The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

Technology has finally broken the Media's choke-hold of Society's Collective Conscience  and I don't know if that is a good thing or not. Truth and fact have been disrupted, making way for the rule of emotion and intuition over rationality and knowledge. I don't think The Zuck ever stopped to think about the true consequences of making people more connected all over the world. But the reality is now in the open, and we can all attest to it now:  Interconnectedness drives instability . What started with the seemingly innocuous (and commendable) goal allowing people to share baby pictures among family members morphed into allowing activists to organize political demonstrations. And then  giving Alt-Right trolls a megaphone . Goading is so much fun! Until the reaction is border militias with elite-training itching to kill imaginary ISIS invaders at the SW border with very non-imaginary AR15s. Actual bloody revolutions still rage, efficiently kindled by the smartpho...

I tried very hard folks, I honestly did. My five years of writing in this space without resorting to talk about Trump come to an end today. (ok, ok. I kind of did before, but at least didn't use his name). Considering that yours truly used to take silly pride in not having the need to wade into the slimy, polarizing, inebriating, shallow, pontificating, and (above all) utterly futile world of "Let-me-shout-to-the-socialmediaverse-my-political-leanings-while-attempting-to-persuade-my-opponents-that-my-political-views-are-the-right-ones", this post is kind of embarrassing. The Author taking pride among friends about NOT talking about Trump Even as entire ecosystems literally  collapse  decades before predictions (and devastate the communities linked to them) as I type this; even as the Russian permafrost thaws --unleashing into the atmosphere anthrax spores that had been frozen there for decades; even as there's a  massive die off  of starfish (a marine k...

Broadcast speech is a public good. Like air. You don't really see it, but it's there; permeating every aspect of your life. You silently feed off of it. You pollute it, and you mess it up for everyone else around you. You know it's dirty. You know it's toxic, and you try to avoid the malicious part of it, but it's always there, a nagging background noise that drones and drones incessantly, chipping away at your sanity. No one really wants to be in charge of keeping it clean, because it's next to impossible to do it. Yes, some high-level, clumsily written rules exist, but nothing that really prevents you or anyone else from spoiling it for everybody else. Oh, yes. The slippery slope argument. You can't contain free speech in any form because then you have to forbid all  speech under this magically simplistic view. And no one wants to live in an oppressive society, right? God forbid someone is forced to use some basic common sense to avoid mocking the...

Elections are over. SuperPAC's bidding wars for the oval office have ended, marking the beginning of the new electoral cycle. The sheer cost of this year's election and its result prompts many questions. Will the Republicans have to rethink their stance and diversify their reliance on a shrinking white male voter population? Is the personalization of corporations ' influence on elections a pernicious one? Some people might be tempted to rationalize the astronomical figure by downplaying it. "America spends more on Halloween candy  than on political campaigns." That may be true, but what about the fact that campaign spending has grown 12.4 times faster than overall US population in the last 12 years? People still decided whom to vote for in 2000 with $6/per person spent by political campaigning. This time around they spent $13.34/per person. It is clear that the current election model, coupled with the  mediatization  of  politics, pro...