Manufactured Predilections

I had dinner with my friend Geri and found myself struggling to define an idea that had been inchoate. Almost everyone senses that polls and trends are manufactured to order. Taking this a baby step further, is there any real difference between announcing a foiled subway terror plot on the eve of the patriot act vote and the sudden appearance of a Goldman Sacks lawsuit on the eve of a bank regulation vote? Are events in the world made to happen by a hidden cabal of mysterious overseers? I doubt it, the world's a big place. Is our view of events squeezed, directed, edited, and sanitized, with an eagle eye for profit by a few public media corporations and their advertisers? Rhetorical question. The news is made to fit an entertainment ideal, a sort of distraction or frame to the real business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. It is made to fit the predilections of the target audience, leaving no room for critical thinking that might leak over to the advertising, and deposits a small amount of unease and powerlessness that the advertiser promises to cure. Sophomore stuff, to be sure, but there it is. Keep a large grain of salt in your work kit and use it often.

Here are some links that I found interesting in the last few days. The first set is media related.

• For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law.
• As soon as we move away from the pure private good paradigm, either because our good is non-rival or non-excludable or both, the market ceases to look like a good idea.
• Today, men of the Right such as Andrew Bacevich and Bill Kauffman publish volumes in the American Empire Project edited by progressives Tom Englehardt and Steve Fraser, while antiwar left-wingers such as Norman Mailer and Ralph Nader appear in the pages of TAC.
• Corruption in the Catholic Church

The next pair are Economic in nature. The China one is a bit odd. The idea that they might be more concerned with their own welfare and dismissive of the legitimate needs of a few currency speculators is just ..

• However, economists remain divided both on whether the yuan is undervalued and how to best influence Chinese policy on the issue.
• Were the big banks all knowingly running Ponzi schemes? That's the question that arises from the stunning hearings held this week by the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, on the collapse of Washington Mutual, the largest thrift failure in the U.S.

The last three are the good ones. Fun stuff. The first is a short story by John Kessel about Buffalo, N.Y. I put it in for Scott (hometown). Tom Waits is a collection of pictures, with a supprise guest, and the last one has the biology folks scratching their collective heads.

• Buffalo by John Kessel
• The piano has been drinking: featuring Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark.
• Metagenomic studies have identified viable Pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV), a plant virus, in the stool of healthy subjects Note: Jump-to clickspace in blue to the right of abstract