Is this it?????
Global Eye
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/11/05/120.html
No Ways Tired
By Chris Floyd
Published: November 5, 2004
Well, that's it. The great American electoral agon is over at last. Now George W. Bush -- the duly elected, finally legitimate president of the United States -- can get back to doing what he does best: killing people for corporate profit and personal aggrandizement.
Yes, it's a hard blow for the world. Yes, it's a deep shame for American democracy, poisoned by lies, fear, greed and hysteria. Yes, it means that tens of thousands of innocent people will now be killed -- by more war, more neglect, more ignorance, more repression, more brutality, more hatred, more fanaticism. Yes, it means that the planet will be gashed with more wounds, smeared with more filth, left to wither and die. Yes, it's a giant step backward for the human spirit, back to the muck of arbitrary rule by vicious elites and their ham-fisted goons, their well-wadded courtiers, their yapping sycophants. Yes, it means that somewhere out there, in the blood-dimmed haze of a dark age falling, Lucifer and bin Laden are lighting cigars and raising a glass to toast the victory of their good friend George.
These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?
Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation -- give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence -- and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin that Bush and his terrorist partners have made of the world.
Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist -- without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.
This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Bush Machine -- that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and woman-haters -- might appear at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite four years of the most relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation and fearmongering ever hurled against a free society, more than 55 million people voted to reject Bush and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of aggressive war; his gulag system of torture and lawless detention; his savage assault on civil rights, the environment, working people and the poor; his systematic destruction of social programs; his transfer of sovereignty from individuals and communities to the iron grip of his corporate donors; his trashing of hard-won international agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional arms, war crimes, global warming, the rights of women and the protection of children; his unleashing of rabid religious zealots into the bowels of government to set policies on science, health, education, welfare, while sucking up billions in public money to fund their sectarian causes.
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Such mass dissent -- even in "wartime," in the face of the Machine -- is surely cause for hope. Moreover, recent academic studies show that a large majority of Bush supporters actually disagree with him on everything from the Kyoto Protocol to missile defense to international law to workers' rights -- but somehow believe that he shares their views. Most Bush-backers also still believe that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida colluded in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- yet this same majority says that the conquest of Iraq would be illegitimate if there were no WMD and no 9/11 connection. Thus more than half of the Bush voters on Tuesday oppose his actual policies, including the criminal war in Iraq -- they just don't know it yet, because they're mired in carefully cultivated delusion.
Of course, many Bush voters are willfully deluded, glad to be suckered and betrayed. They love the ludicrous puppet-show of his supposed greatness, his all-seeing wisdom, his mandate from God. They get teary-eyed at the thought of his honesty and goodness -- while he kills 100,000 innocent people in Iraq, as a new medical study shows, with a brutally stupid military aggression based on lies and fantasies, fomenting more terrorism with each new barbarity and gorging his cronies on blood money. This hard core will never respond to the truth.
But if we can enlighten even the smallest percentage of Bush's razor-thin majority, then support for his murderous folly and waste will quickly erode. One by one, the puppet-strings will snap, and America's headlong plunge into tyranny, bigotry and endless imperial war can perhaps -- perhaps -- be halted, even reversed.
It's worth the fight. Let's take it on, let's take them down. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity and justice starts now.
"Chris Floyd" is apparently an alias of Mark Morford's.
Totally awesome catch, dude!
Uhhhhhmmmmmmmm.....so what's his plan? Oh, yeah--it's a secret.
-snip-
This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Bush Machine -- that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and woman-haters -- might appear at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite four years of the most relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation and fearmongering ever hurled against a free society, more than 55 million people voted to reject Bush and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of aggressive war; his gulag system of torture and lawless detention; his savage assault on civil rights, the environment, working people and the poor; his systematic destruction of social programs; his transfer of sovereignty from individuals and communities to the iron grip of his corporate donors; his trashing of hard-won international agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional arms, war crimes, global warming, the rights of women and the protection of children; his unleashing of rabid religious zealots into the bowels of government to set policies on science, health, education, welfare, while sucking up billions in public money to fund their sectarian causes.
Gollllll-eeeeee, Mr Floyd. You use your tongue purtier'n a twenty dollar whore.
(Apologies to Slim Pickens)
The liberal friends that I have always rant about how conservatives see only BLACK and WHITE, and are blind to the shades of grey. I should show them this article.
HAR!!! Great piece! Lots of kids who write for college newpapers write exactly like this guy.
Dude, if lust for power is encoded by evolution, and people are just bags of chemicals, how can they not be in thrall to the soup in their heads? Aren't leftists bags of soup too? Or, if one bag of soup can think a and do A, and another can think b and do B, in what sense is there any thralldom involved? Bags of soup with choices based on ideas are every bit as undetermined as idealist minds with choices based on ideas.
But he reaches for determinism only to hide from the uncomfortable reality that millions disagree with him freely.
LOL! He forgot "putting arsenic in our water", dragging black people behind pickup trucks, pushing old ladies in wheel chairs off cliffs, praying to (gasp) God in the WH....etc etc.
Sound like the nut wants to fight us .......again. In the words of the late traitor, J effin K, "Bring it on".
Talking about the Kerry campaign. If so, I agree.
Well, then it must be true. Chris whats-his-name writing for the Moscow Times says so. Guess I'll have to return that last Halliburton check and commit hara kiri. Woe is me, What a way to go.
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Incompetence is bliss, say researchers
BY ERICA GOODE
New York Times
There are many incompetent people in the world. But a Cornell University study has shown that most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
People who do things badly, according to David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, the researchers -- Dunning and Justin Kruger, then a graduate student -- suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,´´ wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.
This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,´´ the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
Some college students, Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: After doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong. In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate´´ how well they had performed.
In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.
Aiming high -- real high
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored in only the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English´´ and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.
On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against those of an ``expert´´ panel of professional comedians), low-scoring subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the results were less conclusive.
Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.´´ When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade´´ the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,´´ the researchers concluded. In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.
The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.´´
Such studies are not without critics. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California-Riverside, for example, said he suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the meaning of ``average´´ in statistical terms. But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated that there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency and not be aware of it.
Concrete clues
In some cases, Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own inability is inevitable: ``In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you´re incompetent,´´ he said.
But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And social norms prevent most people, when faced with incompetence, from blurting out, ``You stink!´´ -- truthful though this assessment may be.