The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
-This 3rd video is following the same script and format as the previous two
-Again it was first reported by SITE Intelligence
-Again the actual beheading is not shown
-The result of the beheading is shown in a still
-This video is specifically directed at the allies of the US, the UK in particular
-Again this video ends with the warning that another ISIS hostage will be beheaded in the next video
This Man Wrote Hundreds of Letters Warning Politicians Not to Lie. It Worked.
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan explains why fact-checking keeps candidates honest…sometimes.
Nyhan hasn't just been studying the fact-check movement; he was there at its origins. In the early 2000s, he coauthored a site called Spinsanity.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking outlet. It was the beginning of a wave: In 2003, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched FactCheck.org. But the real fact-checking movement kicked into gear in the late 2000s, with the launch of PolitiFact, by far the most widely known of these outlets, as well as the 2007 launch of the Washington Post fact-checker column, now written by Glenn Kessler.
. . . . . .
So what does the evidence show about this endeavor?
First the good news: Overall, the fact-checkers have reinforced the idea that reality exists, and journalists are capable of discerning what it is.
. . . . . .
A far tougher issue, though, is whether minds change when fact-checkers make their pronouncements. On the level of individual psychology, repeated studies by Nyhan and others have shown that it is very hard to correct a misperception once it is out there in the media ether.
Fundamental, this is.
Paul Vallery
New York Times, 4 September 2014
LONDON — Pope Francis grabbed headlines recently when he announced that Rome had lifted the block on sainthood for Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, who was shot dead while saying Mass in 1980. But much less attention was given to another of the pope’s actions, one that underscores a significant shift inside the Vatican under the first Latin American pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Archbishop Romero was assassinated after speaking out in favor of the poor during an era when right-wing death squads stalked El Salvador under an American-backed, military-led government in the 1970s and ’80s. For three decades Rome blocked his path to sainthood for fear that it would give succor to the proponents of liberation theology, the revolutionary movement that insists that the Catholic Church should work to bring economic and social — as well as spiritual — liberation to the poor.
In quest of the lesser evil for the greater good
Introduction
Befooting and befooted?
Befooting by anti-personnel landmines
Victims of befooting
Befooting as a lesser evil?
Degrees of evil
Paradoxes of framing the greater evil using the Devil's Gambit
Engendering identification with the greater good, despite the necessity for lesser evil
References
“Worth a look.”
Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver ‘People's Shock'
Status quo is not an option if we are to rein in runaway emissions, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate author says in address to conference
“You're having the core conversation of our time.”
That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on “concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth.”
Klein's opening address to the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which kicked off Tuesday in the German city of Leipzig, made perfect sense, as the themes of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, overlap those of the conference — that addressing the climate crisis is incompatible with the current growth-focused economy.
As a life long traveler and walker this piece, although not about a trend, just appealed to me. Perhaps you will like it as well.
Why Walking Helps Us Think
FERRIS JABR – The New Yorker
In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses”: ‘Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in ‘Mrs. Dalloway.”
Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, ‘making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”
Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. ‘Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth-whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads-walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs-including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
DEFENDING AGAINST BIG DADA: DEFENSIVE TACTICS FOR WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
The first casualty of power politics, advocacy journalism, dark propaganda, rumor mills, and media-politico echo chambers is truth. Here’s a defensive tactic for your consideration.
Scholars have been concerned with the pollution of our infospheres (‘infopollution') for many decades. As I prepare this column I am reminded of a column that I wrote on information overload in 1997 (Cyberspace 2000: Dealing with Information Overload, Communications of the ACM, 40:2; February 1997). Some of my predictions were spot on – e.g., the Web did indeed evolve toward multi-mediocrity and self-indulgent tripe. To deal with this, some of us experimented with “cyberbrowsers” that could be optimized with respect to search relevance and maximal information uptake (Customizing information: Getting what we need, when we need it, IEEE Computer, parts I and II, September and October, 1994). But I was deluded into thinking that the solution to the needle-in-haystack problem was primarily a navigational issue. I failed to anticipate that the Web would become a convenient weapon of mass deception. As the toxicity of the Web increased, it became obvious that sophisticated navigation alone won't solve the problem of information overburden, and that defensive browsers were needed. By the mid-1990's the information content of large parts of cyberspace rivaled that of air dancers and lava lamps.
This toxicity may have been anticipated by alert and well-read software developers. By 1990 propaganda models of mass media had been carefully articulated by scholars such as Alex Carey (Taking the Risk out of Democracy, University of Illinois Press, 1997), and Herman and Chomsky (Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon, 1988). Further, the Orwell-Huxley models of dystopia had been extended to mass media by Neil Postman since the 1960’s (see, e.g. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin Books, rev. ed., 2005). So the handwriting should have been visible on the erudite’s wall. However, I was` blindsided by the most insidious side of infopollution: mass deception. This is my chance to redeem myself for the oversight.
