11 Facts From 2011
1. The CIA is monitoring up to 5 million tweets per day.
2. Income inequality in America is worse than in Ancient Rome.
3. Twenty-three straight polls find Americans overwhelmingly want to raise taxes to pay down debt.
4. 68% of millionaires support raising taxes on millionaires.
5. Wall Street’s recession cost 1.5 million times more than securing Occupy Wall Street protests.
6. Six Walmart heirs have the same net worth as the bottom 30% of all Americans.
7. Reagan’s ‘82 and ‘84 deficit reduction plans were 80% tax increases.
8. Since 2009, 88% of income growth went to corporate profits, just 1% to wages.
9. Average Bush tax cut this year for the 1% will exceed average income for the 99%.
10. Planned Parenthood Facts: 4 million STD tests, 1 million screenings for cervical cancer, 830,000 breast exams every year. Receives no federal money for abortion.
11. DEAD: Bin Laden, Quaddafi, and Kim Jong Il. OUSTED: Mubarak, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and Ali Adullah Saleh.
Friday Fact: It takes 713 gallons (2,700 L) of water to make one cotton T-shirt.
@NatGeo
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
A University of Michigan study appears to shows that facts really don’t matter.
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation evenstronger.
The denial is bipartisan, though there is an interesting difference.
The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.
continue reading, much more… thesmirkingchimp
Know It All Pencil Set by Paper Pastries
Bill O’Reilly said that he was proud that he has “not had to retract a story in 13 years” on Fox News..O’Reilly said they were always corrected “quickly.” He attributed his lack of a retraction to the “brain room here at Fox” where they “triple-check everything.”
…O’Reilly opened his show last night with the false claim that President Obama’s 47 percent approval rating was “the lowest number ever recorded for any president at this point in his term.”
President Gerald Ford reached a 42 percent approval rating in a shorter period of time and President Bill Clinton reached a low of 37 percent six months into his first term.
quotes via TV Guide
video via thinkprogress
HA!
