Nobody Knows Anything

Drove to the market today (Cosentino’s Vegetable Haven on Bascom) when I came across this charming poster:

A Clear Channel poster on a Clear Channel billboard. In case you’re wondering: this is propaganda. It is simultaneously political and commercial propaganda.

What does the sign say? Let’s see: “Working to give local heroes a voice, a stage and a victory.” What does that mean? Nothing, of course. How are they working? And what are they working to do? What are “local heroes”? I know what I’m supposed to think they are, but what specifically does Clear Channel mean?

I definitely like the rhythm of “a voice, a stage and a victory.” Again, totally meaningless, unless you start asking: a victory over what? (Actually, the “victory” thing is definitely the most disturbing tidbit on the poster.) And the first people who go to their local Clear Channel station insisting that they get to use their voice and their stage will be met by the radio engineer, whose sole job is to play whatever signal Clear Channel beams to their “local” broadcast.

The United States as the only landmass on a heart-shaped globe. How many ideas does this single image get across? The heart, indicating warm fuzzies and other soft emotions: check. The United States as sole inhabitant of planet: check.

“Clear Channel cares.” Now, anybody who believes Clear Channel cares about anything besides the bottom line is clearly delusional. But that puts the critic in the position of having to say, “No, Clear Channel is a big meanie corporation!”

I discovered Propaganda Critic, which had some relevant things to say on the subject of modern propaganda:

The information revolution has led to information overload, and people are confronted with hundreds of messages each day. Although few studies have looked at this topic, it seems fair to suggest that many people respond to this pressure by processing messages more quickly and, when possible, by taking mental short-cuts.

Propagandists love short-cuts — particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic. As history shows, they can be quite successful.

If you peruse the articles on the site, you quickly see that this billboard fits Propaganda Critic’s definition of propaganda. Glittering generalities! Euphemisms! Plain folks!

Christ.

You know, I’ve never liked the taste of domestic Dasani. I assume they probably use the same formula as the British version, which means I’ll really never drink it again:

First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.

Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a �7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.

The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical.

Oh good—a crap product that’s dangerous for you too!

I actually prefer drinking water to most other beverages. My Brita pitcher is in constant use. I also drink a great deal of Arrowhead (because I buy it by the case of bottles with the sport-tops, which I keep in the car) and Crystal Geyser. I don’t much care for Evian (or, as my sister put it: “We drink domestic! None of that imported stuff!”).

From Reuters:

Deep-Fried Chocolate Sandwich Sells Like Hotcakes

LONDON (Reuters) - Chocoholics seeking to indulge their passion this Easter will appreciate a British hotel chain’s diet-busting chocolate sandwich, which boasts the added attraction of being dipped in batter and deep-fried.

Ramada Jarvis introduced the delicacy last month and said on Wednesday the calorie-heavy dish had become the fastest selling dessert on its menu.

“We were surprised it has become so popular, although it is very tasty,” said the chain’s director of food and beverages Debbie Walter.

The sandwich is particularly popular in Scotland, traditional birthplace of the mother of all deep-fried desserts, the battered Mars bar.

Mindful that Britain, along with other Western countries, faces an increasing problem of obesity the hotel chain also offers less fattening desserts.

“The chocolate sandwich is not something if you are on a serious calorie-controlled diet, but we do offer alternatives,” said Walter.

Ramada Jarvis has 65 hotels in Britain, but only 36 currently offer the waist-expanding dessert.

Actually, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating: How to Choose the Best Bread, Cheeses, Olive Oil, Pasta, Chocolate, and Much More (a book I highly recommend, by the way) has a recipe for a grilled chocolate sandwich that is very much like a grilled cheese sandwich. Strangely, I have not tried that recipe out yet. Their recipe for chocolate pudding, however, is to die for. (Although the recipe says it contains 8 servings, take my advice and make it 12 or 16 servings. I couldn’t finish a 1/8 serving, and I’m a card-carrying chocaholic.)

If you’re not reading Riverbend, do yourself a favor and start. Anyhow, today she talks about life in Baghdad on the first anniversary of the start of Gulf W. War (as we’ve taken to calling it around our house):

And where are we now? Well, our governmental facilities have been burned to the ground by a combination of ‘liberators’ and ‘Free Iraqi Fighters’; 50% of the working population is jobless and hungry; summer is looming close and our electrical situation is a joke; the streets are dirty and overflowing with sewage; our jails are fuller than ever with thousands of innocent people; we’ve seen more explosions, tanks, fighter planes and troops in the last year than almost a decade of war with Iran brought; our homes are being raided and our cars are stopped in the streets for inspectionsÂ… journalists are being killed ‘accidentally’ and the seeds of a civil war are being sown by those who find it most useful; the hospitals overflow with patients but are short on just about everything else- medical supplies, medicine and doctors; and all the while, the oil is flowing.

But we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned that terrorism isn’t actually the act of creating terror. It isn’t the act of killing innocent people and frightening othersÂ… no, you see, that’s called a ‘liberation’. It doesn’t matter what you burn or who you kill- if you wear khaki, ride a tank or Apache or fighter plane and drop missiles and bombs, then you’re not a terrorist- you’re a liberator.

The war on terror is a jokeÂ… Madrid was proof of that last weekÂ… Iraq is proof of that everyday.

I hope someone feels safer, because we certainly don’t.

I know I should stop talking about a movie I have not seen (and have no intention of seeing), but: Garry Wills has a very thoughtful essay in the New York Review of Books entitled “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners”. His ostensible topic is Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II, a book discussing the secrecy and coverups in the Catholic Church. But while he’s at it, Wills discusses The Passion:

Gibson finally removed (from the subtitles, not the Aramaic sound track) the verse taken from the Gospel of Saint Matthew—”His blood be on us, and on our children” (27.25)— after reflecting: “If I included that in there, they’d be coming after me at my house, they’d come kill me.” The “they” is ominous.

That mood is reflected in the large numbers of people who have praised the movie by attacking its critics. This may be at the root of the “religious” experience so many receive from the film. These people feel persecuted, like Gibson, victimized by a secular world or by unfaithful fellow Christians. The chosen groups Gibson showed the movie to at the outset included members of the Legion of Christ, an ultraconservative group that feels its fellow Catholics have deserted the true faith —the Legion is even included in the movie’s closing credits.

In case it matters: Wills is Catholic.

I drove Darin to work the other day and ended up listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross as a result. She was interviewing Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the apparently unreadable Left Behind series, which has reportedly sold 58 million copies. (Slacktivist is a better person than I, subjecting himself to those books.)

You have got to listen to this interview; it is unreal.

If LaHaye and Co.—and their millions of readers—actually believe this stuff…I am aghast. I really didn’t know this kind of nonsense was out there. In the interview, LaHaye spouts what can only be generously termed “garbage” about Christianity and the Apocalypse and the End of Days. And this is, I am sure, the sanitized version, suitable to share with the “unbelievers” on NPR.

These guys want the world to end. They want us all to die. Of course, they’ll be fine, having been saved in the Rapture.

Other than the obvious warm fuzzies of superiority, what do these people get out of believing this shit? And that’s what it is: shit designed to turn off the critical thinking, to turn believers into bleating, fleeceable sheep who pray for death—not theirs, of course, but the evil ones, like Catholics and Jews.

Gross had on another author after LaHaye, Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. What Gorenberg had to say about the Left Behind series, along with Fundamentalism in general, made me immediately sign up to get his book at the library. I’ll report back after I’ve read it.

I read this bit of gossip

WHICH foppish fashionista renowned for his elaborate outfits was literally caught with his pants down at Boy George’s recent birthday bash? The frisky fop was receiving a sex act from three young men at the same time

and I find myself wondering: is the fashionista in question getting one sexual favor from three men at the same time (each getting their licks in, so to speak), or is each providing a different sexual favor? In which case, how does that work? Do you have to be a gymnast? Do you have to plan ahead to figure out who’s going to be doing what? I’m not getting a visual on this, having never gone in for the group grope thing.

It’s morning and I’m letting the kids watch one more half hour of TV before we head to the gym. And in the interest of using this time effectively, here is the Kids TV Quiz (Parents Edition):

• Steve or Joe? Oh please, is there even a choice? Steve, all the way. Steve is goofy and fun. Joe is just useless.
• Caillou: whiny kid or accurate picture of a 4-year-old? Um…are those choices opposites? Accurate. Although I’d say he’s younger than 4; I have a 4-year-old around and she could kick Caillou’s ass.
• Wiggles: hit or miss in your house? We have never seen the Wiggles.
• Po or Laalaa? How could I possibly choose? I guess I’d have to go with Laalaa, because she was Sophia’s favorite for a while.
• From which show you find yourself humming or singing the theme song most often? Dora the Explorer
• Dora: explorer stars or no? Ugh, what an obvious marketing ploy. But the stories are more varied now.
• Most annoying commercial aimed at kids? Ha ha! Trick question! Ti-Vo! Ti-Vo! Ti-Vo! Also, if we don’t zap the commercials fast enough, we’ve taught Sophia to yell, “Oh no! Yucky commercials!”
• Best activities has kids TV inspired your kids to do? Sophia wants swimming lessons because Caillou learned to swim.
• Worst activities has kids TV inspired your kids to do? Well, this isn’t kids TV, but…ever since seeing cheese puffs in Toy Story 2, Sophia asks for them all the time.
• Nick Jr. or Noggin? I have TiVo; I haven’t the slightest idea of what shows are on which channels.
• What do you watch on the Disney channel? I avoid the Disney channel with a passion. TiVo taped Buzz Lightyear for us, and since Buzz is Simon’s favorite character, we sat down to watch it. Not only was the show awful, but I had to keep my finger on the FF to zap the thousands of commercials. The Disney channel is too much work with no payoff.

As I was driving to pick up Sophia at school, I heard a little bit of Joss Whedon on today’s second hour of Talk of the Nation—talking about “cult TV.”

(I’ll change the link when the archive goes up.)

Does anyone know how I can record the archive stream so I can download the show to my iPod and listen to it at the gym?

Tony Hendra writes A Craven Apology to the Republicans in The American Prospect.

I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or…well, you know the drill.

We confess. It’s all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation’s most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to drag him down to our own filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level.

There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and our vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything thrown at him because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House by underhanded means should be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of a free press. And yes, it’s true, just as your more sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary Clinton does owe her success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it’s not true that ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development was the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other truths, Robert Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for hate-mongers and bigots! Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his Republican creator. We see that now.

Read the whole thing.