TV News LIES

The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the elite Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The Associated Press has learned.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Hard to tell what is satire or parody in this life, as it does such a smash-up job with its special sweet-sour mash-up all its own.  Life, poker-faced, says it's playing straight with us, dealing from the top of the deck.

We remain fantastically doubtful about that here.  When we absorb our daily ration of information, insipidness, and fear, via newspapers, we hold them up to the mirror and read everything from there. This way, we don't have to look the news in the eye, not directly at it. We avoid the Gorgon's gaze.  Plus, we are embarrassed for the news,  at all the sludge and drivel in there.  We handle newspapers with metal tongs, so we don't get any on us.

One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. Heartland has issued a press release claiming that some of these documents were sent to an outsider under false pretenses and that one document in the set is a fake, but the AP independently verified their contents.

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute received funding from at least 19 publicly traded corporations in 2010 and 2011.

Car mirrors have legally insisted to all passengers and interested passersby, desperate for reading material, objects in mirror are closer than they appear.  They try to remind us, this nearly inconspicuous, almost invisible image in the view, that being seen smaller in there doesn't necessarily equate to being further away, out here.

No mirror so far observed carries warnings or alerts about smoke being wielded in there, by professionals sent to distract us by way of politicians, corporations, or religions, to name only a few possible sponsors sent to trick our looking and seeing, trying to put off our few visions with unending illusion.

Despite the new era of transparency and open government President Obama promised three years ago, "his administration has been just as secretive—if not more so—than his predecessors, and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become the prime example of his administration’s lack of progress," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noted last month.

The suppression of Blair's criminality and that of his administrations is described in Gareth Peirce's Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice, published in paperback this month by Verso. Peirce is Britain's most distinguished human rights lawyer; her pursuit of infamous miscarriages of justice and justice for the victims of state crimes, such as torture and rendition, is unsurpassed. What is unusual about this accounting of what she calls the "moral and legal pandemonium" in the wake of 9/11 is that, in drawing on the memoirs of Blair and Alistair Campbell, Cabinet minutes and MI6 files, she applies the rule of law to them.

When it comes to natural gas extraction via “fracking,” TV journalism has some serious competition: energy industry commercials.

Like ads for political candidates that run concurrently with broadcast news coverage of the presidential race, ads promoting natural gas (and other fossil fuels) have long been running in concert with news segments about the topic, most recently touting the prospect of a “boom” made possible by the controversial extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing of the shale sprawling beneath more than 30 U.S. states.

The concern that hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract natural gas is contaminating groundwater is overstated, claims a new report. Charles "Chip" Groat, associate director of Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, led the study.

Fracking, though, has become highly controversial, with claims that the pressurised fluids can find their way into water courses and drinking supplies, and also trigger small earthquakes.