Fox News’ Visually Distorted Charts
FlowingData points out a recent graphic from a story on Fox News showing the unemployment rate changes under Obama. The numbers are presumably correct, but do not seem to correspond to the rise and fall of the visual, in which, for instance, 8.6 is a higher number than 8.8 or 8.9. Ah, the “Fox Chart” — what does it mean? Is it a work of postmodern art?
The Road to the Iraq War Will Happen Again
The power of the corporate media to deceive the people is simply astonishing, but, mind you, it depends on an already distracted, ignorant, semi-passive multitude whose marching values have been carefully cultivated.
In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.
Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior. With a straight face the official voices declared that those who…
Inability to Detect Sarcasm & Lies May Be Early Sign of Dementia, Study Shows
Via ScienceDaily:
By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing — some talking truthfully, some insincerely — a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person’s ability to detect sarcasm and lies.
Some of the adults in the group were healthy, but many of the test subjects had neurodegenerative diseases that cause certain parts of the brain to deteriorate. The UCSF team mapped their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which showed associations between the deteriorations of particular parts of the brain and the inability to detect insincere speech.
“These patients cannot detect lies,” said UCSF neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin, PhD, a member of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and the senior author of the study. “This fact can help them be diagnosed earlier.”
The finding was presented April 14, 2011, at the 63rd Annual Meeting…
Jesse Ventura Visits Disinformation (Video)
Jesse Ventura resumed his conversation with Gary Baddeley while visiting disinformation’s NYC offices to promote his new book, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read.
They covered everything from joining Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election to the fall of World Trade Center 7 on 9/11, discussing many topics along the way including Colony Collapse Disorder, fluoride in municipal water supplies, legalization of drugs, and much more.
Stephen Colbert, Inspired by Senator Jon Kyl’s Big Planned Parenthood Lie, Introduces Twitter’s #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement
I think Stephen Colbert has found a great use for Twitter. A quick background on this from MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:
Remember in Friday’s “Rewrite” when we showed you the big lie Sen. Jon Kyl told on the Senate floor about Planned Parenthood? The lie that “well over 90%” of Planned Parenthood’s services go to abortions?
The lie that Sen. Kyl’s staff later said “was not intended to be a factual statement” — a remark Lawrence [O'Donnell] called “one of the strangest clarifications in Senate history?” Well, we weren’t the only ones who took notice. So did Stephen Colbert.
Living In A World Of Lies
Pinocchio by Jim Dine. Photo: Mrkgrd (CC)
Lies have an interesting quality. Repeated often enough, lies become accepted as truth, and it must be said that our lives and our minds are filled with them. Filled with half-truths that are also half-lies, credulously accepted though unfounded rumors, filled with the lies of advertisers sowing insecurity and selling false satisfaction. But not all lies are created equal, some lies are useful, even necessary.
Our physical perception of the world is a kind of lie. Where science tells us there are swarms of swirling electrons, protons and neutrons we see a table or a dog. Our eyes lie to us by omission, registering only a narrow spectrum of all the light streaming into them. These are what we might call necessary and useful lies, simplifications of the truth that allow us to make sense of and interact with the world around us.
But many lies…
Iraqi Defector Comes Clean About His WMD Lies
Meet Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, CIA codename Curveball. He lied about Saddam Hussein’s having biological weapons, giving the Bush administration the ammunition they needed in their push for an invasion of Iraq. Al-Janabi says he would do it all over again if he could — the lesson being, don’t trust anyone named Curveball.
Liars Try To Wash Themselves Clean
Weird one this! From AOL News:
Liars: keep your supplies of mouthwash and hand sanitizer fully stocked.
Lying spurs the guilty parties to want to clean their “dirty” body parts, according to researchers at the University of Michigan. It’s yet another study to establish a connection between abstractions, like morality or worry, and more tangible experiences of purity or contentedness.
The study included 87 college students, who were asked to act the part of lawyers and imagine themselves competing for a promotion with a co-worker. In the scenario, each student was told they had stumbled across a document important to the co-worker’s chances and could reach out to him by email or voice mail — and either opt to tell the truth and hand it over, or fib and pretend they hadn’t found it.
And here’s where the twist comes in: The same students were then asked to complete a marketing survey, which included…
Even Your Pants Are Lying To You?
I don’t believe Disinformation’s first book, the Russ Kick anthology You Are Being Lied To, (now updated as You Are STILL Being Lied To), covered fashion, but this story made me think of it. Wow, as Americans, it seems that we don’t want to accept even the truth about ourselves right beneath our noses. Abram Sauer writes on Esquire:
I’ve never been slim — I played offensive line in high school — but I’m no cow either. (I’m happily a “Russell Crowe” body type.) So I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later learned is called “vanity sizing.”
Your pants have been deceiving you for years. And the lies are compounding:
Read More on Esquire
Democrats and Republicans Are Both Addicted to Lying
This won’t be news to some, but the details are telling. Back in 2006 LiveScience reported:
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.
And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.
Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.
The results were announced today.
“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”
Bias on both sides
The test subjects on both sides of…
Newly Released FBI Documents Support Sibel Edmonds’ Allegations
Thanks to a FOIA request, new evidence has emerged from the FBI’s own internal communications that appear to support many of the claims made by Sibel Edmonds regarding (largely though not exclusively) GOP collusion in the spying activities of the Turkish government.
This is no small matter, as it involves blackmail and bribery of high-level officials like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, PNAC signatory Richard Perle, Congressman Roy Blunt, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Turkish Ambassador Marc Grossman, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Asst. Sec. Def. Douglas Feith, Congressman Dan Burton and others to “look the other way” from those engaged in spying activities with a foreign government against the United States.
Per the report from the Boiling Frogs website:
Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI…
The Lies of Karl Rove
By Melvin A. Goodman for TruthOut:
Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove’s Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced “evidence” of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration’s big lie to the American public and to the international community…
People In Power Make Better Liars
By Eve Tahmincioglu for MSNBC:
New York Gov. David Paterson is embroiled in a scandal over whether he used his power and influence to intimidate a woman pursuing a domestic violence case against one of his top aides. As a result, the governor said last month that he would not seek a second term, and his communications director quit earlier this month citing “integrity” issues.
Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who went to prison after the spectacular collapse of the company, is appealing to the Supreme Court his 2006 conviction on 19 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying. His lawyers argue that he didn’t get a fair trial and that Skilling’s conduct, “even if wrongful in some way,” was not illegal because he was not looking out for his personal interests “apart from his normal compensation incentives.”
The issue of integrity is at the heart of the predicaments these powerful…
