Maintaining Your Mental Filters Helps Avoid Brain Meltdown

With Sarah Palin calling on Obama to declare war on Iran (or as she says "Playing the war card"), I think it is time to do some preventive maintenance on our mental media filters. So I have provided a diagram, and I will walk you through it step by step. The various parts of the diagram have letters to make it easy to see what I am talking about.

I am using an analogy of a typical oil filter, so motorcyclists and auto mechanics will be able to understand the basic idea. You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it.

A. This is a classical dupe. Information is coming in to the ear through a media funnel (D) , and it is coupled to a bullshit filter (E). The bullshit filter can get clogged, and can eventually lead to a total brain meltdown, i.e. the dupe first becoming fearful, then filled with rage, then voting for war.

A properly functioning filter is shown at F. But when the filter is clogged, a pressure relief valve opens, bypassing the filter element and feeding bullshit directly to the brain. This failsafe mode is shown in G. If the valve didn't open to bypass the clogged filter, their brain would melt down immediately for lack of oil. The bypass valve is there to give you time to replace the clogged filter element with a new one, but it should be done without delay.

It pays to keep the filter clean all the time, normally replacing it once a year. However if you have watched over 24 hours of Fox News (B) you will need a new filter immediately, as the element will be clogged and running in bypass mode.

Hopefully this little public service announcement will help you avoid becoming a dupe, and the more people I can help, the better. Otherwise the future is going to look pretty bleak.

So how do we keep a nice clean filter from getting clogged again within a week? In the USA, stop watching Fox News, in Canada stop reading MacLean's, and the National Post. Start reading this blog under the subject heading "Propaganda" or "Politics". If you are heavily into a religion that features a pro-gun Jesus, you can try reading my blogs under the topic label of "Religion". That should make your filter last at least another year.

The picture was a montage I photoshopped. The dupe is played by an ex-high school history teacher/sex offender, who had the expression I was trying to capture.