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Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product.

Think of the world of software today: Tech firms regularly sue geeks who reverse-engineer their code to look for flaws. They want their customers to be ignorant of how their apps work.

Even the financial meltdown was driven by ignorance. Credit-default swaps were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they’d changed hands and been serially securitized, no one knew what they were worth.

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A Spanish newspaper has noticed that the State Department’s identikit picture of Osama Bin Laden appears to have the hair and forehead of Spanish Communist leader Gaspar Llamazares.

No one expects the Spanish identikit addition!

Our main identifying part is the hair. The hair and the forehead.

Our TWO main identifying parts are the hair and the forehead and the eyebrows.

Our THREE…

Muslim suicide bombers in Britain are set to begin a three-day strike on Monday in a dispute over the number of virgins they are entitled to in the afterlife. Emergency talks with Al Qaeda management have so far failed to produce an agreement.

The unrest began last Tuesday when Al Qaeda announced that the number of virgins a suicide bomber would receive after his death will be cut by 25% beginning January from 72 to only 60. The rationale for the cut was the increase in recent years of the number of suicide bombings and a subsequent shortage of virgins in the afterlife.

The suicide bombers’ union, the British Organisation of Occupational Martyrs (or B.O.O.M.) responded with a statement that this was unacceptable to its members and immediately balloted for strike action. General Secretary Abdullah Amir told the press, “Our members are literally working themselves to death in the cause of jihad. We don’t ask for much in return but to be treated like this by management is a kick in the teeth.”

Mr Amir accepted the limited availability of virgins but pointed out that the cutbacks were expected to be borne entirely by the workforce and not by management. “Last Christmas Abu Hamza alone was awarded an annual bonus of 250,000 virgins,” complains Amir. “And you can be sure they’ll all be pretty ones too. How can Al Qaeda afford that for members of the management but not 72 for the people who do the real work?”

Speaking from the shed in the West Midlands where he currently resides, Al Qaeda chief executive Osama bin Laden explained, “We sympathise with our workers’ concerns but Al Qaeda is simply not in a position to meet their demands. They are simply not accepting the realities of modern-day jihad, in a competitive marketplace. Thanks to Western depravity, there is now a chronic shortage of virgins in the afterlife. It’s a straight choice between reducing expenditure and laying people off. I don’t like cutting wages but I’d hate to have to tell 3,000 of my staff that they won’t be able to blow themselves up.” He defended management bonuses by claiming these were necessary to attract good fanatical clerics. “How am I supposed to attract the best people if I can’t compete with the private sector?” asked Mr. Bin-Laden.

Talks broke down this morning after management’s last-ditch proposal of a virgin-sharing scheme was rejected outright after a failure to agree on orifice allocation quotas. One virgin, who refused to be named, was quoted as saying “I’ll be buggered if I’m agreeing to anything like that. It’s too much of a mouthful to swallow”.

Unless some sort of agreement is reached over the weekend, suicide bombers will down explosives at midday on Monday. Most branches are supporting the strike. Only the North London branch, which has a different union, is likely to continue working. However, some members of that branch will only be using waist-down explosives in order to express solidarity with their striking brethren.

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Reports from Costa Rica indicate that final approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States is languishing in the Legislative Assembly due to concerns over the copyright provisions.  The CAFTA copyright provisions are similar to those found in the other major U.S. trade agreements concluded in recent years: DMCA-style protections, ISP liability, and copyright term extension are all part of the package. 

In this case, it is the responses that are most noteworthy. Within Costa Rica, the article reports that the copyright provisions in the trade treaty have set off a wave of student protests over what it means for education.  Meanwhile, health officials are concerned that the provisions on pharmaceutical products “would bankrupt the public health system.” The response from the U.S. is important as well.  It is delaying market access to sugar from the developing country until the copyright reforms are in place.  Until that time, Costa Rican sugar producers will not be able to sell their product in the U.S.

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The drive to ram through the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is ramping up, with the next meeting set for the end of this month in Mexico. ACTA is an unprecedented copyright treaty (unprecedented in that it reaches farther than previous copyright treaties, and that it is being negotiated behind closed doors, without any public input or oversight) that will force copyright policing duties on Internet companies (vastly increasing the cost of hosting “user-generated content”); create new penalties for infringement (including Draconian penalties such as disconnection from the Internet on accusations of infringement); and require countries to search hard-drives, personal media players, and other personal data at their borders.

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Two recurring points that Metalitz raised were that the secrecy in the treaty was a requirement of foreign negotiating partners, and the US’s hands were tied; and that the treaty wouldn’t require any of the “advanced” nations to change their law (he repeated the oft-heard unfounded slur that Canada is a rogue nation when it comes to copyright law).

Both of these points are simply wrong. The country demanding that ACTA be kept secret is the good old US of A, whose strategy for this is being driven by former entertainment industry lawyers who have found new homes as senior officials in the Obama government (the Democrats are terrible on copyright, sadly — we can thank Bill Clinton for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). These lawyers are Metalitz’s old pals, his colleagues in the decades he’s spent winning special privileges and public subsidy for his rich clients.

Even more ridiculous is the claim that ACTA won’t require any changes to law (if that was true, why bother with it?). As the EU’s Commissioner-designate for the Internal Market stated, ACTA will trump the democratic law made by elected governments, requiring changes that are created in smoke-filled rooms that only corporate bigwigs get access to.

If they’re willing to lie this blatantly and obviously about it, it’s pretty obvious that this law will be incredibly bad for every-one except the guys represented by Metalitz.

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Late-night hosts have talked about late-night more than anything else this week, so it only makes sense that Jay Leno had Jimmy Kimmel on his show last night for the “10 at 10″ segment. Bad idea Jay.

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A White House spokesman on Thursday slammed evangelist broadcaster Pat Robertson’s remark that Haiti has been cursed.

A devastating magnitude-7 earthquake hit there Tuesday.

“It never ceases to amaze me that in times of amazing human suffering somebody says something that can be so utterly stupid,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.