#remember when company’s didn’t politicize their products

[hymnless-space-nugget]

[chuckpnla]

Pandemified

The Present

Over three months ago when I left the office on a Thursday, I intended to work from home for “a week or two.”  That was the thought I had as I looked back at my newly renovated office and looked at the new tablet on my desk, thinking, “I’ll be back in a few days, I won’t need it.”  

A month passed, my husband and I started doing projects at home.  His company paid the entire staff full pay the entire time, even though they couldn’t go to work.  They were incredible, but it was a little worrisome to think of how long they could or would decide to continue the practice.  Those projects were deliberate on my part to provide a productive focus for both of us.  There were a number of things, lighting, a bigger TV, furniture, the patio, and several more, all designed to improve the comfort and appearance of our home.  It worked.  

My husband and friends had moments of uncertainty, as we all did.  

The Perspective

I’ve seen a lot of unprecedented, world changing events in my life.  To many, this was the first “Pandemic” they were really aware of.  But for a gay man, who came out during the height of the AIDS crisis, before any effective medication, it is not.  At 18 I moved to LA for college.  During High School I had both a boyfriend and a girlfriend and truly did not understand my sexuality.  Society equates sexuality with sex, but it is really about feelings. So, sex for me didn’t have an exclusive link to the other person’s gender, and because sex alone was society’s measure of sexuality, I was confused.  I came to understand that I’m just gay, period.  Because i feel complete sharing my life with a man.  

When I came out it wasn’t a big announcement.  It was more repeated attempts to bond with one person, some men, some women.  One therapist called it, “serial monogamy.”  During the time, sex was very scary.  The idea being that you were at risk for HIV and if you became positive, there was no effective treatment and a high percentage of people with HIV were dying.  HIV became politicized quickly.  “President” Reagan seemed to deliberately ignore the pandemic, and even mocked people who were sick, even though his own son is gay.  It was brutal to watch.  “Gay Rights,” as it was called at the time, no initials added just yet, had made enormous progress to that point in our culture, and this event set us back decades.  

Some History

The stigma of HIV extended to all gay men, not just those that were positive.  We were viewed by many, in the larger culture, as lepers.  They assumed every gay man had the virus and their ignorance and fear fueled their prejudices.  It increased the difficulty of coming out, because many didn’t want a gay man around for fear they’d somehow become infected.  I remember many conversations where someone expressed that fear and my glib reply was, “Unless you’re sleeping with him, I’m pretty confident you’re safe, so I wouldn’t worry...”  Discrimination in housing, jobs, social settings, and more was rampant and people felt “justified.”  Things like dentists wore masks and gloves for the first time to “protect themselves.”  The idiotic premise that magically disappeared as the pandemic became less a part of public consciousness.

The Change

When CO-19 started, it was far away.  A city in China was quarantined.  It reminded me of SARS, also a “corona virus,” which happened during a period in my life where I was traveling on planes every week.  People from other countries were wearing masks on the plane, but not us.  It seemed excessive.  It was concerning to be next to someone on a plane who was coughing and had symptoms, but that happens all the time.  I’ve had bronchitis and even pneumonia during this period, getting little rest and being exposed to all sorts of things on planes and hotels and being in different cities every week.  But, I took care of myself, went to the doctor and recovered.  

You can’t be a gay man over 40 and not have some knowledge of virology.  You also have knowledge of minimizing risk.  The idea that something as important as sex was as dangerous as it was for the first decade of my adulthood for me was a great teacher.  I have known many gay men during that time who decided not to have sex at all.  I found this sad, but respected their decision.  Sex is life-affirming and necessary for me, so I followed the recommendations, until I was in a monogamous relationship.  I’m still negative even after three long term relationships with HIV positive men.  

So, I stayed home.  I work about 60 hours a week, and it was fantastic to delete the commute from that equation.  My husband was home for 3 months and we have yet to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, so that time together was amazing.  We have made our home as comfortable and attractive as possible.  This matters.  To have options for places to go at home, different spaces for different activities.  If you work at home, you have to be able to “get away” from work.  Even if that is a corner where you work, only do work in that area, when you walk away from it, you are no longer “at work.”  

My company always had an ambivalent attitude about working remotely.  Personally, I really care about the people I’ve worked with for over two decades and like to see them in person, work with them live, and even eat together, most days breakfast and lunch.  Some of us have traveled all over the world together.  So being apart is a loss.  The corporate world can be a swirl of opinions, attitudes, changes, and plans.  The traditional way to understand ones place is to being around, to interact with people, and to share information.  Being physically distant makes this less possible.  

Adapt

So we adapt.  My counterpart at the office and I had breakfast together nearly every day for years, and we now do a call every couple of days.  My boss and I have a weekly call and talk every couple of days.  My husband is back at work on a limited schedule, so I plan my day around when we can be together.  

We have food delivered, which costs a few bucks more, but is pretty cool.  I have driven exactly twice during the quarantine.  I’ve left the house about once a week on average, with a mask, and social distancing.  The cats are thrilled to have us around.  

Unlike HIV, we as gay men, are not stigmatized, this pandemic affects everyone equally.  We are in it together.  I’m not surprised by all the conspiracy theories and the resistance to basic, common sense ways to protect oneself.  It’s a very strange experience and people try to make sense of it however they can.  Denial is not a surprise to me.  But like HIV, it’s hard to be willing but simple to protect oneself.  

Rumors, Theories, Fears

The most important thing to know about conspiracy theories is, if you can’t prove it, it literally doesn’t matter.  If it makes you feel better to believe it, that’s OK.  We can drive ourselves crazy trying to distill the truth and the facts out of all the ideas, exaggerations, “statistics” and “news.”  But, those of us who survived the AIDS crisis had one, very simple, idea to deal with all of that.  We assumed every person we would be intimate with was positive.  They could be positive and lie, they could be positive and not know, they could be positive and not be willing to talk about it.  So asking that question was meaningless, you had to take responsibility for yourself, and act accordingly.   CO-19 is the same in this way, you do not know who is infected, and they may or may not know either.  So act accordingly and take care of yourself.  Period.  This nullifies politics, fake news, exaggerations, and denial.  It’s simple.  

Action

We do not know what is next, but here’s something to consider.  Fear and denial are the biggest enemies to happiness.  We are all going to have moments of doubt and fear in our lives, regardless of things that affect us globally.  The way we respond is the difference between depression and despair, and hope.  Action is the best solution I have found.  Creating projects at home, keeping in touch with family more closely, learning to work well from home, if possible.  My husband started a weekly call with his best friends and they have been getting together on a call every Friday since the beginning, screen sharing and gaming together.  I’ve done every project, including new plants and furniture on our patio and a water feature, to make a safe place to go outside.  Be creative, what is important to you?  Who can you help?  How can you connect with the people in your life who aren’t with you right now?  We...have...options.  Forget the politics, pay less attention to the “news.”  Don’t ignore it, but get the facts that concern you and leave the rest.  You will feel better.  Avoid drama and exaggeration about what is happening.  Make your own life better, act as if you don’t know who is infected, and focus on protecting yourself with the basics, mask, wash your hands, don’t touch your face, and live your life.   Namaste

[guwop-aye-bro-blog]

Some thoughts on the Facebook Killer and how we reacted to it.

Nothing good stems from Facebook live. The only time I remember it exists, someone is getting murdered on it. Sometimes I wish I could see the meetings that hatch these ideas. Does every social networking company gather around solely to ask each other how to (slightly) repackage what the other one is doing? Are Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram all under an umbrella, in some clandestine cabal? Let me know if I am on to something. Apparently, it took Facebook two hours and 14 minutes to take down the video of Robert Godwin Sr.’s murder. Mark Zuckerberg, likely reflecting on what a shitty idea Facebook Live is, said they’ve “got a lot of work to do.” Well, Mark, I’d suggest faster moderators. More importantly, however, a watchlist for whoever shares an article from Thought Catalog. The cesspool that resides in any and all Facebook comment sections, though? Beyond repair.

A little background on Sunday’s events. The 45 hour manhunt started with Steve Stephens going on Facebook live and literally killing somebody for the world to see. The victim, Robert Godwin Sr., 78, was a stranger. Stephens forced him to say his ex girlfriend’s name (Joy Lane) before shooting him. I haven’t seen the clip and don’t plan on it. However, I unknowingly heard the audio when 93x played it on Monday morning as part of their news segment. I would ask who was responsible for letting a snuff film play on the airwaves, but then someone would say 93x and I’d believe them. In a nutshell, he lost it over some relationship troubles and decided to take it out on the world. Almost two days later, Stephens was caught at McDonalds when he was waiting for some nuggets and fries, per the request of the quick thinking employee. This was the only sensible thing he did. If I’ve mustered up the lack of shame to order McDonalds, I will wait until the fries are ready, even if I’m on the run. All jokes aside, the idea of an elderly man being killed in cold blood on Easter shakes people up, understandably. In this instance, though, it shook them up enough to strip themselves of empathy and politicize it immediately. Good work.

The state of discourse is warped. Given the short shelf life for stories, stormy political climate, and ideologies weaponized ad nauseum, a productive approach to the conversation is, at best, uncommon. If you’re a rational person, this isolated, domestic incident is better left apolitical in its early stages. Even if your argument holds weight, you’re just going to piss people off. During the last election cycle, however, I’ve noticed the Internet throwing their two cents in all at once, hoping to be the first with a take. Some immediately shoehorn an agenda, which is obviously the tasteful option. Others, become forensic detectives and blood spatter analysts overnight. Ever heard of a crisis actor? A stranger with an Android screenshot wants to tell you about it. All of this, of course, under the guise of empathy for Godwin Sr. and his family - or in their words, “that old man that died on Facebook Live or whatever.”

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately, social justice is as present as ever. Saying anything deemed “problematic” will make you go viral in the worst way. You don’t want those problems. Frankly, they aren’t out of line most of the time. I’ll always encourage mobilizing against racism and careless language. A few of the younger users tend to virtue signal and leave it at that, but whatever. When I was 17, I liked Ron Paul. They’re far better off than I was then. But, we’re all at risk of getting lost in the sauce.

Within an hour of the story breaking, there were tweets pinning the Cleveland shootings on complex things like hypermasculinity. For the record, it’s no secret that patriarchy played a role here. Men will be destructive, selfish and crazy and still manage to do the mental gymnastics to blame a woman. It’s a tried and true trope. However, “snapping” over a woman versus commanding a stranger to recite their name before ending their life is a little different. Call me crazy, but I think Steve had some screws loose.

Twitter user GeauxGabby, dubbed “The Most Annoying Person On Twitter” by the good people at Bossip, had this to say:

“14 people were just murdered because this man is hurt over his girl. THAT IS HYPERMASCULINITY.”

This was part of a rant about men being murderers. I’ll never attempt to invalidate a woman speaking up about something like that, but it took a strange turn when she got specific. Suddenly, she started to focus solely on black men. I didn’t know who she was so I decided to do my Googles. In a few articles, GeauxGabby is named as a “member” of Black Twitter, although I don’t think she is warmly embraced as such. Her bio is adorned with a #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, as well as a reminder that a retweet does not mean an endorsement. The latter may come as a relief to many.

One of the (deleted) tweets in the thread said “N*****S ARE PISS” echoing sentiments shared with Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman and probably the entire Trump administration. She came to this conclusion so early that the information isn’t even correct - we’ve yet to hear about the 14 other murders. Usually I’d give a pass for misinformation when a story is developing, but not when it’s used to support flippant, dangerous accusations. It’s disheartening to see a valid critique of hypermasculinity mutate into an attack on black men. There’s a lot of opportunities to be thoughtful being squandered by “drag culture.” Nobody wants to unpack ideas when they’re wielded as social currency and provocation.

On the other side of the spectrum, Pepe frogs were doing what they usually do. The reactionary right wing response was expectedly tone deaf, clamoring for a response from Black Lives Matter. How stuck on semantics can you be? An organization against police brutality and systemic oppression isn’t obligated to speak on some lunatic. Immediately, conservative pundits began digging for evidence that Stephens was affiliated with BLM and Islam. It’s almost like they’re trying to smear people they hate, if you can believe that.  A comment on the Blue Lives Matter website (I got there on accident, don’t bother visiting unless you want to buy a wristband or something) said that they were expecting an “outcry” towards police when they catch him. How nauseatingly out of touch (or just plain racist) do you have to be to assume that the same people that defended Eric Garner are going to be crusading for this asshole?

Finally, the conspiracy theorists. Now that Alex Jones is doing the pump fake in court, I was worried that I’d be without my dose of crazy when I need it. My fears subsided when I saw a Facebook page juxtapose Christopher Dorner and Steve Stephens, suggesting they were the same person. This was after someone posted an anecdote about their Dad breaking down why the video was fake. Usually I trust Dads, but I don’t think everyone is Dexter Morgan. There were points about the blood drying too quickly, the shot not being realistic, etc. In fact, this theory is dumber than “Dexter” got after John Lithgow called somebody a c*nt. That’s saying something.

These conspiracy theories imply that professional actors are used by the government to deceive the public. They believe that the same people are used in multiple instances. For example, the Boston Marathon bombing and the Sandy Hook massacre were theorized to use the same Academy Award winners. They have gone so far to personally attack the parents of children slain in the 2012 school shooting, and I’m assuming the same will be done to Godwin Sr.’s family if history is any indication.

I’m at a loss as to why they would hire the same person to appear in multiple publicized tragedies and events. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep a few on retainer? Can they not afford more actors? Actually, can I be a crisis actor? If someone could suggest a template for a resume or do some press shots for me, I’d really be interested. All I have to do is show up and cry, which is what I usually do when I log on to Facebook anyway.

All in all, I don’t really have a thesis here. Sorry to say, but these knee jerk reactions rendered Godwin Sr.’s death into a contest to see who was the loudest in the room. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure whether we project our narcissism whenever we can or have just turned into desensitized shitheads. Look at the president - both options are viable. Regardless, someone died, and I was a bit disturbed (albeit not shocked) at the immediate attempts to politicize and twist the situation to fit a narrative. It’s not a bad thing to just write someone like Stephens off as crazy and leaving your critique to the wayside while families mourn and communities heal. In fact, it may stop us from treating the news like a microwave.

John Dorcy

[thewebofslime]

Nellie Ohr Testimony Confirms Her Work for the CIA Prior to investigating the Trump campaign for Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr worked as a contractor for the CIA for up to six years BY JEFF CARLSON March 13, 2019 Updated: March 13, 2019 Nellie Ohr, the wife of former high-ranking Justice Department (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr—both of whom played pivotal roles in the FBI’s investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign—worked for the CIA as an independent contractor for as long as six years. Ohr was hired as a researcher by Fusion GPS—the company hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to produce the now-infamous Steele dossier—in 2015. She conducted open-source research into members of the Trump campaign for Fusion GPS—which describes itself as a commercial research and strategic intelligence firm—that may have been used in the Steele dossier. She also provided her husband with a USB stick containing all her research from her time at Fusion GPS to pass on to the FBI in late 2016 after she had officially left the firm. Prior to her work for Fusion GPS, Ohr worked for an internal open source division of the CIA named Open Source Works from 2008 to at least June 2010. It appears likely that she remained in that role until 2014. Notably, Open Source Works is a separate entity from the more commonly known governmental open-source division, Open Source Enterprises, formally known as Open Source Center. Nellie’s Work for Open Source Works According to a transcript of an Oct. 19, 2018, closed-door testimony, which was reviewed by The Epoch Times, Ohr acknowledged to congressional investigators that she worked as an independent contractor for “various agencies in the United States Government.” Ohr testified that she worked for the CIA’s Open Source Works (OSW) division. She also revealed that prior to her work for the CIA, she worked for Mitre, which is funded by the U.S. government and interacts with various intelligence agencies. Ms. Ohr: Starting in 2000, I did some part-time contracting for Mitre, which is a contract — Rep. Jordan: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. Ms. Ohr: Mitre. Mitre Corporation, which in turn had contracts with U.S. Government clients. Rep. Jordan: Got it. Ms. Ohr: Through most of 2008. And then starting in 2008, I worked for Open Source Works. Mitre Corporation is a “not-for-profit company that operates multiple federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs).” In other words, Mitre is a government-funded enterprise that conducts research for the U.S. government. Of greater interest was Ohr’s employment as an independent contractor for OSW, the CIA’s internal open source division. Ohr’s Work for the CIA The CIA describes OSW as a division that uses open-source information to produce intelligence products. “[Open Source Works] was charged by the Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights on intelligence issues,” states an unclassified Nov. 16, 2010, CIA report headlined “Russia: Security Concerns About Iran’s Space Program Growing.” Ohr told congressional investigators that she began working for Open Source Works in 2008, but provided no time-frame for her end date. Her profile on LinkedIn, however, provides some indication that she may have remained employed with Open Source Works through 2014. From 2000 to 2014, Ohr lists herself on her resume as a “Linguist/Research Analyst – Self-employed.” But she also concurrently lists her 2013-2015 employment with Plessas Experts’ Networks as an “Expert/Content Creator.” Ohr told congressional investigators that she intentionally did not list any agencies on her resume when working as an independent contractor for the U.S. government: Rep. Meadows: So I have one follow-up. Have you ever submitted a resume that would list any of those agencies on that resume? Ms. Ohr: No. Rep. Meadows: So no resume that would indicate that you did work for those agencies on a resume? Ms. Ohr: My resume stated that I was an independent contractor doing work in support of U.S. Government. Rep. Meadows: But normally there is a sentence or two right after it on what they did. And so what I’m saying is, did — in those resumes, and for example, like with Mitre, we do work with the CIA, NSA whoever — Ms. Ohr: I do not explicitly name those agencies in a resume. In 2010, Ohr was listed as a participant on a June 2010 DOJ Report, “Expert Working Group Report on International Organized Crime.” Ohr was described as “Nellie Ohr, Researcher, Open Source Works, Washington DC.” Listed on the same page were husband Bruce Ohr and Glenn Simpson, who was at the time a “Senior Fellow, International Assessment and Strategy Center.” As the report notes, “In January of 2010, the International Center of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) assembled international experts and practitioners to assess the state of research on international organized crime (IOC).” It may have been here that Bruce and Nellie Ohr first met Glenn Simpson. Beginning in September 2015, Ohr began working for Fusion GPS. Ohr told investigators that she “read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name. I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities.” When later questioned as to her previous knowledge of Simpson, Ohr stated, “I had been at a conference that he was at. I don’t recall directly talking with him at that conference, and I don’t know whether he knew who, you know, who I was other than the fact that I attended that conference.” Ohr acknowledged to congressional investigators that Simpson was acquainted with her husband: Rep. Jordan: And did he know at the time that he hired you that your husband worked for the Department of Justice? Ms Ohr: Yes. Rep. Jordan: Was Glenn Simpson acquainted with your husband, Bruce? Did they have a friendship or relationship prior to you going to work for Fusion? Ms Ohr: They were acquainted, yes. In court documents filed on Dec. 12, 2017, Simpson referred to Ohr as a “former government official expert.” Simpson said Ohr was hired “to help our company with its research and analysis of Mr. Trump.” Ohr admitted in her testimony to having researched Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, as well as members of then-candidate Donald Trump’s family, including his children. “I was asked to research Trump’s family broadly in connection with any — any Russian connections,” Ohr said. According to her online resume, Ohr currently works for Accenture iDefense. iDefense was acquired by Accenture in early 2017. On the presentation schedule for an Oct. 2017 Financial Services – Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) summit, Ohr listed herself as working for Accenture Security. Along with Byron Collie of Goldman Sachs, Ohr gave a presentation at the FS-ISAC summit titled, “Ties Between Government Intelligence Services and Cyber Criminals—Closer Than You Think?” Also attending the event was former CIA Director John Brennan, who gave a presentation titled, “The Cyber Threat: Security Solutions for a Rapidly Changing World.” Like Ohr, Brennan played a key role in the scandal that’s come to be known as Spygate, in which politicized federal agencies launched investigations into members of the Trump campaign based on the false premise they colluded with Russia. It was Brennan who initially collected unofficial foreign intelligence on the Trump campaign and funneled it into the FBI, thereby effectively instigating the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation. He also spread the unproven allegations to members of Congress, and his Intelligence Community Assessment, which he prepared in the fall of 2016, was publicly used to promote the Russia-collusion narrative throughout 2017. What is Open Source Works? Founded in 2007 by the CIA, OSW uses intelligence analysts to draw on publicly available information to produce intelligence products. There appears to be some public confusion around OSW, which differs from the more commonly known Open Source Enterprise. Although Open Source Enterprise is managed by the CIA, it is formally a component of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Open Source Enterprise is the successor to Open Source Center, which, in turn, is the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)—dubbed the U.S. Government’s principal open source agency. The origins of Open Source Enterprise began in 1941 through the creation of the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) which was established in 1941 for the purpose of handling the analysis of foreign documents. In 1947, FBMS joined with the newly created CIA and became the Foreign Broadcast Information System (FBIS). In 2005, the FBIS became the Open Source Center and in 2015 once again changed its name to the Open Source Enterprise when it became part of the CIA’s newly-created Directorate of Digital Innovation. This sequence of names is validated in a Dec. 7, 2016, CIA press release: “Though the office has had different names over the years – FBMS, FBIS, OSC (Open Source Center), and now OSE – 75 years later the demand for its collection and insights from its talented people around the world has never been greater.” Open Source Works (OSW) differs from Open Source Enterprises in that it is an internal division wholly controlled by the CIA. OSW was created sometime in 2007 according to a website from Air University—located at Maxwell Air Force Base—which references a description of OSW obtained from Intellipedia—the Intelligence Community’s classified equivalent to Wikipedia. “Open Source Works was created in 2007 by the CIA’s Director for Intelligence and charged with drawing on language-trained analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights into intelligence issues,” states the website. “Open Source Works products are based only on unclassified information and do not represent the coordinated views of the Central Intelligence Agency.” A 2009 transcript of a congressional hearing with the Department of Defense makes reference to the establishment of the CIA’s OSW division: “EHLS graduates have played a pivotal role in helping the Central Intelligence Agency start up its Open Source Works organization, an operation designed to provide open source analysis.” The 2010 National Security Education Program annual report also referenced employment opportunities at OSW: “HLS Scholars are securing positions throughout the defense and intelligence communities, serving the Central Intelligence Agency’s Open Source Works; U.S. Central Command; the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute; and the National Security Agency, among others.” A 2009 CIA report describes OSW as an independent CIA unit that draws on the expertise of uncleared analysts with in-country experience and advanced, often native language skills to mine open-source information for new insights on intelligence issues. After 2011, however, all public mentions of the CIA’s OSW cease to exist online. The CIA, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by historian Dr. Jeffrey Richelson—in which he requested the directive that established Open Source Works, along with its charter—wrote in a response letter on Nov. 29, 2011, the following: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified.” The response from the CIA indicates that both the directive and charter of OSW are classified. Additionally, it appears the very existence of any records pertaining to OSW is also classified. This is somewhat surprising in that OSW, by definition, performs analysis based on open-source, unclassified material. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists highlighted how unusual the CIA’s denial was in a Dec. 11, 2011, article: Beyond that, it is an interesting question “why the CIA felt the need to establish such a unit given the existence of the DNI Open Source Center,” said Dr. Richelson. The Open Source Center, the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, is the U.S. Government’s principal open source agency. It is, naturally, a publicly acknowledged organization. In a subsequent letter from the CIA on Dec 16, 2011, the agency states that Richelson’s FOIA request was closed “due to an administrative error.” The letter notes that “to the extent your request seeks information that is subject to the FOIA, we accept your request.” Subsequent documents relating to the FOIA request or response have not been published, however, and it is unclear whether there was ever a response from the CIA.

[itateverybody-blog]

He’s Making a List

In the lead up to Christmas Eve, many of us elves had started to become very concerned with Santa’s behavior. It had grown unpredictable. Erratic. Even, disturbing. It was not the St. Nicholas we had grown to know and love over our many years of spreading Christmas cheer. There was something happening in his mind, something dangerous. Something violent. And the violence brewing in Santa’s mind had started to transform his body as well.

Normally, Santa spent this most wonderful time of the year focusing on the global surveillance system he managed from the North Pole. How else was he supposed to compile his infamous list? He had to keep rigorous tabs on every living person across the planet in order to judge whether they were naughty or nice. That responsibility required him to oversee a massive intelligence-gathering operation, far more invasive and far-reaching than the CIA, NSA, KGB, or any other spying agency in the history of nation-states. The North Pole was merely the headquarters of a planetary network of covert elves accumulating information for the big man back home. What do you think the elves did during the majority of the year? Make the toys? Feed the reindeer? They are wiring your telephone line and hacking your webcam. They’re tracking your daily movements from an unmarked van parked down the street. They’re placing microphones in your house when you’re not home. Gathering intelligence. Watching. Listening. Seeing you when you’re sleeping. Knowing when you’re awake.  

In fact, only a small number of elves actually lived at the North Pole and made toys. Most of Santa’s gifts were actually produced by outside companies. In the past several decades, Santa had moved away from toy production, deciding instead to focus on distribution and branding deals with outside marketers. There just wasn’t that much consumer demand anymore for generic label train sets and jacob’s ladders. In other words, I was a dying breed; a true christmas elf that met the piddling production quotas of Santa’s dwindling workshop.

And because of my position as a workshop elf, I am much closer to Santa than most of the elves employed in his operation. I see him everyday. I am a direct aide de camp of the great Kris Kringle. I feel as if I’ve really gotten to know him. Even trust him. And I think he trusted me. I can anticipate his moods. I relied on his surefire commitment to spreading Christmas cheer. His unblemished faithfulness to the spirit of Christmas made me faithful in his strength as a leader.  

But, as I said, recently Santa had started to change. He started to grow more detached. He became less and less directly involved with the international covert operations he had always relied on to make his special list. He had stopped attending daily intelligence briefings. He had left memos and status reports unread on his desk. He spoke less and less with his various project leaders; stepping away from the day to day management of his spying empire. He had become withdrawn. Difficult to approach. Guarded.

But even worse than his personality changes, he was physically transforming in a way no one had ever thought possible. Santa was losing weight. Santa was losing weight fast.

We all first started to notice it around midsummer. I don’t think anyone actually said anything, though, till September hit. That’s when I first remember discussing it with some of my colleagues. Right around the time Santa was suppose to start beefing up and reinforcing his girth, the opposite was happening. He was slimming down. He was growing thinner.

This was a troubling prospect for all of us. Whoever heard of a thin Santa Claus? What a serious blow to our brand identity. What a serious blow to our major distribution operations. Santa can only get away with breaking and entering into so many private residences because he looks like Santa Clause. No one was going to believe some thin guy was busting into their house just to give them presents. We wouldn’t make it past the first chimney before he would be arrested and thrown in jail; some frail and confused old man who had somehow gotten lost inside a stranger’s home.  

We tried the obvious approaches. We baked him cookies. We offered him milk. We worked tirelessly in the kitchen to cook his favorite Christmas dishes in mass quantities. Figgy pudding. Roast goose. But he only picked at the sumptuous feasts we prepared. Santa had never been a picky eater before, but now he was looking sideways at every morsel of food we placed in front of him.

We tried to talk to him. We tried to express our concerns. We tried to convince him to eat more, to prepare for the coming holiday. He needed to gain weight, we all needed him to gain weight. He wouldn’t listen. He had other things on his mind.

He had adopted strange new habits beyond his poor diet and rapid weight loss. He started watching a lot more television than he ever had before. American television. Mainly Fox News. Yeah that’s right. Santa would spend hours watching and listening to the main propaganda arm of the contemporary right wing. He started his days with Fox and Friends, spent some time with Laura Ingraham during the day, and always caught Sean Hannity live.

If he wasn’t watching Fox News, he would spend hours on his computer, pouring over online forums and absorbing the toxic culture of internet trolls. Studying the manic conspiracy theories of the alt-right. He antagonized liberals on social media websites. He shared memes of Pepe the frog. He started listening to Alex Jones.

Santa had never really been one for partisan politics. Sure, he may have been slightly conservative in regards to social issues, I mean after all, he is a beloved institution of a mainstream, technically Christian holiday: what do you expect? But he had always been a pretty neutral figure when it came to divisive issues. He had long recognized the importance of embracing the social norms expected of Santa Claus, to be open and welcoming to everyone and to respect the dignity of his office.

Over the past year, however, Santa had drifted towards a harsher view of the world. A more hostile attitude towards politics. A more conspiratorial paranoia made its way into his thinking. Suspicion lingered within his thoughts and drove him to believe wild fantasies. He insisted that millions of votes in the American presidential election were cast illegally. He tried to convince me once, that Democrats were managing a pedophile ring somewhere in downtown D.C. There was one occasion where I even heard him use the term, “Libtard.”

It was uncanny how Santa’s weight loss paralleled his growing obsession with right wing media. The more the pounds melted away, the more invested he became in the visions of agitated pundits, as if his body mass was being replaced by their political agenda. Somehow the politics he was consuming was enough to sustain him, keeping him alive somehow.  

For the hundreds of years Santa had been delivering presents to boys and girls, no one up at the North Pole had seen anything wrong with the complex spying operations required to separate the nice from the naughty. Santa was such a trustworthy figure, so adored and admired, it didn’t matter how invasive or technologically advanced the surveillance became, it would be okay because Santa was in control of all it. He would make sure that it would not get out of hand. He would make sure that his power would not be abused.

Now that Santa was beginning to see the world through a right wing lens, the feeling of protection most of us had held in the past started to vanish quickly. The loss of a rational, benevolent Santa made us realize how thoroughly dependent we were on the central authority of Good St. Nick. Now that Santa was quickly being lost down a hyper-partisan rabbit hole, the institutions he controlled revealed a certain ugliness, a nasty potential that had always been there to begin with. Now that Santa was becoming a devotee of the hard right, none of the elves could guarantee that he would not use his Christmas magic to advance his political views. Santa had been given so much power over the years, and it had all been built on this unfounded assumption that Santa would always be stable. How wrong we were.

As October became November, Santa only got worse. He was struggling to wear any of his traditional Christmas clothing. His big red pants could barely hold on to his slender waist. His big black gloves slipped off his claw-like fingers. His trademark hat slumped over his eyes, unable to rest firmly on his head.

His sleeping schedule changed. Or rather, he radically cut back on his sleeping entirely, staying up until all hours of the night, his face buried in a screen. The elves out in the field gathering intelligence for Santa’s lists tried to keep their heads down and do their jobs as effectively as they could, but their leader’s deterioration had become difficult to ignore. Despite all the material they compiled, despite all the memos they produced and reports they wrote, the elves were increasingly unsure as to the actual content of the naughty and nice list.

Normally the compilation of the list was a collaborative project, that involved the input of several agency heads and trusted elf advisors based on troves of data and evidence. This Christmas, the elves had been shut out of the list-making process entirely. They supplied Santa with the intelligence but they had no idea how he had used it. The elves began to speculate that Santa’s determinations of who was naughty and nice was quickly conforming to his radical political views. The lists would no longer reflect the moral integrity expected of the North Pole. Instead, it would be used as a weapon - a method of attacking the latte-sipping coastal elites. The list had been politicized.

December rolled around and still Santa continued to get thinner. He didn’t even look like St. Nick anymore. His jolliness had gone. His cheeks were no longer rosy. His long beard had become unkempt and ratty. His eyes had changed from wide beaming harbingers of joy, to a coldly paranoid gaze that viewed everyone around him with suspicion. He had become a miser obsessed with the threat of conspiracy, seeing dangerous plots to takeover his power surfacing from every direction. He saw his elves, his most loyal helpers, as a threat to his power. He no longer trusted us, and we no longer trusted him.

As the big day grew nearer and nearer, I started to notice strange things gathering in Santa’s private workshop. Chemicals with long names that were difficult to pronounce. Sealed containers with bright red labels in various languages warning of terrifyingly lethal capabilities. Strange synthetic smells. The sound of hissing and sizzling. What was Santa building in his workshop? What were those clanging sounds? What was being mixed in those gigantic steel vats? Why did Santa need to wear a face mask and gloves?

What was Santa planning for the people on his naughty list?

And still he lost more weight. More and more of him gone with each passing day. No matter how much we tried to get him to eat, he refused. He insisted he was just fine with his Anthroplex supplements that he ordered online from the Infowars web store. He just kept losing it, like snow melting in spring.

When Christmas Eve finally came, a group of us workshop elves went to go see Santa off. We assembled the reindeer, securing the harness and the reins. We were all very worried, but none of us had the strength to say anything. The mood amongst us was more reminiscent of a funeral party than a holiday celebration. Santa struggled into his sleigh, weak from hunger. His long fingers with overgrown nails gripped the handrails as he stumbled his way into the front seat. I glanced in the back of the sleigh, at the compartment where he was supposed to keep the toys. Instead of plush dolls and erector sets there were unmarked metal canisters. I stepped away from the sleigh and felt a sinking feeling in my stomach.

As I watched Santa lift off into the sky, off towards human civilization, I was struck with the thought that we were somehow all complicit with what was about to happen. And what’s worse, I knew that Santa had always been capable of something like this, a realization that reinforced our complicity. It wasn’t just a madness that developed over a short period of time. It wasn’t an anomaly or a fluke. The frightening potential for unrestrained political terror had always been part of Santa’s identity, living in him like a virus lying dormant for years until he displayed symptoms. He was a strange old man who broke into people’s houses in the night. He spied on children and gave them presents if they pleased him. He ate their cookies and drank their milk. He judged their actions and organized them according to a rigid moral binary. The list-making hadn’t been politicized, it had always-already been a political act. Making a list, checking it twice. Just another power-relation.  

We watched him disappear into the sky. The workshop elves stood silently in the cold North Pole night. We all looked at each other in a moment of utter despair. Not knowing what else to do, we went inside to watch the aftermath of whatever Santa had planned live on CNN. It was all we could do.

[thelondonfilmschool]

LFS provided the creative environment and network of mentors and peers who helped me find my voice, and taught me to trust it.

Monica Santis graduated from the London Film School in 2016, and her graduation film ‘Hacia el Sol’ (Towards the Sun) is currently touring the festival circuit, the highlight of which has been a double win in her home town at the Academy award-qualifying Austin Film Festival. Following a recent screening and nomination for Best Editing at London’s Underwire Festival, we caught up with Monica while she was back in town to talk about making a film about unaccompanied migrants in Trump’s America, why we need festivals like Underwire now more than ever, and what it’s like when your producer is also your Mum …

Sophie McVeigh: Could you explain the story behind Hacia el Sol?

Monica Santis: It’s about a 12-year-old girl named Esmerelda who has recently been placed at a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in Texas, and the film is about how she reclaims her voice through her artwork in the midst of the looming threat of deportation. She’s gone through a very traumatic border crossing and we see her confront her scarring past and take the first steps towards healing. She’s a girl whose voice has been silenced by violence, so she doesn’t open up because she’s traumatized. This was my graduation film, shot in Austin, my home town, and I got to work with a fantastic local cast and crew, and I brought several key LFS crew members because I love them and we work really well together, so I wanted them to be a part of this journey with me. My first AD was Andres Salas who is extremely hardworking, talented, and so positive. He has a great attitude, so I knew he would take on the challenge of running a set with up to 100 extras at one time! I’ve got to give a major thanks and congrats to the entire production team for working hard to coordinate that scale of a shoot. My DOP was Zeta Spyraki, and she was so grounded, disciplined, and creative. It was so special to work with a strong woman; Zeta is a true leader and artist and I loved collaborating with her.  The film’s camera operator was the wonderful Mark Kuczewski, who directed ‘Happy Anniversary’, the first AC was Stephen Glass, the gaffer was Sebastián Lojo and the sound recordist was Heikki Simppula … so all phenomenal filmmakers. I was truly blessed to have a lot of talented fellow LFS students/friends there! I co-wrote the script with Elie Choufany, who is an alum of the LFS Screenwriting program (Cohort 9). We met my first year at LFS, and we just clicked and became really good friends and collaborators. We had worked together on several LFS course exercises, so we had developed a good working relationship and I admire him as a writer. I was so lucky to work with a cast and crew who poured their heart into this film.

S.M: What inspired the story and why did you want to make it?

M.S: In 2015, I visited a shelter for unaccompanied minors who had been placed there after being detained by border patrol on the United States-Mexico border. I went with an organization that runs shelters throughout Texas/Arizona—their aim is to reunify kids with their family members in the USA and provide humanitarian services. The shelter supplies housing, educational courses, legal representation, medical attention and emotional support. Their goal is to provide a home-like environment. I was moved by the sense of community and support from both children and adults. The majority of the kids are fleeing violence in their home countries and are desperately trying to reunify with family in the USA and seek refuge. As I sat and spoke with kids and shelter staff, I was particularly moved by stories about healing. A majority of children had survived an extremely traumatic border crossing and encountered violence and abuse along the perilous way. It broke my heart and motivated me to write this story; what I observed truly stirred me into action. I observed how a lot of children were in limbo as they waited - waiting to see what the uncertain future holds for them, waiting to hear from family, waiting for good news, waiting and anticipating bad news. I wanted to explore the point of view of a girl who had recently arrived, and I wanted to take the audience on an emotional journey with her as she takes her first steps towards integration and healing---in doing so, I wanted to humanize and create compassion around the immigration debate, which is being heavily politicized in the US. I wanted to shed light on a resilient community of children who deserve our support and deserve to feel safe.

S.M: What made you choose art as a way to tell Esmerelda’s story?

M.S: I remember walking through one of the shelters, and I thought that it would look bleak like the horrible detention centers that I’ve seen in the media. But it didn’t. It popped with color. There were murals, decorations and artwork that kids had drawn adorning the walls. I paused and looked at a drawing that caught my eye - a ten-year-old girl had drawn a beautiful, colorful hummingbird and she had written ‘May joy find you wherever you are.’ And I thought, my God, in the midst of all of this, all the struggle, the fear about an unknown future, this girl had drawn something really beautiful and hopeful. I thought, where is she now? What’s her story? Is she ok? I hope she’s safe, I thought. As I observed and connected with staff at the shelter, they told me heartbreaking stories of kids enduring physical and emotional abuse, of survival and facing death, of kids almost dying in the desert, running away from human traffickers, and crossing the border alone which appears in the film at one point in the drawing reveal sequence. We incorporated these details into the story. Since film is a powerful visual medium, I thought the drawing process would be therapeutic for Esmeralda’s initially withdrawn character, and that the drawings could speak for her.

S.M: Had you started working on the film before the current administration came into power, and do you think it’s had more resonance with audiences as a result of Trump’s presidency?

M.S: Story development and principle shooting took place during the Obama administration, but as we entered post production, and as the election fervor was gathering momentum, yes, I changed my approach because of Trump’s anti-immigrant, racist campaign rhetoric. I thought, should I discuss deportation very directly? Do we call out the monster or do we examine that in a more subtle way? But then I decided to insert the word ‘deportation’ in post because I saw that Trump was probably going to be the next president. To clarify, the Obama administration deported thousands of people, but Trump has run a campaign that cruelly depicts immigrants as the ‘other’, ‘the rapists’, ’the bad hombres’, and he has used that fear to stir up his supporter base. It’s a scary time in the US for undocumented kids/families, and I remember sitting with James Hynes, the film’s sound designer, and we just looked at one another somberly and said ‘yep, the word deportation needs to be included because it’s a palpable fear now that’s going to get worse’. In the festival circuit, during Q and As, we’ve had really good discussions where people are genuinely distraught and had no idea that thousands of kids were fleeing violence at immigration shelters. Generating this discussion about immigration is important because we’re talking about vulnerable kids, so actively creating awareness, compassion and understanding has become more crucial than ever now.

S.M: Was this your mom’s first time producing?

M.S: She had helped me produce a couple other smaller scale short films – as an independent filmmaker, you can’t help but get everyone you know on board in some capacity! (laughs) So, she had helped before and she’s a strong business woman; she’s CEO of a company, so she’s very on it! Those management and leadership skills came into great use, and she deeply cares about the kids at the shelters and knows the topic well, so she was outstanding. We learned a lot together throughout the process. I think she finally understands why I would be exhausted at the end of every shoot (laughs). She was super-Mom, always making sure plenty of food was provided and she recruited a huge amount of extras so I was really impressed. She did a really amazing job, especially for her first big producing role. I love my mom, she’s the best.

S.M: Has she been on the festival circuit with you?

M.S: She’s extremely busy, but we went to the Austin Film Festival screenings together which was great and a very moving experience for both of us. Zeta, Elie, and I got to attend the world premiere at Palm Springs ShortFest together which was truly awesome and memorable. Elie then flew in for the Austin Film Festival. Karen Garcia Cruz, the phenomenal leading actress, and her sister, the super talented Daniela Garcia Cruz, who plays Maria the new girl, got to watch the film with their whole family and with a full house at AFF. The screening was sold out, so that was a special day for all of us. We won the Jury Award for Narrative Student Short and the Hiscox Audience Award for Narrative Student Short at AFF. We won twice which was amazing – the best a student film could hope to do there. It means that people truly connected with Esmeralda’s story, and I am so grateful to the AFF jury, programmers, and audiences that supported us. What a surreal and truly wonderful experience. I’m so proud of our team.

S.M: Did it mean even more considering it’s your home town?

M.S: Yes! My heart was just so full. My passion for film grew there. The Austin film community helped develop my creativity, and to win at AFF was such an honour. I used to go to their screenings and dream about being a part of it someday. ‘Towards the Sun’ is still on the festival circuit now. We just got into another really great festival that I can’t announce yet! We still have a couple to hear back from, so stay tuned - some that are in US border states, which I’d love to screen at since I feel like audiences would particularly understand and connect with the story. I’d really like to be there to generate discussion and help create awareness about the plight of unaccompanied minors, so fingers crossed.

S.M: Could you tell me a bit about your background before you ended up at London Film School?

M.S: I’m first generation in the States, so my mom immigrated from Peru and my dad immigrated from Chile. I’m proud of my South American roots, and I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. I worked at the Austin Film School for several years as the Director of Outreach and it further sparked my passion for filmmaking. While I was there I helped develop the Cine Joven: Filmmaking in Spanish program for young filmmakers. I met a lot of talented kids, and I’ve always been an advocate for children’s rights so after working with them, I followed that interest and my interest in US-Latin America international policy and decided to attend The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs to get my Masters in Latin American & Hemispheric studies, focusing on anthropology, sociology and history. My thesis capstone project had to do with researching/creating awareness about human/child trafficking in Puerto Rico. I went into it thinking I might want to go work for the State Department or Unicef, and I respect everyone who went that route, but then I missed writing creatively. I watched a lot of documentaries about human rights while I was at GW, and I realized how powerful films are and I wanted to make an impact that way.  So, I went back to filmmaking and joined the Documentary Film Institute at George Washington University. I learned a great deal there, and I’m still in touch with peers and the amazing mentors who jumpstarted my return to filmmaking. From there I thought I really needed to catch up and get more technical training because I was making a big career change.  So, while I was visiting a friend in London, I immediately fell in love with the creative energy of the city, so I started researching film schools and found LFS. I loved LFS’s mission, and I highly respected the filmmakers that have come out of LFS, so I applied and was so happy to get in. I really liked this idea of organically finding your voice, getting to try out different roles and shooting on film stock.  So I thought, ok, let me give this a whirl. It was the best decision I’ve ever made because the amount of personal and creative growth I experienced during my time at LFS was just amazing.

S.M: How did you find adapting to life in London, coming from sunny Texas?

M.S: It’s a little drearier, obviously, but I didn’t mind it! I did miss my family, but thankfully I was able to make friends quickly. I openly embraced London, and I really loved the creative, bustling lifestyle here. I felt an instant click from the moment I landed, and I miss the film community here obviously, hence why I try to come back so often!

S.M: What’s the most important thing you learnt at LFS?

M.S: LFS provided the creative environment and network of mentors and peers who helped me find my voice, and it taught me to trust that voice. It brought out a confidence in me, towards the end there especially, that I didn’t know I had and that I was searching for.  Being supported by teachers and peers that love the craft as much as I do created a strong sense of community to collaborate and grow with. I loved analyzing and being exposed to new films, styles, techniques.  As a result, I was able to expand my mind, really open my heart and put it into the work. That invaluable network of storytellers/collaborators continues to inspire me, and I truly cherish the LFS community.

S.M: Your background has obviously had a lot of influence on the kind of stories you want to tell, but did you find that the people you met at LFS also had an impact on how you tell them?

M.S: Yes, I was constantly learning from my teachers and peers. I loved the fact that LFS is so international, and I wanted to meet people with different perspectives and different backgrounds but with a similar passion for filmmaking. I wanted to meet and learn from fellow story tellers from all over the world. That was a big selling point for me and why I chose to apply to LFS, because I value diversity. I found it incredibly enriching.  

S.M: You’ve recently screened Hacia el Sol at Underwire in London, which is a festival that promotes the work of female filmmakers. Do you think it’s even more important, given the current climate, that we have these kinds of festivals?

M.S: Yes, definitely. The patriarchy is real and we gotta take it down! The industry is extremely unequal, and women have been systemically undervalued and denied the same opportunities that men get; women deserve representation and to have their voices amplified. At the opening screening at Underwire, I heard someone say something to the effect that, as a woman, it’s important to remember that you have a right to claim your space in the filmmaking industry. To be honest, I got chills. It was a good reminder that we don’t have to make ourselves small, we can claim that space and demand respect. I felt such a surge of empowerment, and I felt so happy that Underwire exists, because they’re creating a space to recognise, support, encourage and celebrate female filmmakers. By the way, we need more female directors and DPs! It was so inspiring to be at festival screenings with up to 80% women in attendance; I felt so honored to be in solidarity with such talented women. When there’s an unequal power dynamic and when abusive men like Harvey Weinstein exist, I believe festivals like Underwire are crucial in helping bridge that inequality gap and creating a safe space for women to learn and grow.

S.M: Do you think that had an influence on the atmosphere at the festival, coming so soon after what’s been happening in Hollywood?

M.S: I think it must have. This was my first time at Underwire so I can’t compare, but I felt that beautiful feminist warrior spirit in full force. In line with the #metoo movement, there were a lot of women fearlessly speaking their truths and sharing their stories on screen. One of the filmmakers at the festival noted how it’s important for women to feel more empowered to just express themselves freely, not be perfectionists as society has conditioned many to be, and just say what you’ve got to say! That spirit of speaking your truth and being your authentic self was really shining through at screenings and in discussions.

S.M: What are you working on at the moment?

M.S: Right now, I’m working on a short script from a similar world to Towards the Sun, so another kid’s perspective in a shelter. And then I’m slowly developing the idea of a feature length story within that world, about unaccompanied minors. That’s in early stages of development, and otherwise I freelance edit. I edited a short documentary that’s currently in the festival circuit called ‘An Uncertain Future’, which was directed by Chelsea Hernandez and Iliana Sosa, produced by Firelight Media and Field of Vision, which is Laura Poitras’s production company. So that was a really cool experience as an editor, to be getting notes from Laura Poitras! I learned a lot!

S.M: Was editing a skill you learnt at LFS?

M.S: I began learning on Final Cut Pro at the GW Documentary Film Institute. LFS gave me many opportunities to edit, and I learned a great deal from the amazing teachers in the editing department. I edited in terms one through three, but I learned the most in term 3 when I edited ‘How We Are Now’, directed by Andrea Niada.  Since there’s so much footage to work with in documentary, the editing process was a true lesson in how to craft the story through the edit.  

S.M: What’s your process as a writer? How do you balance your work and your time to be creative?

M.S: I’m actually in the writing process right now. It can be tricky to fit everything in, so I make sure to write something every day, whether that’s a line or a scene. I try to make sure I keep the inspiration flowing, because writers’ block can happen so easily! I aim to find that kernel of inspiration and make sure that I’m constantly reminding myself why I’m telling a certain story. When things get hard, I remind myself what the heart of the story is and that motivates me to keep going.

 Keep up with Hacia el Sol’s progress on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HaciaElSolFilm/ and Twitter: https://twitter.com/HaciaElSolFilm and watch the trailer: https://vimeo.com/226004442

[thefabulousfulcrum]

Matt Taibbi: Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever

via Rolling Stone

By Matt TaibbiThe onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America's Unfair and Imbalanced Network

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.

In this sense, his Fox News broadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence.

Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt shallowness ("More News in Less Time" was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers. But the main formula was always the political scare story, and Fox quickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady's mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies – to say nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman, saying 'Stand By Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote – were daggers to the hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes' audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette? 

So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.

But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies.

Soon the villains weren't just in Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.

Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others' eyes and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance.

The Fox response was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided muffin tops as evidence of America's decaying values.

Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention.

The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.

Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.

So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.

The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.

Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.

What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.

Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It's no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front of terrified Democrats.

It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.

Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line.

And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.

The extent to which we hate and fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.

[oldguardaudio]

Rush Limbaugh 🏈 Vladimir Putin Hacked the Super Bowl!

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Feb 6, 2017

  RUSH: Well, it looks like the Russians found a way to hack the second half of the Super Bowl. Not kidding, folks. The left, if you know where to look, if you know how to read between the lines before the game, you can see that the left had all kinds of stuff tied up in this game. They wanted the Patriots to lose. They didn’t want Brady to be the MVP because Brady and Belichick and Kraft are so tied to Trump.

And I’m telling you at halftime of that game last night they thought it was nine o’clock on election night, and Hillary Clinton was still gonna win in a landslide, and the Atlanta Falcons are up 28-3 over the New England Patriots, and they’re starting to celebrate. They’re thinking they’re gonna get vindication, that Trump’s gonna be embarrassed, and that his stars on the Patriots are gonna be humiliated by the team from Atlanta.

And then they had to sit there and watch history repeat itself. In fact, you should have seen it over at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at halftime: Patriots have 1% chance of winning the game. Halfway through the third quarter, Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight after the Patriots had to punt and they were still down 28-3 midway through the third quarter: Patriots’ chance of winning now down to one half of 1%.

And the same liberals who thought Hillary had it in the bag on election night thought that Trump was gonna be eating excrement and the Patriots were gonna be disappointing Trump and Trump disappointed them and it was gonna be almost — I mean, it wasn’t gonna salve the election defeat, but it was gonna be a little bit of payback. And, instead, on the pregame show during the interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump had predicted the Patriots to win by eight.

I had predicted a Patriots win, and in parentheses, I said, and it could be a rout, and in the second half it was a rout, and they’re just beside themselves. It doesn’t seem that Trump can lose. It doesn’t seem that anything they do works.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Super Bowl — remember now, folks, everything in America has been politicized. If you doubt me, look at the advertising in the Super Bowl. You had Audi and a couple of other outfits that were devoted to political issues in order to sell their products — a major, major, major miscalculation.

And I know what happens; the media buyers and the creative people at both these companies and the advertising agencies are recent college graduates, mainly women, who are dyed-in-the-wool leftists and have their sway over the media buys and the direction of the ad campaign and so forth and so on. And I think it’s all gonna come back and bite these people in the end.

But, you don’t even have to go to the advertising to find the politicization of the Super Bowl, because if you knew where to look, and if you knew what to watch, even before the game you knew that many on the left were hoping for a New England Patriots defeat. They were hoping the Atlanta Falcons would wipe ’em out, because the Patriots are reputedly and reportedly closely tied to the president of the United States. Tom Brady and Trump are supposedly good friends. Well, I know that they are. Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots and Trump, good friends, I know that they are.

Belichick wrote Trump a congratulatory letter after Trump won the election and wrote admiringly of his steadfastness, his stick-to-itiveness, his persistence, and his unwillingness to give up. And so there was a lot riding on this for the left. For millions of football hating leftists, and they are out there, the Super Bowl was to serve as a massive political cleansing. Political justice would be served. An election might not be reversed, but a statement would be made that the country had recognized it had made a mistake. The Patriots and Trump, who really aren’t patriots, right, according to the left, the Patriots and therefore Trump would be crushed.

And do you know why? Because they deserved it. Why did the Patriots deserve to be crushed and Trump with them? Because their winning is an offense. There isn’t supposed to be this kind of dominance in new America, not Patriot kind of dominance. There isn’t supposed to be this kind of heroism from the majority in America anymore. But they weren’t gonna leave it strictly to the Atlanta Falcons.

Now, there was eager anticipation for the halftime show of the noted song stylist Lady Gaga, about whom it was said prior to the game that she was going to diss Trump with a bunch of drones from high atop NRG Stadium in Houston. And she was gonna tell the world what the left really thought of all of this. And she was gonna do it in the midst of the halftime show in song and in dance, and they were eagerly and breathlessly waiting.

And Lady Gaga, in pre-Super Bowl interviews, did not disabuse them of the notion that she was locked and loaded and that she was gonna come out firing and that she was gonna let Trump have it. And the left was going to have a halftime orgasm because they were going to be able to pretend that they actually didn’t lose. The Super Bowl, the most watched television event in the world, was going to feature Trump’s team losing and therefore Trump losing and Lady Gaga, well-known leftist song stylist, was going to smash Trump in the ground in the middle of the halftime show.

And none of it happened. In fact, the parallels are eerie. Nine o’clock on election night, the Clinton campaign still thought that they were going to win in a landslide. Nine o’clock last night in the Super Bowl, the Patriots were down 28-3 and looked inept. Brady’s passes were off target. When they were on target, his receivers couldn’t hold the ball. He was sacked twice. It doesn’t happen. The Patriots were playing a style of football that people haven’t seen them play.

People on the left were excited, thinking that their dreams were gonna come true, that Brady was not only gonna lose, he was gonna look silly in the process because, by extension, Trump was going to look like the fool, because Trump had gone out on a limb, making it known to everybody that he and the Patriots bigwigs are best buddies, inseparably good friends. And so when bad happens to the Patriots, the thing you have to remember is, in the final analysis, when everything’s balanced out, nothing bad happens to patriots, with a capital P or not.

And so they were excited, and so people on the left who don’t even understand football and just hate it cause it’s too violent and ’cause there’s winners and ’cause there’s losers. The young snowflakes that populate America’s college campuses, who care not a whit about the game and actually think it should not be played because it’s so mean, it’s so violent and people lose, were watching in eager anticipation for Donald Trump to take it on the chin by virtue of the New England Patriots being wiped out.

And at halftime, it was just like election night. But then, about halfway through the third quarter, everything changed. You know when I knew, folks? Snerdley, you didn’t watch. Is that right? You did not watch this? You missed the Fox pregame show from six to 6:30. You missed something that I’m going to tell you that happened, and you’re not gonna believe it. Well, you’ll believe it.

Fox, the broadcast network, obviously intent on establishing deep contact with patriotic Americans, Fox wasn’t going to be the architect or author of any division. They may not be able to control Gaga, they may not be able to control the outcome of the game, but the things they were in control of, there wasn’t going to be any promotion of divisive issues. And yet who did they bring out to read the preamble of the Declaration of Independence? None other than noted communist, Harry Belafonte.

I’m sitting there watching this, and they bring out Harry Belafonte, and I said, “What in the world is this?” Of all people, Harry Belafonte thinks Cuba is paradise on earth. Harry Belafonte is part of the Black Lives Matter organization, which this judge in Seattle, by the way, is very sympathetic to, by the way. And Harry Belafonte starts reading. This guy is a bigoted hatemonger with a rich history of singing the praises of communism and bananas, communist dictators.

And somehow somebody thought this would help the country unify after Donald Trump supposedly divided it. And so they brought Belafonte out. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” I expected him to change the words or to say he thought this was full of it. I thought, what a risk. The only saving grace was it was on tape. And then, after reading the preamble, he said, “In 1974, the great American artist Johnny Cash wrote of Our Ragged Old Flag, ragged and old from the conflict and the suffering that come from our fight for freedom, pride in our flag, freedom’s symbol should now inspire us to keep striving to become a more perfect union,” playing a Johnny Cash tune, Ragged Old Flag.

Yeah, because no one believes more deeply or represents more fully unity and freedom than Harry Belafonte. That was sarcasm, for those of you in Rio Linda. The left began to realize it might not all work out the way they wanted when Lady Gaga did not utter a single word that could be even imagined or construed as critical of Donald Trump. (interruption) Who? No, Jeremiah Wright was not on the show.

But Lady Gaga, you have to say, it was a great halftime performance, and I, because of my hearing limitations, I’m not up to speed on 30-year-old song stylist superiors, but everything I’m reading about her performance today says she has reignited her career. I didn’t know that it was being flushed.

And it was. It was overwhelmingly talented. It was well choreographed, and it was brought off without a hitch. It was really — and, of course, everybody was waiting, you know, for somewhere in the middle, “Trump sucks,” something like that. Didn’t happen. And then the third quarter started, and you could sense it wasn’t to be.

The third quarter, when the Patriots’ comeback began, the left realized it wasn’t to be. Trump was not going to be humiliated. The Patriots were not gonna get creamed. Trump was not gonna be embarrassed. They were not going to be able to relive election night as a victory because the Patriots were coming back.

And the Falcons — now, I’m gonna get in trouble for this, but I’m the mayor of Realville, and I saw all of the reaction after the game. “Greatest game ever. Oh, my God, I’ve never seen, greatest comeback ever, greatest game ever.” I’m sorry. It was a fun game to watch, and the Patriots were overwhelming in coming back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: As I said on Friday during my Super Bowl prediction, I pointed out that the one thing nobody can predict, and therefore you cannot account for, is momentum. It is impossible. It’s impossible to predict who’s gonna come out with the momentum, who’s got it when the game starts. It’s impossible to predict when it’s gonna shift and why.

NFL coaches get heart attacks and pull their hair out when momentum shifts. If they could control momentum shifts, they would never be fired, they would never lose their jobs. It’s one of the intangibles that nobody can identify. But clearly the momentum shifted. I think I know when the momentum shifted in this the game, the first big momentum shift. But you just can’t make it happen.

Atlanta had it the first half, and then it shifted. And then things that shouldn’t happen happened, and we had a great comeback. Hollywood could not have written that game and this year and tied it to current events any better than reality did. But I have a problem with the — yeah, depends on how you define “great game.”

I don’t know what happened to the Atlanta Falcons in the second half. I don’t know. It looked to me like they went into a prevent offense except that they didn’t. A prevent offensive meaning run out the clock, don’t take any risks, think you got a big enough lead, and sit on it for the entire second half. The prevent defense is the term that’s actually used, and that’s a defense that will give up yards and yards and yards but then tighten and not allow a touchdown, and the prevent defense prevents victory.

It’s amazing, the prevent defense is never seldom successful. And I’ve coined the term “prevent offense” to describe an offense that thinks they’ve got the game in the bag and stops taking risks and stops being aggressive and tries to sit on a lead and run out the clock, except the play calling for the Falcons, particularly in the fourth quarter, I don’t understand it.

So, folks, I don’t know if it was just momentum. I don’t know if the Falcons were gassed. I don’t know if they were just out of gas. I don’t know if they choked. But blowing a 23-point in the Super Bowl — I felt kind of like when the Cincinnati Bengals blew a playoff game to the Steelers, committing 30 yards of penalties during dead ball-time. Now, this was not that, they didn’t commit any dead ball penalties, there was not any bad sportsmanship, there was nothing like that, like the Cincinnati-Pittsburgh game.

I sent people a note. In the third quarter when the Patriots scored, I said, “This game is over. I can already tell you, this team, the Falcons, are doing dumb stuff.” And I had people write me back, “Don’t jinx it, don’t jinx, if you start saying that, it’s over, the Falcons are gonna –” I said, “No, it’s not, it is over.” Middle of third quarter. I have a witness. My wife, a Patriots fan, who nearly left the room in anger at me when I said that for jinxing the game, and she saw sought another TV to watch the rest of it, and then told me, “Don’t say anymore,” and as the game progressed, “Don’t be mad, babe, I was right.” But I’m the husband, so really not right.

Here’s Robert, Waldorf, Maryland, great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: How you hitting ’em, Rush?

RUSH: Very good, sir, thank you.

CALLER: That’s what I hear. Look, I’ve been sitting here last week, and I watched this sports media. This morning I thought they were gonna accuse the Russians and Trump of spiking the Atlanta Falcons with Gatorade at halftime, they’ve been flipping out so bad. Last week I sat and watched them. These guys have blatantly taken off their masks. You said the sports media, I heard you say the sports media is no different than the other ones. I mean, they flat-out said the reason they couldn’t stand the Patriots is because they have too many white players, that white guys ain’t supposed to be out on the field —

RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Where did you hear that? Who said that?

CALLER: There’s two shows on ESPN A Conversation with Colin Coward, one of them was, and me and my wife sat here and we watched this and I just looked at her —

RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did somebody actually say the Patriots couldn’t or shouldn’t win ’cause they got too many white guys?

CALLER: The reason that they despise and hate the Patriots is because of the amount of white guys that they have on the field.

RUSH: Well, I don’t know.

CALLER: They’re not supposed to be —

RUSH: Star quarterback, got those two little white wide receivers. I could see that could tick off some sports leftist media types. I wish I’d heard that when it happened. I didn’t know about it. Thanks for the call out there, Robert.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no. I had heard it. I’d read it myself. I didn’t even give it the honor of mentioning it, but there’s sports Drive-Bys all over the place that were commenting on the racial makeup of the Patriots at skill positions and how that doesn’t look like the NFL anymore, that’s not right.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I looked something up here during the break, top of the hour. NBC Sports a few months ago: “Bill Belichick Has the NFL’s Least Diverse Coaching Staff.” That was the NBC Sports blog, ProFootballTalk. The piece was back in July. There have been complaints about the Patriots being too white since 2012, maybe even earlier. So I… Look, I’ve heard this. I’ve heard it about the wide receivers for the Patriots, the fact that the skill-set guys are white on the Patriots when they’re not on most of the other teams. And it’s the sports media making these comments. It’s not players.

It’s the sports media, which is every bit as liberal as their brethren in the Drive-By news media. And they may even be worse. They may actually be even worse in terms of liberalism and bias and just throwing all pretense of objectivity out the window. And with them it is almost all race based, almost entirely race based, with the belief that it’s still so out of balance, the discrimination and the… (sigh) Well, I just want to read it in writing. They say even worse, and it’s despicable and it’s sickening — and I’ll tell you, this Super Bowl, folks, for me — aside from all this that I’ve said — was the most…

Well, it was the least anticipated. I played golf yesterday! I never do that on Super Bowl Sunday. I played golf. I played golf, got home at five o’clock — an hour and a half before the game started — and I just made it to the TV for the pregame stuff around six or 6:15. And I don’t know what it is. I’ve asked myself. Am I just getting older and because of my age, the players are no longer these superstar, unreachable people on pedestals, or is it a combination of the way the game is reported on now? It’s been so politicized by the media, and now the all-out effort to damage and injure the game by convincing parents that their kids shouldn’t play.

I don’t know. It’s probably a cumulative effect of things. And I said, “Maybe I don’t like these teams, or maybe I’m not crazy about these two teams.” I don’t know what it was. But I’ll tell you, I played golf on more NFL Sundays this year than ever. Ever. Now, it wasn’t long ago — last year, certainly the year before — that on Sunday, everybody knew, I didn’t play golf. I’m totally NFL, all day, all night Sunday. Not this year. Don’t know why. Didn’t get into deep, deep analysis of it.

But, anyway, congratulations the Patriots. It was a heck of a comeback, despite the fact that the Falcons… I don’t know where they were. As I said, I don’t know if they’re out of gas. I don’t know if they were overcome by just lack of experience, not being in the big game before, thinking they had it won and they were gonna sit on the lead. I don’t know. They probably don’t, either. That’s the old thing that momentum, you just don’t know.

Let’s move on to some other things, folks, because there’s all kinds… I want to touch on some things. We’re gonna then go back to like the court ruling on executive order, get in some detail about the judge and some of the other aspects of this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Rich, Brunswick, Ohio, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, thank you, sir. Hope you’re having a good day/

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Hey, I got a question for you, and also a comment regarding Rush Revere. But to my question.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Seeing how crucial that one play was with that pass that almost touched the ground and where they had to verify it or validate it using cameras, who’s cameras are being used for the referees to validate calls like that? Is it the broadcasters, or does the NFL have their own cameras?

RUSH: No, those are all network cameras. Look, this used to be a slam dunk. I used to know this question because it was always the network cameras that were granted permission by the NFL. They’re not the same at every game because the networks have different budgets. You know, for a game that’s gonna go to 10% of the country, they won’t use many cameras. The NFL does not move in and use camera locations if the network doesn’t provide in those cases.

So I think every camera at the Super Bowl yesterday was a Fox camera. Now, I say that asking permission, that because it’s the Super Bowl I might be wrong. Maybe the league does provide some cameras, but I don’t think so. Why does it matter to you, what is the point if they do?

CALLER: Well, just from a number of camera standpoints, I imagine Fox probably had at least a dozen to 18 cameras out there on that field yesterday or around the field.

RUSH: Oh, they had more than that.

CALLER: That’s why I wondering, who do the refs defer to.

RUSH: Wonder who the rest of his defer to. Oh. The refs are deferring to the replay official in New York and on the sideline.

CALLER: Who’s looking at whose cameras?

RUSH: Fox’s cameras.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Every replay you see, they don’t have a review, they don’t have an angle that you’re not shown on TV. Well, wait a minute, now. The networks try to show you every angle they have of a play, and they may not show you one that is inconclusive, but the league has access to all of them. But their network camera. I get what’s going on here. I get what’s going on here. I know exactly. “Well, was the league maybe trying to cheat one of the two teams? If it’s their cameras, can they have one not work at a crucial time, something like that.” No. These are network cameras, I’m pretty sure.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And here’s Eric in Armada, Michigan. Great to have you. Really glad you waited, Eric. How you doing, sir?

CALLER: Oh, I’m doing great, Rush, and I hope you and your family are, too.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: Yeah, when I watched that game last night, and I’m a Packer fan, and of course I was rooting against Atlanta to begin with because of what they did to us. But, anyway, you know, they started talking bad about, you know, Tom Brady, I’m thinking, wait a minute. He’s a sixth-round draft pick —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Who was talking bad about Brady?

CALLER: Oh, just, you know, I guess the people that, you know, they’re the pro-Atlanta people, I mean, they were looking at, you know, the record and —

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: — how Matt Ryan had got MVP of the league and all that. Anyway, they were babbling on, I’m thinking, he’s a sixth-round draft pick. He’s a mediocre quarterback at Michigan. So he wasn’t, you know, really expected to go anywhere. But that’s the American dream. The American spirit is to not be expected to do something and to achieve greatness. And I will say this, like you said, I’m a Packer fan, but he is the best quarterback right now.

RUSH: Well, I think Brady is the best quarterback ever, I don’t care how you measure it. I don’t care how you measure it. There’s nobody that can make a claim to being a better quarterback than Brady. He’s had a differing, wide character of wide receivers. The Steelers great teams were all — unit stayed together basically three or four years, same thing with the 49ers and Montana. But you’re right, he is the epitome of a part of America that many people don’t like anymore.

Rush Limbaugh 🏈 Vladimir Putin Hacked the Super Bowl! Rush Limbaugh 🏈 Vladimir Putin Hacked the Super Bowl! Feb 6, 2017 RUSH: Well, it looks like the Russians found a way to hack the second half of the Super Bowl.

[2017mdia4120-blog]

Michael Slevin-Friday Assignment 1/13

Michael Slevin

MDIA 4120

1/13/2016

Part 1

- The earliest memory I have of using social media myself is driving around with two of my friends trying to decide what my first tweet would be. I didn't come up with anything too cool so I just decided to complain about my SATs. 

-The earliest memory I have of a family member using social media is my older sister using Facebook. I remember thinking how crazy Facebook was as a concept and I didn’t even really understand it. It was just people sharing things about themselves/things they like or what they were doing. 

-The first blog that I started following was Joystiq. The internet seemed so cool to me when I was younger because I found that so many people were passionate about the same things that I was passionate about, like video games. I still love the internet because like-minded people can connect and that can be special, but following Joystiq, IGN and other gaming sites led me to realize that the internet offers almost anything you could want. 

- I feel that there is still a lot that I have to do in order to prepare myself for a career in social media, however I think that something I have done well is maintain a consistent voice on my various networks. Specifically on Twitter, I feel that I have a specific “audience,” and people know what to expect from me; entertainment posts, sharing opinions on music/TV/movies/video games and a few other topics. 

Part 2

-One instance in which people shaped social media and its use is when people in 2008 used Twitter and Facebook as a means of political expression. Barack Obama utilized social media and people used social media to show support for political candidates. I learned that Obama had 2 million American supporters on Facebook and 112,000 followers on Twitter in 2008. John McCain had 600,000 supporters on Facebook and only 4,600 followers on Twitter. This set us up for what will be a lifetime of political posts on social media, for better or worse. 

Another example of people shaping social media would be during the Haiti Earthquake disaster. When this article was published, the relief efforts via mobile phone and social media brought in an unprecedented amount of money. Texting brought in $8 million, while celebrities like Ben Stiller and Lance Armstrong brought more money in for the cause through their influence on social media and asking their followers to donate. We also learned that a mad rush to donate money online could easily lead to abuse, like Wyclef Jean taking a bunch of money he raised for Haiti. This was an instance in which social media proved to be a great way of getting money together for relief efforts quickly, assuming the people taking that money can are trusted.

Finally, another major moment in which the people themselves shaped social media would be during the 2009 Iranian election when President of Iran and all-around-scumbag Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected, despite the fact that there was proof of the election being almost certainly rigged. Thus, Twitter was used as a means for Iranians to organize protests. Time stated that “it's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast.” These are all reasons why Twitter was the preferred platform of Iranian protesters, in addition to the fact that hashtags provide a way for a lot of information to be stored in one place.  This marked a moment in which Twitter could be used in instances of political revolution.

- In regard to the future of how users will contribute to social media, I think that as we get more and more divided politically in the U.S., the more we will see people making content/sharing their views on social media. This might be more anecdotal than anything else, but I feel that people feel more and more polarized and it will lead to them becoming even more and more political on social media, despite the fact that many people feel that politics on social media are sort of taboo. If the few weeks following the election are indicative of how pissed off people are/will be about Trump (and don’t forget about the people who are pissed off that other people are pissed off about Trump), look for social media to become more and more politicized. 

Another prediction I have is that we could see some interesting new content creators come out of Facebook and Twitter live streaming. Live streaming has been around for awhile, especially in the video game world, but I can’t wait to see what content creators do with live streaming. I think discussion shows, comedy shows, bands playing live shows, really anything with high production value could take on a life of its own and become a massive success if executed properly. I think that real, thoughtful, and entertaining content will come out of live streaming, and I think that live streaming is a functionality that users will latch onto, making it here to stay.

Finally, I feel that any attempts to get users to pay for access to social media will fail because users will refuse to shell the money out. Social media companies will need to figure out how to make make money through ads or even the selling of personal data, but people will refuse to pay $5-$10 per month. I do predict that a major network will attempt to offer a subscription service of some type with exclusive/better features in the same way that YouTube has tried implementing YouTube Red.