Spin // Current TV

Terry Tomalin's Everyday Adventures will not include Mr. Media! (Video Interview)

Video interview with Tampa Bay Times outdoors-fitness editor Terry Tomalin, author of... more

andelman
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15 days ago
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U.S. Officials Conspire To Spin Tar Sands Issues !

One more example of how and why we can not believe anything that government tell us... more

COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM
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6 months ago
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13 comments

GOP loves and thrives on the DEBT !

Not only did the GOP create the debt, but they depend upon it to justify the actions... more

COMMONSENSEFORCOMMONGOOD_COM
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7 months ago
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5 comments

Nobody, I mean Nobody Knows; can you imagine?

“Nobody Knows How Deep it All Goes” is a mind stopping concept for me;... more

Stephenm1779
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9 months ago
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GOP as Dirty Hippies? I Don’t Think So

Who knew conservatives were, at heart, a bunch of dirty fu@#$ng hippies? That’s... more

joeeddy
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9 months ago
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The Vacuous Accusation of Elitism : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

There is nothing more absurd in the American political system than the right... more

toyotabedzrock
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12 months ago
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15 comments

Leaked e-mail shows Fox boss tried to slant ‘news’ programs | Raw Story

The Washington, DC managing editor at Fox News appears to be caught red-handed in the... more

Darevalo
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1 year ago
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"Proofiness" ; a creative Arts n Crafts of numbers

Lies, Damned Lies, And 'Proofiness'

- an excerpt :

-Our society is now awash in proofiness. Using a few powerful techniques, thousands of people are crafting mathematical falsehoods to get you to swallow untruths. Advertisers use these techniques to forge numbers to get you to buy their products. Bureaucrats fiddle with data to try to get you to reelect them. Pundits and prophets use phony math to get you to believe predictions that never seem to pan out. Businessmen use bogus numerical arguments to steal your money. Pollsters, pretending to listen to what you have to say, use proofiness to tell you what they want you to believe.

Sometimes, people use these techniques to try to convince you of frivolous and absurd things. Scientists and other have used proofiness to show that Olympic sprinters will one day break the sound barrier and that there’s a mathematical formula that determines who has the perfect butt. There’s no limit to how absurd proofiness can be.

At the same time, proofiness has extraordinarily serious consequences. It nullifies elections, crowning victors that are undeserving—both Republican and Democratic. Worse yet, it is used to fix the outcome of future elections; politicians and judges use bogus mathematical techniques to manipulate voting districts and undermine the Census that dictates which Americans are represented in Congress. Proofiness is largely responsible for the collapse of our economy—and for the great sucking sound as more than a trillion dollars vanishes from the Treasury. Prosecutors and justices use proofiness to acquit the guilty and convict the innocent—even to put people to death. In short, bad math is undermining our democracy.

When you learn to shovel proofiness out of the way, some of the most controversial topics become simple and straightforward. For example, the question of who actually won the 2000 presidential election becomes crystal clear. (The surprising answer is the one that almost nobody would have been willing to accept: not Bush, not Gore, and almost none of the people who voted for either candidate.) Understand proofiness, and you can uncover many, many truths that had been obscured by a haze of lies.

LINK- - -
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129972868Lies, Damned Lies, And 'Proofiness' - an excerpt : -Our society is... more

remanns
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1 year ago
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Google's double game with India and China

Google, is not only a smart search engine but also a smart cunning game planner. For... more

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1 year ago
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Deadspin gives Brett Favre sexting another spin

Deadspin spun the internet with its reports of Vikings QB Brett Favre sending pictures... more

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1 year ago
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Spin War Shift: Military Now Bragging About Afghan Air Strikes

18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing insurgents from the skies. In a stream of press releases, the military alliance in Afghanistan is boasting about the air-induced demise to 12 insurgents in the past 10 days. It’s the latest move in a spin war with the Taliban about civilian casualties, one that contrasts the air strikes’ “precision” with the insurgents’ “barbarism.”

Reporters woke up this morning to an emailed report from the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command (yeah, those guys) about a “successful” air strike in Kandahar. The strike occurred Monday in an “open, unpopulated field” following an intelligence operation to track a supposed Taliban commander named Zulmai. “After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft engaged the insurgents, killing Zulmai and another insurgent, and wounded the other,” the press release reads.

Zulmai has company. The day before, in Helmand Province, Qari Hazrat, whom NATO identifies as a local insurgent commander, died with three colleagues in an air strike “while they were driving down an isolated road.” (Sounds like Task Force ODIN’s eyes in the sky were watching that road.) And the day before that, NATO aircraft followed a motorcycle driven by a man believed to be a leader of the Taliban-aligned Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in Kunduz Province and took him out. (NATO notably doesn’t claim to have verified the guy’s identity.) The hit occurred “after verifying insurgent activity and ensuring no civilians were present.”

Two other strikes — one in the Zormat district of Paktia Province, the other in after an attack on a huge base in Khost — killed five other insurgents. In both cases, NATO assured, “No civilians were wounded or killed.”

But that str8-killa-no-filla message isn’t the only one NATO wants out. The other release reporters received this morning was about a roadside bomb attack in Kandahar that killed an official responsible for coordinating religious pilgrimages. “Criminals continue to attack Afghan civilians and government officials showing a total disregard for human life and the peaceful people of this country,” an IJC officer, Colonel Rafael Torres, said in the release.

Torres is big on that “total disregard for human life” formation when describing the insurgency. He’s used permutations of it in seven prepared statements since July 12. That’s shortly after General David Petraeus arrived in Kabul to take over the Afghanistan war. His explicit orders, provided in his July 28 counterinsurgency guidance, are to reframe civilian casualties as a problem for the Taliban, not the U.S.-led coalition. It’s the same play Petraeus ran in Iraq, highlighting al-Qaeda’s finger-chopping excesses. “Hang their barbaric actions like millstones around their necks,” Petraeus told his troops in July.

Any reporter on Petraeus’ press list can verify that NATO is undertaking precisely that initiative. McClatchy reviewed 300 NATO press releases in the first month after Petraeus took command. A full quarter of them “have focused on Taliban attacks and other acts that harmed or endangered civilians.” When I interviewed Petraeus two weeks ago, I began a question by noting that the United Nations recently found the Taliban to be responsible for more Afghan civilians than NATO. “Vastly more,” Petraeus interjected.

The air war in Afghanistan may not have changed altogether much since generals David McKiernan and Stanley McChrystal restricted air strikes in response to Afghan outrage over civilian deaths. It still focuses heavily on intelligence-gathering missions. But the Taliban’s own civilian killings have emboldened Petraeus not just to restore air strikes as an offensive weapon, but to call attention to them as well.

At least until civilians die in the inevitable botched strike. Petraeus’ orders are to be “first with the truth,” meaning to acknowledge mistakes when they happen. That could easily spur a retrenchment of the P.R. push on air strikes. And it’s also worth asking whether journalists, not Afghan civilians, are the target. NATO puts out information in Pashto and Dari, but some 80 percent of Afghans can’t read; most don’t have internet access; and presumably a small fraction of those who do sign up for the latest press releases. Until they do, air strikes will continue to speak louder than media offensives.18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing... more

toyotabedzrock
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1 year ago
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They Hate Your Guts

Down in the swampy streets of Washington, Along the river in the noonday sun they... more

Progresshiv
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1 year ago
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49 comments

Mainstream media has to quit allowing military brass to spin them on Afghanistan War

Video, story and petition to sign... more

BillCorcoran
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1 year ago
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Bible bashers call Einstein's theory "liberal conspiracy"

We all know that E=mc2 was the theory that made Albert Einstein a legend when it came... more

itgrunts
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1 year ago
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116 comments

Seven Reasons Not to Send Your Kids to College

I think reading and seeing the world would be better . What do you think ?

artemis6
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1 year ago
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20 comments

MACWORLD 2010

Jeramy C goes behind the scenes at MACWORLD amidst vendors, developers, and aspiring... more

ericjeller
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1 year ago
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1 comment

Bassnectar: Interview in NYC

In this episode I interview Bassnectar and play one of the songs from his new album.... more

Mike_Johnston
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2 years ago
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Internet Freedom Is Not a Universal Value, Secretary of State Clinton

BusinessWeek Editorial Overview
Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 22

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on the universality of Internet Freedom is a wonderful speech that I personally applaud but it is seriously flawed when applied to China and to Google in China. Absolute internet freedom is a value widely shared among hundreds of millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Europeans but not among the vast, vast, vast majority of Chinese.

I recently spent two weeks in Shanghai and Beijing talking with designers and academics. Here is my sense of how internet censorship and “freedom” work in China. The stereotype of of a distant, old, militaristic censor shutting down blogs and web sites on whim is incorrect. Both the young. high-tech entrepreneurs developing new online businesses and the government censors come from the same good universities, are extremely well-educated and know each other personally. The two sides are in constant contact every day, pushing and pulling, reshaping the zone and focus of censorship. In general, both sides, mostly men in their 20s and early 30s, I am told, are trying to increase the space of what is allowed. I am also told that one problem with Google in China was that it was not tied into this network of censor and censored as well as Baidu and other Chinese web companies. And Google didn’t share the accepted culture of dynamic censorship, further antagonizing the censors.

Two weeks is not a long time in any country, but I did take away the conclusion that for nearly all Chinese, Tibet and Taiwan are as much a part of China as Hawaii and New Mexico are of the US. Government censorship of individuals and groups calling for Tibetan independence is widely applauded, not criticized. It is not an internet space that the younger generation in China wants expanded. However, there is an enormous amount of expressed anger at the rich and powerful all over the net. And throughout contemporary Chinese painting.

I remember going to the 798 art district of Beijing and looking at one installation that listed words. The first word was “propaganda.” The second was “advertising.” The flow of other words expressed the artists conclusion that two were basically the same—messages from powerful institutions designed to persuade you to think one way and behave in a particular way.

more--

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2010/01/internet_freedo.html
http://img.labnol.org/di/periodictableoftheinterum5.jpgBusinessWeek Editorial Overview Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on January 22 Secretary... more

remanns
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2 years ago
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4 comments

The politics of 'Avatar:' Conservatives attack film's political message

James Cameron's "Avatar" may have smashed box-office records, but... more

02
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2 years ago
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152 comments

Feeding the hungry video by microdac | ifood.tv

We waste 40% of our food and we have 49,000,000 hungry Americans. Why is that?

microdac
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2 years ago
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