This...

Surely you know that all those awards are rigged.

...reminded me that I've been wanting to ask you about something my RWA father sent me a short time ago. I wondered if you'd written it too? ;-}

Subject: Fw: Important about snopes.com

Interesting info in this message!

I too have relied heavily upon the info at SNOPES.com and now I'm wondering just HOW RELIABLE ARE THOSE OTHERS? Like:

www.truthorfiction.com ... www.hoaxbusters.com .... http://www.hoax-slayer.com/#six .... and others?

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING. I HAVE PERSONALLY DEPENDED ON snopes.com to give me straight poop. Now I wonder.

For the past few years www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it as the 'tell-all, final word' on any comment, claim and e-mail.

But for several years people tried to find out whom exactly was behind snopes.com. Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it -- kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding. Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team -- that's right, no big ! office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.

David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago -- and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years it gained popularity believing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation? The reason for the questions -- or skepticisms -- is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issues, when in fact, they have been proven wrong. Al! so, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really ! investig ating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.

When I saw that Snopes had falsely claimed that Obama's Birth Certificate had been properly validated, I realized something was wrong with either their research and/or their credibility. It seems something is seriously wrong with both. Then a few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg in Mandeville hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the internet, supposedly the Mikkelson's claim to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com. In their statement they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort ever took place.

I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking he would want to get to the bottom of th! is, and I gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers. Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg no one from snopes.com ever contacted anyone with State Farm. Yet snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things. Not!

Then it has been learned the Mikkelson's are very Democrat and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purpose agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the internet with people pointing out the Mikkelson's liberalism revealing itsel! f in their website findings. Gee, what a shock!

!

So, I say this now to everyone who goes to www.snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line facts: Proceed with caution. Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always google a subject and do the research yourself. It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelson's do. After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things.

Actually, now that I look at it again, it looks more like the Major's work. But the meds must be working because the use of caps, and the number of gratuitous exclamation points, is significantly less than usual. ;-}

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/timmcfarland/gG5kvf

Community Blogs

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
By Tim McFarland - Salem, Oregon - Aug 4th, 2008

Do people alive today remember Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago and other books, who died today at 89?

 

I do.

 

Maybe it was seeing, then later being in, the play One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich when I was in high school; maybe it was just the era (Post-Watergate, Carter & human rights), but I remember buying The Gulag Archipelago, published and sold at the same time as The Pentagon Papers, in the early 70s. I read it, and the two succeeding volumes (1800 pages, total), in college.

 

The subtitle to this work is An Experiment in Literary Investigation. In it, Solzhenitsyn described the climate of oppression that was the Soviet Union. He talked about the suspension of human rights, and systematic torture and extermination of those who Stalin saw as a threat to his power. This fear led to what Solzhenitsyn estimated as the death of sixty-six million people, from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, to 1959 – three years after Stalin’s death. Since the book was published, the estimate has been revised to up to one hundred million deaths.

 

Why is this important? Why is Solzhenitsyn’s life and work important to us today?

 

Solzhenitsyn quotes a proverb as he begins The Gulag Archipelago:

“Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye.
Forget the past, and you’ll lose both eyes.”

 

It is ironic that Solzhenitsyn dies today. I have recently rediscovered my interest in him, after leaving my collection of his works in boxes for many years. You see, history repeats itself, and events happen that make one recall similar events in history. Guantanamo, for example. Habeas corpus. Torture.

 

No, we are not killing millions. We are not the Soviets. Bush is not Stalin.

 

But read chapter one of the Archipelago, “Arrest.” Read how Solzhenitsyn knew it was all a mistake, that they would make it right. Read later about torture, about “the secret brand.”

 

Read, comrade, about how a society was changed to believe in it’s own idiocy.

 

I have to wonder what is happening to our society, when we allow laws to be broken by our leaders, and atrocities to be visited upon our weakest members. What happens to our humanity?

 

Solzhenitsyn’s answer: “One man can be bent into so many shapes in a lifetime! How different he may become, for himself as well as for others. And one of these different selves we readily, eagerly stone to death, obeying an order, the law, an impulse, or our blind misconception.”

 

We cannot afford to lose both eyes.

- - Tim McFarland, Salem, Oregon - Aug 4th, 2008

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/timmcfarland/gG5kvf

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