Memories of the 28th Century

We all know that the advertising and marketing businesses sell the worst things to the people who are least capable of understanding that they are being robbed. There is nothing new about convincing people to pay for things that will do them no good at all. Socrates ranted against useless products twenty five hundred years, and in thanks, the leaders of Athens ordered him to drink a poison hemlock brew. In the end, Socrates was dead, and written language, for one thing, was more entrenched. The ...

Today, July 22, 2022, I ran into another example of someone(s) trying to control how people thought about something by controlling the data. Specifically, it was in regard to the Cambrian Explosion. The manipulator of facts had a set of conclusions and edited the facts to get there, and other opinions be damned. That was how news media in the Soviet Union turned opinion toward the government, and it is how the U.S. Government tries to turn opinion in its favor. That method is easiest to see in regard ...

I have written about the persistence of ignorance before, and I wish I had adequate data to determine the cause. I don't think that actual scientists are very likely to hold onto information that has been shown to be false, because they research their subject before they go further into it. Unfortunately, there are some people who write articles on scientific matters who do not bother with researching.

Earlier today, I looked for articles about the “ozone hole”, because that has ...

I was thinking about writing about the misfortune that people are acting up about racism, but I was listening to TV coverage of an electrical storm that has produced a tornado, when the reporters said many things that were false. It was clear that they didn't know much about weather and probably never studied meteorology, and they certainly never bothered reading the National Weather Service information about warnings and watches. They tried to make the thunderstorm sound like something exciting ...

In the past, it seemed like most people used facts as the bases of their opinions; Marketers usually based their campaigns in fact; even politicians worked from facts. And people who disagreed usually started from contrary facts. Recently, it has seemed like most people ignore facts, just saying what their fantasies dictated.

It might be that I was deluded in the past, and it could be that I have been mistaken more recently, but I think it would be safe to say that even opinions ...