Politifact Updates Data On News Sources, Finds Fox News Lies Even More Than Before

Stephan:  One of the major contributing factors to the Willful Ignorance Trend is the factual shoddiness of cable news television. The signal-to-noise ratio is appalling. And it is not a case of unintentionally putting out  erroneous information.  All too often it is consciously designed disinformation. And the worst villain by far is Fox News. Here's the data.
PolitiFact Truth-o-meter

PolitiFact Truth-o-meter

Last September, when Politifact compiled their list of which TV station lies the most vs. who tells the truth the most, one shouldn’t be shocked to see Fox News took the cake for most lies with 58 percent of statements being made being rated “Mostly False,” “False.” or “Pants on Fire.” NBC and MSNBC came in second place with 45 percent of statements being false, and CNN came in third with only 22 percent.

Well now we’re in January, and Politifact has updated their list to see, again, which station lies the most and who tells the truth the most.

Politifact measured their statements “made by a pundit or a host or paid contributor on a particular network. They do not include statements made by elected leaders, declared candidates or party officials.”

Again, it should be of no surprise that Fox News takes first place in the lies department. Even less shocking, their number of lies jumped from 58 percent to 60 percent. NBC and MSNBC dropped to 44 percent, and CNN dropped to 20 percent.

According to Politifact:

MSNBC […]

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The Game Changer

Stephan:  The evidence for the importance of developing the practice of daily meditation just keeps accumulating. You know it is becoming mainstream when the Marines, and the Seahawks both have programs to teach some form of mindfulness/meditation. In light of the upcoming Superbowl I thought this report particularly apposite.
Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll

Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll

Most coaches impose standards from the outside. Pete Carroll, head coach of the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks, assisted by sports psychologist Michael Gervais, asks his players to go inside—to find the confidence to be the best they can be. He coaches the whole person, and it changes their view of the game, and of life. Hugh Delehanty reports.

The hip-hop music is blaring and Pete Carroll is loving it.

Boom dada dada da da boom.

Up on a hill overlooking the Seattle Seahawks’ practice field, an army of fans, wearing blue-and-neon-green jerseys, ski masks, and war paint are pounding drums, waving flags, and screaming love chants to their heroes. Meanwhile down on the field, quarterbacks are throwing bullets, linemen are crashing into each other, and running backs are charging up the field as if it were the Super Bowl. And Carroll, the team’s energetic 63-year-old head coach, is dancing from one corner to the next, clapping his hands, shouting props to players, and revving […]

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The Koch brothers don’t care if you care about their plans to buy 2016 election

Stephan:  I agree with this essay.  This is what Citizens United has produced; this is what five aging white men of a markedly rightist ideological bent, decided to allow. They put American democracy up for sale, knowing there were buyers. It is amazing to watch a small group of ultra-rich people attempt to pay for and create the U.S. government they want with almost no outcry from the more than 318 million people who collectively comprise the U.S.. Like the rise of the surveillance state -- and the two are linked, this is the new America.  This is the new normal. We must change this if there is to be any hope that we remain the democratic republic the Founders intended.
Credit:radio.foxnews.com

Credit:radio.foxnews.com

The Koch brothers are done being shy. That’s the conclusion one would have to draw from the fact that they just announced that they hope to spend $889 million on the 2016 election, an unprecedented amount of outside money. It won’t all be theirs — they’re assembling a kind of Plutocrat Politburo, a group of billionaires and zillionaires who will contribute to the cause — but with a combined worth of over $80 billion, they’ll surely be the ones opening their ample wallets the widest and determining the strategy and the agenda.

But unlike some previous reporting on Charles and David’s political efforts, this revelation — which comes from a gathering in beautiful Rancho Mirage of Freedom Partners, the organization through which the Kochs and their allies will distribute all these millions — didn’t require any secret meetings with anonymous sources to unearth. They just told everyone. Here’s the Post’s story on it, here’s the New York Times’ story on it, and here’s Politico’s story on it, all complete with ample details and on-the-record quotes. Reporters may not have been invited into the […]

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Morning Joe Hosts Receive Special Invite To Closed Koch Event, Lavish Koch Brothers With Praise

Stephan:  This report shows how the media component of the process of buying the government you want works.  Joe Scarborough in my view has never had much credibility. He was not a distinguished Representative, and this makes it obvious he is superficial. Not to know the truth about what the Kochs' actually fund, as opposed to what they say, condemns him to being either a tool or an ideologue, or both. Technically this is a case study of how to influence parts of the media to create disinformation, or at least doubt.
Mika Brzezinski (left) and Joe Scarborough, hosts of Morning Joe Credit: MSNBC

Mika Brzezinski (left) and Joe Scarborough, hosts of Morning Joe
Credit: MSNBC

Sunday night, a conservative political organization that has been called “the Koch Brothers’ secret bank,” hosted a forum for three potential Republican 2016 presidential hopefuls. The “American Recovery Policy Forum,” moderated by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, was advertised as closed to the public and closed to the press — though networks did have some access to an Internet video stream.

But while other reporters were not invited, MSNBC’s Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were in attendance at the Palm Springs event and fawned over their “awesome” weekend — and about the billionaire oil magnates.

Scarborough noted that he had spoken at length with Charles Koch and found him to be a “true believer,” who is “obsessed” with “income disparity and, mainly, crony capitalism.” The former Republican Congressman from Florida added that Charles Koch “has no use for Republicans that support corporate welfare and no […]

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Unlocking Scrolls Preserved in Eruption of Vesuvius, Using X-Ray Beams

Stephan:  This is a wonderful story. I am actually rather excited about this. In truth we have only very partial records of the thinking and writing of the classical world. We know there are thousands of novels, plays, poems, historical accounts, philosophies, and religious treatise that once existed but which have been lost to time. Now there is a chance we may be able to recover some of the them. Very exciting.
Gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius turned the Herculaneum scrolls into carbonized plant material.  Credit Salvatore Laporta/Associated Press

Gases and ash from Mount Vesuvius turned the Herculaneum scrolls into carbonized plant material.
Credit Salvatore Laporta/Associated Press

Researchers have found a key that may unlock the only library of classical antiquity to survive along with its documents, raising at least a possibility of recovering vanished works of ancient Greek and Roman authors such as the lost books of Livy’s history of Rome.

The library is that of a villa in Herculaneum, a town that was destroyed in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that obliterated nearby Pompeii. Herculaneum, like Pompeii, was engulfed by mixtures of superhot gases and ash, which preserved the documents in a grand villa that probably belonged to the family of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

Though the hot gases did not burn the many papyrus rolls in the villa’s library, they turned them into […]

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