Maggie's Farm

--re Maddow, anyone familiar with Ice-9 understands Bokononism, and its concept of the 'false' Karass, an example of which is the loosely-defined 'Granfalloon' usually regarded as a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaninglessly built upon a fabricated premise.

MSNBC is of course the very definition of a Granfalloon. Without reiterating the exhausted and loathsomely familiar tenets thought by adherents to be the glue that joins 'em, what actually joins 'em is an unfortunate sputter, or wobble, in the circuit connecting the Amygdala to the dorso-lateral prefrontal circuit --the brain’s top executive, which organizes responses to complex problems, plans steps to an objective, searches memory for relevant experience, adapts strategies to accommodate new data, guides behavior with verbal skills, houses working memory, manages in its orbitofrontal circuit emotional impulses in socially appropriate ways for productive behaviors including empathy, altruism, interpretation of facial expressions, and typically responding to injury via releases of foul language and fatuous behavior patterns.

Anyhoo, as the sputtering wobble (think of that toy battery-powered gyroscope you once wired directly to the 220V circuit in your parents firetrap of a house back when you were 10) develops a reverse feedback loop ("LFR" or Esrever Kcabdeef Pool) energized by the photon attention of Aliens (creatures who resemble the self but are from "the outside of me"), the normal power flow from the dorso-lateral prefrontal circuit to the amygdala reverses and that older, evolutionarily-subservient chaotic subsystem (deep in limbic emotional brain, constantly firing aversive cues to the anger and fear needed for ancient basic survival, associated with a range of mental conditions, often oversized in sociopathic brains) swells up like the Pillsbury Dough Boy in Ghostbusters, and begins strolling around the World Trade Center shorting the intricate signaling channels which by the very intricacy define the dorso-lateral prefrontal circuit.

Or you could just say, ''ah, nutz to that buncha idiots'' and get to the same place in less time.

oops, forgot to credit

http://www.brainwaves.com/brain_diagram.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karass

heh --thanks y'all --i got a little carried away there --

--rre the 'unemployment benefits' link, heard the following over the weekend, on FoxBiz:

...from 1990 to 2010, welfare transfers are up 292%, and the poverty rate is up 15%.

(that 292 could be rounded to 300 for ease of remembering --and to foreshadow the unincluded 2011)