Category Archives: phony

World’s Newest Cartographer

New countries are usually created by their inhabitants or by some political process involving treaties and boundaries. This week though, the lines on international maps have been re-aligned by a Tweet. The Tweetie-Bird who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia has designated three new political boundaries.

The city of Cincinnati, once the main hog slaughtering and beer brewing municipality in the State of Ohio, is now The Principality of Cincinnati. The W.H.O. (White House Occupant) by his own royal declaration has identified this shit-hole of a country as the place to which Rep. Amanda Pressley should return.

Now I have lived in Cincinnati, across the way from the Over-the-Rhine, in the Northside, on Chase Avenue. Two of our sons, Steven and Sean, were born in Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati before it became the more recently designated shit-hole Principality. Granted Cincinnati has had its flirtations with odd politicians (Jerry Springer was once mayor and while in that office wrote a check to a prostitute to cover her services; yes that Jerry Springer), but by and large, run-of-the-mill Republicans have dominated politics to bring it to its shitty state. When I last drove through on I-71, we passed through no border point; it was still a city on the north bank of a river. I did not have to show my Passport to cross the Ohio River into Kentucky. Hmmm, Kentucky the home ground of the jowly visage that could one day face you on, say, a Two-Dollar Bill.

I’ve never lived in Detroit, but everyone knows that it has seen better days, as has Flint. But a shit-hole “Le Etat du Nord-Detroit,” I don’t think so. I don’t even think Canada would take it on as one of its Provinces. It remains in the State of Michigan and needs all the help it can get. Perhaps Rep. Tlaib might want, someday to go home, but it will not be back to another country.

And finally AOC’s home country, the newly designated Trumphate of Bronx-Queens. If the WHO (no, not the World Health Organization, Bronx and Queens probably have their own Health Departments as Burroughs) could borrow enough from Deutsche Bank to buy up all the real estate and put in a couple of successful casinos he does not bankrupt, they might function independently as Sovereign. But Amazon isn’t so far allowed to create a sovereign currency, so I doubt the Trumphate can either. Meanwhile AOC is back where she came from.

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Filed under impeachment, phony, politics, Republican, Resistance, Trump, Uncategorized

Faux Flies Faster, Farther

In his satirical poem ‘Don Juan,’ Lord Byron may have coined the phrase ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ but sometimes it is the strangeness of the phony that makes fiction more powerful. Recently the Atlantic noted, “By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.”

The ‘study’ to which Atlantic refers was published in Science [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146]. The abstract of that study informs us: “We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.”

So, the more far-fetched fiction are the tweeted utterances from POTUS45, the more likely they are to penetrate to the substrata of our commonwealth. That fact/truth does not penetrate so exhaustively is obvious to the casual observer as well as to the scientific enquirer. Why else could the Liar-in-Chief maintain such a hold on so many in the substrata?

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Filed under ethics, impeachment, phony, politics, progressive, removal from office, Republican, swindle, Trump