DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Kenny Ausubel of AlterNet predicted the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election 13 months in advance:

This Is Your Brain on Public Relations

Part of the problem is that human beings seem to be hardwired for fraud.

George Lakoff, an author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who calls himself a “cognitive activist,” says this: “One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors — conceptual structures. The frames are in the synapses of our brains — physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”

In other words, forget winning on the facts or the science. It’s all about the story. And once stories take hold, they’re hard to dislodge.

The article is about greenscamming. That’s a word I have yet to hear in the mainstream media. But it’s like the Matrix; it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television… Or, to put it another way, “You think that’s Clean Air you’re breathing?”

Survey after survey shows that Americans care deeply about the environment and are even willing to shell out money to take good care of it. So duping innocent people into harming the environment requires an occult technology of trickery.

The head sorcerer hired by the GOP to provide guidance on fooling voters into doing something they don’t want to do is a guy named Frank Luntz. I’d gloat that Luntz’ report leaked to the press, except that it didn’t matter. In the terms of cognitive science, it was an apparently inconvenient fact.

But if you’re interested, read a summary at the AlterNet article (above) or the whole report at the LCV’s Bush Administration Rollbacks site.