As Romney and Ryan lie with abandon, how should journalists navigate post-truth politics? | Grist

As Romney and Ryan lie with abandon, how should journalists navigate post-truth politics? | Grist:
One effect of the radicalization of the right over the last few decades has been the discovery of just how much our politics is held together by norms rather than rules. There’s no rule you can’t filibuster every bill in the Senate by default; there’s no rule you can’t interrupt a president’s State of the Union; there’s no rule you can’t hold the routine debt-ceiling vote hostage. It simply wasn’t done. But if you shrug off the norm and do it anyway, there’s nothing to stop you.

Similarly, it seems that the lip service given to truth in politics is but a norm itself, one with increasingly tenuous hold. Political campaigns have always lied and stretched the truth, but when caught in a lie, would typically defend themselves (claim it was actually true), retract, or at the very least stop repeating the lie. Either way, the presumption was that truth-telling had some moral force; one ought to tell the truth, even if that commandment was often honored in the breach.

What’s creepy about the Romney crew is that they don’t do any of those things. They don’t deny, they don’t stop, they just don’t care at all. What they’ve realized is that, given today’s hyper-polarization and fragmented media, there’s no practical risk to lying. It doesn’t hurt them, in terms of getting votes, so why shouldn’t they do it?

The day the world went mad | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk

The day the world went mad | George Monbiot | Environment | guardian.co.uk: The Republican party's leading lights either deny climate change altogether, or argue that people can adapt to whatever a changed climate may bring, so there's nothing to worry about.

The deluge of reality has had no impact on the party's determination to wish the physical world away. As Salon.com points out, most of the major figures lined up to speak at the convention deny that man-made climate change is happening.

When your children ask how and why it all went so wrong, point them to yesterday's date, and explain that the world is not led by rational people.

What The Apollo Astronauts Did For Life Insurance : Planet Money : NPR

What The Apollo Astronauts Did For Life Insurance : Planet Money : NPR: About a month before Apollo 11 was set to launch, the three astronauts entered quarantine. And, during free moments in the following weeks, each of the astronauts signed hundreds of covers.

They gave them to a friend. And on important days — the day of the launch, the day the astronauts landed on the moon — their friend got them to the post office and got them postmarked, and then distributed them to the astronauts' families.

It was life insurance in the form of autographs.

Trigger Warning - an opinion then retration about the sexual abuse of children

Father Benedict Groeschel Reflects on 25 Years of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal | Daily News | NCRegister.com:

 "People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that's not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer ... It's not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn't have his own — and they won't be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that."

The page now says:

I apologize for my comments. I did not intend to blame the victim. A priest (or anyone else) who abuses a minor is always wrong and is always responsible. My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be. I have spent my life trying to help others the best that I could. I deeply regret any harm I have caused to anyone.

Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down | Health & Medicine | DISCOVER Magazine

Vital Signs: The Woman Who Needed to Be Upside-Down | Health & Medicine | DISCOVER Magazine: A doctor is baffled: Why did a 
giant man walk into the ER holding 
a tiny woman by her feet?

Clint Eastwood Offers Off-Script Moment - Washington Wire - WSJ

Clint Eastwood Offers Off-Script Moment - Washington Wire - WSJ: Hollywood actor and director Clint Eastwood, the Republican National Convention’s much-touted surprise guest, delivered a rambling, awkward speech that was the highly orchestrated evening’s first off-script moment.

Mr. Eastwood took the stage as the convention moved to prime-time television coverage, and talked for nearly 15 minutes with an empty chair representing President Barack Obama. Suggesting in his imagined conversation that Mr. Obama was making profane remarks, the 82-year old actor implied that lawyers weren’t suited to be president, though both Mr. Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney are Harvard-trained lawyers.

The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney | Politics News | Rolling Stone

The Federal Bailout That Saved Mitt Romney | Politics News | Rolling Stone: Under normal circumstances, such ample reserves would have made liquidating Bain an attractive option: Creditors could simply divvy up the stockpiled cash and be done with the troubled firm. But Bain had inserted a poison pill in its loan agreement with the banks: Instead of being required to use its cash to pay back the firm's creditors, the money could be pocketed by Bain executives in the form of fat bonuses – starting with VPs making $200,000 and up. "The company can deplete its cash balances by making officer-bonus payments," the FDIC lamented, "and still be in compliance with the loan documents."

What's more, the bonus loophole gave Romney a perverse form of leverage: If the banks and the FDIC didn't give in to his demands and forgive much of Bain's debts, Romney would raid the firm's coffers, pushing it into the very bankruptcy that the loan agreement had been intended to avert. The losers in this game would not only be Bain's creditors – including the federal government – but the firm's nearly 1,000 employees worldwide.

https://twitter.com/InvisibleObama/status/241363837478129664

https://twitter.com/InvisibleObama/status/241363837478129664:
When Mitt Romney says "Mr. Chairman", do you think he's referring to me? 

A Dish Reader

Politics In A Post-Truth World:

Don't you find it odd that we now treat journalists and fact-checkers as separate creatures? When Wolf Blitzer suggests that the fact-checkers may take issue with aspects of Ryan's speech, what does that make him? What does journalist even mean?

The Apollo 11 Landing Site Superimposed on a Baseball Diamond

The Apollo 11 Landing Site Superimposed on a Baseball Diamond:
Our moon landing may have been grand, but our astronauts did not go far.

[...]So, I appreciate that Maria Popova brought back this fantastic visualization of the Apollo 11 mission at Ex.plore.com. It presents the mission's travels superimposed on a baseball diamond. German space enthusiast Thomas Schwagmeier created the map for NASA's History office and it's not only revealing, but beautiful.

“Long Flights” – a somewhat serious business idea

“Long Flights” – a somewhat serious business idea:
I’m considering starting a new business venture. It’s called “Long Flight” and it’s based on my experiences writing on airplanes.

“Long Flight” facilities will be located inside Faraday cages. Once you enter the facility, your phone will be cut off from GSM and CDMA networks, and Wifi won’t work. You’ll be encouraged to download and cache anything you’ll need to read ahead of time.

Fixed duration – I work well in libraries, but I tend to leave them after I’ve accomplished the main task I’d had on my to do list. One of the reason long flights are so productive is that you’re committed to staying in a space well beyond the time you need to accomplish a task. For me, that means I get a blogpost or chapter written, but I also catch up on papers I’ve needed to read.

“Long Flight” facilities will be bookable for durations of 6, 8, 10, 12 and 14 hours. We’ll refer to the duration by the names of cities – book an 8 hour session at our Boston facility and we’ll reference your stint as an “Istanbul”. You’ll be free to walk around the facility, pass other people’s compartments, access the rest rooms and snack counter, but your access key won’t let you leave the building until your session is up. (You’ll sign a waiver that prevents us from being charged with holding you against your will. And we’ll have an emergency protocol, so you can press a button and call emergency services. But if you abuse it to end your session early, we’ll ban you from the facility.)

Each pod will feature a screen that shows the progress of your flight to your “destination”. Since you’ll be ending up back in Boston, perhaps we’ll start in Istanbul and follow a great circle route back. The screen will helpfully inform you that it’s -52C outside, which should serve as an incentive to remain in the facility.

Patrick Ruffini: The Groupon Election

Patrick Ruffini: The Groupon Election: Compared to the same period four years ago, the Obama campaign is sending more than twice as many emails, and informative state-of-the-race missives from the campaign managers are practically gone. According to nycsouthpaw, where those Obama '08 emails had "data, strategy, and an air of knowingness," Obama 2012 emails are "hectoring, manipulative, full of angst, and there are just way more of them." A selection of subject lines: "SO COOL," "Up late" and my personal favorite: "(No subject)."

There is a simple reason for all of this: Because it works.

The Obama campaign does nothing if not a ton of testing. Reporters who have signed up with dozens of individual accounts report that the Obama campaign will test numerous subject lines in the first few minutes of an email send, until they settle on one version for the rest of the list. A culture of analytics is embedded through and through in Chicago, in every department from digital to field, and the campaign even has a Chief Scientist.

How Hollywood Is Encouraging Online Piracy: Scientific American

How Hollywood Is Encouraging Online Piracy: Scientific American:
For all of the apparent convenience of renting a movie via the Web, there are a surprising number of drawbacks. For example, when you rent the digital version, you often have only 24 hours to finish watching it, which makes no sense. Do these companies really expect us to rent the same movie again tomorrow night if we can't finish it tonight? In the DVD days, a Blockbuster rental was three days. Why should online rentals be any different?

When you rent online, you don't get any of the DVD extras—deleted scenes, alternative endings, subtitles—even though you're paying as much as you would have paid to rent a DVD.
Yet perhaps most important, there's the availability problem. New movies aren't available online until months after they are finished in the theaters, thanks to the “windowing” system—a long-established obligation that makes each movie available, say, first to hotels, then to pay-per-view systems, then to HBO and, only after that, to you for online rental.

The people want movies. None of Hollywood's baffling legal constructs will stop the demand. The studios are trying to prevent a dam from bursting by putting up a picket fence.

And if you don't make your product available legally, guess what? The people will get it illegally. Traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009, and file downloading is expected to grow about 23 percent annually until 2015. Why? Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, guess how many of them are available to rent online, as I write this in midsummer 2012? Zero. That's right: Hollywood is actually encouraging the very practice they claim to be fighting (with new laws, for example).

BBC News - Procrastination: Readers' tales of epic time-wasting

BBC News - Procrastination: Readers' tales of epic time-wasting: When we first got married, my wife brought home a whiteboard on which we could list the jobs that needed to be done. About a year later it disappeared. Just before our silver wedding anniversary, I found the whiteboard in our garage. There were about 20 jobs on it. None of them had been done - and most of them still needed to be done. Steve Swift, Alton, Hampshire

Guest Post: The Rot Runs Deep 2: Don't Call Out My Scam And I Won't Call Out Yours | ZeroHedge

Guest Post: The Rot Runs Deep 2: Don't Call Out My Scam And I Won't Call Out Yours | ZeroHedge: Parents want their children to join the top 10% and enjoy a security and wealth that is as illusory as the pathway they have been sold: if only you get into an Ivy League university, if only you get a 4. grade point average, if only you earn a law degree--yet none of these guarantee anything beyond an enormous expense and a shot at a roulette wheel with too many players and not enough winners.

Daraya: the defiance that led to the Syrian massacre of hundreds - The National

Daraya: the defiance that led to the Syrian massacre of hundreds - The National:
DAMASCUS // For a rather non-descript town of drab cement block buildings on the southern outskirts of Damascus, Daraya in two short months acquired a significance far exceeding its size or the apparent ordinariness of its neighbourhoods.

Until the start of last week's all-out assault by regime loyalists, which culminated with the alleged massacre of at least 300 people, the community took up the task of governing themselves - a highly emblematic piece of defiance against a regime that has long warned chaos and Islamic extremism would engulf areas outside of its strict control.
Rather than sliding into anarchy after security forces withdrew entirely from the town this summer, Daraya had instead been run with a certain quiet efficiency by opposition activists and volunteers drawn from the town's 200,000 or so population.

Is there a generation of football stars who already have been ruined and don't know it yet? - ESPN

Is there a generation of football stars who already have been ruined and don't know it yet? - ESPN: There are detailed studies being done as we speak about the danger of football, but if you want to understand the lives behind the data, sit in the McKinley Grand during induction weekend. Watch the guys walk across the lobby. Bobby Mitchell inches with a cane. Campbell needs to be pushed. They wobble, waddle and lean. Some sort of swing themselves across the room, like a gate opening and closing. A small group seems untouched by their careers -- Wehrli looks like he could still play -- but mostly, I watch them struggle between the front door and the elevator. "They're all like that," a security guard says. "It's sad."

Brett Forrest � Articles � Shattered Genius

Brett Forrest � Articles � Shattered Genius: Grigori Perelman is one of the greatest mathematicians of our time, a Russian genius who solved the Poincar�Conjecture, which plagued the brightest minds for a century. At the height of his fame, he refused a million-dollar award for his work. Then he disappeared. Our writer hunts him down on the streets of St. Petersburg.

GOP: All Talk on Eliminating Tax Breaks – No Action

GOP: All Talk on Eliminating Tax Breaks – No Action: This week, writers of the Republican platform in Tampa dipped their toe in the tax reform water by excising a plank in previous platforms defending the mortgage interest deduction. Under pressure from groups such as the National Association of Home Builders, language was quickly reinserted to protect the deduction.

The fact is that if fundamental tax reform is on the table, then so is the mortgage interest deduction. Making an exception for it automatically becomes the best possible argument for keeping the next most popular deduction and so on – until we are right back where we started. The fact that Republicans backtracked on mortgage interest the moment there was pushback from special interests doesn’t bode well for tax reform even if Mr. Romney wins.

Apple v Samsung: Verdict creates new pinch-to-zoon monopoly that's bad for consumers

Apple v Samsung: Verdict creates new pinch-to-zoon monopoly that's bad for consumers: What troubles me is the verdict upholding the US Patent and Trademark Office's decision to say that, for example, Apple should have a legal monopoly on the pinch-to-zoom feature which I think is a great example of how the modern-day patent system has gone awry.

Think about cars and you'll see that, of course, lots of different companies make cars. But they all have some very similar user interface elements. In particular, there's a steering wheel that you turn left and right to shift the wheels and there's a gas pedal and brakes that you hit with your right foot. Imagine if the way the automobile industry worked was that each car maker had to devise a unique user interface. So maybe GM cars would have a steering wheel, but Toyotas would have a joystick, and Honda you would steer with your feet and use your hands to control the gas and brakes.