Viral nonsense

I'm going to issue another plea to please please puhleeeezz check your sources before posting stuff.

This goes double for the viral meme type shit you see every single day on social media.  Most of that stuff -- and I'm not talking about the ones that were created purely for the humor value -- is the result of someone throwing together a few intended-to-be-pithy quotes with a photograph downloaded from the internet, so it's only as accurate as the person who made it.

In other words, not very.

Here's an example that I'm seeing all over the place lately:

Okay, let's take a look at this piece by piece.

1. Tilapia has bones.  Anyone who's ever prepared tilapia for cooking knows this.
2. It is an ordinary fish, with not only bones, but skin.  Note that the photograph of the damn fish right in the image shows that it has skin.
3. You can certainly overcook it, like you can with anything.  Leave it in the oven for three hours, and you'll have fish jerky.
4. Tilapia is found in the wild.  It's native to Africa.  Most tilapia being sold is raised on fish farms, so that part is correct, showing the truth of the old adage that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
5. I'm not even sure what "the Algae & lake plant, or replaced by gmo soy & corn" means.  Maybe they're trying to say that farmed tilapia is sometimes fed genetically-modified soy or corn-based products, which could well be, but is completely irrelevant even if it's true.
6. Eating tilapia is not worse than bacon and hamburgers.  It's low in overall calories and saturated fats, and is a good source of protein.
7. It'd be odd if tilapia were unusually high in dioxins, as dioxins are produced by such activities as burning plastic.  In fact, according to Medical News Today, due to EPA regulations, the amount of dioxins in the environment in the USA is 90% reduced from what it was thirty years ago -- and they recommend eating fish as a way of decreasing the amount of dioxin in your diet.
8. Dioxin "can take up to 11 years to clear?"  Not ten or twelve?  Okay, now you're just pulling this out of your ass.
9. You are not killing your family by serving them tilapia.  For fuck's sake.

Then, there's this nonsense that I've seen over and over:

Just out of curiosity, how desperate do you have to be to photoshop Trump into a photograph in order to make him look like a compassionate human being?  I mean, I get that there's not much else you can do.

But still.

If you're curious, the photograph doesn't even come from Hurricane Florence (as the post claims, along with a snarky "You won't see this on the news -- share with everyone!" caption).  It comes from the 2015 flooding in Texas.  Here's the unaltered photo:

I do think it's kind of inadvertently hilarious that when they photoshopped Trump into the picture, they made it look like he's handing the guy a MAGA hat.  "Hey, thanks for being here.  I was expecting more people to show up and applaud me, but I guess the killer flood swept them away.  Here, have a hat."


Then there's latest craze from Gwyneth "Snake Oil" Paltrow's company Goop, which is: "wearable stickers."  Me, I thought all stickers were wearable in the sense that you can stick them to your skin.  Thus the name.

But that's not what she's talking about.  These stickers, which are a "major obsession around Goop HQ," are supposed to "rebalance the energy frequencies in your body."

Whatever the fuck that means.

Here's a photo of a woman with three of them on her arm:

And the sales pitch:

Human bodies operate at an ideal energetic frequency, but everyday stresses and anxiety can throw off our internal balance, depleting our energy reserves and weakening our immune systems.  Body Vibes stickers come pre-programmed to an ideal frequency, allowing them to target imbalances.  While you’re wearing them—close to your heart, on your left shoulder or arm—they’ll fill in the deficiencies in your reserves, creating a calming effect, smoothing out both physical tension and anxiety.  The founders, both aestheticians, also say they help clear skin by reducing inflammation and boosting cell turnover.

Which is nearly "tilapia is killing you" levels of bullshit.  Just to point out one thing -- because even explaining this far is giving Paltrow far more credit than she deserves -- there's no such thing as an "energy frequency" because energy and frequency are two entirely different things.  Saying "energy frequency" is like asking someone what their "weight speed" is.

So I'm begging you.  Do a quick search online before reposting this stuff.  There are a ton of fact-check and skeptical analysis sites where you can at least do a first-order look at whether there's any truth to it.  The only other way to approach this is to comment "THIS IS NONSENSE" every time you see things like this, and that's beginning to feel a little like trying to patch the hole in the Titanic with duct tape.

 *****************************

This week's recommendation is a classic.

When I was a junior in college, I took a class called Seminar, which had a new focus/topic each semester.  That semester's course was a survey of the Book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.  Hofstadter does a masterful job of tying together three disparate realms -- number theory, the art of M. C. Escher, and the contrapuntal music of J. S. Bach.

It makes for a fascinating journey.  I'll warn you that the sections in the last third of the book that are about number theory and the work of mathematician Kurt Gödel get to be some rough going, and despite my pretty solid background in math, I found them a struggle to understand in places.  But the difficulties are well worth it.  Pick up a copy of what my classmates and I came to refer to lovingly as GEB, and fasten your seatbelt for a hell of a ride.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Meme wars

It's time we all make a commitment to the truth.

I am sick unto death of people trying to score political points by spreading around falsehoods on the internet.  With the access to technology most of us have, it usually takes less than five minutes to check on the veracity of what you're about to post before you post it.  Instead, people seem content to spread around bullshit that conforms to their preconceived notions, whether or not it's true.

This is inexcusable.  And it needs to stop.

And yes, it's both sides of the political aisle that are guilty of this.  Let's start with this one, that was making the rounds a few months ago:

Ted Cruz never said that.  Snopes has a link to a transcript of the entire speech he made at Liberty University on the 23rd of March, 2015.  That line appears nowhere.

The worst part?  When I told the person who posted this that it was fake, his response was, "Yes, but I'm sure he believes it.  He could have said it."

You know what?  I don't give a flying fuck what Ted Cruz, or anyone else, could have said.  The fact, is, he didn't say it.  Claiming that he did is a lie.  Don't try to tell me that the truth doesn't matter.

Next up, Elizabeth Warren:

That's another big nope.  Snopes says it's "unproven," but adds, "We were unable to locate any interviews, footage, clips, tweets, or other instances in which Elizabeth Warren said anything remotely resembling the phrase quoted above."

I.e., she didn't say it.  Moving on.

There's this one, attributed to Mitt Romney:

Not only did Romney not say that, Laura Ingraham didn't air a show on that date, and Romney was not her guest at any time in early 2014.

The false attributions don't stop at political figures:

This one started making the rounds right after Prince died, so he conveniently couldn't say "I never said that."  Fortunately, Snopes did.

How about this one, trying to discredit Donald Trump:

The people at FactCheck.org researched this one exhaustively.  Trump never said any such thing, not in 1998 or any other year.

Most appallingly, there's this one:

No, sorry for those of you who'd like to believe this; Hillary Clinton is not an "advocate for rapists."  In 1975 she was a defense attorney.  Do you know what a defense attorney's job is?  Go ahead, I'll wait while you look it up.

The truth is that Clinton was appointed to defend the accused rapist, Tom Taylor, and according to the chief prosecutor, Mahlon Gibson, "Hillary told me she didn’t want to take that case, she made that very clear."  Snopes goes on to say:

As for the claim that Hillary Clinton "knew the defendant was guilty," she couldn't possibly have known that unless she were present when the incident in question occurred.  Even if she surmised that the defendant was likely guilty based upon the evidence and/or his statements, she was obliged to operate under the rules of the U.S. legal system, which assume the accused to be innocent until proved guilty.

And so on and so forth.

You know what?  I don't honestly care what political party you belong to, whether you're liberal or conservative or something else entirely.  I don't care who you're planning to vote for next November, or if you're sick of the whole shebang and decide to stay home.

But I do care about the truth.  So for all of you people with the fast-forward-finger out there; take five damn minutes and check to see if what you're posting is true before you post it.  If posting stupid stuff politicians do and say gets you off, then there's certainly enough to choose from without spreading around outright falsehoods.   You are helping nothing, and proving nothing, by circulating bullshit because it lines up with what you'd like to be true.

What you're doing is making yourself complicit in a lie.

Fast forward

Can I plead with you on bended knee about something?

Will you all promise that if you forward something, or post it on Facebook or Twitter, you'll do three minutes of research and figure out if what you're sending along is correct?

Because I'm sick unto death of seeing stuff like this over and over:

Look, we get it, okay?  You hate President Obama.  If President Obama simultaneously figured out how to erase the national debt, end all war, and cure cancer, you'd complain that he had only done it to distract you from the fact that he failed to stop the Benghazi attack in 2012 that killed four Americans.

But you are not helping your case any by lying.  Let's start with the fact that there is no "Kenyan language"; there are 68 languages spoken in Kenya, of which Swahili, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, and Kamba are the most common.  "Denali" comes from the Koyukon Athabaskan language of (Guess where?  You'll never guess) Alaska, from a word that means "high" or "tall."  The Swahili words for "black" and "power" are "nyeusi" and "nguvu;" in Kikuyu it's "iru" and "thitma;" in Kalenjin, "oosek" and "lugumek;" and so on.

Do you see anything that looks the least bit like "Denali" in there?

No, me neither.

Then there's this thing, that has been circulated so much that it makes me want to scream:

I started out responding every time I saw this with, "Oh, you mean like we still do in damn near every school in America?", but I've seen it so many times that I've kind of given up.  It would take you less than the aforementioned three minutes -- something like fifteen seconds, even with a slow connection -- to verify that the Pledge is still recited in every public school in the United States, and a great many private ones, every single morning.  But the people who this one appeals to seem to be unhappy if they're not embattled, so it's much easier to thump their chests and say, "Let me pass along something that conforms to my preconceived notions of how the world is!  That's how staunchly 'Murikan I am!" than it is to find out if what they're angry about is actually true.

But it's not only the conservatives that do this.  How about this one?

This one circulated around the channels of "Everything the US Does Sucks" for ages.  You'd think that it'd be easy enough to check -- after all, whoever created this image kindly listed all of the countries we allegedly invaded -- but again, it's easier just to get outraged and say, "hell yes!" and post it to your Facebook than it is to see if it's true.

Turns out, some political scientists fact-checked the list, and by the generally accepted definition of "invasion," only three qualify (Grenada, Panama, and Iraq).  Another seven are possibilities, if you stretch the definition to include sending troops to help fighters already battling with the government (Libya, Kuwait, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia).  But this list includes Liberia -- where US troops acted as peacekeepers to stop the citizens from slaughtering each other -- and Congo, where they were sent in for humanitarian aid after refugees from the Rwandan genocide started pouring across the border!

Outrage is easy.  The trouble is, making sure you're not passing along a falsehood is easy, too, in these days where information is available at the touch of a keyboard.  There is no excuse for the fast-forward-finger.

The bottom line is: truth matters.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan so eloquently put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  If you want to argue your position, that's fine and dandy, whether or not I agree with you.  But supporting your cause with lies helps nothing and no one.

All it does is make it look like you don't know how to do a Google search.