Resources

Voter Empowerment Project

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As should be obvious from our relatively infrequent posts, as of January, 2019 this blog has shifted its focus from shorter, more “newsworthy” explorations and announcements to long form, in-depth, mostly psycho-philosophical posts. However, when we received the weekly post from Jen Hofmann (Americans of Conscience Checklist), we could not help but consider suspending our reticence for a brief shout out to someone worthy of praise for her diligence and support for the worthwhile endeavors she sends our way.

Specifically, you might want to check out Jen’s site to learn more about the June 2019 event focusing on “strengthening the integrity of the 2020 elections”.

AI News?

On the frontier of artificial intelligence journalism

AI News Title II

In an era when venerable news publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are being maligned by key societal figures accusing them of “leftist” bias, when publications such as Breitbart or similar media sources often deemed “conservative” unabashedly present stories slanted to reflect political views far right of the majority of public sentiment in the country and when a significant portion of the general public acquires its “facts” about the nature of world events from Twitter, Facebook and a network that used to fly a banner emblazoned with the words “fair and balanced”, bias both inadvertent and intentional has become an insurmountable impediment to attaining the “truth” about what is going on around us. In the face of such a large, sprawling situation, we sometimes get lost, failing to understand the meaning of our daily encounters and  the most appropriate intent we should seek regarding any of these events. Enter knowherenews.com.  This website proposes that computer software can filter reports of world events and effectively sanitize them of ideological bias.

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Truth Matters

“Like it or not, people will have to acquire their own news to a certain extent and must therefore learn journalistic techniques and various tricks of the trade”
~Bruce Bartlett

In the current era of “fake news” and a general mood of “alternate fact” inaccuracies and slights of hand, many of us who truly seek the positive in life—“Good” and “Truth”, for instance—we sometimes can feel overwhelmed by a lack of reliable sources of information about the world.  Bruce Bartlett has written a book—The Truth Matters–to partially address this situation.

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A Place to Stand

the truth will set you free…

leverage - croppedIs it true?  Whatever “it” is, can we be certain “it” represents truth?  How do we know? When we act in the world, when we make choices and, perhaps most important, when we establish relationships between ourselves and others, are we sure that “truth” we use as a basis of that relationship is trustworthy? “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  While American showperson P.T. Barnum might not have made such a statement as is often assumed, he certainly could have. In her book, The Death of Truth, Michiko Kakutani describes Mr. Barnum and his orientation to manipulation this way:

…a self-proclaimed ‘prince of humbugs’ whose ‘great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived’ as long as it was being entertained.’ And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, ‘the socially rewarded art’ became that of making things seem true’; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early 1960s were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue. (p.83)

How do we ever know if we are proceeding through EveryDayLife based on genuine truth or when we, like puppets, are being controlled by the serendipity of others? Where is the anchor point from which we leverage our understanding of the world?

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