Thought for the Day

[buttslinger]

People have been programming people forever, the change now is that computers and the internet can reach voters in any country around the world, dirt cheap. On Fox News, Roger Ailes sent out a memo a day to tell his bimbos what topic to stress that day. For a while, there was a question whether of not this was even legal to give one Party airtime with no crossexamination, the loophole is that Fox News is not News, it's Opinionated Entertainment.
It's amazing to me to hear Kellyanne Conway and other surrogates who are so stupid yet can have the discipline and training not to break character while they spew out their biased garbage. In Advertising, the highest rates go to the sponsors of shows with a young audience who are just starting to have money to spend. If you can hook a kid on Camel cigarettes, or Budweiser beer, you've got him for life. Older viewers are set in their ways. You have to wonder if truly bright people are susceptible to brainwashing tricks, I've heard it said that people of good breeding or intelligence can be just as enticed by immoral and illegal sexual cravings, they just have the presence of mind not to act on those feelings. I don't know.
My Brother was a Teacher, and the past few years he and some of his Associates have been trying to find out the best way to in effect "program" students to learn better. Apparently MEMORIZING plays a large part in the pursuit of a fine mind, it's become a lost art.
What's most troubling is we have done nothing to deter the Russians from their games, and there is even talk that they did indeed hack into voting rolls and voting machines. Imagine what they're doing that we don't know about, the fact that the old Reagan Republicans aren't up in arms is scary to me. Everybody's shell shocked.
BTW Torrid is Intense, like a big line of crystal meth. Those Nazis were Elite when it came to Propaganda and Amphetamine. The Russians, the White House, isn't it considered clumsy when everyone knows what your secret agenda is??

[Stavros]

I meant to add in my post on #releasethememo that I am still not sure if Russian involvement in the 2016 election at the 'Bot' level in social media was a deciding factor in the result, but it might have played a role. Owing to the other issues at the time, not least the FBI's re-opening of the Clinton Emails problem, may have had more influence. Nevertheless I believe the article goes some way to showing how Bots can be influential.

[broncofan]

I meant to add in my post on #releasethememo that I am still not sure if Russian involvement in the 2016 election at the 'Bot' level in social media was a deciding factor in the result, but it might have played a role. Owing to the other issues at the time, not least the FBI's re-opening of the Clinton Emails problem, may have had more influence. Nevertheless I believe the article goes some way to showing how Bots can be influential.

I didn't look at the article but will tomorrow. The bots can be influential and they are surrounding this investigation to try to sow discord. They favor Trump but I get the feeling the objective is to promote chaos. I look at the comments underneath Adam Schiff (the Democratic head of the house oversight committee) videos on youtube and they couldn't be more obvious yelling things about how Schiff can expect to be indicted any minute. It is an enormous effort to just weaken confidence in our system and to stoke paranoia and make it very difficult to ascertain the truth.

[broncofan]

I meant to add in my post on #releasethememo that I am still not sure if Russian involvement in the 2016 election at the 'Bot' level in social media was a deciding factor in the result, but it might have played a role.

And though it's impossible to know the magnitude of the effect it's easy to see it's much more effective than traditional media, even right-wing outlets like fox. They are talking to a demographic that is already highly gullible and are flooding them with nonsense in an interactive forum. At some point it really becomes hard to distinguish the bots from the idiots parroting the bots. It's like a giant game of telephone with an emotional, paranoid crowd being fed bullshit to confirm their biases.

[trish]

does social media change policy and the way people think, and win elections?

I'm a bit late to this discussion. I don't know if social media directly changes policy, but I do think it directly influences elections and those elected decide upon and implement policy.

What I think modern social media is:
It’s addictive. People get hooked on the bright colors, the stream of funny memes, the affirmation of likes, loves, wows, etc., the arguments and accompanying drama. There is even some early research suggesting these things give us dopamine highs. As a result people are constantly checking and rechecking their apps for another hit.

What I think modern social media does to our politics.
1. It energizes individuals.
2. It spreads messages quickly and widely.
3. It divides people. Memes tend to be black and white. You’re on our team or you’re on the wrong team.
4. It neutralizes authority. Sounds good but it doesn’t distinguish between reputable or disreputable sources.
5. It replaces the yard sign, the bill-board, the newspaper ad, the letter to the newspaper, the newspaper itself. Political parties used to pay for the first three of these and depend on the last two. So yes, social media makes a difference in elections.

[buttslinger]

Does anybody else hit Go Advanced and have their entire message disappear into cyberspace?

To make a long painful story short, I read an article in my youth about subliminal advertising, it only takes a fraction of a second for the human mind to "click and save" some deep human basic need imbedded in a cereal ad, so the flip of a magazine page turns into you grabbing a new cereal off a grocery store shelf because you saw some ad months before with a sexual image buried in it. Apparently, this method is cost effective enough to show a profit.
Every Country in the World are now Business Competitors, and while China is the true threat, St Petersburg Russia has a huge percentage of criminal hackers living there. If one hacker can send out a thousand variations of a "HIT AD" on Hillary Clinton, and thousands of Americans see it, even if less than one percent of voters in a two person race can decide a swing state and an election. If a Canadian Pharmacy selling Cialis claims to be the best in quality and price, but some sleazy competitor posts thousands of fake bad reviews, the lies have it.

[broncofan]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/u...hen-trump.html

Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen claims he paid off Stormy Daniels with his own money and was not reimbursed. As someone on twitter pointed out, if he did not get reimbursed it is an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign by an individual that violates federal election laws. It also would be a gift to Donald Trump that he did not report to the IRS, as you have to file a return for gifts over 14,000 dollars.

It's unlikely he would pay off a pornstar Trump had sex with using his own money though so we haven't gotten the full story. Have a feeling we haven't heard the end of this affair.

[buttslinger]

There's a lot of questions about Cohen's finances, I believe the Republican Party is paying him for Trump's defense. And maybe other stuff.
The big story I heard tonight is that US Intelligence had the list of corrupt Russian Oligarchs all written up to release, for that Magnitsky Payback, and Putin was pissing his pants because it was a list of all his closest buds. At the last minute, somebody "high up" in the Trump Administration squashed it and Mnuchin copied and pasted a list from Forbes Magazine instead. WTF is it gonna take?? If the Dems take the House next November, they get to lead the Investigation Committees. I guess that's what it's gonna take. But that's a long long time.

[Stavros]

I am sure we have discussed this before, but nevertheless you have to wonder if a basic education is required before someone can be elected to Congress (it doesn't seem to apply to the Presidency these days).

A Republican congressman has suggested Jewish people killed in the Holocaust could have saved themselves if they had been armed.

Don Young made the remarks as he attempted to argue against stricter gun control laws in the US, which he implied would make Americans less safe.

“How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia,” he told a conference in Juneau, Alaska.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a8232721.html

Psst! Don!! Warsaw! Ghetto! Uprising!!!

[broncofan]

Here's a really funny tweet about Jared Kushner that made me laugh. I like sharing. Scroll through to see it. https://twitter.com/Mobute/status/889631433366679552