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Category: Facts and Fact Checking

Climate: How the media reported on tropical storm Hilary in California

Climate: How the media reported on tropical storm Hilary in California

The spin began with “deadly”, “life threatening”, “catastrophic” speculation, then followed that afterwards with “It wasn’t that bad”, and stories saying the tropical storm was 100% caused by the Global Boiling ClimateCrisis, and then a few adding historical context of past tropical storms and even a hurricane.

Crazy: The U.S. Racial Classification System is Nonsensical

Crazy: The U.S. Racial Classification System is Nonsensical

In 1977, the US decided to classify people by race. We decided the world was made up of 4 “races” and 1 “ethnicity”. An indigenous heritage person in North America is “Native American”, but an indigenous person in South America is …. Hispanic. People in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, India and more are “Asian” “race”, which makes no sense. And many people are of mixed racial heritage (including my family) – but oddly, even if only a tiny part of the heritage is an ethnic group, it is legal to declare yourself part of that group. As the interviewed professor notes, it is now possible for a majority of the U.S. population to qualify as a “minority owned business”. That’s funny when a majority can qualify as a minority 🙂 It is a big mess that was news to me as I had not thought about these issues before.

Spin: Why misinformation didn’t wreck the midterms

Spin: Why misinformation didn’t wreck the midterms

Two years ago, we were told by multiple “sides” that misinformation and disinformation on social media threw election results. Two years later, oddly, everyone is pretending the same misinformation and disinformation no longer is an issue – which is not very believable. And then spin: “The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted,” Source: Why misinformation…

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“How junk science got spread like wildfire”

“How junk science got spread like wildfire”

Two appalling bad studies were widely shared by “experts” on social media. One was so bad, and its errors so obvious, that they only way they could have decided to share was to do so without having read even the abstract of the study.

Fake news: “COVID-19, shootings: Is mass death now tolerated in America?”

Fake news: “COVID-19, shootings: Is mass death now tolerated in America?”

Reporter asserts all Covid deaths in the U.S. were preventable. My pointing out that Covid was not controlled anywhere in the world (having accurate data collection and reporting), and my pointing out that 27 other countries had worse outcomes than the U.S. is “denying that the deaths were preventable”. Therefore, you are cautioned that my inconvenient questions and observations are official disinformation, as determined by the Associated Press. Also, remember Betteridge’s Law – any headline that ends in a question mark means the story is bull shit.

“Fact check” Telegram channel is itself fake, used to spread “misinformation”

“Fact check” Telegram channel is itself fake, used to spread “misinformation”

A Russian Telegram channel purporting to “fact check” reports about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is itself a fake operation used to spread misleading propaganda messaging. Unfortunately, many “fact check” operations, including from professional Western media, are propaganda messaging in a new form. Read this for some background on that.