Perhaps there’s some point where there’s enough proof where the majority accepts the information – as is the case with the birther issue. The majority is not siding with the nutcases. But something so insane as UFO contact would drive normal people a little bit crazy.

James Fallows gets at the problem:

3) Tribal knowledge vs actual knowledge front: Yesterday, about half of all Republicans thought Obama was foreign born, and therefore an illegal occupant of the White House. How many Republicans will think the same thing one week from now? My guess is: about half. We’ve reached that stage on just about everything. It’s probably been true of human beings throughout time, but is more obviously significant in politics now, that generally people don’t act like scientific investigators, or judges in moot-court competitions, when parsing the logic and evidence behind competing arguments to come up with political views. They go on loyalty, and tradition, and hope, and fear, and self-interest, and generosity, and all the rest — as the second half of my recent article on the new media discussed.

Here we have a wonderful real-world test: if “actual knowledge” mattered, the number of people who thought Obama was foreign-born would approach zero by next week — with exceptions for illiterates, the mentally disabled, paranoid schizophrenics, etc. My guess is that the figures will barely change.

Which isn’t to say that you can trust the government totally at their word. But when it comes to the birther issue specifically, whether or not Obama’s a citizen doesn’t matter. If 9-11 were proven to be an inside job, that would rip a hole in people’s perception of government. But Obama’s citizenship is a triviality. Yes, he’d be thrown out of office and someone else would take his place – but that’s about it. I have to admit, I would have loved for it to have been proven that Bush stole Ohio and then got thrown out of office – so I understand the desire to find some way to dethrone the sitting president. But what makes birthers particularly nutty is that they want to replace Obama with a Bachman, Trump, or Palin – so they’re obsessed with a delusion only to fulfill another delusion.

Really, you only believe in birtherism if you think Obama’s a “radical leftist” bent on destroying the country, which means you have absolutely no clue about what sort of government he’s running. Keeping race totally out of it, if you think Obama’s a socialist, and not a moderate Republican – which is what he is – then you have limited perception, and of course a birth certificate would be a core issue. That’s what makes the birther issue so stupid – it’s a distraction from the very real problems with American government perpetrated by our one-party system. It’s a cousin to the socialism claim, which also has no basis in what is actually happening. Related also to global warming denial – crunch the numbers all you want, but to claim that massive pollution will have no effect on the planet takes a fairy tale grip on reality.

Come to think of it – given that there is an overlap between birthers and the Christian right – how come no one’s calling for Jesus’s birth certificate? Since when did proof suddenly become so important? Oh, that’s right, because this has nothing to do with proof, only belief.

Confirmation bias is nothing new:

Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it. That shouldn’t be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It’s a “basic human survival skill,” explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

In short – humans have evolved to be stupid. Doesn’t fill one with a lot of hope that people will be able to absorb important and radical new information – as is necessary for the survival of the species. But then, if this really is evolution at work, those who are able to adapt will survive, while the other half loses their minds and fades away. A nice thought, but not totally realistic if the insane half is the one running the country.

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

What an incredible salesman. It turns out Obama is really not much different than Bush. Bush played the country with fear in order to win in 2004. Obama’s “Yes We Can” was like the hope version of the terror alert system – preying on people’s desperation. On balance, it’s better to have a candidate preying on a person’s hopes than fears, but the disillusionment that follows might have as big an impact.

What’s really mystifying is that Obama totally abandoned his message and entire operation once he was elected. Sell out to big pharma, fine, and you can argue that he was forced into pragmatism, but he had so much momentum to inspire people to do work in their communities and the country. Seriously, where did this person go? That really makes it seem like an election year ploy – he was plainly a bullshit artist. Obama’s like a movie star with a string of failures – after a while people stop thinking you matter. Bush, at least, scared the shit out of people and then, slyly, said, “I’ll protect you.” Obama both gave and destroyed people’s hope. Even if the job numbers get better – he’s already fucked people over once.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald (battle of the Glenns) has this very good post about Obama losing the populist mantle:

That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington — the central promise of his campaign — by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington. Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets. But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity. Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers — and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding — possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can’t.

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party — controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country’s vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse — now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party’s failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner — continuing America’s endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living — renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.

In the Glenn Beck video up top, a construction worker blames his unemployment on “illegal immigration.”  This is hardly the problem.  Even if his job was given to an illegal immigrant, why blame the immigrant and not the business-owner doing the hiring?  But Obama seems to be in no position to make this type of argument because he’s pro-corporate (”Change doesn’t happen from the top down, but the bottom up”=bullshit).  In short, it’s Obama’s own fault that deranged people are calling him a socialist because he hasn’t been able to stand up “for the people,” as that’s not entirely the side he’s on. He’s explained nothing about the true nature of our economic problems because he’s keeping them in place.

And so you get distressingly backwards documentaries like this one, in which the left is called “evil.” This can’t end well. The left might’ve said the same thing about Bush and Co. but the right have the guns.

[I'm] very disturbed to see that so many people have been taken in by Alex Jones and cannot see that he’s, at best, an unstable megalomaniac who’s low on facts and high on fear-mongering, and worse, he fits to a tee the description of a disinformation agent or agent provocateur. I wouldn’t trust this guy as far as I could throw him.

By and large, I agree. He gives conspiracy theory a bad name by linking it to the unhinged fringe – even if he’s calling attention to real corruption and he’s an equal-opportunity critic, paranoid about the left and right. He’ll take the video below too far, but he’s right about the overuse of executive power. Isn’t any better with Obama than Bush. I’m a former Obama supporter whose support has waned since he started legislating. This video (on “liberal” MSNBC) is getting traction on the right. But it should. It fucking sucks:

Good take on the financial meltdown and what caused it. Still don’t know how derivatives work. But then, nobody does. A reminder how clueless and dangerous Boehner’s ant comment was. Could have done without the political music interludes. I’m not sure if there’s a lower form of music than songs that are overtly political, singing about taxes and such. Very cool that this project was completed via Kickstarter.

Seeing Ross Gelbspan’s despair about the future of humanity is one of the more persuasive things I’ve seen about the Global Warming debate.  He knows his shit and he’s genuinely sad that the world as we know it could be coming to an end.  Follows the Global Warming debate through Katrina and “Inconvenient Truth ” – from total apathy to new interest.  It puts the oil spill in a different light – in that it could be another moment that drastically changes public perception for the better.  The argument about Obama’s anger is not necessarily his anger at BP – but his indignation, saying, “Things need to change and will. Now.”  Obama has sucked on this issue.  As much as it’s a disaster, it’s also a potential gift.

Also persuasive about how awful the mainstream media has become – the other side of the discussion is always given a seat at the table, no matter how dubious their claims.  Confuses the issue totally – unsurprisingly.  Because given the choice between a hoax and this-will-kill-you, why wouldn’t it be more comforting to believe it’s a hoax?  Even if the hoax idea is perpetrated by the Tony Haywards of the world.

Less effective because Naomi Wolf goes Godwin with a vengeance. I’m sure she got shit for this – haven’t look at reviews. But it’s fascinating to see Wolf couch the Bush administration in exactly the same terms as the Tea Party – erosion of liberty, believing in the constitution, etc. Imagine if Glenn Beck released a movie called the “End of America” equating Obama with Nazism. Basically, his show does just that every night. There may be more truth to what Wolf is saying, and the Bush administration was a total nightmare, but if we lived in a true totalitarian state, I wouldn’t be writing this. She’s as alarmed at Obama as well, who has been a real disappointment.

All of these issues should be of concern to the right wing base, except Tea Baggers don’t realize the problems in their own party, or don’t care. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Republican Party operative was the first person to start bringing Obama=Hitler signs to rallies. Then it metastasized. So long as Obama is painted as far left (because in the lunatic mind, Hitler=left) then anything he does, no matter how reasonable (or right-leaning) will be met with resistance, and so he’ll have to move rightward. This is exactly what’s been happening (see: healthcare). Trouble is, Obama might not have needed this push even without the insane resistance.

I’d like to see a master documentary covering all these things: Finance/Environment/War, without being overly partisan. Because a fair amount of blame goes to Clinton and Obama as well. In “Capitalism,” Michael Moore smartly called out the members of the Clinton administration who are responsible for deregulation, though he’s called far left. This is a populist issue, not partisan. Someone needs to make an Alex Jones documentary for non-paranoids.

He’s also wrong most of the time.

It’s tempting to believe that the Gulf spill, like so many disasters inherited by Obama, was the fault of the Texas oilman who preceded him in office. But, though George W. Bush paved the way for the catastrophe, it was Obama who gave BP the green light to drill. “Bush owns eight years of the mess,” says Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. “But after more than a year on the job, Salazar owns it too.”

The Spill, The Scandal and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

Here’s what I wrote in April 2009:

Because I’m an avowed conspiracy theorist, I believe there’s got to be more to the torture story than merely “trying to get information.” When you’re waterboarding someone 183 times, there’s something else happening….This really seems like pure sadism at work – or possibly practicing the technique to be used on other people. Or seeing the effect of multiple bouts of torture on the human psyche – i.e. experimentation, nothing to do with gaining information.

Read Truthout’s comprehensive history of the mind control/torture projects MK Ultra and Project Artichoke – no conspiracy theory here.

Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora’s box of legal, institutional, international and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA….

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

Obama’s protection of this program is one of the bigger mysteries – suggesting that it’s way worse than what has thus far been revealed.  Like people claim UFO disclosure would shatter the fabric of society, the disclosure of these torture programs might shatter people’s faith in government.

You can argue (if you like) that Global Warming is not man made, or it can’t be stopped, but you cannot argue that inclement weather is not a national security issue. Suppose another 9-11 happened during another Katrina. Emergency resources would be cut in half. It’s very much a national security issue. 1200 people dying in Katrina is not just “the weather.”

What’s worse is that Fiorina probably knows this. What separates Palin is that she’s as stupid as her supporters. She’s not always manipulating them – she’s a nutcase who so believes in herself that she believes in her lies as gospel. Palin is truly a fictional character – which is part of her appeal. She doesn’t seem to belong to the real world – while her supporters, overcome by a similar dementia, tout her as one of them. To be one with Palin is to experience a religious kind of ecstacy, in which your experiencing the same fictional reality together. This is why Palin’s lies are getting more blatant, as Christianism constructs its own reality. Palin is a priest of the stupid.  Fiorina is not that demented – she’s merely playing to the idiot id of the right.

Say what you will about Obama being a corporatist and not doing nearly enough to fix our horrid situation, but he does not represent ignorance. He doesn’t tell people to ignore facts. It is not much of a surprise this happens – because if you don’t believe in the theory of evolution, why would you believe in climate science? Once you let one fictional story control your world – especially something as huge and unknowable as God – then you can just pick and choose what you want to be true.

Demon sheep.