Showing posts with label Awful Ignorance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Awful Ignorance. Show all posts

Thursday, October 27, 2022

Bad Internet Information

 No, this isn't about politics, science non-facts, or social media trolls.  It is about "just plain wrong".

I was watching a political debate from 2 candidates from Pennsylvania the other night and for some odd reason, it occurred to me that I couldn't recall what city was the capital of that State.  I knew it wasn't either of the 2 largest cities.  State capitals are usually not the largest cities.  

That sort of memory-blank bothers me.  Not that I think I'm losing my mind, just that when not recalling basic facts annoys me.  I tried to think likely cities.  I considered Altoona.  When I finally checked, it was Harrisburg.  LOL!

I mention that to mention this.  While looking up the capital of Pennsylvania, I found a site called "World Atlas".  Which one might assume is generally accurate and managed by knowledgeable individuals.  I'll mention that it seems to be a non-US site.  It said the capital of Pennsylvania was Philadelphia.  I checked around other sites and found that wrong.

It also said some 18th century Pennsylvania resident (David Rittenhouse) "discovered" Venus.  OK, that really made me laugh.  Venus was known to the Ancients and some previous astronomers had observed it though telescopes for a couple of centuries.

So I considered that the site might be a humor site like The Onion.  But most of what was there was accurate, lacking any hint of humor or sarcasm.  My best guess is that they were serious about what they wrote.  So, it was like they said the Capital of Russia was Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).

Looking up "David Rittenhouse", I discovered that he was actually only researching the orbit of Venus by examining its transit across the Sun.  

Where did these "World Atlas" people get their information?  I can only laugh (and shake my head in amazement) at such bad information.  Even legitimate-sounding sites can be astonishingly wrong.  

But I also want to mention (thinking about Venus) what Carl Sagan once said about thoughts on Venus.  And I paraphrase:

1.  Venus has an opaque atmosphere.  You can't see through it with a telescope.  So what did some scientists conclude in the 1800s?

2.  The atmosphere is all clouds.  What makes clouds?  Water.  Venus must be very wet.

3.  If Venus is very wet, it was be mostly swampy.  What grows in swamps?  Ferns.

4.   What eats ferns?  Dinosaurs.  Therefore, Venus must have dinosaurs.

5.  From not seeing anything at all, they concluded there were dinosaurs on Venus!

We now know, from probes and better equipment, that Venus is a desert and the atmosphere is made up of mostly noxious chemicals that would prevent any life as we know it.  Even relatively modern people can think in bizarrely illogical ways.

I'm not exactly blaming them.  I dread to think about some things we currently think to be accurate and logical will seem bizarre to our descendents.  Well, at least I won't be around then to experience the embarrassment!

But, still, that "World Atlas" stuff really cracked me up!

Edited to add:  I just noticed the Weather Channel's "10 Day Forecast" includes 14 days!  ROTFL...


Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Political Partisanship

I was politically aware when I was young.  At 10, I stayed up late to see the results of the Kennedy/Nixon election.  It was not as partisan then.  There were liberal Republicans in the NE and conservative Republicans in the SW.  There were conservative Democrats in the South and liberal Democrats in the Midwest.

Both parties had candidates and supporters in each wing and had to get along somewhere toward the center.  So the both parties strategies were to see how close they could get to the center and still have candidates who would promote their general programs.

Nixon changed that.  He managed to move the Republicans away from an economic to a soccially conservative program in the South.  He left the Democrats without a southern base and won.

Since then, the 2 parties have been separating politically.  I used to be a Progressive Republican in Maryland,  It took more years for the Republican Party to purge the NE of Progressive views  and there are still a few rogue holdovers.  My Liberal Democratic party conservatives have been equally purged. 

The "purification" in both parties has damaged our political campaigns.  We used to be able to choose between candidates who 55% liberal vs another who was 55% conservative.  Now our choices are 80-20. 

This can't go on.  Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan would not have a chance at getting the Republican nomination today.  Jimmy Carter ( mildly conservative) or Bill Clinton (a Centrist) could not get the Democratic nomination today.  You now have to be a fanatic, rabid, and never give an inch, to get a party nomination.  I doubt that John Kennedy could get the Democratic nomination today or Dwight Eisenhower the Republican one now.

I think there are 2 main causes for this.  First, Gerrymandering.  Gerrymandering is named for a Massachusetts government  official named "Gerry" in the 1800s where they structured a single congressional district shaped like a salamander.  It has been used over the decades since, but never so successfully as since the 1990s.  The purpose is to make sure your voting district have enough of one party to guarantee victory every election.

Back then, that couldn't be done for the whole State, because the State had many voters from both parties.  That has changed.  When a State hits about 75-80% one party, Gerrymandering works for the entire State.  It is politically wonderful but ethically evil.  But politicians trying to keep their jobs don't worry about "ethics" very much.  Both Republicans and Democrats to it.

I support measures to prevent that.

The other thing that is destroying voters from controlling elections is Dark Campaign Money.  That's  where people with extreme amounts of money can get involved in  even your local campaigns and influence them with negative ads and you don't know who is paying for it.  

I'll create an example.  "Candidate Smith voted to raise taxes twice.  Vote against Smith".  And the fact is that Smith voted against a bill to allow out-of-state industries to dump raw toxins in the local lake for a 1% tax fee on the dumpers 2 times.  Which is actually a pretty pathetically weak response.  But that's how they work. 

And connected to that is the "astroturf" campaigns.  An "astroturf campaign is the opposite of a "grass-roots" campaign.  A grassroots campaign is started by people at the bottom and builds it way up for a local cause of larger national purpose.

An astroturf campaign a fake one (like astroturf).  It starts at the top of industry or politics and works its way down prentending to be real.  They aren't, but the sure sound like it.

1. 'The Center For Consumer Freedom' supports tobacco companies and fast food restaurants.
2.  'Al Gore's Penguin Army' looked like a local criticism of  his movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', but was sponored by ExxonMobile.
3.  'Americans for Technology Leadership and Citizens Against Government Waste' was funded by Microsoft, which organized a letter drive.
4.  'Save Our Species Alliance'  - Many of these false flag operations have vaguely Orwellian names, but perhaps none are so bad as the Save Our Species Alliance. The group describes itself as “a nationwide grassroots organization comprised of property owners, farmers, ranchers, miners, foresters, builders/developers, sportsmen, recreationists, business owners and ordinary citizens sharing the common goal of making the Endangered Species Act friendlier to local conservation efforts, property owners, and local governments while at the same time, doing a better job of actually saving species at risk.” Naturally it actually opposes most of the Endangered Species Act, especially all the parts that inconvenience the logging/timber and cattle industries. Who naturally bankroll most of the group’s operations.
5. 'Working Families For Wal-Mart' was/is a group created by Wal-Mart and PR firm Edelman to give the appearance that a grassroots organization was rising up to support Wal-Mart against unions and labor. The effort mainly consisted of fake blogs including one called “Wal-Marting Across America”.

Another corporate and political trick is to pack the microphones at some town hall meetings with prepared speakers.  The announcement is made that the mikes are open, and a dozen people wearing identical clothes instantly stand in line up to say nearly identical speeches.  They are all sitting at the aisle seats waiting to go.  They use up all the audience speaking time and no one else gets a chance.

We have to find a way to stop this nonsense.  Otherwise, we will go the way of the Greeks and Romans and French and British.  Things can change, but it will take effort and determination. 

Vote for the most centrist candidate in the primary (and VOTE).  Vote for the most centrist moniee in the election.  Get people elected who will stand more toward the center.  The CENTER CAN HOLD!  We just have to all decide to reconstruct it.

Sure, we have had hotly contested elections.  But most were closer to the center than you may know.  Kennedy and Nixon were like 45-60 on the political scale.  Kennedy was hard on the Communists and he wasn't friends with hard line unions.  He expanded our actions in Vietnam.  Later Nixon worked to make peace with China and created the Environmental Protection Agency.  Watergate aside (and Kennedy had persoanal faults)  they weren't 80-20 apart. 

And now we are.  We have to get back to some degree of general agreements.  Or we will fail. 









Monday, July 25, 2016

Astonishingly Stupid Blogs

I am constantly amazed by the horribly bad advice given out by some blogs that seem to purport to know what they are talking about. 

For example, a friend mentioned a wasp sting, so to be careful of my advice, I did an internet search of sites referring specifically to wasp stings.  The top 5 results said to carefully remove the stinger without squeezing the venom gland. 

I'm so pissed reading that, I can barely even type!

Thats BEES!!!  Wasps don't sting the same way.  Bees lose their stingers when they sting and part of their insides come out that continue to pump venom.  And that causes them to die.  Bees sting once.

But wasps don't sting the same way.  They can sting over and over and don't lose an inside part, more like fangs on a snake.  They don't leave the stinger or any part behind.

So the advice was so stupid I nearly screamed in frustration.

Bees and wasps are not very closely related.  The stinging aspect is called "covergent evolution" (where some animals get similar traits indendently).

If I recall correctly, bees evolved from termites (thus the solid body structure) and wasps evolved from ants (thus the segmented body structure).  They both have stingers, but from entirely different origins.

But, OMG, if you were a parent of a child who was stung by a wasp and searched these "first up" sites, you would be desperately searching for the stinger in the child's flesh and you wouldn't find one!  Well of course not, wasp's don't leave stingers behind!!!

And their advice tells you to look for one.  AAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

I can't even tell the site how bad their answer is.  I would have to join it and that would mean weeks of scammy emails until they gave up on me.

The site is http://www.lifescript.com/.  Based on the wasp sting post, DON'T EVER GO THERE FOR ANYTHING...

Looking Up

 While I was outside with The Mews, I laid back and looked up.  I thought the tree branches and the clouds were kind of nice. Nothing import...