Reuters and AP, Associated Press, Issue Simultaneous Fact Checks: “Mass Formation Psychosis” or “Mass Psychosis” Does Not Exist As a Legitimate, Academically Recognized Theory

Two of these three above caused Reuters and AP to issue fact check articles that there is no such thing as "Mass Formation Psychosis"

More or less simultaneously, a day apart, Reuters and AP, the Associated Press, issued fact check articles announcing that “Mass Formation Psychosis” or “Mass Psychosis” is an “unfounded,” “discredited” theory; that the “concept has no academic credibility,” is “not officially recognized” “is not supported by evidence, and is similar to theories that have long been discredited” and that the term does not appear as a classification in medical reference dictionaries.  See: Fact Check-No evidence of pandemic ‘mass formation psychosis’, say experts speaking to Reuters, By Reuters Fact Check January 7, 2022, and (AP) FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures
By Angelo Fichera and Josh Kelety, January 8, 2022.

According to professor John Drury quoted by both articles the theory is a “notion” that “has been discredited by decades of research.” He says that “no respectable psychologist” now “agrees with these ideas.”

Reporting this delivery of the verdict of “psychology experts,” Reuters and AP both say that they talked with “numerous psychologists” and “multiple experts.”

Both Reuters and AP quote some of those experts, between them a total of six.  Both Reuters and AP quote:

    •    John Drury, Professor of Social Psychology and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Sussex
    •    Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, who says “I’ve been studying group identity and collective behavior for nearly two decades
    •    Steven Reicher, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews, who has studied crowd psychology for more than 40 years. (and important update 2/14/'22)

In addition, Reuters quotes:

    •    Chris Cocking, Principal Lecturer at the School of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Brighton

And AP additionally quotes two other experts:

    •    Steven Jay Lynn, a psychology professor at Binghamton University in New York
    •    Richard McNally, a professor of clinical psychology at Harvard University- He is not quoted as saying the theory does not exist, only as offering the opinion that the way that public is responding to Covid is a rational response “to the arguments and evidence adduced by the relevant scientific experts.”

As one can tell from the above, there are theories of “crowd psychology,” “group identity and collective behavior” that these experts, who were tapped to offer these opinions, believe exist.  But as Professor Drury explains, he distinguishes and dismisses concepts, such as “mob mentality” and “group mind,” where “when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control” and where “they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate.”

The fact checks were, of course, picked up and republished elsewhere.   ABC affiliate- FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures, NBC affiliate-  Fact Check: Doctor uses unfounded theory to dismiss COVID measures on Rogan podcast, by Angelo Fichera and Josh Kelety Associated Press, Tuesday, January 11th 2022, CBS affiliate-  FACT FOCUS: Unfounded theory used to dismiss COVID measures, Jan 8, 2022, Yahoo News- ‘No academic credibility’: Experts debunk mass psychosis Covid theory floated by doctor on Joe Rogan podcast, Gino Spocchia, January 9, 2022.

All the other publications don’t matter so much since Google’s algorithms ensure that these fact check articles, and/or the points they make, Google high.

The fact check articles both identify themselves as being a quick response to Dr. Robert Malone speaking about the theory on the Joe Rogan Show about a week before:

AP:

The term gained attention after it was floated by Dr. Robert Malone on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Dec. 31 podcast. Malone is a scientist who once researched mRNA technology but is now a vocal skeptic of the COVID-19 vaccines that use it.

Reuters:

Dr Robert Malone . .  told The Joe Rogan Experience that “mass formation psychosis” is a phenomenon that occurred in 1920s and 30s Germany when a highly educated population “went barking mad”.

“And that is what’s happened here,” he said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic (here).

According to Malone, the condition occurs when a society “becomes decoupled from each other and has a free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense… And then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis.”

. . . . . They will follow that person – it doesn’t matter whether they lie to them or whatever, the data are irrelevant.”

Aside from the fact checks saying that the theory does not exist, Big Tech media responded to Malone’s speaking about this notion by immediately taking down the Joe Rogan YouTube clip of Malone talking to Rogan about this idea.  See:  NY Post- YouTube scraps Joe Rogan podcast episode over Nazi Germany comparison By Ben Cost, January 4, 2022   and NY Daily News-  Joe Rogan video taken down by YouTube for anti-vax content, By Brian Niemietz, January 03, 2022.

The same week Twitter cancelled Dr. Malone’s account banning him from Twitter’s platform, the reasons for which are analyzed here.  Likewise, LinkedIn cancelled Dr. Malone’s LinkedIn account.

Meanwhile, somebody mustered a group that includes professors, some health professionals, some scientists, some doctors, etc. to sign a letter demanding that the top-rated Joe Rogan Show be cancelled from Spotify because Joe Rogan interviewed vaccine expert Dr. Malone about Covid.

The unfounded “Mass Formation Psychosis” theory is more or less a variation, with the overlay of certain extra manifestations that take it in a more extreme direction, of what has been described as “Groupthink.”  “Groupthink” hales back to a seminal article written by William H. (Holly) Whyte published in Fortune magazine in 1952.  The “Groupthink” theory was built upon and further developed, by Irving Janis, a research psychologist from Yale University in ensuing years.  Features of the Groupthink theory involve a dysfunctional deterioration of critical, independent, and quality thinking and decision making as people within an “ingroup” are pressured to think similar things.  There is an intolerance of other ideas and the “ingroup” is likely to get an inflated sense of the correctness of their own decisions that goes along with “illusions of invulnerability.”  This is likely to go along with denigration of anyone in an “outgroup” and that can often cause members of the “outgroup” to be treated in a dehumanized way.  The theory includes the observation that “groupthink” often arises or is more likely in situations where there is a high level of stress or anxiety from external threats.

As for the “Mass Formation Psychosis” theory itself, one good expression of what it is Reuters and AP were able to fact check as being unfounded is this cartoon illustrated After Skool/Academy of Ideas presentation: Mass Psychosis - How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill, August 3, 2021.  Cartooning ideas can be extremely influential: it could easily be argued that Whyte’s Fortune Groupthink article would never have been as influential without the accompanying illustrations by Robert Osborn.  This After Skool/Academy of Ideas presentation is incredibly similar in approach to the recent “Your Debt Is Someone Else’s Asset,” a cancel debt with a jubilee advocacy video up at the Intercept (December 9 2021) by Kim Boekbinder, Jim Batt, illustrations by Molly Crabapple, except that the illustrator is somebody different from Molly Crabapple.

If you want something more talky and academic, less streamlined, to review this (talking, for instance, about breaking down human bonds), there is an interview available here with Professor Matthias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology Ghent University, Belgium, a psychoanalyst and who also has a degree in statistics: Why Do So Many Still Buy into the Narrative?  Professor Matthias Desmet, September 21st, 2021.

Human brains and human thinking are strange.  For instance, there is the famous story of Tolstoy’s challenge (originally from his older brother?) to stand facing a corner and not think of a white bear.  It’s almost impossible.

Is the New York Times Offering A Misleadingly Bleak Depiction of Status of “Herd Immunity” in New York City?

Today's New York Times front page featuring a petri dish chart for its home city of New York, saying that those with antibodies in the city are scarce, while it describes the potential of herd immunity as a "distant objective" and cautions that there is no safety from the spread.  But,the presentation of its NYC statistic is suspiciously inaccurate.

[NOTE: This article was updated July 2, 2020 to refer to the estimated lag times it takes for Coronavisrus antibodies to develop thus making it important to look back and consider April's random testing of New York City residents as being a snap shot of the status of the infection's spread earlier in the month of April.] 

Front page, above the fold, upper right there is a big prominent chart in the physical copy of today’s New York Times to go along with the headline: “In battling Outbreak, Herd Immunity,  Remains Distant Objective,” by Nadja Popovich and Margot Sanger-Katz May 28, 2020.  (The Times internet version of its headline is currently “The World Is Still Far From Herd Immunity for Coronavirus”)

That chart has a dramatic petri dish-looking dot diagram labeled to say that it shows that in New York City 19.9% of the population have covid antibodies and in the smaller print adding “May 2nd.”  The chart has its own bold headline label: "Still not Safe From The Spread."

The print version of this article provides this text:

In New York City, which has had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the United States, around 20 percent of the city’s residents have been infected by the virus as of early May, according to a survey of people in grocery stores and community centers released by the governor’s office.

But, in actuality, the study results just described by the New York Times as fixing this percentage in “early May,” were reported in the New York Times April 23rd: "1 in 5 New Yorkers May Have Had Covid-19, Antibody Tests Suggest" By J. David Goodman and Michael Rothfeld, April 23, 2020-

In New York City, about 21 percent tested positive for coronavirus antibodies during the state survey.

That article also stated:

State officials said the test had been calibrated to err on the side of producing false negatives — to miss some who may have antibodies —

That April Times article didn’t say then when in April the study had been conducted, perhaps an unusual skip, saying only that the study had involved tests conducted “over two days, including about 1,300 in New York City, at grocery and big-box stores” that had then been “sent to the state’s Wadsworth facility in Albany” and generated an announcement about its results on Wednesday, April 22, 2020 (publicly discussed by NYS Governor Cuomo the next day).  All of this would push back somewhat the unknown date that the random study was actually conducted.-- 

-- Pushing things back further in assessing things is that antibodies for Covid are not said to develop for one-to-three, or even more weeks after becoming infected.  That means that the random sample snap-shot involves a lag.  If you push things back two weeks plus a few days to compensate for all this, that means that the snap shot may best reflect a date of about Friday, April 3rd.  The "confirmed case" for New York City count the New York Times gave on April 2nd was 52,000.  May 29th the New York Times gives a "confirmed case" count figure of "205,854."

While the results of that mid-April random study were intriguing, there seems to be no hint of another updating random study since.

Reporting on rates of coronavirus infection is a moving target.  The virus is capably of spreading at an exponential rate, which is clearly what it did in the beginning in many locations including New York City.  At about the time of the NYC random study it had been reported (April 15, 2020 on Democracy Now) that the milestone of 10,000 deaths from the virus in New York City had just been reached.  The death toll in New York City is now more than double that number at about 21,000.  Increases in and accelerations of the infection rate precede the reported death rate.

So, if random testing were done, now, at the tail end of May, probably about six or more weeks since the last random tests were conducted, where would the current antibody detection rate in New York City be?  That would have to take into consideration that April, followed by the first half of May was the month during which the virus was spreading most rapidly in New York City to create new infections.  Would it be more than double the April random test figure the Times splashed on its front page incorrectly saying the figures were from May as it based it article on that?  The charts below, from the New York Times itself, are elucidating in considering this:

Remember, when looking at these charts, that although the numbers are consistent for what they are, the "confirmed case" figure is always just a tiny fraction of the number of the people who have actually contracted the virus.  That's something that is widely acknowledged.  So, for instance, the April 2nd date when there were a reported about 52,000 confirmed cases is the approximate date when random testing indicates that probably about 21% of New Yorkers had had the virus.  By the May 29th date that the New York Times gives a "confirmed case" count figure of "205,854" for one can expect, following at least somewhat proportionally, a fairly major increase in the actual cases.
 
So the question I ask is: Is the New York Times offering a misleadingly bleak depiction respecting the possibilities of when the protections of herd immunity may be kick in for those who live in New York City, the Times' home base?  Still a "distant objective" that new Yorkers are "far from"?

The Clinton And The Trump Investigations And Impeachments: Both Following The Same Formula For Division And Subtraction By Distraction?

I don’t know about you, but I had a striking revelation: The Clinton and the Trump presidential impeachments and the theatrically dramatic investigations accompanying them were remarkably the same.  In each case, the news media and our congress obsessed and transfixed for months on an investigation that seemed giant, sensational, and exhaustive, yet in each case was focused on something largely irrelevant to what was actually there to be investigated.  Also, in each case, the relatively trivial offenses selected to be focused on were perfect to foment and stoke distracting Red Team/Blue Team division.

I first realized the strange kinship of the two impeachments/investigations when I was reading a Whitney Webb article.  It was the fourth article in Ms. Webb's MintPress News series on pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein.  This is the in depth, connect-the-dots series that has attracted Ms. Webb so much attention.  The series was extra-remarkable when it got started getting real attention because Ms. Webb started it before Epstein’s provocatively mysterious death.–   The fourth article in the series, the first written after Jeffrey Epstein’s death, had me thinking, “reeling” is a better word, about how there was so much about the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, that Whitney Webb was writing about that was never investigated, never surfaced as part of any formal investigation, stuff that obviously should have been investigated. . .  But I remembered the Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation that turned into the Monica Lewinsky scandal based impeachment and trial of Clinton.  Hmm.
                                           
That’s when I first thought about the commonality of the Clinton and Trump impeachments/investigations.  I don’t know if it vexed you, but for me it was excruciating that there is so much to investigate about Trump, so much that he could be impeached for (violations of the emoluments clause in the running of his hotels and resorts, diverting money appropriated for other things into his “wall,” willful violations of international treaties, assassination of Soleimani, putting a fox in charge of the hen house of every government regulatory agency chartered to protect the public), and yet the Democrats ignored all the potentially strong bipartisan issues challenging Trump and they impeached him for something totally different. 

Ignoring strong potentially bipartisan grounds for impeaching Trump while going after Trump on weak ones, the Democrats weaken anyone’s future ability to impeach and convict Trump on the much stronger, valid grounds available; “What doesn’t kill him, makes him stronger.”  They probably weaken the ability of anyone to impeach and convict any president in the future.  Beforehand, the Democrats notably put their energy into a rather bogus “Russiagate” investigation.  That’s now morphed, somewhat seamlessly, into a Ukraingate investigation. Of all possible things, the Democrats decided to impeach Trump for steps Trump took to surface corrupt activities of Joe Biden and his son in the Ukraine.

Are you wondering about the probable depths of the Bidens’ Ukranian corruption?  If you're doubting that it’s a significant issue, I suspect that, unserved by corporate mass media, or at least the Blue media, there’s much you haven't yet paid attention to.  To catch up, I recommend to you some documentary segments “UkraineGate – Inconvenient Facts” (the first is “A Not So ‘Solid’ Prosecutor”) produced out of France.  It’s available through partnering work done with Consortium News, for anyone who wants to get extra educated as they indulge their wondering about whether the Bidens, father and son, behaved in a manner worthy of a corruption investigation that would look into how, when Joe Bidden was in charge of Ukrainian affairs for the Obama administration following the United States’ participation in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, Hunter Bidden, his son, got a very hard-to-explain, almost insanely lucrative five-year appointment to Burisma Holdings, a huge Ukrainian natural gas company.  Joe Biden was thereafter, still theoretically working of the U.S. taxpayers, when he was involved in removing and replacing the Ukrainian prosecutor in charge of investigations of that gas company’s business.

It’s possible you’re a Blue-team loyal Democrat who is in line with the feeling that Trump should absolutely not have tried to surface matters for investigation about the Bidens– If so, I suggest you try turning these things around and imagine how a Red-team loyal Republican might scoff hearing about the refusal of Democrats to allow the Bidens to be called as witnesses concerning the corruption Trump says he wanted to surface.  If impeachment witnesses are, indeed, important, why not welcome these witnesses? . .   Or just imagine that it was a yet-to-take-office Democratic president trying to surface, for better investigation, matters involving corruption during a prior Republican administration, perhaps Trump’s family reaping spoils in a country where we helped depose the government.  That country could be Bolivia, which is another country with natural gas resources likely to now be privatized.  Or possibly it could be Venezuela, an oil rich country the Trump administration is making concerted attempts to overthrow.

The point is this: Was Trump’s interest in seeing the Biden’s Ukranian activities investigated strong grounds for impeachment, or just an issue guaranteed to cause people to divisively side more strongly with contradictory outrage being expressed, respectively, in turn by either the Blue Team or the Red Team?

Now let’s go back in time to the Clintons.

Reading the Whitney Webb article with so many unsavory facts and allegations about the Clintons in one place, made me think about how I felt when Ken Starr, having supposedly started with Whitewater, was relentless pursuing President Bill Clinton for not telling the frank truth about his philandering sex life.  I remember, at that time, honing in on the principle that you should investigate the crime, not investigate the man.  That’s because in this complicated world if you selectively devote enormous resources to investigate just about any single individual there is probably something you can find that that individual did wrong if that is your intent.  And it seemed that was exactly what Ken Starr was doing.

I remember how back at the time in the 1990s, I felt increasingly aligned with, and defensive of Bill Clinton, because I felt he was being persecuted not prosecuted.  At that time, it forced me to ask whether we needed to know about and judge peoples’ personal sex lives as a predicate for determining their suitability to hold a governing office.  My answer on this subject was basically, no, with some exceptions.  In particular, I felt those exceptions pertained to those individuals in politics who were hypocritically trying to dictate and moralize about the sex lives of others by holding up rules they didn’t follow themselves: I was keenly aware that top Republicans prosecuting the Clinton impeachment, including three Republican House Speakers at the time, Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, were all involved in their own sex scandals.

I wasn’t the only one reacting to the Clinton impeachment this way.  Democrats picked up seats in Congress as the probable result of the impeachment.  The impeachment of Clinton launched MoveOn as an organization to raise money for candidates opposing Republicans.  Bill Clinton’s sex life and the potentially hypocrisy of some Democrats seeming to defend even its predatory aspects, helped build up both sides.  MSNBC, only a few year old at the time was able, as pointed out by Matt Taibbi, to build up a Blue-Team type audience reporting on the Clinton impeachment hearings– It was an alternative to Fox, which was relishing a semen-stained dress.  Matt Taibbi points out that, “Fox struck gold with the Lewinsky story and the Clinton impeachment.”  Both “sides” were inflamed to more Red Team/Blue Team rooting by the issue.

Similarly, today, even as Blue Team-rooting Democrats were cheering the Trump impeachment or coaxed to do so, indications are that the Democrat’s flailing impeachment of Trump is driving Trump’s ratings up.
    
Flash back to the Clintons: After the Ken Starr investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton culminating in the targeting of Clinton for impeachment for quibbling about what “is” meant when he was uncomfortably being questioned about his sex life, I felt as if the Clintons had been thoroughly investigated.  They must have thoroughly investigated, or so it seemed.  Ken Starr spent massively on his investigation of the Clintons.  Starr is estimated to have spent between $70 million and $80 million on his investigation (with all Clinton investigations combined, it may have been $92 million), and didn’t it seem that Starr was obviously stretching to hit the Clintons with whatever he could dig up, even it was something flimsy about Clinton not honestly answering questions concerning his sex life?  To appreciate whether that was a lot of resources devoted to an investigation, consider that the entire 9/11 investigation, the investigation of the event that launched multiple wars and trillions in spending, was initially budgeted just $3 million. $11 to $15 million was what was finally spent on that investigation; it was obvious it was to keep it on a short leash.
                               
Fast forward to find we have Trump in office.  We have another investigation that involves headlines awesomely plastered everywhere, Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation.  Again we sense that enormous resources are being devoted to the delving.  This time though the investigation actually costs the taxpayers a little less.  Although Trump tweets and Giuliani as his lawyer asserts that the Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation is costing $40 or more, the actual cost of it, coming out gradually, over time is probably in the mid-30s.  But then, of course, the “Russiagate” investigation is followed up with Ukraingate from which its is financially distinct, although they get thematically linked ('election help for Trump from foreign governments that use Cyrillic alphabets').  While we had the spectacle of what was referred to as the Trump-accusing “whistleblower” in Ukraingate (probably not an individual, but a CIA team effort), which must have involved some inevitable investigative followup, there are no figures yet offered for the cost of the impeachment investigation to add to the perhaps $35 million Mueller spent on Russiagate.

Certainly, from all the headlines and the leaks reported by Rachel Maddow, the New York Times, et al, there again had to be a feeling engendered that the investigation of Trump was thorough. Furthermore, the mainstream press assured us ahead of time that Robert Mueller could be relied upon for a credible investigation. As just a sample, the New York Times said Mueller was “a former federal prosecutor with an unblemished reputation” whose appointment would “alleviate uncertainty about the government’s ability to investigate the questions surrounding the Trump campaign and the Russians,” that he was “hailed by Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, who view him as one of the most credible law enforcement officials in the country.”  We were told Mr. Mueller’s “record, character, and trustworthiness have been lauded for decades by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

Accepting any assurance of the expected validity of any of Mueller’s investigations is ill advised . . .  While the Times was writing about about Mueller’s “unblemished reputation” and sterling qualifications to be the Russiagate Special Prosecutor on May 17, 2017, just four years prior, May 9, 2013, you would have been reading in the Times the prediction that Mueller’s legacy would be unforgettably besmirched by Mueller’s botched investigation of tips the FBI was given ahead of time concerning the Boston Marathon Bombing.

If you review the entirety of Mueller’s career, you will find that Mueller’s forte is, in fact, craftily botching investigations to reach incorrect and misleading results.  The investigations he is involved in regularly focus on, pursue, and indict the wrong people for the wrong things.  Researching and writing about his record, I discovered over a dozen extraordinarily high profile cases and investigations (BCCI, Iragate, Iran-Contra, Anthrax, Enron, Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie, Whitey Bulger, Khobar Towers Bombing, Timothy J. McVeigh, 9/11, etc.) running from the 1990s consistently to the present where his results were conspicuously suspect.  At one time or another the inadequacy of various investigations were all covered by the mainstream corporate media, but the media usually has a conveniently short memory when they want to report about Mueller’s record.  The actual facts are that Mueller doesn’t seem to have very much in his record to boast of where the results of his investigations, when examined, did not seem to involve misdirection.

There was, of course, at the end, the publicly conducted jousting of Mueller William Barr that grabbed extra attention.  That jousting made Mueller’s Russiagate investigation efforts to `nail’ Trump seem sincere, but it helps to set aside that distraction if you know that Mueller and Barr are actually good friends who have worked together, often closely, on many of Mueller’s misdirecting investigations in the past.

As for Ken Starr, the Clinton Special Prosecutor, Starr just showed up as part of Trump’s legal impeachment defense team to make news by not-so-adroitly reversing himself on the subject of whether the country should pursue “divisive” impeachments. Should we consider Starr’s investigation of Clinton any more credible in terms of it's being on target in terms of what really needed to be investigated?   Starr is also very good at ignoring things and not investigating what needs to be investigated.  In 2016 Starr was fired from his job as president of Baylor University, accused of ignoring a fairly massive scandal about sexual assaults on his campus.  How ironic, after going after Clinton for sexual conduct issues.  Ironic too that the president Starr would choose to defend is the pussy-grabbing Trump . . .

 . . Starr was also part of the legal defense team for pedophile sex ring operator and apparent blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, which brings up back around to uninvestigated cover-ups.  It also bring us back around to that fourth article in Whitney Webb’s Jeffrey Epstein series that laid out so much damaging information about the Clintons in relation thereto.
   
That then is what I believe deserves noticing: The Trump and the Clinton presidential impeachments and related investigations resemble each other so closely, that it is almost as if the Clinton impeachment and investigation was used as the playbook for what we just witnessed with Trump.  It’s the same subtraction, division, distraction formula with the same results:

    •    Start with important serious complex matters worth investigating, that would need to be investigated in order to hold the powerful to account.
    •    Subtract out for investigation only some things that are trivial and not worthy grounds for impeaching a president.
    •    Have those things that you investigate be sensational and controversial to ensure escalating division of the populace from differing Red Team/Blue Team perspectives.
    •    Have a big showy investigation where it looks like all the stops have being pulled out and the investigators are really anxious to “get” the president any way they can.

And what you get is:

    •    A more divided populace, pushed more into the deepest corners of the Red Team/Blue Team factionalism that helps ensure, fuel, finance and perpetuate the duopoly that traps and controls the electorate.  In this regard it is important to note that factionalism pushing people into rooting emotionally for the Red Team or the Blue Team, respectively, turns off critical thinking and analysis.  Additionally, it causes people not to think in terms of the many common interests they share would otherwise naturally prevail.
    •    A public misguided by its strong impression that everything that needed to be investigated has been delved into deeply and relentlessly, that no stone has been left unturned.  The public thinks that, like in a court of law, there has been a contest that ensures this, not that it amounts to a certain form of collusion.
    •    A government that is even less subject to being held to account than it was before.

The Awokening– A Climate Change Change Short Story

We didn’t notice it at first.  I certainly didn’t notice, not at the beginning.  I mean how could you notice anything if you didn’t know anything was happening, that there was anything to look for, or what to look for?

We were thinking about things like sea level rise, how it was locked in, so it was a question of thinking about how much sea level rise, how fast, where it would be experienced worst– sea level rise is not just the melting icecaps, it's also that warm water expands, it’s “thicker”– The local tides also factor in with tide-funneling coastline shapes causing some areas to be affected worse– And we were thinking about how to adapt.

Figuring out where to move and when, how long it could make sense to wait, were questions on almost everyone’s minds. Areas that we’d thought of as cool and alpine were warming up.  Anywhere could be where there’d be fires next.  Lots of areas were drying out with local vegetation that evolved in wetter climates becoming dry dead fuel.  And then there were more and more areas that looked like they’d be, unpredictably, at times, too wet and too low lying when floods came.  Ironically, it was sometimes impossible to find potable, unpoisoned drinking water in some of those same areas.

Everyone was aware of the hopelessness and the resignation.  I mean, even if we didn’t consciously acknowledge it, it was there as a sense we all had.  If nothing else, you knew it without knowing it.

Those of us who knew enough, who weren’t listening to the national network, cable or legacy internet programs as our news sources, blamed the fossil fuel companies.  We blamed what we understood was their psycho-graphic control.  We remembered, in the early days, how swathes of people didn’t believe that there was climate change, or if they believed it, they didn’t think it was man made, or maybe they did think humans were causing it.  Maybe they thought it would be good, or not so bad.

Maybe some people thought it would be bad, but not for them.  Or they thought they’d get some personal benefit from what was happening, the way they were plugged into the system, so that the good for them would outweigh the bad. . . Some people, a lot, said it was happening, but didn’t think they could do anything about it.  Others suspected they could do something about it, but just couldn’t figure out what that was.

Some of us did something about it by voting for politicians who said they were going to do something about it but then didn’t.  We voted for those kinds of politicians more than once.  And we spent a lot of time figuring out who to believe as we voted.  It seems we could never be right.  It was a no-win proposition every time.  Many of us just didn’t have time for all of it.  Life was increasing taxing with people struggling to make ends meet.  Or we maybe we did have the time, but we somehow never got around to doing anything.  Escapist fantasy was especially popular.  We could watch it on our tablets indoors while our air conditioners ran.  Life spent with super heroes saving worlds around the universe, frequently earth itself, and CGI generated versions of our favorite old movie stars was a tad more soothing . .

. . . There were a thousand things that could be picked from, essentially an infinite menu of reasons not to do anything about climate change that the fossil fuel companies could deliver in tailored packages to suit our individual personalities and disable us.  “Nano-targeting” was one phrase for it.  The social media companies, data-collecting marketers like Amazon, the search engines, our phone and door bell trackers, provided the manipulators with everything necessary to know about any of us.  They picked our leaders for us too.  It meant they also picked and had a hand in which charismatics were sent into bubble oblivion, maybe assigned small personalized ineffectual followings to be dispensed with at the same time.

We knew they were doing it.  You could tell.  I mean, if you cared to pay attention, you knew.  You didn’t need hints from those occasional leaks.  Besides, some of those leaks were themselves meant to make you think certain things and why get entangled?  Yes, sure, go ahead and connect the dots as proof if you were compulsive about proving things.  But, otherwise, just go with the big overall picture.  You could tell.  You could just easily tell.

First, I’ve got to say that it didn’t seem like anything when you stopped running into people who wanted to tell that there was no climate change, that it wasn’t man made, or wouldn’t be so bad, anything from that whole list of crap.  After all, it made sense that people were simply out of rope to believe the impossible; That was clearly explanation enough. . .

That explanation went far enough to cover that much. . .

 . . I remember young, red-headed Edgar excited about his new job.  Truly excited.  Really?  He was working on solar capture fabrics.  An anomaly?  I remember that first and best.  Then Shaheen was excited about her job— It involved road and highways generating energy, multiple ways actually.  Hester was working on storage, with weights elevating on rails that could spin flywheels coming down.  Her eyes had a certain gleam.

It was the sense of optimism that was disorienting. Each time it seemed unexpected, and now the  repetitiveness of such encounters just made it seem much more improbable. – People, I mean a different kind of people, were actually going back into government and interested in doing all sorts of things there, a ton of it having really positive implications rippling out in all directions for the climate.  Also respecting government, you, of course know the names of the new capable and charismatic leaders who arose.  They emerged pretty much right away.

My friend Joshua had no knack at all for engineering, but his enthusiasm for things that others were achieving got him involved in promoting and spreading the word.  Technically, he was “advertising” the new technologies to help make them successful in finding a market, and, indeed, he was now working at a legacy advertising firm that had taken this on as its specialty. PR firms were going the same route. 

You almost didn’t need the advertising or PR firms: People were hungrily seeking out news everywhere, because there was so much that was terrifically good to learn and potentially take advantage of yourself by finding new endeavors to plug into.  Journalists were plying a new skill: solution identification.  They were doing a real good job to investigate, find and bring solutions to the surface.  A lot of surfaced solutions, or near solutions, were combining with others to make even better ones.

Renewables had already essentially been cheaper than fossil fuel.  The flip over to zero fossil fuel use occurred fast.  Elimination of the subsidies for fossil fuels might never even have been required.  But is was more than that: With the flip, came a vast increase, an upward dizzying spiral, in the efficiency of energy production at lower and lower cost with less and less environmental impact. The energy storage problem for renewables was quickly solved in multiple scores of ways.

We soon had so much extra energy, a vast surplus, beyond what was needed for all our economic needs that it was obvious that there was only one thing to do with it.  We started up all sorts engines and devices to extract carbon from the atmosphere and our oceans. At first the methods for extracting carbon from the seawater took the lead.– Either worked: The oceans, in a continual rebalancing, grabbed carbon from the atmosphere so it was the same thing.  Carbon extraction was easier than dealing with the methane.  Nevertheless, the fact was we were on track to get it all satisfactorily done.

There were a lot of jobs, with attendant excitement and enthusiasm, in the carbon extraction business too.  The work that had once been done to determine the cost to the world of dumping carbon into the atmosphere like trash was handy in setting a price for what people could be paid per ton of carbon extraction.  As the cost of the technology came down, profits attracted wider and wider scale participation.  We turned back the clock.  That was what people said: "We turned back the clock."    The climate catastrophe chaos was reversed.  The planet restored itself to what had been climate normalcy for all the tens of thousands of years any form modern human civilization has existed.

I felt dumb at first not to realize it.  Where the change came from was obvious.  Why the change was so sudden and complete was obvious. But, when you are in the middle of a whirlwind, recognition can come with obstinate slowness.  I, like others, had been so habituated to blaming the fossil fuel industry for the way they commandeered psycho-graphics to immobilize the population and continue their plunder unimpeded, I wasn’t immediately ready to change the lens through which I viewed the world.

It was obvious, truly obvious.  What was obvious was that some other group had taken power behind the scenes.  All those psycho-graphic tools still existed, but now they had been wrested from the fossil fuel industry.  The psycho-graphic tools, the ability to manipulate human beings in a fine tuned personalized way across a huge spectrum of personalities, was being turned around and used for purposes exactly opposite to how the fossil fuel industry had used them.  Through psycho-graphic tools every individual’s strengths in terms of personality and skill, where they might fit in in terms of solving the climate change emergency, was systematically identified and assessed so that they could be tipped into taking the most appropriate personal actions they could take.

It worked.  It worked.

My problem with all this, is that it wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.  I revile psycho-graphics.  I had this problem with it when it was being used by the fossil fuel industry to keep us consuming fossil fuels.  I had the same problem when it was being used to keep us perpetually at war with huge amount of runaway military spending.  I still have a problem with psycho-graphics.  I ask you, where is the democracy in a group of powerful people, a coordinating elite, deciding the direction that everyone should take?

Where is the democracy?  I thought it was all supposed to happen starting bottom up, grass roots, the wisdom of crowds when people listen to each other.  Where is the democracy?  Is this the way it was supposed to happen?

* * * *

From the Kickstarter page for "The Truth Has Changed" tour.

 Author's Note: The idea for this short story came to me after I saw a Brooklyn performance of Josh Fox’s “The Truth Has Changed.”  It was in Brooklyn, in Mr. Fox's theater company's rehearsal space, because, with some strange controversy involved, his show was kicked out of The Public Theater in Manhattan.  I give credence to Fox’s statements that the eviction probably came about because of the show’s content.

Fox’s one man show (think echos of a Spalding Gray performance) is, in part, about the climate crisis emergency.  He’s written an accompanying book, which has a foreword by climate activist Bill McKibben.  Fox’s show is also largely about information control, the kind that is directed at manipulating the public.  Information control and manipulation of public opinion is charging ahead with the development of new techniques so fast that it is hard to separate a short futuristic science fiction story like this from yesterday’s news.  That aspect of Fox’s show gives it a fair amount of overlap with the issues of censorship, information control and dumbing down the public that have been concerns for Citizens Defending Libraries, of which I am a co-founder.

I will note that Fox’s show is a strenuous tour de force and challenging in the bleakness of some of its urgency.  Project Censored has begun grappling with the notion that negative news reporting that eschews the provision of “solutions” is a form of news abuse.  It results in “negative news overload” that enervates the public, a form of control in itself.  Fox is interested in solutions too.  The program notes for “The Truth has Changed” explains that one of his other endeavors is “The Solutions Project,” co-founded with Mark Ruffalo, Mark Jacobson and Marco Krapels.  Similarly, with respect to the climate crisis, Project Censored notes that there is “The Drawdown Project.”  Personally I believe many solutions would presently be unfolding at a quickening pace if we had a fossil fuels tax and were looking to start paying people to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans and I think the two should be related.

Fox’s show does not leave the subject of potential solutions entirely unaddressed, but it is mostly more about the urgency with which we need to find them.  His show does not identify or present the questionable solution posed by the short story above. I hope it leaves your thoughts provoked.

The show was shut down at The Public.  Content too challenging?

How To Listen To “Democracy Now”- A Mind Boggling List of Possibilities For A Program That Was Incubated By Terrestrial Radio In NYC: Plus, Part II, A Few Cautions About Internet “Generosity”

How to listen to Democracy Now? The options that are multiplying make it complicated, but we are about to tell you.

Democracy Now is a very good place to get a lot of news.  You’ll get a get dense, comprehensive, very intelligently compiled overview of most world and national events every week day.  It's an hour broadcast every day.  The fast paced headline coverage that starts the program generally runs from about 12 to 19 minutes, depending on what's happened.  (Appropriately, there's usually more to catch up with on the Monday mornings that follow the weekend .)

Democracy Now covers news and issues that corporate media typically shuns such as the climate chaos catastrophe (including how mankind and the fossil fuel industry are causing it), corporate malfeasance in general (its coverage of the Boing 737 max crashes was better than anywhere else), misadventures of the U.S. military, and U.S. meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Democracy Now will not shy away from telling you about the plight of disadvantaged members of our society whose rights are being ignored and abused.  It will tell you what the powerful are tying to get away with.  Their coverage of issues such as the recent Supreme Court nominees under consideration (Kavanaugh and Gorsuch) sets standards that, by contrast, made clear how embarrassingly inadequate coverage by NPR and the New York Times is. It almost seemed that the NPR and the Times, with a modicum of objection, were smoothing the way for eventual acceptance of bad outcomes.

I generally recommend Democracy Now as a good starting place where you can get about 85% of the important national news, versus the maybe the 20% and inevitably misleading stuff you may get if, for instance, you watch NBC's nightly half hour of advertising-interspersed national news.  Democracy Now's hour is free of commercial interruptions.  It runs on listener support.

I say you can get about "85%" of the news from Democracy Now, because, valiant and comprehensive as it is, there is some news that Democracy Now seems to treat as off limits.  (For instance, there was one significant story involving the Kennedy, King and Macolm X families joining with a number of respected notables that was- perhaps oddly?- covered in January, very thoroughly and respectfully by the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post, but Democracy Now never mentioned or reported it at all.  Of course Democracy Now wasn't alone, NPR didn't report on it and it went unreported just about everywhere else as well. . .  And Washington Post Coverage didn't provoke the New York Times or anyone else to follow in its footsteps.  .  .

 . . . To be fair, perhaps once upon a time (and just once), Democracy Now, way back in 1997, did previously report one aspect of that particular story-- There's a link extant for some June 18, 1997 coverage!-- Ah!  The internet giveth!  Isn't the internet amazing with respect to what it can do?-  It can take you all the way back to 1997!   However, if you click on the Democracy Now video link to hear and see the video link reporting of that story, the link is broken.  Yikes! The Democracy Now reporting is not there to be found (frown).  The internet taketh away!

How do you get news from Democracy Now?  There are lots of ways and this article will fill you in.  Following that instruction we have a few cautions to offer about the future.  Those cautions concern the internet.

Democracy Now began with WBAI radio.  WBAI is the New York City Pacifica Network radio station that once was a home to Amy Goodman, Democracy Now's principal host, and it is the home out of which Democracy Now was incubated and able to emerge.  WBAI is still a way to listen to Democracy Now.  Here, starting with WBAI, are the ways you can plan to be informed by getting the comprehensive news Democracy Now furnishes.

Tune in and listen on WBAI FM radio, where it all began, where the show was incubated.

1.    Listen to a terrestrial broadcast of WBAI radio in New York weekdays at 8:00 AM as Democracy Now is first being broadcast.  WBAI radio has a strong signal so you can listen up in Westchester and New Jersey, all the environs immediately surrounding the greater NYC metropolitan area.

2.    Listen to WBAI’s live internet stream station broadcast.  Like most radio stations these days, WBAI also streams its broadcasts on the internet.  The internet giveth!

The internet live stream straight from Democracy Now's website is an interesting alternative, and there is video to provide a visual, but you may find the live stream cuts out (the faltering is very trying during election night coverage).

3.    Listen, or even watch, directly at 8:00 AM ET on the internet by going to the Democracy Now website, where you can get both an audio and a video stream of the show.  Plus you can get special Democracy Now broadcasts like election night coverage.  It’s almost like TV, you know the kind when you cut the cable?  The internet giveth!  The vexing problem with the live video stream however is that the video often cuts out.  In our household, the cutting out of the video stream was especially pronounced one night when we were trying to watch the 2016 election night coverage.  Otherwise, Democracy Now would have been almost as convenient as watching any of the major corporate network coverage that night.  I am told that, since, in Brooklyn Heights, we sit atop a Spectrum (formerly TimeWarner) trunk line, internet bandwidth should not have been a problem and should not have been causing the halting of the stream.   The internet taketh away!

There are others now following in the footsteps of Democracy Now to launch, using the internet, what are essentially their own television broadcasts.  Mid-July (July 12, 2019) the alternative website Consortium News launched CN Live to start such video broadcasting.   It's an appealing idea, being able broadcast video over the internet that could be as satisfying in quality to the viewer as anything the major networks put out over cable or the airwaves.  The internet giveth!  Just as it launched its CN Live broadcasts, Consortium News tweeted (July 15, 2019) "Our website is completely down. Our media host said we have been attacked by malware. . .  Every article published since 2011 now gets a 404 Not Found. They are working on it. Problem started slowly on Friday first day of CN Live!"  . . . Oh my!: The internet taketh away!

Pacifica Radio app

4.    Listen to WBAI at 8:00 AM using the Pacifica Radio app that plays an internet live stream of all five Pacifica Network Stations (WBAI from NYC, KPFA from Berkley, California, KPFK from Los Angeles, KPFT from Houston, WPFW from Washington D.C.) plus one Pacifica affiliate station, WQRT from Madison, Wisconsin.  Since KPFT, the Houston station, broadcasts a second signal using its HD capacity (high definition radio), the Pacifica app actually affords a choice of seven streams to listen to Pacifica Network content.  The app can play on your phone or can play of your iPad tablet. The internet giveth!

Democracy Now phone app- It used to work on an iPad too, but doesn't now.

5.    Listen to or watch a Democracy Now live internet stream on your phone via the Democracy Now phone app.  Listening live, the same cautions apply about how the show may cut out as you listen because there isn’t enough bandwidth.  The Democracy Now app also once worked on the similar Apple iPad Operating systems– That was until Apple introduced a new operating system.  Now the app still works on iPhones, but not on the iPads any longer.  The internet taketh away!

6.    Now it’s 9:00 AM ET and Democracy Now has finished its one hour weekday morning broadcasts.  What if you missed it?  You can listen via the Pacifica App and hear it broadcast again on KPFA from Berkley. (It’s 6:00 AM California time!)  The Democracy Now show always begins with host and anchor Amy Goodman reading the headlines, which, will, as noted, in ten minutes or perhaps just under twenty, cover about three times as much news as the corporate networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.) cover in their half hour evening news broadcasts.  It means Amy is speaking very fast.  If you are not fully awake, there is no quick rewind.  It's best to be fully awake when you listen.  Maybe that's what some Californians thought--  Pacifica’s KPFK from Los Angeles just moved Democracy Now from a 6:00 AM California time slot to an 8:00 AM California time slot which means you can hear it again in New York at 11:00 AM ET.  All the Pacifica stations carry Democracy Now and the twin Houston stations carry it differing times.  So there are lots of options using the Pacifica app.   The internet giveth!

For a while, after the 9:00 AM hour, the only way to listen is WBAI's archive

7.    But what if its after 9:00 AM ET and, hungry to catch up on the news (particularly the headlines?), you’ve missed the beginning of Democracy Now?  Anytime after 9:00 AM you can go to the WBAI archive and listen to the previous broadcasts of Democracy Now.  In fact, for a while, after 9:00 AM that’s the only way you can listen to it.  The internet giveth!

8.    Still later in the day (it could be as late or later than 11:00 AM ET), Democracy Now will make its program available on demand on the internet.  At that time, it will be available for listening or watching from Democracy Now from its website or, alternatively through its Democracy Now app.  Plus, the broadcast Democracy Now show is an hour; but, on the internet, Democracy Now posts extra “web exclusives,” extensions of on-air interviews if you are interested in hearing more and going into greater depth on the subjects covered.  The internet giveth!

Two day's Democracy Now Show segments

9.    Still later in the day, Democracy Now will start dividing its broadcast up into different segments, so you can pick and choose portions of the show to listen to specifically.  And you will be able to share links to specific content that way too.  The internet giveth!

When the text transcript of show content like this goes up like this, it is more likely that Google will, for example, help you find out that an unusually long lasting sustained drought in Honduras is one of the things driving refugees away from their homes (that is if Google's algorithms are in the mood to let you know).

10.     Eventually, later in the day, there is another way to take in Democracy Now.  That’s when the text of the segments for the day get written up and posted.  That also makes the content searchable on Google.  The internet giveth!  But has Google been adjusting its algorithms to make Democracy Now content harder to find, the way that Google has been spiking the algorithms of many alternative news sites?  You will probably find that Democracy Now content does not Google as high as it should . . . The internet taketh away!  But if Democracy Now behaves . .?

Amazon’s Alexa

11.    At some point during the day it has become possible to ask Amazon’s Alexa to play that day’s Democracy Now program.  Command "Alexa: Play Democracy Now," and the show starts!  For now, without looking into it, we’ll assume things work much the same way with Siri alternatives that listen to your home commands: Google Assistant, Cortana, Mycroft, whatever.  The internet giveth!  (if you want these kinds of things in your home.)  Asking a willing Alexa to play Democracy Now was, we observed, possible for a number or weeks. . .  For a number of weeks, that is just up until recently: Now, if you ask Alexa to play Democracy Now it has found a substitute program to play.  Alexa now refuses to play Democracy Now.  The internet taketh away!

Democracy Now on cable TV via the CUNY station in New York

12.    Want to watch Democracy Now as good old fashioned cable television?  In New York City, wait until 6:00 PM and you will find it broadcast on the local city university CUNY station.  However, if you want to capture it reliably for time shifting on your Tivo, you will have to deal with the fact that CUNY TV and Tivo haven’t been coordinating on exchanging programming information the usual way so you will have to set up a specified word “wish list” program to capture the show rather than a Tivo "season pass." These electronics are all so reliably smart and dependable, until they are not.

13.    Don’t like old fashioned cable television?  Do you think that YouTube is the answer?  Democracy Now also goes up on YouTube, which allows you to subscribe to it there.  The internet giveth!  One thing we must note, however, about content that is put up and made available on YouTube: Sometimes it gets taken down by YouTube for reasons that seem totally inexplicable, or, if those reasons are explicable, then for reasons that are downright scary.  (Ditto Facebook.) 
The internet taketh away!
  

14.    You can also listen or watch Democracy Now in Spanish because it gets translated.

The iTunes audio Podcast

15.    Prefer everything via podcasts?  You can get podcasts of the audio through iTunes
Google Play, and Spotify.  And iTunes also has podcasts of the video too.

PART II: A Few Cautions About The Internet

With such a mind boggling multiplicity of options, it certainly seems like there is cornucopic wealth to the variety of ways in which you can access the news that Democracy Now will provide. The internet giveth!  However, the illusion fades when you realize that almost all of these options that seem to afford such liberating choice come through just one spigot: the internet.  There are hands ready to turn the handle on that spigot.  They could turn it off entirely, or just adjust the flow.

The Federal Communications Commission under Trump appointed chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and telecommunications industry corporate lobbyist, is determinedly doing away with net neutrality.  Net neutrality is the principle that lets Democracy Now and others compete with the conglomerate telecommunication giants that consistently stream government friendly news-- even when those telecommunication giants don't want that competition.

The elimination of net neutrality isn't the result of democracy.  Quite the opposite- "poll after poll after poll shows that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or any other party: Overwhelming majorities of people in the United States support net neutrality rules."  So it is not as if democracy can be counted on to protect us from this change.  Instead, with 83%, perhaps more of the public, wanting net neutrality, the FCC's elimination of it is just one of the most extreme examples of how on issue and after issue democracy is being overridden to give corporate and moneyed interests and other powers in charge the things they want instead of the things that the vast majority of the public, supermajorities, want and should by all reason be allowed to have.  The internet taketh away!

There are all sorts of ways that the internet can take things away: Things can disappear, they can just get lost or buried, they can become unfindable, the enabling technology by which they are accessed might not keep up to date or it may fail, tech product interfaces foe accessing content can be withdrawn, you can be steered or warned away from things, or things can be censored.  From early on, the model of the internet has been to lure people in by offering up things seemingly for free.  The internet giveth! But that doesn't mean those things will stick around or are that they are actually free. 
The internet taketh away!

I was one of the many who was heavily solicited by Google to become a trend-setting first adopter of Google+ when Google launched Google+ as an alternative, perhaps preferable in certain ways, to Facebook.   Google shut down Google+ this past April deleting all its users' accounts and posts.  Google+ was a favorite means of sharing information and content of Yoko Ono.  I could show you what I mean by linking to her posts, but they have all been deleted.  In a sense, these deletions were also a re-erasure of John Lennon's presence in our lives, assassinated in 1980-- many of Yoko's posts were about John.  The internet taketh away!  Google announced its plans to end the Google+ (originally launched in June of 2011) in October.

Google's October announcement of the Google+ withdrawal was contemporaneous with Facebook's October shutdown of more than 800 mostly anti-war, anti-authoritarian pages, including things like popular Black Lives Matters and police watchdog sites.  The October Facebook shutdowns occurred during the run up to the mid-term elections and involved coordinated action with other social media giants like Twitter.

Scary?  Wondering why this is something that people know so little about?  Here is something scarier.  When this was breaking as news, in a brilliant bit of nonreporting and disinformation the New York Times ran a contemporaneous story about the Facebook deletions that made you complacently think you knew what was going on.  The Time story communicated `not to worry . . . everything is under control.'   The report of the Facebook take downs was hidden, Purloined Letter fashion, on the paper's front page.  The Times article made it seem like mainly that Facebook was taking down pernicious, maliciously motivated  right wing disinformation sites.   The article's headline?: Made in U.S.: Untruths Infest Social Websites- The Right and the Left Try Russia’s Methods, By Sheera Frenkel, October 11, 2018.

The Times October 12, 2018 front page from the internet (The internet giveth!): Prominently displayed, but escaping notice, an article about how Facebook took down more than 800 web page sites, mostly anti-authoritarian and anti-war.

The main example the Times article led with and gave considerable focus to was what it described as a sketchy conservative right wing blogger publishing “several false stories” about Christine Blasey Ford as she was accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.  Eliminating such “false stories” doesn’t seem like it would be upsetting to Times readers.  The sketchy blogger's "Right Wing News" site gets a total of 19 mentions of it by its full name in the Times article.
        
Or maybe the front page Times article successfully escaped much notice because readers were turned off and very bored, and didn't read the damned thing because it sounded so much like just another of the endless run of Times' articles harping on "Russiagate."  . . . The article simply characterized the rest of Facebook take downs being about another manifestation of the conspiracy theory that "state-backed Russian operatives" swung the 2016 election to Trump, albeit that in this case the Times pontificated that we were dealing with the "spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans . .   emulating the Russian strategy of 2016."  "Americans, for Americans"?  The article said that "such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right."

If you are trying to go back in time find the Times article about the Facebook take downs without knowing exactly what you are looking for, it is very hard to find because the online headline for the article makes the article sound even more like it is just another Russiagate story: Facebook Tackles Rising Threat: Americans Aping Russian Schemes to Deceive.  (The Times frequently uses different headlines for its web edition than it uses for its print edition- It's one of the vagaries of what we think the internet documents and preserves for posterity.)
        
The Times article quotes two seemingly impartial third parties for perspective.  One of them is presented as "Ryan Fox, a co-founder of New Knowledge, a firm that tracks disinformation" who assures that the Facebook take downs don't present a worrisome free speech issue with these words: “These networks are trying to manipulate people by manufacturing consensus — that’s crossing the line over free speech.”  You might catch in that statement something altogether too coy: "manufacturing consensus."  It's a virtually and obviously synonymous with "Manufacturing Consent" or "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media."   That is the seminal and now key reference book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988 that explains the propaganda model by which the government and those in power in our society manipulate and control public opinion in a "democracy."

The Times does not explain that Ryan Fox was at "New Knowledge" (does "New Knowledge" sound Orwellian?) having just come from the National Security Agency where he was  an “Intel Analyst,” nor does the Times indicate how that probably also tells you a lot about "New Knowledge."  On his LinkedIn profile Ryan says the New Knowledge mission is "to secure the integrity of public discourse."  For good measure, please know that Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council to determine which web pages it will censor.  The internet taketh away!  That is not mentioned by the Times article.

Ryan Fox's LinkedIn info and more information (The internet giveth!): "Ryan spent 15 years at the NSA championing next-generation SIGINT solutions, driven to support national security interests. Prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under U.S. Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC), as a CNO Analyst for the U.S. Army."

To be clear, the Atlantic Council has been described by Peter Phillips as the unofficial policy-making and consensus-building arm for the transnational corporate elite as they seek to protect their interconnected capital investments throughout the world.  Phillips is the author of the new reference book "Giants - The Global Power Elite," that, identifies, boiling down to a very few people, about 300, controlling most of the world's wealth.  He furnishes the bios of 199 directors of seventeen global financial Giants controlling $50 trillion of the world's wealth- $41 trillion in 2017.  He furnishes estimates that overall world wealth is about $255 trillion two-thirds of which is U.S. and European.

As noted, while the prevailing model of the internet is to lure you in for free, much of it is here today, and (The internet taketh away!) gone tomorrow.   My central storage hard drive device came with the option of using a free program that allowed me (my family too) to stream and listen anywhere to any of the music I had stored on my computer, a large music collection.  Did that console me for the fact that my once upon a time "lifetime" purchase of the Music Match music player meant the "lifetime" was only that of the corporation owning Music Match, not my own?   Eventually, my ability to stream and listen to my music collection anywhere via the program from my hard drive device maker simply ended as well without warning or fanfare.  Now, I think we are all supposed to be uploading our music collections to the Amazon cloud, or using streaming services like Spotify where the security of my being able to access that music in the future is dependent upon my ability to pay future rent.

Much of the fitful starting and stopping with which the lure of free internet convenience has proved undependable has to with the acquisition and consolidation of the internet companies into increasingly few giant tech monopolies.  Music Match was subsumed into Yahoo.  Yahoo faded, pushed aside by the dominance of other fast growing companies.  Eventually, Yahoo's remnants were picked up by Verizon to be administered alongside Verizon's previously acquired AOL so that the AOL and Yahoo email services became clones, both subject to new simultaneously implemented restrictions on promulgation of information through email distribution lists.

While the lure of the internet may often be things that seem to be free, the provision of those things is far from free at all: The other recognized key to the standard model of internet provided services is the prevalence of data scraping.  Would I have a right to expect that, with the internet music services I just mentioned, those services will not be tracking and collecting data about my music preferences, listening and buying habits?  When was the last time you read or bothered to understand the "terms of service" agreement according to which you got a computer or internet program?

Of course we all know how some of that generally expected data scraping results in our being micro-targeted with advertisements tailored very specifically to us after we looked into the availability of a product.  Or did I express interest in that product writing in an email or mention it on a Facebook post?  Even if I disregard or chose to like this volunteered assistance from the internet, including the way it reduces my need to think, in other contexts it can be creepier.  What if what this kind of surveillance notes that I seem to be paying a lot of attention to stories on Democracy Now about mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers at the boarder?  About ICE misconduct?  And what if the follow up to that is that someone micro-targets me with links to stories that convey a mistaken impression that immigration at the border involves a flood of immigrants at unprecedented levels and an insoluble crisis?  Or what if the follow up is simply to ramp up the distractions being offered with more Russiagate conspiracy theories?

You may put yourself at ease by saying to yourself that no one is likely to want to pay attention to your little needle in the big haystack out there, and you may virtuously feel that to the extent you get fed distracting or misleading stories you have the strength of mind and mental acuity to think for yourself no matter what.  If so, you'd be right be right in one respect: Most of the surveillance methods sweeping up data tend not to focus on the individual; they focus broadly on interconnections and relationships throughout cyberspace.

If your emerging individual political predilections were lonely and aberrant they'd hardly be a concern for those seeking to maintain power and control.  What is more to be worried about is something the internet and the data collection surveillance systems are designed to do very well: Keep track of where groups of people and their ideas are swarming.  So when you and your neighbors in your extended political community all start paying attention to, for example, certain Democracy Now stories and reports, you may find that you and your neighbors all get headed off and deflected in similar ways.  Algorithms may do a lot of the work and those algorithms again may smartly incorporate informed instincts of what is the best and most tailored way of deflecting you and like-minded neighbors to other modes of thought.

Would any of the big internet monopolies take actions that steer public discourse (the way that their sister corporate media giants do)?  Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been doing very well recently despite the way that the corporate media has been working to shut out her anti-war themed campaign.  Right now Gabbard is suing Google for halting and refusing to accept her campaign advertisements.  Is she likely to win?

Nor is it necessarily good when we teeter on the brink as politicians finding fault with the biases of Facebook, et al. threaten to regulate the internet giants as common carriers (the giants assuredly control what has become the public square) without actually doing so. . .  Because then those ongoing unconsummated threats become a vehicle for coercing political favors and bias that could not be demanded of entities that were actually, in fact, regulated by the government.

The internet, created by the U.S. government, was privatized in the mid 1980's without fanfare and with virtually no discussion about that privatization as Yasha Levine notes in his book “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.”  Also as Levine notes, the original purpose of the internet when the government created it had a lot to do with surveillance and information control.  Lawrence Preston Gise, the mentor and maternal grandfather of Amazon's Jeff Bezos was involved was involved with DARPA (originally ARPA- which he helped set up and he worked)  in setting up the internet.
 
The privatizing of the internet is an interesting thing.  Legal distinctions of what is permissible mean that those who control the internet privately have not been subject to the same restrictions on surveillance to which the government itself was theoretically subject. But the convenience of that distinction does not prevent data collected by private firms from being sold to politically active individuals (where is the dividing line really?), nor, probably, at least as a practical matter, to private firms hired to work for the government.

As noted, almost every way to get the news from Democracy Now involves information that flows through the interruptible spigot of the internet.  The two exceptions are the evening CUNY cable television broadcast and listening to Democracy Now via terrestrial radio such as the broadcasting of the WBAI NYC radio station that helped incubate and give birth to the Democracy Now program.

It is nice to think about cable as affording one of the backstopping alternatives to the internet, but the cable services owned by private communication conglomerates like TimeWarner (Spectrum) and Verizon can’t be relied upon for secure access to information either.  Just as internet access to content and ideas can be choked off, so can access through cable.  The Supreme Court, in the very recently decided DeeDee Halleck (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) case written by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, ruled that cable TV companies, even in the case of channels regulated for the purpose of providing “public access,” are not subject to  First Amendment free speech constraints and requirements and that the cable companies as private entities can censor and deny transmission to whomever they want.  So for instance, as with Halleck, they can cut you off if you raise questions about broadcasting access or the economics affecting the content provided by the public access channels.

If internet access to information and content is choked off more in the United States than it is now (and other countries like China provide examples of just how choked off it can be), would we be able to rely on Newspapers for more robust information flow as once was the case?  Newspapers once wielded the power of printing press production linked with their own channels of very effective distribution.  It was a huge, very powerful physical infrastructure for information delivery that, now supplanted by the internet, is getting dismantled.

The internet has given us ready access to information like we once got from newspapers, including information from the remaining newspapers that still survive (The internet giveth!), but, disruptively, the internet has largely demonetized the newspaper business. That demonetization includes the advent of services like Craigslist, which has diverted all of the classified advertising revenue that previously supported those papers.  The internet taketh away!

The demonetized newspapers can now be bought up for a pittance by wealthy individuals (like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post) interested in their propaganda value.  That's what will generally happen with the legacy papers whose great names still afford branding value for propaganda.  The lesser papers are simply going out of existence-- or maybe they become meaningless by just simply republishing corporate press releases.  The internet has worked brilliantly as a disruptive force to slice and dice things in a way that the production of content, going every which way, has become untethered from monetary streams.

Unless you have independent resources, monetization and access to monetization is obviously important.  Because there are also controls and levers with respect to monetization on the internet it is another way that content on the internet can be regulated and controlled.  YouTube, owned by Google under its Alphabet umbrella, demonetized The Jimmy Dore Show videos when The Jimmy Dore Show was putting out facts about how reports of chemical attacks attributed to Assad's government in Syria were probably false and designed to draw the Unites States into further conflict there. In retrospect, as opposed to the uniform and unquestioning incendiary reports of the corporate media, it appears clear that Dore, while suffering this kind of censorship, was correct. . . 

. . . This is why the model of donor-supported news production is becoming increasingly critical.  Among other things, speaking in old fashioned terms, it eliminates one of the "filters" that Herman and Chomsky identified in  "Manufacturing Consent" as a hurdle blocking the content reaching the public: Advertising and sponsorship.  The Jimmy Dore Show now supports itself through donor support from the show's fans coming in via Patreon.  Like Democracy Now, the radio show version of the Jimmy Dore Show plays on the Pacifica Network radio stations, including WBAI in New York.

With cable being unreliable, if the internet damps down to throttle a news broadcasting show like Democracy Now, the terra firma that remains to which Democracy Now could return will consist only of publicly owned independent terrestrial radio stations like Pacific Network stations, a fittingly poetic homecoming to its origins.

How firm is that terra firma?  Would Democracy Now continue in such a future and is it assured that WBAI would still be broadcasting in New York, able to provide Democracy Now with a future within its embrace?   As is obvious from the production values when you watch Democracy Now, it is a show with ample resources and very well funded.  In fact, its budget may now dwarf the entire budget of WBAI radio.

It should also be noted that a good number of all of the internet options for watching Democracy Now that were described at the beginning of this article involve mechanisms (accompanied by appeals) by which those watching and listening to Democracy Now can support the program by donating directly to it.  The internet giveth!  At the same time, all of the separate multiple ways the internet furnishes for donating directly to Democracy Now represents ways in which supporting Democracy Now and other shows on Pacfica radio stations like WBAI that also have alternate incarnations on the internet (The Jimmy Dore Show is another example) have become untethered from supporting the terra firma of terrestrial radio.  The internet taketh away!

Stations like WBAI and the other Pacifica network stations rely on listener donations just does.  Thus, in a sense, the stations are almost being asked to compete with shows like Democracy Now for donations.  Much like the untetherings that the internet caused to occur in the newspaper industry, that untethering of the stations from shows that are spread through the internet is weakening the guarantee of terrestrial radio as an alternative and backstop that may be turned to if the increasingly few hands controlling the internet spigot impede further information that threatens existing power structures.

If the information traveling through the internet that is critical of power is further damped down in the future, maybe Democracy Now will still be around because it will continue to broadcasts via terrestrial radio.  Or maybe Democracy Now will adapt and mange to stay around because it will simply broadcast less of the news than it currently does.  Nevertheless, Democracy Now, broadcasting over the internet, might even position itself as being still nominally critical of the government.

Does Democracy Now already pull any of its punches with respect to what it reports? 

Democracy Now covered the issue of Facebook censorship, albeit, somewhat gingerly, in September 2018, when the website ThinkProgress (which is somewhat middle-of-the-road politically despite its name) was peculiarly censored by Facebook for reporting about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's position with respect to overturning Roe v. Wade (yes evidence is Kavanaugh has such instincts).  That September 17, 2018 Democracy Now reporting was just weeks before Facebook’s massive censorship take down of more than 800 pages, but Democracy Now never followed up that ThinkProgess story to report on Facebook’s subsequent big take down.

Facebook censors a story about Brett Kanaugh's Roe v. Wade position-  Are there any other stories that relate to this?:  Only a 2012 story about the effect of media consolidation on journalism?

If you go to the Democracy Now page reporting the censorship of ThinkProgress's reporting of Kavanaugh's Roe v. Wade position, Democracy Now offers up as “related” a soon-to-be-vintage January 12, 2012 story: Ex-FCC Commissioner Michael Copps on Media Consolidation, Broadband Expansion, Threats to Journalism. . . . . Not linked to on their site was a more confusing pre-Facebook-take-down August 1, 2018 Democracy Now story that was even somewhat sympathetic to Facebook. It was about how Facebook was then taking down just a few sites that Facebook said had “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to “undermine democracy.” 

If you'd absorbed that August 1st Democracy Now story beforehand, it probably would not have prepped you to be alarmed when reading the New York Times front page story published in October.

. . .  As we noted, Democracy Now is a good place to get about 85% of your news, not a full 100%. 

PS (8/11/2019): After this article was written and posted, there was this breaking (August 9, 2019) news- “leaked documents show the White House is planning an executive order that would put Ajit Pai in charge of policing free speech online and allow government censorship of the Internet.”