Apocrypha vs. Facts

Talking heads love apocrypha.

Always spurious, never detailed, claims/anecdotes/statistics that seem to just materialize out of nowhere.

Some...

a.) man
b.) company
c.) child

who/that...

a.) died from ___
b.) lost all his money to ___
c.) laid off all its workers when it couldn't stop the union

then...

a.) the government didn't help
b.) the government didn't help
c.) the government didn't help

of course this kind of thing...

a.) happens all the time
b.) can be proven by the following arbitrary statistic...
c.) COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!

NOT exactly scientific arguments generally.

I was watching the Daily Show the other day and some lady was condemning our public school system by invoking numerous anecdotes that sounded fairly ridiculous to me.

Something along the lines of how all the kids were being indoctrinated as pussies because they were being forced to hug like 90% of the time.

I could tell Jon smelled something fishy and he actually asked her how prevalent this kind of thing was.

She said "It happens all the time."

Uh-huh.

What he DIDN'T ask her, but he really could have, would be something akin to:

What was the name of ONE of these schools?
or
How many schools does this happen in?
or
So which is it? Every school makes every kid hug 90% of their classmates 100% of the time, or they hug 100% of classmates 90% of the time, or maybe 90% of the schools are all hugging all of the time while the other 10% have 0 hugging?

"It happens all the time."

You know what else happens "all the time"?
Virtually everything.

Does "all the time" mean "once a day", "once a week", "once a month", "once a year", "once a decade", "once a century", "once a milennia"?

Depends.

Let's examine the following truthful statements:

Dude, the Catholics pick a new Pope "all the time."
--Once every few years/decades.

Dude, a new flu virus shows up "all the time."
--About once a year.

Dude, Drew writes a new blog entry "all the time."
--Not very often at all actually.

Dude, ice ages happen "all the time."
--About every 10,000 years.

Dude, the Estate/Death tax takes a family farm when the Dad dies "all the time."
--This has never happened.

Dude, people live to be 100 years old "all the time."
--Approx. 70,000 people in the U.S. (about two one hundreths of a percent).

Dude, huge asteroids hit the earth and wipe out all life as we know it "all the time."
--Never. God created the heavens and the earth 8,000 years ago and put Dinosaurs here to test our faith.

Dude, politicians lie "all the time."
--Every microsecond of every moment since the beginning of time.

So, yeah.

Next time you watch the republican noise machine bouncing around some god awful statistic about how global warming isn't actually happening, or the economy is kicking ass, or we are winning the war on terror, or we have the best health care on the planet, or whatever; And then commences to "prove" his point with some piece of apocrypha, don't be afraid to call bullshit.

Brit Hume ain't gonna, but you certainly can.

Real live Apocrypha:

"555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980." Ergo: no global warming.

Get bonus points for finding my use of apocrypha in this post.