INTERESTING TIMES

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

—Joseph Goebbels

Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-goebbels-on-the-quot-big-lie-quot

"Get your facts first,
then you can distort them
as you please."
--Mark Twain

If the truth brings them down, then by all mean let them go down. This story reinforces for me the fact that businesses are never as ethical as people. It's no surprise that a wind power company would want to bury bird death data, but it reminds me of pharmaceuticals that try to hide negative findings about their drugs. You might think wind power is green and renewable and good, but perhaps it is not. You might think that nuclear power is suicidally dangerous and evil, but perhaps it is not.

http://www.capitalpress.com/Energy/20141117/wind-firm-sues-to-block-release-of-bird-death-data#
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Because Muslims, Hindus and African Animists are also made in the very likeness and image of God, to hate them is to hate God! To reject them to is to reject God and the Gospel of Christ. Whether we worship at a church, a synagogue, a mosque or a mandir, it does not matter. Whether we call God, Jesus, Adonai, Allah or Krishna, we all worship the same God of love. This truth is self-evident to all who have love and humility in their hearts!
--Pope Francis

Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies
--Ron Paul

Today you are you,
that is truer than true.
There is no one alive
who is youer than you.
--Dr Seuss

(1) It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition, or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.
(2) Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and survey things in terms of cause and effect. Certainly it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order.
(3) This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza).
(4) Denominational traditions I can only consider historically and psychologically ; they have no other significance for me.
--Albert Einstein in Essays in Science, p11, 1934.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and, especially important, to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion that emerges out of a train follows from the premise of starting point and whether that premise is true.
--Carl Sagan in his Baloney Detection Kit
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