This Week: The Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive, Week 3: (Plus: A Gallimaufry of "Quotes")

What They're Saying About Nygaard Notes (What They're REALLY Saying: Send Your Pledge Today!)

Fighting "Delusion Disease" With Nygaard Notes; An Essay on Freeing Our Minds

A Gallimaufry of "Quotes" of the Week! (Part 1

Greetings,

Thank you so much to those who have made pledges to Nygaard Notes during this Pledge Drive! And a special thanks to people who have taken the occasion of the Pledge Drive to renew their pledges, thus saving me the cost of printing and mailing their renewal reminder. Very thoughtful of you!

I would still like to get about five more NEW pledges before the end of this fall's version of the Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive. Can we do it? I think we can. Send in your pledge—using a stamp or using the online PayPal system—today! Then we'll be done with this Pledge Drive stuff.

Thankfully yours,

Nygaard

What They're Saying About Nygaard Notes (What They're REALLY Saying: Send Your Pledge Today!)

Just to inspire you to make a pledge of support for the Notes, here are some of the nice things that people have said about Nygaard Notes in the past few months.

"We Need More Jeffs"

A local activist sent out a note to his mailing list to encourage them to read my piece on the gay marriage amendment campaign here in Minnesota a few months ago. Among other things, he said:

"I am SO inspired to know and be around people like this! We definitely and desperately need more Jeffs in the world!"

Actually, what we need at the moment is for you to send in your financial pledge of support for THIS Jeff. That would be a great start!

"Moving Readers to New Depths"

A professor in Indiana is using some Nygaard Notes resources in his graduate Peace Studies seminar. In the course of his correspondence with me to get permission to do so, he said:

"You move readers to new depths. It's a much needed task and I'm grateful to have been led to the Notes."

For those of you who have already been led to the Notes: Please lead yourself to your checkbook and make out your 2006 Pledge of support!

"Not a Know-It-All"

A reader in Germany recently discovered the Notes (the miracle of the Internet!) and sent along the following, which is one of my favorites from recent months:

"Really very good, your Notes! No pathos, not this teacher's ‘I-know-it-all' finger up."

It would be "really very good" if YOU made your pledge TODAY. You can go to the Nygaard Notes website, you know, and make your pledge online. Easy. Important. Thank you!

Fighting "Delusion Disease" With Nygaard Notes; An Essay on Freeing Our Minds

One of the issues I often talk about in Nygaard Notes is the complexity of how we all get our ideas about the world. What are the things that we consider important enough to pay taxes for? To work for? To kill and die for? I constantly check myself on these things, and I encourage my readers to check themselves, to see if they are abiding by my favorite slogan: "Don't believe everything you think."

A large part of the point of Nygaard Notes is to constantly remind people that we live in an Age of Propaganda. That is, we live in a time when there are enormous forces organized in our society solely for the purpose of getting us to believe certain things and disbelieve other things. When I say "forces" I am not talking about some general and vague "whatever." I'm talking about specific social forces, using real people and real dollars to put out whatever message suits them. I'm talking, in part, about the "public relations" industry—$6 to $10 billion in scale—and also the massive amount of creative energy and resources that go into constructing the ideologies upon which the techniques of PR are based.

These forces include the actual PR companies, but also various spin doctors, political campaign managers, presidential press officers, the Office of Public Diplomacy, the Pentagon's propaganda division, the covert propaganda operations of the so-called "intelligence" agencies (whose budgets are secret), and on and on.

Since we live in a culture saturated with Propaganda, it is inevitable that many people will end up with a bad case of what I call Delusion Disease. That is, many of us will end up having internalized a lot of crazy and dangerous (and untrue!) attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions about how the world works. This Delusion Disease makes us highly susceptible to Propaganda. I'd say it's epidemic in the U.S. of A., and has been for a long time.

Three Ways to Treat Delusion Disease

‘Way back in Nygaard Notes Number 317 I made an analogy between how we deal with cancer in this society and how we deal with Delusion Disease. There are three basic ways to deal with any rampant disease, I said, and here they are:

THE FIRST WAY is "treatment." This is the most INDIVIDUALISTIC and REACTIVE way to deal with disease. This way focuses on what to do about the disease after it appears. In other words, how can I, myself, as an individual, treat my "delusion disease" once I know that I have it? (And we all have it, to greater or lesser degrees.) In Bob Marley's immortal words, how can we emancipate ourselves from mental slavery?

Nygaard Notes offers "treatment" in the form of offering alternative sources for information, and also by offering all sorts of tricks and techniques that you can then use to evaluate and interpret the various messages that bombard us every day. If you are a regular reader of Nygaard Notes, you will be better prepared to "question authority" when "authority" tries to get in your head with some form of Propaganda—whether the authority is media, or school, or your mom's side of the family.

Another way to deal with Propaganda is "inoculation." This is also INDIVIDUALISTIC, but it has the advantage of being PROACTIVE instead of REactive. Inoculation is aimed at preventing a disease from ever infecting you in the first place. If it works, you won't need "treatment."

Nygaard Notes helps readers inoculate themselves against Delusion Disease by modeling—and sometimes spelling out some of the steps involved in—a "re-education" process that calls into question much of what we have been taught and have internalized over a lifetime of living in a Propaganda-saturated culture. This can be a very lengthy, very challenging and very difficult process, as it involves no small amount of self-examination and honesty, and you'll be swimming against some very strong cultural currents, as well. It's also very exciting, and liberating, and well worth doing. If you read Nygaard Notes regularly, you'll be happy to find that a lot of the "germs" that are carried by Propaganda will just bounce right off of you. Really!

Yet a third way of dealing with Delusion Disease is SOCIAL and PROACTIVE, and that involves seeing oneself as a part of a larger social group—a community, a society, a planet—and asking "What can we do together to prevent ANYONE from getting this disease?"

We know that public health initiatives like sewage treatment and water filtration have prevented innumerable infectious diseases and deaths. In the same way, some radical changes in the ways we produce and distribute ideas and information—something like "information treatment"—could drastically reduce the incidence of Delusion Disease.

Now we are talking about social change, which is what Nygaard Notes is all about! One of the things that distinguishes Nygaard Notes from a lot of publications—and readers tell me this all the time—is that the Notes is optimistic, lacking in cynicism, not "preachy," and not "depressing." That's no accident. It's because Nygaard Notes constantly focuses on the core values of Solidarity, Justice, Compassion, and Democracy. I don't judge other people, but I do judge the things they do, and I try to understand exactly why some things in the culture promote certain values and not others. Nygaard Notes is all about pursuing a vision of what could be, not about complaining about what is.

If you support this kind of "reality-based," visionary writing, done by a plain old small-town guy from rural Minnesota who is willing to have you come along on his journey of discovery and change, then you might want to help make it possible for the project to continue and grow. The way to do that is to make a pledge of support to Nygaard Notes. Thank you!

A Gallimaufry of "Quotes" of the Week! (Part 1)

Before we begin, allow me to tell a little story of my high-school days. Somewhere in my senior year I took my turn, as all of us seniors were encouraged to do, at reading the "Daily Bulletin" over the school loudspeaker. Those of you who went to public schools in the U.S. probably had something similar. In our school the Daily Bulletin got read at the beginning of the day, and told students what's for lunch, the time of this meeting or that meeting, the location for driver's education class, and so forth. It was piped into every homeroom via a school-wide intercom system, so that everyone would know what was on the agenda for the day.

The Daily Bulletin was a terribly tedious and boring thing to endure, which made me decide to use my turn at the microphone to inject a little entertainment into the ritual. So, on my first day I read the script in my best Elmer Fudd voice. That got good reviews from my peers, so on the second day I imitated Lyndon Johnson (and pretty well, too, I thought: "My fellow students, I come to you with a heavy Bulletin...")

The authorities were not amused, and ordered me to read the Bulletin using my "normal" voice. "The Daily Bulletin is meant to provide information, not entertainment," I was told by our rather humorless vice-principal. I protested that one could provide both information AND entertainment, but this got me nowhere, so on my third day of reading the Bulletin I impersonated the vice-principal. And that was the end of that.

In that spirit, the next couple of weeks in Nygaard Notes will be will be a potpourri, a festival, a cornucopia—a gallimaufry, if you will!—of various odds-‘n-ends, tidbits, and sundry news items from the past couple of months that I have neglected and that you may have missed, or that you may have seen but failed to sufficiently appreciate. Information, certainly. But also, I hope, a little bit of entertainment. They're not mutually exclusive, y'know. This week, money, money, and money are the subjects.

**

U.S. Higher Education: "Stalled." Or "Going Backwards." Take Your Pick

On October 4th the New York Times reported (on page 24) that "The United States, long the world leader in higher education, has fallen behind other nations in its college enrollment and completion rates, as the affordability of American colleges and universities has declined, according to a new report" from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (NCPPHE).

The bottom line: "Over all, the report said, while other nations have significantly improved and expanded their higher education systems, the United States' higher education performance has stalled since the early 1990's."

The article notes that "for most American families, college is becoming increasingly unaffordable. While federal Pell grants for low-income students covered 70 percent of the cost of a year at a four-year public university in the 1990's, [NCPPHE president Patrick M.] Callan said, that has dropped to less than half." Callan added:

"It's going backwards. Tuition is going up faster than family income, faster than inflation, faster even than health care."

**

Consider a Major In Thought Policing; That's Where the Money Is

‘Way back on page 24 of the October 4th New York Times ran a story headlined "Software Being Developed To Monitor Opinions of U.S." It seems that the U.S. government has awarded $2.4 million to "a consortium of major universities" to "develop software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas."

Well into the article we hear from Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who simply says of the program:

"It is just creepy and Orwellian."

Better watch out, Lucy. You never know where your "negative opinion" might land you.

**

That's Not the ONLY Place the Money Is

And in the September 21st NY Times the headline read: "G.O.P. Gains Big Fund-Raising Advantage." The gist of it was that "new fund-raising reports show that at the beginning of September, Republicans had $39 million in the bank, compared with $11 million for Democrats."

Here's my favorite line from the article: "Republicans concede that fund-raising, at least by the Republican National Committee, is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise frustrating political season." It's frustrating, no doubt, since it occasionally touches on the issues, as opposed to vague appeals to voters' fears. Not too often, but too often for the fund-raising champs.

In case anyone is feeling confident that the Republicans will be thrown out of office on November 7th, consider the words of Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who remarked on where some of that money is going:

"We've been building our turnout operation since 2005."

Off the Front Page: Human Costs of the Iraq War

This week's "Quote" of the Week has George Bush dismissing a major scholarly study which found that 655,000 people have died "as a consequence of the U.S. attack on and occupation of Iraq."

In line with this dismissal, the U.S. media similarly dismissed the report, relegating it to the inside pages in almost every case. Page 16 in the New York Times, page 12 in the Washington Post, and page 6 in my local paper. Two U.S. newspapers, the Buffalo News and the Baltimore Sun, did put it on the front page but in each case the headline questioned the study's validity. (The News: "Bush rejects study's total of war deaths; Says 600,000 killed is 'not credible' finding." The Sun: "Hopkins Research Yields Toll Far Higher than Most Estimates.")

You can read the Lancet article for yourself online at http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf

In the meantime, here are just a couple of highlights from the October 11th press release of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:

* The study actually gave a range of "excess Iraqi deaths" between 392,979 and 942,636 since the U.S. invaded in March of 2003

* 91.8 percent of the "excess" deaths were caused by caused by violence (as opposed to non-violent causes, such as heart disease, cancer and chronic illness).

* About half of the households surveyed by the Johns Hopkins team were "uncertain who was responsible for the death of a household member."

* "The proportion of deaths attributed to coalition forces diminished in 2006 to 26 percent. Between March 2003 and July 2006, households attributed 31 percent of deaths to the coalition."

* "Researchers recommend establishment of an international body to calculate mortality and monitor health of people living in all regions affected by conflict."

* "The mortality survey used well-established and scientifically proven methods for measuring mortality and disease in populations."

* The report shows that "about 2.5 percent of Iraqi's population [has] died as a consequence of the war."

* "To put the 654,000 deaths in context with other conflicts, the authors note that during the Vietnam War an estimated 3 million civilians died overall; the Congo conflict was responsible for 3.8 million deaths; and recent estimates are that 200,000 have died in Darfur over the past 31 months."

Epilogue: Here are a few comments about the credibility of the study:

Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, says, "I can't imagine them doing much more in a much more rigorous fashion."

Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, called the study design solid and said it included "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data."

Richard Brennan, head of health programs at the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, which has conducted similar projects in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo, said that "This is the most practical and appropriate methodology for sampling that we have in humanitarian conflict zones," and added that "While the results of this survey may startle people, it's hard to argue with the methodology at this point."

U.S. "President" George W. Bush: "I don't consider it a credible report." (No evidence was offered by the Leader of the World's Only Superpower to back up his dismissal, yet his comment was widely reported in the daily media.)