Tag: fake news

Rumblings of Revolution

2nd Amendment, America, Government, Headlines, Law and Order, Media, Society & Culture

Yesterday I attended a training meeting organized by an emergency response team to which I belong. The topic was those actions we might undertake outside of our official capacity when happening upon an emergency, before first responders arrive. The instructor included in his preamble something along the lines of the following: “Today Trump was indicted so we should all be particularly mindful of the potential for insurrection and violence anywhere we go.”

What unadulterated BS! This guy has clearly been watching too much Fake News. The leftist talking heads WANT there to be violence. They WANT to show images of “white supremacist nationalist racist homophobic transphobic ultra MAGA Trump followers” engaging in violence to support their false narrative. They ignore the Biden corruption and breathlessly show video of snipers on roofs and any possible example of raised voices in order to be able to point, “There, see, they’re violent extremists”. So of course the instructor, a Leftist, virtue-signaler who get his news from MSNBC just HAD to parrot the idiot talking heads hyperventilating in hopes of “if it bleeds it leads” headlines.

It is, of course, the Left that riots, burns buildings and cars, kills people and engages in violent insurrection, not Trump supports or the Right! But let’s not let facts cloud the story!

What really happened was that thousands of people absolutely appalled by the judicial travesty that unfolded yesterday came out and PEACEFULLY protested the abuse. The Cuban refugee community prayed for Trump in a popular local restaurant he visited, and hundreds turned up for a fundraiser at Trump’s club in Bedminster, NJ last night to support him. No violence, no armed rebellion, no looting or burning or lascivious acts.

Every day our country descends further and further into the abyss of tyranny and oppression. Tucker Carlson, in the third installment of his Twitter monologues (see it here) puts it succinctly and in far more eloquent terms than I could ever articulate. His topic was the hypocrisy of the Uniparty, i.e. the Swamp, i.e. institutional Washington, but the underlying message was further explanation of why our country is going to hell.

As I have noted repeatedly over the last few years, short of Divine Intervention, only a Black Swan, Unknown-unknown, cataclysmic or catastrophic event will eliminate the evil that has permeated every corner of our institutions and our society. We have gone way past the point of no return. We are now careening down the slippery slope to a second-rate world power, no longer to be a land of peace and prosperity, a beacon on a hill.

An article by Glenn Elmers of the Claremont Institute goes so far as to suggest that a Revolution MAY be possible, may even be inevitable given how out of control the government aka the Biden administration has gotten. His article, which cites the Declaration of Independence and the factors that compelled the original Revolution can be read here. So, yeah, at some point the Left may push so hard against sanity and the American traditions that millions upon millions of pissed off people, having lost their freedoms, having lost their livelihoods, having lost their property and their way of life, WILL revolt.

I also commend to your reading the article by Kevin Slack, author of a brand new book entitled, “The War on the American Republic:How Liberalism Became Despotism”. The article, found here, is entitled, “The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right” and pretty well summarizes his thesis. He argues that it is the fact that the people ARE armed that forms a bulwark against tyranny, a deterrent to ultimate subjugation of the people into servitude.

The Left keeps baiting us. They want to foment armed conflict in order to be able to declare martial law and/or exert control by force. But as Slack notes…

“The only force that can oppose this servitude is an armed citizenry with a stake in society, angry about its managed decline, and insistent upon its rights. Thus the kleptocrats’ fear is an armed citizenry above all, and they seek to register, then confiscate, AR-15s to render the people defenseless against state coercion. Such tyranny could trigger open conflict—Americans own some 500 million firearms. And while the Left celebrates revolution, its marchers have never seen the systematic ordering force of conservatism when prodded to destruction. The Left can claim control of the bureaucracy and military command, but of actual fighting forces it holds few—it has alienated local police and the 3.3 million veterans who have returned from recent imperial wars. The Right, after such a long train of abuses, must confront whether it would be willing to leap into the revolutionary abyss. This willingness and preparedness for war may be the way to prevent open conflict, to force a common recognition of some table of values, of inalienable rights not subject to negotiation.”

Yup.

Facts Simply Don’t Matter

Elections, Headlines, Media, Politics

I keep reading analyses of the economy, of the upcoming election, of the political landscape. For example, J. Robert Smith in an astute article in American Thinker, presents a fact-based, highly hopeful recitation of why it is that the GOP should win big in November.

It doesn’t matter.

Way too many otherwise thinking people will vote based on nonsense like the debt forgiveness plan, the “inflation reduction” bill, “Republicans are mean,” “Orange Man Bad”, and celebrity politics, as usual. Or, they’ll lazily vote the way they always have. That includes voters of all stripes.

No one thinks anymore. No one considers the knock on effects of their vote. People are driven by what “feels right”, by what is popular, by what will make them feel virtuous. The facts about what the Democrats and Biden have done to our country simply don’t compute for them. We can cite facts till we’re blue in the face. They will not be HEARD much less considered. The Media (see my August 25th post) will cover up the idiocy, will with world-class production values twist perception and reality to gaslight and brainwash lazy, non-thinking lemmings into thinking all is well, that failures are successes, that bad is good, that what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears are not real…that what they SHOW and SAY is what’s real.

The outcome of the November election will turn on the perceptions created by the Media in the last couple of weeks before November 8th. The only thing that will win back this country are charismatic, inspiring, so-good-they-can’t-be-ignored, made-for-Hollywood or by Hollywood personalities who will repeat slogans that will pull at heart strings, make sycophants feel valued, goad the angry, feed the egos of the dumbed-down sheeple, all the while giving sanctuary to every American whether Democrat, Republican or Independent, who cares about traditional values and returning our country to what it once was and could be again.

Is that personality De Santis? Jim Jordan? Devin Nunes? Tom Cotton? Ted Cruz? Mike Pompeo? A reformed and more statesmanlike Trump? While we have many qualified and charismatic women Republicans, I believe we need a kick-ass, take-names, testosterone-filled but articulate MAN for the next several iterations.

I truly hope that the inflation, shortages, international disrespect, internecine fighting, gaslighting, border invasion, education perversions, history destruction, get properly ascribed and attributed to Democrat policies and that Americans of all persuasions wake up by November 8th. I’m hopeful but not confident.

PSYOP

Government, Headlines, History, Media, Politics, Society & Culture, Values

A Psychological Operation or PSYOP is one which conveys information and indicators that are intended to influence audiences (enemies in military parlance) in one way or another. The information may be true, selectively true, deliberately false, surreptitiously false, deliberately vague or misleading, intended to incite behavior of one sort or another…you get the idea. We’ve all seen enough movies that involve PSYOPs in the plot to understand what it is. Applying the term to what the Left does may seem inflammatory, but perfectly describes what they’re doing.

I’ve referred previously to the term “production values” as the elements of a message that when skillfully put together evoke strong emotions: heart string pulls, angry reactions, deer-in-the-headlights behavior, etc. Those elements include everything from powerful rhetoric and diction to mood music, visual effects, other “special effects” coupled with the gazillion-watt amplification of social and main-street media, and the allure of money and power that unfortunately drives so much of human behavior.

Production values are a key component of PSYOP. And it works on both sides of the ideological aisle. Go ahead, click on msnbc.com I just did and this is what comes up, among other things:

Now, click on Beitbart and this is what you get:

I place both these sites in the category of what I call “PSYOPs for Money”. These are profit-seeking entities both using PSYOPS to stir their readers/audiences to frequent and patronize their sites so they can maximize advertising dollars.

But what about the PSYOPS that are NOT seeking profit but are intended to mislead even the most plugged in, most savvy investigators, not to mention the public at large. Remember that graphic we saw last November depicting data flowing around the world, supposedly proving that Hammer and Scorecard were used to steal the election?

This and the accompanying data was a fundamental element of Mike Lindell’s exposé “Absolute Proof”.

Turns out, the analysis was provided by a huckster with a checkered past named Dennis Montgomery. (For a full explanation of this whole affair, read the reporting by Gateway Pundit here and here.) Among other skullduggeries Montgomery swindled more than $100k out of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. We still haven’t found out who paid (if anyone) Montgomery to create this narrative, but some day maybe we will.

I am of the firm belief that both Mike Lindell and Joe Arpaio (and Sydney Powell, Michael Flynn, Tom McInerny and others) are among many ardent patriots who were and are trying to get to the bottom of what happened last November 6th. No sane, critical thinking, reasonably objective person believes that Basement/Addled Joe legitimately won 81 million votes.  But my point is that there is so much PSYOP produced information and misinformation out there that we still have not been able to prove without a doubt, or at least prove sufficiently such that it would stand up in court, all of the fraud and shenanigans we rationally believe stole the election for Biden.

And this is what the Left cleverly and evilly want – they can’t prove the election was legitimate so they’re aim is to delegitimize any honest inquiry concerning its illegitimacy by creating CHAOS. THAT, I submit, is exquisitely executed PSYOP.

Unfortunately, as a result of the Left’s success at creating chaos no justice will prevail concerning the 2020 elections for president and the two Georgia senate seats. Admonitions that “the Truth will prevail” represent wishful thinking. It may, but not likely in our lifetimes. Historians will someday, I pray, look back on this episode with conviction that the elections of 2020 were the most corrupt in U.S. history. But the chaos has been so effective that “truth” has gone the way of moral relativism. It doesn’t really exist at all in the minds of many!

So where does this leave us?

1.            The old maxim, “You can’t believe everything you read or see on television” still holds true.

2.            We must stop echoing what we “wish” to believe. Even if true, the general public, including persuadable independents and democrats with brains, don’t want to listen to chest-pounding and angry epitaphs from the Right. It just turns them off.

3.            The Left won’t listen to facts or reason, of course, but at this point that other old maxim, this one from Napolean is also wise: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.” I believe the Left has, characteristically, overplayed their hand and are starting to make complete fools of themselves. Let ’em do it.

4.            Finally, we MUST, on the other hand, selectively throw the BS flag on what the Left is spouting. Be careful not to expose just how pissed off you are about what they’re doing. Rather, let the Leftist you’re talking to think you’re either a Leftist yourself or independent and simply ask questions. Scratch your head and ask, for example, “What do you think the implications are of letting in all these illegals through the Southern Border?” Resist the temptation to rip your debate opponent’s head off, but firmly call out their nonsense. And when they devolve into calling you a racist (as they will inevitably do) just express concern and sympathy that your antagonist is suffering from the psychological disorder called Projection. It will both belittle him or her, although I hasten to point out that Leftists are impossible to shame because as collectivists their hive-minds deflect any sense of it, but pointing out their illness will make you feel better as you walk away. Alternatively, you can play the “I know you are but what am I?” children’s game. Either will probably enrage them and at that point, you can also feel good about having kept your own cool and having won the debate.

As an aside, I want to refer my readers to a couple of articles that I found helpful and instructive. The first, How to Fight the Left Effectively, discusses in so many words how PSYOPS have prepared the battlefield for the conflict we’re engaged in, and how not to get conned. The other, The Six Steps To Dealing With Liberal Friends And Family written back in 2008, ( a decidedly different time ) deals with how to walk softly when dealing with Leftist friends and family.

Finally, as I have been preaching since the Spring, don’t be lulled into thinking that the Truth Cavalry is coming or that people will be going to jail for the treason they’ve committed against the country, or that you and your buddies are going to “suit up” for a REAL insurrection. Rather, keep your powder dry, your heads in the game and on a swivel and continue to educate yourselves, using critical thinking to see through the PSYOPs. That, and GET INVOLVED locally. Don’t just stand there and gripe. DO SOMETHING to push the pendulum back the other way like those courageous parents are doing at school board meetings in Loudon County, or Tatiana Ibrahim in Carmel, NY (if you haven’t seen this, you MUST, it’s truly inspiring!)

Goodbye Wall Street Journal

America, Economy, Headlines, Media, Society & Culture, Values

I’ve been a Wall Street Journal subscriber for over fifty (!) years. Today I cancelled my subscription. The paper has been exhibiting increasing left-wing bias for some time now, and today a straw broke the camel’s back. It was a headline that appeared on my iPhone something to the effect of, “Trump moves ahead with transition to Biden after weeks of delay.”

It was that gratuitous, sniveling, “after weeks of delay” that really angered me. Not only was the WSJ among the first to start calling Biden the President Elect, but the editorial content and articles it has published concerning the election have virtually all capitulated to the Leftist, “woke” script. I can’t take it anymore.

The Journal used to be a voice of conservatism and while I understand that the Trump phenomenon has undermined the traditional support of corporate and financial America for the Republican Party, never would I have suspected that the WSJ would abandon the vast Silent Majority in an attempt to keep in the good graces of big business.

Here’s where the GOP rift now occurs. It’s big business against the upper middle, middle and working-modest-means population, what I will call America Firsters , a HUGE swath of our country! The WSJ is betting that it can ignore them while genuflecting in front of the multinational corporations.

I know something about this. I was a multinational and merchant banker for many years. While American based multinational banks and corporations started out as AMERICAN companies stretching their business models abroad, they have become something else. They have become TRANSNATIONAL businesses, with their focus almost exclusively on the top and bottom lines.

The Wall Street Journal has followed suit.

I support big business. Without it we would never have the defense and energy capabilities we now have. But Big Tech, and Big Pharma, and Big Banking…sorry, but you’ve lost me.

I will from this point forth be getting my financial news and data from other sources: the less they are tied to Big (aka Fake News) Media and the more independent they are, the better. These include Newsmax, One America News, Zero Hedge and direct market quotes form the exchanges. I’ll still listen, for the moment, to Maria Bartiromo, Stu Varney, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, but whether I continue to do so remains to be seen.

May God bless America!

Perception

America, Politics, Society & Culture, Values

I’ve written about this before, but it’s plain to see that two halves of our population can look at the exact same set of facts and firmly believe positions that are 180 degrees apart. But it is astounding that ANYONE in this country can look at the Democrats’ impeachment antics as credible, or the horrifying (to those of us with brains who are paying attention) stupidity coming out of the mouths of the Democrat candidates for President as believable, yet there are many, even if not 50% of the population, who do. THAT’s what’s scary about what we’re witnessing…that ostensibly ‘normal’ people could buy the nonsense the Left is peddling.

Don’t they get it? How is it that they can’t see how perniciously calculating, conniving, dishonest and hypocritical the Left is?

I have a theory. It goes back to the basic principle that our perception is based on our experience (see my post (https://grumpsreport.com/?s=Briggs). In my opinion, the experiences of half the country have consisted of Leftist indoctrination, read brainwashing.

The Left is brilliant at manipulation, false-impression-creation, misrepresentation, and above all, in knowing how to play on human emotions. They cannot appeal to peoples’ left brains so they go after the right hemisphere and heart strings. Play the right music in the background and a horror film becomes a comedy. Set the lights just right and the ugly can appear beautiful. Put just the right amount of quiver in your voice and twist the story line and you can make anyone a victim. Celebrating losers and victims is their stock-in-trade. Disagree with that and you’re a racist, bigot, heartless, entitled, privileged old white person the product of a discriminatory society bent on crushing the less fortunate.  

Hollywood is of course the crucible in which all the leftist soup is created. The world’s greatest experts in deception and heart-string manipulation, Hollywood has fed generation after generation since the Greatest Generation with emotional drivel which, while entertaining, is taken as reality. It is THIS emotional drivel that has been the diet of those, in my opinion, who believe what the Left is saying and doing.

It’s no wonder therefore that the EXPERIENCE of half the country…the half that have swallowed the drivel with little to no critical thinking, are empty vessels into which the current Leftist nonsense can be easily poured. It fills their souls with emotional satisfaction to hear concepts like “Medicare for All” and Welcoming (i.e. ‘Open’) Borders. And it’s what allows them to believe the lies about children in cages and every other lie put forth by the Left.

It’s not FAKE NEWS, it’s blatant indoctrination, messaging with an agenda, subjective twisting of facts, figures, data to push a narrative that anyone with a functional LEFT brain sees as destructive to mankind and the world. The “Media” is just a court jester, pandering to whomever will buy their verbal diarrhea for the highest amount.

Follow the money. Always. The self-righteous and hyper-hypocritical Left will do whatever maximizes the cash in their pockets, and the quickest way to undeservedly do so is to amass and exercise POWER.

To be fair, there are plenty on the RIGHT who subscribe to this strategy and who take advantage of it. But like so many other things, IT’S A QUESTION OF DEGREE. The Left is guilty of lying, cheating, and indiscriminately acting in ways that benefit themselves thousands of times more frequently than the Right.

Not until the weak-minded and gullible face REAL reality ( I can’t believe I’ve had to use such a term ) or have their heart strings pulled by Goodness, Grace, God or the Holy Spirit, or whatever universal positive Force you subscribe to, or, alternatively, have an experience or experiences that wake them up to the real world, will they make their way back to the realm of the grounded human race with traditional values and practices, and will our Country revert to its position as Light Shining on the Hill.

Fake (Medical) News

Health Care

Should I or shouldn’t I get a PSA test? Should my wife get a mammogram or not? Is coffee bad for me, or good? Will I die sooner if I eat bacon and eggs? What about red wine? One day the gurus pronounce one thing. The next it’s 180 degrees the opposite. Can we trust ANY experts in medicine?

My kids used to tease me, chanting in unison “Gingko” whenever I exhibited a brain cramp. Gingko, a few years ago, was supposed to improve mental acuity. Now it’s apoaequorin (the stuff “originally found in jellyfish”). Since no one knows how to pronounce apoaequorin everyone just says “Prevagen”!

Resveratrol (in red wine) is another of these miracle supplements. It falls under the category “anti-oxidants”. These are supposed to purge those free radicals from our bodies and help us resist all kinds of nasty things like cancer and heart disease. (I wish there was resveratrol for free-radical LEFTISTS)!

I moved a few years ago and changed doctors. One insisted at my age getting a PSA test for prostate cancer was useless. “What would you do if you it came out positive? Prostate cancer is so slow growing that you’re likely to be gone before it does you any harm,” he said. My current doctor says, “If it were me, I’d want to know and go ahead and treat it!” Who’s right?

As with most things, we have to make our own decisions. For my part, I go to the Mayo Clinic website and WebMD. If what they say about one thing or other is consistent, I figure it’s pretty good advice. If they conflict, I keep on researching until I either get frustrated or bored, then usually make a non-decision or flip a coin.

But it’s confusing, and if you really need medical advice and want to do some homework on your own, you have to really really use critical thinking and good judgment before coming to any conclusions.

Bear in mind that many physicians and health care professionals have gone from Hippocrates (.sic) to Hypocrites (.sic). Follow the money. Physicians have been forced to practice not just defensive medicine, but also profitable medicine. Even solo practitioners can’t survive unless they PRACTICE so as not to lose money!

One of the unique features of medicine is that physicians and other health care professionals can prescribe demand for their own services. “Take two aspirin and come back to me in a week. Sally, please make a follow up appointment for Mr. Smith for next week.” What are you going to do? Say, “No doc, I don’t want to have to pay another out-of-pocket co-pay in a week. I’ll call you if I need you.” Well, some might say that, but the majority of patients do not.

Doctors used to plan on 20 minute time slots per patient. That then went to 15 minutes. At 10 minutes the doctor shuffles between examination rooms and you can see he or she is rushed. At 8 minutes you’ve come to understand the meaning of one of my favorite terms: “Mis-managed care.”

The layering of regulation, bureaucracy, profit motive, misleading, false or downright harmful information in social media or on quack websites have all contributed to a general decline, in my opinion, of our health care system. The Left, of course, to which is attributable most of the destruction, is trying to capitalize on the deteriorating system as they usually do, by claiming that if they control the system (i.e. universal or single-payer government health care) they will take care of all of us.

On that I throw the BS flag. Competition, rewards for practicing medicine based not on effort or cost but on OUTCOMES is what’s needed. Transparency and understandable-to-the-layman report cards and performance indicators will make that possible, not “Medicare for All”.

Keep dreaming and lying and pushing your utopian nonsense Leftists…I’ll do everything I can to take care of myself, take aspirin, put on a sweater like my mother taught me, and tune out all the fads and above all the FAKE MEDICAL NEWS.

Be well.

How We Think Matters

Reason, Society & Culture

IBM used to give away desk name plates with the word THINK on them. Perhaps that’s what the title of this post should have been. Pausing to think is as much of a challenge today as how one thinks.

We are becoming increasingly scatter-brained. Business and Life at the Speed of Thought leaves no time to smell the roses unless of course the scent comes packaged as aromatherapy. “Ready, fire, aim,” we’re told. “If you snooze you lose.” “Just do it!”

When was the last time you had the patience to watch, much less actually watched a show on television that wasn’t comprised of five minute segments, where the people interviewed weren’t forced to rush their answers because of “hard breaks”? As an aside, when was the last time you saw commentators who actually presented meaningful analysis or had something truly substantive to say? (Answer: the only contemporary show I can think of is “Life, Liberty and Levin”.

FOMO. The Fear of Missing Out. It’s not just a millennial thing. I see countless supposed adults with their noses pinned to small screens studying the latest (within the last 2 minutes) pop-culture meme. Too many of us to block out the real world and live in a virtual one. FOMO causes shallow thinking. No thinking, really…just reaction to often heart-string-tugging snippets or easy-to-remember, catchy slogans and phrases.

Since information, whether true or false, right or wrong, good or bad is always at our fingertips through Google! (it’s a verb now), why bother to memorize, remember or LEARN anything? Fewer and fewer people actually concentrate on a single subject or topic. And thus, increasingly, we have an entire generation who are a mile wide and an inch deep. And fewer and fewer people actually think. Most just respond to stimuli.

What happened to “Less haste, less waste?” What happened to Critical Thinking?

Laziness. What the internet and exponentially growing databases of “stuff” has done is condition people to obtain information from sound bites, with no real depth, no substantive corroboration, no skepticism. If it sounds good, or “feels” right, it’s accepted.

Talk about mind control! The demagogues of the Third Reich would have loved this medium. An ability to influence/brainwash an entire population of dumbed-down, lazy people would have meant we might all be speaking German today! Oh, and by the way, the Russians and Chinese and the LEFT  have figured this out and are doing precisely what the Third Reich would have done…broadcasting propaganda with an efficiency and effectiveness that only “The Matrix” could improve on.

Think. Think! When so much garbage is constantly overloading our input circuits, at an ever-increasing rate, we have to force ourselves to stop and think. And it’s not just stopping to think. It’s compartmentalizing so as to shut out the noise. It’s not just turning off the ring tone. It’s turning off the vibration notification as well. It’s finding a quiet spot and moment amid the chaos to consider what’s important, what really needs to be done, not what the voice in your ear or the face on the screen are telling you to do.

And it’s being skeptical, increasingly. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read.” That became, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” Whether you liked him or not, everyone expected and relied on Walter Cronkite to give us Real News. Can you say the same of the 6PM news anchors today? Sure, the Bon Ami folks tried to convince you that their product would’t scratch your porcelain surfaces. But we all recognized that as advertising. Now, “infomercials” abound, and ALL the news is biased, colored, i.e. ‘fake’ in the sense that it never just reports what’s happening. We need to listen to or watch EVERYTHING with a major, not just healthy, dose of skepticism.

It’s sad that we can’t count on anyone or any organization to provide honest information anymore. But that’s the current reality. The only antidote is Critical Thinking – forcing ourselves to sort the wheat from the chaff, to make decisions and form opinions based not on what the firehose of noise directs at us, but on what reasoned judgment emerges from pause and reflection.

In short, don’t just think.

Ponder.

Truth Matters

Reason, Society & Culture

In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” was post-truth, suggesting that truth is dead, and objective facts no longer have any meaning. Really? Have we become so poisoned with relativism that standards no longer exist and the individual is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth or lies and, by way of conclusion, “anything goes?”

“What is truth?” is one of the central questions of philosophy. Is Corey Booker correct to suggest that we must all live “our truth”? Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Corey Booker can debate the answer. Here’s one truth, however, that should but probably won’t be universally accepted. It is that there is a difference between truth and belief.

What is or should be of great concern is how falsehood, what a business school course once called “creative misrepresentation” and fiction are used to persuade or judge everyday matters. And of paramount concern is how lies have been weaponized so as to cause belief to be to pushed and accepted as truth. By way of example, that the Benghazi disaster was the result of an anti-muslim video was proclaimed so loudly and assertively, it brainwashed many.

It’s also true that not everything is black or white. Grey is the predominant color in debate. But has the questioning of norms and rules gone so far overboard that it attacks the very idea of having any rules at all as Victor Davis Hanson suggested in his 2014 essay “The Poison of Postmodern Lying“? As he so starkly points out, “Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant.”

So it seems nowadays that truth is in the hands of he or she who has the bigger megaphone, or who can more cleverly devise a phrase or seven second soundbite that tugs at a heartstring or “sounds right.”

The antidote?

Critical Thinking…something that is sorely lacking in our population today. Or, how about, at least, healthy skepticism?

Not all news is fake news, but a lot of it consists of selective truth, or facts taken out of context. Not all advertising is nonsense, though healthy skepticism should cause us to consider whether ground-up peach pits will cure cancer, or whether an actress’s proclamation that vaccinations cause autism should be accepted as truth.

If you hear a talking head say, “Let me be clear,” or “Make no mistake”, or “The truth of the matter is”, or, my favorite…”It goes without saying,” immediately turn on your skeptic’s filter.

Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, involves work. It is the work of seeking out, validating and judging evidence. In an era of information overload, (I like the analogy of trying to take a drink from a firehose), sounding plausible or looking, in the case of websites or television, as if it’s plausible does not mean it’s true. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything your read.” Now we have to add “hear” and “see” to the list. Today you can’t even believe your own eyes thanks to the wonders of PhotoShop.

Besides applying the principle of critical thinking we can resolve to tell the truth ourselves, teach our children and grandchildren the difference between truth and a lie (remember George Washington and the cherry tree?) and remind ourselves not to be swayed by the herd, by popular opinion, by peer pressure and by what tugs at the heart while bypassing our brains.

The truth matters.

Copyright © 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 - All rights reserved - Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy