Xtianoid Twitterati Strike Back at 'COSMOS'

I must admit to being wrong, in my post about the new 'COSMOS' series when I wrote:

My take is there won’t be any such ‘pushback’ because these close-minded dolts won’t bother to watch it in the first place!  They are too sure of their blind faith based on nothing but superstition and old wives tales elaborated by primitive, semi-literate nomads in an ancient book.

This was in response to Denver Post reviewer Joanne Ostrow's take that 'pushback' would come from "conservative religious quarters" who didn't like the graphic animation of how the Roman Catholic Inquisition put Giordano Bruno to death for his conception of an infinite universe. The segment was very well done, especially the scene where Bruno is dragged in front of his accusers - all Bishops - who also had the appearance of psycho perverts with their dark-rimmed beady eyes and reptilian pupils and the exaggerated five o'clock shadow with some drool coming down over the lips. It was well done but I didn't think any of these idiots would respond because well, they wouldn't watch it!

But I was wrong! According to a salon.com report, these Neanderthals came out guns blazing. According to the report:

"Some of the poor souls oppressed by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s return to the promised land first pioneered by Carl Sagan took to Twitter with their predictable grumblings. My favorite: “Dear #cosmos, the origin of the universe actually is not mysterious. God had Moses write about it in the #Bible. You should read it sometime.”


Well uh, okay, if you're going by the old wives' tales of Genesis, it's not mysterious. But, to those of us who've studied physics, we'd still like to know the Earth can exist BEFORE the Sun, when the Sun's origination is essential to spin off the Earth and other planets.  We know from modern astrophysics that the solar proto-nebula had to collapse first to yield the SUN. (No planets, since they had yet to spin off the collapsing nebular cloud – it hadn’t cooled enough to allow it). As the proto-solar nebula collapsed it also began spinning and gained angular momentum. This angular momentum was then transferred to regions of the nebula that cooled and separated from the whole, and these regions became separate clouds of dust and gas that aggregated into the planets. Under a combination of electrostatic attraction (between larger charged particles) and gravity (attracting the whole mass from the center of the cloud) each planet was formed as what we call a “planetesimal”.

As more angular momentum was transferred – the planetesimals (each one) acquired their own spin (in a period of revolution) and specific shapes. The giant planets (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) garnered more spin momentum than the more dense, terrestrial planets. Thus Jupiter’s planetesimal ended up as an oblate spheroid with diameter of about 88,000 mile and rotating rapidly with a day of ~ 10 hours. Earth meanwhile ended up as a relatively spherical orb with diameter of ~ 8,000 miles and day approaching approach 24 hrs. Mars ended up in a similar shape to that of Earth and a diameter of 4200 miles and day ~ 24 hours.

Thus, the Earth spun off about 1.1 billion years after the solar nebula fully collapsed, and it could not have come BEFORE the Sun.

Yet Genesis (1:1-5)proclaims :

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light....

which is nonsense. . It is clear from this that Gen.1:1-5 has stated a patent impossibility which violates all known laws of physics and dynamics and is therefore WRONG! It is clear from this that the Bible must be in error, certainly in this one passage – and if here then likely in many other places too. If this is so then it must have been written by flawed humans using limited conceptions of space, time and astrophysics which accounts are not even correct in their most general form.

The actual origin of the cosmos is indeed a deep mystery because it entails the fact that we may inhabit a multiverse, not just a universe.  Thus, the mystery enters by way of the inherent complexity of the theories, including for M-branes, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-could-universe-originate-from.html

Another howler in the salon.com report is the Evolution News and Views take,  published by The Discovery Institute - backward bunch of Seattle-based goobers who are all for "intelligent design" but refuse to explain who or what this 'designer' is. Anyway, their take on COSMOS is that  Giordano Bruno "wasn’t even really a scientist, and he was burned to death because of his theological heresies and not his belief in Copernican theory," (SO HE DESERVED IT!)

Also,  "the main reason he showed up on “Cosmos” at all was because he was the only one with even a passing association with a scientific controversy to be burned at the stake during this period of history.”

Of course, this is nonsense. According to Henry Lea, the author of 'The Inquisition of the Middle Ages' we don't really know how many of those expressing scientific theories (say based on Copernicus' heliocentric theories) might have been burned at the stake. It could run into the thousands, as records weren't always kept. Also, their property was also confiscated first, and there was little to go by in ascertaining their identities.  Bruno then is likely the most major and significant example, representing all  those of scientific temperament burned at the time.

The argument that he "wasn't really a scientist" also rings hollow and uninformed. What is science, after all? It is based on open inquiry, asking questions and finding out ways to pursue the answers. Giordano Bruno may not have had the empirical tests available to test his concept of an infinite universe, but he did extrapolate to his concept from Copernicus' results. Yes, his idea of untold numbers of populated worlds was speculation, but it was scientific speculation little different from Carl Sagan's own speculations, written about in his assorted books.

The dumbest aspect of the knuckle dragging religious Twitterati is that Cosmos is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing.   In fact, scientific materialism is the ONLY philosophy that puts us in touch with reality, all else is superstition and tomfoolery.

It is precisely scientific materialism that provides and energizes the drive to make measurements to confirm that what we think we observe, is actually there- and then accounting for it in a physical setting.  For example, it enables us to grasp that the "Miracle at Fatima" was no miracle at all.

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose to examine the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people "reportedly saw the sun move", to apply Hume's principle: As Dawkins observed:

"On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people," Dawkins writes. "This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

The dual –tandem improbability associated with the Sun actually moving is less than getting a royal flush in poker 6.5 million times in succession. It is actually less than the proverbial monkey on a typewriter re-typing Hamlet in its entirety, and with no errors. It is indeed, beyond the realm of physical possibility especially as NO solar observatories around at the time - detected ANY motion! Hence, it had to be all in the believers' heads.

This comports with David Hume's principle of what it would take to accept any "miracle":

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."


In other words, given a mass hallucination by those at Fatima that day is LESS miraculous than that the Sun actually moved even a centimeter -- then clearly THAT is the only explanation the rationalist can accept!

Hence, we see here the sheer power of scientific Materialism at work. Observations, REASON and formulating a consistent conclusion based on them!  Contrary to most fundies' misperceptions, scientists do not willy-nilly accept violations of physical laws without demanding empirical support for the claim. If you insist that water can be changed into wine, a scientist (or scientific Materialist)  will demand to see your evidence for such a feat. The same applies to the claim of a man "walking on water", or "brought back to life". In each case, the evidence by which a natural law is violated must be thoroughly scrutinized.

In this process, all alternative natural explanations must be considered-- including outright trickery or fraud, before the actual violation of a physical law is conceded. If you instead simply quote an ancient text, you will be summarily dismissed as a babbling idiot.

The 'Cosmos' complainers, if they have any sense, will go back to their enclaves and rethink their nonsense, and also realize this is one contest they can't win.   As the author of the salon.com piece put it:

"All we need to do to see our world descend into a real pit of hellfire is to continue to let the nonsense propagated by The Discovery Institute stand uncontested, while we greenhouse gas ourselves to the boiling point. Kudos to “Cosmos” for calling bullshit."

New 'COSMOS' Series Is Well Worth A Look!

For years I have been patiently waiting for an update of Carl Sagan's 'COSMOS' series, given the many discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology that have transpired since 1980. Now that has arrived with a timely and streamlined re-do narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and broadcast on FOX (which I usually never watch) and The National Geographic channel (which re-broadcasts the FOX episodes on Monday night).

The update – at least from the first episode- is well worth watching. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an engaging host who's more than able to fill the shoes left by the original host, Carl Sagan. Having watched the original, the first thing that strikes the viewer in the new series is the vivid use of graphics, including computer SGI visuals (such as in one scene with Tyson near the sea, discussing abiogenesis,  as a fishlike creature ambles out on land).

 

Some reviewers, e.g. Joanne Ostrow (Denver Post, Mar. 8) have bemoaned the attention to “so much astrophysics” noting:

                                                                                      

“Marvel at the stunning visuals, be stirred by the grand concepts, but don’t expect to really comprehend astrophysics. The producers assure us it’s enough to come away feeling a respect for science.”

 

My quarrel with that view is that first, it's way too myopic. It dumbs down the Americans who would be attracted to watching the series, and second, it is hard to ‘come away with respect for science’ unless one at least has a workable, basic understanding of what the science is about!  This is why, for example, I did extensive past work on  introducing basic and intermediate astronomy concepts to blog readers, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/07/tackling-simple-astronmoyh-problems.html

 

Also I did a series introducing readers to astrophysics earlier, in 2010, followed up by more advanced astrophysics: e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/introducing-some-advanced-astrophysics-1.html

 

But ‘Cosmos’ surely won’t veer anywhere near this level of detail, hence the astronomy and astrophysics ought to be understandable to most viewers who've at least had some high school science under their belts, and exposure to a bit of algebra and geometry.

Two aspects in this first episode were particularly useful and captivating: nailing down our own planet’s cosmic ‘address’, i.e. Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo cluster, universe, and the way a ‘cosmic calendar’ is presented to grasp (or try to) the vast stretches of cosmic time. Thus, the Big Bang occurs the first instant of ‘January 1^st’,  while humans don’t appear until Dec. 31^st and recorded history only occupies the last 14 seconds of ‘December 31^st’. Nearly the entire cosmic ‘year’ has elapsed before humans have appeared.

 

Ostrow is correct that ‘Cosmos’ “is not a documentary so much as a cinematic journey” and this was also appreciated by Sagan in his original series. There simply aren’t the details to qualify as a genuine documentary which should mean even a greater viewership than say, Brian Greene’s PBS series ‘The Elegant Universe’ (in which the equations for cosmic string theory are also featured)

 

One of my favorites segments, as a confirmed atheist and free thought advocate, featured the graphic animations depicting Giordano Bruno’s vicious treatment at the hands of the Inquisition. Merely because Bruno visualized an infinite cosmos and that the stars were other suns (likely with populated planets too), he was hounded for his views. After continuing to express them and refusing to recant, we see the Inquisitors – depicted as demonic looking perverts - interrogating and torturing Bruno,  then burning him at the stake.   To me, the segment graphically exposed how science and religion differ and why the two can never, ever be 'bedfellows' - but rather eternally at each other's throats.  Thus, the recent memes spewed out that attempt to show how religion helped "advance" science are so much hooey and balderdash. Science helped itself primarily by breaking away from the constraints of thought and inquiry peculiar to religion!

Ostrow warns, also commenting on this:

"Expect pushback from conservative religious quarters- this series unapologetically takes a stand for science versus blind faith"

 

But why pushback against the TRUTH? My take is there won’t be any such ‘pushback’ because these close-minded dolts won’t bother to watch it in the first place!  They are too sure of their blind faith based on nothing but superstition and old wives tales elaborated by primitive, semi-literate nomads in an ancient book.

I only had a couple of quibbles with this first episode: first the banishing of Pluto to a sub-planet sized,  'asteroid type' rock, which Tyson himself was partly responsible for, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/03/neil-degrasse-tyson-is-wrong-about.html

 

 and second,  depicting the big bang as an explosion when it actually wasn’t.  It is more an unfolding in space and time.  The standard analogy, i.e. to a terrestrial explosion - while attention grabbing is inaccurate.  A good article ('Cosmology's 5 Big Things You Need to Know')    will be of help in grasping this, found in the May, 2007 issue of ASTRONOMY magazine. As noted therein, p. 31:

 

"The universe's beginning wasn't an explosion. It was closer to an unfolding or creation of matter, energy, time and space itself. "

 

The last is especially important as it is consonant with the expansion of space with time. The lead astronomer of the Wilkinson Microwave Array Project quoted in the piece also adds:

 

"The Big Bang is not an accurate name for the theory. What this theory describes is the expansion and cooling of the universe. It doesn't describe an explosion at all."

 

Thus, a better analogy would be depicting a hot, very dense gas inside a confined container or bag, then letting it all out. The dense gas escapes, expands into the larger volume  available and cools as it does so. Of course, this is no where as entertaining or riveting as an explosion!

 

 

Never mind, this series re-do is welcome and at least ought to get again get people’s minds expanding outwards beyond their limited terrestrial lives and everyday concerns.

'Big Brother' Haters Merit Neither Sympathy, Respect......or Ratings!

No, not the NSA's Big Brother spies and lying troglodytes, who merely merit firing for violating the Constitution. I am talking about the haters ensconced in the 24/7 spy camera residence of the CBS "reality" show Big Brother, which is drawing the ire of assorted critics - as it should.

Look, it's one thing to be a demented, friendless loser (entertaining fantasies of "salvation"),  who sits in a squirrel cage hideout in his apt. and churns out blog after blog of hate:  deriding those he despises as "monkeys", "black apes", "libtards" or "c*nts" (in the case of potential female presidential contenders) - but it's another thing to have it on a network prime time program. In the first case, the creepazoid psycho may have barely five regular followers, in the latter case we're talking about millions. This may be one reason Barbados opted never to have the 'Big Brother' show as part of its mixed STV (subscription TV)  schedule,  though it did accept 'The Amazing Race' and 'Survivor'.

According to a piece in The Denver Post yesterday by media critic Joanne Ostrow ('Racist, Boorish 'Big Brother' Houseguests Light Up Ratings', p. 6C) this installment of Big Brother has out done all others in hate, over the top nastiness, and racial epithets - all issued by the whiteys (including two Jews, if you can believe it!)   While one can make allowances, perhaps, for those from the South - like Aaryn Gries from San Marcos, TX, and 'Spencer' from Ark.,  it's difficult to understand the basis for the hate spewed out by the Jewish female contestants. Have they not read their own history or studied the history of the holocaust? Are they not aware that similar racial opprobrium as they now spew forth was also part and parcel of Hitler's propaganda films on German Jewry?

Enter Gina Marie Zimmerman, of Staten Island, NY who (according to Ostrow's article):

"in the online feed used the N-word to describe welfare as 'insurance' for black people"

An aside:

This is interesting indeed, coming from a privileged white woman, who likely has never known poverty in her life. It's even more interesting because her recycled trope fits in almost perfectly with the current FOX campaign to denigrate food stamp recipients. Chris Hayes' featured this on his 'All In' show two nights ago, displaying a Fox News (Fox Nation) banner header: 'Unabashed Surfer Receiving Food Stamps to Buy Sushi and Avoid Work'.   Chris noted the content was all about how the guy was receiving food stamps to avoid working. He also noted it is a case of "perpetuating lies on a program that has one of the lowest rates of fraud in the U.S." and "just about the most dishonest depiction of food stamp fraud ever."

Chris portrayed it as "lies" but at a deeper level,  of course, FOX commits the fallacy of distribution,  when an argument assumes there is no difference between a specific person belonging to a given class and the class as a whole. In other words, it makes no distinction between  the distributive (referring to a given member) and collective-  referring to the class itself as a whole.  Thus, FOX Nation sought to show-  and hoped its ignorant viewers would accept- that because one loser surf bum avoids work using food stamps, ALL those who need food stamps are of the same exploitative inclination.  It also reminds me of Michelle Malkin's attack on Social Security disability two years ago, in which in which she attempted to link the outrageous behavior of a couple of extreme cases (adults with adult baby syndrome' - who needed to wear diapers all day so couldn't work- had to have disability)  to the behavior of all those receiving Social Security disability.

The same fallacy is employed to attempt to stir bitter outrage over "voter fraud" - to justify the use of photo IDs which would essentially disenfranchise most African-Americans especially older ones - who were often born at home and with no birth certificates. In fact, the actual cases of voter fraud are so rare as to not be worth a mention. Yet yahoos and haters try to turn it into some major conspiracy against proper white voters!

So what we find in each case is an outrageous insult to the intelligence of the prospective viewer (in the case of the Fox Nation bunkum) or reader, in the case of Malkin's odious tripe.  Does Ms. Zimmerman buy into these moronic fables? I hate to say it, but it seems so!

She,  like other demented loons, appears to be buying into what Chris Hayes has called the GOP 'turning its institutional attention to fighting the scourge of hungry people getting food'. In other words, the Goopers "want to turn food stamp recipients into the next welfare queens"  according to Hayes, and would rather all those hungry people, 1 in 3 of whom are kids, starve.

This whole shtick was exposed on FOX in a disgusting propaganda piece called "The Great Food Stamp Binge", grossly misrepresenting a program that feeds millions of hungry Americans - many of whom fell out of the middle class and may be your neighbors. What do these nattering FOX turds expect? That the hungry in our nation starve? The kids go without food? Are these morons even aware that one of the ways McDonald's lists for employees to "try to make ends meet" is to use food stamps (since their wages are so low). Oh, they also mention trying to get an extra job or two!


Meanwhile,  Hayes provided the reality check facts on food stamp recipients, including:

- Less than 2% of SNAP benefits go to households that don't need the food stamps

- The program is actually under-used with roughly 25% of people eligible signing up

- Less than 40% of seniors eligible participated in 2010.

WHO is actually receiving help? Hayes again gives the facts from actual government statistics.

- 91% of SNAP benefits go to families living under the poverty line of $23,550 for a family of 4

- 55% of SNAP benefits go to households with incomes below half of the poverty line.

- Most of the food stamp recipients live in Red state counties.

According to Bloomberg News, "among the 254 counties where food stamps doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them (in red states) last year".

This is eye-opening and shows something is rotten in Denmark, or rather down Dixie way (which are all red states).  It's also interesting that some of the biggest hater bloggers are also gov't benefit recipients, who are blessed by not having to work any more - so they can blog on and hate! They castigate others taking handouts but don't look at themselves. Maybe they can't spell hypocrisy.

Back to Big Brother.

Aaryn Gries, the 22 yr. old white girl from Texas, also earned fame in the house by "calling one fellow contestant a 'queer'" according to Ostrow (ibid.) and telling an Asian-American contestant to "shut up and go make some rice".  She also "warned others to be careful what you say in the dark you might not be able to see that n-bitch" in reference to the African -American girl, Candice, from New Orleans.

Then there is Amanda Zuckerman who Ostrow notes "called another housemate a 'monkey'." She also went one step further and "complained about a black cast member putting a headband on her 'greasy, nappy hair head'". Not yet satisfied, she mocked the accent of a Korean-American woman.

Of course, some dunderheads - like a certain intellect challenged hate blogger- will likely say this is all an example of "political correctness" run amuck. But really what it's far more likely to be is civility gone lost. And please, calling out hateful remarks and bare-faced prejudice is not the same as being politically correct. And anyone who believes so is a moron, just like anyone who seriously  believes that all food stamp recipients are 'welfare queens'.

None of this would matter much, as Ostrow notes, if Big Brother wasn't enjoying sky high ratings. As Ostrow observes:

"This week, up against the 'Teen Choice Awards' on FOX, Big Brother was the highest rated show of the evening with 7.2 million viewers."

The saddest remark of all was perhaps the one quoted from CBS honcho Les Moonves who told critics in Los Angeles recently, according to Ostrow:

"What you see there.....is reflective of how certain people feel in America."

Well, let us hope it's only "certain people",  mostly losers, like the pitiful hate blogger referenced earlier. Let's hope it isn't over thirty million mostly in the South and red states that wanted desperately to see Obama go down in the last election. And when he didn't, found their new racist 'oats' on steroids. It's one thing to feel your racist 'oats', another to broadcast them.

Let's also hope that when the racist house guests on Big Brother finally exit, they get a good look at themselves when they play back the episodes...and then ask if those people, those bigots, are individuals they can live with.

NEWTOWN.....And the Disappearance of Childhood (2)

In his Chapter Seven ‘The Adult Child’, Neil Postman lays out a summary of his thesis on the disappearance of childhood in tandem with defining the modern conception of “adult” and what it has evolved (devolved?) into after the emergence of video culture. As he puts it, the modern idea of the adult “is largely a product of the printing press.” Further, almost all the attributes we associate with adulthood “are those either generated or amplified by a literary culture”. These include:


- A capacity for self-restraint

- A tolerance for delayed gratification

- A sophisticated ability to think sequentially and conceptually

- A preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future

- A high valuation of reason and hierarchical order


He then goes on to warn that as electronic (visual) media have assumed center stage “different attitudes and character traits come to be valued and a new, diminished definition of adulthood begins to emerge”. This new stunted version of the adult which reaches its apotheosis (nadir?) in the adult child has arrived with the television-video age which flattens out all differences between all ages. A typical observation by Postman (p. 101) serves to clarify and lead to a fuller exposition:


“Television redefines what is meant by ‘sound judgment’ by making it into an aesthetic rather than a logical matter. A barely literate ten year old can interpret and at least respond to the information “given off” by a (political) candidate as easily and quickly as a well-informed 50 year old."

As Exhibit A, look no further than the recent phenomenon of  4-year old Abigail Evans, about whose infantile election complaints much was made by our semi-inebriated, blow-dried media hacks who confused her bawling about “Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney” with how real adults interpreted their policies, and the polarizing arguments that ensued. Some in the media actually had the temerity to lead with crappola like: “We’re all Abigail Evans Now!” Uh, no we’re not, and if you think YOU are, Mr. Media Maven, you have more serious problems than can even be described by the latest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual.

But this media hyping is instructive because it eminently proves Postman’s point, that not only are: a) Children now the new “adults”, but symmetrically that (b) today’s adults are the new children, infantile, narcissistic and greedy as only ADULT children can be. Hence, a conflation exists such that childhood has essentially disappeared. I can’t cite every example and case that Postman does, but for anyone interested I suggest getting hold of his book, including his examples of how our corporate hyper-media sexualizes children in films, music and other areas. He notes this would have been unthinkable, for example, as recently as the “Little Rascals-Our Gang” era in the 1930s where teens and tweens were never seen wearing anything other than children’s clothing. And NO, in the 1930s you’d never ever catch a kid appearing as 12-year old Brooke Shields did in the 1978 Louis Malle-directed flick ‘Pretty Baby”. (One of several films he mentions (p.124), along with “Blue Lagoon”, “The Exorcist”, “Paper Moon”, “Carrie” and “The Omen”)


But what is it about video-TV culture that makes it so dangerous? The danger is twofold: 1) Television –video culture essentially opens the “barn door” and lets everything into the house without careful parsing or interpretation, and 2) TV does not call attention to ideas first but rather “atmospherics’, personalities and hot button emotional issues. This makes it almost impossible to have a sane political discussion, for example, in today’s TV sound bite venue.


Even worse, the presentation of TV news, in Postman’s calculations, amounts to a totally unbalanced retelling of the day’s top events without point of view or even import. Events reeled off from the TV anchors’ chairs end up as an endless stream of meaningless drivel. Postman details a typical night’s news viewing of WCBS on page 104, where he assays the time allotments as follows:


- 264 seconds for a story about bribery of public officials

- 40 seconds about Iran

- 22 seconds about Aeroflot

- 25 seconds about Muhammad Ali

- 53 seconds about a New Mexico Prison riot

- 174 seconds for an ‘in depth’ look at depression

- 18 seconds about Suzanne Sommers


As Postman puts it (ibid.):

“This way of defining the ‘news’ achieves two interesting effects. First, it makes it difficult to think about an event, and second, it makes it difficult to feel anything about an event. By thinking, I mean having the time and motivation to ask oneself: What is the meaning of such an event? What is its history? What are the reasons for it? How does it fit into what I know about the world? By feeling, I mean the normal human responses to murder, rape, fire, bribery and general mayhem”

Postman then goes on to make the point that the manner of presentation is such that events are presented without any historical continuity or other context, and in such rapid succession “they wash over our minds in an undifferentiated stream”. Postman’s other questions, observations are equally germane:

- What is the connection between Aeroflot and Suzanne Sommers?

- Why is Iran worth 40 seconds and the results of a basketball game 160?

- How is it determined that Suzanne Sommers gets less time than Muhammad Ali?


The effect of presenting a meaningless string of unrelated acts, events is that there is no sense of proportion to be discerned in the world. To quote Postman: “Events are entirely idiosyncratic; history is irrelevant.”

It is in this context that the aftermath of the Newtown slayings must be considered, and how the national media treated the young surviving victims. Because if events are ultimately “idiosyncratic” and can “just happen” while proportion is lacking in the presentation (so that feelings are also absent), then it means the media presenting the stories must create ersatz emotion where none would otherwise exist.

Thus, we saw in the wake of the Aurora shootings, microphones being shoved into the faces of victims while being asked “How do you FEEL?” How the hell do YOU think they felt, Mr. Media Hack? Thus we also, on Friday, beheld microphones shoved in the face of children who were psychologically victimized by the Sandy Hook killings.

Denver Post columnist Joanne Ostrow perhaps put it in the most salient terms (DPost, Dec. 16, p. 17A):

“Does it serve any journalistic purpose to put children on live television in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting? Is it ethically permissible to put shocked parents on live TV, to give the nation a taste of the horror? Clearly it serves no purpose other than titillation to put shocked, underage and vulnerable people on TV to give the nation a taste of the horror.”

 

Exactly, but more importantly, to invoke Postman’s thesis: this has to be done to fabricate ersatz emotion because the very nature of video news on a 24/7 cycle is to neutralize and flatten all emotional response. Beyond that, the constant emphasis on the horror can play havoc with young, impressionable minds ….i.e. those of KIDS!


It is for this reason, Dr. David Schonfeld, Director for the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital has warned parents across the country to be careful about letting children consume media coverage of the events. Or indulge in obsessing over the events via Twitter, where real time events take precedence.


The problem is that it may already be too late for any of this, since the genie has already escaped the bottle. The omnipresence of a video connection wherever one goes, as well as a web connection or camera phone, has assured none of us can now escape the ever-present video reality. The most we can hope to do is temper it, and use it judiciously – or try to – and that means being aware of its effects, including how the news cycle is also “dumbed down” and trivialized by the intermittent presence of commercials. To quote Postman one more time (p 106):

“The news, in a phrase, is not an adult world view. Otherwise we would not be shown four commercials celebrating the affluence of America, followed by the despair and degradation of prisoners in New Mexico.”

Even worse, is that the commercially-dominant idiom fuels private consumption and accelerates the turn into infantile, ‘me’ behavior. Benjamin Barber, author of ‘CONSUMED’ is clear on the connection to capitalist-market privatization and infantilism (p. 159):
 

“Examining the dynamics of privatization, as we have done, suggests that private relates to public as childish stands to the adult. Prioritizing the individual and rendering the community private in a way that makes it look like an aggregation of individual wants and needs is a puerile way to construct the social world.”

 

As I’ve shown before this also applies with particularly strong force to 2nd amendment fetishists of the type who uphold owning automatic weapons and multiple-capacity clips. They – including the automatic weapons aficionados in Newtown itself, have placed their own childish demands and needs ahead of community security.

And, of course, author Mark Bauerlein ('The Dumbest Generation'), has already shown how the social media obsession has infantilized the under-30 generation by enabling them to create virtual worlds, Facebook pages etc. that “mirrors their own woes and fantasies, a pre-packaged representation of the world, a ‘Daily ME’”

In other words, a solipsistic world of puerile narcissism. Bauerlein (p. 137) underscores this by citing a quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, purporting to reveal the secret of his site in terms of never having to “hear a dissenting word’:

“That’s kind of what we are doing here, but with ‘what’s going on in the world with these people I care about’. “

So, all the things that bother and bore them are blocked out. The people they don’t know and don’t want to know they can exclude at the touch of key. A new bomb may have been developed by Iran, and an earthquake may have killed thousands in China, but in the case of Facebook users it’s the old monkey show: “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” .

A delimited reality is confected which deliberately excludes the harsh outside world, and confines the personalized reality to chirpy “how r ya’s”, or gossip, mainly in deformed English which Bauerlein ranks just above the reading level of pre-school children’s books. Again, consolidating Neil Postman’s thesis that we’re all reverting to a conflated adult-child/ child adult society that likely will be unable to handle the next real mega-crisis.

By extension, the “news cycle” to which most of us are exposed, is infantilizing and regressive if it’s the only source from which we obtain our perspectives on the world. If don’t read widely, including newspapers, we will become the adult –children that Postman holds up to ridicule, the ones who inevitably end up in a Jerry Springer world, whether by choice or accident.

As for the children, as in Newtown and other places, one can only hope that their parents will now assure them some measure of genuine childhood as well as genuine security, and not thrust them too quickly into the adult scene ….including training them to fire automatic weapons and explode propane gas tanks at nearby “freelance” (unregulated)  ranges!

Calling all adults! Any? At all? We need you to show up and take responsibility! Not go out with your tyke firing rounds with automatic weapons at propane gas tanks!