Category: Religion

How I try to stay informed…

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Since the news business has changed from reporting to profits, keeping eyeballs is what it is all about. 

Fox found this out after they accurately reported that Trump was projected to lose Arizona. Tucker Carlson then ranted about how their viewership was going down, along with the stock price with which he was richly compensated. He understood that their viewers were  there to hear what they need to believe. And if they didn’t get it, they would move to Newsmax, Onan and other alternative news sources that would feed the beast.

Rush Limbaugh always understood that and bragged that he was an Entertainer. Are you entertained?

For any democracy to it operate efficiently, it needs an informed electorate. So how do you sort out the news from the fire hose of information flow these days?

1)Realize that your. 00001 experience of the world contributes to 80% of your worldview. Approach your understanding with a scientist skepticism that he’s always willing to accept that he could be wrong.

 2)Intentionally expose yourself to opposing views. We don’t like to do this because it makes us uncomfortable. Over the years I have developed a diversity of writers that I follow on the hellscape that is Twitter. Most of us don’t have a luxury of time to do that. It’s not easy being free, when you don’t have an emperor to make all the decisions for you.

3) Turn off the Crisis News networks . If there isn’t good video footage, or if the victim isn’t attractive, you won’t hear about it . Just like the print media, television is all about eyeballs. Now there are live news events that television coverage excels at. Television Studios nowadays don’t need to wait for their cameras to warm up to go live. Walter Cronkite had to wait to give the world the shocking news about Kennedy being shot in Dallas.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Credit CBS via Landov

4) Read some news sources from outside the United States bubble. Here are some free websites that also have free apps for your handhelds. 

A good one to see the southeast Asian perspective on the world is the Asia Times  https://asiatimes.com/

Also, try the Arab news source https://www.aljazeera.com/

France 24 for another perspective https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/

The Guardian is one of the few British rags that isn’t just a tabloid http://thrguardian.com/

If you can afford subscription the Financial Times, The Week, The Economist, Wall Street Journal and NY Times will cover a lot of area.

A great little tool that I use is an aggregator that ranks stories by their number of hits in real time. Bookmark this handy page

https://www.memeorandum.com

5) Last, but not least, Social Media is just that and not a source of verifiable information. Outrage and anger build engagement. Realize that you are being baited with these emotions to click on their stories.

The Difference Between American and European Abortion Laws

 European countries that have 12-week limits on “elective” abortions still make it fairly easy for women to get abortions later on, with relatively broad exceptions for mental health or socioeconomic circumstances. Republicans have aggressively fought against similar exceptions, and in particular have worked to bar consideration of mental health risk — even the risk of suicide if a pregnancy continues — as a factor.

And in other ways, European countries make it easier to get an abortion than in even relatively permissive jurisdictions in the United States. Across Europe, abortion services are covered under national health insurance, meaning the cost of accessing care is a far lower barrier for pregnant people facing time constraints.By contrast, in the US, cost is one of the biggest hurdles to ending a pregnancy. Even though more than 90 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, roughly 75 percent of all US abortion patients are low-income according to 2014 numbers, and researchers find Americans needing care in the second trimester tend to be those with less education, Black women, and women who have experienced “multiple disruptive events” in the past year, such as losing a job.

https://www.vox.com/23741997/republicans-12-week-abortion-bans-europe-roe-dobbs

What you didn’t know about Noah’s Ark

Ancient Babylonian Flood Myth That Inspired Biblical Tale Had A Dark Twist

Noah’s Ark (1846), by the American folk painter Edward Hicks.

The Babylonian flood myth that inspired the story of Noah’s Ark may also include the world’s oldest fake news.

https://www.iflscience.com/ancient-babylonian-flood-myth-that-inspired-biblical-tale-had-a-dark-twist-69014

The next epidemic could be home grown

Measles is wildly contagious, can linger in air for hours, and kills 1/1000 it infects. It also kinda resets your immune system so you can get sick from everything you’ve been sick from again, like you are a toddler in preschool

Interestingly, in a 1990 SC case that denied religious freedoms to Native Americans and privileged the rights of the gov’t, *Scalia,* the darling of conservatives, says religious beliefs don’t give ppl the right to reject “compulsory vaccination laws.”

The rest of the world stares in disbelief.

https://www.unicef.org/health/childhood-diseases

Meanwhile Russia persuades Americans to become anti-vaxers.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2022-02-25/heres-what-putins-disinformation-war-looks-like-on-the-internet

Putin’s Long War Against American Science
by William J. Broad


A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/9357/

How Germs changed History

Plague of Athens

Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/04/microbes-pathogens-plagues-human-civilization-history/673753/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230418&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

How Your Brain Is Like The Cosmic Web

Interestingly enough, the total number of neurons in the human brain falls in the same ballpark of the number of galaxies in the observable universe.

It is truly a remarkable fact that the cosmic web is more similar to the human brain than it is to the interior of a galaxy; or that the neuronal network is more similar to the cosmic web than it is to the interior of a neuronal body. Despite extraordinary differences in substrate, physical mechanisms, and size, the human neuronal network and the cosmic web of galaxies, when considered with the tools of information theory, are strikingly similar.

http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/the-strange-similarity-of-neuron-and-galaxy-networks

How to Disagree

If we’re all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here’s an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

Source: How to Disagree

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