Luckily for me, I almost never watch TV otherwise the political commercials that Black castigates would drive me insane, especially since Ohio is a so-called ‘swing state’ and we get much more than our fair share of this nonsense. Yes, we are all swingers here. To think that TV viewers have to put up with this for another three months makes me worry whether come November, people will be wandering around with glazed eyes. [Read more…]
It should not be a surprise that I like blogs. But it is true that bloggers are sometimes responsible for the generation of fake news that makes its way into the mainstream media. This happens when a poorly-sourced item on a blog gets picked up by other blogs and spreads, creating the impression that it is based on fact. These items tend to be those that are either intriguing, surprising, or address widely held beliefs or hot trends.
Ryan Holliday in Forbes magazine provided two recent examples of how this happened. Edward Jay Epstein exposed one article that appeared in the New York Times that said “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths’ and that they exhibit an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.'” But while many people might suspect that to be true, no such study exists. Or rather there was a study that had some data on corporate professionals but whose authors did not make any claim along the lines reported in the news articles.
While bloggers are sometimes responsible for these false news items gaining wider currency, on the plus side, bloggers can also be a valuable source for corrections to false news.
One lesson from this is to pay close attention to the sourcing of the news. But not everyone has the time or the resources to track down and gain access to the original source. Another option is to treat such conclusions as tentative and wait a bit before passing judgment to allow for corrections and opposing views to surface.
We have all observed what happens when water drops fall on a hot skillet. Rather than simply boiling off, they skitter around for awhile before disappearing in a puff.
This phenomenon is due to something called the Leidenfrost effect. If you place a drop of water on a surface, it gets flattened and just stays there due to gravity. But when placed on a surface whose temperature is higher than the boiling point of water, a thin layer of water vapor forms almost immediately that partially insulates the drop from the hot surface and also raises it off the surface, making it almost spherical again as well as reducing the frictional forces on it, enabling the drop to move around freely in response to the turbulent air currents that surround it. [Read more…]
Princeton University professor of politics Martin Gilens has a new book Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America that spells out something that many of us instinctively sense, that America is a one-party state in which the rich get their own way, while the rest are shut out to an extent that threatens democracy itself. [Read more…]
Thanks, as always, to Jesus and Mo for capturing in a few panels a point that it took me an entire extended blog post to make, about how religious people’s rationality only extends so far as it conforms to what their religious texts say.
The first American woman in space let it be known in her obituary that she was a lesbian who had been in a relationship with her childhood friend that spanned nearly three decades, although she had been married at one time to a fellow astronaut. Andrew Sullivan criticizes this reticence on her part. [Read more…]
I have never actually eaten at a Chick-fil-A restaurant but the head of the company Dan Cathy has been in the news recently proudly proclaiming that his company is run on ‘biblical principles’. He and the family-owned company also contribute to groups that oppose same sex marriage. [Read more…]
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was the massive $700 billion dollar bailout that was rushed through government with almost no public discussion in the fall of 2008, when everyone was being panicked by alarms that there was the danger of a massive meltdown of the financial system. [Read more…]
I have written before about Monsignor William Lynn who was convicted of covering up sex abuse by a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He has now been sentenced to three to six years in prison and becomes the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church to serve time for offenses associated with sexual abuse. [Read more…]
The radical journalist died after a two-year struggle with cancer. His close colleague Jeffrey St. Clair said that he had kept his illness a tight secret, telling only his closest friends, not wanting to chronicle his own last days in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, his fellow British expatriate, one-time colleague, and later adversary when Hitchens abandoned his left-wing politics and joined up with the Bush administration and the neoconservatives in their warmongering. [Read more…]