Category Archives: Society

Fact Checking

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An email trumpeting that “Casa D’Ice is back!” has made the rounds again.

For anyone not in the know, Casa D’Ice is a restaurant in North Versailles, Pennsylvania, some 10 miles from Pittsburgh. The restaurant has a lighted message board sign out front, the kind that typically heralds the daily special or the Sunday sermon with black slide-in-the-groove lettering. Outspoken owner Bill Balsamico changes the sign every couple of weeks when he feels the need to make a political statement.

I don’t think Mr. Balsamico uses factcheck.org. In fact (heh) I reckon that 90.31% of all online content is not fact checked.

Fact checking is a reporting term for verifying statements through several reliable, independent sources before publication. We expect the professional media to do it and we censure the professional media when they do not. The Dan Rather fiasco over his CBS News story about President Bush’s Air National Guard service is a case in point. His statement on the documents that he reported were written by President Bush’s National Guard commander lead the 272,000 hits returned when I Googled “Dan Rather” “CBS News.”

I did not fact check my 90% statistic. I made it up out of thin air but I’ll suggest that someone out there can correct me. I’ll further suggest that I’m within 20% of the correct answer. That may be seriously poor statistically but it still means there is a lot of misinformation online.

According to another email this week, a 1,200 pound Great White shark was caught in the Chesapeake over the weekend. That’s wrong, too.

This Casa D’Ice sign caught my eye first: “President Bush’s great fuel efficiency program on trucks & SUVs [will] save 30 gallons in 2008.” I couldn’t find anything to back that up. The current energy bill requires auto companies to achieve a 35-mpg CAFE by 2020. “Social security recipients get 3 dollar raise per month.” The actual Social Security Benefit COLA Increase for 2008 was 2.3 Percent.

I like Mr. Balsamico’s signs anyway. They are pithy–sometimes Deckish–and popular. His heart is in the right place even if he sometimes uses “Internet wisdom” for his source. I have singled him out not because he is doing a bad thing but because he could do his good thing so much better. More people see Mr. Balsamico’s signs than read this blog. Since the signs have gone viral, many many more people see photos of Mr. Balsamico’s thoughts than read this blog.

All that leads me to posit this theory: Internet Information Popularity is inversely proportional to Internet Information Accuracy.

That’s a rather sad commentary.

FactCheck.org describes its own goal as “[reducing] the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center project is run by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.

Press 1 for Spanglish

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I paid $3 to wash my truck in a $2.50 carwash over the weekend. That irritated me because I needed an extra few minutes to finish rinsing the thing and the Car Wash sign said “Add quarters for extra time.”

Of course, when I added the two extra quarters for extra time, it simply swallowed them and blinked at me.

Where are the illegal aliens when you need them? I would gladly pay $3 to some illegals to wash my truck. I went searching for some and got 3,170,000 hits in Google alone. Outraged Patriots leads that list.

Thirteen motel owners in Mesa, Arizona, were sentenced last week for catering to human smugglers and conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens. UPI reported that a US task force raided several Latino commercial establishments and arrested 49 people alleged to be illegal aliens who worked for a security company.

Huh. My great-x8-grandfather, Richard Barnard (ber-NARD), was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, and sailed for the New World about 1642. Richard accompanied William Penn to the fertile southeastern counties of Pennsylvania (1). I guess that means that to the Lenni Lenape, my great x 8 grandfather was an illegal alien. Good thing the Lenni Lenape had less Homeland Security than we have today. And that conquerors don’t have to learn the Algonquian language known as Lenape (now “Delaware”).

I can think of a few reasons we don’t want people coming here from other countries to do the work we apparently don’t want to do. After all, they might change the way we live, change the foods we eat, change the way we manufacture things, and teach our wimmens a thing or two about love.

I’m all for it. After all, I come from alien stock. Just ask my kids. So do you, and you, and you. That fresh blood is one part of what makes this country great. I say we should spend our security efforts filtering out the peeps who want to rob and rape and maim and kill us and then invite the others in for a good party.

As long as we quit telling them they don’t have to learn English.


Want more detail? I wrote the op-ed Norman – French – English – Italian – Dutch – American for the Burlington Free Press about a dozen years ago. You can read it here.

Pennies

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I get a lot of, um, opportunities to contribute to one cause or another. Some are actual non-profits. Others are simple pitches for a product. Most are couched as “Buy Now!” and “Just 27 cents per day!”

I didn’t understand until I read Nicholas Epley opining in the New York Times:

“People are more likely to donate to a charity
when the cost is described in terms of pennies
per day instead of dollars per year.”

It has never occurred to me NOT to multiply it out. That 27 cents a day for the DVR is another $100 bucks I won’t have at the end of the year. I do that automagically and without much forebrain activity.

People are sheep. That isn’t news.

Oh. Wait. Our fuel oil for last year cost only $8.22 per day. And this year is a leap year so it will be even less.

There. Wasn’t that better?<BR>