Trust none of what you hear, some of what you read, half of what you see– attributed to various writers
Why this is a good thing is that once Real News becomes indistinguishable from Fake News in the media, then power gravitates back to those who are able to tell the difference between Truth and Fiction, or Real and Fake, by the logical and common-sensical methods of discernment that have moved Man forward since the Enlightenment.
The differences between real evidence vs hearsay (third persons or “undisclosed sources” common to the news business) are not to be toyed with, for they require critical thinking instead of blind belief. This should seem self-evident, only lately it has become clear it no longer is.
So we stand at a crossroads. But that we are where we are today, as to where it seemed we might be headed, is, as I said, a Good Thing, for Truth now has the upper hand.
Fake News presupposes that its recipients, its “buyers”, cannot dissect it, nor are even inclined to try. They either accept it fully, or reject it fully. The “sellers” were fine with this believing they had a far larger following than they really do, and believed they could bully their way past the rest, which they had for several years now. Fake News propagators assume their product can always be based on knee-jerk belief.
Fake News looks to push certain buttons the culture has already implanted. Pre-election polling, from False Impressions going as far back as the nomination process that allowed a factually-proven and indictable Hillary Clinton to be nominated as her party’s choice for the presidency of the United States convinced the primary propagators of Fake News, major newspapers such as the “New York Times” and “Washington Post” and network news organizations, ABC, NBC, CBS, even PBS, that they could sell any lie if they just packaged it a certain way and dispersed it among select groups to be filtered down. In this endeavor they could rely on cable news, even Fox to the extent it could not bring itself to show outrage about fakery, to disseminate Fake News as fact. Following close behind came prominent internet news sites who moved the narrative further into the well, to then be analyzed and bull-horned by all the known suspects, from Politico, Salon, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, who all got daily play in the major news aggregators such as YahooNews and Drudge Report….where finally, Fake News wormed itself into America’s playground, Facebook and Twitter, where “truth” was certified by clicks and “likes” without a single judge, either in the courtroom sense of the term, or a body of peers in the scientific sense of the term, to bring the gavel down and throw all, most of those facts out of the room for the lack of evidence.
Come election day, then, the victory for the Truth Benders was viewed as inevitable, as largely based on the count of those clicks and likes.
My first takeaway from the Trump victory announced sometime after 0330 hrs the morning of the 9th was that Nature was still in charge of human affairs in matters of survival, and that yes, as Rev Franklin Graham announced, God probably had something to do with it. This was probably was the first time since 1860 that Good stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Evil in America in an election…
…and could have been our last chance, had we blinked.
But let me dwell on Nature’s role here, instead of God’s, since, while I believe in God’s overlordship in their joint domains, many, in fact almost as many as those who blindly accepted the Fake News to vote for Hillary, probably don’t. I simply cannot believe that as many as 48.5% of the American people are so hellbent for self-destruction. To turn away from fact, and to spurn even the simplest of thought processes that causes one to “tell the difference between a horse and mule” (Billy Ed Wheeler), is the perfect recipe for absolute and total self-destruction.
The road to Hell is paved with Fake News believers.
The fate of every Marxist or totalitarian regime that has ever come down the pike, or ever will, is proof where the Truth Benders will take a society. The first question you have to ask is “why would they continue, generation after generation, to fall back into line, and try to improve what has failed every time it has been tried?”
There’s a well-known psychology behind the answer, and it has to do with pushing just every about self-destructive button a person can possess, from vanity to avarice to lust to the need to be part of an elite, to be able to always kick down (almost every young Marxist thinks he/she will always be part of management some day only to end up in a 6 x 6 cubicle with a computer) to get even.
All of these desires and attitudes Nature abhors, for they are self-destructive. For the individual Nature considers such behavior to be survival-endangering, and in nature will move swiftly to quash destructive trends in any animal population. Animals are far more ruthless and severe than humans in disposing of those who would upset the natural order of harmony and a common morality based on reciprocity in its population.
It’s no longer in question that Fake News had become so pervasive that the purveyors of Real News who have employed it as a tool, i.e., NYT, WAPO, ABC, et al, have placed themselves in a precarious survival situation. With the election of Donald Trump and the resulting disbelief, disgust, and shall we say teat-fittery that ensued, it seems Fake News seems to be only salve that can keep their bodies and souls together. So they seem to have gone all in, dismissing even the guise of truth-telling.
What has happened, of course, is that the world has quickly divided into two camps, not only political, but between those who “can tell that horse from a mule” and those who cannot. As of the November election, in America, that number is split just about down the middle, 48.5%-48% nationally, or 2-48 if we count states only. The losers’ clicks and likes told them their count should have been far larger than they actually were.
How does this play in the future?
A booming economy is ballyhooed by Janet Yellin, while 95 million Americans are not in the work force. Actual unemployment is closer to 15% not 5%, the lower number a government-contrived Fake Number. Will the Federal Reserve then say it is a Good Thing if Donald Trump should pull say 10 million out of those-no-longer-in-the-workforce and plunk them back among the gainfully employed? Or will the Fed see this as bad? (I know America’s welfare agencies will.) The Fed will have to take note of it, as well as adjust to the changing patterns of economic activity…I assume toward small business, but this may not be seen as a bright omen. Discerning minds seem already to believe that the stock market and Federal Reserve no longer reflect economic health in this country, but only healthy for a few. And some call those few “globalists”, who seem to be happy with that 95 million not in the work force. They use other spread sheets for their data of good health.
The hottest case in point:
(You could have followed this some months ago and guessed where it might go should Trump win the election.)
The encapsulates the entire Fake News flavor of the current notion that Russia not only hacks, and not only tried to turn the election to Trump with those hacks, but succeeded.
Brian Ross of ABC News, the still-employed Brian Ross who first identified the Aurora, CO theater-shooter as a member of the Tea Party, has penned a story that Vladimir Putin personally knew and approved of the Russian spy efforts to influence the US elections. So far none of these facts have actually been established with evidence. Still, they are reported by Brian Ross as “facts”. He states that “US intelligence sources” report that Putin knew and approved, which would mean either 1) the US was hacking Russian emails, a possibility, or that 2) we had a mole inside the Kremlin, close to Russian central command, much as described by Tom Clancy in his spy thriller “Cardinal of the Kremlin” in 1988. To be a factual news account, i.e., Real News, a variation of one of those two things has to have been true. Secondly, and this is the clincher in my eyes, ABC and the American news media are not part of the intelligence communities’ chain of command. None of them. In fact, it is against federal law for Intel agencies to release this sort of information to the media without prior approval of the American senior command.
So, to accept this ABC story as fact you have to accept one of those underlying premises: Question; Why are known liars still reporting this kind of news and still have access to highly sensitive intelligence information? Shouldn’t Putin’s involvement, if true, be classified?
This is a classic example of Fake News, but not because it is fake, although it likely is, but because the underlying requirements that would make it credible are just too fantastical to believe.
Consequently, only those who 1) want to believe this kind of news, or 2) are too gullible and one-dimensional to question it in any logical fashion will believe this.
When by sheer act of numbers…following the trickle down theory from primary news source down the pipeline Fake News could be made to appear to be Real News among many readers, especially those who accept news at face value.
This is why Nature and its laws intervene. Sometimes humans have to go through several crossroads to reach that last crossroad where survival of the group depends on taking the correct last turn.
The recent election was the Final Collision. our species first step back away from the abyss, and if you’ve noticed, other European nations are taking similar steps. It really is a worldwide phenomenon. The smell of new beginnings is in the air.
But we have found out that we are still only barely half of the voting population, hence my belief that we are at the last crossroads. From the looks at the numbers of non-voting high school and grade school kids who are convinced they will lose all their rights (abortion?) if the results of this election should stand, we have a long way to go. We had no idea how deeply the power of trickle-down Fake News has had on the population the past 25 years or so, but Nature tells us we can’t allow it to go any further. Remember, Al Gore told the world that polar bears can’t swim and got an Oscar for it in 2006.
Today we find ourselves in power, with the ability to say “No” to Fake News, requiring even the most venerable of media institutions to prove what they tell us. We have this power. We can now demand it.
It’s easy. Go to any news site, Yahoo (left) and Drudge (right) and begin with almost any title and its opening two paragraphs. Instead of saying to yourself, “Yeah, I agree with that” ask only “How can this be true?” and then walk through the simple steps of ascertaining not only a fact, but how that the writer might know it. (The media world is filed with Brian Ross’s.) Then comment and Tweet, especially the lie but also the Truth, which within a year or so, you will find springing up out of the ground ike a march lily..
One of Nature’s most ancient laws of survival is to never believe a liar twice. And its corollary: Never believe anyone who continues to quote a person who has lied more than once. (Yes, I know, Trump has lied many times, but since he hasn’t been sworn in, has very little in the way of actions to put an asterisk to those fibs. They are still of the “church-burning’s-in-Arkansas” or Sir Edmund Hillary variety, gratuitous lies which have no impact. Obama has told whoppers that have cost men and women worldwide lives, jobs, and economic security. If Trump reaches that point, the same rules should apply….evidence, evidence, evidence.
The point is, the survival of the nation, the group, will not depend on Donald Trump but on the sense of survival as found in our own culture. We will determine with good sense what is truth and what is not. Intellectuals Yet Idiots will not.
The purveyors of Fake News at the top of the media food chain simply will not continue (over time) to ply us with Fake News once they see that it is being believed by a diminishing number of buyers. As a demand for Real Facts increases, Fake News will diminish, although there will always be a portion of our society, which I used to call the hardcore Left, for whom Fake News, just like their Fake Worldview, is their life’s blood. So stay ever at the ready. They’ve been known to build bombs in their basement. This is why we have to go onto their plantations and rescue their shock troops, and go into their school and college laboratories, and rescue their cannon fodder.