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POPSFox News isn't even pretending anymore The boldest innovator, however, has been Fox News. Since President Obama’s election, the cable news channel has dropped all but the barest pretense of objectivity. Billing itself as “fair and balanced,” Fox has turned itself into what White House communications director Anita Dunn recently called “the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” Actually, that’s an extremely polite way of putting it. It’s closer to Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.” Fox openly promotes “Tea Parties” and other political demonstrations; it portrays every perceived White House defeat, such as Chicago’s failure to secure the 2016 Olympic Games, as a victory for something called “Fox Nation.” “Doublethink,” Orwell called it: the ability to “hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.” So it is with “Fox Nation” and “fair and balanced.”
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POPSNarrative distance
I haven’t dared to try any of these things yet. I just appreciate them when I see them. But I run into it nonetheless: reading my old attempts at novel-writing, I can see where I tried it without knowing that’s what I was trying, and screwed it up. Reading over more recent stuff, I can see the difference between character A and character B, the levels of sympathy and/or objectivity applied to their separate perspectives. I identify most easily with this character, and it is apparent in the story even when I made no conscious decision to choose one over the other. I am endlessly fascinated by this stuff. Writing a fictional first person perspective for the first time in –eek, 10 years at least– puts all this stuff front and center in my head. Because first person is instant intimacy, whereas with third limited, even a really close third limited, you have the option of pulling back just the tiniest bit, so that your reader can see that this character isn’t thinking clearly, or underst
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POPSCharter Cities A brilliant idea that bears in mind the ecology as well as the possibility of changing the rules so that more people can share the best working ideas. A video of a TED presentation can be watched here: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
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POPSSome beautiful tributes re Walter Cronkite i clipped a few of the quotes from other celebs/news reporters that i thought were so incredibily heartfelt about Walter Cronkite, and his passing. Must be amazing to have that much influence over so many people...
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POPSGod Comes Cheap These Days For eight years, Christian conservatives had "Lord Bush." Now, liberals have "Lord Obama." Seems to me that gods come pretty cheap these days. As a non-American, this is very much the way it seems. Nothing really matters, but beating the other side. Left vs right feuding, instead of right vs wrong. So much time wasted fighting each other, instead of fighting for your supposed values and principles Is this really what America is all about? Think about it.
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POPSLaugher v, Laffer Knowing how these people think, NATION might should expect some serious competition for the influential communist niche, a real growth market. Bets?
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POPSComputers Call The Shots "Although humans can overrule the computer, SDM's call has stood in 91% of decisions in the county on whether to open an investigation, 92% of recommendations on removing a child from a home and 99% of decisions on whether to return a child."
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POPSPhoto - Graphy .. the Writing through Light What is at stake (at play, en jeu) is the place of reality, the question of its degree. It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image. This puts into question our simplistic explanations about the birth of technology and the advent of the modern world. It is perhaps not technologies and media which have caused our now famous disappearance of reality. On the contrary, it is probable that all our technologies (fatal offsprings that they are) arise from the gradual extinction of reality.
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POPSIncompetent individuals overestimate their ability While competent ones tend to underestimate theirs: The Dunning-Kruger effect is "'an example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it'". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average." Could this be part of the reason wingnuts are so absolutely certain they're right?
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POPSAre Crime and Punishment connected? Another intriguing result of the study was that the part of the brain that third-party subjects used to determine guilt in this study was the same brain area that has previously been found to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions. “The convergence of findings between second-party and third-party punishment studies suggests that impartial legal decision-making may not be fundamentally different from the reasoning used in deciding to punish those who have harmed us personally,” objectivity seems to be an invented concept, that has no correlate in the way the brain perceives.
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POPSObjectivity is a Fallacy That "take him out" - that wouldn't be some kind of physical harm he was fantasizing about would it? Kill him? No, just injure him in some way that would incapacitate him for a year or so. Massive Brain Injury just short of death seems to be implied. Not that the "progressives" are angry or threatening physical injury or anything.
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POPSThe Seat of Bigotry Ms. Phillips evidently doesn't engage her brain before putting her mouth in motion. Her hate filled diatribe is more suited to the middle of the last century than today's reality. Unfortunately, her sentiment is rather common. If one substitutes Jew or Muslim or Black or any other non-Christian minority for atheist it immediately becomes apparent that she is a bigoted, angry person in search of a scapegoat. Given that near 85% of Americans are Christian, her blaming the 12% for all the problems society faces is ludicrous and is indicative of profound projection on her part. Her spew sounds like it was transcribed from a speech recorded in 1930s Germany, not 21st century America. Really sad.
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POPSPop Obsession With Obama 'The Messiah' America swoons in the presence of fame, and their obsession with celebrity shows in the treatment of Obama, 'The Messiah'--savior of politics, the media, and fans who faint in his presence. Was that a thrill that just went up my leg?
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POPSPre Spinning a Palin Loss Wouldn't it be nice if once, just once, somebody actually surprised us? The more I look at our political system the more I need anti-depressants.
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