Month: September 2014

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Shill Shun

“I was regularly called a shill for the food industry”. Elizabeth Whelan, in NY Times Sep 18, 2014.

Why is this so inevitable? From the inside, it must look like something no one will really notice or pay attention to. Or maybe you just don’t care. Or maybe you are right: no one thinks that just because you take money from the industry that benefits from your “science” you would alter your findings.

And Elizabeth Whelan set out to establish a national organization that would battle what she called “junk science” and excessive government regulation protecting us from chemicals and substances which, she believed, were of marginal risk.

Why oh why oh why did she not resist the temptation? I thought there might be something to her point of view. I thought, it is likely that government bureaucrats would over-react to preliminary test results. It is possible that banning one substance will only increase different risks from the alternatives. I thought, let me read more.

And then, inevitably, it is discovered that the industry, delighted with her point of view, began to fund her organization.

And she accepted the money.

Among other things, American Council on Science and Health has endorsed saccharine, smokeless tobacco, pcbs, and fracking. She ridiculed Michael Bloomberg’s drive to ban sales of huge soft drinks in New York City.

Now, if I had been one of the corporations, I would have kept as far away from her organization as possible. I might even have attacked her for being too cautious, too reticent. I would have urged my fellow corporate buccaneers to lay off, stay back, restrain yourselves– because the minute a person like me finds out that Elizabeth Whelan is paid by the industry that benefits from her activism, her research loses all of it’s value and credibility.

Now, I shouldn’t have to respond to this hypothetical argument from the conservatives: activists from the other side also benefit from their cause– they have nice, paying jobs, junkets, expenses, and so on. But that is like saying that any married woman is the same as a whore because she offers sex to the man who feeds her and keeps her. It is not even remotely the same thing. The “benefit” corporations receive from Elizabeth Whelan’s advocacy is increased material profit for a small number of shareholders and owners. The benefit received by those who support Greenpeace is a healthier, more beautiful world for everyone– not just themselves.

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And I guess Dalton McGinty just couldn’t resist either, signing up with a company that makes software for schools– which it sells to the provincial government. I agree with the NDP on this one: MP’s should have to wait five years after retirement before they can take jobs like this. But I think it should be 10.

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Tactless CBC

Who you gonna blame
The star of the game
Or the no-name girl in the marching band?

Quarterback, Kira Isabelle

I just heard the CBC play some songs from the CCMA show (Canadian Country Music Awards). First, a sensitive song about a young girl in the marching band who is date-raped by the star quarterback of the football team, who then posts pictures of her naked on the internet. (The chorus is “Who you gonna blame/The star of the game/or the no-name girl in the marching band?”)

The ever-tactful CBC followed this with a presentation of “Day Drinking” by Little Big Town. “I know you know what I’m thinking/Why don’t we do a little day drinking? Day drinking! Day drinking!… Ready get set, baby here we go”. Sung with that bombastic pseudo-rock stadium gusto: woohoo!

Maybe the CBC programmers were doing a little day-drinking of their own.

Incidentally– or not– I note that line in the chorus– “who you gonna blame/ the star of the game/or the no-name girl in the marching band” captures nicely a sentiment expressed by many women about the issue of date-rape, but which I find problematic in this sense: it is no doubt true that too often, the famous athlete or favorite son or celebrity miscreant, is automatically believed because so many figures in authority have a vested interest in believing him. After all, he is the star; she is a nobody. Maybe they really believe him, maybe not, but she, after all, is still a nobody.

And I note that “Quarterback” is not necessarily about date-rape– it might well only be about betrayal, though the chorus makes less sense that way.

I simply point out that reversing the automatic belief– which many women seem to do– is equally offensive, and when the argument is put that way– who are you going to believe?— the implication is that the woman should always be believed instead of the man. The implication is that women never lie when claiming that the sex was non-consensual.

And the ongoing curse of these issues is that, in the majority of cases, it is simply her word against his. Confronted with this issue, many women (and many sympathetic men) respond with “why would she lie about something like that?”. That’s not an argument, and even if it were, the answer is not that hard to find: is it so hard to believe that woman might consent to sex with a man because she believes it is the beginning of a relationship, but, soon after, when she finds out she was used, she wants him punished?

Or there might be a more exotic explanation, as in the case of Brigadier General Jeffrey Sinclair.

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The Orwellian School

High schooler Blake Robbins filed an invasion of privacy lawsuit against his school, alleging that the Lower Merion School District had taken hundreds of secret photos of him over a two-week period. His family discovered this when a teacher accused Robbins of dealing drugs based on one of the photos.  Forbes (see link).

My first question is, does this school district teach George Orwell’s “1984”?  What do they teach about it?  What do they tell students about sick, totalitarian, repressive, intrusive, voyeuristic minds that have nothing but contempt for the privacy rights of any individual?

How the hell does this not result in criminal action?  Because the school district’s asserted intent was “good”?   How the hell does this not result in a police investigation in which it is determined which individual employee or group of employees at the school board decided to secretly spy on their own students, in their bedrooms, and retain the obtained images.  How the hell did these people not get arrested?

A student named Blake Robbins was photographed “dealing drugs”.  He says he was sharing candies, not pills, and the police never charged him, but Mr. Robbins wondered why the police ever thought he was dealing drugs.  Well, they had a photo, which the school district had given them, showing Mr. Robbins “dealing”.

The school denied any active spying, saying that security software activated for laptops suspected of being stolen kicked in automatically, and took photos every 15 minutes. That defense, while reasonable, was made shaky by the school’s possession of over 56,000 Webcam shots.   Forbes (see link below).

Forbes points out that the school district’s biggest mistake was not telling the students that the school district would be spying on them and taking photos of them in their bedrooms.    Forbes says, “if they had, they likely would not have gotten into so much legal trouble of the civil variety”, while pointing out, again, that there was no criminal charges filed.  The prosecutors “declined” to press charges.

You would think the school district had shot some people with a licensed gun: recklessly, with negligence, or in sheer stupidity– it doesn’t matter: they would be immune because Americans believe that of all the things in the world you could be liable for in terms of causing death, destruction, or mayhem, one of them is not ever going to be a gun.

Robbins successfully sued the school board.  He won $600,000.  Then his lawyer took $425,000 of that– the cost of seeing justice done.

How the hell, was this lawyer not also arrested?

The Forbes Article

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The Discovery of Consciousness

Wow. Shocking. So this “talented” student has discovered consciousness. This is a “breakthrough”.

I assume these tests were normally conducted by employers to evaluate employees and judge how suitable they might be for senior level positions. Managers. Leaders. Supervisors.

What Carolyn Bate did was apply these tests to a number of students. First she measured their IQs. Then she had them answer a number of questions the answers to which will help assess whether the person is capable of empathy or other normal feelings of compassion or kindness. After collecting this information, Carolyn had the subjects go through a different test utilizing Galvanic Skin Response– a lie-detector, really– to measure responses to a series of pictures which are intended to evoke feelings of empathy and compassion.

Carolyn found that the GSR responses among her participants were much as she would have predicted – except for the fact that it was only those with lower levels of intelligence who displayed the expected levels of excitement.

In other words, smart people were able to fool the lie-detector. I mean, the Galvanic Skin Response machine. They were able to fake the right emotional responses.

Like Generals and politicians and hedge-fund managers and brokers and bankers and investors and General Motors executives and arms manufacturers and football players and so on and on and on.

This kind of muddies the issue. Do organizations use the Galvanic Skin Response machine to test their employees?

Can it be that most psychology students, until now, have assumed that people filling out their questionnaires simply responded to their queries with uninhibited instinctive honesty? Oh woeful day! Now they will have to go back over all of their studies and begin to account for the fact that people might have understood what those questions were about and how their responses might be interpreted and whether or not they like those interpretations and whether or not they really like the feeling of revealing their true thoughts to a stranger, even if it’s all supposed to be anonymous and private.

But Carolyn misses the biggest point of all: how many corporations would not, in fact, leap at the chance to hire a true psycho who was capable of concealing his complete lack of empathy for customers, investors, civilians, and reporters?

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The Discovery of Consciousness

A BREAKTHROUGH by a talented University of Huddersfield student has shown for the first time that people with psychopathic tendencies who have high IQs can mask their symptoms by manipulating tests designed to reveal their personalities. It raises the possibility that large numbers of ruthless risk-takers are able to conceal their level of psychopathy as they rise to key managerial posts.   University of Huddersfield Academic Journal

Wow. Shocking. So this “talented” student has discovered consciousness. This is a “breakthrough”.

I assume these tests were normally conducted by employers to evaluate employees and judge how suitable they might be for senior level positions. Managers. Leaders. Supervisors.

What Carolyn Bate did was apply these tests to a number of students. First she measured their IQs. Then she had them answer a number of questions the answers to which will help assess whether the person is capable of empathy or other normal feelings of compassion or kindness. After collecting this information, Carolyn had the subjects go through a different test utilizing Galvanic Skin Response– a lie-detector, really– to measure responses to a series of pictures which are intended to evoke feelings of empathy and compassion.

Carolyn found that the GSR responses among her participants were much as she would have predicted – except for the fact that it was only those with lower levels of intelligence who displayed the expected levels of excitement.

In other words, smart people were able to fool the lie-detector. I mean, the Galvanic Skin Response machine. They were able to fake the right emotional responses.

Like Generals and politicians and hedge-fund managers and brokers and bankers and investors and General Motors executives and arms manufacturers and football players and so on and on and on.

This kind of muddies the issue. Do organizations use the Galvanic Skin Response machine to test their employees?

Can it be that most psychology students, until now, have assumed that people filling out their questionnaires simply responded to their queries with uninhibited instinctive honesty?

Oh woeful day! Now they will have to go back over all of their studies and begin to account for the fact that people might have understood what those questions were about and how their responses might be interpreted and whether or not they like those interpretations and whether or not they really like the feeling of revealing their true thoughts to a stranger, even if it’s all supposed to be anonymous and private.

But Carolyn misses the biggest point of all: how many corporations would not, in fact, leap at the chance to hire a true psycho who was capable of concealing his complete lack of empathy for customers, investors, civilians, and reporters?

Is “Huddersfield” a real name?