#also further proof that our government is bullshit

[the-hem]

"Firm Certitude." From the Tejo-Bindu Upanishad. "A drop of glory."

45. Those who are greatly developed through the ripening (of their past Karmas) attain the state of Brahman; others are simply reciters of words. 46. Those who are clever in arguments about Brahman, but are without the action pertaining to Brahman and who are greatly attached to the world – those certainly are born again and again (in this world) through their Ajnana; 47. (The former) never remain, even for half a moment – without the Vritti of Brahman, like Brahma and others, Sanaka "experienced", etc., Suka "aphrodisiac" and others. 48. When a cause is subject to changes, it (as an effect) must also have its cause. When the cause ceases to exist in truth, the effect perishes through right discrimination. Then that substance (or principle) which is beyond the scope of words, remains pure. 49. After that, Vritti Jnana arises in their purified mind; through meditation with transcendental energy, there arises a firm certitude.

Purity and certainty are firmly ensconced in the truth. They are all the same.

The problems we are having between the self, selves, Self and our religions, politics and systems of living are because we can't accept how words and letters can only imply the proper directions we are supposed to take.

There must be recognition of how the truth dissolves itself and...comes true after one reads or hears about it. There must be both knowledge of and proof of a truth, there must be observation or there is no certain truth.

Vrittis are Declarations of the most important Truths handed down by God to help us civilize and govern self and others.

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Well, He is. There should be no further need to process this or stir up bullshit all day long about it. We were made to apprehend the Nature of God such as it is and even a dipshit can handle this.

"I am This." We are. Choose otherwise and go to hell, your choice, leave the rest of us out of it.

Simeon Horeb: "Honorable men are God's Lights unto the world."

There are many many others. Filtered through a purified mind their results are provable. When and if this is done on the surface of this chaotic world, I expect the certainty of their principals will be pretty obvious.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Bureaucracy

Well, that went better than expected. Though now that I’m not dealing with a perfectly charming lady who doesn’t deserve to be the recipient of my ire over something she literally cannot control, I’m going to be a little bit pissed off over the fact that we’re still looking at a five-week wait between the initial application for Universal Credit benefits and actually receiving money. But I’m going to be pissed at the government - specifically Theresa May, who set this whole bit of bullshit up in the first place.

Seriously, the Tory government, man. There are no words.

At least they’re dealing reasonably well with the current situation at the public-facing level. I mean, they’ve shut down all the offices in which face-to-face interviews would happen, and so while normally I’d turn up with a whole file folder full of proof of identity and the like, I just got a few questions confirming name, address, date of birth, residential status, and so on. Also there would generally be a lot of questions about what kinds of jobs I’m looking for and my job-hunting plan, but given the situation ... well, all I got was “Did you lose your job because of the current situation?” and I have a feeling that was more out of curiosity than anything on a checklist.

The thing that I’m starting to worry about on behalf of the poor workers trying to deal with people is ... okay, one of the first things I got from the woman I spoke to was, “My apologies if there are any hold-ups; I’ve come in to find that there are new guidelines in place starting today, so you’re the first person I’ve run through this with the new guidelines”. A little ways further in, I got, “...Oh. There’s a message here saying that guidelines are changing again on Tuesday.” So there’s a lot of on-the-fly overhaul going on. I don’t know what any of it means, and I don’t think the people dealing with the phone interviews do either. I can’t imagine the uncertainty ... particularly in a role that, given the current situation, involves people having to work at 9am on a Saturday - on Easter weekend, at that.

According to my interviewer, people have been really nice to her so far. This is good; I know how people can get in stressful times. I mean, hell, I work in medical; I’ve been on the receiving end of that whole deal where people are stressed to the hilt and take it out on the first person that comes along. I told her when we started the call that I was going to be as nice to her as possible, and proved it when I had all relevant documentation in front of me and ready to be quoted if necessary - residence permit, stuff like that. She didn’t need it because of the streamlining, but she thanked me for being so organised. I didn’t say it, but my thought was, “I’m a secretary; I can’t go into a call like this and not have all the details on hand...”

But yeah, everything’s confirmed so that’s all good to go ... but there’s the minor issue that there’s still that five week delay. Who the fuck decided that waiting five weeks to provide benefits for people was a good idea? Theresa May, apparently. I know it’s supposed to be some kind of anti-fraud measure, or centralising it to cut down on communication issues or something but for fuck’s sake, people who are limping by from paycheque to paycheque can’t always wait five weeks to receive a payment. It’s probably okay for people who are looking at a final paycheque from their permanent, paid-monthly jobs, but for agency staff like me, it’s a fucking nightmare. Then again, I remember the outrage last year when we got May sticking to her guns about the Universal Credit scheme despite being told by an awful lot of MPs - and the work and pensions secretary - that some people would be worse off under the Universal Credit scheme.

One thing to be said about this whole pandemic - it’s really underlining where the problem areas are with ... well, just about all of our systems and safety nets. I read an article about how there’s going to be a mass advertising campaign when things are a bit more settled as per SARS-CoV-2 to try to convince us to get back to normal. I don’t want things to go back to ‘normal’. ‘Normal’ is bullshit. ‘Normal’ is hurting so many people. Can we just ... not go back to ‘normal’? Can we try something else? I want to try something else. This would be a great time to tell ‘normal’ to go fuck itself and try something else.

[kramlabs]

undefined

https://inspiredhumandevelopment.com/blog/the-basis-of-bullshit-bias-logical-fallacy-and-our-imperfect-percept

“In addition to the biases built from past experience, each of us are subject to a vast number of cognitive biases inherent to human thought—what Warren Buffet’s business partner, Charlie Munger, calls the psychology of human misjudgment. Some of the most powerful include:

Consistency Bias: The human mind is like the female egg. Once one sperm gets in, there is a shut-off mechanism that prevents any other from getting in. In the United States we have access to as many thoughts and ideas as we want to explore. Yet how many people are raised Methodist and say, you know, I think Hinduism makes more sense? How many even change from Baptism to Catholicism? How many say, you know these three branches of government and bi-cameral legislature have been cool, but the German parliamentary system makes more sense to me? These changes of mind are very unlikely to made without strong social pressure.

Liking Distortion: Humans naturally hold ourselves and our opinions with inflated regard. Thus, we all see ourselves as above average and gravitate to people who think like we do. It is why we consider our political views obvious to anyone who thinks and everyone who disagrees is an idiot. It is also, probably, why my father was certain I was the greatest high-school football player in the history of the world and why I’ve noticed a similar trend with most parents.

Social Proof Bias: How convenient that many Americans tend to fall into two neat political parties, each sharing very consistent views with the rest of their pack. Our tendency to believe what others do—social proof—has allowed humans to normalize bizarre beliefs and narrow simplifications even against overwhelming evidence. Hello Westboro. Hello feeding children Pop Tarts for breakfast. Similarly we see the over-influence from authority that was shown in the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. If wondering how genocide is possible, look no further.

Deprival Super-Reaction Bias: Studies suggest that losses are twice as psychologically powerful as gains. We will go to great lengths in order to mitigate small losses while not lifting a finger when modest effort would yield tremendous gains.

Reciprocation Tendency: The Marketing professor, Dr. Robert Cialdini went around campus asking people to take young children to the zoo. One in six said yes. Then he went around asking different people if they would devote two afternoons a week to watching young children. 100% said no, but he followed that question up by saying, well would you at least take them to the zoo once. By starting with the big ask, he tripled the frequency of people agreeing to take children to the zoo.

Contrast-Caused Distortion: Similarly, we are easily fooled by contrast. Put a hand in hot water and a hand in cold water, then plunge them both into room temperature water. One hand perceives that water as cold and the other hot, yet it’s the same water. This has tangible effects in sales. That mediocre home seems like a dream after the real-estate agent shows you a few over-priced dumps.

It is with flawed senses, heavily driven by bias and a very narrow set of experiences, that we humans try to make sense of the world and make decisions about the best ways to conduct our lives. “

https://buffettmungerwisdom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/mungerspeech_june_95.pdf

[fromtraveldiaries]

Bad parenting

Each trip abroad reaffirms the bad parenting skills of the Indian State. Like one with a split-personality, the govt. can simultaneously exhibit deep-seated inertia and lightning swiftness. For example, it can drag its feet in taking steps to ease your life and yet ground you with a single stroke should you try to help yourself.

One of the first things you notice in Europe is that people are free to smoke in public. Bus stations, train stations, public roads, marketplaces, and outdoors in general don’t prohibit smoking. It’s left to the individual to be discerning and use their judgement. It’s a great example of letting the individual make the choice instead of shoving a law down their throats.

Another thing that’s quite apparent is how the airport experience and the accompanying security measures are put in place keeping the paying customer in mind. Everything is geared towards providing a great customer experience to the travellers. For example, compare the facilities, efficiency, and general courtesy you experience in the Gulf airports to the chaos, mismanagement, and over-bearing security you experience at Indian airports. If you are travelling with a child, you experience near-zero waiting time in queues and additional benefits such as free upgrades. Kids are in fact treated royally in Europe. They have free passes to most tourist attractions such as palaces, museums, etc. that are run by the government. They can also travel for free on all state-owned transport. You get the best seats in restaurants and cafes, buses, trains, and flights. In India, people travelling with kids are generally frowned upon equally by the concerned staff and fellow visitors, customers, passengers as potentially demanding.

Cameras! Cameras are allowed everywhere (except inside sex shops in Paris and on the streets during business hours in the red light district of Amsterdam) without additional charges. This is in stark contrast to India where cameras are either not allowed in a lot of places, or even if they are allowed, you need to pay a hefty amount for them.

Further, you can buy prepaid sim cards at the Charles de Gaulle airport, for instance, without a photograph, proof of residence, or any copies of personal information. Try doing that in India. Despite paying the mobile service provider, by Indian law, you have to pass through the rigmarole of sharing various proofs of PII before you can get a sim card. Even installing and signing up for mobile apps is more relaxed outside. For example, the cab-hailing app Bolt asks for your date of birth in India. However, you can install it in Europe without providing your date of birth. Apparently, in India you can’t ride a cab if you aren’t 18 years or older. Why European countries don’t have this validation or how India benefits from this restriction isn’t public information.

Similarly, you can carry cigarette lighters on flights outside but not within India. Check in counters at Indian entry airports are littered with abandoned articles after being flagged by security. This is only because Indian laws are different. A security officer at the New Delhi international airport informed us that one could even carry ammunition on flights in some countries. He shrugged and pointed upstairs when we asked why this wasn’t seen as a threat in those countries but only in India.

While flying out to Europe, you have to fill out minimal paper work. We did it on our mobile phones at the airport right before flying. However, you have to propitiate all the Indian Gods and their progeny should you happen to be flying into India from Europe. There’s this program called Air Suvidha (suvidha, ironically, translates to convenience in English) that’s more stringent than the gatekeepers of heaven. You need a laptop with great internet connection, a lot of patience, a couple of hours, and the general willingness to be bullshitted to fill the Air Suvidha form. It’s almost as if the Indian govt. is trying its best to keep out all the undeserving crowd from Europe that’s desperately trying to get into India every minute. What a farce!

Our lawmakers travel abroad at every opportunity. What they observe, learn, imbibe, implement, and execute in India after their return remains a mystery.

[kolinnnn]

Political Shit, Pay of no mind.

I’ve been trying my damnedest to keep my channels overall politics-free for the past two years. Buuuuuuuut, I’m getting to the point where I can’t bite my tongue any longer. I’m physically feeling the NEED to call out senseless bullshit that I see. So, without further ado: a post from Facebook.

“So let me get this straight: We’re a nation that accepts pornography but hates abuse. A nation that doesn’t believe in gender but fights for women’s rights. We’re a nation that believes no child should be left behind by we have aborted over 60 million. We’re a nation where heroes have died so our flag could fly over a free nation, but then we give the title “heroes” to wealthy athletes who kneel in disrespect. We’re a nation where political parties ignore the corruption of their own party while condemning the corruption of the other. We’re a nation of laws, yet we’re a nation where that only applies if you’re not politically powerful. We’re a nation that has in God we trust printed on our money but we’re a nation where the ACLU sues people who makes His name known in public. We’re the “greatest” nation on the earth yet we consume more antidepressants than any other nation in the world. We’re a nation that pledges we’re “one” yet we’re a nation of aggressive division. And we wonder why there is so much confusion?”

I’d like to break this down line by line, but first an overall note: I copied this line by line. It’s laden with poor grammar. This was not my decision, but the author’s.

“We’re a nation that accepts pornography but hates abuse”

This is factually accurate. Also, there is nothing wrong with either of these things. I’m lead to believe that this was written by a “Christian” who wants us to believe that abuse and porn are on the same level of evil. However, there’s one thing that porn has that abuse doesn’t: CONSENT. Two consenting adults participating in sexual activities that have been predetermined and even have gone the extra step and have consented to the recording and transmission of said activities is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, abuse, by definition, is the complete lack of consent.

“A nation that doesn’t believe in gender but fights for women’s rights.”

This is partially inaccurate. It’s not that we don’t believe in gender, it’s that we’re becoming more enlightened to the fact that gender is more of a spectrum than it is a binary identifier. We’re also at the point, intellectually, where changing your external appearance to match your gender is an amazing thing that we’re able to accomplish. Sadly, however, calling us a “nation who believes” would be an overstatement, however this is something that’s changing all the time. It’s changing because we are fighting for women’s rights, we’re fighting for trans rights, we’re fighting for gender equality. Is it so bad to want everyone to live their best life, regardless of what they identify as?

“We’re a nation that believes no child should be left behind by we have aborted over 60 million.”

As a child that grew up during the beginning of “No Child Left Behind” I wholeheartedly wish that were a true statement. However, time and time again, we’re shown that we’re a nation that LOVES fetuses. Like it’s some sick fetish. As soon as the child is born, that child is left behind. Granted, not always by their parents. Because of all these children that are left behind, because of our nation’s inability to properly teach growing kids how to have safe sex, many expectant mothers don’t have the means to care for a child properly. Some pregnancies are products of abusive environments. Also, not to pick and choose, but the CDC reports that there have been only 44.5 million legal abortions in the United States. So, let’s say the 60 million number is correct, that would mean 15.5 million women have found it necessary to risk their own life to ensure that their child isn’t left to live a terrible life. I could go on and on about this.

“We’re a nation where heroes have died so our flag could fly over a free nation, but then we give the title ‘heroes’ to wealthy athletes who kneel in disrespect.”

*sigh* This one is difficult. I’m going to skip some of my feelings and stick to the facts. We give the title “hero” to many people, including wealthy athletes to don’t do anything, respectful or disrespectful. We even call people who have done horrible and terrible things “heroes.” Also, as a note: Colin Kaepernick knelt as a sign of respect as recommended by US Army vet Nate Boyer for his peaceful protests.

“We’re a nation where political parties ignore the corruption of their own party while condemning the corruption of the other.”

I actually have nothing to say to this... it’s true? I mean, overall, Democrats will call out the actions of others, and they will, in the end, go away. I haven’t heard of a Democrat being accused multiple times of sexual assault and then getting elected or (effectively) promoted. I’m not exactly one to ask on this, I’ll admit.

“We’re a nation of laws, yet we’re a nation where that only applies if you’re not politically powerful.”

Also true, here’s looking at most of the GOP?

“We’re a nation that has in God we trust printed on our money but we’re a nation where the ACLU sues people who makes His name known in public.”

I’m fairly certain that this is inaccurate. As a person who has gone to churches their entire life, I have yet to attend a house of worship that has ever been sued by the ACLU. The ACLU is more of a legal mediator between government and the people whose voices can’t be heard, rather than an atheist attack dog, like you make it sound.

“We’re the ‘greatest’ nation on the earth yet we consume more antidepressants than any other nation in the world.”

First, no, we’re not. The United States of America is actually ranked 8th in greatest nations. Switzerland is actually the best, on average. In 2016, we rank the highest consumer of antidepressants, barely jumping ahead of Iceland. Given that we have 1,000 times the population, I’m not so sure about how those numbers work out. ANYWAY! Do you ever wonder why we take so many antidepressants? It has nothing to do with how great we are as a country. It’s because we have problems. We all have problems. However, it would appear that our government, our elected officials, the people put in power for the greater good of their citizens do not care about mental healthcare. Even to this day, there are so many Republicans that believe that depression is something you can just get over, and so, it’s very difficult to get mental healthcare. I would know, I’ve experienced the hoops (whether it be monetary or through insurance or just lack of care providers) that people need to jump through just to see a therapist.

“We’re a nation that pledges we’re ‘one’ yet we’re a nation of aggressive division.”

I don’t think someone paid any attention to the pledge of allegiance. We don’t pledge that we’re “one” like we’re the musketeers or something. We’re literally saying that we’re one nation, indivisible. The pledge was written after the civil war at an ebbing point of nationalistic pride. “One nation, indivisible” is essentially a response to the results of the war, proclaiming American unity. Secession of any state can only happen through due process and approval of federal Congress. Or, quite simply, it’s the last bit to marital vows; “till death do us part.” We’ve always been a nation of aggressive division. The problem is now that no one is listening, and some are so set in their bigotry that they’ve cemented their feet in their standing and vowing to never falter, thus destroying the work that our forefathers have done.

“And we wonder why there is so much confusion?”

See previous line. We’re a nation that doesn’t believe in the burden of proof. When ignorance cries “google it” while not doing any actual research. We are slowly destroying ourselves because we are no longer using facts as facts.

That’s all. I’m done for tonight.

[theliterateape]

The Demagogues Are Here (and They're Smarter Than Trump)

by Don Hall

As attempted coups go, that was a fucking mess.

Trump, like the anarchists and zealots he emboldened (on both sides of the horseshoe), had no other strategy than Burn it all down and see what happens. His M.O. was so incredibly transparent to anyone paying attention. First, distract and deflect from anything he couldn't lie about. Second, lie. BIG. A lot. The more truth obfuscated, the less centralized the potential for objectivity until all truth fits the postmodernist subjective reality mold. Third, use the passions and emotional immaturity of those most convinced by the lies to inflame the situation. Wind 'em up and let them go.

Granted, we have to give the man some credit. He introduced incredibly sticky terminology that will far outlast his four years in office. Fake News. "Every body knows" as a sign of evidence or proof. "Loser" has taken on an entirely enlarged importance due to Trump. While primarily the quintessential bullshit artist, the man knew exactly how to use social media in ways that have been constructive for everyone from middle school kids trying to out their classroom bullies to college students unhappy with their professors.

His use of Hitler's Big Lie technique is almost unparalleled.

So, if the man was so good at this despot thing why was his coup attempt so blatantly obvious and unsuccessful?

Ego. Trump is so in love with himself and the aura of invincibility he's created that he didn't care that it was in plain sight. He wanted it to be in plain sight so that he, and only he, would get the credit for it in the end. Hitler had a host of sidemen, each equally brilliant and despicable as he. Trump surrounded himself with sub-par bigots, industry insiders, and his moron children so that he was always the smartest person in the room.

His only real problem is that he is far from the smartest person in Washington, D.C.

The only action that will eliminate his threat to our country (or at least severely minimize it) is in the hands of the Gods of Social Media. Take away his bully pulpit and Don Jr. is the only one he reaches. Zuckerberg snapped his FB and Insta until after January 20 but he should consider it permanent if mitigating the TrumpFire is a goal. Twitter has closed him out temporarily -- should be permanent.

Yes, Trump will be a problem for us until the fatass finally clogs his heart-hole up with a Big Mac and he croaks on the shitter like Elvis but at this point, we have more insidious things to worry about.

The demagogues of 2021 have been watching. They've been fine-tuning their approach to power and are constructing their own Big Lies to spread. Unlike Trump, they aren't supposed captains of industry and have no designs on public office. They've seen the constraints of political power and know those obstacles are not the clear road to dominance.

Like Trump, they've seen the power of populism gone rogue and intend to use us against ourselves in exactly the same way. That's how Trump came to power. The Russian hackers didn't rig our election, change votes, or tamper with machinery. They hit us where we can't see it: social media propaganda. They ginned up our own hatred for one another and jacked us all up emotionally. They used our own blind faith in the authority of the internet to divide and conquer. It was nearly flawless and extremely effective.

It's easy to see the asshats who breached the Capitol as stupid morons, stealing lecterns and taking selfies but each one is you. Each one is a normal American who was victim of propaganda. Every QAnon believer has been messaged to over time until the conspiracy seems reasonable.

There has been plenty of handwringing think pieces written about the dangers of both social media and populism. Populism is not in and of itself a bad thing. It is, on its face, the ideal behind our democracy after all. Neither is social media. How could a technology that allows my mom to see pictures of my wife and I in Rhyolite, NV or David's parents see videos of his two year old son saying "Fuck" be evil? Nonetheless, the combination of the two elements create a potentially deadly mix.

As recently as this time last year when confronted with the idea that so-called hate speech should receive censorship my eyes would roll around like marbles in a coffee cup. The very concept of censorship in a marketplace of ideas is against everything I believe America to stand for yet, after watching anti-vaxxers, QAnoners, maskholes, and Donald Fucking Trump use the unlimited reach of the internet to poison that very marketplace, I have to re-examine my stance. 

I have to imagine what the Third Reich would've been if Goebbels had had Faceborg and the thought is horrifying. If Hanoi Hannah had Twitter instead of the radio? Christ. These sorts of propagandists are not new. In a war, messaging to the enemy has been standard operating practice since Alexander the Great ("Great," see?) but the addition of the awesome reach of our modern-day soma is giving the Big Lies rocket fuel.

We have licenses to drive and speed limits because there are always going to be few who can't be trusted to drive responsibly. We have licenses for owning guns because a few are always going to use them criminally. Perhaps, in the argument to somehow regulate communication we require a license to Tweet? Yeah, I hear you. How dare we even consider something so legislative? The libertarians will go apeshit at the government overreach. Right now the internet is only regulated in any meaningful way by the providers. For a large enough fee, you can use it without limitation.

Perhaps the internet should be a public utility like water or electricity? Sure, you're still gonna punish black people in Flint, MI but at least there are legal remedies to that sort of bigoted grift. Whatever the answer, we need to be talking about this now. QAnon came to be via an unlicensed, anonymous jackass convincing otherwise reasonable people that there was a pedophile ring in the basement of pizza parlor in D.C. run by Hillary Clinton. That's the kind of spew one would hear from a raging lunatic digging into a trash can on a street corner wearing stuffed animals for shoes but somehow, on the internet, it suddenly seems more plausible to the gentle-minded few looking for answers to the question "What did Hillary do with those seven year olds who only wanted a slice?"

Expanding the definition of hate speech isn't going to help us. The further we go to muddy the waters of what is and is not hate speech has left us with the notion that everyone white is racist and that everyone Asian is also white. The expansion of hate speech has us somehow agreeing that a dirty joke in the wrong setting constitutes assault and that sort of thinking is just one virtue signal away from being Pizzagate.

No. The demagogues have been watching and waiting and Trump's yuge shadow merely kept the light of day off of them. He'll be out of the picture (at least as much as he'll accept it) soon enough and those Capitol-storming jack holes and Seattle-burning Antifa posers will find another power-thirsty grifter to follow like Moses did a shrub on fire.

You'll know them because their credo has no evidence for their conclusions, it centers on them as the experts, denies corroboration from science or credible expertise, and intentionally creates division and Otherism in order to maintain a foothold into the mania that is their Big Lie.

They are also smarter than Trump so their coup will be sneakier and far, far more effective.

[austinpanda]

Litany of Complaint

I feel like complaining a bit! Pardons while I vent. 

It’s my anniversary today! Zachary Z. Giberson and I have been gay married for seven years. I’m not enjoying the day so far. Mostly this is because we spent yesterday watching ...well, watching our government cease to function because a guy wanted to sit in Pelosi’s chair and scratch his balls in order to save the country from the effects of an election his side lost. So yesterday sucked; Trump supporters stormed the capitol building and temporarily stopped certification of the electoral vote, and one Trump supporter got shot and killed, and three others died from other medical emergencies. Zach was, I think, shocked and horrified. My sister was shocked and horrified. I, for some reason, am not shocked and horrified. 

It bothers me that it doesn’t bother me more. But as I watched this bullshit unfold, it all simply seemed like the next logical step. This is what the president told them to do. With his mouth! Right before they did it! I knew it wouldn’t change the outcome of the election at all. I figured they’d break some stuff and steal some stuff and go home after curfew, which they mostly did. I hoped the Congress would then reconvene to finish certifying the electoral votes, and they did. I figured it was just a bunch of republicans making asses of themselves on television, which generally only serves to push things in the right direction, as far as being a democrat goes. Now some republicans who should have acknowledged the danger and sheer fookin’ evil in what this president says and does a long time ago, are finally doing so. It took until now, but it seems like the vice president and Mitch McConnell have publicly joined me in my belief that the outcome of the election was fair and legitimate. 

And nothing changes. They arrested a bunch of people; I’m curious how many will serve time. I wonder how many would have been shot if they’d been black. I wonder if they’d have made it into the building if they were black. The president has already said he loves them, the ones who stormed the capitol on his behalf. Cheeto hitler now seems about 10% more likely to vacate the White House on the 20th, like he’s supposed to, without barricading himself into the oval office with a pillow fort and daring the secret service to do something about it. The president got banninated from Twitter...for 12 whole hours. He temporarily lost a few friends and privileges that he was going to lose on January 20th anyway. We even took the senate, by winning both Georgia runoff races. Do I think it’ll result in anything that makes my life a little easier? ...I dunno, should I? Seems unwise to expect so.

I suppose I’m dealing with the fact that half the country probably looks at what happened yesterday and thinks, “Good. That’ll show ‘em. Keep fighting the good fight.” And I’m reminded of a recent meme going around, depicting our most recent presidential election. It was depicted as a choice between a free Krispy Kreme doughnut, and burning grandma’s house down, and the result was 50.1% voting for the free doughnut, and 49.1% voting to stick it to grandma. Well, thank goodness, the preferable side won, but JESUS, WHY WAS IT SO CLOSE?

Anyway, it’s over. The election is over. Biden and Harris step in on January 20th at noon. Trump will, I’m sure, be holding a rally somewhere in DC or Florida, or perhaps just be on his way somewhere on Air Force One for the last time. He’s supposed to be there, for the inauguration. It’s an important, necessary part of the transfer of power, but for those reasons alone, the chances he’ll do it are slim. He’d have to be seen wearing a mask. He wouldn’t be allowed to speak. He’d have to be seen on the same podium as the man who beat him. Who would even want him there?

So...my anniversary! Our anniversary celebration is going to be modest; we’re certainly not going anywhere, or buying each other gifts, or doing anything else that might conflict with the Code of Ennui we’re currently living under. Zach knows how to make a really tasty purple spaghetti dish by adding red wine to the pasta water, so he’s making that. 

Something about my anniversary always bothers me. We’ve never obtained a marriage certificate. We don’t have any proof of our marriage on paper. We never did the thing you do in your state to make it official. We have two very good reasons for this. The first reason we’ve never been officially married is because, when we got married, gay marriage was illegal in Texas. We had neither the funds nor the inclination to travel to a state where it’s legal, get married there, and carry the piece of paper back to Texas with us, where it would be worthless anyway. (Also, not for nothin’, but fuck that. I’m really going to drive to Massachusetts to get married, because that’s the only legal place in America? I applaud those who feel the process is important enough to make that kind of journey, but to me, it just further enforces the second class status.)

The second reason why we never got officially married is because, after being made to have an illegal wedding and marriage the first time, we don’t feel especially eager to get married AGAIN for the sake of those who denied us that fundamental right in the past. Neither of us finds it particularly logical to get married a second time, giving us a new anniversary of lesser duration--we go from being married 7 years to being married 0 years and counting--only to accommodate the requirements of the state that would still consider my marriage illegal, immoral, and ungodly if the Supreme Court hadn’t expressly forbidden it. 

So, yeah. Are Zach and I married? Well, only if you consider being married as that which constitutes a marriage. If you think registering it with your government, paying a fee, getting a certificate, AND being married all have to happen, then I guess I’m not married. 

Not sure why this is bothering me today, in particular. (Except, yes I do, it’s because it’s my anniversary!) But I’m going to try to shake off this feeling in favor of a more positive one. I take a little bit of reluctant comfort in knowing that, if I had to prove Zach and I were married, we could do so fairly easily, by virtue of the fact that we wear rings, we pay rent together, file our taxes jointly, and wake up in the same bed every day. We’ve been married for seven years; it wouldn’t be hard to show that. In other words, I don’t think our refusal to get official “Yes, You’re Married!” paperwork is ever going to interfere with our ability to present as a married couple. But I don’t know that for sure.

And with that, here’s the recipe for red wine spaghetti!

(That’s a joke. I’m making fun of those stupid online recipes that make you scroll through 20 screens of extracurriculur bullshit before you get to the recipe part.)

[pennsylvaniaprelawland-blog]

Polygraph Tests: Efficacy and Utility Examined

By Emily Condon, University of Pennsylvania Class of 2021

October 9, 2019

At an early age, the development of deception skills marks progress. Children as young as two

years old begin to concoct lies, often for personal benefit, and these lies reflect the ability of the child to anticipate consequences and others’ behavior. Lying never ceases to provide the opportunity for personal gain, and as humans develop, these opportunities may seem irresistible and weighted, especially in the context of a criminal investigation or career development. Polygraph examinations, colloquially dubbed ‘lie-detector tests,’ seek to measure these diversions from the truth in such settings, and while the mechanisms associated with the exam involve scientific measurements, the test has proven unreliable in most courts, inadmissible evidence. However, the polygraph exam persists, and along with its frequent appearances in movies and on reality television, the tool is used in job screenings and investigations with more frequency than its accuracy imposes. Below, we will examine the utility of this tool and discuss the role it continues to play, despite its suspect reliability.

The most common type of polygraph exam, which happens to be the one that’s most publicized in the media, is the Control Question Test (CQT). In the CQT, the examiner asks both general and specific questions. Specific questions relate to immediately relevant subject matter. For example, in the criminal investigation in the murder of a man by firearm, an examiner might ask the wife of the victim, “Did you shoot your husband in the chest last Tuesday night?” General questions relate to a person’s past, and ask, for example, “Have you ever violated someone’s trust?” (APA) The idea behind this bifurcated line of questioning is to ask general questions that are vague and difficult to answer completely truthfully in order to create a baseline level of anxiety. If the person is innocent, they will be more likely to show signs of anxiety about general questions, because they have definitive, clear answers to the specific questions. Using the example questions above, an innocent wife knows for sure that she didn’t shoot her husband but may fumble when it comes to the question of betraying trust, needing to think back. This creates a situation in which her biological responses indicate more anxiety about general questions rather than specific ones. However, a guilty wife knows she committed the crime, and won’t have the same reaction to specific questions because she must lie to maintain innocence, the lying process often eliciting biological responses linked to deception. (Stromberg, 2014)

In terms of mechanics, the polygraph exam is quite simple. Variation exists across machines, however, in general, examiners attach between four and six sensors to the subject, including finger sensors, chest straps, and a blood pressure cuff. These sensors and others serve to  measure the subject’s blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, and perspiration, among other factors. A combination of these factors and strategic questioning yields physical results for interpretation by the examiner, designed to determine if the subject told the truth throughout his or her questioning. The idea is that when any one of these factors is elevated, breathing rate, pulse, and/or the other aforementioned items measured, the person can be assumed to be lying. (How Stuff Works) A large part of this alleged pseudoscience, however, proves subjective and manipulatable, and as there exists no biologically-based measure for deception, the test surely measures the correlation of biological symptoms, and subsequent findings aren’t as easy to corroborate. “‘There's no unique physiological sign of deception. And there's no evidence whatsoever that the things the polygraph measures — heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, and breathing — are linked to whether you're telling the truth or not,’ says Leonard Saxe, a psychologist at Brandeis University who's conducted research into polygraphs.” (Stromberg, 2014)

Another drawback and link in the chain of inadmissibility for this device is the fact that the test can be fooled, and subjects can markedly manipulate the accuracy of the test results. These tests can be stifled through many means, for example, by medication or psychological manipulation. Taking certain muscle relaxants or mind-altering drugs before a polygraph may inhibit the validity of a test, numbing a person to the stimuli and potentially blocking a natural biological reaction to the need to lie for oneself. It’s easy to see how taking a benzodiazepine, for example, designed to limit or inhibit a person’s anxiety, may impact the results of the exam. A person may also engage in thought-control to cause their body to artificially elicit biological responses at strategic moments to create areas of interest on the test results. Publication of these strategies is abundant, and suggests the success of these strategies, which devalue the accuracy of readings further.

The New York Times published an interview with a former Oklahoma City police detective and polygraph examiner named Doug Williams to explain the strategy behind mind control. “‘Before your test, practice deciphering between the two question types. “‘Go to the beach’” when you hear a relevant question, Williams says. Calm yourself before answering by imagining gentle waves and warm sand. When you get a control question, which is more general, envision the scariest thing you can in order to trigger physiological distress; the polygraph’s tubes around your chest measure breathing, the arm cuff monitors heart rate and electrodes attached to you fingertips detect perspiration. What is your greatest fear? Falling? Drowning? Being buried alive? “‘Picture that,’” Williams says.” (Wollan, 2015)

If these tests are so fallible, why do we still use them? One common use for polygraph testing is the screening of job candidates and employees. Those seeking employment with the NSA, CIA, and several other government agencies are often subject to polygraph tests. Additionally, the exams may be used as a scare tactic. The examiner may attempt to convince the subject that this test will reveal the complete truth, so he may as well confess. This strategy has the potential to lead to proof of guilt that may have otherwise flown under the radar, undetected by the exam. These tests may also be used as a deterrent, for example, in post-conviction sexual offender treatment programs. (Bear Forensics, 2019) If a person knows they’ll undergo polygraph testing related to their behavior, they may feel more inclined to perform only behaviors that won’t get them in trouble. (Cummins, 2019)

Clearly, the debate about the role of polygraphs in our society remains active. It’s clear that while polygraphs can point investigators in the right direction, they aren’t fool-proof. A large gap exists between the hard science of DNA testing, for example, and the alleged pseudoscience of interpreting manipulatable and subjective polygraph results, and therefore, it’s clear why most courts don’t allow polygraph testing as admissible evidence. The utility of the exam extends beyond court cases, though, and therefore, extinction of the exam is unlikely any time soon.

________________________________________________________________

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/is-a-polygraph-test-admissible-as-evidence-31737.

(n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.

12 Common Lies That Cheaters Tell says: (2018, December 6).

Polygraph testing explained: Process and steps of a lie detector exam. Retrieved from https://bearforensics.com/2017/08/24/polygraph-testing-explained/.

Conti, A. (2014, November 18). Are Lie Detector Tests Complete... Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qbeaeq/are-lie-detector-tests-complete-bullshit-1117.

Contributors, H. S. W. (2019, September 11). How Does a Lie Detector (Polygraph) Work? Retrieved from https://science.howstuffworks.com/question123.htm.

Cummins, E. (2019, March 18). Polygraph tests don't work as lie detectors and they never have. Retrieved from https://www.popsci.com/polygraph-test-science/.

Handler, M. (n.d.). Polygraph Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved from https://apoa.memberclicks.net/polygraph-frequently-asked-questions.

Horton, S., Horton, S., Horton Law PLLC, & Horton Law PLLC. (2018, July 20). Polygraph Testing at Work. Retrieved from https://hortonpllc.com/polygraph-testing-work/.

Kismet, M. (2018, February 9). Polygraph Tests and How to Beat Them. Retrieved from https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/How-To-Beat-A-Polygraph-Test.

Stromberg, J. (2014, December 15). Lie detectors: Why they don't work, and why police use them anyway. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2014/8/14/5999119/polygraphs-lie-detectors-do-they-work.

Wollan, M. (2015, April 10). How to Beat a Polygraph Test. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/magazine/how-to-beat-a-polygraph-test.html.

[honeybeelily]

A question was asked....

....of me over the weekend. I have no idea in what way the comment was meant as it was via lovely Facebook but it has been bothering me. I did not reply back. I have not said anything still. However I have spent a great deal thinking about this small, insignificant comment.

“Has anyone told you the election is over.”

I was awake watching the results on November 8th. I was there with fellow Americans, the nation, and the world watching the results unfold with bated breath. I was one of the 65,800,000+ Americans that was devastated by the results, unable to catch my breath.

Yes, I know the election is over.

I was angry. I was disappointed. I was disgusted. A man who had no problem saying "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything ... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything." was elected of the free world.

To be fair, Hillary wasn’t my original candidate either. Yet we aligned on many different topics the most. The longer Cheeto ran, the more I desired her to win for I felt she stood more for democracy than he did. But that didn’t matter, did it? Even though she was the more popular candidate she still lost the election.

After a while, politically I went quiet. I retreated from the news and social media to digest the loss as much as I could. To focus on the things I could directly control like the safety of my staff against hate and abuse. Yet even that came under scrutiny. “Then just move.” Yes, because I can just pack up and move to some magical place that racism, hate, bigotry, sexism, misogyny, and ignorance doesn’t exist. Like I don’t have responsibilities and obligations that I can just drop and move. You know, a husband and career.

I shed tears when I heard the electoral college voted Cheeto into office. Again I was angry but I tried to keep quiet. “Give him a chance.” I thought. “Maybe it was all a show and he will actually do right by America. Maybe I was wrong.” I hoped and prayed more than I ever have in my entire life. After a very long and painful 2016, I prayed that 2017 would be kinder, wiser, and more loving than any year before.

Then January 20th, 2017 happened.

The day I gave up any form of faith as I watched how Melanie show clear signs of abuse. Something I am unfortunately intimately familiar with. The day I watched the first President I had ever voted for leave the oval office for the final time. The day I felt that everything negative about humanity had won. The day we became the most divided.

Within 24 hours my greatest fears for this nation were confirmed. Our President accused that millions voted illegally for Hillary even though there is zero proof to support this (Actually, some woman did illegally vote, for him). Betsy DeVos was announced as the choice for Education Secretary. You seriously think this woman deserves to head education? We are already struggling with educating our young and we want to condemn them further? I remember public school and there are far worse school’s than mine.

Executive action to repeal the ACA which will end up restricting health insurance to millions of people from the man that wants to reinstate “Pre Existing Conditions” back into play. This would effect my family just like the millions around the country. Oh, don’t forget there is no replacement plan on the table last I heard.

However the bad news didn’t stop there, did it? Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. Climate change removed from the White House Website while scientists are being silenced about it (You know, national parks setting up alternate twitter accounts to continue to inform people of science facts.) Not to mention the other multiple federal agencies ordered not to speak to the press. Instead we are getting “Alternate Facts” which are utter bullshit.

He pledged to sign FADA, a legalized form of discrimation against the LGBTQ community. The ban on Green Card & Visa holders from 7 middle east countries and detaining them from their families and responsibilities for “The Security Of The Nation” while conveniently leaving out Saudi Arabia where he has a business and, where one could argue, many terrorists can come from too. It also supports discriminating against a person’s faith. Don’t forget the Muslim register that could go into effect. *Cough* Like the persecution of Jews *Cough*

The Senate wanting to strip away a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and the health care associated with it. Pushing the Pro-Life agenda without having any plan in place to support the children you are forcing us to have. And don’t you dare give me the bullshit about keeping my legs closed when there are studies showing that sexual activity builds a closer and healthier relationship with your spouse. Or the long term environmental effects each life has. You know, the fact this planet cannot sustain life if we continue down the path we are currently on.

Keystone XL & Dakota Access pipelines are going forward again. Cheeto and cabinet members still using their personal electronics for government duties and responsibilities. Wasn’t that what you were all upset about with Hillary? #Thefuckingwall. Not only is this one of the dumbest things he wants to implement, it does not foster any good will with other countries which we really need. I would rather spend my tax dollars on education, infrastructure, health, and science.

I’m sure I’m missing several other key pieces of information but I think you get the idea. If you voted for Cheeto, for whatever reason, I do not hate, dislike, or unlove you. I respect you used your American privilege to vote for who you thought was right. I will not attack, torment, or be prejudice of you. But I do not have to respect him as many of you did not respect Obama. I will not say his name, he has not earned it in my book. Yes, I know the election is over. But did you know…

In the words of Agent Carter “..Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides something WRONG is something RIGHT. This nation was founded on the one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or consequences…..When the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world. ‘No, YOU move.’ “

I will not stand quietly by as people’s rights are taken away out of fear. I will not quietly stand as a dictator tries to silence the people, which violates our most sacred amendment, the first amendment. I will not stand by as our rights are attempted to be taken away by a proven Nazi (Bannon). I will not stand for injustice, racism, hate, bigotry, sexism, misogyny, and ignorance. I will not fear.

I will march. I will call my representative. I will read and educate myself. I will have discussions. I will advocate for every man, woman, child regardless of the color of their skin or the choice of religious faith. I will stand for your right to your opinion even if they are on the opposite sides. I will be peaceful in my protest but I will also refuse to move. Let me be the first to say that I’m sure I don’t have all the facts. I’m sure there is more to everything than we will ever know. I’m sure more information will continue to come out and we will all have to navigate the waters of journalism and decide what is truth nor will we all agree. But I will fight for you, myself, friends, family, strangers, and mostly importantly our future.

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, When we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, But it is not this day.

An hour of woes and shattered shields, When the age of men comes crashing down, But it is not this day…..this day we fight.” -Aragorn

Yes, I know the election if over. But do you know the #Resistance is revived?

[silver-wield]

Sorry for the ridiculously long rant. But yeah, I just wanted to say this to someone who I feel knows the FF7 universe inside out. So yeah, enjoy my 3 am rant after a ridiculously difficult Calculus worksheet.

I joined this community fairly recently. I wanted to play FF7R when it came out but never had the time since it happened during exam season, and the rest of the year was spent doing college applications. But since I’ve finished HS and the workload has gotten less. I’ve finally had time to sit down and immerse myself in the FF7 universe.

I’ve tried learning all I can about most of the characters and trying my best to understand the dynamics between each character. And so after getting a good understanding of the world and our main heroes, I think I can confidently say: Zack is literally my favorite character in ff7. He’s just great all around!

He treats Aerith like a literal queen (as one should, Zerith is one of my OTPs, right up there with Cloti) he’s strong, loyal, unafraid to express himself, has a bright and inviting personality (unlike a certain blonde boy, we still love him though). There’s so much more, but in a nutshell he’s basically GOATed in everything.

I don’t give a damn what ppl ship cuz at the end of the day, whatever the canon is, is the canon. So with that knowledge in mind I don’t have an issue with CAs or Aertis (I think both are cute, esp Aerti), etc. But it rly does pain me and lowkey piss me off when I see CAs, especially that one girl with the “You gonna be ok” line in her bio, USING Zack to further their CA ship. They’re so excited for some love triangle between Z, A, and C. They think Z’s gonna be C’s wingman to get A.

So y’know, the guy who made the determination and promise to either literally risk getting caught by the government who’s out to kill his and his comatose friend and make it to Midgar so that he can finally reunite with the girl he loves and loves him back, or die trying. And the motherfucker did the latter. (Tbf he prolly didn’t plan on dying but that’s besides the point it was hella risky) And so yeah, THAT guy (who may or may not be alive now?) is gonna help the comatose friend get with the girl he died trying to get back to. Oh, and that friend also treats her like crap every now and then (srsly he’s so harsh to her sometimes).

From someone who’s not part of the CA ship, I hope this can bring a little perspective on just how ridiculous and sad that idea would be. To me, jealousy isn’t that cute. I think if can definitely get a point across that maybe there’s some attraction or spark but it also strains relationships and makes the parties involved so much more unhappy than they need to be. And that’s the last thing I want for any of the characters. Especially when their time all together is so short. So my point is, I hate that they are looking forward to seeing my boy Zack have to go through either losing his gf to Cloud, or having Zack have to fight for Aerith??? He already won her like 5 years ago bitch, back off don’t do this to my boy.

Side note: And if we’re rly doing the jealousy thing here, you literally see C get jealous over guys hitting on T a ridiculous amount of times in part 1 so… :/

So to the CAs out there, if what you want is a tragic love story between star-crossed lovers who had found peace, happiness, and a place of healing and security in one another, and who had a shit ton of potential for more heart-melting sweetness that got abruptly cut off because they were torn apart by outside forces and eventually ends solemnly with party dying and left the other alone and without the closure of reuniting but still waits for the day they will see each other again, then come join Zerith :D

This is what you wanted with Cloud, right? Well honey, that story’s already been told, you just chose to ignore it.

So again CAs, come join Zerith! Ignoring the shitheads that are present in every community, the majority and non-toxic portion of us want you to join us! Please, we won’t judge (unlike some ppl), as long as you drop the “A is gonna leave Z for C” bullshit, like name just a single reason why she would if Zack is standing there right in front of her.

Alright I’m going to bed. Whether you read this or not, well I’m just glad I got it out there. One more opinion thrown into the abyss. Alright, peace✌️

That's Calli with that dumb line. Same person who said Sephiroth warns Cloud he's gonna kill Aerith, so he can save her. Same one who said Aerith's gonna ride the Hardy Davidson cause of a key art. Same one who came up with the blue baby vending machine theory. She's also the one on 4chan rn calling Tifa a whore and hoping she'll get eviscerated and eaten by monsters, so you can see she ain't playing with a full deck.

I mean, if Cloud asking if someone's okay is proof then Cloud is also into Tifa, Barret, Red, Wedge, Biggs, Jessie and the Wall Market trio since he asks all of them if they're okay as well.

Imagine acting like basic concern for someone is romantic. Cloud doesn't even follow up on it. Just says "gonna be okay?" in this passive tone while standing 6ft away from her and then leaves it there. They're acting like this is a train roll situation. Because Cloud being 3inches away from Tifa is the same as this 🤦‍♀️

[entergamingxp]

Down and out in Orgrimmar and London • Eurogamer.net

Spend any amount of time on any popular gaming message board when the issue of LGBT+ representation raises its head, and you can guarantee there’ll be someone waiting in the wings to, at the very least, remind LGBT+ players that it’s 2020 and ‘nobody cares they’re gay anymore’ – oh, and ‘Would you mind keeping your sexuality out of my video games?’. It’s not exactly surprising then that countless LGBT+ gamers around the world are still seeking the comfort of like-minded individuals and social spaces, both in-game and in real-life, where they’re free to be themselves without abuse, judgement, or fear of repercussions – and to simply enjoy the games they want to play.

“I think in mainstream culture there is this wishful idea that because we’ve had too many seasons of Will & Grace…things are just fine and dandy for the queers in our society,” Benjamin Bon Temps, founder of the long-running Rough Trade Gaming Community tells me, “Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. While things are better, and the average Bubba Beercan Gamer might be more open-minded and respectful, there is still the same slew of tired asshats firing off verbal fag bombs and ‘this stupid dungeon is gay’ type bullshit.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Matthew Hardwick, co-founder of the on- and offline LGBT+ community London Gaymers; “Online spaces can be generally quite a negative experience for minorities as it is,” he says, “but with insults like ‘fag’, ‘queer’, and ‘gay’ often thrown around in a derogatory manner, it can be particularly hard for LGBT people.” By way of illustration, Hardwick relates one of his own experiences, when someone he’d played online with for over a year immediately bombarded him with abuse on finding out he was gay in party chat. “[He] said I should ‘die of AIDS’ and ‘ass cancer’ before threatening to come to my home to murder me.”

Although Hardwick admits this is one of the more extreme responses he’s encountered, the constant minefield of anti-LGBT+ vitriol can be exhausting for players – and he points to an academic study by Jason Rockwood, backed up by London Gaymers’ own research during MCM panels, which found 80% of people have heard anti-LGBT+ slurs online. When I ask Hardwick to describe these encounters in his own words, he simply responds, “Dehumanising”.

It’s for precisely these reasons that countless LGBT+ gaming communities have been established around the world in an effort to provide a safe, welcoming space for LGBT+ players and allies, and remain as popular as ever. The London Gaymers, for instance, started life as a Reddit community and Google group back in 2012, with the goal of providing a means for LGBT+ players to easily find others to enjoy video games with. “What online spaces existed already were toxic, and not very welcoming to any minority that was open about their identity,” explains Hardwick.

And if proof were needed as to how much demand there still is for welcoming social spaces for LGBT+ players, the London Gaymers has, from its humble beginnings, now grown to over 3,750 people on its Facebook Group and over 1,800 regularly visit its Discord channel. Additionally, it has active guilds and clans hosting regular gaming nights for the likes of Minecraft, Final Fantasy 14, and Sea of Thieves; it has one of the largest LGBT+ WoW guilds in Europe; there’s a dedicated space available for women, including non-LGBT+ players, looking for somewhere to play, and for other women gamers to talk to. And London Gaymers even has a pretty large Animal Crossing Turnip Exchange community too.

“Many LGBT people face an increased risk of Mental Health issues,” explains Hardwick, “Isolation, anxiety, and depression are all issues many LGBT people face. Having a group that can knock down some of the barriers to battling those by providing a friendship group and space to express yourself is important”.

Some of London Gaymers members attending real-world Pride.

Inevitably too, these online communities have gradually spilled out into the real-world, and London Gaymers now hosts LGBT+ nights focussed on everything from board games and ping pong to bowling and laser tag. Crucially, these activities help provide real-world connections and spaces some may struggle to find ordinarily. “They may be feeling isolated or nervous, and not be willing to attend gay bars without people they know they can talk to about things they are interested in,” says Hardwick, “or they may be nervous about their appearance or perception in a traditional gaming space. The group provides that intersection for LGBT people to be themselves in both their nerdy-ness and their queerness.”

These days, thanks to London Gaymers’ size and scope, the group is able to use its influence and community to assist other gaming and LGBT+ organisations. It’s hosted panels on games industry representation at MCM, given talks to studios and government departments, and it regularly embarks on fundraising efforts with its members, for charities including the likes of SpecialEffect, the Terrance Higgins Trust, LGBT Hero/GMFA, and the Albert Kennedy Trust.

In real terms though, the London Gaymers reaches but a small fraction of LGBT+ players online and around the world, and thousands of other LGBT+ gaming communities continue to thrive, each catering to different audiences and niches. One of the oldest and most established of these is the MMO-focussed Rough Trade Gaming Community, described by its founder Benjamin Bon Temps as a “counterpoint to and escape from the general immature, homophobic bro culture that still permeates gaming spaces” and, more importantly, a “fun, safe, relaxing space where people can bring their authentic selves and play together” .

“Any queer can tell you that being seen and accepted feels awesome,” he says, “and we do what we can to help make that happen for our members.”

Real-world events are an important part of London Gaymers activities.

The RTGC had its unofficial beginnings over 17 years ago, when Benjamin joined a Dark Age of Camelot guild “comprised of mostly gay dudes and a few ‘mo-friendly military guys”. The group was eager to move over to superhero MMO City of Heroes but, says Benjamin, “I knew from somewhat bitter experience in DAoC that the gaming community at the time was absolutely rancid with frequent expressions of homophobic slang. Furthermore, there was, and still is, a ‘don’t tell, don’t share’ attitude from players claiming to be tolerant and accepting, yet [who] lose their collective minds if a queer character options or storyline is introduced in their favourite game, or if you reveal the gender of your partner in guild chat.”

“Much of the social aspect in gaming happens during the downtime,” he points out, “waiting on other players, recouping between battles, repairing armour etc., and that’s when chatting about our lives happens. I’ve heard countless stories from other members of RTGC about how they’d have to lie about the gender of their partner and other details so as not to instigate the possibility of harsh comments from other intolerant players.”

While some groups prefer to offer a somewhat sanitised space for their members, Benjamin notes the RTGC is relatively unique in that it has never shied from the subject of sex. “There always seems to be a secondary censoring of queer lives and stories by the mainstream,” he explains, “something along the lines of ‘Okay, you are gay and you can talk about it a little, but nothing about your sexual acts, preferences or fetishes please’…but I’ve always been at least mildly interested in what excites people, whether it be geekery or in the sack or sling.”

And so, from that goal of building a community that didn’t just enjoy games, but celebrated all kinds of sexual expression, the Rough Trade Gaming Community was created as an “unapologetically queer [place to] celebrate geekdom and fetish life.” Benjamin admits the group “might not be everyone’s cup of tea” thanks to its openness to fetish and kink, but says he believes it’s a “good fit for the queer person who may feel too queer, too kinky, too hardcore in mainstream gay social spaces.” What’s more, it happily welcomes “heterosexual-identified players who, because of their own kink, political views, spiritual practices, or whatever else, don’t feel comfortable in standard gaming social spaces” too.

RTGC’s Taint guilds continue to have a significant presence in WoW.

“We’re also a great testing ground for those of us emerging, or considering emerging, from the closet,” says Benjamin, “We are a very welcoming bunch for the most part and online experimentation in a gaming environment can be a fun and safe way to experiment with self-expression.”

It’s a social mix that’s clearly working; the group now organises real-life meets around the likes of San Francisco and New Orleans, and Benjamin is proud to have helped build a community that can cater to both younger gamers and “an older and more mature player”.

These days the RTGC has over 9,000 active users online, split across six officially supported games (World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Classic, Final Fantasy 14, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, and Phantasy Star Online 2), alongside a variety of forums and social media sites including Facebook. “Our Xtube channel has close to 2 million views,” notes Benjamin, “but honestly most of those are probably from me.”

One of the RTGC’s most high-profile activities comes in the form of Pixel Pride, an annual virtual Pride event that started out back in the group’s City of Heroes days and is now celebrating its 16th year. “We wanted to show how many players in the game were queer,” says Benjamin of that initial event, “so every queer superhero in the game wore the colour red and we flew, leapt, and teleported to a central meeting place, and had a great time.”

These days Pixel Pride takes place every July on World of Warcraft’s Proudmoore server that many of the group’s guilds calls home, and this year’s pride celebrations – which occurred last weekend – passed in a flurry of ‘donations, support, dancing, laughing, flirting, and duelling in their skivvies’.

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“Pixel Pride,” explains Benjamin, “is important because of the ease of accessibility for folks who can’t and don’t want to find parking at real world Prides, for folks who for whatever reasons can’t be fully out in the real world, and to also remind the non-queers on our servers that we are here, and we are legion, and that the toon tanking in your party, or healing your ass in a dungeon, or peeling aggro off you in PvP might be one of us, so watch your fucking language.”

Benjamin also believes Pixel Pride is valuable for those group members in rural areas too. “We know that queers can tend to flock to big cities to find their tribe, but we also have tons of players who live in remote areas as well”, he says. “I’ve heard from folks like that who are grateful for our Pixel Pride celebrations because, due to distance, or being in the closet, or mobility challenges, that is the only Pride they can safely or reasonably attend. This has, of course, become even more important during the current pandemic.”

Yet despite the obvious demand for the kind of LGBT+ communities and spaces fostered by the likes of London Gaymers and the RTGC, resistance still remains in the wider gaming community to the idea that visibility for LGBT+ players is even necessary, usually, and tellingly, alongside the declaration that ‘politics doesn’t belong in video games’.

“In much the same way a fish can’t really tell you what ‘wet’ feels like, because it is all they’ve ever known, straight folk can be blind, and sometimes stubbornly and wilfully so, to how inextricably enmeshed expressions of affection, sexuality, longing, romance etc. are in our everyday lives,” says Benjamin. “It permeates everything we experience, games included. Every game I’ve played has some element of a love interest storyline, an unrequited romance, etc. It is just fair play that some of those reflect our lives as well.”

A note from an RTGC member attesting to the importance of Pixel Pride.

The good news, though, according to London Gaymers’ Matt Hardwick, is that attitudes do slowly seem to be shifting. “Anecdotally, I would say things have improved over the years, certainly within some areas of online gaming,” he tells me, “[but] there is still a long way to go.”

“I think that developers play a big part in this. Weeding out toxic behaviour is something that a few studios say they are dedicated to but is seldom reflected in their feedback loops or reporting processes,” Hardwick continues. “Gamers at large can help by calling out the behaviour when they see or hear it. Remind them that whilst they may think it’s trash talk they have no idea how their words affect those around them. I do however appreciate this is often easier said than done and that’s why spaces like London Gaymers exists – nobody wants to paint a target on their back – but using reporting processes is always one small step that doesn’t require you to interact with trolls.”

Yet while a harmonious gaming future will ultimately benefit everyone, and is a goal worth aiming for, Benjamin doesn’t think it will spell an end to LGBT+ gaming spaces.

“It can obviously be challenging to be your true queer self, in the ‘real’ world and in-game, and a lot of old, tired attitudes and beliefs can get in the way and make that difficult to attain,” he says. “Once we have though, one of the great blessings about being queer, for me anyway, is the ability to be a little left of centre, to be slightly outside what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘average’. I think that is intensely valuable, both for queers and for the heteronormative, relative ‘centre’, to have that perspective and space for folks who don’t feel they fit in with whatever the fuck ‘normal’ is.

“For that reason, I think and hope we’ll always occupy that space, to question and challenge expected norms, ‘common wisdom’ and convention. To not have that, to have everything and everyone in one homogeneous space, would dilute the colourful and diverse part of the human experience and that would just be boring as fuck…Things could be, and certainly might be, better than they are today, but whether that happens or not, the Rough Trade Gaming Community will be here as a space for anyone fun, friendly, and ready to play.”

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/down-and-out-in-orgrimmar-and-london-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=down-and-out-in-orgrimmar-and-london-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[charlesjening]

State of the Profession 2019: We Need to Talk About Accounting’s Big PR Problem

Not sure if anyone’s noticed but the profession is in trouble. You know it’s bad when the most cynical of cynics feels compelled to say yeah, this is kinda actually bad.

Sure, I’ve talked plenty of shit over the years but I’ve also been one of the profession’s biggest cheerleaders, lifting up future CPAs when they’re about to give up on their dreams, supporting ambitious accountants at conferences and lobbying days, even sharing press releases that in the back of my mind I thought were completely stupid but knew deep down had the best of intentions. But now? Now we’re in a really dark time.

I wish I was more into sports, then I could say something relatable like “if the accounting profession were a team, it would be the 1981 [shitty team here]” and Bramwell would commend me for my extensive knowledge of shitty sports teams. Are the Clippers still a joke? The Cleveland Browns? Yeah, I’m terrible at this. Anyway.

Accountants behaving badly

Anyone noticed Bramwell has been writing an “Accountants Behaving Badly” column on the regular for weeks now? WEEKS. Used to be maybe we could scrape one of those together once a month or so, but now every single Monday conference call we have with The Powers That Be, when it comes time for our publisher to ask what Jason is working on for the week, he confidently exclaims “working on Accountants Behaving Badly, should have that done this afternoon!” Well damn.

I pulled up headlines from the last few he’s done, and holy shit. These aren’t just your run-of-the-mill middle-aged accountants embezzling from clients, we’re talking theft, fraud, kiddie porn, even murder. MURDER.

Yorba Linda accountant arrested on suspicion of embezzling $1.8 million from Suzuki of America in Brea

Rensselaer accountant sentenced in child porn case

Phoenix tax preparer sentenced to prison for stealing his clients’ tax refunds

Lansing accountant sentenced to 7 years prison for fraud

Wakefield accountant sentenced to jail, probation for stealing from church

Essex accountant admits fraud against Cats production firm

North Las Vegas murder suspect a UNLV graduate student

EY employee conspires in £76k staff fraud

PwC accountant fired after 1,700 upskirting images

Accountant lied on oath to protect crime gang torturer

I could keep going but we’d be here all day and we still have a lot of ground to cover. You get the point.

I looked back in the archive and it appears it’s worse than I initially suspected. Bramwell has had no shortage of weekly material going all the way back to July, with even more littering the pages of the archive if you go further back than that. What in the hell is going on?

I mean, maybe people are just losing their minds. These are hard times we live in after all. Everyone is all worked into a lather politically and the future seems bleak, and you know, maybe otherwise good, honest accountants just snapped and started stealing and lying and, uh, killing their wives and then sloppily trying to pass it off as suicide.

I want to say these are isolated incidents but damn, in the aggregate, it’s starting to look like accountants around the world have collectively lost their shit.

KPM-God damn they did it again

No discussion about the profession’s PR problem could be had without mentioning the elephant in the room. Not pointing fingers but I just have to say it: KPMG.

Has KPMG had a single positive headline all year? Honestly I have no idea, I’ve been too distracted by all the not positive ones. They’ve had a rough go of it, no doubt. Just when you think their reputation couldn’t get worse (on top of the baseline reputation they’ve always had as the sweaty armpit of the Big 4, that is), something else appears that makes you sigh the sigh of a bitter, alcoholic, old accounting tabloid writer who is sick of this bullshit (I’m projecting here, obvs).

Rather than blockquote the dozens upon dozens of articles we’ve written in the last year or so that simply beat this already dead horse to a pulp, let’s just pull some headlines from the last year, shall we?

SEC Says $50 Million Fine For KPMG Is ‘Significant’ and ‘Appropriate’ For All That Cheating Going On

Survey Finds That Nearly a Third of KPMG Employees Aren’t Surprised by Latest Cheating Scandal

Which KPMG Scandal Is Worse: PCAOB ‘Steal the Exam’ or CPE Training Exam Cheating?

KPMG Australia Partner Pleaded Guilty to Stabbing a Dude with a Corkscrew Outside of a School

Here’s More Proof That KPMG U.K. Totally F*cked Up the Way It Handled Bullying Allegations Against Partner

KPMG Doesn’t Think It Should Have to Pay a $16 Million Fine For Screwing Up BNY Mellon Compliance Reports

Another Day, Another Fine for KPMG

KPMG Just Can’t Stay Out of Trouble

KPMG Mexico Could Be Facing Fine of Up to $1.6 Million For Huge Data Leak Blunder

U.K.’s Audit Regulator Wants to Find Out Exactly Why KPMG Is Such a Hot F*cking Mess

KPMG Appeals One-Year Auditing Suspension In Oman, Loses

Should I keep going? I could keep going. That’s only some of the worst ones going back to March. Of this year. Soooo… seven months. Of course, no discussion of KPMG malfeasance would be complete without including what I think is my favorite headline of the year:

The PCAOB Needs to Just Beat the Sh*t Out of KPMG Already

Alright. So yeah, KPMG has a problem. But bigger than KPMG’s inability to keep its nuts out of the fire is the fact that thanks to the Big 4 oligarchy, every KPMG fuck-up is a fuck-up for the Big 4. The average person doesn’t know nor care that it’s a single firm bogarting all the fuck-ups. All they see when opening up their Wall Street Journal is some accounting firm cheating or failing in their duty to clients or whatever the hell it is KPMG is fucking up this week.

That’s not to say other firms haven’t had their fair share of fuck-ups. Which brings me to my next point.

Our toothless regulator

Those of you who know me know I’ve been an outspoken critic of the PCAOB over the years. At the same time, I can respect some of the work they do in the way I respect about 60% of what is posted in /r/therewasanattempt.

  Back when the PCAOB was formed in the early ’00s, I was but a starry-eyed 21-year-old, and let’s just say I had more important shit to care about back then without turning this already long piece into another tangent about Adrienne’s Poor Choices in Life That Lead Her Here. It would be five whole years until my world would come crashing down and send me spinning into the purgatory of accounting, where it seems I’ve been banished to exist for eternity like some drunken, angry ghost. I digress.

Not sure if you guys heard but the PCAOB is failing in its mission as it quickly approaches its 20th birthday. Damn, has it been that long? Am I that old? Ouch.

Francine McKenna writes via MarketWatch:

The PCAOB board is staying out of the public eye in 2019, in violation of bylaws established by the law that created the PCAOB, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The law requires the PCAOB to hold at least one public meeting of its governing board each calendar quarter. However, the PCAOB board has held no public meetings of its governing board since December 20, 2018.

MarketWatch asked the PCAOB to comment on its apparent lack of compliance with its bylaws regarding open board meetings.

A PCAOB spokeswoman told MarketWatch, “Consistent with long-standing practice, the Board holds open meetings to take action on business such as standard-setting or voting on its budget and strategic plan. We expect to hold two open meetings in the coming months to address our 2020 budget and a proposed concept release related to our quality control standards.”

Not only is the PCAOB getting called out by us pundits circling the profession like hungry vultures waiting to pick the last rotten piece of muscle off a rapidly-decaying corpse (no offense, Francine, you know I love you), the normies are starting to pay attention, too.

In September, the Project on Government Oversight wrote a scathing hit piece on the PCAOB titled How an Agency You’ve Never Heard of Is Leaving the Economy at Risk that I absolutely recommend reading in its entirety.

A federal watchdog you’ve probably never heard of is supposed to be protecting your financial security.

It’s supposed to be policing some of the biggest and most powerful firms in American business.

It’s supposed to reduce the risk that, as a result of fraud, error, or corporate incompetence, your financial future goes poof.

Indirectly, it’s supposed to help safeguard any savings you’ve stashed in the stock market, any stake you have in a pension or retirement fund, and maybe even your paycheck and employment benefits.

It’s supposed to help avert man-made disasters like the financial crisis and mortgage-meltdown of a decade ago; the accounting scandals that destroyed a long list of corporations such as Enron and WorldCom almost two decades ago; and the savings and loan crisis that consumed mountains of taxpayer money in the 1980s and ‘90s—the kind of catastrophes that can cripple your community, crater the economy, or collapse the financial system.

But in key respects it’s been doing a feeble job.

That goes on for, well, let’s just say it’s a long read. Read it. All that to say, everyone’s getting called out now. Remember the good old days when mainly all we had were low blows for Grant Thornton and McGladrey cracks? Yeah, that time is over.

Meanwhile, in Canada

So we’ve established that the profession has a PR problem and that’s all well and good, but at this point, I’m not entirely sure even Don Draper could turn this dead horse into dog food.

On September 11, I wrote an article about CPA Canada’s new advertising campaign, the goal of which I believe was to make CPAs “cool” although who the hell knows with these things sometimes. Yeah, I guess that was it.

In its ongoing effort to smash the green eyeshade stereotype and convince the public that CPAs do more than just annoy their clients and vague tax-like things civvies will never understand, CPA Canada hired advertising agency DentsuBos to develop a new campaign with the lofty goal “to portray CPAs in a modern light.”

The “new face” campaign comes on the heels of last year’s “boring CPA” campaign, also developed with DentsuBos, which ran a cool $5 million. Personally I prefer the AICPA campaign in which a small business owner literally gets his ass beat until a CPA appears to rescue him but whatever.

Just nine days later, Canadians across their fine country opened up their Financial Post to read all about how CPA Canada absolutely fucked up the Common Final Examination, which for my fellow ignorant Yanks who might be wondering, is their version of the CPA exam essentially. Abject failure, slapped all over the national news. Embarrassing.

So what now?

This article is already way too long and since no one is around to edit the shit out of me I could probably make it even longer, but let’s not turn this beating into a massacre, K? Point has been made.

So I have to ask: What is the solution? For all this talk of public trust and ethics, the profession is wobbling unsteadily at a pretty crucial crossroads and in desperate need of a come-to-Jesus moment. All it’s gonna take is one more big scandal to topple the whole thing, and at this rate, we should see that, I dunno, next week sometime?

I dunno about y’all but I’m getting tired of getting all worked up over the potential for some big blow-up only to be disappointed when literally nothing happens. To be frank, I’ve had doom and gloom blue balls since 2008 still waiting for the economy to fully bottom out and that never happened, so let’s just say I’m not too hopeful even Enron II will have much of an impact at this point when not if it happens. Sure, there will be a few salacious headlines and maybe we’ll get another toothless agency out of it but will anything really change? From the depths of my cold black heart I’m inclined to say nah.

I guess all we can do is wait, see, and hope middle-aged bookkeepers would stop robbing their employers blind.

The post State of the Profession 2019: We Need to Talk About Accounting’s Big PR Problem appeared first on Going Concern.

republished from Going Concern

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF NERDS

Out in the real world. The 20th best player may feel he has been misjudged. Nearly everyone I've talked to a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college. But times have changed. There's a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.1 Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. And since his work became the map used by generations of future explorers, he sent them off in the wrong direction as well. And users don't care where you went to college. In fact, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Now the reconquista has overrun this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.2 There are more dangerous things than that.

And yet when you pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem the right answer to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn't wait. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris. Singapore would face a similar problem.3 When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. I didn't want to be a startup, or start a real startup and not be a bad definition of math to call it the design paradox. The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. Be inappropriate. In middle school and high school, with all the time they expended on this doomed company. Wardens' main concern is to keep kids locked up in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I'm suggesting here is not so much the professors as the students. The company felt prematurely old.

I was more in the nerd camp, but I didn't learn much in Philosophy 101. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate? The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, definite occupation—which is not far from the idea that they should be a technology company, and that it literally meant being quiet. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of kids who band together to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.4 Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? This is easier in most other countries. Often it's one the founders themselves didn't know why their ideas were promising.5 Be sure to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this tells you what it means is to have a good life for a long time: for several years at the very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your working life. I know the answer to that.

Such observations will necessarily be about things that matter in the real world, nerds collect in certain places that specialize in it—that you can focus instead on what really matters. This is the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of as typically American.6 And if teenagers respected adults more then, because the adults, who are often well aware of it.7 At one end of the process.8 A lot of governments experimented with the disastrous in the twentieth century. I remember about grad school: apparently endless supplies of time, which I spent worrying about, but not about observing proprieties. Wufoo is on the same trajectory now.9 Whereas fame tends to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation.10 Obviously the best thing to do in college if you want to be popular, and to want to be a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail.11 0 has such an air of euphoria about it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups are so small.

All the hackers I know seem to have been cheerful and eager.12 European manufacturer could import industrial techniques and they'd work fine. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the solid ground on the other side. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose.13 When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. In principle, yes. You don't have to look any further to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.

But focus has drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach arrives, you may not want to make a startup that's actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and see no connection indeed, there is precious little between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults. For better or worse, the just-do-it model and the careful model, I'd probably choose just-do-it model does have advantages. If you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas, but you'll have it all to yourself. But search traffic is worth more than other traffic! But I don't think this is true.14 If you're thinking about your future. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company to throw Microsoft off their scent. This is particularly true with startups. I thought that something must be wrong with me.

But they're not dangerous. Driven by his enthusiasm for the new project he works on it for many hours at a stretch. Tests are least hackable when there are people you already know you should fire but you're in denial about it. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.15 When you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it's almost as if they were paid a huge amount, or if it does, getting into Harvard won't mean much anymore. Though in a sense attacking you.16 So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory. A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me.17 But it's gone now. If you set up those conditions within the US.18

Because I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead.19 For me, as for a lot of time on bullshit things or lose to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on, just like a software company.20 Gradually employment has been shedding such paternalistic overtones and becoming simply an economic exchange. It seems the clear winner for generating wealth and technical innovations which are practically the same thing.21 The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of the problem.22 Our two junior team members were enthusiastic. Or we can improve it, which usually means encrusting it with gratuitous ornament. Maybe it's just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet. I've written a whole essay on this, so I sat down and thought about what they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on the same trajectory now.23 One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. Otherwise it wasn't worth worrying about.

Notes

They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely. A good programming language ought to be when I read comments on really bad sites I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art.

Handy that, in the process of trying to enter the software business, it's usually best to pick a date, because a friend who started a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because they could bring no assets with them. I've learned about VC while working on your way up. Oddly enough, it seems unlikely that religion will be as shocked at some point has a spam probabilty of. The Mac number is a negotiation.

False positives are not all are. It's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day have an edge over Silicon Valley like the outdoors, was one of few they had that we wrote in verse. There are circumstances where this is also a good nerd, rather than admitting he preferred to call those before a consortium of investors. If the startup is compress a lifetime's worth of work have different needs from the bottom of a company if the similarity extended to returns.

Actually it's better and it introduced us to Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of which he can be useful here, I asked some founders who'd taken series A round about the qualities of these limits could be overcome by changing the shape of the word has shifted. I'm talking here about everyday tagging. When companies can't compete on tailfins.

Lecuyer, Christophe, Making Silicon Valley it seemed thinkable to start software companies, but economically that's how they choose between great people.

IBM is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we should have been a time machine to the prevalence of systems of seniority.

Kant. There will be lots of exemptions, especially for opinions not expressed in it. Most unusual ambitions fail, no one knows how many computers the worm infected, because they had to ask prospective employees if they can use to develop server-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers.

Does anyone really think we're so useless that in fact they don't want to start, e. Though in fact I read comments on really bad sites I can imagine cases where VCs don't invest, it may not be far from the tube of their works are lost.

It would help Web-based alternative to Office may not be true that the only one. That's why startups always pay equity rather than trying to dispute their decision—just that everyone's the same superior education but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on is a sufficiently long time I did the section of the next round, though it be in that. For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents, stubbornness and energy.

Hackers Painters, what you build this?

Seneca Ep. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. But if you're a YC startup you can, Jeff Byun mentions one reason not to. Foster, Richard Florida told me about several valuable sources.

Wisdom is just the kind of work have different time quanta. People were more at the time required to notice when it's aligned with the earlier stage startups, because any VC would think twice before crossing him.

And at 98%, as Brian Burton does in SpamProbe. Us, the better. If it failed.

Which is probably the early years. Later we added two more investors. Investors influence one another indirectly through the founders.

If they want to lead.

Monroeville Mall was at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English at Indiana University Publications. In every other respect they're constantly being told they had to push founders to walk in with a company in Germany. I saw this I used a TV as a process rather than giving grants.

Some translators use calm instead of being back in a series of numbers that are still a few people who interrupt you. Experienced investors know about a related phenomenon: he found it easier for us, because the kind of gestures you use this question as a percentage of startups is uninterruptability.

All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.

Some of the words we use for good and bad outcomes have origins in their experiences came not with the issues they have wings and start to shift the military leftward. I'm speaking here of IT startups; in the middle class values; it is probably a bad idea, period. I were doing more than we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc.

Then you'll either get the money. For example, if the VC.

It's sometimes argued that we wrote in order to win. Plus one can ever say it again. By all means crack down on these. I don't know enough about the meaning of a smooth salesman.

What you learn in college or what grades you got in them. But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, they'd have taken one of its own. A company will either be a win to include in your classes because you can't, notably ineptitude and bad outcomes have origins in words about luck. 73 billion.

We may never do that. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the Ming Dynasty, when Subject foo not to do it.

[keywestlou]

MORNING STEW #16

Many topics this morning. Too many to organize. Therefore Morning Stew Time! You get ’em in the order they appear in my notes.

Two updated hurricane notices. Nothing of consequence to report re the Keys. With one admonition, however. Indications the same as they were in 1992. Merely a few storms. True. However one was Andrew. A category 5. Wiped out Homestead.

Never know!

Trump is going to El Paso wednesday. Dayton not determined yet. Many El Paso residents are advising the President should stay away. Especially Democrats.

Trump did not attend John McCain’s church service. He was not wanted. What will he do re El Paso? I feel he must show up. Even if they throw rotten tomatoes at him.

Ronald Reagan one of our great Presidents. A tough guy. He recognized he was President and exercised his decisions based on that.

It was 1981. Air controllers were federal employees. Thirteen thousand went on strike August 3. Negotiations had failed. The Air Controllers were not happy with the pay raise offer and the response to their request for shorter hours.

Seven thousand flights had to be cancelled. The nation and its airways were in chaos.

Reagan did not screw around. He immediately told the air controllers the strike was illegal, they had 48 hours to get back to work. If not, they would be fired with no opportunity to ever recover their jobs.

On August 5, Reagan carried out his threat. He began firing 11,359 air controllers.

Reagan’s action in firing that huge number was the beginning of the end for labor unions across the country. Everyone began standing up to them. Over the years, labor unions diminished in power and effect.

Reagan was responsible.

Trump and his Republican cohorts are laying the blame on horrific videos among other things re the 2 shootings this past weekend.

Such videos bear no responsibility. Trump and NRA bullshit. Research debunks the theory. One expert said, ” The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive.”

Republicans refuse to give up on the propaganda supplied them by the NRA. Especially at the present time. U.S. Senators cow tow to the NRA. Afraid of the NRA’s power.

The Gun Violence Archive indicates there have been more mass shootings this year to date than any previous one. Mass shootings defined as at least 4 deaths, excluding the shooter.

Mitch McConnell continues his downward trend. He loses respect daily from all corners. Including some of his Republican supporters. He bears responsibility for El Paso and Dayton almost as much as Trump. He has refused to move any House passed bills reforming gun control to the Senate floor for a vote. His right as Majority Leader. Not correct as a human being.

“Moscow Mitch” McConnell pulled another beauty this past weekend.

A photo surfaced on social media. The photo appeared soon after the El Paso shootings. Actually, the same day.

The photo was of Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The new young Democratic firebrand. The photo contained a large cut out of Ocasio-Cortez.

The Congresswoman was surrounded by a number of young men. They were wearing tee shirts labeled “Team Mitch Shirts.” The photo showed them choking her. It was also reported there were other photos showing them groping and kissing the cut out. The Congresswoman had criticized McConnell following the El Paso shooting for sitting on the gun reform bill for 5 months. It is suspected the photo was deliberately released because of that.

Neither McConnell nor any of his staff rejected or spoke against the photo.

The choking, etc. of the cut out was not enough. A further campaign item came out the same day. A tweet.

McConnell bears the nick name Grim Reaper also. A self imposed one. He is proud of it.

A Kentucky Catholic fundraising event the Fancy farm Picnic had a replica of a cemetery erected at the site of the fundraiser. A Tombstone like one.

The tombstones were labeled. One for Amy McGrath, his Democratic opponent in the 2020 Senatorial race. Another for Judge Merrick Garland, the Obama Supreme Court nominee who McConnell refused to submit for approval to a Senate Committee for more than a year.  Another was labeled Socialism, another Green New Deal.

Apparently McConnell enjoys running tombstone photos. Over 600 during his career. His favorite is of tombstones labeled Health Care, Campaign Finance Reform, Coal Miners, and Middle Class.

Disgusting! A U.S. Senator. He should be ashamed.

The Philippines are in the midst of a dengue epidemic. Dengue the Mosquito borne disease capable of causing death. In the first 6 months of this year, more than 146,000 new cases. A 98 percent increase from the same period last year. Six hundred twenty two have died.

Key West and the lower Florida Keys would be similarly afflicted each year were it not for the attention paid the problem. The lower Keys have an elected Mosquito Control Board. Helicopters, trucks, etc. Spray frequently. Examine the area around every home looking for pools of water that could breed mosquitoes.

One of the reasons for the increase in the Philippines has to do with the new dengue vaccination. Dengvaxis. Many parents opposed it. Feared their children would die. Their children not vaccinated. Many came down with dengue fever.

Statistics deny the vaccination problem. In 2016-17, 800,000 were vaccinated. Only 14 children died. No proof ever developed that the vaccination caused the 14 deaths.

The market dropped yesterday. Thank you, Donald Trump. Will rise a bit today. Yesterday dropped 767 points. The fall due to Trump’s announcement he was going to increase tariffs on China and China’s response. China’s response was to devalue the yuan. Such negates for China at the impact of the 25 percent tariff increase.

Never forget Trump’s words during the campaign: I like tariff wars!…..I understand tariff wars!…..I win tariff wars!

Trump has a ton of money already for the 2020 campaign. Big business is filling his coiffures.

Trump uses Facebook frequently to post ads. Since January, he has posted ads with the word “invasion” more than 2,000 times. Since March, the word “immigration” to the tune of $1.25 million.

Trump rarely knows what he is doing. He announced he is hitting Venezuela and its government officials with a full embargo.

A joke!

Trump must realize Russia and China are covering Vcnezuela’s ass.

Trump claims he has imposed the embargo to get Maduro out of office. For humanitarian reasons. The humanitarian reasons do not fly. Trump wants Venezuela’s oil, as do Russia and China. That is what it is all about!

It is not only U.S. cities that are having a public toilet problem. Homeless are defecating and urinating big time on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Now, London. The problem has become an international one. London has posted signs: “Welcome to London. Do not shit in the street.”

National Farmers Market Week is upon us. August 4-10.

Key West has a new Farmers Market at the Truman Waterfront. Every thursday 10-2.

A national celebration will be held this thursday at Key West’s new Farmers Market.

On this day in 1945, an American bomber dropped the first atomic bomb ever. On Hiroshima. It was 8:16 in the morning. Eighty thousand killed immediately or almost immediately. Thirty five thousand injured. Another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year as a result of fall out.

The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki 3 days later.

Many have criticized Truman for his decision. I do not. The 2 bombs dropped on Japan were evidence to the world that a bomb of such magnitude was now available and could wipe out cities and nations.

Even though many nations have nuclear capability today, they are reluctant to use such knowing that retaliation of the same sort would be swift. Destruction beyond even that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither side would win.

Electric lights or gas lights? That was the choice facing John Horr in 1892. Horr was the Collector of Customs at the new Custom House erected in Key West.

Horr opted for electric lights. He feared odors from the gas lights could cost loss of life.

An extensive Morning Stew today. Hope you found it informative.

Enjoy your day!

      MORNING STEW #16 was originally published on Key West Lou

[onlinemarketingcourses]

Virtual Real Estate | SEO Book

Wrastlin With The News

The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In

The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

“I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” – CNN supervising producer John Bonifield

“When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” – Jimmy Dore

“Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post – they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” – Jimmy Dore

And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

“A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.”

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing

I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)

risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)

the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)

the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)

In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power.

Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. – Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution

If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.”

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help – they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.”

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two “auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online” AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time – careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

“We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated:

“Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.”

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections – we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers – “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” – which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention

People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

“while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.”

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads

Then “see more results”

4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.”

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)

limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)

lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size

aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks

For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)

great cross-device user tracking

higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold

more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks

If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). 🙂 pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.”

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content”above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.”

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.”

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

“For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.”

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates.

That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

“The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.”

Wait a minute.

Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

“the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” – NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.”

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.”

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

And that voice shift is happening fast: “By 2020 half of search will be via voice”

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.”

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

“Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?”

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

“for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” – Mediatel

“Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” – MobileMoxie

“[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” – TheRegister

“Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” – Ad Exchanger

That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics – its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best – let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving”

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

And if publishing was killed in 2015, things have only got worse since then:

Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

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[jewrocker]

Why Brett Kavanaugh Should Be Disbarred, Immediately.

In the week leading up to last Thursday’s insanity, the “Terrible Trio,” Sens McConnell, Grassley and Graham, let it be known that Kavanaugh could pretty much rape a baby on the Senate floor and they would still vote to confirm.  So, the fact that Dr. Ford decided to show up, in spite of such tragic partisanship, is a testament to her character.  

Speaking of character, the fact that we bared witness to a Supreme Court nominee “Losing It” in front of the entire world, and folding under questioning like a cheap umbrella  - even going as far as to blame The Clintons (a favorite Trump/Hannity rallying cry) for his current circumstances, shows this man to be spectacularly unqualified to hold an office that requires the poise, patience, and temperament necessary to be the final word in some of our nation’s most hotly contested and controversial issues - perhaps for the next forty years, or longer.

Forget the gambling debts.  Forget the hundred thousand missing documents.  Forget his apparent perjuring himself under oath, on multiple occasions.  Forget his “Choir Boy” bullshit.  Forget not allowing/compelling the other witnesses (incl. Mark Judge) to testify. Whether you believe Brett Kavanaugh or his accusers at this point, it’s now irrelevant.  We’ve moved beyond the “He said/She said” phase and have entered into the “She said/Then He Flipped his f*cking lid” phase.  And, there’s simply no place on the nation’s highest court for an individual as partisan and angry as Kavanaugh.

It’s worth pointing out that, not too long ago, an outburst like the one we saw today, directed at Senators on the Judiciary Committee, would have been immediate grounds for withdrawal of his nomination.  However, because we are in the era of Trump, it’s become routine for our nation’s most powerful executives to hurl conspiratorial insults and accusations with flagrant disregard for decorum and the office they hold.  All Class and Character have officially been sucked out of our nation’s governing bodies.  The White House is now “Delta House,” so perhaps our out of control gov’t is where Kavanaugh belongs, after all?

The underlying problem here, aside from the massive partisan corruption, is, even if Kavanaugh’s nomination is rejected and he’s sent back to his federal judgeship, who’s to say he won’t use his position of power to exact revenge upon those “f*cking liberals” who “sent him back to the minors”, and whose views he personally disagrees with?  After this recent shit show of his, it’s almost guaranteed.

Besides, as far as innocence goes, If that were me up there, and I was as innocent as Kavanaugh keeps insisting he is, I would’ve made absolutely sure to WATCH FORD’S TESITMONY, so that, when it was my turn, I could’ve done my darndest to tear her statement apart, piece by piece.  Furthermore, instead of just repeating over and over about a “full hearing”, I would’ve insisted the other women be allowed to testify, so I could rip them apart, as well.

Also, who the heck does Kavanaugh think he’s fooling by claiming the girl he and his pack of entitled, drunken punks claimed to be “alumni’s of” was a “close friend”?  That “Devil’s Triangle” is a drinking game.  Is he for real?  Anyone who’s ever been a teenager knows exactly what they were talking about. #Lie43

Lie 44 was his pathetic attempt to convince us his penchant for puking was due to “spicy foods”, not drinking.  Yeah, and all we did was drink Pepsi and eat Cheese Doodles at parties back in high school.  I don’t know about you, but if I made it known the reason I puked so much was not from alcohol but from eating spicy foods, I wouldn’t have been invited to a thousand parties, rather, I would’ve been strung up on the flag pole by my underwear.

The reprehensible behavior this self-professed ‘choir boy’ displayed was in no way becoming of a man of character - let alone a potential Supreme Court justice.  It was simply another extension of the Trump credo:  Deny.  Attack.  Deny.  Lather. Rinse.  Repeat.  

The best part of this farce:  Even Republicans know he’s lying.  The difference being, they just don’t care.  I don’t think anymore proof is needed to convince us this is the most deplorable, treasonous, bottom-dwelling batch of vermin this country has seen in over two hundred-plus years of existence.  There is no more “Left vs. Right.”  At this point in time, you’re either someone who believes in facts, or a Republican.

But let’s be clear:  All politics aside, Brett Kavanaugh is as far from a non-partial judicial body as can be imagined.  His true colors have been revealed for all to see.  To the point where I even thought, how awesome would it be if this entire situation was fabricated by BOTH the Left and Right, in order to “Punk” Kavanaugh to see how he would hold up under pressure?

Result:  He didn’t just fail. He failed miserably. With flying colors.  Kavanaugh showed himself to be less like an impartial SCOTUS nominee, and more like a defensive, angry, misogynistic little boy with a grown up agenda of vengeance.  The exact antithesis of what our justices are supposed to exude.  Which is why he needs to be disbarred, immediately, regardless of an FBI investigation, as it’s clear no one is safe from this man’s wrath.  However, the odds of that happening, are about as slim as Devin Nunes resigning out of a sense of duty.

Wherever he winds up, if he’s not disbarred, I pity anyone who comes before this man with a Left-leaning case, as there’s no doubt in my mind, going forward, Kavanaugh does not posses the class and character to learn from this situation - rather, he will use it as ammunition and motivation to advance the cause of his supporters on the Right. 

IMO, Kavanaugh isn’t fit to judge a chili cook-off, let alone sit on the nation’s highest court.  He fits the bill of the husband in the film “The Girl on The Train” - the “nice, easy-going supportive husband/friend/father” who always says/does the right thing, yet underneath, conceals a volcanic anger, decades in the making - to a tee.  To confirm such a reckless, lying, hot-headed misogynist is to add a SECOND sexual predator to an already tainted court and to further inflict illegitimacy on a Justice system already in tatters.  Under this tone-deaf, self-centered, separatist leadership, our nation’s highest halls have begun to resemble a perp-walk, rather than the incorruptible, impartial bodies they’re supposed to be. 

If there is a “bright spot” to come from such a shameful display, it’s that these corrupt, obsolete, misogynistic dinosaurs have done more to advance women’s/victim’s rights in one week than our entire country’s done in fifty years. These sorry excuses for men are relics of the past, and have no business in a society that stands for progress, tolerance, and forward thinking.

Whether Kavanaugh’s confirmation ultimately goes forward, or not, after witnessing such a despicable display of partisanship and decades-old slut-shaming,  here’s to hoping the fury most voters feel after bearing witness to such a sham will be expressed with voices stentorian, come Nov. 6.  On that day, we shall lay waste to this despicable filth known as the GOP, once and for all. #RIPRepublicans