Lying and being uninformed.

The two things go together like peanut butter and jelly. As voters, we need to avoid both. The item that causes this thought to percolate through my head is an item that I notice in my local newspaper this morning. In a casual aside, buried in an article about the election campaign, is the fact that 15% of the american electorate apparently still thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. What the *%#@!

This belief was originally put forward on the internet by right wing bloggers who asserted that Obama is a Muslim. Wrong, its' a lie. Think about it, if he were a Muslim, why would he have spent the past 20 years in Jeremiah Wright's Church, which is a Christian church?  Yeah, that's dumb at this point to think that Obama is Muslim, but i guess that many of us are dumb. All we need is to see a lie somewhere and bingo we swallow it hook line and sinker.

This disturbing and depressing item got me to thinking about things I say here on gather. For the record, I told the truth about John McCain when I said that he is the son and grandson of Admirals, and that his wife is the heiress to a beer distribution empire worth 100 million. HOWEVER they signed a pre-nup that keeps his hands off her cash. McCain actually only earned $400,000 last year. I think he must have made considerably more back when he wrote his books- all three candidates have gotten good paydays from book writing. The moral of this story is to tell, as they tell you in Court, "the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth"- a pretty high bar to go over.

I have taken it upon myself here on gather to try to inform people a little better on the topic of climate change. In some ways this is just as challenging as the chore of convincing people that Obama is NOT a Muslim. On the one side, a few right wing bloggers- on the other side, reality. For global warming, the world scientific community is pretty much on the side of the argument that accepts the gravity of the problem, and that the human race deserves the lion's share of the credit for actually causing the climate to be warming up. But let's face it, it is tought to prove a negative. How do I know that Barack Obama is not a "Secret Muslim" who prostrates himself in a men's room stall several times a day facing Mecca? How do I know that climate change is not being caused by sunspots or, well, God?  Here is the truth- I can't prove that God is not the root cause of Global warming, because it is not possible to prove or disprove the existence of God.

Anyway, I will rededicate myself to the proposition that I need to differentiate here on Gather between a fact that needs to be universally acknowledged (for example, Barack Obama is a Christian) and something about which there is still some debate (for example, is the world sea level going to increase by one foot over the coming century as a result of climate change, as the IPCC has predicted, or will it be more like three feet, as many climatologists have argued?).  In the final analysis, there are things out there that are true, and things out there that are absolutely false. Then there is the gray area. We need to do better at drawing the lines.