HOW TO LIE IN 14 STEPS: THE WIKIHOW GUIDE TO DISHONESTY

from Dangerous Minds:

Writing for Esquire in 1969, Gore Vidal laid bare a “demagogic strategy” William F. Buckley used to befuddle opponents: 

If one is lying, accuse others of lying. On television this sort of thing is enormously effective in demoralizing the innocent and well-mannered who, acting in good faith, do not lie or make personal insults. Buckley has made many honorable men look dishonest fools by his demagoguery, and by the time they recover from his first assault and are ready to retaliate, the program is over.

Why is this effective? Because the thought of lying in public, where a judge, policeman or journalist might hear, gives good citizens the cold sweats. The mere accusation unleashes the bad conscience of the regular taxpayer and snaps his mind neatly in half. Did I fail to give a full and accurate account? Am I guilty of an act of omission, if not commission? Could I have used a more charitable adjective? Perhaps I did mischaracterize certain of my honorable friend’s views, etc.

We at Dangerous Minds don’t believe the strategies and tactics of dishonesty should be the preserve of the rich, the powerful, and the stupid, and few other “content providers” will tell you the score. While the New York Times may report on “How to Improve Your Productivity at Work,” the Gray Lady is unlikely to teach you how to play fast and loose with the facts. Less reputable outlets than ours will lie to you, which can be instructive, but they will do nothing deliberately to wise you up.

That’s why, until they start teaching us how to do our own surgeries, WikiHow’s lying clinic is likely to remain their most useful public service.  

I won’t list all of their 14 steps to falsehood, but here are some of the basics. Rehearsal is a key part of the technique. Repetition gives purchase to the most absurd, self-contradictory assertion. There are a few body language tips:

Be sure not to rub your face too much, sway back and forth, or shrug your shoulders a lot. Keep your arms down at your sides rather than folding them across your chest. Don’t blink more often than normal or turn your body away from the person. All of these are signs that you are lying.

(But what if you want people to believe you’re lying? It would be interesting to try all of these gestures at once while scrupulously telling the truth, as an experiment.)



Another pro tip from WikiHow: lie before you have to. Take the initiative. I think this means you run into the living room with icing in your nostrils and scream “I did not eat the cake that is not missing!”

The Community Q&A covers likely eventualities: “What if the person has found evidence?” “Is covering up your bad deed with a less significant bad deed a good strategy?” “If I need to, how do I force tears?” 

This last question is misguided. Just tell the sucker you’re crying.

Five myths about Ronald Reagan's legacy

from the Washington Post:

On Sunday, America [NOT ANYONE I KNOW] celebrates the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, whose presidency is a touchstone for the modern conservative movement. In 2011, it is virtually impossible for a major Republican politician to succeed without citing Reagan as a role model. But much of what today's voters think they know about the 40th president is more myth than reality, misconceptions resulting from the passage of time or from calculated attempts to rebuild or remake Reagan's legacy. So, what are we getting wrong about the Gipper?

1. Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.

It's true that Reagan is popular more than two decades after leaving office. A CNN/Opinion Research poll last month gave him the third-highest approval rating among presidents of the past 50 years, behind John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. But Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular - 52.8 percent, according to Gallup. That places the 40th president not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower, but also Lyndon Johnson and George H.W. Bush, neither of whom are talked up as candidates for Mount Rushmore.

During his presidency, Reagan's popularity had high peaks - after the attempt on his life in 1981, for example - and huge valleys. In 1982, as the national unemployment rate spiked above 10 percent, Reagan's approval rating fell to 35 percent. At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, nearly one-third of Americans wanted him to resign.

In the early 1990s, shortly after Reagan left office, several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular. Only since Reagan's 1994 disclosure that he had Alzheimer's disease - along with lobbying efforts by conservatives, such as Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which pushed to rename Washington's National Airport for the president - has his popularity steadily climbed.

2. Reagan was a tax-cutter.

Certainly, Reagan's boldest move as president was his 1981 tax cut, a sweeping measure that slashed the marginal rate on the wealthiest Americans from 70 percent to 50 percent. The legislation also included smaller cuts in lower tax brackets, as well as big breaks for corporations and the oil industry. But the following year, as the economy was mired in recession and the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, even groups such as the Business Roundtable lobbied Reagan to raise taxes. And he did: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.

Ultimately, Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last. These included a higher gasoline levy, a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history, and a substantial raise in payroll taxes in 1983 as part of a deal to keep Social Security solvent. While wealthy Americans benefitted from Reagan's tax policies, blue-collar Americans paid a higher percentage of their income in taxes when Reagan left office than when he came in.

3. Reagan was a hawk.

Long before he was elected president, Reagan predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse because of communism's inherent corruption and inefficiency. His forecast proved accurate, but it is not clear that his military buildup moved the process forward. Though Reagan expanded the U.S. military and launched new weapons programs, his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer. Indeed, a USA Today poll taken four days after the fall of the Berlin Wall found that 43 percent of Americans credited Gorbachev, while only 14 percent cited Reagan.

With the exception of the 1986 bombing of Libya, Reagan also disappointed hawkish aides with his unwillingness to retaliate militarily for terrorism in the Middle East. According to biographer Lou Cannon, the president called the death of innocent civilians in anti-terror operations "terrorism itself."

In 1987, Reagan aide Paul Bremer, later George W. Bush's point man in Baghdad, even argued that terrorism suspects should be tried in civilian courts. "A major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are - criminals - and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law, against them," Bremer said. In 1988, Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which stated that torture could be used under "no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever."

4. Reagan shrank the federal government.

Reagan famously declared at his 1981 inauguration that "in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." This rhetorical flourish didn't stop the 40th president from increasing the federal government's size by every possible measure during his eight years in office.

Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. Many experts believe that Reagan's massive deficits not only worsened the recession of the early 1990s but doomed his successor, George H.W. Bush, to a one-term presidency by forcing him to abandon his "no new taxes" pledge.

The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. (It took the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to trim the employee rolls back to 2.7 million.) Reagan also abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies - Energy and Education - and added a new one, Veterans Affairs.

5. Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.

Reagan's contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic. Although he published a book in 1983 about his staunch opposition to abortion (overlooking the fact that he had legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s), he never sought a constitutional ban on abortion. In fact, Reagan began the odd practice of speaking to anti-abortion rallies by phone instead of in person - a custom continued by subsequent Republican presidents. He also advocated prayer in public schools in speeches, but never in legislation.

In 1981, Reagan unintentionally did more than any other president to prevent the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling from being overturned when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. O'Connor mostly upheld abortion rights during her 25 years as a justice.

No wonder that home-schooling advocate Michael Ferris was one of many right-wing activists complaining about Reagan by the end of his presidency, writing that his White House "offered us a bunch of political trinkets."

Will Bunch is the author of "Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy." He is a senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and a senior fellow with Media Matters for America.

Want to challenge everything you know? Visit the Five Myths archive.

Besides all this, in case you didn't live through his years, Reagan was a fucking dumb asshole, only Geoge W. rivaled him in ignorance. Most americans were as embarrassed by him when he left office as they were about George W., it's fucking insane to to think and see how his history has been re-written over the years.

Here's another from CNN: Reagan's Myth Has Grown Over Time

Happy Birthday and Thanks, Arabella

Controlling Our Food "The World According to Monsanto"

On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television - a documentary that Americans won’t ever see on TV. The gigantic bio-tech corporation Monsanto is threatening to destroy the agricultural biodiversity which has served mankind for thousands of years.

Here's an internet news clip:

Here's the Documentary "The World According to Monsanto":

John Stewart once again showing he's the most important reporter on commercial Television

I watch the Daily Show every night, when i can, and always recommend that you should too.

skipping around Air America on-line ...

And somehow i found this on a page where the writer David Bender mentioned Deepak Chopra's thoughts on Rush Limbaugh.

I had the pleasure of interviewing a man whose work I've admired for many years, but had never met--Dr. Deepak Chopra. He's written a piece for Huffington Post titled "Rush Limbaugh: Icon of Anti-Morality" and I wanted to get his take on whether we were actually helping the Devil's Dirigible stay afloat by stoking the dangerous flames of his own self-inflating ego.

In the course of the conversation (in which Dr. Chopra admitted that even his own wife listens to Limbaugh out of sheer morbid fascination), we both concluded that it's better to call him out for the dangerous charlatan that he is, just as Edward R. Murrow called out Senator Joe McCarthy 55 years ago. A demagogue is a demagogue, whether he's sitting in the US Senate or in a radio studio in West Plam Beach.

and then this note in the comments section

I want the government to choose my doctor, because the choice they will offer will be much more vast than the small section of a county within a state that for-profit insurance companies force you to go to to chose from a small list of "preferred providers" if you actually want to see any of those ridiculous premium dollars ever again.

For-profit Health Insurance has been chosing your doctor for you for years and refusing to cover you if you refuse to see one of their lackeys.

It's is time for America to grow up like the rest of the world, and time for our government to stop punishing our citizens so politicians can get richer than they are.

2/3 of the Senate and about 1/3 of the House being millionaires is fine and dandy for millionaires, but doesn't do much for the remaining 95% of our population. Our country cannot afford to wait until the millionaire number is 100% in both chambers, though those assholes are doing their best.

Limbaugh is the not much better than the nuclear materal of the virus infecting a bacteria which is infecting a parasite in the gut of a maggot on a piece of shit. On this basis, this less than piece of shit has no credibility in my view.

Maybe this glutton will survive long enough to see the Rush Limbaugh Memorial Fuck Over 95% of My Listenership Legislation, or perhaps we can just refer to the last 30 years of anti-American, union-breaking, crony laisse faire trade policy, anti-guaranteed pension, wage staggering crap that his party has been passing. That is both wings of The Corporate Party by the way.

If there is a God, this traitor will fall over dead from a heart attack long before Kennedy succumbs to his brain tumor.

Good luck in finding a casket big enough for this fat fucker.

By Antillectual

Humor.

classic clip from the 2004 republikkkan convention in New York City

Young Conservatives "Fuck New York!" before the Republican National Convention. Bush and his cronies acted out as prep school B-boys... Incredible script.


I thought this should have been an ad on MTV, and I actually showed it to some people who were going to make it happen with an edit or two, but it never happened, besides they probably wouldn't have aired it anyway. At the time this was by far the coolest most creative rallying cry I saw. These kids acting deserve some credit too. Directed by Matt Lenski.

Stating the obvious: Fox news is for fucking idiots ONLY.

I never watch Fox news, not like i used to watch some of the networks just to see what's going on in the general media, to see how average people are getting their news fed to them, and why they think of the days political events as they do. But Several years ago after seeing that documentary OUTFOXED i thought, well at least now they've been exposed for the shit that they so obviously are.... No such luck, fucking idiots keep on telling their stories and fucking idiots still go on believing them.

I was watching Jon Stewart on The Daily Show earlier (this past Thursday's episode online), and he was showing some clips of some of the stupid shit they said the day before, and it really is beyond my belief that people can actually watch and believe this stuff. I watched Bill O'Reilly once when some one i knew went on the show, obviously just being a media whore to promote something to people who don't give a fuck about anything he would say anyway, just giving the scum-bag-lying-sack-of-shit O'Reilly credibility for him showing up ("see we have liberals on our show" - hardly!), and of course it was pathetic. but at least cordial. That said, if you look on line for evidence or even at the last time that sack of shit was on David Letterman it's obvious that anyone who thinks for their self or has more than half a brain would NEVER watch this ass or Hannity or any of the slightly more subtle sacks-of-shit they got lying constantly over there.

The reason I am stating this obvious here is that i really think if you know anyone who still watches "Faux News" (because it just came on after some funny Fox network lead-in, or they really like to be scared into not thinking) YOU MUST tell them how fucking stupid they are, or are further becoming by watching these assholes. Don't let'em slide, even if it's your parents. It's time for a bit of a change now in this country and they just can't bare it. I'm thinking within' the next four years these fuckers will just have to cut off their "news" organization completely. Rush Limbaugh too, they should all get their tongues cut out!