Mark Collier

Disclaimer:  I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, and throughout the course of the campaign I supported one of each: Ron Paul in the primary (who frankly is the antithesis of the modern GOP), and then Obama (although his un-American FISA flip almost cost him my vote).  So I hope this post can meet a certain objective standard, even though that is of course impossible and it is a personal blog for fracks sake, so whatever…

Lemming Power

Merriam-Webster defines ignorance as

“the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness”

I have always been intrigued by the power of collective ignorance in consolidating power for politicians, which of course provides a strong motive to mislead.  While being described as “ignorant” would certainly feel like a condescending personal attack (all too common in politics), in certain matters of well established fact it should be possible (without getting personal or ugly) to determine whether a commonly held belief is simply false.  And a large group holding that belief could then be accurately described as “ignorant”.

From there it’s fair to ask a couple of questions:

1) How did this group come to believe this falsehood?

2)  Who benefits most from their ignorance?

While one could probably bring down rackspace creating a list of false beliefs which have put (or kept) people in power, I will throw out a couple of examples that I believe are truly meaningful.  The type of ignorance that start wars, cost lives, and could determine who sits in the most powerful seat on the planet.

Example #1:  “Saddam was behind 9/11″.

I’ve always found it telling that so many people believed Saddam was behind 9/11, while at the same time support for the war was growing.  This seems like common sense, yet the media and pollsters rarely tie the two together explicity.  This seems like such an obvious connection.  After all, people who believed Saddam was behind 9/11 who also supported our invasion were not illogical.  On the contrary!  They were thinking very clearly and decisively.  They were just ignorant.

According to this article, “Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either “most” or “some” of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.”

Why the 1400% increase in ignorance?  And who had the most to gain from this ignorance?  This study attempts to prove the obvious answer scientifically, and for that I applaud them.   However, this may be one case where a study is a waste of time when the answer is so frelling obvious.  Bush could put any sentence in the world together, as long as it had “9/11″ and “Saddam Hussein” or “Iraq” in it, and the more he repeated it, the more this false connection would be solidified in peoples minds.  A dash of common sense tells us that.

This study gets closer to the heart of the matter, showing how strongly ignorance corresponded to support for the war:

“An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

Such misperceptions are highly related to support for the war. Among those with none of the misperceptions listed above, only 23% support the war. Among those with one of these misperceptions, 53% support the war, rising to 78% for those who have two of the misperceptions, and to 86% for those with all 3 misperceptions. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, “While we cannot assert that these misperceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions.”

They also show the influence of different media outlets on ignorance, but I will leave that for the reader to contemplate.

Example #2:  “Barack Obama is a Muslim”

Not Who You Think He Is (True, if you think he's a Muslim!)

I wish it could go without saying that there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim, but that would be giving our citizens too much credit I fear.  I’d venture to guess that ignorance about what it means to be a Muslim runs just as deep as the misperception about which candidates actually our Muslim, but I digress.

According to this just-released poll, 23% of Texans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.

In the same poll, it is revealed that 51% support Mccain and 40% support Barack Obama.  What they don’t connect, unfortunately, is the overlap between the ignorance and the candidate supported.  This is the same situation we faced in the run up (and aftermath) of the Iraq invasion:  Two highly related pieces of data that the media seems to avoid connecting explicity.

So, in the absence of real facts, I will just take the risk of showing my own ignorance by connecting the dots in some obvious, common sense ways.  If anyone has hard data to back this up, or challenge it, for the love of data please share!

Assumption:  100% of people who mistakenly believe Barack Obama is a muslim support Mccain.  Feel free to challenge the logic here, but it rings true to me.

Back of the Envelope:

Mccain (non-ignorant*):  28%

Obama:  58%

Mccain (ignorant*):  23%

*I’m sure we’re all ignorant about something, so this is just meant to capture those who are wrong about Barack’s religious beliefs according to the poll.  Deep Breaths.

I’m not trying to insult people who vote for Mccain (some of my best friends are Republicans, or so the saying goes, though most are voting for Obama) or to suggest in some high and mighty way that Obama’s supporters are smarter or don’t suffer from some powerful ignorance of their own that benefits him.

All I’m trying to say is that education matters, and if we don’t take a close look at the beliefs underpinning our support for people in power (myself included) we will end up starting wars we would otherwise oppose and have to live with the consequences.  There is too much at stake for such widespread ignorance to be in the drivers seat.

Hope that wasn’t too preachy.

Peace.

still market with yahoo

Originally uploaded by MarkWCollier.

I snapped this pic on wednesday, October 21st 2008 while visiting NYC for the first time in a few years. The purpose of the trip was business, but of course I took the opportunity to catch up with old friends (Maxwell) and take in a bit of the city.

This scene captured the moment: Nasdaq building after market close, all of the screens flashing RED! from stocks down 2, 3, 5 even 10% or more on the day. And the lovely, emblematic Yahoo! neon sign in the reflection, daring the triple Q to go lower.

There’s even an american flag reflection, just so no one forgets exactly where the financial center of the world is.

A great trip, at an interesting time.

Like steve said recently, local radio can still be a great way to discover new music, despite the often cited trend of increasing suckification for radio overall.

At home, I fire up the sonos and have two favorites bookmarked: kexp (out of seattle) and radioparadise.com (ok, this is not really fair since it’s a pure play online radio station. kicks ass, though).

But in the car in Austin, I have 3 stations I rely on from time to time:

1) 101.5 (101x) - straight up alternative rock, so no real discovery going on here (more like flashing back to STP days), but better than a sharp stick in the eye when the ipod’s in the gym bag or the iphone is out of batteries.
2) 90.5 (KUT) - college radio / NPR — you know the drill.
3) 107.1 (KGSR) - this is the only real austin station, and plays an eclectic mix of singer songwriter, alt-country, rock, etc with a strong emphasis on local artists.

Which brings us to a gem I discovered yesterday, while taking a lovely Sunday drive with Zoe out to the hill country west of austin (where I grew up), listening to KGSR. OK, the song’s a little gimicky but it described about the perfect day for me featuring three of my favorite things, so as soon as I got home I bought a copy on Amazon for 99 cents.

Click Play to give it a whirl and discover 3 of my favorite things.

It’s my new theme song.

I’ve had the iphone 3g for a couple of weeks now, and I decided to download an album from the itunes store directly to the phone (over wifi) the other day. I knew there was a new Beck album out, and the single was pretty catchy, so I gave it a shot. The process was very fast and painless, and I’ve been giving the album a few listens in the car over the past few days.

The album is definitely growing on me, and in particular I like a couple of songs so much that I usually just start the album on song 7 (youthless), which is followed by another song with interesting lyrics and a haunting sound (walls). Click the play buttons to given them a listen, and buy the album if you like it.

Here’s the real slap in the face, though, the album is locked on my iPhone and is wrapped with DRM, since apparently UMG and Apple haven’t figured out how to put customers above their petty differences. Amazon has it in MP3 format, and for a buck cheaper at $8.99, but of course I can’t download over the air to my phone from Amazon so we’re right back at square one in the battle for legal music’s relevancy. One step forward, three steps back.

I did take me over 10 seconds to type in the right terms in the google search box and kick off transmission on my hackintosh to get a proper backup copy of the album I already paid for. It took a good minute or so before that was done. Less than the time it takes to load iTunes (oink).

Hey what are you gonna do
When those walls are falling down
Falling down on you

I’ve often thought that people use the disrespectful behavior by copyright holders to justify their actions — actions they would have taken anyway. It’s an easy trap to fall into, i.e. using the language of values (i.e. right and wrong) to describe why you’re pursuing your interests (i.e. free, as in beer). My good friend Glynn Owens used to bring the values vs. interests concept into the debate often, and he showed a generation of kids how to know the difference as a teacher. Tip o’ the 40 to you, Glynn.

But, this is clearly a case where all of the consumer loyalty in the world (read: thousands of dollars over the life of a iphone) are rewarded with a damp head and assurances that it is, indeed, raining.

It’s not raining.

I’ve been having trouble getting audio to work under firefox recently when playing back video clips, such as Youtube.  The “solution” has been to use IE, which is like saying the solution when you run out of beer is to crack open the rubbing alcohol.

My friend Alex has complained of the same problem, so after finding a fix I thought I’d share it in case anyone else has run into this.

So after a little quality time with our friend Google, I found that some weird flash settings were causing the problem.  Specifically, the seting to “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”.

So I visited this link, which governs “global settings” for new sites, and made sure the magic box was checked, and set my limit to 1MB (I have no idea if this is ideal, does anyone know?).

One really cool thing about this Adobe help site is that the screen shot is not just a screen shot.. it’s actually the real live settings for your PC.  So instead of an illustration, it actually allows you to fix the problem inside of the help page.  What a concept.  See below (red highlights added by me for the relevant areas)

Then I visited this link (NOTE: You can just click the far most tab if you already have the settings panel open) to try and set the limits for existing sites.  Sure enough, this was set to zero.  I couldn’t get it to save my settings after increasing it, so I just “deleted all” sites so that every site would behave by the global settings when I visit again.

Voila!  I can now enjoy this little masterpiece without launching IE.

The Hills Outdoor Pool

I’ve received a lot of good advice over the years, from many trusted friends and family.  In some cases, you hear the same exact thing from many trusted friends and so you really know it’s true.  It usually only takes me somewhere between 5 and 10 years to take such good advice, though I suspect the cycle is trending towards the latter as I get older.

Some people might even call this stubborn behavior, but I like to think of it as “mulling it over until I think it’s my idea.”

Which brings me to my latest passion:  swimming.  I’ve had a bad back for several years, after throwing it out in a tragic accident at a friend’s Oscar party several years ago (I’ll save you the gory details, but suffice it to say there was a heroic lunge involved toward a treacherously placed tub full of icy cold beverages - a risk every athlete takes).  Apparently, as I’ve been told by dozens of friends and family, swimming is “real good for ya”.

So a few weeks ago I started swimming at my gym - the hills (a fantastic gym in westlake / Austin, TX).  Here are a few of the surprisingly awesome things about getting in shape by swimming (aside from the old “good for your joints and bad back” wisdom so often cited):

1)    It takes about 5 whole minutes to be completely exhausted when you’re out of shape.  I could spend 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and not be this tired!  This might sound depressing, but on the contrary I can leave my house, swim, shower up, and be back home in under 1 hour!

2)  Motivation:  Unlike traditional excercises at the gym, if you give up whilst swimming you will actually die.  This is a nice motivation and it seems to kick in automatically.

3)  Muscles:  This one totally took me by surprise, but I have found that I’m getting a lot stronger after only a few weeks of swimming.  I guess when you’re flailing like a 200 lb fail wail whale, you really get quite a work out.  I’ve actually started doing push ups when I can’t go to the gym just to keep up the upper body workout.  This is totally not like me.

I will be booking my trip to Beijing now.

So, in summary, if you value your time on earth and thus would like to get on to the business of doing-smart-things up to 10 years sooner:  listen to your mother.

The new FISA law recently passed and signed into law by President Bush is one of the most egregious affronts to Freedom and Liberty in my life time, and only advances a pattern of law making (following law breaking) that corrupts the very essence (and future) of democracy in America. The mainstream media has repeated many falsehoods, one of the most damaging of which is that the “far left” is upset with Obama for supporting it.

This is hogwash, a half truth, a smokescreen. Something to fill the papers instead of this.

It’s not about right and left, it’s about accountability, which senators on both “sides” of the aisle were all to quick to suspend, by passing this ill conceived amendment. The very concept of retro active immunity is offensive when it hasn’t even yet been established what laws were broken. It is well known that most Senators never even read bills before voting for them. The Patriot act wasn’t even circulated with sufficient time for even the speediest reader to finish before a vote!

So we now find ourselves in a situation where law makers don’t know the laws they’re making, and yet they feel compelled to make news laws absolving those who broke the old laws before a court (you know, that red headed step child of a branch) can make a ruling. How exactly does this make sense to anyone?

To quote the incomparable Glenn Greenwald

“…If the rule of law doesn’t constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They’re all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they’re caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.”

One of the sentiments I’ve most often heard over the past goes something like this “soon our long national nightmare will be be over” (read: 8 years of Bush). Sadly, this is far from the truth, for two reasons:

1) The vast increases in executive power and the repealing of basic rights are not so easily undone. People don’t give up power once the ring is on their finger. This is even more true in this case because…
2) The Democrats have, with a few notable exceptions (Dodd, Kucinich, Feingold) been directly responsible for #1, with the help of course of the Republicans save the always principled Ron Paul. The undermining of our free society has happened on the watch of both candidates and today’s congress, voted in by you my fellow Americans (myself included). This is why it is important that we focus on issues and individual accountability, not two party warfare. Two party warfare is a scam. Elephants and Asses both stink to high heaven.

Thus it’s time that like minded folk with a passion for Liberty bind together to hold our leaders accountable. It’s clear that the legislative won’t hold the executive accountable (nor will they let the judicial do their job), so it’s time for citizens to step in and make some demands. The Accountability Now PAC was started to to just that. Please check your left/right notions at the door and help restore Freedom to our country. Freedom Fighting and Nation Building starts at home.

For tonight’s homework, I ask that you read up on your Glenn Greenwald who has been spot on regarding these issues, and would also strongly encourage you to read my friend Alex Chiba’s post here about actions you can take now, as well as an updated post here.

More info on Accountability Now & their upcoming “money bomb” on August 8th:

I’ve been spinning the hell out of this MGMT record all weekend. (formerly “Management”)

On the 4th of July we had a BBQ and my friend Carlos, who just moved back to Austin (they all do), had come over and I handed him the keys to the Sonos to DJ. Carlos is one of the biggest music fans I know, which is saying something after working at Musicmatch and Yahoo! Music for 4 years, so naturally I was a little apprehensive my 100 gigs of music would stand up to the scrutiny. The first thing he says is “you don’t have any management”. ‘Doh!

MGMT was the best band I saw at SXSW this year (thanks to Kirker for convincing me to go). They played at a small venue, the Rio Grande (an odd Mexican Restaurant transplant from Boulder, with suprisingly great food and very strong ‘ritas). After they rocked the house, I have been listening to MGMT quite a bit over on hype machine, but haven’t gotten around to acquiring the record.

So, fresh off the shaming from Carlos, I bought it on Amazon for $7.99 on Friday and loaded it onto my iPod and the HTPC that powers by Sonos at home (thanks to no DRM this bit of internal family sharing is not only legal, it’s actually convenient!). I guess this is referred to as “buying music”, something I’m trying to reacquaint myself with after years of subscription music.

I have to say that I’ve already gotten way more than $8 worth of value out of this purchase! This whole buying music thing is not as bad as it sounds. One of the tricks for enjoying music is to find something my kids dig (read: will dance to), and it’s an added bonus if Dianna likes it. MGMT fills the bill!

Here’s a taste:

Buy the record at Amazon: