Saturday, December 17, 2016

More "Fake News" News


Here are some news snippets and/or my insights which have recently struck my fancy. Deem them fake news if you wish ... I consider them to be genuine ...

- If the Russians really swung our election with their hacking ... and Putin was personally involved ... wouldn't these revelations by our intelligence agencies compromise their "sources and methods" to the Ruskies? If the Obummer administration is willing to pay this high a price for dubious political gain, then they are really a bunch of doofuses. If not, then it must be just more liberal fake news.

- Hillary, at a recent holiday gathering, seems to have aged 20 years following the election of Trump. But her appearance for the debates was masterful. I wonder who did her makeup then? A mortician?

- During the recent Jill Stein recounts, 37% of Detroit voting machines did not have meter counts equivalent to actual ballots cast. One such machine had an indicated tally of 306 votes ... but when the machine was opened, it only contained 50 actual ballots. (Obviously the same ballots were run through multiple times.) These voter-fraud revelations caused the Michigan Democrat party to call off the recount with beet red faces.

- Is there such a thing as a right-wing Internet fact-checking site? The four major supposedly "no-partisan" fact checkers: Snopes, Factcheck.org, Politifact and Washington Post's Fact Checker ... all are so loaded with liberals that one can easily predict their responses regarding conservative revelations ... must be "fake news." Now, Facebook is stepping into this one-sided game with its own set of moonbats to negate the views from the other side. Who, in the end is going to check the fact checkers?

- The US employment rate's denominator is based upon not all working-age people but only upon those "looking for work." This statistic was "adjusted" late in Bill Clinton's presidential term ... which obviously artificially inflated this key statistic ... and thus deflated the unemployment rate.  If calculated the old way, the unemployment rate today would be over 9% not the 4.6% as currently reported. Is the unemployment rate an example of fake news? As governments control the reported statistics, they then control the news.

- The New York Times is vacating 8 floors of its headquarters on Times Square. Perhaps the NYT has another 5-10 years? I understand the Clinton Foundation was looking to rent this space ... until the recent election that is (just joking ...).

- If hate crimes are reported only on social media, but not by calling 911 ... then the chances of them being hoaxes is quite a bit larger ... because reporting a hoax on 911 can result in criminal consequences whereas using social media is generally without repercussions. Tip of the hat to
Howie Carr for this idea.

Afterthought: Much of the incentive for genuine fake news is the ad revenue received therefrom. Sites that don't contain ads or that don't pay for premium placement in searches (like this one) have much less reason to create or pass on so-called fake news or hyper-biased opinion.

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