Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for May 13, 2022

People often use critical thinking skills when buying expensive things such as cars. It’s rare for someone to make their multi-thousand dollar purchase with thoughts like “I don’t see any reason why the car salesman might try to misdirect me”. Some research on details such as mileage, recalls, and alternatives are usually made in advance of signing on the dotted line. But with science, and politics, and conspiracy theories? Not so much.

I haven’t used “As you are probably aware..” for a long time.

You think it’s bad now, wait until Elon Musk owns Twitter.

Hard to interpret the joke, but the financial models are broken in several ways. Right now the dominant models are disguised propaganda (a la FAUX) and disaster porn (a la CNN). The propaganda is funded by extremely rich folks with an unsolvable problem: “Thar ain’t no profit big enough.” The disaster porn model only works when there’s a disaster, so it’s like the kid with a hammer trying to see everything as a nail.

Then you have to consider the “production costs”. Finding the truth is difficult and expensive—and then it has to compete with free on the big Internet. In contrast, BS is infinitely cheap and infinitely abundant and often aggressively supported by advertisers, who, after all, prefer easily manipulated and gullible suckers.

I’d like to see a solution-oriented financial model for journalism. At it would apply right here, the comic could be followed by some links for projects that can solve the problems the joke is based on. If enough of us want to donate for one of the projects, then it would get the money and the comic (or website or producer of a video or author of a news story) would get a share for helping.

Don’t know where the phrase originated but have rarely ever seen a situation where it was accurate.

Truth is to be found somewhere between the (NY) Post and Times, but that space is portrayed as empty.

I haven’t heard those terms used in movie dialog either. But then movie dialog isn’t really written for the exchange of ideas between characters in the movies I watch.

The Post is owned by Murdoch (who owns Fox). The Times is owned by a reputable company.

Here is a brain teaser from Scientific American on this very subject.

A ball and a bat cost $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The knee-jerk reaction is that the ball costs 10 cents. If you do the math, the actual answers are $0.05 for the ball and %1.05 for the bat.

People don’t think when faced with “obvious” answers, it’s one of the reasons why scams work so well.

Now if we are talking about Republicans when you prove to them that they are wrong, first of all they won’t get it because it involves math. This is especially true in Florida where you may be accused of using liberal, “Critical Race Theory” math. Good, conservative math says that 73 million votes is more than 81 million votes and if you recount votes often enough, eventually the results will change. I think this works on he same principles as “Nazi science.”

Secondly they will complain loudly that you are stupid because balls and bats cost a lot more than $1.10. After fake news and name calling, diversion is their favorite debate tactic.

Media. Talking heads. Opinion pieces.

How about… Reporters? Reporters who report on verified and verifiable, unbiased facts.

Naw, that would never fly in America.

“Remember, what you see and what you hear is NOT what’s happening!”

The Velveeta Voldemort.

There’s an old saying about journalism: "“If someone says it’s raining & another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the [expletive] window and find out which is true.”

All things being equal, arithmetic would be a lot simpler.

Well, there you go. That’s just what we need. A Fox News neighborhood service center. (I propose we build walls around our cities instead of the whole country. Think local. Avoid global.) ..medeival, right?

Now, those newspaper kiosks usually lead with the phrase “Going out of Business”

As it happens, that’s a pretty good idea, all things considered.

Let me be clear, that’s not who we are, that’s not what we’re about, it’s time to try something new…

“Quantified news” – LOL. I remember one parody slogan “All the news that fits, we print.”

Considering all the bigots, perverts and morons on social media, I’m not sure equality is anything I want to shoot for.

Kevin McCarthy has taken refuge atop an oil tank.They think they’ve got Kevin McCarthy….well,they haven’t got Kevin McCarthy……

Not so much, LATELY anyway.

All media is equal, but some is more equal than others

If there were a newspaper stand with a sign saying “truth” I would try it out.

In this great country of Oz, media hasn’t been ‘equal’ for as long as I can remember.

The problem is that Nothing is Ever “Equal”.