Saturday Sidebar – Daydream Believers And Confirmation Bias

The first draft of this got to around 1700 words before I realised it was in danger of going on forever. Clearly one of my New Year resolutions should be to try and be more succinct. 

I’d been chatting to a pal of mine over Skype about the state funeral of Kim Jong-il in North Korea. After he’d given me the heads up on the story about priests having a bit of a brawl http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16347418 we moved on to belief systems in general. 

Yes, under certain regimes information is not readily available to those sufficiently curious to question perceived wisdom but in other societies, there is an abundance of information available to enable the slaughtering of the occasional sacred cow. And yet, certain ideas persist no matter what information comes to light. Or does it just seem that way? Do we have difficulty considering timescales greater than the average human lifespan? 

If you have happened upon any of my previous posts this year you’ll have noticed that I’ve become mightily distracted from the noble enterprise of making music that sounds twenty years out of date by the economic crisis. All it took was a bout of insomnia and an absentminded scroll up the television channel list from the BBC News to RT where I caught an episode of the Keiser Report with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert. I was so transfixed I forgot all about scrolling further up to the delights of Babestation. Yeah, Max and Stacy were that interesting AND funny ;) 

If you can stomach an insight into why the parameters within which you live your life are based on the most audacious chicanery then look them up. If not, do it anyway, for your kids’ sake if nothing else.

Whether it’s been studying the difference between how the BBC, Sky, Channel 4, RT and Al Jazeera report the news; films like Collapse, Inside Job, The Flaw and Zeitgeist: Moving Forward or programmes like The Alyona Show, Capital Account and the Keiser Report, it’s been a hell of a year for learning the extent to which our lives are affected by policies implemented off the back of a system so completely divorced from our physical reality.

I think it was at this point in the first draft that I really started to ramble on and ended up just repeating what other far more articulate souls have already put out into the ether. I thought about Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror trilogy and reconsidered. When programmes as good as that exist, what else is left to say? Only that the old news footage in Ben Elton’s Laughing At The 80s programme showed we’ve been here before.

So what of what we believe in? Having effectively spent most of 2011 devouring as much information as my sanity would allow, let the record reflect that I’ve stopped laughing about North Korea. 

Happy New Year x

p.s. there's a new song called Mockingbird available on the Music tab or a super spangly version available on the Download Here! tab.