Tag Facts

Cite your sources

Michael 12 Comments

Somewhere sometime someone is having a crisis. It’s me!

I’m having a crisis. I am losing touch with the part of the world that feeds me information and I’m worried I am starting to sound like a one of those people who spouts so-called facts that you know aren’t true. Their verity may be questioned without question because they (the facts) are so ludicrous that nobody but a Dimwit Donny Disciple (DDD) would believe them (e.g., did you know gas is only $1.98/gallon), or because they (the fact-spouters) are DDDs or DD hisself.

Believe it or not, this is not a political post. It’s a true personal crisis. I’m forgetting not things, but that which made me aware of the thing. Don’t question. Just read on. It will become clear.

It came to me when I mentioned to my daughter, “I just read somewhere that keeping cut fruit in the fridge in glass containers will add at least 2 days to their use by date versus storing them in plastic.” This isn’t something I dreamed or something I overheard in the produce section while working my way around the gaggle of grocery gals gathered in front of the mango display. This was a real “read somewhere” moment, but I can’t recall where. If it was say in Food Network Magazine, then it’s probably a pretty good tip. Likewise in the food section of the newspaper or a real food expert’s social site. On the other hand, if I read it in the comments section of an online recipe or in the social site of the dingy broad who records entire recipes in 30 seconds and posts them to a site known for lip-synched videos and blasphemous AI generated images, it likely is as true as claims of sub $3.00 eggs (per dozen, not apiece).

This worries me because I always would be able to recite the source of my information as readily as the information. I know I found the cut fruit tidbit in a respected, responsible source, but not being able to recite that source feels like I should be being fitted for a red hat. (By the way, why does the Dummy in Chief always have those stupid hats on its desk in the Oval Office. Is there a merch table at the back of the room to visit between acts?) if I should be challenged in the fresh fruit freshness extension tip, I wouldn’t be able to cite my source other than to say, “I read it somewhere.” Well, that’s not an answer. I might as well expound on the sphericalosity of the earth without doing the math.

So you now understand my crisis. (You do, don’t you?) How will I ever be taken seriously again. How will I ever take myself seriously again. I won’t be long before I begin a conversation with, “I saw somewhere that someone did something that I thought was interesting. What do you think?” My sole reasonable conversation partners will be clairvoyants, mediums (It is mediums not media when you’re speaking of those who communicate with dead, right?) (I figure they’d be a decent one to chat with considering by then I’d be at least brain dead), or DDDs (because they are experienced in listening to unfounded, unproven, unreliable sources of disinformation).

Anyway, I read somewhere than fresh cut fruit stored in glass containers will extend its life. That all I had to say.

Not news is good news

Michael 16 Comments

There is a news column I read every Friday that amazes me, week after week, without fail, no matter how busy or slow the week has been. That column is from Associated Press, “NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week.” It’s not just the boring round-up of social media posts that only a complete idiot would believe. For those you can go any day of the week to apnews.com and click on “Fact Check” in the menu bar. No, the weekly summary has the most egregious findings, sprinkled with one or two that will tickle even the most astute news hound.

For example:

A couple days after Halloween, the AP debunked the claim made in a video of drones erecting a skeleton next to and the size of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world at more than 2,716 feet tall (actually 2,716 feet and 6 inches or a little less than 2&1/2 Empire State Buildings). The video with the caption, “Dubai’s #Halloween drone show takes an eerie turn with a spooky skeleton in the sky,” was viewed on TicToc over 8.5 million times and shared to other social sites including the one formerly known as Twitter where some yo-yo claimed the decision to erect the skeleton “sparked outrage among many muslim countries, who view Halloween a ‘satanic holiday’.” The yo-yo notwithstanding, I think it’s hilarious that anybody could believe a corps of 200 drones could build a 2700+ foot skeleton and nobody on the mall next to the building noticed. (In the video, people, at the location were just walking about like nothing was going on. (Imagine that!)) I wish I had a copy of the video to share but it’s since been removed.

Or how about this:

Did you know that the Salzburg Airport in Austria has a help desk specifically for people who intended to fly to Australia? I myself saw that post sometime during the last week of October on the site formerly known as Twitter and said to myself, “Self I said, ‘hahahaha!’” Apparently enough people believed it that the airport posted a clarification on their Facebook page that no such help desk exists, and the AP (and others) published a fact-check on it. It’s a story that illustrates the power of the internet and the stupidity of the human. There really was such a sign, sort of, made as an advertisement by home security company Commend International that hung in the baggage claim area as part of an ad campaign they ran in 2009!
Notice the differences including the original tag line, “Commend provides security…for even the most unlikely of situations”:

IMG_0923

IMG_0922

Sign at Salzburg Airport (📷Facebook (Commend International))

Image

If you’re having a bad day, just remember that the airport in Salzburg, Austria has a counter for people who flew to Austria instead of Australia. (Social media post (📷 apnews.com))

Naturally not all the fake news they uncover is fun stuff like these. There are the usual suspect ballot stuffing, voting machine flipping, he said/she said accusations, and general mis- and disinformation pieces that fill most of the column, but the occasional fun ones make up for those you scratch your head over and wonder why someone would bother putting something together that is so outlandish.

I wade through the nonsense so I can get to the fun nonsense and have a good chuckle over it all. There’s always something there to laugh at. Especially around the holidays. I can’t wait for Christmas when they will be fact checking stories of a fat man wearing a red suit breaking into some politician’s house through the chimney, with the intent of keeping the politico from appearing at the next debate or something equally stupid.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe all motivation is self-motivation. We did and we wrote about in the most recent Uplift! See what we had to say about it then tell us if you agree.

A1B5A0C9-6981-4F0D-B943-DA427DAB8F1C

2020 In a Word, or Three

Michael Leave a comment
Ah, were getting close to the New Year. The way people have been saying they can’t wait for this year to be over you would think there is an expiration date on “the virus.” I put that in quotes because that seems to be how most people are looking at it. At least that seems to be how American people are looking at it and at most other news of the year. A character, a reference, a headline. It didn’t matter how complex a matter was, all of 2020 was a slogan. Health, welfare, politics, social justice, social injustice – all were condensed into a few words, small enough and simple enough to read as a headline, fit on a protest sign, or look spiffy behind a hashtag. Every cause must have hired a PR rep to ensure its message got across to the people without all the distracting stats, explanations, and sometimes facts.
 
Would you like proof?
 
Let’s start with the election, that solemn activity undertaken with thought and due consideration for all issues. If yard signs were any indication of the thought that was taken this year we are in big trouble. We could have chosen between “Keep America Great” or “Build Back Better.” What does either mean!  But this is not unusual. Spiffy easy to remember slogans are a staple with elections. “I Like Ike” and “All The way With LBJ” didn’t rate very high on the infometer either. What was unusual this year was the trite sloganeering continued, er continues. It morphed from “Get Out and Vote” to “Your Vote Matters” to “Count Every Vote” to “Count Every Legal Vote” to “Stop The Steal.” Duh. Well, “You Can’t Fix Stupid but You Can Vote it Out.”
 
Protests lend themselves to spiffy slogans. They have to be short enough to fit on a sign in letters big enough to be legible when captured by the news cameras and catchy enough to be remembered after the cameras leave. “Silence Is Violence” is a great example. The pity is how many people did not know the origin of the phrase or its original context. Then it was confounded when the same movements adopted the “Muted” campaign. Think about that.
 
Lack of context could not stop a good protest throughout the year. We were intent on ensuring others knew we knew that various things mattered, that many peoples names needed said, that just about every ethic group was strong and that we should make America a variety of things again. We wanted to “Defund the Police” but still “Back the Blue,” and we let the world know our demands included “No Justice No Peace” then telling ourselves “Whatever It Takes.”
 
Neither could lack of facts stop a good protest. Marchers across America on Columbus Day carried signs to “Make America Native Again” or “Columbus Didn’t Discover America, He Invaded It” oblivious to the fact that Columbus never made it to any part of mainland North America on any of his four voyages.
 
And that takes us back to “the virus.” For almost the entire year a CoViD story was front and center on your favorite news source. We learned how to “Wash Your Hands” even if we didn’t know why we did it that way. We included “Flatten the Curve” in as many conversations as we could then we switched to “Business on Top, Pajamas on the Bottom” when it became clear that curve was tougher than we expected. If we did find ourselves in an intelligent conversation about CoViD and how to deal with it yet still uncertain of how to deal with it, we could fake our way through by looking thoughtful then declaring, “Corona, It’s Not Just a Beer Anymore!” Any attempt to break quarantine was met with “[Fill in the blank] IS Essential” and if that argument failed we turned to “Quarantine the Virus, Not the Constitution.” Apparently logic was what ended up in quarantine.
 
I will be glad to see 2020 come to an end but not because I think we will finally have put the issues of 2020 to bed. No, I’ll be happy to see it end because then I can finally stop having to listen to people say “I can’t wait for 2020 to end!”
 
Boy I can’t wait for 2020 to end!
.
20201228_135843
.
 
 

Fearful Things

Michael 7 Comments

I saw an interesting article last week but when I tried to find it again I had no luck so I’m going to end up paraphrasing most of it from memory. Typically my memory can be likened to a well-worn sieve but one line I particularly remember. “We can still make a difference but I’m not seeing enough fear.” I don’t remember the speaker other than it was the medical director of one of the local hospitals. Unfortunately my local has like 30 some hospitals. Well now, I suppose that is more fortunately than un unless you are trying to remember which one of the 30 some hospitals had a medical director quoted in a recent newspaper article. About 30 some of the do so then there’s that too.

For our purposes I doesn’t matter who said it other than it was said by a respected medical authority (unlike the nut case hospital “executive” in the [name withheld to protect the professionalism of the health care team] health center in South Dakota) (See what happens when you let just anybody run a hospital, like a doctor wasn’t good enough.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes – I’m not seeing enough fear.

That was in reference to mitigating the surge of confirmed new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths attributed to CoViD-19. We could make a difference. We could wear a mask even though some seemingly intelligent people chose to not. We can continue to wash out hands even though many have forgotten the 20 second rule. We could not go to the unofficial fortieth high school reunion even though somebody obvious figured out that if you call something unofficial like maybe a home coming dance the virus won’t know to go there. We could do all those things and that would be a good start but “we” the society aren’t and we aren’t because we aren’t fearing the virus. If we respected it and realized the power it has and the knowledge that we don’t (and unless you are a microbiologist I don’t mean the societal “we,” I mean each every one of we) we would be damn scared of this thing.

I look around and I see even more than the virus that we don’t fear. We don’t fear the nation is being torn apart because people like the virus people don’t realize the power of division and lack the knowledge to make accept outcomes. The American we has polarized more strongly than the hawks and the doves of the 1960s, more than the free states versus the slave states of the 1860s, and more than the federalists versus the centrists in the 1770s. Division and polarization are not the same as party loyalty. Party loyalists address ideals. Polarizers address egoism.

We can still make a difference but I’m not seeing enough fear.

People don’t get to choose facts. Folks who relish in saying “it is what it is” usually have no intention of admitting exactly what it is. Or don’t know. Masks stop the spread of airborne viruses. Voting machines don’t switch votes. Vaccines don’t cause autism. The travel sites Hotel, Hot Wire, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Trivago are owned by Expedia and the sun will always rise in the east. It is what it is. If we choose not to believe in something you may but you can’t argue it.

I’m certain I’ve written the FDR had it wrong. The only thing to fear is not fear itself for only a fool would not fear anything. Fear should be feared. And so should much, much else.

We can still make a difference but I’m not seeing enough fear.

FEARemogi

Just the Facts Ma’am

Michael 3 Comments
Welcome to Columbus Day 2019! The holiday everyone loves to hate!!! Personally I’m not thrilled with any holiday outside of Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. All the others are just excuses for anybody who works for the government to get an extra day off.
.
Columbus Day is also the holiday everyone loves to demonstrate their knowledge of “the facts.”
  • Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, Amerigo Vespucci discovered it, that’s why we call it America.
  • Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, Leif Erikson discovered it 500 years before either of those Europeans.
  • Nobody discovered America, there were already people living here!
  • Columbus was a criminal, slave trader, tyrant, and probably didn’t like dogs.
All sort of true (except maybe about the dogs) and all sort of not true, or at least inaccurate. If you’re looking for who actually first landed on the American mainland, whether North, South, or Central, that probably was John Cabot (surprise!) who landed in modern Canada in 1497. Columbus didn’t reach the South American mainland until his third voyage in 1499, and Vespucci landed in South America in 1500. Although the Vikings were known to have reached what is now Greenland as early as before 1100 their presence on mainland America has not been clearly documented before the 16th century. Columbus’s crimes are well-documented, but in 15th century Europe everybody who ran afoul of royalty would be accused and convicted of something, many of those some things quite routine for the rest of the populace.
.
20191014_152221The “fact” most people seem to get the most mileage from is that Columbus could not have discovered America because there were already people living here. Again true, there were people living here, but then not true because that’s not what a discovery is. That would be like saying Neil Armstrong discovered the Moon because when he landed on it there were no people there. Of course the discovery of the Moon happened hundreds of thousands of years ago when the first eyes looked to the sky one night and saw a a big round, bright object. It isn’t whether people were here or not, it was a discovery for the Europeans because they did not know that this “it” was here. That discovery led to greatest period of trade and colonization that the world had seen yet or since.
.
But of all the facts, suppositions, non facts, and inaccuracies, the one of most importance today is this – you can stop wondering when the mail is going to come.
.