inkbluesky

type grass. i posted one previously shot from another angle. its a little large at over 2mb.

A Nation of Hysterics

All this reflects a more general problem: the many cultural and political forces pushing us to behave like a nation of hysterics.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the typical American suburb is just about the safest place that has ever existed in the history of the world — yet it’s full of terrified people.

Statistics have little power in the face of a media environment in which extraordinarily rare events, such as strangers kidnapping children, are presented as commonplace by profit-hungry “news” outlets, for whom the bottom line is that fear sells.

Politicians realize this too. The ongoing overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is only the most vivid example of how our leaders cynically exploit our fears by making wildly exaggerated claims, such as that Islamic terrorism poses an “existential threat” to America.

There is one network in particular and most local news affiliates that sell the childnapping hysteria. AS the author points out there are 75 million children in America with about 115 abductions (in 2006). Everyday, and I do mean every day some far Right talking head, some of them ministers cry wolf about the so called Islamic plot to have a worldwide Caliphate.  You can pull out all the statistics you like proving that the chances of your kid being grabbed are very small and that the world’s one billion Muslims hardly seem like they’re on the march to war and it doesn’t seem to matter. Fear is profitable, it keeps people’s eyes glued to the screen, but it doesn’t seem to all about profit. Fear seems to be something that some people enjoy, much like some movie goers enjoy being scared at a horror movie. There is something about this phenomenon that is wired into some people and not others. Speaking up and saying hey let’s keep all the potential risks that we face in perspective is the new heresy.

tree on canvas

It has turned into a myth buster day, Inequalities

The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.