No Wonder We're Fat!

Factoids on Parade!

"Food inflation hit an 18-year high in April [2008], with grocery prices rising 1.5 percent for the month, the government said Wednesday. Prices rose in every aisle--dairy, breads, meats, beverages, fruits and vegetables. It means $53 more a month to feed a family of four with a typical food budget."

-- Pioneer Press of St. Paul, MN
05/15/2008 06:59:05 AM CDT

Fake News

THE THOUGHT-CLICHE of "Fake News" (which TOF will endeavor to spell "Fake News [sic]" at least until he tires of doing so) which was launched by the old-school dish-it-out media has faded somewhat as the old-school media discovered it bounding back on them like eager little puppy dogs.

Most ironic of all ... was the outcry against "fake news," said to be fostered and encouraged by their upstart rivals in the social media, possibly with the assistance of Russian or Macedonian hackers (experts said) plying gullible Trump supporters with disinformation (or accurate but purloined information) tending to the disadvantage of Mrs Clinton. Worst of all, these dark, clandestine forces were causing a drop in readership and in newspaper advertising revenue and so endangering the livelihood of proper journalists, like the criers-out.
"The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items," thundered Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times on the day before the election.

--James Bowman, "Faking It and Making It" The New Criterion, Jan 31, 2017)

The first example to pass before TOF's optics was one played on the network news regarding a pizza parlor in Washington DC said to host a satanic child pornography ring run by DNC officials, identified by no less reliable a source than a guy in his pajamas in his mother's basement: i.e., a blogger. This so evidently inspired a bloggee that he went there with a rifle to "self-investigate the claims." At least no one did so wretched a thing back when the mainstream media was propagating similarly bootless calumnies -- quoting real-life officials who self-investigated -- about satanic day-care centers. They used firearms and juries to clap innocent people in jail. Satanic child-care is always a winner in stirring folks up, whether it is a blogger or a district attorney who does the stirring.

Fake News Redux

The recent revelation that bomb threats directed to Jewish Community Centers in the United States and two Canadian provinces originated in Ashkelon, Israel, by an Israeli hacker "with a medical condition" raises once again the theme by Gilbert and Sullivan:

"Things are seldom what they seem
Skim milk masquerades as cream"

Scientists know -- or used to know -- that a fact is not self-demonstrating. What the fact means depends on other things and what seems to support one theory may in fact support another. So that bomb threats called into JCC centers seemed to mean a rise in antisemitism in Canada and the USA, but might mean instead a mentally disturbed hacker acting out. 

In the ever popular category of Fake News there was an item that popped up four months ago (2 December 2016) in the New York media. It was first reported in DNAinfo, a neighborhood newspaper.

MANHATTAN — A Muslim woman wearing a hijab was harassed by three drunk men on a Manhattan 6 train who called her a “f---ing terrorist” before trying to pull off her head scarf Thursday night, DNAinfo New York has learned.
The 18-year-old boarded a northbound 6 train at Park Avenue and 23rd Street after attending an event at Baruch College when three young white men approached her yelling "Donald Trump," sources said.
One of them screamed, "Look, there is a f----g terrorist! Get out of this country, you don’t belong here!”

...

The story naturally went viral, with other news outlets reporting her allegations and Yasmin Seweid [the young woman in question] giving interviews to local news stations.

Unlike other shocking stories, this article is not attended by the usual flotilla of "alleged" or "unsubstantiated" or "offered no evidence."  This is because any story that tends to reinforce a dominant paradigm is accepted with little question, as Thucydides noted a long time ago:

For the usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ the full force of reason in rejecting what they find unpalatable.

-- Thucydides IV, 108

We can see this in the media reactions to various stories regarding this vs that public figure.

The media did carry the follow-up story: viz., that the young woman, Yasmin Seweid, had made the whole thing up "because of problems she was having with her family," namely that she had missed a curfew.

A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that incidents like this were indicative of the "tremendous psychological stress and pressure" that Muslims are under. IOW, even if it was a false report, it darned well should have been true because Trump. Or something.

Her sister blamed the media for covering the story and blamed the NYPD for investigating the hate crime claim, apparently not aware that in the USA this is what these two institutions do. She wrote on Facebook:

“The NYPD should have never been involved in the first place
even if the incident did happen.”

But of course that is just what NYPD should have done if a crime has been reported. The police grew suspicious when no witnesses or surveillance footage could be found. The sister complained that:

"Things snowballed out of our control." 

which indicated a peculiar attitude toward the purpose of crime reporting. She wrote further:

"I’m deeply concerned about the mental state of young Muslim women who feel that they have to lie so intensely to survive."

To survive? Survive what? What was going to happen to her for staying out past her curfew? Why are we reminded so strongly of Tawana Brawley, who also lied about staying out from fear of consequences at home?

And why is one of the tags on the story "Donald Trump"? 

Fake News of the Day

NBC (and one supposes, other outlets) reports that Kellyanne Conway, apparently a flack with the current administration, committed a serious breach of ethics by endorsing a product. She is reported to have said on a TV news show, "Go buy Ivanka’s stuff!" referring to a clothing line that uses Ivanka Trump's name for marketing. Nordstrom's, which had recently dropped the line, said that their decision was a purely business decision, and this claim was repeated without being verified.

There was no mention of the vociferous boycott movement initiated late last year that targeted (among others) Nordstrom's precisely because they carried good bearing Ivanka Trump's name. http://fortune.com/20…/…/14/boycott-targets-trump-retailers/

Noting the propensity of news shows to quote only isolated sentences or even one or two words, clipped and pruned, and often distracted by graphics-in-motion on the screen, it may be useful to look at Conway's entire statement. Finding people who speak in whole paragraphs is unusual enough, since thoughts are carried in paragraphs, not in individual words, that we should treasure the occasion. TV news evidently prefers the micro-sound bite because it leaves more time for shampoo commercials and other important stuff.

In the interview, Conway said in response to Nordstrom's action:

“I do find it ironic that you have got some executives all over the internet bragging about what they have done to her and her line, and yet, they are using the most prominent woman in Donald Trump’s, you know, most prominent his daughter, using her, who has been a champion for women empowerment of women in the workplace, to get to him. I think people could see through that. Go buy Ivanka’s stuff! I hate shopping, and I will go get some myself today.”

This sounds a bit different than a product endorsement. It sounds more like a defiance of the calls to boycott someone's wares because of what someone else (her father) has said or done.

Fake News I

The topic of "Fake News" being much in the news lately, TOF thought he would much amuse himself by noting occasional sightings of the species here and there in the wild. Not being a frequenter of many of the places where these things are said to dwell -- indeed, he has never heard of many of them -- he is forced to rely upon his own sources and upon logical and rational analysis to identify them.