Times like these
You know it's at times like this, when it's closing in on 2am and I, for reasons known only to the Flying Spagetti Monster, will not fall asleep, that I really wish that I'd developed a barbituates habit. But as has happened before, this is only to your benefit.

I was yacking with Faceplant today regarding the usual, politics and related issues, when I remembered something that's really been annoying me as of late. That thing is fact, or the lack thereof. There are myriad debates at the moment regarding this, that, or the other thing, all of which, to my mind, could easily resolved with the insertion of fact. For instance, as I wrote earlier, there's been some debate over the accuracy of the "facts" that Al Gore presents in his presentation now movie An Inconvenient Truth. In particular he spends some time showing pictures and talking about the melting glaciers or Greenland and Antarctica. He says that should these massive repositories of ice melt that they would raise the sea level worldwide by 20 to 40 feet. Impressive, yes, but is it fact? I cruised the web to try and find corroberating evidence and came up worse than empty. In fact I ran into such a jumbled confusion of articles quoting a gradient of experts that claimed the ice could fall into the ocean at any moment to ones that said that the ice in both regions was actually thicker today than it was a couple decades ago. Some said that if it did melt it would only raise ocean levels a few feet, others matched what Gore had to say. Nowhere did I find a nice table, graph, or simple paragraph stating that the given pieces of ice contain X cubic meters of frozen water and that it takes Y cubic meters of water to make the ocean levels raise Z meters. Those things should not be in debate, those should be quantifiable, measurable, fact like things. Things that an adequate peer reviewed study can say, within a known degree of accuracy, if fact.

This, I think, is the greatest failing of the media today. It no longer supplies us with facts, it supplies us with viewpoints. Any facts that a particular story happens to disclose are there soley to support it's viewpoint. Facts that could contradict the viewpoint are conveneintly forgotten of explained away in a manner both specious and off-handed. The journalist's job is no longer simply to uncover the facts and provide them wholesale to a mature public able to draw its own conclusions, the job now is to entertain with his/her latest greatest "story". So called reporters ceased reporting ages ago in favor of opinion pieces. Is it any wonder that we can no longer tell what is news and what is government or corporate propaganda supplied pre-packaged to the media? In the end how are we the public supposed to make informed decisions when all information is given to us in the form of refined opinions from pundits?
OK, finally feeling like I can sleep now. Can't wait for work tomorrow...wheeeee!