The Peckish Synapse

customboss · July 31, 2025

Just now, customboss said:

I can’t kill

it myself.

And you know my issues

txab · July 31, 2025

Yeah, you got issues alright. But we all do. Some different that others.

I'd come to your house and try to knock some sense back into you, but you mountain guys have a pillbox at the end of your road with a .50 in it , probably. j/k :crackup:

customboss · July 31, 2025

1 hour ago, txab said:

Yeah, you got issues alright. But we all do. Some different that others.

I'd come to your house and try to knock some sense back into you, but you mountain guys have a pillbox at the end of your road with a .50 in it , probably. j/k

that's @diyer2 with the MA DUECE

Grumpy Bear · August 1, 2025

14 hours ago, txab said:

When it comes to "facts", whose "facts"? Everyone has their own and won't budge.

Indeed. Who?

So question. How does that work? Everyone having their own facts? Different alphabet, dictionary, grammar, number system, physical laws, moral law, equations, math system, history, definitions for color, texture, or none........ We each chose which side of the road to drive on. Some chose murder as moral. The PURGE. How does it work? How do we communicate? How do we survive? How do we learn and teach? How do we get treated for cancer? Heart issues? What do we say about the value of currency? A fair scale? How many first causes can be first? What are the value of law and principle? Why bother with enforcement or prevention? How does that work? And even if one could tell me how would you if we all have our own facts?

Atlas · August 1, 2025

Yep. There are no alternative facts. Just lies.

Seek what is real.

customboss · August 1, 2025

Copy and paste of WAPO last article on fact checking. Warning to paragraph destruction when copy and paste. Did my best.

Fact Checker Analysis The Fact Checker rose in an era of false claims. Falsehoods are now winning. Longtime Fact Checker Glenn Kessler takes stock as he departs The Washington Post.

Yesterday at 03:00 MT Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania Trump, is applauded by his daughter Ivanka Trump, right, as he's introduced before his announcement in June 2015 that he would run for president in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. (Richard Drew/AP) By Glenn Kessler When 400 fact-checkers from around the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June for an annual conference, the mood was tense. After years of exponential growth, political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire. And somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world. Meta, which after 2016 spent more than $100 million to fund 100 fact-checking organizations, ended a partnership with U.S. fact-checkers to highlight false claims and signaled it would cut back across the world. Google announced it would end its ClaimReview program — which I helped foster — that elevated fact checks in search results.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s abrupt dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development cut off additional funding for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. The state of the fact-checking field is on my mind as I write my last column for The Washington Post. I am taking a voluntary buyout, ending almost 28 years at the newspaper, including more than 14 as The Fact Checker.

In reviewing many of the some 3,000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for president. “Businessman Donald Trump is a fact-checker’s dream … and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact check of his announcement speech. How little did I realize that would be true. Trump decreed that mainstream news organizations were “the enemy of the people,” undermining faith in traditional reporting, and insisted to his followers that he was the best source of information. In ending its work with fact-checkers, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed that fact-checkers censored free speech by being “too politically biased,” echoing Trump administration arguments.

The Washington Post did not participate in the Meta program, but any Facebook user had the option to opt out of having posts fact-checked. Many fact-checkers would liken their work to nutritional labels on snack foods — providing more information about online content. People are free to ignore the warnings, just as people can ignore nutritional labels. Meanwhile, although the European Union enacted a law, the Digital Services Act, to ensure online platforms combat misinformation (such as by relying on fact-checkers), European fact-checkers are concerned that enforcement of the law could be weakened as part of trade negotiations with the Trump administration — which opposes such regulation. Indeed, the Trump administration also has pressured Brazil to end its regulation of online platforms. The issue is sensitive in Brazil because the Jan. 8, 2022 attack on the Brazilian Congress was inspired by clips spread across social media platforms of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters one year earlier. Brazilian officials insisted they will not back down in the face of Trump’s threats, saying regulating social media platforms is a consumer safety issue, like driving laws. “Self-regulation has proven a failure,” said Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. “Your freedom does not mean to be free to go the wrong way and crash into another car and kill another driver,” Cármen Lúcia, the president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, told the fact-checking conference.

Before Trump entered politics, I found that many politicians spun or dissembled but most tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth. Our fact checks covered a range of topics, such as the accuracy of government statistics on students dying from alcohol or exaggerated claims about sex trafficking, which led lawmakers to stop using them. President Barack Obama told the occasional whopper — “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan” — but it was the rare politician, such as Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minnesota), who constantly spouted Pinocchio-laden nonsense. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, also had a reputation for mangling the truth: In 2011, Biden touted an Obama-era jobs bill by claiming the number of rapes in Flint, Michigan, had — depending on the hour of the day — doubled, tripled or even quadrupled because the number of police had been reduced. There was no evidence to support any of his statistics.

But Bachmann and Biden were outliers. In the 2012 presidential campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in their average Pinocchio rating. Indeed, they had the lowest average number of Pinocchios of the major 2012 presidential candidates. They also took fact checks seriously. Both candidates dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating. An Obama administration official explained to me how, when faced with a choice of figures, the administration took the more modest number in hopes of avoiding Pinocchios.

I heard from a campaign source that during debate prep, Obama, to his great annoyance, was told he couldn’t use a statistic because it had gotten Pinocchios. Obama’s campaign manager even sent a lengthy letter to The Post’s editor complaining that my Pinocchio ratings were undermining his attacks on Romney’s business record. The expectation that politicians would stick close to the truth began to erode with Trump’s emergence. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks — and doubled down even after my fact check proved this was a fantasy. He invented statistics — that the unemployment rate, then pegged at 4.9 percent, was really 42 percent — and kept repeating them, no matter how many times he was fact-checked.

In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s (R) campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible). But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.

Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter — where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 — and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most talked about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data. Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump — and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content — tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces which benefited from false information — such as Trump and his allies — led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation. In Trump’s second term, even venerable institutions such as the State Department — which I covered for 9 years — spout falsehoods to attack efforts to combat disinformation. “In Europe, thousands are being convicted for the crime of criticizing their own governments,” the department said in an X post on July 22. “This Orwellian message won’t fool the United States. Censorship is not freedom.” (The post was in response to a French government post promoting the Digital Services Act.) When I asked State for evidence of the claim that “thousands” had been convicted, the department twice asked for more time to respond — and then declined to comment. Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers — The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org — reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95 percent of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way. During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios — the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term. Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost twenty times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then-Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California). During the 2024 campaign, Trump sometimes mentioned Pinocchios, such as in a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in October. “I have to be very careful when I talk because the fake news, if I say something wrong, a little wrong, if I’m 3 percent off … they’ll give me Pinocchios,” he told a rally. “You know the Pinocchio? The Washington Post, they give you Pinocchios. If you say something perfectly, they give you a Pinocchio.” But since Trump took office for a second time in January, he hasn’t mentioned Pinocchios again. In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers. (About our rating scale) Send us facts to check by filling out this form Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletter The Fact Checker is a verified signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles

Atlas · August 1, 2025

Silverado4x4 · August 1, 2025

Here we go again.

txab · August 1, 2025

We're about to have revamping of political posting since some can't seem to back away from it. We've gone to far over the line and we need to pull it back a bit. Other members don't appreciate some of the posts and that is their right.

The tone of some of these posts has changed and are getting personal

Y'all really need to take a break and back away from the keyboard.

Guidelines:

Please avoid discussing topics related to religion and politics. However tempting it may be, these topics always get out of hand quickly and there are plenty of other websites where these topics can be discussed.

Edited August 1, 2025 by txab

Grumpy Bear · September 10, 2025

2

1.41421356237

0.707106781188

1, 1.414, 2, 2.828, 4..... What are these numbers?

This sequence is the square roots of the first five perfect squares: 12, 22, 32, 42, and 52. Specifically, it represents 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16.

Multiply any diameter value by the square root of two and its area will be double that of the original number. Multiply it by its reciprocal and its area is half the original. It's what governs a cameras aperture. It's what those numbers mean. It has application in piping (oil galleys) and pressure drops and a hundred other applications in magnetics, attenuation and so on.

But what this really is, is proof that 'truth' exist. Something that is true regardless of your belief in it. There is no alternate fact for it. There is not 'other' truth or reality. Believe it, don't believe it..IT doesn't care and is not subject to this notion we can create reality. It will do what it does regardless. You will benefit from it regardless of how hard to attempt to reject it.

It is perfectly ordered and in perfect order. Such truths are what anchor our perceptions of the physical world and due to that fact, it makes sense to us all in exactly the same way to every person.

It works the same for the idiot and the genius, the educated and the ignorant. It works for them and in spite of their beliefs. And there are as many examples of such truths as there are stars in the heavens or grains of sand on earth times infinity. A fraction of them are expressed in mathematics and the sciences. The remainder we are all ignorant of.

I dig for it like pearls and sell all nonfactual thoughts uprooted when found in exchange for it. Once you have it, it doesn't matter if you completely understand it for it to be useful to you and work for you.

When I find such a truth it becomes immovable in my mind. That is not stubbornness. It's just good common sense.