How much lying can we avoid if we practice "right speech"?
Pujitha Kuruwita (Anderson South Carolina Independent Mail)
My 4-year-old wouldn’t come to me to comb her hair. After calling her several times I told her “Oh, look at that red bird eating berries.” Of course, there was no bird and no berries. She quickly ran to me, keen on looking at the bird. “Where’s the bird ....?” she looked around. “Oh, it flew away. It would come back soon if I comb your hair quickly,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. After a while she said, “Oh, look! There’s a butterfly on that flower.” Again, there was no butterfly and no flower. “What color is the butterfly?” I asked. “It’s red,” she said. I stood in silence, bewildered. She lied to me! In my haste to distract her I taught her to lie. And that is not good.
Being a Buddhist, I am conscious of false speech and its consequences. But most of us do tell lies in everyday life. Sometimes it’s only to get away from an awkward situation, which would mean no harm to anyone. But sometimes lying would really be harmful to someone. We should always stop to think, Is it good for our well being as well as that of others? More>>
Buzz on lie detectors is all a lie, NSA says
Jeff Stein (Washington Post)
The National Security Agency wants job applicants to know that its polygraph test is nothing to sweat. The eavesdropping and code-breaking organization has produced a 10-minute video designed to soothe applicants' anxiety over the notoriously grim experience.
"The Truth About the Polygraph" (publicly available on the Defense Security Service's training Web site) opens with various applicants -- or actors playing them, it's not clear -- describing everything bad they had heard about the test, the implication being that none of it is true.
More>> Berkeley’s Uncommon Common Experience
I’ve been teaching an early summer graduate course in Corporate and Professional Ethics. As in all my courses, one of its goals is to help students make the link between theory and practice -- particularly important in this case because ethics is by definition “applied.” So I draw heavily on real cases and situations. They give students practice in identifying ethical issues and ethics failure...
YouTube has used the CitizenTube name a few times in the past, tracking certain major news stories (i.e., Iran election protests). But why limit it to only extraordinary situations? YouTube today announced that CitizenTube will be seeing a hefty expansion this summer. Working with the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, YouTube is looking to turn CitizenTube into a curated stream of news videos from all kinds of sources. More>>
