April 16, 2022

Elon "Modest Me" Musk wants to buy Twitter. What could go wrong? By Hal Brown

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Yesterday's blog


 File this under I really don't give a damn about this story. Well, I gave enough of a damn to see if I can get a tweet of mine to trend. That's why I posted this on Twitter (click to enlarge):

I superimposed the DonkeyHotey caricature of Musk over a depiction of the Telsa he fired into space Wirth his Space-X rocket.


You can follow replies or retweets, if there are any, here.

April 15, 2022

The color wheel is a metaphor for U.S. becoming all white in near future, by Hal Brown

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"The color wheel is a metaphor for U.S. becoming all white, as with sunlight, in near future" by Hal Brown

This story is dedicated to the memory Jackie Robinson. Today we celebrate the date in 1947 he played his first Major League baseball game. See article about he originally was a Republican and became a dedicated Democrat.



Just for the hell of it I decided to add red, blue, and green lights for my bathroom to add a little festiveness. I thought replacing three white lights with them might make the room darker but they didn't.


With the white lights unscrewed the room still looks white albeit a little darker..


Observing this led me to do some research about the colors that constitute visible white light. Here is what I found on this website:

What are the 3 primary colors that make up white light?

Light is perceived as white by humans when all three cone cell types are simultaneously stimulated by equal amounts of red, green, and blue light. Because the addition of these three colors yields white light, the colors red, green, and blue are termed the primary additive colors.

How many colors make a white light?

The spectrum of white light consists of six basic colours arranged in a specific order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Although Newton understood that a beam of light of a particular colour is always deviated by the same amount, he did not appear to understand why this is so.

How many different colours make up white light?

White light is made up of the following colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

It occurred to me that this is a metaphor for what the United States will be when the group commonly referred to among the MAGA bigots “us white people”, and with liberals “angry white people” are no longer  in the majority.

One could just say that if the primary colors of red, green, and blue represent people with black, brown, and white skin, add them all together you get white. I don’t mean white in the sense of the color of white skin which is even in an albino is never really white, or a sheet of white parer, but white like the sunlight streaming through my skylight:



Here’s another metaphor: sunlight is known to be a disinfectant. There’s nothing this diseased country needs more than a good disinfecting and I don’t mean the swallowing of bleach as a cure for Covid.


Expanding the color metaphor to all the colors of the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet made me think of both the original Pride flag with its six colors...





... to the new version:





Photo by HalBrown

 
Whether it is gender identity or ethnic background the United States in moving inextricably towards being a country where people who place a great deal of stock in having white skin and being heterosexual, and you might as well add in being Evangelical Christians and believing in conspiracy theories (see previous blog entry), no longer can swing elections their way.

In their death throes they are more likely to express their rage in antisocial ways in order to shape our society and culture to their liking. This could see the end of Roe vs. Wade protections of a woman's right to choose and in Republican  controlled states the end of fair elections.

But time is still on the side of shifting demography, and time will usher in true white sunlight. Anything that was changed for the worse can be changed back for the better.

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Hal Brown, Conspiracy theories

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I received this in an email from Tom Dwyer Auto Repair in Selwood, Oregon (Website). This repair service is an excellent car repair service which promotes progressive books by having a collection of just about every anti-Trump book ever published in their waiting room for customers to read.


Conspiracy Theories...
When Reality just isn't twisted enough.

We live in a world that is, unfortunately, dominated by conspiracy theories.  There are the funny ones like the Jewish Space Lasers or the Flat Earthers, and less entertaining ones like the Satanist pedophile ring in the pizza restaurant or the 'false flags' of school shootings.  It may be tempting to laugh, but one need look no farther than the January 6 Insurrection, fueled by the paranoid ravings of election fraud, to see how deadly serious these self-reinforcing lies can be.  As we were strolling along the InterTubes recently, one link led to another and they all prompted us to share this short article on Conspiracy Theories with you.  There's an amazing chart with current conspiracies, reasons people believe, and ways to fight back, but keep reading for your own way to participate in spreading the lies that someone, somewhere will believe...


  

Conspiracies in the world today


***MUST LOOK***



 The Conspiracy Chart 2021


- A chart of conspiracies arranged from those that actually, provably happened to those that are even too insane for Alex Jones.  And it’s interactive, so if you see a conspiracy you haven’t heard of before (like “Biden is a robot”) all you have to do is click for more ‘information’.

  

The Craziest Conspiracy Theories That People Actually Believe


30 Real Doozies, Charlotte Chilton in Popular Mechanics, Oct 2021

 

The 13 biggest conspiracy theories,


 Benjamin Radford and Stephanie Pappas in LiveScience, Dec 2021

 

Why do people believe this horsepuckey?



Belief in conspiracy theories is the product of normal human psychology, but can be extremely dangerous, Graham Lawton in New Scientist 


Conspiracy Theories: Why Do We Believe Them? Calvin J. Emerson on Engage.youth.gov, Aug 2021

 

Speaking of Psychology: Why people believe in conspiracy theories, Karen Douglas PhD in American Psychological Association ‘Speaking of Psychology’, Jan 2021

 

Maybe a free thinker but not a critical one: High conspiracy belief is associated with low critical thinking ability, Lantian, Bagneux, Delouvee, and Gauvrit in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Jan 2021 


The Roots Of Conspiracy Theory, Helen Lee Bouygues in Forbes, Mar 2021


Fighting back IS possible… sometimes


Conspiracy Theories: What Can I Do to Stop Them? Calvin J. Emerson on Engage.youth.gov, Aug 2021

 

Expert: The best way to fight a conspiracy theory isn’t with facts, Keith Brannon in Tulane News, Oct 2020

 

It's only fake-believe: how to deal with a conspiracy theorist, David Robson in The Guardian, Nov 2020

 

Zen and the Art of Talking to Conspiracy Theorists, Jonathan Jarry in McGill Office for Science and Society, Feb 2021





My contribution to the articles above is this from AlterNet:



Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown, wrote:


 "There is a calculating quality to Greene’s polemics," Zimmer wrote. "Last fall, for instance, she recorded a campaign video in which she used a military-grade sniper rifle to blow up a car that had the word 'socialism' written on it, promising to do the same to the 'Democrats’ socialist agenda.'"

However, he also highlighted what he believes to be the reason behind her antics. "It was over-exaggerated campaign nonsense," Zimmer noted. "But Greene knew the unsubtle insinuation of using violence against a political opponent would demand attention."


My view: There is no doubt that she expresses extreme views and probably does so in a calculated way In order to get media attention and incite her base. However she also promotes ludicrous conspiracy theories. It is not possible to ascertain whether she she believes them. If she does the expert analyses of why people are unable or unwilling to evaluate these theories using logical thinking applies to her.

 


It appears that some people who understand how gullible believers in conspiracy theories are use this knowledge to exploit them in order to make money. Consider:

QAnon influencers luring followers into multi-level marketing schemes: report

, Raw Story

April 15, 2022

 


 

 
 

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