Critical Brain Candy

This is a very interesting interview. I really don’t know too much about him yet, but from what I have read he seems like a good man. We need more people like him to speak out against the craziness going on right now.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18888

Went to see a movie called Stupidity tonight. It was really good and thought-provoking.

One of the main premises is that we value and encourage stupidity as a society. I agree with this and all you have to do for proof is turn on the television.

Two interesting articles I stumbled onto about dealing with the media’s attempts to make everything seem as scary as possible. The big outlets have been doing this for a long time, but I now notice myself catching this on the smaller local-news channels more than ever before.

The one I heard the other day was “When we come back… A food you eat EVERY DAY and is probably in your kitchen RIGHT NOW might give you cancer. Stay tuned to find out which one.”

This is so insulting. If it was so important that I’d die without hearing it, then they’re assholes for not telling me right now. After hearing something like that there’s not a chance I’m going to “stick around.” Even if I did trust these idiots I’d still rather find out for myself. If I happen to think what they’re hiding from is is important I’ll go look it up on the web.

The second article is more along the lines of dispelling some of the big myths that the media started, especially after the recent terrorist attacks. Talks about how the threats of millions dying from chemical or biological attacks are completely overblown. After 9/11 I was sickened while watching CNN the one day. It was apparent they had run out of real things to talk about, so they started making stuff up. They ran a half hour segment on how unprepared our nations nuclear power plants were for a terrorist attack and went into detail about how they could be compromised. First of all, why are they trying to scare even more crap out of everybody right after the terrorist attacks. Second of all, we don’t need to run down every possible way that terrorists could attack on the nightly news, that’s for the defense department. I bet there was even some potential “evildoer” sitting at home thinking “Man, I didn’t think of that. What a good idea!!”

http://www.gdbinc.com/media_fear_tactics.cfm
http://www.gdbinc.com/apocalypse_not_now.cfm