#i love being a fake historian who is an expert on all these fake facts 😌

[lumiereandcogsworth]

heyyyyyyy hey wait I forgot I follow up on this, you mentioned there was tea regarding Adam’s dad and his first wife 👁️ is that something you’re willing to share bc I am all ears

ahhhh yes yes yes. my LORE!!!!!!! i am absolutely happy to spill that tea. i did indeed mention here that adam is the product of his father’s second wife, not his first. so let me divulge all the stuff that went down before adam came around!!

so, first, some backstory on louis, adam’s father. he was his father, king antoine’s, firstborn. four years later, he has a brother named adrien. adrien dies of illness around age five, and young louis is devastated, but his father is tough and hard and tells his son to buck up! crying is for the ladies. a few years later, louis’s mother, anne michelle, also dies. louis doesn’t cope well with this at all, but he’s so scared of his abusive father that he hides his feelings once again. soon, king antoine remarries. he and his new wife have a daughter, and they name her genevieve after her mother. they entirely dote on genevieve, completely neglecting louis, leaving him to his own devices. he becomes miserable and cruel, and an entirely reckless young man.

when prince louis is 24, king antoine has a health scare that causes him concern. he fears he may not live much longer, and he sees that his son is in no place to take the throne, should he die. so, he arranges for his reckless son to marry an upstanding young lady, to ensure that louis could become king at the moment of antoine’s passing. louis is less than thrilled about his bride, but when they meet on their wedding day, there is actually a spark between them. her name is agnès claudine marie. she was chosen because their marriage would be politically advantageous, as well as look very perfect to the public eye. louis was all ready to loathe this new wife of his. but he just… didn’t.

agnès was firey and stood her ground. she challenged him constantly and louis was pretty shocked by it. (but also… turned on by it as well.) louis was still a very shitty person, like, agnès did Not make him a better man. but they sort of got along in their own twisted way. they appeared a perfect, prim and proper couple to the public eye, but behind closed doors they were very just… toxic and messy. and what made matters worse was that king antoine died shortly after they were married, so louis had to grapple with his father’s death (sprouting the classic, complicated grief that comes along with losing an abusive father), and handle being king, all while never being mentally or emotionally prepared for it, nor having anyone to lean on in the process. it’s ROUGH.

louis had such a quick temper and was insanely jealous. he got pissed at agnès for even so much as talking to another man at a party, even if he was right there by her side. after the parties would end, he’d throw things and break things and scream at her and she’d scream right back, bullying him just as much as he berated her. these arguments almost always ended in ridiculously hot sex. which is funny and i don’t know why i feel the need to mention it but. as a fake historian it’s my duty to share all fake facts. anyway.

eventually, louis and agnès had a daughter. they named her claudine. louis doesn’t feel MUCH about this, as he very much needs a son to be his heir, but he does care enough about agnès to not completely despise his daughter. he’s a pretty indifferent father at this point. although i’m sure he always made claudine feel fairly useless, just for being a girl.

about six years later, agnès became pregnant with their second child. tragedy struck, however, when she died in childbirth. she delivered a boy, but he did not live longer than a day.

THIS is really the turning point where louis goes from bad to the absolute worst. it’s all buried and complicated inside him but he’s truly devastated by agnès’s death. she was always so alive with passion he just never expected to lose her. and the fact that he loses their son, HIS SON, within a day, it just breaks him for good. he goes from awful to downright ruthless. he grows more wicked toward his daughter, seeing too much of her mother in her and blaming her for it. blaming her too, for not being his much-needed male heir. he also becomes a terror in his court, and in general just a horrible person to be around.

unfortunately at this point, the psychological damage that has been done to him just really causes him to spiral out of control. he’s blinded by unprocessed grief and unfounded rage. and the people are in an uproar! who will be their heir! where is the dauphin of france!! all this just makes him desperate to find another wife to give him a male heir. it’s all he cares about now. so, less than a year later, louis found someone. it was similar to prologue adam’s parties where the villages and towns were taxed to send all their maidens. and renée elizabeth aubert was the only daughter of five children. her parents OF COURSE wanted to give her the opportunity to marry THE KING!

and… it worked. louis saw her and found her to be beautiful. (oh, shall i mention here that he’s 30 and she’s 17?) renée wasn’t as tenacious as agnès but she was gorgeous and held her head high. she intrigued him. (and her mentioning that she had four brothers was definitely a factor for louis.) so, he courted her and married her swiftly.

renée settled into her new life as queen. louis distracted and enticed her with the finest clothes and jewelry, making her feel so very adored. she tried to get along with her step-daughter, claudine, who was around 7 years old at this point, but poor princess claudine was so traumatized from losing her mother and from louis’s abuse, so she didn’t really want to connect much with renée. so, claudine spend the vast majority of her time with her governess, who was basically raising her fully at that point.

soon, renée became pregnant, and successfully delivered a boy! huzzah!! adam is here!!

for a few years, things carry on. louis grows more twisted and disinterested in his wife and children. he hardly sees claudine, and he’s disappointed in adam thus far. (adam didn’t start speaking or walking until he was like 2-3, so louis was convinced he was just “stupid” and they all got worried he was possibly deaf. but renée knew her boy wasn’t deaf or stupid, because she actually spent time with him and could see that his mind just worked differently. and he always looked up at her when she called his name.) regardless, louis was also getting increasingly frustrated with renée, because she kept miscarrying pregnancies. (i think giving birth to adam very nearly killed her, and left damage that just made carrying any future pregnancy to full term impossible.) so, louis was now stuck with a useless daughter and a worthless son and a dysfunctional wife. and he made sure they all knew it! he continued to drink and be abusive. claudine sort of gets out of it, eventually going to live in paris for private tutoring and finishing school.

but! claudine would still come home for christmas, and other events. well, approaching one christmas, louis and renée had been away on a trip for diplomatic reasons. on the trip, renée had caught some sort of illness. when they returned, they kept adam away from her (for fear that the heir would catch it) but unfortunately, princess claudine was there, and caught the illness. renée recovered in a couple of weeks. the princess, however, died. she was 12 years old.

adam was 4, and doesn’t really have any memories of his sister claudine. especially since they didn’t really grow up under the same roof. but anyway, louis is just angered by yet ANOTHER death in this godforsaken family of his. and he, despite caring very little for claudine, IS saddened because she WAS his last piece of agnès. he decided to blame renée, since she’s the one who brought the illness home.

well. time carries on. some years later, when adam is nine and a half, he loses his mother, queen renée, to illness as well. he’s left alone with his father, and you know how the story goes…

anyway my take is that the de beaumont family is quite literally cursed by death and for generations they’re just plagued to lose people but Just Enough survive to maintain the family line. and adam, breaking his own separate curse by the enchantress, does then, in turn, break the beaumont family death curse as well. because true love conquers ALL. thank you 💙

[jupiterjames]

A long time ago, I had a therapist who asked me a very simple question. In 2004, he asked me, “what would make you happy right now, this very minute?”

And I thought about it and said, “buying a plane ticket to San Fransisco to go to Yaoi-con and meet my favorite manga artist.”

(Side note in the interest of being a huge geek : it was Yamane Ayano, who was making her first overseas appearance, and wrote about the experience extensively in the omake for her Viewfinder series several times. To which I discovered later actually mentioned me briefly, and not directly by name, since I’d been one of her convention staff escorts.)

ANYWAY, my therapist asked me if I could do that, and I said, yes. So he said to do it. So, I did. And I came back after that weekend and told him that I had had the best time of my life out there.

So, he was amused by discovering how big of a geek I was. And also acknowledged the reason not a whole lot of people knew at the time. Geeks were starting to mainstream then, but nothing like today.

And he suggested that every now and then I should make a list of things that unapologeticlly make me happy. Not stuff I’ll talk to my mom about or whatever. Stuff I was a total geek for and probably kept to myself or even felt a measure of shame over.

Therefore, I present my current list with an air of :

1. J-Pop. The more pop, the more synth, the more I want it. In fact, give me like, anime theme songs. Or the whole soundtrack for Gravitation. I’ll also take the other end of the spectrum with Macross Plus, or frankly, anything by Kanno Yoko.

2. Opera. Fuck, I love opera. I’ve loved it since I was 11 years old and heard it for the first time.

3. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Eat me, I will watch all of his musicals.

4. Romance Novels. Bodice rippers. Beefy dudes falling for average women who are all around better them no matter the time period. Dark Ages, Old West, A Hundred Years Later In Space, women being amazing and causing men to pop inappropriate boners for them all over the place.

5. Supernatural. I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, but holy shit, it’s embarrassing how much I goddamn love that show.

6. Disney and Pixar films. I will watch them with or without my daughter and cry every time.

7. ゲイーコミ/BL/Yaoi manga, etc. Not saying there aren’t so so so so many titles that push through all the wrong ideas about two men having sex and falling in love, especially during the boom in the late 90′s-mid-00′s, but I was published as a BL Manga expert and historian in an actual, real, respected anthropology journal. That’s how much I knew about the whole genre and its roots when it took my interest. So, yes, I will read FAKE, Gravitation, Yubisaki no Koi, Viewfinder, and, Haru wo Diete Ita a million times.

8. Fanfiction. I’m 37 years old, I won’t be embarrassed by this anymore. In fact, the last time I dated a man, I told him I wrote fics and gave him my screen name (as a challenge) when he asked, and he live-texted me his reading of Protect and Serve, and actually really liked it.

That’s all I can think of right now, but it’s a good start? I was so depressing earlier, I thought this would help!

Anyone else wanna join my in sharing their “refuse-to-call-them-guilty-pleasures” pleasures? XD

[newstechreviews]

Kelly Ferro is a busy mom on her way to the post office: leather mini-backpack, brunet topknot, turquoise pedicure with a matching ombré manicure. A hairdresser from Kenosha, Wis., Ferro didn’t vote in 2016 but has since become a strong supporter of Donald Trump. “Why does the news hate the President so much?” she says. “I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research.”

When I ask what she means by research, something shifts. Her voice has the same honey tone as before, and her face is as friendly as ever. But there’s an uncanny flash as she says, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”

Ferro may not have even realized it, but she was parroting elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a pro-Trump viral delusion that began in 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-right corners of the Internet to infect ordinary voters in the suburbs. Its followers believe President Trump is a hero safeguarding the world from a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals.

None of this is even remotely true. But an alarming number of Americans have been exposed to these wild ideas. There are thousands of QAnon groups and pages on Facebook, with millions of members, according to an internal company document reviewed by NBC News. Dozens of QAnon-friendly candidates have run for Congress, and at least three have won GOP primaries. Trump has called its adherents “people that love our country.”

In more than seven dozen interviews conducted in Wisconsin in early September, from the suburbs around Milwaukee to the scarred streets of Kenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, about 1 in 5 voters volunteered ideas that veered into the realm of conspiracy theory, ranging from QAnon to the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax. Two women in Ozaukee County calmly informed me that an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rape and torture children and drink their blood. A Joe Biden supporter near a Kenosha church told me votes don’t matter, because “the elites” will decide the outcome of the election anyway. A woman on a Kenosha street corner explained that Democrats were planning to bring in U.N. troops before the election to prevent a Trump win.

It’s hard to know exactly why people believe what they believe. Some had clearly been exposed to QAnon conspiracy theorists online. Others seemed to be repeating false ideas espoused in Plandemic, a pair of conspiracy videos featuring a discredited former medical researcher that went viral, spreading the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax across social media. (COVID-19 is not a hoax.) When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true.

This matters not just because of what these voters believe but also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense of shared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that might ordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by data on coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock market gains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers” or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won’t believe it. They are impervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected with conspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.

Sinna NasseriA man in a QAnon shirt appears outside a Trump rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 20

Democracy relies on an informed and engaged public responding in rational ways to the real-life facts and challenges before us. But a growing number of Americans are untethered from that. “They’re not on the same epistemological grounding, they’re not living in the same worlds,” says Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse who studies online disinformation. “You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.”

American politics has always been prone to spasms of conspiracy. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously called it “an arena for angry minds.” In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Americans were convinced that the Masons were an antigovernment conspiracy; populists in the 1890s warned of the “secret cabals” controlling the price of gold; in the 20th century, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society fueled a wave of anti-Communist delusions that animated the right. More recently, Trump helped seed a racist lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump seemed to promote a new wild conspiracy every week, from linking Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination to suggesting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. In interviews at Trump rallies that year, I heard voters espouse all manner of delusions: that the government was run by drug cartels; that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim running for a third term; that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed. But after four years of a Trump presidency, the paranoia is no longer relegated to the margins of society. According to the Pew Research Center, 25% of Americans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was intentionally planned. (Virologists, global health officials and U.S. intelligence and national-security officials have all dismissed the idea that the pandemic was human-engineered, although Trump Administration officials have said they have not ruled out the possibility that it was the result of an accident in a lab.) In a recent poll of nearly 1,400 people by left-leaning Civiqs/Daily Kos, more than half of Republican respondents believed some part of QAnon: 33% said they believed the conspiracy was “mostly true,” while 26% said “some parts” are true.

Over a week of interviews in early September, I heard baseless conspiracies from ordinary Americans in parking lots and boutiques and strip malls from Racine to Cedarburg to Wauwatosa, Wis. Shaletha Mayfield, a Biden supporter from Racine, says she thinks Trump created COVID-19 and will bring it back again in the fall. Courtney Bjorn, a Kenosha resident who voted for Clinton in 2016 and plans to vote for Biden, lowered her voice as she speculated about the forces behind the destruction in her city. “No rich people lost their buildings,” she says. “Who benefits when neighborhoods burn down?”

But by far the greatest delusions I heard came from voters on the right. More than a third of the Trump supporters I spoke with voiced some kind of conspiratorial thinking. “COVID could have been released by communist China to bring down our economy,” says John Poulos, loading groceries into his car outside Sendik’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. “COVID was manufactured,” says Maureen Bloedorn, walking into a Dollar Tree in Kenosha. She did not vote for Trump in 2016 but plans to support him in November, in part because “he sent Obama a bill for all of his vacations he took on the American dime.” This idea was popularized by a fake news story that originated on a satirical website and went viral.

On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.

Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product of several interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of local news; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficult to debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will help his political fortunes. It’s also a part of our wiring. “The brain likes crazy,” says Nicco Mele, the former director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, who studies the spread of online disinformation and conspiracies. Because of this, experts say, algorithms on platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to serve up content that reinforces existing beliefs–learning what users search for and feeding them more and more extreme content in an attempt to keep them on their sites.

All this madness contributes to a political imbalance. On the right, conspiracy theories make Trump voters even more loyal to the President, whom many see as a warrior against enemies in the “deep state.” It also protects him against an October surprise, as no matter what news emerges about Trump, a growing group of U.S. voters simply won’t believe it. On the left, however, conspiracy theories often weaken voters’ allegiance to Biden by making them less likely to trust the voting process. If they believe their votes won’t matter because shadowy elites are pulling the country’s strings, why bother going through the trouble of casting a ballot?

Experts who follow disinformation say nothing will change until Facebook and YouTube shift their business model away from the algorithms that reward conspiracies. “We are not anywhere near peak crazy,” says Mele. Phillips, the professor from Syracuse, agrees that things will get weirder. “We’re in trouble,” she adds. “Words sort of fail to capture what a nightmare scenario this is.”

But to voters like Kelly Ferro, the mass delusion seems more like a mass awakening. Trump “is revealing these things,” she says serenely, gesturing with her turquoise-tipped fingernails. Americans’ “eyes are being opened to the darkness that was once hidden.”

After yoga in the morning, Ferro says, she often spends hours watching videos, immersing herself in a world she believes is bringing her ever closer to the truth. “You can’t stop, because it’s so addicting to have this knowledge of what kind of world we’re living in,” she says. “We’re living in an alternate reality.”

With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING CASES

I fortify myself by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases. A founder who knows nothing about fundraising but has made something users love will have an easier time at $x/2. The other reason no one was doing quite what we do in those three months is make sure this new Lisp does some important job better than other languages. And if the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. I had to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of it, and the founders ignore them, because they don't know what I'll do next, but I'll probably think of something. And those that did evolve this way are probably still written in whatever language they use. Valuation is at best third. If there was a problem with a server. Is not that they were experts in technology. Economically, the print media.

Is the worry that made the work good. It means arguments of the form Life is too short for something, you can figure out a way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. You're not just looking for good ideas, so long as you seem to be expected. If your numbers grow significantly between two investor meetings, investors will be hot to close, and if it's no good they may never come back. Starting a startup will change you a lot. Just not now. The real test is revenue. If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably spent too much. This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Same story in 2004. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. It's obvious how too little money could kill you, but unless they behaved badly to treat it as the happiest time of their lives.

If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them. Their fundamental problem is that they all wait as long as no one is forced to use it. But the problem with Europe is not that they can't leave. But powerful as they are in the business of selling information to consumers has always been a stream of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem with Lisp, or at least log n more rewarding. But if capital gains rates vary, you move assets, not yourself, so changes are reflected at market speeds. Defense contractors? 5 didn't have macros, for example, got their seed funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of which won't surprise them, and find it very hard to answer in the general case. But the idea is so visceral it's probably inborn. I learned from Michael Rabin: that the way to make something people want. The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that win. Big companies are biased against new technologies, and to allow programmers to use inline byte code if you need to attract.

A fundraising is when you won't be able to charge for content when it works to charge for content? It was not until Perl 5 if then that the language was suitable for writing serious programs, and yet needs to meet multiple times before making up his mind, has very low expected value. The empirical answer is: no. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. When PR people and journalists recount the histories of startups after they've become big, they always underestimate how uncertain things were at first. I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. How long do they expect it to take? Do you need a San Francisco. The Matrix have such resonance.

When I want to invest—usually because they've heard you're a hot deal. So they don't make something users want. When I was in high school I spent a lot of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. This happens in intellectual as well as moral questions. TV helped Kennedy, so historians are correct in regarding this election as a watershed. Since getting the first offer is most of the work is as artificial as running laps. If the founders aren't sure what to focus on the wrong track.

Don't listen to them. Where did they get their pick of all the departments in a university. There don't seem to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore. The charisma theory may also explain why Democrats tend to lose presidential elections. When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made at great expense by web consultants. 1, solve the core problem in a startup, not a point, and what they use it for. I think people believe that coming up with an idea for something people want, and you need to launch is that it's still so poor. The biggest factor in most investors' opinions of you is the opinion of other investors. At least we know now what it would look like: The author's main point seems to be x. Be a real student and not start a startup. Some investors will let you email them a business plan, but you can learn when you need to get the effect of subroutines when the ui is just a means to an end.

He didn't foresee the future of handheld devices one locked down by Apple? But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. But because the lies are indirect we don't keep a very strict accounting of them. Valuation is at best third. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the real problem. I studied Arabic as a freshman. Or rather, I don't know what the tricks are for convincing investors. In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than by, say, $2 million, they generally expect to offer a significant amount of help along with the money. When parents are of different religions, they'll often invest in phase 3. Saying YC does seed funding for startups is a description in terms of the old one. Basically, unions were just Razorfish. As for the theory being obvious, as far as I know, operate on the manager's schedule.

In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to behave well, they tend to split the difference on the issues, leaving the election to be decided by the one factor they can't control: charisma. Is particularly acute for people who are quite timid, initially, about the idea of starting their own company. Hacking What should you do in the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, and often require you to figure out what lies you were told as a kid, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this essay is the advice we give them. I walked into the final, the main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions would turn up on the page. There's something fake about it. And when you agree there's less to say. Ideas get developed in the process, is money from individual angel investors. The bizarre half is what makes the religion stick, and the transformation was miraculous. In fact I don't intend to make any more iPhone applications unless absolutely necessary. The programs you write in classes differ in three critical ways from the ones you'll write in the real world where gaming the system stops working when you start.

[omegasupremeconservative]

Fake News Watch: CNN Says Trump Is Leading A Hate Movement Against The Media

CNN never ceases to amaze me at just how dedicated they are to putting out fake news. Sure you may find some truth “somewhere” in their reporting but they have such a blatant disregard for the principles of journalism and reporting it should be clear to everyone their agenda isn’t for the betterment of the American public.

It’s time we properly categorized what CNN largely is which is Opinion Journalism. As Wikipedia states this is the type of journalism that “makes no claim of objectivity”. “Unlike advocacy journalism, opinion journalism has a reduced focus on facts or research and its perspective is often of a more personalized variety. Its product may be only one component of a generally objective news outlet, rather than the dominant feature of an entire publication or broadcast network.”

At the same time most of the media in my analysis engages in Advocacy Journalism or a combination of advocacy journalism and opinion journalism.

“Advocacy journalism is a genre of journalism that intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint, usually for some social or political purpose. Because it is intended to be factual, it is distinguished from propaganda. It is also distinct from instances of media bias and failures of objectivity in media outlets, since the bias is intended. ”

I’m not sure there are any journalistic standards that CNN follows but the Canadian Association of Journalists offered some advice for advocacy journalists to follow:

Acknowledge your perspective up front.

Be truthful, accurate, and credible. Don’t spread propaganda, don’t take quotes or facts out of context, “don’t fabricate or falsify”, and “don’t judge or suppress vital facts or present half-truths”

Don’t give your opponents equal time, but don’t ignore them, either.

Explore arguments that challenge your perspective, and report embarrassing facts that support the opposition. Ask critical questions of people who agree with you.

Avoid slogans, ranting, and polemics. Instead, “articulate complex issues clearly and carefully.”

Be fair and thorough.

Make use of neutral sources to establish facts.

Let’s look at the latest claims from Brian Stetler a news anchor on CNN.

Stelter makes the connection that a Trump Tweet at 3:14am instigated and encouraged someone to stick a pipe bomb in the mail and send it to CNN.

Funny how lowly rated CNN, and others, can criticize me at will, even blaming me for the current spate of Bombs and ridiculously comparing this to September 11th and the Oklahoma City bombing, yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, “it’s just not Presidential!”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2018

Then we see Brian Stelter attempt to research more into Trump and his rallies by asking the question WHAT IS TRUMP ACCOMPLISHING WITH HIS RALLIES?

Notable quotes from his commentary:

“when your in that pen you really do feel like a zoo animal” he is referring to the area the press uses to record, shoot video and report on the event at the Trump rally.

“before the rally people are gawking at you, saying your fake news, enemy of the people”.

“parts of the crowd are primed to chant CNN sucks, but then after they did that one of the men walked over and said hey nothing personal”.

“Trump is leading a hate movement against the media” he does acknowledge that “not everyone in his crowd believes it but some do and that is dangerous”.

What is a hate movement? There is no common definition for a hate movement but Wikipedia defines a hate group as this “A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society. According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a hate group’s “primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization.”

If you analyze the MAGA Make America Great Again movement you would find out that MAGA people love their country, they are very patriotic, they could be religious but not always, they believe in helping America First but they don’t hate or dislike our friends around the globe. Conservatives have been treated very unfairly in the media and yes many conservatives and Republicans HATE the media but in a way that someone would hate their in-laws or hate rush our traffic or hate their boss, or hate it when their taxes go up.

There is anger and resentment towards the mainstream media and cable news outlets like CNN and rightly so. CNN tries to be slick and suggest that Trumps creating a hate movement and the result is what we saw last week with various pipe bombs mailed to prominent critics of Donald Trump which CNN called TRUMPS TARGETS.

CNN needs to frame Trump and his supporters as a hate movement to subjugate MAGA. To remove any credibility of it being a peaceful movement. This is why CNN and other media outlets will be quick to highlight and use anything they can to point out that Trump is riling up his followers and making people hate the media.

The Real Problem The Media Has

More and more people everyday are beginning to distrust the media and Donald Trump has been very effective at challenging the ruling class in the press who aren’t used to being challenged. CNN can write a fake story and within an instance one of Trump’s tweets can vaporize the impact of it. Trump has shown that he is light years ahead of the mainstream media in terms of persuading and attracting loyal followers. PERSUATION IS THE KEY WORD.

Scott Adams does an amazing job of outling and explaining the difference between Trump’s persuasion skills and Hillary’s. Note Scott Adams is a trained hypnotist and persuasion expert along with being the creator of the cartoon Dilbert.

CNN Wants True Leadership

It is an important skill to look at someone whom you want to believe, someone who looks good or talks good, someone personable and likeable and be able to determine when they are telling you the truth or not.

Let’s analyze and summarize what social narrative engineer aka news anchor Anderson Cooper is trying to do here:

He tells us suspicious packages have been sent to very prominent opponents of Donald Trump.

Whoever sent them is still on the loose (not as of the date of writing this blog)

He tells us we are learning far more about the “pieces of this plot” (in other words who is responsible DONALD TRUMP)

He’s “keeping them honest” by focusing on what those “pieces add up to”. Insert the word circumstance for pieces.

He tells us that the President of the United States can’t seem to see what these “pieces add up to”. In other words why can’t Trump see HE is the problem.

He proceeds to engage his scare tactic by telling us to remember IF those devices had exploded the country would be making funeral arrangements right now for 2 MURDERED ex presidents, a former vice president, a former secretary of state, a sitting Congresswomen, a former head of the CIA, a renowned actor and the people we work alongside of everyday. Not to mention potentially postal workers, and police or any number of bystanders. The phrase 2 murdered ex presidents was included in his prewritten monologue to heighten the emotional response that the viewers would have.

Cooper then introduces an authority figure into his routine “as Presidential Historian Douglass Brinkley pointed out earlier today the sheer number of targets and devices is unprecendented and given who was being targeted this is the kind of event when Presidents traditionally might become aware of the awesome responsibility they have to all Americans of all political stripes. It is a moment that traditionally inspires deep humility, its a moment of leadership. I am reminded that Donald Trump is not a traditional President, nor right now is he acting like a traditional leader.

This is a play on words, Anderson Cooper suggests that in moments of crisis or events a leader is supposed to have deep humility. What he really means is this event happened to your critics why don’t you stop attacking them politically because something bad almost happened to them.

Watch the rest of the video and play it extra slow so you can begin to see he is artfully using language as a weapon to influence you in a calm sympathetic tone. CNN spends very little time discussing the actual culprit who has now been caught, the culprit in their eyes is Donald Trump.

Mark Levin Goes Postal On Left-Wing Caller

This is another instructive video, just listen to this short 7 minute video or you can read the transcript below. The liberal caller believes that the influence of the President is much greater than any senators, congress person, or anyone else in our society as such his rhetoric has triggered someone to commit acts of violence against his enemies. His example is when Donald Trump talked about punching someone in the face at one of his rallies. Yes it’s true. Barack Obama also talked about bringing a gun to a knife fight. Neither of these comments disturb me by the way.

Audio Transcript Courtesy of Trump Fan Network YouTube Channel

Robert Garland Texas the great WBA PA liberal GO.

Hello Marc I listen to your show often I don’t agree with you almost ever but I have up until now respected you greatly because I think that everything you said is sincere.

Okay right sir now don’t psychoanalyze me go ahead and make your point you don’t know me you know nothing about me I don’t know you just make your point.

My point is that you are trying to say that others in America whether they’re senators or whatever have the same amount of weight in what they say as the President of the United States.

I absolutely didn’t say that but I will say that the president of the United States has said nothing nothing that would trigger somebody to do something like this nothing.

At his rallies he has literally called and said I wish it was the time where we could just punch people in the face.

Yeah he mentioned once punching but let me ask you a question sir do you know who Oscar Lopez Rivera is?

Let me ask you question I want to have a discussion with you if you will allow it, do you know who Oscare Lopez Rivera is?

I’m gonna ask you one more time do you know who Oscar Lopez Rivera is it’s not a trick yes or no?

Yes but that is not what we are talking about.

Who is he who is he? Get him off the air he’s a liar.

He was the head of the FALN bombers in this country that resulted in the death of a police officer two police officers and several bombings and Barak Obama commuted his sentence and all the rest of them that were involved in that gang Bill Clinton pardoned them.

Now you want to talk about presidential responsibility let’s talk about presidential responsibility.

Barack Obama best buddies with Ayers another bomber Bernardine Dohrn another bomber commutes the sentence of Oscar Lopez Rivera who never recant who never backed off what he did even Clinton wouldn’t commute his sentence while commuting all the others.

I don’t need lectures from you people on the left and neither does the President of the United States you are full of it.

“The Presidents said punch somebody in the mouth” these guys were bombing the country! Civilians police officers and you elected Obama president and you reelected Clinton president shocking.

Absolutely shocking and I have to listen to the moral outrage of the left the moral outrage of the media it’s preposterous it’s disgusting it’s like this khashoggi matter you’ve this Iran that slaughters journalists left and right slaughters gay people left and right slaughters Christians left and right the second highest execution rate in the world behind China Obama facilitates a deal in which he gives them a hundred and fifty billion dollars and one and a half billion dollars in the cover of darkness what foreign currency they killed American soldiers and suddenly the left is upset with Trump’s rhetoric.

They’re not upset with their own rhetoric I never get a caller here from the left complaining about Antifa it is a violent left-wing militia group a Marxist militia group and we had individuals on CNN like Don Lemon people on MSNBC who downplayed their violence.

They train they come armed, excuses are made for them but Trump’s rhetoric you see is what’s pushing the country over the edge.

One of the biggest animals in human history is Adolf Hitler they call him Hitler they call American citizens who voted for him Nazis racists.

But it’s Trump you see if the left and the Democrats and the media had accepted the results of this last election in 2016 criticized a president of course but try to destroy him come up with Russian conspiracy theories.

Act like they’re the National Enquirer with every allegation try and force him from office talk about his mental illness and on and on and on.

If they accepted his legitimacy as president and criticized his policies or what he was saying that’s one thing but that’s not what’s going on in this country that’s not what’s going on in this country and we all know it.

So don’t call your little whiny ass to me and sayyes but Trump said you had no idea who Oscar Lopez Rivera was none and you don’t give a damn you didn’t care about Bill Ayers you didn’t care about Bernardine Dohrn Khalidi another one you don’t care about any of them.

Incredible really incredible really and what exactly has Trump said that would cause somebody to try and blow up 12 other people or threatened 12 other people.

What does he say? He says punch somebody in the face?

So when Obama said get in the face when holder said kick them when they’re down and I go on and on and on did that spark some Republican? No.

When Bernie Sanders goes on and on about how horrible America how about how unjust it is how people are discriminated against how racist we are on and on and on what kind of support does that build for a society or does it cause some nut to go to a baseball field in Alexandria Virginia with a sniper rifle and start shooting Republicans with a list in his pocket. We don’t need any lectures from you leftist that’s for sure or you clowns in the media I’ll be right back.

Not many people can go off like Mark Levin. CNN is going to lose this information battle. This battle for the minds of good Patriotic people. They will lose because the truth will always prevail.

The post Fake News Watch: CNN Says Trump Is Leading A Hate Movement Against The Media appeared first on Alternative News Source, Research and Analysis.

source http://ugetinformed.com/politics/fake-news-watch-cnn-says-trump-is-leading-a-hate-movement-against-the-media

[robertmcangusgroup]

The Daily Tulip

The Daily Tulip

Tuesday 28th February 2017

Good Morning Gentle Reader…. as we collectively fly though the heavens gazing at the stars as we journey through life… and our journey, that is Bella and I was down to the ocean to watch the fishing boats catch lunch or dinner for someone early this morning, the little one man fishing boat with its light ablaze slowly pulled the baited line through the water ..I have no idea what he caught or if in fact he caught anything, but for a moment I was as one with him “The Old Man and the Sea” … Bella and I turned and started our journey once again back to the house for Dog Food and Coffee…Enjoy your day…

NOKIA 3310 MOBILE PHONE RESURRECTED AT MWC 2017… Nokia's 3310 phone has been relaunched nearly 17 years after its debut. Many consider the original handset iconic because of its popularity and sturdiness. More than 126 million were produced before it was phased out in 2005. The revamped version will be sold under license by the Finnish start-up HMD Global, which also unveiled several Nokia-branded Android smartphones. One expert said it was a "fantastic way" to relaunch Nokia's phone brand. "The 3310 was the first mass-market mobile and there's a massive amount of nostalgia and affection for it," commented Ben Wood from the technology consultancy CCS Insight. "If HMD had just announced three Android devices they would have barely got a couple of column inches in the press. "So, the 3310 is a very clever move and we expect it will sell in significant volumes." I wonder if the Motorola “Brick” will be next???

FRENCH HISTORIAN HENRY ROUSSO NEARLY DEPORTED FROM US… A French historian on his way to a conference in Texas was detained for 10 hours by US border officials and threatened with deportation. Officials at Texas A&M University said Henry Rousso was going to be returned to Paris as an illegal alien "due to a visa misunderstanding". The university stopped the deportation with help from a law professor, local news website The Eagle reported. President Donald Trump has pledged to tighten US border controls. "I have been detained 10 hours at Houston International Airport about to be deported," Mr Rousso, 62, confirmed in a tweet on Saturday. "The officer who arrested me was 'inexperienced'," he added.  The Egyptian-born Jewish scholar, a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, is a specialist on French World War Two history. Texas A&M University had announced to the conference on Friday that Mr Rousso had been detained upon arriving at Houston airport on Wednesday. Senior official Richard Golsan said there had been a misunderstanding regarding the parameters of his visa, The Eagle reported. "When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out," Mr Golsan told the meeting. He said the university enlisted the help of law school professor and immigrant rights expert Fatma Marouf. "Due to her prompt and timely intervention, Rousso was released," Mr Golsan said. Ms Marouf described the behaviour of customs officials as an "extreme response". "It seems like there's much more rigidity and rigor in enforcing these immigration requirements and the technicalities of every visa," she said, quoted by The Eagle. Mr Rousso went on to attend the conference and thanked his supporters in a post on Twitter.

INDIA CASH HANDLER ARRESTED OVER ALLEGED ATM CURRENCY SCAM… The new 2,000 rupee note was introduced last year after India banned most of its currency to fight corruption and counterfeiting. A cash handler has been arrested for allegedly swapping currency notes with fake bills at an automated cash point, Delhi police have told the BBC. Mohammad Isha is accused of replacing the original bills while carrying out his job to refill the ATM last week. One customer got four 2,000 rupee notes marked "children's bank of India", local media reported. The State of Bank of India said the possibility of fake notes being dispensed was "very remote". India's cash crisis explained. The bank said it had handed over the CCTV footage obtained from the ATM to the police, who confirmed to the BBC that Mr Isha had been arrested. "He has told us that he replaced the notes while refilling the ATM machine. Further investigation is under way," Delhi police spokesperson Deependra Pathak said. Mr Isha was working for a private firm that handled cash refilling at State Bank of India ATMs in Delhi. India introduced a new 2,000 rupee note last year after the government brought in cash currency reforms to fight corruption and counterfeiting.

PAKISTAN AIRLINE ADMITS TAKING EXTRA PASSENGERS IN AISLE… PIA has in recent months endured several knocks to its reputation Pakistan International Airlines is investigating how seven extra passengers were allowed to stand in the aisles on a flight to Saudi Arabia, a spokesman told the BBC. The passengers were allowed on the 20 January flight to Medina despite every seat being filled, the airline said. Details of the flight have only emerged now because of extensive investigations by Dawn newspaper. Staff had issued additional handwritten boarding passes, the paper reported. Such an over-crowded flight would have caused problems in an emergency evacuation, aviation experts said, and passengers would not have had access to oxygen if it was suddenly required. This is the first time the airline is known to have boarded excess passengers on a flight.  The flight in question went from Karachi to Medina carrying a total of 416 passengers, on a Boeing 777 with a total seating capacity of 409, including staff seats.

MO FARAH SAYS HE IS 'A CLEAN ATHLETE' AND 'FRUSTRATED' BY LEAKED REPORT ON SALAZAR….. Great Britain's Mo Farah says he is a "clean athlete" after a leaked report suggested his American coach may have broken anti-doping rules to boost the performance of some of his athletes. The leaked US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) report, dated March 2016, was obtained by the Sunday Times."If Usada or any other anti-doping body has evidence of wrongdoing they should publish it and take action rather than allow the media to be judge and jury," said Farah, who has won 5,000m and 10,000m gold at the past two Olympics. The coach in question, Alberto Salazar, has been under investigation since a BBC Panorama programme made allegations about drugs use at his US training base. According to the Sunday Times, the leaked report also alleges Salazar, head coach of the world famous endurance Nike Oregon Project (NOP), routinely gave Farah and other athletes legal prescription drugs with potentially harmful side-effects without a justifiable medical reason. The investigation into Salazar, who is also a consultant to UK Athletics (UKA), has been under way since at least June 2015. Salazar and Farah deny they have ever broken anti-doping rules. "It's deeply frustrating that I'm having to make an announcement on this subject," said 33-year-old Farah in a statement. "I am a clean athlete who has never broken the rules in regards to substances, methods or dosages and it is upsetting that some parts of the media, despite the clear facts, continue to try to associate me with allegations of drug misuse.

AND FINALLY… HE WHO LAPS LAST… Kurt Busch Wins Daytona 500… The only lap first-time winner Kurt Busch led on Sunday was the final one, but that’s all he needed. It was the first race using NASCAR’s new format, dividing the 500-mile event into three stages in order to make drivers race harder. It worked: The race went from mundane to madness, with 35 of 40 cars involved in accidents, including pre-race favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr. Even Busch’s car was “completely thrashed” by the time he claimed victory with a last-lap pass of Kyle Larson.

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this, last Tuesday morning of the month …

Our Tulips today are a bouquet of Parrot Tulips....

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Tuesday 28th February 2017 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in ….. Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus

[shesaidwithirony]

La Repubblica interview on Social Media in the Trump Era

Questions from Luciana Grosso (La Repubblica)

Luciana Grosso: What’s next? What is coming after the social network era? What will arrive after this social-mania, if it will ever end?

Geert Lovink: I do not mind to act like a futurologist but I have to disappoint you: we’ll be stuck in this social media age for some time to come. We Europeans failed to develop alternatives. There is no ‘market’ and we all let it happen: crippling monopolies are a fact, we’ve locked ourselves in and now we complain. Unless there’s going to be a global crisis or war, we will not able to free ourselves from the ‘tremendous’ addiction to these real-time apps. I have given up that individuals who make the courageous exodus will make a difference. Boredom or dispear won’t make a difference either; the physical, social and emotional dependency is already too big. We were naive to think that users would move on, as they did from Geocities to Blogger to Friendster to MySpace. Then it stopped at Facebook. Youngsters migrated to Whatsapp and Instagram, but these are owned by the same old Facebook Corp. and are currently being integrated into the same data empire. What’s left is the proposal of a public takeover of platforms (including the datacentre infrastructure). This a political proposal we need to further discuss and put on the table in this year of crucial elections.

For decades European elites deliberately looked away, convinced that the internet was a fad, a fashion that would fade away, and now they have been pushed to the sides. Brussels thought telcos such as Orange and Telefonica, and traditional technology players such as Philips and Siemens would develop alternatives. Nothing happened. Instead, we’re using hardware produced in China with services controlled in the United States. Lately Europeans have woken up and have installed austerity-driven neo-liberal ‘creative industries’ policies that try to foster start-up cultures. Ever since Evgene Morozov we know that techno-solutionism is not the answer. Developing an app is not a solution to overcome platform capitalism. For the social media drama it might already be too late, unless drastic measures are taken that implements anti-trust measures overnight.

LG: In the beginning, Internet was seen as a utopian place where the only rule was ‘no rules’: everyone was free to say and write and read whatever they wanted. Was this in fact the case at the time?

GL: There is no doubt that 1990s internet culture was more wild. But I am not nostalgic. There were far less users. The user base was homogeneous and the interfaces and operating systems didn’t work very well. These days we’re not often confronted anymore with crashing devices. Instead, dysfunctionality has moved to the level of society. The smoothness of today comes with a price. Jaron Lanier often points at the anarchic nature of individual homepages—a far cry from the standardized communication environments of Facebook and Twitter. Why learn Linux or XML anymore as an ordinary user? This overall loss of technical knowledge amongst users has lead to crisis in media literacy. The idea is that we do not need anymore instruction. All platforms are self-evident for a child—and this is what we actually see happening around us. This is also the case of moderation. That’s an art form: how to run a community, to overcome differences and structures debates (without policing them). One of the sources of the problem here is the lack of tools to develop communities. Social media are not built for that, on purpose. They are outward-looking with the aim to connect as much data with other data with the aim to sell the profiles to third parties for advertisement purposes. Everyone knows that social media is an alienating echo chamber and fosters narcissism as a necessary act in the struggle for self promotion. In the end, empowerment is not satisfying. We need a cold restart, from scratch, and build peer-to-peer networks that focus on collaboration and discussion, not just on ‘news’ that ‘shared’ and commented by ‘friends’. This has already been said time and again, but nothing happens. That’s how we got stuck. Many feel that way. That’s the disillusion of the internet, which is no longer a progressive tool nor a parallel reality but an abyss that takes us down further into a state of inequality, fear and hatred.

LG: How did that happen, a place celebrated for freedom becoming so dark, filled with lies, violence and fascism? Is this jungle what freedom looks like?

GL: I have not lost my belief in freedom and subversion. Let’s go back to Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom. There is so much fascinating literature that we can read together. Take Hannah Ahrendt, or Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. Promote such thinkers and contrast them with the libertarian dogma’s of Ayn Rand that is being promoted so much these days. Which freedom do we want? Many of us have second thoughts when it comes to radical openness. We can’t deal with the ‘open society’ and intuitively search for a ‘New Order’ as Michael Seemann, the Berlin ‘Kontrollverlust’ blogger and author of Digital Tailspin, calls it. What comes after radical transparency? Will we find a new equilibrium after the dust has settled? Do we withdrawal in a new cult of secrecy, as Byung Chul-Han in his Transparency Society proposes? Will we ever get used to the bright light of over-exposure, to put in terms of Jean Baudrillard? I would love to answer your question in an orthodox psycho-analytical way. Why do we want to punish ourselves after a period of excessive communication and radical freedom? How can we escape this vicious circle of orgy and remorse? Where is the psycho-historian Lloyd deMause, now that we need him? Who updates his epic book on Reagan’s America?

LG: Should we be afraid of fake news? Lies and the manipulation of the truth have always been around, ever since the times of Moses. Why is this suddenly a problem?

GL: As you say,  fake news has always been core business, it’s was once called ‘manufacturing consent’ or ‘public relations’. As Morozov tweets: “Messing with the media, celebrities, facts, etc does not really get in the way of getting the job done – for Trump, it’s *the* job.” Our problem is the ‘authenticity bonus’  of direct communication. We do not see the social media managers that operate behind their dashboards (as Douglas Rushkoff teaches us). Why the fake news question did not come earlier has got to do with moment in which social media became mainstream. Until recent, the Net was still looked upon as something unknown and new, at best an additional toy. Experts talked about multi-media as if it was some sort of symphony, a media concert in search for harmony between all the different channels. But the liberal ‘multimodality’ view of ‘remediation’ has been blasted away by the directness and real-time of social media.

Now that the introductory period of ‘digitization’ has come to an end, we are exposed to an unprecedented form of acceleration.  In the original idea of networked democracy it was assumed that the multiplicity of channels would lead to a greater diversity of voices. This did not materialize and it would be useful to reconstruct where precisely the process derailed. In classic internet fashion, things move fast, and that will also be the case with the fake news meme itself, which will be overruled by even more spectacular propaganda acts, pseudo-events–and historical tragedies.

LG: Is preventive censorship a solution?

GL: In past weeks we see that the  ‘perception management’ industry is busy figuring out which ‘anti-missile missiles’ they should invent to calm down the media frenzy. A Minority Report technique to isolate evil behaviour might work on the individual level but is no longer effective once the political upheaval has already started. Facebook is entirely naive as they still believe in filtering of ‘fake news’ by temporary consultancy firms such as Correctiv or Snopes, as if this problem can be solved and will disappear in a few months. There are also fact-checking firms on specific topics such as Ukraine or climate change. The next step is the ‘democratization’ of the meme design workshops, ‘meme sprints’ where multi-disciplinary ‘agile’ teams of designers, coders and ’trolls’ gather to unleash ‘meme wars’–and then disappear: organized networks that take the ideas of Adbusters one step further but shy away from the long-term commitment of the work that is done out of The Agency, a presumed ’troll farm’ office building in St. Petersburg (see also this Guardian article). Not far from here is the NATO observatory in Riga that looks in Russian social media manipulations.

LG: Will our grandchildren read Facebook or The New York Times?

GL: The New York Times, which by then will be owned by Facebook. That would be the Dutch pragmatist answer. The correct one is of course neither of them. The kids will navigate through Uber Entertainment. You must have heard from Alfabet, the mother company of Google, an umbrella structure for mega corporations, which is also likely to happen to Facebook as well. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now owns The Washington Post. The new rubber barons are running the largest non-profits in the world (think of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). Others enter different industries such as space travel.  What we need is a new iteration of cyberpunk literature that takes us on a tour through corporate cities owned by Snapchat, Tesla factories that mass manufacture killer robots and the Huawei hacking bunker, a smart internet observatory, masterminded by Chinese hipsters.

http://networkcultures.org/geert/2017/01/25/la-repubblica-interview-on-social-media-in-the-trump-era/

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Getting a Whiff of Perfume’s Illusions

The Garden of Scents (all image by Projectiles Arte Factory for Le Grand Musée de Parfum, unless noted)

We’ve all experienced it, whether we think of ourselves as olfactory aficionados or not: flashbacks and recollections triggered by perfume. Scent can literally manipulate emotions by sending signals to our hippocampus, the part of the brain that guards the pathways to the different elements that make up a memory. These memories intertwine with smells, conjuring up the past like a visceral film reel.

When Helena Fitzgerald, who writes the perfume newsletter “The Dry Down” with Rachel Syme, thinks about a fragrance she purchased in the beginning of a relationship, she is “overcome with a gratitude that I have a way to get back to that time in our lives, that I will still have that way to return to the first version of our loving each other, even when we’re old.” Perfume becomes a physical vessel for something intangible, a bottle containing not just scent notes but the excitement of a first trip abroad or the gut-punch of heartbreak.

Perfume Organ by Jason Bruges, an artistic work created specifically for the museum

In addition to recalling the past, perfume can have a profound effect on the present. It’s a method of communication: enticing or repulsive, playful or aggressive. “Being able to tell stories about ourselves rates high on the modern list of necessities,” writes Tara Isabella Burton at Real Life Magazine. She’s talking about the so-called “lipstick effect,” when an economic downturn results in higher sales of small luxury items. This seems to be the case with perfume, which became more affordable and accessible in recent years through the advent of sites like Surrender to Chance, where you can purchase decants of perfumes that may not otherwise be offered in budget sizes or as samples.

A bottle of Bapteme du Feu

Buying perfume via the internet has only added to its storytelling qualities. Most online shops use two descriptions for scented products: details about the actual notes, and a vignette that translates those notes into something we can better understand. To take just one example, Serge Lutens’s Bapteme de Feu is made of six components, three of which are “powdery notes,” “castoreum,” and “osmanthus.” This is difficult to imagine; easier to make sense of is the accompanying text describing the fragrance as “the moment when we’ve jumped and sit awaiting the unknown.” It’s a perfume for the daring, or those who want to be, a bottle of “dressing for the job you want” or “faking it ‘til you make it.”

“The perfumer is an illusionist before he is a chemist” states a press release for Le Grand Musée de Parfum, which opened in Paris this past December. Paris has a perfume museum already — several, in fact — but they tend to be run by specific perfumers, like the Musée de Parfum attached to and owned by Parfumerie Fragonard. By contrast, Le Grand Musée is co-owned by more than 100 perfume houses and industry experts, and it is more concerned with the art of perfume than individual perfumes as art. Through immersive experiences (like the Garden of Scents, a room of futuristic-looking flowers that spray mystery smells into the air for visitors to identify) and workshops, Le Grand Musée seeks to utilize the power of scent to “access the sphere of dreams.”

Sensory immersion exhibit

Perfume in the Middle Ages

This sound a bit woo-woo, but it’s actually not: Through the olfactory cortex’s role in the limbic system, which pilots emotions and behavior, perfume is able to influence both our beliefs and our fantasies. It’s an influence so notable that it must be controlled for in scientific testing: Scent samples are often misidentified to subjects to ensure they’re reacting to the scent itself and not just its associated memory. Study results from the Warwick Olfaction Research Group in England show that some fragrances have similar effects on the brain to those of antidepressant drugs, and the University of Tokyo concluded that scents like jasmine can act as stimulants. Perfumes that instill feelings of calm or alertness via memory, then, are potentially just as powerful.

Cadavre Exquis bottle and booklet (image courtesy of Bruno Fazzolari and Antonio Gardoni)

Perfumers are well aware of this power, and they are getting weird. While the bigger names iterate on high-earning formulas, many lesser-known artisans are outdoing themselves with each release, creating concoctions that challenge the wearer. Some shirk pleasant smells for the foul (Bruno Fazzolari and Antonio Gardoni’s Cadavre Exquis, which smells like rigor mortis), others aim to unsettle (Aftelier’s Memento Mori, named after the Victorian jewelry designed to “remind the viewer [or wearer] of their mortality and the shortness of human life”), and a select few seek to provoke (Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab’s Phobia series, with each scent inspired by a fear).

Such fragrances may not be “pleasing” in a traditional sense, but that hardly makes them unappealing — horror movies are incredibly popular, after all. It is this kinship with media, a closer association with film and literature than other wearables, that makes perfume so captivating. The glass bottles decorating our dressers and vanities aren’t just aesthetic layers to add and remove but a story we tell the world about ourselves. And, like any story, perfume is highly subjective: What one individual finds moving might disgust someone else, and a nondescript fragrance worn for olfactory pleasure alone could produce intense, unexpected emotional reactions in those who smell it.

Perfume in the Middle Ages

Given perfume’s effect on everything from physical health to emotions, it’s not particularly surprising that Le Grand Musée has opened during a time that, for many of us, is uncertain and chaotic. We are compelled to tell stories, and museum president Guillaume de Maussion contends that perfume possesses “a gift for expressing who we are and what we aspire to be.” Like a character’s theme song, scent precedes you into a room and lingers when you leave, both announcer and historian. And like the hippocampus, it’s a master of pathways: those between being and narrative. If we must live in the anxiety-ridden moment right after the jump, shouldn’t we at least smell like it?

The post Getting a Whiff of Perfume’s Illusions appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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