Hal Morris

It's another slogan and slogans aren't really my thing. I want a bumper sticker that says
"Question Bumper Sticker Slogans".

Let's just say I want freedom for myself and others, and we need practical freedom, not just formal legal freedom.

Muhammad Yunus ('Banker to the Poor') is an example of spreading practical freedom without changing any laws, and indeed creating a broad based market system in communities where only a theoretical market system existed before.

The dark side of the Internet is it gives myriad groups the facility to build their own "Echo Chambers" that they can go into and then make up their own alternative universes.

Eliminating Gerrymandering might provide the biggest bang for the buck (or the amount of effort) to reform politics. My hunch is one thing that stops liberals from going after it whole heartedly is that various ethnic groups want their safe seats, and fear they won't be represented without them, but the current system of splitting the body politic up into "safe seats" has favored extremism. Areas where conservatives and liberals might overlap or negotiate something incorporating something of the wisdom of each side are of little interest in deciding elections, and so of little interest in congressional debates.

(TRYING TO DEMONSTRATE/EXPOSE MASS PRODUCTION OF "RIGHT WING FORWARD" EMAILS)

This is a brief summary of some things I've been blogging on TheRealTruthProject.blogspot.com.

I think a good case can be made that a very high volume of political emails -- those that say "Forward to 10 friends if
you care anything about this country" are (1) being churned out en masse, and constantly recycled by a small group of
activists, (2) are highly reliant on carefully devised deception, and (3) are having a very large impact on public
opinion in the U.S. -- enough to have a major impact on elections.

I also have in mind strategies for learning more about them, so as to get some objective factual data on (1) how widely they really are read and believed, and (2) their possible origins.

I believe much of the appeal of "New Media" in which I include these emails, comes from the belief that it is a sort of "people's media" and hence more trustworthy than what is put out by mainstream institutions. That might make these emails, which never reveal who wrote them, particularly vulnerable to exposure, especially when it is show that they are full of deliberate cleverly devised deceptions and lies.

This seems to me very urgent. If interested in pursuing this, or knowing more of my rationalle for these conclusions, or even referring me to someone likely to take an interest, write to me: hal@panix.com.