As IF Times

Source: The 7 Worst Examples of Fake News From the Mainstream Media – John Hawkins

The current rage over the preponderance and influence of ‘fake news’ is amusing because I’ve been writing about this stuff for many, many years.  From the smallest of manufactured news items concerning some straw man issue to the grand scale concoctions regarding Global Warming, fantasy narratives have been common reportage in the mainstream media for a long time. What seems to have turned the zeitgeist from tolerance to outrage is that now, fake news is widely blamed for causing the election loss of the candidate from the left.

Not to be deterred, the fake news business is turning its guns against Donald Trump, attempting to discredit his creds even before he puts his hand on the swearing in bible.  We’ve alluded many times to one of the biggest ironies in modern culture and that is,  historically, people’s access to information has never been better, yet they are as likely to be uninformed, or more correctly, misinformed as ever.

We can blame to some degree, the internet business model.  Many ‘news’ sites have been created over the past decade to compete somewhat with the established oligarchy of news outlets.  With free access notionally provided by the internet news sites, whose revenue models are based on clicks instead of subscriptions,  people increasingly defer to them as information sources rather than read more in depth coverage.  Who hasn’t turned on their browser and scanned through Google News or MSN News?

While this may give an overview of the headlines of the day, nobody makes money on headlines, so the tactic is to make people click further on the page.  The standard model is to create an attention grabbing headline such as “Dog has sex with man” and then follows up with clickbait such as “12 reasons why this can ruin your marriage“.  Internet users have to navigate a minefield of “What celebrity X looks like today is amazing” stories in order to get to legitimate news stories.  How else to explain the ubiquity of Kim Kardashian stories if not for their ability to attract clicks from people desperate to catch up on her most recent adventures? When stories such as “10 things that Trump did in Moscow” come to light, the line between fake and reality truly disappears.  (I mean, who doesn’t want to know at least what 5 of those things were?)

They’ve dumbed down the news business to emulate the format pioneered by Cosmopolitan magazine, famous for cover stories such as ” 6 best ways to keep your man” and “7 ways to a sexier butt“.  With the ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency, we can expect at least 4 years of fanciful news from some of the more hysterical partisan news websites.  But that’s not the root of the issue; the real threat is the proliferation of fake journalists.  While it’s easy to disregard anything from sites with names such as TMZ, MTV, or Rolling Stone, there is more and more evidence that stories from outlets such as CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, are nakedly partisan and often fanciful in their telling.

One of these days, Donald Trump will actually do something shocking… and we won’t know if it’s true.

Source: Saturated fat is GOOD for you despite diabetes, cancer, and heart risk warnings | Health | Life & Style | Daily Express

Gee I hope this isn’t fake news. It does seem too good to be true. Imagine that we can safely eat foods that taste good and historically enjoyed by generations of people without annoyance by finger wagging food nannies.  Cheese, butter, marbled steaks, wine: bring it on!

As anyone who’s lived long enough will know, almost every food or food group has at one time or another been tagged as risky for consumption.  Yet over time, subsquent research overturns those views and then, once shunned foods come back to favor again.  This includes coffee, eggs, red meats including bacon, dairy and certain sweet confections.  For some reason, foods that resemble kibble have always been blessed as desirable by the food nannies.  Consequently, nuts, oats, seeds, root vegetables, seaweed and dandelion greens acquired favored food status.  If people paid attention, they would notice that these are things that wild animals eat….principally because they haven’t evolved to cook eggs, meats, dairy and make coffee.

Oddly, you never find heaping helpings of granola and kibble at high level political meetings of State Poobahs.  Those menus usually feature expensive cuts of meat, rare cheeses, decadent desserts and choice bottles of wines.  Oh the sacrifices those people make for their minions!

Humans can exhibit much of the behavior famously shown by lemmings.  While only one in a crowd can influence that crowd, once that crowd gets a head of steam going, it takes a lot to move them the other way, even to the threat of their own existence.  We saw this in the most recent US presidential election for example as the left continued to pursue directions that were non-sensical and suicidal.  We see this in the ongoing cult of global warming believers.  Many may recall that it was only a couple of generations ago that an earth-wide cooling phase was threatening man’s continued existence.  Remember overpopulation? How about the once prevailing wisdom of bleeding people as the accepted way to treat malaise?

The gullibility of people was perhaps best exemplified in the late 1930’s when Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of War of The Worlds created mass panic among the listening population.  The parallels to today’s Global warming narrative is eerie.  Except that the fiction is fueled by much more reach, more money and many more influential people.  The first clue that the premise is iffy is that it’s being championed by lawyers and entertainers.  At least in Welle’s case, there was a strong disclaimer of fiction at the outset of his broadcast.

So as far as the change of heart on what constitutes ‘healthy’ food intake is concerned, I hope it’s all true, but who knows. What I do know is that it’s better to eat good food and live a decent life than to eat granola and still have the possibility of dying early. If you only go around once, eat what you want and enjoy it.  Who wants to be 113 anyway?