Fake news at the Washington Post

I’m sure we all look forward to Facebook banning links to the Washington Post due to the fact that it is a confirmed provider of fake news:

The Washington Post has retracted its story about Russian hackers penetrating the nation’s electricity grid with a virus found in a Burlington, Vt., electric company laptop.

“Authorities say there is no indication of that so far [that Russians had penetrated the US electric grid],” according to an editor’s note attached to a corrected version of the story on the paper’s Web site. “The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid,” the editor’s note read.

News of the supposed hack had set off a firestorm of recriminations, with Vermont leaders calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “a thug” earlier Saturday, after one of the state’s electric utilities found a virus on a laptop computer. A utility spokesman has also told the Burlington Free Press the laptop was not hooked into the grid.

The amusing thing about the whole SJW “fake news” strategy is that even liberal observers predicted that it was going to be turned around and used against the mainstream media. This simply goes to show, once more, that a calm and strategic approach combined with ruthless tactical meme magic is an extremely effective approach to defeating the SJWs despite their possession of the cultural high ground.

On a related note, James Delingpole pens a savage declaration of war on the Liberal/Globalist/SJW/Media/Establishment Left at Breitbart London:

We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man’s Land

One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism – so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits  – that elections are “won in the centre ground.”

This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U.S., that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama; and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his (self-admitted heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It’s also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, sell-out concept of “soft Brexit”.)

No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally left-wing one or the notionally right-wing one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite.

Of course we should always despise the liberal-left because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are; sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise.

I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy.”

If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation – much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so – to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong; and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for.

On Brexit, for example, I’m with Her Majesty the Queen: “‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out? What’s the problem?’


We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender

See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys – and it is, invariably, men – who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful liberal-left doesn’t just want humiliation – it wants total annihilation.

Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile – but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification.

Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW witch-hunt mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender!

We may or may not be outnumbered. The recent European referenda and the US presidential election suggest that we are not. We may not have the high ground. But we are never outgunned, intellectually or literally. Do not surrender, do not apologize, and do not hesitate to go on the attack, either directly or circumspectly, every single time you encounter an SJW anywhere.


On cherishing extremists

People have asked me, repeatedly, if I am not violating my stated tactic of “protect and cherish your extremists” when I criticize those on the right for doing what I consider to be objectively stupid things. The answer is both simple and obvious: no.

You protect an extremist by refusing to criticize him when he does something extreme to the enemy in the interest of the cause. You protect an extremist by refusing to criticize the excessive tactics he utilizes in taking the battle to the other side. You do not protect an idiot by refusing to criticize him when he a) acts like a moderate and attacks someone on your side, b) does something idiotic and irrelevant, c) serves the interests of the other side by dancing for the media.

The latter really isn’t that hard to understand. Look at how the media actually went so far as to pay for the KKK’s wood and fuel just so they could create evidence to support their “stupid white people is raciss” narrative.

TIJAT producers went so far as to orchestrate more than one cross-burning ceremony in Pulaski, though it is presented in the documentary as if the KKK is actually hosting the event. “We’ve been allowed special access to film this secret induction,” reads a title card that precedes one of the cross-burning scenes.

“It was the producers who told me they wanted a cross-lighting,” recounted Nichols. “In fact they made two cross-lightings cause they wanted to reshoot some scenes. They bought everything—the wood, the burlap to wrap around the wood, the diesel and kerosene for my cross lighting. They even brought all the food for everyone.”

If you’re dressed in a monkey suit and dancing for the media, you’re not “playing 4d chess”, you’re not “mocking the media”, you’re not an extremist who merits defending, you’re just a dancing monkey being used by ruthless hypocrites on the other side.

“They kept asking me, wanting me, to use the word ‘nigger,’” said Nichols, who alleged he was paid $600 per day by producers to participate. “I was sitting down being filmed and interviewed with the lights and the backdrop set up, and I said something and used the word ‘blacks.’ Then the producer interrupted me and said ‘No, no, no. We want him to use the word “nigger!”’’’

There is always demand for idiots who will play media patsy. And while there are people who can go boldly into the lion’s den and make the lions do tricks, if your name is not “Donald Trump” or “Milo Yiannopoulos”, you are not one of them. Trust me on this. I am smarter than you, I am better-educated than you, and as a three-time nationally syndicated columnist, I have far more media experience than you. And yet, even I can’t do it reliably. That’s why I limit my contact with the media to written questions, and that’s why they don’t run my answers when they interview me. I don’t serve their narrative.

Turn your guns on allies and sympathizers instead of the enemy, and you lose all right to any cover or assistance or regard. I don’t have much tolerance for idiots and I don’t have any for those who attack my friends and allies. If you’re going to attack Mike and Milo and Stefan and Roosh, you won’t do it here and you will go immediately on my “ignore that idiot” list.


It’s Milo’s world

We’re all just living in it. This is hugely amusing, because I was informed that some SF-SJWs were doing their usual narrative-spinning about how Milo’s $250k book contract really wasn’t that big, and tended to indicate that he wasn’t really all that famous or important.

Then I noticed that SJWAL sales were spiking and I wondered why. This is why.

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Threshold Editions (March 14, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1501173081
ISBN-13: 978-1501173080


Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Censorship
#1 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Political
#1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Specific Topics > Commentary & Opinion

So, congratulations, Milo, for hitting #1 on Amazon. And, well, thanks! Apparently it’s not at all a bad thing to have the best-selling author in the world write the Foreword to your own little book.

Love the title. It quite suits him. He is dangerous, Ice…man.


Moths drawn to the media flame

There has been a fair amount of drama of late surrounding the Deploraball, Mike, Milo, Baked Alaska, and perhaps a few others for all I know. I am not involved with it, I am not attending it, I know nothing about it, nor have I spoken to anyone about any of it. I haven’t even been on Twitter.

However, I suspect I may understand the core issues underlying whatever the various details might be. Basically, there are people who understand the difference between social media and mainstream media and there are people who don’t. There is also a fairly significant difference between those who seek to get any attention they can and those who are under incessant scrutiny by enemies looking to discredit and disqualify. Having been one of the latter for the last 15 years, I understand what many of those who have never been subjected to a media blitz simply can’t grasp until they experience it for themselves.

The fact is that if you run around using vulgar language, throwing Roman salutes, wearing bedsheets, denying the Holocaust, publicly soiling yourself, denigrating Christianity, declaring your intention of attacking an elected official, expressing your attraction to a minor, putting naked pictures of yourself online, or threatening to commit violence on another individual, you are not ready for prime time. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what else you might have to say, you have rendered yourself completely vulnerable to a public neutering courtesy of the media. Just ask Anthony Weiner… and he’s on their side.

Moreover, those who are dealing with a hostile mainstream media on a regular basis simply don’t have either the time or the inclination to defend your stupid, attention-seeking antics. If you don’t have enough respect for yourself or your public image to put on your big boy pants and play by the observable rules, there is no reason for anyone else with anything at stake to maintain a connection to you. You’re not worth it.

If you want to publicly neuter yourself, go ahead. If you want to defecate all over yourself in the name of principle, courage, the Third Reich, or sheer bloodymindedness, that is absolutely your prerogative. Do as you see fit. But you should not expect anyone else to stand passively by you and allow you to splatter your self-destructive shit all over them.

This isn’t about SJW attacks, where one minor violation of the Narrative results in a media-driven SJW witch hunt. This is about attention-seeking provocateurs failing to grasp the difference between social media memes and real-world public relations, and in doing so, creating both distractions and potential headaches for others.

Look at how the New York Times came to me, then vanished into thin air when I answered their questions and pointed them to the 16 Points of the Alt-Right. They don’t want the public to see an intelligent and sophisticated political philosophy of nationalism that has ever-increasing global appeal, they want toothless hillbillies, psychotic racists, and retarded neo-Nazis to dance for them and bolster their false Narrative of “Hey Look, KKK Nazi Squirrel!”

Anyone who is determined to play dancing monkey for the mainstream media and provide support for the media’s false Narrative is of less than zero utility to the Alt-Right, to the Alt-Lite, and to the Trump administration, no matter who they are, no matter what they have done. So get serious and stop dancing.

It’s fair to criticize Mike, or Milo, or me for things we have done, for words we have written, and for public positions we have taken. It is fair to criticize those who are self-serving cowards and refuse to stand up for putative allies who are attacked unjustly. But it is simply stupid to expect us, or anyone else, to devote any time and effort to defending the willful stupidity of others. And to say that any of us are afraid of being attacked is even more ridiculous when a simple Google search will reveal hundreds of vituperative and defamatory attacks on any of us.

FFS, why play into the media’s default script for those they would dearly love to destroy?

UPDATE: Mike Cernovich has posted his side of the story.


Thomas Sowell lays down his pen

The conservative economist retires his column at 86:

Back in 1962, President John F. Kennedy, a man narrowly elected just two years earlier, came on television to tell the nation that he was taking us to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, because the Soviets had secretly built bases for nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from America.

Most of us did not question what he did. He was president of the United States, and he knew things the rest of us couldn’t know – and that was good enough for us. Fortunately, the Soviets backed down. But could any president today do anything like that and have the American people behind him?

Years of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon, especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.

Goodbye and good luck to all.

Dr. Sowell is a good man and he wrote many a fine opinion column. I enjoyed several of his books and considered him to be among the more thoughtful conservative columnists. His ideas were always worthy of consideration.

25 years of syndicated columns is an amazing achievement and testimony to the man’s intellectual stamina; I didn’t last half that long myself. Congratulations to Dr. Sowell, and I hope he enjoys more than a few years of relaxed retirement.


The hate-filled echo chamber

It’s fascinating, is it not, how the media and the SJWs – but I repeat myself – try to simultaneously dismiss the Alt-Tech alternatives as hate-filled echo chambers of racism and conspiracy theories while simultaneously celebrating the banishment of everyone who doesn’t submit to the Narrative enforced by the SJW thought police on Big Social Media. Of course, if they could successfully connect consequences to actions, they wouldn’t be SJWs.

A Guardian rabbit cautiously ventures, undercover, into the terrible dark abyss of GAB:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, it was said that Twitter had helped swing the election for the property developer, reality TV star and insatiable tweeter. But some of his more high-profile supporters on the so-called “alt-right” who have had their Twitter accounts suspended are abandoning the platform in favour of a new social network called Gab.

The self-styled cult iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart has apparently joined the likes of Trump attack-dog Ann Coulter and the excitable Alex Jones of Infowars in signing up with Gab. There is even a parody RealPresidentTrump account that for a short while presented itself – all too convincingly – as the real thing.

And recently the white nationalist leader Richard B Spencer went so far as to claim that Twitter had sent “execution squads across the alt-right” to purge users with far-right views. He predicted that Gab would be “the place where we go next”.

The brainchild of its 25-year-old Christian conservative founder, Andrew Torba, Gab promises to guarantee free speech, no matter how offensive. It is currently in the early “beta” stage of development and there is an extensive waiting list to join. When I applied, wanting to take a look at the site, I was told there were more than 400,000 applicants in front of me, and was advised that it could take a week before I was allowed on.

Instead I used the login of a colleague in America and spent 48 hours in a strange world of Trump worship, white nationalism, racism, conspiracy theory, gun idolatry and crass humour, all of it delivered with the righteous conviction of total certainty. The effect is a little like viewing the world through a circus mirror while being constantly told that this is what reality looks like….

Twitter and Facebook are commercial enterprises that advertise themselves as neutral places of communication, which inevitably brings complications. Some of the fake news that Facebook promoted during the election is thought to have helped the Trump campaign. And Twitter, which has been used to circulate Holocaust denial and other scandalous nonsense, is slowly coming round to a more interventionist monitoring of content.

They’re like bossy little children who can’t bear to be left alone.

“We don’t want you here! Go away! You are banished from our tree house!”

“Um, okay. Later.” (goes and builds own tree house)

“Hey, hey, hey, can we come in? Why won’t you let us in?” (secretly climbs tree)  “Hey, hey, you’re not doing it right! This tree house sucks! Why can’t we play here? I know, let’s vote on some new rules about what everyone can do!”

Never think, for one single moment, that SJWs won’t invade Gab, Infogalactic, and every other successful Alt-Tech site and attempt to take them over. It won’t work, of course, but don’t think they will simply leave them alone.

They also appear to have conveniently forgotten, already, that it is the circus mirror people who are in possession of the reliable predictive model. As Aristotle wrote, some people simply cannot be educated by mere information.


Pointless pressure

There has been considerable sturm und drang about the Electoral College, mostly because the media is grasping at any straw that won’t leave them cast out of influence for the next eight years:

In two days, members of the Electoral College will cast their historic votes for the next president of the United States. In the meantime, they are under siege. The nation’s 538 presidential electors have been thrust into the political foreground like never before in American history. In the aftermath of a uniquely polarizing presidential contest, the once-anonymous electors are squarely in the spotlight, targeted by death threats, harassing phone calls and reams of hate mail. One Texas Republican elector said he’s been bombarded with more than 200,000 emails.

“I never can imagine harassing people like this. It’s just f—– up,” said Jim Rhoades, a Republican elector from Michigan who runs a home inspection service. “I’ve lost a bunch of business.”

In recent decades, the Electoral College had become such a reliable rubber stamp of Election Day results that it was viewed as an afterthought.

But with many Democrats desperate to block the all-but-certain ascension of Donald Trump to the White House, this long-neglected body has been gripped by turmoil, and its members have been subjected to pleas to upend centuries of tradition by casting their votes for someone other than the president-elect.

There have been ad campaigns targeting electors and op-eds assailing their role. One Democratic member of Congress has called to delay the vote for president while an investigation of Russian involvement in the election is underway. Two others have pleaded with electors to consider Russia’s role when deciding how to vote. Progressive groups are preparing protests across the country at sites where electors will meet to cast their ballots. Personal contact information for many electors has been posted publicly — and it’s been used to bury them with massive email campaigns.

None of it signifies anything. I’ll be very surprised if more than two electors actually prove faithless, and it’s as likely to be a Clinton elector as a Trump one. Trump’s popularity has risen considerably since his election, his post-election moves have been distinctly presidential to the point of overshadowing the actual president, and the electors will have noticed that just like everyone else.


Dealing with defamation

Melania Trump files suit in Maryland:

The original complaint filed in Maryland Circuit Court focused on an Aug. 19 Daily Mail article entitled, “Naked photoshoots, and troubling questions about visas that won’t go away: The VERY racy past of Donald Trump’s Slovenian wife.”

“The statements of fact in the Daily Mail Article are false. Plaintiff did legitimate and legal modeling work for legitimate business entities and did not work for any ‘gentleman’s club’ or ‘escort’ agencies. Plaintiff was not a sex worker, escort or prostitute in any way, shape or form, nor did she ever have a composite or presentation card for the sex business,” the lawsuit said.

“Plaintiff did not come to the United States until 1996. Thus, Plaintiff did not, and could not have participated in a photo shoot in the United States or met her current husband in the United States prior to that time,” the lawsuit also said.

So, she’s considerably more of a public figure than I am, the accusation is less harmful, and she doesn’t even have multiple examples of documentary evidence of malice on the part of the accused demonstrated over an extended period of time.

And yet, the Daily Mail is likely going to try to settle.

Meanwhile, keep in mind the owner of Amazing Stories attitude toward lawsuits before you defend his right to engage to defend defamatory practices:

I don’t want to become an industry that threatens to sue everyone improperly using the name, but I also have a duty to my licensing partners to preserve and protect it. Right now I am spending what little free cash I have on IP attorneys. The research they are doing will determine who we go after and how; we’re still trying to decide whether to get settlements from “little guys” first, or go after a big kahuna first. The latter is potentially more attractive for a variety of reasons – publicity, the potential winnings (some have already been informed of their infringement and have chosen to ignore that notice, which means they could be up for treble damages) and the possibility of making things better for many others who find themselves in similar circumstances; going after little guys first is usually done to help build a case against the larger guys, but it usually involves a lot of what some might call “intimidation” and I’m not that comfortable with that. But in the end the attorneys are going to tell me what our best course will be and we’ll pursue it.

Steve Davidson was obviously quite comfortable with engaging in lawfare when he thought it suited him. And he already knows he has a little problem on his hands here.

anyone having access to good information to defamation and anti-nazi laws in EU countries, please get in touch with me

It’s rather depressing to learn that a guy whose wife was diagnosed with cancer in April prefers to spend his time and financial resources on defamation rather than on her, but, as the Austrians say, all value is subjective. What is wrong with these people?

Anyhow, it would certainly be amusing to end up in possession of the Amazing Stories trademark as a result of all this. We’ve already been reviewing an example of case law with $235k in damages for defamation alone in New Hampshire, an award that was appealed and upheld. Considering that I am an editor and publisher of leading Jewish and Israeli authors, including two books coming out in the next four months, it should be readily apparent that Mr. Davidson’s publication of Ms Meadow’s defamatory claim was both wanton and malicious.

Interestingly enough, one of those authors is even considered a world expert on fascism, having written one of the foremost academic treatments of it.

Right now, the bulk of Experimenter’s budget is being spent on intellectual property attorneys. 

No worries, we can fix that.


The fox guarding the chicken coop

Facebook is arguably the very worst organization to lead the charge against “fake news” than any organization not called “The Onion”, as Techdirt concluded long before Mark Zuckerberg’s latest George Soros-funded crusade:

Facebook is generally seen as a key multiplier in this false force of non-news, which is probably what led the social media giant to declare war on fake news sites a year or so back. So how’d that go? Well, the results as analyzed over at Buzzfeed seems to suggest that Facebook has either lost this war it declared or is losing it badly enough that it might as well give it up.

To gauge Facebook’s progress in its fight, BuzzFeed News examined data across thousands of posts published to the fake news sites’ Facebook pages, and found decidedly mixed results. While average engagements (likes + shares + comments) per post fell from 972.7 in January 2015 to 434.78 in December 2015, they jumped to 827.8 in January 2016 and a whopping 1,304.7 in February. 


Some of the posts on the fake news sites’ pages went extremely viral many months after Facebook announced its crackdown. In August, for instance, an Empire News story reporting that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sustained serious injuries in prison received more than 240,000 likes, 43,000 shares, and 28,000 comments on its Facebook page. The incident was pure fiction, but still spread like wildfire on the platform. An even less believable September post about a fatal gang war sparked by the “Blood” moon was shared over 22,000 times from the Facebook page of Huzlers, another fake news site.

So, how did this war go so wrong for Facebook? Well, to start, it relied heavily on user-submitted notifications that a link or site was a fake news site. Sounds great, as aggregating feedback has worked quite well in other arenas. For this, however, it was doomed from the start. The purpose of fake news sites is, after all, to fool people, and fooled people are obviously not reporting the links as fake. Even when a reader manages to determine eventually that a link was a fake news post at a later time, perhaps after sharing it and having comments proving it false, how many of those people then take steps to report the link? Not enough, clearly, as the fake news scourge marches on.


Another layer of the problem appears to be the faith and trust the general public puts into some famous people they are following, who have also been fooled with startling regularity. Take D.L. Hughley, for example. The comedian, whose page is liked by more than 1.7 million people, showed up twice in the Huzlers logs. One fictitious Huzlers story he posted, about Magic Johnson donating blood, garnered more than 10,000 shares from his page. Hughley, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment, also shared four National Report links in 2015. 

Radio stations also frequently post fake news. The Florida-based 93XFM was one of a number of radio stations BuzzFeed News discovered sharing Huzlers posts in 2015. Asked about one April post linking to a Huzlers story about a woman smoking PCP and chewing off her boyfriend’s penis, a 93XFM DJ named Sadie explained that fact-checking Facebook posts isn’t exactly a high priority.

So, it’s not the dark and ever-dangerous Alt-Right that is to blame for fake news, but celebrities and Facebook itself. Moreover, Facebook isn’t even reliable when it comes to reporting its own internal metrics to advertisers, as it has been caught exaggerating its own traffic numbers for the FOURTH time. Or, as Facebook would prefer you see it, accidentally making mistakes that just coincidentally happened to favor its own financial interests again for the fourth straight time.

Facebook Inc. built a colossal business based on measuring something older advertising methods cannot: the granular details about people. Two months ago, the company copped to a flaw in that measurement. Then Facebook did it again. And again.

On Friday, Facebook revealed faulty metrics with Instant Articles, its mobile publishing system, the fourth disclosure of a measurement error since September. The admission sharpened calls for more independent organizations to monitor the performance of digital advertising. And some large firms that buy a lot of ads said they will more closely scrutinize their spending on the social networking giant and could shift marketing dollars elsewhere….

In September, Facebook shared its first measurement error: inflated viewership numbers for its video ads, a relatively new product. Two months later, the company disclosed additional metric errors along with new tools for third-party measurement companies, including ComScore and Nielsen, to track its system more closely.

Problems persisted. Earlier this month, a report in Marketing Land, an industry publication, spotted a discrepancy between Facebook’s internal metrics on how articles where shared and public measurements. Facebook confirmed the error. “That shouldn’t happen,” said Brian Wieser, senior analyst, Pivotal Research Group. “If anyone was concerned that Facebook’s self-audit was not sufficient enough, they just proved it.”

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that Facebook is trafficking heavily in false information on every side. Look at who runs it. Once a con artist, always a con artist. That’s been Zuckerberg’s motif from the start.


The death knell of the dinosaur media

The New York Times has entered its terminal decline:

When we moved into our new building in 2007, we saw it as a modern headquarters for a modern New York Times. We still feel that way.

But as Mark mentioned in the State of The Times last month, after a good deal of consideration, we have determined that the way that we use our headquarters building needs to evolve to better match the changes you and your colleagues have been driving across every part of the company.

The current way we have configured our office makes us slower and less collaborative. It is also, frankly, too expensive to occupy this many floors when we don’t truly need them.

We’ve made the decision to consolidate our footprint across the building to create a more dynamic, modern and open workplace, one that is better suited to the moment. We’re planning significant investments in a redesign of our existing space in order to facilitate more cross-departmental collaboration.

We expect a substantial financial benefit as well. All told, we will vacate at least eight floors, allowing us to generate significant rental income.

We have engaged Gensler, an architecture and interior design firm, to help us redesign our workplace and beginning early next year, work will begin on select floors below 14. By the end of next year, we expect to have consolidated our occupancy to that side of the building. We will keep the cafeteria and the conference rooms on 15.

We have already seen that changing office layouts can lead to good results. Some of the most creative wings of the company — the Beta team, the Graphics Department and some of our technology teams have changed their floor plans to help improve the way they work.

The coming redesign will introduce more team rooms and common spaces. And, we will do away with big corner offices, like the ones you see on the 16th and 17th floors, including, yes, the publisher and CEO’s offices. We don’t need to preserve those vestiges from a different era, so we won’t.

What a pity they employed Paul Krugman back in 2007, rather than a more astute economist who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming, who could have warned them that buying real estate was not a good idea at the time.

Anyhow, it will take a while before the NYT goes away entirely, as there is a lot of ruin in a major media institution, but it won’t be too terribly long before its debts exceed its assets.