On Mon, 05 May 2008 10:51:11 -0500, pseudomodo <sinohegemon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>My friends & I have been talking about media stampedes, especially about
>the recent hoarding of rice in the USA and Canada. The headlines scream
>"rationing" and "shortages," but in America all that means is people are
>being limited to buying two 50-lb bags of rice at Sams or Costco.
>
>It's no news that the rate-of-cycle on news stories has increased
>dramatically in the past twenty years along with a general shelf life
>decrease in all media. I see this going hand-in-hand with an increased
>use of anxiety-inducing media techniques, from screaming headlines to a
>broader negativity in popular arts and culture. The advertising
>profession is renown for employing anxiety-inducing imagery (status
>differential, solution-to-problem) to appeal to unconscious motivations,
>to reify in the mind of the consumer "need for product." These
>techniques have evolved to a dark art for quite a while (from the almost
>inobtrusive "Burma Shave" ads to the insidious "Get laid with a
>quadruple-blade razor" images on TV) and are now firmly planted in
>attention-grabbing statements in politics and media. Remember the
>Reagan-era concern about the use of "hot buttons?" It didn't go away, it
> was simply flushed down the memory hole.
>
>Anxiety is the hardest-to-identify of our base instincts, it's integral
>to the problem-solving and risk-*****sment engine of ego - the grand
>mechanism that defends the elusive specter of Self. Gotama used a
>didactic style to address this, through long discourse employing
>empirical disproof (not this, not that). It's a method of bring a mental
>feature into starker relief against the background noise of the those
>infernal and distracting aggregates.
>
>The implications for a civil culture are clear when societies might rush
>to a premature solution against a perceived threat, but it's also
>problematic in the sciences where the regime of falsification is
>required to decouple evidence from belief and professional ego.
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_cascade
>
>OK, those are your talking points. Now lemme see watchugot.
>
>/leebert
Anxiety is easy to sell. So is anger and hatred.
24 hour news has to fill the talking heads mouths
with something, however bizarre or innane. That's
why I never watch TV except those times that I do.
And many of the commercials are the best things on.
What is it with all this entertainment anyway?
Who needs to look at the boob tube for hours
every day? Doesn't anybody have anything to
do? Like the dishes or mowing the lawn or
posting to usenet? Our ancestors made quilts
and whittled furniture in their spare time.
We just eat chips and stare into space.
And then complain that we haven't the
time to get anything done.
Why can't we be like it was in my youth?
We used to stare at the radio.
To bring up a totally new off the wall issue,
in the controversy over global warming the
two sides seem to be 'stay the course' or
'innovate the future'. Since even without
the CO2 controversy, many believe that the
world has already passed peak oil production
even as worldwide consumption escalates,
staying the course is not an option.
The recent spike in oil prices spells the doom
of suburbia which was built in expectation
of cheap energy. With the increase, all prices
rise, especially food. The average supermarket
item has traveled 1500 miles in a truck. Rich
countries can afford food, but poor ones can't.
And how long can we expect to get out of
season fruits and veggies from the other
side of the world?
Coal is abundant, but is a known degrader of
environment under present processes. We've
been hogs at the trough, but the swill is getting
scarce. Piss in the well long enough and the
water will start to taste funny.
Next we'll use the sun and the wind until we
run out of them too.
I predict that future commuting will be by
helium balloons from our mansions in the sky.
Powered by good old petroleum residues of course.
(Unless I can patent my personal natural gas engine.
It only hurts for a week or two after insertion.)
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