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Antidote for Fake News: Fair Witnesses and Mentats

George Noga
Journalism is dead. Fake news proliferates. Fact checkers are corrupt. Most people
want the truth but don’t know where to find it. This post offers a possible solution. 
Antidote for Fake News: Fair Witnesses and Mentats
By: George Noga – February 5, 2017
    More Americans believe Elvis is alive (8%) than trust the media (6%). Their distrust is not misplaced. Journalism schools are hothouses of progressive argle-bargle; they draw their students, who cling to illusions of adequacy, from the bottom deciles. The media have abandoned even the veneer of objectivity; they are irredeemably corrupt.
    Most Americans want to know the plain truth even if it shatters long and deeply held shibboleths. I exclude from that group the 24% who self-identify as progressives because their beliefs are based on religion and are thus impervious to facts or logic. Fortunately, there are solutions for the remaining 76% of Americans who want truth.
     All the main fact checking sources including Facebook, PolitiFact, and Snopes are debauched and unprincipled. We need an unimpeachable, competent and nonpolitical source for checking facts and determining truth. We need Fair Witnesses and Mentats.
     The Fair Witness concept is a creation of science fiction author Robert Heinlein in his book, Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein’s book takes place in the milieu of an overbearing government (familiar?). One way citizens could counter the overweening power of government was to hire a Fair Witness, a specially trained and recognized person who was so truthful and objective as to be unimpeachable. Anything observed or reported by a Fair Witness was universally accepted by government and the courts.
    Heinlein’s Fair Witnesses are professionals with an eidetic memory trained to make no extrapolations or assumptions; they wear distinctive white robes and are accorded deferential treatment by society. When a Fair Witness is asked the color of a house, he/she replies, “It is white on this side.” Heinlein’s book was published 55 years ago and the Fair Witness concept was only a small, obscure part of the book. However, if you search the internet for Fair Witness, there are 80 million entries – more than for the Kardashians, Pope Francis and Vladimir Putin. Obviously, it resonated with readers.
     Mentats, created by sci-fi writer Frank Herbert (Dune series), were specially trained to develop their cognitive and analytic capacities to unimaginable heights. They were the embodiment of logic and reason and only a few could qualify. It is thus a recurring sci-fi theme that society needs accurate, impartial arbiters of ascertainable facts.
    Clearly, the public, or at least 76% of it, is hungry (make that desperate) for a reliable way to separate fact from fiction. The potential is unlimited and there is no reason the Fair Witness/Mentat  concept could not be modified to work today. In fact, I have a blueprint for such a program but it is too lengthy to include herein. If someone successfully introduced such a concept (website) today, he/she could be the next internet billionaire. I would be tempted to try it if I were fifteen years younger.
     Imagine the possibilities! Fair Witnesses would transform public debate about any matter that lends itself to proof. It would be the death knell of progressivism – which is based on lies. Being untruthful would become unproductive. The thought of a news story being promptly rendered untrue might even make the media more circumspect. There are obvious applications for business and advertising. Note: I  plan to write a future post about what a Fair Witness might have to say about climate change.
     We have much to learn from obscure sci-fi tracts published long ago. Like all great science fiction, Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune speak to us today. Fair Witnesses or Mentats would shatter the Elvis myth but they also would bring about a renaissance in the media – currently trusted by only 6% of the most gullible Americans.
Next up from MLLG on February 12th – The Democrats’ War on Blacks

Plague or Pestilence?

George Noga
Here are some final thoughts about the 2016 election and a far, far too early look at 2020.
Plague or Pestilence?
By: George Noga – November 6, 2016
      I have been a keen observer of US presidential elections beginning 56 years ago in 1960. This election is different than anything I have seen before; only 1968 comes remotely close. By any conventional method or measure, Clinton wins; nevertheless, there is a path still open for Trump if all the factors noted below break just right.
 –

     ##  The polls are wrong. For technical reasons (absence of landlines, etc.) polling is much less accurate than in past elections. Polling was notoriously wrong in many primaries, in the Brexit vote and most recently in the Colombian FARC treaty vote. Many people, especially Trump voters, do not divulge their true feelings to pollsters.

     ##  The massive global failure of government drives voters to make a change. Government is failing in the US, Europe, Japan, the Middle East and elsewhere. Change is in the air worldwide and the USA is not immune from this dynamic which was clearly manifest in the Brexit vote and in other recent European elections.

     ##  Voter turnout could produce a seismic swing if blacks and millennials stay home while evangelicals turnout in force. Polls do not properly account for turnout.

     ##  Obamacare is a festering wound and massive voter repudiation could happen.

A Ridiculously Early Look at the 2020 Election
Are you ready for President Tom Cotton?

     Believe it or not, I honestly think I can make a fairly accurate assessment of the 2020 election. Just as it can be easier to see longer term movement in stock prices, the same thing is possible in politics – especially given conditions and trends in the USA.

     Assuming Hillary wins in 2016, her policies will be a continuation of the failed Obama regime. The US economy will remain in a low (or negative) growth mode and lucky to avoid recession. Recessions occur every 7 or 8 years and 2020 would be 12 years since the last one. Hillary’s tax, regulatory and trade policies will prove disastrous and at some point this will be reflected in the financial markets. Obamacare will fester for four more years leading to massive voter repudiation. The global anti-government movement will build steam and morph into an unstoppable force.

     By 2020 the US will be an economic basket case with immense underemployment, stagnant (or even declining) middle class incomes and debt and deficits nearing critical mass. Malaise will define the national mood. The country will have suffered through 12 years of one party rule; historically this means change – which would have occurred in 2016 had anyone but Trump been nominated; it is merely being delayed four years. Did I mention a weak military, foreign conflagrations and a worsening of terrorism?

     It is ridiculously premature to predict who the president will be in 2021, but my bet is firmly on Tom Cotton. Remember, you read it first in this post. Heck – I am going to go all in on Cotton. Not only will Cotton win big in 2020, he will go on to lead a Reaganesque revival in America – provided America still is recognizable in 2021.

We are skipping next week; the next post is scheduled for November 20.

Inequality in America III – The $15 Minimum Wage

George Noga

Advocates of the $15 minimum wage agree it is bad economics but justify their support on moral grounds. What is moral about putting poor people out of work?

By: George Noga – May 15, 2016

   The reference in the preheader is to California Governor Jerry Brown. His actual quote is: “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense but morally, socially and politically it makes sense. . . .” The previous year Brown stated raising the minimum wage would “put a lot of poor people out of work“. It seems that for progressives, creating more unemployment among the poor now has become a moral imperative.

    Governor Brown has company. As with all progressive causes, there are two groups of supporters. At the core there always are special interests, in this case labor unions. Many union contracts contain automatic built-in differentials over minimum wage. Unions also support it because it prices the poor and minorities out of the labor market, reducing competition for lower paying jobs. The second group consists of do-gooders who are both soft-hearted and soft-headed; they are, in-effect, shilling for the unions.

    Minimum wage has been a leitmotif in America since 1938 when it began at $.25 per hour. In nearly eight decades since, it has been thoroughly studied by economists and there is virtual unanimity among them that the economic effects are harmful. Economics doesn’t get more basic than when the price of anything (labor) is increased, there will be less of it. Children with lemonade stands understand this. Following are some other things you may not know about minimum wages in America.

1. Minimum wage affects less than one percent of all workers and most who earn the minimum wage do so for six months or less before receiving raises. Virtually no heads of households or full time workers earn the minimum wage.

2. The average household income for a family with someone earning the minimum wage is $50,000. Most receiving the minimum wage aren’t poor; they are spouses or teenagers living at home, like the kid who delivers pizza to buy gas for his BMW.

3. A majority of those in poverty don’t work; they need jobs, not a higher minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage makes it much harder for them to find jobs.

4. The young, poor, minorities and unskilled are disproportionately harmed by raising the minimum wage. Raising the minimum reduces the EITC (earned income tax credit) thereby negating much or all of the benefit of a higher minimum wage.

5. There is consistent and copious empirical evidence that raising the minimum is a death-knell for the poor and minorities; every time it goes up, they lose hundreds of thousands of jobs. With each increase, business has more incentive to automate or to relocate (if it is a state increase) and to put even more people out of work.

    It seems clear enough that raising the minimum wage does not reduce inequality in America; it does the opposite. Even though only one percent of workers earn the minimum, that still amounts to 1.25 million people. The last increase resulted in over 300,000 jobs lost – nearly all poor and minority. That is a recipe for more inequality.

    Progressives claim a moral imperative to raise the minimum wage, even knowing it puts poor people out of work. They do this for their own self esteem. However, the real minimum wage always is zero, zilch, nada and not what progressive kool-aid drinkers deign to make it. And zero, zilch, nada is exactly the wage many more poor people will receive with a $15 minimum wage. I have one word to describe this: immoral!

Part IV of Inequality in America – Reality versus Rhetoric – will be posted May 22.