SeniorJunior

How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News TIME Magazine does a very nice piece of scientfic reporting on the "fake news" susceptibility we all share - somewhere deep in our brain boxes.  [As ye faithful SrJr readers know, it's been a hot topic with me.    There's: Folks Prefer Lies                       Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories                       Crazy as a Q    ... and a bunch more. Cruise through me humble blog .] So thanks, Time Magazine.  Here's your payoff: Helluva deal.

Bots (on-line "comments" from roBots) are pretty dumb - but they are getting smarter. Learn to smell 'em out. With practice, you can stay as smart as the bots. Here are a few tips for your smeller.  If you read "comments" on any web site, look for these "tells." 1. They are quick . Bot comments roll out immediately after actual reader comments that contain certain key words or phrases the A.I. in the bot recognizes as a "key." Actual human responders typically take a little longer. 2. They are generic . Bots have meme-heavy, specifics-light responses. "Another big government fan, I see," is common. "You must hate the Constitution," is another. "Go home to your safe place," "Once a commie, always a commie," "Put her in jail,"  etc., etc.  3. Sometimes they use stupid grammar . Bots don't get a lot of copy editing in the propaganda mills from whence they ooze. "You need a s

Awful Truth "There’s simply too much misinformation out there, and it’s unreasonable to expect ordinary people to know how to tell truth from the lies." (From the  Salon article  by Amanda Marcott that inspired the  "Hell Spawn"  post below.) Ok, now a little moralizing. I mean this is a BLOG, is it not? Bloggers moralize the way pigs wallow in mud. It's just in our genes. "...unreasonable to expect ordinary people to know how to tell truth from lies."  Really? We "ordinaries" can't do a bit of research if something seems questionable or unlikely or probably false?                                                                                YES WE CAN!   It has never been easier to research. It's not just Google, Bing, Yahoo and all the other search engines. There are credible sources in any field of human endeavor right here on your device. You don't even have to crack a book, much less go to the library (WAY

Professor Henry A. Giroux Knocks It Out of the Park in Salon.com * SATURDAY, JUN 24, 2017 07:00 AM MDT Manufactured illiteracy and miseducation: A long process of decline led to President Donald Trump  A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope!  HENRY A. GIROUX I am wholeheartedly recommending you read this article. It's a straight-up super piece of reality, a facing of facts, and a powerful call to action. Just what Doomsayers are supposed to do, get us off our duffs. Go read it at  Salon ! A FEW HIGHLIGHTS. (Kind of like the briefing before the battle.) Cliffs notes of Prof Giroux's diagnostics on where the U.S. of A. is slipping off the tracks: -a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason -the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared ci