Deterioration of news weeklies, and a vulgar new idiom

Noted by Ed Driscoll: In The Future, Everyone Will Be Emmanuel Goldstein For 15 Minutes. The idiom is in the video linked at the end. NSFW, though captured from TV.

Update: In the funnies.

Conflict of interests for WaPo climate reporter

Recent stories about Climategate in the WaPo (and not-so-recent stories about global warming) written by Juliet Eilperin are written from the slant that AGW is incontrovertibly proven, and that "The e-mails don't say that: They don't provide proof that human-caused climate change is a lie or a swindle."

Oh, OK then. That statement begs the question in a couple of ways, by assuming that "climate change" is happening and that it is human-caused. Shoddy logic.

The conflict of interest appears when we note that Juliet Eilperin is married to Andrew Light. Andrew Light is, among other things, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, specializing in climate, energy, and science policy. A look around the CAP website shows that it is committed to all the worst ideas of the "progressive" left, including, of course, the notion that AGW is real and that therefore the world must be turned upside down to fight it. Oh, and overpopulation is a menace. They are right there with Holdren and Ehrlich.

O'Reilly has Stossel on the show, and won't let him speak

That was disappointing. I tuned in to hear what John Stossel had to say, and heard much more of Bill O'Reilly's bloviating and interruptions. It seemed like a waste of time for Stossel, and for me. When Stossel switched from ABC to Fox, the announcement was that he would do some one-hour specials on Fox Business, and some shorter segments on Fox News. I liked Stossel's one-hour shows on ABC, so I would watch those, but don't get Fox Business.

I would have more respect for Fox if they would replace Geraldo Rivera with Stossel. If all we are going to see of Stossel on Fox News is segments like this, then he is being wasted, or deliberately suppressed. Let the Libertarian speak!

Some background on ACORN

From the NY Post:

Sowing the seeds of destruction.

ACORN's shady tactics made headlines last week. But their shocking radicalism is nothing new.

"Every time you turn over an ACORN rock, something ugly crawls out," said Scott St. Clair, of the nonpartisan Evergreen Freedom Foundation based in Washington.

A story that should have been written years ago, but better late than never.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

A printed version of PBS and NPR ...

... is what the newspapers will look like if this happens.

Obama open to newspaper bailout bill

The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin's Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).…

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," [Obama] said.

That reference to fact-checking sounds like a joke, considering the way the mainstream press has treated the Van Jones story, and, indeed, Obama himself. Where are his college transcripts? What did he study at Columbia? Have we heard anything from Tony Rezko lately? Many more questions, unanswered and never asked.

Both of those Senators are from Baltimore. Their sponsorship makes sense to anyone who has picked up a copy of the Baltimore Sun lately. The paper of Mencken has become a shadow of what it was a few years ago. It used to be as fat as the Washington Post. Now it's thinner than the Washington Times, and has less content. I remember when there were two Sunpapers, the Sun in the morning and the Evening Sun in, naturally, the evening. The Evening Sun set on September 15, 1995. The idea of saving the paper by restructuring it as a nonprofit is mentioned in Baltimore Magazine's current issue: Stop the Presses. The article places the blame for the paper's declining revenue on, guess what, the Internet. David Simon, the genius who created "The Wire," suggests charging subscription fees for access to online content. Nowhere in the Baltimore Magazine article is it mentioned that the Sun is a far-left paper. Maybe people just don't want to read the content that they are offering. If that's the case then trying to charge for it on line would simply be a repeat of the Times Select experience.(Baltimore Magazine, by the way, seems to be doing fine. It's fat and glossy and loaded with advertising. Maybe the newspaper could learn something from the magazine.)

But getting away from Baltimore: Tax breaks? Would all non-profit newspapers receive the same tax breaks? What government agency would determine which newspapers would receive which tax breaks? Would Cass Sunstein, who favors policing the Web for "falsehoods," be involved? As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, it seems only natural that he would be.

Government is already in the auto business and in banking. The press, next? The profit motive has never looked better.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Kim Priestap has something to say about this, at Wizbang.

ACORN videos here

For reference, these hidden-camera videos are coming in on this Youtube channel, veritasvisuals.

Sweet bird of youth, you must be laughing

The song. (First version is the one from the album, second from a live performance, sort of eerie.)

The play, which the song is referring to.

The bird.

The bird.

Up at the mountains, we watched the old Studio One production of "The Trial of John Peter Zenger," from this set of movies. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of the Zenger verdict to American jurisprudence. I think I said, "This was the case that established freedom of the press in America, even before America existed." I thought there should have been a few more minutes to it, to give some attention to the jury's deliberations. The way it was presented made it look like Andrew Hamilton simply won Zenger's case, but the way the jury reached their verdict was just about as important as the verdict itself. The film skipped over that entirely.

But much more conversation resulted from the fact that this old TV show included three Westinghouse commercials, with Betty Furness selling a refrigerator, of course, and a TV, and something else, an air conditioner, it might have been.

So the daughter said, of Betty Furness, "When was it that people stopped wanting to look like that?" Like adults, she went on to explain. Which I thought was a good question, and we went down a winding conversational path having to do with neotenic behavior among baby-boomers.

Now I'm back in the world which includes an Internet, and I see that Morgan Freeberg has done some redecorating at The House of Eratosthenes, and that he has a post there with a clip from the late night Scot, dealing with this very issue. So check it out.

Secret origin revealed: the shallowness of Paul Krugman

He read Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, loved them, and failed to understand them. Understood about the first twenty percent or so, the setup of Hari Seldon's idea of psychohistory. If he'd been paying attention through the rest of the stories, he would have seen that psychohistory was doomed to fail.

This explains much.

TigerHawk has the story, and the comments.

And Ramesh Ponnuru has something to say.

It's a pity his school librarian didn't give him some Heinlein.

A tale of two transcripts

Efforts to marginalize Sarah Palin are becoming risible and transparent. This bit on the Conan O'Brien show, with William Shatner reading a few sentences from her farewell speech as beat poetry, to the accompaniment of bass and bongos, is schoolyard-level mockery.

It's instructive to compare the transcripts offered by a hostile site and by a friendly one. The HuffPo's AKMuckraker has a transcript with the ums and hesitations preserved, some dialect spellings, and very little punctuation. This seems to be the one that's going around.

For contrast, Townhall has one with correct spellings and punctuation. (And paragraph numbers! If you find the paragraph numbers intrusive, try this version at Free Republic.) These transcription tricks are reprehensible, but they further the narrative, which is all that counts.

For an example of how NPR routinely cleans up interviews, see NPR news, "fake but accurate," here earlier. All of the media that present these transcriptions of Palin with the dialect spellings and um's preserved should do the same for everyone they quote. Pigs will be flying on that day.

Where in the world is Sarah Palin?

Or, Photo caption writer didn't read the article.


It's actually a pretty decent article. But that was too funny to let go by.

Roger L. Simon on Walter Duranty

At PJTV. Part 2 of a series on the NY Times.

Freeman Dyson speaks on climate modeling ...

… in a recent interview: Freeman Dyson Takes On the Climate Establishment. Jerry Pournelle says this is important.

The interviewer is Michael Lemonick, not a scientist but a science journalist and teacher of science journalism. Judging from his latest at the same site, As Effects of Warming Grow, U.N. Report is Quickly Dated, he is firmly in the alarmist camp.

The whole interview is available at the site as a streaming sound file, which reveals that the transcript is heavily edited, with some sections transposed, some just cut. For instance, here is my transcription of what was said during the ellipsis between "That’s the crucial point: I don’t see the evidence..." and "And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century —"

Dyson: That's the crucial point: I don't see the evidence. I mean, about the Sahara, which is something they never discuss, which to me is one of the strong points that — I don't know if you're familiar with that —

Lemonick: No I'm not.

Dyson: Anyway, six thousand years ago, we know, absolutely for sure, there were people in the central Sahara drawing paintings on the rocks, and lots of them. There are lots of these paintings. They show people with herds of animals, giraffes and cows and such, apparently living there quite happily. We know at the same time, six thousand years ago, that there were forests in the north of Russia, much further north than they are today, so the climate was definitely warmer. There probably was ice-free Arctic. We don't know that for sure. It's very likely, since the climate was warmer, it's quite likely that the ocean was ice-free. What we do know for sure is there were trees in the valleys in Switzerland underneath where there are glaciers today. So the glaciers were even smaller then than they are now. So anyway, you put that all together, it implies that six thousand years ago there was a much warmer climate in the North, and there was a very much pleasanter climate in Africa. That seems to me to be a very strong argument that a warmer climate may be good for us. I can't imagine why you'd want to keep the Sahara a desert.

Lemonick: Right.

Dyson: So anyway, I mean, nobody ever discusses that.

Lemonick: I would guess the argument would be that if the Sahara became fertile again, or had a lot of rain again, and if Siberia became more hospitable, and Greenland became more hospitable, other changes might well — that you couldn't necessarily twist that dial without doing something else over here, because it's all interconnected, and that it's plausible at least that some of those changes could be very harmful to large numbers of people, so

Dyson: Yeah, that's possible, that certainly is possible, but it's pure speculation. Nobody knows. And why you should imagine that the climate of the 18th century, or whatever it is, what they call pre-industrial climate, is somehow the best possible, I can't imagine.

No idea why that would have been omitted. Why would anyone want to keep the Sahara a desert? Mr. Gore, speak up please.

Here earlier: Freeman Dyson on scientific attitudes toward "global warming."

Freedom of speech in Ireland ...

… is in the same kind of danger that it faces in Canada. Remember the hearings held by the Human Rights Tribunals against Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant last year, briefly mentioned here at the time, now recounted in Levant's book Shakedown.

Now Mark Steyn draws our attention to a similar case in Ireland, in a Corner post titled Cockles and Muzzles.

Kevin Myers, my old comrade from my Irish Times and Sunday Telegraph days, is undergoing an experience that sounds very familiar to yours truly.

Last year he wrote a column about Africa dissenting from the approved line that there's nothing wrong with the place that can't be solved by tossing a few more gazillion dollars into the dictators' Swiss bank accounts. It was a strong column and he might reasonably have expected an avalanche of outraged letters to the editor. Instead:

The National Migrant Council reported me to An Garda Siochana [that's Oirish for "the coppers"], demanding a criminal prosecution for incitement to hatred, with a no-jury court, and four years imprisonment the possible outcome. Hans Zomer of Dochas reported me to the National Press Council, on numerous grounds.

It is a sad day indeed when to speak your mind is to risk the wrath of the law, aided by the State-backed auxiliary bodies of intellectual conformism...

Tell me about it. What's at issue here is a sustained attempt to criminalize opinion — or, at any rate, opinion which dissents from liberal dinner-party orthodoxy.

RTWT.

Five numbered lists, and one with bullets

I seem to have run across several of these lately. First, the 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. (Via The Message Digest.) For those who don't have time to read Machiavelli, but still would like power. (Not talking about solar, nuclear, electric or steam here, but politics at any level, personal, office, or, uh, political.) A few samples:

Law 14

Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Law 15

Crush your Enemy Totally

All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely. (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.) If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out. More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation: The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge. Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.

Law 32

Play to People’s Fantasies

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Then we have Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, another guide to power. Morgan Freeberg gives the list, with commentary, and links to further commentary.

Freeberg has another list on the front page today, a Twelve Step Program for Obama Supporters. Again, he gives the list and some insightful commentary, and links to a fuller presentation.

This seems to be the day I link to Freeberg. Let me sneak in a bulleted, not numbered, list of "a dozen factual bullet points about the most politically powerful man alive today, the most politically powerful man the world has ever known. Twelve things, each of which, smart-money says you’re learning for the very first time. It’s likely each of the twelve is news to you — that six or more come as a surprise, is a virtual certainty." That's Obama he's talking about. Again, a shortish piece, linking to the full treatment, this time of things the press does not see fit to cover.

While on the subject of numbered lists for the ambitious (is this self-improvement, or the reverse?), one can never fail by linking to a classic, The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord.

Another one I have linked before, but worth revisiting, is Professor Dutch's Top Ten No Sympathy Lines. The relationship between teacher and student is a power relationship, so it's not entirely out of place here.

Are they fresh, or rotten?

Eggs:



White House reporters:



If they rise, they are not so fresh. Of course adding ice cubes has always been a way to find the truth about a reporter. Ice cubes and scotch.

Thanks to Althouse commenter EDH for pointing to the press "corpse" video.

Did Jon Stewart call Harry Truman a war criminal? Yes he did

It was in the course of a segment that was announced at the beginning as about torture. Escort81, posting at TigerHawk's place, elicits a lot of comments.

That's not all he said. Listening to the full unedited conversation between Stewart and Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies requires hearing a lot more Stewart than May. It seems to be the reverse of an interview. Stewart is uninterested in what May thinks, and is too busy preaching to let him speak much.

Preaching not so much to Cliff May as to the audience. It brings to mind a thread at Making Light in which a consensus developed of agreement with the notion that if ordered to use torture, defined as the enhanced interrogation techniques mentioned in the Bradbury/Bybee memos, interrogators should refuse:

If this leads directly to a terrorist attack on my home city which causes my crushed body to be found under a pile of smoking rubble?

I am counting on someone from ML to make sure my gravestone says "she preferred this to condoning torture".

Most of the bodies of the 9/11 victims were never found. They were vaporized. The others who died in the pile of smoking rubble might have been more interested in, say, the continuation of Western Civilization than in display of moral superiority.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Bill Whittle's reply to Stewart is both fact-filled and heartfelt. This is really a must-see, even if you don't care about Stewart at all.

Stewart has apologized, or recanted, or something, about the war criminal remark. It's not much.

Missed the Tea Party ...

… because I was still wrangling the taxes! Got the e-file in at about 3:30 pm, too late to go up to Providence as I had something at home at 6.

It was a good turnout, considering how blue a state Rhode Island is.

There's some pretty fair coverage of the local event at the Providence Journal: Stimulated to protest. The video in that story is better here. There's even a slideshow. This is better coverage than the NY or Boston papers gave to events in their cities.

Glenn Reynolds has plenty of pictures and links. Blake has a post with more links, including some to Twitter, which, well, I'll understand it better by and by.

Doing a little channel-hopping around the networks, between CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, to see what the coverage would be like, I found the bias so blatant it was shocking. (Oh, yes, "I'm shocked, shocked, to find bias going on here.")

One of the (many) things that bugs me about today's lefties is their faux naiveté, or you might say disingenuousness. They pretend that they don't know what you're talking about, seize on some little turn of phrase, and proceed to argue against that, as if it were really the main point. That they continue to use this tactic shows that they are arguing in bad faith. And the obscenities, and the flood-the-zone. These so-called reporters are acting like comment trolls.

This CNN newsbabe, Susan Roesgen, in particular is exemplary, but really, the teabagging jokes are enough to demonstrate that the media elites are, uh, in the bag for the administration. Malkin writes on this effort by the no-longer-remotely-respectable media to turn this dissent into a dirty joke. This is rank stuff. Anderson Cooper and the rest who used this term, teabagging, in the sex-play sense have disgraced their networks. This is not sophisticated wit, it's Beavis and Butthead, snickering. No thought was taken for the many, a majority, I'd guess, who had never heard of this practice. I feel a little dirtier now, and I was a fairly dirty old man already. To Cooper, Shuster, the rest of the tv talkers who commented in this vein, I say, don't be doing blue comedy on the news, or, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Ed Driscoll has a roundup post on early coverage, with more than I really wanted to read on the obscenities, and a link to a Nazi comparison.

Update: Speaking of disgusting lefties, here's an example: Teabag Fox News dot com. (I don't want to link this thing.) I was looking for the Janeane Garofolo clip as an example of fluorescent idiocy: here it is, posted proudly, along with much else that should be marked as not for the young or easily squicked.

More: Ed Driscoll has Jon Stewart taking a Cody Willard quote out of context. (It's dangerous to use terms, in this case "fascism," that have a real meaning known to some, and are used by others as invective.) Driscoll links to Stephen Green, who shows how the "teabag" shtick comes straight out of the Alinsky rulebook. In a comment on Green's piece, CraigZ clarifies the point that Jon Stewart used to make trouble for Cody Willard:

Calling Obama a Fascist is NOT to compare him to Hitler. It is an honest question whether the economic, repeat economic policies of this Administration are similar to those pursued by Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the ’30s. The “firing” of the CEO of GM seemed too similar for my tastes to the relationship between Krupp and the German government of 1938.

Though CraigZ is talking about something else, the general point applies. Did I take this quote out of context? Unlike viewers of The Daily Show, the reader here can click the link and decide for him- or herself.

Another update: To end, for now, on a more pleasant note, C-Span has a collection of Tea Party "videos submitted by C-SPAN viewers from across the nation," 14 in all, each from a different place.

Added: Why the tea parties? Why so suddenly? That "Taxed Enough Already" retronym is unfortunate, as it's allowing critics to say things about current taxes and tax breaks. I think the reason that hundreds of tea parties took place last week is that the significance of this

is being noticed by more people. The taxes that the tea partiers are complaining about are not necessarily the current taxes, but the taxes that will be required to meet the budgets that Pelosi, Obama, and Reid have promised. Especially since tax revenue is dropping like a stone. Democrats appear to believe the Laffer Curve is a figment of the imagination, so their prescription will be to raise the rates on the "rich," which will lead to revenue falling further, and so on. You've seen it over and over with municipal transit: when there are too few fare-paying riders to pay the cost of drivers, fuel, maintenance on the equipment, the authority will raise the fare. Except on the ever-increasing number of those who have bus passes. Compare Ari Fleischer: Everyone Should Pay Income Taxes.

As you might say on a sign, "It's the spending, stupid!"

The very model

Compare, contrast:

Pat Sky plays it straight, listen so you'll know what the tune sounds like:



Commenter Stephen at Accuracy in Media contributes this bit of genius:

I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Media-Journalist

(with thanks in perpetuity to William Schwenck Gilbert)


I am the very model of a modern Media-Journalist,
I‘ve information biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
I know the talking heads and every bureau puke and oracle
from A-B-C to C-N-N in order categorical;
I’m very well acquainted, too, with schedules for sabbatical,
I live to write a sentence that’s both simple and grammatical,
I’m good at leading questions, and my team puts out a lot o’ news,
With many damning facts for which, at times, fact-checking’s not in use!
ALL:
With many damning facts for which, at times, fact-checking’s not in use!
With many damning facts for which, at times, fact-checking’s not in use!
With many damning facts for which, at times, fact-checking’s not, oh not in use!

I’m very good at racial stereotyping and diversity,
I know the ‘scientific names’ endorsing this perversity,
In short, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
I am the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.
ALL:
In short, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
He is the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.

I’m full of mythic history, rewritten so it’s ‘relevant’;
I like my coffee caustic, I’ve a pretty taste for Volauvent,
I quote in daily articles the views of quasi socialists,
In columns I accede to notions from post-modern notionalists;
I can tell un-Dowded talking points from those in New York Magazine,
I help the croaking chorus bitch at ‘nonsequences’ unforeseen!
Then I am in a business you’d mistake for Gilbert’s Pinafore,
If not for validation, it’s a mystery what I’m in it for!
ALL:
If not for validation, it’s a mystery what he’s in it for!
If not for validation, it’s a mystery what he’s in it for!
If not for validation, it’s a mystery what he’s in it, in it for!

Then I can write a memo with Orwellian verisimilitude,
And tell you ev’ry detail of how Donaldson’s toupee is glued:
In short, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
I am the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.
ALL:
In short, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
He is the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.

In fact, when I know what is meant by “permalink” and “Blogosphere,”
When I can tell at sight a hunting rifle from a frogging spear,
When I know Stars’ affaires ain’t news and how our coverage went awry,
And when I know precisely what is meant by who, what, where ‘n why.
When I have learnt what progress has been made in free economy,
When I know more of ethics, real science, and isonomy,
In short, when I’ve a smattering of what is news, not punditry,
You’ll say a better Media-Journalist has never done dead-tree!
ALL:
You’ll say a better Media-Journalist has never done dead-tree!
You’ll say a better Media-Journalist has never done dead-tree!.
You’ll say a better Media-Journalist has never done dead, done dead-tree!

For my journalistic knowledge, though not firm or evidentiary,
Is what I learned in Journal’ School and really so last century,
But still, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
I am the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.
ALL:
But still, in matters biased, bogus, banal and paternalist,
He is the very model of a modern Media-Journalist.

Who wields the airbrush at the Ministry of Truth?

It's getting easier all the time to change the past. What is history, anyway, other than a story that story-tellers are ready to tell. Should the story-tellers change the story, who's to know?

One chilly day last September, United Airlines’ stock temporarily crashed more than $1 billion due to an accidental re-release of an old news report about its 2002 bankruptcy. The New York Times reported that “shares of United traded at one cent… down 99.92 percent, or $12.29.” Other news sites and blogs quoted or linked to the NY Times story.

Shortly afterwards, the NY Times article changed.

Today, the New York Times article from Sept 8, 2008 instead reads “United Airlines shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour before trading was halted… Its shares closed at $10.92, down 11.2 percent.” There is no record of that earlier statement on the NYTimes site. There is no indication in the article that a correction or previous release was made. It’s almost impossible to find the earlier version online, except in a few personal reports and isolated quotes on random sites. Months ago there were blogs with comments that referred to the $.01 low point, which have now mostly disappeared. The statement they refer to does not seem to exist in public archives.

Fifty years ago, physically published mainstream newspaper articles provided a fairly high degree of reliability: physical copies were distributed throughout the country, and then locally archived. Corrections necessarily left an audit trail. Readers could go to trusted custodians at their local libraries to verify that certain information had been released by a major central news source.

Maybe this is the real end of history, as it dissolves into competing versions. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Update: More on revising the news at TigerHawk. It's the NY Times, again.

That there Google can be quick

I did not expect to see this:


at all, certainly not so quick.

What a kick!
Top o' the Google to you, Rachel Lucas. I couldn't have done it without you.

The link is to the post right before this one. I won't name it here; the screenshot shows quite enough wackiness for one day!

My "Links to this post" has not worked for a year, though. Oh, what do I want, caviar? Sorry. Room service sent all the caviar up to the Obama suite.

Update: There might be some caviar left after all. It seems that story was fake. Don't believe everything you read in the papers! Only on the Internet are all facts guaranteed!