fear

Fear Mongering: The Media on the Government Shutdown

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Fear mongering isn’t just done by cultists and tyrants. Although many of the dictators of today and days past did have it down to a T, our media happens to be one of the best fear mongering machines around. How about the North Korea debacle of recent times? It was the only subject on the news, only to be dismissed again by the masses and forgotten until the news took another recent shot at it. And Syria? We have only been following news on Syria when there are horrendous events happening leading up to what seems to be an intervention initiated by the US. Fear mongering is central to every major subject covered by the media.

Related Article: Imminent Western Intervention in Syria

No wonder our government doesn’t tell us everything; we would be in a constant state of hysteria, running around and threatening each other to protect our family and property. Let’s say, for instance, that beyond the fear mongering hype we knew there was to be a global crash of all computer systems and all the data was to be reset because we were dawning on a new millennium. Oh right, the panic of Y2K. Oh HOOO!!! What if we knew precisely when the world was going to end? Ahh.. December 21, 2012. Boy did that rattle the cages.

Related Article: NOT Another 9-11 Article

Fear mongering is omnipresent in all facets of our lives. Maybe I can spin it another way to get you riled up [after all I am representing a media of sorts, and boy do we like to spin things (tops, pizzas, balls, mouse scrollers, clocks, globes)]. The media is making the government shutdown seem more severe than it needs to be. Let us explore a couple of facts about our government:

How about the fact that there have been 18 government shutdowns since 1976! Take a good look at that list of reasons why the government shut down. Most of them are political disputes that couldn’t be solved so they took the battle to the people, showing their supporters how they stood by their policies and wouldn’t budge. No possible fear mongering there.

How about the fact that neither you nor I were influenced by the shutdown? Nothing actually happened (to us and our daily lives) when the government took a break. In fact our government probably saved a whole lot of money during the shutdown.

Another fact is that Obamacare is in high demand, causing its own shut down of government websites resulting in a blindsided president? Wasn’t Obamacare at the root of the problem of politicians disagreeing in the first place? And yet here it is slowly starting to function and in extreme demand. If you’re going to practice fear mongering, start screaming about the failure of the Obamacare website.

Lastly, it is a fact that the stock market didn’t crash due to the shutdown, people didn’t withdraw all their funds to cause a high volatility in the market place, and investors just kept on investing. So much for all that fear that was being tossed around.. but the government shutdown did happen, and it may happen again if budget problems aren’t solved.

Related Article: TVs, Brains, and Zombies Oh My!

All the while the people of this great country will stand by and listen to live broadcasts in order to be the first to know of any revolts or uprisings taking place. And for what? To be prepared damnit! If the media practices fear mongering and says the situation is severe then we should go buy water and food supplies for the next couple of months, go get a gun to protect ourselves (not that we shouldn’t anyway), and of course find ways to secure our wealth and protect our property! All this for something that is purely word of mouth. If only the game “telephone” was this effective at getting a point across.

Oh misery! What is the point? I am not saying we should be oblivious to world events. In fact it is important that we embrace world events such as the recent protests in Egypt over governmental control, instead of blindly accepting the fear mongering that is fed to us. However, we often forget that a great deal of media is formed on opinion, and the stronger opinions always jump out at us more than the calm, forgetful opinions and facts. Maybe it is time to turn off the news? Maybe it is time to forget about the 9 o’clock updates of recent events on channel 9, 7 , 5, 2, etc. The saying “ignorance is bliss” perfectly pertains to the media and its relentless fear mongering.

Cheers to being ignorant of the media and its senseless fear mongering!

 

 

Research:

Government Shutdown in the United States

PRY: The danger of dismissing North Korea’s nuclear threat

North Korea on high alert, threatens US ships with “horrible disaster”

Y2K Bug Britannica

December 21 2012

Government shutdown? Panic on the markets? Buy stocks.

Obamacare website problems blindsided the President

ObamaCare Facts

 

Wondergressive: Clouds of Western Intervention Loom over Syria

Wondergressive: Imminent Western Intervention in Syria

Wondergressive: NOT Another 9-11 Article

Wondergressive: World Protests: Can You Hear Me Now?

Wondergressive: TVs, Brains, and Zombies Oh My!

Stem Burger, The Future of Meat

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The world is growing. People are multiplying. We are all living longer. And we like to eat. How do you satisfy a horde of hungry humans that want to live a long and hearty life? In this day and age we can turn to science to answer that question.

Genetically modified organisms or GMOs are a thing of the past, present, and likely our future. It is so important for people to understand the uses and benefits of being able to mass produce food to satisfy the hungry population. Well, at least to prepare for a future necessity for more food.  A new development in the world of food has peaked my interest. The creation of the schmeat, or as I like to call it, the Stem Burger. It is meat grown in vitro, and is really quite a step in the right direction, in fact, in more than one way. For animal right’s activists it definitely is a blessing in disguise.

Related Article: I Believe in GMOs

Enormous swaths of the population can’t bring themselves to become vegan, so it’s logical to support in vitro meat if its goal is to reduce suffering of animals

Says Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It would be something new, where we no longer harm animals or mass produce them, instead we’d use their cells to grow the foods we need, or clone them rather for our purposes. Playing god only as a necessity some would argue. Yes, yes…

Religious groups are crying out against stem cell research, and it isn’t likely that it will ever be fully supported, but when push comes to shove and there isn’t enough food to feed families, where will we turn? Mind you, these concerns aren’t something that we should fear or even worry about in our current state, but a stem burger could lead to other preparations for the future.

Granted, this Stem Burger actually wasn’t the best burger that participants of a taste test have tasted, however, with work, I am positive that a Stem Burger will become the number one choice for people in the future. Now if the scientific community could only use stem cells for medicinal uses without being criticized and scrutinized…

May that future come swiftly. Cheers!

Related Article: Don’t Fear Anti-GM Hysteria

 

Research:

Time: Meet ‘Schmeat’

PETA

Wondergressive: The Ugly Face of Overpopulation

Wondergressive: I Believe in GMOs

Wondergressive: Don’t Fear Anti-GM Hysteria

“Here’s My Rape!”: The Reality of Rape

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Most men have no idea how terrifying it can be to be grabbed by a stranger who then refuses to let go. Or how fast a heart can beat when a man hollering at you from his car decides to pull over and get out of his vehicle. In the twilight hours, most men will not discreetly but desperately grapple with the contents of their purse until they find their keys, then hold fast to them in their fists—just in case an oncoming confrontation requires them to have some small advantage.

To be clear: this is not a feminist rant.

Recent events in my personal life gave me pause to think of the different ways men and women live out their typical nights and days. It was a rather mind-boggling exercise and I can’t help but think, at its conclusion, that there should be no place for these differences in an advanced, first world society like ours.

Chicago comedian Ever Mainard puts a humorous spin on the problem, but her words are unfortunately spot on:

The problem is that every woman has that one moment when you think—here’s my rape! This is it! OK, it’s (checks watch) 11:47pm, how old am I? 25? Alright, here’s my rape! It’s like we wait for it, like, what took you so long?

(Above quoted bit starts at 2:10)

I have absolutely had such moments in the past, and I’d hazard a guess that too many other women have, too. Over a late dinner with a male friend, the subject was brought up. He was genuinely surprised to hear this angle of the story. That same evening, another male associate related how he never understood what it must feel like for an attractive woman every day until he was in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood. (Boystown is home to a large portion of Chicago’s LGBTQA population, particularly the men).

In her fantastic and thought-provoking article, “A Letter to the Guy Who Harassed Me Outside the Bar,” Emily Heist Moss accuses poignantly:

You probably don’t even remember Friday night, and if you do, your memory is the sound of your friends laughing.

 

But that is not all that happened. (Emphasis, mine).

In a world that prides itself on the fact that its women are doctors and lawyers, judges and single-parent households, construction workers and business owners, I truly believe this is a hurdle we should be over. This double standard should be offensive to men, as well, since it says that they are such crazed animals that they can’t control themselves. It is one of those mindsets that contribute to the propagation of rape culture: teaching women not to get raped as though it’s an inevitability instead of teaching men not to commit rape. It isn’t right that for women:

“You can’t have people look at you and listen to you at the same time.” —Gina

Barreca,Professor of English Literature & Feminist Theory, University of Connecticut

For additional reading regarding the rights rapists retain as parents, click here. 
 
Sources: 
http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2012-12-a-letter-to-the-guy-who-harrassed-me-outside-the-bar
 
https://wondergressive.com/2012/08/31/rapists-have-the-same-parental-rights-as-any-other-father-in-majority-of-states/