Only Facebook, ever the conflicted conundrum of “How do we make suckle more money out of people and also make them never leave?”, trusting itself to algorithms, allows a juxtaposition such as above. This is a company that walks backward over itself to excuse hate speech, revenge posts, and silos everyone into clusters of like-minds. Today’s algorithm decided that the attempted assassination of a president too graphic for my view. It’s our own post. We put it on our wall ourselves. We don’t need protection from ourselves, Facebook. You’re not our fucking mom. This image is no less or more violent than Jedi Cats.
When the press is controlled by two or three massively wealthy individuals , it is indeed the enemy of the people.
When a staffer putting her feet on the couch is the top story, that makes the press the enemy of the people.
When the President putting ketchup on his steak is big news, the press is the enemy if the people.
When the press deletes content that negates their views (Huffington Post, MSNBC, CNN, BuzzFeed) the press is the enemy of the people.
When comedians are viewed as astute opinionmakers and intelligent thinkers forming the views of the public, the press is the enemy of the people.
When skin color and appearance should never be taken into account as far as qualifications for office (or anything else ) are concerned, but only for some (a Cheeto with a dead animal on his head and tiny hands), the press is most definitely the enemy of the people.
TIME editors throw in the towel before week 2 of the Trump administration comes to a close (or maybe they just fired senior editors that didn’t wanna play scratch backs). Seriously, either they know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines or they just don’t give a shit anymore.
It’s a massive, scrollable photograph of the inauguration. Be sure to swing a hard right with your mouse/finger and check the massive cluster of people that reaches back to the Washington Monument.
Whatever the National Park Service (NPS) retweeted, they’ve been forced to delete it. And when putting sooo much faith in their counting, remember that they undercounted the Million Man March in 1995 (emphasis mine):
within 24 hours after the March there arose a conflict about crowd sizeestimates between March organizers and Park Service officials. The National Park Service issued an estimate of about 400,000 attendees, a number significantly lower than March organizers had hoped for.After a heated exchange between leaders of the march and Park Service, ABC-TV-funded researchers at Boston University estimated the crowd size to be about 837,000 members, with a 20% margin of error.
Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power, and as the president said, “The transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States.” Member … some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting. For all the talk about the proper use of Twitter, two instances yesterday stand out. One was a particularly egregious example in which a reported falsely tweeted out that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from The Oval Office. After it was pointed out that this was just plain wrong, the reporter casually reported an con … tweeted out that a Secret Service agent must have just been standing in front of it. This was irresponsible and reckless. Secondly, photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way … in one particular tweet to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas were people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual. This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the wall preventing hundreds of thousands of people from a … being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past. Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion. We do know a few things, so let’s go through the facts. We know …”
He then goes into “the facts” as the White House is choosing to spin them today. He goes on about the great reception President Trump received this place and that place, takes a dig at the Democrats, mentions Canada and Mexico. Then chastises the press for not writing about those things. Finally, he follows it all up with a schedule of what President Trump will do tomorrow before walking out.
It’s easy to miss in the video and maybe in the transcript, too, but the harshness of the press secretary’s tone when he says, “This was irresponsible and reckless.” This is the sitting government adding a layer of aesthetic interpretation to what is being said about them in a public forum. Other governments have done this too, it’s not special, unique, or even worrisome per se, but it is very worthy of note here, because this is presented within a larger context of “fake news”. The reporter says it was a mistake. Brietbart calls it “Fake News on Day One“. Ddong Today calls it ‘jumping the gun’.
Whatever it was, it is no more irresponsible and reckless than any number of things that have gone down since this fiasco started with a rant about raping Mexicans.
Forget the numbers and counting, as stated in the Vox article, real counts aren’t known for days or weeks until after an event. The thing to watch are the press conferences, the tone the White House sets down as “acceptable” (e.g. not irresponsible, not reckless), and what other stories, events, people, facts, etc. will fall into the newly defined category of ‘irresponsible and reckless’.
These “mistakes” feel more like digs and FUs than ignorance. It takes energy to do stuff like this and unless that image was just one in a default upload folder. And President Trump himself has shown again and again that he’s a big fan of the petty dig.
It was a beautiful inauguration. The most beautiful ever watched by most Americans because most Americans don’t sit down and watch inaugurations—nobody cares. There’s no teams, no scores, no cheerleaders, no tits. It’s another excuse for American showmanship where the cameras follow a white guy and his wife around for a day (previous two presidential inaugurations excluded—they are the exception to the norm). When Americans want to watch white guys and their wives all day, they flip on Duck Dynasty. SSDS.
wanted to see a revolution (that cuts a number of ways).
wanted to see President Trump put his foot in his mouth.
wanted to see lefties getting roughed up.
wanted to see riot police getting hit with bricks.
wanted to watch the associate editor of the WAPO ramble on on CBS about how this wasn’t the first time folks rioted during an inauguration, “Nixon had rocks thrown at his limousine.”source
wanted to see their man wrest the capitol from the tentacles of the elite.
wanted to see what the good missus President Trump would wear (and no one foresaw the Jackie O. comparisons).
Then most people fell asleep waiting for the motorcade to motor or went to eat some food while the media talked about President Trump’s speech. Waking up the next day, it turns out that President Trump finally found himself a desk on day 1 of stewarding America and signed some stuff.
The bulk of the MSM has dwelled on his signing of an executive order related to the Affordable Care Act, some say to reign it in, others say to break it down. It’s too soon to know … and, outside looking in, the Affordable Care Act seems poorly executed in the first place. And things that aren’t executed correctly are easy to build hate and distrust around and against.
Figuring out what other things were important to President Trump to sign on his first use of a presidential pen took more leg work. Vice has this covered with some videos of presidential hobnobbing and games of pass-the-pen. One executive order was to change another law to all the new Secretary of Defense to take his post. Another was for a “National Day of Patriotism”—not many details for that though (some basics here).
It’s hard to take these things in stride, to “give him a chance”. Folks like specifics, even if they don’t read them, it’s good to know that they are there, that they can be read, if the desire is there. Most folks will never bother to read up on much of anything, instead, clusters of groups that watch the inner workings of our government scour every line of print for things to that they think we either should know or be frighten by. Usually, those groups break for the latter—instilling fear is the shortest way to get folks to do stuff.
Give the new whitehouse.gov site a read. Or look through the page source, they seem to have every incarnation of every browser covered, but I want to know if President Trump has taken care of the “cyber” yet. How many exploits will it take to fell whitehouse.gov? Someone will figure that out this year, bet on it.
