Monday, November 15, 2010

How Would You Like To Have A Head Like That?


That is the musical question that Jean-Luc Ponty asked with this brilliant piece of music back in 1972. This was an incredible fusion band. At the time, Ponty was also playing with Frank Zappa and very much influenced by Zappas compositional work and humor.
This band consisted of:
Jean Luc Ponty - violin, Philip Catherine - gtr, Jasper Van't Hof - piano and organ,Peter Trunk - bass, Aldo Romano - drums and Nano Vasconcelos - percussion

Ponty asked this question in 1972 and I'm asking Americans today, 38 years later:
How Did You Ever Get A Head Like This?
Facts don't matter, we live in a "facts be damned" environment or more accurately, A Mendocracy,
Rule by liars....
Here is just a few ways America has blazed a trail into the new frontiers of ignorance:

• Polling data during and after last week’s midterm elections suggested that many Americans genuinely believe President Obama has raised their taxes -- even though the reality is that our president actually lowered them for most of us. This means that people trust pundits like Rush Limbaugh, a major force behind spreading that lie, over the numbers on their own tax returns.
• Another recent phenomenon? Half of new Congressmen don’t believe in the reality of global warming. It’s not that they don’t just disagree on the source or the severity of the problem. They flat out don’t think the world is getting warmer--despite the evidence outside their windows.
• The new Congress will probably try to restore millions of dollars of funding for scientifically inaccurate, largely disastrous abstinence-only curriculum in schools, many of which have been shown to spread lies like "condoms don't work" and "abortion causes cancer."
• News outlets picked up a wildly inflated and completely outlandish claim from an Indian blog that Obama’s trip abroad cost $200 million a day--and listeners have swallowed it. (In this case, the White House flat-out denied it.)
And that's only the tip of the idiotic iceberg.
• Nearly one-fifth of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. Thanks, Fox news, for acting like this was a matter of opinion, not fact.
• 25 percent of Americans don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution while less than 40 percent do. Consider the fact that several of our newly elected officials, specifically newly elected Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, share that belief.
• Earlier this year, nearly 40 percent of Americans still believed the Sarah Palin-supported lie about "death panels" being included in health care reform.
• As of just a few years ago, about half of Americans still suspected a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11, a lie that was reinforced by none other than Dick Cheney.
• While a hefty amount of this demonstrable cluelessness gets better as the respondents get younger, all is not well in the below-30 demographic. A majority of “young Americans” cannot identify Iraq or Afghanistan--the places their peers are fighting and dying--on a map.
• Two out of five Americans, despite the whole separation of church and state being a foundation of our democracy thing, think teachers should be able to lead prayer in classrooms. So it seems those right-wingers clamoring to tear down the wall between church and state aren’t the only ones who don’t know their constitutional principles.
• Many Americans still believe in witchcraft, ESP and other supernatural phenomena. Does that explain why Christine O’Donnell was so quick to deny her “dabbling”?
• Speaking of antiquated religious beliefs, about a decade ago, 20 percent of Americans still believed that the sun revolves around the earth. That's just sad, considering that even the Vatican has let Galileo off the hook for being right.
• Only about half of Americans realize that Judaism is the oldest of the three monotheistic religions. Other examples of wild misunderstanding about religion and the separation of church and state can be found in this fall’s Pew survey on Americans’ religious knowledge.
How would you like to have a head like that? Enjoy the music.....

1 comment:

Laci the Chinese Crested said...

This is Something I frequently blog about--

Quite simply, the Conservatives have been running the show since Reagan was elected in 1980. Although, the writing was on the wall prior to then.

First off, the US media is monopolised and consolidated in the hands of a few. This media is commercial, which means that it is controlled by corporations.

Next, even the US "Public" media PBS, NPR, and the rest have been targets of the right since their inception. The "public" in public media is an incredibly small source of income. Most of US Public broadcasting's funding comes from corporate underwriting, which is a very subtle form of commercial.

This page gets into how the public is misinformed and there is no alternative source for information.
http://www.dailysource.org/about/problems

We can add in that the US educational system does not teach people to think, but is more in tune with providing serfs for the work force.

Thus, people get information and are incapable of critical thinking.

We can add in that critical thought is painful, especially when it challenges established beliefs: e.g., Thomas Jefferson truly believed that all men were created equal.

The end product is that the masses can be fed all sorts of BS and they will willingly swallow it.

Which is why people can say things such as:
The long term unemployed are lazy and would get off their arses if they didn't have unemployment benefits to take lower paying jobs since their previous jobs came with inflated salaries.

Listen to te the one idiot in this story:
http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131342946/employers-pickier-about-job-applicants-skills