Tag: media

Taleb Admits the Obvious

One of the things I admire about NN Taleb is his ability, unlike most intellectuals, to openly and unashamedly admit that he was wrong about something. That’s one of the reasons I take him seriously even on those rare occasions when I think he has gotten it wrong.

I concede that @DavidSacks is correct about the relative strength of the parties in the Ukraine war, and I was WRONG. Russia is not as weak as it seemed; it has staying power. This means a settlement is the likely outcome.

And by “likely outcome” he means “the rational outcome”. But since NATO is, by most perspectives, an intrinsically irrational party, I wouldn’t place too much confidence in that. After all, what is the point in Russia signing a third Minsk agreement with parties who have repeatedly proven to be agreement-incapable?

Still, it’s good to see the more intelligent elements of the mainstream perspective beginning to understand that Russia was always going to win its war against NATO in Ukraine.

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The Pulse of Fandom

Now that Bounding Into Comics has collapsed into convergence, a new champion arises from the ashes: FANDOM PULSE! The editor-in-chief, Jon del Arroz, puts out a call for writers and other volunteers.

Fandom Pulse is looking for writers! We’re building a pop culture site that’s explicitly right wing to fight the culture war against the fake news of CBR, Bleeding Cool, IGN, and others. The key is going to be content, and we need writers to help us get to the point where we have enough to compete. If you can write clear, consistent work on pop culture at about 500 words an article, please let me know. We’d love to have you. Send an email to fandompulse@gmail.com

It’s certainly off to an interesting start.

Snyder told Entertainment Weekly that he got the idea for Rebel Moon as a student in the late ‘80s. Creating a one-line pitch, he settled on “a ragtag team of warriors from different backgrounds assembled to fight for a common cause — but piloting spaceships and wielding laser guns instead of World War II bombers.”

His wife Deborah Snyder further reinforces the notion that Rebel Moon is totally original when she told EW that “Mostly everything right now is based on a book or based on a game. It’s a remake, or it’s a sequel,” and added, “There are very few times you get the opportunity to do something that’s wholly original.”

Now, the overall story of Snyder’s film has little to do with the book Rebel Moon, which is essentially a 90’s military SF take on Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I haven’t given the movie a moment’s thought; I just assumed Snyder thought, correctly, that it was a cool SF title. However, based on the description, it’s pretty clear that both the title and the core conflict of the movie were, at the very least, somewhat influenced by the novel written by The Original Cyberpunk and me. Which is fine, of course. It would be bizarre and hypocritical to insist it is not fitting that a work so clearly derivative of an earlier work should subsequently serve as the source of another derivative itself.

The lady would appear to be protesting both unnecessarily and just a little too much. After all, if it’s a farming colony planet that is rebelling, why is the film named Rebel Moon?

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The Peterson Folly

The fact that a public figure says one or two things with which you happen to agree does not a) make him a good guy or b) mean that he is not a ticket-taker in service to Clown World.

Presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted Tuesday he flew on late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet twice, not just once as he previously claimed — and that his then-wife had a “relationship” with madam Ghislaine Maxwell. The independent candidate opened up about his ties to the notorious perv after being asked by Fox News’ Jesse Watters during a discussion of his ethics.

If they’re in the public eye and given any positive coverage by the media or the social media giants, they’re clowns. There are very, very few, if any, exceptions to this.

Stop looking to the other side to provide you with leadership. Just stop! That’s beyond retarded.

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The Death Spiral of Journalism

Peter King, an excellent and very liberal sportswriter, pointedly refuses an invitation to defend his former publication, Sports Illustrated:

On Sports Illustrated and AI. From Nick Colletti, of Grapevine, Texas: “Given your expressed disgust with the recent Charissa Thompson episode, I’d like to get your thoughts on your former employer, Sports Illustrated, being accused of publishing AI-generated stories by non-existent writers. If true, this confirms the death spiral of journalism.”

It’s a sham. It’s a shame. It’s also not surprising that a company that bought a grand brand in the sports media space (but heading downhill fast) would do what so many companies that are money-first, -second and -third would do—try to make money off the great name of Sports Illustrated instead of trying to revive it and make it great again. In the business of journalism, we face a major challenge from companies that cut costs further than down to the bone—but actually into the bone marrow. That resulted in a story by the site Futurism that reported that SI.com posted stories or reviews that were generated by Artificial Intelligence writers, with bylines of invented writers. When Futurism contacted the company for comment on using fake people to write fake stories passed off as content from venerable Sports Illustrated, the stories and the bios of the “writers” disappeared from the site. What the owners of the company are doing now is using the Sports Illustrated name to make money on other things that have nothing to do with journalism.

It’s fascinating to see how even those who are completely blind to the intrinsic degradation of Clown World are capable of seeing the fundamental evil of the corpocracy when it touches their own area of expertise. But there is no reason to mourn the loss of something that was always dyscivilizational, to the contrary, it’s a reminder of how it is wise and proper to focus on building our own platforms and institutions instead of attempting to take the easy path to what supposedly passes for success.

Michael Crichton was right, he was just three decades too early.

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

It’s pretty obvious that he will have been proven right by 2033… and there’s that number again.

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People are Still Dying and They are Still Lying

You may recall that I wrote, before the vaccines even began to be administered en masse, that the one thing its advocates would not be able to deny would be the body count. But that does not mean they are not going to try.

Heart attacks among young people in England are on the rise, MailOnline analysis shows. Cases in some younger age groups have almost doubled over the last decade, with rates in under-40s as whole rising by a quarter.

Our revelation comes after the death of 29-year-old mother Lauren Page Smith, who was discovered lying on her bathroom floor with her two-year-old daughter clinging to her chest just hours after paramedics had given her the all-clear.

Experts say the rise, which has become increasingly obvious in the wake of Covid, is down to a multitude of factors, including rising obesity rates in the young. Over half of under 35s are now overweight or obese.

Being too fat is a major contributor to heart attacks, as critical arteries get clogged over time.

Fears that Covid vaccines may have fuelled the increase are way off the mark, top cardiologists have said.  Heart attack admissions were broadly increasing across most adult age groups, including the young, before the pandemic took off. 

Why ARE so many young people suffering heart attacks? DAILY MAIL 1 December 2023

Sooner or later, there will be a well-deserved reckoning for the great evil that these men and women have committed in the name of science and public health. They’re not going to be able to hide their crimes against the naive, credulous, and innocent public forever. Not when the mainstream media is already being forced to publicly address the obvious questions, however deceitfully.

UPDATE: Literally no one is buying it.

  • Those with a memory will point out to a document that was published by the CDC in 2020 that listed HEART ATTACK and DEATH as a list of possible side effects of taking the product that we all know has caused this issue.
  • Started with that footballer not long after they were pushing the jabs for travel. The media have a lot to answer for. Athletes seem the badly affected especially.
  • Even when faced with evidence people still try to deny the real reason. Wake up.
  • Omg it is so infuriating reading this when they know damn well what the reason is as does any sane person.
  • They are really insulting our intelligence. “Feed the public lies and let them lap it up”. Do not believe anything anymore because 99% of it is lies.

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Don’t See That Often

In which a term I coined – in this case, “midwit” – is correctly attributed to me.

IQ Bell Curve, also known as IQ Distribution Curve and Midwit, refers to a series of memes that use the IQ distribution diagrams to mock one of the three main groups represented by the diagram, most often targeting the largest group of people representing the average intelligence. The concept of IQ Bell Curve memes utilizes the horseshoe theory, implying that the groups with low intelligence and high intelligence often chose to follow the same goals while being guided by different reasoning. Those who possess average intelligence are referred to as “midwits.”

Origin
The word “mid-witted” was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post “The tragedy of the mid-witted” in which he commented on a life story article “Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume” by Jennifer Wright.[2] In the blog post, Vox Day writes that “those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence.”

It will be interesting to see how long that particular attribution lasts. I tend to doubt they’ll do the same with Gamma Male or Sigma Male, at least not until the SSH book is published and the terms are sufficiently clarified again.

I do find it a little confusing that people continue to refer to me as some sort of activist, given the fact that I’m almost the exact opposite of one. An activist generally doesn’t write novels or completely shun both the media and the government-corporate complex, as he is usually far too busy running around demonstrating, seeking attention, and attempting to strike up relationships with celebrities and other influential individuals.

The problem, I suspect, is that in the aftermath of the death of the late, great Umberto Eco, the term “public intellectual” has been essentially abandoned due to the way in which most figures in the public eye these days are both anti-intellectual and mid-witted.

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Literally Fake Media

There is absolutely no chance that Sports Illustrated is the only mainstream media publication using AI-generated articles attributed to nonexistent individuals whose headshots are also AI-generated:

There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.

“Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” it read. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”

Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions.

“There’s a lot,” they told us of the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”

“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”

The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that’s because it’s not just the authors’ headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well.

“The content is absolutely AI-generated,” the second source said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”

After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation…

The Arena Group is also hardly alone, either. As powerful generative AI tools have debuted over the past few years, many publishers have quickly attempted to use the tech to churn out monetizable content. In almost every case, though, these efforts to cut out human journalists have backfired embarrassingly.

We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism; in the ensuing storm of criticism, CNET issued corrections to more than half its AI-generated articles. G/O Media also published AI-generated material on its portfolio of sites, resulting in embarrassing bungles at Gizmodo and The A.V. Club. We caught BuzzFeed publishing slapdash AI-generated travel guides. And USA Today and other Gannett newspapers were busted publishing hilariously garbled AI-generated sports roundups that one of the company’s own sports journalists described as “embarrassing,” saying they “shouldn’t ever” have been published.

Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers, FUTURISM, 27 November 2023

This is yet another reason why your standard assumption should be that every bit of news that is reported by the mainstream media is, at best, misleading, and and worst, outright fiction concocted by artificial intelligence that is attributed to people who don’t even exist.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how Peter King, the former Sports Illustrated NFL reporter, will react to this, especially given his recent two-week jihad against fabulist sideline reporter Charissa Thompson due to the way that he felt her fake halftime interviews called the legitimacy of the sports media into question.

The lesson, as always, is this: everything in Clown World is fake.

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Delingpole and the Demons

James Delingpole interviews a repentant Satanist:

I’ve posted up the strangest, most disturbing and compelling podcast I’ve ever recorded. The one with former Mother of Darkness Jesse Czebotar.

Perhaps I should have accompanied it with a health warning. There are lots of reasons why I hesitated before releasing the recording: Is Jesse for real or is she a fraud? Is she a genuine Christian or part of some kind of New Age/Luciferian trap? How much of her extraordinary story can we believe?

But the main reason it took me so long is simply this: it freaked me out and gave me nightmares and told me stuff I’m not sure I wanted to know.

As she explains in the podcast, Jesse Czebotar was selected at a very early age as a candidate to become a Satanist High Priestess known as a Mother of Darkness. She qualified, she claims, because she was descended from a number of ‘bloodlines’ families and because she demonstrated the psychic powers which enabled her to communicate with demonic forces, including Satan.

And that’s just the beginning of her tale. It gets much weirder, much darker, as she describes the satanic rituals in which she was forced to participate, including ones involving the rape, torture and murder of small children.

Czebotar names names – most of which, for obvious reasons, I’ve had to cut out. But if you want the short version it goes like this: almost every famous person in the world is quite literally working for the devil. Presidents, pop idols, movie stars, central bankers [dur, obviously], senior politicians, royals, etc: if you know their name they are in the game.

What I find fascinating about those who deny the Biblical description of our fallen world – and even most self-professed Christians do – is the way in which even when people who have taken the ticket, who have participated in the rituals, and who are openly testifying to what they have witnessed, the default position is to claim that the world cannot possibly be otherwise than it is described on television.

Whether or not Delingpole’s guest is telling the truth or is merely another psychological operation meant to discredit those who correctly perceive the evils of this world is irrelevant. The more you simply open your eyes and observe without prejudice or preconception, the more you will see and understand.

The fools of the world love to declare “there is no evidence” even when they are staring directly at irrefutable and conclusive proof. But the weight of the evidence, when seen through the lens of history, is absolutely staggering. And the provable fact of the matter is that nearly everything you were taught, from the innocent English settlers being forced to seize land from savage Indian tribes to the need to drop atomic bombs to force the Japanese to surrender to the assassination of President Kennedy to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to the inevitable Ukrainian victory in the Donbass, has been an absolute lie.

If, at this point, you still don’t believe in evil, real spiritual evil that acts in the material world as described in the Bible, you are consciously averting your eyes.

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She’s Far from the Only One

Peter King is an excellent football reporter. While I could do without his occasional editorial sallies into politics, which reliably offer typically retarded left-wing takes, he follows in the well-respected tradition of Paul Zimmerman. If he reports on something football-related, you can guarantee that it is honest, legitimate, and well-sourced, and it is probably true.

But he clearly has no idea how flagrantly dishonest most of the mainstream media is on a regular basis, or he wouldn’t be calling for sideline fabulist Charissa Thompson’s pretty little head:

We live in a time when the media is more distrusted than I ever remember. Thompson is a high-profile person who hosts the Thursday night pregame show on Amazon Prime, who hosts a Sunday pre-game on Fox, who co-hosts a podcast with Erin Andrews. She says on the Pardon My Take podcast that in her former role as a sideline reporter at Fox she would “make up the report sometimes.” It’s outrageous. It’s fireable. Thompson’s not covering the White House, but I don’t care if she’s covering the Chula Vista Little League. Her job is to report the truth, and she admitted she made up things. When Thompson says that, it’s fodder for media-haters to say, “See? They all lie.” Now, in these high-profile roles at Amazon and Fox, how do you trust she’s not inventing some of the things she’s saying? And where are the programming people, the bosses, particularly at Fox, where Thompson said these sideline reports occurred? The silence says one of two things: Sideline reports don’t really matter. Or the truth doesn’t really matter. Or both.

Thompson’s statement after the firestorm didn’t solve anything. Thompson didn’t say on Pardon My Take that she’d almost make it up, or use some qualifying words. She said she “would make it up.” And she repeated it: “No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.” In her Instagram statement the next day, Thompson said: “I understand how important words are and I chose the wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.” Twice Thompson said she’d made up reporting. A day later she said she never lied or was unethical. So, what’s true? What she said on the podcast? What she said in a clear CYA statement that made things worse?

So she lied a few times. And then she lied about having lied. So what? The vast majority of reporters lie, or at the very least report things they don’t actually know to be true, on a daily basis. It’s not as if Congress is sending tens of billions of dollars to the Carolina Panthers because she gave them cause to believe they might possibly be able to win a few games.

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A Gatekeeper in Action

Tim Pool does NOT want to let his guest talk about the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty or its potential implications for the current US Navy presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

GUEST: I’m concerned with having American aircraft carriers over there, like what I keep being told about the USS Liberty, that’s something with the Israeli government-

TIM POOL: You should, you should be careful about that one!

SIDEKICK: Allegedly, the Israeli Air Force, jet fighter aircraft, I mean, they did end up paying out the American government.

GUEST: So I’m concerned, like false flag operation, like a missile comes out of Gaza and hits one of our aircraft carriers, but it was actually an Israeli missile. I don’t want, we should get out of there, it doesn’t-

TIM POOL: Let me stop you there. It doesn’t matter where the missile comes from. If a missile comes out of the Middle East in any capacity and hits a US target, everyone will claim it was exactly what they want it
to be, exactly. The US military will say Iran did it, the pro-Palestinians will say Israel did it, the pro-Israel will say Hamas did it.

GUEST: Yeah, if it comes out of a foreign country other than Israel, then it’ll be hard to deny.

TIM POOL: It doesn’t matter where it comes from! The US will say Iran did it.

GUEST: Right, well, if it comes out of Tel Aviv it’s going to be hard to sell that.

TIM POOL: But prove it came out of Tel Aviv! How do you know? You read the news! You are going to get American intelligence agencies going to news organizations, saying “tell them it came out of Iran”!

GUEST: I don’t think the Americans want their carrier to be hit as a false flag. Maybe the USS Liberty thing was an accident.

SIDEKICK: That’s the controversy over it. The Israeli government claims it was an accident, but some survivors say that they don’t think it was an accident, so was it a false flag? That’s why people talk about it.

GUEST: Did America get involved in the 1967 war after that?

SIDEKICK: No, because it ended up it ended up being really short but-

TIM POOL: We are, we’re going to go to super chats so if you haven’t already would you kindly smash that Like button, and subscribe to this channel.

I’m not saying Tim Pool is wrong, although I think there is zero chance that any Israeli missiles will be launched at any American ships; the fact that the US media still avoids the subject of the USS Liberty like vampires avoiding holy water tends to indicate that the Israelis don’t have any desire to risk repeating that sort of debacle, not when the US Navy is perfectly capable of sinking its own ships without any help from friend, foe, or greatest ally. And, depending upon the captain, possibly without even intentionally trying to do so.

Also, there are no shortage of influential neocons in the US government and media who want war with Iran far worse than the Israelis do. They are both less attached to reality and more distanced from the potential consequences. Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld once said, in an ironic turn of phrase, that US neocons are willing to fight to the very last Israeli.

What is most interesting about the interview, however, is the way in which Pool tells the guest to “be careful” after he brings up the incident, and then immediately attempts to change the subject, twice. It would be very interesting to ask Mr. Pool why he believes one has to “be careful” about a minor military engagement that took place 56 years ago and is such a matter of public record that it has its own Wikipedia page.

This is what media gatekeeping looks like in action. It’s the avoidance of certain topics and the steering of the public discourse away from those topics when they are, for some reason, accidentally brought up.

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