The common man thinks religion is true.
The wise man understands religion is false.
The powerful man knows religion to be useful.
Dec 20, 2023
Today's Trae
Dec 19, 2023
It's Crazy
Wanna know how fucked up the polling is? - and how it got fucked up?
Republicans.
Or more accurately, Republican fuckery, plus Press Poodles who refuse to do their fucking job.
What do we hear? "Crime is rampant!!!!"
Bullshit.
It's bullshit now, the same as it was bullshit back in 2017 when Trump did that god-awful American Carnage crap at his inauguration.
"Well now, that was some pretty weird shit." --George W Bush
Almost 80 percent of Americans, and 92 percent of Republicans, think crime has gone up. It actually fell in 2023. An expert blames a familiar culprit for the mistaken impression.
Crime in the United States has declined significantly over the last year, according to new FBI data that contradicts a widespread national perception that law-breaking and violence are on the rise.
A Gallup poll released this month found that 77% of Americans believe crime rates are worsening, but they are mistaken, the new FBI data and other statistics show.
The FBI data, which compares crime rates in the third quarter of 2023 to the same period last year, found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961, according to criminologist Jeff Asher, who analyzed the FBI numbers.
NINETEEN-SIXTY-ONE
SIXTY-TWO FUCKING YEARS AGO
Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded, Asher found, and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.
Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.
“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”
The FBI’s quarterly numbers cover about 78% of the U.S. population and don’t give as full a picture as the more comprehensive annual report the FBI puts out once a year. But Asher said the quarterly reports in the past have hewed fairly close to the annual ones.
The most recent annual report, released in October, covered 94% of the country and found that violent crime in 2022 fell back to pre-pandemic levels, with murder dropping 6.1%.
Asher maintains a separate database of murder in big cities which found that murder is down 12.7 percent this year, after rising during the pandemic.
Detroit is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1966, Asher found, while Baltimore and St Louis are on track to post the fewest murders in each city in nearly a decade. A few cities, including Memphis and Washington DC, are still seeing increases in their murder rates, but they are outliers.
FBI data doesn’t have a separate category for retail theft. It falls under “larceny,” which declined overall last year, according to the latest numbers. Retail theft is widely believed to have skyrocketed in some cities, and the industry says it is at “unprecedented” levels. But the data doesn’t necessarily support that thesis.
FBI numbers are not the only measure of crime. The annual Justice Department survey of criminal victimization in 2022 found that a lot of crime goes unreported, and that more people reported being victims of violent crime in 2022 than in 2021. But Asher has documented questions about that survey’s methodology.
So why are Americans’ perceptions about crime so different from the apparent reality? Asher believes there is a measure of partisanship at work — Republicans are more ready to believe crime is increasing while Democrats hold the White House — but he largely chalks it up to media consumption.
“My neighbors never post on NextDoor how many thousands of packages they successfully receive,” he wrote recently. “Only video of the one that randomly got swiped.”
Asher and other analysts say the natural tendency of the news media to highlight disturbing crime stories — and the tendency of those stories to go viral on social media — presents a false but persuasive picture.
Videos of flash mobs on shop lifting sprees or carjackings in broad day light are more ubiquitous, even if those crimes are not.
“These outlier incidents become the glue people rely on when guesstimating whether crime is up or down,” he wrote.
SCOTUS Here We Come
Now all we have to do is figure the over/under
for how much Clarence Thomas
is gonna make outa this.
Today's Keith
TRUMP REVEALS HOW HE WILL TAKE OVER ALL POLICE - 12.19.23
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT:
In his three-day orgy of insults, expanding his list of those who are "poisoning our nation's blood" from Hispanics to Africans and Asians, praising dictators and echoing Hitler, it's understandable that most of us missed it. But Trump also explained the one rug that will really tie his totalitarian room together: he's going to indemnify the police.
Translation: under Trump, the cops can kill George Floyd and be certain they will face no legal liability. They can kill YOU and be certain they will face no legal liability. It is literally a license to kill, a license granted to the 700,000 police officers at all state and city levels in this nation. Who already have weapons. Who already have tanks. Who already have affinity to Trump and the fascism and white supremacism he's selling.
And now they will be freed of all restraint. And they'll owe that freedom to Trump.
They will become Trump's stormtroopers and his little SS. And if invoking the Insurrection Act to use the National Guard against unarmed civilians is too sharp-edged for some of his under-Fuhrers, Trump can simply dispatch local cops to shoot up a Black Lives Matter protest. Or an anti-Cop City protest. Or just an anti-Trump protest.
It may be his most totalitarian revelation since.
And naturally, the New York Times follows it with an op-ed titled "The Secret of Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism” and Axios begins the last full business week of the year with 1,000 words on Trump and not one of them mentions his plan to take over the cops or his quoting Hitler or his praising Xi and Kim. Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have shown that they - and so many other institutions we think would recoil from authoritarianism - are in fact ready to serve them, just as long as they can continue to make profits. Axios has 1,000 words on Trump and they are all positive and normalizing and praising him fo having "much greater power than in his first term and fewer restraints on carrying out his political agenda.”
His political agenda is Totalitarianism, you useless slobs.
B-Block (22:22) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS:
Ruby Goodman and Shaye Moss are awarded $148 million from Giuliani. Giuliani re-slanders them. They sue again. He re-re-slanders them against last night. Clarence Thomas wasn't being bought; he was prostituting himself. Congressmen ask him to recuse. Mayor Eric Adams says NYC is the greatest because any day could be 9/11.
(28:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD:
Wreaths Across America, Laura Loomer and the Senate staffer who was just, uh, receiving testimony. And the new allegation: that wasn't the first staffer CPAC's Matt Schlapp allegedly groped.
C-Block (35:10) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL:
Tells you something that a week ago somebody who didn't know asked me about the legendary sportscaster for whom I interned in 1978. That means he's been famous for 80 years, the last 10 of them after he passed away. The story of The Amazin' Bill Mazer.
Down The Road
40 years later, it became the foundation for a technology that led to the invention of the laser.
Neither Einstein nor the many nerds who followed were thinking, "Y'know what, I think barcodes and inventory control is what we should be working towards - and a digital music format would be cool too..."
Today, right about ⅓ of the world's entire GDP depends on some aspect of information technology - creating, processing, storing, retrieving and transmitting information - but if you had asked those nerds 50 or 60 or 70 years ago, "OK, so how does this benefit me right here and right now?", they wouldn't have had answers. And if instant gratification is your only criterion for whether or not you fund their work, you'd cut their budgets and the work would either be wasted, or delayed to the point of being lost - potentially for generations.
Twenty years before Einstein, an English physicist name JJ Thomson proved the existence of the electron, overturning 2,000 years of humans' "understanding" of the structure of atoms.
Neither of these discoveries had any practical application at the time.
Can you tell me what part of your existence right now isn't either dependent upon or tied in some way to electronics?
Support your local nerds
Dec 18, 2023
Aging Like Vintage Milk
After touting stock market, Trump claims record high under Biden only makes “rich people richer”
The Dow Jones hit a record high despite Trump's prediction that the economy would collapse under Biden
Donald Trump, who predicted in a 2020 debate that stock markets would crash under President Joe Biden, griped Sunday that stock markets reaching record highs were just making "rich people richer." The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose to a record high last week, hitting 37,000 and surpassing the previous record set in 2022. The former president often patted himself on the back for a bustling stock market during his time in office between 2017 and 2021.
"The stock market is making rich people richer," Trump said, per Reuters, to a crowd of supporters in Reno, Nevada, in an effort to put an anti-Biden, populist spin on the new record stock market value. "Biden's inflation catastrophe is demolishing your savings and ravaging your dreams," the GOP nomination frontrunner added, changing the subject to high prices — a hallmark of Biden's term thus far — to take a jab at his likely opponent in the 2024 contest. Despite a recent increase in wages, a decrease in inflation and low unemployment, Trump went on: "We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool."
Biden mocked Trump last week for his incorrect prediction in a campaign video shared on X/Twitter flaunting the record stock market high, CNBC reports. “Good one, Donald,” Biden tweeted. The video replayed a clip of Trump declaring, "If Biden wins, you’re gonna have a stock market collapse the likes of which you’ve never had," before rolling soundbites of news anchors lauding the stock market's recent upsurge. “Uh, let’s just talk for a moment about the stock market. Boom,” says Larry Kudlow, Trump's former top economic aide, in an included snippet from his Fox Business show.
Good one, Donald. pic.twitter.com/XNtiU4bqSF
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 15, 2023
QShaman Gets Snubbed
Got him right in the feels.
The Qanon Shamen got punked by Matt Gaetz and is in his feeling hard about it. Jake is snot bawling and I am here for it. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂pic.twitter.com/gwA6jwccXa
— Eugene (@Democracy1stE) December 18, 2023
More Than Just A Wingnut
My simple advice to young men:
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 18, 2023
Find a woman.
Fall in love.
Get married.
Have more children than you can afford. Have an insane amount of kids.
God loves you and He has a purpose for you.#AMFEST2023 pic.twitter.com/dq9ZuAtcJ7
The German Reich needed a robust and growing population and encouraged couples to have large families. It started such encouragement early. Once members of the distaff wing of the Hitler Youth movement, the League of German Girls, turned 18, they became eligible for a branch called Faith and Beauty, which trained these girls in the art of becoming ideal mothers. One component of that ideal was fecundity. And so each year, in honor of his beloved mother, Klara, and in memory of her birthday, a gold medal was awarded to women with seven children, a silver to women with six, and a bronze to women with five.
Fouling The Nest
I don't quite get how we decided it's OK for people to just walk away from their responsibility to clean up after themselves when they've profited from fucking up the air and the water and the soil.
Why do we do that?
Five women in my family lived either at our house on Independence Way, or on Hackberry Hill in Arvada. All five had bouts with cancer, and four of them died of it - and this in a family of some very long-lived old gals. The ones who lived in Arvada got sick.
Northern Jefferson County has been a known Disease Cluster for 50 years - downhill and downwind of Rocky Flats (plutonium) - and I'm just now learning about this uranium shit seeping into the drinking water!?!
What the actual fuck, you guys.
Cleanup company walks away from Jeffco uranium mine, state takes $7.3 million bond
Colorado mining officials say they will take over water purifying that keeps radioactivity and other contamination out of Denver and Arvada water supply.
The company charged with keeping uranium-tainted water out of Denver and Arvada’s drinking supply is walking away from cleaning up Jefferson County’s shuttered Schwartzwalder mine, and state officials are taking over a $7.3 million surety bond they say will continue to fund treatment.
Without water treatment and other uranium reclamation, the Schwartzwalder mine above Ralston Creek and Ralston Reservoir has leaked tainted water into key city supplies, state reclamation officials said in their stipulated agreement with Colorado Legacy Land. The company’s water treatment plant at the mine has been running May to October in recent years, and the state said Friday the previously posted bond will allow work to continue in 2024.
Colorado officials won’t know until the end of next year’s treatment season how many years the surety bond will last in running the plant, said Michael Cunningham, acting division director for Reclamation, Mining and Safety. Colorado could invest the surety bond and use proceeds to continue treatment, but the state may also have recourse to seek more funding from Colorado Legacy Land, Cunningham said.
The state revoked Colorado Legacy Land’s permit to run mine or cleanup operations at Schwartzwalder as part of the stipulation agreement. The stipulation agreement says no civil fines will be issued as part of the revocation and transition to state control. The latest surety bond agreement was for $7.6 million, but the state is moving to take over about $7.3 million left in the fund.
Community activists who have tried to track the uranium cleanups in both Jefferson County and Canon City said they were not surprised about CLL’s surrender of the Golden efforts.
The promises were “never going to be enough for the best cleanup possible,” said Carol Dunn, co-chair of Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste. “I could not guess where CLL got the highly optimistic idea that there was ‘easy money’ to be made.”
Reporters in the past have not received responses to inquiries at Colorado Legacy Land. A message left with Colorado Legacy Land representative Jim Harrington on Friday was not returned.
The walkaway agreement signed last week is the latest in a series of failed cleanup sagas for two major Colorado uranium sites once controlled by Colorado Legacy Land, which in turn had taken over the two sites from Cotter Corp.
Schwartzwalder, about 7 miles northwest of Golden, has not produced uranium since 2000, state officials said, and is in the final stages of rock and dirt reclamation. Water treatment at the Jeffco site must go on for years, according to regulators at the reclamation division and the state health department.
Colorado Legacy Land had also taken over and later walked away from the Cotter Mill cleanup, an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site at Cañon City. Colorado Legacy Land surprised Cañon City residents in February with an insolvency and news it was giving up its share of cleanups at both Cotter Mill and Schwartzwalder.
State action at Schwartzwalder dates at least to 2010, when reclamation officials demanded action from then-owner Cotter Corp. over discharges into surface water. The state’s stipulation agreement last week says that without proper summer water treatment, tainted mine water builds up and then overflows into Ralston Creek, which feeds Ralston Reservoir.
Unless the treatment equipment is turned on again in spring of 2024, the pool of tainted water would begin overflowing in June, state officials said in the stipulation agreement approved by the mining reclamation board on Wednesday.
The land portion of the reclamation has a finite end and will be completed under the surety bond, the state’s Cunningham said. Rock waste is being moved above any water contact on the valley floor, and will be capped with soil to be covered in vegetation, he said.
“The division is going to have a much clearer idea of how long that water can be treated utilizing the financial warranty once we get to the end of the 2024 season,” he said
“The system that’s in place there will ensure that the water that is discharged into Ralston Creek meets water quality standards,” Cunningham said. “This is what Colorado Legacy Land has been doing themselves since taking over this permit. And they’ve been successful in meeting water quality standards up there.”
Arvada water officials said they have been monitoring the discussions about Schwartzwalder and have been advocating “for the protection of Ralston Creek.”
“At this time, we have no concerns about risk to water supply or water quality in Arvada,” said Arvada infrastructure communications manager Katie Patterson. “We are confident that the state and the Mined Land Reclamation Board are committed to continuing to run the water treatment plant in the year ahead and to determining a path for long term management of the site. The city will continue to monitor, support, and engage with the state in the future management of the site to ensure the protection of Ralston Creek.”
Denver Water officials have said in the past that their own water treatment systems for Ralston Reservoir water also keep uranium or other contaminants out of city supplies.
Friday, Denver Water officials said they are “monitoring the situation at the mine and appreciate the leadership of the Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety in its work to ensure water treatment continues at the site.”
Cunningham said the state has known since early this year that Colorado Legacy Land would be leaving the site. “CLL stated and confirmed it does not presently have the financial capacity to perform its obligations under the permit,” the stipulation says, in part.
“We feel well positioned to take the site over,” Cunningham said.
Dec 17, 2023
Greasing Up The Fuckery
They're not going to be this obvious.
And the quality will get better.
A lot better.
AI is making it easy for anyone to create propaganda outlets, producing content that can be hard to differentiate from real news
Artificial intelligence is automating the creation of fake news, spurring an explosion of web content mimicking factual articles that instead disseminates false information about elections, wars and natural disasters.
Since May, websites hosting AI-created false articles have increased by more than 1,000 percent, ballooning from 49 sites to more than 600, according to NewsGuard, an organization that tracks misinformation.
Historically, propaganda operations have relied on armies of low-paid workers or highly coordinated intelligence organizations to build sites that appear to be legitimate. But AI is making it easy for nearly anyone — whether they are part of a spy agency or just a teenager in their basement — to create these outlets, producing content that is at times hard to differentiate from real news.
One AI-generated article recounted a made-up story about Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, a NewsGuard investigation found, alleging that he had died and left behind a note suggesting the involvement of the Israeli prime minister. The psychiatrist appears to have been fictitious, but the claim was featured on an Iranian TV show, and it was recirculated on media sites in Arabic, English and Indonesian, and spread by users on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram.
The heightened churn of polarizing and misleading content may make it difficult to know what is true — harming political candidates, military leaders and aid efforts. Misinformation experts said the rapid growth of these sites is particularly worrisome in the run-up to the 2024 elections.
“Some of these sites are generating hundreds if not thousands of articles a day,” said Jack Brewster, a researcher at NewsGuard who conducted the investigation. “This is why we call it the next great misinformation superspreader.”
Generative artificial intelligence has ushered in an era in which chatbots, image makers and voice cloners can produce content that seems human-made.
Well-dressed AI-generated news anchors are spewing pro-Chinese propaganda, amplified by bot networks sympathetic to Beijing. In Slovakia, politicians up for election found their voices had been cloned to say controversial things they never uttered, days before voters went to the polls. A growing number of websites, with generic names such as iBusiness Day or Ireland Top News, are delivering fake news made to look genuine, in dozens of languages from Arabic to Thai.
Readers can easily be fooled by the websites.
Global Village Space, which published the piece on Netanyahu’s alleged psychiatrist, is flooded with articles on a variety of serious topics. There are pieces detailing U.S. sanctions on Russian weapons suppliers; the oil behemoth Saudi Aramco’s investments in Pakistan; and the United States’ increasingly tenuous relationship with China.
The site also contains essays written by a Middle East think tank expert, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the site’s chief executive, Moeed Pirzada, a television news anchor from Pakistan. (Pirzada did not respond to a request for comment. Two contributors confirmed they have written articles appearing on Global Village Space.)
But sandwiched in with these ordinary stories are AI-generated articles, Brewster said, such as the piece on Netanyahu’s psychiatrist, which was relabeled as “satire” after NewsGuard reached out to the organization during its investigation. NewsGuard says the story appears to have been based on a satirical piece published in June 2010, which made similar claims about an Israeli psychiatrist’s death.
Having real and AI-generated news side-by-side makes deceptive stories more believable. “You have people that simply are not media literate enough to know that this is false,” said Jeffrey Blevins, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Cincinnati. “It’s misleading.”
Websites similar to Global Village Space may proliferate during the 2024 election, becoming an efficient way to distribute misinformation, media and AI experts said.
The sites work in two ways, Brewster said. Some stories are created manually, with people asking chatbots for articles that amplify a certain political narrative and posting the result to a website. The process can also be automatic, with web scrapers searching for articles that contain certain keywords, and feeding those stories into a large language model that rewrites them to sound unique and evade plagiarism allegations. The result is automatically posted online.
NewsGuard locates AI-generated sites by scanning for error messages or other language that “indicates that the content was produced by AI tools without adequate editing,” the organization says.
The motivations for creating these sites vary. Some are intended to sway political beliefs or wreak havoc. Other sites churn out polarizing content to draw clicks and capture ad revenue, Brewster said. But the ability to turbocharge fake content is a significant security risk, he added.
Technology has long fueled misinformation. In the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election, Eastern European troll farms — professional groups that promote propaganda — built large audiences on Facebook disseminating provocative content on Black and Christian group pages, reaching 140 million users per month.
Pink-slime journalism sites, named after the meat byproduct, often crop up in small towns where local news outlets have disappeared, generating articles that benefit the financiers that fund the operation, according to the media watchdog Poynter.
But Blevins said those techniques are more resource-intensive compared with artificial intelligence. “The danger is the scope and scale with AI … especially when paired with more sophisticated algorithms,” he said. “It’s an information war on a scale we haven’t seen before.”
It’s not clear whether intelligence agencies are using AI-generated news for foreign influence campaigns, but it is a major concern. “I would not be shocked at all that this is used — definitely next year with the elections,” Brewster said. “It’s hard not to see some politician setting up one of these sites to generate fluff content about them and misinformation about their opponent.”
Blevins said people should watch for clues in articles, “red flags” such as “really odd grammar” or errors in sentence construction. But the most effective tool is to increase media literacy among average readers.
“Make people aware that there are these kinds of sites that are out there. This is the kind of harm they can cause,” he said. “But also recognize that not all sources are equally credible. Just because something claims to be a news site doesn’t mean that they actually have a journalist … producing content.”
Regulation, he added, is largely nonexistent. It may be difficult for governments to clamp down on fake news content, for fear of running afoul of free-speech protections. That leaves it to social media companies, which haven’t done a good job so far.
It’s infeasible to deal quickly with the sheer number of such sites. “It’s a lot like playing whack-a-mole,” Blevins said.
“You spot one [site], you shut it down, and there’s another one created someplace else,” he added. “You’re never going to fully catch up with it.”
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