Guys, the first images of Irma’s level of devastation are coming out of Barbuda and it’s heartbreaking. The President of Barbuda says that 90% of the island is uninhabitable, upwards of 60% of the TOTAL population are now homeless because the hurricane destroyed virtually every building and home on the island, and that the estimated damage is valued at no less than $200 million dollars. That’s money a small island like that doesn’t have. They’re saying it’s going to take years to rebuild and Hurricane Jose is right behind Irma on the same path which means they could be hit twice. This is just one of the islands being affected.
Please, show up for the Caribbean like you did for Houston. There is no safety net for any of these islands including mine. They’ll rely entirely on foreign aid. Find local charities or global trustworthy charities (NOT the Red Cross) and make a donation asking them to aid the Caribbean. There’s whole countries being turned into rubble with no financial means to repair their infrastructures. They’re going to need help.
For the hundreds of people replying or in my inbox asking “Why not the Red Cross?!”:
Seriously, guess where I found all of those in two solid minutes of searching? Google. Even better, they didn’t charge me a penny for it.
Stop wanting things to be spoonfed to you. While you waited for someone to link you to sources, you could’ve done it yourself and already donated to people who desperately need it.
Because people are also asking where to donate instead of the Red Cross:
Habitat For Humanity [83% rating on Charity Navigator // Because with islands like Barbuda 90% destroyed and French St. Martin said to be 95% destroyed then people are going to need homes built]
Catholic Relief Services [90% rating on Charity Navigator // For those who would want to donate to a religious organization]
If there is a note or comments section on their donation page please do let them know that you would want your money to go to their Caribbean relief efforts. Houston and Florida have the US government backing them in whatever they will need but these islands will have very little except for these charities to fall back if they have any hope of rebuilding what seems to be entire countries in some cases. For the people who lost everything even a few bucks will go a long way.
For the most part I would suggest staying away from privately launched GoFundMes unless you know the person directly. Ultimately, you just never know where those funds are going to end up and if your money will be used wisely. Sure, the same can be said for charity organizations but at least there is a better shot at possibly helping through them. The five listed above are world known and have been studied by charity oversight organizations. It’s as close to perfect as we’re going to get.
Please donate if you can! [ Here’s ] a list of essentials to donate.
This’ll be queued on repeat for the next few hours.
One of the most sacred events at ICP concerts is a sort of communion known as the “Faygo Shower.” Basically, band members spray members of the audience with soda.
But not just any soda. Faygo is a soda brand local to Detroit, where ICP originated— they even reference the soft drink in their lyrics. And so, as part of their devotion to Juggalo life, fans drink the stuff by the bucketful. Faygo tries to keep a healthy distance from Juggalos, but the company certainly benefited from the face-painted consumers.
ICP has helped a company thrive, a company started by Jewish immigrants.
Faygo is short for Feigenson— yes, really. The Faygo website euphemistically describes brothers Ben and Perry as “Russian immigrants,” but a quick Google search will confirm the obvious. In 1907 they began their bottling business, and soon began flavoring soda water with frosting flavors (they were originally bakers). And like something out of a novel about Jews making it in America, they shortened their name to something completely alien sounding to help the product sell. The company stayed in the family until the 1980s, and while it now belongs to the National Beverage Company (they own the likes of LaCroix and Shasta), Faygo is still headquartered in Detroit.
And so, the Insane Clown Posse, admittedly unwittingly, votes with their pocketbooks, and in their semi-obscure, highly regional, and affordable beverage of choice is one brought to us by the very people the Neo-Nazis stand against: Jews, and immigrants.
this is an amazing article but it gets one very salient point wrong: shaggy 2 dope isn’t white. he’s cherokee. he’s very proud of his heritage. important context
1) This guy is THE MOST creative storyteller I have EVER SEEN on social media – and that’s not hyperbole, because the thought and care that went into this is so good!
or
2) He finna actually die.
Either way, this is such a good way to spend your lunchbreak. Please go on this journey.
I’m trying to get through this but with every paragraph I finish the screaming in my head gets louder.
For everybody who doesn’t want to read the whole thing – do, it’s really eye-opening – here some key paragraphs:
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so
to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a
series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate
change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute);
and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of
the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve
Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he
gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting
“liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger,
and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at
the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a
rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a
Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo
Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic
views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands
after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the
29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s
bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than
PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on
Twitter.
…
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name:
because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics
company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was
spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in
“election management strategies” and “messaging and information
operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological
operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign.
…
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a
database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting
population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post
reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington
office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s
administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in
engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly
if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.
…
One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of
thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have
tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a
trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together
to drown out all other sources of information.
Like zombies?
“Like zombies.”
Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then
exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools
developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy
with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”
The last sentences:
(…) a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the
60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With
no divisions between military and civilian participation.”
By that definition we’re already there.
I’m gonna break it down further because seriously, holy shit.
1. Billionaire white man is spending millions to “disrupt mainstream media.” He’s very conservative and backed Trump with $13.5 million in donations, and has close ties to Steve Bannon.
2. He funded Breitbart.com with $10 million, which is now more popular with U.S. Internet users than HuffPo or PornHub.
3. He also has a large stake in a company that specializes in psyops, also known as propaganda and other forms of psychological warfare, refined in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia.
4. This company lent its software both to the Leave side of Brexit and Trump’s presidential campaign.
5. This company claims to have a database with information on almost every eligible voter in the U.S.
6. This information is then used to target people with ads, websites, and headlines in a way designed to control their thinking and change their minds on political issues.
7. There are thousands, maybe millions of cookie cutter “news” websites and Twitter bots designed to spread a specific message to make it seem legitimate and drown out actually legitimate news.
Other important quotes:
“Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.”
“The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.”
“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”
“It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.”
“There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”
““Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.””
Hydra and Project Insight are real. Terrifying to know.
… so that’s what happened to 4chan. I could tell it was being used as a testing pool for propaganda – free human test subjects! – but I was stuck using forensic linguistics to catalogue “insincere posters” and check for patterns in the things they said. It’s already known that people are paid to post on there, but the overarching motive was unclear.
I have been witnessing this happening on Facebook and Reddit with my own eyes and struggling to describe it in coherent words that don’t sound alarmist, but I’m not sure there are any.
^ This has been happening for a very long time. I would estimate this started around 2006, aka, “the summer that never ended”, but it was absolutely in motion by 2009. I’ve been watching it happen. My friends have been watching it happen. It’s not “oh no, this is happening”.
We finally found the wallet. This has been the proverbial serpent in the frog garden for a decade. It has devoured the internet.
Yeah, 2006 sounds about right. I was talking about this with my partners the other night.
The rise of Facebook is a linchpin because it’s the best implement anyone’s ever had for delivering individually tailored propaganda to a large number of people. (Peter Thiel was its first funder…)
Account signup opened to the public in ‘06 and the userbase started expanding dramatically around 2009-10. This was also when they started turning a profit. I don’t have a timeline for the development of their manipulative algorithms, but it seems a reasonable inference that that’s when they figured out how to get people hooked and also convince them to buy things, so…
Do you have any recommendations for equally pretentious webcomics?
Sure thing!
The Abominable Charles Christopher – In theory, it’s about a mute yeti having whimsical adventures. In practice, like 80% of the strips have nothing to do with that, instead focusing on the daily lives of various forest creatures whose primary pastime seems to be acting out a surreal parody of human society. Also, there’s a couple of primal gods involved in some capacity, and this elderly bear whose blood-soaked tragedy of a backstory keeps popping up completely at random. The end result is like a very bleak sendup of Garfield-style newspaper comics with a complicated epic fantasy yarn just sort of happening in the background.
Minus – The daily life of a little girl who is, to all indications, completely omnipotent. Her various misadventures range from cute and heartwarming to utterly horrifying in their implications, and the comic doesn’t distinguish between the two; both extremes are presented in the same soft-toned, storybook-like fashion. The author vanished off the face of the Internet some years ago, and their comics are now accessible only via independent backups (one of which is linked above); by fortunate coincidence, Minus is one of their few works for which a complete archive still exists.
Rho – Highschool magical realism with a post-ironic twist. Basically, picture Scott Pilgrim if the protagonist was a. a teenage girl, and b. not an irredeemable douchebag, and that won’t be exactly right, but you’ll be in the same general ballpark. Largely episodic with few recurring characters, it ends abruptly and without resolution, so if you’re looking for an actual arc, this one may not be the best choice. It was published like a decade ago, when screen resolutions were lower, so the dialogue can be kinda squinty on a modern desktop, and also the site sometimes runs porn ads – fair warning on both counts.
this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014.
the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):
this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up.
but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop.
they remembered that no harm was coming from this actionand decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop.
she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.
they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered.
it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!
how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this???
well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen.
so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????
plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)
national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!
This isn’t even touching on the fact that plants exchange nutrients with other plants through their root networks and engage in constant “bartering,” sometimes withholding resources until they get something extra. This is all performed with the aid of fungi, and the fungi in turn seem to weigh options and make decisions that will best benefit both themselves and their plant symbiotes. Sometimes two plants even get territorial and try to poison one another, and the fungal network steps in to put a stop to it.
(I know some people hate Zak S, but the dude has a fine arts degree and knows his shit on this topic.)
Yes! This thread made me think of this essay when I first read it, but I couldn’t think of any identifiers from it to google so I didn’t bother running it down to include. Thanks to the-real-seebs for unknowingly providing a link to an essay I had lost track of, but was secretly thinking about for the last week :p
Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but – it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration – why do assholes always come out on top? – and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.
“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”
This is fascinating if you’re into math or sociology or computer programming or all of the above.
just moving along like everyone else 