Don’t! Before you share anything, read the whole article. Check your facts. But even before that … before you believe anything, read carefully, check your facts. Headlines are often misleading. Their purpose is to get you to read, and in social media, they are aimed to get you to share. In an emergency, misinformation can…
Whether it’s about elections or hurricane predictions, neither the media nor the public understand probability. I suspect this is because we are evolutionarily programmed to look for certainty. Certainty leads to decisive action. It is sometimes said in military circles that a bad decision is often better than no decision. But it’s easy to be…
I call this group of (people | entities | circumstances) the infernal “they” or “them.” They are the people who cause all the problems. They have no moral compass. They are disruptive. They lie. They are apostates, perverts, stupid, deplorable, weak, losers, socialists, libertines (sometimes intended to include libertarians!). Disgusting, all of them. They are…
In the good old days when I had time to do fantasy role-playing games, stodgy traditionalists would object that it wasn’t real. Why spend your time on something that isn’t real? This was often said by people who would spend hours watching and discussing football games with approximately the same effect on reality. But I…
Anyone who looks at the blog header, or my Henry’s Web icon at the right, will know I like spiders. When I was younger (as in pre-teens and early teens), I read books about them and collected a few. That started while we were living in north Georgia, and continued in Guyana, South America, where…
I’ve previously said a few good things about fact checking operations such as Politifact, but I’ve also noticed a few questionable items where opinion interfered with facts. But today I read the article Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact Checking’, and having looked into this a bit further, I must say that the few issues I…
“Them,” in this case being the media. I’m not about to start recommending Jon Stewart as a balanced news source, but he has definitely put his finger on some things, and often comedy gets closer to the truth than anything else in our political system. And while I disagree with Ron Paul on a number…
Keith Olbermann, regularly angry about many things, is angry about the bank bonuses. (I blogged some about this here.) His answer? Break up the banks. Regulate the financial industries, to within an inch of their existences. Roll back corporate legal protections. Make liable the officers of corporations, for their debts, and for their deeds. Resurrect…
I haven’t read the books or seen the movie, and thus far I really haven’t been attracted to them enough to go out of my way and do so. So why am I commenting on this at all? Well, I’ve been asked, and I have to say that I can’t really comment on something I…
They took the time to condemn the [tag]MoveOn.org[/tag] Ad on General [tag]Petraeus[/tag] (LA Times story). Now I don’t like the ad, and I don’t particularly like MoveOn.org, and I think private groups and politicians should go ahead and do all the condemning that the ad deserves. Though I’m an opponent of the war in Iraq,…
