What's True in the News?

I'm glad that some of you took the time to comment about yesterdays post. It's such a complex situation that it cannot be solved by rhetoric, protest, or any single means. It's a problem that's multi-faceted and will take time or divine intervention to fix. The point I want to stress is this:

It's about personal responsibility. You make the choices and deal with the consequences. Sure, some people are dealt a raw hand, but you just have to do the best you can with what you've got.

I just want to tell half these people protesting to "Suck it up, buttercup" but that would be counter-productive and frankly, I have better things to do. It's not that I disagree entirely with what they are doing but I do disagree quite a lot. We haven't seen them protesting about injustice in the rest of the world, it's only when it directly affects their affluent lives that they care. What about the billions of people who live under oppression every day on our planet? Who can't get gov't support or food stamps or even an education. Who have no running water or a safe place to sleep? What about those who can't follow the dictates of their hearts without fear of arrest or death?

Anyways, enough of that. It's too much of a nice day to be dragged down into such discussions. It's sunny right now and 10 degrees outside but looks like it's going to cloud over pretty soon. Chris missed his bus when his alarm failed to go off this morning (due to a 6am power failure) so he's my slave for the day. I'm not doing anything that interesting, just normal household chores. This whole week looks pretty calm in fact and hopefully will give me a chance to get some things caught up.

We had family pictures taken yesterday by our friend Somer who is a professional photographer so with luck we'll have prints back for Christmas mailing and you can see how lovely we all look in our casual clothes (except Kate who insisted on dressing up). The tree is up and now almost totally decorated. Cookies tonight mean it'll be done I think. And there's some friend trouble brewing for Meghan so it'll be good to keep her distracted.

Today's thought for the day is about the News. Would you consider the things you hear on the radio to be fact? What bout in the paper? Do we assume that there must be someone there doing their own fact checking or do we cross reference and try to get different perspectives or more details. I was thinking about this because of a CBC Radio show called "This is That". They basically produce a satirical radio show once a week. We were listening to it last week with the kids in the car. Here's the episode. CBC.ca | This Is That There's a great non-story about how one U.S. town is claiming that Manitoba is stealing 'American Wind' to power their wind turbines. It's really funny. But of course some people don't realize that it's satire, it's not real. A journalist from a large oil magazine recently referenced a This is That story to support his claim that the oil sands aren't that bad. So much for fact checking. That's what made me think that getting the real news can be tricky.