My folks used to watch the news every night without fail. It was the news out of Vancouver, hosted by Tony Parsons and Gloria Macarenko. My parents watching the news was such a huge part of my life that I didn’t have to even look up those names, they’ve been burned into a large chunk of my synapses. I hated the news as a kid because, well, it was boring.

The news wasn’t electrifying, exciting or enticing growing up. It was the facts, what was going on in the city, the province, the nation, and the world. There was no opinion, no scary or moving music, no shouting. The job of the news was to inform, not to entertain.

There was also shows with a more editorial perspective, like W5. It was informative, but it was also slanted. It had music to give a certain mood, and presented not only the facts, but the emotions that you should be feeling along with the information. With stories like “Are you getting ripped off at the mechanics” and “How much salt is really in your food”, they were shooting for specific emotions. Anger, disgust, outrage.

There wasn’t any voices raised during the news. But during the editorials there certainly were. Mostly my father calling out the bullshit. If there’s one thing I remember vividly about my father, it’s that he didn’t like being told how to feel about something. Both my parents usually would scoff at the editorial style investigative journalism.

Fast forward to today. Nobody I know watches the news anymore. Everybody seems to get their news online. This allows people to gather news from a much wider variety of news sources than my parents ever had. We are overwhelmed with an overload of news information. The issue is, is that no one is capable of reading all the news that would come across a daily feed, whether you get that news from CBC, Al-Jazeera, Facebook, Fox, CNBC, CNN; it doesn’t matter the source, there’s too much of it. There’s also more channels available, and I’m not just talking television stations. There’s Vice for more alternative news, BBC for news from Britain, Huffington Post, for more pop culturish news. There’s a news outlet for everyone.

In the world of news tailored to your tastes, there’s a larger portion of people who have the news built to fit their lifestyles, their tastes, and their opinions. I’m certainly no different. I find myself browsing Reddit, CBC, Al-Jazeera, Vice, and NPR. I avoid places that don’t suit my lifestyle or my tastes. I also tend not to peruse news that it clickbait in style and manufactures outrage. Articles from sites like the Daily Mail and The Rebel Media turn me off.

The daily mail is basically a tabloid, but I find the Rebel to be a little more insidious, as it used language to incite people to get riled up. It also distorts facts, states opinions rather than facts, and basically makes a mockery of journalism. Here’s the front page of the Rebel. I took a snapshot.

Look under the ‘Need to Know’ articles. The first one is titled “For progressives, ‘zero tolerance’ only applies to straight-A students, not murderers, pedophiles”. When you click on the article, you find out a 16 year old was suspended from school for having a 4 inch pocket knife. Honestly, I can agree it was an extreme method of punishing a student. The article then goes on to explain that the supreme court considers mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders unconstitutional.

Whoa whoa whoa. How on earth did we go from a student getting expelled from his school by his school board, to the supreme courts decision to to repeal mandatory minimum sentences? Was the student forced to face trial against the supreme court of Canada? Wasn’t the decision to suspend the student coming from the school? How does the two articles tie into each other? The headline itself is meant to cause outrage. Murderers? Pedophiles? I DON’T agree with THOSE things! Is this HONOR student made to walk in shame and have a trip to PARIS cancelled? While MURDERERS and PEDOPHILES continue to prey on HARD WORKING Canadians?

The two item have absolutely nothing in common. On one hand, you have some over zealous educators go overboard when disciplining a student. On the other hand, you have a policy regarding drug laws that has been proven to have failed during the course of the trillion dollar drug war. They aren’t in the same ball park. They’re not even in the same league. They’re not even playing the same goddamn sport. Everything about that article is cringe worthy. It’s not an article, it’s the drunken ramblings of that guy who’s had too much to drink at the bar, who then proceeds to tell you that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.

The problem with having our news filtered is that we become blind to the other sources around it. Especially those sources that offer opinions differing from our own views. And that’s dangerous. As much as it pains me, I’m going to be reading the Rebel a lot more often from now on. For a cynic who writes about people spouting bullshit, that place is a goddamn goldmine.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Notice how THEY use a bunch of all-caps in HALF of their headlines? I don’t know about YOU, but I’m certainly not MANIPULATED.

Earth is a funny place. You think you understand it at first, then it throws you a curveball and everything gets all topsy turvy. In this case, the meaning is literal. The Earth is due for a geomagnetic reversal, a phenomenon where the magnetic poles shift and change position. The North pole becomes the South pole and vice versa. This happens naturally every 100,000 to a million years, and the last known event was 780, 000 years ago.

Scientists aren’t exactly sure what causes this phenomenon, and if it does happen soon it will be the first time we’ll be able to monitor it with scientific equipment. From the best of my understanding, the solid iron core of planet Earth shifts, causing the poles to change. This change can be as quick as a hundred years, and can take as long as a thousand.

When you have such a massive change to something as important as the locations of the poles, there’s bound to be some sort of alarm. You’re certain to find notions of apocalypse and cataclysm bubbling from the internet. The source of this panic shocked me a bit. The crazy isn’t coming from where you think it would.

First off, there isn’t anything to be worried about from the standpoint of the planet. There have been no mass extinctions that coincide with the geomagnetic reversals of the past. There have been no more earthquakes that what the planet normally goes through. Many animals and insects use the planet’s magnetism to migrate. I’m certain that they will quickly adapt to deal with any changes.

Even our own ecosystem will be largely unaffected. Most navigation now relies on satellites, as opposed to the compasses of yesteryear. There’s speculation it may have consequences on the power grid, but it’s only still speculation. Some people have become concerned that the shift would cause more solar radiation to come through our atmosphere, driving the skin cancer rates through the roof. Even though the magnetic field can fluctuate, there has never been any scientific evidence that points to it disappearing completely.

To be frank, this is an area outside of my limited expertise. What I do know is that most of the scare from geomagnetic reversal was from the 2012 doomsday prophecy, when the Mayan calendar ended. Many people thought some apocalyptic or cataclysmic event would occur in the year 2012. Nothing of the sort ever did happen, unless of course you voted against Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

I knew a number of people that took the 2012 prophecy seriously. When I pry them about it now, they have a hard time remembering it was even a concern. The strange thing is, when I started doing research, to see if there was any concern regarding the polar switch., there was. There were still articles being written, less than a year old, like this one.

These kind of publications seem to be the source of any kind of calamity claxon that has been sounding regarding the polar switch-a -roo. The shift in geomagnetic poles isn’t a particularly devastating  event that could occur. It will be incredibly interesting in regards to science, as we will be able to study the phenomena for the first time. Gossip wise, though, without the doom and gloom future laid out for us by poorly put together ideas, there isn’t anything most people would be interested, except that we might all have to buy new compasses.

What fascinated me most of all wasn’t the switch of the poles, but rather how desperately some publications were trying to push the story. My questions from this foray into geomagnetic pole reversal has nothing to do with the topic. Rather, the question is, what happened to investigative journalism? What happened to facts? News has changed so dramatically, not only with the now constant twenty-four hour news cycle, but also how the news has changed from the reporting of incidents to the entertainment of the populous.

Unless you’re either a geologist, or a scientist with an interest in the magnetic poles, there isn’t anything in the story to make you feel an emotion. Throw in the possibility of us all dying in a cancerous inferno, well, now you’ve made people feel something. You’re making them feel fear, dread, and despair. At least you’re making them feel something though. And that sells papers.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. I’m telling this story so I can tell you another one.

p.s.s. I get terribly sad when someone send me an article and the headline starts with ‘Top Twelve Reasons…’

p.s.s.s. The kind of sad where I just drink a bottle of wine and stare at a blank wall for an hour or so. That sort of sad.

The Health Minister of Ontario, Eric Hoskins, is trying to put through a bill regarding parents who refuse to vaccinate their children. If the parents of a child refuse to to have their child vaccinated, for religious or personal reasons, then they would be forced to take a course on vaccinations and herd immunity. Although the bill would allow people the choice of vaccinating their children, it would at least try and educate them on why their insistence to go against proven science is a mistake.

What is a vaccine, exactly? A measles vaccination shot is a small amount of the measles virus that is innocuous. The body uses these innocuous virus cells like target practice, so if they encounter the actual virus out in the wild, they are primed for it and are much more able to stave the virus off. There are other methods of vaccination, but this is the most common. Vaccinating people against viruses is the reason Polio, Small Pox and other deadly diseases don’t represent a problem for the population any longer.

Except some of them are making a comeback. A child died from measles in Berlin in 2015. There have been outbreaks of the Whooping cough in Michigan and Alberta. Diseases once thought eradicated are popping up in the Western world, and it’s due to parent refusing to have their children vaccinated. Why are some of these parents so inclined not to vaccinate their children?

There was a study published back in 1998, headed by a Dr. Andrew Wakefield, that linked vaccinations to autism. His study has since been retracted and he’s been stripped of his license to practice medicine. Unfortunately, the paper was latched onto by a number of celebrities, most notably Jenny McCarthy, who’s son has autism. For years, she was the guest on a number of talk shows and she was determined to get parents of young children to stop vaccinating their kids. And it worked. Since then, there have been a large number of people who are incredibly wary of vaccinations.

Now, before the finger pointing begins and we condemn Jenny to oblivion for going against medical science, she unfortunately has the right to be wary of vaccines. Not because they don’t work, mind you, but rather because of the source of the vaccines, which is the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Unlike most other developed countries, and even with ObamaCare, the US is still a nation where health care is a personal expense. Doctors are told to regard their patients as clients. If you watch American television, you’ll be surprised to see how many of the commercials are pushing pharmaceutical medication, with the tagline “Ask your doctor about…”

There’s also the cult of celebrity culture. There is a lot of people who are taking the word of famous celebrities over trained professionals. We ask rock stars their opinions about politics, as if they were political scientists. We ask movie stars what they think of international affairs. And models are now the experts brought onto talk shows to talk about immunization.

The third piece of the puzzle is the growing movement to live healthier lifestyles. This is great, but what started off as a return to making your own dinner and drinking more water became ground zero for the war against the imaginary foe ‘Toxins’. This movement is against any kind of chemicals that happen to be in your food and water, not realizing that your food and water are made up of chemicals. Now there’s a variety of solutions on the market, all claiming to pull the nasty toxins from your body, but never specifying what those toxins happen to be. Even though it’s straight pseudo-science with little or no proof to back it up, it comes from a source other than the profiteering medical industry of the United States, and because of that some people are choosing to trust it.

We now have three elements preventing health science from succeeding; A for-profit  industry that makes people uneasy, a simple solution that can be administered at home, and good looking, charismatic people to sell the solution to you. If you ever wondered how you could sell the anti-vaccination idea to people, there’s the answer. In the age of Do-It-Yourself, everyone with an internet connection can become an expert.

The bill to get parents to courses talking about the benefits of vaccination is a great idea, and I hope the bill passes. No parent should be forced to have anything pushed upon their children, whether I agree with it or not. But they should be forced to educate themselves properly. Not from someone who makes their living looking good, but rather with the proper background. A background in education and in science.

Sincerely,

The Illustrious Mr. Charlton

p.s. Yes, there is some silver in many of the vaccines. It’s totally safe, as long as your child isn’t a werewolf.