Just the facts Jack

Books are certainly more fact checked than internet articles. Well I am speaking of books published by the major publishing houses. First the editors aren’t going to accept anything that is a tissue of lies, and then, after the book is accepted, they have teams of fact checkers go through it to make sure that the facts are straight. By facts I don’t mean anything like an opinion like Reagan was a secret socialist, but something like the dow jones was at such a point on September 3, 1987.

There are some publishing houses of the left and the right and the middle loony who probably don’t fact check anything as long as it agrees with their particular point of view, but you generally don’t find their books in a Barnes and Noble.

All you need to get on the internet is a website, or not even that, you can just make comments on an article, you can say anything you damn well please. As percentages go there is certainly a lot more crapola on the internet than you will find in a public library or a book store.

And I guess our old pal wiki is the exception that proves the rule. Information on wiki is viewed by a lot of people, and they have the ability to object to anything they don’t think is true and that is considered by monitors, who check with experts, so wiki is certainly accepted by scholarly gents such as ourselves, sipping our brandy and smoking our cigars in the sumptuously appointed reading room of The Beaglesonian Institute.

Nobody ever solves the problems of immigration anymore than one ever solves the problem of terrorism. There will always be somebody sneaking across the border and there will always be somebody hurling a bomb. Most Americans don’t like winter. Why don’t we just pass a law against that and spend the treasury hiring people to, I don’t know, put a big roof on the country and build furnaces every fifteen square feet?

How do you measure that the immigration problem is worse now than in Reagan’s time?

I wasn’t there for the Bliss Fest Tyranny so I will have to take your word for it. I imagine they don’t want to have dogs running all over the place because while most dog owners are decent law abiding citizens, many of them are big fucking assholes with big fucking asshole dogs. They could make an announcement saying that only decent law abiding citizens can bring a dog, but everybody, especially big fucking assholes, think that they are law abiding citizens. So it’s easier just to say no dogs allowed.

And then some decent law abiding guy arrives with his nice little dog who he has brought all the way from Arkansas, and you can turn him away, or you can tell him to be careful with his dog. Myself I am going to cut the Arkansas traveller a break. The rule of law and all that, but I think there is no reason to be so rigid about it all the time. The reason that they made the rule was so that the festival could be held without asshole dogs barking their heads off, not because they hated dogs. If a few dogs slipped in there won’t be the problem, so the spirit of the law is upheld.

Well more can be argued about this. My general theory is that laws are just words and people are people.

I wonder how much you watch fb. Do you get all those dumb lefty and righty packaged rants? I say packaged rants because the people don’t write them themselves, they just pick up something from some fringe group or they repeat what somebody else posted. God knows why, certainly no mind is going to be changed by viewing them, and really I think they are just identifying themselves as being on one side and sticking their finger in the eye of the other side, and I think this is one of many factors polarizing the country.

Normally I don’t get involved, but when they express something that is not a fact, I feel that I should step in.

Back during the Trayvon thing a right winger I know posted a picture of some gang banging, jewelry encrusted, armed, guy holding up a handful of money and sneering and the quote said here is a photo taken from Trayvon’s webpage. You can just tell sometimes that things are bogus, so I went to Snopes and sure enough it was a photo of some other guy and it was being passed around on fb one wingnut to the other wingnut.

Just a couple days ago there was one from another friend of mine who is a lefty about how Black Friday was originally called that because that was the day they had a big slave sale before the civil war. That didn’t sound right either, so I went back to snopes and sure enough it was bullshit.

I informed both the wingnut and the lefty. The wingnut said something like it might as well be true and left it up. The lefty agreed with me that we weaken our credibility by posting lies, but then she left hers up too, because she had gotten it from her sister and didn’t want to offend her, and like the wingnut she believed it might as well be true.

Maybe we spend too much time with the brandy and cigars and should be out informing the citizenry. On the other hand, it sure is comfy in our big stuffed chairs in our reading room.