I am an aging specimen fighting the rampages of time on my body. Hair has redirected itself inward, reemerging from the ears. The tummy sags, joints ache. I work out three times a week, running ten miles total and lifting and pushing and grunting and observing all those young bodies – look away! Look away! Time and gravity are winning.

I take daily doses of glucosamine for the joints. I have no idea if it works. But it doesn’t hurt me, they say. And, I take what I call “Scrabble” pills. (They help me beat my wife at that game, sometimes. About half the time.) These are otherwise known as Omega 3 fish oil tablets. They are all the rage. And they taught me something about our Internet.

There are a wide array of sources for the pills, and the cost can be anywhere from a lot for a few to a little for a lot. WalMart wants $9.00 for a thousand. But what’s a good pill? Which of them do what they say they do? This is America, so only one thing is for sure: Everyone is probably lying.

I did some Internet “research”. I went to various sources who say they have “compared” all of the pills on the market, and found “one” that was better than all the others. One came from New Zealand and had to be ordered by mail. Others had special mumbo-jumble-hocus-pocus light saber magic done to them, and were very expensive – $16.00 for 60 pills. Still others warned that “cheap” pills might be rancid, made from fish that had sat on the dock for a week, like Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks.

All I wanted was an objective source that had done some testing and gave an honest and non-self-promoting opinion on the worth of the various pills. It turns out there are two: Consumerlab.com, and Consumer Reports. But both require that you join and pay them money for these opinions. They are worthy, no doubt – no problem. But I only wanted one opinion on one product, and was not willing to pay $30 for it.

The Internet started out as a wonderful source of freely-shared information, and so it was hostile to the American way where everything is for sale and everybody lies. Advertisers are yet to find a way to make a dishonest buck on a regular basis on anything other than porn and books, but they are trying. Any venture now in quest of objective information is like a walk down the concourse at the local carnival – hucksters and barkers yelling at you from every booth. My foray into the Omega3 pill market showed me that the Internet is not very useful anymore. Advertising is winning out, useful information is dwindling and getting harder to find.

Regarding Omega3 pills, there was scads of useless information and outright lies, much of it masquerading as medically sourced.

But someone committed a sin. Someone broke the code. Someone put up an excerpt from a Consumer Reports piece on the pills. It said they are all pretty much the same. None of them will hurt you. If there is any good to be had from them, all of them offer that good. So when shopping, just buy the cheapest one. It took about half an hour to find this piece of information.

And once again, the local Food Co-op, supposedly offering us alternatives to all of the corporate food scams going on, is doing a scam of its own. They want $26.59 for 250 Scrabble pills. They insult us with wholesome fervor.

Palin/Bachman 2012.

There might be cause for unity among right and left wingers in opposing “Cap and Trade” legislation. If Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon is right, Democrats have replaced Republicans now as the people handing out “big sloppy wet kisses” to both Wall Street and polluters.

Here’s a brief interview from July 1st from the Thom Hartmann radio show.

HARTMANN: Congressman Peter DeFazio is with us. And you, along with Dennis Kucinich and a few others were among the few Democrats who actually voted against the cap and trade legislation in the House of Representatives. It’s not yet come up in the Senate. Congressman, why?

DEFAZIO: There were three progressives at least – me, Dennis, and Pete Stark of California, who understands financial markets, because we felt it’s not going to effectively deal with greenhouse gases, it’s loophole-ridden, it’s subject to massive manipulation (we already have some great quotes from people on Wall Street saying this is going to be the biggest market the world has ever had, much bigger than financial services.) They’re already creating, in Europe, carbon-offset futures derivatives.

HARTMANN:: This is the new bubble.

DEFAZIO:: Yeah – they’re going to create carbon offset derivative futures. They’re already talking about – the guy who’s head of Friends of the Earth got his economist somehow into a meeting of people on Wall Street – and they’re talking about traunching them into junk carbon and good carbon and gourmet carbon, so they’re going to traunch them, and then the bill says that if you are doing these exotic instruments on offsets, you have to buy insurance. That brings in the credit default swaps. So what it might do is get us our money back. Maybe AIG can go into the business of doing these as collateralized debt obligations and selling credit default swap insurance, and if we get the taxpayer money back real fast, before they collapse the next bubble, and if we don’t bail them out, maybe we won’t come out so bad. But this is really a bad way to deal with the issue.

HARTMANN:: So you’re of the opinion that a bad bill is worse than no bill. I’ve been taking the position that, and you’re causing me to rethink it, that a bad bill is better than no bill because at least a) the government’s acknowledging that we’ve got a carbon problem, and b) it’s making the right wing hysterical (I listened to part of Shaun Hannity’s show yesterday, and he spent half an hour – he calls it “cap and tax” – he’s hysterical about this, and c) once we’ve got that door open, maybe we can fix it. You think it’s just going to get worse?

DEFAZIO:: Well, I like to drive the right wing nuts, and that’s always part of the reason to do something or say something. But here’s the thing and most people miss this detail. The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that the EPA can regulate carbon as emissions, greenhouse gases …

HARTMANN:: So we don’t need this bill.

DEFAZIO:Right. The Bush Administration refused to [inaudible], Obama earlier this year – the Obama EPA said we are going to begin the process to regulate greenhouse gases. This bill prohibits them from continuing that process.

HARTMANN:: Oh no.

DEFAZIO:: Yes. That is a specific provision in the bill that the polluters wanted. They said we don’t want the EPA going ahead with these rules and regulations like they did with clean water and clean air.

HARTMANN:: So this is not only a big sloppy wet kiss to AIG and Goldman Sachs, but also to the coal industry.

DEFAZIO:: Oh, it’s very coal-friendly. In fact, in the end it took away allowances for utilities that have a lot of renewable generation and, if they don’t have fossil fuels to spend them on, they’re taking their allowances and transferring them to the coal industry. That was a last minute Colin Peterson deal in the Ag section of the bill. I think it’s one of the most coal-friendly pieces of legislation since I’ve been in congress.

HARTMANN: : Amazing. …

The Democrats seem to be basically nice people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They’re the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would manage somehow to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. Also, the Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc.
Dave Barry, 1990

I just finished the book “The Authoritarian Specter, by Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. It’s taken a while, I’ve read other books while I struggled through this one, but today I finally closed the back cover.

Altemeyer spends a great deal of time describing methodology, and then chapter after chapter detailing the results of various tests of students, their parents, legislators and and even Russian students. The implications of his work, controversial but replicable and defendable, are damning for the right wing.

The center of Altemeyer’s work is a test he developed over many years called the RWA. It’s a 34 question test with various statements to extract positive and contrait data from those who take it. The questions are answered on a -4 to +4 scale, to that there are nine possible responses to each statement. Only 30 of the 34 questions count in the scoring (the first four are table-setters), so that the highest possible score is 270 – anyone who scores that high is truly dangerous. (He says that a Texas Democrat and West Virginia Republican legislator each scored 257 – the highest ever. Eeek!)

I would put the test up here for observation, but since it is not available on the internet, I suspect it is proprietary. However, anyone wanting to see it can contact me via the comment section, and I will fax or PDF it it to you. I think that is legal.

Altemeyer has taken the scores on the test, and correlated them with attitudes of conservatives and liberals, progressives and right wingers. He found a very high correlation between Canadian conservatives and American Republicans and high RWA scores, and a lower one for liberals and Democrats. In other words, right wingers tend to manifest authoritarian traits, which I will list in detail below, while left wingers do not. The old saw that there are extremes of left and right, and that each side provides dictators, according to Altemeyer, is false. The right wing is providing the world its thugs …

… with one caveat. He uncovered an odd duck. He calls this person the “wild card” authoritarian, not a right winger, not a left winger, but standing at the ready to assume power. Altemeyer speculates that this is the origin of our Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s – non ideological psychopaths who like authority for its own sake, and kill and enslave people because they can, and because it pleases them. Pinochet was a right wing authoritarian, as is Cheney, but these men are also driven by right wing ideology.

Altemeyer studied Russian students (during the Cold War) to ascertain their attitudes, and found that those who supported the Soviet system were also … right wing authoritarians. Those in charge of the Soviet system were mirror images of American right wingers.

Anyway, here’s a list of traits exhibited by ‘most’ High RWA’s, and keep in mind that nothing is true of all, and to say that these traits manifest mostly on the right does not mean they do not exist on the left. It only means that they are far less prominent on the left.

Compared with others, right wing authoritarians are significantly more likely to:

Accept unfair and illegal abuses of power by government authorities.

Trust leaders who are untrustworthy.

Weaken constitutional guarantees of liberty, such as the Bill of Rights.

Punish severely “common” criminals in role playing situations, and admit they get personal pleasure from doing so.

Go easy on authorities who commit crimes and people who attack minorities.

Be prejudiced against many racial, ethnic, nationalistic and linguistic minorities.

Be hostile towards homosexuals and support “gay bashing”.

Volunteer to help the government prosecute almost anyone.

Be mean-spirited towards those who have made mistakes and suffered.

Insist on traditional sex roles.

Be hostile towards feminists.

Conform to opinions of others, and be more likely to “yea-say”.

Be fearful of a dangerous world.

Be highly self-righteous.

Strongly beleive in group cohesiveness and “loyalty”.

Make many incorrect inferences from evidence.

Hold contradictory ideas – cognitive dissonance.

Uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs.

Uncritically trust people who tell them what they want to hear.

Use double standards in thinking and judgments.

Be hypocrites.

Be bullies when they have power over others.

Seek dominance by being competitive and destructive.

Believe they have no personal failings.

Use religioin to erase guilt over their acts and to maintain their self-righteousness.

Be religious “fundamentalists”.

Be dogmatic.

Be zealots.

Be less educated.

Be conservative/Republican (U.S.), Reform (Canada) and have a conservative economic philosophy.

Believe in social dominance.

Oppose abortion.

Be ethnocentric.

Support capital punishment.

Oppose gun control.

Say they value freedom but actually want to undermine the Bill of Rights.

Do not value equality.

Not be likely to rise in the Democratic Party, but likely to rise among Republicans.

Phew! I should say that I got a queasy feeling as I typed many items on the list, as I am no slouch when it comes to failings regarding evidence, hero-worship, or dogmatism.

There are those who like to compare parties and ideologies and claim that all exhibit mirror negative tendencies. According to Altemeyer, it’s not true. It’s a Republican/conservative/right wing thing more than anything.

Most interesting: The book was written in 1996, long before 9/11 and Naomi Kleins’ “Shock Doctrine”. But Altemeyer claims that right wingers are very dangerous in troubled times, as they look to authoritarians to govern them. This, before Bush/Cheney. I think that prescient.

And, among his many warnings in the concluding chapter, we should be very careful when protesting certain behaviors and policies, such as pro-abortion or single payer, never to engage in violence. This sets off right wingers, and is counterproductive. I guess that’s obvious.

Matt Taibbi’s article in the current Rolling Stone (The Great American Bubble Machine) about Goldman Sachs is very good. It’s not up on the RS website yet, but is worth the price of a paper copy.

It reminds me of a couple of things:

1. The Daily Show these days is doing NBC/CBS/CNN’s job, and Rolling Stone is doing NY TImes/WaPo/Wall Street Journal’s job. Pop culture has stepped in to fill a vacuum. Isn’t that interesting?

2. Years ago I was a victim of Goldman Sachs – I had invested for years in Montana Power for my kids. The price had skyrocketed, and I didn’t know what to do. I consulted a professional investment adviser who said that long-term prospects were very good. (I’ve never consulted one since – they don’t know any more than you or me, maybe even less.) I took a bath, and ended up buying out my kids at half of what the stock was worth at its high – the point where I should have sold.

Goldman Sachs was mentioned in a 60 Minutes piece on the demise of Montana Power, one of the stupidest business moves since New Coke. Apparently, Bob Gannon, CEO of MPC, used Goldman to sell of its power-generation assets and reinvest in fiber-optic cables. According to the 60 Minutes piece, Goldman was the “driver” of the deal, insisting it be done before the market for the MPC assets collapsed. Montanans took a bath (still do in the form of higher utility costs), employees of the once venerable institution were jettisoned, and retirees ate worms.

Gannon, in a boldface slap-in-the-face of everyone in the world, took a million dollar bonus. Goldman Sachs made $20 million on the deal.

Footnote: Check out Taibbi’s blog. He gets hammered pretty good by commenters.