amplify fdbk bak

schizo b/c death spiral or evolution/learning, synergy?

see social networks2 and jrnlism fail

SEE ECHO ESCALATOR

includes multiplier effect (eg 1 $ invest gets you 7), cascade

bak 619

see carbon bomb

===

ROGan boost benz to musk usaid woodchipper JO 3 26

===

aha doh escalator echo is amplify feedback loop

mma 4 23

aLICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, I am so glad that Andy reminded us that 1/6 is a part of this continuum here. Philip Bump at The Washington Post reports, quote, "Fox News's coverage since mid-2020 has disproportionately involved clips of isolated criminal activity to generate a sense of unconstrained violence in urban areas -- despite evidence that the increase in crime since the pandemic also occurred in rural areas." You touched upon that, but what I want to come back to is the fact that this week, you had the GOP-led House leading a field hearing about crime in New York City, which then Fox News covers, and it just becomes part of this endless feedback loop where the circus becomes reality.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT AND CEO): Yeah, and I think the part that concerns me the most is -- I think, that it's one thing when it's just a misinformation, feedback loop,that itself is a problem, but in a way, it's actually less scary than the current scenario because a couple of years ago -- and now, it's really just fully formed -- there was a switch. And basically the Republican party, via the right-wing media, decided that they were going to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And so once they sort of moved those fringe and set them right and directly front and center in the Republican core, it actually basically pulls in people that are most likely to act on these types of ideas, on this misinformation feedback loop. So what they're basically doing is taking an already simmering cauldron of anxiety, of fear, of hate, of rage, and they are ratcheting up that temperature, bit by bit. And so every time they sort of misrepresent, missample the threat of crime, who's actually responsible, that it's coming for you, they are basically raising the temperature on that cauldron. So it shouldn't be a surprise that it's increasingly starting to spill over and boil over. It's kind of what they're doing. They are organizing power on the fringes. This is what you get when you move the fringes front and center.

===

wapo

Democracy Dies in Darkness

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

By Sarah Ellison and

Clara Ence Morse

May 8, 2024

On the second day of his civil fraud trial in New York last fall, Donald Trump posted a photo of a young woman, Allison Greenfield, standing next to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). Trump claimed falsely that she was “Schumer’s girlfriend” and was “running this case against me.”

Donald Trump's Truth Social profile picture

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Schumer’s girlfriend, Alison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me. How disgraceful! This case should be dismissed immediately!! https://www.instagram.com/greenfield4civilcourt/A photo of Allison Greenfield standing next to New York senator Charles E. Schumer displayed as a silhouette.The Washington Post is not displaying this image.

October 3, 2023 at 6:56 p.m.

Trump’s post about Greenfield, the principal law clerk for New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, received only around 1,400 shares, modest activity for a former president whose Twitter account once had nearly 90 million followers.

Engoron, who oversaw the trial, ordered Trump to take down the post, which he did the same day. But the message was already out. The next day, insults directed at Greenfield flooded right-wing podcasts and social media.

X/Twitter

alt text

Laura Loomer

LauraLoomer

President Trump posted this on Truth Social. Judge Arthur Engoron’s Principal Law Clerk Allison Greenfield appears to be a Democrat political operative who is collaborating with @SenSchumer who has openly proclaimed his desire to “get Trump” and see him jailed. WITCH HUNT

October 3, 2023 at 3:13 p.m.

TimCast podcast

October 4, 2023

“These people have an agenda. They have had a bias, obvious bias against Donald Trump from day one.”

— Tim Pool

The Michael Knowles Show podcast

October 4, 2023

“Trump took a swipe at one of the judge's staff members and pointed out that she's a huge lib, Alison Greenfield. She's a big lib. She's a big Democrat.”

— Michael Knowles

Over the next two months, dozens of articles focused on Greenfield’s role. Conservative media personalities such as Laura Loomer and the cable TV news channel Newsmax kept the spotlight on the clerk by frequently repeating Trump’s complaints.

Breitbart

November 3, 2023

A Breitbart headline reading: Conniption in Court: Gasps as Breitbart Exposé on Trump New York Judge’s Clerk Takes Center Stage

NewsMax

November 3, 2023

A NewsMax headline reading: Judge Blasts Trump Lawyers for Attacking Staff

NewsMax

November 3, 2023

New York Post

November 15, 2023

A New York Post headline reading: Trump seeks mistrial in 'tainted' $250M civil fraud case — citing judge's 'overwhelming' bias

The Epoch Times

December 7, 2023

A The Epoch Times headline reading: NY Judge Argues Against Trump Suit, Says Relationships Between Judge and Staff 'Sacrosanct'

With the attention from Trump’s backers came threats and abuse — a torrent that compelled Greenfield to tighten security at home and avoid public transportation.

When transcribed, the harassing voice-mail messages left for Greenfield covered more than 275 single-spaced pages.

Those concerned about the impact of Trump’s incendiary and often inaccurate messages have long sought ways to limit his reach. Cable news networks stopped airing his speeches live. Social media companies adopted new rules to slow the spread of false information. The targets of his bogus election conspiracy theories sued him and his proxies.

Perhaps the most significant move to limit Trump’s audience came after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol: bans on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, blocking him from some of the most influential social media platforms of the era.

And yet, three years later, a Washington Post analysis shows how those efforts have failed.

Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Trump is as potent a political force as ever, with an army of amplifiers ensuring that his messages — true or untrue — reach a broad swath of the American public. He is set to face President Biden in November, with Trump running roughly even in national polls.

When Trump was initially suspended from the major social media platforms, he issued a statement: “We will not be SILENCED!”

He then created his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he would never be banned and which would allow him to profit financially from his own messages.

Former president Donald Trump is reflected in a mirror as he speaks to supporters in Laconia, N.H., on the day before the New Hampshire Republican primary. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Truth Social was estimated to have 5.4 million website visits in the United States in March, with another 800,000 on its app. By comparison, X, which was formerly known as Twitter, claimed more than 200 times that, with over 1 billion visits. Facebook is estimated to have had 3 billion visits in the same period, according to audience tracking firm Similarweb. Even though Trump has now been reinstated on the larger platforms, he has stuck with Truth Social, a platform that gives him greater freedom but a far more limited reach.

Yet despite its relatively small user base, Truth Social is influential because it sustains the networks of MAGA influencers, culture warriors and election deniers who power the right-wing media and guide the rhetoric and policies of many Republican elected officials. It directly connects Trump to influencers with enormous networks and audiences outside the platform, The Post’s analysis found.

Press Enter to skip to end of carousel

How Trump has become angrier and more isolated on Truth Social

Here on his company’s social network Trump is offering followers an intimate view of what his second term could look like: isolated, vitriolic and vengeful.

End of carousel]

The Post analyzed 14,101 of Trump’s posts from the day he announced his presidential campaign on Nov. 15, 2022, through March 15, 2024, including 7,716 original text posts as well as reposts and image-only posts. He posted to Truth Social, where he now has 6.96 million followers, an average of 29 times a day over that period.

Those messages were in turn shared by followers with wildly popular Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, podcasts and cable news shows, some of which reach tens of millions of people. The Post’s analysis focused on nearly 200 right-wing political influencers who have active accounts on Truth Social and other social media sites.

“The people around Trump know better than anybody how to spread a message,” Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump senior adviser and influential podcaster, said in an interview. They also benefit personally from their role.

Supporters of former president Donald Trump try to get his photo as he walks out to announce his bid for president at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Nov. 15, 2022. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

By “recirculating golden nuggets from Trump, influencers provide the bonding of this media ecosystem,” said Yochai Benkler, a Harvard Law School professor who has long studied propaganda. “The more outrageous and trolling of the libs it is,” added Benkler, “the more attractive it is for those who want to make money and get credibility inside the political community for being a true believer.”

Trump recently praised Truth Social for its effectiveness. “When I put out a statement or message, it is SPREAD all over the place, fast and furious. EVERYBODY SEEMS TO GET WHATEVER I HAVE TO SAY, AND QUICKLY,” he wrote on the platform in early April.

Shannon Devine, spokesperson for Truth Social, said in a statement that “since users can express themselves on Truth Social without censorship and without their message being filtered through biased media outlets, it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump would use the platform or that people would spread his statements elsewhere.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s biggest amplifiers include well-known political figures and media organizations, as well as those who have built their brands almost entirely based on their habitual echo of the former president’s words, The Post’s analysis found.

Influencers such as conservative radio and TV host Mark Levin, former Trump adviser and media commentator Sebastian Gorka, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, and online personalities such as Philip Buchanan, who posts using the handle Catturd, regularly share Trump’s Truth Social posts within the platform and amplify his messages to their massive followings off it. Levin, Gorka, Flynn and Catturd each boast over a million followers on X, and Levin and Gorka host popular podcasts. Levin, Flynn and Buchanan did not respond to requests for comment. Gorka responded by saying, “You are scum and a hack. Go to Hell.”

Sebastian Gorka greets supporters on the first day of CPAC on March 2, 2023, in Fort Washington, Md. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Former Trump national security adviser and retired three-star Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn greets visitors during the ReAwaken America Tour on Oct. 21, 2022, in Manheim, Pa. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Trump uses Truth Social to promote his campaign and personal brand, attack political rivals and solicit donations. He also makes false claims of election fraud, spreads far-right conspiracy theories and hurls vitriol at the judges, witnesses and prosecutors involved in his court cases. Posts that make claims of election interference, discuss his court cases or include aggressively insulting language, tend to get the most attention. Five of Trump’s 10 most reposted messages involve election denial.

Early in his campaign, almost all of Trump’s election-denial posts focused on the 2020 presidential race. But after his first indictment in April 2023, Trump began alleging that prosecutors, by charging him, were interfering in the 2024 election. Around the time of his June indictment for mishandling classified documents, his posts on alleged 2024 election interference began to outnumber claims of 2020 election fraud, a trend that continued throughout the year, the Post analysis found.

On Aug. 14, when Trump was indicted in Georgia, he posted three messages equating the indictment with election interference. “THOSE WHO RIGGED & STOLE THE ELECTION WERE THE ONES DOING THE TAMPERING, & THEY ARE THE SLIME THAT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED,” he wrote in his typical all-caps style.

His language was repeated dozens of times in the two following days on right-wing media, podcasts and television. Internet personality Catturd posted a screenshot of Trump’s post to Twitter an hour later, where it garnered 150,000 views. That afternoon, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) wrote on Facebook and Truth Social that the justice system was rigged against Trump, ending the post with an allegation of “election interference!”

The phenomenon is a “steroidal version of political messaging,” according to Chris Stirewalt, politics editor at NewsNation and a former political editor at Fox News. “Trump says or does something egregious and the people who are currying favor with him say, ‘Well, let’s workshop this,’ and they share his message on their own account, but add their own twist.”

One of the reasons Trump has not regularly posted on X is that he wants to create and keep financial value for his Truth Social site, which he carefully tracks, according to people close to him who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

He has relentlessly tried to promote it, telling his advisers that he wants to break news on the platform to bring in more users. That focus paid off with an early, heady valuation of the company that peaked at more than $10 billion in late March, though shares in parent company Trump Media and Technology Group have fallen sharply since then.

Supporters use their phones during a rally in Erie, Pa., on July 29. (Dustin Franz for The Washington Post)

Trump has posted on X only once since leaving the Oval Office — his mug shot last year from an Atlanta jail, where he was booked on charges of trying to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.

But “even though Trump had been kicked off Twitter, people like me can get out Trump’s message on Twitter,” said Mike Davis, a former Senate aide who helped guide the confirmation of Supreme Court justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Davis, who founded the Article III Project, a judicial advocacy organization, is a frequent podcast guest on shows hosted by influencers such as Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, Jack Posobiec and Bannon. He estimates that he’s done over 3,000 media appearances, “and that’s in addition to constant social media and writing opinion pieces defending Trump.”

Davis said that being kicked off social media is galvanizing for conservatives, and he would know. He has been suspended from Twitter five times. But each time, “it was the best thing ever, because then I would go on Fox News and talk about how I was being censored and that would build a bigger audience.”

An ideal testing ground

The day before the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Bannon hosted a “force amplifier” event for influencers to discuss the most effective ways to support Trump’s causes.

Truth Social is an ideal testing ground, Bannon said, because it provides a way to test a message among a relatively small group that can then pass along the most effective lines to a wider audience.

“This entire industry is predicated upon the Trumps of the world creating compelling content daily,” said Bannon. “From YouTube to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, the whole thing. People are making businesses and careers out of his content.”

A radio show is live-streamed as supporters of Donald Trump gather to watch election results following the presidential primaries on March 12 in Smyrna, Ga. (Megan Varner/For The Washington Post )

On July 27, new charges against Trump in the mishandling classified documents case were filed by special counsel Jack Smith. The following day, Trump wrote three posts on Truth Social referencing the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice or FBI, including one post that garnered over 8,400 reposts and 29,000 likes. The language quickly found its way off Truth Social.

“People are not stupid,” Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said that night on Sean Hannity’s show, which typically reaches 2.3 million people. “As a whole, they are starting to understand that the weaponization of the justice system is full throttle right now.”

“This morning, I joined Fox and Friends to discuss the illegal weaponization of the DOJ against Joe Biden’s top political opponent,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) posted on her Facebook page, which has 360,000 followers, that afternoon.

Newsmax posted a video to its YouTube channel, which has 2.2 million subscribers, promoting an interview with former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, who said the Biden administration had “weaponized the justice system in a shameful and disgraceful way.” (A Newsmax spokesperson said the network covers both sides of Trump’s trials. Guilfoyle said that the “censorship of President Trump is un-American, a total assault on the First Amendment.”)

Despite his frequent public complaints about how Fox treats him, Trump is also still amplified by its major prime time shows. The night he posted about the Georgia indictments, guests on the popular Hannity, “Jesse Watters Primetime” and “Fox News @ Night” shows, cited the indictments as evidence of election interference.

“For mainstream outlets, it’s the laziest kind of rage revenue because TV producers and web editors go out to find the posts that online rage merchants have already made,” said Stirewalt, who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “And then you can bring it back to your more mainstream audience and say: ‘Aren’t you enraged by how enraged they are?’”

From anonymity to influencer

Some of the former president’s biggest boosters have built their identities almost entirely online, with no credentials beyond their instinct for amplifying his words.

Philip Buchanan, a 59-year-old living in the panhandle of Florida, is the person behind the social media personality Catturd. Buchanan began tweeting in 2018 as a so-called “Reply Guy,” someone with a small social media following who communicates primarily in the comments section of prominent users. Today, his X account boasts 2.4 million followers, including former Fox host Tucker Carlson, billionaire X owner Elon Musk, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Trump.

Buchanan, who is behind the social media personality Catturd, has 2.4 million followers of his X account. (Screenshot from social media)

Buchanan’s interactions with Trump highlight how each benefit from the other. Through much of 2020, the Catturd account had featured pandemic-era jabs at Democrats, often with a scatological twist. But after the election, Buchanan — like Trump — became fixated on false claims of a rigged vote. Trump retweeted him three times that November.

More recently, Buchanan posted a screenshot of an April 6 Trump post on Truth Social attacking New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s hush money case. “Trump just violated the gag order and dares the corrupt activist hack judge to put him in jail,” Buchanan wrote on X. He followed up with a flame emoji to express his appreciation for Trump’s stance.

Buchanan, whose identity was revealed by Rolling Stone and confirmed by The Post, has credited his social media fame with changing his financial life. In January, he told Carlson, the former Fox News personality who now hosts a show on X, that he bought a new truck, started a podcast and now sells a line of Catturd-branded merchandise.

A clerk under threat

The public scrutiny of Allison Greenfield began with a Wisconsin man named Brock Fredin, who unearthed the photo of the law clerk with Schumer. Fredin posted the photo on X, using the handle @JudicialProtest, and added a caption asking why she was “palling around with Charles E. Schumer?”

Fredin did not respond to a request for comment.

Days later, Trump took a screenshot of Fredin’s post, added a link to Greenfield’s Instagram account, and pushed the message out to his followers. His campaign sent out an email blast targeting Greenfield minutes later.

Although Trump did not directly threaten Greenfield, he clearly voiced his disapproval to his many followers. Right-wing influencers publicized Greenfield’s cellphone and social media accounts, and she scrambled to hide her personal information and that of her family. Court security directed her to stop taking the subway and instead travel by car.

Judge Arthur Engoron, right, sits on the bench with principal law clerk Allison Greenfield, center, during former president Donald Trump's civil business fraud trial in New York on Nov. 2. (John Taggart for The Washington Post)

Laura Loomer speaks during protests against the indictment of former president Donald Trump outside the Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami on June 13. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)

Greenfield, who is now running to be a Manhattan civil court judge, declined to comment for this piece. But her experience was described in court papers and by Jerry Skurnik, a consultant for her campaign.

Trump’s post resulted in roughly 20-30 calls per day to Greenfield’s personal cellphone and approximately 30-50 messages per day across social media, Linkedln and two personal email addresses, according to court papers. The threats, many of which were sexist and antisemitic in nature, included several death threats.

Loomer was among those who focused attention on Greenfield, sharing Trump’s Truth Social message about the clerk to her nearly 1 million followers on X and proclaiming the case against the former president a “WITCH HUNT.” When reached for comment, Loomer said that “it is important for me and the MAGA base to be Donald Trump’s bullhorn,” a role that she said has only become more crucial since he has been subjected to multiple gag orders.

Once an appellate judge temporarily paused the gag order on Nov. 16, Trump lashed out again at Greenfield and Engoron on Truth Social. “His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace,” Trump wrote.

Trump continues to attack several of the judges overseeing his cases, and recently flouted a gag order in his hush money case in New York by lashing out against two potential trial witnesses and the jury.

Trump said he would be “honored” to go to jail for violating the gag order. Instead, in late April, Merchan fined Trump $9,000.

The same day, Trump posted on Truth Social that the judge was “Rigged, Crooked, and above all, and without question, CONFLICTED.”

Loomer shared Trump’s post on X, and Catturd reshared the message to his followers, adding three fire emojis.

===

aha/doh shift platform eg telegram, then use bad spelling, it's resilient b/c it's a network

https://theconversation.com/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-testified-that-the-companys-algorithms-are-dangerous-heres-how-they-can-manipulate-you-169420

Fo:{rmer Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on Oct. 5, 2021, that the company’s social media platforms “} harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy :{.”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.”}:

Haugen was the primary source for a Wall Street Journal exposé on the company. She called Facebook’s algorithms dangerous, said Facebook executives were aware of the threat but put profits before people, and called on Congress to regulate the company.

Social media platforms rely heavily on people’s behavior to decide on the content that you see. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting and sharing. Troll farms, organizations that spread provocative content, exploit this by copying high-engagement content and posting it as their own, which helps them reach a wide audience.

As a computer scientist who studies the ways large numbers of people interact using technology, I understand the logic of using the wisdom of the crowds in these algorithms. I also see substantial pitfalls in how the social media companies do so in practice.

From lions on the savanna to likes on Facebook

The concept of the wisdom of crowds assumes that using signals from others’ actions, opinions and preferences as a guide will lead to sound decisions. For example, collective predictions are normally more accurate than individual ones. Collective intelligence is used to predict financial markets, sports, elections and even disease outbreaks.

Throughout millions of years of evolution, these principles have been coded into the human brain in the form of cognitive biases that come with names like familiarity, mere exposure and bandwagon effect. If everyone starts running, you should also start running; maybe someone saw a lion coming and running could save your life. You may not know why, but it’s wiser to ask questions later.

Your brain picks up clues from the environment – including your peers – and uses simple rules to quickly translate those signals into decisions: Go with the winner, follow the majority, copy your neighbor. These rules work remarkably well in typical situations because they are based on sound assumptions. For example, they assume that people often act rationally, it is unlikely that many are wrong, the past predicts the future, and so on.

Technology allows people to access signals from much larger numbers of other people, most of whom they do not know. Artificial intelligence applications make heavy use of these popularity or “engagement” signals, from selecting search engine results to recommending music and videos, and from suggesting friends to ranking posts on news feeds.

Not everything viral deserves to be

Our research shows that virtually all web technology platforms, such as social media and news recommendation systems, have a strong popularity bias. When applications are driven by cues like engagement rather than explicit search engine queries, popularity bias can lead to harmful unintended consequences.

Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok rely heavily on AI algorithms to rank and recommend content. These algorithms take as input what you like, comment on and share – in other words, content you engage with. The goal of the algorithms is to maximize engagement by finding out what people like and ranking it at the top of their feeds.

A primer on the Facebook algorithm.[vid?]

On the surface this seems reasonable. If people like credible news, expert opinions and fun videos, these algorithms should identify such high-quality content. But the wisdom of the crowds makes a key assumption here: that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content “bubble up.”

We tested this assumption by studying an algorithm that ranks items using a mix of quality and popularity. We found that in general, popularity bias is more likely to lower the overall quality of content. The reason is that engagement is not a reliable indicator of quality when few people have been exposed to an item. In these cases, engagement generates a noisy signal, and the algorithm is likely to amplify this initial noise. Once the popularity of a low-quality item is large enough, it will keep getting amplified.

Algorithms aren’t the only thing affected by engagement bias – it can affect people too. Evidence shows that information is transmitted via “complex contagion,” meaning the more times people are exposed to an idea online, the more likely they are to adopt and reshare it. When social media tells people an item is going viral, their cognitive biases kick in and translate into the irresistible urge to pay attention to it and share it.

Not-so-wise crowds

We recently ran an experiment using a news literacy app called Fakey. It is a game developed by our lab that simulates a news feed like those of Facebook and Twitter. Players see a mix of current articles from fake news, junk science, hyperpartisan and conspiratorial sources, as well as mainstream sources. They get points for sharing or liking news from reliable sources and for flagging low-credibility articles for fact-checking.

We found that players are more likely to like or share and less likely to flag articles from low-credibility sources when players can see that many other users have engaged with those articles. Exposure to the engagement metrics thus creates a vulnerability.

The wisdom of the crowds fails because it is built on the false assumption that the crowd is made up of diverse, independent sources. There may be several reasons this is not the case.

First, because of people’s tendency to associate with similar people, their online neighborhoods are not very diverse. The ease with which social media users can unfriend those with whom they disagree pushes people into homogeneous communities, often referred to as echo chambers.

Second, because many people’s friends are friends of one another, they influence one another. A famous experiment demonstrated that knowing what music your friends like affects your own stated preferences. Your social desire to conform distorts your independent judgment.

Third, popularity signals can be gamed. Over the years, search engines have developed sophisticated techniques to counter so-called “link farms” and other schemes to manipulate search algorithms. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are just beginning to learn about their own vulnerabilities.

People aiming to manipulate the information market have created fake accounts, like trolls and social bots, and organized fake networks. They have flooded the network to create the appearance that a conspiracy theory or a political candidate is popular, tricking both platform algorithms and people’s cognitive biases at once. They have even altered the structure of social networks to create illusions about majority opinions.

Dialing down engagement

What to do? Technology platforms are currently on the defensive. They are becoming more aggressive during elections in taking down fake accounts and harmful misinformation. But these efforts can be akin to a game of whack-a-mole.

A different, preventive approach would be to add friction. In other words, to slow down the process of spreading information. High-frequency behaviors such as automated liking and sharing could be inhibited by CAPTCHA tests, which require a human to respond, or fees. Not only would this decrease opportunities for manipulation, but with less information people would be able to pay more attention to what they see. It would leave less room for engagement bias to affect people’s decisions.

It would also help if social media companies adjusted their algorithms to rely less on engagement signals and more on quality signals to determine the content they serve you. Perhaps the whistleblower revelations will provide the necessary impetus.

===

aha doh gerry is cause and result of polarization, amplifies!? but primary appeals to the more extreme of party, so can push in left or right? tho left has no word for flakned; see rank vote jungl primary?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/jim-jordan

ah poster boy on gerry

Among Democrats, liberals, progressives, centrists and Never Trump conservatives, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is one of the most notorious Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. And because of gerrymandering — and because his district is so reliably Republican — the 57-year-old Jordan keeps getting reelected year after year. In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on May 24, Cleveland-based journalist Keith Osmun examines the effect that the 2020 U.S. Census may have on Jordan in 2022.

Jordan, a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, presently represents Ohio's 4th Congressional District — where he was first elected in 2006 after having served in the Ohio State Senate and the Ohio House of Representatives.

Osmun explains, "Since the 1930s, Ohio's 4th Congressional District has been under Republican control…. It is arguably the safest Republican district in the country. The current occupant of its seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is everyone's favorite Trump sycophant: Jim Jordan."

Ohio has 16 congressional U.S. House districts; 12 of them are presently occupied by Republicans, while four are occupied by Democrats.

Democrat Janet Garrett, who ran against Jordan in 2014, 2016 and 2018, told Osmun, "I knew the odds. I ran because I felt that it was imperative that somebody put up a fight. If he ran unopposed, they would tout him around the district as so wonderful no one wants to reproach him."

Garrett said of Jordan, "He's never introduced any legislation other than a monument to someone. He doesn't introduce legislation; he's just a bomb thrower. He didn't go to Washington to legislate."

What Ohio's new congressional map will look like in 2022 remains to be seen.

Collin Marozzi, an ACLU attorney who has been fighting gerrymandering in Ohio, told Osmun, "Gerrymandering allows Jim Jordan to be the most Jim Jordan he can be: the most bombastic, bomb throwing, partisan person in Congress. He hasn't passed a single piece of legislation in ten years.He has no real incentive to compromise because he only has to worry about a primary challenge."

Following the 2020 U.S. Census, Ohio will be losing a seat in the U.S. House — and it will have 15 U.S. House districts instead of 16. Osmun observes, "One of the happy byproducts of Ohio losing a congressional seat as a result of the 2020 Census is that the districts will be redrawn under more bipartisan rules put in place in the years since the 2010 Census…. If the changes work as intended, the ride 'safe seats' provide legislators like Jim Jordan will be a bumpier one in the midterms."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax

Marc Morano broke the Swift Boat story and effectively stalled John Kerry's presidential run. Now he is working against an even bigger enemy: belief in climate change. Somehow, he seems to be winning.

By John H. Richardson

Marc Morano

Mackenzie Stroh

Early on the morning of November 17, Gavin Schmidt sat down at his computer and entered his password. It didn't work. Strange, he thought. He tried a few other accounts and none of them worked, either. Now he was alarmed. As a leading climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute in Manhattan, he’d been hacked before. He was used to e-mails from people who disapproved of his work, threatening e-mails that detailed the romantic life he was going to have in prison. So he knew what to do: He logged in via the Unix shell command.

A second later, the computer logged him off — and locked him out. Someone was in there, fighting him in real time. Schmidt sent an emergency message to his Web server:

"WE ARE BEING HACKED RIGHT NOW."

When they started the system up again, hours later, Schmidt found a forged Web page and a link to a file holding thousands of what looked like private e-mails written by some leading climatologists who study global warming. In addition to being a massive theft, it was a dark joke. Because the Goddard Institute is the professional home of James Hansen, the scientist famous for first sounding the alarm on rising temperatures back in 1988, and these particular e-mails had been compiled as part of a bitter Freedom of Information fight launched by contrarians who insist that global warming is a hoax, the hacker was posting the e-mails as a malicious tweak. He came in via a misconfigured proxy server in Turkey that was on a list of the proxy servers people use if they want to hide their tracks.[C8 CARSON WIKI?]

But the hacker had moved on. He'd been working on this for weeks, maybe longer, risking prison on charges of industrial espionage. A few hours later, he posted this note on a blog called The Air Vent:

"We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release arandom selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

"This is a limited time offer, download now."

Two days later, Marc Morano is riding up the Pacific Coast Highway in the back of a rental car, a big cheerful guy with five o'clock shadow that makes him look like Barney Rubble.He was eleven when his older brother got him a job on the Reagan campaign placing [BUYING TIME FOR ADS?] sound bites with radio stations, which eventually led to a job with Rush Limbaugh and three years as communications director for Senator James Inhofe, where he made the words Global warming is a hoaxworld famous. Now he's forty-one and he's enjoying the downtime between political speeches, catching glimpses of the California ocean — on these lecture tours, he just runs and runs and runs until all he wants is a quiet place to drink a beer and smoke a cigar.

But a call comes in from Anthony Watts, a retired TV weatherman who runs one of the leading contrarian blogs, and he has astonishing news about some e-mails from theClimate Research Unitat the University of East Anglia in England. There's explosive stuff there — in one, a scientist actually rejoices over a contrarian's death. How's that for scientific detachment? Another says he's using a trick to "hide the decline" in temperature. A trick!

It's exactly what the contrarians have been saying for years. The leading global-warming scientists are scamming the world. Billions of dollars in green energy and CO₂ restrictions and it all comes down to their reputations and their grant money.

So Watts is posting a note on his Web site: "The details on this are still sketchy, we'll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown..."

"Many many" files is right. There are thousands of them, nearly a million words total. Fortunately, the hacker took the time to draw up an annotated list. Watts is posting some of the juiciest.

The timing is perfect. The United Nations climate conference starts in Copenhagen in three weeks. The activists are pushing for a 40 percent cut in CO₂ emissions within ten years, a revolutionary number. The eyes of the world are open wide and suddenly here's this tremendous gift: Climate-gate, they'll call it. With any luck, it will be just like the story that put Morano on the map, the one he wrote in a hurry late on a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2004 that was supposed to be the beginning of a vacation. He was working at the time for the right-wing CNS News service, and hisboss wanted a pound of flesh before he left, as bosses do, so he made some calls and a contact suggested he call a guy named John O'Neill down in Texas. A few minutes later O'Neill was on the phone, sounding surprised. Yeah, he was leading a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, hundreds of them, all ready to declare that John Kerry was unfit to be commander in chief. Yeah, nineteen of them had actually served with Kerry. They even had his commanding officer, who said he'd had thorn pricks that were worse than some of Kerry's wounds.

Morano knew it was big. He stayed late, digging through clips and calling Kerry's office for comment. "You asked for a pound of flesh," he told his editor. "I may have given you several."

The story ran on Monday under the headline "KERRY UNFIT TO BE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF," SAY FORMER MILITARY COLLEAGUES, when Morano was down in North Carolina, at Nag's Head with his two baby girls. It blew up into international news, turning the Swift Boaters' press conference into a mob scene, the beginning of the end for Kerry, who simply didn't understand what he was up against. It didn't matter that the claims of the Swift Boaters would later be documented to be lavishly financed lies; the actual truth was a lumbering dinosaur in the face of a blitzkrieg. Morano followed it with stories like KERRY'S MEETING WITH COMMUNISTS VIOLATED U. S. LAW and FBI FILES SHOW KERRY MET WITH COMMUNISTS MORE THAN ONCE.

But that was when he still had some institutional support behind him. Now he's all alone in a hotel room with a laptop, a phone, and a BlackBerry, and his only weapon is a Web site called ClimateDepot.com.

Listen and learn, pilgrim. This is how the information wars are fought in the age of the Internet, when an isolated outside voice can swing the debate and change the world. The story starts with Hansen's congressional testimony back in '88: "The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." Within a few years, the fossil-fuel industry was fighting back with films like The Greening of Planet Earth, which said that more CO₂ would actually be good for farmers. Big Oil and Big Coal funded sympathetic think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute and also outright front groups with names like Friends of Science and the Global Climate Coalition, all of which came up with an endless stream of arguments for why global warming wasn't happening and even if it was, nothing should be done about it. Some of their criticisms were valid, like questioning the more extreme predictions for ocean-level rise or the dubious link to hurricanes, and they were certainly right to bring up the cost-benefit analysis of cap-and-trade.But as the science piled up, each bit of evidence more convincing than the last, more and more people were starting to believe that global warming was real.

The first turning point was 1997, when the nations of the world agreed to limit their CO₂emissions at theKyoto Protocol. A year later, the American Petroleum Institute hired a conservative PR expert named Steve Milloy to develop a "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." They had to tell a better story and tell it fast. They had to change the narrative. Milloy ran a Web site called Junk Science, joined in time by Climate Audit and Ice Cap and a thousand others, all hammering the same message — ignore global warming.There was even an evangelical-Christian faction, led by something called the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. Then,in 2006, Al Gore killed them with An Inconvenient Truth. On one side you had a Nobel-prize-winning vice-president, the world's leading scientists, a Hollywood cheering section, and a growing public consensus. On the other, a handful of legitimate scientists and a small but noisy group of amateurs, ideologues, and cranks. At the peak of the consensus, 84 percent of Americans thought global warming was a threat. The only thing they agreed on more was the existence of God.

Then Morano got hired as the communications director for Jim Inhofe, the dyspeptic senator from Oklahoma. Setting to work, he began compiling so many inflammatory stories and documents on Inhofe's Web site, Newsweeksaid he was "more like a wire service than a spokesman." He began to use the Web in pugnacious new ways, like printing the e-mail addresses of reporters and scientists and inviting readers to pester them. All this made Inhofe's office the global center of the resistance, but it also infuriated people. "Morano is unquotable and uncitable," said one influential climate blog. "Besides his penchant for smear, he just makes stuff up." Another investigated his e-mail list. A scientist threatened him with a libel suit. Eventually other Republicans started telling Inhofe to fire him — he was unprofessional, they said. He appealed to Inhofe's worst instincts.

Morano took those as compliments.

[Pix Morano Limbaugh]

Now he sits at the anonymous desk in his California hotel room and taps away on his Web site, which is funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire who also financed the investigation into Bill Clinton's sex life. Morano starts searching and surfing, setting up Google alerts to aggregate stories to his in-box, grabbing scraps of information wherever he can find them, adding headlines and lining them up on his front page.

Click on the headline Real Files or Fakeand it takes you to a Web site called the Blackboard, where a blogger named Lucia mentions e-mails "between various bloggers and climate science illuminati" but isn't sure whether they're some sort of scam. May sully the reputations of a number of working scientistsleads to a story on Examiner.com New York by a writer named Thomas Fuller, who refuses to go into detail because the e-mails are private and would almost certainly "prove embarrassing to those concerned, especially if ... published in snippets and without context." If legit, this apparently devastating series of revelations will be very hard for the media to ignoreleads to a giddy post at the National Review Online: "The blue-dress moment may have arrived!"

Morano has fun with it too, using goofy illustrations like a cartoon hand hammering a nail into a coffin and a Scooby Doo villain getting his mask pulled off. People tell him this is too childish for a publication that affects global policy, but it's part of his vision for his Web site — climate entertainment, he calls it.

As the words leave his fingers and become electric ones and zeros in the information cloud, other people start responding. One of the first is James Delingpole of London's Daily Telegraph:"If you own any shares in alternative-energy companies I should start dumping them NOW." Morano's Google alerts pick up the new tidbit and he slaps on another headline and adds it to his Web page. Then other people pick up his stuff and he writes about that and someone else writes about that until it's all swirling around like a digital dust devil in a Michael Crichton novel. Soon Morano's caution begins to fade: [note iterativeamplify feedback amplify]

If they are real and not fake, he writes, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause.

Physicist on alleged behavior of CRU scientists: "These people should be put in jail as soon as possible."

A scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.....

===

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102018/jet-stream-climate-change-study-extreme-weather-arctic-amplification-temperature

Global Warming Is Messing with the Jet Stream. That Means More Extreme Weather.

BY BOB BERWYN

Greenhouse gases are increasingly disrupting the jet stream, a powerful river of winds that steers weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere. That's causing more frequent summer droughts, floods and wildfires, a new study says.

The findings suggest that summers like 2018, when the jet stream drove extreme weather on an unprecedented scale across the Northern Hemisphere, will be 50 percent more frequent by the end of the century if emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants from industry, agriculture and the burning of fossil fuels continue at a high rate.

In a worst-case scenario, there could be a near-tripling of such extreme jet stream events, but other factors, like aerosol emissions, are a wild card, according to the research, published today in the journal Science Advances.

The study identifies how the faster warming of the Arctic twists the jet stream into an extreme pattern that leads to persistent heat and drought extremes in some regions, with flooding in other areas.

The researchers said they were surprised by how big a role other pollutants play in the jet stream's behavior, especially aerosols—microscopic solid or liquid particles from industry, agriculture, volcanoes and plants. Aerosols have a cooling effect that partially counteracts the jet stream changes caused by greenhouse gases, said co-author Dim Comou, a climate and extreme weather researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

"The aerosols forcing was a bit of a surprise to us," Comou said. "Those emissions are expected to decrease rapidly in the mid-latitude regions in the next 10 to 30 years" because of phasing out of pollution to protect people from breathing unhealthy air.

In recent decades, aerosol pollution has actually been slowing down the global warming process across the Northern Hemisphere's mid-latitude industrial regions. If aerosol emissions drop rapidly, as projected, these regions would warm faster.

That would change the temperature contrast between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, which would dampen the warming effect of greenhouse gases on the jet stream. By how much depends on the rate, location and timing of the reductions, and the offset would end by mid-century, when man-made aerosols are expected to be mostly gone and no longer reflecting incoming solar radiation, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist and study lead author Michael Mann.

Repeats of the Summer of 2018?

The jet stream is a powerful high-altitude wind that shapes and moves weather systems from west to east. Different branches of the jet stream undulate from the subtropics to the edge of the Arctic. In the past 15 years at least, the jet stream has been coiling up more, slithering farther north and south. When it gets stuck in the extreme pattern identified by the scientists, it leads to more deadly and costly weather extremes.

That extremely wavy pattern, called "quasi-resonant amplification," was evident during the extreme summer of 2018, Mann said.

[nice map]

It played out in real time on TV and in newspaper headlines about droughts, floods, heat extremes and wildfires—an "unprecedented hemisphere-wide pattern,"Mann said. "It played a key role in the large-scale jet pattern we saw in late July, associated with deep stagnant high pressure centers over California and Europe."

That brought blazing temperatures and wildfire conditions to California, flooding over the Eastern U.S. and unprecedented heat to the Scandinavian Arctic region, as well as a six-month heat wave and drought across parts of Central Europe, all events showing a clear global warming fingerprint, according to scientists.

The new study focuses on summer extremes, while other research has looked at how global warming affects the jet stream in winter.

What Happens in the Arctic Doesn't Stay There

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved with the new research, said the study has some"compelling new evidence on the link between amplified Arctic warming and extreme mid-latitude weather during the summer months."

What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay there. Increased melting of reflective sea ice in summer exposes more dark-colored ocean to absorb heat, and that heats the surrounding land. As Arctic warming races ahead of the rest of the global average, the temperature contrasts that drive the jet stream are reduced, and the river of wind more frequently twists into sharp and slow-moving or stationary waves.

"When the jet stream enters this wavy state, extreme weather tends to occur on either side of the amplified ridges and troughs as the storm track becomes locked in place," Swain said. Then, specific regions experience long periods of cool and stormy or, contrarily, hot and dry weather, he added.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

EXTREME WEATHER

CLIMATE SCIENCE

CLIMATE CHANGE

===

redmap did systemic long term damage TP--> freedom cocks, suicide squad, unaccountable old white guys --> voter suppression, anti-abortion ...

amplified and accelerated polarization

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-decade-republicans-hijacked-our-democracy-via-the-gerrymander/

===

no lnx

‘Boiling with methane’: Scientists reveal ‘truly terrifying’ sign of climate change under the Arctic Ocean

A spectacular image of methane bubbles rising above a cold seep site. Methane bubbles flow in a small stream out of the sediment on an area of seafloor offshore Virginia north of Washington Canyon. Quill worms, anemones, patches of bacterial mat, pandalid shrimp, and a large red crab (Chaceon quinquedens) can be seen in and along the periphery of the seepage area.]

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams October 9, 2019

Scientists studying the consequences of methane emissions from underwater permafrost in the Arctic Ocean announced this week that they found a 50-square-foot area of the East Siberian Sea “boiling with methane bubbles.”

“This is the most powerful seep I have ever been able to observe,” lead scientist Igor Semiletov said Monday, using a term for methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor to the surface. “No one has ever recorded anything similar.”

Semiletov, a Russian researcher who has participated in 45 Arctic expeditions, set out on the Academic Mstislav Keldysh last month, accompanied by scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Their discovery was announced in a statement from Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University, where Semiletov is a professor. The researchers’ findings from the expedition and Semiletov’s remarks were translated and reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph.

Russian scientists find ‘most powerful’ ever methane seep in Arctic Ocean https://t.co/v6HrbjPlXv

— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) October 8, 2019

Permafrost is a mix of soil, rocks, and sand bound together by ice that stays frozen for two or more years straight. As human activity causes global temperatures to rise, the world’s permafrost is thawing—releasing ancient bacteria and viruses as well as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that further heat the planet.

Compared with carbon dioxide, methane has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere but is better at trapping radiation, so methane’s impact is more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Experts are increasingly concerned about the consequences of thawing permafrost that is located both beneath land and water in the planet’s coldest regions. Last week, the Washington Post reported on “stunning and dramatic” scenes from a region of Eastern Siberia where “sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground—rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth,” and “rivers are rising and running faster,” sweeping away entire neighborhoods.

The Academic Mstislav Keldysh expedition’s research team, led by Semiletov, traveled to an area of the Arctic Ocean known for methane “fountains” to study the effects of permafrost thawing. Around the “powerful” fountain they found east of Bennett Island, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was more than nine times higher than the global average.

Describing the researchers’ discovery of the fountain based on the univeristy’s statement, The Telegraph reported:

When researchers drew near to the “emerald-colored” water of the methane fountain, they “could see how gas was rising to the surface from the black depths of the sea in thousands of bubbly strands,” according to expedition member Sergei Nikiforov.

They took samples of bottom sediments, water, and gas, scooping up the extraordinarily large methane bubbles in buckets rather than small plastic capsules and filling several pressurized canisters.

The next day, the expedition stumbled upon another giant seep of roughly the same size, even though discovering seeps among rough ocean waves is usually “harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Nikiforov said.

The expedition’s findings, also reported on Tuesday by Newsweek, elicited alarmed reactions from readers and climate activists the world over:

Our seas are starting to ‘boil’ — with methane. This is not normal. #ClimateCrisis #ArcticMatters #UniteBehindTheScience https://t.co/ATk7IzFuSi

— Callum Grieve (@callumgrieve) October 9, 2019

Oh, fuck. https://t.co/OnwCW2rL2c

— Ray Monk (@Raymodraco) October 8, 2019

A New Zealand chapter of the Extinction Rebellion movement—which launched a fresh wave of peaceful acts of civil disobedience around the world on Monday to demand bolder climate policies—tweeted in response to the expedition’s discovery, “This is why the disruption we caused is very minor in comparison to what’s coming.”

new

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/13/humanitys-destruction-oceans-nearly-doubled-over-decade-scientists-warn-and-could

Humanity's impact on global oceans nearly doubled in a just over a decade and could double again soon without urgent and sweeping international action, warns a study published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports.

"We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

—Ben Halpern, study lead author

To determine the pace of change in cumulative human impacts on the world's oceans, researchers from University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University combined annual data from 2003 to 2013 on 14 human stressors and how they affected 21 marine ecosystems.

The team found that over the 11 years, 59 percent of the ocean experienced a significant increase in cumulative impact, "in particular due to climate change but also from fishing, land-based pollution, and shipping." Human impact significantly decreased for only five percent of the ocean.

"Impacts of human activities on the ocean have been shown to be substantial, ubiquitous, and changing," the study says, pointing to both existing uses of global oceans and emerging ones such as offshore energy production, aquaculture, and undersea mining. "The resulting cumulative impact of these activities often leads to ecosystem degradation or even collapse."

Researchers determined that during the analyzed period, "nearly all countries saw increases in cumulative impacts in their coastal waters, as did all ecosystems, with coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves at most risk." However, some regions saw high impacts and are at greater risk for ecosystem collapse: the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean Sea, Canadian Eastern Seaboard, Southern Atlantic Ocean, and Southern/Western Australia.

With the new study, the team aimed to provide "aholistic perspective of where and how much human activities shape ocean change—for better or worse—which is essential to policy and planning," according to a statement from UC Santa Barbara announcing the research.

"If you don't pay attention to the big picture, you miss the actual story," said lead author Ben Halpern of the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. "The bigger picture is critical if you want to make smart management decisions—where are you going to get your biggest bang for your buck."

The apparent accelerating pace of human impacts on oceans around the world "creates even more urgency to solve these problems," Halpern added. "We can improve things. The solutions are known and within our grasp. We just need the social and political will to take action."

As the study explains:

Despite these sobering results, messages of hope remain. During this time period, many countries, particularly in Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, saw notable declines in impacts from commercial fishing, and many countries saw reduced impacts from land-based pollution. In a few cases, these declines were larger than increases in climate change and other stressors, leading to overall decreases in [cumulative human impacts] , and in all cases the declines helped mitigate increases.

"Coordinated, comprehensive management that accounts for multiple stressors can leverage decreases in single stressors," the study continues, noting that "results indicate that climate mitigation to meet targets of the Paris agreement would have major positive impact on the condition of marine ecosystems."

Co-author Melanie Frazier, a data scientist at NCEAS, pointed to the accelerating rate at which oceans are warming—because of global heating fueled by human activity—as a motivator for swift international action.

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem," she said. "I think this study, along with many others, highlights the importance of a concerted global effort to control climate change."

"You don't need fancy statistics to see how rapidly ocean temperature is changing and understand the magnitude of the problem."

—Melanie Frazier, study co-author

The research was released just a week before United Nations delegates are scheduled to meet for the third time in less than a year to discuss "conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction."

In an op-ed published Monday by The Hill, Mark Abbott of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Chris Scholin of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute wrote that "so far, these negotiations have had a critical omission: the vast stretch of ocean known as the twilight zone" that spans from 660 to 3,300 feet deep.

"With the twilight zone, we have an opportunity to transform how humanity relates to little known—yet potentially indispensable—ecosystems and resources," they argued. "The ocean's midwater is remote enough that it has mostly remained shielded from human impacts. We do not have to make another mistake of epic proportions and find ourselves trying to repair the damage done by overexploitationwhen it is already too late."

===

new 819

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-youtube-radicalized-brazil/

no lnx

How YouTube radicalized Brazil

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2019

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub have spent two years researching and reporting on the internet’s role as a force for radicalization. But as Fisher said on Twitter, nothing has disturbed him more than their recent story about how YouTube radicalized Brazil.

Most of us have been exposed to the fact that individuals like the El Paso shooter were engaged with white supremacists in online forums. We’ve heard about how people like Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to psychographically target young white men with racial messages. But Fisher and Taub decided to ask a different question.

Wherever we looked, the rate and consequences of online radicalization seemed far beyond what we’d anticipated, and were growing fast. So, in January, we decided to ask the question in a different way: Could the consequences of online radicalization go beyond a few extremists and, in ways that might be less obvious but perhaps just as consequential, radicalize large swaths of an entire society?

That is what led them to travel to Brazil.

Brazil’s politics have experienced a sudden, world-shaking shift, with Jair Bolsonaro, the once-fringe, far-right politician, becoming president this year. Years of political corruption crises had undoubtedly played a role. But something else was clearly happening there.

And Brazil is the second-largest market for YouTube, after the United States. YouTube has not received as much scrutiny as, say, Facebook. But experts say the platform has the power to radicalize people and communities in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Here is what they found that was so disturbing.

Members of the nation’s newly empowered far right — from grass-roots organizers to federal lawmakers — say their movement would not have risen so far, so fast, without YouTube’s recommendation engine.

New research has found they may be correct. YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil.

A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life.

Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors.

Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates.

And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation.

Renan Santos, the national coordinator of a group that used YouTube videos to agitate for the 2016 impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff, made a chilling statement: “Reality is shaped by whatever message goes most viral.”

On Monday I wrote about how tyranny takes hold via a process of malignant normalcy. Here is how Dr. John Gartner explained the process.

Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

What Fisher and Taub found in Brazil is that social media platforms like YouTube can advance malignant normalcy in their quest to maximize watchtime (i.e. make money).

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, Beto O’Rourke wrote an opinion column for CNN titled, “It’s America’s Moment of Truth.” This is the portion that caught my eye.

When President Donald Trump describes Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “bringing crime,” or refers to undocumented immigrants as individuals who “infest our country” — he speaks not as America’s President but as an emissary of hate. And his vilification and fear-mongering connect with those who are open to receiving it.

The seeds of terror we saw that August day are transmitted day and night on Fox News, the most watched cable news channel in the country. They are amplified by right-wing websites like Breitbart, and in messages forced onto local news broadcasts by Sinclair Media.

They metastasize on Facebook. And they filter up from grotesque online havens for white supremacists who preach intolerance and worship violence.

What O’Rourke just described are the forces that have aligned to make a profit off of hate—gaining either political power or money, perhaps even both. As O’Rourke said, our moment of truth has arrived. Silence is complicity.

===

NEW 719

An area of 3.2 million hectares (7.9 million acres) was engulfed by forest fires in remote regions of Russiaon Monday. In comparison, the total surface of the nation of Belgium is 3.07 million hectares.

With fires raging for days, immense clouds of smoke reached large population centers, including Russia's third biggest city, Novosibirsk. Authorities declared emergencies in several regions.

"The smoke is horrible," pensioner Raisa Brovkina told state television after being hospitalized in Novosibirsk.

"I am choking and dizzy," she added.

No Money to Put out Fires

Siberia regularly faces immense wildfires, but the impact this year had been boosted by strong wind and unusually dry weather. The blazes have been allowed to spread as cash-strapped local authorities usually ignore fires in remote regions.

Talking to Siberian Times, an emergency pilot in Krasnoyarski Krai said he had spent days waiting to fly his firefighting plane, but received no order to do so.

"Every day the whole team and I are on duty. There are four aircraft," he said in an article published on Monday.

"Since the beginning of the fires, not a single specialized [plane] has been lifted into the air."

"They say it is expensive to extinguish and if part of the forest burns down — it is not scary," the unnamed pilot said.

Greenpeace Steps in

Separately, the region's officials said that cost of the firefighting effort is sometimes "ten times larger than the possible damage" caused by the fire.

But the pilot slammed the calculation as "absurd."

"Of course, now, probably it will be expensive to extinguish everything that burns," he said.

"But why was there no order to fly out earlier, when the fire had just begun to spread?"

The Russian charter of Greenpeace had launched a petition to force the government to move against wildfires in Siberia, which was signed by some 245,000 by Tuesday evening.

Burning in the Sun

The wildfires "have long stopped being a local problem" and have "transformed into an ecological disaster with consequences for the entire country," Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace expert Grigory Kuksin said thesoot and ashes accelerate the melting of the Arctic ice and permafrost, which in turns releases even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"It is comparable to the emissions of major cities," he told the AFP news agency. "The more fires affect the climate, the more conditions are created for new dangerous fires."

The group said almost 12 million hectares have already burned this year, destroying forests that absorb carbon dioxide.

Siberia was almost 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average in June, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/30/how-disinformation-works-news-outlets-are-filtering-muellers-statement-through-trumps-lies/223837

no lnx pix twit

How disinformation works: News outlets are filtering Mueller's statement through Trump's lies

Blog ››› May 30, 2019 2:27 PM EDT ››› MATT GERTZ

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Wednesday statement served as an indictment of the press for its failure to effectively convey the damning conclusions of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to the public and its willingness to accept the dishonest spin of President Donald Trump and the members of his administration. But the behavior of many major news outlets since Mueller stepped down from the Justice Department’s lectern suggests that few lessons have been learned, and journalists continue their business-as-usual practice of filtering their coverage through the lens of Trump’s deceptive critiques.

New York Times reporter Peter Baker’s analysis is a key example of journalists reporting on Mueller’s statement as a good faith disagreement between Democrats and the president. The story appeared online on Wednesday under the headline “Mueller Delivered a Message. Washington Couldn’t Agree on What It Was,” and it was splashed across the paper’s front page the next day. “At long last, the sphinx of Washington spoke on Wednesday,” Baker wrote, “and here is what President Trump heard: ‘Case closed.’ Here is what the president’s adversaries heard: ‘Time to impeach.’”

These are statements that can be assessed for their accuracy, with the reporter concluding that one party’s interpretation is correct. Instead, Baker chose to examine the remarks from both sides and then all but throw up his hands in dismay, framing his story as a case of Washington partisans simply failing to agree on the facts. But the Times scribe’s own reporting in the piece showed that Trump is not credible when he discusses Mueller’s probe. As Baker noted, Mueller’s statement “effectively refuted Mr. Trump’s no-collusion, no-obstruction mantra,” demonstrating the president’s mendacity. He also wrote that the special counsel “implied that Congress could pursue impeachment without directly recommending it,” thus supporting the opinion he ascribed to “the president’s adversaries.”

Baker’s piece rewarded what Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent has called the Trump administration’s “full-saturation propaganda casting the investigation itself as the real crime — disinformation designed to blot out shared agreement on the most basic facts about what just happened before all of our very eyes.”

Jay Rosen

@jayrosen_nyu

This is why journalists can't simply stand in the middle between warring parties — Barr vs. the House — and report what they say. Stakes are too big. For without 'shared agreement on the most basic facts,' journalism itself becomes impossible or pointless. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/29/comeys-new-attack-trump-highlights-big-danger-democrats/ …

This style of political journalism -- setting out the claims of both the Trump administration and its critics and leaving it to the reader to decide which interpretation is correct -- simply doesn’t work in the face of Trump’s systemic disinformation.

Trump and his allies know that they can take advantage of this media vulnerability by offering arguments in bad faith on every last detail. This pushes reporters to cover stories with an “on the one hand, but on the other hand” frame, leaving the public confused about basic facts.

This vulnerability is particularly acute when it comes to headlines -- the only part of a story that most people actually read. Since journalists tend to treat a politician’s statements as intrinsically newsworthy, Trump’s comments are often quoted without context in headlines. That pattern held true yesterday, as several major news outlets produced headlines quoting Trump’s “case is closed” reaction to Mueller’s statement without any context:

This pattern of amplifying the president’s claimscontinued the next day. Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, Trump laid into Mueller with a fact-free screed, calling him a “true never-Trumper” who “should have never been chosen” as special counsel because he is “totally conflicted.” While the president’s allies have been pushing Mueller’s purported conflicts for years as a way of delegitimizing his investigation, those claims have long been debunked. But that didn’t stop a flurry of tweets from major media outlets promoting his claims in tweets:

@CBSEveningNews

Pres. Trump slams special counsel Robert Mueller Thursday, saying he "should have never been chosen" to lead the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, a day after the longtime DOJ official made his first public statement on Russia probe https://cbsn.ws/2JLqnJl

ABC News

@ABC

Pres. Trump on special counsel Robert Mueller: "I think he is a total conflicted person. I think Mueller is a true never-Trumper. He's somebody that dislikes Donald Trump." https://abcn.ws/2EKwUQi

CNN Politics

@CNNPolitics

President Trump calls special counsel Robert Mueller a “true Never Trumper”

The Hill

@thehill

President Trump: "There's no obstruction, there's no collusion, there's no nothing. It's nothing but a witch hunt. A witch hunt by the media and the Democrats, they're partners."

And their on-air chyrons:

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Lis Power

@LisPower1

Replying to @LisPower1

Houston, we have a chyron problem

(and it's not just Fox ... though, they're the worst)

Meanwhile, the president’s right-wing media allies continued hammering the message of Mueller’s malfeasance to their huge audiences, depicting the special counsel as a “sleazy and dishonest” “Trump-hating partisan” who participated in a Democratic plot to “steal” the 2018 midterm elections.

The propaganda machine marches on, and credible news outlets aren’t doing nearly enough to hold back its disinformation.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/right-wing-groups-are-training-young-conservatives-to-win-the-next-meme-war/

april 2019

no lnx twit

POLITICS

APRIL 2, 2019

“The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors

Memes helped elect Donald Trump. Now well-funded conservative groups are using them to proselytize.

STORY BY STEPHANIE MENCIMER, VIDEO BY MARK HELENOWSKI

Benny Johnson took to the stage at the convention center in Palm Beach, Florida, before an audience of cheering young Trump supporters in December to lead a session titled “How to Own the Libs.”

“I ask myself every day: How do we own the libs?” said Johnson, at the time a reporter for the right-wing Daily Caller. “How do we do it in a way that makes a difference? Because these people deserved to be wrecked.”

According to Johnson, the answer to that question is memes. These bits of humor or political propaganda—generally images overlaid with a caption designed to go viral—are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump. Or as notorious internet troll Chuck Johnson has said, “We memed the president into existence.”

Following that unexpected meme-driven success, well-funded conservative groups are making a more organized push to train young internet-savvy right-wingers in the art of meme-making, enlisting a growing army in what they see as the coming meme war of 2020.Turning Point USA, the conservative campus group that organized the conference, is merely one of these organizations seeking to sway hearts, minds, and elections via meme trainings. And it’s clear that when it comes to political memes, the left—which has never taken them very seriously—is trailing the right badly, and falling even further behind.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters, which did a study of Facebook memes last summer. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry. What you’re looking at here with memes is storytelling around the bend, and what you’re seeing is the future.”

Memes are best known for littering social media, but some experts think they might have helped elect Donald Trump president.

Trump’s presidential campaign keyed into the power of memes early on, monitoring obscure meme sites and boosting pro-Trump images and videos onto mainstream platforms like Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms favor images and videos over more nuanced text posts or links to news articles, so pro-Trump memes quickly went viral. During the campaign, memes also helped spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s health and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that prompted an armed North Carolina man to show up at aDC pizza parlor to break up a nonexistent child sex ring supposedly led by Democratic Party operatives.

Perhaps no one understood the effectiveness of memes better than former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who had served as executive chairman of the far-right publication Breitbart News. In 2016, only 5 percent of Breitbart‘s posts were of images, but those images accounted for half of the site’s most-shared posts on Facebook.

Jeff Giesea, a consultant who has worked with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers, is a self-described “memetics” expert. During the 2016 campaign, he joined with men’s rights agitatorMike Cernovichto organize MAGA3X, a grassroots army of online trolls who worked to meme Trump to the White House. The effort produced tens of thousands of social media accounts, all working in concert to promote Trump, with a heavy emphasis on iconography. They even created a flash-mob meme generator to make it easy for Trump supporters to hook up in real life.

Giesea has long argued that memes are such a powerful tool they should be used as cyberwarfare to combat propaganda from ISIS and other foreign threats. In 2015, he wrote in a NATO journal on information warfare that “it seems obvious that more aggressive communication tactics and broader warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies…Memetic warfare is about taking control of the dialogue, narrative, and psychological space. It’s about denigrating, disrupting, and subverting the enemy’s effort to do the same.”

The same could be said of memes in politics. Cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare. Republicans have gotten Giesea’s message, while Democrats have all but ignored it.

“Right-wing speaker training has been around for decades,” says Media Matters president Angelo Carusone. “Memes are a new front in the asymmetry.”

Johnson’s skill in this area launched him to Washington media fame for a while, until he was ousted from BuzzFeed and then the Independent Journal Review after being accused of plagiarism. He seems to have found his calling with Turning Point USA, the conservative campus activist group that sponsored the student convention in Palm Beach and is itself something of a meme factory.

Founded in 2012, TPUSA got its startup funding from Foster Friess, a wealthy Republican donor, and it has since raked in donations from the oil and gas industry and organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers. With a budget of more than $8 million last year, TPUSA amplifies its campus presence by churning out endless “Big Government Sucks” memes on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Turning Point USA

Like most memes, a few of TPUSA’s are clever and spread far, and many more have been trashed by internet trolls, who have created a whole meme subgenre they call “Toilet Paper USA.” Johnson was on hand in Florida to help TPUSA members up their game.

Johnson started his tutorial with “based Lindsey Graham,” a video montage of the South Carolina senator’s angry performance during the contentious confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. “That is a special moment,” he explained, noting that Kavanaugh was confirmed in spite of the allegations.“In your lifetime, there has never been a culture war that conservatives have won except for this.”

He proceeded to walk the audience through the evolution of Graham memes that went viral during the hearing and may have helped change public opinion on Kavanaugh. On the big screen, Johnson showed photos and a video he had taken of Graham coming out of the Capitol after a day of hearings. In the video, Graham is coolly adjusting his tie and smiling, while in the background, a police officer restrains a hysterical-looking woman who’s screaming at him about Kavanaugh. Johnson tweeted that he had just taken “the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.”

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Benny

@bennyjohnson

I hate to brag.

I just took the most thug life @LindseyGrahamSC photos of the entire Kavanaugh saga.

[Story soon]

From there, the internet took care of the rest. “Did this sucker meme?” Johnson asked, laughing. The answer was yes. Creative internet users tweaked and photoshopped the image, both still and video, as it spread. Johnson showed one meme of the tie-adjusting Graham superimposed on the burning Twin Towers. Then one featuring Joe Biden planting a kiss on the screaming woman. And finally, one that turned Graham into a “thug life” rap video star.

Embedded video

Benny

@bennyjohnson

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????

???? MUST WATCH: SOUND ON ????#kavanaugh

2,539

8:16 PM - Oct 7, 2018

818 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

“This is how you know you’ve made it in this profession,” Johnson told his audience. “When memes take life.”

In February, TPUSA hired Johnson to do this sort of thing full time as its chief creative officer, a sign of just how seriously well-funded pro-Trump organizations are taking the business of memes.

The TPUSA conference also included a second, more interactive session on memes, hosted by two minor Instagram stars, Rogan O’Handley (Instagram handle DC_Draino) and Grant Godwin (the_typical-liberal), who got into the nuts and bolts of the art form—or, as Godwin explained, how to get your Pepe the Frog memes to go viral.

Two weeks earlier, meme training got top billing at the American Priority Conference, which billed itself as an “America First,” pro-Trump political gathering.Speakers included Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate who was indicted the next month for obstruction and false statements in the special counsel investigation, and AnthonyScaramucci, who lasted less than a week as White House communications director. The conference featured a session on memetics by Tom Shadilay, a producer for Mike Cernovich. (Shadilay’s name may itself be a meme: It’s a popular hashtag on Gab, the social media site favored by the far right, and a code word for trolls on 4chan. Shadilay is the name of a 1986 Italian disco song by a band called P.E.P.E., whose album art featured a cartoon frog that resembles Pepe the Frog. Tom Shadilay does not appear to have any internet presence before his Twitter account was created in May 2017. He stopped responding to my emails after I asked whether that’s really his last name.)

In January, Liberty Con, a national convention of libertarian students, offered advice from David Gay, a libertarian activist who runs the Facebook group Liberty Memes, which has nearly a half-million followers spreading his political message through memes. (Until late 2016, Giesea, the meme expert, was on the board of Students for Liberty, which sponsored the conference.)* Johnson has four events scheduled this month on college campuses on “winning the meme wars.”

Boston University professor Gianluca Stringhini studies memes for a living. When I told him that well-funded right-wing organizations were specifically training activists for the next great meme war, he was surprised. Typically, he says, memes are seen as organic, emerging from the dark corners of the internet, not propaganda directed by people in politics. “Memes are tools for information warfare,” he says. “Probably this is a new way of doing politics. A new weapon that campaigns can use.”

It’s not clear exactly whether memes do, in fact, change public opinion, but conservative groups working to train grassroots troops seem to think so. So do the Russians. In the 2018 report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that meddled in the 2016 presidential election, researchers discovered that the IRA was especially fond of memes put out by TPUSA. Using accounts that it created to look like ordinary Americans and spread misinformation and propaganda, the IRA gave TPUSA memes a boost across multiple social media platforms. But the researchers couldn’t determine exactly what the impact of all those memes was.

Last year, Stringhini and six colleagues published a study on the origins of memes, analyzing more than 2 billion social media posts on Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, and Gab, tofigure out where the most popular memes get their start. Stringhini says the most trafficked memes start on right-wing internet forums, places like 4chan’s politically incorrect /pol/ channel and Reddit’s /r/the_Donald/ subreddit. From there, the far right has been extremely successful in getting its stuff to take off on mainstream platforms.Stringhini notes that after the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, tweeted her thanks to 4chan and Reddit users for making it all happen, putting a sharp point on how much people on the right believe that memes are influencing public opinion.

As a result, conservative groups seem to be incorporating memes into their training arsenal for grassroots activists in a way that has no parallel on the left. In fact, “the left can’t meme” is itself a subgenre of memes, reflecting an idea accepted on both ends of the political spectrum that progressive activists are really bad at this form of political warfare.

One potential exception is long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who has recently catapulted to fame thanks to memes. But those memes are coming from the same sources, on Reddit and 4chan, that promoted Trump, not from liberal groups, creating a bizarre movement of Yang fans among white nationalists.

Media Matters’ Carusone says people on the left are more concerned with nuanced facts and gray areas that can’t always be boiled down accurately into a photo with a caption. On the left, he says, “every meme has to have a million qualifiers, so that it’s no longer a meme. It’s a Medium post.” Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to communicate their ideas “in ways that are very reductionist. They’re also much more comfortable lying, and their audiences are much more likely to accept it.”

Benny Johnson has his own take on what makes a good political meme. The first step for successful lib ownership, he told the students assembled in Palm Beach, is to “challenge the culture,” as Graham did during the Kavanaugh hearings. Second, “join the conversation” by creating an interaction, but be sure it will “demonstrate the superiority of conservative ideas.”

As an example, he played a goofy video he made withFederal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai. In the video, Pai is dressed like Santa Claus, wielding a light saber, and he defends his plan for “internet freedom” in response to criticism of the Trump administration’s move to end net neutrality. “We were trolling the internet,” Johnson said. And it worked.

He flashed through a host of viral memes that took off after the video was posted. In the video, there’s a shot of Pai in front of a screen eating popcorn and watching a movie. Meme-makers have swapped in clips to make it look like Pai is watching Hitler rallies or the burning Twin Towers. Even Luke Skywalker weighed in:

View image on Twitter

Mark Hamill

@HamillHimself

Cute video Ajit "Aren't I Precious?" Pai ??-but you are profoundly unworthy 2 wield a lightsaber-A Jedi acts selflessly for the common man-NOT lie 2 enrich giant corporations. Btw-did you pay John Williams his royalty? @AjitPaiFCCorpShill #AJediYouAreNOT

The third step in successful lib ownership, Johnson instructed the crowd, was critical: “Have more fun than the left.” He played a video he had made in 2015 of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz cooking bacon on a machine gun. “Can you think of three thing libs hate more?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “Ted Cruz, bacon, guns.” All the ingredients for a good meme.

Finally, Johnson concluded: “Smile. You’re on the winning side.”

joe romm

Arctic death spiral speeds up sixfold, driving coastal permafrost collapse

JOE ROMM

===

https://grist.org/article/the-arctics-ticking-carbon-bomb-could-blow-up-the-paris-agreement/

yoder 3/19

Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by U.N. Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

The report, released at the U.N. Environment conference in Kenya on Wednesday, says that theArctic is warming twice as fast as the planetary average, and models show that it’s on track to become ice-free during the summer as soon as 2030.

That’s the bad news. So here’s even worse news. The Arctic contains much of the world’s permafrost, which holds what the report calls a “sleeping giant” made of greenhouse gases. As the ground warms, the microbes in the soil wake up and start belching greenhouse gases. Estimates vary, but the report says1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide lurk beneath the Earth’s permafrost. That’s more than 40 times as much CO2 as humans released into the atmosphere last year, and double the amount of the gas in the atmosphere today.

If that permafrost stayed permanently frozen, as the word itself suggests it should, we could continue worrying about other stuff. But researchers expect Arctic permafrost to shrink 45 percent compared to today. Unleashing that stored-up carbon dioxide and methane would obviously “derail efforts” to limit warming to 2 degrees C (3.6CK degrees F) as outlined in the Paris Agreement, the report says. But then again, it would derail pretty much everything.

“New evidence suggests that permafrost is thawing much faster than previously thought, withconsequences not just for Arctic peoples and ecosystems, but for the planet as a whole because of feedback loops,” the report states.

This is one of the runaway warming scenarios, often called the “carbon bomb” or “methane bomb.” (Permafrost holds both greenhouse gases.) Unlike a real bomb, however, it wouldn’t explode all at once. And at least one recent study suggests that we still have time to defuse it.

Within the Arctic, the soil formerly known as permafrost — let’s call it “meltafrost” — could pose a danger to 70 percent of current infrastructure by 2050, as well as the region’s 4 million inhabitants, 10 percent of whom areindigenous. Recent studies have shown that permafrost thaw could cause houses to collapse, lead to uneven roads, and threaten important cultural and archaeological sites.

The North Pole runs warmer than the rest of the planet because of a phenomenon called “Arctic amplification” — basically a region-specific term for feedback loops. “[W]hen sea ice melts in the summer, it opens up dark areas of water that absorb more heat from the sun, which in turn melts more ice,” the report explains.

These rapid changes in the Arctic might seem far away, but you will feel them, too. For those of you on the coasts, keep in mind that the melting of Arctic glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet makes up a third of sea-level rise around the globe. Rising seas will wreak havoc in coastal regions as they deal with flooding, damaged buildings, and the saltwater contamination of drinking water sources.

And for those further inland, there’s the wild weather. The melting of the Arctic causes changes in the jet stream and disrupts weather patterns much further south. It’s been linked to worsening drought across the western United States, stalled hurricanes in the East, and the polar vortex that occasionally dips down over North America to turn us all into popsicles.

As many are fond of saying, “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.”

Trump's Budget Cuts Could Have a Chilling Effect on U.S. Clean Energy Leadership

BY: DAN GEARINO

The national labs are the country's cradle of innovation for renewable energy and efficiency. President Trump's proposal for deep budget cuts sends a message.

APR 2, 2019

At the Ames Laboratory, a national energy lab in the heart of Iowa, scientists and engineers are developing low-cost substitutes for the rare-earth metals used in electric-vehicle batteries and solar cells to reduce the need for imports from geopolitical rivals like China.

It's the kind of foundational research and development being carried out at national labs across the country that has helped to dramatically lower energy technology costs and pushed clean energy toward a tipping point.

But that renewable energy work and its local economic impact are at risk in the Trump administration's budget proposal for the coming year.

The administration's proposal would zero out energy efficiency and renewable energy (EERE) funding at the Ames lab and would slash similar funding by more than half at almost all of the national labs with EERE programs. With labs targeted for cuts in more than a dozen states, each representing jobs and local economic impact, the budget plan isn't likely to get through Congress without major changes, but scientists say that kind of proposal alone can have a chilling impact.

At the flagship National Renewable Energy Lab, where breakthroughs in solar, wind and electric vehicle technology have increased energy efficiency and lowered costs, the administration's proposed budget would leave wind power projects with a third of their current funding. Work on energy efficient buildings technologies, targeting another major source of greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, would be left with less than 8 percent of current funding, according to the budget documents released in March by the Department of Energy.

In all, the proposed budget would cut 86 percent of new spending for the Energy Department and labs' work in energy efficiency and renewable energy, going from nearly $2.4 billion to a proposed $343 million.

Congress started hearings on the Energy Department budget last week, and the funding numbers are likely to change significantly before it's done. That happened in each of the past two years as President Donald Trump and his administration promoted fossil fuel interests and talked down renewable energy.

But the threat still has a chilling effect on scientists and the surrounding communities, where the total proposed cuts at the national labs would cost thousands of jobs and interrupt work that is essential to the leadership of the U.S. and its private businesses in the energy economy, congressional Democrats and scientists say.

The proposal may do damage even if lawmakers reject the bulk of the cuts, said Jacob Carter of the Union of Concerned Scientists, because it creates a sense of instability at the labs, hurting morale and any sense of job security and undermining officials' ability to attract and retain scientists. And any cuts that are eventually approved also ripple through the surrounding economies, connected universities and businesses.

"The fallout of this would be drastic given the multiplier-effect on DOE-supported jobs is in the range that could double or triple that job fallout," U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, chair of the subcommittee that oversees the Energy Department budget, said at last week. "It is no secret that the innovation economy faces fierce international competition, including those with nefarious intent."

House Democrats estimate the budget cuts would eliminate 6,100 jobs in the national labs, many of which would be in energy efficiency and renewable energy.

"We're sliding backward," Kaptur said.

Energy Secretary Rick Perrydiscussed the budget before U.S. House and Senate committees last week, emphasizing the research areas getting increases in funding, such as supercomputing, but saying little to disagree with lawmakers from both parties who questioned the proposed cuts to the national labs.

Perry said the administration's budget was just the beginning of a process, noting that when he was in Texas politics, "the governor's budget was a very useful doorstop." With the Energy Department's budget proposal, he said he was just "saluting the flag on the 5 percent reduction across the board" that had been ordered by the White House, then he went on to praise the national labs' work as "what keeps America ahead."

'Crown Jewels' of U.S. Science Capabilities

The Department of Energy's national labs are the "crown jewels in the national science capability," said Lynn Orr, who was undersecretary for science and energy at the department for the final three years of the Obama administration, overseeing budgets for 13 of the 17 national labs. He now teaches at Stanford.

"People mostly don't know what the labs are, what they do," he said. "Taken together, they are a very important part of our national R&D enterprise."

The labs are the foundation of the Energy Department's research and development efforts, and those efforts helped to make the department by far the leader among government agencies in the number of patents per billion dollars of spending in 2013 and 2014, according to a report done while Orr was at the agency.

They developed crucial technology used in electric vehicle batteries, designed utility-scale energy storage now used by private companies, developed coatings used to reduce wear and tear on wind turbines, and worked with industry to develop energy efficient lighting and window technologies, among many other developments.

Pooling Expertise for Difficult Research

Ames Laboratory, nestled among the science buildings at Iowa State University in Ames, specializes in developing new materials to improve the efficiency of manufacturing and clean energy technologies.

Its Critical Materials Institute brings together engineers and scientists from labs and universities around the country to pool their resources on projects involving rare-earth metals and other important materials that could be subject to supply disruptions.

It's not "sexy" research, so the work of the lab and others like it often isn't known or appreciated by the public, said Tom Barton, a chemist who was director of the lab from 1988 to 2007, and is now on the faculty at Iowa State.

But it's important to U.S. competitiveness, he said.

Under the administration's budget proposal, funding for the lab's research related to energy efficiency and renewable energy would be eliminated. That includes the advanced manufacturing research."I think the Ames lab is something the state of Iowa should be proud of, and it's something the nation should be proud of," Barton said.

A spokeswoman for the lab declined to comment about the potential effects of budget cuts, referring those questions to the Department of Energy, which had no comment. Adam Schwartz, the lab's director, emailed a statement about the importance of what the lab does.

"We use our scientific expertise and unique capabilities to create materials and energy solutions for our economic and national security," Schwartz said. The lab has about 380 employees, plus shared faculty with Iowa State, visiting scientists and graduate students.

Officials at other labs also declined to publicly discuss the president's budget proposal for the most part, directing questions to the Department of Energy.

NREL's Economic Impact Tops $1 Billion a Year

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, would also face transformative cuts under the Trump administration's proposed budget, dropping from $332 million this fiscal year to $206 million in the next one.

That kind ofloss would reverberate across the entire renewable energy industry, which relies on research from the lab to improve the efficiency of wind turbines, solar panels and other components of the clean energy economy.

The lab issued a news release this month calling attention to a study about the economic impact of the lab's work. During the 2017 fiscal year, the lab had 1,745 full-time and part-time employees and contributed $1.1 billion to the nation's economy, the release said. A lab spokeswoman referred budget questions to the Energy Department.

At the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory inRichland, Washington, where the research and development work includes making the electricity grid more efficient and resilient, overall funding would fall from $603 million this year to $521 million under the administration's proposed budget. Funding for its energy efficiency and renewable energy work would drop from about $78 million in the current year to $24 million next year, according the budget breakdown released in March.

The cut didn't make sense toRepublican Rep. Dan Newhouse of Washington,who asked Perry to explain at the hearing. Perry said he agreed that the lab's work was vital.

Newhouse's objection reflects why the labs' funding is typically protected: The national labs are found in communities nationwide, represented by Republicans and Democrats, and several are in states with an outsize influence on presidential politics, such as Iowa.

The Energy Department's Argument

The Department of Energy says in a budget summary document that the cuts to energy efficiency and renewable energy funding are part of a focus on "early-stage R&D, where the federal role is strongest, and reflects an increased reliance on the private sector to fund later-stage research." In other words, it argues that the government should have a smaller role in developing technologies that are close to being ready for market.

Orr saw early indications of that approach during the transition to the Trump administration after the 2016 election.

"Their view, I think, is that it's fine to do the fundamental science, but if it's stuff that has potential commercial utility, even if it's far downstream, that should be done by private industry," Orr said.

He disagrees with that approach and thinks it is harmful to the economy to reduce funding for energy efficiency and clean energy.

There is a worldwide race to see which countries and companies will be leaders in the transition to clean energy, and the U.S. is unwise to reduce the government's role, he said.

Fears of a Chilling Impact on Science

A larger concern is that the administration is eroding the country's science infrastructure, said Carter of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who previously was a scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The administration is succeeding at sending a message to scientists that their work is not valued and that they will face ongoing instability about budgets, he said.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found low morale in a survey of federal scientists last year. It didn't include employees of the national labs, but Carter suspects that there are similar problems there.

Barton, the former Ames lab director, said the constant threat of cuts may be bad for morale, but the fact that this threat comes almost every budget cycle reduces its effect.

If the budget cuts were to be enacted, that would be bad for the economy and bad for the environment, Kaptur told Perry during the hearing.

"Emblazoned on the president's budget request are the words, 'A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept, Taxpayers First,'" she said. "However, the proposals in this request tell a very different story. In fact, the president's budget request harms America's energy future, our competitiveness, our consumers and our economy."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

A Real Win-Win-Win': New Report Reveals Benefits of $500 Billion Investment in Energy Efficiency

common dreams 3/19

yikes

Wikistrat is essentially a think tank for rent. The firm, which only has a few full-time employees, contracts with foreign policy and national security experts to produce reports for corporate and government clients about specific geopolitical issues. The firm’s analysts also sometimes produce reports that aren’t for clients, according to people close to the firm; the firm then displays those reports on its website to demonstrate the quality of its work, or markets them to potential buyers.

The report The Daily Beast reviewed includes several different conversation threads, like a high-end version of Reddit. It was titled “The Rise of the Cyber Mercenary.”

In a discussion of how a hostile foreign government could weaponize social media against an adversary, one Wikistrat analyst put it this way:

“Cyber-mercenaries are mainly hired by governments as online counter-information and counter-counter-information officers. Disguised as ordinary citizens, these cyber-mercenaries are experts at sensationalizing and distorting political issues in a manner that appeals to common sense. Their objectives are not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. Their ultimate targets are foreign governments, but their attacks are launched on proxy targets, ordinary citizens, chiefly ignorant, vulnerable, and uneducated populaces of a particular nation-state.”

The analyst then noted that entities like “Russia’s ‘Internet Research Group’”—likely a misnomer for the country’s Internet Research Agency, which Mueller indicted in Feb. 2018—already weaponize social media to shape their countries’ domestic politics.

“As a foreign policy tool, misinformation can be used to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the population of antagonist countries, therefore furthering the instigator’s own agenda,” the analyst added. “Instead of direct government involvement, using cyber-mercenaries to enact these operations would create a degree of indirection and a veneer of plausible deniability that would make it harder to clearly separate propaganda from facts.”

Another analyst then sounded off on what makes trolling effective.

“[T]hese ‘cyber-trolls’ are trained controversialists: they openly engage in public controversy…People are drawn to the excitement of controversy and these cyber-trolls are experts in sensationalizing a political issue. The objective of cyber-trolls is not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism. They are not afraid to use provocative and confrontational language, as it is to their advantage if it leads to an emotional rise in the reader because the reader is then more likely to engage in debate, which in-turn, creates more buzz and attracts a greater audience, increasing the potential number of people exposed to this misinformation campaign.”

The analysis was written after the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency had begun its U.S. election interference campaign, but well before the American public knew about it. In the end the troll factory controlled thousands of fake organizations and personas on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which it used to push out divisive rhetoric and fake news—overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump’s candidacy.

In another discussion thread that was part of the Cyber Mercenaries project, analysts scrutinized the possibility of a hostile foreign government targeting the U.S. elections.

Matthew Effect:the more there is, the more there is, applies to social media in general

but faCEBOOK AND FAKE NEWS (inherently sexy, so can go viral?)

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/12/20/guy-behind-gofundme-account-trump-s-border-wall-used-facebook-page-network-connected-fake-news-sites/222374

Brian Kolfage, the man behind a campaign to crowdsource donations for a wall at the U.S. southern border, has been using a network of Facebook pages tied to fake news sites to boost his funding efforts.

On December 17, Kolfage launched a GoFundMe campaign seeking $5 billion to fund President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The campaign has so far raised $7 million and has been promoted by right-wing media and figures. Before the campaign took off, Kolfage appears to have amplified it on Facebook using a network of pages connected to the fake news sites Conservative Post and, as of late, Right Wing News.

Kolfage has been involved in Facebook networks linking to fake news sites before. In October, the social media company banned a network of other Facebook pages connected to his fake news site Right Wing News for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Since then, Kolfage appears to have coordinated with two blue badge-verified Facebook pages -- Conservative Postand American Joe -- and is using them in place of the removed pages to promote Right Wing News and now to promote his wall fundraising campaign.

About four days after Facebook removed the network of pages that funneled traffic to Right Wing News, the Conservative Post Facebook page (which has over 1.6 million page likes) began sporadically sharing links to Right Wing News’ website, at the time found at rwnofficial.com. Before that, Conservative Post almost exclusively shared links to conservativepost.com.

Toward the end of November, Conservative Post and American Joe (which has over 916,000 page likes) began frequently linking to the domain rightwing.news, a website also titled Right Wing News, which shares a Google Analytics code with Kolfage’s website rwnofficial.com. (Website administrators use Google Analytics codes to track analyzable data and metrics for their sites; sites that share this code are associated with the same web administrator.)

Since then, rightwing.news has become the domain most frequently linked to by Facebook pages American Joe and Conservative Post. Since American Joe began posting links to rightwing.news, Kolfage has used his official Facebook page to promote American Joe as well. He has shared posts from American Joe multiple times, including in one post from December 19, in which Kolfage asked his followers to like American Joe’s page.

[twit]

Thus, even though Facebook removed his old pages, Kolfage has been able to re-create the amplification network with Conservative Post’s pages. On December 17 (the day Kolfage launched his campaign on GoFundMe) and December 18, Kolfage’s Facebook page and Twitter handle, Conservative Post, and American Joe all shared links to a petition that redirected users to Kolfage’s GoFundMe campaign. The petition used ClickFunnels, a marketing tool used to promote products, events, and build contact lists, and the link (under the url americanjoe.clickfunnels.com) earned over 63,000 interactions on Facebook.

The following day, right-wing media figures and far-right trolls including Milo Yiannopoulos, Raheem Kassam, Jim Hoft and Ryan Fournier picked up Kolfage’s campaign and began promoting the GoFundMe link, which has thus far earned over 1.3 million interactions on Facebook. And right-wing news outlets Fox News and Daily Mail have earned tens to hundreds of thousands of Facebook interactions by posting content about the campaign -- as have far-right clickbait sites Chicks on the Right, Update America, and Kolfage’s Right Wing News. These statistics demonstrate that amplification networks of Facebook pages continue to be a staple in helping make right-wing content go viral.

===

https://points.datasociety.net/media-manipulation-strategic-amplification-and-responsible-journalism-95f4d611f462

This is a crib of a talk that Data & Society Founder and President danah boydgave at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas on September 13, 2018. For a video of the talk, click here.

In early September 2018, Facebook and Twitter were accused during a Congressional hearing of having anti-conservative bias. This should sound familiar to many of you in this room as you too have been accused for political purposes of being the “liberal media.” The core of this narrative is a stunt, architected by media manipulators, designed to trigger outrage among conservatives and pressure news and social media to react.

...

Strategic Amplification

In the meantime, you face another challenge. If manipulators are trying to use you to help polarize American society, how do you not take the bait? How do you not allow the trust problem to worsen?

First, recognize that the rubric with which you decide what to devote time to is not neutral. I don’t mean this in a condescending or pejorative sense. I mean: own the fact that what makes something newsworthy is subjective. It depends on the power of the actors involved. It depends on the norms of your audience. It depends on the implications for specific communities or countries. Many of you have honed muscles to focus on some stories and not others. Yet, you must also find a hook to make a newsworthy story relevant to your readers. You must navigate business interests alongside the recognition that an exhausted public might prefer junk food. Furthermore, because your organizations are rooted in an industry and culture of competition, you’re under pressure to be attentive to what others have deemed newsworthy. There be dragons everywhere. But like a yogi or jedi, your challenge is to constantly improve your awareness of the pressures and adversaries you face and evolve your strategy for navigating them.

Next, recognize that, in a networked era, every organizational and communicative process is exploitable. When journalism was the primary information gatekeeper in society, it was hard for a story to “break” without journalists being involved. But now, just as algorithmic manipulators have learned to engage in search engine optimization and game Twitter’s trending topics, media manipulators have figured out how to trick you into telling their story. Accept this and outsmart them.

It works. Over the last two years, both social media and news media organizations have desperately tried to prove that they aren’t biased. What’s at stake is not whether these organizations are restricting discussions concerning free-market economics or failing to allow conservative perspectives to be heard. What’s at stake is how fringe groups can pervert the logics of media to spread conspiratorial and hateful messages under their false flag of conservatism.

Accusations of anti-conservative bias are not evaluated through evidence because reality doesn’t matter to them. This is what makes this stunt so effective. News organizations and tech companies have no way to “prove” their innocence. What makes conspiratorial messages work is how they pervert evidence. The simplest technique is to conflate correlation and causation. Conspiracy makers point to the data that suggests that both journalists and Silicon Valley engineers are more likely to vote for candidates from the Democratic party. Or that they have higher levels of education than the average American and are more likely to live in Blue states.

...

As Joan Donovan and I struggled to offer advice to journalists in light of media manipulation, we pulled on threads of history. She uncovered details about how newsrooms learned to respond to their recognition that when they covered the KKK in the mid-20th century, they served the goals of hate rally organizers. I was more obsessed with the history of the Werther Effect, which makes it very clear that howa news outlet covers a death by suicide can affect the likelihood of copycats. (Side note: as a board member of Crisis Text Line, I’m very frustrated by how Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain’s deaths were covered.) The scholarly literature describes the technique journalists can use to minimize harm as “strategic silence.” So we used this term. Yet, no matter how much we emphasized the strategic component of this practice, those in the news business consistently reacted with outrage that we were arguing that they should be silent....

===

ref

https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/

The Oxygen of Amplification

Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators

Whitney Phillips

PUBLISHED 05.22.18

cf exec report

The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups.

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.

After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of **editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm**.

As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.

This work is the first practitioner-focused report from Data & Society’s Media Manipulation Initiative, which examines how groups use the participatory culture of the internet to turn the strengths of a free society into vulnerabilities.

Cohen Syndrome: interpret all as attack?] deny everything, counter-attack --> amplify? tolerance/addiction --> constant escalation? in echo bubble, no balancing info/ fdbk FB social media algorithm amplifies the sensational (eg hothouse v stabilized Earth)

pvtization boosts inequality

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/how-privatization-is-fuel_b_13173324.html

iterative amplifying spiral --> tip pt?

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-23-2018/

Jeremiah Garretson discusses his new book “The Path to Gay Rights: How Activism and Coming Out Changed Public Opinion.”

2 std models: elite signal effect (leaders we trust , we follow them

2) framing; he sez facts don't follw these 2; ppl who watcgh TV least changed most (eg young ppl); tho leaders being more pro gay allowed them to come out (snowball?)

outsider aND insider tracks (lobbying, coercsion, novel PR techniques) eg act up; AIDS activist esp NYC got press, led to pos media portrayals: hank philly, ellen, seinfeld, roseanne

spike off ppl out in 80's, age of coming out dropped fast in 90's (at end, HS) now MS

celebs limosine liberals left coast elite, take on cause eg animal rights, once mjr target of right. But Kanye and Kim are amplifier/spotlight

not sure about feedback part

===

Most of us have a growing sense that something’s deeply wrong with the way that digital data is used to track and monitor us. But most of us don’t realize that the poorest among us are particularly vulnerable. Virginia Eubanks argues that such data is used to criminalize and turn the poor away from public resources to which they are entitled.

Resources:

Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor St. Martin’s Press, 2018

https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-july-18-2018/

partner attacked, hurt, ER bills, days later told had no coverage, no start date (a new policy) not married, painkillers, red flag for insurance fraud, suspend.

homeless: 168? agncy have info, keeps 7 yrs, even if expugded, sometimes not: are you trade sex for durgs, debts? warrants , can take pix...

allegheny tries to predict child endanger; not all ppl in db b/c pay babysitter or psych are pvt. feedback loop, poor ppl watched more carefully; // to policing.

mitch daniels billion? $ contract to automate snap b/c public sector workers make decison, thus collusions: church indianapolis fake acc'ts anecdote, ibm

sever connection to person, aplly online (1/2 have PC) call ctr i mill failure to cooperate in est'b eligibility 7-14 days, ppl in hosp w/ cancer missed appt

===

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26786

:{S. Abbas Raza:(style="font-weight:700"):}:

Founding Editor, 3QuarksDaily.com

r > g: Increasing Inequality of Wealth and Income is a Runaway Process

---

One of the biggest challenges facing us is the increasing disparity in wealth and income which has become obvious in American society in the last four decades or so, with all its pernicious effects on societal health. Thomas Piketty's extensively data-backed tour de force,Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), gave us two alarming pieces of news about this trend: 1) Inequality is worse than we thought, and 2) it will continue to worsen because of structural reasons inherent in our form of capitalism, unless we do something.

The top 0.1 percent of families in America went from having 7 percent of national wealth in the late 1970s to having about 25 percent now. Over the same period, the income share of the top 1 percent of families has gone from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent. And lest we think that even if wealth and income are more concentrated America is still the land of opportunity and those born with very little have a good chance to move up in economic class, a depressing number of studies show that according to standard measures of intergenerational mobility, the United States ranks among the least economically mobile of the developed nations.

Piketty shows that an internal feature of capitalism increases inequality: As long as the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g), wealth will tend to concentrate in a minority, and that the inequality r > g always holds in the long term.And he is not some lone-wolf academic with an eccentric theory of inequality. Scores of well-respected economists have given ringing endorsements to his book's central thesis, including economics Nobel laureates Robert Solow, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman. Krugman has written that

Piketty doesn’t just offer invaluable documentation of what is happening, with unmatched historical depth. He also offers what amounts to a unified field theory of inequality, one that integrates economic growth, the distribution of income between capital and labor, and the distribution of wealth and income among individuals into a single frame.

The only solution to this growing problem, it seems, is the redistribution of the wealth concentrating within a tiny elite using instruments such as aggressive progressive taxation (such as exists in some European countries that show a much better distribution of wealth), but thedifficulty here is the obvious one that political policymaking is itself greatly affected by the level of inequality. WICKED This vicious positive-feedback loop makes things even worse. It is clearly the case now in the United States that not only can the rich hugely influence government policy directly but also that elite forces shape public opinion and affect election outcomes with large-scale propaganda efforts through media they own or control. This double-edged sword attacks and shreds democracy itself.

The resultant political dysfunction makes it difficult to address our most pressing problems—for example, lack of opportunity in education, lack of availability of quality healthcare, man-made climate change, and not least the indecent injustice of inequality itself. I am not sure if there is any way to stop the growth in inequality that we have seen in the last four or five decades anytime soon, but I do believe it is one of the very important things we have learned more about just in the last couple of years. Unfortunately the news is not good.

http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/is-there-a-scientific-law-stating-that-inequality-is-a-fact-of-the-universe

The Matthew effect: Is inequality just a fact of the universe?

May 15, 2018 by SCOTTY HENDRICKS

There is an old saying: the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. You might suppose that such a pessimistic adage would be attributable to a great robber baron or tyrant of ancient Greece. The genesis of the idea, however, belongs to Jesus Christ as depicted in the gospels of Luke, Mark, and Matthew—even if he didn’t phrase it exactly as above.

It might be bad news for the people who want to reduce inequality if even a prophet who flogged bankers and preached on the nobility of the poor thinks inequality is inevitable.

However, the phrase is relevant to more fields than just economics.

The Matthew effect, or Price’s law as it is sometimes called in science, is the principle that states that inequality is both the rule and tendency in many systems. Examples abound in human-made systems and can even be found in nature.

It is an often referenced, and accurate, notion that the lion's share of our communication uses less than a thousand different words, giving those few terms a massive weight in our discourse. In classical music, where one would suppose that the occasional one-hit wonder would be able to break out, we find that only four composers are responsible for most of the music you are likely to hear played by an orchestra in this day and age.

In the world of science, we find that a small number of scientists produce most of the papers you read or hear about. There is also Stigler's law, which posits that naming rights will often go to the second, often more famous, person to discover something, which is named for Stephen Stigler despite the tendency being described first by a man named Merton.

In the natural world, the effect can also be seen as the direct result of the laws of nature. For example, when you weigh the masses of heavenly bodies, a small number of them contain most of the mass. Since more mass is tied to a stronger gravitational pull, massive objects are also better able to pull other objects into them, increasing their mass further.

In the wild world of lobster social hierarchies, lobsters that lose fights are statistically more likely to lose their next fight than you would expect based on their previous history alone. Meaning that the losers will fail more often for no other reason than that they already lost once.

A massive amount of interstellar material. Since gravity is tied to mass, the most massive objects in the universe are best able to draw more mass to them, making them even larger and better able to grow. The perpetuation of inequality on a cosmic scale.

So, is trying to fight inequality a fool’s errand?

Is massive inequality just the way of nature? Should it exist because it does exist? To say that inequality is okay because it is natural is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. As was explained by David Hume in 1739, we cannot derive morality or how the world should be from how it is. In his own words:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”

What this means is that we cannot obtain a moral ought from facts about the world alone, we need something else to help us complete the jump. For example, if we try to say that eating meat is natural and therefore we ought to eat meat, we don’t have a full argument. We would have to add the idea that doing what is natural is good or another idea which can bridge the Is-Ought gap.

Now, this isn’t to say that we can’t look to facts about the world to help guide us in deciding what we ought to do or how the world ought to be. But it does mean that we can’t just say: “X is the way of the world. Therefore X is good,” or "X is the way of the world. Therefore we ought to do Y." So before you run off and say that inequality is natural, know that this doesn’t mean it is good or that we shouldn’t try to prevent it.

After all, getting cancer is natural too.

David Hume

David Hume (1711- 1776) the Scottish philosopher and historian. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

So, what can we take away from this?

The existence of the Matthew effect in our social systems, the natural world, and even our languages, does provide a real and challenging obstacle for those who wish to promote equality. It also, however, provides them with a potential tool to use in the promotion of their goals.

In the book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker describes how the Matthew effect can be understood as part of a virtuous cycle of progress or a vicious cycle of violence.

He cites research examining large cities where it was found that:

“the shorter the expected lifespan (from all causes other than violence), the higher the rate of violent crime. The correlation supports the hypothesis that, holding age constant, people are more reckless when they have fewer years of unlived life at risk. A rational adjustment of one’s discounting rate in response to the uncertainty of the environment could create a vicious cycle, since your own recklessness then figures into the discounting rate of everyone else. The Matthew effect, in which everything seems to go right in some societies and wrong in others, could be a consequence of environmental uncertainty and psychological recklessness feeding on each other.”

While he notes that this often means that wealthier societies will make progress on domestic issues that poorer nations are unable to tackle, it also provides a roadmap to closing those inequalities if it is genuinely the case that it only takes a few institutions in place to start a virtuous cycle.

Similarly, in his book Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty argues that ever-increasing inequality is not a bug but a feature of modern capitalism. He suggests that we try to understand this tendency and act on it directly rather than pretending that these inequalities are flukes that can be treated on a case by case basis.

Is inequality natural? In many ways it is, but that is no reason that our society should have massive inequalities. What is natural is not always good and what is good is not always natural. In any case, to understand how the world functions and often tends to inequality is a vital part of any discussion on the subject. Should we take steps to reduce economic and political inequality? Or are we going to let nature take its course?

===

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/how-trump-used-facebook-2016-and-why-thats-coming-every-important-race-year

...

Parscale do for Trump in 2016 that is setting the standard for 2018?

“If I had to characterize what the Trump campaign did, theyautomated Facebook’s best [advertising] practices at a very large scale. I think that statewide campaigns will try to do the same kind of thing in 2018,” said Colin Delany, founder of Epolitics. “I’m wondering if any new technology is going to come out of the resistance. It’s possible. I think a lot of what you are seeing is training and capacity building.”

In other words, Democrats are playing catchup to Republicans, compared to 2016, when their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee—under a series of chairwomen—were more focused on older media platforms like TV, rather than new platforms like social media.

To begin to understand how Parscale, an online advertising specialist, went from building websites for Trump products, to running Trump’s online messaging and fundraising in 2016, to assisting the RNC with small donor outreach in 2018, to being named Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, you have to examine how Parscale used Facebook.

Consultants like Delany are quick to say they can’t tell you how the Trump campaign’s messaging specifically affected voters when they cast ballots. But they can say how Parscale used Facebook, which revolutionized how national campaigns targeted and messaged likely voters.

The Trump campaign took voter files from the Republican Party, which had people’s electoral histories—age, gender, address, party registration and voting histories. They took more personalized data by Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm run by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, which boasted it had psychological profiles of every voter. (On Friday, Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for not deleting data taken from the social network in 2016 to create its voter profiles. The Guardian reported Cambridge Analytica's data was culled from 50 million to 60 million Facebook user profiles it had stolen before it joined the Trump campaign.)

If you roll back the clock to before the internet, a baseline emerges showing how much has changed. When I was press secretary on the 1990 campaign that first elected Bernie Sanders to the House of Representatives, I remember picking up a half-dozen TV ads for the campaign’s final stretch. Bernie looked at the stack of 30-second videos and said his future rested on those tapes. That was a statewide race in a rural state with small media markets, but compare its scale to what Parscale and Facebook did for Trump.

It’s no secret. An October 2016 in-depth report by Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg for Bloomberg.com laid out the basics. It started with indentifying persuadable voters in swing states, and then sending messaging poking at their biases and personality types. More recent reports, such as this weekend's Guardian report featuring a Trump campaign whistleblower, added more detail showing how powerful Facebook's user profiles were in 2016.

The campaign put all that voter profiling data into Facebook’s advertising supercomputers, which had its own deep profiles of users based on their pages, communications and networks. Facebook provided staffers to every major campaign in 2016 to facilitate this process. From that data merging and data mining, Parscale oversaw an operation that identified 13.5 million Facebook users in 16 states that it deemed were persuadable. It targeted those individuals with the kind of personality-driven content that social media emphasizes—more opinion, belief and bias than facts.

The Trump campaign didn’t just send out original content, noted Melissa Ryan, who writes the Ctrl Alt Right Delete newsletter. “The Trump campaign put out relatively few ideas of their own,” she explained on Medium.com. “Instead they chose to validateand amplify the conversation happening online. They didn’t need to confirm or deny anything, they simply gave Trump’s army their megaphone… [It] put their supporters one content front and center, taking a backseat in their own campaign.”

“They were banking that people are more likely to believe something from an unofficial source that seems true rather than to believe something from an official source that actually is true,” Ryan explained. “Once they realized there was no line to cross, they went all in using social media to bully and intimidate others, spread misinformation, and mainstream the language of hate. Those who spoke out were met with a flood of abuse, and that abuse was organized. Their targets had few places to turn as tech companies turned a blind eye, and law enforcement was of little help.”

By late October, days before former FBI director James Comey announced the FBI was reopening its investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified emails, the Bloomberg reporting team said Parscale’s crew of subcontractors had determined “which social media ads [messages, memes, shares, etc.] were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences.”

Facebook allowed Parscale to build and target what it calls “custom audiences,” as ex-Facebook executive Antonio Garcia-Martinez explained in a Wired piece, “How Trump Conquered Facebook—Without Russian Ads.” Its custom audience consisted of all the impressionable voters—Trump enthusiasts on one hand, Democrats dubious about Clinton on the other—who could be encouraged to vote or encouraged not to.

Then the campaign used another Facebook advertising feature built atop that preliminary customization called “Lookalike Audiences.” It targeted another wider circle of Facebook usersin the swing constituencies in swing states. Some of this was to keep Trump’s base engaged. Some was to discourage three key columns of Clinton supporters from voting. As Bloomberg noted, “idealistic white liberal, young women and African Americans” were the targets of Trump’s three voter suppression campaigns.

Garcia-Martinez, the original product manager for "Custom Audiences,” explained how the Trump campaign targeted audiences and then fed it content, often propaganda from other online sources. This explains how Breitbart.com temporarily had more traffic than Fox News in the campaign’s final weeks. But Garcia-Martinez’s explanation also alludes to platform features that are designed to be psychologically engaging and provoke emotional responses. It starts with creating political echo chambers filled with like-minded associates.

“We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences,” he wrote. “One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.”

Colin Delany, the online media consultant and author on the topic, is quick to point out that it’s impossible to trace how all this messaging affected voters’ behavior when they cast their 2016 ballots. That’s because the thread Parscale could observe—whether messaging recipients liked, commented on or shared his handiwork—was broken as voters put down their devices and picked up ballots.

But Delany said there was another metric that confirmed how powerful and engaging Facebook was before 2016’s Election Day. It helped raise a fortune for Trump.

“Now one of the main things with Facebook is this is one of the few operations that I’ve heard of that’s been able to raise a significant amount of money by targeting people on Facebook,” he said. “Now my suspicion is that almost all the money actually got raised by email. But they would identify and recruit the people via Facebook.”

“If you can get them to respond to the first fundraising pitch and give you $5, then you are in their email program. Or you get them to sign a petition. You get them to do whatever it is that gets them the email address,” Delany said. “The small donor lists that the RNC is using to pretty good effect right now comes out of the work that Parscale did for Trump. If you want to look for results, I think you can look to social media fundraising.”

Seen from that metric, there’s no denying the political power of social media. With 10 days to go before Election Day, Bloomberg reported that Parscale’s operation raised $275 million from 2.5 million small donors. That’s more than the nearly $238 million raised by the Sanders presidential campaign from his grassroots base. Think about that: Parscale’s operation outraised Bernie’s operation—but Parscale isn’t bragging about it.

The Clinton campaign, as many political insiders and former Facebook executives have said, didn’t use Facebook as aggressively. In one intriguing series of recent tweets, these tech and political insiders said that Democrats in general rely more on TV ads than online messaging, partly because political consultants can earn more that way. They also said her campaign was relying on dated internal assessments by Facebook (from 2010) about its affects on voter participation, and that overall, its campaigns discounted—and didn’t sufficiently study—“observational political science,” or how voters responded to social media provocations in focus groups.

These cringe-worthy observations are part and parcel of political campaigns, which are like startups that rapidly pop up and then mostly disappear after Election Day. Political campaigns are perpetually in search of messaging and fundraising infrastructure they can use; just as institutions like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have created infrastructure seeking new users. Garcia-Martinez, reached by email, said he was stunned by how little political professionals—and academics who study politics—know about advertising.

“My recent [Wired] piece tossed me into a few threads with political/election/academic Twitter, and I found it a very strange world,” he wrote. “Very punctiliously following strict experimental protocols and the scientific method, and also not knowing the first f**king thing about how to advertise on Facebook (their studies measure what they can as outsiders, which isn't much). It is a leap of faith to just assume Facebook ads work for politics.... but without question, they work for more commercial direct-response advertisers.”

His takeaway: “Parscale is hailed as this genius, but all he did is what any reasonably savvy ecommerce operation would have done, and that set him way beyond Hillary and the supposedly ‘best and brightest.’ Which is why, as Delany and Graves, campaign media consultants and columnists, said, social media will be at the center of 2018’s elections for control of Congress and constitutional offices in swing states.

Steven Rosenfeld

yikes, amplifying feedback

http://www.alternet.org/environment/tanker-crosses-arctic-without-icebreaker-first-time-due-melting-sea-ice

amplifying fdbk:note, these are often family foundations, in theory charity, but evil b/c tax shelters (~ inheritance tax, thus mod) used to make themselves richer and to promote RW agenda (which supports their delusion their riches are earned/deserved)

===

social network "supernode"

luther 95 thesis were statement he wanted to have a debate, al l greeks, but picked up by one printer, then copies copied

standage writing on the wall

sil valley "accelerant" https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-28-2016/

pamphlets stop ppl from reading classics deja vu

Swanson's law - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Swanson's**_law

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px;border-width:5px 4px 0px !important"):}:

:{:{Swanson's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Law is an observation that the price of :{solar:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. At present rates, costs halve about every 10 years. The Law is named after Richard :{Swanson:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, the founder of SunPower Corporation, a :{solar:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: panel manufacturer.:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

see hedge, dark $, inequality, offhsore

**Matthew effect:**

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

**==**

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/south-african-insurance-company-backs-tree-planting-effort-to-reduce-effects-of-drought/

...Rather than sit idly by and watch farmers lose untold acreage of croplands, Santam is working to actively reduce drought risk for its customers by funding Living Lands, an international nonprofit that has been active in South Africa since 2008. Working with government agencies, community organizations, and individual farmers, the project has planted more than 3.7 million trees so far in an effort to stop land degradation and restore the compromised water catchment system. All of this falls under a larger project intended to create “a living landscape” in the Baviaanskloof.

“This is a business imperative for us, the likelihood of our sustainability is highly dependent on this,” Ray-Ann Sedres, head of integrated sustainability at Santam, told The Guardian. She explained Santam recognizes how climate change is impacting businesses, and feels projects like this tree-planting effort are crucial for the company’s survival.

The city of Port Elizabeth, now home to 1.4 million residents, hopes to reap direct benefits from the tree-planting program. The city has doubled in size since 1997 and endured water restrictions on and off since 2007. Baviaanskloof area farmers report the rate of topsoil loss has slowed, indicating the runoff which causes erosion has been reduced. With any luck, Port Elizabeth’s water supply will also stabilize as the result of this unique approach to risk management.

pension plan DESTROYS PENALTY FOR BAD CONDUCT; even nixon rehabbed? but also attractor // incubator: you can't fail ~ market dogma (irony) ; thus encourages more extreme behavior? (amplify fdbk) see also TP insanity and Beck (also a kind of buffer?)

===

donohue at CoC seeks more and more $ from fewer and fewer corps, so launders targetted $; these are the most profitable, biggest, with most to lose/gain from gaming the gov't (fossil fuel, but could also be banks, health care, even MIC).

12 leverage pts:

7. Gain by driving amplifying loops: source of growth, collapse, evolution and learning? Trust builds trust, bi-partisanship creates more, but all Obama attempts ignored or used as basis for moving the goalpost?

LEARNING most benign/hopeful form: In a war /arms race between networks, it's the one that learns fastest and adapts the best that wins? "It has the additional advantage of being the truth"?

Hawken says NGO will win b/c more nimble and must do more with few resources (but Golaith has huge resources, thus need for ju jitsu: use strength to defest: enough just to show $ flows?)

Escalate the LW infra to cope/beat rw?

Matthew Effect destabilizes the political and economic system, and gives the rich more power to fight (and a greater stake in defense? relateds or not to sunk cost of energy co?]. But can't the rich have enough money to to feel safe and thus not retaliate? Any attempt to redistribute wealth/level the playing field portrayed as socialist/commie. But Freakonmics? says we have an inherent? sense of what fair taxes are, and any demand above that leads to cheating to achieve that level?

danger is runaway mode: tipping pt in global warming (methane frozen)

leads to polarization: Beck must conjure up new threats to hold audience; direct mail must do same to keep $ coming in;

to be consistent ideologically (pure, not get flanked) will drive ppl to say silly stuff like baby w/ half brain shd go full term and live in pain; also media shock/clowns must constantly up themselves to hold audience; direct mail activists must up scare to bring in more $ (Beck is a bit of old-timey evangelical selling salvation? 912 endtimes?)

THIS IS AMPLIFYING FEEDBACK RARELY CORRECTED

===

6 Structure of Info flow: who has access to what?

In gulf 2, b2 given benefit of the doubt b/c assumed he had better info (that is we trusted he would do what's right w/ it [also shields us from guilt of acting to go to war and kill ppl)

More/better/info (quicker) gives us the ability to make better decisions and thus be safer, saner and healthier. Hopeful eg is Dutch electricity meter: new/better info led to painless improvement. Internet envisioned as such, but RW blogospherev Fox news and other info bubbles were unforseen and unintended consequwnce?

Dana says missing info is the most common cause of system malfunction.(157). The market knows the price of fish, but not how many there are (or worse, higher price leads to better to techniques to find and thus wipe out remainders).

Systematic tendency for humans to (try to) avoid accountability for decisions [a partial explnation for why errors not corrected: personal humiliation and an opportunity for enemy to discredit? ]

5. The rules of the system: (written and not? formal vs informal?

The constitution is the operating system, but Rushkoff says corps have gotten into the DNA? a corp is a person, thus has free speech = unlimited SECRET money, money decoupled from info in some ways, cf sho has access to info, or for that matter what lobbyist has access to what pol]

checks and BALANCES

WTO has no accountability (ironic that RW worries about black helicopters of UN, but roots for WTO? it deprives US and all of soverignty, but we run it so we don't worry, or doctrine is that the market will always make the right decision a la Greenspace circa 2008). But it rules against subsidies which in principle RW says are bad? Also encourages outsourceing/race to the bottom wherein green and labor laws are ignored?

===

RE-Volv, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, is working to make solar more financially accessible to local community groups. The organization is building a program that allows community centers to make the switch to clean energy with no upfront costs. see Economics and Solar.

===