The Bob Edwards Show

(via azspot)

azspot:

Cable news thinking has nothing to do with fires or with politics. Instead, it amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:

1. Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
2. Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what’s important.
3. Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
4. Unwillingness to reverse course and change one’s mind.
5. Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
6. Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
7. Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
8. Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
9. Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
10. Confusing opinion with the truth.
11. Revising facts to fit a point of view.
12. Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.

givemesomethingtoread:

During the last four decades, a well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study has taken place in American higher education. The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history.

azspot:

Now look at it this way. The United States’ military budget is $636,292,979,000. Now, think about the “grave threats to our security” that neoconservatives are always rambling about–and realize that they spend a tiny percentage of this amount on their militaries:

Russia - $39,600,000,000
China - $70,308,600,000
North Korea - $5,500,000,000
Iran - $2,500,000,000
Venezuela - $4,000,000,000

In other words, we could cut military spending in half and we’d still be spending about three times as much as our “major threats” combined.