The Raw Story has the article Noam Chomsky helps explain the ‘Fox Effect’ in upcoming film ‘Brainwashing of my Dad’.

Writer and documentarian Jen Senko has released a trailer for the film “The Brainwashing of my Dad,” in which she explores her father’s political conversion from lifelong Democrat into angry, ultra-conservative talk radio listener.

The trailer has an excellent teaser that will make me want to see this documentary when it comes out. She promises to tell us how the victim can be deprogrammed.

As I watched the segment about how the listening to talk radio is usually done alone, it struck me how close this interaction was to hypnotism. I found a comment that addressed this very point.

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Regarding the comments that say there is something hypnotic going on with Fox news. The famous hypnotist Milton Erickson described his “yes set” or piggy back principle. One tells the something they are compelled to agree with. That is, they would not disagree due to some strict internal value system. This is the “yes set.” Once a rapport is developed based on the “yes set,” the target belief can be inserted.

Fox news is pro-Christianity and aligns itself with the anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-immigrant mentality to get access to 100% believability rating by the vulnerable population. Fox news then adds in the target messages, “tax breaks for the rich are good”, “corporate power is good”, “Democrats are bad,” etc. Fox news is all about this combination of messages of the serving the authoritarian rich together with the deep-seated religious/reproductive/racist values (the yes set). This is a mental control tactic well known to hypnotists. https://www.google.com/search?q=milton+erickson+yes+set

Esquire has the article Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher.

There already are forces, even within the Democratic party, gathering themselves to squash that debate. Larry Summers, her old bête noire, whose hands Warren was instrumental in keeping off the Federal Reserve system last year, already is giving interviews about “setting class against class” in anticipation of Democratic losses in this fall’s midterm elections. If those losses occur, there will be a fearsome momentum for the party to move back toward the more corporate-friendly Democratic party that elected Bill Clinton, who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation and generally set the tone for the Democratic complicity in the economic catastrophe that hit in 2008. And Elizabeth Warren has come to teach us the greatest lesson the country needs to learn: who we are. Or at least who we once were.

Self-government must be an educational enterprise, with lessons learned over and over again, and that is what Elizabeth Warren is about these days. She is still teaching. She teaches because she has learned, and she has learned because she teaches. The great teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledge—and more important, the drive to know more—to their students. That is how teachers become immortal.

It is beyond my ability to understand how anyone could read this article and not want Elizabeth Warren to be President.  As for thinking about Hillary Clinton as President, oh please!  Not even in the same league let alone same ballpark.

If you can read this article and come away with a different conclusion, please explain it in the comments here, if you have a login, or on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter if you can’t do it here.

The MaddowBlog has the article Foreign policy and the definition of ‘manhood’.

Right off the bat, let’s note that it’s arguably well past time for the political world to stop equating “manhood” with “cruise missiles.” Being an “alpha male” or an “alpha dog” may somehow seem impressive, in a junior-high-school-yard sort of way, but when analyzing geopolitical crises, we need a different kind of framework.

There’s apparently a knee-jerk assumption among too many that “real men” use bombs, not diplomacy. If memory serves, President Obama’s predecessor, whom no one accused of having a perceived “manhood problem,” often thought the same way. The foreign policy consequences, however, were nevertheless disastrous.

Are you willing to die so that Obama can prove he doesn’t have a “manhood” problem?  Are you willing to send your children and grand-children, or even great-grand-children to war to prove that the current president has “balls”, even if that President is eventually a woman?

For about a microsecond I was thinking that having a woman President might solve this problem of trying to prove “manhood”.  The trouble is that a woman President will have to act even more warlike than a man to prove that she is strong enough to be President.  I am not sure that even Elizabeth Warren would be strong enough to stand against this tide.  Maybe if she were in the same administration as Bernie Sanders, the two of them could resist this foolish talk.  And please don’t say something as silly as Hillary Clinton would be less of a war hawk than even George W. Bush.

Who do you think could possibly have the courage to say no to fomenting war?  Does the President control the CIA, or does the CIA control the President?  Once in office, will the CIA whine to the new President, “You can’t stop this war, we’ve put too much effort into getting it started.  If you stop it now, you will just confuse our allies and our enemies.”  Is this the kind of foolish rhetoric that has finally got Obama out proving his “manhood”?

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog has the article Kochs, conservative allies align against solar.

This is arguably evidence of an energy breakthrough: up until fairly recently the right never really cared enough about solar power to move aggressively against it.
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The power industry argues that net metering provides an unfair advantage to solar consumers, who don’t pay to maintain the power grid although they draw money from it and rely on it for backup on cloudy days. The more people produce their own electricity through solar, the fewer are left being billed for the transmission lines, substations and computer systems that make up the grid, industry officials say.

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As for whether industry claims have merit, the L.A. Times report also reported, “The arguments over who benefits from net metering, meanwhile, are hotly disputed. Some studies, including one published recently by regulators in Vermont, conclude that solar customers bring enough benefits to a regional power supply to fully defray the cost of the incentive.”

Not to mention that having a distributed power supply is more robust in the face of catastrophes than having a concentrated one. Or not to mention that utilities being a regulated monopoly is enough insurance against insufficient capital to pay for the infrastructure.

Is it a coincidence that the Kochs and conservatives have taken such notice of solar energy and the rise of the Bundy incident discussed in my previous post The Case For Cliven Bundy?  The fact that right wingers could connect a defiance of the federal government, an attack on Harry Reid, and an attack on the solar industry must have been irresistible whether or not any of it was true.

I tracked down some information that has been put forth in defense of Cliven Bundy’s claim that the government case against him is a conspiracy fomented by Harry Reid.  As I was about to put together some of what I found, I decided to follow the link to Snopes and the article Ranch Stash.

Claim:   Senator Harry Reid and a Chinese company building a solar plant are behind a standoff between federal agents and a Nevada rancher.

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Some versions of this conspiracy theory mistake the proposed ENN Mojave Energy site with that of the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar project, but the latter’s 250MW solar power plant is already under construction (so there is no need to grab land for it), and, as noted in Wildlife News, the Moapa plant is being built near the Moapa Indian Reservation and not on public land disputed by Cliven Bundy:

A cursory search shows a sudden explosion of articles claiming Nevada’s senior senator, Harry Reid, wants Bundy’s land (all Bundy actually owns is a melon farm) to build a solar plant to enrich himself and his son.

Bundy has been trespassing over 750,000 acres of U.S. public land to the south of Mesquite and Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy’s actual private property is his melon farm at Bunkerville, which looks like maybe 100 acres on Google Earth. There is a solar farm. But it is not on the huge swath of land Bundy is trespassing on. The solar facility is actually under construction near the Moapa Indian Reservation about ten miles closer to Las Vegas.

It turns out that I think the solar plant in question is more like 50 miles away from the Bundy ranch as near as I can tell.

The Bureau Of Land Management (BLM) report is Regional Mitigation Strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone

Notice that the zone is at the intersection of route US93 and I15 on this map.  The distance from this intersection to the Bundy protest areas is shown on the Google map above.

What seems to have the right wing so upset is that Harry Reid, Barack Obama, some large corporations, and some billionaire investors may be making money from the program to foster solar energy.  They don’t seem to mind very much that some other billionaires and the oil companies such as Exxon-Mobil are making billions of dollars from the current oil and gas focused energy policy.  In fact, the right wing blocks any effort to cut the billions of dollars in subsidies to these companies that would be hugely profitable without the subsidies.

So what is the solution to politicians and private billionaire investors making huge profits from these government funded projects?  The problem seems to be that the way things are done now with the government contracting with and subsidizing private enterprise is that the workers get short shrift and the rich take huge profits.  Is there a solution other than the government hiring the workers directly and keeping the gains out of the hands of the already rich?  Is it true that only some form of socialism can solve the problem?

If the whole point of involving private enterprise is to make some people rich, then the only complaint of the Right Wing must be that their favorite billionaires aren’t getting as rich as someone else’s favorite billionaires.  This doesn’t seem to be a very principled stance unless I am just missing what the principle is.

A friend called me to say that he could not play one of the YouTube videos on my blog.  It would play for a few seconds and then he would get a message “An error occurred”.  Along with the error message there were all sorts of suggestions as to what he could do to fix the error, but none of them worked.

I had him repeat to me the exact words of the message.  Googling youtube an error occurred was enough to find the problem.  I found the web page The dreaded “an error occurred” message shows on *every* YouTube video.

Eventually, it turned out that my friend did not have any speakers nor headphone connected to his computer, and that was the problem.  This was mentioned in the thread about the error. I realized that if the YouTube message had said something like “An error occurred, I could not find the sound device,” he could have solved his problem himself without any need to call me.

This leads me to one of the prime principles that I held to as a programmer.  If you are  going to write an error message about an error that has been detected, you owe it to  the user to tell him or her exactly what was the error that you detected.

Maybe the YouTube folks thought that they were being nice by telling you what things you might try in order to fix the unidentified error.  The trouble is that no programmer can imagine all the things that might go wrong, nor all the reasons for them to go wrong.  If you tell the user exactly what it was you detected, then the user may know what he or she did to cause the error.  Or the user might consult with someone who would understand the details of the error as described in the message.

When my friend told me that he had no speakers or headphones, my natural question was “Why would you do that?”  He explained why he used headphones and not speakers and that he was just testing to see if he could watch the video before he plugged in his headphones.  It was certainly a reasonable explanation, but not something I would have ever imagined.  Which brings me to another oft heard response from other programmers  when I insisted on good error messages and also allowing people to do things that you would never imagine them wanting to do.  I would hear the old dreaded question, “Well, why would anybody want to do that?”  My answer was “I have no idea, but what harm does it  do if you to let them do it?”  I had found over the years that customers could find amazing things to do with your program that you never dreamed of.

The error message issue is related to the question of “Well, why would anybody want to do that?”   The related question is “What would anybody do with this information if I gave it to  them?”.  The answer is similar.  “I don’t know what they might do, but why not tell them anyway?  Would it kill you?”

The Las Vegas Guardian has the story Nebraska School Faces Heat on Facebook for Bullying Message.

I was incensed when I read this story yesterday.  What kind of message does the principal of the school send when she writes comments such as “Would we keep our friends if we tattled on them?” and “It’s the person who retaliates or responds, who actually starts the fight” and “No one likes a sore loser”?

I can see giving advice on how to stand-up to a bully, but blaming the victim is exactly the wrong attitude.  Standing up to a bully may be reasonable advice to someone who can do it.  However, for someone who is not capable of doing it, making that person feel inadequate is only to double the pain.  It leaves the victim feeling alone and unprotected by the very people who should be responsible for protecting him or her.

In fact, a victim might be better able to stand-up to the bully if he or she knew that the adults in the world would also stand-up for the victim if the situation were to get out of hand.

You can tell how well a person has internalized this stupid message by their reactions to criminal behavior as adults.  Look at the Whitey Bulger case in Boston.  Some adults are more incensed that Bulger might have been an informant for the FBI than they are incensed by the murders he committed and the terrorism that he used in Boston.  The way that the FBI protected their informant may also be a reflection of internalizing the stupid message.  The FBI seemed more concerned about their informant than they were about the victims.  Although it may just have been a case of plain old corruption in the FBI.

This idea that it is abhorrent to be a snitch is something that needs to be stamped out. If the principal of the school in Nebraska cannot show that she has learned how seriously wrong her attitude is (not just that the wording is wrong), then she ought to be fired.

Democracy Now has the interview “We Are Not Beginning a New Cold War, We are Well into It”: Stephen Cohen on Russia-Ukraine Crisis.

STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I think you’ve emphasized the absolute flaw in at least the American—because I don’t follow the European press that closely—the American media and political narrative. As a historian, I would say that this conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.

In my previous post Investigation Finds Former Ukraine President Not Responsible For Sniper Attack on Protestors, I admitted to the possibility that the speaker was going overboard in his analysis. What I have been reading since then, and this interview seems to strengthen the case that the previous speaker was far from alone in his analysis.

Your assessment as to who is giving you the straight poop and who is just giving you poop, depends somewhat on which media you trust. However, there are certain things you can assess for yourself.

STEPHEN COHEN: You left out one thing that he said which I consider to be unwise and possibly reckless. He went on to say that Russia wouldn’t go to war with us because our conventional weapons are superior. That is an exceedingly provocative thing to say. And he seems to be unaware, President Obama, that Russian military doctrine says that when confronted by overwhelming conventional forces, we can use nuclear weapons. They mean tactical nuclear weapons. I don’t think any informed president, his handlers, would have permitted him to make such a statement. In fact, depending on how far you want to take this conversation about the Obama administration, I don’t recall in my lifetime, in confrontations with Russia, an administration—I speak now of the president and his secretary of state—who seem in their public statements to be so misinformed, even uninformed, both about Ukraine and Russia.

In my own judgment, I think that a lot of the statements from Obama are extremely reckless.  Earlier I heard Obama dismisses Russia as ‘regional power’ acting out of weakness.  Why would you go out of your way to tweak the nose of your adversary who has major economic powers over Europe because of the amount of energy that Russia supplies to Europe?  I don’t need anybody to point out to me that such talk is reckless.

It wouldn’t surprise me if I have to headline a post in the next few days, “Obama has gone completely bonkers”. He is rapidly going in that direction. Who will save us?

The Daily Kos has published the cartoon It’s a Scandal.

Now you understand why Lois Lerner has contempt of Congress. That contempt is well earned.