Hah hah: “Solar storm TERROR looms for Earth as equinox approaches; Know why the date is SCARY”
Hilariously stupid headline says earth to face SCARY TERROR on March 21st. Well, I’ve updated this on March 26th and we’ve survived!
Polls: Reminder a public opinion poll is a survey of what people have been told
Reminder – a public opinion poll is a metric measuring the success or failure of a propaganda campaign, especially when the public is asked to have views on things they may know little about.
No they are not: Are newspapers as relevant as they think they are?
Newspapers view themselves as heroes holding government accountable and being the voice of the unseen victims of the world. Except, in reality, they are missing most of the stories – including big ones like the SVB bank collapse which was hiding in plain sight.
“CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders”
The CDC was obtaining phone tracking data to monitor American’s compliance with lockdown orders, and gradually intended to expand the monitoring for other activities too, unrelated to Covid.
Censorship: “America’s Secret Censorship-Industrial Complex” by Michael Shellenberg
Go to the link, below for this must-read item. The US government and powerful interests developed a powerful censorship operation operating in conjunction with social media companies. It is important to understand how these groups function. They are not publicly engaging with their opponents in an open exchange of ideas. They aren’t asking for a national debate over the limits of the First Amendment. Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms…
Rule by technocratic experts
The inventors of “public relations” (the name given to the field after “propaganda” grew out of favor) argued for rule by technocratic elite, thinking that important decisions should be left to “experts” and not democracies.
Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges
A journal paper finds that misinformation is not as common as perceived, that people are more likely to be uniformed than “misinformed”, and that – surprise – people do not believe everything they read or watch on the Internet.
Why do science and health reporters lack background in their subject?
Bloomberg, and many media outlets, use unqualified or questionably qualified “reporters” to cover complex topics in science and engineering. Such reporters learned what they know from media and interviewing others, who talk to the press as part of their own evangelism. This is not how the media should be doing reporting.
YouTube took down a farm video shot by a child on her family’s farm
Youtube censors, probably sitting in a dense urban office building, censored a child’s video of her family’s farm in Canada, saying it presented a child engaged in dangerous activity.
Why do science and health reporters lack any background in the subject?
Does it make sense for most reporters to report on technical subjects about which they have no specific training?