The WDP Project: Validation of sources

In today's post (which was supposed to be posted yesterday), I will be discussing the WDP, a project I have started with the goal of fostering honesty in goverment by holding our elected officials accountable for the claims they make. -TCR

One of the biggest problems facing the We Demand Proof project is the selection of valid sources of proof that most people can agree on. While I'm generally not keen on pointing fingers, in this case I believe it's necessary. The blame lay almost entirely at the feet of CNN. Yes, the one and only CNN. The Cable News Network is single-handedly responsible for creating the 24-hour news cycle. While CNN did not create the panel of pundits, a very old staple of news programming, they have come to abuse it, a disease that has infected all other news networks and broadcast to the point where panels have almost entirely replaced actual reporting.

Field work, in essence, has become a tool to collect questions for panel discussions.

Interview with a woman named Larry

I'm just going to write something directly out of my head, so we'll see how it goes. -TCR

I've always liked the name Larry. It feels old without being stuffy, and there's an inherent jocularity about it. When you hear that you'll be meeting with some dude named Larry it instills in you the idea that the interaction won't be dark or heavy. When I walked into the room to meet my particular Larry, however, things didn't go as expected.

My Larry was a woman and anything but jovial.

"Sit," she said, not looking up from her tablet. I sat.

Can I avoid using Facebook for The WDP?

In case you don't know, and there's no reason you should, the WDP is, my new website that I hope will keep political feet to the fire when they make unsubstantiated claims.

The issue I am facing, among many, is whether to leverage the enormous potential audience available via Facebook, or just leave them out because they're evil.

I'm not against social networking. I'm just against all of the shit that we have recently discovered Facebook has been perpetrating for years now. I've closed my Facebook account (my 2nd after I closed my first account) permanently and have zero intention of ever going back, yet I recognize that Facebook is a rather enormous online resource that can reach millions of people. Part of what the WDP does is use social media to keep the claims made by our politicians in the zeitgeist so they can't just wiggle away from responsibility through the obscurity of time.

While the WDP is a social service intent on developing an ethic of honesty and truth telling among our elected officials, I also don't want to be a hypocrite and use a service that has been proven to remove privacy rights from millions of people around the world.

So, what should I do?

I'm committing to writing something every day

It takes roughly 30 days of doing the same thing over and over again to cement a pattern behavior into a habit that becomes so natural you cannot imagine getting through a day without engaging in said activity.

As a writer, I've been lax. I'm going to try to change that now, and I'm going to do that through writing every day.



It's not like I have nothing to write about. I'm a rideshare driver most of the time. I've started a website about a month ago that I think is important and I don't spend enough time working on. The site is called, and despite the fact that I have been ruminating on this concept for a couple of years now and it's been live for about a month, I've done little with it aside from think more on it and share it with some of my riders, all of whom said it was a fantastic idea and it was about time. Simply put, I want the WDP to hold out leaders accountable for the claims they make by keeping those claims in the public eye and requesting that they furnish verifiable proof for said claims.

I develop ideas for that science fiction I've been dreaming about writing ever since I was nine.

While driving the other day, I spotted a plumbers truck and was reminded of Mario in the Nintendo video game series. Perhaps inspired by an unconscious recollection of the ghosts in those games, I wondered what fiction about a plumber who is also a paranormal problem solver might be like. Not scifi, but you get the idea. I've been pondering my Robot Series for years now, and have even written a few short stories about an EPIC robot named Toby. I use the idea of Toby as a foil for the suggestion that Artificial Intelligence would develop like humans and how the far more likely divergent evolutionary process of robotic intelligence would interact with humanity. I'll likely post them in the near future.

Regardless of what I end up doing, it was never my intent to be a rideshare driver at 50 years old, and I have been languishing in the simple, uncomplicated process of the work for two and a half years now. Then I heard about Anthony Bourdain having committed suicide and decided that I didn't want to die without having done something I wanted to do with my life.

That would suck.