Who?

Sometimes I ask myself, “Who the Hell is running this show anyway?”

Gas prices are going through the roof.  The oil industry is trying to help, but keeps getting bad press. They spent $146 million lobbying Congress last year to keep their tax breaks intact, but only got a few billion in tax breaks back for their efforts. So gas prices must go up. 


Republicans made up a big story about how it's all Hopey Changey's fault for not drilling in every backyard in America. Then Hopey Changey himself fell for the bogus story like some gullible rube at a carnival and immediately started running around promising to drill for oil and build pipelines all over the place. 






The government is regulating our asses off. In some states, you can only buy one gun at a time (unless you are at a gun show where, fortunately, you can back up your truck and take the whole show home.)  Young kids get shot to death for wearing hoodies--and its legal under newly adopted State gun laws in 21 states.


Pink slime is in 80 percent of our ground beef.  The entire earth is about to be roasted into charcoal briquettes by the global warming oven. Polar bears are running out of ice.


The Supreme Court is worried about whether Obama is going to regulate broccoli.  


The very  rich are now so absurdly rich that even they cannot imagine what to do with the money...so they set up Super Pacs and give billions to marginal political weirdos. Ponzi schemers have taken over the investment world while regulators of financial fraud are being neutered. Goldman Sachs employees are dropping out because the company is trying to make a few bucks by double dealing on their clients.  Southern Europe is in and out of bankruptcy several times a day.


Voters in America are being disenfranchised by voter ID laws requiring proof of Christi-insanity. The Pope is making friends with Fidel.  Atheists are rallying on the national mall denouncing the power of prayer.  A leader of a bizarre polygamist sect who is known to have tortured animals and who mostly likes to fire people is the leading candidate for President.


The International Olympic Committee voted to allow female volleyball players to wear baggy pants instead of bikinis, thereby totally ruining the sport for 50% of the viewers in the world.


Meanwhile, Congress has become EVEN MORE dysfunctional than ever before, so much so that it cannot even pass a bill to fix bridges that are falling down.  Grover Norquist won't even let them read the tax code anymore, much less tamper with it. They need more campaign donations...SO GET BUSY and send them some money.


Michelle Obama keeps wearing the wrong dresses.   Law schools are filling up with sluts and prostitutes demanding that the taxpayers buy them condoms.

And that is just the beginning. All of this I have documented in graphic detail, including pictures, in earlier blogs.

Someone must be responsible for this unholy mess.

Who?

I have researched all the possibilities. At first, I thought it was the giant vampire squid, Goldman Sachs.  Based on yellow dog Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi’s excellent research, that theory was momentarily plausible because of the fact that Goldman’s tentacles reached so far and wide, but the theory did not hold up in the end. The leaders of the greedy squid are interested in only one thing: more money for themselves. Causing chaos and wrecking everything in sight is not really their prime objective, although it could be a necessary consequence.

Who really WANTS to bring us into a world of total anarchy and chaos (a.k.a. freedom to pillage and steal)? Cognitive science has shown that the human brain cannot deall with the unexplained. It always needs an explanation when confronting the confusing world around it. Usually a simple story, a myth, a conspiracy theory, or a religion will do the job.

Finally, I figured found an explanation that works.  It’s the Koch brothers.

They are behind the entire political-social-economic mess. They pay for the intellectual dishonesty in the think tanks that control Congressional policy. They are behind the increase in gas prices (they manipulate the futures markets for fuel.) They are even behind the law that results in the murder of people wearing hoodies.


They are masterminding all the chaos and destruction.

Don’t take my word for it, there is a new movie out now by Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation which documents the whole game. It debuted earlier this week in New York. The film is entitled, Koch Brothers Exposed.

Basically, the deal is this. The Kochs are rich. So rich you cannot even imagine how rich they are. Billionaires many times over.  They have over $50 billion![i] They own the second largest privately held company in America.

Like the giant vampire squids, they are interested in making money, but that is only secondary because for them-- been there-- done that. They have so much loot now that their main idea is to control EVERYTHING.

Their strategy is multifaceted.  First, they want to control the minds inside the beltway, so they take over huge think thanks that used to have a good reputation for providing government with independent analysis, such as the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Institute. They also endow key professorships dedicated to promoting their right wing views.

Second, they want to reduce the impact of poor and minority voters, so they pay advocates to push a voter ID law that will have exactly that effect. They are the biggest funders behind the Tea party which took over the House of Representatives in the last election. The Kochs were there to greet the new Members when they were sworn in.[ii]

They do astroturf politics better than anyone. They founded, funded and led Americans for Prosperity and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation to fight Obamacare. They spent $200 million on activist groups. They are behind the controversy over the Solyndra scandal and they are manipulating gas prices to create a problem for Obama and all Americans.

They are working to destroy public sector unions, eliminate environmental regulations, and phase out social security.

In one of their most insidious operations, they fund an organization called ALEC. ALEC provides model laws to State legislatures to make it easier for those bodies to simply enact them, go home, and be done with it. No fuss, no muss and no TEDIOUS legislative work involved for the legislators at all. The model laws from ALEC often further the Koch Bros objectives. One of those laws is the Stand Your Ground Law---enacted in 21 states. It came to the states from ALEC all fully written up, packaged in a nice box with ribbons and bows.


This law led to the murder in Florida of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen, by George Zimmerman an overzealous neighborhood watch volunteer. Martin was guilty of walking home in a hoodie with too much candy.

For more on the behind the scenes work by the Kochs through their ALEC operation, see http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

This is a certified organic free-range blog.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

Note: The blog Alternet helped immensely in my extensive research on this topic, and has much more on the Koch's schemes-- so check it out: by clicking here.

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[i](http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/154714/3_shady_things_the_koch_brothers_have_been_up_to_that_the_media_ignore)

[ii]Id.

Belief and Disbelief

In the last blog, I wrote about how I drank some Kool Aid and fell for a politician.  It was not a pretty thing,  an old crusty skeptic drooling like a puppy over a Senate candidate.

 

But I am over it.

Hallelujah! I was lost. But now I am found.  I got my disbelief mojo working again. I am back in the hunt for the big game:  the liars, cheaters, and thieves who roam our planet like feral animals out to prey on the gullible.

Lucky for me, there was an event on the National Mall that provided an opportunity to study at close range people who believe and people who don’t.  It was billed as the world’s biggest rally for non-believers, but plenty of believers showed up too.

All the big guns in the world of disbelief were there. Cristina Rad, who was by far the hottest, came all the way from Romania.

Christina Rad

Richard Dawkins, and dozens of followers of Darwin and other disbelieving luminaries were also there.  The rally involved a lot of complex speeches about theology, philosophy, and biological science, interlaced with jokes and magic.  Most of it was over my head and probably  over the heads of anyone reading this blog. So the best way to tell the story is through the informative signs and T-shirts that were scattered around.

Believers

On the one hand there was mob  believers, making a big fuss and preaching eternal damnation.

Polish Believers

Then there were these confusing folks. They were Polish, so I suppose the confusion can be explained somehow. The word in Polish for Jesus is the same as the word for hedgehog.  So they worship a hedgehog named Pan Jesus. You can find out more about their curious faith on their website by clicking here.  The website, however, does not clarify much unless you are fluent in Polish. Perhaps.

People came from all over, even Alabama. transported to DC by means  of a tornado apparently, together with their extinct pet.

There was deep theology everywhere. 

Some rally participants worried about Santorum's effect on American agriculture.

Woman Without A Penis

Some had philosophical ideas about defects in their anatomy, like this poor woman lamenting the absence of her penis.

Airline Pilot

Some folks were interested in flying aircraft.

She Prayed for 16 Years.  Now What?

There were frustrated young girls who had been praying to both Santa Claus and God for years, with little success. Now they are starting to get pissed.

Then there were motivational experts, who believe in providing liquid rewards for a good effort, even for a lost cause or an impossible task.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

I lost it

I have been had.  Like Willard Mitt Romney's dad, I was brainwashed. I was taken for a ride. I bought the story-- hook, line, and sinker. I completely lost it.

I wrote a check to a political campaign for the first time in my life.

This reprehensible behavior violated everything this blog is all about.  All my warnings to blog readers about lying, cheating, stealing politicians went into the toilet last night with a loud flush.

I could say, “I am sorry.” But I would be lying. I am not sorry.  I would do it all over again, and I probably will.

All my nasty, mean-spirited, bitter, snarky cynical blogging and doomsday preaching was upended by an elderly, mild-mannered, law school professor running for the United States Senate in a state in which I cannot vote!

It was pathetic. I was like silly putty in her hands.  Regular readers of this blog probably think I was on drugs. I felt like a groupie at a rock concert.

I probably should have gone home and taken a bath.  Politicians and their nauseating political campaigns disgust me. In 39 years of working with politicians, I have seen it all, and as Rick Sanctimonious said about Jack Kennedy, it makes me want to throw up.

But last night, at the invitation of a neighbor (initials H. Q.), I went to hear Elizabeth Warren speak.  Elizabeth is a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts once held by Senator Ted Kennedy.  It’s a blue state, but the Rs captured it in 2010 with an out-of-nowhere Tea Party-backed candidate.

I was expecting to hear the usual progressive policy wonk stuff, knocking the other side, with a little of the “hopey changey thing” thrown in, after which I could return to this blog and explain all the ways in which Democrats don’t know what they stand for and don’t have a clue about how to do political campaigns and can, therefore, never compete against the slick manipulative lies of the right.

After many dismal months of following the Herminator (Cain), the Executioner (Perry), Anne Rand (Ron Paul), the Pompous Historian (Newt), and Etch a Sketch Romney make fools of themselves and fools of the American voter, disgusting each other and everyone who is exposed to their absurd pandering and negative attack ads, I was pretty sure that the cesspool of politics was going to stink from now until November.

Sure, Obama would come with a little hopey changey PIXIE dust to try to cover up his blunders and failures of the last six years.  But then, he would be suffocated in the usual political stench and try to get out of it by building a few more pipelines and artificially surpressing the price of gasoline.

Then along comes Elizabeth Warren.

I flipped.

How did Elizabeth flip me?

It was not her agenda, a typical progressive agenda. Her platform is about strengthening public education, building the infrastructure our economy needs, and forging ahead with the research and new science we need to maintain a place in the world economy. Nothing new, except that thank God she did not blather on about any stupid ALL-of-the-above energy policy.[i]

It was not her charisma. She is not a stem-winding speaker.  She pushes up her spectacles when talking.  She doesn’t wear the latest Oscar de la Renta outfits.  She pretty clearly does not hunt and skin elk in Alaska. I would bet a case of beer that she has never been drinking with the boys at a NASCAR event.

She does not have much experience in politics or business. Her only other foray into politics before now was taking on every single lobbyist in Washington trying to get legislation passed to protect consumers from financial and other frauds, after which she became so toxic to the K Street crowd that she was run out of town on a rail by the biggest lobbyists in the business.

She is not a comedian.  No jokes.  No pandering.  No cheesy grits.

She did not claim that God told her to run for Congress.

It wasn’t about destroying the enemy. There was no denigrating or making fun of other people.  No sarcasm.  No screaming, shouting, or abusing anyone or calling names.

She was calm and determined. She was not defensive.  No cheap shots. (Well…maybe one little one.… a tiny joke about Gingrich’s plan to make elementary school students work as janitors.) She never once mentioned her opponent.

So how did she flip a seen-it-all cynic like me?

It was simple really. She told a true personal story, her history (with no drama.)  She explained why she is now running for office.   She talked about one thing that everyone can relate to—what we need to do in America to continue to provide opportunities for Americans to have good lives-- why we need to do it—and how we need to do it.

She reframed all the tax-budget-deficit issues into issues about values, the values that all (or all but a small minority) of Americans share.[ii] She said that it is not about putting up a fence and defending your pile of accumulated stuff from other people gorging themselves on food stamps who want to take it away from you.

It IS about fairness to the next generation and the generation after that.  It’s not about taking all you can get as fast as you can get it and leaving a devastated wasteland behind. It IS about paying the dues that you owe and contributing what we all should contribute to make sure that our kids and our grandkids, and everyone’s kids and grandkids, can have the opportunity to make something of themselves.  

Some pundits say that Republicans are the daddy candidates, all about taking your punishment, not showing weakness (NO CRYING Speaker Boehner!), going to war and beating the crap out of the other guy, and not asking for help from anyone. Democrats, they say, are the mommy candidates, forgiving, nurturing, caring, respectful, etc.

There may be some truth to those models.  Or maybe not. Either way, my money went to grandma.  It might be wasted though. Her opponent is backed by every bank and financial services lobbyist and super pac on the planet.  

Visit Elizabeth at www.elizabethwarren.com.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments

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[i] If you think Obama’s ridiculous ”all-of-the-above” concept of energy policy is a good idea, listen to what Bill McKibben says about it. Bill says that if you want more dirty coal, more oil drilled everywhere, and more pipelines snaking across the Great Plains like spaghetti, together with a few windmills and solar cells scattered here and there, you are like a drunk who thinks it is good healthy plan to mix 2 or 3 vitamins in a gallon of gin and tonics. (NPR News March 21, 2012.)

[ii] I dislike the word “frame” that people use to refer to the context for a story, question, or idea, but that is the word we are stuck with ever since congnitive scientists and brain researchers started using it to explain how our brains process information and make decisions. Framing issues is the most relevant, important--and surprising-- concept for politics to emerge from modern cognitive science. To understand framing, you unfortunately must read  David Kahneman's 499 page book, Thinking Fast and Slow. (I am only on page 59.) An example of framing an issue would be in the abortion debate: do you talk about being pro life, or do you discuss being pro choice? How you frame a question determines the answer/outcome. Forget about the facts, if any, that might be thrown in. See George Lakoff, Don’t Think of An Elephant, p. 17.

Squids

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi famously described the giant investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs, as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Taibbi’s description is eloquent, but totally unfair to squids.

The vampire squid (vampyroteuthis infernalis) is a wonderful creature.[i]  Sure-- it has a slightly unappealing appearance,  with  a big thing flowing like a black cape, reminding one of a vampire. And its does have suckers, although they are hard to see unless you look up close at one, but there is no “blood funnel.”

Why did Taibbi pick the vampire squid to represent Goldman Sachs?  Maybe because this squid doesn’t shoot out ink when it feels threatened. Instead, the vampire squid shoots out a sticky mucus.

If you have to choose between the kind of slime coming out of Goldman Sachs or the sticky mucus from a vampire squid living in the ocean, pick the one in the ocean. It won’t stick to your wallet.

People often wonder--what does Goldman Sachs (or any investment bank) do?  The slime at Goldman is actually a financial lubricant, greasing the gears of the financial world.

Some critics allege that investment banks don’t manufacture anything and don’t create anything of value—other than billions in profits for the bank itself. Wrong again.  Investment banks invented amazing things, including complex financial instruments (derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc.) capable of temporarily bamboozling the entire planet, extracting wealth from every nook and cranny, and bringing the entire modern world to the brink of a massive financial crisis.

Recently, the "vampire squid" of Wall Street was in the news yet again. One of its derivative salesmen, Greg Smith, resigned and passed on his resignation letter to the New York Times, setting off a fire storm of controversy. Smith complained that Goldman had lost its way ethically since he started with the firm. He pointed to the double dealing that Goldman typically does when fleecing its customers (referred to by the firm as “muppets”). Smith wrote of a “toxic and destructive” environment that subordinated the needs of the firm’s clients to the firm’s profits.

Goldman Sachs Clients

It took poor Greg Smith more than 10 years inside the firm to figure out that the company he worked for was a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing gangsters. He seems a bit oblivious.

Goldman Sachs has been in trouble with the law for cheating its clients almost since the day it was founded. In 1928 the firm was famous for creating a “notorious Ponzi scheme known then as the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation.”[ii]

Since that time Goldman has been oozing slime through one SEC prosecution or another for its entire lifetime, almost always a situation in which Goldman gets caught fleecing its own clients.

Former investment banker William D. Cohan describes Goldman’s escapades in his book “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.”  In a recent article, Cohan described in detail how in 1970 Goldman totally screwed its clients in the Penn Central bankruptcy. Essentially, Goldman unloaded worthless Penn Central commercial paper on its own clients to save its own ass, AFTER it learned, but did not disclose to its clients, that the railroad was bankrupt.

Bringing things up to date, Goldman profited to the tune of $4,000,000,000 in the mortgage meltdown by betting against mortgage-backed securities that it created and sold to clients, while knowing full well that the stuff was toxic junk.[iii]

Only a week ago, Goldman promised the Delaware court that it would try to “strengthen internal rules to prevent…conflicts of interest” after it was caught playing both sides against the middle in another classic example of Goldman double dealing, this time between an energy company (El Paso) being bought out by Kinder Morgan, a pipeline company.[iv]

So let’s not be so mean to the vampire squids. They are harmless creatures, living in the deep ocean far from the rapacious crooks on Wall Street.

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[i] The vampire squid's body is covered with light-producing organs called photophores. This gives the squid the unique ability to "turn itself on or off" at will through a chemical process known as bioluminescence. When the photophores are off, the squid is completely invisible in the dark waters where it lives. The squid has incredible control over these light organs. It has the ability to modulate the size and intensity of the photophores to create complex patterns that can be used to disorient predators and attract prey. http://www.seasky.org/deep-sea/vampire-squid.html

[ii] William D. Cohan, “Goldman’s Long History of Duping Clients,” Washington Post, March 18, 2012, p.B3.

[iii] Id.

[iv] Washington Post, March 17, p.A10.

First Check the Trees

Caution! Today's blog is not for the squeamish. If you are a liberal, stop now and do not read further.

Your normal blogster is indisposed today--unable even to blog...due to an epic hangover.  So he asked me, an anonymous trusted confidante and expert on food, hunting, mineral extraction, philosophy, auto-mechanics, and women’s health issues, to write today's blog. I will try to maintain the same scholarly standards as Ed does in his usual blogs (but without all those pesky footnotes.)

I relish the opportunity to contribute to this popular blog because I have been closely following the political primary contests and I have a couple of important things to say about that.

I started off today with some cheesy grits for breakfast.  Luckily, I did not think about Jack Kennedy trying to pretend like the church and government are not one and the same, or I would have thrown up all over the grits. Maybe choked to death.

Then,  after breakfast, what does your average red-blooded American man do? Go hunting of course! What else? There is only one thing better than hunting small varmints, and that is firing people. I LOVE to fire people. But, lacking any employees, it's back to hunting for me.

No problem. My favorite prey: small liberal varmints.

So...I said a few Hail Marys, administered corporeal punishment to my wife, my kids, and my girl friend, gobbled down the cheesy grits with bacon and red-eye gravy, pulled on my sweater vest, duct taped my favorite hunting dog to the roof of my Humvee, and went out to track down the elusive small liberal varmint.

Now the first thing you have to do when hunting varmints of any kind is-- naturally -- check the height of the trees.  If you are in an area where the trees are too high or too short, you can forget the whole idea of finding any varmints.

Liberal

Now here is where the problem comes in. I couldn't drive too far in search of the right trees because that durn Obama is pushing gas prices right through the roof, delaying approval of all those Canadian oil pipelines we so desperately need. He won't let anyone drill for oil in the ground, the tundra, or even the Gulf of Mexico anymore either.   My little Humvee takes about $300 every time I hit the pump these days, and Mr. President, I have a news flash for you---IT WON’T BURN ALGAE! 

Thank YOU for ruining my morning of hunting, Mr. Pseudo-Intellectual Harvard-Educated Eurotrash Teleprompter-Reading Job-Killing Gay-Marriage-loving auto company-bail-outing entrepreneur-hating socialist President. YOU are a FAILED PRESIDENT!  And everybody knows it.

I don’t know how in Hell Mrs. Romney can keep on driving ANY of her Cadillacs with Obama jacking gas prices up like this day after day.  She will end up like this poor thing pictured below---desperate for a ride----  if Obama keeps up with this algae stuff.

Resourceful American Deals with Gas  Price Crisis

This is what we get for electing a job-killing, Taliban-loving, Muslim teleprompter failed President.  And one with a fake birth certificate to boot.  It's a damn good thing the Supremes finally allowed multinational corporations to buy American votes. After the election we can put an end to this nonsense and get gas prices down to where they belong--$2.50 a gallon--cheaper than water-- like they used to be.

Meanwhile, back to the important matter at hand. Our country is plagued by filthy sex-crazed law school sluts. This is the main thing wrong with our educational system today. Most of them are gay, most likely. And that being the case--I ask you--why do they need so much subsidized birth control?

It's another mystery of modern life.

I am sick and tired of all these liberal floozies running amok in our top-rated law schools.  It is driving us all to the poorhouse....feminazi sex maniacs just gobbling up free birth control pills like they were M&Ms and using condoms as decorations for their pathetic little law school sorority parties.

The cause of all this is obviously Planned Parenthood.  Parenthood cannot be planned for God's sake! Parenthood in its best form is something that gets started by hot teenagers in the back seat of a car, and any group that tries to PLAN THAT is 100% anti-American.

If they keep this sluttiness up, I want to see EVERYTHING on film, including their law boards.  It's my tax money and I want to get something for it.

What Law School Looks Like in America today

So I am asking all of America's hottest law school sluts to send me videos showing EXACTLY what they do with the condoms, text books, and birth control pills we taxpayers are footing the bills for.  The more explicit the better.  I will get Ed to post everything on his blog as soon as he gets back from the massage parlor.

Law school was nothing like that back in my day. I had more condoms than I needed.  I wish I had needed more, but what with all that annoying studying and memorizing cases, and all...never mind.

 The only way out of this immoral mess is transvaginal ultrasound, as proposed earlier this month in the Virginia legislature.

Transvaginal Rush

Rush Limbaugh has already signed up to administer this delicate procedure.  An aspirin between your knees isn't going to help you when the Rushster comes a-calling with his vaginal ultrasound device.

To comment on this blog,  click on the hyperlink at the bottom that reads “0 comments” or “X comments” (x being a number).

Get A Condom!

Are you worried about getting impregnated by one of the political lies now circulating?

How can you protect yourself, especially now that condoms are being taken out of your health plan by the Catholic bishops?

Rick Santimonious (by way of his billionaire backer Foster Friess) suggests putting an aspirin between your knees and holding it there.

You could try that, but I don’t think it’s going to work long term.

A better idea to protect yourself from all the liars trying to have their way with you is to buy some serious protection.  In this case, protection might be available in writing -- in  Pamela Meyers’ book, “Lie Spotting.”[i]

Pamela admits that “we are facing a pandemic of deception.”  She says that we are “living in a post-truth society,” but she knows what to do about it. Her theory starts with the simple premise that a “lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance; its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”  Lies, she says, are “a cooperative act.”

Given that premise, if you can identify the lies, you can agree to cooperate and believe them or not.

Of course, if you are a Progressive, you will happily get in bed with Progressive myths, whether they have any basis in fact or not.  Likewise, if you are a Republican conservative, you will elect to have conjugal relations with the Republican mythology, and enjoy every passionate minute of it.  If you are an evangelical you will choose to hop in the sack with creationism, rejecting that old ugly Darwinian theory of evolution. In politics, sex, and religion, facts and science don’t matter; stories do.

These ideological and religious myths may or may not be harmful to you but they are qualitatively different from lies being told to you by people who know they are lying.  Progressives, conservatives, and evangelicals don’t even think they are telling stories.

Meyers doesn't focus on the kind of political/religious lies and myths that the tellers actually believe in and the listeners also want to believe in.  She focuses on knowing when you are being lied to by someone who knows he is lying and who is trying to get away with it.

Her thesis is, that if you acquire a little expertise in deceptology, you can often detect when you are being told a lie. Meyers says: “When you combine the science of recognizing deception" with the art of careful looking and listening, you can avoid collaborating in a lie.

A few examples from Pamela’s  research:

• When someone starts off by saying “truthfully” or “to be honest about it,” you are probably going to get told a big fat one.
• Or if they start hedging with words such as “If I recall correctly…” or “If you really think about it…”
• Another tip off is when a person denies something but does not use the contractions used in normal speech. For example, “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Pamela also has some useful observations about lying in our modern world and its consequences.  She claims that on average you are lied to between 10 and 200 times a day and that strangers typically lie to you three times in the first ten minutes of meeting you.

Some lies have serious consequences.  Investors have recently lost almost a trillion dollars ($997,000,000) due to corporate deceptions, according to Meyers.

If you don’t want to go to the library or send your hard-earned loot off to Amazon to get Pamela’s excellent book, you can still get a little protection from liars by watching Pamela’s excellent talk on TED or by visiting her brilliant blog   www.liespotting.com.  

It is a good thing to know when you are being lied to by Ponzi schemers and crooks, but in the world of political/religious lies where you are sometimes being fed a story by true believers who hold tight to one myth or another, even Pamela's insights are not going to offer you fool proof protection.  These guys can lie to you with a straight face, so to speak.

Maybe it's time to get out the asprin after all.

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[i] Pamela Meyer is founder and CEO of Simpatico Networks, asocial networking company that owns and operates online social networks. She holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in Public Policy from Claremont Graduate School, and is a Certified Fraud Examiner. The quotes in this blog are from her book, the TED website, and Pamela's blog.

Political Deceptology: The Science of Effective Lying

In the last blog I argued that Rick Sanctimonious was more effective as a politician than Willard Romney because he strongly believes in what he is dishing out, while Romney often appears not to be too convinced by his own spiel.  Both may, or may not, be delivering to us a pack of lies, but that is totally irrelevant because every politician (as well as everyone else) is usually lying and facts don’t matter, especially in politics.

I am not saying that I would bet on Rick beating Willard to the nomination. He probably won’t because Willard is backed by 9 billionaires and Rick has only one, and in today's presidential campaigns, the number of billionaire backers you have trumps even effective political lying.

The point is, however, that a lie is only politically effective if the perpetrator believes in the lies he is telling, or at least is perceived to believe in them.  When Rick Sanctimonious says weird things such as “JFK makes me want to throw up,” it actually reinforces the belief that he really does believe in what he is saying.  It is even more convincing when he has to pay a political price in the elite liberal media for his weirdness.

There is more to it than just being a true believer, however.  Explaining this involves an teensey weensy bit of cognitive science, so stick with me here.

Most of the characteristics of effective political lying are based on how the human brain takes in data, processes the data, and makes decisions.  Cognitive scientists have demonstrated that the human mind can only handle a small part of the massive volume of data coming in through our senses.

If you took everything in, your thought process would look something like the circuitry of an Indian telephone system.

     Photo attributed to Marcus Ferrell; widely circulating on the Internet

To deal with this overwhelming mess, your mind uses filters to declutter the incoming data. These filters are not totally random. They come from childhood, family, school, and other learned experiences.  Some may even be based on heredity and our ancient genes that allowed us to survive in primitive times. Most filters seem to come from early childhood.[i]

After filtering everything through our cognitive illusions, most of the data get lost, but our thought process and decision-making process become simpler, reducing the mess above to this:

Photo from a web page attributed to: © Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.

Our filters are all loosely hooked together into a (not always coherent) system we call our world view or our belief system. One observer calls this our package of “cognitive illusions.”[ii]  This is the source of the intuitions and educated guesses that make the complex pathway of life easier to navigate.

Whatever their origin, and whatever is lost in the filtering, the filters in our brain allow us to get on with daily life and make decisions about what to eat, wear, and who to vote for and other very complex matters without trying to sift laboriously through all the factual data and make reasoned decisions about everything.  

Our filters determine how we understand the world and make meaning out of the chaos of the universe.  No one could survive without them.

David Kahneman, the world's most influential living psychologist,  explains this as our two brains:  the slow brain and the fast brain. By necessity, we use the fast brain for almost everything. [iii] Malcom Gladwell, in his best-selling book Blink, tries to make the case that the fast brain can produce better decisions than can the slow brain.[iv]

Gladwell’s view is not supported by anything in cognitive science, but sometimes  our filters do more or less coincide with reality. Then they will work for us. Sometimes they don’t, and then we end up getting royally screwed by our own ways of thinking.[v] The latter happens far more than the former, especially in politics.

One of the ways the fast brain filters things is through the adoption of rules of thumb, referred to sometimes as “heuristics.”  Political consultants, magicians, and advertising wizards realized a long time ago that these heuristics can be triggered by language. They have developed an armory of techniques to get us to buy in to whatever they are trying to sell to us.  For advertisers, some of the words that trigger our brain heuristics are “SALE!”,  “BARGAIN,” “FREE!”, “NEW!”, “BEST,” or “TOP RATED.”  We become weak and helpless when attacked by these little buzz words --and out comes the credit card.

Politicians do the same thing. 

An example:  Romney will often say things like, “I am going to bring you smaller government, free enterprise, lower taxes, and a strong defense. Obama is a socialist who wants to promote class warfare. He wants to take away your hard-earned cash and give it to some loafing, lazy illegal immigrant.”  Everyone cheers wildly. No one asks for any proof or evidence.  Romney is using buzz words triggering heuristics that hook into a way of seeing the world that resonates with his listeners.

George Lakoff, in his book “Don’t Think of An Elephant,” calls this “framing.” He defines it as using language to evoke a certain world view and certain strongly held values.

People are often amazed and baffled by why poor people vote for candidates who promise to raise their taxes, take away their social services, and transfer money to rich people and big corporations.  There is a book and a movie about why people vote against their own economic self-interest in Kansas.[vi]  In the 2010 elections, a Tea Party advocate--who was on Medicare!--told South Carolina congressman Bob Inglis in a town hall meeting that he wanted to force “the government to  get its hands off my health care.”  Inglis, for once in his life, was speechless.

The reason people don’t vote their interest is that they never analyze data or think things through logically with their slow brains when deciding about political issues. They vote for the candidate who best triggers the cognitive heuristics in the fast brain--the one who taps into their intuitive core world view and values.

A politician cannot just mumble any nutty thing over and over again and get away with it.  It can be nutty, but he has to believe it to make it work, and it has to hook into some deeply held values.  This is how Ron Paul gets votes. He is patently a total fruitcake, but (1) he believes firmly in his delusions, (2) some of them hook into values that everyone holds dear, and (3) he is emotional and ANGRY. You will never see him smile when he unloads his true beliefs.

The key for the effective political liar is not to get all tangled up in policy details or other wonky stuff like Hillary Clinton famously used to do.  Don’t worry about facts. If a strongly held frame does not fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept.[vii]

Republicans have completely mastered this game.

Democrats (Bill Clinton, excepted) struggle with lying effectively.

Why can’t Democrats lie effectively?

That will be the subject of the next blog. 


And how can we protect ourselves from lies, political lies and other lies (assuming we want to)?


That important question is best answered by Pamela Meyer on her Ted talk entitled "How to Spot a Liar"  which every reader of this blog should watch.

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[i] I know there is an authoritative scientific source for this statement but I have dozens of books scattered all over my house and I cannot locate the right one.

[ii] Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (2008).

[iii] David Khaneman, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. David Brookes described the theory as follows: “We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition).” http://www.economicsandethics.org/2011/10/david-brooks-on-daniel-kahneman-and-the-complexities-of-the-mind.html.

[iv] Gladwell argues in an age of information overload, experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do drowning in volumes of analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(book).

[v] In Blink, Gladwell cites numerous examples in which lightening quick intuition saved the day. On the other hand, intuitive decisions made in the blink of an eye can also lead to disaster, as in the case where four New York policemen using rapid, intuitive, fast brain judgment shot an innocent man on his doorstep 41 times.

[vi] Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004). In the book. Frank argues that politicians generate votes by evoking issues, such as abortion, immigration, or gay marriage. However, once in office, they turn their attention to issues favoring their wealthy business supporters, such as deregulation of polluting industries.

[vii]  George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant.