The lead character in our story was the leader of a second century Christian community based in the Greek islands. Back in those days, early Christians couldn’t agree on just about anything. Official Christian doctrine hadn’t been fully established yet, so an extremely wide range of opinions and teachings fell under the label of “Christianity.” The only thing they had in common was that they all thought Jesus was a cool guy. Other than that, everything else was up for debate since they couldn’t even agree on which books should become official scriptures. Some Christians believed their religion was to remain exclusively for Jewish people. Others wanted to open it to all ethnicities. Some believed Jesus and God were one. Others were far from sold about this. Some were strict ascetics. Others enjoyed a very sensual life. Some promoted women as leaders within their groups. Others felt women were good to cook dinner and make babies, but religious leaders? Ha!

In the midst of this very chaotic beginning, Carpocrates emerged as a particularly charismatic preacher, who soon attracted enough of a following as to give birth to his own branch of Christianity. His ideas were just a tad on the wild side. Jesus—Carpocrates argued—was as human as anyone else. He was a visionary whose brilliance and wisdom put him in touch with God, but was not God himself. This didn’t diminish Jesus’s status in Carpocrates’s eyes, since it set him up as a model of behavior that regular human beings could hope to emulate. The whole story of the virgin birth made Carpocrates laugh. In his view, good old Jesus was conceived in the old fashioned way: through sweaty sex. The depth of Jesus’s wisdom was enough for Carpocrates to admire and love him, so he felt no need for any supernatural special effects.

Since this beginning was apparently not controversial enough, Carpocrates promptly taught his followers to reject Mosaic Law as well as the prevailing morality of his times as mere human opinions, not divine commandments. A goodie-goodie morality was according to Carpocrates nothing but a cage built by those who were too scared by life’s intensity. The soul could only achieve freedom and fulfillment by experiencing all of life, without discriminating too much. Only in this way, it would free itself from the cycle of reincarnation …

Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention that? Carpocrates’s followers—like the members of many other early Christian sects—fully believed in reincarnation. And just like several tantric schools found in the history of both Hinduism and Buddhism, they also believed that human beings should explore every emotion without holding back. Sensual pleasure in their eyes was not any less sacred than the most spiritual practices, so good food, sex and every other earthly joy was embraced as a stepping stone toward liberation.

This determination to live life to the fullest went hand in hand with another radical notion. Carp considered differences in wealth and social class as unnatural perversions. Since everyone is born naked and equal in front of God, human attempts to gain status at the expense of others were misguided and ultimately against God’s plan. The cure for the very human tendency toward ego aggrandizing was to discourage the evil of private property. Instead, everything—from material possessions to sexual partners—was to be held in common. Coupled with Carp’s insistence on indulging in sensual pleasures, this idea led his followers to regularly stage sexual orgies as part of their spiritual practices … which makes you wonder: just how different would the world be had mainstream forms of Christianity decided to embrace Carpocrates rather than stern moralists like Saint Paul and Saint Augustine? I think it’s a safe bet that church attendance would be much higher.

US financial regulators charged a father and son in Utah state with operating a $220 million property investment Ponzi scheme which targeted fellow members of the Mormon church.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Wendell Jacobson and his son Allen Jacobson, of Fountain Green in central Utah, with selling shares in their purported real estate business and using the funds from some investors to pay returns promised to others.

It said that since 2008 the two had solicited investments into their business of ostensibly buying, rehabilitating and then renting out properties.

They appeared to use the memberships in the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — the Mormon church — “to make connections and win over the trust of prospective investors,” the SEC said.

Securities in their businesses were sold to investors without registering with the SEC as required by law.

Read More: AP via Google News

Detail from Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder (1896).

Via ScienceDaily:

Why do we stick up for a system or institution we live in — a government, company, or marriage — even when anyone else can see it is failing miserably? Why do we resist change even when the system is corrupt or unjust?

A new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, illuminates the conditions under which we’re motivated to defend the status quo — a process called “system justification.”System justification isn’t the same as acquiescence, explains Aaron C. Kay, a psychologist at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, who co-authored the paper with University of Waterloo graduate student Justin Friesen. “It’s pro-active. When someone comes to justify the status quo, they also come to see it as what should be.”

Reviewing laboratory and cross-national studies, the paper illuminates four situations that foster system justification: system threat, system dependence, system inescapability, and low personal control …

Read more here.

In a classic TED talk, James Kunstler tears apart the architecture and public space design of post-World War II America, with pictorial examples of egregiously dismal cases, and explains why the suburbs are a sham:

Evolutionary psychologists suspect that prejudice is rooted in survival: Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease. Research still shows that when people feel vulnerable to illness, they exhibit more bias toward stigmatized groups. But a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science suggests there might be a modern way to break that link.

“We thought if we could alleviate concerns about disease, we could also alleviate the prejudice that arises from them,” says Julie Y. Huang of the University of Toronto, about a study she conducted with Alexandra Sedlovskaya of Harvard University; Joshua M. Ackerman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Yale University’s John A. Bargh. The group found that the sense of security derived through measures such as vaccination and hand washing can reduce bias against “out” groups, from immigrants to the obese.

The researchers conducted three experiments. The first two (with 135 and 26 participants, respectively) looked at people’s reactions to threats of the flu …

Read More: ScienceDaily

Prosecutors on Wednesday abandoned their 30-year push to execute convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther whose claim that he was the victim of a racist legal system made him an international cause celebre.Abu-Jamal, 58, will instead spend the rest of his life in prison.

Flanked by police Officer Daniel Faulkner’s widow, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams announced his decision two days short of the 30th anniversary of the white patrolman’s killing.

He said that continuing to seek the death penalty could lead to “an unknowable number of years” of appeals, and that some witnesses have died or are unavailable after nearly three decades.

“There’s never been any doubt in my mind that Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed Officer Faulkner. I believe that the appropriate sentence was handed down by a jury of his peers in 1982,” said Williams, the city’s first black district attorney. “While Abu-Jamal will no longer be facing the death penalty, he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, and that is where he belongs.”

Abu-Jamal was originally sentenced to death. His murder conviction was upheld through years of appeals. But in 2008, a federal appeals court ordered a new sentencing hearing on the grounds that the instructions given to the jury were potentially misleading. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in two months ago, prosecutors were forced to decide whether to pursue the death penalty again or accept a life sentence without parole …

Read more here.

The gulf between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially and stands to “unravel the social contract in many countries,” according to a report released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 17 out of 22 countries the OECD measured, income inequality has risen steadily for more than three decades and now sits at the highest levels in recent history. The study found the average income of the richest 10% of a population is nine times that of the poorest 10%. The income gap in “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Demark and Sweden rose from 5 to 1 in the 80’s to 6 to 1 today, and in America, the income gap is a staggering 14 to 1.

Inequality in wages and salaries is the largest contributing factor to the rise in income disparity. Other factors include an increase in part time work and declining collective bargaining agreements between workers and employers; disparity between workers with higher technological skills and those without; and regulatory reforms that created mainly low wage jobs.

In the United States, the richest 1% bring home an average of $1.3 million after taxes. The poorest 20% take in just $17,700. During the same period of time (1980–2008), the income tax rate dropped from 70% to 35%. Redistribution of income by taxes and benefits offset less than 10% of market income inequality. While the hours of low wage workers increased by more than 20% over the past decades, overall earnings inequality still rose “moderately” due to the low level of the minimum wage.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media