Month: March 2012

“From the fountains of your mind will spring the waters of your salvation”

Do you ever consider whether you are a reasonable person or not? If you are a reasoning person, then you already follow what is known as The Way. So, what is The Way? The Way is truth, knowledge, logic and reason, and when you live by The Way, you live according to these principles of thought.

Ask yourself the question, do you want to live in reason, with logic, knowledge and provable fact as your daily guide, or do you want to live your life with the opposite? Namely, with unreason, lack of logic, lack of knowledge and fantasy as your only guide?

Do you consider that they are reasonable, sensible, just, correct, or otherwise? And on what do you base your reasoning?

Remember that you may think that you know all about things, but do you in fact? You only know what you know, and you don't know that you don't know what you don't know. So, on what do you judge? Are you really a reasoning person? What do you really know?

Remember that belief can only exist in the absence of hard fact. So, what do you know, and what do you only believe?

Become a follower of The Way if you are searching for reason. The Way is knowledge, reason. logic and provable truth. From the workings of your own mind comes your salvation or damnation. We all have choices. What are yours?

 

Wearing his wide-brimmed hat, climate scientist James Hansen starts his TEDTalk by asking, “What do I know that would cause me, a reticent midwestern scientist, to get arrested in front of the White House, protesting?”

Hansen studied under professor James Van Allen, who told him about observations of Venus ,” there was intense microwave radiation ,” because it's hot, and it was kept that way by a thick C02 atmosphere. He was fortunate enough to join NASA and send an instrument to Venus. But while it was in transit, he became involved in calculating what would be the effect of the greenhouse effect here on Earth.

Research by US physicist and climatologist Michael E. Mann demonstrating an increase in global temperatures infuriated climate change deniers. Photograph: Greg Rico

Research by Michael E. Mann confirmed the reality of global warming. Little did he know that it would also expose him to a vicious hate campaign.

The scientist who has borne the full brunt of attacks by climate change deniers, including death threats and accusations of misappropriating funds, is set to hit back.

Michael E. Mann, creator of the “hockey stick” graph that illustrates recent rapid rises in global temperatures, is to publish a book next month detailing the “disingenuous and cynical” methods used by those who have tried to disprove his findings. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is a startling depiction of a scientist persecuted for trying to tell the truth.

Among the tactics used against Mann were the theft and publication, in 2009, of emails he had exchanged with climate scientist Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University. Selected, distorted versions of these emails were then published on the internet in order to undermine UN climate talks due to begin in Copenhagen a few weeks later. These negotiations ended in failure. The use of those emails to kill off the climate talks was “a crime against humanity, a crime against the planet,” says Mann, a scientist at Penn State University.

In his book, Mann warns that “public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation ,“ not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats.” The implications for the planet are grim, he adds.

Article link…..

 

 

No man or woman is without value, unless they reach beyond the length of their arms, grasping nothing, and so, remaining in their poverty.




What you know or think you know, is a mixture of what is fact and what you have been taught to accept as fact. When you follow the straight road, which is The Way, then you segregate fact from belief, and truth from that which is just believed to be true.
The follower clears his or her mind of things that have no basis in fact or reality, and distinguishes things that make sense from those that don't. Belief is based on a mixture of theory, fantasy and misguided conclusion. When fed to you as fact, your ability to reason is overridden, due to the confusions caused.

 

ROY GREENSLADE

THE LEVESON inquiry into the phone hacking scandal took a much more sinister and serious turn this week. It was transformed from an exploration of newspaper ethics into a full-frontal assault on the conduct of Britain's police.

Over four days, evidence emerged that called into question the way in which the Metropolitan police handled its original investigation into hacking and, just as significantly, its five-year denial of there being anything worth investigating.

Along the way we discovered the intensely close relationship between senior journalists at Rupert Murdoch's UK publishing company, News International, and high-ranking officers from Scotland Yard. The links were cemented through lunches, dinners, drinks, including the quaffing of champagne, and visits to football matches. And, most bizarre of all, there was the case of the retired police horse lent to the company's former chief executive, Rebekah Brooks.

Read more…

Response to Irish Times article

 

Mr. Greenslade is correct when he says that this is a continuous revelation that seems to have no bottom, but yet more and more bubbling up of murky plots and subversion of media influence.

Where potential exists to make money and keep business profitable, there will always be the opportunity for abuse and corruption. Press media is no different, and considering the widespread public appetite for titillation, the potential outcome of a journalist’s writings can serve to give licence to get the story, any story, at any price, as they then become the big cheese reporter. Lives can be destroyed by a single sentence, but tomorrow’s story looms, so the cost of harm done is yet again ignored, as it becomes profitable to those who choose ignorance. And it is a choice, but when you are dealing with people like Yates, who can casually respond to the question of whether or not he considered there was any personal perception of improper inference on his judgment, “My conscience is clear,” it just shows that it’s easy to keep your conscience clear if you don’t allow it to be influenced by anything that might inform it of better. If you don’t use something it’s easy to keep it clean; as in, hear no evil, see no evil etc.

Of course not all reporters are like this, just some of them, and to be fair, many do succeed in moderating self promotion over an above the call of duty. However, in any system where the newest story becomes a do-or-die rush for fame and peer recognition, humans can very often slip down the evolutionary ladder very quickly, often ignoring the fact that they may be trampling with reckless abandon on the lives of their fellow man.

Permission to behave in such a manner is ultimately set by the overarching authority of the owners of the particular enterprise, and if the general ethos is for staff to follow the prevailing example once it even become tacitly perceived as being the way to go, then that will prevail by proxy. A nod and a wink, or the unsaid but understood message, can serve to let loose the practice of whatever suits the prevailing climate; a climate where the thermostat is set by the gods in charge of the upper echelons, where the sweated profits from unjust practices often accumulate, thus feeding the beast that created the process in the first place. However, the thirst for power is a poisonous drive, eventually exhausting itself and creating an opposite and equal force that causes it to consume itself from the tail upwards; but man never really learns, does he?

We are living in a time of the airing of dirty laundry in many societal fields, be they political, media or religious, and be sure there is much more to come. Such times can be hard for the average man or woman in the street to get to grips with, and can tend to make them wonder as to what is real and what is not, what can they depend on, or not. However, it’s good to know that at least some of those who make a living from the press media are similarly shocked and disgusted by the depths of the corrosion and perversion. It’s a pity, as in other similar power-bases of society, including politics and religion, that the best of humane thinking is left outside of the primary spheres of influence, to all our collective cost. That’s our fault.