And So It Begins

Here comes the flood of wackiness.

Ryan McBeth breaks some of it down.

Some Debunkment

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

A gas leak at a Kentucky polling place fuels false claims of election fraud

CLAIM: Reports of a gas leak at a Kentucky polling place were an election-rigging tactic to gain more votes for Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

THE FACTS: Louisville Gas & Electric confirmed there was a legitimate report of a gas leak at a polling place at Highland Baptist Church in Jefferson County on Tuesday morning. The leak caused the polls there to close for 30 minutes, so a judge ruled that it should stay open another half-hour that evening to reach a statutorily required 12-hour voting window. Between this location and another where voting was extended, only one more voter cast a ballot after 6 p.m., according to the county clerk’s office. But social media users are questioning the incident, insinuating it was a ruse to give Beshear the votes he needed to win reelection. “Looks a lot like 100k ballots with the Governor race only filled out showed up tonight after the ‘gas leak,’” reads one post on X, formerly known as Twitter. But officials tamped down on the conspiracy theories. “This was a legitimate instance of a gas leak so any claims otherwise, we just think are patently absurd,” said Erran Huber, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County Clerk’s Office. Chris Whelan, a spokesperson for Louisville Gas & Electric, confirmed gas was detected emitting from a stove in the church, but not at hazardous levels. The stove was turned off and it dissipated. A Jefferson Circuit Court judge then extended voting at the church until 6:30 p.m., instead of the scheduled 6 p.m. deadline. The judge ordered the same extension at a polling place at an elementary school, which had also been closed for half an hour Tuesday morning, while police were pursuing a suspect, according to court documents. Huber said that only one voter came to cast a ballot between 6 and 6:30 p.m. at either of the two polling places. Despite suggestions that voters in Kentucky’s most populous county were suspiciously only casting ballots in the gubernatorial contest, state results show only around 4,000 more voters in that race than for attorney general or secretary of state. The Democratic candidates got the majority of Jefferson County’s votes in those two contests, while they fell short in other Kentucky counties.

Posts misrepresent voting machine error in Pennsylvania county as evidence of ‘rigged’ elections

CLAIM: Democrats cheated in Pennsylvania elections with voting machines that were rigged to flip votes.

THE FACTS: Social media users are misrepresenting an issue with machines in one county where there is no evidence of fraud. Instead, the machines’ maker acknowledged it made a clerical error, which resulted in devices in Northampton County printing out records that mixed up the results on two ballot measures. Despite the inaccurate printout, the voters’ actual choices were properly recorded, county officials said. The news was nevertheless wildly misconstrued online. “BREAKING: voting machines in Pennsylvania shut down after getting caught flipping votes,” reads one post on X, formerly Twitter. “Democrats run that state and will cheat in (asterisk)any(asterisk) way possible. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH - Get rid of these damn rigged machines!!” But the claims of cheating are baseless. Voters in Northampton County were asked to decide whether Pennsylvania Superior Court Judges Jack Panella, a Democrat, and Victor Stabile, a Republican, should each be retained for additional 10-year terms by marking “yes” or “no” for each candidate. Officials found that the “yes” or “no” votes for each judge appeared to have been switched on a printed summary shown to voters before they cast their ballot, Charles Dertinger, the Northampton County director of administration, said. For example, if a voter marked “yes” to retain Panella and “no” on Stabile, it was reflected on the summary as “no” on Panella and “yes” on Stabile. Voters’ actual choices were properly recorded by the machines’ backend system, meaning their votes could be tabulated accurately, Dertinger said. Elections Systems & Software, the Ohama, Nebraska-based company that provided the ExpressVoteXL machines, acknowledged it was at fault for the clerical error that caused the issue. Unofficial results released by the Pennsylvania Department of State show both Panella and Stabile retaining their seats, each with a margin of hundreds of thousands of votes. Only about 70,000 votes were cast in Northampton County for those races, the results show. An election integrity expert confirmed that the problem with the machines was not indicative of anything suspicious. “All the facts here are consistent with human error, not fraud,” Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Anyone who actually wants to steal votes should try to do something that voters wouldn’t notice almost immediately.”

No, Ukraine’s president didn’t surrender to Russia, despite social media claims

CLAIM: Ukraine’s president has surrendered and his country has fallen to Russia’s prolonged invasion.

THE FACTS: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not surrender as social media posts have claimed, and the country remains at war with Russia. Some online are nevertheless sharing a post claiming Ukraine is waving the white flag. “Zelensky has surrendered. Ukraine has fallen. Israel is next,” reads the viral post, which was written last Saturday and includes a black-and-white headshot of the Ukrainian president. The post offered no proof of the claim. But Ukraine did not abruptly surrender the day the viral social media post appeared and there hasn’t been any major development on either side to bring the fighting to a close. In recent days, Ukraine has said a Russian missile strike on the port city of Odesa hit a freighter, resulting in at least one death and multiple injuries. Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for a car bombing that killed a member of the Russia-backed authority in the illegally annexed Luhansk region. Zelenskyy, for his part, rejected claims that the war was entering a stalemate in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” On Monday, he also urged his countrymen to avoid political divides, saying they must concentrate all resources on fighting Russia.

Media Report

What Fake News actually looks like.

WaPo:

President Trump’s fury was palpable last week after CNN released a poll that showed him trailing in his reelection bid by 14 points. He lashed out on Twitter and took the unusual step of threatening a lawsuit over the result, a move that might be called dubious in the same way that LeBron James might be called athletic. It is — but that’s underselling the point a bit.

Happily for the president, there exists an ecosystem of questionable actors willing to assuage whatever concerns might emerge. His repeated excoriations against “fake news” have made clear to his supporters that any reporting that may be in any way construed as negative should be considered untrue. That puts pressure on outlets such as Fox News that, although certainly more generous to Trump than other outlets, still at times include voices other than the most sycophantic. That’s a frustration to the president — and an opportunity by One America News, a tiny cable-network upstart that has earned praise from Trump for being unfailingly positive about his presidency.

Last week, we reported that OAN’s core mission of supporting Trump had been hampered by some bad news: a poll of Florida that the company’s chief executive pledged would offer good news for the president instead showed him in a tie with former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the state. This state, remember, is one Trump won four years ago and is also his newly adopted home.

Dear Democrats

It's already started.

It doesn't matter what the truth is. The right radicals are going to make shit up and slag you with it.

Just like the Troopergate bullshit, and the Vince Foster bullshit, and the Swift Boat bullshit, and the Kenyan Usurper bullshit, and and and.

So, none of you boogers ever played any high school football?

Proving again that even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while, here's one of the very few life lessons my coach was actually right about.

You're looping around the end, out of the backfield, going over the middle for a short pass.

The ball's coming to you, and you know this much:

There's a linebacker in front of you, and a safety coming from your right, and whether you catch the ball or you drop the ball, they're gonna hit you so hard your dog dies.

So get something out of it for us, and catch the fuckin' football.

In The Age Of Poe

Poe's Law: Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.

This kinda thing is popping up more often.

The Independent:

An American started a fake news website to see how ridiculous a story had to be before Donald Trump supporters realised it was untrue – and ended up concluding that some of them would believe absolutely anything.

Despite aiming to write stories no-one would believe, James McDaniel found Trump supporters who believed that Barack Obama had been plotting a coup from a secret bunker near the White House, and that the British singer Adele had demanded he be jailed for such treachery.

They believed that Obama had tweeted “Trump must be removed as president by any means necessary”, and when one commenter, ‘Truthseeker’, dared suggest the story ‘Obama ran paedophile ring out of White House’ might possibly be fake, he was told: “Really “Truthseeker” if you had ANY clue of the truth, you’d KNOW that Wikileaks hasn’t published ONE thing that has been false. So please use your own mind. Stop listening to MSM [mainstream media] and realize what the TRUTH really is.”

Another commenter, ‘Mary’, said caustically: “Truthseeker? Really … but the truth is bothering you?”

She then – apparently without irony – posted a link to the now notorious ‘Pizzagate’ fake news story, about an alleged Democratic child sex ring in a Washington pizza parlour, which had prompted one credulous reader to walk into the restaurant with a semi-automatic rifle and open fire.

Mr McDaniel, 28, who is based in Costa Rica and works for an American nutrition company, said that within two weeks of him starting his website undergroundnewsreport.com, it had received more than one million visitors, and hundreds and thousands of likes and shares on Facebook.

He followed ‘Obama ran paedophile ring out of White House’ with a fake story about Wikileakspublishing an email in which Hillary Clintonsupposedly urged the then president to restrict his child abuse to ‘the pizza arrangement’.

Despite the obvious reference to Pizzagate, Trump supporters responded by urging Julian Assange to reveal all his Clinton information immediately - because otherwise Democrats might distract the American people with “fake news”.

How Stuff Works

The bots and various other rat-fuckers are hard at it, kids.

Bob Brigham, RawStory:

Conservatives in the United States helped spread a fake video against “manspreading” that resulted in a misogynistic backlash against women.

The video purportedly shows a feminist woman pouring a mix of water and bleach on the crotches of multiple men riding on a subway, who were “manspreading” by widening their legs into the area in front of adjacent seats.

The website EU vs Disinfo reported on Monday that the video features paid actors. The report originated with the Russian language online magazine Bumaga, which interviewed one of the men seen in the video.

Conservatives in the United States spread the video, including The Blaze (founded by conservative radio personality Glenn Beck), The Daily Wire (founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro) and the website Chicks on Right.

“In other words, the video stages extreme feminist activism and manages to provoke extreme anti-feminist reactions,” EU vs Disinfo noted.

Wacky Numbers

I've seen this float by on more than a few occasions lately:

After One Full Month of Unhinged and Violent Anti-ICE Protests -- Trump's Approval Jumps 10 Points With HISPANICS! from r/Conservative

Latin Rebels asked Zogby about their numbers and got some interesting insight.

143 LatinX respondents - not exactly a representative sample.

And a 10% increase is not the same as a 10-point increase, so chill your tits.

Go to school, "conservatives".

Good Neighbor Sam

More smoke.
More mud in the water.
More confusion and chaos.

The point is to make people think there's no such thing as 'objective reality'. There are no 'facts'. Nobody's capable of either telling the truth, or knowing the truth when they hear it.

This part of the plan - at its core - is to make it look like there's no plan.

But there is a plan, and it's about Power & Money. Because there's always a plan, and it's always about power & money.

The closer Mueller gets to showing us the enormity of this crime, the bigger the spectacle has to be to keep us entertained.

The crime gets wider & deeper & bigger & uglier, so now it's Sam Nunberg's turn to go on national TV and set himself on fire for our amusement.

Are you not entertained.
WaPo, Aaron Blake:

Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg had a surreal day Monday. After deciding he wouldn't cooperate with a grand jury subpoena from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's Russia investigation, he went on a media blitz to, well, air some things. Each interview seemed intent upon out-shocking the last.

By the end, he had suggested that President Trump may have worked with the Russians, dared Mueller to throw him in jail, repeatedly inquired as to what journalists thought his fate might be, and said he thought Trump knew about that Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. Nunberg did no fewer than three separate interviews with CNN, two with MSNBC and several others.

So what on earth was all that about? Below are some ideas. (And it bears noting that not all of these are mutually exclusive.)

It was an elaborate, Roger Stone-ian show

- and -

During Monday's interviews, Nunberg oscillated between saying Trump hadn't colluded and suggesting he might have had some arrangement with Russia. He at one point said Trump was too smart to fall victim to Russian blackmail, only to later say that Trump “caused this, because he’s an idiot.” He also said that “there is nobody who hates [Trump] more than me.”

“I'm not a Donald Trump fan, as I told you before, okay?” Nunberg told CNN. “He treated me like crap.”
Stay focused , and remember - the guy can say he's your enemy's enemy, but that don't make him your friend.

You want a friend? Buy a dog.

The Buzz Man

You've heard it before, and here it is again:

Of all the wealth generated in the world last year, 82% of it went to the Top 1%.
None of it - NONE OF IT - went to the bottom 50%.

And there's a very good rundown of what's been happening in the Mueller investigation, and the bit about the use of bots and American social media.*

Buzz Burbank - News & Comment:




*BTW -

Why Fake News Targeted Trump Supporters - The Atlantic from last year.

‘Fake News’: Wide Reach but Little Impact, Study Suggests - NYT this month 

(I think this guy's conclusions are a bit silly, because we know that moving even a low percentage of voters makes a huge difference)
Here's the study

Abstract: 

Though some warnings about online “echo chambers” have been hyperbolic, tenden- cies toward selective exposure to politically congenial content are likely to extend to misinformation and to be exacerbated by social media platforms. We test this prediction using data on the factually dubious articles known as “fake news.” Using unique data combining survey responses with individual-level web tra c histories, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news website from October 7-November 14, 2016. Trump supporters visited the most fake news web- sites, which were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. However, fake news consumption was heavily concentrated among a small group — almost 6 in 10 visits to fake news web- sites came from the 10% of people with the most conservative online information diets. We also find that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news and that fact-checks of fake news almost never reached its consumers.
Happy Friday!

Stoopid Is As Stoopid Does

The Beaverton:

JERUSALEM – In response to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, the Palestinian National Authority has announced that it will recognize Texas as a state of Mexico since it was violently annexed by the United States in the 1840s.

“The territory north and east of the Rio Grande is very important to the Mexican people,” explained a PNA spokesperson. “Before American settlers showed up and implemented slavery, Mexico oversaw this land. Then, President Polk sent his armies to invade the rest of these Mexican territories, and force the country to give up California, New Mexico, most of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. We may soon recognize these states as part of Mexico too.”

hat tip = @ALT_uscis

Today's Tweet

Need some fake news? Look no further than your nearest Self-servative Media outlet.

BTW - what this jagoff has done is illegal. And it's a federal rap. (Stolen Valor Act 2013)

And wouldn't it be nice if somebody charged DumFux News with being an accessory? Yeah but - you know - 1st Amendment. Dammit.

Fox anchor on 'Navy Seal' extolling Trump: "God bless John Garofalo"
Fox correction: “All Garofalo’s claims untrue" https://t.co/uoJDvu9lUn

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 20, 2017

A Short Tutorial

Ali Belshi takes a whack at explaining Fake News

Clowns And Jokers

We've got real trouble when the White House staffer who's in charge of Social Media can't quite figure out how to Fact Check something before he retweets it.

scavino deleted the tweet, but i filmed it pic.twitter.com/MTXsc0dlKA

— David Mack (@davidmackau) September 10, 2017

Whenever anybody with WH Credentials picks up a phone, everybody everywhere takes the call. Should be really easy to find out if the story is valid or not. That shit made it out to millions of people whose lives could depend on their government getting good information to them.

So, a question: Is the guy just a standard-issue deliberately-ignorant fuckwad, or are we seeing further evidence that Cult45 isn't really running the show?

It's a wonderment.

Info And Academics

Spark at CBC Radio: (I have a hard time getting the embed thing to work sometimes, so if you don't see anything in the space below, just follow the link)



Here's the only infographic I've been able to find so far. It's supposed to show how the websites interlock, which Albright hypothesizes is driven by analytics and the bots that grab little bits of info about where you go on the web and uses that info to feed similar info to you.

eg: Use Google to search for widgets and you'll see ads for widgets the next time you go to Facebook.

Or follow a link to Breitbart on your Twitter feed, and guess what's going to pop up as a Promoted Tweet when you go back. And then, you'll start getting links to other similar websites on Facebook, and before you know it, you're in a silo.

There's not a lot there that's brand spanking new, but now we're getting some research that begins to prove out the problems of confirmation bias and propaganda in the Information Age. 

The Guardian:

Here’s what you don’t want to do late on a Sunday night. You do not want to type seven letters into Google. That’s all I did. I typed: “a-r-e”. And then “j-e-w-s”. Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”

Are Jews evil? It’s not a question I’ve ever thought of asking. I hadn’t gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google’s question. And this was Google’s answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.” I click on it: “Jews today have taken over marketing, militia, medicinal, technological, media, industrial, cinema challenges etc and continue to face the worlds [sic] envy through unexplained success stories given their inglorious past and vermin like repression all over Europe.”

Google is search. It’s the verb, to Google. It’s what we all do, all the time, whenever we want to know anything. We Google it. The site handles at least 63,000 searches a second, 5.5 billion a day. Its mission as a company, the one-line overview that has informed the company since its foundation and is still the banner headline on its corporate website today, is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. It strives to give you the best, most relevant results. And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query “are Jews… ” is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: “Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.”

The sixth is from Yahoo Answers: “Why are Jews so evil?” The seventh result is: “Jews are demonic souls from a different world.” And the 10th is from jesus-is-saviour.com: “Judaism is Satanic!”

There’s one result in the 10 that offers a different point of view. It’s a link to a rather dense, scholarly book review from thetabletmag.com, a Jewish magazine, with the unfortunately misleading headline: “Why Literally Everybody In the World Hates Jews.”

I feel like I’ve fallen down a wormhole, entered some parallel universe where black is white, and good is bad. Though later, I think that perhaps what I’ve actually done is scraped the topsoil off the surface of 2016 and found one of the underground springs that has been quietly nurturing it. It’s been there all the time, of course. Just a few keystrokes away… on our laptops, our tablets, our phones. This isn’t a secret Nazi cell lurking in the shadows. It’s hiding in plain sight.

 

Fake And Alt-Fake News

Beware the double negative - and the triple and the fourple.

Don Lemon gets up and slaps back.

Yay Don. You are earning your way out of Press Poodle status. Ya did us proud right there, son.

WTF Moments

Rolling Stone

Standout: "The leaks are real. The news is fake."

I can say I've been a little impressed with the Press Poodles performing better than they've done before.  We still need to find the new Sam Donaldson, but they're starting to get up and push back.

Today's Tweet

The definition of irony, FOX News reporting on fake news! pic.twitter.com/xEbwfJNJZq

— philip harris (@pharris830) January 1, 2017

When the main subject of "the news" is "the news", we've gone beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated and sardonic irony.

This has to be a strong indication that we've been running in tighter and tighter circles for so long that we are now ready to complete the process of political evolution by disappearing up our own assholes (Allan Sherman --The Rape Of The A*P*E).

Today's Chart

Again:

The presence of confirming evidence

and

the absence of conflicting evidence

yields a higher probability for truth

-------------

The absence of confirming evidence 

or

the presence of conflicting evidence requires continued skepticism and further review

Imitations

Stephen Colbert

Alt-Right assholes and Pizzagate