Fake news filter

New from the Unintentional Irony department, we have: Alex Jones of InfoWars is launching an effort to combat fake news on the internet.

Yes, the same man who thinks that the Moon landing was staged.  Who had a meltdown, complete with sobbing, on-air because he thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, and "she is the Antichrist."  Who claimed that the U.S. government was adding chemicals to juice boxes to "turn children gay."  Who promotes something called "horny goat weed" to enhance male virility.

I bet you thought I was going to say "okay, I made the last one up."  Ha, shows you what you know.  Also shows you how completely batshit insane Alex Jones is.

"We are launching a fake news analysis center to combat lies and fake stories being pushed by the mainstream media," Jones said in his radio show this week.  "What’s happening is very, very simple.  Mainstream dinosaur discredited media that have fake pollsters and fake media analysts and all the disinformation that’s been totally repudiated and proven to be a lie — they weren’t wrong, they were congenital liars on purpose — they're now desperate attempt is to flood the web through third-party sites they control with so much fake news and disinformation that it discredits the entire web itself, and then they will preside over the false flag they’ve staged and claim that they can only be trusted."

It's not that I don't think that fake news is a problem, as anyone who read my post from two days ago knows.  It's more that putting Jones in charge of deciding what constitutes disinformation is a little like the Scientologists running a cult awareness help center.

Oh, wait.  They did that.

Interesting too that in the same radio show, Jones made the claim that "three million votes in the U.S. presidential election were cast by illegal aliens, according to Greg Phillips of the VoteFraud.org organization.  If true, this would mean that Donald Trump still won the contest despite widespread vote fraud and almost certainly won the popular vote.  'We have verified more than three million votes cast by non-citizens,' tweeted Phillips after reporting that the group had completed an analysis of a database of 180 million voter registrations."

Phillips himself is no newcomer to such claims.  In 2013 he claimed in an article in Breitbart that the 2012 election was "the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world."  Funny, then, that independent non-partisan poll monitoring agencies have found no instances of voter fraud in either the 2012 or 2016 elections.  The only "voting irregularities" this time around were caused by machine failures and human error, and amounted to less than a thousand votes nationwide -- i.e., not enough to make a difference.

But that doesn't fit the narrative that the government is being run by an evil cadre of all-powerful Illuminati who will do anything to stay in power.  So Phillips is right, q.e.d.

So anyhow, it's oddly reassuring that Alex Jones isn't going to give up his loony version of reality just because his Golden Boy (or Orange Boy, as the case may be) is now the president elect.  And the fact that he's set himself up as the arbiter of what's real and what's fake is perhaps unsurprising.  We can look forward to many more missives from InfoWars about the "mainstream dinosaur discredited media," so I guess that means I will be tirelessly pursuing stories for Skeptophilia for a while longer.  Especially once this "horny goat weed" starts to kick in.

Raw deal

You know, there are things humans used to do that we've stopped doing, and usually it's for a good reason.  Bloodletting in order to cure infectious diseases, for example.  You would think this would have gone out of vogue sooner than it did, given that the treatment so often had the unfortunate side effect of death.  But these were the days before malpractice lawsuits, so perhaps that explains it.

The problem is, there's a mystique connected to stuff our ancestors did, and a whole "back to our roots" movement amongst people who apparently have an inordinate fondness for surgery without anesthesia and no indoor plumbing.  The idea is that we need to jettison three hundred years of scientific advances, which have made us the longest-lived and healthiest human society the world has ever known, simply because it sounds appealing to do things "the old way."

As an example of this, take the whole "raw milk" phenomenon.  The idea is that the nasty technological processes of pasteurization and homogenization are screwing up the nutritive value of milk, and we need to be going back to the straight-from-the-cow stuff.  This conveniently ignores the fact that the two processes, especially pasteurization, were invented to increase the shelf life of milk and to prevent the consumption of dairy products from being an avenue for such unpleasantness as cryptosporidium, shigellosis, and TB, which used to be a serious problem.  People forget that those diseases have declined not only from the use of antibiotics to treat them, but a combination of better farming practices and higher food safety standards to stop them from spreading in the first place.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is something that a couple in Australia should have been told before they gave their three-year-old son raw milk that had been approved as a "milk bath" but had big "NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION" and "FOR COSMETIC PURPOSES ONLY" messages on the label.  But to hell with that, right?  "Raw" means "natural" and "natural" means "good."  After drinking the raw milk, the little boy developed an E. coli infection that led to blood sepsis and thrombotic microangiopathy, which is as horrible as it sounds.  Symptoms include kidney failure, high fever, and poor blood clotting.  It's almost always fatal.

Which it was in this case.  The child died on October 4.

Under Australian law, the parents apparently can't be prosecuted, although you have to wonder what constitutes negligent homicide if this doesn't.  On the other hand, the case has prompted authorities to propose a new law that will fine someone $60,000 if (s)he knowingly gives someone a product to eat that is labeled as unsafe for human consumption.

Which, of course, is too little and too late for the child, who died solely because his parents are back-to-the-earth morons who have never heard of the naturalistic fallacy.

I know that makes me sound unfeeling, but for fuck's sake, a little boy died here.  If you want to give up technology and medical advances and go live in a yurt in the woods, knock yourself out.  But to visit your Luddite tendencies upon a child who has no voice in the matter is nothing short of child endangerment.  And apparently they're not the only ones who've done this.  Drinking raw milk -- including milk certified for cosmetic use only -- is becoming commonplace, despite the fact that it can be associated with severe health problems.  (Four other children in Australia were hospitalized in the past year with hemolytic uremic syndrome, a complication of E. coli infection, from drinking raw milk.)

The advances we've made in science are called "advances" for a reason.  Yes, I know they have come with tradeoffs -- from pollution to the profit motive -- but on balance, there is a good reason that our average life expectancy is over twice what it was in the Middle Ages.  Childhood mortality is extremely low, and hundreds of diseases that were death sentences a century ago are now completely treatable.

So if you think it's a good idea to jettison all that, that's up to you.  But don't bring your kids along on the ride.

Viral nonsense

One of the most frustrating things about social media is the tendency of a lot of people to post something (or respond to it) without reading any more than the headline.  I got blasted for my post two days ago asking conscientious Republicans to stand up and repudiate the people who are responsible for the upswing in hate crimes, who apparently think that the recent election gives them carte blanche to sink to their worst tendencies.  This caused one woman to shriek, "I am so sick and tired of nonsense like this!  I am GREATLY OFFENDED that you seem to think that all Republicans are racists!"

Which, if you read the post, is exactly the opposite of what I wrote.  My point was that I know most Republicans aren't racists, but it is now their obligation to condemn the ones who are.

Couple the mental laziness of assuming the headline tells you everything you need to know with the unfortunate tendency of people to forward things without checking on their veracity, and you have a real problem.  Of course, the latter is a phenomenon I've railed against so much here in Skeptophilia that I hardly need to mention it again.  But there's a more insidious force at work here -- the fact that people are now creating sensationalized, often incendiary, "fake news" designed for one reason and one reason only -- to score clicks, and therefore advertising revenue.

Let's start with a study called "Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content" led by Craig Silverman of Columbia University that looked at the speed with which stories from these fake news sites can circulate through social media. "Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement," Silverman said. "Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on. Instead, they rely on linking-out to other media reports, which themselves often only cite other media reports as well... The extent to which a fake news article can get traction was surprising to me."

Max Read, editor of Gawker, put it more succinctly: "Already ankle-deep in smarmy bullshit and fake ‘viral’garbage, we are now standing at the edge of a gurgling swamp of it."

Among the rather unsettling conclusions of Silverman's study is that not only are the consumers to blame, the mainstream media is often content to hit the fast-forward button themselves.  "Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on," Silverman writes.  "Instead, they rely on linking-out to other media reports, which themselves often only cite other media reports as well."

What is wryly amusing about all of this is that I first heard about this study in none other than The Daily Mail, which published it without any apparent sense of irony.

The BBC in a recent report states that the problem is worse even than a lack of quality control.  There are now websites whose entire raison d'être is the creation of false stories that have the ring of truth, and who then do everything they can to make sure that these stories get the maximum circulation possible.  Sites like The National Report call themselves "satire" -- but no one seems to be laughing.  Unlike The Onion, which is obviously tongue-in-cheek satire to anyone with a reasonable IQ, The National Report isn't trying to be funny.  They're trying to outrage, to scare, to whip up anger -- and to make money.

Site founder and owner Allen Montgomery is up front about this. "There are highs that you get from watching traffic spikes and kind of baiting people into the story," he says. "I just find it to be a lot of fun... There are times when it feels like a drug."

It's big business, too.  "Obviously the headline is key, and the domain name itself is very much a part of the formula -- you need to have a fake news site that looks legitimate as can be," Montgomery says.  "Beyond the headline and the first couple of paragraphs people totally stop reading, so as long as the first two or three paragraphs sound like legitimate news then you can do whatever you want at the end of the story and make it ridiculous...  We've had stories that have made $10,000.  When we really tap in to something and get it to go big then we're talking about in the thousands of dollars that are made per story."

And of course, social media plays right into the hands of people like Montgomery.  It only takes one click to forward a story to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, and damn the consequences.  The frightening thing is that such garbage circulating around the internet is reaching so many people so quickly, the contention that it could affect elections is well within the realm of possibility.

Of course, far be it from anyone to take responsibility for any of this. Just a couple of days ago, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, said that news stories (fake and otherwise) on social media "surely had no impact" on the election.

"More than 99% of content on Facebook is authentic," Zuckerberg said.  "Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.  The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics."

Which sounds like nothing but equivocation and denial of responsibility to me.  Not to mention complete bullshit.  99% accuracy of Facebook content, my ass.

As I've said before, it is incumbent upon consumers of all kinds of media to verify what they're reading, especially before they pass it along.  With sites like The National Report out there, and the increasing tendency of people not to think critically -- well, all I can say is, if you can't take five damn minutes to check Snopes, you're part of the problem.

The conspirators shift gears

If, like me,  you find yourself perusing conspiracy websites every so often, you're probably wondering what the conspiracists are gonna do now.

I mean, the whole lot of 'em claimed that Hillary Clinton was in league with the Illuminati at the very least, and at worst was herself the Antichrist.  The election was rigged in her favor, they said, and anyone who got in her way would be steamrolled.  Some claimed that her opponents wouldn't only be shoved out of the way, they'd be assassinated.  She'd win the presidency, then proceed to destroy America.

And then two things happened.  (1) The election was pretty fraud-free, as anyone with any knowledge of the electoral process anticipated.  And (2) Donald Trump won.

Now, if we were talking about normal people here, the expected response would be for them to have a good laugh at themselves, and say, "Wow, I guess we were wrong!  What a bunch of nimrods we are!"  And then vanish into well-deserved obscurity.  Alex Jones, especially, who a few weeks ago was in tears on-air when he spoke of the inevitability of a Clinton presidency, should be clean out of a job.

But these aren't normal people; these are conspiracy theorists.  Which means that the logical thing to do is to assume...

... that Donald Trump himself is part of the conspiracy.

I shit you not.  One week, and they're already turning on him.  Our first contribution from the Loose Grasp On Reality cadre is William Tapley, a right-wing evangelical loony who calls himself the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse."  (What happened to Eagles #1 and 2, I don't know.)  Tapley says that not only is Trump being controlled by the Illuminati, so is Melania.

The evidence for this?  A mural in the Denver International Airport that has two figures, a man and a woman.  The woman looks vaguely like Melania Trump.  The man, Tapley says, looks as if he is having a lewd act performed upon him by the woman.  For some reason, the only possible conclusion we can draw from all of this is that Trump is a member of the Illuminati.

"Please don’t tell Anderson Cooper what you and I both see," Tapley says, in a video you can watch at either of the links posted above.

Don't worry, Mr. Tapley.  We're not telling Anderson Cooper anything.

If that wasn't enough, we have a second contention, which is that Donald Trump wasn't born in the United States, he was born "Dawood Ibrahim Khan" in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.

While this is funnier than hell from the perspective that Trump was one of the most prominent spokespeople for the whole Obama birtherism thing, I have to admit that as a hypothesis, it doesn't have much to recommend it.  As far as I can see, they just found a photograph of a blond kid in vaguely Middle Eastern garb, and proclaimed that it must be Donald Trump as a child.

Dawood "Donald" Ibrahim-Trump

So it was kind of reassuring to find that the other trending story on conspiracy websites these days is that the earthquake that struck near Christchurch, New Zealand a couple of days ago was caused by a "seismic blasting ship" sent for some reason by President Obama.  Wikileaks, which at this point has damn little credibility left even without this story, apparently said so.  "These is science showing disturbances that are linked to the earthquakes," one commenter said (verbatim).  Which is enough proof for me.

Thanks, Obama.

Anyhow, I find it fascinating how quickly the conspiracy nutjobs are pivoting on Donald Trump.  I guess if your baseline assumption is that you can't get elected without the blessing of the Illuminati, it stands to reason, if I can use the word "reason" in this context.  But at least it's a mood lightener after the last week, which I sorely needed.  Nice to know there are still people out there who are both crazy and relatively harmless.

The right to fear

I keep telling myself "this will be my last political post," but circumstances keep intervening.

The circumstance this time was one of my Facebook friends who posted an article that said that the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump, and who are now in a serious freak-out about the future of our country, are simply sore losers who can't handle not winning.  We are, the author said, "whiny safe-space liberals" who "were told by mommy and daddy that it's only fair if everyone gets a trophy," and therefore we just need to grow up, suck it up, and deal.

My first thought, after reading this, was that it must be nice to see things that black-and-white.  Makes life easy.  In reality, of course, there were dozens of reasons that people voted the way they did (on both sides).  The pro-life/pro-choice issue, considerations of foreign policy and our relations with China, Russia, and the Middle East, concerns over the rights of LGBT individuals, the size of government, the role of the military...  The reason the election went the way it did is not a matter of a single issue.

Neither, I might add, is the reaction of the people who were on the losing side.  Maybe some of 'em are of the sore-loser variety; they do exist.  Those of you who are regular readers of Skeptophilia know that I've railed as hard as anyone about the tendency of colleges to cave in to students who want nothing more than to be continually validated, who demand that above all, they never have their preconceived notions challenged.  The whole "safe-space" concept completely contradicts the real purpose of education, which is to push the envelope, look at other points of view, expand the mind.  (Note that I am referring to "safe spaces" insofar as the term applies to intellectual pursuits; of course students should be safe with respect to discrimination, bullying, or bodily harm.)

But to characterize the protests now going on over the prospects of a Trump presidency as solely due to Democrats being poor losers is to miss the reality.  Not only does such a stance conveniently forget the ugly, and often racist, rhetoric that flew about from Republicans each time Obama won, it also ignores the fact that many of the people who are protesting are justified in being afraid.  Trump's stump speeches marginalized one group after another -- immigrants (legal and otherwise), Muslims, LGBT, women, atheists... the list goes on and on.

Oh, but that was just chest-thumping, a way to get his base excited, right?  He didn't mean any of that stuff literally, it was just the political version of "locker room talk."  Okay, add to that the appointment of Steve Bannon of Breitbart as Chief Strategist of the incoming administration -- a man who was called "a racist anti-Semite" by John Weaver, adviser to Republican Governor John Kasich of Ohio -- and you might understand why a Jewish friend of mine said, "We always heard, 'Never Again.'  I believed that.  I don't now."

And whatever you might say about Trump's intentions, it appears that some of his followers are in no doubt about taking the whole thing literally.  Hate crimes spiked right after the election -- to the point that even conservative media outlet Forbes commented upon it.  There is a new website called "Why We're Afraid," started with the intention of documenting cases where this ominous rhetoric has crossed the line into actual threats.  Here are just a few of the cases this site records:

• At work at a hospital where I'm a member of the junior staff.  An elder physician came up to me and told me I should get ready to go to the death camp now that Trump was elected.  I'm openly gay, and he knows this.
• At a church support group.  A women of Latino heritage says that a family member, a child, was told at school that he and his family were going to be sent “back to Mexico.”  The response from a member of the group: “Well, I’m sure you’ll be happier in Mexico.”
• Overheard at work at a trucking company. Oregon, 11/11/16: “This is a white country.  It’s always been a white country, and now we’re taking it back.”
• [From a U.S. citizen of Syrian heritage] I was minding my own business pumping gas when a pick-up truck filled with four white males blasting country music drove-by.  As they passed the gas station, the passenger leaned out and yelled, “Trump’s President now take that fucking dirty rag off your head you towel fucking desert nigger before I take it and hang you with it.  Make America White Again!”
• Woke up this morning to find someone had spray-painted "Die Faggot!  Your time here is over!  Trump 2016" on my car and the side of my house.

I know that like with most ugly acts, these are the actions of a few and don't represent the majority of voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump.  But for fuck's sake, don't tell the rest of us we have no right to be afraid.  Own up and admit that your candidate did incite such behavior, whether or not he "meant it literally."

And better still, let's hear you repudiate such horrific acts.  You're saying that the folks who don't support Donald Trump are overreacting, that they have no justifiable reason for fear?  Prove it.  Stand up and shout down the people who are, right now, doing these things.  You may have perfectly legitimate reasons for voting for Trump, but it is now incumbent upon you to demonstrate that a Trump presidency isn't going to turn into the horror show that is already, before a week has passed, beginning to unfold.

I grew up in rural southern Louisiana.  The lion's share of my family and high school friends are conservative, and the majority of them voted for Donald Trump.  I know them -- I know they would never condone such things.  So I'm asking them, and any other readers who are conservative: show us that you will not tolerate the scapegoating of minorities and other marginalized groups, that you will stand up for the right of all citizens of this country to live, work, and play without fear of being the targets of harassment and violence.

You want us to pipe down, to be good losers, to "suck it up and deal?"  Okay.  But only if you put your money where your mouth is and show us that we on the losing side have no reason to fear.

The Cabinet from hell

Okay, folks, I'm trying not to panic about a Trump presidency.  I won't say that I have a naturally sunny disposition -- my tendency when confronted by adversity is to shriek "Dear god we're all gonna die!" -- but I try to temper this with a "this too shall pass" attitude.

But my desire to keep my hopes for the future on an even keel were given a severe blow yesterday when I found out that the president-elect has chosen Myron Ebell to head the Environmental Protection Agency, and has his eye on either Forrest Lucas (of Lucas Oil) or Sarah "Drill, Baby, Drill" Palin for Secretary of the Interior.

And this has brought out my inner Chicken Little something fierce.

Ebell is one of the most vocal climate change deniers out there (I will not refer to them as skeptics, because that's not what they are -- skeptics respect evidence).  Ebell considered the U.S.'s participation in the Paris Accords to be "clearly an unconstitutional usurpation of the Senate’s authority."  He went on record in an interview in Vanity Fair in 2007 as saying that "There has been a little bit of warming ... but it’s been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it’s caused by human beings or not, it’s nothing to worry about."

For the record, July 2016 was the fifteenth consecutive "warmest month on record" and 2016 has broken the record for the lowest amount of Arctic sea ice ever recorded.  Which record was set in 2015, which broke the record in 2014, which broke the record in 2013, and so on and so forth.

But do go on, Mr. Ebell, about how the warming is nothing to worry about.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Then for Secretary of the Interior there's Forrest Lucas, CEO and co-founder of the petroleum products company Lucas Oil.  Lucas is not only a virulent climate-change denier, he's battled the federal government over the Endangered Species Act and been an outspoken advocate of opening up federal parklands for oil and gas drilling.  This is the man being considered to run the branch of the federal government in charge of protecting our natural resources?

Of course, he might be okay compared to the other choice, which is Sarah Palin.  I try my best to be charitable, but Palin is not only a nightmare on environmental issues, she might be the most aggressively stupid person ever to hold public office (the only ones giving her a run for her money are Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann).  The idea of putting our country's environmental health in the hands of someone who has almost certainly never read anything longer than the back of a cereal box is profoundly frightening.

And the outlandish weather keeps on happening around us, and we keep on sitting on our hands.  The day of the presidential election there was near-record rainfall on the island of Longyearbyen, which only is bizarre once you realize that Longyearbyen is 800 miles from the North Pole and it's the middle of the Arctic winter.

Okay, that's weather, not climate; a one-off, maybe?  Take a look at a study released this week from the University of Florida showing that 80% of the ecosystems studied are already showing effects from climate change.  "Some people didn’t expect this level of change for decades," said co-author James Watson, of the University of Queensland in Australia.  "The impacts of climate change are being felt with no ecosystem on Earth being spared."

The climate change deniers have characterized the scientists as being alarmists, and for the most part the public has bought that perception.  Part of it comes from our unwillingness to admit that there's a problem, because then it becomes incumbent upon us to do something about it.  Part comes from the fact that anything we could do about it would require a serious reworking of our society to lessen its dependence on fossil fuels, and that's pretty uncomfortable to consider.  The reality is, however, that scientists are the most cautious of people; they usually don't go public with information until they're absolutely sure, until their data has been checked and cross-checked and rechecked, because there's a high likelihood that if they jump the gun they'll get caught out and have to publish a retraction.  (Note the difference from politics, where you can pretty much say any fucking thing you want and no one bats an eye.)

So it's a little horrifying when scientists actually do start sound like alarmists, because at that point, we damn sure better sit up and take notice.  Which makes the report that came out just yesterday even more appalling; because it said that we may have already passed the point of no return, that it could be -- their words, mind you, not mine -- "game over for the planet."

"The results of the study demonstrate that unabated human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are likely to push Earth’s climate out of the envelope of temperature conditions that have prevailed for the last 784,000 years," said study co-author, Tobias Friedrich of the University of Hawaii.  "The only way out is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible."

Which, given the current slate of picks for filling government offices, is looking increasingly unlikely.

Taking time for gratitude

I'm going to take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to share something personal.

My first year of teaching Critical Thinking, when I felt very much like I was sort of making the curriculum up as I went along, I had a student in my class named Tamila.  When I saw her name on my class list the first day of school, I had that momentary "oh, no" feeling that all teachers can relate to.  Tamila had a reputation as a tough kid, a hardass, someone with an explosive temper and little tolerance for frustration.  My first few days with that class, I found that my fears were somewhat unfounded; she had a bit of a swagger, some bluster in her mannerisms, but was well-spoken and intelligent, and didn't seem to be walking in with a chip on her shoulder.  Still, she didn't say much in class discussions at first, just sat in the back listening and watching me with intense blue eyes that you got the feeling didn't miss much.

As time went on, Tamila began to open up.  First she started raising her hand, contributing to  discussions, asking questions, challenging what other students said.  It was always in a respectful fashion, and added a tremendous amount to the class.  She shared with us that she had been raised in poverty, and was able to explain in an articulate fashion how that changed her perspective.  She started coming in early (the class was right after lunch) and bringing her lunch along, so we could chat about stuff -- sometimes trivia, sometimes important things, and more than once because she was still thinking about what we'd talked about in class the previous day.

Toward the end of the semester, I assigned the final project, which was for students to write a personal essay explaining how their thinking had evolved over the previous months.  I thought it was a good opportunity for students to do a little self-reflection, consider how their own thought processes worked and why they believed what they did.

Tamila's essay had me in tears.  She told me how through twelve years of schooling, it had never seemed important what she thought -- that in class after class, teachers had simply told her information and expected her to recite it back a couple of weeks later.  Then you get the grade, then you go on to the next course.  Critical Thinking, she said, was the first time anyone had ever truly valued her opinion, and (more importantly) shown her that her opinions had value.  The course had, she told me, given her the confidence to think on her own, and the knowledge that she could figure stuff out when she needed to.

Right after the course ended, though, Tamila took a serious downturn.  She got pretty close to hitting bottom.  I lost touch with her -- I sent her a couple of emails asking how she was doing, but never got an answer.  It was about four years later that I ran into her, quite by accident, at a local restaurant where she'd just gotten hired on the wait staff.  She came up to me with a big grin, gave me a hug, and told me that she was doing well, had been drug and alcohol free for a year, and was optimistic about her future.  We became Facebook friends, and I enjoyed seeing her updates -- frequently about her passion, which was fishing.

A couple of months ago she sent me an email saying that she still remembered Critical Thinking and all of the discussions we'd had about issues large and small.  I responded that I still treasured her final essay -- that it was, to this day, one of the best and most heartfelt ones I'd ever seen.  She responded with a string of emoji smiley-faces and hearts and said that meant an incredible amount to her.

That was the last time I chatted with her.  And yesterday I found out that two days ago, Tamila was killed in an automobile accident.

I'm not posting this to garner sympathy for my own loss of a friend, nor to bring anyone to tears (heaven knows I've shed more than enough since I found out).  It's more to say how thankful I am that I had the opportunity to tell Tamila how much her friendship meant to me, how glad I was that I'd had the opportunity to be her teacher.  She was a young woman who I doubt heard that from very many people, either during high school or afterwards.  That I had the chance to let her know that I still remembered her with great fondness is something I will always be grateful for.

So I'll end this by encouraging you all not to put off telling the people you care about that you love them.  It's almost a cliché to say that you don't know how much time you have left, but it's also the honest truth, and I think we all need to carpe the absolute hell out of every diem we have.  Tamila told me once that I had truly changed her life, and my grief over her death is coupled with a deep gratitude that she also changed mine.

So take the time to be kind and loving and appreciative of the people you see every day.  As for me, I need to close this, because I'm having a hard time seeing the keyboard.