Kurt Fliegel
What time is it? Race time.
Just couldn’t run her down this morning. Herself: 2/143 AG. Himself: 7/69 AG, 25:38 real time, 20:15 age graded.
It’s not just Facebook, it’s not just memes, it’s not just trolling.
“The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.”
On the heels of deleting my Facebook account this weekend, it’s worth bringing this back to the top again.
“What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.”
“The process of demoralization is complete and irreversible…then it only takes 2-5 years to destabilize a nation…the next stage is crisis, and it may only take 6 weeks…and after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure and economy, you have the period of normalization. That lasts indefinitely.”
Another dangerous new phase for the news industry. No indication publishers will be any smarter this time around. “Regardless of labels, what remains constant is the distribution of power. There are those who make the rules and those who adapt to them.”
[from the Columbia Journalism Review]
This report is part of an ongoing, multi-year study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School into the relationship between large-scale technology companies and journalism. This research is generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open S…
And they’re probably much better at it than most adults.
[from Nieman Lab]
You have no rights here. Neither does anyone who passes within view, including children.
[from The Washington Post]
Slow down and eat right.
[from Thrillist]
Had only been to one, and only had one other on the list. The rest don’t matter to me.
[from Fodor’s Travel]
There was an even stronger article in Financial Times a couple of days ago, but it’s behind a paywall. This one is fine as far as it goes.
[from Tim Karr on Medium]
Here we go.
The Electoral College should have ended with the Civil War. That it didn’t haunts us today.
“What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes.”
[from The Atlantic]
They put the public at great risk because they’re too afraid to do their jobs and they refuse to enforce the laws designed to protect the public.
[from CBS 60 Minutes Overtime]
“America is addicted to hurting black people. America is addicted to watching itself hurt black people. The internet didn’t invent this kind of spectacle, nor is it the source of the disease, but rather collaborates with the country’s disregard for the black lives without which it wouldn’t exist. Black people taught the internet how to go viral. But when virality became enterprise, black people were seldom to be found.”
[from The Paris Review]
Few moments from a recent recovery run on one of my regular routes, including inbound ducks.
Long, worthwhile read if you have some time.
“We all hate our parents for not acting as we would, and my hatred in this moment is particularly intense. When she plays the victim, I end up playing the parent, and I am boxed into the role of keeping up appearances. I can’t figure out how to break out of it—to authorize myself to not function—to be sad in a way that is disruptive. To do that would be to take the starring role in my mother’s sickness. I want someone to recognize that what I need is a dog bed to loll in, day in and day out. At another time, the person who would have bought me the dog bed was my mother—the witness to the child’s suffering. Now, she is the star, and I the coddler. When our food comes, she gets exactly her order and they fuck mine up.”
[from N+1 Magazine]
Whatever it was I was trying to lay down, she wasn’t diggin’ it. Meme fodder.
Couldn’t ask for better models.
70,000 children separated and detained in 2019 alone. You know people who vote for this. You know people who support this. You know people who are responsible for this.
[from the Associated Press]
If it’s gonna be Chiberia this early, I’m at least gonna keep my feet warm.
“A federal court in Boston has ruled that warrantless U.S. government searches of the phones and laptops of international travelers at airports and other U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment.’
[Associated Press]
‘“To be clear: under this arrangement, Ascension’s data cannot be used for any other purpose than for providing these services we’re offering under the agreement, and patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data,” writes Google Cloud president Tariq Shaukat.’
[from The Verge]
Written 5 years ago and still fresh and topical. By David Byrne.
‘What if the disillusionment eventually reaches a point at which many feel that the free services and convenience no longer compensate for the exploitation, control and surveillance? What if, one night, a small group of people decide they’ve had enough and say, “Let’s call it a day”?’
Oregano the Duck is a wild mallard duck who chose a planter on my townhome balcony to lay clutches of eggs in the spring of 2018 and again in 2019. The pot originally contained oregano plants, and the little sign was still in the dirt when she took over—hence her name.
Season one, she hatched eight ducklings in June, of which seven survived the jump from the balcony to the pavement. They made a home in the wetlands adjacent to my complex and a school, and I was able to see them a couple of times later that summer.
She returned earlier for season two and hatched eleven ducklings in May, all of whom survived. Saw them once a few weeks later, then they were gone.
If we don’t move the pot, Oregano should be back again in March or April 2020. She’s had followers all around the country and around the world including active military in the Middle East. Will be posting again on Instagram, and also here. Full chronicles and archive are still on Instagram under the #oreganotheduck hashtag.
If you spend any time on social media, this is an incredibly important article about misinformation for you to read and understand. You may not have time or inclination to read the extensive warnings of the SCO, House Intel, SSCI, and the intelligence community at large, but you do have 15 minutes to read this.
Please think–then think again–before you post, share, respond or react to anything without knowing its origin, its purpose, or its credibility, especially if it’s been crafted as easily shareable content like memes. Please consider whether you want to stay on platforms which give propaganda agency and oxygen without judgment or safeguard, with your personal data and metadata as fuel for the algorithms, and pictures of your family and your friends and and your pets as smokescreens to hide the activity. I still see very smart people doing very stupid things in the service of bad actors they actively oppose, amplifying extremist messaging and, worse, bringing their friends into the influence stream.
If you can’t detect bad intent, if you can’t restrain yourself from sharing it, if you simply don’t know what you’re doing, then the world is better off if you delete your account. And honestly, in the case of some of the more popular platforms, it’s already far too late to stop the flood, so it’s a good recommendation to do it now before you get swept away in the tsunami that’s coming.
[from The Yale Review]
‘Although we think of information overload as one big problem, it actually consists of four problems that are each getting exponentially worse, and that together add up to one big crisis. This crisis risks making us collectively dumber instead of more intelligent, and tearing us apart instead of bringing us together.’
[Accelerated Intelligence on Medium]
“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked, as they steamed toward Brooklyn in the darkness.
“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where she had lived for thirty-four years and found the voice that had won her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”
[from The New Yorker]
