|
Post by neil on Oct 11, 2020 7:12:46 GMT -5
ibid.
MEANWHILE . . .
A British Airways jumbo jet cleared the Dolphin Expressway and touched down at Miami International. The control tower had to-the-horizon visibility for minimum landing separation. Minutes later, another transatlantic from Berlin. And Rome. And Madrid. Then the domestics, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Nashville.
The cadence of swooping turbines rattled the inside of a tiny bar on the back of an ill-stocked package store with Honduran cigars and a bulletproof Plexiglas cage for night sales that was so thick it was like looking at the cashier through an aquarium.
Only four customers in the late afternoon. Guillermo and his boys. The bar sat just north of the airport on the side of Okeecho-bee Boulevard. The interior was dark, choked with cigarette smoke from insufficient ventilation, which consisted of an open back door on a windless day. Out the door: roosters and roaming dogs pulling wet clothes from laundry lines. Beyond that, an unassuming drainage canal that began a hundred miles away near Clewiston, cutting south through a million sugarcane acres, then the Everglades, past western quarries and jumping the turnpike for a perfect, man-made straight diagonal shot through Hialeah, eventually assuming natural bends when it became the Miami River before dumping into Biscayne Bay.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 11, 2020 20:38:30 GMT -5
I have been alone all my life. There is no reason to think that now is a good time to go about changing my social status.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 14, 2020 20:05:10 GMT -5
If you walk around one corner and see yourself disappear around the corner ahead, it's the end of the world.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 15, 2020 15:35:06 GMT -5
Pelagic fish live in the pelagic zone of ocean or lake waters – being neither close to the bottom nor near the shore – in contrast with demersal fish that do live on or near the bottom, and reef fish that are associated with coral reefs.
The marine pelagic environment is the largest aquatic habitat on Earth, occupying 1,370 million cubic kilometres (330 million cubic miles), and is the habitat for 11% of known fish species. The oceans have a mean depth of 4000 metres*. About 98% of the total water volume is below 100 metres (330 ft), and 75% is below 1,000 metres (3,300 ft).
Marine pelagic fish can be divided into pelagic coastal fish and oceanic pelagic fish. Coastal fish inhabit the relatively shallow and sunlit waters above the continental shelf, while oceanic fish inhabit the vast and deep waters beyond the continental shelf (even though they also may swim inshore).
Pelagic fish range in size from small coastal forage fish, such as herrings and sardines, to large apex predator oceanic fishes, such as bluefin tuna and oceanic sharks. They are usually agile swimmers with streamlined bodies, capable of sustained cruising on long-distance migrations. Many pelagic fish swim in schools weighing hundreds of tonnes. Others are solitary, such as the large ocean sunfish weighing more than 500 kilograms, which sometimes drift passively with ocean currents, eating jellyfish.
*2.5 miles, or MILES. Can't speak for anyone else, but that sorta makes me feel like a bug.
Wikipomeranian
Font Size 3, which your humble servant is able to read without grunting.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 16, 2020 3:08:27 GMT -5
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/trump-administration-partisan-campaigning-hatch-actTop Trump administration figures flout law banning partisan campaigning Peter Stone 6-8 minutes
On 24 August, Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, traveled to the battleground state of North Carolina for an official departmental event for food producers hurt by the pandemic. But Perdue’s speech to attendees also featured a campaign pep talk for Trump, who was there too.
At one point Perdue led a chant of “four more years” and called Trump a champion of “forgotten people”.
Perdue’s blurring of the lines between hosting an official Department of Agriculture meeting and a Trump rally, sparked a complaint to the federal Office of Special Counsel by the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) that charged he violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that bars most federal officials from using their government posts to engage in various kinds of political activity.
In a stinging rebuke to Perdue, OSC on 8 October ruled that he had violated the Hatch Act and ordered him to reimburse taxpayers for his travel and other expenses linked to the event.
But Perdue is hardly an isolated example of top Trump officials mixing their work with political activities that critics and watchdog groups say is a worrying breach of laws and regulations designed to stem corruption and keep America’s machinery of state free from political interference.
Reports show that 14 senior Trump political appointees have been cited by OSC for Hatch Act violations, including some repeat offenders. Trump’s ex-political adviser Kellyanne Conway was charged with about two dozen Hatch Act violations according to Crew, which led OSC in 2019 to recommend that she be fired, a message Trump ignored.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 16, 2020 6:04:20 GMT -5
www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/heres-one-way-dark-money-is-getting-even-darker/Money In Politics Here’s one way dark money is getting even darker Matt Corley October 14, 2020
Recently, multiple news outlets reported on a new “dark money group” that is sending mail-in ballot applications to voters in Minnesota and Pennsylvania accompanied by an “election guide” framed to benefit President Trump and hurt his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Little is known about the group, Common Sense Voters of America LLC, other than that it was established in Ohio in June by a law firm with ties to Kanye West’s effort to get on the Ohio ballot.
The stories generally refer to Common Sense Voters of America LLC as a nonprofit organization without specifying what type, suggesting that it is similar to other politically-active nonprofits that are typically organized as nonprofit corporations tax-exempt under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Since this type of tax-exempt organization can spend money on politics but is not required to disclose its donors, it is commonly used by anonymous donors to influence elections and is referred to as “dark money.”
But Common Sense Voters of America LLC is actually a different type of entity called a domestic nonprofit limited liability company (LLC) that provides even less information to the public about its activities. Since at least 2018, nonprofit LLCs have increasingly been used as a vehicle for anonymous political activity.
Common Sense Voters of America LLC registered as a nonprofit LLC with the Ohio Secretary of State on June 29, 2020. If it had filed as a domestic nonprofit corporation, as section 501(c)(4) organizations typically do in Ohio, it would have been required to provide more information, including a description of the organization’s purpose, to the Ohio Secretary of State.
More importantly, due to its formation as an LLC, Common Sense Voters of America LLC is unlikely to file a publicly available tax return with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that would provide additional transparency about its operations. As a nonprofit LLC, Common Sense Voters of America LLC can be reported to the IRS as a “disregarded entity” of another nonprofit, which means it can essentially be treated as a subsidiary and does not have to file its own tax return. Instead, disregarded entities are treated as part of the controlling organization for tax purposes and their information is included in the parent nonprofit’s tax return, known as a Form 990.
This is exactly what has happened with several nonprofit LLCs registered in Ohio in recent years that have engaged in the political arena. LZP, LLC, for instance, was formed in Ohio as a nonprofit LLC in March 2018. During the 2018 election, LZP, LLC completely funded a federal super PAC that ran ads opposing recently indicted and now-former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder’s election. As CREW detailed in a conduit contribution complaint with the Federal Election Commission, little was known about LZP, LLC at the time.
It was only after another nonprofit, Independence and Freedom Network, filed its 2018 tax return in November 2019 that LZP, LLC was revealed as a related, subsidiary organization of the larger nonprofit. LZP, LLC’s super PAC contributions were reported to the IRS as though they came from Independence and Freedom Network itself. Beyond that, the only specific financial information included about LZP, LLC on the tax return was its total income and end-of-year assets.
CREW has identified the controlling nonprofits of two other nonprofit LLCs registered in 2018 by the same lawyer who registered LZP, LLC. Security is Strength, LLC, which has paid for Facebook ads promoting Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), is a disregarded entity of a nonprofit called the Government Integrity Fund while Next Policies, LLC, which ran an issue ad in the 2018 Kansas gubernatorial election, is a disregarded entity of a nonprofit called A Public Voice, Inc.
But there are more politically-active nonprofit LLCs whose parent nonprofits are still unknown. In last year’s GOP gubernatorial primary in Louisiana, for instance, a nonprofit LLC registered in Ohio called Securing Louisiana’s Future, LLC gave $262,500 to a similarly-named super PAC that backed Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA) in the race. Another nonprofit LLC, Women’s Action Fund LLC, spent more than $22,000 attacking an Oregon state Senate candidate in 2018. More recently, Freedom and Liberty Fund, LLC, which formed in Ohio early this year, spent in an Oklahoma state Senate GOP primary this summer.
The same law firm that registered the group sending mailers in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, Common Sense Voters of America LLC, was also involved in the registration of another nonprofit LLC, South Carolina Conservatives Fund LLC, in Ohio in June 2020 that soon spent more than half a million dollars on TV ads targeting a South Carolina state senator in a primary race. Two months after the targeted senator won the primary South Carolina Conservatives Fund LLC filed dissolution paperwork to go out of business.
For each of these entities, the normal tools that watchdog organizations and journalists use to discern details about dark money groups are not as useful. Since they are likely subsidiaries of other nonprofits, information can’t be found by entering their names into the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organization Search tool or looking for them in the Exempt Organizations Business Master File Extract, which aggregates cumulative information about exempt organizations. It’s no use requesting the group’s tax return or tax-exempt application directly from the IRS either.
Eventually, the information will be discovered, but it is likely to be long after the money has been spent and votes have been cast. Even then, less will be known than if the nonprofit LLCs filed their own tax returns.
Unfortunately, even though there are occasionally positive developments in the fight for more transparency, political operatives and lawyers determined to influence politics while allowing anonymous donors to remain in the dark are hard at work finding new ways to avoid sunlight.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 16, 2020 6:26:44 GMT -5
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVUEwww.cjr.org/the_media_today/yes-were-doing-it-all-over-again.php Yes, we’re doing it all over again
By Mathew Ingram October 15, 2020
Since Donald Trump became president, there has been a never-ending series of articles about what the media did to enable his victory. Near the top of that list is the air time and free advertising ($2 billion worth, according to one estimate) given to him by TV networks like CNN, because they knew he would attract a crowd, in much the same way a car accident does. Also near the top of the list is credulous reporting of stories about Hillary Clinton that were fed by hacked and leaked emails, creating the erroneous impression that both sides were equally guilty of political transgressions. Given the sheer volume of these “lessons learned” pieces, you might think it unlikely that something similar would happen this time around. You would be wrong. A blizzard of news on Wednesday showed that some are not only failing to heed those warnings but failing hard.
Take NBC. In the wake of Trump’s refusal to attend a virtual presidential debate, the network offered the president his own town hall event and scheduled it at the same time as Biden’s previously announced town hall (at Trump’s behest). In other words, the network is treating a debate between candidates for president as though it were the finale of a celebrity cooking show. More than one observer was reminded of what former CBS chief executive Les Moonves said about Trump’s presidency in 2016: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” New Yorker writer Sue Halpern called the NBC decision “stunning and shameful”, and Yashar Ali of HuffPost said more than a dozen NBC sources expressed “frustration and anger toward their employer.” As Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan said: “the defining media story of this era is mainstream journalism’s refusal to deny Trump a giant megaphone.”
Meanwhile, in a flashback to the Hillary Clinton email story, the New York Post published a thinly-sourced and highly questionable piece alleging that Joe Biden’s son Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian executive whose company was later investigated for fraud. The alleged evidence for this story– by a reporter who has spent almost her entire career as a producer at Fox News—includes emails taken from a laptop that a computer repair shop owner said may have belonged to Hunter Biden (the owner later gave a rambling and disjointed interview in which he contradicted himself repeatedly). And it appears that all the paper has are screenshots of the emails it says it has based the story on. Despite this, the story was breathlessly promoted by the usual suspects, including Rudy Giuliani and Breitbart News, and was even picked up by other outlets, including Bloomberg. The Biden campaign released a statement saying there was no truth to the report, and that the candidate’s calendar shows he was busy when the alleged meeting occurred.
Both Twitter and Facebook to tried to limit the amplification of the Post story, which quickly became a big part of the conversation. A Facebook spokesman said the social network had already started reducing the distribution of the report while it was being fact-checked. This is a reversal of the usual procedure, which typically involves reducing the algorithmic promotion of a story only after it has found to be false. But Facebook’s head of security noted that he had recently warned of the potential for foreign interference, including “hack and leak” operations aimed at destabilizing the election. Twitter took the extra step of preventing users from sharing the link, a decision that triggered immediate cries of censorship and which some said could backfire. Senator Josh Hawley wrote the Federal Election Commission arguing that the blocking amounts to a donation to the Biden campaign and is therefore a rules violation.
As my colleague Jon Allsop has pointed out, the potential saving grace is that the sheer volume and frequency of Trump’s lying — not to mention his repeated demonization of the press—has made the information environment so chaotic and noisy that the Biden story is almost certain to sink beneath the waves. On the same day as the Post story broke, for example, Trump retweeted a conspiracy theory that Osama bin Laden was kept alive and moved to Pakistan so that Barack Obama could have a “trophy kill.” In any other reality that would have been a front-page story, but now it barely merits a bullet point.
Here’s more on the media and disinformation:
Amplification: A number of disinformation experts including Laura Rosenberger of The Alliance for Securing Democracy warned that linking to and/or mentioning such a misleading story, even while debunking or rebutting it, serves to amplify it. Some journalists and others took New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman to task for doing exactly this with some of her tweets on the story, many of which didn’t contain any context about how questionable the sourcing is. Soledad O’Brien tweeted that “all my years of tweeting about the terribleness of Axios, the mess that is Politico and of course, the access-journalism that informs much of the NY Times political coverage is just one big overlapping Venn diagram today.” Weaponization: In a recent research paper, Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler wrote about how part of Trump’s weaponization of the media involved taking advantage of journalism’s desire to maintain certain norms of behavior, including a desire to cover both sides of an issue even when one side is clearly more truthful than the other. We used CJR’s Galley discussion platform to host a series of discussions with disinformation experts—including Benkler himself—about the research and implications for the media and social platforms. Censorship: Robby Soave, an editor at Reason magazine, criticized not just the decision to block the Post story on Twitter and Facebook, but also the shaming of journalists who shared it. “This is the work of journalism—to ask questions, to probe, to find and share the truth,” he writes. “Haberman and Sherman were right to let their audiences know that The New York Post story exists, and they were right to challenge it. Many others in the media apparently believe the public cannot be trusted with such a challenging article. They have not merely shamed people for sharing it online, but also want to make it difficult for people to read the report at all.”
Other notable stories:
Free Press has released a 100-page essay as part of the launch of a new project called “Media 2070: An Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparations.” The essay and the project call for a national reckoning on the history of systemic racism in the US. “Media organizations were complicit in the slave trade and profited off of chattel slavery,” the essay notes. “Racist journalism has led to countless lynchings; southern broadcast stations have opposed integration; and, in the 21st century, powerful social media and tech companies are allowing white supremacists to use their platforms to organize, fundraise, recruit and spread hate.” The great “unmasking” scandal collapsed this week, CNN reports. A story Fox News portrayed as one of the greatest political scandals in American history, and that Tucker Carlson called a “domestic spying operation” started to look thinner when The Washington Post reported that a Justice Department investigation into the matter quietly ended with no charges. The story revolved around an intelligence report that included an anonymous source who was later “unmasked” by government order, and turned out to be Michael Flynn. At the time, Sean Hannity declared it to be the “biggest abuse of power” the country had ever seen. Christopher Tedeschi, a New York emergency-room physician, writes for CJR about the dangers of doctors speculating on the president’s health in the wake of his COVID diagnosis, despite sketchy and even misleading official statements. “Into the information vacuum have poured countless talking head doctors, in every media outlet,” he writes. “Their commentary has ranged from explanatory to speculative to maybe misleading; sometimes, they offer a prognosis for a patient they have never met. It’s understandable, on one level. The public needs to know the health status of elected officials. But it remains impossible to assess the clinical condition of a patient you don’t know, and irresponsible to do so.” New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has released its ranking of the top 10 works of journalism in the past decade, and in the number one slot is “The Case for Reparations,” an Atlantic piece written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The list also includes an article by Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement,” and the Miami Herald article by Julie K. Brown that first revealed some of the details of the sexual abuse of young girls by Jeffrey Epstein, “How a Future Trump Cabinet Member Gave a Serial Sex Abuser the Deal of a Lifetime.” The 1619 project from the New York Times also gets a nod. There’s been a 200 percent increase in the number of fact-checking organizations worldwide since Trump was elected in 2016, according to data from the Duke Reporter’s Lab, as reported by Axios in its media newsletter. “It’s definitely a response to the extraordinary propensity for falsehoods that President Trump has exhibited as President and before that, during the campaign,” says Lucas Graves, an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of “What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism.” Discourse, a blog collective run by former staffers at Splinter, has relaunched with its own dedicated website after leaving the Substack newsletter platform. It describes itself as a “worker-run, collectively owned leftist politics and culture website” and says that its mission is to be “part of a new wave of truly independent media and to do work that is fearless and wild and heartfelt, that stands with the people against the bosses, and that takes on establishments of all kinds.” A Daily Beast report says that in recent weeks, Fox News’ Brain Room—the channel’s research resource for its journalists, which suffered disproportionately in the latest round of layoffs—”launched a behind-the-scenes operation that current and former staffers say is designed to reinforce and amplify Trump’s erroneous accusations.” Called the Election Integrity Project, an anonymous Fox News veteran quoted in the report said that while it looks like an attempt to report on election irregularities, “it’s an attempt to push more baseless conspiracy theories and scare the viewers into thinking the election is being stolen.” A letter from the Nova Scotia government sent out to residents to warn about a pack of wolves on the loose in the province was forged by Canadian military personnel as part of a propaganda training mission that went off the rails, according to a report in the Ottawa Citizen. The letter told residents to be wary of wolves that had been reintroduced into the area by the provincial and federal governments and warned the animals were now roaming the Annapolis Valley. The letter sparked concern and questions among residents, but was later branded as “fake” by the Nova Scotia government, which didn’t know the military was behind the deception.
Mathew Ingram is CJR’s chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 16, 2020 8:38:59 GMT -5
we are now living in the post literate age
|
|
|
Post by neil on Oct 23, 2020 5:23:55 GMT -5
In software engineering, inversion of control (IoC) is a programming principle. IoC inverts the flow of control as compared to traditional control flow. In IoC, custom-written portions of a computer program receive the flow of control from a generic framework. A software architecture with this design inverts control as compared to traditional procedural programming: in traditional programming, the custom code that expresses the purpose of the program calls into reusable libraries to take care of generic tasks, but with inversion of control, it is the framework that calls into the custom, or task-specific, code.
Inversion of control is used to increase modularity of the program and make it extensible,[1] and has applications in object-oriented programming and other programming paradigms. The term was used by Michael Mattsson in a thesis,[2] taken from there[3] by Stefano Mazzocchi and popularized by him in 1999 in a defunct Apache Software Foundation project, Avalon, then further popularized in 2004 by Robert C. Martin and Martin Fowler.
The term is related to, but different from, the dependency inversion principle, which concerns itself with decoupling dependencies between high-level and low-level layers through shared abstractions. The general concept is also related to event-driven programming in that it is often implemented using IoC, so that the custom code is commonly only concerned with the handling of events, whereas the event loop and dispatch of events/messages is handled by the framework or the runtime environment.
OK, look, is this even real? Just because it's in Wikipedia doesn't make it real. I think it's a Bojack Horse.
|
|