Month: February 2017

I started building towards a bit of a quest lately. I am intrigued by the proliferation of false news–stories designed to mislead and titillate, mostly to encourage the reader to behave or think in a certain way but also for ‘clickbait’ purposes. I decided that I would start mapping out a list of sites that were ‘bad actors’ and use that list as the basis for a future student project with the goal of deepening the list. What followed were a lot of clicks to bad sites. In retrospect I should’ve done all this in Chrome’s Incognito mode, because it would have lessened the impact on my web travel profile.

There are a few basic truths about fake news. If the news comes in list form and reminds you that #7 is shocking! then it is fake. If you click and are redirected to a page where a bunch of salacious headlines are the main situation, fake. If the words ‘weird’ and ‘trick’ appear in any sentence, fake. Overexposure of breasts? probably fake news. Probably. If the article cites wikipedia it ought to be considered suspect. If the article is in proximity to one in which a notable celebrity who you know to be alive is being eulogized, you might be dealing with fake news.

That is all rookie level stuff. I’m looking to dig deeper…

 

The much ballyhooed false Bowling Green Massacre really reminded me of how little the truth matters these days. I remember not too long ago there were senators openly explaining that it is more important what people think is true than is actually true. Finally I am coming around to accepting that as the new reality. It starts at the top. We have long held deep respect for the Office of the President. As such whatever he says, true or false, carries a tremendous amount of weight and support behind it. Lately Fox News has all but rebranded itself as a spin zone for the president they thought would never get elected.

People are about how they feel and the reality they choose to live in. To be more specific, they don’t care about a whole lot beyond the scope of their own lives and what protects the reality they’ve shaped. To that end, the truth is less useful to the modern individual than ever before. Why not swallow the lie instead?

One of my longstanding dreams has been to live in a warehouse or an old church. I’ve been spamming loopnet and a dozen other sites with searches for the prized unconventional living spot at a responsible price, but no luck yet. Bottom line: having a cool living space matters very much. There is a lot of creativity that goes into designing such spaces, and I believe that (once you deal with the inevitable bug drama) it could be a very good look for me as a person seeking creative flow.

Oh, and it is crazy cool. I’m talking hoop in the house kind of cool. What I truly envision is building out a school with live-in property on the campus, allowing me to engage in my business (said school) 24/7 and be able to interact with the students and staff in a way that reflects the family values nature of the facility. In fact, it could go so far as being a live-in facility itself–an academy in the vein of Charles Xavier… Okay I am getting quite carried away, but I think the discussion about building a school and living on that property has legs.

Then again, maybe I just want the property all to myself and my devious plans…

I am going to limit my interactions with the media for the same reason I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Doing so made me feel sad and powerless. Forget this juvenile argument about how every vote is equal, etc. That just is not true. Every electoral vote is equal and those votes rang in the presidency that has me straight up dumbstruck. I got close to understanding. I felt a flicker of awareness while reading The Chocolate War where it talked about how things always had been and how uncomfortable change made people feel–how those who’d been able to see where they were on the scale and clearly identify who was below them fought to maintain that status quo because it meant they weren’t slipping. I get that part of it.

What I don’t fully grasp is how the need for that type of ‘social security’ outweighs the clear awareness that our literal security in a nuclear globe is being harmed. Trump has a different set of ideas about what is and isn’t real. He is a spoiled rich kid who has never had to deal with the consequences of his actions and still does not. The man openly advised the ‘Nuclear Option’ when it came to a supreme court appointment just a day after there was a question of whether or not his appointee would be expediently confirmed.

Consider the language: Nuclear Option. That means end game politics. I fear that he is a man who believes in end game politics in every sense of the word. In other words, I believe that he lives by the old Autoduel philosophy of ‘The right of way goes to the biggest guns’. This is not a prudent leadership philosophy in a world where using said ‘guns’ will only result in a war of attrition that we are not built to handle. We learned this in both gulf wars. Now we want to start crap with every other dog on the block?

I told a colleague today to look at the bright side of this. If we fear the worst of this administration, we will only leave ourself room for happiness when they fall short of our expectations. I stand by the statement. It is gonna get worse. What really worries me is all of the doomsayers who thought Obama was going to bring us to the end of the world. They thought he was the antichrist. Well, what if Obama did bring us to the end of the world, but they stuck the wrong guy with the bill?

I didn’t post yesterday’s post, a nasty little bourbon infused rant about the presidency. I will do so, and I hope I do so quickly before it goes into that dark little place where all the Monday posts have been disappearing for a time. Fact is, I don’t do well with transcribing my writing to the digital realm. I’m not about that life. Lately I’m about hanging on and trying to manage things the best I can before they fall apart. If it sounds dire that is because it should be. I’m behind on grading, behind on writing, behind on cleaning, and close to the point where all of that seems like it ought to be swept under a rug to start fresh. Call it a life-management bankruptcy. The sad part is the workload is actually manageable provided a basic structure. The problem is I cannot seem to get myself to properly build that structure.

I’m trying. Still Still Still trying so very hard at this in a time where I feel like I ought to be paying less attention to the dozen balls I am juggling and more to the nonsense spewing from the mouths of our political leaders. I can say one thing about that: Hypocrisy is on full display. Anyone who bothers to listen to the Republican rhetoric from 2008 ought to see very clear parallels to how the Dems are behaving. Moreover, they ought to see how the Republicans who condemn said behavior displayed those exact behaviors back in the day and felt completely righteous for doing so and have before and will again.

It is Elephants and Donkeys all the way down.