Updated 20 August 2004

Credibility, if you can believe it, is a person or statement believable or worthy of belief. This immediately eliminates lawyers, politicians, pathological liars (pardon the redundancy), and oft times, religious fundamentalists. It also reduces or eliminates the believability of anything they might say or write -- or for that matter, think.

Bertrand Russell said, many moons ago, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." A corollary to this is that anyone who is cocksure about something almost always lacks credibility. Anyone absolutely certain about something has typically closed down their receptors for incoming information, and thus they have eliminated any ideas or concepts which might contradict their firmly established beliefs. On this basis their pronouncements are no longer credible.

It is very important to recognize that these people have decided to close their minds to anything that might challenge their beliefs. They have become willfully ignorant. In all respects they have chosen, of their own free will, to be as stupid as a fence post. With apologies to Betrand Russell, it's not that the cocksure among us are necessarily all lacking in intelligence -- many are members of Mensa, possess Ph.D.'s, and have impressively high IQs. But they have chosen to close their minds (and hearts) to other possibilities. The result is that their opinions have no value and no credibility.

The current political situation is just one case in point, where the leader of the most powerful nation on the earth has chosen willful ignorance. Instead of making decisons based on all the facts -- or even an attempt at the whole truth -- he has instead eliminated all traditional avenues of incoming information. He reads no newspapers, news magazines, or anything else of content -- and instead has limited all data input to what he is told by a very small cadre of inside staffers. Even the election rallies he attends are so stringently choreographed that there is almost no chance that any one with an alternative viewpoint might possibly get the ear of the President and thereby suggest that perhaps not everything is peaches and cream in the heartland. This so-called leader might as well be playing croquet with Alice In Wonderland.

The end result of such limited access to alternative viewpoints is that all decisions are based on biased, narrow-minded, prophecy-fulfilling information input by equally biased and inherently, willfully ignorant people. Thus the decisions become biased, narrow... and so forth. It's the old computer adage: GIGO, i.e. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

One is reminded of Rush Limbaugh, the very conservative radio/tv commentator, who was reported some time ago to have lost a significant portion of his hearing. The irony is that inasmuch as Mr. Limbaugh has not really listened to anyone else' viewpoint in decades, it's no surprise that his hearing might have failed, if only from lack of use. It's the equivalent of the brain adage: use it or lose it. And thus without an open mind or a willingness to hear any other viewpoint, we obtain zero credibility in Rush's arguments.

Admittedly, there is equal danger in the opposite condition, wherein too much data or input information can cause the truth to be lost in the shuffle. And this is where the Inter Net comes into play. One might ideally like as input the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But also perhaps, only the relevant truth.

The difficulty, of course, is what constitutes relevancy. In a world of connections, where all things are related in some manner or another, it is difficult to prejudge information as to its relevancy to any given issue. You just never know what might become relevant once you have enough information available.

One test is receiving and then accepting or rejecting various e-mails and allusions to specific web sites with amazing, often shocking relevations. One such tongue-inserted-firmly-cheek articles says pretty much what needs to be said in regard to all the stuff out there (all purporting to be absolutely true). As such it is well worth recanting here.  Just keep in mind that without Discrimination, all the truth in the world will quickly become veiled or lost in the sheer mass of... uninhibited speculations.  And we wouldn’t want that would we?  Or would we?  And just exactly who’s “we”?