The American Cargo Cult

Link from sailor_jim Johnston.

I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me.  I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not.  The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways.  By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it.

I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war.  There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions.  I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate.

Whee! Verizon faw down, go boom

Yup, Verizon dropped something on the floor again.  One second, solid DSL, good carrier, solid IP connection, a good dozen TCP connections open, traffic flowing freely.  Next second, BLAM, no IP transport.  DSL carrier is still rock-solid, but we can't re-establish our PPP connection.

Verizon, of course, didn't have the least idea what's going on.  But at least this time they escalated it, hopefully before blowing away our authentication information again.  Go Verizon.

Oops ... forgot to update.  The above was written about 1145E, about 45 minutes after our IP transport went down.  It was POSTED about five minutes after they found and fixed the problem (hopefully permanently) and PPP came back up.