How to avoid “fake news”

Today, when REAL news is called “fake news”, and “fake news” is called “real news”, how can you tell which is which, especially if Rudy Giuliani has said that “truth isn’t truth”?

If you are familiar with the 14 defining characteristics of fascism (and you should be) , #6 directly applies to FOX “news” today:

“Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.”

https://rense.com/general37/fascism.htm

I’ve always maintained that it is important to consider the source when attempting to evaluate a particular news article. As a general rule, I have found that conservative sources are less reliable than liberal sources, but there definitely are exceptions to the rule.

I’ve seen several lists that analyze the veracity of news sources, but the vast majority feel that British sources, as well as public television/radio are the most reliable.

You’ll notice that the Wall Street Journal, a conservative publication, is ranked fairly high, and Occupy Democrats, a liberal publication, is ranked very low. However, ALL of the “main stream media” sources (MSNBC, NBC, CNN, and CBS) are rated higher than FOX,

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-are-the-most-and-the-least-trusted-news-sources-in-the-us-2017-08-03

If you are looking to do a quick fact check, then Wikipedia is a good place to start. If you are planning to do a research paper, Wikipedia is NOT a good source, for the following reasons:

1)    Contributors to the site are usually anonymous

2)   The administrators for the site are responsible for managing an average of 32,000 pages

3)   Sometimes, the information is not accurate

4)   Information on the site can be easily manipulated.

Generally speaking, articles that have been published by encyclopedias, academic journals, magazines, newspapers and books, should be fairly reliable because they have been fact checked before they were published. However, if you are writing a college term paper, or need more accurate information, then you need to use some databases. Database companies (and there are many) analyze a variety of news articles, and do FURTHER fact checking. Once completed, the updates stories are sold to institutions of higher learning, government organizations, or other interested parties.

Interestingly enough, the best source that I have seen so far about databases was found on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_databases_and_search_engines

Although a number of data bases are free (Google books is one example) the majority require affiliation with another entity. For example, the state of Arizona has paid a company called Gale to do further research. As long as you are a resident of Arizona, access to the digital Arizona library is available to any resident of the state for free.

https://azlibrary.gov/dazl

If you aren’t a college student, you don’t need to worry about the format of the article you are writing. However, if you ARE a student, a good source to use to determine how your paper should look can be found at The Purdue Writing Lab.

https://owl.purdue.edu/

Even the most reliable news sources often have a “slant”. A quick guide to use in evaluating news sources is Media Bias/ Fact Check.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

For example, Infowars – Alex Jones gets this rating:

“CONSPIRACY-PSEUDOSCIENCE Sources in the Conspiracy-Pseudoscience category may publish unverifiable information that is not always supported by evidence.”

The New York Times has won more Pulitzer Prizes than any other newspaper. This is their rating:

“LEFT-CENTER BIAS These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias.  They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words.”

If you are looking for accuracy in a newspaper, it’s hard to beat The Des Moines Register.

“LEAST BIASED These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes.”).

Even the best newspapers make mistakes, and the most famous example of that is the November 3, 1948 edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune, which proudly proclaimed that Thomas Dewey had beaten Harry Truman.

Besides the New York Times, the Arizona Republic, the Tucson Daily Star, and Al Jazeera, the other newspaper that I read every day is The Washington Post, which does a very good job of fact checking individual stories. If a story’s accuracy is very much in doubt, it gets a “4 Pinocchio rating”. The paper has also kept a running tally of the “fibs” uttered by a well know politician. As of today, the total is 15,413 utterances are either false of misleading.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/

Now that you know how to analyze news sources, all I can add is this:

“Be careful out there”.

Why we need more immigrants

I’ve written extensively about immigrants previously (10 articles, to be exact) but an article in the local Tucson newspaper from April of this year illustrates why we REALLY need immigrants, especially in our schools.

Math teacher Arneil Aro arrived from the Philippines about a month ago. He begins his classes with his students at TUSD’s Magee Middle School lined up for their personalized handshake, one of his new classroom traditions since arriving in the U.S. with 26 years of teaching experience.

Aro was one of six teachers who came from the Philippines to teach at Magee this year — three math teachers and three special-education teachers. Although there are differences between classrooms in the U.S. and overseas, Aro’s experience with students crosses cultures.

This is the second year that several Pima County school districts have hired teachers internationally to lower high vacancy rates, a problem across Arizona due to low teacher salaries.

Despite the raises that Arizona teachers got last year, the state is ranked 49th in teacher pay in elementary schools and 48th in secondary schools, according to Expect More Arizona, a nonpartisan education advocacy group.

Tucson Unified School District hired 14 teachers from India last year, who have all renewed their contracts for a second year, according to Director of Human Resources Renée Heusser. The district hired 17 teachers this year from the Philippines, and TUSD is still looking at international applicants to continue filling vacancies.

The international teachers are coming to the U.S through the Exchange Visitor Program, or J-1 visa. Across the state, schools hired 187 international teachers last year through the program. It is meant to promote “the interchange of persons, knowledge, and skills, in the fields of education, arts, and science,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The visa participant typically covers any costs, with no cost to schools or districts. Teachers with the program have a minimum of two years’ professional experience and at least the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree, 

Aro and two other newly arrived math teachers, Christen Hoyo-a and May Italia, say their sponsor, through the State Department, gave them a handbook and not much more support.

The teachers only had some clothes they brought with them, so their new principal helped put together an online sign-up to collect household supplies and furniture. It was shared with Magee employees and local churches. Lindsay also took the teachers shopping for groceries while they waited for their first paychecks.

With close to three decades as an educator, Aro’s salary is the same as any experienced teacher new to the district, and he receives a $5,000 one-time hiring incentive for hard-to-fill positions. TUSD teachers with 15 or more years of experience start at $46,700, and if they have a master’s degree, which Aro does, they receive an additional $2,000 annually.

In the Philippines, Aro says he was paid about $400 a month. He plans to send most of salary home to his wife, four grown children and two grandchildren.

Although a lot of the old white folks don’t like to admit it, our country is changing rapidly, and white Caucasians will be in the minority in less than 20 years.

If you examine the demographics of the six local high schools that I have taught at, you are not going to find a lot of Caucasian students. Catalina has the highest percentage, at 24%, but it drops off quickly after that. Pueblo is 97% minority, and Cholla is close behind, at 92%. The majority of the minority students are Hispanic, but there are a handful of African-American and Asian students in the mix as well.

https://tucson.com/news/local/tucson-schools-continue-to-look-overseas-to-help-fill-teacher/article_48856151-6e43-5278-8ade-2de63c265b36.html

Across America, we are facing numerous problems besides teacher shortages in Arizona due to a lack of an adequate number of immigrants. It’s also true that there is a shortage of farm workers in Florida, California, and Texas for the same reason.

The medical profession still has a high percentage of doctors who are Caucasians, but the best brain surgeon in the country works at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and he came here as an illegal immigrant from Mexico, who survived his early years here picking crops in California.

Due largely due to the efforts of the Nazi in the White House, Stephen Miller, we are definitely headed in the wrong direction with respect to immigration. Even if you aren’t Catholic, the best advice about immigration comes from Pope Francis, who said, “build bridges, not walls”.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/03/31/pope-francis-build-bridges-not-wallsosaid,

The fountain of youth

The other day at the grocery store, a lime green Challenger, much like the one pictured below (but with a huge hood scoop) parked in a handicapped parking place next to me. You would normally expect to see a car like this being driven by a young guy in his 20’s, but when the driver got out of the car, I was a little surprised that he was a guy in his early 70’s. The car DID have a handicapped license plate, as well as an American flag on the plate itself, which told me that it belongs to a disabled veteran.

Likely for most of human history, we have tried to hold onto our youth as long as we could. The Fountain of Youth is a spring that supposedly restores the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. Tales of such a fountain have been recounted across the world for thousands of years, appearing in writings by Herodotus (5th century BC), the Alexander romance (3rd century AD), and the stories of Prester John (early Crusades, 11th/12th centuries AD). Stories of similar waters were also evidently prominent among the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean during the Age of Exploration (early 16th century), who spoke of the restorative powers of the water in the mythical land of Bimini and others. Based on these many legends, explorers and adventurers have long looked for the elusive Fountain of Youth or, at least, some remedy to aging, which was most often associated with magic waters. These waters were not necessarily a fountain but might have been a river, a spring, or any other water source that was said to reverse the aging process and cure sickness when drank or bathed in.

The legend became particularly prominent in the 16th century, when it was attached to the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, first Governor of Puerto Rico. According to an apocryphal combination of New World and Eurasian elements, Ponce de León was searching for the Fountain of Youth when he traveled to what is now Florida in 1513. The legend says that Ponce de León was told by Native Americans that the Fountain of Youth was in Bimini and it could restore youth to anyone.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_of_Youth 

If you visit St. Augustine, Florida today, you will have an opportunity to visit the Fountain of Youth Archeological Park, which contains the remains of the first Spanish settlement in the year 1513.

An old guy today doesn’t have to travel to Florida to regain a sense of being a young man again, due to the magic of modern day chemistry.

In 1998, Pfizer developed a new blood pressure treatment with the chemical name of sildenafil. Although it WAS a successful treatment for high blood pressure, it also had an interesting side effect, since it temporarily cured erectile dysfunction. The FDA approved the drug (now known as Viagara) and sales skyrocketed. By 2008, sales were close to $2 billion a year. Despite competition from other products (Cialis and Levitra) it was still bringing in $1.6 billion a year in 2016.

https://fortune.com/2018/03/27/viagra-anniversary-pfizer/

Regaining your youth can be taken to extremes, though, and the best example of that is Hugh Hefner, who married 26 year old Crystal Harris in 2012, when he was 86 years old.

Women also want to stay young and attractive as long as they can. Jane Fonda turned 82 on December 21, and she is still a very attractive woman.

Nancy Pelosi turned 79 in March, and she is still not afraid to “speak truth to power”. 2020 is DEFINITELY going to be an interesting year for a lady who is now serving in her 17^th term as a congresswomen.

At some point in the last decade, I came to the realization that I could no longer list “brown” as my hair color on my driver’s license, so today it reads “white”. I’m at the age where a number of people that I know are having cataract surgery, or getting hip and/or knee replacements, so we certainly can’t be called “those young kids” anymore.

None of us know how long we’ll be walking the planet, but we ARE living much longer than most of our ancestors. Life expectancy in the United States in 1935, the year the Social Security Act was put into law, was 60 for men and 64 for women. In 2017, the life expectancy of males is 77 and 82 for females. Both of my parents live to be in their mid-80’s, and I have two relatives who lived to be 95.

Today is the first day of a brand new year, and it’s been a number of years since I made any New Year’s resolutions. Having said that, though, I DO plan think of myself as a young man for as long as I can, and that (to me) is the best way to approach life.