Quibbles and Bits, New Years Edition

Delectable or detestable - take your pick:

>>The holdup on updates has been in part due to my right hand healing from my dermatologist taking curette to skin on two fingers. As I’m typing this, they’re still in bandages, and I’m literally fat-fingering ½ of the words I’m typing, slowing me down considerably and causing much frustration. Two more weeks of these bandages and I should be home free - I hope;

>>As I’m returning to school in pursuit of my long-delayed Bachelor’s Degree, updates will likely become more sporadic, as time and brain space allow;

>>We can speculate all we want about the true motivation of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ assassin wanna-be (who succeeded in ending several other lives, including that of a nine-year-old girl) - till we’re either red or blue in the face. I’ve observed the overheated rhetoric flying back and forth over the last several years, with ever-increasing intensity, and felt that it was only a matter of time before something like an assassination attempt took place. The only person who can tell us definitively what his motivations were, though, is the shooter himself, and the last time I checked, he wasn’t cooperating with law enforcement (why should he? His life is over anyway). The disseminating of this overheated rhetoric (and I’m sorry, but the basest examples of this are coming from the RIGHT wing, not the left) is a factor in this scenario, for sure, and while I agree that the worst of the pack (Beck, Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, et al.) have blood on their hands, that’s only part of the story. 

In any communication, there are two participants - the sender, and the receiver. Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a lot of words written and spoken about the American infotainment media in all it’s permutations - talk radio/cable and broadcast TV/print media/Internet - the “sender” half of this equation. What about the other half - the receivers - you and me? If critical thinking and logic were valued enough in our society to be taught in our schools, then there would be very little room for the right-wing propaganda being spewed these days. Those “market forces” the Repubs and their ilk luuuuuv to talk about would work their “magic” and prevent those sordid seeds from taking root. But critical thinking and logic, not to mention compassion, are not merely in short supply in this country, they are in a deficit condition, just like our state and federal budgets. A glance at the current makeup of the Congress we just elected demonstrates this deficit in compassion/critical thinking/logic in all it’s pungent stench: the global warming deniers, the Friedmanist supply siders like Paul Ryan, the Ayn Randies like Rand Paul, and of course the Tan Man himself.

The bottom line is - the problem here has much more to do with the receivers than the sender. Remember the saying “if we build it, they will come?” The empires of Murdoch, Moon, and the Koch Brothers got big because we, the receivers, merely accepted their manipulations without question or healthy skepticism.
What would happen to the empires they built if nobody came to play the receiver? The communications cycle, and thus the businesses they built on it, would collapse - which would fit me just fine.