Public Hearing Notice - Summit County: Fill & Download for Free

Dr. Julian Bashir: You know, I still have a lot of questions to ask you about your past.Elim Garak: I have given you all the answers I'm capable of.Bashir: You've given me answers, all right; but they were all different. What I want to know is, out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?Garak: (slightly agahst) My dear Doctor, they're all true!Bashir: Even the lies?Garak: Especially the lies!- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “The Wire”Back when I used to teach high school language arts, I did a unit with my sophomores on critical thinking and source evaluation that focused on essentially this very question.Not specifically Snopes or Politifact, but all sources.How do you know that what you’re reading or viewing is credible and accurate?I started the unit by asking how many of my students believed in the Grand Canyon. All of them raised their hands. I asked them how many had been to the Grand Canyon. Usually a few would keep their hands up, no more than three or so. I’d ask how much of it they had viewed. Whether they measured its depth or length personally.By the time we were done, no student could ever definitively say for absolute sure that the Grand Canyon, precisely as described in scientific literature, existed for sure.Then I’d ask the students to find some event that they had all witnessed personally, usually something recent. I’d have them write down as many details as possible personally, and then go start comparing on the board.They’d start to notice inconsistencies between themselves. “Why?” I would ask, while hiding a smile. They were all there, right? Why is it that they remember it different? What’s the truth?This answer will be long. There will not be a TL;DR version.Pretty much everything in source evaluation comes down to credibility. You have to decide whether or not you trust that source. You have to decide whether the scientists who measured the length, depth, and width of the Grand Canyon were honest about it. You have to trust that any student had an accurate perception of an event.There’s just one problem with that trust: human beings really suck at intuiting who to trust.We all routinely tend to overestimate our abilities to determine whether or not someone is telling the truth.[1] We are very prone to disbelieving facts that do not correlate with our inbuilt implicit biases, or which challenge our core beliefs.[2] And likewise, we are prone to automatically accept information that verifies our core beliefs without challenging it.[3] [4]Some people are more prone to this than others.[5]This is why eyewitnesses to a crime are actually surprisingly untrustworthy.[6] Our very memories are not necessarily as reliable as we’d like to believe.[7]So, who should you trust? And what factors tell you that you can you trust them?There are some important things to think about whenever evaluating sources.(1) Do I want to believe it?Do you know you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head? Look it up. Now somebody's gonna say, "I did look that up and it's wrong." Well mister, that's cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut. I did. And my gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.~ Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, October 17, 2005Ask yourself, do I want to believe this? Do I not want to believe this? Where are you predisposed?Is this another story that confirms your fears about Killary having those with evidence of her wrongdoing in Benghazi knocked off? Is this a story about some new horrible thing that Trump tweeted at 2:30 AM? Do you immediately dismiss it as nonsense because it says something unflattering about something you believe?How do you feel about the story, right from the title? What is, as Stephen Colbert calls it, the “truthiness” of the story?The stronger you feel about the story, the more critically you should vet it, either way.This is because of confirmation bias.I’ll talk more about biases in general later, but I want to address this specifically as a gateway question in source evaluation.Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept information that corroborates our worldviews and reject information that is dissonant to our worldviews. The Oatmeal has an excellent strip about this and the “backfire effect” in debate, which is how confirmation bias leads people to entrench themselves more deeply in a belief when presented with contrary facts.Confirmation bias is the single biggest reason that fake news goes viral. People read something, it agrees with their already-held views, and without even questioning it, they pass it along. Everyone that also already agrees with those views sees that, nods their head, and without questioning it, passes it along.People don’t do that when it violates their worldviews.That’s why the first check for evaluating any source ought to be “do I want this to be true or false.”Being aware of your own predisposition is critical in actively evaluating a source, because it can lead you to overlook or place undue emphasis on other information that disagrees with or corroborates the source.Intelligence professionals have this hammered into them constantly. It is very tempting to get a piece of intel and then only look to confirm it or dispute it - even when, especially when they don’t know it’s what they’re doing. It’s a great way to get people killed.This is how the United States got into the Second Gulf War in Iraq: when the intelligence community didn’t tell the administration what it wanted to hear, it created a specialized task force within the military to circumvent the rest of the intelligence community and find enough evidence to support what the administration wanted.Attorneys like me also have this hammered into them. It’s very tempting to just look for case law or facts that support the client’s position. It affects the very way we construct searches for those pieces of information, and it can cause us to overlook contrary law or facts, and then get ambushed with it. Good attorneys learn to think antagonistically to their own case and look for ways to destroy their own positions, so they can defend against them. That requires being very aware of our own confirmation biases. (One mentor attorney I know routinely plays chess against himself to train his brain to attack his own preferred positions.)Before moving on to any other steps of source evaluation, this is the first and most critical one. Don’t let the wish be the father of the thought.Now, some people are more susceptible to confirmation bias than others.(2) Levels of sources: primary, secondary, tertiary.The next most important places to start with source evaluation is checking how close to the original fact reporting the source is.Primary sources are sources that have direct, first-hand knowledge.Some examples of primary sources would be eyewitnesses, autobiographies, diaries, or photographs that can be authenticated by the person who took them. Audio or video recordings are primary sources. Original legal documents are primary sources.Secondary sources are interpretations of those primary sources. Scholarly research would be a secondary source, while the data scholarly research relies on would be the primary source. Editorial commentary on a news story is a secondary source.Secondary sources fall along a spectrum from original fact journalism that gathers up and reports primary source material to analysis of primary facts to outright opinion on the facts.Tertiary sources are unrelated to the facts themselves and are tools to help interpret primary and secondary sources. Dictionaries, thesauruses, almanacs, fact books, encyclopedias, that kind of stuff are tertiary sources.Now, the line between primary and secondary sources can sometime be a little fuzzy.For example, reporting itself can be a secondary source. Good, ethical journalism tries to refrain from editorializing as much as possible, and focuses on just reporting the primary source material without interpretation or commentary.However, good journalists also understand that just reciting facts without putting those facts into context is also problematic. Trying to add that context can sometimes end up interjecting analysis and opinion into the mix.A critical reader understands how to sort out the primary source material from the secondary source material.This is where Fox News gets itself into a lot of trouble, where Politifact sometimes straddles the line, and where Snopes is generally quite good.Snopes, Politifact, Factcheck.org, and other fact checking sources will cite the primary sources and follow up on those sources. They will link to online sources and vet those sources for verification.Snopes is excellent at just checking whether or not there is primary source material, and whether that primary source material supports the conclusion. Snopes does a very good job at providing links and citations to the primary source material so that a responsible critical reader can follow up on that source material and verify it for themselves.Politifact is also very good at linking to its primary sources.Fox News, Occupy Democrats, Breitbart, Huffington Post, InfoWars, the Daily Kos, and others are not very good at this.These sources tend not to link to primary source reporting or primary sources at all. If you follow those links, the original source might be buried five layers deep. Fox News cites to World News Daily which cites to Breitbart which cites to The Daily Mail tabloid which simply pulled it out of its ass to start with.Or worse, these links are circular. Fox News cites to WND which cites to Breitbart which cites to InfoWars which cited to a Fox News article in the first place. In that game of telephone, the information got distorted enough that the new article becomes an amped up pile of steaming bullshit.This kind of source burying and game of telephone is exactly how an Obama administration “scandal” got started that never actually existed. President Obama went on a trade summit mission to India in 2010. These kinds of visits abroad require a lot of staff and routinely cost several million dollars a day.On November 2nd, the website for New Delhi TV reported that this trip was going to cost the United States two hundred million dollars a day. It cited an anonymous Indian official. There was no other verification.The Drudge Report picked up the story and posted a link to it, either believing the story or simply not caring whether it was or wasn’t. Rush Limbaugh, popular conservative radio host, picked up the Drudge Report story, and runs with it. Fox News picks up the Limbaugh broadcast, where then-Fox commentator Glenn Beck adds 34 warships or approximately fifteen percent of the U.S. Navy, and ups the staff count of folks coming along to three thousand people.This prompts the administration to put out a statement that these figures “have no basis in reality.”Then-Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann ignored the statement, and restated to Anderson Cooper these entirely unverified numbers and now adding that President Obama’s administration had booked over 800 rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel - which has only 550 rooms total. When Cooper asked her where they came from, she simply said, “These are the numbers coming out of the press.”It took less than 48 hours for this story, which was made up whole cloth, to make it up to a Congresswoman to be recited as gospel truth, because nobody in that chain looked for the primary source to verify its accuracy or credibility. It passed through at least six levels of secondary sources. And in that game of telephone, an inflated number of staff, nearly one-sixth of the United States Navy, and double-booking at least half of the Taj Mahal Hotel were all added.(3) What are the actual, verified facts the source contains?There’s an old expression: trust, but verify. Look for facts.Importantly: look for actual facts and not just opinions masquerading as facts. This is becoming an all-too-common problem today. Someone’s unsupported conclusion is taken as fact.Facts are verifiable. They happened, or they did not. They exist, or they do not.Opinions carry around a conclusion or a preference with them. A person who says that the color green is their favorite is stating what looks like a fact about themselves, but it’s a preferential opinion: green is the best color. This can’t be verified. This is merely a conclusion.Facts, on the other hand, are simply neutral. That grass is green. How do you know that? We can verify it. Five people can look at the grass, and come to a consensus about whether it is green. We can settle the matter by using a spectrometer and determining whether the grass reflects electromagnetic waves at 560–520 nm (the accepted consensus definition of green.)This is one of the reasons that Snopes and Politifact are generally regarded as safe: they verify the facts that various statements rely on.Some time back, a friend of mine posted an article she ran across in something called the Freedom Daily about Islamberg, New York being raided by a massive counter-terrorism task force who caught more than two dozen Muslim terrorists with various explosives and weapons.The problem is… it never happened.The only thing that can be verified is that one Muslim person from a town nearly fifty miles away with no verified ties to Islamberg was arrested for stealing several boxes of ammunition, and in the subsequent search related to that investigation, it was discovered that he had several illegal firearms.There is absolutely no verification of a Federal raid on Islamberg.Primary sources such as the county sheriff, someone that would have to be included in something like that, noted that it was familiar with the article and that there was “absolutely no truth” to it.There was literally no verification of the story.But what if there’s proof, like photos, right? Surely they can’t be made up!Even pictures can lie.Graphic pictures are another area where untrustworthy sources can try to grab you and suck you in. For example, there was a photograph that was circulated in around several evangelical Christian blogs depicting a bloodied woman with her eyes and mouth sewn shut, and touted as a Saudi woman who had been tortured for her Christian faith.A reverse Google image search quickly reveals that this woman is actually Japanese, and is into “extreme body modification.”Stock images or composite images are often used in many fake news sites. While some composites are difficult for the average person to detect, others are usually obvious - shadows or lighting that doesn’t match, that sort of stuff. If a photograph is reported in the news source, do a reverse image search if you’re not sure about it. And if it’s graphic or seems extremely damning, definitely you shouldn’t be sure of it.Even reputable news sources can sometimes re-use old photographs or video, particularly of various natural disasters or extreme weather. A photograph or video of people walking through a blizzard could be years old.Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck.org, etc., are excellent secondary sources when it comes to pulling out the verifiable, relevant facts from the primary sources. They follow up on the sources from other information outlets, internet stories, or statements of public figures, and find out what the verifiable facts are. The only opinion they make is whether the facts support the conclusions reached by these information outlets, and they’re up front about what their opinion is and how they reached it. They check whether photos are real or not. They do the reverse image searches. They follow the links. They make sure to vet the material before presenting it.(4) What inferences can reasonably be drawn from the facts, and do you have all of the facts to draw accurate inferences?Inferences are conclusions that people make after looking at the facts.This is where people mostly get into trouble. This is also where the spin doctors make their money. NPR, MSNBC, and FOX can all report the exact same piece of news, and all three of these sources could result in three entirely different and competing narratives. Why? Because of the why. Each will present the story slanted to let the reader come up with their own context about what those facts mean, why the story happened that way. The sources, the context, all of it is designed to lead you to a certain conclusion.Facts on their own are just trivia. People naturally try to put facts into a narrative. It’s just how we think, how we operate as human beings.That is why people will make viral a Natural News article that shows that a study “conclusively proved” that there is usually 1 part per billion of glyphosate in wine.Why does that matter?Because glyphosate is a boogeyman to a large group of people. It could (very disputably) be a carcinogen. Never mind that your typical wine contains approximately 130 million parts per billion of a known carcinogen (ethanol) because that’s not the story. The narrative is something sinister is amok. The article invites you to draw a conclusion from the facts they present, namely that Big Wine is in the pocket of Monsanto who doesn’t want you to know they’re spraying grapes with Roundup because Monsanto wants you to have cancer. Why? Because they’re eeee-ville!What logically follows from the facts? Not what you want them to mean. Not what you wish them to mean. This is where you have to walk back over to step 1 and ask yourself what do I want to hear?Logical inferences are created by applying facts to rules.For example, what happened here?It probably seems pretty obvious to most people that this guy’s wife snuck up behind him, smashed him with a bottle while brushing his teeth, and then tried to make it look like he slipped on some soap coming out of the shower, right?There is a whole set of rules about the evidence we see in this picture getting applied. What does a bathroom typically look like? How do shoe prints get there, and what rules do we have about the shape of shoe prints? What do we know about monogrammed towels and their typical usage? There are a whole host of rules that get subconsciously applied here: only women wear high heels. A man doesn’t use the “hers” towel - he uses the “his” towel.These rules are the critical link between the facts and the conclusions we can draw from those basic facts. The facts here are not in dispute. We can all look at those facts and agree what the facts are.But the rules we impose on those facts to draw inferences might not be accurate.When assessing the credibility of a source, it’s essential to be self-reflective and personally critical of the rules that you are applying to reach a conclusion. This goes back to that confirmation bias that I referred to earlier.Even certain pieces of evidence might be inferred, or conclusions stacked on top of each other to make larger inferences.For example, if there’s a missing person, a pool of blood, and drag marks, and you don’t have a body, would you not typically infer there was a dead person somewhere? So, if it’s somewhere, where is it? And what happened?It seems obvious that someone was murdered, right? But that’s merely an inference, which filled in certain missing pieces of evidence.This is also why it’s important to have all of the facts before making an inferential conclusion.Are you using all the facts, or ignoring ones that go against the narrative you want to hear?During the 2016 U.S. election cycle, a black church was burned, and the words Vote Trump spray painted on the side.Factually, this happened. Depending on how crazy you want to get, you could either trust the photos, or have bought a plane ticket and driven down to Mississippi to go see it with your own eyes. It’s verifiable, authentic.What came after that is the problem. Assumptions and inferences ran amok.Not without good reason, mind you.It was a historically black church in Mississippi. It’s not hard to add a little into the fact pattern. It’s not a stretch to find a context. A lot of people wanted it to be Trump supporters. They wanted them to be as vile and deplorable as they were led to believe Trump supporters were. A few facts were enough data points combined with some historical precedence to reach a plausible conclusion. A lot of liberal people wanted that story to be true.Then, it turned out later that the church was burned down and tagged by a black man, who was a congregation member.Immediately, conservatives went crazy. This was vindication, based on that one little fact alone. They tweeted and posted and blogged immediately, crowing their victory. They wanted a different story to be true, one in which they weren’t the bad guys. Black guy trying to set us all up, we knew it all along! See?! See?! Y’all called us deplorables, and look how mistaken you were!And so they ignored (or didn’t bother to look for) any other facts. They went straight from a little bit of fact to an inference about what those facts showed, because it supported their narrative.I admit, when the story first broke originally, I wanted it to be true. Black church, Mississippi, plenty of white supremacists at Trump rallies, sure. It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t implausible. And it said something about Trump supporters that I personally liked, that some of them were terrible enough people to firebomb a church and tag the ruins with self-supporting graffiti. I wanted that to be true.Still, I cautioned myself and others at the time after a day of thinking about it to wait for the investigation to come back. Let’s wait for the facts. All of the facts.Turns out, after we got those facts, everyone was wrong. Everyone drew inferences from scant facts, and every one of those inferences was wrong.It turned out that the man arrested wasn’t doing it for racially motivated reasons at all. He was taking advantage of the charged, polarized environment around the election to cover up a burglary he committed at the church. It was a convenient cover for him. He would have gotten away with it, as well, if it weren’t for good police work that went beyond the initial theory of the case, and looked for all the facts. (And those meddling kids!) Not just facts that supported one version of events, but all the facts.If all the police did was look at the early facts and didn’t investigate more, didn’t follow up on everything, they might very well have reached the same conclusions the internet did. They might have reached the same conclusions that many of their predecessors in the same town might have reached a hundred years ago, and those people a hundred years ago typically ended up lynching someone over it.Remember: there are two parts to inferences, the facts and the rules.In my profession as an attorney, we talk about “garbage in, garbage out.” If there is a breakdown in the facts, either inaccurate or incomplete facts, or if there is a breakdown in the rules, either inaccurate or incomplete rules, then the inference drawn from those facts and rules will also be inaccurate.When evaluating a source, evaluate the inferences it makes, and the inferences you draw from the source, and ask whether it is logically supported, whether it is based on incomplete or inaccurate data, or whether it is based on incomplete or inaccurate logical rules.Furthermore, you need to be self-aware of any rules that you are imputing into the situation. Again: go back up to the picture here and think about how you arrived at any conclusions. What rules did you apply to those facts?Those rules didn’t come out of nowhere.Our brains are constantly creating a framework of rules for how the universe operates. We literally couldn’t function without them. Many of these rules are intuited from our observations.In the Tragedy in the Bathroom, some of those rules might include:Women are the ones who usually wear high heels, not men.A man is likely to use the “his” towel and a woman is likely to use the “hers” towel.Bare feet don’t leave the same kinds of footprints as shoes and certainly don’t leave the kinds of footprints as high heels.Additionally: high-heeled shoes leave a distinctive footprint pattern that looks like this.A person who suffers a slip-and-fall-injury leading to death would probably be facing parallel to the place where they would have slipped and fallen, not perpendicular.You could chart these out like this:If you have evidence and a conclusion, have you consciously articulated how you got there? If not, stop and think about that for a moment: what rule did you apply that bridged that evidence and conclusion?And then ask whether that rule is valid. Is that rule an assumption? Or based on assumptions?For example, if you concluded that the poor schmuck in the photograph was killed by his wife, what assumptions did you likely make?Did you assume that whoever owned these “his” and hers” towels were married?This assumes that only people who are married cohabitate. This assumption may or may not be true, depending on where you live and the culture there.This also assumes that it was whoever used the “hers” towel that killed the guy.This neglects possibilities such as a jilted mistress who just found out that the guy was married, or that this poor schmuck was at the mistress’ place and his wife found out. The deceased might have even been at a crappy run-down motel for a tryst.For that matter, maybe the guy was killed by a femme fatale assassin looking to set up another woman?The key here is to be self-reflective: if you’ve come to a conclusion, do you have both verifiable evidence to support that conclusion, and valid rules? Make sure to think critically about those rules and whether they are built on any assumptions of how the world works. Question those.This is quite difficult in practice, and often best done by bringing in an objective third party to question those rules and assumptions.(5) What is the authorial bias?I imagine most of you thought we ought to start here. If the source is biased, we can just dismiss it, right?Absolutely not.Every source is biased. And that’s okay.Bias is not inherently a discrediting problem.There are a couple of common forms of authorial bias.Confirmation bias. I discussed this earlier. It’s the tendency to accept things we already like and reject things that we don’t.Partisan or “statement” bias. This is what we most often think of as bias, or “spin,” where the author engages in active advocacy. This kind of bias is where the author goes beyond simple primary fact reporting and interjects a preferential or partisan slant on the material. They present the facts in such a way that it clearly favors a perspective.Selection or “gatekeeping” bias. Some news sources go out of their way to try to be balanced in their presentment of a news story, such as NPR, but have a different kind of bias: what stories they present at all. This is selection bias. By cherry-picking only certain events or facts, even if the story is presented in a balanced manner, the overall source is biased.A subset of this is “ventriloquism,” where a source edits experts or witnesses out of context so that their quotes agree with the author’s bias, or only show the parts of the expert or witness that agree with the author’s bias.Coverage or “visibility” bias. Some stories are juicier or more popular than others, and so get more coverage. Hundreds of children are killed by their parents every year in shaken baby incidents or abuse. But the Casey Anthony trial ended up becoming incredibly high profile, dominating the national news for weeks and captivating the country, because it had a special twisted kind of appeal to it.Concision bias. In the TL;DR culture today, sources are having a harder and harder time with complex, nuanced reporting and analysis. Investigative journalism can take months if not years of research; see the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s investigation of the clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church. There is a lot of information that needs to be put into context.And people are less patient to read that. They want the quarter-page summary. The 140 character tweetable explanation.The McDonald’s hot coffee case is a perfect example. The original story was long and complex. The jury found that McDonald’s was not only negligent, but actively reckless in how it stored and served coffee, having broken regulations on safe temperatures. The woman involved was not driving; her son was. They had pulled over into a parking stall; they were not in motion when she spilled the coffee. She had received third degree burns to much of her body. The jury award was not only for her medical bills, but punitive damages because McDonald’s had acted so egregiously.But the story continued to get truncated and truncated as it was repeated by outlets until it was 250 words and a headline that made it sound like a frivolous lawsuit.Sensationalism. This is bias for the extraordinary over the ordinary. Sometimes also called “yellow journalism,” it is the tendency of media outlets to hype up an otherwise less exciting story to get better ratings or circulation, thereby giving the impression that relatively rare events (such as an illegal immigrant committing a violent crime,) are more common than ordinary events (American citizens committing violent crimes.)Modern mass media’s newest form of sensationalism is what we call “clickbait.” If you see articles about “X Politician Blasts Obama!” or “21 Unconstitutional Things Obama Did - You’ll Never Believe #17!” it’s just sensationalized clickbait.The Spanish-American war was started because of a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. On February 15, 1898, the U.S.S. Maine blew up in the Havana harbor after what a Spanish investigation determined to be a spontaneous coal bunker fire that spread to the ship’s main magazine. The Navy tried to push the narrative that it was a Spanish mine, but openly ignored their own internal investigators that believed the Spanish conclusion was accurate and the explosion was initially caused by firedamp released by the use of bituminous coal over anthracite coal.Decades later, further exploration of the wreck of the Maine and investigation of firsthand accounts leaned heavily to confirm the conclusion that the Maine had been destroyed by a coal explosion and not a Spanish mine, in part because many other ships of the same construction type and class using the same coal suffered similar nearly catastrophic explosions until the Navy quit using coal and switched to fuel oil.But at the time, Pulitzer and Hearst hyped it up as an attack on the Maine by Spanish forces to sell more papers. Quickly, the chant “Remember the Maine; to hell with Spain!” became a rallying cry that shut down ongoing diplomatic negotiations and instead goaded a hawkish Congress into declaring war on Spain two months later in April of 1898.False Balance or “fairness bias.” Sometimes sources try to present facts in a balanced manner to avoid the appearance of bias, but this can lead to giving the appearance of fairness at the expense of artificially making it seem like a side of the story is more based in reality than it is.There’s a good little exchange in the television show The Newsroom that illustrates this:Maggie: How can you be biased towards fairness?MacKenzie: There aren't two sides to every story. Some stories have five sides; some only have one.Tess: I still don't underst...Will: Bias towards fairness means that if the entire congressional Republican caucus were to walk into the House and propose a resolution stating that the Earth was flat, the Times would lead with "Democrats and Republicans Can't Agree on Shape of Earth."False Timeliness. This can come in two main flavors:Presenting an old story as new. This is more common to hoax sites or actual fake news, recycling old scaremongering and just updating the release dates. This happens a lot with crimes; something from five or ten years ago is brought out as having freshly happened.Bringing up an old story as suddenly relevant because a similar event has now occurred, or without specific context and thus implying that the old story is new or timely.The key to evaluating a source for bias is understanding what bias it might have, and then accounting for it when verifying the source material or judging the credibility of the source.I don’t ignore Fox News, but I know very well that if I see a Fox News article, I’m going to have to do a lot of extra digging to get the rest of the facts that they inevitably decided weren’t relevant (and usually are,) and spend a lot of time sorting out the spin from the primary source material and isolating the rest of the biases.Now, most of the time I’m just too lazy to do that much work on it, so I don’t bother with Fox News in most circumstances.There’s an excellent chart out there called the Media Bias Chart.This is a good chart, but it really only covers partisan or statement bias, and where along the secondary source spectrum a source tends to exist on average.This chart doesn’t tell you much about selection bias, coverage bias, or other authorial biases.Some of the sources at the top of that chart are highly reliable sources in terms of their partisanship and original primary source reporting. The AP and Reuters are some of the gold standard in journalism.But the AP and Reuters can also still be subject to selection or concision biases without ever being partisan. The AP doesn’t often do extremely in-depth investigative journalism; it tends to report shorter stories of current events.ProPublica, The Economist, USA Today, or even Time Magazine are all reasonably centrist in partisan bias, but these tend to interject a great deal of selection bias simply due to format of presentation. Most of these are periodicals for their long-format pieces. They don’t do much short reporting. They do more analysis. It might be non-partisan analysis, but because they only have so much space and time, they have to pick and choose what to write about. That inherently results in some selection or coverage bias.That’s not necessarily anything bad. It just means you might not get other important, relevant facts or stories that could shed relevant context on the original story.Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are also susceptible to these kinds of biases, particularly selection bias.Politifact is criticized by conservatives as liberal-biased because of this. Politifact tends to fact-check more conservative claims than liberal claims. As a result, a broad survey of the site makes it seem like it is biased towards liberalism.And conservatives sometimes gripe about the site simply not bothering to check on certain liberal claims. That can be a valid criticism.Now, there’s also something to be said that conservatives might just also make more and more incendiary claims, and make more erroneous claims.For example, conservatives argue that the bulk of the media outlets must be liberally biased simply because they tend to report much more negative press about President Donald Trump than positive stories.But, that doesn’t inherently indicate partisan, selection, or any other bias. It could simply be that President Trump keeps consistently lying out every corner of his mouth and constantly picking fights with the press over policies that are generally criticized by a majority of the public figures out there.If Republicans do a dozen crazy things and Democrats do one, it isn’t unbiased to make up eleven crazy stories about Democrats to balance it out. That would just be introducing a fairness bias, instead.As I said, every source has some degree of bias. That’s fine. Apply the appropriate corrective lenses, and evaluate the facts and inferences on their merits.(6) What degree of institutional integrity does this source have?Good journalistic outlets know that the only resource they have is credibility. If a journalist is not credible, she is finished in the industry. Lying, just once, even by mistake, is (usually) a career death sentence.Sources that are reputable and credible take this very seriously. If they have to issue a retraction, they have probably fired the journalist who reported the story and that guy is likely blackballed from everything with more integrity than Buzzfeed.Look at how the source handles corrections and retractions when it turns out they’re wrong about something. That will tell you a lot about the credibility of the source right there. FOX virtually never issues corrections or retractions, and never for its flagship primetime shows hosted by what they go out of their way to call entertainers, such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. Even if these guys are straight up factually wrong, provably so, they never issue an apology for getting it wrong. That should tell you something about the institutional integrity of the source; namely, that it has virtually none.CNN is likewise slow to correct itself when it does. The Huffington Post doesn’t readily admit mistakes, either. I’ve never seen the Daily Kos issue a significant correction or retraction about anything.WaPo and the Times, in contrast? Generally, they’re quick to admit mistakes and issue corrections, updates, or even retractions. The AP, Reuters, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CBS, ABC, NBC, The Atlantic, really most major journalistic outlets are pretty good about this.There are some red flags you should immediately recognize for any source, article, or media outlet that should alert you to credibility issues. Some can be “immediately discount this source and do not engage further with it,” while others can be “proceed with caution.”You are barraged with advertising and pop-ups the minute you get to the site. Even reputable sources make money off of advertising, but if your screen starts to look like the house from Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation, especially if it’s advertising to lots of clickbaity things like “This one weird trick in your town can lower your insurance by 75%!” it’s less likely to be a reputable, credible source.Run away and don’t come back to these sources.Listicles and articles that require you to click through 15 pages to read all of it. If you’re in a source that requires you to wade through 30 ads a page and click on “next” a dozen times to read the whole thing, it’s a red flag that this is not a reputable, credible source, and is just a steaming pile of clickbait trying to extract advertising dollars from you.Again, run, don’t walk, and never come back.Number Seven Will Shock You! These are another form of clickbait closely related to listicles. Spoiler alert: number seven probably won’t shock you.This is why sources like Buzzfeed, Twenty-Two Words, etc. are generally crap. Don’t use these for news or credible sources.Headlines that don’t match the articles. You’d be amazed at how often shitty sources will try to grab you with a sensationalized headline that has little or nothing to do with the article. “Joe Biden Actually Registered Member of KKK!” turns out to be a story about some idiot that just happens to be named Joe Biden that lives in Mississippi and not the former vice president.One time here or there and it’s minimal? Flag it and be skeptical of anything it publishes. If a source does this a lot, or it’s really egregious (like the Biden example above), just stop using it.Headlines with graphic pictures or promises of graphic pictures. This is often clickbait. The source is trying to lure you in with the promise of a novelty. That picture may not even be in the article.This is again why sources like Buzzfeed, Twenty-Two Words, etc. are generally crap. Don’t use these for news or credible sources.Also, be really aware of photographs. Some of the pictures of kids in cages published during the Trump Family Separation Crisis were either from the previous administration or, when zoomed back, were random kids on a street behind a chain link fence who were not being held in detention at all. There are many sources, even reputable sources that as of August 2019 are using old stock images of forest fires for headlines about Amazon rainforest wildfires; at least two normally reputable sources used photographs that weren’t even of the Amazon.Headlines that are questions. This is also clickbait. The source is trying to lure you in by offering a question, not a fact. The article probably doesn’t answer it. No, it’s not a “thinkpiece.” It’s usually just a pile of trash designed to generate ad dollars.“Native advertising,” or pieces written by advertisers, not the actual content providers. These can be really hard to spot sometimes. They look like actual articles. They have headlines and graphics, sometimes infographics, and can very accurately mimic a real piece. But in actuality, they’re written by advertisers, not journalists.Sometimes this is called “branded content,” or “sponsored content,” or “featured partners.” It’s the same thing.Some sources try to take good care to make this very explicit. The Times usually has a big banner that reads “Paid Post.” But even this may be misleading to the reader, if they are not aware that not all content is written by the outlet itself, and these don’t look like ads at times - they look like articles.If you see these kinds of articles, and you might have to look carefully, it may not be an instant disqualification for the source itself, but you can safely discount that entire article.Vague attacks or generalized references. If you see something about “Washington” or “The White House,” or “Trump supporters” or “Bernie fans,” you can safely discount it by at least 50%.Anonymous sources. Be careful with these. They can be reputable. Mark Felt was the whistleblower who brought down Nixon, and nearly until his death in 2008 was an anonymous source known only to the public as “Deep Throat.”But anonymous sources can also be extremely disreputable. Look to see if any of the facts can be verified by independent sources. The “Deep Throat” information was all vetted very, very carefully through independent sources before the Times ran with it.Future speculation. If the source is speculating on what might happen, be wary of it. Unless military scientists have something with time travel not generally available to the public, it’s pretty difficult to get accurate fact reporting from the future. Be wary of sources talking about what’s going to happen as if it were fact.“Lawmaker says [insert shitty foot-in-mouth statement here]” or “Lawmaker proposes bill to [insert extremely stupid or divisive issue here.]” Turns out that “lawmaker” is a pretty generic term that can apply right on down to a city alderman somewhere that has about as much national level political clout as the secretary of the local PTA. Sources use “lawmaker” because it’s not a Congressman or Senator and it makes the person sound more important.That “lawmaker” is probably a low-level junior freshman politician that has absolutely zero chance of passing his “ban breastfeeding for public morality” bill. But a disreputable source might try to make it sound like he’s the governor of New York or Speaker of the House.There are over seven thousand state-level elected legislators, some of whom won their seats while getting fewer than 1500 people to vote for them. New Hampshire alone has over 400 elected legislators.The same is true of “advisors” or “officials.” These are basically no better than anonymous sources. The source is trying to make them sound more important than they probably are. Take it with a salt lick.The same is also true of [insert celebrity figure with zero expert qualifications here.]Let me get this off my chest:Ted Fucking Nugent is not a reliable source regarding literally any goddamned piece of information, including music. Ted Nugent is not a politician. Ted Nugent is not a policy expert. Ted Nugent doesn’t have any expertise in any area except how to sing “Cat Scratch Fever” and avoid getting drafted by the military. Ted Nugent does not hold a single degree above a high school diploma nor have any relevant professional experience that would qualify him to be a credible source of anything except for how to look like human-rat hybrid experiment that went horrifically wrong.Stop giving this moron any sort of credibility. He is not a credible source of information.The same is true of all sorts of other celebrities who have decided that for some reason or another, their opinion matters and should be taken serious. Just because you have a million followers on Instagram does not make you a credible source. Just because your parent was a senator doesn’t qualify you as an expert on foreign policy or politics.It’s on the blog portion of an otherwise reputable source’s website. Forbes and Reuters are respected, usually highly credible news sources. However, both Forbes and Reuters have third-party-blog portions of their websites that are not vetted and edited by Forbes or Reuters. I could go get a blog on Forbes. Reuters has a section of its site dedicated to unvetted, unedited press releases that literally anyone can publish. Contributors are solely responsible for the content. These sources do no fact checking about these posts. Make sure its from the journalism side of those generally reliable, credible sources before trusting it, not Joe’s Totally Unbiased Blog hosted on Forbes.Avoid these sources, or very carefully review them.Look for weasel words. “Many experts agree” or “polls indicate” is often a way to weasel out and report something that isn’t really credible without actually saying it is. “Many experts” could turn out to be four guys in a bar in Djibouti. The source ought to tell you who those experts are and where they work.Follow up and see if they’re actually credible sources and experts in the field they’re talking about.Recent/new study shows [insert inflammatory conclusion or health benefit of otherwise unhealthy habit, etc.] This is another classic piece of clickbait. News sources are notoriously scientifically illiterate and rarely report on methodology, confidence levels, what “statistically significant means,” the fact that correlation is not causation, and a lot more. Take everything that involves studies with a salt lick unless it’s from a peer reviewed journal and you actually know how to read the published results. Which also leads to…Watch out for “journals” that aren’t actually peer-reviewed, credible sources, or are actually just think tanks, foundations, and institutes that spout made up bullshit.There is an ever-increasing number of sources that really look and sound like they would be scientific, prestigious journals, and are anything but.For example, the American Journal of Engineering Research sounds like a pretty reputable source from the title, but it’s nothing more than a predatory journal that does not publish anything even approaching peer-reviewed quality scientific research.There are also various organizations, think tanks, and “institutes” that sound like credible sources, but publish conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, hoaxes, and other entirely made up nonsense. It’s really easy to fall down the rabbit hole these days, especially on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.Avoid these like the plague on humanity they are.Public Survey Push Polls. Unless it’s conducted by a reputable pollster who specializes in this kind of statistical work, polls are not always a very credible source of information. Worse yet if they’re a poll conducted by a local news outlet by putting a question up on Facebook or Twitter.Discount them as credible sources of anything except how many really angry people use Facebook or Twitter.Polls can be useful if they’re well conducted by otherwise reputable sources. Gallup, for example, is generally a pretty good pollster. Marist and Quinnipiac are fairly highly regarded. Zogby… not so much.Fox News, surprisingly, is a pretty good credible pollster. They source this out to two firms, one Democratic and one Republican (Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw and Company research, respectively). These firms are quite respectable and their methodology usually quite sound. While Fox News itself might be a dumpster fire of credibility, their polls are usually fine. (With thanks to resident stats expert Mac Tan on this one.)Check the URL. There are hundreds of fake websites that look almost exactly like actual news sites and are off by just a letter or two. ABC News is an actual source, and generally highly respected. There’s a website at the URL abcnews dot com dot co, and it looks very similar, but is loaded with actual fake news instead.Conventional source evaluation used to hold that .edu or .gov sources were likely to be reputable. Many educational institutions today host web content that is not reviewed or fact checked, much like Forbes and Reuters above. Government sources are still likely to be mostly credible, but the current administration has a tenuous grasp at best of what constitutes credible, reliable fact-based information and those running various agencies are little better.Your mileage may vary here.Nobody else is talking about it. If your source’s headline or article isn’t reported literally anywhere else except a handful of blogs or some threads on Reddit, that’s a good clue that it’s not credible. There is no validity to the idea that there is a massive conspiracy to hide Teh Truth!™ from all of us by the mainstream media, only to be thwarted by a plucky band of YouTube commentors and Redditors.Look for at least local news articles. Most small towns have at least a local radio station or weekly newspaper that publishes local news, even “Cow Crosses Road; Traffic Halted for Hour.”If it’s something that seems nationally important and even the local herald doesn’t report on it, odds are it never happened.View foreign government-run sources with a healthy skepticism. Some of my conservative friends have started sharing a lot of things from RT. RT is literally Russia Today, a Russian state-run media corporation. For the love of God, don’t. This is literally a propaganda arm of the Russian government.Now, not all foreign sources are bad. The Times of India, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Der Spiegel are excellent journalism and well-respected sources.But don’t rely on foreign state-run media as a rule.Edit: Al Jazeera is a bit of an oddity here. It’s generally pretty well-respected and credible, but it’s also the state media arm of Qatar. It’s not without controversy for that precise reason. I take it seriously as a source, but I always follow up to see if anyone else is also reporting it and whether there’s anything missing.Edit 8/26/19: Some Indian residents are telling me that the Times of India isn’t what it used to be and has become far less reputable.Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are usually very good at avoiding these kinds of red flags.Snopes, Politifact, and other fact checkers are generally accurate and honest arbiters of truth because they don’t engage in shady journalistic practices, verify and disclose their sources so anyone can decide that if they don’t want to take the fact-checker’s word for it that they can follow up and do the math themselves, and have reputations for correcting mistakes.They have good journalistic integrity and that is why they are regarded as high quality, reputable, credible sources.Mostly Standard Addendum and Disclaimer: read this before you comment.I welcome rational, reasoned debate on the merits with reliable, credible sources.But coming on here and calling me names, pissing and moaning about how biased I am, et cetera and so forth, will result in a swift one-way frogmarch out the airlock. Doing the same to others will result in the same treatment.Essentially, act like an adult and don’t be a dick about it.Getting cute with me about my commenting rules and how my answer doesn’t follow my rules and blah, blah, whine, blah is getting old. Again, ornery enough today to not put up with it. Stay on topic or you’ll get to watch the debate from the outside.If you want to argue and you’re not sure how to not be a dick about it, just post a picture of a cute baby animal instead, all right? Your displeasure and disagreement will be duly noted. Pinkie swear.I’m done with warnings. If you have to consider whether or not you’re over the line, the answer is most likely yes. I’ll just delete your comment and probably block you, and frankly, I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it.Debate responsibly.Footnotes[1] Page on apa.org[2] You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - The Oatmeal[3] Liberals and Conservatives Are Both Susceptible to Fake News, but for Different Reasons[4] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/08/fake-news[5] Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/[7] Revisionist History Season 3 Episode 4

Chronic Fear is Worse than Chronic PainFear is a state of mind and to get through it, you need to learn a bit, let go a bit of the tight implausible control that most of believe we have over our lives and be patient with yourselves and your families.My family so looked forward to snowboarding in Summit County, CO, in the high mountains, for our 2020 Spring Break. That was this week. Like waking from a dream, that image has faded. Our two youngest children, my wife and myself are all at the same level of boarding capability and had, over New Year’s the most spectacular time with one another playing in the powder of the back country of the Rocky Mountains. There are few points in life, if ever, when a family’s capabilities are all matched. We looked forward to an encore vacation over Spring Break. We knew that there was a possibility of things not working out as COVID19 continued, but our excitement trumped our caution believing that it would take a few weeks before the USA really had to deal with the spreading pandemic. We chose hope over caution and would do it again and again because it gave our youngest children a sense that this whole thing, will, in fact, end. It will be at its end one day in the future.We flew to Denver on Friday; We went hiking on Saturday on Bergen Peak with Denver friends and saw dozens of outdoor enthusiasts running and hiking. Yes, in Colorado, they run, physically run, up and down these foothill mountains that soar up to 9,000 in altitude. We Ohioans, we walked for ten minutes, took a break, caught a picture, then walked, then break… you see that picture in your head. I tell the boys I’m acclimatizing. Them… running; Me walking.My thirteen-year-old asked if there were mountain lions around us? The friend we were with said, “Yes, but they generally do not bother humans.” He, being my best-friend of nearly 34 years, then adds; “Besides, your dad is the slowest in our group, he’ll get eaten while we all escape.” He smiled easily to my son, who giggled and smiled, and looked at me with one raised eyebrow, simultaneously. Hard to capture playful menacing and humor together, but there it was. They laughed together, then, out loud. I said, “Hey, I’ve lost 40 pounds in the last year.” It was shaping up to be a fun vacation, despite… despite… being on the verge of life perhaps changing for our family, for our community, for our State and our Nation.We got back to the hotel to find all the previous reassuring emails from Vail and Arapahoe Basin and Beavercreek that we had received just that morning had changed. Our phones began ringing of cancellations. They were saying; Everything is closing, indefinitely. Our friends in Vail texted, ‘stay away.’ Sad emoji. The case count jumped in the Vail Valley(s) there from 11 to 80 overnight. It is a hotspot. They were transporting people own from altitude, back to Denver from the mountain resorts. We called the airlines… 120-minute wait. We waited. We also called others and cancelled all the plans in the place we were staying. Everyone understood. Everyone was incredibly nice and understanding on the phone. My wife, a physician at Ohio State, commented, “I just knew this was going to happen.”I replied, “I think I knew, too. But we all worked so hard to be here, together… next…” I stuttered ever so slightly, a very rare tell of true emotional uncomfortableness, of which I rarely suffer, “next.” I paused. “Next year won’t be the same.” It’s true, I won’t be able to keep up with the boys on the mountain next year. Our perfect family-vacation moment was going to pass into history without us. We knew we needed to fly home Sunday.We were re-packed efficiently. Exactly 121-minutes later, my wife was rescheduling our flight for the following morning. We arrived at the airport early. We notice people talking less. Not less people, mind you, lots of people, just, they were, being stiller, talking less. When conversations were overheard, COVID19 or Coronavirus were the words heard from afar. Those words travelled further. Like those sounds carried on the air more than others, perhaps like the very virus itself. It looked like the set of a movie more than the bustling Denver International Airport we know well. Something not-real about it all. My boys whispered about people looking nervous. Quietly.While we we’re getting ready to push back from the gate, the flight’s air circulation was at minimum flow. The plane got warm, then hot, and stuffy and you could smell the slightest fear building around you as people realized they were all breathing one another’s air. The last time I smelled fear in a group was on 9/11, at about noon, after all surgeries were all cancelled, after mass discharges from the hospital had been initiated, when The Ohio State Medical Center learned it would be receiving burn victims from the collapsed towers. That time, on 9/11, it was more sudden, more intense and more palpable than what was felt now, in the Present.My mind wandered to 2001, to the Past. That day, we waited hours and hours to learn there would be no patients coming. They were all dead in New York. I shoved away from those thoughts. I steadied my breath and saw my boys playing on their devices and my wife had some Netflix show playing on a tablet. Everyone being normal; I imagined this happening in 100’s or even 1,000’s of planes worldwide. Everyone acting normal with this background slight fear beginning. From that point, over the next 24 hours, I began to notice the signs of Chronic Fear.On the way home from the airport, back in Columbus, OH, we decided to go to the stores that Sunday evening. Remember, we left for vacation, so we had emptied the fridge prior and had to get something. Shopping was… interesting, the shelves half bare, and again, the people, quieter. You could see it in others faces, you could feel it in the air. Some cracked jokes. Fraternity boys snapped selfies of themselves on emptied shelves. Acute fear and panic are different than a simmering chronic fear state. The adrenaline and flight vs. fight mechanisms keep you sharp, frosty and biologically driven to survive. Chronically, it tires you, exhaust you and weakens your systems.It is what happens when you realize slowly, over days to weeks, that the danger cannot go away, you cannot outrun it, or outfight it… but you just might be able to hide from it. Chronic Fear. Stay still. Remain calm. Try… to remain calm. Be… exist… as a quiet hiding thing. If you’re near silent and you’re motionless and your breath remains shallow enough that the only sensation of breathing is your very thought of it… you just might go unnoticed by the evil you believe you perceive closing in around you. Closing in around your family. That’s the chronic fear I’m talking about.“Are you scared, dad?” one boy asked, I was not sure which one, their voices can be so close to one another in tone, pitch and volume. “Are you going to write, again, to everyone, about this?” the other asks on top of the first question. I’m turned away at the time.I turn my head to them, “Yes.” My simple answer to both at once. And… I am scared on some levels. But I’ve been scared before. In fact, chronically scared for years is how my disability journey went. It’s awful. I return my gaze to address them, both looking older to me and like the children they are at the same time. “But it’s the uncertainty of people, themselves, that scares me. Not the virus. Not the economic disruption. Not the politics. People forgetting that this all ends one day in the future. That’s the scary part for me.”My 15-year-old, on the verge of sixteen, asks, “Am I going back to school? What about my AP test(s)? And… do I even keep working on getting my driver’s license?” My 84-year-old father-in-law, who is in great shape and teaches others to fly sport’s planes, had just finished talking to me about his fear a few minutes before this. ‘GranPap,’ that’s his house nickname, said he didn’t want to be grounded for months. He says he’s too old to wait for this to get better. He expressed he only had so much time left to be so healthy. Don’t we all.My youngest, at 13 years-old, asks me, “The store was out of white cheddar Cheese-Its. Are they going to make more?” Inside, in my mind, I bust up laughing. My 15-year-old glares at his younger brother for asking such a stupid question while the fate of the rest of his high school sophomore year is at stake!“I’m sure white cheddar ‘Cheese-It’s’ are going to be on the shelves by the end of March and… No, I do not believe you will physically return to school this academic year. You will both complete this school year; digitally, virtually or whatever they are going to call it. As to your driver’s license, buddy, I think the entire United States might take April off from driving.” The young one ran away to go play Rocket League with friends in an online tournament for $10… yes, ten whole dollars is the prize for an 8-level, single elimination, tournament! The near 16-year-old remains… eyes like a man, but the look he gives me, like a child. I remembered these coming-of-age moments with his two older siblings and here it is, finally, definitely, with my third child. Lost for only a second in his chocolate dreamy eyes… and yes, one day, those eyes will melt hearts… so intense! “But… Maxen… honey, this is all going to be temporary. In six to eight weeks, the summer weather will break. They, the doctors and the scientists, believe that transmission rates will fall, and we can all get ready for next year, together.”Sharp as a razor, his mind and voice, at once react. I see the question in his facial muscles, and he asks, “What’s going to happen next year?”I could have told him about the 6th century illness that killed nearly 50% of the world, or the 13th century black plague that eliminated 1/3rd of Europe population or I could have told him hours about 1918 and the Spanish Flu that killed 5% of the modern world and did so at the tail end of World War I… and the world war had left economies devastated… but instead I said, “Do you know the story of the Phoenix and the Dragon?”“What? Dad! I want to know.” His body language shifting to quite a defensive posture.“It begins in today’s world, an illness out of China. The Dragon of the world comes to life and…” I am abruptly cut off.“And... America is the Phoenix. Nice dad. My friends on discord are scared. They are asking me questions. Just tell me.” Of course, I really have no Earthy idea how all of this will unfold; Any more than you reading this right now know how this piece of writing will end today. Yet, my perspective is different, I’ve been scared and scared chronically. My own inner-Phoenix rising just this past summer.“No, son, America is The Eagle… The Human Race is the Phoenix.” We talk for a time and then my wife and I decide to take away some of the mystery of a pandemic… by the only means we really have… teaching our kids. We began with this. Italians sent a message to the world on YouTube: “You are all 10 days behind us”Then, we pulled up the Johns Hopkins’ interactive map. If you want to see, in real time, or almost real time, Earth’s numbers for this pandemic and the effect that social distancing will have on the spread of disease over the next two months; Then here is a graphic map that is updated regularly from Johns Hopkins University: Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)Johns Hopkins University: Coronavirus Live MapNext, we decided to show them Vox’s show, on Netflix: “Explained - The Next Pandemic” and then we watched “Contagion” the 2011 movie. This combination of TV Show plus Movie demonstrates the ‘how’ of what’s happening and the Hollywood version of something at least 10 times worse than what is happening today. We talked about how fear, itself, is the greatest enemy of all.This next sentiment cannot be expressed better. (And I tried… for about an hour to re-write or paraphrase this into a more modern tone.) We talked about how humans have overcome fear in the past, again and again and again. We humans are a persistent, resilient and resistant breed, to be sure.President Trump is not President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”(The) understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.Everyone knows the phrase, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…” but, as a teacher my whole life, I wanted to ‘teach’ the boys that it is ultimately up to the people to learn, understand and support the efforts (of any leadership) that result in victory, over COVID19, over World War II or over anything in their lives. Trump; Love him, hate him, he’s the leadership right now in 2020.I can no longer practice medicine. I still feel the sadness inside, to this day, when writing those words. With every fiber of my being I wish I could be a doctor right now. Yet, my life’s path is different than I once envisioned. I have known loss, and fear to the point of depression and helplessness, even suicidal ideation... over losing the career I so loved. The shame and guilt were, sometimes, still are, tremendous. I recovered because of understanding and support from family, friends and believe it or not, 1,000’s of strangers online who comment on stories, answers, and writings that I have become fond of producing on Quora, Medium, LinkedIn and even Facebook. I have referred to the past decade and all the changes in my life as a giant ‘left-hand turn’ in my journey’s path.I believe many of us, on Earth, are about to go on the same type of ‘left turn’ as we absorb the changes to our lives and our economy after we defeat the virus. We will defeat it. Again. We will defeat it and likely far faster than ever believed possible as the world’s biotechnology corporations are showing unprecedented cooperation and sharing of information.What can you do in your life? What can you think about in your life, for your family, for your friends? I’m going to go through what I tell others in texts and emails. I’ll repeat again what I repeat often. Civilization, itself, can fragment and fracture when needs are not met, basic human needs… but that will not happen this time around. There are many good reasons to remain optimistic. We literally all live in the best time to be handling this pandemic. We have the best technology and the best communications, ever, for humankind.Food, Water, ShelterThe markets will remain open, at least during the daytime. I expect nightly curfews to begin in every major city shortly and last through the end of April. I would prepare though, for you and your family to be limited in the amount of shopping. Maybe, at times, to only one time per week, perhaps by last name or some other identifier. This will be done to social distance primarily, and reduce, numerically, person-to-person contact.The water supply in America’s residential zones is the best in the world (in most places… Flint, MI, notwithstanding) so you are not going to run out of clean water. Most tap water has some degree of chlorination and that’s for keeping it as sterile as possible. While we all love whatever favorite drink we love, water and remaining hydrated are critical. Your immune system works better when you are hydrated.Shelter in place is great, unless you cannot pay rent. I believe that any landlord ‘kicking people’ out for not paying rent, will face harsh penalties in the near future. There are rumors of sending checks to people. Today, the news spoke of a hold on all evictions and foreclosures until May. We will all see what Congress decides to do in the next two weeks.Safety and SecurityPlease know that your part in this is the following: (YES, I KNOW I’M WRITING IT IN ALL CAPITALS, THAT IS FOR YOUR BRAIN TO READ IT CAREFULLY.)• WASH YOUR HANDS• TOUCH LESS THINGS AND PEOPLE• TOUCH YOUR FACE LESS• COUGH OR SNEEZE INTO ELBOW• WIPE DOWN YOUR EYEWEAR, EARWEAR, AND DEVICES SUCH AS PHONES, TABLETS AND LAPTOPS ONCE A DAY WITH AN ALCOHOL SWAB (70% ALCOHOL OR GREATER)That’s what I said on March 5, 2020… then, on March 10, 2020… I added the following:• YOU WILL LIKELY BE ASKED TO MONITOR YOURSELVES. IF EXPOSED, YOU WILL BE CONTACTED BY PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS, AND BE ASKED TO TAKE STEPS DEPENDING ON WHETHER YOU ARE AT HIGH, MODERATE OR LOW RISK. YOU MAY BE ASKED TO REMAIN HOME FOR 14 DAYS FROM EXPOSURE. IF YOU ARE UNDER 60 YEARS OLD AND HEALTHY, YOU, PERSONALLY, ARE AT LOW RISK, BUT EVERY PERSON YOU COME IN CONTACT WHO IS EITHER OVER 60 YEARS OLD OR UNHEALTHY OR WHO WILL OR MAY COME IN CONTACT WITH SOMEONE OVER 60 AND UNHEALTHY, IS AT RISK.• PREPARE TO STAY HOME FOR 14 TO 21 DAYS. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH FOOD FOR YOU, YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS AND ONE EXTRA PERSON. RICE, BEANS, CANNED FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. (TEN POUNDS OF RICE/PASTA PER FAMILY MEMBER PLUS ONE AND THEN TEN CANS OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLES FOR EACH MEMBER OF YOUR FAMILY)• MANY PEOPLE ARE BUYING CLEANING SUPPLIES. IT APPEARS AS IF SOAP AND WATER ARE SUFFICIENT TO KILL THE VIRUS ON YOUR HANDS AND ON SURFACES. ANY CLEANING SUPPLY THAT IS LESS THAN 70% ALCOHOL WILL BE LESS EFFICIENT THAN CLEANING WITH PLAIN SOAP AND WATER. CHECK WHAT YOU HAVE AT HOME FIRST. WE ALL, BASICALLY, KNOW HOW TO CLEAN THINGS, EVEN IF WE HATE THE CHORE.• DO NOT PANIC. THINK BEFORE YOU ACT. THIS UNFOLDING TRAGEDY FOR THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THE PUBLIC, IS NOT THE VIRUS, NOR THE CONTAGION, IT IS THE IRRATIONAL OR NON-UNIFORMITY IMPLIED OR ENACTED IN THE REACTIONS TO THIS COVID19 EVENT.Now, today, right after St. Patrick’s Day (GO Irish!!!) I have to add the following:• IF YOU ARE UNDER 40 YEARS OLD AND HEALTHY, YOU, PERSONALLY, ARE AT LOW RISK. FROM 40-60 YEARS OLD, THE RISK INCREASES. EVERY PERSON YOU COME IN CONTACT WHO IS EITHER OVER 60 YEARS OLD OR UNHEALTHY OR WHO WILL OR MAY COME IN CONTACT WITH SOMEONE OVER 60 AND UNHEALTHY, IS AT RISK. AN ALARMING NUMBER OF MILLENIALS ARE NOT SOCIAL DISTANCING BUT NEED TO FOR THE SAKE OF THE ENTIRE POPULATION.• SOCIAL DISTANCING WILL BECOME MANDATORY EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES. THE BORDERS TO COUNTRIES WILL ALL SEAL OVER THE NEXT 30 DAYS. PREPARE FOR SOME FAIRLY DRACONIAN METHODS OF SOCIAL RESTRICTIONS TO LIMIT PHYSICAL SOCIAL INTERACTIONS. DOMESTIC AIR TRAVEL WILL LIKELY CEASE OR BE LIMITED TO PRE-APPROVED-NEED-ONLY BEFORE THE END OF THE MONTH. IN SOME PLACES, THE USE OF AUTOMOBILES MAY BE HEAVILY RESTRICTED TO ESSENTIAL PERSONAL ONLY; MEDICAL, FOOD & WATER SUPPLIERS, SANITATION, POLICE, FIRE, GOV’T, ETC.• YOU CAN HELP EVERYONE, INCLUDING YOURSELF BY REMAINING IN PLACE, AT HOME, AWAY FROM OTHERS, FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. WHEN OUT, REMAIN, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, MORE THAN 6 FEET AWAY FROM OTHERS, ESPECIALLY WHILE INDOORS! IF OUTDOORS, IN THE SUN, WITH SOME AIRFLOW AROUND YOU, STAYING 6 FEET AWAY FROM ONE ANOTHER, IF NO ONE IS ILL, YOU ARE LIKELY VERY SAFE TO TALK AND LISTEN TO ONE ANOTHER. DON’T PANIC. BE SMART. BE UNDERSTANDING TO OTHERS. DID YOU KNOW JUST REMAINING QUIET AND LISTENING TO SOMEONE SCARED OR DEPRESSED IS ONE OF THE BEST THINGS YOU CAN DO FOR THEM? EVEN IF YOU HAVE TO STAND 6 FEET AWAY FROM THEM AND YOU NEED TO FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF THIS.• THE PHYSICIANS I AM NETWORKED WITH HAVE WARNED ME OVER THE LAST 72 HOURS THAT THE COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) IS WORSE THAN EXPECTED. THERE IS A REAL RISK THAT YOUR LOCAL HEALTHCARE INFRASTRUCTURE WILL BE MAXED OUT. U.S. HOSPITALS ARE NOT BUILT TO SURGE TO MULTIPLES OF NORMAL CARE. U.S. HOSPITALS ARE NOT BUILT TO SURGE TO MULTIPLES OF NORMAL CARE. THAT MEANS THEY WILL HAVE LITTLE REMAINING CAPACITY FOR CAR WRECKS, COMPLICATED BIRTHS, STROKES, HEART ATTACKS, ETC. BE CAREFUL WITH YOURSELVES. THINK ABOUT THE THINGS YOU ARE GOING TO DO. THINK BEFORE YOU ACT.• THIS WILL NOT END QUICKLY, NOT IN WEEKS, MAYBE IN MONTHS, DEFINITELY WITHIN YEARS. IT WILL END, JUST, NOT QUICKLY. FOUR TO FIVE DAYS AGO, THE U.S.A. REALIZED (PUBLICALLY) IT NEEDED TO ENFORCE SOCIAL DISTANCING MORE STRONGLY IN ORDER TO ‘FLATTEN THE CURVE’ OF CONTAGION. AT THIS POINT, I BELIEVE THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL USE ALL ITS POWER AND RESOURCES TO PROTECT AS MANY CITIZENS AS POSSIBLE. THAT INCLUDES, IF NEEDED, MARTIAL LAW FOR TIME. THAT INCLUDES, IF NEEDED, THE NATIONALIZATION OF VITAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND CORPORATIONS – WHICH I HEAR IS STARTING WITH THE DEFENSE NATIONALIZATION ACT.Okay, I really do hate writing in all CAPS but it’s important and you need to read and absorb information. This is the flattening the curve graphic getting the most views:I hope you watched the Italian YouTube video showing regular people who are 10 days in front of us (The U.S.) in time. My kids had heard the phrase, “flattening the curve,” in their science classes in school before Spring Break occurred. There is a ton of material about flattening the curve online but in essence it is simple: If everyone gets sick at the same time, there will be a bottleneck of healthcare services, most especially ventilators and respiratory support machinery and personal… that means many people who could have been saved will die waiting for help. If we all get sick (over time… say 3-6 months instead of all in one month) then services and machinery can keep up will the demand and fewer lives will be lost. It’s math. It’s statistics. This was written in the last week and explains how the above graphic got created and distributed. Flattening the Curve – NY TimesI lived in Chronic Fear for a long… long time secondary to my disability. I fought hard for the right to be free of my disability, thinking, believing, it would end, and I could be normal again. While I cannot and will not ever practice anesthesia or medicine again… You, Your Life, You will be different. Your Life will return to normal, in time… months, hopefully, maybe a year or two but Life will go on and this virus will not beat the Human Race. In fact, we’ll roar back like Elon Musk’s rockets into the skies! I’ll bet 2022-2025 may be some of the most exciting times on Earth. We cannot fall into Chronic Panic.Chronic Panic will rob you of your senses. Do not allow this to happen to You. You are going to fine. You can keep yourself interested in life. Play games to keep your mind moving. Learn new games; cards, dominos, mahjong, there are hundreds of games to play, many of them online and free to learn. Even remaining in your home, you can get 20 minutes of movement and exercise in every day. Each day you don’t overeat, each day you plan to get a good night’s sleep, each day you move for 20 minutes… YOU beat this crisis.Make plans within your family units… and these do not need to be biological families. We all choose our families in and throughout life. Online groups are and can be families, too. Each one of us that takes care of ourselves, remains socially distance physically but NOT emotionally or psychologically IS HELPING TO FIX THIS CRISIS.My two youngest and my wife in the mountains of Colorado… 2 miles high. For us this picture is pure heaven and we wish we were there right now. Wind burn, sunburn, sore joints and muscles, some bruises and we would take it all… happily. Instead, we are at home, planning to get through the next weeks to months.These are the types of things we are doing. We are all getting 20 minutes of movement or exercise each day. We plan our meals and we are only ‘snacking’ in the deep evening after dinner when we play a board game, cards, watch a movie or stream some TV show we all agree on (and that is tough one) but we try to plan the next day in the evening of the current one. We’ll find a regular rhythm soon, each day building a routine upon one another. I hope all your families find that rhythm for the next 6 to 8 weeks.As I teach my own children; Human beings need (3) things in this life:1) Something or Someone to Love. We are all built differently but we all have the capacity to Love and be Loved. This is one of those times in Life when You must decide to allow Yourself to be Loved by those that need to Love You.2) Something to look forward to in the Future. This may seem dark right now, today. There is uncertainty in many possible futures for many of us. I tell my children, even the two grown ones, that by May 15, 2020 we will know whether this is a seasonal illness. Even if it is not, the sun will be shining in the Northern Hemisphere and being outside will be some extended freedom from the confinement we are all facing together. Together, that is the key thought. If it is not seasonal, I look forward to August 2020 when the largest bulge of the curve (flattened or not) will have passed through our healthcare system and many people, millions, will have recovered and be able to return to more of their lives. After that, I look forward to the announcements of the vaccines, the treatments and the eventual human race gaining immunity over this nasty bug called COVID19. And, after that I very much look forward to watching the most incredible nation ever conceived rebuild itself in record time… which will happen.3) Something To Do. Yes, without doing things or having things to do, we humans get into a lot of trouble. You know this is true. You are thinking about it right now. Physically, emotionally, psychologically… humans require something to do whether mandated or invented or enjoyed, the very act of doing something can define our lives… like medicine defined mine for so many years. This is why we plan, in our family, right now and each day, we plan what we are doing the next day… we all know that we will have something to do and we can look forward to doing it for a time before we sleep… that reduces stress… even if it is chores to do the following day.You can, in your own way, think and believe that these three things can and will help you through this crisis.· Someone or Something to Love· Something to Look Forward to in the Future· Something to DoIf you want more scientific information on COVID19 (SARS-CoV-2) here’s one website: Coronavirus COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) – by Paul G. Auwaerter, M.D.Lastly, and in closing, let me let you in on one of the hardest things to teach anesthesia residents. You know anesthesiologists, we are very cool customers, in general. The job is 99.9% controlled utter boredom pursuing the impossible perfection of the perfect anesthetic and 0.1% sheer terror when it does not work out. Anesthesiologists do not all start out that way. Given all the information these young doctors learn, and for anesthesiologists, especially about physiology and pharmacology, they can do what seems magical, even to other physicians sometimes, with a human body’s biophysical functions. Yet, there are sometimes in the course of a surgery or anesthetic where the exact right correct and most productive thing to do is… nothing. Wait. Gather data. Wait. Do nothing. Think. Think. Always, think before you act. Teaching someone to do nothing when they are bombarded by constant streams of information and updates like the control panels of a modern operating room suite… can be… difficult.We all need to learn a little bit of that skill. It’s really more of an art. There is an Art to doing less, to being still, to choosing to do nothing. Acting, for action’s sake, will be the biggest mistake most of us will make during this next 6 to 8 weeks, or these next few months or even this next entire year. List out what you think you need to do but add “Do nothing right now,” to the bottom of the list.Every time you take an action and it hurts you in some way, your fear will increase. Think, Can I do less? Can I be patient? Can I watch, listen and learn for one more day before acting?Circle May 15, 2020 on your calendars. That’s what I did with my kids. By that date, I believe, we will all begin to take action again ‘in our regular lives’ and until then. 1) Don’t Panic; 2) Think before You Act; and 3) Have Fun each and every day until then in some small way.Peace. Love. Life.~ChrisI know I said I was done, but one more thing… the more you know, the less there is to fear. WHAT THEY ARE TELLING MEDICAL PEOPLE:All the hospitals in America are sending various things out to their medical workers. These have been compiled by what we know is here in the USA, what Italy and South Korea are telling us and what Chinese physicians have been able to convey to their families in the United States. I have now seen several of these ‘notices’ and here’s what they have in common:Runny nose, itching eyes – you have allergies or the common cold, not likely to have COVID19. Still use precaution, but do not panic.Coughing spreads droplets about six feet, Sneezes can disperse droplets to 10 feet. Stay away from those who are ill, coughing or sneezing. If providing care, wear a mask (any mask) and eye protection (any glasses). Wash your hands thoroughly each and every time you care for anyone ill. Soap kills this virus. Wash clothing and bedding often of anyone who is ill (wear your mask and eye protection when handling dirty clothing or sheets).There is evidence that the COVID19 virus may not be as transmissible in high heat or high humidity, but this is not proven. By May 15, 2020, we will know if the better weather impacts the virus pandemic.Stay hydrated. Your immune system needs hydration for proper function. If sick, choose warm fluids over cold fluids. Literally, this may be the most important thing you do to help yourselves through this crisis. Stay hydrated.Symptoms of the COVID19 Coronavirus:Most people report a sore throat first. This can last 3-4 days. Drink plenty of fluids, warm fluids, throughout the day if your throat hurts. More people report a dry cough accompanying the sore throat than a ‘wet’ cough. Many people under 40 years old report that this is all the illness they experienced and that they do not even get a fever during this time. (IF THIS IS YOU OR YOUR FAMILY MEMBER, SEEK TESTING, CALL YOUR PHYSICIAN, DO NOT GO INTO THE HOSPITAL OR CLINIC UNLESS INSTRUCTED TO BY YOUR DOCTOR)Others, report that after the few days of sore throat and dry cough, they begin to get stuffiness and nasal discharge. This discharge is swallowed, coating the throat, the trachea and gets into the lungs with breathing and coughing. At the 5-6 days mark since symptoms began, reports of shortness of breath become common as do muscle and body pain(s). This is the beginning of the pneumonia. Many people report a fever of greater than 101 degrees, persistent dry cough, and difficulty breathing. (IF THIS IS YOU, YOUR FRIEND OR YOUR FAMILY MEMBER. CALL YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY. YOU NEED TO BE TESTED AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND EVALUATED FURTHER)After that, the sickness advances and not only do you have the fever, the dry cough becoming wetter as the pneumonia advances, body pain, increased difficulty breathing but you then get a non-stop congestive runny nose that has been reported to feel as if your nose is continuously underwater. (YOU WILL FEEL AS IF YOU ARE DROWNING AT THIS POINT. SEEK ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY.)This really is the end of this answer. ~Chris

Oh just a few things the liars at the mainstream media won't bother to tell you about.To date, the administration of President Donald Trump has taken significant action on issues of concern to social conservatives -- life, family, and religious liberty:2017On January 23, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, which blocks funding for international organizations that perform or promote abortion. This new program is known as Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), which now covers $8.8 billion in family planning and global health funds that go to organizations abroad (none of whom may perform or promote abortion).On February 22, the Department of Education, in conjunction with the Department of Justice (DOJ) rescinded President Obama's guidance that required public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and showers of their choice.On April 7, President Trump's nominee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Justice Gorsuch has already developed a reputation as an originalist who will rule the right way on religious liberty issues. Gorsuch is representative of President Trump's judicial nominees overall.On May 4, President Trump signed an Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty (known as the "Religious Liberty Executive Order"), broadly setting forth religious liberty as a policy priority of the administration, and requiring all federal agencies to take action to protect it. The order also more specifically addressed conscience protections, forthcoming guidance from the DOJ, and religious liberty in the context of free speech.On August 25, President Trump announced changes to the Obama administration's Department of Defense (DOD) policy which had allowed military personnel to serve even if they openly self-identified as transgender. (A DOD study found the Obama administration's policy to be detrimental to military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion.)On September 7, DOJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending the religious freedom rights of baker Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. This filing is representative of other actions defending religious freedom taking place throughout the Trump administration DOJ.On October 6, DOJ issued guidance and an implementing memo (as instructed by the Religious Liberty Executive Order) to all federal agencies explaining religious freedom law and how religious liberty must be protected. This guidance laid out a broad defense of religious liberty based on multiple statutes and provided each federal agency with guidelines for protecting religious liberty.Also on October 6, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed two regulations to deal with the Obamacare "HHS contraceptive mandate" that had for years violated conscience and religious liberty. These new regulations exempt organizations that have moral or religious objections to purchasing insurance that includes coverage of contraceptives and abortion-causing drugs and devices.2018On January 16, DOJ filed an amicus brief with the District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on behalf of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. The Archdiocese had wanted to promote a religious message during the Christmas holiday but, had been denied advertising space within the District's public transit system.On January 18, DOJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue defending the First Amendment rights of parents and students who attend a religious school, to participate in a private school scholarship program.On January 18, HHS announced a new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within its Office of Civil Rights (OCR). This new division was established to enforce federal laws that protect conscience rights and religious freedom.On January 19, HHS issued a new proposed regulation on conscience protections related to abortion. Specifically, the regulation proposed to implement 25 laws that protect pro-life healthcare entities against discrimination by federal agencies -- or state or local governments receiving federal funds -- due to their objections to participating in abortion, sterilization, and other morally objectionable procedures.On January 24, Sam Brownback was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. In choosing Brownback for this role, President Trump demonstrated the administration's commitment to religious freedom by choosing someone with gravitas and experience on the issue.On March 23, 2018, the White House and DOD issued a new policy allowing existing personnel to remain in the military while preventing those who have been diagnosed with "gender dysphoria" or had undergone gender transition surgery from joining the military. Those who are transgender and stable for 36 months could join so long as they serve in accordance with their biological sex.On April 26, Mike Pompeo was confirmed as Secretary of State. In choosing Pompeo for this position, President Trump chose someone who cares deeply about religious liberty and will make it a priority to see the issue advanced through this administration.On April 30, during a press conference with Nigeria's president, President Trump raised the issue of religious freedom and the killing of Christians in that country -- bringing attention to an issue that had largely been neglected by other government officials.On May 22, HHS issued a new proposed regulation reversing the Title X family planning regulations implemented by President Clinton. The proposed regulation would restore the separation of abortion services from the federal Title X family planning program, which President Reagan first implemented. The proposed regulation would also ensure parents are more involved in the decisions of minors to obtain services from Title X clinics. It reverses the discriminatory abortion referral requirement the Clinton regulations implemented and is poised to put a dent into Planned Parenthood's roughly $60 million annual revenues from the Title X program.On June 13, DOJ announced the Place to Worship Initiative, designed to increase enforcement and public awareness of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIA). This federal law protects places of worship and other religious uses of property. Through this initiative, federal prosecutors will receive training about legal protections for houses of worship.On July 24-26, the State Department held the first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. Political and civil society leaders from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C. for a three-day summit to discuss religious freedom issues and solutions. The Potomac Declaration, issued at the Ministerial, made a strong statement about the state of religious freedom around the globe and provided a plan of action for promoting global religious freedom. The U.S. also announced the International Religious Freedom Fund (to provide emergency assistance to victims of religiously motivated discrimination and abuse around the world) and the Genocide Recovery and Persecution Response Initiative (which has provided nearly $373 million to help persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq restore their communities). The U.S. was among 25 countries who signed a statement condemning terrorism and the abuse of religious believers by non-state actors.On July 30, DOJ announced a Religious Liberty Task Force to fully implement religious liberty guidance and policy across all components of the DOJ.On August 1, the Trump administration relied on Executive Order 13818 (which builds on Global Magnitsky Act authority) to sanction two Turkish officials over the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson due to his Christian faith. This Executive Order ultimately resulted in Pastor Brunson's release.On September 24, HHS terminated a $15,900 contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources to procure fetal tissue from aborted babies for research. The termination of this contract led HHS to announce an audit of all acquisitions and research involving human fetal tissue to ensure consistency with statutes and regulations.On October 6, President Trump's nominee Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh is the second constitutional originalist the president saw confirmed to the Court.On November 7, HHS finalized its two regulations to protect conscience and religious liberty from long-running problems with the Obamacare "HHS contraceptive mandate." These two final regulations exempt organizations with either a moral or religious objection to purchasing insurance with coverage of contraceptives and abortion-causing drugs and devices. The regulations took effect on January 14, 2019.On November 9, HHS proposed a new regulation to address an abortion surcharge hidden in many plans purchased on the Obamacare exchange. This proposed regulation would enforce the requirement that abortion surcharges are to be collected separately from other insurance premiums. This requirement was not closely followed under the Obama administration, leading HHS to now more strictly enforce the separation of abortion payments from other payments.On December 26, DOJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending a publicly-displayed cross-shaped veteran's memorial that had been challenged as a violation of the Establishment Clause. This position is representative of the Trump administration's originalist approach to the Constitution concerning First Amendment rights and other issues. Such an approach results in legal analysis that interprets the law rather than injecting policy preferences into it.2019On January 18, HHS notified California that its law requiring pregnancy resource centers to post notices about how to obtain an abortion violated the pro-life Weldon and Coates-Snowe Amendments. This marks the first time that the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division at HHS found a state in violation of these laws. This demonstrates the administration's commitment to enforcing conscience protections and its pro-life priorities.On January 19, at the request of 169 members of Congress and 49 senators, President Trump sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which he promised to veto any legislation that weakens current pro-life Federal policies and laws. This letter was a message to the new Democrat majority in the House that longstanding pro-life protections like the Hyde Amendment and safeguards protecting the conscience rights of health care providers are not negotiable.On Februa ry 22, HHS announced final rule changes governing the Title X family planning program. Consistent with federal law, these rule changes ensured that Title X clinics would be financially and physically separate from abortion facilities and would not refer patients for abortions. Since the implementation of the rule, Planned Parenthood and several pro-abortion states voluntarily decided to withdraw from the program rather than quit performing abortions or referring patients for abortions.On March 8, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback criticized China's poor religious freedom record in a speech he delivered in Hong Kong.On April 12, the Trump administration's policy on military service by those with gender dysphoria went into effect. This policy will help halt the deterioration of military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion caused by social experimentation in the military.On May 2, HHS announced a final rule to expand the structure in which federal conscience laws are enforced. In 2011, President Obama issued a rule that enforced only three federal conscience provisions. The new regulation under President Trump covers 25 existing statutes, which will be enforced by the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, part of the HHS OCR.On May 5, at the World Health Assembly, the Trump administration issued a joint statement on behalf of the United States and eight other nations calling on other countries to join an effort to focus on women's health issues that unify rather than create dissension among members (like abortion and sexual and reproductive health). This statement was the first action taken under the administration's new Protecting Life in Global Health Policy (PLGHP), which seeks to build a global coalition to promote women's health while also protecting unborn life and strengthening the family. This policy works in conjunction with the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) program, which restricts funding for organizations abroad that perform or promote abortion.On May 24, HHS proposed a new regulation that clarifies that discrimination on the basis of sex in section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act was to be interpreted under the plain meaning of the word. Therefore, it does not include "gender identity" or "termination of pregnancy" as set forth by a 2016 Obama administration regulation. The HHS regulation will continue to enforce existing civil rights protections; however, it makes clear that the federal government will not force physicians to participate in gender reassignment surgeries or abortions.On June 5, after an extensive audit into fetal tissue research, the Trump administration announced a major change in the enforcement of research contracts. HHS would no longer conduct intramural (internal) research using tissue from aborted babies and would greatly increase the ethics rules and safeguards that govern extramural (external) fetal tissue research contracts. All new external contracts will be subject to a congressionally authorized ethics advisory board, making it much more difficult for fetal tissue research contracts to be awarded by the National Institute of Health.On July 16-18, the State Department held the second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a new global initiative, the International Religious Freedom Alliance, meant to provide a way for like-minded countries to work together to advance religious freedom. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai gave a compelling speech condemning the use of technology to track and control the lives of religious minorities. The United States was among 14 signatory countries on a statement of concern about technology and religious freedom. The U.S. was also one of 34 countries that signed a statement of concern on counterterrorism as a pretext for the repression of religious freedom; one of 27 countries that signed a statement condemning blasphemy, apostasy, or other laws that restrict religious freedom; and was one of 46 countries that signed a statement that called upon government officials to condemn attacks on places of worship and to work with religious communities to protect these places. At this event, the State Department and USAID also announced new religious freedom training programs for foreign service officers.On July 16, the State Department placed targeted sanctions on Burmese military officials for their human rights and religious freedom violations committed against the Rohingya Muslim population.On July 18, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and HHS Secretary Alex Azar issued a joint letter on International Partnerships that called states to join a coalition of countries that seek to advocate against pro-abortion policies at the World Health Organization and the United Nations (UN).In August 2019, DOJ filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in two important religious liberty cases, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Bostock v. Clayton County/Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda. Through these filings, DOJ advanced a biologically binary definition of sex and those who operate accordingly, whether because of science or religious belief.On August 15, the Department of Labor (DOL) proposed a new regulation that would clarify the scope and application of religious exemptions for federal contractors. Under the Obama administration, the scope of religious exemption at the DOL was severely narrowed. The current DOL relied on the history of our nation's preservation of religious liberty, the First Amendment, and Supreme Court decisions to re-invigorate the exemption to its historical and constitutional parameters.On August 28, the HHS OCR issued a notice of violation to the University of Vermont Medical Center for forcing a nurse to participate in an abortion despite a conscience objection. This marks the third time that the HHS Religious Freedom Division under President Trump has investigated a conscience complaint related to participating in or promoting abortion.On September 10, the State Department placed targeted sanctions on Russian officials for their religious freedom violations and torture of Jehovah's Witnesses.On September 23, President Trump hosted a meeting during the U.N. General Assembly and gave a speech solely on the topic of religious freedom. During the speech, he announced a U.S. policy initiative to protect places of worship, pledging an additional $25 million in funding to protect religious sites and relics. President Trump also announced the U.S. would form a coalition within the business community to protect religious freedom. This is the first time a U.S. president has hosted a meeting focused solely on religious freedom at the UN.On September 24, President Trump discussed the need to protect religious freedom during his UN General Assembly speech, in which he also discussed China and Iran -- two major violators of religious freedom.On September 25, HHS Secretary Alex Azar delivered a statement at the UN General Assembly stating that there is no international right to abortion, and that the U.S. does not support ambiguous terms like "sexual and reproductive health" in UN documents.On October 7, the Department of Commerce blacklisted 28 Chinese companies whose surveillance technology products are used to systematically oppress and control -- and violate the religious freedom -- of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, China.On October 11, 2019, Attorney General Barr delivered a striking defense of religious liberty at Notre Dame Law School. He noted, "[t]he imperative of protecting religious freedom was not just a nod in the direction of piety. It reflects the Framers' belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government." The Attorney General proceeded to remind the audience that religion gives us the "right rules to live by." Barr highlighted the recent attacks on religious liberty, and that the DOJ under his leadership has been fighting back and protecting religious liberty.On November 14, the U.S. government lead a statement on behalf of itself and 10 other countries at the Nairobi Summit, once again calling upon the international community to focus on areas of consensus instead of divisive issues like abortion and sexual and reproductive health.On November 19, HHS issued a rule removing burdensome requirements that all grantees, including those that are faith-based, must accept same-sex marriages and profess gender identity as valid in order to be eligible to participate in grant programs. This included the adoption and foster care space, where these requirements had been used to shut down faith-based providers of foster care and adoption.On November 27, President Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, which affirms Hong Kong's semi-autonomous status and protects against Chinese government encroachment, which is a threat to Hong Kong's religious freedom.On December 19, the Treasury Department sanctioned two Iranian judges responsible for human rights violations. One of the judges was known to violate the rights of Iran's Christian and Baha'i religious minority communitiesOn December 20, the center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a final regulation to address the abortion surcharge hidden in many plans purchased on the Obamacare exchange. This final rule aligns federal regulations with section 1303 of the Affordable Care Act, ensuring that consumers know their health care plan covers abortion and that funding for abortion is kept separate from all other covered services.2020On January 16, HHS Secretary Alex Azar hosted 34 countries for a meeting on how to promote women's health and protect the lives of the unborn. This meeting followed an invitation sent by Secretary Azar and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to 70 different countries inviting them to join a coalition to oppose international efforts to enshrine abortion as a human right.On January 16, the Departments of Education and Justice issued guidance on constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression in public elementary and secondary schools. This guidance ensures that prayer in schools is properly protected and not unconstitutionally prohibited or curtailed.On January 16, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent a memo to the heads of executive departments and agencies providing guidance on Executive Order (EO) 13798 "Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty." In order to protect the ability of religious organizations to operate in the public square, this memo required the agencies to review the EO and publish policies on how they will comply.On January 17, nine federal agencies (the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Justice, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development) proposed rules leveling the playing field for faith-based organizations wishing to participate in grant programs or become a contractor. The rules eliminated two requirements placed on faith-based organizations that were not placed on secular organizations.On January 22, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services at HHS approved a family planning waiver for Texas to implement a state-run Medicaid program that excludes abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. This makes Texas the first state to receive Medicaid funding for a family planning program that does not include abortion providers.On January 24, President Trump became the first sitting president to give remarks in person at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. In his address he stated the eternal truth that every child is a sacred gift from God and reiterated his effort to defend the dignity and sanctity of every human life.Also on January 24, HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced live at Family Research Council's ProLifeCon event that HHS issued a notice of violation to California for violating the federal Weldon Amendment by mandating all health insurers provide coverage for abortion. California's abortion coverage mandate has deprived over 28,000 residents of plans that do not cover abortion. This marks the second time that HHS has issued a notice of violation to California for violating federal conscience laws and is the fourth enforcement action taken by the HHS OCR's Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.In February, the Trump administration filled the role of Special Adviser to the President on International Religious Freedom within the National Security Council. This role was authorized by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, but has remained unfilled for over 20 years since that law's enactment. President Trump is the first president to dedicate a full-time staffer to this role and fill it on a permanent basis.On February 4, during his State of the Union address, President Trump called on Congress to pass legislation that would ban late-term abortions. To highlight the need for this legislation, he invited special guest Ellie Schneider, who was born at just 21 weeks gestation.On February 5, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance. The Alliance will unite government leaders from like-minded nations to strategize ways to promote religious freedom and protect religious minorities around the world.On February 25, OMB issued a Statement of Administrative Policy strongly supporting two pro-life bills being voted on in the U.S. Senate: the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Had Congress passed these bills, the president's advisors would have recommended that he sign both into law.On March 24, DOJ filed a statement of interest in a case protecting women against men intruding on their sporting competitions. The statement made clear that athletic qualifications on the basis of "gender identity" were harmful to women's sports.On March 28, amid the coronavirus pandemic, HHS OCR issued a strong statement reminding health care entities of their obligation to treat persons with disabilities with the same dignity and worth as everyone else. OCR reiterated its duty to enforce current civil rights laws and has already worked with states like Alabama and Pennsylvania to remove discriminatory practices from their pandemic health plans.On April 2, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback held a special briefing. He called upon China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia to release their prisoners of conscience in light of the contagious coronavirus. Many of these prisoners were imprisoned for their religious faith.On April 3, after hearing from Family Research Council and other organizations, the Small Business Administration (SBA) issued a FAQ document confirming that churches and religious nonprofits are eligible for assistance like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in the coronavirus relief legislation known as the CARES Act. These clarifying protections ensure organizations would not be discriminated against based on their religious affiliation and would not have to give up their religious freedom in order to participate in these programs. In addition, the administration used an affiliation rule to ensure that large abortion providers like Planned Parenthood would not be eligible for coronavirus relief in the CARES Act.On April 14, DOJ filed a statement of interest protecting the religious liberty of church-goers in Greenville, Mississippi. During the coronavirus pandemic, the city of Greenville banned all religious services, even those that were able to abide by social distancing standards with drive-in church services.On April 17, the Department of Homeland Security included "clergy for essential support" in its list of personnel and entities deemed "essential" for purposes of responding to the coronavirus. This designation allows clergy and pastors more freedom to continue to operate and serve those around them in need at this time.On April 27, Attorney General William Barr directed federal prosecutors to monitor and, if necessary, take action to correct state and local policies that discriminate against religious institutions and believers while battling the coronavirus pandemic.On May 3, DOJ filed a statement of interest supporting the religious freedom of Lighthouse Fellowship Church in Chincoteague Island, Virginia. After the church held a 16-person worship service on Palm Sunday (following strict social distancing protocols), a criminal citation and summons were issued against the pastor pursuant to Governor Ralph Northam's executive order which banned in-person religious services but allowed large gatherings for businesses like liquor stores and dry cleaners.As of May 12, the Trump administration has overseen the confirmation of 193 federal judges, including two Supreme Court justices and 51 federal appeals court judges. Counting seven other judicial confirmations for roles outside the federal court system, President Trump has confirmed 200 judges so far during his time in office. An overwhelming number of President Trump's judicial nominees have been constitutional originalists, who will interpret the law as written, rather than interpret it according to their personal policy preferences. As judges, these nominees will rule correctly on religious liberty and pro-life issues.On May 15, the DOL issued guidance implementing the administration's Religious Liberty Executive Order and the DOJ religious liberty guidance. The DOL guidance also cited tothe OMB memo from earlier this year which directed all grant-administering agencies to detail how they will protect religious liberty in the context of such grants, and included specific action steps to ensure that religious liberty is protected.On May 18, USAID Acting Administrator John Barsa sent a letter to the UN Secretary General advocating that the UN not push abortion during the coronavirus crisis. Barsa noted that abortion is not an "essential service," and there are many actual health needs at this time. Therefore, the United States, which stands with the international pro-life community under the Trump administration, does not look kindly on these efforts to promote abortion.Persevering in Political Engagement: Lessons from the Life of William Wilberforceby Worth Loving (July 29, 2020)The abolition of slavery. Women's suffrage. Civil rights for black Americans. None of these reforms happened quickly. They only came about through years of dedicated efforts from people who refused to give up, despite overwhelming