The Barometer Online

Yea for the return of the Summer Olympics! Not only are we the spectators enjoying ourselves, the athletes are too. Beijing has announced that the games will provide 100,000 condoms to Olympic athletes in the hopes that they will not run out as in years past in Sydney and Athens.

Haven't the Olympics been great so far? Okay enough of that. Perhaps even more surprising than the U.S. victory in the men's 400 meter relay is that Disney will no longer allow guests to turn in written complaints or compliments regarding its theme parks.

One could argue that we live in a miasma of contradictory options, a fog toxic to learning, purposefully poisoned by skewed presentation and interpretation of fact. Corporate news, industry-sponsored experts and modern day sophists (we call them pundits)all present information designed to sway or influence public opinion, rather than presenting facts in as complete and unbiased a manner as possible.

In my experience, defenders of abortion, contraception and Planned Parenthood have one main thing in common: they obfuscate and try to cloud the argument. Sara Gwin's response to my last column was predictably filled with enough rhetorical straw men and red herrings to be the journalistic equivalent of the Scarecrow falling into a giant vat of Swedish Fish.