Social Capital

One thing that we all agree on quite strongly here at CultureKitchen is that most of what we read and hear from the various mainstream news media sources is bogus to some extent -- incomplete, inaccurate, in many cases biased.

How can we tell when we're being told the truth and when we're being misled or lied to? How do we know who we can count on to tell us the truth and who we can safely assume is blowing smoke at us? How can we tell the difference between good journalism and bad?

It's difficult to separate the news wheat from the spin chaff, because every time we look at a new article or listen to a new story we have to keep asking ourselves the same questions time after time:

Is this a good story?
Is it informative?
Is it fair?
Is it well-sourced?
Does it show the "big picture"?
Can we trust the publisher of this story?

That's a time-consuming set of mental hoops to jump to every time we see a headline or hear a lead-in to another piece of news. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "yes", then we don't want to miss out on exploring and learning from the story in question. If the answer to all or most of those questions is "no", then we don't want to waste our time or bandwidth wading through it at all.

Title courtesy of Charles Schultz

Now you know what happens when I get my period.

I get totally mysanthropic and the energy that I throw out there comes back in the way of imploding websites, giant zits, stupid rants and cyatic pain with more imploding technology.

It's like I'm Charlie Brown and blogs are my kites. The blogosphere hates me, I hate it back. The problem is that we are both obstinate, opinionated and egotastical and neither of is backing down.

The post "Cry me a river" is gone along with JJ's last post (the one that for some reason made the site implode). Somehow the comments are in the database, so I'll gather those around soon.

I'm just going to say this : I grew up with Charlie Brown and I could totally relate to his losing his temperament a lot of the time along with his stubborness and his seeming inability to back down.

Lucy also had those qualities but the difference between Lucy and Chuck was that Lucy always had control of the ball and she always took it away from him.

When Charles Schultz died, it broke my heart that he did so without giving Chuck the happy ending. Charlie Brown never got to tell the little red haired girl how he felt. Charlie Brown also went out without ever feeling his feet punt just for once against that pig skin.