How Fox News Manipulates the News

Fox News: "Historians Pretty Much Agree" That FDR Prolonged the Great Depression That's the title of Huffington Post's article and you know immediately: that can not be true. Or is there a piece of forgotten, even hidden evidence? So we want to hear or read about reliable sources. Who is called "historians"? Pointer's guess is that it is a kind of oral history, like common in the dark ages. Well that's the field of religion or any other kind of devoted believe. It's not factual.
Watch the video:
In the article David Sirota gives us some quote, as is appropriate. Read it, but the finest is this:

Paul Krugman recently explained to a stunningly ignorant George Will on ABC News, 1937-1938 was the period Roosevelt dialed back the New Deal in the name of conservative demands that he stop spending:

By 1937 things were a lot better than they were in 1933. Then [FDR] was persuaded to balance the budget or try to and he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again and then it took an enormous public works program known as World War II to bring the economy out of the depression.

So with all of that data, let's go back to Fox News' main assertion: Is it really true that "historians pretty much agree" that the New Deal's government intervention prolonged the Great Depression? Of course not, as New York Times economics writer Daniel Gross says:

It was only with the passage of New Deal efforts--the SEC, the FDIC, the FSLIC--that the mechanisms of private capital began to kick back into gear. Don't take it from me. Take it from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who wrote the following in Essays on the Great Depression: "Only with the New Deal's rehabilitation of the financial system in 1933-35 did the economy begin its slow emergence from the Great Depression."...
The argument that the New Deal's efforts "perhaps had prolonged, the Depression," is a canard. One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian--I mean a serious historian, not a think-tank wanker, not an economist, not a journalist--who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression. (emphasis added)

In other words, it's the opposite of what Fox News says. "Historians pretty much agree" on one thing when it comes to Roosevelt: The New Deal helped end the Great Depression. But I would go even further than that, and agree with economist Brad DeLong who said that whether you are a historian or not - to argue what Jarrett and Crowley argued yesterday is to publicly declare oneself as divorced from the facts as the most ridiculed conspiracy theorists. As DeLong says, "A normal person would not argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression."
But, then, these are not "normal people" - those making these arguments are right-wing automatons whose claim that we shouldn't look at actual data, we should simply accept the truth of their claims because they insist "it's in the books!" or they've supposedly seen "all kinds of studies and academic work" that proves their hysteria true.

Couldn't better say it.

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Heaven for the Godless?

crusade

Pointer can't help it. Op-Ed Columnist CHARLES M. BLOW wrote publicly about what he had read from others, yes those catholic PEW-guys who wrote about it and so do I. They want to scare me?
Well, take a look out of my atheist window.
You are dead and in heaven?
That will never end because you can't die twice!
You have to live there for ever and ever, so, what do you have to do?

• Can you produce something;
• can you improve something;
• can you extend your knowledge;
• can you practice your skills
• or can fulfill your lifelong desire to f**k your first teacher?

That's not gonna happen, my friends. Heaven is perfect, isn't it? It's all done.
So, there is nothing to do for you. It's your duty to be wallpaper for the boss, decoration and you even can't order the choir of angels to shut up and you also can't safe your loved ones who you can see burning in hell because the boss gave them that destiny before they were born. If you ask why? The answer is: Thát's why! So, heaven is a cruelty and the really jolly nice message is: It doesn't exist! The whole religious crap is a fabulous fraud!
So after your death you are as unaware of something anything as before your birth.

Now let's see what others think about it. In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life. This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that. The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they? So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them. And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go. What on earth does this mean? One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith. As Alan Segal, a professor of religion at Barnard College told me: “We are a multicultural society, and people expect this American life to continue the same way in heaven.” He explained that in our society, we meet so many good people of different faiths that it’s hard for us to imagine God letting them go to hell. In fact, in the most recent survey, Pew asked people what they thought determined whether a person would achieve eternal life. Nearly as many Christians said you could achieve eternal life by just being a good person as said that you had to believe in Jesus. Also, many Christians apparently view their didactic text as flexible. According to Pew’s August survey, only 39 percent of Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, and 18 percent think that it’s just a book written by men and not the word of God at all. In fact, on the question in the Pew survey about what it would take to achieve eternal life, only 1 percent of Christians said living life in accordance with the Bible. Now, there remains the possibility that some of those polled may not have understood the implications of their answers. As John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said, “The capacity of ignorance to influence survey outcomes should never be underestimated.” But I don’t think that they are ignorant about this most basic tenet of their faith. I think that they are choosing to ignore it ... for goodness sake.
It's really the bloody limit of all human stupdity, Heaven, that eternal life without duties, is a curse of unthinkable cruelty. If there should be a living god who invented it he/she/it should have to be prosecuted and hastily punished to death.
But who am I...?
The answer is blown in the wind.

The Brittish Approach on Counterterrorism

Sound during the first minutes is poor and the introducing lady is not aware of the microphone; her voice is heading north-east to Iceland, Greenland or Newfoundland.
So, make yourself a drink and come back for about an hour.

Double Trouble

Research Highlights

Nature Reports Climate Change
doi:10.1038/climate.2008.137

Olive Heffernan

Conservation Biol. doi:10.1111/j.1523–1739.2008.01096.x (2008)

Replacing tropical rainforests with oil palm plantations threatens biodiversity and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, report scientists. One of a number of biofuel crops touted as a sustainable, environmentally friendly energy source, palm oil now covers some 13 million hectares of land surface worldwide, mostly in Southeast Asia.

An international team of researchers, led by Finn Danielsen of Denmark's Nordic Agency for Development and Ecology, has carried out the most comprehensive analysis yet of the impact of oil palm plantations on tropical forests. They estimate it would take 75 to 93 years for the carbon saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through clearing tropical rainforest. This payback time would increase to more than 600 years if the original habitat was peatland, and would decrease to just 10 years on degraded grassland, they say. Based on a meta-analysis of faunal data and a comparative field study of flora on forested and converted land in Indonesia, they also show that plantations support species-poor communities compared to forests, and that the most abundant species in converted lands are generalists of low conservation value.

The authors call for global standards to assess the sustainability of biofuel crops.

Methane Mystery

Research Highlights

Nature Reports Climate Change
doi:10.1038/climate.2008.134

Alicia Newton | Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L22805 (2008)

Atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas methane rose sharply in early 2007, having remained largely stable over the past decade. Methane is released from wetlands and wildfires as well as from human activities, such as fossil fuel use and farming, but is destroyed in the atmosphere through reaction with a compound known as the hydroxyl radical.

Now Matthew Rigby of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have examined the change in global emissions of methane over a ten year period. They retrieved atmospheric measurements of methane and other chemical compounds from two monitoring networks with a total of 12 worldwide locations. Methane levels rose simultaneously across all global sites since early 2007. The team propose that the increase may have coincided with a slight decline in levels of the hydroxyl radical, but the changes in hydroxyl chemistry alone were insufficient to explain the entire methane rise.

By combining the data with numerical simulations from an atmospheric transport and chemistry model, they were able to attribute the methane spike to a worldwide rise in emissions between 2006 and 2007, the bulk of which originated in the Northern Hemisphere. The exact source of the extra methane, however, remains a mystery.