Oh, back to yesterday, I wrote mostly about the alphabet. But I mentioned those quirky pangrams, most notably, that very quick brown fox jumping over the insufferable lazy dog.
And it made me wonder about the fox. Are they quick? Are they brown?
As it turns out, I learned a few things. For one, the fox is related to the dog she just jumped over. Foxes are members of the Canidae family. So that means they have a bunch of relatives, which include wolves, jackals, and dogs. But foxes come in all sorts and sizes of that big family, with their cute pointy faces and bushy tails.
But if we take a look at the “fox” family itself, there are 37 animals called foxes. However, don’t be outfoxed by that figure. Of those “37,” only 12 are considered “true foxes.” These would include the red, Arctic, fennec, and kit foxes. A lot of people frequently mix foxes up with other canids, like coyotes. I should add, too, that the red fox is the most common of them all.
Finally, they have a lot of good qualities. They are excellent parents. They are mostly friendly toward humans, though you should never trust a wild animal, and they are excellent hunters.
In fact, foxes act just like a guided missile when they hunt. And how they do this is pretty amazing. The fox harnesses Earth’s magnetic field when zoning in on its prey. Other animals, like birds, sharks, and turtles, have this “magnetic sense,” but the fox is the first one known to use it to catch prey.
I’m not sure I understand completely. But the fox can see the planet’s magnetic field as a “ring of shadow” on its eyes. This “shadow” darkens as it moves toward magnetic north. When the shadow and the sound of prey line up, it’s time to pounce. Or so the scientists say.
Regardless, there is one more species of Fox that hunts. And that is Fox News.
I’ll just say it. I don’t like Fox News. It has been proven in a court of law that they misled their viewers by feeding them false information. They also editorialize in a way that makes their viewers believe it is “actual” news. I’ve seen it with my own eyes several times.
But here is the bad thing. Fox News has a unique partisan power, and here is how.
Recently, The Washington Post and the University of Maryland conducted a national poll that included an assessment of where people get their news about politics and government.
A good poll to conduct. Here is what they found. Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents consult a variety of sources — CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, NPR, the Times, The Post, and USA Today (among others) — when getting their news. Democrats consult a wide news base, with several different outlets, to fact-check information. But Republicans? They only use one national source for news. Fox.
This has always been the reason that Fox News wins the ratings battle. Republican viewers watch just one source of news. Fox News’s strength with 43 percent of the country (the percentage that is Republican or Republican-leaning independent, according to Gallup) is due to this tunnel vision.
The sad part is most of the Republicans don’t care. They take Fox’s reporting as the gospel truth and won’t consult other sources. Democrats, as stated, poll several news sites daily. Information is knowledge. Well. Only if it is factual information.
So, a look at two different foxes. One exists in the wild kingdom. And the other makes the kingdom terribly wild.
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“We are made of all those who have built and broken us.”
― Atticus Poetry, Love Her Wild
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“Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
― Jacques Derrida
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“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
― Iris Murdoch
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