Comic Conspiracy

Sometimes I wonder if the people that write comics have some kind of meetings where they all get together and decide to write about the same thing on the same day.

Actually, this has happened in the past, for certain causes. Veterans, Earth Day, and other causes sometimes get the concerted treatment by our Comic Authors.

Today was and example of when many of the writers come up with a similar idea, maybe not by agreement.

Today's comics had a common theme that nobody stays up until midnight for New Year's Eve.

Sometimes, it was the kids being allowed to celebrate at 8pm or 9pm, like little Billy from Family Circus, who thinks celebration is having a second chocolate milk. Other times, it was adults sheepishly admiting that they didn't even try to stay up.

This theme was as lame as Cathy's fake embarassment marks on her little comic face.

Weekends at Bellview

I heard a book review recently on Science Friday. The author was Dr. Julie Holland who wrote Weekends at Bellevue, Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psyche ER.

Somehow, this doctor lasted for a long time working one of the most bizarre environments a Psychologist or Psychiatrist could ever see.

I'm sure the book is full of specific strange and wacky stories, titillating anecdotes that fascinate the average "sane" person. However, the interesting part of the interview was the conclusions that she drew from her experience.

They discussed how some people would fake mental illness in order to get off the street. I've always heard that most of the homeless people you see out there are mentally ill.

She talked about how to maintain your personal mental health. There are three things she recommends to stay sane:
Go outside
Exercise
Meditate

This seems so common sense to me, that it makes mental health sound easy.

What was really interesting was when she started talking about drugs that could be used to enhance therapy. She just mentioned that she was interested in Medical Marijuana, but she did not really say what she thought the benefit to marijuana could be. She just talked about how the legal environment does not allow for any research.

She said that low levels of the drug MDMA (which is usually known as ecstasy) can be used to enhance psychotherapy. I found this very interesting, as you don't think of ecstasy as a drug with any medical purposes, given its club drug reputation. I have heard that it burns out the pleasure centers of the brain. She seemed to think that low levels of the drug lowered people's resistance to change and allowed them to be more receptive to suggestions.

She also said something else very interesting. She recommended that psychedelic mushrooms be used for people facing death. You always hear people say that if they knew they had a few days to live, they would take drugs or get really drunk or start smoking again, mainly because at that point, it just wouldn't matter. You don't think of the drugs as having any therapeutic effect.

All in all, it was a very interesting interview, but I have not yet checked into getting the book to read.

Ignorant Ignorance

I was talking to my wife the other day and complaining about people that I believed were being deliberately ignorant. My complaint was that people were proud of their lack of knowledge, they were bragging about not knowing anything about subjects. And when they were not, they seemed so self-assured and certain when they spouted off about subjects that they were not at all well-informed on. This did not seem to stop them from talking at length about it.

My wife's idea was that people that are stupid don't know it. She thinks that the people that you hear spouting ridiculous ideas (some of which are syndicated talk show hosts) have no idea how stupid they sound. She cited the often repeated idea that people liked George W. Bush because they thought he was a guy they could drink a beer with.

I see people being fed things that sound smart by talk radio, then parrot them back without checking to see if there is any basis of fact. They love to have sayings that sound like argument stoppers, something you couldn't possibly refute or contradict. Then they strut away like they just won a boxing match.

The problem with people with completely foolish ideas is that they can't be convinced otherwise. It does not good to argue or try to reason with someone when they have an idea in their head wrong. One of my favorite quotes is from Orson Scott Card's book Speaker for the Dead, "This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."

The problem with realizing this problem of blindness is that it virtually assures you of being blind to your own stupidities as well as frustrated with others.

Liberal Bias

I get really tired of hearing people say that the news media has a liberal bias. These are usually people that watch Fox News. If they can't see that this news is so biased as to be inaccurate, you aren't going to convince them that news that they don't agree with or don't like to hear isn't "biased" as opposed to wrong. Actually, they aren't saying that news they don't like is wrong, they are saying it's being presented in an unfair way. So if it's correct, but we don't present it delicately, that's not a good thing?

In the "old days" newscasters worked by pulling information directly off the AP or UPI wire. I remember reading Bob Schieffer's autobiography, This Just In, and noting how he would read the AP and UPI wire for newscast material. They were directly wired in to the news at that time, reading the raw feed prior to reporting the news on the air. This is similar to what Walter Kronkite reported about his early career. I think that journalists as a group closer were to the source of knowledge back then. That they could easily study the raw material of news close to when it happened. I think this is something that has leaked out of news coverage over the years. I think what most newscasters are analyzing is opinion or speculation by the time they see it. That, plus the phenomenon of a short attention span means that no one really digs in depth to an event to the point where they can really understand it.

When you are closer to the source of information, you can't hide from reality. Raw data, without filtering or editing, will give a confused, yet complete picture of events. Sort of like looking at something giant from a few feet away, you can't see it clearly. A good newsperson crawls all over the giant subject, then puts it together in their mind by mentally stepping back from it. It takes time, and it's not easy, but you have to be hard working, persistent, and thorough.

Conservative talk radio and talk shows have always struck me as being fiery, but empty of real substance. Here, the goal is not to explain the truth with all its nuance and complexity, but to inflame passions and invoke a reaction. They are often deliberately ignorant, deliberately ignoring reality, both because they don't prefer it and because the truth is rarely satisfying in a simple, easy to swallow manner. The truth has contradictions and conflicting interests in it. People are not one dimensional, and neither are most news subjects. However, it is easier to pick a viewpoint, and crop the truth down until it fits neatly into this viewpoint.

It's not unlike recent interviews about how Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were said to come up with the justification to go to war in Iraq. They started with the idea that this is what they wanted to do. All of their efforts were to try to make reality bend to their ideals.

We're not asking individual newscasters to give up their viewpoints. Most people have opinions on everything from the big subjects of the day to the trivial news fillers like celebrity gossip. The real trick of a good newscaster is to explore a subject fully in a way that exposes the most relevant information about a subject, but leaves you ignorant of that newscaster's own opinion. Interestingly, Slate.com recently polled their reporters, around the time of the 2008 election and found that 90% of their reporters had liberal leanings. Yet I hear them criticizing Obama and other liberal politicians all the time and have heard defenses of everyone from Sarah Palin to most Israel supporters.

I don't think bias is the problem, I think it's reporting the facts that is the problem. When Stephen Colbert started the Colbert report, he admitted that he was spoofing conservative pundits in order to make fun of them. One of his most often repeated saying in his conservative Colbert Report persona is that reality has a liberal bias. If the facts don't fit your own pre-conceived ideas, they must have a liberal bias.

The Sinister Side of American's Boy Scout Ranger

I've always read the comic strip Mark Trail.

I'm not saying it's a high quality endeavor, and I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying it's funny because he tends to recycle plots and you can almost predict what's going to happen next.

My little brother used to be amused because I would deadpan very serious reports of what was going on with Mark, as if he was a real person of universal interest and appeal, meriting all of our respect and adoration. For some reason, he acted as if he rarely picked up on the irony of my little reports, which is what made them fun.

Now Mark has taken a serious turn to the dark side. It appears that Rusty, the orphaned son of an abusive alcoholic father that Mark adopted, has become stuck under their broken down station wagon (from 1973) on the beach with the tide coming in. That little dumbshit dog of Rusty's, named (appropriately) Sassy (or maybe it should be Sissy), managed to knock the massive station wagon off the jack, break the jack, trap Rusty, and not get squished himself. There is no justice in cartoon land.

With the tide coming in, Mark is racing against time to free Rusty and failing. This is a dark and disturbing storyline for the Mark Trail strip, especially with Christmas right around the corner.

Not interested in keeping things dark and dismal, he makes them more frustrating and forlorn when Mark breaks into a nearby building to get a jack to jack the station wagon off his poor soon to drown formerly abused adopted son. While breaking in, and promising out loud to come back and make the break-in right, the owner sneaks up on Mark and knocks him out with a massive cartoon wrench. Rusty is truly screwed, now. Sassy will probably run around in circles and yap annoyingly while Rusty desperately struggles to keep his mouth above water.

The strip at this time is moving toward a Cool Hand Luke kind of vibe where the hard core Sheriff can't wait to abuse Mark in prison. You just know that they will not believe Mark when he desperately tells them that his abused adopted son is going to die a horrible death, thus justifying his criminal endeavors.

How will it all turn out? That's easy, Mark, Rusty, Cherry, and Doc will be sitting around the cabin with happy smiles on their faces, eating a big Christmas turkey and shrugging off the intense danger they have just been in. No Post Traumatic Shock Disorders allowed! I would like to step in at this point and ghost write for them. I'm thinking that the dark and sinister vane could very well continue into the new year and beyond. Bwwwaaa Haaa Haaa!

Merry Christmas Mark Trail.