https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2AX_PQi-s
Жанр
политической сатиры и пародий:
The
World According to Vladimir Putin
A comic but ultimately alarming glimpse
into the surreal world of Russian TV, from the Skripal poisoning to President
Putin's hidden talent as a nightclub crooner…:
Tonight
With Vladimir Putin (TV
show)
Sometimes the most pointed social commentary is best
delivered by a giant-eyed, blue-bodied, huggable cartoon character.
In just over two minutes, the animated short A Sad Little Fact asks
tough questions about the future of truth itself. Do facts matter in
a world where some politicians and pundits lie so regularly and without any
accountability? The answer is—and must be—yes, but restoring a public debate
grounded in truth is going to take time. And it’s going to require some
challenging conversations.
There are big issues raised by this charming and accessible little short;
questions that may not have simple answers. But with A Sad Little Fact,
families, teachers, and friends have a new tool for starting a conversation that could not be more
important.
A
Democratic strategist helps a retired veteran run for mayor in a small,
conservative Midwest town.
Family
Guy
Peter
Griffin and
his family of two teenagers, a smart dog, a devilish baby and his wife find
themselves in some of the most hilarious scenarios
Adult Education Meg gets married.
Picking up where the last episode left off, Brian and Stewie wonder what Meg
has been up to since staying behind with Ivan in Russia.
Although she enjoys her new life, she still misses some aspects of her old one,
such as the food and decreased censorship. Following a brief health scare, Ivan
refuses to be apart from Meg and proposes to her, which she accepts. However,
when Meg admits her sadness at how her family missed her wedding, Ivan suggests
that the two visit America for a proper goodbye. While walking away to call
them, she overhears her husband gloating about how he was only using her for a
green card marriage to get to the United States. As an act of revenge, Meg puts
out several tweets under Ivan's name, criticizing the Russian way of life and
getting him darted to death before walking out on him.
Meanwhile, Chris discovers that
there are no pictures of him in the Adam West High yearbook, due to his lack of
extracurriculars. At Lois' insistence, he tries out various clubs but none of
them suit him. During a porn break at home, he soon discovers that some videos
are shot at his own school, and he confronts Principal Shepherd about this.
Noting how badly-made the videos are, Chris offers his directing services to
help him improve it, in exchange for extracurricular credit. While the scheme
works out at first, Chris and Shepherd are soon caught by Lois, who reports
their actions to the school board. Chris talks everyone down by claiming that
the porn was done to offset a constantly shrinking school budget, and tells his
mother that doing this was good for him since he is now aware of skills he
didn't know he had. He nonetheless agrees to stop making porn, much to Lois'
relief. https://familyguy.fandom.com/wiki/Adult_Education
From
Russia With Love
Meg, Stewie and Brian go to Russia. April 30, 2023
Despite his family's indifference, Brian goes on Instagram Live to hold a
discussion about writing, but gains a very minuscule audience. Undeterred,
Brian soon discovers that he's eligible to become a verified user, but Stewie
notes that his new checkmark is green rather than blue, signifying that he's
been hacked. With Meg's help, the two discover that the hacker is based in
Chelyabinsk, Russia, and the trio agrees to head there to restore Brian's
account. There, they meet the hacker, named Ivan, who quickly starts to hit on
Meg. He also reveals that his life at home has been bleak, and that he only
hacked Brian's Instagram so he could feel like he was living a good, American
life. While the trio ultimately accomplishes their goal, Stewie and Brian are
shocked to learn that Meg has decided to stay behind with Ivan, knowing that
her unusual body is considered very attractive in Russia. The group parts ways,
although Meg continues to keep in touch with her family.
Meanwhile, Quagmire drops by and invites Peter and
Lois to a double date with a new woman he's met. The two agree, but Lois is
shocked to see that Quagmire is dating her junior high school bully, Stephanie,
who once pushed her into the water at a pool party back in the day. Stephanie
manages to hit it off with the others, but Lois is unable to get over her
middle school trauma, not helped by the humiliating stories being told about
her. She remains on edge throughout the rest of the evening and then has a
panic attack much like the ones she used to get, with even her body reverting
to its awkward, teenage form. Lois is diagnosed with Severe Nerd Damage and
must cope with it while attending a pool party at Joe's house; when she is
shoved into the pool again, she is convinced that Stephanie hasn't changed.
Stephanie reveals that she never bullied Lois and that the times she fell into
the pool were both accidents. In fact, Lois' childhood imperfections were
actually an inspiration for her, as she has since opened a foundation for kids
with scoliosis. https://familyguy.fandom.com/wiki/From_Russia_With_Love
A Hopeful Story About a Sad Little Fact
TRUTH
MATTERS
DECEMBER 04, 2019
BY SARAH MARGON
Sometimes the most
pointed social commentary is best delivered by an adorable, giant-eyed,
blue-bodied, and huggable cartoon character.
In just over two
minutes, A Sad Little Fact asks tough questions about the future
of honesty and truth in an “alternative facts” world. How can we “save” facts
when they are relentlessly under attack? Do facts matter in a world where some
politicians and pundits lie so regularly and without any accountability? If
facts matter, why, and to whom?
One person, unnamed in this
animation, looms large off-screen. Since assuming office, U.S. President Donald
Trump has made more than 13,000 false or misleading claims, according to
the Washington Post, which has been tracking his
lies. In an interview on Fox and Friends in late November,
Trump made 18 false claims in a 53-minute interview, according to CNN (that’s one lie every 176 seconds).
As Sacha Baron Cohen told the Anti-Defamation League last month,
“There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.” The Holocaust
happened. A man walked on the moon. Twenty-seven children were murdered at
Sandy Hook elementary school. Russia hacked the 2016 elections in the United
States.
When it comes to human
rights, facts can be the difference between life and death. Here are a few
recent examples:
- Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident and Washington
Post columnist who wrote about the Saudi Crown Price, walked into
the Saudi Embassy in Ankara for a marriage license and never exited.
Instead, he was brutally murdered by Saudi security services.
- Myanmar’s military used Facebook to spread hate
and fuel a mass atrocity against the Rohingya people.
- A few U.S. lawmakers peddled the falsehood that
the Open Society Foundations paid protestors and migrants. These lies
directly inspired violence; pipe bombs were sent to homes of prominent
Democrats. Twelve Jews were murdered at a Pittsburgh Synagogue.
Since the current U.S.
president took office, fact-checking has exploded. There are now more than 200
fact-checking organizations worldwide. Five years ago, there were 44.
Meanwhile, the president’s
term “fake news”—which he uses to dismiss media outlets and stories with which
he disagrees—has been embraced by repressive leaders around the world.
Authoritarian leaders in a number of countries—including in Cambodia, Syria,
and the Philippines—now use the term to target independent journalists and
human rights activists. By using this term to reject the truth, these leaders
entrench and promote fictitious narratives that serve their interests only.
When President Trump leaves
office, this problem won’t leave with him. Restoring a public debate grounded
in truth is going to take time. That’s why it is important to tell this story
in a way that is provocative for adults, but also can open up a conversation
within communities—in an approachable way.
The assault on facts makes
addressing transnational problems like income inequality, migration, and
climate change difficult and requires a united response from multiple
countries.
I am often asked what can be
done to push back against those who threaten basic freedoms, and seem intent on
destroying the foundations of democracy. Looking for new ways to share facts
and help them resonate with a wider audience so they are relatable to everyone
is a tremendously important part of a much longer journey. Starting today, we
have a new tool—one that can be used by families, teachers, and friends to
start a conversation within their schools, neighborhoods, and communities about
the importance of facts, and how we need them to uncover and support the truth.
C4 commissions ground-breaking documentary series Putin: A
Russian Spy Story
Channel 4 has commissioned Rogan Productions to
produce a ground-breaking three-part documentary series on Russian President
Vladimir Putin. Filmed across Russia, America, Europe and the UK, this landmark
series will show how Putin brought his knowledge of spy-craft to define the
presidency of a nuclear power. Landing 20 years into his rule, this will be the
definitive account of Putin’s power and how it has changed the modern
world. …:
How
Political Opinions Change
A clever experiment shows it's surprisingly easy
to change someone’s political views, revealing how flexible we are
Our political opinions and attitudes are an important
part of who we are and how we construct our identities. Hence, if I ask your
opinion on health care, you will not only share it with me, but you will likely
resist any of my attempts to persuade you of another point of view. Likewise,
it would be odd for me to ask if you are sure that what you said actually was
your opinion. If anything seems certain to us, it is our own attitudes. But
what if this weren’t necessarily the case?
In a recent experiment, we showed it is possible to trick
people into changing their political views. In fact, we could get some people
to adopt opinions that were directly opposite of their original ones. Our
findings imply that we should rethink some of the ways we think about our own
attitudes, and how they relate to the currently polarized political climate.
When it comes to the actual political attitudes we hold, we are considerably
more flexible than we think.
A powerful shaping factor about our social and
political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities. For instance, researchers have found that moral and emotion
messages on contentious political topics, such as gun-control and climate
change, spread more rapidly within rather than between ideologically
like-minded networks. This echo-chamber problem seems to be made worse by the
algorithms of social media companies who send us increasingly extreme content
to fit our political preferences.
We are also far more motivated to reason and argue to
protect our own or our group’s views. Indeed, some researchers argue that our
reasoning capabilities evolved to serve that very function. A recent study illustrates this very well:
participants who were assigned to follow Twitter accounts that retweeted
information containing opposing political views to their own with the hope of
exposing them to new political views. But the exposure backfired—increased
polarization in the participants. Simply tuning Republicans into MSNBC, or
Democrats into Fox News, might only amplify conflict. What can we do to make
people open their minds?
The trick, as strange as it may sound, is to make
people believe the opposite opinion was their own to begin
with.
The experiment relies on a phenomenon known as choice
blindness. Choice
blindness was discovered in 2005 by a team of Swedish researchers. They presented participants
with two photos of faces and asked participants to choose the photo they
thought was more attractive, and then handed participants that photo.
Using a clever
trick inspired by stage magic, when participants received the photo
it had been switched to the person not chosen by the
participant—the less attractive photo. Remarkably, most participants accepted
this card as their own choice and then proceeded to give arguments for why they
had chosen that face in the first place. This revealed a striking mismatch
between our choices and our ability to rationalize outcomes. This same finding
has since been replicated in various domains including taste for jam, financial
decisions, and eye-witness testimony.
While it is remarkable that people can be fooled into
picking an attractive photo or a sweet jam in the moment, we wondered whether it
would be possible to use this false-feedback to alter political beliefs in a
way that would stand the test of time.
In our experiment, we first gave false-feedback about
their choices, but this time concerning actual political questions (e.g.,
climate taxes on consumer goods). Participants were then asked to state their
views a second time that same day, and again one week later. The results were
striking. Participants’ responses were shifted considerably in the
direction of the manipulation. For instance, those who originally had favoured
higher taxes were more likely to be undecided or even opposed to it.
These effects lasted up to a week later. The changes
in their opinions were also larger when they were asked to give an argument—or
rationalization—for their new opinion. It seems that giving people the
opportunity to reason reinforced the false-feedback and led them further away
from their initial attitude.
Why do attitudes shift in our experiment? The
difference is that when faced with the false-feedback people are free from the
motives that normally lead them to defend themselves or their ideas from
external criticism. Instead they can consider the benefits of the alternative
position.
To understand this, imagine that you have picked out a
pair of pants to wear later in the evening. Your partner comes in and
criticizes your choice, saying you should have picked the blue ones rather than
the red ones. You will likely become defensive about your choice and defend
it—maybe even becoming more entrenched in your choice of hot red pants.
Now imagine instead that your partner switches the
pants while you are distracted, instead of arguing with you. You turn around
and discover that you had picked the blue pants. In this case, you need to
reconcile the physical evidence of your preference (the pants on your bed) with
whatever inside your brain normally makes you choose the red pants. Perhaps you
made a mistake or had a shift in opinion that slipped you mind. But now that
the pants were placed in front of you, it would be easy to slip them on and
continue getting ready for the party. As you catch yourself in the mirror, you
decide that these pants are quite flattering after all.
The very same thing happens in our experiment, which
suggests that people have a pretty high degree of flexibility about their
political views once you strip away the things that normally make them
defensive. Their results suggest that we need rethink what it means to hold an
attitude. If we become aware that our political attitudes are not set in stone,
it might become easier for us to seek out information that might change them.
There is no quick fix to the current polarization and
inter-party conflict tearing apart this country and many others. But
understanding and embracing the fluid nature of our beliefs, might reduce the
temptation to grandstand about our political opinions. Instead humility might
again find a place in our political lives.
Tuesday
17 March 2020 by Davywavy
Vladimir Putin reluctantly agrees to
quarantine himself inside the Russian President’s office until at least 2036
Vladimir Putin
has sadly announced he has no choice but to self-isolate in the President’s
office for as long as necessary – possibly years, if not decades.
Putin,
who it was feared might have to come out of the office and mingle with ordinary
people at the end of his term, is understood to have made the decision on the
advice of experts who knew they’d better not advise him to do anything else.
“Expert
advice is for people to quarantine themselves for the good of others, and so
there really isn’t any greater good than me staying right here for a long, long
time to come,” Putin said in a statement to the Russian public.
“Of
course, there are piddling little things like laws and the constitution to
consider, but what are they when there are important things like my wellbeing
at risk?
“I
will always do what is best for the Russian people, as I always have, and right
now it appears that this is for me to stay right here, in the President’s
office, until such time as the nation is completely healthy and free home any
virus threats.
“Do
not worry, I will definitely let everyone know when that day arrives.”
Taking
another mouthful of caviar and popping his feet on the Presidential desk, Putin
nodded to reporters over a web link.
He
concluded, “Clearly it is for the best that I stay here for as long as
necessary. Possibly forever. And you all agree with me, don’t you?”
FEBRUARY
1, 2020 8:56PM PT
‘Saturday Night
Live’: Alec Baldwin Returns for ‘Judge Mathis’ Impeachment Court Sketch (Watch)
How self-deception allows people to lie:
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220525-how-self-deception-allows-people-to-lie
‘The Optimism Bias: A
Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain’,
by Tali Sharot (Vintage, 2012)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11382184-the-optimism-bias
Community of shitposters
that ridicule and expose Russian disinformation
about the war in Ukraine, troll Russian diplomats and propagandists
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pd5y/shitposting-shiba-inu-accounts-chased-a-russian-diplomat-offline
Quick Calm Easy Meditations to Short-Circuit Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroscience
Jennifer R. Wolkin
Do you ever feel like your stress levels are off the charts? You aren’t alone. Every day it feels like there’s something new to juggle or a fresh crisis to avert. And just keeping everything in the air requires an exhausting amount of attention and a dizzying amount of responsibilities. The more chaotic life becomes, the more we tend to forget what we truly value—from family and friends to mental and physical health. Fortunately, there are things you can do to stay grounded that won’t eat away at your increasingly precious time.
Quick Calm is a practical and fun guidebook designed to fit perfectly into a fast-paced lifestyle. You’ll discover the what, why, and how of developing your own mindfulness practice. You’ll learn all about the essential, life-affirming benefits of this ancient practice, including mindfulness meditation’s positive effects on both mind and body. And, most importantly, you’ll find daily practices you can do in just five minutes a day!
So, if you’re ready to discover the gift of mindfulness, but you don’t have the time to attend a meditation retreat, set aside five minutes a day with this handy little guide. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better return on your time investment! : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54670255-quick-calm
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Lisa
Feldman Barrett
Seven short essays
(plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved) reveal lessons from
neuroscience research. Questions like these in any order:
1 where brains came from
2 how they’re structured (and why it matters)
3 how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you
experience
4 dismiss popular myths
5 idea of a “lizard brain”
6 the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions
7 between nature and nurture
1/2 to determine your behavior
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48930266-seven-and-a-half-lessons-about-the-brain
Rationality:
What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
Steven
Arthur Pinker
In Rationality,
Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species
- cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions.
After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives
and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think
in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives,
but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up
over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and
decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our
educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly
in a single book - until now.
Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public
sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress.
Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten,
inspire and empower.
'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56224080-rationality
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