It was really warm here today. Keep waiting for the winter hammer to drop though…

Good stuff man thanks for sharing.
Did some work for Monsanto in Idaho a while back…their money spent like any other…lol
70 tomorrow…

Hello Kitty,

Absolutely. The definition is the key. And probably what separates people in their estimation of news, non-news, fake news and propaganda. The dictionary definition doesn’t factor in those other attributed that use or abuse the news.

Did a quick check of Amazon’s Alexa ranking service and there are a lot of news sites ahead of them. Their US rankings of all website traffic: first news site is CNN at #18 followed by #24 NY Times with Breitbart coming in at #31. Washington Post next, then Huffington Post, etc. And those pale in comparison to Yahoo and Google’s news aggregation. Drudgereport comes in at 119 and Infowars at 1696. But with 48 million page views a month that’s still pretty impressive. Or take the news services like AP or Reuters that infect all of the sites but don’t rank alone.

Anyways, none of this really matters. What matters I suppose is what information we choose to accept that will guide our beliefs, choices, opinions and actions. Not sure there is a right choice. Like a lot of preachers who insist they have the one true way, same goes for many media outlets. Some actually say that.

At the end of the day I would rather spend my time thinking about riding than the news…

I understand.

When you look at the history of a lot of the agricultural industry in Pennsylvania and beyond you see a lot of Penn State fingerprints. Chemicals, machinery, the whole artificial insemination industry. The research that was done after the war led to a lot of commercialization. It continues today but the innovations appear less spectacular. The genetic modification of crops in the US began in 1973. There is a lot of GM myth surrounding all of this kind of stuff, especially with Monsanto. It’s worth a look to sort out exactly what was happening. We published a story here: http://agsci.psu.edu/magazine/articles/2015/spring-summer/the-science-of-gmos

And another interesting set of myths that NPR explored: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/18/163034053/top-five-myths-of-genetically-modified-seeds-busted

Hard to keep up with everything. There is so much incomplete information, dense information, misinformation, confusing information. It’s no wonder that no one trusts anything. Or becomes open to the first thing that sounds like what they want to hear.

“Not much news in those aggregator sites” Steve? Perhaps for you it all depends on what your definition of news is? My dictionary defines news as a report of news; information not previously known to someone; or something considered interesting enough to be reported.

By those definitions I would certainly have to state that the aggregator sites I listed certainly are FULL of news. Period. For you to say otherwise Steve is ludicrous. As a matter of fact two of the four sites I listed are the two largest english language news sites in all of the global internet, as measured by Google Analytics and other measuring services.

But at least we can agree on the joys of two-wheeling!

….and religion

Part of my study curriculum at Penn State in the late 60’s was Turf Management. It was then I ran across a “crop nutrient study group.”
Money was available from mushroom growers, and indeed Pennsylvania has its share.
Penn State was being paid large royalties on chemicals they developed to improve the nutrient potential of Kennett Square horseshit.
The relationship between business and research has not diminished.
My favorite from that time was to discover that Dow supposedly developed a genetic modification to make corn sterile…so farmers were forced to buy seed corn…rather than save a portion of their crop for next season….my cynicism was born then…

Maybe Dire Straits had special insight…

The definition of an “educated populace” is hard to pin down. And like you say, harder to control. Fear has worked well since 9/11. And the government was able to take control of a lot of stuff because of it. I always chuckle at conversations about the good old days and what the framers of our constitution would want. They were pretty damn skeptical of government and the people in it. They would not be thrilled with how things have been going for the past 35 years or so. And they definitely didn’t trust “the people” enough to invest direct control in them. Hence the pretty cool checks and balances we have. And they enshrined a free press — which back then was a wild one — as a part of our country free to call bullshit whenever and however they want. It’s amazing to watch things play out. Everyday I get home and open Google news to see what excitement has unfolded…

Go ahead, finish that thought…