See what I did there?

Come on. I’d never publish a post about the five worst people you’ll ever meet. I’m no meanyhead. But if I were a paid-by-the-page-view advertiser, I’d say anything to get you to come to my site, so I could possibly swipe your email address, your location, and especially your shopping habits and what advertisements you click on. That way, I could spam you to buy whatever I’m selling, and even sell your email address to other potential spammers.

Still, I tricked you. You clicked on the title because you were interested in what I had to say about who I think you should stay away from. If I were you, I’d feel a bit annoyed. I understand; I’ve been there. While I won’t do it, I’d be curious to see my stats if I shared only today’s title (with no accompanying text) on social media. I bet my hit count would be through the roof.

The title of this post is an example of something particularly insidious, making its rounds on the internet for several years now in a relentless, perpetual grab for your eyeballs (and, ultimately, your money — because if you think there is any other reason why these heartwarming/heartbreaking stories are published, you’re under-informed). It’s called clickbait, and it’s doing its part to eat away at our already-shaky trust relationship with online journalism. So what is clickbait? You likely already know, even if you don’t know you know. Clickbait is any link that manipulates, plays on the emotions, or is deliberately vague in order to arouse curiosity, with the purpose of duping you into clicking on it.

Ever see headlines like these? (Taken from a cursory cruise down my Facebook feed, ten minutes ago)

It’s Reba McEntire.

Employees played a synchronized version of “Jingle Bells” by waving boxes in front of their product scanners (so they made the beeping noise). One guy beat-boxed into the mic.

This brave man took photos of his wife’s final journey. However, the last three pictures, while sad, are not “devastating,” in my opinion. They show his wife’s bed, a view of a rainy highway, and her headstone. The truly heartbreaking photos are the ones before the last three.

It’s a physics phenomenon having to do with vortices created by the plate displacing water. I mean, science is cool and all, but it wasn’t “I couldn’t believe my eyes!” Good Lord.

You get the idea. And the titles get wackier and more groan-worthy by the day, so it becomes a case of crying wolf: you become so desensitized to the sensational headlines, “real” news titles don’t faze.

My personal favorite among the groaners: “She Collapses After Every Single Race. When I Learned The Truth, It Broke Me.” It broke you? Seriously? Cripes. (The story behind the headline: “She” is a track athlete with multiple sclerosis. Her legs give out after every race, and sometimes she loses feeling. While it is most certainly a testament to this young lady’s incredible bravery in the face of a debilitating disease, did it break you in half to find out the reason why she collapses? I was rather uplifted — even inspired — by her courage, actually. But I resented the dupe all the same.)

Marketing groups are a savvy bunch. They know the power of human inquisitiveness; in fact, it’s a major construct of advertising. Get them to want to know more. It’s classic, and it works, and they know it. So, as is the American way, they ride it into the ground in order to suck every last nickel out of it before it slithers off into the graveyard of used-up ad techniques that worked until the customer base got wise to it.

And shame on Huffington Post — they’re one of the worst offenders (and there are many perps). Just today, I saw this headline: Seven Brothers Give Bride the Wedding Gift to End All Wedding Gifts. Out of pure disgust at walking open-eyed into another trap, I clicked on it. It was one of the sloppiest “choreographed” dude dances I have ever seen, and it’s ten interminable minutes long. This was the “wedding gift to end all wedding gifts”? Honestly — don’t take my word for it; judge for yourself.

I dunno. Maybe all this trickery doesn’t bother you. As you can no doubt tell, it bugs the heck out of me. In fact, I reached a point where I actually considered functioning as a spoiler on Facebook, commenting under each clickbait link exactly what the mystery was. Turns out, some cool people beat me to the punch.

On Twitter: HuffPo Spoilers

On Facebook: Clickbait Spoilers

Now this doesn’t mean that honest stories can’t have interesting titles. They can and do. The difference is that in a legitimate human interest link, there is some information given. No mystery. Two examples:

1. Clickbait — “A nine-year-old girl sells lemonade  in her front yard to raise money for cancer research. What happens on her second day defies explanation.”
2. Honest — “A nine-year-old girl sells lemonade in her front yard to raise money for cancer research. Neighborhood bands together and donates $2,000.”

While the second headline might make you want to click over to read more, you at least have the “punchline” already. No tricks, no gimmicks.

All right. It’s done. Fortunately for you, all you’ve lost today is several minutes of your time, as this is a blog about nothing, and I have nothing to sell.  The bottom line, though, is that if enough of us ignore clickbait, it’ll eventually go away.

Whooooaaa, camel. Notsafast.

Wait wait wait.

Yesterday, I heard a teenager say, My religion is my civil right! That’s true, yes? Well, no. Not exactly. I did some cursory research on how much the youth of America — indeed, all Americans — know about the paperwork that forms the raison d’état for our republic. The findings are depressing, long-standing and embarrassing (although to be fair, 1,000 people in a survey doesn’t strike me as a truly representative slice of America).

A good number of my middle and high school students cannot name the Vice President of the United States. Still more can’t tell me the three branches of government, or who was President before Barack Obama. Of course, this isn’t due to bad parenting or lack of intelligence or teachers abandoning good instruction. Rather, it’s a pervasive, nationwide complacency — apathy in epidemic proportions — with regard to government. This nonchalance has taken our youth hostage over the last three or so decades, and hasn’t let up in the slightest. I worry.

Therefore, with love for all and malice towards none, I give you something to share with the next person you find who either 1) misquotes the Constitution, its Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence, or 2) mixes up the difference between a civil liberty and a civil right. Actually, it’s good for all of us as a refresher; I know it was for me.

The following is a translation of what happened in 1789, when Congress realized there’d better be some “oh, and by the ways” in the document in order to minimize abuses of power, and to ensure that each US citizen had a clear list of basic legal rights.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
BILL OF RIGHTS
(RtB Edition)

1. You can believe in whatever god you want, say basically anything you want, write whatever opinion you want, tell your government you’re mad at them anytime you want, and gather peacefully wherever you want (the five basic freedoms of religion, speech, the press, redress, and peaceful assembly).
2. You have the right to own guns.
3. If the Army wants to hole up in your house when there’s no war happening on US soil, you have the right to say no.
4. Your home and your stuff can’t be searched or taken without good legal reason (search and seizure; probable cause).
5. You can’t be tried twice for the same crime (double jeopardy), and if you’re accused of a capital crime, a Grand Jury of your peers will convene first, to see if there’s enough evidence against you to go to trial.
6. If you do go to trial, it needs to happen as fast as possible, in the district where the crime was committed. You also have the right to acquire a lawyer, and to confront your accuser(s).
7. You have the right to impanel a jury in a civil case (a case in which a plaintiff sues a defendant, usually for damages), as long as the amount in dispute exceeds $20.
8. Outrageous bail amounts — like, say, $20 million — are forbidden. So is torture in prison (cruel and unusual punishment).
9. The above is not a complete, final list of your rights.
10. If numbers 1-8 fail to cover a certain issue, then the individual States get to make the call.

And that is the Bill of Rights:  a fancy name for the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Now, about these pesky definitions…

I guess it’s nit-picking, in a way. Guilty as charged, and it’s really not that huge of a deal, since the lines between the words have come to be quite blurred. But the above 10 items, while listed as rights, are in fact your civil liberties, or “freedoms.” Civil rights deal with the equal dispatch of those civil liberties within the framework of the law. FindLaw.com offers this analogy:

[A]s an employee, you do not have the legal right to a promotion, mainly because getting a promotion is not a guaranteed “civil liberty.” But, as a female employee, you do have the legal right to be free from discrimination in being considered for that promotion. By choosing not to promote a female worker solely because of the employee’s gender, the employer has committed a civil rights violation and has engaged in unlawful employment discrimination based on sex or gender.

Then there’s the complex issue of granting civil rights under the law to people who really aren’t nice folks, according to “civilized society.” You know who I’m talking about: the pornographers, the flag burners, the America haters, murderers and rapists, etc. Like it or not, they have civil rights, too, even though their activities are abhorrent to a large section of our culture.

I for one am glad these laws exist. I would like to think that if I were ever upbraided legally for something I did or said according to my First Amendment beliefs, I would be relieved to have the law on my side.

The most cloudy and dangerous of all “rights” issues is when one liberty clashes with another, and further interpretation and arbitration are required. Enter the Supreme Court of the United States, whose job it is to come to a decision on the most sensitive and legally explosive cases of Constitutional law. The Pentagon Papers case comes to mind, when the freedom of government to keep military secrets clashed with the freedom of the press to report the secrets to the people. What a mess.

Speaking of mess, I’d better get up and get to cleaning around here. Busy week ahead before the busy week after that. Almost down to go-time!

…that I intend to do whatever is necessary to rid America of the reprehensible, appalling, disgusting, vile behavior that has gripped the waning consciousness of greedy, malicious, classless people who have managed to once again turn the US into a worldwide laughing stock (as if we needed any help in that category).

Of course, I’m talking about Black Friday. Behold:

http://youtu.be/-xL8rE9DT4g

And it’s getting worse every year.

Had enough of pigs at the trough yet?

http://youtu.be/WBk32OUxCnU

And as I was just discussing on Facebook — how many people will have to die before the government realizes that people can’t be trusted to control their own behavior, so it behooves the feds to step in and control it for them? RtB fiend Steve reminded me of the “festival seating” disaster in Cincinnati in 1979. It resulted in a 24-year ban on open seating for concerts in that city. They lifted the ban in favor of increased security and crowd-control measures. But they did something after someone died.

Not a single detail about Black Friday changed after this incident in 2008 (in fact, the only change was that stores opened for the filthy behavior on Thanksgiving Day, instead of the day after). Why not? I’ll let you guess.

Ladies and gentlemen, Decency has left the building.

Here in America, we’re hot and heavy about not being anyone’s fool. NO one’s taking America down the garden path, lemmetellya. I mean it. We’ll blast ya. T’ smithereenies.

Then, why, why, why are so many of us duped by a simple Internet meme? I haven’t a clue. So, for the good of the nation at-large, and for my own sanity and general confusion about the subject, here are…

Things That Are Not True

1. There are no Fukushima giant killer hornets murdering people in Nebraska.
2. Bill Cosby did not give the “I’m 83 and I’m Tired” speech. Rather, it was written as a 2009 blog post by a retired Marine named Robert Hall.  You can also confirm the misquote at Bill Cosby’s own site.
3. President Obama did not claim that November is National Muslim Month.
4. “Obamacare” features forced home inspections. Um, no.

I have about 60 more, but alas, out of time and out of here. If there is such a thing as a “happy Monday,” I want you to have it. That’s an order.

Bossyfink