179.1 - A note about sources

A note about sources

I'm going to start this week with something I've been meaning to mention for a little while now but I keep forgetting. So this time I decided to do it at the beginning of the show so I wouldn't forget.

A short while back I heard on another show on this station someone making a claim about a political issue. It was a claim, a factual claim, making an assertion about a government practice which I had never heard of before from any source, left, mainstream, or right. No source was given, no basis for the claim was provided. I wondered to myself where that had come from, what was the source and was there one beyond mere rumor or idle speculation or pure imagination.

So here's what I want to say: On this show, when I make an assertion of fact - not an opinion or an interpretation, but an assertion of fact - I have a specific basis for it. It might be a report or a study from some organization or government agency, it might be a news report, it might be something else. But there is a basis for it that is independent of me.

Opinions on, interpretations of, or judgements about such facts are on me - but the basic assertions themselves, the basic assertions of fact, are based on something, again, independent of me and my convictions. And I frankly think it's pretty easy to tell which is which around here, to tell which are assertions of fact and which are judgments.

So here's the point: If you ever hear me say something here and you wonder "Where did he get that from," this is what you do. Go to my website, which is, again, called Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time and the URL is whoviating.blogspot.com. I do the show on Wednesday and usually by that Saturday it is posted to my blog and broken down by segment. Each such segment, each post, contains links, hyperlinks, to the material from which that particular bit of information is drawn and at the end of each segment there is a list of the sources used in that segment.

So if you ever wonder where I got such-and-such from, I tell you where I got it from and you can go to the website, follow the link to the source, and check it out for yourself.