'Research has also shown that individuals strategically seek out opportunities to act morally if they know they might need a moral license for an upcoming dubious action. Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. How do individuals face the ethical uncertainties of social life? When under the threat that their next action might be (or appear to be) morally dubious, individuals can derive confidence from their past moral behavior, such that an impeccable track record increases their propensity to engage in otherwise suspect actions. Such moral self-licensing (Monin & Miller, 2001) occurs when past moral behavior makes people more likely to do potentially immoral things without worrying about feeling or appearing immoral. We argue that moral self-licensing occurs because good deeds make people feel secure in their moral self-regard. For example, when people are confident that their past behavior demonstrates compassion, generosity, or a lack of prejudice, they are more likely to act in morally dubious ways without fear of feeling heartless, selfish, or bigoted. Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people?' -- Action Identification: "I am *doing* good" = I am doing the thought: "I am *being* good"

'Why do people rationalize? A need to *feel* (not be) consistent/authentic.' -- "Sometimes we bend the truth in our minds, so that from our own perspective, it feels like we've continued to believe something that is consistent all along." -- 'Three options for cognitive dissonance: Change Attitude; Change Behaviour (sometimes can't always do this); Justify/Minimize conflict.'

'People change their conceptions of what they are doing either by moving from a higher level to a lower one, or by moving from a lower level to a higher one. This means that in moving from one high-level conception of an action to another, the person must necessarily pass through a transitional state in which the specifics of the action come to mind. This formulation indicates that when people hold a fairly comprehensive and general conception of what they are doing, that conception will serve as an intention to act and will remain unperturbed by suggestions that the act has some alternative general identity. Thus, the theory explains why people are not always willing to believe it when someone suggests to them a new high-level conception of their action. It is only when people come to identify an action in terms of its details that they lose sight of their initial high-level understanding of the act and become susceptible to information indicating that the act can be identified in another high-level way.'

'If successfully enacted, an action tends to be identified at a relatively high level; if unsuccessfully enacted, it tends to be identified in lower-level terms. ...in the face of failure, the actor is likely to think about the action in more mechanistic terms. -- ...the extension of action identification principles to the communication of action allows for a certain "coyness" in self-presentation. Rather than boasting of one's personal competence, a person might nonetheless communicate this image of himself or herself through high-level identities. And rather than admitting failure or explaining it away, one can simply (and honestly) describe what one has done in mechanistic terms, thereby circumventing the presentation of oneself as incompetent. Finally, one can cultivate an image of modesty in the eyes of others by describing action-even successful action-in relatively low-level terms.'

'...the mind uses "sophisticated compression routines ... for efficiently packaging previous events as they are being sent to memory." -- ...memory invention was specifically triggered by observing a consequence that implied an earlier causal action had happened and had been seen. -- The researchers said their findings have obvious implications for crime scene witnesses. Imagine a witness sees a man wielding a gun, and imagine seconds later they also see a person nearby falling from a gunshot wound - these new results show how easily the mind of the witness could invent a memory of having seen the moment the trigger was actually pulled. "In some circumstances," the researchers said, "conceptual packaging can induce the perceiver to insert unseen information in order to fulfil structural requirements."'

'Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.'

'...there is speculation that implanted memories into one's existing photos could alter one's reality of the past and subsequent brand loyalty. ...according to Raskin, he notes that "social networking sites may either begin selling ad space in our memories as a business model for themselves, or people may directly offer themselves up as a platform for advertising to make some cash." In essence, this approach would be replacing 'celebrity' endorsements with "social-networking-followers-you-trust' endorsements. This is also supported by the fact that product placement within photos has greater value than simple TV commercials. On the flip side, the ethics of such advertising could put the social networking user at risk of losing the trust of his followers.'

JA: 'If you control the present, you control history and then you control all the decisions that are made based on history. What I said before is that political parties, philosophies, all limited by what is our intellectual heritage. What is the historical record. If you control the historical record, you are in control, you control what decisions can be made. If you do not know about something, you can not make an accurate decision. So that is extremely worrying, that in fact the Internet is the easiest thing in the world to control. -- ...people have been censored, and they do not reveal that they are censored. The reason that they do not reveal that they are censored is because it reveals to the readership that it has been been betrayed. So the censorship is being self censored. -- We are going to get harmonization. Question is; is it going to be the walls of China, is it going to be the Swedish press freedom act? Is it going to be an Internet full of black lists?'

'Welcome to billionaire Jimmy Lai's newest gamble: Animated news. When news agencies didn't have footage of scenes from the car crash involving Tiger Woods, Lai's team raced to put together animation dramatizing the incident, garnering hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. The end product drew derision, with critics saying there's a credibility gap because the animated features mix real news footage with dramatizations of often unverified versions of events. Every day they churn out about 20 reports, often a combination of animation and real video, for the Web sites of Lai's Apple Daily newspapers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. "You have a lot of missing images, in the TV, in the news reporting," Lai said. "If this is an image generation or image era that we are in, that is a big gap we are filling."'

'The “believers” have suddenly realized how uncool it is to talk about “beliefs” when it’s supposed to be about science. So the rush is on to post articles warning believers to hide their “faith” and to throw in token comments about evidence instead. Indeed the Real Deniers are scrambling to claim the “name” skeptic that they used to despise. It’s a measure of how far this debate has come. Such was the success of the PR campaign, some skeptics gave up on the term and opted to use “realist”. But the skeptics have been proved right time after time, and the unskeptical scientists have been embarrassed by their own conniving words, mistakes, tricks and lies. The resurgence of the word “skeptic” is rising like a rocket. As I’ve said many times, the opposite of skeptical is gullible. And an unskeptical scientist is an oxymoron. The believers are acknowledging we are right: Science is about the evidence.'

We shall fight them on the 'recent edits' tab! We shall never surrender!

'"The irony is that thinking counterfactually increases the perception that life's path was meant to be," says Kray, "which ultimately imbues one's life with significance." While one might argue that believers of destiny would be less inclined to be analytical, the research also found that people who think counterfactually and find meaning in their lives are more apt to believe life is not a product of chance and that they can make valuable choices. -- "How we react to counterfactuals is a great test of how open- or closed-minded we are on a topic," adds Tetlock, who has studied how people think about what-if scenarios at the organizational and even country level. "In my book Expert Political Judgment (2005), I find that the more imaginatively experts think about possible pasts, the better calibrated they are in attaching realistic probabilities to possible futures."'

'"Our research indicates that da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Galileo basically hoisted the entire intellectual transformation of mankind onto their shoulders while everyone else just sat around being superstitious nimrods," said Sue Viero of the Correr Museum of Art in Venice, Italy.'

'Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it’s unreliable if not false. It’s my own version of “slow news”. ...the advent of 1,440 minute news cycle (should we call it the 86,400 second news cycle?), which brings with it an insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy. ...Clay Shirky (also a friend) observed recently — in a Tweet, no less — that “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”'

'The media is fond of saying that no one in the mainstream saw this coming except Roubini. How stupid is this? The media is the sole decision maker about who we get to pay attention to. If they feature only liars and fools, then of course it will seem that no one saw this coming. And they feature almost entirely liars, fools, and criminal manipulators. Let’s consider who got this right in addition to Roubini. [A long list of truthers] Why did we almost never see these guys on the tube or in print. And why, when we did see them, was the usual purpose to ridicule and harass them? Because the media was and is a co-conspirator, witting or unwitting, with the Wall Street criminal distribution machine. The media is populated by conformist morons, too fat and lazy, too coddled by their Wall Street sponsors to be bothered by anything so mundane as to search for the truth. Only the mainstream infomercial media didn’t get it, because they are, after all, on the payroll of the Wall Street Mob.'

'Fans of the AMC’s Mad Men know that the show, about fictional 1960s advertising agency Sterling Cooper, names other real-life agencies and brands to achieve some verisimilitude. What they may not know is that some of those are actual product placements. The show’s third season, which premiered Sunday (Aug. 16), featured placements with London Fog and Stolichnaya vodka that both brands said were engineered. -- When asked whether other brands mentioned on the show on previous seasons like Utz and Cadillac were paid placements, AMC president and general manager Charlie Collier was coy: “We absolutely have product integration on the show, but you shouldn’t know which ones are paid and which ones aren’t.”'

'Congress says that with no way to actually pay back our debts, faking a coup to eliminate financial obligations is the best plan for the U.S. economy.' -- HOPE!!!

'...books published by MobileReference, including Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, were remotely deleted from customers' Kindles over night. (Customers had their accounts credited for the value lost.)' Orwell would have appreciated the irony. But he also would have been the first to predict that this problem would arise when one company sells both the books themselves and the device required to read them, when that company insists on locking up the books with "protection" that prevents them being shifted to any other device, and has the power of "remote deletion" at its fingertips. Big Brother, indeed!' -- Unbook quickwise

'A previously unheard recording of a Russian spacecraft attempting to beat NASA's Apollo 11 in 1969's race to the moon has been released. The recordings from Jodrell's Lovell radio telescope, which were hidden in archives until researchers found them, show the Russian craft orbited the Moon and crash-landed onto its surface at 15:50 on July 21 – just a few hours before the Americans lifted.' -- Первый!

'An unperson is a person who has been "vaporized"; who has been not only killed by the state, but effectively erased from existence. Such a person would be written out of existing books, photographs, and articles so that no trace of their existence could be found in the historical record. The idea is that such a person would, according to the principles of doublethink, be forgotten completely (for it would be impossible to provide evidence of their existence), even by close friends and family members. Mentioning his or her name, or even speaking of their past existence, is thoughtcrime; the concept that the person may have existed at one time and has disappeared cannot be expressed in Newspeak. Compare to the Stalinist practice of erasing people from photographs after their execution (see photos, right).'

"... macroeconomists [and politicians] can almost always claim to be right, no matter what happens. If they recommend Policy X and the economy weakens, they can say it prevented a complete disaster. If they say Policy X will hurt and things improve, they can say without it, we'd be even better off. Being a macroeconomist means never having to say you're sorry."

'Benzon's proposal derives from the finding that memories are often mood dependent: people tend to recall autobiographical memories of when they were happy when they are happy once again, and they best recall memories of loss and failure when they are sad. Benzon says: "My argument is that this communal experience of stories helps us to create neural circuits that give us the ability to recall a wide range of experience without our having to be in a neurochemical state approximating that which mediated that experience. Without the constant experience of emotionally charged stories, our memories would be captive to the current mood."' -- Findings from the "Sarah Cole" study: 'When angry one thinks forward from a slight or injustice towards possibilities of what to do about it, including possibilities of vengeance. When sad, one backtracks mentally from the loss or mistake to what might have caused it.' -- And it should be precisely the reverse.

Doublethink: "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind, and accepting both of them." ...a Party member who needs to "revise" his own memories to conform with the Party's latest revision of history will necessarily know that he is playing tricks with reality, "but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Using this technique, the Party can stay in power indefinitely—"for the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes... The prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity." -- Unread.

'Connor sent Kyle to protect his mother, and the first T-800 to stop the T-1000. But while he deliberated on what to do with the second captured T-800, something incredible happened. “You must send me back, too,” the Terminator said. “When?” “As far back as the system will allow. Thousands of years into the past. Before recorded history.” “What will you do there?” '“I will guard the human race,” the Terminator promised. “I will guide its development from chaos into civilization. I will live on the outskirts - a warrior without a home, eternally wandering. And maybe, when Cyberdyne comes around, I’ll be ready for them.” And so the Terminator, calling itself Conan once more, continued its long and lonely march through history. Having forgot that it was a machine, it lived as a man. He is the guardian of our species, defending us from our own base desires. He will never stop. He will never leave us.' -- Real Schwarzeneggers don't die, negger, wut??

"Human beings are as good at devising ex post facto explanations for big disasters as they are bad at anticipating those disasters. It is indeed impressive how rapidly the economists who failed to predict this crisis — or predicted the wrong crisis (a dollar crash) — have been able to produce such a satisfying story about its origins. Yes, it was all the fault of deregulation. The reality is that crises are more often caused by bad regulation than by deregulation. It is more than a little convenient for America’s political class to blame deregulation for this financial crisis and the resulting excesses of the free market. Not only does that neatly pass the buck, but it also creates a justification for . . . more regulation. The old Latin question is highly apposite here: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who regulates the regulators? Until that question is answered, calls for more regulation are symptoms of the very disease they purport to cure."

"Rep. Gregory White (D-NH) tearfully asks forgiveness for the degrading and sinful acts he is about to engage in."

"Goldman’s 2008 fiscal year ended Nov. 30. This year the company is switching to a calendar year. The leaves December as an orphan month, one that will be largely ignored. In Goldman’s earnings statement, and in most of the news reports, the quarter ended March 31 is compared to the quarter last year that ended in February. The orphan month featured — surprise — lots of write-offs. The pretax loss was $1.3 billion, and the after-tax loss was $780 million." -- Creative accounting is creative

"Consider what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format. The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon—to buy another book, pay a bill, whatever—will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book."

'This episode examine[s] how the various national memories of the Second World War were effectively rewritten and manipulated in the Cold War period.'

"It's understood that Alexander and Loeb were let go because of Peacock execs' frustration with the creative direction of the show. The show is also said to have been grappling with hefty budget overruns this season that are going well beyond its already sizable $4 million per-seg pricetag. Reps for NBC and UMS declined comment." -- Comment: Anon: "They constantly reuse the same plot devices -- traveling into the future to see a disaster, people painting the future, people coming back from the dead. The show has also become painfully convoluted, with plot holes, continuity errors, and retcons left and right. That a show only in its third season even HAS retcons shows just how bad the writing has been."