Avoid the Great Lie.
No matter where you gather your news, the Drudge or Yahoo news aggregator, Twitter, Facebook, even your favorite blog, or Fox, NBC, CNN. Even me. The greatest lie is when a person alleges as fact a thing that he does not know, nor cannot know, to be true. The dictionary provides all sorts of terms for us to use to broadcast that what we are saying is only an “opinion”, a “belief”, “a hearsay”, “the evidence suggests”.
Science requires this. The courtroom requires it. So does the ticket booth at the Pearly Gates.
And yes, this lie is greater than the knowing lie we may tell others. It’s not “No, Honey, that is not lipstick on my collar.”
This is the lie we tell ourselves.
It is the oven in which the vast majority of our politics is now baked. For a civilization it is behavior that is survival-endangering.
I would warn you to steer clear, for if the shooting ever does start, I’d hate for us to be staring ourselves in the face.
We’d lose
