The Binary Circumstance

Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog writes about the disconnect between what the media covers and the world events that are really important.

To her credit Molly Ivins has written an exemplary article asking for a Media Accountability Day and providing attention to Project Censored. Their Top Ten Stories not covered by Corporate Media:

#1 Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government
#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Deathtoll
#3 Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage
#4 Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In
#5 U.S. Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia
#6 The Real Oil for Food Scam
#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood
#8 Iraqi Farmers Threatened By Bremer’s Mandates
#9 Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency
#10 Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

In her article Molly Ivans writes:

I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don’t give enough attention to — because, after all, we have to cover Jennifer and Brad, and Scott and Laci, and Whosit who disappeared in Aruba without whom the world can scarce carry on.

The media’s “laziness and bad news judgment” is only part of the problem. The fact is that if they want to make money and stay in business they have to write what $ell$.

The U.S. is a very mystical culture due to the prominent role of religion. That mysticism often produces a lot of guilt about basic human characteristics as well as a fantasy world designed to provide relief from that guilt and shame.

All types of mysticism and religion is just one type teach people to blur the line between existence and nonexistence, and as a result we lose the ability to distinguish between what is true and what is false. As a matter of fact, we stop caring because myticism and intellectual decadence teach us that the distinction is unimportant or doesn’t even exist.

This makes up a large part of the potential audience that the news media, bloggers and writers of all kinds must try to attract and keep.

The problem with writing about reality is that the audience is more interested in escaping reality than reading about it.

This is a free county and nobody in the media has the option of forcing people to stay tuned to their particular take on world events. There are many, and I agree with them, that there should be no PBS because it is run by the government and the taxpayers, while not forced to watch it, are forced to pay for it.

Government is another problem because mandatory, coercive governments are based on irrational premises, just like religion. As long as there are so many forces in our culture and others which put selective pressure on the genetically based, rational faculties of the human race, the population of individuals who prefer escapism to factual information will continue to grow.

As long as that population continues to grow, anyone in the media will have a financial incentive to tailor their coverage of world events to that audience.

The Washington Post [reg. req.] has an excellent article on evolution and natural selection. Research continues to bolster Darwin’s theory. This one example illustrates the process so well:

Richard E. Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University, has been following 12 cultures of the bacterium Escherichia coli since 1988, comprising more than 25,000 generations. All 12 cultures were genetically identical at the start. For years he gave each the same daily stress: six hours of food (glucose) and 18 hours of starvation. All 12 strains adapted to this by becoming faster consumers of glucose and developing bigger cell size than their 1988 “parents.”

When Lenski and his colleagues examined each strain’s genes, they found that the strains had not acquired the same mutations. Instead, there was some variety in the happy accidents that had allowed each culture to survive. And when the 12 strains were then subjected to a different stress — a new food source — they did not fare equally well. In some, the changes from the first round of adaptation stood in the way of adaptation to the new conditions. The 12 strains had started to diverge, taking the first evolutionary steps that might eventually make them different species — just as Darwin and Wallace predicted.

Organisms evolve to adapt to their environment. Period.

When the environment changes, if the changes put selective pressure on the species, it will either adapt or die off.

It is for this reason that societies built on irrational premises will ultimately result in a race of humans best suited to being irrational. If we want to preserve the rational faculties that evolution has bestowed upon us, we must base our culture on rational premises.

[See also: Food for Thought]

She said it was Jesus. She said it was reading from The Purpose Driven Life.

Ashley Smith, who became instantly famous when she talked an alledged murderer into giving himself up in Atlanta, has written a book called Unlikely Angel. She now reveals that she gave him crystal meth.

She is interviewed by The Book Standard.

In her new book, Unlikely Angel, written with Stacy Mattingly and in stores today, Smith reveals some surprising details of the seven hours she spent in her home with a desperate man, including her admission that she shared crystal methamphetamine (or “ice”) with her captor. Smith also relates the painful story of the five years before she was taken hostage—her years-long battle with drug addiction, the premature birth of her daughter, Paige, and the murder of her husband, Mack. And while so much has been made of the fact that Smith read aloud from Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life to Nichols, Angel reveals that, in fact, she read little more than a paragraph, and it was the telling of her own story and the sharing of her faith that turned Nichols around and allowed Smith to pass the night unharmed.

I think she has trouble giving herself credit. She obviously did what she needed to do and Jesus had nothing to do with it.

I’m looking to trade links to specific posts with other reality-based blogs.

If you write such a blog and would like me to link to one of your favorite posts, I will trade for the same consideration from you.

Reality-based libertarian bloggers have got to get a lot more organized so that when readers find one of us, they find a lot more of us. That’s the only way we’re going to break the hold that all the various forms of mysticism have on all those human minds out there.

So use the contact me link in the sidebar to e-mail me or just link to one of my posts and trackback. I will be watching for those so I that can return the favor.

If you’re not a reality-based blog, I’ll also trade links with you but I won’t guarantee that I’ll have something positive to say about your writing. But that doesn’t really matter because as far as Technorati and the search engines are concerned, a link is a link.