click bait

Nuance Revisited

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I often write about things and try to add an anecdote to illustrate what is being written. Sadly, my aging memory is like the rest of us seniors: remembering anecdotes takes time, and their memory comes at odd times and places. They most often return to me in my car during the 15-minute drive to the Fitness Center at Turning Stone Resort and Casino, when “all hands are on deck” making sure there is no deer in the road and I stay between the lines. Yes, I could take the time to make audio notes, but how many of us–at any age–are so smart early in the morning?

Last Tuesday, a perfect case of “Nuance” was retrieved from The Deep Files*. It is also an example of other essays about critical thinking, as well as the admonition to “do your own research”.  Hopefully, you’ve read enough essays to be aware of all these issues.

The Case of the Absent Nuance is also a story about click-bait, silo information, and “new versus old journalism”, but for now let’s only ponder Nuance.

The breathless headlines stated variations of this theme: “Thousands of dead voters Found on Voter Registration Rolls.” Wow. Maybe Trump was right about election integrity? There really is Election Fraud? Several versions of the story did not get the facts wrong and did not seem to be biased, but there was an odd emptiness to the story crying out for more information. “Dead voters”?

North Carolina is the state where all this “seemingly” unreasonable electoral action “allowed” 34,000 dead voters to remain registered to vote. I lived in NC, a Republican controlled state, and know if there IS election fraud in NC it is by Republicans. (Google it, and enjoy, it’s old school and kind of cute, in a way.) But the actual cases of fraud in NC did not involve more than hundreds of votes. Was the fraud even deeper than reported?

By now you may have guessed the story of dead voters is an empty, inconsequential issue probably written about for its “click bait” power. Imagine both Dem and Repub readers wondering which party was “frauding”** now.  Imagine the clickers, commenters, and criticizers of all stripes.***

Here is the nuance: in any given year approximately 100, 000 North Carolinians die. A lot of them are registered voters. How do dead registered voter names get removed from current voter registration rolls? And does it happen in a timely fashion? Think of your own death: who notifies any election commission in any state of your death? Imagine if you lived half your voting life in NC and half in New York, for example. After googling how many died in NC, I googled how is the NC Election Commission notified of a now-dead, registered NC voter? You should google your own state and see if its procedures are any better than the Rube Goldberg****system in NC.

Is it a fact that 34,000 deceased voters are still registered to vote in NC? Yes, it is. But is it good journalism to call them “voters”? So far, no version of the story has articulated a very important “nuance”: did any of the 34,000 cast a vote? If so, how did they get to the polling place?

Kidding. Having dead voters on your voting rolls is a nonissue until we all get implanted microchips to send an immediate signal to the pertinent Election Commission not to expect us next voting cycle. The Chip could also tell our credit card companies to stop waiting for payment and our life insurance companies to send checks to beneficiaries seconds after we pass away.

There is an urge to ask this: Does a bear shite in the woods?

If it’s related to this essay, research it and figure it out.

Honor Nuance!

*The inner-sanctum memory area in some Latin-named part of another Latin-named part of the brain. Retrieving memories in old age is like being in a large warehouse where you know where everything is but someone has turned off all the lights. Advice: be patient.

**New word. Like it?

***Not lost on me is the irony of me being one of “them”.

****A lost Art. Ai or google, please.

Interesting Stuff From The Innernet

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Yes, Innernet(sic). We’re going to start renaming things to make life more confusing.

Ski Jumping is a funny sport. Imagine the first guy who thought of it: let’s ski down the hill as fast as we can and jump off the end of a ramp at the bottom. But in these Innernet times, why are a man’s* genitals suddenly relevant? As the ski jumpers jump, they spread their legs for more surface area and more aerodynamic lift. As one current jumper put it: “We want to be like flying squirrels out there.” It appears some jumpers are sewing extra material into the crotch of their suits for “extra” surface area. Perhaps in a response to the new Ski Jumper Crotch Measurement team now tasked with using 3-D imaging to make sure the suits “fit” the anatomy, there is a rumor of ski jumpers getting “injections into their penises” to justify the extra crotch material. I’d say, “Only in America”, but so far, the scandal hasn’t affected our ski team. Were they picked for the team because the size of their…no…no way…right?

There are software/Ai companies now generating life-like memes and images of the dead. For a fee, of course. These companies will take video and audio recordings and transform the recordings into life-like, talking images of the departed that loved ones can actually engage in conversation. It sounds like a great idea and reminds me of a statistic from a population story: It’s estimated over 110 billion people have died during humankind’s history. Forget the details of how that number was determined and imagine if they all had made the “After Death Avatar(ADA)”**? Now imagine everyone, starting today, gets an ADA. The business potential is obvious but maybe in 100 years we can use all these ADAs to populate an artificial world?***

Imagine how history would be written and recorded. Boom goes the mind.

A Super Bowl halftime controversy is recently being enjoyed by all who care about it. Most of us true football fans go off to the bathroom and kitchen (not in that order) at halftime, so meh. But the rage about the 2026 Super Bowl show is interesting. After decades of English Language Super Bowls, the Super Bowl Powers had a Spanish Language Super Bowl. Hm. It has united left and right in xenophobic, linguistic bombasticness(sic). What will happen next, a Navajo language halftime? Irish? Swahili? Minion? The fact that for 13 minutes of American Television, lazy, single-language Americans had to endure the words of a language representing 20 per cent of the American citizenry and over 400 million people worldwide…OMG! For one second imagine how that 20 percent felt for all the other Superbowls, all 59 of them.

The Innernet has so many good stories getting lost in the algorithms, dooming them to being “gone” from eyeballs, forever. One that will live on for at least as long as this essay, is the story of two Greenland Scientists.**** They have found a way to convert a bad, manufacturing and water-treatment by-product, arsenic, into a product not only necessary in the making of electronic devices, but currently in short supply. Well, done, Greenlanders, for taking a deadly contaminant out of circulation and giving it a new, safe, useful life. Hopefully, by the time the electronic devices reach the landfill we will find a way to deal with arsenic—and other deadly shite– permanently.

Want to do a little good for the world but don’t know how? Click on better stories. Instead of clicking on stories about men’s crotches, click on stories like the Greenland recyclers. It will change the search algorithms and maybe change the world. It would be nice to have the Innernet news feeds send good stuff to the top of the page.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll find something else to ponder and pontificate about, like ending a sentence with a preposition.

  *Are females doing it, too? Hm.

 **For convenience and not to be confused with the real ADA.

***See “Upload”, as Amazon streaming series for how close that world might be.

****Huh. No wonder we want Greenland so bad.

PS: Having trouble with footnote locations. Don’t stop reading, we’ll get it sorted, as the British like to say.