French Scientist's Photo of 'Distant Star' Was Actually Chorizo (vice.com) 123
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A photo tweeted by a famous French physicist supposedly of Proxima Centauri by the James Webb Space Telescope was actually a slice of chorizo. Etienne Klein, research director at France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission posted the photo last week, claiming it showed the closest star to the sun. "This level of detail," Klein wrote. "A new world is revealed day after day."
But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world's most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage. "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth," he said after apologizing for tricking so many people. "Like an idiot, I got screwed," tweeted one French user. "Same," replied another, "the source was so credible" Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online, adding that "I also think that if I hadn't said it was a James Webb photo, it wouldn't have been so successful."
But a few days later, Klein revealed that the photo he tweeted was not the work of the world's most powerful space telescope, as he had in fact tweeted a slice of chorizo sausage. "According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth," he said after apologizing for tricking so many people. "Like an idiot, I got screwed," tweeted one French user. "Same," replied another, "the source was so credible" Klein told French news outlet Le Point that his intention had been to educate people about fake news online, adding that "I also think that if I hadn't said it was a James Webb photo, it wouldn't have been so successful."
Mmm, chorizo. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mmm, chorizo. (Score:5, Funny)
It's obviously a fake. If you convert the image to grayscale and rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, you can see the word "Sex" in the supposed convection currents.
Re:Mmm, chorizo. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mmm, chorizo. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's the point: Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the telescope could recognize that it was a fake. It was a deliberately bad fake, so anyone who repeated it is demonstrating their lack of verification.
News organizations especially are under great pressure to be fast - got to catch a story right away, or the readers will go elsewhere to find the breaking topic. So they can't afford to wait a couple of hours for a scientist to respond to emails and tell how plausible something is.
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The photo came from a (formerly) reputable scientist and was endorsed (erroneously) by another reputable scientist.
I don't think it is fair to blame the media for this one.
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:4, Insightful)
People are overreacting to this. Why so sad?
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:4, Insightful)
So a scientist did a fun joke.
RTFA. He didn't do it as a joke. He did it to "educate people" that "fake news" can even come from reputable scientists.
A week from now, climate denialists will be citing this as yet another example of scientists lying and falsifying data. And this time, they will be right.
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:4, Informative)
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Focus on the normal people.
Denialists are normal people. You are deluded if you believe they are a fringe movement. The mid-term elections are in three months, and polls predict that the party of the denialists will win both houses of Congress. So, no, I don't think "Reputable scientist posts fake news" is a funny joke.
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Not any more. Five thirty eight has the Democrats keeping and even expanding their numbers in the Senate.
https://projects.fivethirtyeig... [fivethirtyeight.com]
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:2)
538 said Trump would lose in 2016
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Republicans have a huge opportunity to take congress this year. Everything is going in their favor.
Everything except themselves, that is. Why not cheer when veterans are left to suffer medical problems? The Republican party is a party of clowns.
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First, I read the RTFA from multiple sources, some quote that he did it as a joke. Second, climate denialists do not need this article to confirm their believes. They will always find a way to confirm their believes. It is not the cognitive rational mind you are dealing with here. You will not get someone out of denial by showing them the facts, on the contrary, they will burry their heads even deeper. It is bad to adjust your messages to these people. Focus on the normal people.
Science is not 'belief', science is a set of facts proven by experiment and observation. 'Belief' and 'faith' is for religionists.
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Science is not 'belief', science is a set of facts proven by experiment and observation. 'Belief' and 'faith' is for religionists.
That is not true at all. Science is the empirical methods we use to gain knowledge about the natural world.
Knowledge is the goal of science, not science itself. Furthermore, science does not "prove" things, it disproves things. We make assumptions about what is true because there are hypotheses that we have been unable to disprove. The more things we disprove the more likely the hypotheses we cannot disprove are to be true (assuming they are falsifiable).
As Thomas Kuhn put it (paraphrasing), once we underst
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:2)
Science isn't a set of facts, it's a process.
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:2)
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Science is not 'belief', science is a set of facts proven by experiment and observation. 'Belief' and 'faith' is for religionists.
Wrong. [stanford.edu] A belief is ANY statement you consider to be true. Scientific knowledge is a subset of the set of all beliefs.
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:2)
"Most of science is not proven, in scientific terms. Most of it is theory and deduction from observation."
I don't know that you understand the implications of any of that, starting with "proven, in scientific terms". I also think you might mistake the unwillingness to apply absolutes of correctness to be evidence of lack of confidence.
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science is a set of facts proven by experiment and observation
Most of science is not proven, in scientific terms. Most of it is theory and deduction from observation. There are a lot of really bad practices from people who don't do science but see themselves as allies. Claiming that science is proofs, for example. "The science is settled" is another one. I know you people mean well but it would be better is you just kept your mouths shut.
Even if that is true it still beats the pants off of 'belief' and blind 'faith' because the science at least has a leg to stand on.
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Science is not 'belief', science is a set of facts proven by experiment and observation. 'Belief' and 'faith' is for religionists.
That is not true at all. Science is the empirical methods we use to gain knowledge about the natural world.
Knowledge is the goal of science, not science itself. Furthermore, science does not "prove" things, it disproves things. We make assumptions about what is true because there are hypotheses that we have been unable to disprove. The more things we disprove the more likely the hypotheses we cannot disprove are to be true (assuming they are falsifiable).
As Thomas Kuhn put it (paraphrasing), once we understand physics with enough precision and certainty to apply it, it's no longer physics. It's engineering. This is why Newtonian physics, despite being technically inaccurate if we're looking for quantum precision, works so well: it gives us approximations that are close enough for most applications at our scale.
No, that is your belief/interpretation/opinion. Scientific method is the process of objectively establishing facts through testing and experimentation.
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I mean, I could just turn the whole "that is your belief/interpretation/opinion" back on you—that's a retort that you can level against any argument. It's intellectually lazy and ineffective. The difference between my belief/interpretation/opinion and yours is that mine is informed by epistemology and the philosophy of science, whereas yours are just common misunderstandings because for some reason modern science courses love to spend the first day talking about "the scientific method" and then move o
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> Focus on the normal people.
The average person will now re-ajust their priors so that when something is reported as based on 'science', it now has a bit more chance that it will turn out to be a hoax.
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That is a type of joke.
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Except they won't be right because as people with as brain know, science corrects itself. As did this. And for fucks sake it wasn't fake news, it was a silly prank that was revealed by the prankster.
Climate change is very well established, and anyone still denying it isn't doing so because they are detached yet unconvinced by the arguments. They're doing it because they are deeply irrational, pretty thick and are convinced that their politics is somehow superior to reality.
Nothing will convince the remainin
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Posting pictures on Twitter isn't 'falsifying data." Besides, if your argument relies on the fact that "scientists are always right," you need a better argument.
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Read the parent's post. He did claim the scientist did it "as" a joke. He said that he did a joke, and it was a joke.
When you tell someone else to "read" something it helps if you can understand and parse basic English. We use jokes to educate all the bloody time.
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So one source is all it takes?
Even if that source got his Twitter account hacked?
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Researchers suspected something was off when they detected protein in the spectrum.
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:2)
And an unreasonable quantity of sodium in the atmosphere. The wanted to name the body "Knorr".
To be fair (Score:5, Funny)
the scientist thought he was doing gastronomy.
Re: To be fair (Score:3)
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the scientist thought he was doing gastronomy.
We really need to have a talk with the editors. This needs to be modded as something other than "funny." Maybe "bad dad pun"?
Re: Mmm, chorizo. (Score:3)
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I can't fault them too much. A bit of booze and chorizo makes for a lot of bad ideas.
Tequila and Chorizo - sounds like heaven.
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The cocktail needs to be tequila dusted with diamond.
https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
It's still pretty impressive (Score:5, Funny)
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Imagine all the money we could save on astronomy if we could photograph food right here on Earth.
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Imagine how many pointless Facebook posts we could save by not photographing food altogether.
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Sounds like the Total Perspective Vortex. That would probably prove fatal.
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Guess there's a little Zaphod in all of us.
She's built like a steakhouse (Score:4, Funny)
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For the James W*bb telescope to be able to resolve this level of detail from a serving plate in a French bistro is pretty astonishing.
That's how we discovered that this is fake news.
With the telescope's strict requirements for constant shading with its sun shield, it would never be able to direct its gaze on France.
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Good point. I was about to correct you that the sun shield was always between the sun and earth, then I realized I was imagining the JWST at the L1 point instead of the L2 point. Lagrange points [nasa.gov]
Perhaps it's for the best. Since the JWST is primarily an infrared telescope, it helps that it is always on the dark side of the earth, even if it can't really turn our direction for fear of burning out its sensors.
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W*bb? Is that to evade IAU goons coming after you?
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No, that is a false way to put it. I realize your side has to lie to advance and get votes, but you may want to back off on blatantly making stuff up and exaggerating. The issue was that he may have been homophobic and fired people for being gay. I mean, Arthur Rudolph did important stuff for NASA and was a "product of his time" too .. we don't name rockets after him do we? Well I suppose someone like you might want to.
Re: It's still pretty impressive (Score:3)
Oh fuck off, both of you. This is a pretty fun discussion for once. :)
Re: It's still pretty impressive (Score:2)
Cancelling people for being products of their times is foolish. Back then it was common practice to flat-out refuse to hire women for technical or executive positions and to refuse to promote ethnic minorities beyond menial jobs. As well as firing out gays. It's not good, but it's unrealistic to expect people who climbed the ladder to be martyrs for future conceptions of ethical conduct.
Twenty years ago if you championed gender weirdos in the workplace, you'd get your pinkslip too. Today if you actively ref
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If we can exalt people who did bad things using the excuse that they are "products of their time," we ought to be able to excuse everyone for anything. Is not any serial killer "the product of his time" .. by time, I mean environmental factors and influences .. most of them have grown up with some sort of abuse or upbringing that failed to ingrain things like empathy, self-control, the value of other people's lives, etc. We should look at what values we want to promulgate in our time. If in the future, all
Re: It's still pretty impressive (Score:2)
Do we exalt Washington and Jefferson for owning slaves or do we exalt them for leading the Continental Army to victory and establishing the systems, practices, and norms that we find honorable and claim to revere to this day?
JFK and MLK both liked the ladies. We don't dwell on that.
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Do we exalt Washington and Jefferson for owning slaves or do we exalt them for leading the Continental Army to victory and establishing the systems, practices, and norms that we find honorable and claim to revere to this day?
Or, you know, controversial opinion here I know... how about not worshipping people as demigods? And even better, how about not whitewashing and/or otherwise ignoring large swathes of history in order to paint them as demigods? I mean good grief, the founding fathers didn't invent their
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It's interesting how you managed to almost quote me back to myself from an earlier thread while also believing that you're righteously disagreeing with me.
when you stop worshipping them, we can see if we agree.
Somewhere between scorn and worship is a happy medium where we honor people fir their honorable deeds,
An idiot acting wit great incompetence, as a traitor, fighting for the right to enslave is not performing an honourable act.
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Whom are you describing? I was talking about Jefferson and Washington.
We're talking about your opinions which consist of blind worship of the founding fathers, a great deal of fear about them losing their slot on TV, getting fired from their jobs and hounded on twitter. Which is, frankly, weird given they're long dead. And of course your opinion on the statues of traitorous and incompetent Confederate generals.
The daughters of the confederacy paid for and put up grave markers.
It was a memorial not a marker
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I see, so you make up a fact, lie about it, then quietly ignore it when proven wrong.
Very typical.
And I read your comment on this thread:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
You flip your shit whenever anyone says anything less than perfect about a founding father, bleating about cancelling, even though it appears you have no idea what the word even means. Then, because you in your heart know it's absurd tow worship them, you say it's bad to worshipping them, just before going straight back to flipping your shi
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Slavery is bad.
Glad you agree.
Extrapolating that to "everything any slaveowner ever did is bad by extension," the way the 1619 types
I have no idea what a "1619 type" is, but is sounds like you are assuming that the most extreme twits you can find on twitter are somehow representative of anything broader.
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The twits in question have bylines in major newspapers
Sure bro. If this was the case, you could point to an article that said some of the things you're claiming. Unfortunately you know I can and do read, so all posting a link would do for you is massively undermine your position to the point where you might have to question your ill founded opinions. No chance of that!
Once again: don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.
How about you don't see someone taking a drink of water 100 feet away and whine th
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Not actually far off from what it could do. The analogy they've used before is that the Webb telescope could detect a bumblebee at the distance of the moon.
People need to lighten up (Score:4, Funny)
This was pretty darn funny.
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This was pretty darn funny.
People can get pretty worked up over sausage. Just ask Cracker Barrel. [cnn.com]
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This looks shopped, I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few sausages in my time.
At least, he admitted it... (Score:4, Insightful)
At least, the guy admitted it — and laughed. Meanwhile, the "real" Science has a reproducibility crisis [nature.com] of immense proportions [bbc.com]:
And yet, these guys not only insist on being taken seriously, the rest of us have generally accepted "following the Science" and "trusting the Scientists" as an unquestionable principle. Where is the wise Bugs, who responded to a request to be "cooperative" and surrender his brain [imdb.com] with a polite but firm refusal: "Sorry, Doc, but I need what little I've got"?
I think the reproducibility crisis is overblown (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are wasteful and I think we need to get over that. Otherwise we're going to become way too neurotic and stop progressing as a species
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That’s when I proffered my words of wisdom, that waste is the highest virtue one can achieve in advanced capitalist society. The fact that Japan bought Phantom jets from America and wasted vast quantities of fuel on scrambles put an extra spin in the global economy, and that extra spin lifted capitalism to yet greater heights. If you put an end to all the waste, mass panic would ensue and the global economy would go haywire. Waste is the fuel of contradiction, and contradiction activates the economy, and an active economy creates more waste.
- Haruki Murakami [wikipedia.org] - Dance, Dance, Dance [wikipedia.org]
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Re:I think the reproducibility crisis is overblown (Score:5, Informative)
Basic research is incredibly expensive and takes decades to pay off. A good example is the covid vaccine or the MRNA technology was developed in the seventies. Right now Pfizer and moderna are making billions of that but it took 50 years.
We've cut taxes so much there's no money fund basic research. The problem with that is our entire economy is driven by boom and bust cycles where new technology creates new markets and drives our economy forward and then Wall Street deregulation causes a massive economic crash when they gamble away the profits and we bail them out.
The problem is we've been without basic research funding for about 40 years now and we're running out of new stuff to monetize.
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I think that's just a byproduct of the budget cuts that started during the Reagan era.
That would make great sense if America was the only country doing any science. It's not.
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Research funding has around doubled since 1978. Inflation has made dollars worth about a quarter of what they were worth in 1978. In real terms, funding has therefore halved.
I do however love your link to a weird crank blog as some sort of evidence. Please do keep up the good work.
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I smell Dunning-Kruger... (Score:3)
I just love it when dunces cite the normal, positive functioning of science as evidence that science is incompetent. Presumably you believe the total absence of factual self-correction in institutions like religion and business is evidence of ho
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At least he didn't post a goatse.
Re: At least, he admitted it... (Score:3)
Next up: see this close-up of a black hole :)
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Christmas island domain? I think it's kind of reddish.
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So what scientific fact do you object to?
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Don't you worry, as long as we have "skeptics" that believe harebrained nonsense that they could easily debunk themselves but instead prefer to believe some bullshit peddler whose credentials pretty much consist of what they use to log into their YouTube account, we have bigger "scientific" problems than that.
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instead prefer to believe some bullshit peddler whose credentials pretty much consist of what they use to log into their YouTube account
In this case, the bullshit was peddled by a reputable scientist.
So it appears that checking credentials doesn't help.
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Actually taking the time and effort to know something about the field being discussed helps the most. If you don't care to, then checking credentials gives you much better odds than not checking them.
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Just because science, and especially the process of publication, is not perfect, does not mean that your feelings about what the facts ought to be have any legitimacy at all.
The lack of reproducability is a problem, but longer term the bad papers fade away because people are unable to build on them and knowledge moves forwards (one funeral at a time as the saying goes). Science ultimately corrects itself, you never do.
Science is the current state of the art of knowledge, with the certainty increasing based
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Science may sometimes take its time but it does eventually correct itself when presented with convincing evidence. The modern scientific method is very young, since around the mid-1970s, so it's got a lot to correct from the days when people took "eminent scientists" at their word on the basis of their reputations. Can you think of other sections of society that commit this same error on a regular
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You mean scientists can't have harmless fun and do pranks like the rest of humanity?
Maybe we should have a rule, all scientists should be humourless robots.
Re: At least, he admitted it... (Score:2)
> More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments
Reminds me of my o-chem lab in college
check out my sausage (Score:1)
This is a very elaborate way to show everyone your sausage.
No physicists were fooled ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope. ... only 40? I expected a much bigger number, to be honest. Webb is damned impressive!
NASA says "Seeing at a resolution of 0.1 arc-second means that Webb could see details the size of a US penny at a distance of about 24 miles (40 km)".
So say 1 in 4 million.
Proxima Centauri is 200,000km across, so Webb would need to be 10^12km away.
It is actually 4 light years away which is forty times that distance
(if my maths is right)
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I was just a bit disappointed by that resolution, then I remembered that the JWST is more about light gathering than resolution. To get more than point images of some stars we can use multiple telescopes [wikipedia.org] to achieve a longer baseline. For nearby stars, the long baseline is what matters and the Earth-based array can achieve a resolution of 0.002 arc second according to the linked article. Imagine if we had a bunch of those above the atmosphere, or *two* JWSTs!
Simpler method (Score:2)
Sounds about right (Score:2)
for twitter.
So That's A Microscopic Picture Of His Sausauge? (Score:2)
And he named it Chorizo? Porn these days.
Sigh of relief (Score:2)
on reputation (Score:1)
Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf?
That's how reputation works. You work to build it your whole life, then you destroy it in a second by a stupid act.
Bukhari, famous collector of ahadith, whose collection of Sahih ahadith is book number two in Islam, once traveled to a different corner of a vast Islamic empire because he heard of a man who knew a hadith that he did not know.
After many days of travel he finally got to a rural place and he saw the man trying to call for a stock animal by pretendi
Jusst wait ... (Score:4, Funny)
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Anybody making that leap is irredeemably stupid. Just let the be. Don't engage.
Many in France will be outraged (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually, this joke was first made by a BRITISH (well, sort of) astronomy at Maynooth University in Ireland. He posted it, and then the French astronomer stole the joke and re-posted it the next day without attribution.
See
https://telescoper.wordpress.c... [wordpress.com]
A FOOLish tweet? (Score:1)
Adding to the problem. (Score:1, Insightful)
So he's got this completely backwards. He has literally become part of the problem and added to our mistrust of sources that we previously expected to be reliable.