An uplifting news item

The Afghan Girls’ Robotics Team Designed an Inexpensive Ventilator Out of Car Parts to Help With the Pandemic Fight

Finally, a piece of news that was really uplifting on multiple fronts.

Catching Delta Doing Good

Delta took 120 girls to NASA with an all-female crew, to encourage the girls to pursue careers in aviation that do not necessarily involve greeting passengers.

Pretty awesome when you consider back in the 1970's, there were height and weight restrictions on stewardesses.

P.S. I wasn't going to post this tonight, but another Facebook post caught my eye and I had to post on that. Check out "Your" News.

"Your" News

When I take the Roku to Reuter News, they ask how long I have to watch, then have me wait a moment while they prepare "your" news. I need to ask someone (with a Roku and Reuters but very different interests and viewpoints) to check the news the same time I do - and see who gets what stories.

On my Facebook feed today, there was a photo "covered" so I could decide whether or not to look at it. It was a little boy lying on the ground, presumably a dead Kurd. it made me remember the napalmed little girl running down the road in Vietnam - a photo that helped us move to end that war. Would it have had the same impact if we'd had the choice to look only at news we want to see?

Long ago, I had a friend who'd been in the OSS in Eastern Europe right after World War II. (The OSS morphed into the CIA later.) He'd been appalled at the idiocy of people for believing the propaganda and lies in the state newspaper, so he did an experiment. For some weeks he read only the state newspaper. At first he recognized lies for what they were; gradually he started saying the improbable "might" be true (with the knowledge base he was growing by reading that paper); eventually he came to doubt his own view of events he witnessed, when the paper gave a dramatically different account.

When we read only news that leans our way, we're self-propagandizing, which leads to believing the improbable and eventually denying reality. It leads to the polarization that is tearing this country (and others) apart.

It's tough, when so much of what we take in is already chosen as "your" news. But here's my challenge: pick at least two news sources the "other" guys consider reliable and spend as much time with them as you do with "your" news.

If you do this electronically, "your" news may start to be more balanced.

With enough balance, maybe we can work together again.