March 29, 2011
Minuteman Salsa was a brand of salsa made in the United States. The brand was founded by Ryan Lambert, along with four associates during the summer of 2006 in reference to the illegal immigration debate. According to the company’s Web site, it is America’s only 100% United States-made salsa. Minuteman Salsa donates a portion of its profits to the Minuteman Project, a group of American citizens whose goal is to deter illegal crossings of the United States–Mexico border. The salsa’s slogan was ‘Deport Bad Taste.’
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March 29, 2011
Freedom fries is a political euphemism for French fries used in the US as a result of anti-French sentiment during the controversy over the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. France expressed strong opposition in the UN, leading to boycotts of French goods and the removal of the country’s name from products.
Representatives Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter B. Jones, Jr. (R-North Carolina) declared that all references to French fries and French toast on the menus of the restaurants and snack bars run by the House of Representatives would be removed. House cafeterias were ordered to rename French fries ‘freedom fries.’ This action was carried out without a congressional vote, under the authority of Ney’s position as Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees restaurant operations for the chamber.
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March 29, 2011
Scapegoating is singling out someone for unmerited negative treatment or blame. A whipping boy or ‘fall guy’ is a form of scapegoat. The word is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word ‘Azazel.’ The Biblical scapegoat was a goat cast out into the desert as part of the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement.
Since this goat, carrying the sins of the people placed on it, is sent away to perish, the word ‘scapegoat’ has come to mean a person, often innocent, who is blamed and punished for the sins, crimes or sufferings of others, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes. In Christian theology, the story of the scapegoat in Leviticus is interpreted as a symbolic prefiguration of the self-sacrifice of Jesus, who takes the sins of humanity on his own head, having been crucified on a cross outside the city by order of the high priests.
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March 29, 2011
Sheeple (a portmanteau of ‘sheep’ and ‘people’) is a term of disparagement, in which people are likened to sheep. It is often used to denote persons who voluntarily acquiesce to a perceived authority or suggestion without sufficient research to understand fully the ramifications involved in that decision, and thus undermine their own human individuality or in other cases give up certain rights.
The implication of sheeple is that as a collective, people believe or do whatever they are told, especially if told so by a perceived authority figure believed to be trustworthy, without critically thinking about it or doing adequate research to be sure that it is an accurate representation of the real world around them. The term is generally used in a political, social, and mostly in a spiritual sense.
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March 29, 2011
The Bradley effect is a theory proposed to explain observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some US government elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. The theory proposes that some voters will tell pollsters they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, while on election day they vote for the white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.
The effect theorizes that the inaccurate polls were skewed by the phenomenon of social desirability bias. Specifically, some white voters give inaccurate polling responses for fear that, by stating their true preference, they will open themselves to criticism of racial motivation. Some analysts have dismissed that theory, or argued that it may have existed in past elections, but not in more recent ones. Others believe that it is a persistent phenomenon. Similar effects have been posited in other contexts, notably the Shy Tory Factor and spiral of silence.
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March 29, 2011
Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Research psychologist, Irving Janis studied a number of ‘disasters’ in American foreign policy, such as failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), the Bay of Pigs fiasco (1961), and the prosecution of the Vietnam War (1964–67) by President Lyndon Johnson. He concluded that in each of these cases, the decisions were made largely due to the cohesive nature of the committees which made them. Moreover, that cohesiveness prevented contradictory views from being expressed and subsequently evaluated.
Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group. Members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking to avoid being seen as foolish, or to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. The term is frequently used pejoratively, in hindsight, and was coined by journalist William H. Whyte in a 1952 ‘Fortune’ magazine article.
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March 29, 2011
The Abilene paradox is a paradox in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of any of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group’s and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire to not ‘rock the boat.’
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March 29, 2011
SAMO© graffiti appeared in NYC from 1977 to early 1980. They were short phrases, in turns poetic and sarcastic, mainly painted in downtown Manhattan. The tag has been primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was developed in collaboration with his high school friend Al Diaz, and a few others. Diaz had previously been part of the New York graffiti scene, using the tag ‘Bomb I.’ Later Basquiat took on the tag himself, creating some non-graffiti work on paper and canvas with it, just before and after killing off the SAMO graffiti by painting ‘SAMO IS DEAD’ around the streets of downtown in early 1980.
Basquiat claims the name was first developed in a stoned conversation with Diaz, calling the marijuana they smoked ‘the same old shit.’ The character of SAMO was first developed by Basquiat, Diaz, and Shannon Dawson while they were students at City As School high school. Basquiat took the lead in the project, selling a false religion, in comics made in high school. The concept was further developed in a theatre-as-therapy course in upper Manhattan (called ‘Family Life’).
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March 29, 2011
Jean-Michel Basquiat [bah-skee-ott] (1960 – 1988) was a Neo-expressionist painter who got his start as a graffiti artist in NYC in the late 1970s. He died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. In 1976, Basquiat and friend Al Diaz began spray-painting political-poetical graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. In 1979, he formed the noise rock band Gray with Vincent Gallo. In 1983-84 he was a frequent collaborator with Andy Warhol. The record price for a Basquiat painting is $14.6 million, paid in 2007 for an untitled 1981 piece. In keeping with his street art roots, Basquiat often incorporated words into his paintings.
He would often draw on random objects and surfaces. A major reference source throughout his career was ‘Gray’s Anatomy,’ which his mother gave to him while in the hospital at age seven. It remained influential in his depictions of internal human anatomy, and in its mixture of image and text. Other reference sources were Henry Dreyfuss’ ‘Symbol Sourcebook,’ Da Vinci’s notebooks, and Brentjes’ ‘African Rock Art.’ Basquiat doodled often, and some of his later pieces, done mostly with colored pencils on paper, exhibit this, often with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his paintings.
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March 29, 2011
Knife money refers to large, cast, bronze, knife-shaped coins produced by Ancient Chinese governments and kingdoms approximately 2500 years ago. They had holes on the end to be easily strapped onto belts or rings. Known as ‘jin cuo dao’ in Chinese, knife money circulated in China between 600 to 200 BCE during the Zhou dynasty. There are several stories that attempt to explain how knife money was introduced but it is not certain if any or all are true.
In one story a prince who was running low on money to pay his troops allowed them to use their knives as a form of currency to barter with villagers and the medium became so popular that it became generally accepted. In another story, the same prince began accepting knives as payment for small fines in the place of the current legal ring currency. Knife money may also have been brought in by sea traders from the Indian Ocean. Over time, the currency slowly shrank until only the ring of the handle was produced as a symbol of the knife that it represented.
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March 29, 2011
The ketogenic [kee-toh-jen-ik] diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that in medicine is used primarily to treat difficult-to-control epilepsy in children. The diet mimics aspects of starvation by forcing the body to burn fats rather than carbohydrates.
Normally, the carbohydrates contained in food are converted into glucose, which is then transported around the body and is particularly important in fuelling brain function. However, if there is very little carbohydrate in the diet, the liver converts fat into fatty acids and ketone bodies. The ketone bodies pass into the brain and replace glucose as an energy source. An elevated level of ketone bodies in the blood, a state known as ketosis, leads to a reduction in the frequency of epileptic seizures.
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March 28, 2011
Red Hot Organization (RHO) is an international not-for-profit organization dedicated to fighting AIDS through pop culture. Since its inception in 1989, over 400 artists, producers and directors have contributed to over 15 compilation albums, related television programs and media events to raise donations totaling more than 10 million dollars for HIV / AIDS relief and awareness around the world.
First founded as King Cole, Inc. by Leigh Blake and John Carlin, Red Hot was established in response to the devastation wrought by AIDS on a generation of New York artists and intellectuals. Carlin had an ‘improbable dream: to create an AIDS charity album with pop stars singing Cole Porter songs.’ In 1990 the dream was realized when ‘Red Hot + Blue’ was released, featuring David Byrne, Annie Lennox, Tom Waits, U2, and Erasure.
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The Daily Omnivore 