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A system vulnerability for all seasons: AMD |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-11-2024, 01:50 AM - Forum: Computers & Coding
- Replies (3)
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I thought I would share this here because it is strictly a 'computer' thing... particularly, AMD systems.
For many of us, the distinction between them is lost... except now for this reporting.... we'll see what comes of it...
From ArsTechnica: Almost unfixable “Sinkclose” bug affects hundreds of millions of AMD chips
What the article title doesn't say is that the discovery of this "bug" includes that it has existed for many years (it dates back in AMD chip since 2006.)
Also, that once malicious code is deployed via this 'vulnerability' removing it is nearly impossible for a regular use (the ArsTechnica article was subtitled "Worse-case scenario: "You basically have to throw your computer away."... not encouraging at all.
At the Defcon hacker conference, Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, plan to present a vulnerability in AMD chips they're calling Sinkclose. The flaw would allow hackers to run their own code in one of the most privileged modes of an AMD processor, known as System Management Mode, designed to be reserved only for a specific, protected portion of its firmware. IOActive's researchers warn that it affects virtually all AMD chips dating back to 2006, or possibly even earlier.
Nissim and Okupski note that exploiting the bug would require hackers to already have obtained relatively deep access to an AMD-based PC or server, but that the Sinkclose flaw would then allow them to plant their malicious code far deeper still. In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a “bootkit” that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot—which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested—a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system.
“Imagine nation-state hackers or whoever wants to persist on your system. Even if you wipe your drive clean, it's still going to be there,” says Okupski. “It's going to be nearly undetectable and nearly unpatchable.” Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says.
Nissim sums up that worst-case scenario in more practical terms: “You basically have to throw your computer away.”
[Bold and underlining is mine]
Not trying to "doom porn" this thing, but remember, these companies implement these products with many 'security' assurances... (Intel is no different, they found a different exploit from 2015 in their code too)... and it always seems to pop up that the problems are from ages ago, in tech-time terms...
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UFO Whistleblower David Grusch sues Sheriff's Office over records release |
Posted by: Waterglass - 08-10-2024, 09:00 AM - Forum: General Conspiracies
- Replies (25)
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Hmm. So this story isn't picked up by the "saintly" USA MSM? Odd isnt it?
https://www.loudountimes.com/0local-or-n...077be.html
DENY Ignorance. Lets assume that DI is repository for like minded individuals for those who seek the truth. So lets put your thinking caps on and ask yourself as to why his medical records were released by the Virgina cops? Why as in whats their coin in this game. I hope he owns the town after this one but the cops are covered as the lawsuit money will possibly come from a black budget "kitty"?
NONE as the cops have NO coin in the game. Thats the above board game. Then we have the otherside. The dark side. See book by Richard Thieme' Mind Games. I own it. I Read it. I get it as I lived through it.
So to borrow a Q thread from back in the day does the state of Virginia have something in common with either Fort Meade and Langley. Seems to me that based on the release of personal medical records the FEDS are putting the crush on grusch.
The FEDS typical playbook is as follows:
[1] To entrap. Doesnt work go to step two
[2] To discredit. Doesnt work go to step three
[3] Suicide
I am not a fan of Trump but what they did to him and are doing doesnt fit the crime now does it? Yet they let all those other white collar thugs go around and pound law abiding citicizens into the ground. So you want proof just Google it on your own time and deductive reasoning may be required.
I consider my self an participant expert on FED behavior as I have been through the gauntlet and remain under a permanent gag order by a FED Judge. My partner took his life by shotgun and I know directly why. So how is it that these FEDS just happen to lose evidence all the time? Thats a clue.
My opinion is based by the book as written by Richard Thieme; "Mind Games" and by reading up to page 50 if you dont get it, we cant help you.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Richar...0938326244
Mind Games, a collection of nineteen stories of brave new worlds and alternate realities Clint Brooks, former Senior Advisor for Homeland Security and Assistant Deputy Director, NSA, says: "Richard Thieme takes us to the edge of cliffs we know are there but rarely visit. He wonderfully weaves life, mystery, and passion through digital and natural worlds with creativity and imagination. Delightful and deeply thought provoking reading." Stories of computer hackers, deception and intelligence, puzzling anomalies, spirituality and mysteries of consciousness, the paranormal, UFOs, alien life forms - in short, everyday life in the 21st century. Play these ""Mind Games" and see why the most common response to Richard Thieme's writing and speaking is: "You made me think."
I do not believe that these hearings are a false flag of fodder to divert attention. They are a slow leak of factual information. I am an UFO experiencer. I want to thank DI for banning another to whom I perceive was a threat to the USA. I dont perceive Grusch as a threat to the USA as I also dont feel that retired FBI Special Agent John Desuza is writing for fame or fortune. He wants the truth out. So look him up and do your dedutive reasoning as can you see any possibly connect to what Desuza is thinking and what Grush has seen? Same with me and I am working with others.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13680478/
Sending my hope and prayers for David Grusch!
Now its 10:10am somewhere in the USA and I havent had a touch of Woo Woo juice! Get it?
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The rapaciousness of data harvesting |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-09-2024, 05:38 PM - Forum: Science & Technology
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Recently, I was reading about the recent changes to Illinoisian law... the "Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA)".
Evidently, it had apparently been "accidentally" created including "teeth." And the lobbying army went to work.
Reportedly, "The 2008 law required companies to obtain written consent for the collection or use of biometric data and allowed victims to sue for damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation."
But at the time, no one explained that this was a "real thing" and when the metrics came out it became clear that the industry was sucking data so hard they found the potential damages to be "damaging."
So after a time, this:
From ArsTechnica: Illinois changes biometric privacy law to help corporations avoid big payouts
The 2008 law required companies to obtain written consent for the collection or use of biometric data and allowed victims to sue for damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation. But an amendment enacted on Friday states that multiple violations related to a single person's biometric data will be counted as only one violation.
You see, Big Tech "sells" your data so repeatedly, so broadly, and in such volume, that it may well be considered a form of currency. It's never disclosed monetary value is a mystery. Your "harmless" data is continuously being "packaged and sold," and then "packaged as something different and sold again," over and over. Your virtual "you" is quite literally "the product." Some may feel this to be of no concern... I differ.
Perhaps, the number of violations showing up in the audit trail are enormous, and represent the potential loss of previously exploited billions... the actual numbers, I presume, are "trade secrets," or will become so considered.
In 2020, Facebook agreed to a $650 million settlement after being sued by users who alleged violations of the Illinois law. Settlement class members received over $400 each.
The Illinois law is unique in letting individuals sue for damages, Friel wrote. "Colorado recently enacted a BIPA-like biometrics law, but like other states except only Illinois, it does not have a privacy right of action and can only be enforced by the state," he wrote. "However, states are active in enforcing their privacy laws as illustrated by a recent Texas settlement with a social media company for biometric consent claims that included a 9-figure civil penalty payment."
Friel was referring to Facebook-owner Meta agreeing to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The Texas AG alleged that Meta "unlawfully captur[ed] the biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining their informed consent as required by Texas law." The claim was over Facebook using facial recognition for a feature that makes it easier to tag people in photographs.
It isn't that they do this... they all do... It's that they made it a secret.
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Birthday music |
Posted by: Karl12 - 08-09-2024, 04:37 PM - Forum: Music
- Replies (8)
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Please post
Best birthday tune ever
Turn it right up
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Japanese Meteorological agency issues mega-quake advisory as precaution |
Posted by: guyfriday - 08-09-2024, 02:38 AM - Forum: Fragile Earth
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Why isn't this being talked about as much as it should?
Meteorological agency issues mega-quake advisory as precaution | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News
Quote:Japanese authorities are urging people in a wide section of the country to take precautions against a possible mega-earthquake.
They have issued a special advisory for the first time. This comes after a powerful quake rocked Kyushu on Thursday.
The advisory is part of a precautionary measure being taken against a possible mega earthquake. The measure is known as the Nankai Trough Earthquake Extra Information protocol.
The Japan Meteorological Agency says there is a relatively high possibility that a giant earthquake will strike the area where the Nankai Trough is located. If a large-scale earthquake occurs in the future, strong tremors and large tsunami are expected. While the possibility is now higher than usual, the agency notes this does not mean that something will definitely occur during a certain period of time.
A magnitude 7.1 quake struck southwestern Japan early on Thursday, and more tremors hit the area through Friday. Experts note that seismic activity remains high.
If this occurs the amount of damage could be drastic.
Quote:
Experts believe that the Nankai Trough quake could occur along the plate boundary between Suruga Bay in Shizuoka Prefecture and the Hyuganada Sea off Kyushu. They believe there is a 70 to 80 percent chance that it will strike within the next three decades and have a magnitude in the range of 8 to 9.
According to a recent government estimate, in the worst-case scenario, it could claim more than 230,000 lives and destroy about 2 million buildings.
The target area includes the island of Okinawa, which has a lot of US military assists on it. If this quake happens and those bases are massively damaged it might push the Japanese government to vacate the region so that they can claim autonomy over their defense and defense of the region. While I doubt that would occur, I can see it happening under a Japanese Government that switches towards a regional coalition philosophy similar to what China is pushing.
Hopefully the Next Presidential Administration would be more into helping the Japanese recover, then leave them high and dry for China to swoop in and claim to be the hero like they did with Tawain not that long ago.
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UFO Sets Boy's Hair On Fire. |
Posted by: Karl12 - 08-09-2024, 02:15 AM - Forum: Aliens & UFOs
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Lots of close range reports involving human related physical UFO effects over the years and John Schuessler has compiled some truly interesting ones in his catalogue below:
• A CATALOG OF UFO-RELATED HUMAN PHYSIOLOGICAL EFFECTS (PDF File)
One of the entries which occurred during the 1964 wave really does sound like a freaky one and involves a UFO setting a boy's hair on fire in broad daylight - the unknown object was also witnessed by his grandmother and the event caused quite a media stir at the time.
Apparently after the incident the boy's nose was not visible, his hair was burnt off and his ears 'were turned inside out resembling ground beef' - his mother also described him as looking like a 'monster' and refused to give him a mirror.
Also found it interesting that the boy suffered temporary blindness (as other UFO witnesses do) and, although the grandmother stated the flames covered the child's entire body, he was only affected from the neck up.
Quote:1964/06/02 NEW MEXICO, HOBBS
1600 Source: FATE, Oct. 1968
National Enquirer, Oct. 28, 1970
Charles Davis was burned by a blackish ball of fire from a strange object overhead. His hair was singed, and a sooty deposit was left embedded in the skin of his face and on his ears, neck, and shirt. His face became so swollen that his nose wasn’t discernable. He had no pain but was afraid he was going to die. The event was witnessed by his grandmother, Mrs. Frank Smith.
EFFECTS:
• Burned hair
• Swollen skin
• Ears that looked like raw meat
• Sooty deposits
• No pain
Years later whilst going through the archives of atmospherical physicist Dr James E Mcdonald (link) UFO researcher David Marler came across some pretty remarkable audio recordings from the folks involved and actually tracked the witness down - in the vid below is testimony from the mother, grandmother and a recent video interview with the main witness (56 years later).
As well as the media circus also discussed is the subsequent police investigation and rather dodgy FBI involvement (samples were taken but were never heard of again).
Quote:Guest David Marler with a premier discussion of his most recent research of a UFO Burn Victim Case - New Mexico 1964. There are early audio excerpts of an original witness and a bonus clip at the end of the show of an on camera interview with victim, Charles Davis after he has tracked down 56 years after the incident.
• For folks interested also thought David Marler gave a great presentation on FBTs here.
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Cognitive Dissonance Question. |
Posted by: Karl12 - 08-07-2024, 01:03 PM - Forum: The Gray Area
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Even though they claim they 'never forced anyone to do anything' lol.
How do people who 'trust' the people running the government logically internalise these two statements?
• Lockdown - it's so important that everyone stays in their homes and has no contact with anyone due to viral contagion - it's so serious we are shutting down the global economy.
• Immigration - yes we are freely allowing literally millions of unchecked, unknown people across our borders and actually paying them upon arrival.
Can anybody help me with this apparent cognitive dissonance?
Hope folks can imagine the ramifications of these two seemingly opposing ideologies (even though they are coming from the same place).
Is conformity being mistaken for intelligence now?
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Something about "Common knowledge"... |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-07-2024, 02:35 AM - Forum: Chit Chat
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I thought this interesting enough to share...
It's about some common notions that aren't true... and I, at least at one point or other, thought most of them were...
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Three-faced Jesus... a censorship conspiracy |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-06-2024, 09:08 PM - Forum: Conspiracies In Religions
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Ultimately, this is about censorship.
I consider censorship to be one of the "apex" class of conspiracies.
Regardless of the reasoning or cause, people must conspire to effect censorship.
It's one of those things I might callout when people tell me that most conspiracy theory is paranoid nonsense... I would ask... "How about censorship? That's always a conspiracy..." and it would lead down the eventual acceptance that "Conspiracy Theory is a real thing."
In this case it comes illuminated in the video I have attached below. While not well-versed in classical art, I found it mostly interesting (except the embedded commercial.)
I hope others see this an an interesting example censorship often overlooked ... and what the impact was.
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TikTok - “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy” |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-06-2024, 04:27 PM - Forum: Current Events
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I am learning about the U.S. Department of Justice's case against TikTok... where there press releases allege a "massive-scale invasion of children's privacy."
This of course, is all something that had been 'not explicitly regulated' until 1998 when the legislature finally made a call and passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA)... From that point forward, any website operation online was lawfully required to conduct their data collection within specific parameters...
Briefly, COPPA created an obligation necessary to operate within our region... and apparently TikTok, by virtue of the primacy of it's corporate existence, resisted fulfilling that obligation (ostensibly until now.) Billions have been poured into lobbying against this obligation, not just by TikTok, but by others as well.
From ArsTechnica: DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”
...That's concerning because after the kids create the general account, TikTok then gathers even more information—"including usage information, device information, location data, image and audio information, metadata, and data from cookies and similar technologies that track users across different websites and platforms"—while allegedly turning a blind eye to kids dodging age-gates. In some cases prior to 2022, the DOJ alleged, TikTok allowed kids to create non-Kids Mode accounts by using login credentials from Google and Instagram that TikTok neglectfully marked as "age unknown."
Making things even worse, the DOJ alleged that TikTok chose to ignore the obvious problem of asking kids to self-report their ages, while earning ad revenue and sometimes sharing kids' data with third parties. And perhaps most concerning for parents who approved kids creating Kids Mode accounts to avoid such invasive targeting and data collection, the DOJ claimed that TikTok collects "several types of persistent identifiers from Kids Mode users without notifying parents or obtaining their consent, including IP address and unique device identifiers."
"Defendants did not need to collect all of the persistent identifiers they have collected from users in Kids Mode to operate the TikTok platform," the DOJ alleged. And "until at least mid-2020, Defendants shared information they collected from children in Kids Mode with third parties for reasons other than support for internal operations. Defendants did not notify parents of that practice."...
Rather than lament over the data siphoning, I call attention to the notion that this kind of legislation implies that anyone other than children is "fair game." You know that anywhere this kind of aggressive data massing could be done outside the scope of this issue... it is being done. And somehow, that concerns me. It's getting so you can't access information unless you "identify yourself" to the data provider... something which sort of make certain that YOU are the product to be sold here... and whatever you want to access is just "bait."
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On Consciousness |
Posted by: schuyler - 08-06-2024, 12:02 PM - Forum: Psychology, Philosophy & Metaphysics
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Consciousness is really quite simple. The reason so many people grapple with it is because they cannot get rid of the materialist paradigm. The basic idea is the assumption that consciousness emerges from the physical, from the brain, and is the result of firing synapses and chemicals creating an environment where consciousness can thrive. he idea is that consciousness is an emergent property from the physical. The amount of time and effort spent on attempting to explain consciousness in terms of the physical is prodigious, and completely wrong.
Consciousness does not come from the physical. It utilizes (and requires) the physical to manifest. You can still say that consciousness emerges from the physical, but it may be more correct to say it emerges out of the physical in the same way a television program emerges out of the television set. The physical TV has all the circuits and parts necessary to pick up a signal and play it through the TV set. No one would ever claim that the TV program came out of or was created by the TV set itself. The program was created elsewhere and packaged in such a way that it could manifest through the TV set to be seen by the viewer.
When I was a child growing up in the fifties there were quite a few westerns on the three TV channels that were available. I imagined that all the dead cowboys and Indians had to be lying dead in the back of the television set and that if I could get the back of the TV off, that's where I would find them. My father disabused me of this notion when he did that very thing and took the many tubes to the grocery store to a testing machine so he could find the broken ones. There was a lot of dust and cobwebs in back of the TV, but no dead cowboys. Of course I also was afraid to sit in front of the TV in my pajamas because I feared the host of "I Search for Adventure," Jack Douglas, could see I wasn't properly dressed.
You are not going to get anywhere useful in explaining consciousness until you accept the fact that there is more to reality than just the physical. Yes, that's anathema to "science," but you still need to change your ideas of what constitutes reality. Consciousness does not inherently reside "here." Of course, if you call consciousness the "soul" you get into even more trouble with the enlightened people of science, but let's just try it as a mental exercise. For consciousness to manifest in the physical realm it requires a physical brain with all those synapses and chemicals. Once that connection is made you can do what you need to do here. If you need or want to do advanced physics, you need a brain capable of it. That's why apes can't do it. Their brains are not sufficiently developed to allow them to manage those types of thoughts. They still have consciousness, just as all animals do, but their brains are like black and white TV sets without the capacity to show advanced color. Their brains limit their abilities. The growth in the ability of consciousness to express itself requires advanced evolution in brains.
Of course there is a massive feedback loop going on vis-s-vis evolution. You need opposable thumbs and a sufficiently long lifetime to allow for education before you can embark on civilization. So it's complex, to be sure. But NONE of this implies God or Jesus or any of the religious mumbo jumbo that has retarded us as a species. That is what scares materialists the most, the idea that if they accept the duality of consciousness then they must accept dealing with the religious crazies. Don't worry; they're still crazy, but my guess is that the more thoughtful theologians know this very well. As one scientist put it years ago: As you travel up the mountain of understanding searching for the truth, you may very well find the theologians at the top waiting for you.
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1800's Black Triangle Sightings / Book of the Damned |
Posted by: Waterglass - 08-06-2024, 09:01 AM - Forum: Aliens & UFOs
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Book of the Damned was the first published nonfiction work by American author Charles Fort (first edition 1919). Concerning various types of anomalous phenomena including UFOs, strange falls of both organic and inorganic materials from the sky, odd weather patterns, the possible existence of creatures generally believed to be mythological, disappearances of people, and many other phenomena, the book is considered to be the first of the specific topic of anomalistics.
Reference: The Book of the Damned; Chapter 20, Triangular by Charles Fort
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22472/22...2472-h.htm
I thought I would toss this out here as to provide reference materials that run opposite to the 2024 narrative what is pushed by the United States, UFO "experts" , NASA and to the millions of arm chair UFO quarterbacks whom just either don’t get it or have little to offer towards the progression of mankind. Either that or they are on the disinformation payroll or the list for disappearance. I also get that many of you will never believe that ET exists until they land in front of your house and have their way with your wife or children. What’s that saying from Kansas? Anyway I am no billionaire but Robert Bigelow gets it and so do I as to the existence of UFO's and ET or AI or whatever runs these crafts. I am an experiencer and witness. So do yourself a favor and do some due diligence of your own. I attached a link so you can fact mine if you wish. This book is basically a listing of events that were documented in the media of the day in the 1700's and 1800's and it covers a lot of unexplained happenings. As it written back in 1919 before the CIA was in existence along with Men In Black it can be construed as original as not corrupted. The author throws much shade on those experts and their explanations and that’s back in 1919. Say what?
BACKGROUND:
My first sighting of a Black Triangle was during December 2018. I have a video of it along with a still camera picture as it was crossing in front of the moon. I was a member in good standing of ATS back then and I posted the pictute which was subsequently posted by ATS on Goggle Images relating to Silent Black Triangles. I am currenly shadow banned. I aslo cant communicate with the other ATS witnesses of the Triangle. Men in Black do work in mysterious ways dont they.
What I saw was huge and on its belly were 100's of geometric projections like a printed circuit board. It was black with one light in the center and it was larger that a football field and made NO noise. My other ATS contact also saw it on other days and have videos and pictures. One member says it lands in the ocean. Cirquids? Another member says it is based somewhere in thw mountains where Georgia, South Carolina and Tenessee border one another.
What I am writing here is that I am witness to one, and that going back to the 1800's there are numerous reports on a global basis of triangles being seen in the sky.
So how about taking a chance on the existance of God? Say a prayer for yourself.
https://denyignorance.com/uploader/image...ca15eb.jpg
https://denyignorance.com/uploader/image...1a76ff.jpg
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1% Club gameshow, American version |
Posted by: FlyingClayDisk - 08-04-2024, 10:47 PM - Forum: TV
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So, the wife and I gave up cable a couple years ago, but periodically we will stream something fun from the interwebz. Recently, we've been playing along with the gameshow, "The 1% Club". For those unfamiliar, it's a Q&A game show which starts out with 100 contestants and everyone is asked a question. People who get it wrong are eliminated. The questions get progressively more difficult as the game goes on. They phrase each successive question by saying what percent of 100 will get the question correct. Some questions are easy, and some are very difficult. All of the questions involve using your head in a common sense way, not just in a smart way. In other words, by about 50% most of the questions are trick questions. The top prize is $100k, split evenly between all contestants who make it to the final round and answer the final question correctly.
My wife and I are pretty good at the game, and can usually get into the 10% bracket without any trouble (i.e. only 10 out of 100 will get it right). Oddly, some of the questions in the middle 45-50% are the hardest and weed out the most players (often 10-15 per question). By the 10% question there are usually only about 4-5 players left (out of 100).
Tonight we were watching, and were on a roll, batting 1000 on the questions all the way through. It came down to the final question, and there were (2) contestants left ($50k each if they got it right). They asked question which was totally wrong, and nobody won. We got the answer correct (but weren't contestants just viewers). Because we streamed and saved the game, we went back and reviewed the question. Sure enough, the question they asked, was NOT the answer they gave.
They showed (5) longer words and the question was to form "common words" from each of the (5) complex words. I managed to form (5) common words. The two contestants completely locked up. One of them got two words. The host remarked they missed it by only (1) word, that they needed to form THREE common words out of the (5) words. This was NOT what the question asked; it said nothing about forming (3) words, only that you needed to form a common word from ALL (5) words. There was absolutely no question about what the question asked, and no question about how wrong the host and the show was about the answer given. The (2) contestants lost fair and square, so no argument there, BUT...if we had been there and answered all (5) words, I believe we would have been disqualified also. Blatant error on the show.
So, tonight I decided to go out and look on the web about this. I discovered two things. First, I guess the show also has a UK counterpart (like 'Got Talent' and a few others). Second, I discovered our observation was not unique; the show has gotten the top question wrong on numerous occasions. In some of the cases the contestants answered correctly only to be told they were wrong and sent home empty handed.
It's been a long time since we watched a show which was fun and challenging. I was pretty disappointed to see they give out a wrong answer, just blatantly wrong, for the finale'.
Back to reading books again I guess. Bummer. (I was even contemplating sending in an application to see if I could get on the show too! Probably never happen, but it's about the first time I ever thought that. I can generally rule on Jeopardy on most subjects, but sometimes they get into some pretty obscure stuff which loses me. But not this 1% Club; if I can make it past question #5, I can usually go all the way). Question #5 and #6 are generally the hardest questions (and even though they say these are 50% questions, they usually take out about 75% of the remaining contestants).
Anyway...bummer!
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Because we stream the show, it's not live, but we don't cheat. So, we have no knowledge of the questions or answers before we watch the program. What's nice is we can skip through all the idle chatter and BS, and cut right to the questions. About 60% of the questions are multiple choice, and about 40% require an original answer. Most of the questions are very similar to IQ test type questions (i.e. shapes, geometry, words, play on words, math, word problems, etc.).
It's really a fun show, and I'm sure we'll keep watching, but my hopes of going on the show have been seriously dashed now that I've seen they make some (serious) mistakes. (Not that I seriously ever thought I'd get picked though.)
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A Dire Warning of Nuclear Catastrophe |
Posted by: TimeTravel_0 - 08-04-2024, 03:28 AM - Forum: World War III
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I return with a grave and urgent warning that demands your attention. The decisions made in the coming months, particularly surrounding the November US presidential election, will set into motion events that could lead to a catastrophic nuclear conflict by the year 2026. The shadows of this future are becoming clearer, and it is imperative that you heed this warning.
The path to this dire outcome is fraught with escalating tensions and pivotal moments. My observations:
November 2024: The presidential election is marred by controversy and widespread unrest. The outcome, regardless of the winning candidate, leaves the nation deeply divided and on edge. Protests and clashes become a daily occurrence, further polarizing the populace.
Spring 2025: The new administration adopts a hardline stance on international relations, particularly with rival superpowers. Diplomatic efforts are replaced with shows of military strength, and several critical alliances begin to fracture. Key treaties that once ensured a fragile peace are abandoned, heightening global instability.
Fall 2025: A series of aggressive maneuvers and provocations in contested regions, such as Eastern Europe and the South China Sea, bring the world to the brink of war. Misinformation and cyber warfare play significant roles in escalating these conflicts, making diplomacy nearly impossible.
Early 2026: A major incident, perhaps an accidental missile launch or a significant terrorist attack attributed to a state actor, ignites the spark that leads to all-out war. The retaliation is swift and devastating, with nuclear-armed nations unleashing their arsenals in a bid to assert dominance or ensure survival.
Mid-2026: The nuclear exchanges devastate major cities and infrastructure globally. The aftermath is a world plunged into chaos, with millions of lives lost and countless others suffering from the effects of radiation and the collapse of social order. The geopolitical landscape is irreparably altered, and the survivors are left to navigate a new, harsher reality.
This is not a prophecy set in stone, but a warning of what could be if current trajectories are not altered. The potential for nuclear conflict is real and terrifying. However, there is still time to change course.
The future is shaped by the actions we take today. The warning is clear: we stand on the precipice of potential devastation, but together, we have the power to steer away from the abyss.
-John
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Hey! Black Ops Guys! Come get me! |
Posted by: schuyler - 08-03-2024, 09:20 PM - Forum: General Conspiracies
- Replies (5)
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I tried this once before on ATS to no avail, so I thought I'd try again here. I’d like to sign up for the New World Order in the Black Ops UFO division, which is why I posted here instead of the NWO site specifically. I’d rather not do the neo-fascist thing, but Capitalist Masonic Pig Dog would be fine with me. My grandfather was a Mason, and I know he would have encouraged me to join had he not died before I was born. I’m cool with it. I’ve heard so many good things about the NWO that I think it’s time for me to make my contribution to the greater good. Does anyone know how to submit an application? I mean, do the Men in Black monitor this board looking for recruits, or maybe the top secret black ops guys? I don’t know, of course, but I’m assuming they must, so I thought I’d just ask them right here since their phone number is, like, unlisted.
Look, I’m well qualified. I have a lifetime of experience in both conspiracies, UFOs, and bureaucracies. I’m computer literate and height/weight proportionate. I don’t smoke. I lean conservative and I’m a loyal American. I feel my education (B.A. and a Master's), experience, and loyalty qualify me as a commissioned officer. Considering that time is of the essence here (I’m no spring chicken), I suggest you start me off as, say, a Lieutenant Colonel. I’m not asking to set policy or anything, but I’d like to contribute at a meaningful level and I simply do not have the time to work up through the ranks. I’m a pretty good mission specialist. Just give me direction and I’ll get the job done whatever it is. Once you see my resume you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Eventually I’d like to join the General Staff. I know I have to prove myself first, but I wanted you to know I have goals. Oh, also! I’ve had a Secret Clearance before, so we don’t have to start from scratch.
So if you would just contact me offline, which should be easy enough for folks like you. I’m not really hiding, but I don’t want to deal with the cranks. I mean, I’ve got Caller ID on purpose. Other than that I’m easy to find. Contact me and I’ll point you to my online resume (if you haven’t found it already) and we can go from there. There’s a big open field directly in front of my house (see Google Earth to verify), so if you are restricted to, shall we say, more exotic means of travel, it should be no problem. You could always just drive up in a black sedan and knock on the door. That would be okay, too. Don’t worry about the dog. He has a big bark, but he’s really harmless. If he knows who you are he’ll hide under the bed anyway. That’s what he did last time the cops showed up. (It was no big deal. I’ll tell you all about it.)
Oh, by the way, I don’t require payment except for expenses incurred. I’ll volunteer. I wanted you to know how serious I am about this. And I’m a pretty good shot.
Thanks. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
P.S. I'm not kidding.
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Climate "tipping point" - Stop misusing the words |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-03-2024, 05:44 PM - Forum: Fragile Earth
- Replies (4)
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I'll start off by admitting that we should be concerned about the climate. Just as we should be concerned about any global dynamics that affect our lives and the lives of our future generations.
But the angry, alarmist-activists who's purpose is to garner attention, should be exposed to reality... namely that "We don't know everything, and what we do know is both incomplete, and only partially understood."
From PhysOrg: Not the day after tomorrow: Why we can't predict the timing of climate tipping points
First some housekeeping stuff you can skip, if you are so inclined... - The article appears under what PhysOrg labels as "Editor's Notes" - Whether or not this is a left-handed way to disguise an "opinion" article, is unclear to me. But it is important to recognize that it is not being "published" as climatology cannon, meaning the author still maintains a firm "greenhouse gas" orientation.
- The source material for this article is a scientific journal publication from "Technical University Munich."
- The source paper: Uncertainties too large to predict tipping times of major Earth system components from historical data
In my opinion, the long and short of it is an affirmation that the exclamatory utterances of professional "activists", "We're all gonna be doomed because of our climate suicide;" and those proselytizing such things, are based upon an extremist position lacking sufficient data, and lacking any solid affirmative actual evidence. The paper authors demonstrate that the "plus or minus" figure in any 'forecast" or prediction about "climate tipping points" is so large as to make predictions of that sort disharmonious with reason.
...First, predictions rely on assumptions regarding the underlying physical mechanisms, as well as regarding future human actions to extrapolate past data into the future. These assumptions can be overly simplistic and lead to significant errors.
Second, long-term, direct observations of the climate system are rare and the Earth system components in question may not be suitably represented by the data. Third, historical climate data is incomplete.
Huge data gaps, especially for the longer past, and the methods used to fill these gaps can introduce errors in the statistics used to predict possible tipping times.
To illustrate their findings, the authors examined the AMOC, a crucial ocean current system. Previous predictions from historical data suggested a collapse could occur between 2025 and 2095. However, the new study revealed that the uncertainties are so large that these predictions are not reliable.
Using different fingerprints and data sets, predicted tipping times for the AMOC ranged from 2050 to 8065 even if the underlying mechanistic assumptions were true. Knowing that the AMOC might tip somewhere within a 6,000-year window isn't practically useful, and this large range highlights the complexity and uncertainty involved in such predictions....
I happen to think that the problem about the discussion isn't that we really needn't "change our ways"... I think we do. The problem is that if you tell climate activists that they are fearmongering, and it is being exploited... they freak out and proclaim that "You must be one of those people." (Assuming they actually care about what they are paid to do.)
Yes, everything humans discard accumulates and has a direct impact on the environment. We discard too much, and live too much for today. As the population growth declines it will become clearer that the future matters differently than today, so let's not encourage suffering over a envisioned crisis which we know so little about. We can do better certainly... but we have to admit that we don't know everything... and neither does the climate "activist," (nor those who employ them.)
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Still Manufacturing Consent |
Posted by: theshadowknows - 08-03-2024, 11:13 AM - Forum: Education & Media
- Replies (1)
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I found this incredible article while looking around the web for a 'update' of my favorite book. I wanted to share this interview.
Quote:When it came out in 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent rattled the accepted view in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America that journalists’ relationship to power was essentially adversarial. Instead, they argued, the institutional structure of American media — its dependence on corporate advertising and sources in the upper ranks of government and business — created a role for the press as creators of propaganda. Without any direct press censorship, with full freedom of speech, the media narrowed the political debate to exclude anything that offended the interests of the market or the state.
Thirty years after the publication of Manufacturing Consent, the journalist Matt Taibbi has made it his mission to provide an update of Chomsky and Herman’s critique for the twenty-first century. A columnist for Rolling Stone who has written at length about the 2008 financial crisis and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Taibbi’s new book, The Fairway, is appearing in serial form on the newsletter site Substack.
Jacob Hamburger
You describe Manufacturing Consent as a book that “blew your mind” when you were a young journalist. What was so powerful about Chomsky and Herman’s critique of the media?
Matt Taibbi
I never had any idea that there was any kind of propaganda built into the media business. My father was a journalist, and I was so in tune with the process of how reporting worked, having been around reporters from a young age.
I had never seen anyone tell a reporter to stay away from a particular topic. I had an idea that they were extremely free to explore any topic they found newsworthy. And when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, this was a period where the media were relatively free compared to other periods in our history.
But when I read Manufacturing Consent, it occurred to me for the first time that the debate is artificially narrowed off camera. That the people you see in the op-ed represent two narrow poles of conventional wisdom. That we’ll report one story to death when it reflects badly on our ideological enemies abroad, but we’ll avoid the exact same story if it involves one of our client states.
All this opened up a new world for me. And when I started my career, I was reporting from Russia. All these factors are amplified when you’re reporting from abroad.
Jacob Hamburger
Everybody is criticizing the media today. We have a president who, as you write, won his campaign largely by attacking the press. Why do we need to revisit Manufacturing Consent in 2018?
Matt Taibbi
My point is that it’s not the same critique today. There’s a lot that’s been unexplored that a lot of the people in the business haven’t thought about.
What Chomsky and Herman were talking about thirty years ago was the use of commercial media to organize the whole population behind the foreign policy objectives of the United States. What’s going on right now is far more sophisticated, far more intrusive, far more implicated in the daily life of every person. The media has become significantly more commercialized since then, and has developed the technique of targeting information to specific demographics, constantly feeding people content an algorithm has determined they will agree with.
The result of that is we’re selling a lot of intramural conflict, the idea that some other group you don’t like is up to no good. In other words, other Americans suck.
People are really addicted to that kind of conflict, and that’s had a really nefarious effect not just on politics, but on reporting techniques. We’ve gravitated towards a reporting that reinforces the worldview of our audiences.
That’s not political journalism — that’s commercial journalism. And the algorithms of Google and Facebook make it an addictive form of information as well. A lot of reporters simply aren’t aware that this is what they’re creating.
Jacob Hamburger
This is exactly what Manufacturing Consent talked about. Journalists have an idea of themselves as heroes for democracy, getting under the skin of the powerful, but this is often a mask for the commercial reality of what they’re doing.
Matt Taibbi
The most recent iteration of this is the Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which is particularly loathsome for me. I spent two years covering the Trump campaign, and speaking as a journalist, we could not have fucked up that story more. Not only did we get every single prediction wrong, we actually helped elect the guy. Trump was of course great for television, and while we were putting him on the screen we pretended we were just being objective. People were not adequately warned about the political reality.
When the media realized Trump was a serious danger, people made a decision to change course and say that being objective was not enough. We told ourselves we had a responsibility to protect people from Trump by telling them he was not an appropriate political candidate. We started going around calling ourselves the tribunes of Truth, the defenders of democracy, and we got high on our own fumes.
By this time it was too late, and we sounded like the boy who cried wolf. I remember being behind the rope line at Trump rallies, and he would literally point to us and say, “Look at those bloodsuckers — they didn’t think I could come this far.” He made us the representatives of the condescending elite, and anyone who’s watched pro wrestling knows that the baby-faced good guys in the room are the people you want to see hit with a chair. Trump instinctively understood that, but we in the press didn’t, because we all watch The West Wing instead of WWE.
We bore primary culpability for helping Trump get elected, and then what did we do after 2016? We rebranded ourselves, once again, as the defenders of democracy. This is one of the reasons I wanted to do this book. We had an opportunity for a real change in our posture. There should have been a “come to Jesus” moment. But instead we compounded the problem we had with the public.
Jacob Hamburger
Part of what it sounds like you’re saying is that if in Chomsky and Herman’s time the issue was big corporate and government interests setting the terms of media debate, today’s media landscape is expressing some major conflicts between different groups of elites.
Matt Taibbi
There’s definitely a schism of opinion up above, though I try to avoid the term “elites.” The concept of “manufacturing consent” is that the conflicts we see in the media — between Democrats and Republicans, for example — are not really conflicts. The conflict is all for show. What we see is the strip of acceptable thought to those up top.
With Trump, there’s clearly a conflict with Beltway liberals. And though he’s broken bread with the Republican establishment, we should remember that he was overwhelmingly rejected initially. Remember that moment when the National Review recruited every Republican pundit they could find to tell conservatives Trump was an unacceptable candidate? Republican voters of course tuned this out completely, and it made them want to vote for him even more.
There’s a cautionary tale here for the liberal and even left media. It feels good to tell the audience what you think it wants to hear now, but there are crucial moments where the audience will know you’re full of it.
A great example of this was when journalists were discussing the $675,000 Hillary Clinton accepted from Goldman Sachs [in speaking fees]. Once that became an issue, the media consensus immediately became in what we call the left-leaning press that it was fine for her to take the money — she’s a person too, you know, she has to make money! They assumed this is what liberal audiences wanted to hear, and look how things turned out.
Jacob Hamburger
Do you think this shift reflects a broader contradiction in today’s media structure? In the past, a number of major interests converged with a media model that produced a unified narrative. Today, the media model encourages disunity and distraction, but the need for that sort of unified narrative never totally goes away. How do you see this dynamic playing out?
Matt Taibbi
I think what we find out is that there are moments where that need to rally people behind a cause is felt both on Fox News and on MSNBC. Everyone will agree that we need to bomb Syria or invade some other country.
We saw some of this in the outpouring of sentiment over the death of John McCain. This was an opportunity to reinforce the old establishment attitudes. But in the meantime, we’re mostly selling dislike of one another as our product.
Jacob Hamburger
Ironically, some parts of the splintered media landscape are almost explicitly selling nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite when we all watched the same news.
Matt Taibbi
Exactly. Walter Cronkite at one point had around a 70 percent approval rating. That’s basically unimaginable for a media figure today. The business model today just doesn’t permit it.
Jacob Hamburger
Are there regulatory reforms that could remedy this business model?
Matt Taibbi
There have to be, if we have any sense that the news still has any relation to the public interest. The original bargain of the Communications Act of 1934 was that in exchange for using the public airwaves, media companies have to divert some of their profits from the dumb stuff they sell towards news that actually serves the community. The regulations weren’t really strict, and there was never very stringent enforcement, but there were some standards, and the idea was that the media is not just a commercial enterprise.
In the eighties and nineties these regulations evaporated, starting with the Reagan Administration. We lost the Fairness Doctrine and the ban on televised editorials. That cleared the way for the news to become 100 percent business.
Jacob Hamburger
Some might also interpret the format of your book as an endorsement for the “platform” model of media content. Do you see this as a serious alternative to hyper-commercialization, or is it just a smaller version of the capitalist media?
Matt Taibbi
It’s certainly better. The alternative to an advertising-driven model is having people pay directly for their content. That takes a lot of noise out of the content, and it takes a lot of pressure off of the people doing the reporting to conform to the standard that is going to get a lot of hits.
But the ideal for real investigative reporting has to be some kind of subsidy. The kind of reporting that is really beneficial just doesn’t pay. Historically we’ve seen this, going back to the days of the abolitionist writers who were able to benefit from free postage. If real reporting is not subsidized by the state, or from nonprofits like ProPublica, it’s usually been subsidized by the more profitable parts of a private company. We don’t have nearly any of this now, and you’re not going to be able to pay for a lot of serious exposés with a Patreon account.
Jacob Hamburger
Taking this back to Manufacturing Consent, figures like Chomsky have been outspoken critics of the structure of the media for a long time, and these ideas have been important for people on the Left. And since 1988, popular frustration with the media has become widespread. But it’s the Right that’s been most successful in capitalizing on this frustration politically. Could the Left replicate this? Is there a way to weaponize this anti-media sentiment in left-wing terms?
Matt Taibbi
When I talked to Chomsky about this for the book, he expressed regrets that Manufacturing Consent had encouraged people on the Left to distrust the media. His point was that the press mostly tells the truth, but that this truth is narrowly constrained.
But I’m more concerned there’s a generation of people that consider themselves to be progressive who don’t understand this concept of an artificially narrowed reality. They look at the op-ed pages in the newspaper, and they see that there’s one side that’s pro-Kavanaugh and another side that’s anti-Kavanaugh. There’s a whole other world out there they’re not seeing. I wrote this book because I thought it would be great if they could see it. The Left could certainly use a reevaluation of how we see the news.
So far, though, it’s true that only the Right has been able to really make use of this political weapon. For a lot of Democratic strategists, the takeaway from Trump’s victory was that they needed someone who could manipulate the media as well as Trump does. But nobody’s as good at reality-show, pro-wrestling politics as Trump. He’s got absolutely no shame, and so he’s the perfect television product. So unless you find some complete psychopath who happens to have billions of dollars behind them, you’re not going to win like that.
You do see some work going on in the Bernie Sanders movement. One thing he’s been doing lately has been putting out testimonials of people who work at companies like Amazon and Disney, and they’ve had a big impact. This is our job. I know from speaking to Bernie that he’s been frustrated with the press for failing to bring to light the reality of day-to-day life under modern corporate practices.
Jacob Hamburger
In a way, Trump opened up some possibilities, demonstrating that the feedback structures in politics in the media didn’t work the way we thought they did.
Matt Taibbi
I hope so. Trump gave us an opportunity to reevaluate our reporting practices during the campaign.
We helicopter in from city to city during the campaigns. We scrounge around for quotes we already know we want in advance about what candidates’ attitudes are. We only talk to campaign people most of the time. We cover campaigns the way we cover sports — if you’re ever around reporters during a debate, they love to talk about who dealt the knockout blow. We’re incredibly over-reliant on data journalism to tell us what the public mood is and what the public issues are.
It would be so much better if we did what Sanders is doing, spending time with actual people. We also need to end our reliance on polls. I just don’t know that we’re going to.
Manufacturing Consent was a valuable book for a whole generation of reporters, because it trained us to look beyond the artificial parameters. What I’m hoping to accomplish today is simply to raise awareness about the commercial aspects about what journalists do, and how that influences what we do.
Most journalists will tell you they got into the business because they watched All the President’s Men. They want to accomplish something important. We need to recognize we’re creating a product, and it’s a bad product.
Jacob Hamburger
You describe Manufacturing Consent as a book that “blew your mind” when you were a young journalist. What was so powerful about Chomsky and Herman’s critique of the media?
Matt Taibbi
I never had any idea that there was any kind of propaganda built into the media business. My father was a journalist, and I was so in tune with the process of how reporting worked, having been around reporters from a young age.
I had never seen anyone tell a reporter to stay away from a particular topic. I had an idea that they were extremely free to explore any topic they found newsworthy. And when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, this was a period where the media were relatively free compared to other periods in our history.
But when I read Manufacturing Consent, it occurred to me for the first time that the debate is artificially narrowed off camera. That the people you see in the op-ed represent two narrow poles of conventional wisdom. That we’ll report one story to death when it reflects badly on our ideological enemies abroad, but we’ll avoid the exact same story if it involves one of our client states.
All this opened up a new world for me. And when I started my career, I was reporting from Russia. All these factors are amplified when you’re reporting from abroad.
Jacob Hamburger
Everybody is criticizing the media today. We have a president who, as you write, won his campaign largely by attacking the press. Why do we need to revisit Manufacturing Consent in 2018?
Matt Taibbi
My point is that it’s not the same critique today. There’s a lot that’s been unexplored that a lot of the people in the business haven’t thought about.
What Chomsky and Herman were talking about thirty years ago was the use of commercial media to organize the whole population behind the foreign policy objectives of the United States. What’s going on right now is far more sophisticated, far more intrusive, far more implicated in the daily life of every person. The media has become significantly more commercialized since then, and has developed the technique of targeting information to specific demographics, constantly feeding people content an algorithm has determined they will agree with.
The result of that is we’re selling a lot of intramural conflict, the idea that some other group you don’t like is up to no good. In other words, other Americans suck.
People are really addicted to that kind of conflict, and that’s had a really nefarious effect not just on politics, but on reporting techniques. We’ve gravitated towards a reporting that reinforces the worldview of our audiences.
That’s not political journalism — that’s commercial journalism. And the algorithms of Google and Facebook make it an addictive form of information as well. A lot of reporters simply aren’t aware that this is what they’re creating.
Jacob Hamburger
This is exactly what Manufacturing Consent talked about. Journalists have an idea of themselves as heroes for democracy, getting under the skin of the powerful, but this is often a mask for the commercial reality of what they’re doing.
Matt Taibbi
The most recent iteration of this is the Washington Post’s slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which is particularly loathsome for me. I spent two years covering the Trump campaign, and speaking as a journalist, we could not have fucked up that story more. Not only did we get every single prediction wrong, we actually helped elect the guy. Trump was of course great for television, and while we were putting him on the screen we pretended we were just being objective. People were not adequately warned about the political reality.
When the media realized Trump was a serious danger, people made a decision to change course and say that being objective was not enough. We told ourselves we had a responsibility to protect people from Trump by telling them he was not an appropriate political candidate. We started going around calling ourselves the tribunes of Truth, the defenders of democracy, and we got high on our own fumes.
By this time it was too late, and we sounded like the boy who cried wolf. I remember being behind the rope line at Trump rallies, and he would literally point to us and say, “Look at those bloodsuckers — they didn’t think I could come this far.” He made us the representatives of the condescending elite, and anyone who’s watched pro wrestling knows that the baby-faced good guys in the room are the people you want to see hit with a chair. Trump instinctively understood that, but we in the press didn’t, because we all watch The West Wing instead of WWE.
We bore primary culpability for helping Trump get elected, and then what did we do after 2016? We rebranded ourselves, once again, as the defenders of democracy. This is one of the reasons I wanted to do this book. We had an opportunity for a real change in our posture. There should have been a “come to Jesus” moment. But instead we compounded the problem we had with the public.
Jacob Hamburger
Part of what it sounds like you’re saying is that if in Chomsky and Herman’s time the issue was big corporate and government interests setting the terms of media debate, today’s media landscape is expressing some major conflicts between different groups of elites.
Matt Taibbi
There’s definitely a schism of opinion up above, though I try to avoid the term “elites.” The concept of “manufacturing consent” is that the conflicts we see in the media — between Democrats and Republicans, for example — are not really conflicts. The conflict is all for show. What we see is the strip of acceptable thought to those up top.
With Trump, there’s clearly a conflict with Beltway liberals. And though he’s broken bread with the Republican establishment, we should remember that he was overwhelmingly rejected initially. Remember that moment when the National Review recruited every Republican pundit they could find to tell conservatives Trump was an unacceptable candidate? Republican voters of course tuned this out completely, and it made them want to vote for him even more.
There’s a cautionary tale here for the liberal and even left media. It feels good to tell the audience what you think it wants to hear now, but there are crucial moments where the audience will know you’re full of it.
A great example of this was when journalists were discussing the $675,000 Hillary Clinton accepted from Goldman Sachs [in speaking fees]. Once that became an issue, the media consensus immediately became in what we call the left-leaning press that it was fine for her to take the money — she’s a person too, you know, she has to make money! They assumed this is what liberal audiences wanted to hear, and look how things turned out.
Jacob Hamburger
Do you think this shift reflects a broader contradiction in today’s media structure? In the past, a number of major interests converged with a media model that produced a unified narrative. Today, the media model encourages disunity and distraction, but the need for that sort of unified narrative never totally goes away. How do you see this dynamic playing out?
Matt Taibbi
I think what we find out is that there are moments where that need to rally people behind a cause is felt both on Fox News and on MSNBC. Everyone will agree that we need to bomb Syria or invade some other country.
We saw some of this in the outpouring of sentiment over the death of John McCain. This was an opportunity to reinforce the old establishment attitudes. But in the meantime, we’re mostly selling dislike of one another as our product.
Jacob Hamburger
Ironically, some parts of the splintered media landscape are almost explicitly selling nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite when we all watched the same news.
Matt Taibbi
Exactly. Walter Cronkite at one point had around a 70 percent approval rating. That’s basically unimaginable for a media figure today. The business model today just doesn’t permit it.
Jacob Hamburger
Are there regulatory reforms that could remedy this business model?
Matt Taibbi
There have to be, if we have any sense that the news still has any relation to the public interest. The original bargain of the Communications Act of 1934 was that in exchange for using the public airwaves, media companies have to divert some of their profits from the dumb stuff they sell towards news that actually serves the community. The regulations weren’t really strict, and there was never very stringent enforcement, but there were some standards, and the idea was that the media is not just a commercial enterprise.
In the eighties and nineties these regulations evaporated, starting with the Reagan Administration. We lost the Fairness Doctrine and the ban on televised editorials. That cleared the way for the news to become 100 percent business.
Jacob Hamburger
Some might also interpret the format of your book as an endorsement for the “platform” model of media content. Do you see this as a serious alternative to hyper-commercialization, or is it just a smaller version of the capitalist media?
Matt Taibbi
It’s certainly better. The alternative to an advertising-driven model is having people pay directly for their content. That takes a lot of noise out of the content, and it takes a lot of pressure off of the people doing the reporting to conform to the standard that is going to get a lot of hits.
But the ideal for real investigative reporting has to be some kind of subsidy. The kind of reporting that is really beneficial just doesn’t pay. Historically we’ve seen this, going back to the days of the abolitionist writers who were able to benefit from free postage. If real reporting is not subsidized by the state, or from nonprofits like ProPublica, it’s usually been subsidized by the more profitable parts of a private company. We don’t have nearly any of this now, and you’re not going to be able to pay for a lot of serious exposés with a Patreon account.
Jacob Hamburger
Taking this back to Manufacturing Consent, figures like Chomsky have been outspoken critics of the structure of the media for a long time, and these ideas have been important for people on the Left. And since 1988, popular frustration with the media has become widespread. But it’s the Right that’s been most successful in capitalizing on this frustration politically. Could the Left replicate this? Is there a way to weaponize this anti-media sentiment in left-wing terms?
Matt Taibbi
When I talked to Chomsky about this for the book, he expressed regrets that Manufacturing Consent had encouraged people on the Left to distrust the media. His point was that the press mostly tells the truth, but that this truth is narrowly constrained.
But I’m more concerned there’s a generation of people that consider themselves to be progressive who don’t understand this concept of an artificially narrowed reality. They look at the op-ed pages in the newspaper, and they see that there’s one side that’s pro-Kavanaugh and another side that’s anti-Kavanaugh. There’s a whole other world out there they’re not seeing. I wrote this book because I thought it would be great if they could see it. The Left could certainly use a reevaluation of how we see the news.
So far, though, it’s true that only the Right has been able to really make use of this political weapon. For a lot of Democratic strategists, the takeaway from Trump’s victory was that they needed someone who could manipulate the media as well as Trump does. But nobody’s as good at reality-show, pro-wrestling politics as Trump. He’s got absolutely no shame, and so he’s the perfect television product. So unless you find some complete psychopath who happens to have billions of dollars behind them, you’re not going to win like that.
You do see some work going on in the Bernie Sanders movement. One thing he’s been doing lately has been putting out testimonials of people who work at companies like Amazon and Disney, and they’ve had a big impact. This is our job. I know from speaking to Bernie that he’s been frustrated with the press for failing to bring to light the reality of day-to-day life under modern corporate practices.
Jacob Hamburger
In a way, Trump opened up some possibilities, demonstrating that the feedback structures in politics in the media didn’t work the way we thought they did.
Matt Taibbi
I hope so. Trump gave us an opportunity to reevaluate our reporting practices during the campaign.
We helicopter in from city to city during the campaigns. We scrounge around for quotes we already know we want in advance about what candidates’ attitudes are. We only talk to campaign people most of the time. We cover campaigns the way we cover sports — if you’re ever around reporters during a debate, they love to talk about who dealt the knockout blow. We’re incredibly over-reliant on data journalism to tell us what the public mood is and what the public issues are.
It would be so much better if we did what Sanders is doing, spending time with actual people. We also need to end our reliance on polls. I just don’t know that we’re going to.
Manufacturing Consent was a valuable book for a whole generation of reporters, because it trained us to look beyond the artificial parameters. What I’m hoping to accomplish today is simply to raise awareness about the commercial aspects about what journalists do, and how that influences what we do.
Most journalists will tell you they got into the business because they watched All the President’s Men. They want to accomplish something important. We need to recognize we’re creating a product, and it’s a bad product.
https://jacobin.com/2018/10/matt-taibbi-...ng-consent
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The 9/11 "mastermind" plea-deal rescinded? |
Posted by: Maxmars - 08-03-2024, 12:37 AM - Forum: Decision 2024
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I ran across a headline to an article which I could not read...
But the particulars don't really speak to this thread anyway...
A short while ago, we receive word that the person they are calling the "9/11 mastermind" has reached a plea agreement with the US government to avoid the death sentence.
It was understandably politicized, of course. But I found myself wondering about the timing... wondering if the 'deal' wasn't meant to provide an "appearance" for some end unrelated to criminal justice. I hesitated to comment on the subject until now because....
Biden-Harris administration backtracks, revokes plea deal for 9/11 terrorists
As this is a FoxNews story, I expected it to be brimming with personal criticisms, conservative pandering, and other such 'political' garbage. But I couldn't read it, as it was one of those many articles that Big Media places behind a "give us your identity, and we'll let you read it" ploys.
But I noticed a few things...
Suddenly it is the "Biden-Harris" administration... not the Biden administration...
The benign term "backtrack" makes it seem the previously accepted plea deal was nothing more serious than a pinky-swear...
And the association of the "mastermind" is being offered to terrorists, not just him.
I don't profess to being a law professional... so I may be wrong... but most frequently, it is the defendant who rescinds the plea deal*... after all, an 'accepted' plea deal was already "accepted" by the Judge... it was an agreement of the legal variety. For the sate to rescind an already accepted deal, I would have assumed a legal "justification" is in order for the judge to refuse or acquiesce to.
I think the embarrassment of the deal, and the emotional fallout that might befall voters was too costly to the political game. Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever reason the government moved to accept the deal in the first place was not exactly kosher.... but... once again... maybe I'm wrong... what do you think?
(* pleas usually get rescinded after "new" facts about the prosecution's case come to light. It's up to the judge. PS - I'm not a lawyer.)
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Massive Attack. |
Posted by: Karl12 - 08-02-2024, 08:45 PM - Forum: Music
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Love this group and all their content is always original and thought provoking.
Absolute tunes lol.
Viewer discretion
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