Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Wire news now:
A U.S. official says Obama is expected to announce the deployment of about 100 Green Berets to Iraq to help train and advise the Iraqi forces.
The crippled philosophy. Bombing paupers, first with small bits, the only way to go. Have at it.
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I point you to a long piece in the New Yorker entitled “The Disruption Machine: What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.”
It’s a point-by-point dissection of the narratives by Clayton M. Christensen. You could call him one of the biggest pushers of “disruptive innovation” in the American economy. And the New Yorker writer, Jill Lepore, informs his material, all based on stories of allegedly successful startups that engage in disruption against bigger, allegedly inferior competitors, has crept into all facets of business life.
In the hands of the Silicon Valley, it’s now trying to take over the public work of education and medicine, every service, even places where it’s profoundly unsuitable, or its immoral philosophy of blowing everything up for the sake of some small new business getting its pile, has grown toxic.
You face it virtually everywhere in American life. Disruption is the key to everything. If you can’t disrupt or deal with being disrupted, you’re just more splatter on the highway to the future. You can rule the world through your smartphone and twiddling fingers or die.
Upworthy comes in for a mention, as does another clickbait “news site,” Buzzfeed, for the way they are viewed, with fear, by the giants of real news.
It’s readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the “public interest.??? That’s why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church and state.) “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades,??? according to the Times’ Innovation Report, “allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers,??? as if this had been, all along, simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned, according to the report, because it has “hidden costs??? that thwart innovation. Earlier this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy. Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, “Reader Experience,??? which can be measured, following Upworthy, in “Attention Minutes.??? Vox Media, a digital-media disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times’ strongest competitors (few of which are profitable), called the report “brilliant,??? “shockingly good,??? and an “insanely clear??? explanation of disruption, but expressed the view that there’s no way the Times will implement its recommendations, because “what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.???
That some of the corporate leadership at the Times would even be interested in hiring a former head of promotion from Upworthy is discouraging. It shows only that some leadership at newspapers is easily frightened by garbage, pure internet eyeball suckerbait, stuff that has no beneficial role at a publication like the NYT.
And make no mistake, as referenced last week, Upworthy is unreservedly daily dogshite, nicely wrapped and sugar-frosted for instantaneous eating, a business where its “contributors” or “curators” post viral swill. The only requirement is that it test well and come as hand-wringing 1-to-5 minute doses of mechanized sincerity delivered by smiling faces who profess to be able to change with world through their cheer, tireless effort, and the magic of Internet.
Two more numbing examples from today’s menu:
Trying To Follow What Is Going On In Syria And Why? This Comic Will Get You There In 5 Minutes.
Here’s the “contributor’s” lead: “Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, people you never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.”
The author, of course: “I love living in a purple city in a purple state (Virginia is for lovers!) because my neighbors represent a wide range of viewpoints, from libertarians to socialists, all striving to live with compassion. I want to bring that respectful tussling to the wild world of the Internet.”
When He Meets His First Child, I Cheer. When He Gets To His Second, I Almost Lose It.
The lead-in:It takes Andrew 13 minutes to tell you how many kids he has. Kudos to you if you can keep your eyes dry that whole time. And along the way, he meets a buxom necrophiliac (1:50), a doughnut dad (3:00), the love of his life, and the mother of his future childre [sic]…”
Naturally, roll the author’s changing-the-world-through-the-pitiless-optimism-of-the-web: “I’m working on big ideas and a small garden. I believe there’s plenty of planet, plenty of money, and plenty of love to go around. People are my passion, and while talk is cheap, conversation is priceless.”
Understanding Syria after five minutes and a cartoon. Crying your eyes out for the want of a copy editor to fix the word “childre” on a website that employs few, pays little, but gets millions of hits for “big ideas” and an endless click-stream of people who share, are pursuing their passion and changing the world through the wonder of social media technology and sunbeams.
On a fundamental level one understands why the lowest-common-denominator delivery of happiness and life lessons works. It impresses people who put no thought into anything but who intensely dislike complicated and often painfully depressing news.
But to think that harvesting an audience of that measure, of believing that you can carry out a valid news function catering to it, that it is disruptive and innovative and to adopt its way, is insane.
It is custom-made groupthink perfect only for the Culture of Lickspittle.
A link to the New Yorker, again, is here.
As if it isn’t big enough already, you can observe how large elements in the media and sources at the Pentagon wish to relight the American war machine, in at least two places.
The bombing theater of Iraq. And doing something about Russia’s slow re-annexation of the Ukraine.
Today, at TIME (no link):
The U.S. confirmed Friday that Russia sent tanks and military equipment to separatist fighters in Ukraine.
The delivery of military equipment threatens to further escalate tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies …
Someone at the State Department told the magazine, “We are highly concerned.”
At which point two things should occur to you. First: What you mean by we?
And, second, the State Department has been nothing more than a toady (or appendix) of the national security machine since the Vietnam War.
Getting involved in anything on the old battlefields of The Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union is an idea magnitudes worse than the epic fraud and disaster that was the invasion of Iraq.
But Americans don’t know this. Most of us probably think Uncle Sam actually beat the Wehrmacht and so, forever, the world owes us a big thank you.
The Soviet Army destroyed the majority of Nazi Germany’s war machine. Without the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, the Second World War might have been very different for Americans on the landing beaches of North Africa, France and Italy.
Russians have very strong feelings about the Patriotic War.
Want to relight a big war? One where you could be badly hurt here? One where drones and bombing the paupers won’t be jolly good and risk-free?
Go, go ahead, trying antagonizing Russians by picking a fight on what they consider to still be their bloody patriotic battlefields.
And what else can you say about Iraq? Nothing, that’s what. We should have the good grace to admit we pulverized the place for no damn good reason and the result is not surprising.
Again, because, some famous last words from 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …???
Heat-packin’ humanitarians, aren’t we all?
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What was the Poisoner’s black market for young American men? Apparently, Black Market Reloaded, accessed on TOR, before it was taken down.
A San Francisco Chronicle piece tells the story of another arrested man, one who had purchased what he thought were liquid poisons on BMR.
I’m not going to try to paraphrase it:
Court filings by FBI Special Agent Michael Eldridge allege that Chamberlain sought to buy abrin, a natural poison that is found in rosary pea seeds and is considered to be a potential weapon of terrorism, among other illicit chemicals, and to have the toxins shipped to his Polk Street apartment …
In February, Eldridge said, a New York City man told police and the FBI that he had bought cyanide and abrin on Black Market Reloaded so he could commit suicide, before apparently having second thoughts.
It turned out, the FBI said, that the same online seller had sent abrin to Chamberlain. When that man, a Sacramento resident, was arrested last month, he told the FBI that Chamberlain had previously sought to buy liquid ricin from another seller but balked at the high price. Ricin comes from castor beans.
Chamberlain “indicated that he was seeking abrin to ‘ease the suffering’ of cancer patients” and asked the Sacramento seller whether abrin could be detected in the autopsy of a dead person, Eldridge wrote …
Abrin, ricin, even nicotine and bomb-making show up: The stars of the death files of the old computer underground, now peddled on-line, or at least ersatz versions of them. Chamberlain, the story reads, complained that the BMR seller’s abrin did not work.
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Steel Knees is a happy man today. A relatively small number of really angry WhiteManistanis in Virginia booted famous House Republican Eric Cantor for, essentially, not hating on illegals, “bloodsuckers” and “the takers” enough.
Now Virginia has lighted the way. Eric Cantor is now the revolutionary verb, and it is time to go Eric Cantor on the whole bunch of them. No more compromise. No more BS freebees. No more getting anything you don’t earn. No more spending like maniacs flying over the cuckoo’s nest. No more criminal invaders and no more bloodsuckers.
Charles Blow at the NYT sums it up:
While the beltway chatter grows over the political death of Eric Cantor, the first House leader to be unseated in a primary, it would be easy to lose sight of just how unsettling his demise is for our politics in general.
On one level, it is a glaring example — and condemnation — of the staggering levels of voter apathy that exist the further an election race is from presidential politics. Only about 65,000 people voted in the Republican primary in Virginia’s Seventh District on Tuesday. This is in a district of nearly 760,000 people …
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From a long time ago.
On the unfolding disaster, extract from the NYT today:
Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled, while emboldened Sunni militants who seized two other important northern cities this week moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism …
Militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept across the porous border from Syria on Tuesday to overrun Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. They have been driving toward the capital since then, capturing the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, seizing parts of the oil refinery city of Baiji and threatening Samarra, a city sacred to Shiites just 70 miles north of Baghdad.
I have nothing to say except we did this.
Now unintentionally hilarious and black quote from Salon writer Wagner James Au, at Salon, in 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …”
And in honor, you can again download and listen to Iraq N Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMs. Here.
The old recommended donation, not obligatory, was three dollars and fifty cents.
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Jeffrey Levenderis of Akron, OH, was convicted in a ricin case that had been on the books since 2011 when the FBI discovered a mixture containing it in a jar in his former dwelling.
The government said is was to be part of a plot to kill his stepfather and “against first responders who might respond to a fire Levenderis planned to set at his house as part of an elaborate suicide plan,” according to a news report.
This, perhaps, speaks to the state of Levenderis’ mind. As described in the news the plan makes little sense. Ricin is a protein and is destroyed by heat. How it would be used in a fire is a mystery. That would now seem immaterial.
The jury trial took four days. Levenderis had been in jail since 2011 and was confined to a wheelchair.
In the web environment made by Google and corporate America, clickbait reigns supreme. Working example, above, on the Yahoo news page, about 50 percent of which on any given day constitutes virtually fake news and useless career and lifestyle advice columns written by people, all of whom have smiling thumbnail photos in which they look almost exactly alike.
Has Russia banned the US from the International Space Station, tantamount to almost an act of war? No. But that’s the point of the weasel-worded headline, to get you to think so.
The link takes you to stock-picking advice column by Rich Smith who begins: Oh, no. Russia is mad at us again.
His bio is here but you don’t have to read it to know he’s a jerk off.
This week the Los Angeles Times held its yearly awards dinner. A friend of mine won one for copy editing. It’s a big deal.
Copy-editing and integrity still mean something, most of the time, at big newspapers. Someone caught writing a clickbait piece like the above would stand a good chance of being pulled off their beat and their career blighted in, at least, the short term.
And a copy editor would suffer for putting such a title on a piece, or waving it through.
But web news jerk-offs are now way more than a dime a dozen. It’s the economic model everyone is convinced is gold.
Let’s have a look at Upworthy today, to see what’s brewing at the pinnacle of click masturbaiting:
Haven’t Classic Children’s Stories Always Been About More Than What They’re About?
The author: “I’m a father, writer, and singer/songwriter (see label for actual order). I get it: Time is precious, every life is precious, this little blue marble is precious. We all want the same things, really. But, um, how do we do that? Let’s see if the Internet knows…”
A Pixelated Nietzsche Warns Us About The Danger Of Looking To Science For All The Answers
The author: “I was born in the hometown of Elvis and raised in the land of Mark Twain. I care about America, fairness, human beings, manners, and everyone’s right to be weird.”
This Illustration Of How Many Soldiers Died On D-Day Is Like A Kick To The Gut
The author: “By day I’m a transformative photographer and art therapist. At night, I sleuth the web for outrageously important stuff. I want you to be happier, smarter, healthier, and more generous.”
Oh Snap! The Government Just Got Put On Notice … By An 8th-Grader
The author: “I’m a poet and activist using my Internet unicorn powers for the greater good. I push myself and others to make a positive impact on their local and global communities. I believe the web is the one true equalizer in the world …”
If you look at all the writer bios on Upworthy, they have a common and numbing theme. Everyone is using all their power on the internet to make you, the nation and the world better and happier. They appear as little more than mannequins with smiley faces.
There’s another good way to characterize them: One note sincerity trolls.
“We see Upworthy as confirmation that the potential to have a broadly well-informed public still exists,??? Eli Pariser told New York Magazine back in March. You could have fooled me because I’ve never seen that potential.
The article goes on to explain Upworthy’s delivery is purposely like advertising, advertising specifically aimed at getting shares on social media, particularly Facebook. Pariser tells the interviewer he once worked for a college literary magazine, a model he then wished to avoid.
“Contributors,” or the writers aren’t just that. They’re also “curators” at Upworthy.
Curators of what? The best 3-second-to-minute-readable clickbait in hand-wringing sincerity, uplift and lessons for the day.
Moving along, we have Medium, the blogging platform started by the guy who made Twitter. Who then professed to have found that 140-character blurts don’t really constitute much in the way of information and journalism.
Roll it:
Holy shit, dude! How I accidentally lost 50 pounds in 8 months
The author: “Designer. Maker of things. Total weirdo. Husband to wife. Friend to startups. Avid fan: scary movies, loud music, lists.”
On Gradually Rebuilding My iTunes Library…
I wish I had an intern…The author: “Bostonian/Independent A&R/Blogger/Writer @ Poisonous Paragraphs/Bastard Swordsman/Producers I Know/HipHop Wired/The Urban Daily/Killer Boombox & NPR”
“Somtimes i feel that Medium is like taking a sh*t???
Which is great valueThe author: “UI/UX Designer.”
Listening to Russia’s State Media, It’s Hard to Tell Fact From Fiction
The Kremlin’s government-media complex spins the Ukraine crisisDelivered without a hint of national self-recognition, one might add.
Two Weeks Ago, I Almost Died in the Deadliest Plane Crash Ever
The author: “Pittsburgher San Franciscan. Economic consultant and writer. Loves politics, economics, comedy, poetry, and Stanford football.”
Today I’m Going to Predict Your Future
Five important things that will happen to you before your 20-year college reunionThe author: “Head of @WebbmediaGroup, an emerging tech ideas + strategy agency.”
Finally, we turn to Henry Blodget, the CEO of Business Insider, a former stock-pumping fraud criminal, who re-invented himself as one of the web’s top MasturBaiters.
In a recent interview:
Henry Blodget is infamous for hyping dot-com stocks before the crash. Now he has one of his own Henry Blodget is enjoying an impressive second act. Eleven years ago, his career as a high-profile Wall Street analyst imploded with the collapse of the dot-com bubble, when he was accused of promoting stocks publicly and disparaging them privately. He was banned for life from the investment industry … Business Insider is loud and brash – a “scrappy upstart,??? as Mr. Blodget puts it, aimed at a young audience – with headlines that scream and content that roams well beyond a core business readership. It now claims more U.S. readers than The Wall Street Journal.
There are quite a few mainstream-media journalists gravitating toward start-ups, such as FiveThirtyEight and Vox. Is this a new era for journalism–and where is it headed?
Blodget: We are in a golden age for journalism. The digital medium is by far the richest, most flexible and most powerful medium ever developed, and it is creating amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs and journalists who embrace it.
Is the comparison to the Wall Street Journal valid? No.
Blodget claims the “editorial budget” of Business Insider is 10 million dollars. It employs 50 people as editorial staff.
The Wall Street Journal employs about 2,000 people worldwide, has 85 news bureaus and 26 printing plants, including one in southern California. It’s the country’s largest newspaper with a circulation of over 2 million, not including its website.
The newspaper is valued at around 5 billion dollars and has won over 30 Pulitzers. Business Insider and Henry Blodget will never win a Pulitzer.
If the web metric that Business Insider reaches more people than the Wall Street Journal is accurate, this only illustrates that the former is indeed, largely, just a mass of clickbait.
Being part of a story on Business Insider is virtually meaningless compared to the WSJ. Chances are high, too, it’s merely recycled and chopped content from somewhere else.
Jeff Bezos is a big fan and bank-roller of Henry Blodget, mostly for reasons having to do with the latter having hyped Amazon stock early on.
After Bezos bought the Washington Post, he sent Blodget to the paper to tutor its journalists in the ways of web news success. It would have been entertaining to see the rolling eyes, to hear the water-cooler talk after Blodget was no longer in earshot.
“We’re doomed,” somebody probably said.
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The still life of a thicket of Colt 45s grows more lush. At the very end, the hand makes an appearance.
The glitzy version, full rock band with swiped GE commercial, was made about three years ago.
Since then, not so amazingly, nothing has changed.
And Tapatio sells more at my neighborhood market than Sriracha (1) so it makes an appearance. The packets come in bags of potato chips from Mexico, not at all a bad idea.
As an existential question that falls naturally from the music: What is one to do when you’ve been locked out of everything you are able to do in American life?
Since it’s now a condition that affects millions, it’s of some importance.
My answer is that in choosing not to answer it, the country will be an historic and unique example of a corporate fascist state characterized of crushing poverty and small enclaves of well-being where the wealthy and their high-button servants live, sub-nations where the people are protected by the security infrastructure and the general national character of servile obedience to wealth.
Fed by workers who bring them their meals through TaskRabbit, they will be continually delighted by consumer electronics from Apple, always enhanced by apps which allow them to use simple finger motions to summon the help.
1. Town burghers decided they did not want to continue bad relations with the company, anyway. Two weeks after the national news fight, everyone made nice.
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There are enclaves of WhiteManistan in California. They just no longer count for much since no Republican holds any major public office in the state.
But, if you go to the land of northern redwoods, WhiteManistanis have been trying to secede for years.
Yesterday was election day, only one in three counties given the opportunity voted for forming the new state of Jefferson.
Between the three, there are less people than live in Pasadena. In the one voting for new statehood, this translates to to the wishes of probably a little over 4,000 people as a majority.
The people in favor of the new state of Jefferson are, bluntly, stupid. It’s an angry ego thing for them.
These places have no tax base. That they have public services and schools at all is because of the tax money flowing from the rest of the state, you know, the kind of money a still civilized society feels is necessary to be a civil society, even if there are places within it where not too many people live.
Yet the rationalization for the creation of Jefferson is they are tired of having no representation.
Voters in one far Northern California county defeated a measure to call for the creation of a 51st state named Jefferson while those in a neighboring county responded more favorably to the test of whether a secessionist movement has sails in a region accustomed to feeling overlooked by the rest of California.
Del Norte County voters rejected the secessionist measure by 59 percent Tuesday, while Tehama County voters were supporting the proposal by 56 percent with ballots still being tallied.
A similar but unrelated question on the ballot in Siskiyou County, to rename it the Republic of Jefferson, failed with only 44 percent of voters in favor.
Follow the link for the amusing picture.
The ludicrously named Neel Kashkari did win the opportunity to be crushed by Jerry Brown in the upcoming gubernatorial election.
So happy were election workers to see me in the afternoon at my polling place, they insisted I take an “I Voted!” sticker. I had the place to myself, it was a warm afternoon and did not want to disappoint them. Voter turnout was estimated to be a meager 13 percent.
There’s another secessionist movement in California, bankrolled by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who wants to split the state into six different new ones. The most prosperous and bestest to be named, of course, Silicon Valley.
Check the guy pushing it, Tim Draper, singing to handfuls of nerds begging for his money. The guy’s fucking horrible.
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