Suppose something happens in your neighborhood, such as a new family moving in next door or a new business opening up in the vacant restaurant space on the strip. You look them over and become convinced that there is no way that they are going to make it – they can’t possibly cover that huge new mortgage or the business seems likely to fail. There are three things you can do, economically, to take advantage of your assessment – shake your head and wonder who loaned them the money, make a bet with a friend that they don’t make it to the end of the year, or you can go around with a notebook betting everyone in the neighborhood and keeping track of the money put down and the odds that you were given for each bet like any good bookie.
Context versus (CowPuckey)
Students sent home for wearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo! Is this another sign of the terrible decline of the USofA? The short answer is “No”, but the long version is “Yes”.
Zero Tolerance for (CowPuckey)
A person who is connected in today’s world is a person who is constantly bombarded by information, far more than most of us can honestly make sense of. Much of it is neither exactly true or false, but simply a perspective that is alien to us. A large number of unscrupulous people have taken advantage of the situation and will say just about anything without taking the time or energy to even care whether it is true or false. As we develop the skills to navigate the constant stream of information that comes our way, I think it’s time that we all have a Zero Tolerance policy towards (CowPuckey).
On (CowPuckey)
Is it really a lie when the person making an outrageous statement doesn’t actually care if it’s the truth or not? It’s such a common situation that statements somewhere outside of lies and truth have gotten not only their own name, which I’ll abbreviate “BS”, but they are spawning a line of academic thought and papers. It’s a big part of our culture and our politics, but what can we do about it?
For What It’s Worth
It’s been a bad week. The Gulf of Mexico is being poisoned on a scale almost unimaginable, the cradle of Western Civilization, Greece, threatened to bring it all down, and we have dogs and cats planning to live together – no, wait, that’s Tories and Liberal Democrats. On a rainy May morning that might freeze over into snow, I have only one thing running through my head:
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I’ve got to beware
Think it’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 