Cognitive Dissonance

By John Ballard

Even before my second cup of coffee this morning I'm coming down with a case of cognitive dissonance. I've only been reading for an hour and have already come across three attacks. This latest was like accidentally standing too long on a hill of ants.
I'll start with that one and work back...

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Gary Schwitzer points to an Australian journalist with a collection of food related examples of marketing messages aimed at making companies or ideas look like what they are not.

World hunger � a marketing solution for obesity-promoting companies?

Yum! Brands, Inc, based in Louisville, Kentucky, describes itself as the world�s largest �system restaurant company� (whatever that is), with more than 37,000 restaurants in over 110 countries and territories.

According to a company press release, the company is ranked #239 on the Fortune 500 List, with revenues in excess of $11 billion in 2008. The Company�s restaurant brands include KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. The company says it opens more than four new restaurants outside the US each day of the year.

The company is a big fund raiser for world hunger through this campaign.

It�s interesting how many of the companies whose products are implicated in contributing to globesity are so very keen to tackle world hunger.

That's just one of a list which includes Unhappy meals

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  Junking up carrots


• Health-washing the junk


• Expanding markets and waistlines


• Green tea's health claims overstep the mark

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Maggie Mahar reports on an expensive (if ill-conceived) technological solution to a human problem. Step right up, folks, and take a look at your new, improved operating room of the future, GE's Smart Patient Room. This is not your Papa's nasty old microbe-infested hospital room, folks. No, siree. This is a place fitted with electronic surveillance equipment calibrated to set of an alarm if your health care professional makes a mistake. Good professional training and teamwork are now almost obsolete thanks to this new technology.

Last week GE Healthcare announced that its Smart Patient Room pilot at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, New York has been approved and is ready to being �collecting data.�
What does �collecting data� have to do with preventable infections? The GE press release is rather wordy, so let me sum it up: �Smart Patient Rooms� spy on nurses, doctors, and other health care workers to make sure that they are washing their hands. Over time, the technology will be expanded to check up on them in other ways.

But "the first app -- the killer app -- is hand hygiene,� Jeff Terry, managing principal at GE Healthcare announced proudly.

Some reporters had an opportunity to view the technology in action in a mock hospital room at the GE research campus. Eric Anderson, Business Editor at the Albany Times Union describes how it works: �sensors and visual detectors . . . track individuals and identify whether they are patients, doctors, nurses, or other staff or visitors,� and �make sure that any staff interacting with the patient washes their hands before and after the visit. Incidents are collected in a Medical Errors Reporting System or MERS.�

No further snide remarks from me. Go to the site and make up your own.

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And Kat, the Newshoggers secret weapon, points to the most egregious example of all cognitive dissonance, the ongoing deconstruction of American history by Conservatives, led by the Tea Party insurgency.

As a student of history I have never been one to take historical revisionism carelessly. Sometimes, like amputating a gangrene-infected body part, revisionism is in order. I read somewhere that many students in Japan are not taught to this day the full implications of Japan's role in the Second World War. And only lately has a generation of young Jews been permitted, even encouraged, to appreciate the once maligned language of their grandparents, considered vulgar by many despite the fact that Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature over thirty years ago. 

But the corruption and rape of US history by latter day Conservatives defies description. Peter Daou's list of perversions covers several subjects but a Balloon Juice post yesterday clarifies in stark language how the Conservative appeal to what they claim to be patriotic values is for many nothing more than a dog whistle to nothing more than old-fashioned bigotry. 

It was Lincoln changed the term �United States� from a descriptive term about States sometimes working together into a proper noun that named our Nation. It was Lincoln who began the move away from gold and issued paper money. It was Lincoln who could multi-task with an eye to the future. While he was kicking Confederate ass he also financed a transcontinental railroad, land grant schools and education and land for homesteaders. It was Lincoln who worked to protect free labor and to end slavery. Ending slavery, he also set up the first government run welfare effort to help former slaves transition to freemen. And it was Lincoln who led our Nation to soundly defeat the Confederacy and deliver to these traitors a well-earned ass whopping. Their ideological descendants are still holding a grudge towards the America that Lincoln shaped.

In all of these efforts and many more, Lincoln changed the rules of the American economy to favor the working class, the poor and to create new entrepreneurial opportunities. He totally screwed the Southern oligarchs who were used to running the Country. To protect their power, those Southern planter oligarchs created the Confederacy. The modern oligarchs in America have created the TeaTards to protect them from market forces. Then as now, the appeal to the gullible is racism, fear and the promotion of ignorance as a source of strength.

When I listen to these fuckers these days all I can hear is the echo of Confederate bullshit in their every statement, their every word. Their understanding of the US Constitution is a Confederate understanding. Their understanding of the Founding Fathers is completely informed by Confederate myths, memes and spin. When they wrap themselves in the American flag you know that they would rather wrap themselves in a Confederate battle flag snuggie. And when the chant USA! USA! USA! USA! you can be sure that they really mean CSA! CSA! CSA! CSA!

It is a common line of these wankers to state that �We need to take our Country back�. I believe them, but the Country they seek to rescue is the Confederate States of America. As for the United States of America, they are always quick to tell you that that government is their enemy. It is ironic that this group of neo-Confederate deadenders have captured Lincoln�s Party and killed it. Now they seek to do the same to the Union and Nation Abe gave his life for.

And it was Lincoln, I might add, who wisely understood that the Union would never reach its fullest potential if the rebellious South was to be treated with further humiliation. He knew the true meaning of amnesty, a term now as maligned as socialism.

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As I was putting this post together I remembered one more example of what can be called cognitive dissonance, although it is more an example of tragic and fundamental conflict of values. I'm talking about a disturbing report on today's Morning Edition looking closely at what different countries mean when discussing the dangers of the Internet.

Advanced industrial democracies are likely to see a cyberattack as an assault on the computer infrastructure that underlies power, telecommunications, transportation and financial systems.

But many developing countries see cyberwar in political terms.

The Russian government, the leading advocate for a cyber-arms-control agreement, prefers the term "information war" and describes the threat in terms that make cyber conflict sound like a battle of ideas.

Each year since 1998, Russia has introduced a resolution at the United Nations calling for an international agreement to combat what it calls "information terrorism." Russian leaders worry that the Internet makes it so easy for people to communicate that a government could use the Internet to challenge another country's political system. Some Russian diplomats have actually revived an old Soviet term � "ideological aggression" � to describe what governments could do to each other via the Internet.

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The United States has consistently opposed efforts to limit Internet communication, but the Russians are not alone in their interpretation of the "information" threat. James Lewis, who has advised the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, says he's heard similar views from several governments.

"The thing that really unites them is their desire to control information, to control content," Lewis says. "They see information as a weapon. An official from one of those countries told me [that] Twitter is an American plot to destabilize foreign governments. That's what they think. And so they're asking, 'How do we get laws that control the information weapon?' "

Last year, Russia successfully sponsored an even sharper version of its cyber disarmament proposal at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China and four Central Asian countries as well as Russia. The accord defined "information war," in part, as an effort by a state to undermine another's "political, economic, and social systems."

Using the term "mass psychologic [sic] brainwashing," the agreement said that the dissemination of information "harmful to the spiritual, moral and cultural spheres of other states" should be considered a "security threat."

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In recent months, the debate over Internet governance and cyber-arms control has moved to the International Telecommunications Union. The ITU secretary-general, Hamadoun Toure, has even suggested that his organization could "broker" a cyber disarmament accord.

"My dream is to have a cyberpeace treaty," Toure said in London earlier this month.

U.S. officials are wary of Toure's agenda, in part because he has linked his cyber disarmament ideas to proposals for restructuring Internet governance in ways that would boost government controls. But his ideas have considerable support in the developing world.

"India feels this way. Brazil feels this way. China feels this way," says Lewis, who directs the Technology and Public Policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They want a bigger role for government on the Internet."

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The desire of many countries to see more regulation in cyberspace has prompted the Obama administration to work with Russia and other governments to establish some norms of "appropriate government behavior" in cyberspace.

But the United States would not support information controls � and continuing disagreements over the definition of cyberweapons are likely to complicate any effort to reach international agreement on a broad cyber disarmament accord.

Journalists are not making this up. I have no reason to believe it is not a world-wide problem.

The last year I spent in Korea, 1967, I met one of America's first Peace Corps emissaries to that country. She was polite but somewhat cool to those of us (GI's) who had been leading weekend classes in English Conversation and other activities at a local high school.She insisted on speaking only Korean to Koreans, knowing that a command of the language was essential to the ultimate success of her mission. She and her husband were to be assigned to a rural area where no one spoke English and learning Korean would be totally essential for them.

Later I asked a Korean friend what Koreans thought of the Peace Corps. He consulted his Korean-English dictionary to find exactly the right word. The word was "espionage"  and he meant the word in no pejorative sense. Americans, having seen too many movies and television shows about spies use the word in a different way. He simply understood, correctly, that the Peace Corps was there to penetrate and learn about their country and culture. As a friend and employee of the US military he had no reason to feel suspicious of their intentions. 

Time now for a second cup.