So how do we get more people to vote???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I think it’s pretty safe to say that when less than half the country can’t be bothered to come out to the voting booths on election day, we have a serious problem with the democratic process in our country because, well, those who actually get elected can’t possibly be very representative when the majority didn’t even vote to begin with.

So what do we do about that?

When I look at the electorate in America today, I think that people fall into one of several buckets:

  • Those passionate about a particular candidate or issue
  • Those dispassionate about the same (where I fell this year)
  • Those who don’t really care one way or the other

That third group is our focus for this exercise because they’re the ones who aren’t coming to the polls en masse, and for anyone who says that their vote simply doesn’t matter, consider the results simply for the governor’s race here in the State of Florida…

Votes for Rick Scott (R) :  ~2,865,000
Votes for Charlie Crist (D) : ~2,800,000
Votes for Others : ~280,000

Governor Rick Scott was able to beat out Charlie Crist and keep his seat with a difference of roughly 65,000 votes.

In 2014, the State of Florida has approximately 12 million voters and 6 million of whom didn’t vote this year, meaning that a little over 1% of them voting could’ve helped Charlie Crist take back the governorship from one of the most corrupt leaders Florida has ever had.

But even if Rick Scott still would’ve won, I can’t imagine anyone with any honor in the process not saying that the more voters, the better is generally a good thing for democracy. So how do we get people to care? How do we get people to take an hour out of their daily lives to go down to the polls? How do we convince people that their votes actually do still matter?

I think it’s a number of things, and none of them are very easy to do.

Some people don’t vote because it’s a hassle. I’ve already written about making the voting process smoother, but I think it goes without saying that here in the 21st century where many of us carry around computers in our pockets, the system should be easy to use and it should be informative. There’s no reason that someone should have to stand in line when a simple smart phone app or website could enable the same vote from someone’s home or office or even their toilet! The Internet is trusted with $3.5 billion in e-commerce transactions around the world every day – let’s figure out the security and fraud concerns and make online voting a reality.

Some people don’t vote because they hate politics. Which isn’t hard to understand when you consider how passionate friends and family members and co-workers can get … some would much rather ignore politics in favor of everything else that’s going on in their lives. But the thing is, politics exist whether you want to talk about them or not and you can still vote for your own beliefs without getting into political tussles with people who seem like they want to fight just for the sake of fighting. Back when I was a kid, I remember adults wanting to keep who they voted for private, yet now party preferences are anything but. If anything, I think this is where no bullshit information could help because someone not eager to vote as it is needs their information from a non-partisan source they can trust, something that news outlets for either side are capable of doing today.

Some people don’t vote because they don’t think that their vote matters. And this can be either in the results themselves like I illustrated above or simply in the actions of their politicians after the fact when it turns out that they end up doing the exact opposite of what they had said they were going to do. Frankly, this is an area where a better news organization would be a godsend to the people, too, because whether it’s explaining a candidate’s position or validating their track record, voters deserve information that they can trust and it shouldn’t be served up to either side based on the news that they’d prefer to hear for their own personal beliefs. Sure, it’s a struggle when some will go so far as to choose their own facts to support what they want to believe, but there’s got to be a better way of getting the right information in front of people and that’s the job of the news, plain and simple.

Some people don’t vote because they just don’t care. If I had to pick a group to be ok with their not voting, it would probably have to be this one, although I would still present the argument that typically those who say that they don’t care about politics end up being the ones directly affected by it the most…

Now I know that politics is a touchy subject for people – some would even say toxic, to the point that many are just tired of the back and forth and don’t want to be around anything resembling what’s essentially a lost cause of a debate. Our country is more polarized than ever and more often than not, we do a lot of fighting instead of actually trying to work towards compromise on any given thing. And over time, I think if we could start to get some of the right people into office, those are things that we could work on, too. Politicians need to be held accountable and when they can’t get their job done, it should be time for them to go. We the people shouldn’t tolerate politicians who sit in office and vote merely to maintain the status quo, blocking anything that the other party has to say because they didn’t say it themselves.

But none of these things can change if you don’t vote because at the end of November 4th, that’s the only way that politicians get elected. We’re in a political rut right now and it’s probably going to take a while to make things better, but we have to keep trying because that’s what makes our country great – at least we get to try. Some countries around the world don’t have elections, while others do and literally tax their citizens if they choose not to vote. Here in the land of the free, we’re free to do whatever we want and to care as much or as little about the politics around us as we want…

Personally, I’d like to see voting as something that people can look forward to again – a lot more people than 40% during the midterms and 60% during presidential elections. I’d like politics to be something where you can be super passionate if you’d like, OR you can think about it for 5-10 minutes on Election Day and have that be the end of it, with technology providing you the on the spot information that you need to make an informed decision based on whatever it is that you believe.

Voting should be fast, it should be easy, and it should be effective, and that’s a tall order for a country that’s not very representative in the process today. But we can do better, and we should do better so that maybe 25 or 50 or 100 years from now, America’s electoral process will be something worth bragging about to the rest of the world.

In Order to Form a More Perfect Union…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So the midterm elections happened yesterday, and as you may have guessed, things didn’t exactly go the way that I’d hoped.

I went out and voted against Rick Scott, but it seems that enough of my neighbors want him around for another term that I’m going to have to live with that. We also voted down medical marijuana in Florida, which seems stupid. And we didn’t even have a same-sex marriage proposal on the ballot, which even seems stupider.

As a result, I don’t really expect much to come out of the next couple of years, not that we’ve seen leaps and strides in the past couple of years anyways. It’s made me think more about what an ideal country would look like to me, so in an attempt to push depressing politics back out of my head to make room for holiday happy fun time, here are a few of those thoughts in my own little world…

Voting Overhaul
The fact that only 40% of the public who’s able to vote turn out for midterms and 60% for a big presidential election is embarrassing and should be one of the top priorities of a government that values representation of the people. I won’t even get into voter ID, but as a general rule we should be making voting in this country more accessible, not less.

Why can’t I vote from the Internet? Why can’t I vote from an election app that I download to my phone? Why can’t I text a short code to vote like people do for American Idol each week?!

Also, a big pet peeve of mine is misinformed voters, myself included because yesterday I didn’t know who in the hell half of the local seats on my ballot even were! This is 2014 and we carry amazing technology in our pockets – the voting experience should be far more expansive and informative than it is today.

Equal Rights
I’m done talking about it and it’s embarrassing to look back at our country’s history and see how many examples of some people thinking that they’re better than others we have on our books. Gays should be able to marry and buy things from public businesses without discrimination now, and the Supreme Court should be swift at dealing with new iterations of civil rights movements when they come up in the future.

Fuck the public opinion. If you don’t think the guy standing next to you should be able to do something that you freely do today, then you’re wrong.

Money in Politics
Rick Scott won his re-election by spending a record $100 million on his campaign this year.

It’s time to level the playing field – fund each candidate equally from a preset campaign fund or something. The guys with the deepest pockets shouldn’t automatically get a free ride.

Conflicts of Interest
And while we’re ranting about my governor, conflicts of interest should automatically exclude you for running for office. Period. None of this “But I transferred all of my assets to my wife, so *I* don’t have a conflict of interest.” or “It’s in a double-blind trust, so *I* wouldn’t have even known that I was making millions from that law!”

I think as a general statement, we need politicians who are in it to serve their country and if you’ve spent most of your life cannibalizing a certain industry that you’ll have influence over as a politician, then maybe you should step aside and let somebody else do it.

Term Limits
Why is it that Presidents only sit for 4 years at a time and can only be re-elected twice, yet senators sit for 6 years at a time and can be re-elected infinitely???

This one is simple and Warren Buffett already said it – you set specific budgetary targets and no one is allowed to get re-elected if you miss them. A lot of our congressional standstill over the past years has been the fault of both sides not working together – if they can’t play nice, we find somebody else and let them give it a shot.

Healthcare
Single payer so that we can finally knock down some of the costs that make healthcare cost nearly double what they cost per capita for the rest of the free world.

Taxes
I honestly think we need to de-stigmatize the idea that paying taxes is bad and tax increases are bad because point blank, if you don’t want to cut your budget and you don’t want a mountainous debt, you have to raise taxes. It’s simple math.

Now that’s not to say that we shouldn’t look to cut spending – we should definitely be reexamining the areas where we spend money all of the time, but we should be looking for efficiencies and ways to better stretch our dollars instead of the slash and burn that takes place today. And especially in a day when we’re watching unemployment like a hawk, we need to remember that every cut – even the military – costs American jobs. We need to spend our money smarter, and a lot more of it domestically.

War
What is it good for? We spend so much money in this sector alone and it’s very controversial … maybe it’s time to accept that we shouldn’t be playing world police when there’s so much to fix back at home. In the long run you can help so many more people after you’ve properly taken care of yourself…

Social Welfare
If capitalism can’t take care of our people then the government has to step in to pick up the slack, yet few people seem to point fingers at our businesses when they complain about welfare moochers living off the system.

Personally I think that aside from targeting obvious cases of fraud, it’s fruitless to focus on the people relying on these benefits because they don’t have any control over it in the first place. Instead, look out to the employment rate and the underemployment stats to see the real culprits – why don’t we have jobs for these people to work, and why do they still need benefits if they’ve already got a job in the first place?! We need to stop rewarding businesses with tax breaks for coming to our states and instead make it an expectation that American businesses that profit off of Americans operate in America and pay American taxes. Government should be the ones governing, not the other way around – businesses don’t get to make their own rules when the people themselves are left suffering.

Education and Learning
Two pieces – public schools, we need to stop fracturing them with charter schools that siphon off funds that are desperately needed. A public school education should be good enough for anyone who doesn’t require a religious influence in the classroom, and if it isn’t, we need to work towards fixing those classrooms – not providing a backdoor for those able to sneak out while the rest have to linger and suffer.

And for higher education, good god, is this an area where regulation is required. Actually, a lot of areas in our country require regulation because the free market is a great idea until you remember that a lot of people are greedy assholes who will take the wooden leg out from under you if they can get a dollar for it down the street! College costs are too high and college debt is way too easy to acquire and way too difficult to pay back by the time you actually have a job paying more than minimum wage. The solution needs to come from both ends – lower costs in school and more challenging student loans that less resemble mortgage terms than they do today.

The Minimum Wage
What do you need … to live???

It would be one thing if our nation’s corporations weren’t making more profits than they ever have in history, or if income inequality didn’t make the six heirs of a company like Walmart worth more than nearly half the country. Greed is ruining America and it’s things like this that make people laugh when we brag about America being the greatest country in the world!

The greatest country in the world shouldn’t have full-time workers living in poverty and on public assistance – that’s the whole point of why the minimum wage was created in the first place. The wage needs to go up, and employers need to raise it without just dumping the added costs back onto consumers. Maybe that means weighing profits against wages – I don’t know, but this is a big issue and most politicians don’t care because they have a conflict of interest to keep things just the way they are…

Gun Control
I don’t know the answer, but the serious talks should’ve started two years ago and the fact that we’ve had 71 school shootings since Sandy Hook says simply that we’ve failed our children in keeping them safe. We need to stop letting the NRA point at the 2nd amendment and make any talk about gun control off limits. There are no doubt many facets to the actual solution, but right now all we do is point fingers and cry, “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Tell that to the 50 kids who got slaughtered in their own classrooms in the last two years while you were bickering about people taking away your guns.

A Nation of Science
Right now a lot of the polarization in our country is because people deny science in favor of their religious preferences, and while beliefs are certainly a powerful thing, how did we get to this place that beliefs carry more weight in the public eye than provable facts???

We know that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. We know that homosexuality is a born trait found in many species besides humans. We know that mankind is contributing negatively to our environment and the result is global climate change. We know that there are limited numbers of non-renewable resources in the ground and that eventually we’ll need to embrace better forms of energy. We know how many of the catastrophic diseases throughout history behave and how to effectively deal with them in a modern society…

…yet we allow millions of people to be dissuaded from fact to instead follow the various talking heads in their lives down roads that are scientifically inept. We have some of the smartest minds in the world who create the phones that we use every day, but we can’t develop a way to keep their manufacture affordable in America to employ our own citizens instead of thousands more halfway around the world for pennies on the dollar?

Collectively America is one of the dumbest smart countries on the globe because we have so much great intelligence and we allow it to get overruled by the couple down the street that refuses to vaccine their kids because of something that a super model told them on TV! We allow companies to convince our desperate public that things like fracking are ok when in reality they’re both ruining the environment and creating flammable drinking water at the same time!

I get that religion is a big deal for a bulk of Americans, but religion and science are not the same thing and we need to stop letting religions play the victim and treat them as an equivalent. The very basic definition of science being explanations based on repeatable tests that are built upon over time is one of the first things taught about the subject, yet it’s lost on so many adults who fear it in favor of their almighty god.

Did I cover everything?! 😉

Scottland (not to be confused with the other one) may not be a perfect nation, but this should give us enough to get started and we can build from them as we go. And we don’t expect to get everything to change over night, but one of the things that we should insist on at the polls that we certainly don’t do today is actually seeing those results and ousting our officials when they fail to move the status quo forward in a positive direction.

America may have a lot of room for improvement … a lot! But at least we’ve proven that we can get better – we just need to push ourselves to get there faster so that entire generations aren’t lost as we stumble through so many of these issues that other countries have already solved for themselves. It’s ok to take a cue from the guy next to you when you’re stuck on a problem, but America is globally known as a very arrogant country.

As it’s been said all too eloquently, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one, and we currently have no shortage of problems to pick from around here.

So what are we waiting for???

Ruining our oceans with the wonders of plastic…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So I watched this documentary this afternoon, and boy, do I now feel like just a terrible human being.

I mean, it just takes a simple look around the room to see how much plastic is involved in our daily lives, and yet a few months or years from now just about all of it will be out the door and replaced with something new. All of that junk plastic has to go somewhere, and to think that these folks can get on a boat and sail a thousand miles out into the ocean and find themselves absolutely inundated with our garbage is kind of sickening!

Even if it isn’t just a giant, floating island of garbage like the description makes it sound, seeing the kinds of things that they were able to scoop out of the water in such abundance really makes you stop and think about how we’re kind of ruining the environment in ways that we don’t even realize, and that there’s not really an easy way to stop it, either. One of the lines that really stuck with me was the scientist talking about sandwich bags at Subway that get used for, what, maybe a minute if you then sit down and eat your sandwich right there at the restaurant?!

And here I felt a little better about myself for (mostly) using reusable bags at the grocery store, but clearly it’s not nearly good enough if the plastics we use get in the oceans, which then partially breaks down and ends up in the fish that we eat and finds their way right back to us.

It’s scary to see how a life of convenience is slowly ruining one of the biggest resources that our planet has, and we don’t even know it, and frankly most people probably wouldn’t care if they did.

What would it take to significantly cut down on consumer packaging in your life?

Of all the places that I’d expect to see pollution, plastics floating around in the ocean as tiny particles that will be there forever wouldn’t exactly have been on the top of my list. What do we do???

Creating the Illusion of Customer Service…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I try to be nice to customer service reps – I’ve had that job before and I know that it sucks, but I still have little patience for those who don’t even try to walk the customer service walk.

The trick to working customer service is creating the illusion that you give a shit about your customer’s problems.

I called in because I’m having a problem with our home warranty – thing broke on Friday and repair guy said that it’d be fixed on Monday or Tuesday, and today is Wednesday. I talk to him and he says that his hands are tied until he gets the parts from the home warranty company because they insist on using their own. I talk to them and they say that they’ve just been ordered today and will arrive in 72 hours. So basically I’m out for a full week at this point.

The delay doesn’t bother me that much, though – delays happen.

What struck a nerve with me was when the home warranty rep told me, “I’m sorry about the delay, but things are kind of out of my control.”

“No, they’re not,” I countered. “You should have control of your own supply chain that you use to fix my stuff.”

It looks like there was a discrepancy in pricing, and it is what it is at this point.

Excuse me?!

My biggest pet peeve with customer service reps, or really anybody who works for a company, is when they shift from we to they when they’re talking about the problem that I’m experiencing.

We’re having a small delay in getting those parts to you…

They’re having a small delay in getting those parts to you…

You see the difference? The difference is that in the second one, the rep makes it sound like he’s on my side and he doesn’t know why my parts are being delayed, either! But as I tried in vain to explain to this dim-witted claim rep, when I call customer support to complain about an issue, you are the company that I’m calling to complain about.

That doesn’t mean that you personally delayed my parts, and I get that. But it does mean that you’re responsible for it – you, in the royal sense, meaning the company that’s paying you to take my call. And that’s where the illusion falls apart because if instead you say, “We’re really sorry about the delay, Mr. Sevener, but I can confirm that the parts have been ordered and should be delivered within 72 hours…” now you’re fulfilling your role as a customer service representative and I can go back to my day knowing that your company is trying to address my issue.

I’m not calling for a buddy to hear my pain about why my repair isn’t done yet, but when you say, “They had an issue getting the parts…” you’re shifting responsibility to somebody else, which is a no no because at the end of the day, I’m paying you. Sure, there are lots of moving parts and third parties that you use to facilitate this transaction, but at the end of the day they all report back to you.

…because if I was working with any of these other folks directly, my thing would’ve been fixed last Friday because the repair guy already had the parts on his truck – your process just wouldn’t let him use them!!!

So I have all of the sympathy in the world when good customer service reps have to deal with asshole customers, and I’ll even admit that I’m sure that occasionally I’ve been that asshole customer myself who calls up yelling and screaming and absolutely refusing to listen to anything resembling reason. But you have to try at your job – create the illusion that you’re concerned about my problem – because for the eight minutes that I’m talking to you on the phone, my problem is your problem.

Or at least my problem is your company’s problem…

An Old Man’s Debate and the Lesser of Two Evils…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Sometimes I feel like politics is more geared towards my parents’ generation.

At least that’s how I felt about watching this debate – both of the candidates are around 60 years old, the moderators were older people, and just the entire presentation of the debate itself wasn’t anywhere near in a format that I would demand as a voter to actually help me make a decision as to who should be the next Governor of the State of Florida.

Sure, they had some questions from social media, but that’s not even in the same neighborhood as what I’m talking about.

1) It’s clear before the debate even starts that the moderator in the middle is biased towards Governor Rick Scott, and bias has no place if you’re chosen to orchestrate a political debate.

2) The exchanges at one minute are too short and don’t really give the candidates a chance to get into their actual opinions after they’ve spent the first 30 seconds positioning themselves without really saying anything, which doesn’t end up being a big deal because…

3) The moderators don’t hold the candidates’ feet to the fire and actually make them answer the fucking questions, anyways!!!

Sure, there were a couple where the girl on the end asked for clarification because “she might not have gotten an answer,” but fuck that – I want to see moderators who are actually going to grill candidates and who will sit there and say, “You didn’t answer the question – YES or NO, do you believe that the ban on gay marriage is discriminatory??? And we’re not moving on to the next question until you tell me yes or no.”

I guess I don’t understand why, after doing these debates for a long time now, we don’t have higher standards for them because at the end of 1:07 of watching this exchange, I can’t really say that I know a whole lot more about the two candidates than I already knew before…

I know that Charlie Crist is the democratic candidate and that Rick Scott is the republican candidate, and they’re both playing their roles in those political wheelhouses as expected.

I know that Rick Scott wants to continue running the state like a business, which I have huge problems with considering his numerous conflicts of interest already as our governor.

And I know that Charlie Crist doesn’t really seem to have the fight in him that I’d like to see of a political candidate who wants to run our state – neither of them do – because frankly this debate was really boring.

Oh yeah, and I know that Rick Scott was being really petty over a stupid fan … is that what I’m supposed to use to base my vote for governor on?!

This year’s election, and even the last presidential election, seems to me to be a perfect example of what’s wrong with the political process in this country because when I go to cast my ballot in the next couple of weeks, I can tell you right now that I’m not walking into that booth to vote for somebody – I’m walking into the voting booth to vote against somebody else. And that’s a terrible way to choose a leader.

I look at Rick Scott and I see a mini Mitt Romney, and after watching him govern us for the last four years, I’m ready for anything different.

I used to think that I liked Charlie Crist back when I didn’t pay much attention to the politics, but watching this debate reminds me that he’s just more of the same.

Neither of them are the candidates that we need to move our state forward here in 2014, yet I’m forced to cast my vote for the guy I don’t like because there isn’t one on the ballot who I do.

It’s sad when we have to turn to entertainment to get political discourse that’s actually worth its weight, but I also recently re-watched this debate between Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly from a couple of years ago, and I think the actual debates could learn a think or two from it. I know that, like The Daily Show, it was first and foremost meant to be a lighthearted comedy show, but there’s actually some good back and forth here because, well for starters, the debate format actually allows them to go back and forth! This whole you have one minute, you have one minute, next question! shtick may be the way our grandfathers used to debate, but what I want to see out of a debate is an actual debate where at the end of a given question, we actually know where each candidate stands on an issue. And if one of them is blowing bullshit, I want the other candidate to be able to call him out on that bullshit in more than just:

  • “During his term, my opponent did ABC…”
  • “No, I didn’t, but you did XYZ…”
  • “Yes you did…”
  • “MOVING ON!”

I want a debate to get heated. I want the candidates to argue. I want them to stand up their and fight for their principles in front of all of us so that at the end of it all, we know that we’re standing with the right candidate for reasons, not for partisanship!

You can follow a debate outline to address specific questions without sticking to this rigid, carefully calculated by a guy in a suit schedule that still manages to leave us empty-handed at the end of an hour-plus – maybe this formal, uninformative bullshit is what contented our grandparents, but it’s time to start gearing elections for a different generation.

And maybe part of that takes a younger generation of candidates, too – I don’t know. There are a handful of younger guys – some seem decent, some molded from the same as their grandparents – but with more and more career politicians, that’s how we end up with a President who’s 10 years younger than our Governor.

I don’t know if it’s an age thing, though. I’d like to think that older voters would like real answers to these questions, too, even though it begs the question of why haven’t they demanded it despite being around much longer than my generation has. Or maybe they have and politicians just don’t care because despite everyone having a political opinion, only half the nation can be bothered to vote during a presidential election and even less come out for the mid-term elections. There’s only so much of the same people can take before they throw their hands up and say, “It doesn’t matter, so I’m going to spend my time doing anything else.”

I think the bottom line is that the entire process needs an overhaul, from the candidates themselves to the people whose job it is to get information out of them for us, and while this particular debate was a horrible example of anything intended to actually help voters make their decision in November, hopefully it can garner more people getting agitated and demanding change rather than just growing old and cynical and giving up. 😕

Dream Journal : Alligators, Science Experiments, and Wine…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Three dreams in one!!!

We were in a factory/laboratory-type setting and the wall is lined with giant fish tanks … but they’re not super-sized, reinforced fish tanks – just really big versions of the same fish tanks people typically have in their homes.

This is important because inside the tanks were alligators!

I was talking to one of the science guys when the first tank started to crack. He just turned to me and said, “Run!” an instant before the water … and its lizardy contents … came wooshing down the wall and rapidly towards us.

* * *

Sara and I were traveling and we were at the end of a long trip. Money was getting short, so I was looking over our balances trying to figure out where I could pull money from so we didn’t have to compromise before we got home.

Panic arose when after enjoying a nice dinner with friends in a random restaurant, the waitress brought the bill and it was $250.

We looked back over what we’d gotten and it didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary until she pointed out that the bottle of wine we had picked out was $180.

I went and talked to the owner, and asked if she would take a check, but she said because our card had been declined it would have to be a cashier’s check. (huh???) I told her that there was no way I could get a cashier’s check because we were traveling from another country, and she finally agreed to accept cash from an ATM instead.

I just had to find an ATM…

* * *

It was sort of like a return to high school – it started with seeing an old friend, but soon it evolved into some sort of weird chemistry/cooking class where we had to turn food into … something.

I figured that the teacher didn’t have very high expectations because it was only the first class, yet I started getting worried when everyone else but me starting producing results. One kid had this weird glowy electric man made out of french toast, another had turned a package of chicken fingers into a gourmet meal.

Much like the others, this one never really got resolved and the dream ended with me stumped as to how I could make something amazing out of the pile of food and electronics that had been laid out in front of me.

Reporting Ebola Right

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ll proudly admit that I’m usually pretty critical of Fox News and how their programming typically ends up doing far more harm than good, however I also believe in acknowledging when the bad apple does something right, and I’ve got to say that I was pretty damn impressed when I came across this commentary from Fox’s own Shepard Smith in which he addresses the reality of Ebola in America today and how all of the fear-mongering from politicians and the media is completely out of line with the science that we actually know today about such a horrible disease.

This is what news coverage is supposed to look like – factual and rational.