Start with the truth

Cleaning out browser tabs…

George Lakoff, Professor Emeritus of UC Berkeley, tweeted how to disarm the nasty guy’s lies, which other news outlets tend to magnify as they “report” them. Do it with a truth sandwich:

Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the lie if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.

Alas, too many news outlets don’t point out the lies in what their interviewees are saying.



Jennifer Cohn, an election security advocate, asks:

Legal scholars: What will be the remedy if voter registration systems are hacked (again) and voters are wiped from the rolls? We already know they were hacked in 2016, & yet there was no talk of nullifying a fraudulent election & much remains unknown to the public. Rinse repeat?

Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos wrote about Taco Bell announcing they will test paying some of their restaurant managers a salary of $100,000. That’s a decent living. Higgins then turns to the workers, whose median pay is about $20,000, which is not a decent living. It’s not surprising that 52% of fast food workers use public assistance. She adds:

If one’s gut reaction to these numbers is “get a better job” or “do something more valuable,” it’s important to sit with the following statistics, too. According to a 2015 analysis, 25% of part-time college faculty use public assistance. Close to 50% of home-care workers do. That number is similar when you look at people who work in child care, coming in at 46%. These jobs—just like working in food service—require skills, forms of education, and seriously draining labor. Most families who receive SNAP benefits have at least one person working, though people who don’t (or can’t) work still deserve to survive.

I worked for several years as a part time college instructor. I could afford to do it because I had a pension from an auto industry career. I was paid classroom hours. But add in all the hours preparing and grading papers and the wage was well below minimum.



The NPR show Marketplace Tech has a conversation with the Chief Environmental Officer of Microsoft. The company is investing $1 billion to become not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative within ten years. Carbon negative means drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. They hope to do this partly through new tech, and partly the way nature does it now with photosynthesis.

So, all you other big companies – at least Google, Facebook, Amazon – let’s hear a corresponding pledge from you. With dollars to go with it.



Now that the Space Force proposed by the nasty guy is now a reality it is time to introduce the new Space Force uniform. Twitter had a lot of fun with this one – the basic cloth of the new uniforms is jungle camo. And there aren’t any jungles in space. There were lots of tweets of alternate materials: A wizard cape covered in stars. Child pajamas with flying saucers. Adult pajamas with planets and spaceships. A suit with Star Wars symbols. Sweat pants with brightly colored nebulas.



Kali Gross of The Root talked about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from royal duties. Yeah, part of this was Harry wanting to protect himself and his family from the fate his mother received from the swarming paparazzi. But Gross says another big factor was Markle and the historical legacy of black women’s resistance. She didn’t silently abide the torrents of racism from the press. She fought back, stunning both the royal family and the press. And she rejected exclusionary social institutions. In both of these Gross highlights black women who have done the same thing.



One advantage of living in the Detroit area is access to Canadian radio (I could get Canadian TV too if I watched TV). So most weekdays I catch the classical music hour of Shift, hosted by Tom Allen on CBC music. I’ve been fascinated by his survey of string quartets, which he began in September of 2018 with the first quartets of Franz Joseph Hayden. The survey is currently up to about 2002, so has a way to go.

I mention all this to explain why I have the next link. Allen tweeted out a CBC News report of the recent blizzard in Newfoundland. It looks like they got several feet of snow. Most of the three minute report isn’t about the amount of snow, its about how helpful neighbors were in digging each other out.