The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Andy Smith:

"There are “spiritual warfare†adherents out there who publicly take credit for the death of Mother Teresa."

She was 87 when she died. Epic fail.

Neil @ 7:
Aw, c'mon, you know Vampires always have the best suckers.

I prefer my Greep thank you very much.

Linkmeister @ 16

I am aware of the watchdog sites. The problem is not with me however, it is that there seems to be a social issue of general acceptance towards anything that looks legitimate. I have had co-workers of mine forward the "Obama is a radical Muslim" email without even being aware of the snopes.com writeup that methodically debunks it. Actually none of my co-workers actually are aware of snopes.com at all. I work in a law office and my coworkers are moderately intelligent if not quite hip to the internet age.

Just as Tim Berners-Lee perceived the need for a Truth rating for web sites there is distinctly a lack of popular accuracy metrics for television and print news.

That is somewhat of a tangent to Teresa's post, but my point is that we're not suddenly baby seal eating cretins any more than we used to be. It's just that FOX News ran a special titled "Baby Seals Cure All Ills" that has caused a bit of a run on fresh baby seals and nobody has bothered to point out that maybe a nice plate of veggies would be better for you.

I think that while your post does have a very valid point, these things tend to go in cycles. This is the same country that used to blacklist people for being *suspected* communists or for refusing to cut ties with people suspected of being communists.

The solution to lies is truth. The current issue is that we have no way of confronting the liars with their lies as much of the media refuses to do their job. Liars are nothing new, but when you cannot even get a credible story published about blatant, brazen lying you have a problem. When you get more accurate reporting from The Daily Show than you do from, say, CNN this should worry us about CNN.

I'm just curious how you would plot, say, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on that axis. I think you're missing an four dimensional axis for humor that is neither beautiful, true, realistic, symbolic and only incidentally related to dinosaurs and sodomy.

I think the gist we can get from both the folks who admired the man and those who reviled him, is that all men and women are both flawed and gifted. Whether his flaws outweigh his gifts is something that is inevitably subjective. You can debate his (de)merits all you like but for myself I find comfort that somebody with such views as he had also had traits worthy of admiration. If you're going to have evil in your world at least it should be respectable.

I personally think that science is being cast as the new statistics. Just like there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, now there's science, bad science, and "scientific study". Is global warming real? Some scientists say yes, some say no. Is evolution a theory or a fact? Does hexavalent chromium cause cancer?

For far too long the american public has been lead down the path to thinking that technology and theories are science. Understanding of the scientific method and its application is fairly low IMO, mostly because the majority of journalists don't understand what the scientific method is and thus have no clue what to report as science or politically motivated doctored results.

Just as evolution is reported as "a controversial theory" we have a government and seemingly a large population base that finds that the scientific method poses too many pointed questions about their established belief systems. While I doubt there is a serious conspiracy to eliminate science, I do not doubt that much of our population and government is comfortable encouraging people to think about it less.

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