How the rich delude themselves on social inequality

From LiveScience:

The Rich See What They Believe

By Jeanna Bryner

LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 28 February 2007

People see what they believe, not vice versa, when it comes to social injustice.

And this mind-altering trick of perception keeps moral outrage at bay, especially among the rich, a new psychological study suggests.

By reducing outrage, this mental hoodwink also impedes social change because it inhibits people from taking action, allowing injustices to persist, said lead researcher Cheryl Wakslak of New York University.

Research has shown that people become emotionally distressed when confronted with inequality.

The privileged minority is particularly affected, and they are likely to have a nagging worry that their cash and prizes are undeserved.

To keep a clean conscience and legitimize privilege, individuals often alter their perceptions of the status quo.

The details of how that mental distortion provides the relief, however, remained a mystery until now.

Mind benders

To get at those details, Wakslak and her colleagues presented survey questions and scenarios involving just and unjust situations to about 100 undergraduate students.

Inequality in Australia: here.

Twenty new fish species discovered in Indonesia

This video is called Diving Indonesia – Grey Reef Sharks.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV:

At Indonesian fish markets, at least twenty new species of rays and sharks have been discovered.

Australian researchers went to these markets in the five past years in order to photograph and describe fishes.

According to the Australians, before their research started, still much was unknown about sharks and rays in Indonesia.

There are more sharks and rays there than anywhere else in the world.

Each year, over 100,000 tons are caught.

Ever since Dutch researcher Pieter Bleeker between 1842 and 1860 described over 1100 fish species in Indonesia, there has not been such intensive research into new fish species there.

Read more on this here.

And here.

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“Rembrandt” not by Rembrandt

From Dutch NOS TV:

The painting “Man with a red bonnet” is not by Rembrandt.

It was made in Rembrandt’s workshop, however.

This was concluded by Museum Boijmans van Beuningen [in Rotterdam, The Netherlands] after the painting was restored.

There had been doubts about who made it for a long time.

New Mark Fiore animation on ‘Scooter’ Libby trial in the USA

There is a new Mark Fiore animation on the Internet.

It is here.

It is called Slimy circus.

Its subject is the ‘Scooter’ Libby trial in the USA; on the lies which started the Iraq war.

Music, poetry, and a magician in the theater

On Tuesday 27 February, there was music, poetry, and a magician in the theater.

The presenter was Egon Snelders.

The music was by Warner van Esch, and Maurice Tomey.

The magician was Tilman Andris.

And the poetry was by Frans Terken from Leiderdorp and Ton Jansen from Leiden.

Ton Jansen was first, with poems including one on refugee children.

Then, Maurice Tomey.

Then, the rope and rings tricks by Tilman Andris.

After the pause, the column by yours truly, about Rembrandt.

Then, the composer Warner van Esch on his new opera, with vocals by Olga van Marion.

Finally, Frans Terken’s poems.

Related articles

• Magician Rips up a Homeless Veteran’s sign. Then Surprises Him…

Rich-poor gap bigger than ever under Blair in Britain

This video is about poverty in Britain.

From British daily The Guardian:

Who is really to blame for the widening gaps in British society?

Playwrights Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones turned to London’s Hackney to find out

Tuesday February 27, 2007

Who would have imagined that Britain would end up like this?

That life expectancy for men in parts of Glasgow would slump below 60; that almost half of Hackney would be living on income support; that Britain’s children are at the bottom of the industrialised world’s well-being league?

Poverty in Blair’s Britain: here.

Forced labour in Britain: here.

Related articles

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USA: extreme poverty grows dramatically under Bush

From British daily The Independent:

Poverty gap in US has widened under Bush

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Published: 27 February 2007

The number of Americans living in severe poverty has expanded dramatically under the Bush administration, with nearly 16 million people now living on an individual income of less than $5,000 (£2,500) a year or a family income of less than $10,000, according to an analysis of 2005 official census data.

The analysis, by the McClatchy group of newspapers, showed that the number of people living in extreme poverty had grown by 26 per cent since 2000.

Poverty as a whole has worsened, too, but the number of severe poor is growing 56 per cent faster than the overall segment of the population characterised as poor – about 37 million people in all according to the census data.

That represents more than 10 per cent of the US population, which recently surpassed the 300 million mark.

The widening of the income gap between haves and have-nots is nothing new in America – it has been going on steadily since the late 1970s.

What is new, though, is the rapid increase in numbers at the bottom of the socio-economic pile.

The numbers of severely poor have increased faster than any other segment of the population.

“That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began,” one of the McClatchy study’s co-authors, Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said.

“We’re not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we’re seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty.”

The causes of the problem are no mystery to sociologists and political scientists.

The share of national income going to corporate profits has far outstripped the share going to wages and salaries.

Manufacturing jobs with benefits and union protection have vanished and been supplanted by low-wage, low-security service-sector work.

The richest fifth of US households enjoys more than 50 per cent of the national income, while the poorest fifth gets by on an estimated 3.5 per cent.

US and world economic problems: here.

Iraq war: Blair government tries to censor Turner-prize winning artist Steve McQueen

From British daily The Independent:

Turner-prize winner’s true portrait of war

By Ian Herbert

Published: 27 February 2007

It is an image of war that the Ministry of Defence never wanted to see published: an intimate family photograph of a British soldier killed in Iraq which, taken with nearly 100 others, forms the official portrait of the conflict by the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen.

As the finished work, For Queen and Country, was unveiled in Manchester last night, McQueen said it had been completed in the face of two years’ opposition from the MoD, which had offered only a limited glimpse of the conflict, refused him access to the families of British casualties and asked why he could not produce “a landscape” portrait instead.

To the astonishment of the 98 bereaved families who have worked on the project with McQueen, the Royal Mail chairman, Allan Leighton has also declined the artist’s personal request that the stamps be turned into a real commemorative issue, to mark the lives laid down in the conflict.

Carol Jones, the mother of Sgt John Jones, whose image is reproduced in The Independent with her permission, said she was astonished that McQueen had been discouraged from approaching her.

“It’s wonderful, such a tribute, and it makes me feel so proud,” she said.

“We will always remember our sons and husbands but I don’t know about the public, once this conflict is over.

How wonderful it would be to receive a letter through the post with John’s face on it.

I wish the Royal Mail would co-operate while the conflict is still remembered.”

McQueen says he was deeply moved by the reaction of 200 families who attended a private view of the piece, a pre-commission for this summer’s Manchester International Festival.

“One little girl came up and said, ‘do you want to see my daddy’ and pulled out the drawer,” he said.

Update, March 2008: here.

USA: Oscar awards uninspiring

By David Walsh:

There is not much to be said about the 79th edition of the Academy Awards.

No one said or did anything of particular interest during the more than three-and-a-half-hour ceremony Sunday evening.

The film that received the highest honors (best picture, best direction, best adapted screenplay and film editing), Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, is a miserable, misanthropic work, the worst by some distance of the five nominated for best film (along with Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, Letters from Iwo Jima and The Queen).

The overriding impression left by the evening at the Kodak Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard is of a group of people far removed from the realities of American or global life.

Wealthy, insulated and self-involved to an unhealthy degree, the Hollywood elite is not in any position to make serious or profound judgments on much of anything.

See also here.

Infamous US torture camp Bagram hit by bomb attack as Dick Cheney visits

This video from the USA is called Moazzam Begg on detainment, torture, and civil liberties 1/5.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

From the BBC:

Afghan base hit as Cheney visits

At least 19 people have been killed and 10 injured in a suicide attack outside Afghanistan’s main US base during a visit by US Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Mr Cheney, on an unannounced visit to the region, was staying at the Bagram base, 60km (40 miles) from Kabul. …

Most of the dead were labourers queuing for daily jobs at the base, but at least one US soldier was killed. …

His [Cheney’s] visit comes amid increasing concern about insurgent activity in several regions of the country.

But the BBC’s Charles Haviland in Kabul says Bagram is one of the most heavily guarded sites in Afghanistan and such incidents there are extremely rare.

The surrounding territory is heavily mined and people, including children, have frequently been injured by such devices.

See also here.

And here.

Bagram is infamous for torture of civilian prisoners at the base, of which several of them died.

Blair and the Afghanistan war: here.