No one among us can claim to know everything. We have sympathy for those who admit that, and we can forgive those who are contrite when they realize that they had disbursed wrong information. There is giving information that turned out wrong and there is one about knowing something to be wrong but gives it anyway. There is no getting around that - it is telling a lie. But still all is not lost because there is atonement for such an act. What is unforgivable is when folks continue to lie or even double down on the lie. It is one thing when someone realizes it is a lie; it is unconscionable to continue with it anyway because there is an expediency to do it. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy. When being a hypocrite to look good is bad, being one to fool other people or to gain political power is a devilish thing to do. Hypocrisy, of course, is a social derivative of lying.
Then there's the other kind - the lie has been exposed and the perpetrator of a lie digs a deeper hole even when he or she knows it is a lie, then pretending not to know somehow exonerates them. A special cubbyhole is reserved for them somewhere, someday, where they may never see the light or ever be seen again. Anonymity or the relegation to oblivion is the severely surest way to punish them.
But that is not how it works in politics and other social settings. Politics is man's invention where lying is expected and frowned upon at the same time. Political lies are tolerated and the ones who are good at it seems to be rewarded with very little consequence. Politicians, most of them anyway, are not meted any kind of penalty for such misdeeds. Some of them even prosper in their career or in some other tangential preoccupations. A U.S. president caught in a lie in a televised deposition, impeached but kept in office, even prospered with high approval ratings almost immediately afterwards. There are too many of these stories.
Let's take the famous case of Tawana Brawley.
"It was 1987 when a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, said she had been raped and kidnapped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, N.Y.
Her story of being attacked, scrawled with racial slurs, smeared with feces and left beside a road wrapped in a plastic bag made front pages across the nation — especially after the Rev. Al Sharpton took up her case".
Strangely, Tawana Brawley actually made up the lie to avoid punishment for staying out late one night. The court judgment against her after the hoax unraveled was to pay the aggrieved party of the white men she falsely accused was a financial restitution of $190,000. 15 years later she was only able to $3700, or less than 1 per cent. Rev. Sharpton paid the $65,000 judgment against him from supporters who contributed to his defense. In other words the perpetrators of the hoax were hardly held accountable.
"The only way to cover up a lie? Keep lying". --- Tomi Lahren
Then this country was gripped by another racially triggered hoax in recent days. Again, just as the Tawana Brawley case, the country is split once more along not just racial lines.
Jussie Smollet's first lie was writing to himself a racially motivated threat with letters cut out from a magazine to compose a whole page, like a kidnapping notes ransom note. When that didn't gain the intended results he staged another one that was so much more severe in implications.
Those two misdeeds have more than social repercussions because the racial divide fuels political discord as well because politicians, at least from one side of it, are making it one.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, AOC, is doubling down on her Green New Deal even as the tidal wave she was hoping to generate is slowly becoming an ebb tide as little by little more people are beginning to see through the lies. She has not backed down from her most recent tweet and repeated TV quotes:
"Millennials, and Gen z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we're like 'the world will end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'" @AOC #MLKNow #MLK2019
But let's have former Vice President turned climate change advocate and Nobel Prize winner on the lime light as well. To be fair we let Snopes clear it up for him. Snopes - not exactly a conservative advocate - makes a habit of defending liberal claims from being slammed so badly has this to say:
"Arctic sea ice is, without question, on a declining trend, but Gore definitely erred in his use of preliminary projections and misrepresentations of research. Because Gore himself did not claim to have made these predictions, however, and because his statements applied specifically to summer sea ice in the Arctic, we rate the claim that Gore “predicted the ice caps will melt by 2014” as a mixture".
That is being fair to Mr. Gore but clearly there was no mention of one attribution to him about New York, Manhattan in particular, was going to be underwater by 2014-2015. Granted he parsed his language with "may" or "if we don't do anything" about climate change.
Mr. Gore had become a multimillionaire from his books and movies on "The Inconvenient Truth".
Now, how are we to make of the world ending claim espoused by AOC? Now, she's at it again:
"Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested on Sunday night that people should consider not having children due to climate change because there is a "scientific consensus" that life will be hard for kids".
"Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don't turn this ship around and so it's basically like, there's a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult," Ocasio-Cortez said while chopping up food in her kitchen during an Instagram live video. "And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, 'Is it okay to still have children?'" She is no longer just after cows.
We don't know where "scientific consensus" that life will be hard for kids" came from. It is okay when she says things out of ignorance though in her position, "ignorance is no longer bliss". She is downright manipulative! Her ignorance runs smack at shamelessly fighting for minimum wage for those working at McDonald's and Burger King and all restaurants serving meat. Then she turns around and admonish people to turn away from beef - threatening the livelihood of the very same folks she is supposedly helping. Where is the accountability for such hypocrisy.
When lies are repeated over and over again, they do not miraculously become truths.
Truths and lies are mutually exclusive but somehow folks like those at Snopes make it a "mixture".
There lies, no pun intended, the problem with how media allows deference to people they like even when they are not telling the truth.
Twelve years from now AOC may no longer be in Congress, let alone two years from now, so she may not be held accountable for the things she says. For sure Al Gore is not being held to defend his prediction in 2006 for what he said about 2014-15.
True Lies are real. Let's be aware of it.
The following story is not true. It is in fact a story I updated/modified for this musing:
A young man found a bottle where upon a genie came out and immediately offered the finder one unlimited wish. The young man, enamored with the idea of zero emissions and call for elimination of commercial and private jets, wished for a bridge from California to Hawaii for an over-ocean train system.
The genie replied: "Oh no. That is too much. Imagine all the engineering involved, the technology I have yet to invent and of the expense. No, that is too much. Give me another wish"
The man, now wishing to make a difference and the furtherance of the Green New Deal, asked this: "Okay, give me the wisdom to understand how Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's thought processes work and of everyone who thinks the same way so I too can do the same thing they're espousing for the environment".
The genie immediately rushed his reply: "Do you want that bridge to have two lanes or four?"
Then there's the other kind - the lie has been exposed and the perpetrator of a lie digs a deeper hole even when he or she knows it is a lie, then pretending not to know somehow exonerates them. A special cubbyhole is reserved for them somewhere, someday, where they may never see the light or ever be seen again. Anonymity or the relegation to oblivion is the severely surest way to punish them.
But that is not how it works in politics and other social settings. Politics is man's invention where lying is expected and frowned upon at the same time. Political lies are tolerated and the ones who are good at it seems to be rewarded with very little consequence. Politicians, most of them anyway, are not meted any kind of penalty for such misdeeds. Some of them even prosper in their career or in some other tangential preoccupations. A U.S. president caught in a lie in a televised deposition, impeached but kept in office, even prospered with high approval ratings almost immediately afterwards. There are too many of these stories.
Let's take the famous case of Tawana Brawley.
"It was 1987 when a black teenager, Tawana Brawley, said she had been raped and kidnapped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, N.Y.
Her story of being attacked, scrawled with racial slurs, smeared with feces and left beside a road wrapped in a plastic bag made front pages across the nation — especially after the Rev. Al Sharpton took up her case".
Strangely, Tawana Brawley actually made up the lie to avoid punishment for staying out late one night. The court judgment against her after the hoax unraveled was to pay the aggrieved party of the white men she falsely accused was a financial restitution of $190,000. 15 years later she was only able to $3700, or less than 1 per cent. Rev. Sharpton paid the $65,000 judgment against him from supporters who contributed to his defense. In other words the perpetrators of the hoax were hardly held accountable.
"The only way to cover up a lie? Keep lying". --- Tomi Lahren
Then this country was gripped by another racially triggered hoax in recent days. Again, just as the Tawana Brawley case, the country is split once more along not just racial lines.
Jussie Smollet's first lie was writing to himself a racially motivated threat with letters cut out from a magazine to compose a whole page, like a kidnapping notes ransom note. When that didn't gain the intended results he staged another one that was so much more severe in implications.
Those two misdeeds have more than social repercussions because the racial divide fuels political discord as well because politicians, at least from one side of it, are making it one.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, AOC, is doubling down on her Green New Deal even as the tidal wave she was hoping to generate is slowly becoming an ebb tide as little by little more people are beginning to see through the lies. She has not backed down from her most recent tweet and repeated TV quotes:
"Millennials, and Gen z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we're like 'the world will end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'" @AOC #MLKNow #MLK2019
But let's have former Vice President turned climate change advocate and Nobel Prize winner on the lime light as well. To be fair we let Snopes clear it up for him. Snopes - not exactly a conservative advocate - makes a habit of defending liberal claims from being slammed so badly has this to say:
"Arctic sea ice is, without question, on a declining trend, but Gore definitely erred in his use of preliminary projections and misrepresentations of research. Because Gore himself did not claim to have made these predictions, however, and because his statements applied specifically to summer sea ice in the Arctic, we rate the claim that Gore “predicted the ice caps will melt by 2014” as a mixture".
That is being fair to Mr. Gore but clearly there was no mention of one attribution to him about New York, Manhattan in particular, was going to be underwater by 2014-2015. Granted he parsed his language with "may" or "if we don't do anything" about climate change.
Mr. Gore had become a multimillionaire from his books and movies on "The Inconvenient Truth".
Now, how are we to make of the world ending claim espoused by AOC? Now, she's at it again:
"Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested on Sunday night that people should consider not having children due to climate change because there is a "scientific consensus" that life will be hard for kids".
"Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don't turn this ship around and so it's basically like, there's a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult," Ocasio-Cortez said while chopping up food in her kitchen during an Instagram live video. "And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, 'Is it okay to still have children?'" She is no longer just after cows.
We don't know where "scientific consensus" that life will be hard for kids" came from. It is okay when she says things out of ignorance though in her position, "ignorance is no longer bliss". She is downright manipulative! Her ignorance runs smack at shamelessly fighting for minimum wage for those working at McDonald's and Burger King and all restaurants serving meat. Then she turns around and admonish people to turn away from beef - threatening the livelihood of the very same folks she is supposedly helping. Where is the accountability for such hypocrisy.
When lies are repeated over and over again, they do not miraculously become truths.
Truths and lies are mutually exclusive but somehow folks like those at Snopes make it a "mixture".
There lies, no pun intended, the problem with how media allows deference to people they like even when they are not telling the truth.
Twelve years from now AOC may no longer be in Congress, let alone two years from now, so she may not be held accountable for the things she says. For sure Al Gore is not being held to defend his prediction in 2006 for what he said about 2014-15.
True Lies are real. Let's be aware of it.
The following story is not true. It is in fact a story I updated/modified for this musing:
A young man found a bottle where upon a genie came out and immediately offered the finder one unlimited wish. The young man, enamored with the idea of zero emissions and call for elimination of commercial and private jets, wished for a bridge from California to Hawaii for an over-ocean train system.
The genie replied: "Oh no. That is too much. Imagine all the engineering involved, the technology I have yet to invent and of the expense. No, that is too much. Give me another wish"
The man, now wishing to make a difference and the furtherance of the Green New Deal, asked this: "Okay, give me the wisdom to understand how Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's thought processes work and of everyone who thinks the same way so I too can do the same thing they're espousing for the environment".
The genie immediately rushed his reply: "Do you want that bridge to have two lanes or four?"
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