The business blogger Paul Kedrosky was browsing Business Wire (via biz.yahoo.com) this week when he came across what was "hands-down the strangest headline (and story) I've ever seen to cross a supposedly fact-based newswire" (paul.kedrosky.com).com
Even so, an uncritical press quickly whipped a supposedly incontrovertible fact into a crisis despite signals from the job market (often reported in the very same publications) indicating that there was no such shortage.
In his preface, he notes, as a supposedly telltale fact (evidence of "conflict"), that Robbins, who was born in 1918, kept his affairs with men "as clandestine as possible".
So he stops argument short by appealing to a supposedly indubitable fact.
A bit of reflection exposes the biases of the criteria used to support the supposedly obvious fact of women's weakness and transforms it from an unassailable reality to an unreliable assumption.
Aside from grisly details and tantalizing questions about whether Marge's relationship with Bernie was sexual, the real story of Bernie is supposedly the fact that the people of Carthage, almost unanimously felt that Bernie deserved little or no punishment for his confessed crime since he was such a beloved community member and Marge was such a nasty piece of work.
These supposedly basic facts thereby provide the requisite metaphysical foundation for his physical hypotheses: in other words, one proceeds from our "clear and distinct" knowledge of general metaphysical items, such as the nature of material substance and its modes, to derive particular conclusions on specific types of physical processes, for instance the laws of nature.
Finally, a couple of documentaries and a film supposedly based on fact.
But isn't the most important thing about music the way it makes us feel, rather than some supposedly but in fact not-at-all objective assessment of its cultural worth?
Although the movie, inspired by Mr. Groberg's memoir "In the Eye of the Storm," is supposedly based on fact, any resemblances between its characters' behavior and real people are glancing.
Its fear is that while converts from abroad are fairly few, tens of thousands of foreign workers living in Israel will line up for the supposedly easier (in fact, still quite demanding) forms of conversion, get their passports and stay permanently.
