Fake News – Ratburger

A Study in Fake News

A friend and former colleague sent me a link to the following brief article: A Strong Start to Sierra Snowpack. It purports to be a factual report of the water situation in California. Such stories are always interesting for the things they leave out: the dog that didn’t bark.

Start with the title. Since the snowpack is already above the normal peak, which is referenced to April (seasonal peak), it would be more accurate to say that the snowpack is already well above average for the whole season though it’s still only February. That’s more than a strong start. Furthermore, though the 2017-2018 year was below average, the prior year was well above average. Together, they were about average.It is in the nature of snowfall to fluctuate from year to year.

Next, the article states that “…most of the reservoirs are already more than half-full, and several have water levels that are above the historical average for the middle of February.” It would be more accurate to write that all the reservoirs but one are at or above the historical average for February. The exception is Oroville, which is low because of a major structural failure two years ago. Furthermore, all of the reservoirs are more than half full, which is also misleading because it’s not normal for them to ever be full. Should they ever be almost full, the headline would be “Reservoirs Nearly Full: Flooding Crisis Looms” since they would need to release large amounts of water, which could raise downstream rivers to flood stage.

This 300-word article manages to pack in a tremendous amount of misinformation, brought to you by NASA. This brings to mind the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, or in more modern parlance, fake news. Also relevant is Mencken’s observation that

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

I would only change the last half to read “…the whole aim of practical media is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

Snow is forecast for tomorrow and Thursday in the Sierra.

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USA Today cheerleading for impeachment

They have got nuthin’. This is a long feature, prominently highlighted at the default Google News aggregator, purporting to list a bill of particulars. None of this is concerning; it is all old news, with the case for corruption resting on a house of cards of innuendo, guilt by association, and denigrating land development business as somehow inherently evil.

Six years ago I was thinking of USA Today as one of the least unreliable of the major mass media news organizations. But in the Age of Trump they have energetically leapfrogged their competition in a rush to Leftist advocacy exclusively. They are Fake News. The Enemy of the People.

I don’t think I need to refute all this mess for the Ratburghers. Every charge in this article has been discussed, and we generally agreed that there was no evidence of collusion between Team Trump and Russian government hackers. We observed that the members of Team Trump who have been indicted, and who have spent time in jail, and slapped with large fines, and threatened with ruin, were being squeezed in order to get them to flip on President Trump. One of the prominent bits cited in this long feature is Michael Cohen. We have previously observed that he pled guilty to an act that is not a crime. It is clear that the prosecutors were more interested in tainting President Trump than in any issues of justice or ethics. Which, I think, indicates that the prosecutors themselves ought to be brought up on ethics charges.

Other crimes by members of Team Trump predated their involvement with Trump by several years. They also were clearly prosecuted in order to squeeze them for testimony damaging to President Trump.

Michael Flynn lying to the FBI is a real curiosity to me. Why did he lie? He had done nothing wrong, nor had Trump. Nevertheless, Flynn’s lie is a much lesser crime than many crimes that this same team of prosecutors chose not to pursue.

Fake News

I expect that all y’all will see similar instances this week of Leftist mass media cheerleading for impeachment. This is going to be a very popular theme from Big Media for the next little while. This feature from USA Today is attributed to three staff reporters, even though it is entirely a rehash of stuff from weeks or months ago.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/30/forces-threaten-donald-trumps-presidency-robert-mueller/2347032002/

May God bless and keep President Trump in His care, and grant wisdom and health and safety as he leads America even while under the “assault of the ten thousand lawyers.”

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Media v Evangelicals –2018 part 9

Tribalism.

Yes, that stale accusation is making the rounds once again. After a diversion of several weeks, Big Media is now in panic mode since early voting has started. Big Media was distracted by Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, and used that as the launch pad for attacks on white women, in an attempt to shame and bully white women who were leaning towards Republican candidates. They showed how desperate they are to wedge voters away from the GOP and President Trump. Now they are returning to more familiar ground, which is continued attacks on white Evangelicals in an attempt to wedge them away from President Trump’s GOP.

Of course the New York Times is leading the charge. They ran an article that purported to provide a political history of Evangelicals: “Religion and Right Wing Politics: How Evangelicals Reshaped Elections.” It is mostly forgettable. It contains several howlers, such as “American evangelicals had long steered clear of politics,” which is silly. It would be better to say that American evangelicals had long been politically divided. This article incorrectly cites the Moral Majority as the beginning of political realignment of Evangelicals. I think that is really clueless. The Moral Majority got its start and gained traction because the Democrat Party started kicking traditionalists and conservatives out and embraced moral confusion. Along the way, the NYT quotes Michael Gerson as part of the “Religious Right.” Ha.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/religion-politics-evangelicals.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

The New York Times also did a feature where they invited young Evangelicals to comment on their personal politics. They said they received 1500 comments. They printed ten or so. It was pretty much what you would expect. The New York Times’s favorite Evangelicals are actually ex-Evangelicals. The young Evangelicals the NYT chose to quote expressed quite a lot of confusion and dissatisfaction with their Christianity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/us/young-evangelicals-politics-midterms.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

NeverTrumper David French wrote a column at National Review in which he riffed on the NYT comments from young Evangelicals and blamed this youthful religious confusion on Donald Trump. He charged “tribalism.” How tedious.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/the-two-different-temptations-facing-young-evangelicals/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-11-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives

My favorite media critics noticed all this, but in this case they are very clever but ultimately less than helpful. They are pro-life Democrats, though, so it is not surprising that they are not up to the challenge of giving this mess the thorough mocking that it all deserves.

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2018/11/2/thinking-about-donald-trump-young-evangelicals-the-new-york-times-and-screwtape

They did manage to pass along this nice observation:

“…it’s amazing the degree to which the voices in this unscientific survey that ended up in print — in the world’s most powerful newspaper — sound exactly like you would expect young evangelical Times readers to sound.”

Exactly.

Elsewhere, NPR is rooting for liberal Evangelicals, hoping that they will persuade some traditionalist Evangelicals that Trump is so immoral that they should not vote for him.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/25/660375278/finding-common-good-among-evangelicals-in-the-political-season

So, as you might expect, a last-minute flurry of attempts to wedge Evangelicals away from President Trump. All of this is oriented towards the midterm elections.

Nothing new; I just thought I ought to put out an update before election day.

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bimbo number three

Senator Grassley has an admission from the third lady that her story of Kavanaugh rape was entirely fiction.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/11/02/brett-kavanaugh-accuser-referred-fbi-doj-investigation/1863210002/

“…took responsibility for authoring an anonymous letter that made allegations that Kavanaugh and a friend raped her. After she was tracked down and interviewed by Senate investigators, the woman recanted and said she was not, in fact. the author and had never met Kavanaugh.”

Grassley claims the woman is a left-wing activist and told investigators it was “just a ploy,” he wrote in the letter. Her full comments to investigators were not made available ….

There is more detail at Twitchy:

HOLY S*IT: Woman who claimed Brett Kavanaugh raped her now says she made the whole thing up

She further confessed to Committee investigators that (1) she “just wanted to get attention”;
(2) “it was a tactic”; and (3) “that was just a ploy.” She told Committee investigators that she had
called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time
Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination. Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation she made via her email to the Committee, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.”
When asked by Committee investigators whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said:
“Oh Lord, no.”

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LifeSiteNewsDotCom

LifeSiteNews is a small anti-abortion activist group, pro-life journalism outlet, and news aggregator. It was launched in 1997 as a spinoff of Campaign Life Coalition. Both are based in Toronto. Unless you are a traditionalist Catholic or a pro-life culture warrior, you probably never heard of them.

They have had a lot of excitement lately. For a year they have been fighting for their life as an organization. They had become very dependent on their Facebook page as their primary way to communicate with their network of donors, most of whom are Catholic families making small-time contributions. Facebook has been waging war against them.

Facebook ghetto

In addition to filtering them out of searches and giving them the “shadow ban” treatment, Facebook has refused to run their ads:

One response that our team received as the reason for Facebook’s disapproval of our ads is equally concerning. The ad pertaining to this response simply showed an image of a pregnant mother holding a photo of her baby’s ultrasound…

I do see that the ad has a fetus and while it involves your ad text and topic, it may be viewed too strong for Facebook to allow to show.

Such viewpoint discrimination is a direct attack on our shared life and family values, and is greatly affecting our efforts to fundraise and spread our news.

Yes, a pregnant woman showing off the ultrasound picture of her baby is “too strong” for Facebook. That is a transparent excuse that says Facebook does not like advocacy for babies. Facebook is enforcing the Culture of Death.

They do this by decreeing that accurately reporting on the abortion industry and Planned Parenthood is “fake news.” Truth is irrelevant; what matters is the narrative.

Facebook recently admitted to combating “fake news” by developing a system that ranks users’ trustworthiness on a scale from 1 to 10. This is determined by users’ opinions rather than objective investigations!

This means that aggressively pro-choice and anti-family Facebook users can rank LifeSiteNews as “untrustworthy” with the simple click of a button – just because they dislike the facts that we publish.

Facebook has therefore made it ridiculously easy for our highly organized, well-financed (George Soros, etc) and hateful opponents to have LifeSiteNews wrongly categorized as “fake news” and our traffic suppressed according to Facebook’s “terms of agreement.” Truth does not matter according to this mob-mentality-serving process.

Sex scandals

If you are wondering where it was that you recently saw their name, it was because they landed the biggest Catholic scoop of August. In the middle of the Catholic summer of distress over new sex scandals, Archbishop Viganò released a letter that said that Pope Francis and the rest of the Vatican were aware of Cardinal McCarrick’s habit of pressing young seminarians for sex, and also that he had covered for homosexual priests who preyed on teenage boys. Pope Francis had rehabilitated McCarrick in spite of this knowledge.

Archbishop Viganò gave his letter to two conservative Italian journalists that he trusts. He also sent it to LifeSiteNews. Evidently that was the only English-language outlet that he trusts.

Since then, other traditionalist Catholics have gone directly to LifeSiteNews with background and new developments on these scandals.

Search and you will not find

Facebook is not the only internet service that is hostile to pro-life advocates. Several news aggregators have the habit of demoting LifeSiteNews as well as other conservative outlets. So for the past weeks we have seen searches that turned up dozens of articles and editorials that cited LifeSiteNews, but unless you type “lifesitenews” in your search, you will not see their original reporting on the first four pages of results.

Allies

I am not a Catholic. As a Lutheran, the Church of Rome teaches that I am condemned to hell as a Schismatic. Nevertheless I have several Catholic friends, and I find that traditionalist Catholics are my most trustworthy allies in the culture wars. I need strong Catholics to help rescue western civilization from the assaults of Satan.

Please consider giving a little support to LifeSiteNews, either with a few bucks, or by sharing their plight with your Catholic and pro-life friends.

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Enemy of the People 2018-08-16

Today we were treated to a burst of collusion by the lamestream media. For the past week, the Boston Globe has been encouraging journalists to publish editorials today that would condemn President Trump for calling the “fake news media” the “enemy of the people.” Somewhere around 350 editorials were published today in answer to the Boston Globe’s call. There were also a handful of editorials that opined that this collective effort would surely backfire and only prove Trump’s allegation that the journalists are partisan Leftists and “the Opposition Party.”

So, Ratburghers, did you bother to read any of these editorials?

Did you see any new points that you had not already heard many times?

Did you see any really good examples of arguments against President Trump? Any criticisms that seemed to be helpful or useful to the public discourse over the battles between Team Trump and mass media?

Have you heard any conversations triggered by this effort at a collective rebuke of President Trump?

My thinking is that this is a really small deal. Nobody will be persuaded to think differently than they already did.

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Enemy of the People

This tweet followed this interesting follow-up exchange at the White House yesterday.

“For the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world are watching what you’re saying, Sarah,” Acosta said. “The president of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people.”

“I appreciate your passion,” Sanders responded. “I share it. I’ve addressed this question. I’ve addressed my personal feelings. I’m here to speak on behalf of the president. He’s made his comments clear.”

Acosta and his fellow-travelers in mass media think they are on the high ground here.

I think they are “the enemy of the people.”

In fact, I think they are unwittingly doing the work of the Enemy.

President Trump called them the “Opposition Party.”

They 0ppose my political values.

They oppose my social values.

They oppose my moral code.

They oppose my traditionalist Christianity.

They oppose my ability to freely exercise my religion.

They oppose American leadership in the world.

They hide the murderous crimes of America’s enemies while trumpeting any fault they can find with America.

They hide the murderous crimes of all other religions aside from Christianity, including Atheism, while haranguing us with repeated tales of Christians’ violence.

They do not want me to be able to teach my children my religion and values; they do not want me to be able to defend my family; they do not want me to have a voice in the public square; they do not want me to know the truth.

I think they are the enemy of the people, even more than President Trump does.

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Just a little tidbit about “Fake News”

I came across this just now and I thought just maybe I should share it. So all maybes aside here it is:

Continue reading “Just a little tidbit about “Fake News””

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less clear

It was a major project. Multiple billions of dollars involved, with dozens of interested parties, dozens of consultants, multiple government agencies and quasi-government organizations, plus five activist groups. The Environmental Impact Statement had been held up by a lawsuit for years, and all the interested parties had lawyers involved on one side or the other. After ten years they were down to one particular issue. The state agency convinced everyone else to sign off on the EIS, with the proviso that the engineering study for that particular issue would be re-done on the basis of a new analysis, and that the affected portion of the project would wait until the engineering study was signed by all the affected participating agencies. So about a billion dollars’ worth of the work was waiting on the study, while the remainder of the project got started.

The project would take several years, so there was plenty of slack time to get the engineering study done. After a couple of false starts, I was put in charge of the engineering study. After four months of analysis, I had enough to start writing the report, while the remaining analysis work continued. I read the previous work on the issue, and then set aside and wrote a fresh report from a new start.

I had a great engineering director. She was a great woman engineer who came into engineering when there was plenty of open anti-woman bias in the field. She was shrewd and tough and became my good friend. She helped me navigate the minefield of the reviewers.

Before we could send the report out to the different agencies, I had to get legal review. On my consultant team we had two environmental lawyers and an overall lawyer. The State sponsoring agency had two lawyers, plus a consultant lawyer. So my draft report had to be reviewed by six lawyers, each one with the charge of keeping in mind the likely legal challenges that would come from the other agencies.

I wrote a really tight report. Even so, it was about 25 pages. That is really long for an engineering report. Previous reports that I had written were typical engineering reports, so about four pages of text with about 300 pages of appendices. But this one had to be a self-supporting document, so I had to summarize big chunks of the EIS.

The lawyers went to work. Four of the six were energetic wordsmiths, determined that not a single word of the engineer’s original text would remain. However, they all wanted to delete different parts of the text, and their re-writing would overlap, and in some instances, conflict. It was a lot of work to address all their comments. The analysis was complete before we were finished with the third draft of the text.

In the end, my original 25 pages had become 42 pages. Two of those pages were tables that presented the remainder of the analyses. The other 15 pages were fluff.

A comparison of my original to the finished product showed me that the added information could have been fit onto a single page. Plus, there was more than an equivalent amount of information that had been deleted. The overall result of the involvement of the six lawyers was that we used a lot more words to convey less information.

I was put in mind of that experience while reading about the latest Trumpian lawyering over Russian collusion.

The president has previously expressed his willingness to speak to Mueller, but frequently oscillates from one position to another on that issue. And since Giuliani was brought on board, the president’s stance has only become less clear.

Less clear. I am familiar with that. More words with less information.

Go, Giuliani, go. Run rings around them. Protect the President. Make the fake news media guess at the meaning of what you just said. Clarity is not your goal. Winning is the goal.

Even if he was guilty as sin, which I don’t believe, it would be better for America for President Trump to win this legal battle and be loosed from the entanglements of lawyers. The Mueller investigation is hindering progress at Swamp-draining.

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Invasion! fake news Venezuela edition

In the Google News aggregator all day today there has been a rolling series of articles about how President Trump wants to invade Venezuela.

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqdggKInBDQklTVGpvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NrRUtFUWlLeWV6UGpJQU1FWUF2a1B4TXZENEZFaXhVY25WdGNDQndjbVZ6YzJWa0lHRnBaR1Z6SUdGaWIzVjBJR2x1ZG1Ga2FXNW5JRlpsYm1WNmRXVnNZU2dBUAE?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

These articles are about a couple of comments and a discussion from a meeting in August of 2017. Evidently nobody has spoken of Trump’s questions on the issue since last September.

Fake news.

And they wonder why so many American voters say they believe that mass media sometimes or frequently post things that “they know to be false or misleading.” Ha.

Here is that poll again.

https://www.axios.com/trump-effect-92-percent-republicans-media-fake-news-9c1bbf70-0054-41dd-b506-0869bb10f08c.html

As Mollie pointed out, it was disingenuous to lead with the very low credibility in media by Republicans (92%). The real lead should have been the finding that 79 % of independent voters don’t trust them, either.

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Fake News status report

There was a disgruntled man. He was mad at his local paper. He thought they had dished out shabby treatment to him personally in story about his conviction for a domestic disturbance. He sued and lost. He threatened. Then he went and shot up the news room, killing five people.

Several journalists blamed President Trump. They attributed the killings to the toxic atmosphere created by President Trump for calling them “fake news.”

I find that to be similar to the way that several media outlets blamed the Orlando gay nightclub shooting by the Muslim jihadist on the “atmosphere of hate” created by conservative Christians.

At any rate, Mollie wrote a column calling them out for this latest outrage. In her remarks, she cited a recent poll. It was a SurveyMonkey poll by Axios. It shows the low state of credibility of the news media. Rather, it should be called the high state of incredibility of the news media. Even Democrats know that they are frequently fake news.

In response to the question whether news media published things they knew to be “fake, false or purposely misleading,” 79 percent of Independent voters said “Sometimes” or “a lot.” Republicans were at 92 %; I bet Ratburghers would be even higher. Democrats were at 53 %.

I am happy to see the mass media news organizations becoming so badly discredited. They carry water for the Enemy.

I thought y’all would be interested in Mollie’s column:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/29/journalists-blame-trump-for-annapolis-shooting-despite-complete-lack-of-evidence/

Also at theFederalist.com, Ms. Rachel Stoltzfoos has a follow-up post in which she reviews some recent fake news history:

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/30/journos-blame-fake-news-for-shooting-claim-criticism-is-now-off-limits/

The summary of the Axios poll is here:

https://www.axios.com/trump-effect-92-percent-republicans-media-fake-news-9c1bbf70-0054-41dd-b506-0869bb10f08c.html

The details of the poll are brief and really interesting:

Democrats see most news outlets as unbiased. Republicans think they’re almost all biased.

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A Nation of Laws or of (Wo)Men?

FoxNews reported, in an interview with Judge Napolitano, that Trump is in legal jeopardy because of emails related to Donald Jr.’s setting up a meeting at Trump Tower to ostensibly obtain dirt of Hillary Clinton. (link: https://www.newsmax.com/politics/andrew-napolitano-trump-tower-meeting-robert-mueller/2018/02/01/id/840953/ ) Supposedly, White House communications director Hope Hicks wanted to prevent the release of those emails. According to the judge’s analysis, this is conspiracy to obstruct justice. How it pertains to Trump himself is beyond me, but if it is even slightly plausible, expect the MSM to run with it screaming.

Lets us make a comparison. Because someone on Trump’s team wanted to hide emails, that is viewed as prima facie conspiracy to obstruct (conspiracy because it involved more than one person). Now, where have we seen that before?

Hillary Clinton ignored the law and had created (she did not do it herself) a private server to conduct her official State Department correspondence. That, in itself is blatant conspiracy to perpetrate a fraud on the US government, whose Freedom of Information Act requires all public officials to use official channels (the State Department’s email system) and to preserve all their official correspondence. After an investigation was already underway, 33,000 emails on that server were deleted and deleted in a such a way as to make them unrecoverable from the local hard drive (setting aside the question of whether or not they were recoverable elsewhere – not that the FBI seemed very interested in making the effort). As well, numerous cell phones were destroyed with hammers – just the kind of things ordinary folks do for the sake of personal privacy.

Saint Comey, aided and abetted by the MSM perpetrated a massive deception by way of deflection from these obvious felonies. They all framed the issue in terms of “carelessness” with classified information. That, too was felonious, but much more easily excusable. And the spin saw to it that that was all anyone talked about. Meanwhile, the blatant acts for which regular men and women go directly to jail – without passing “Go,” on a regular basis were simply ignored! Such cases for ordinary defendants rarely ever go to trial. They are pled out, since defense lawyers know their clients don’t stand a chance.

What Hillary did was uncontrovertibly conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. For anyone else, many or all the emails would have been recovered from other servers after a painstaking forensic investigation. Anyone else would have faced a withering interview with the FBI under oath. For anyone else, the FBI would not have participated in the clever misdirection – away from blatant felonies and toward simple carelessness. Even that “carelessness” was an intentional misdirection away from the “gross negligence” it actually represented. We now know that Comey’s original exoneration statement, written months before Hillary was even interviewed, was redacted since it initially used the term “gross negligence” – the legal standard for requisite mens rea.

Not only have we become a nation of (wo)men and not of laws. It redounds to the benefit of the political party immune to shame, since the MSM never holds them to any principle except expediency. A Democrat’s multiple felonies are covered up by the FBI director. Meanwhile a Republican who merely inhabited the same building as his son working for his campaign (and who may have actually done not a thing wrong), is prima facie guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice.

All this, in plain view, perpetrated by federal law enforcement at the highest levels. Were there any actual journalism happening in the MSM – ‘investigative reporting” (à la Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes) is reserved exclusively for Republicans and is indistinguishable from character assassination. This exemplifies the faking of news at its most refined practice.

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