Keeping Things Straight

FACT:

Information without emotion

OPINION:

Information in light of experience

IGNORANCE:

Opinion without information

STUPIDITY:

Opinion contrary to known fact

Some Facts

• Trump negotiated directly with the Taliban terrorists, purposely excluding the Afghan Army and the government in Kabul
• Trump drew down US forces from 13,000 to 2,500, making them vulnerable to attack
• Trump ordered the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from prison, one of whom would become the new leader of Afghanistan
• Trump invited Taliban leaders to Camp David on the 9/11 anniversary
• Trump agreed to a May 1st withdrawal, and then bragged about how he didn't have an exit strategy
• Trump refused to brief the incoming Biden team on the situation in Afghanistan
• Trump shut down all but one US airbase in Afghanistan, crippling our ability to extract our assets safely

Pay heed to the facts, not the bullshit.

Score Card

It's good to know Shep Smith is trying to keep it 100, even though we can't really be sure this isn't just ass-covering.  

But I think get it - DumFux News needs some kind of beard; they need plausible deniability; something that muddies up the water a little; something that lets them maintain the illusion that their "coverage" during the day is real news while their prime time programming is all about opinion and blah blah blah.

Anyway, Media Matters For America does some good work once in a while by making these mashups so we can keep track of some of the epic volume of bullshit that flies out of Cult45 at record speed.

Today's Fake News

Here in the Age Of Alt-Fact, we have to get used to Poe's Law having supplanted Godwin's Law.

Alas, snopes.com says it's false.

Fact Checking

FactCheck.org

The Republican presidential candidates met for their second debate on Sept. 16, this one hosted by CNN at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California. We found they strayed from the facts on numerous issues, including:

--Donald Trump told a story linking vaccination to autism, but there’s no evidence that recommended vaccines cause autism. 

--And Sen. Rand Paul suggested that it would be safer to spread out recommended vaccines, but there’s no evidence of that, either.

--Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump donated to his gubernatorial campaign to get him to change his mind on casino gambling in Florida. But Trump denied he ever wanted to bring casino gambling to the state. A former lobbyist says he did.

--Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said that Hillary Clinton was “under investigation by the FBI” because she “destroyed government records.” Not true. She had the authority to delete personal emails.

--Trump said that “illegal immigration” cost “more than $200 billion a year.” We couldn’t find any support for that. Actually, it could cost taxpayers $137 billion or more to deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, as Trump proposes.

--Trump again wrongly said that Mexico doesn’t have a birthright citizenship policy like the United States. It does.

--Carly Fiorina said that the Planned Parenthood videos released by an anti-abortion group showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” But that scene isn’t in any of the videos.

--Fiorina repeated familiar boasts about her time at Hewlett-Packard, saying the size of the company “doubled,” without mentioning that was due to a merger with Compaq, and she cherry-picked other statistics.

--Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said that U.S. policies to combat climate change would “do absolutely nothing.” The U.S. acting alone would have a small effect on rising temperatures and sea levels, and experts say U.S. leadership on the issue would prompt other nations to act.

--In the “happy hour” debate, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham glossed over the accompanying tax increases when he said only that Ronald Reagan and then-House Speaker Tip O’Neill “found a way to save Social Security from bankruptcy by adjusting the age of retirement from 65 to 67.”

Today's Quotes

"Evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould, Evolutionary Biologist

"That evolution is a theory in the proper scientific sense means that there is both a fact of evolution to be explained and a well-supported mechanistic framework to account for it."
-Richard Lenski, Biologist

"One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun."
-Richard Dawkins, Biologist

"Today, nearly all biologists acknowledge that evolution is a fact. The term theory is no longer appropriate except when referring to the various models that attempt to explain how life evolves... it is important to understand that the current questions about how life evolves in no way implies any disagreement over the fact of evolution."
-Neil Campbell, Biologist

"The basic theory of evolution has been confirmed so completely that most modern biologists consider evolution simply a fact. How else except by the word evolution can we designate the sequence of faunas and floras in precisely dated geological strata? And evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation."
-Ernst Mayr, Biologist

At The Nexus

...of dreams and reality - yeah, OK it's pretty obviously a little Twilight Zoney, but damn if this ain't impressive either way.