Do These Look Reliable to You?

Debbi Mack

3 min readAug 21, 2023

“All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” — Will Rogers

Seriously, though. What am I to make of these sources on the internet (formerly known as the Internet)?

The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco.

Ain’t that the truth? 🙂

[Psst. Pass it around. We need to keep the print book relevant.]

Texas Teacher Fired For Making TikTok After Teaching Kids About Their ‘Constitutional Rights’.

Okay. Is this a real event being parodied or a completely made up story, i.e., a work of fiction? Is this a parody publication, in general? Is there any truth in this depiction? Do any of the people described actually exist? Or is it a fictional account based on real events?

Plus …

Confidential affidavits detail reasoning for police raid of Kansas newspaper. You’ll need to subscribe to The Washington Post, because I’m fast running out of gift links.

Or you could read the same news in The Spokesman-Review or something called Hot Air.

And my second to the last gift link goes to:

At age 114, here’s her advice: ‘Speak your mind and don’t hold your tongue’. (With thanks to The Washington Post and its fine owner Jeff “Crazy Eddie” Bezos.)

And then, of course, there’s this:

‘TO PILE PELION UPON OSSA’: MEANINGS AND ORIGIN

I’ll quote just enough to satisfy fair use requirements as of this moment in time (and as far as I have personal knowledge of):

MEANINGS

The phrase , also , Pelion upon Ossa, and variants, mean to add difficulty to difficulty, also, to add to what is already great.

This phrase occurs, for example, in Just put a royal sock in it, Sarah, by Judith Woods, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Wednesday 9 thMarch 2011:

Who would want to be the Duchess of York’s PR this week? Short of being caught in a YouTube tryst with Charlie Sheen, snorting cocaine off a hooker in a hot tub, Sarah Ferguson’s stock could not conceivably sink any lower.

Quoting a source called word histories.

Indeed! 🙂

PS: Amazon is Getting Sued and other Good News!

Can you spot the irony? 🙂