Saturday, December 10, 2016

Nice Fake News Summary

I don't know if the CIA, FBI, et al, will be threatened by an outsider like Trump. I suspect they are sort of like labor unions where the administrators hate Trump but the rank and file love him.

Media Meltdown Remix

FROM THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED FAKE NEWS

A Boatload Of Jeremiahs

This is all the sweeter for Mike Murphy's appearance at about 10:00. Prior to calling the general election about as wrong as possible, Murphy worked on the Jeb Bush campaign where he famously secured fifth place for his candidate in Iowa at the unheard of cost of $2,884 per vote. He also formulated the ingenious strategy of attacking Christie, Rubio and Kasich, leaving Trump, Cruz and Carson untouched. Somehow, this buffoon commands a seven-figure salary. What a country!

AND THEY LAUGHED AT MISS CLEO

Rethinking Website Advertising

Web monetization has proven to be elusive. Yes, there are success stories, like Facebook, for instance. Some of us believe that FB has jumped the shark but that is another story for another time. Let's talk about website advertising and its obvious shortcomings.

"American Thinker" was once my favorite website. I stopped going there because of the oppressive advertisements that make reading a challenge. It takes a long time to load the page and the simple actions of scrolling and reading become burdensome. Once the page is loaded, we don't just see pages on the right hand column, we also see ads that block the text.

"American Thinker" offers solutions. For $6.79/month we can get ad-free content. This reminds one of cable television and premium channels. Yes you have some good products but it is a big world with oodles of free content. I search dozens of sites every day and I cannot afford to pay for ad-free reading at every (or any) address.

Earlier today I got linked to "American Spectator." A brief article became impossible to read. In a different way, sites like "Forbes" are also a challenge to navigate. I discontinued a couple of email newsletters because the newsletter itself was bogged down with ads that made reading next to impossible.

On a slightly tangential note, why do all the second and third tier sites display the same crappy ads? "You won't believe what this forgotten starlet looks like forty years later!" Nor do we care to know. Maybe if she were not truly forgotten, we might muster some curiosity. I bet she looks older. What do you think?

We might click on a swimwear malfunction link but even then we are misdirected to a slideshow that takes forever to load. Anyone want to clue me in on the dark secret of Tiffany Trump because I do not care enough to wade through the spammage.

 A variant of Gresham's Law might be at play where the bad readers chase out the good. Or chase out the many. I don't have a solution at hand. Let's put our thinking caps on. This status quo is not acceptable.

Friday, December 9, 2016

More Surrealism: Brian Williams Denounces Fake News

"WERE YOU SUBJECTED TO GROUND FIRE AT TRUMP TOWER, MR. WILLIAMS?"

Surrealism: Dan Rather Lectures Don Lemon On Ethics Of Journalism

Dan Rather is a luminary in the world of fake news. He saw his cushy job come to an end when he pushed a phony story concerning the National Guard record of then President George W. Bush.

Was Rather complicit in promoting the fake news report or merely negligent? In the court of public opinion he pleaded to the lesser charge and was subsequently honored for a lifetime of service to crooked journalism.

How negligent was Rather? He promoted the validity of a supposedly typewritten document that contained superscript. For those of you who never used a typewriter, superscript was not possible on manual typewriters and even most latter generation electrics did not usually offer that feature.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy .

CNN drags Rather out of the pasture from time to time to get the perspective of a living sage.



"COURAGE. COURAGE. COURAGE."

As bizarre as that might be, the following link is to a Dan Rather correspondence course entitled:

Dan Rather on Journalism & Finding the Truth in the News


I am not making this up. The course was $150 but is now available for $19. Sale ends today! Better hurry.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

DHS, Not Russians, Attempts To Breach Georgia Secretary Of State Firewall

Georgia’s secretary of state has claimed the Department of Homeland Security tried to breach his office’s firewall and has issued a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson asking for an explanation.

Brian Kemp issued a letter to Johnson on Thursday after the state’s third-party cybersecurity provider detected an IP address from the agency’s Southwest D.C. office trying to penetrate the state’s firewall. According to the letter, the attempt was unsuccessful.  

The attempt took place on Nov. 15, a few days after the presidential election. The office of the Georgia Secretary of State is responsible for overseeing the state’s elections.

Complete article at CyberScoop

They Don't Make Prophets Like They Used To

THE GENIUS WHO CARRIED WALTER MONDALE TO VICTORY IN 1984

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The Fakest News Of All? The Vast Alt-Right Conspiracy

When an habitual liar named Hillary Clinton launched a witch hunt that focused on the "alt-right" this blogger immediately registered suspicion. I immerse myself in this sort of thing and I was entirely unfamiliar with anything called alt-right two decades after the newsgroup faded from the Internet.

Hillary's typical unfounded attacks on "Breitbart News" seemed like something to easily shrug off. Andrew Breitbart was himself Jewish and Jewish writers contribute to Breitbart but these stubborn facts did not prevent charges of anti-Semitism spewing from that evil woman and her sleazy minions. Of course, the MSM parroted the ridiculous Clinton narrative. Recently "The Washington Post" kicked of a "fake news" meme and all the Pravda types followed their lead. The ironacity is that it has been the MSM all along who have been peddling fake news.

I am not familiar with Bruce Bialosky but he contributes to "Town Hall" so he would probably know his way around the parts of the Internet frequented by Conservatives and self-labeled Right Wingers. Bialosky too, was unfamiliar with this fake news sensation.

During the last election campaign all of a sudden I kept hearing about the Alt-Right. Since I thought I was pretty well read and had never heard of them, I considered them to have the same social relevance as a Miley Cyrus song. I decided to investigate this supposed social phenomenon as soon as the election was over and I was done writing about real issues important to the campaign.

I started by sending emails to mainstream Republicans asking them if they knew anyone who considered themselves members of the Alt-Right. The answer was a universal no. Then I sent emails to my friends who consider themselves conservative Republicans. These are people I respect, but I consider a little more hardcore. The answer was again we don’t know any of these people.

I did get one positive response suggesting I contact Jon Fleischman, someone I have known for 20 years, who in the past five years or so has been the California editor for Breitbart. I have also written for Jon’s publication Flashreport.org.

Jon is Jewish and works for Breitbart which has been accused of being anti-Semitic. Jon is a pretty knowledgeable guy -- doing his own publication and working for Breitbart -- but was totally ignorant about the Alt-Right.

Seek and you shall find but you might not find a lot of them. Bialosky's quest in its entirety at "Town Hall."

Fake news is real. Ask the MSM about all the phony polls that had Hillary running the table, including Texas and Utah. The alt-right is also real and both of its members will verify that assertion.