Congratulations, Stupid.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Sep 03, 2018 7:24 pm

2012 Countdown » Sun Feb 18, 2018 3:41 pm wrote:R's are reduced to a 'smash and grab' operation.- I've heard that comment a few weeks ago.
We get our social safety net and oversight smashed while they do the grabbing.


Yep. Smash and grab, plunder and burn, mafia bust-out. That in a nutshell is the Trump cabinet, regulatory rollback, insane warlike posturing in all foreign directions, and one piece of successful lawmaking so far, i.e. the tax-cut a.k.a. payoff to the corporations and ruling class who are using it for the usual pumping up of asset bubbles on the way to the next crash, which may or may not be before 2020. Obscure it all by the smoke of serial unleashing of fascist outrages and a daily diet of new Reality TV programming.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby Grizzly » Mon Sep 03, 2018 8:23 pm

Happy Labor Day!

I am amazed and impressed -- in horrified fascination -- that this holiday has been so completely stripped of its association with the organization of working people.

It's all picnics and flags now, and nothing about strikes or Pinkertons or lock-outs or wage theft. or...

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Sep 19, 2018 10:46 pm

Seeing as we had some bitcoin stuff here earlier -is there another thread for it? Anyway:

Yes, the reindustrialization has arrived!

Abandoned golden-age industrial towns of upstate New York experiencing revival thanks to bitcoin mining operations. Seriously, they move to the cheap electricity and set up server farms, pay fees to the towns. Must be employing... uh, somebody?

Is this nuts, or is it nuts? Is it a perfect metaphor for shit, or what?


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyre ... icity.html

www.nytimes.com

Bitcoin Miners Flock to New York’s Remote Corners, but Get Chilly Reception

MASSENA, N.Y. — The hulking aluminum plant in this northern border town is starting to spew heat and noise again, four years after Alcoa shut it down. But now the hot hum comes from thousands of Chinese computer servers whirring away 24 hours a day for a very modern purpose: producing Bitcoins and other digital currencies.

The crackerbox-size machines stacked inside rusty cargo containers are powered by the same cheap source of electricity once used to extract aluminum from ore. They represent the first stage of an obscure company’s plan to convert the 60-year-old smelting works into the world’s biggest cryptocurrency mine.

“The size is overwhelming,” said Prieur Leary, as he led a tour of the 1,300-acre site formerly known as Alcoa East. “Maybe we’re a little bit crazy.”

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Prieur Leary, chief technology officer of Coinmint.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Mr. Leary is the chief technology officer of Coinmint, which has led an influx of entrepreneurs to this economically depressed region, all seeking to capitalize on the soaring value of digital currencies, like Bitcoin. Their arrival has been met with wariness — just what are they doing? — coupled with fears of their outsize thirst for electricity.

A backlash has spurred changes in state regulations and local building codes and some officials worry about becoming the East Coast counterpart to Wenatchee, Wash., which has been inundated by cryptocurrency speculators.

But neither local resistance nor a steep decline in the value of Bitcoin has blunted the demand for practically any space with a reliable power supply. Utility officials in this remote corner of New York — known as the North Country — continue to receive weekly inquiries from people aspiring to set up cryptocurrency mines.

[What Is Bitcoin, and How Does It Work?]

The region is an unlikely front in the global race to produce Bitcoin. Massena used to be a hub for making things — tangible things, like V-8 engines and parts for the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The factories that churned out those products are, for the most part, gone. Thousands of union jobs that paid well and offered full benefits have vanished, leaving the area with one of the state’s highest unemployment rates.

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A dam on the St. Lawrence River between Canada and the United States provides hydroelectric power.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
But the iconic American corporations that abandoned plants in Massena left behind the precious resource that drew them here in the first place: abundant, cheap electricity flowing from a dam in the St. Lawrence River.

Some locals had never heard of cryptocurrency before their utility bills increased last winter and they learned that start up ventures rushing to cash in on the Bitcoin boom were responsible. If they knew anything about this new type of intangible money, it was that Bitcoin’s value had shot up last year to nearly $20,000 from $1,000. (It has since fallen back to about $6,300.)

Bitcoin is nearly a decade old, but that dizzying run-up and fall has put the North Country on the crypto-mining map. Before the speculators arrived in Massena, they discovered Plattsburgh, a small city about 80 miles to the east that was also awash in cheap hydropower from the St. Lawrence.

Mr. Leary showed up there two years ago, before Bitcoin had fully registered in the popular consciousness, and set up shop in an industrial park. Coinmint filled a small space with servers built for the singular task of creating cryptocurrency, running them nonstop. Each server, or miner, draws as much as 1.5 kilowatts, or about twice as much as a typical refrigerator.

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A Coinmint facility in Plattsburgh.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
As the Bitcoin market grew, Mr. Leary expanded into much bigger space in a nearby shopping center that had been a distribution center for comic books. Soon, Coinmint installed four transformers that could draw more than 13 megawatts, or enough power to run about 10,000 homes. It was more than one-tenth of the local utility’s total allocation of low-cost hydropower.

This heavy usage was not a problem on most days, said Colin Read, the mayor of Plattsburgh. But during an extreme cold spell last winter, the people of Plattsburgh got a costly glimpse at the impact their new neighbors could have.

With electricity so cheap that most residents use it to heat their homes, the city’s consumption exceeded its allocation on several days, Mr. Read explained. As a result, the Municipal Lighting Department had to purchase additional power at much higher prices — a cost it spread across its customers.

“We had a huge rash of complaints” about the jump in utility bills, Mr. Read said.

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Plattsburgh, N.Y., is the first American municipality to place a moratorium on new cryptocurrency mining operations while the city decides how to cope with the new burdens on its power grid.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Among those complaining was Thomas Recny, the chief financial officer of one of city’s biggest employers, Mold-Rite Plastics. Mr. Recny said his company’s electric bills were about $60,000 higher than normal for January and February, an unforeseen increase of about 30 percent.

Mr. Recny asked why an enterprise that required only a few people to run it should be able to drive up the operating costs of a company that employed about 500.

“The only reason they’re here is this unusually inexpensive rate for power,” Mr. Recny said. “But with two guys, they can consume more electricity than a hospital.”

Mr. Recny also said he was “still somewhat puzzled” about the need for digital currency, which he knew could be used for essentially anonymous online transactions. He questioned whether it was appropriate “to have the electricity used for that purpose,” which he said might involve some illicit activities.

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Colin Read, the mayor of Plattsburgh.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Sitting in his office in City Hall near the shore of Lake Champlain, Mr. Read had a more positive view of cryptocurrency. He said he told his economics students at SUNY Plattsburgh that it would exist in some form, whatever the fate of Bitcoin itself, for many years. “No doubt about that,” he said.

The mining operations that ultimately survive will be those that get the most electricity at the lowest prices, he said. Whether they deserve it is a separate question that Plattsburgh, Massena and other towns in the region have been grappling with. Their municipal utilities have persuaded state regulators to allow them to charge higher rates for electricity to cryptocurrency miners.

In March, Plattsburgh became the first American municipality to impose a moratorium on new cryptocurrency mining while the city decides how to cope with the new burdens on its power grid.

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Leon Christman manages Coinmint’s operations in Plattsburgh.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
In the meantime, Mr. Read said, city officials are adapting building codes to account for the fire hazards posed by the servers, each of which can generate as much heat as a small space heater. The concerns are part of a broader battle over the enormous carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining, which on a global scale uses as much energy as a medium-sized country.

Mr. Read estimated that Coinmint had made a profit of more than $50 million in Plattsburgh. Leon Christman, who manages the company’s operations there, said the larger installation in Plattsburgh — the one with the leftover image of Spiderman painted on the back wall — earned $600,000 on its best day last year.

Plattsburgh’s temporary ban sent Mr. Leary to Massena, in St. Lawrence County, looking for an expansion site. Massena’s municipal utility, owned by its ratepayers, was already trying to hold Bitcoin speculators at bay as it figured out how to accommodate their demands, said Andrew J. McMahon, superintendent of the Massena Electric Department.

“Back last fall when Bitcoin was at $15,000 to $20,000, we were getting eight to 10 calls a week and they were wanting to set up within two or three weeks,” Mr. McMahon recounted. “These guys were wanting to plug in 10, 20, 30 megawatts. They were asking: How much do you have?”

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Ryan Brienza, 19, postponed college to try his hand at the cryptocurrency business. His company, Zafra, is developing a big box that could serve as a self-contained unit for miners, complete with electrical hookups, cooling and ventilation.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
The answer was nowhere near that much. Massena’s system has never distributed more than 50 megawatts at a time, and the biggest users draw just a few megawatts. In its industrial heyday, Massena was home to two aluminum plants and a General Motors factory. But they were far too big to connect to the municipal system. They tapped directly into the state’s power grid and purchased the lowest-priced wholesale power.

Mr. Leary wanted to follow that recipe. Earlier this year, the New York Power Authority agreed to provide 15 megawatts of subsidized power to Coinmint. But the authority grew skeptical of the company’s promises for job creation and local investment, scuttling that agreement and leaving Coinmint to obtain its power on the wholesale market, Mr. Leary said.

Standing outside the old Alcoa plant, Mr. Leary pointed out new bundles of black cables leading from an electric substation to smaller transformers inside. Those cables could deliver more than 40 megawatts now, he said, with the potential to increase the capacity tenfold.

“We’re just getting started,” Mr. Leary said.

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Cheap electricity is abundant in the area.CreditGabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times
Coinmint told state officials it would eventually employ 150 people in Massena, but only a few clusters of workers were visible on a recent midday tour of the plant.

Still, some residents welcomed the cryptocurrency miners — even if they weren’t too sure exactly what it is they do.

Over lunch at Spanky’s, a diner on Massena’s Main Street, Brad and Nancy Fletcher said they had no idea that Coinmint was already operating at Alcoa East. Mr. Fletcher, a retired state trooper, helps his wife manage her family’s RV park in neighboring Franklin County, which Mrs. Fletcher said was “even more depressed than St. Lawrence County.”

Besides the remaining aluminum works, the biggest employers in the area are prisons and a casino on the St. Regis Mohawk tribal land, the Fletchers said. If Coinmint fulfilled its promise, “that’s 150 more people that are going to be working,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “The area needs jobs. Anything that’s going to bring some would be good.”

We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby DrEvil » Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:10 am

^^Definitely nuts. We have cheap hydro power where I live too, and shock, surprise, some guy with heavy Chinese backing is opening a data center here. No one knows what it's for as everything is very hush-hush, but I'll eat my keyboard if it's not bitcoin mining. And of course the idiots at city hall gobbled it all up and signed a contract that none of them are even remotely qualified to understand, and then withheld everything from the public because business secrets.

Will be interesting to see the electricity bill come winter.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Sep 25, 2018 12:05 am

But back to the original topic with a cross-post.

JackRiddler » Mon Sep 24, 2018 11:55 pm wrote:.

CJ Hopkins does a monotone schtick, over and over. He (or possibly she, but I doubt it and will stick with "he" for now) is a lazy thinker and not funny. He is also serving the cause of confusionism. His one argument relies on agreeing with the corporate media lie that the non-FOX corporate media themselves are "liberal" or "the resistance," that they represent a significant real-world popular mass within the opposition to the Trumpian regime. This move allows him to conflate his juvenile if mostly justified mockery of corporate media propaganda with a dismissal and condemnation of the opposition to the Trumpian regime in general.

It also works to trivialize the rise of actual Nazis in the United States, not just people who are like Nazis but fucking self-designated Nazis, fascists and white supremacists.

I doubt CJH sets out to present an apologetic or trivialization of Nazis. He may be just a dick who thinks provoking the edumacated liberals makes him much smarter than them.

The column in the original post on this thread contains a disingenuous projection of what CJH thinks "liberals" and "the resistance" were thinking before the Charlottesville atrocity. He portrays his imagined liberals as relieved that actual Nazis showed up for the manifestation, so that they could condemn it and exaggerate the Nazi threat.

This attitude makes a big joke of the very real spike in Nazi violence, including the murder of Heather Heyer and attempted lynchings of various people at Charlottesville. Naturally not a single "resistance" figure who supposedly thought as CJH projects is cited saying anything like what he imagines. In fact, CJH doesn't refer to anyone at all, so that he is free to construct a caricature that covers a vague patch from "liberal" to "left." He's not interested in scholarship or empiricism. At best he's a dilettante. At worst, I figure he's... a dilettante. His material is too dumb to give it credence as some kind of sophisticated psyop.

Contrary to what CJH suggests in his latest contribution, it is not at all hard to discover why people associate Trump with fascism. Or connect him to Mussolini or Hitler (or Duterte, or various other dictators). Trump himself has willingly provided the fodder for it, along with his crew and his cabinet.

One need only have been sentient on the first day of Trump's campaign, when he identified Mexico as the source-land of rapists and drug dealers. Those of us who tracked him even a little bit in the decades before 2015 were long aware of it. What kind of person takes out ads calling for executions? But no prior knowledge was necessary once he started his campaign tour. The stump-speech cadences, the violent schtick and incitement, the identification of enemies among the dispossessed and excluded, the maudlin inchoate nostalgia for a past that never was, all these were amply clear. In office as on The Apprentice, the leadership principle of "Business CEO Ueber Alles" and the arbitrary daily demands that everyone shut up who doesn't salute him all echo familiar hits from the fascist songbook. The shared style is self-evident.

As I have taken to saying, he may not be a Hitler, but he sure likes to play one on TV. How deep does it run, how far can it go, how far will it go? Is it just a show? How much of it is just "snowflake provocation" to jolt the joyful yahoo base -- a more consequential version of what CJH also endeavors?

Do we really want to find out? He got up in front of the General Assembly and boasted about being ready to wage nuclear war, all "fire and fury." Am I supposed to just fob this off as an adorable Mad Dog stratagem? Should I say, what a negotiator?! Fuck that. The first rule of humanity is, you do not joke about nuclear war. Certainly not if you are someone capable of waging it.

His aborted idea of last week, already forgotten, was to send a presidential text to every cell phone in the nation. Maybe this is only staged like the wet dream of a fascist madman so as to bother the liberals, see? Hilarious.

In reality, Hitler and his party were not just political monsters who enacted putsch politics at just the right time to take power, and who used it with a consistent bent to total war and genocide. Hitler was also a crowd-working Kayfabe stage performer, a witting fake with an insatiable appetite for provocation. The brown shirts would kick people to death on the street while Hitler alternated between cheering them on and saying he had nothing to do with it, he was all about love and beautiful Aryan children. Mussolini, same style. It's not something everyone does but it's also not rare. It's not the province of some singular mastermind. Contrary to the reassuring stories we tell ourselves, and regardless of what creates them, Hitlers are not the world's rarest personality type. Surely we can agree on that?

The politically fascist legacy as embodied inside the Trump regime by the likes of Bannon, Gorka and Miller is obvious enough. Am I supposed to forget them, now that a couple of them are out? There are so many more where they came from. Trump not only acts like a crude tyrant on TV, he actively lures and attracts real ones in reality. Am I supposed to ignore the applause for him from the KKK and the Spencers and the alt-right? That's asking for more compartmentalization than anyone should have to grant.

That the permanent security state has always had its own, far more technocratic fascist legacy, long before Trump, doesn't change a thing about him. It's stupid to trivialize one because the other is bad. In reality, there are more points of correspondence than disagreement between the established power elite and the Trumpian regime. An undercurrent to normalize the Kayfabe Hitler can be seen in the corporate media's praise of his militarism and war moves, or in the recent NYT column by the "Anonymous" miscreant who affected to be the White House resistance within the regime itself, and to reassure us that the adults are in charge of the unruly child. This theme has accompanied the selective demonization through "Russiagate." Normalization and demonization operate as carrot and stick so that permanent state and power elite including its "liberals" can come to an accommodation with a number of actual Trumpian policies such as accelerated wealth concentration, tax cuts for billionaires, deregulation of corporate crime and pollution, suppression of electoral democracy, and of course the same bipartisan militarism as always. Every Democratic senator voted for the new military budget (Sanders and six Republicans voted against), but none of them compelled the administration to propose it in the first place. That was programmatic, and it is another important aspect that the CJH-style rhetoric helps to obscure.

Seeing the fascism in Trump doesn't require us to subscribe to the Louise Mensch twitter feed, or to lionize the CIA-NSA-FBI or the DNC or Clinton or the Silicon Valley mafia or Wall Street, or to long for restoration of the system as it was on the day before Trump's inauguration--the same system that in every way spawned him as one of its logical products.

Dimaggio was right, of course, and CJH is a piker hardly worth noting, except there are quite a few of his ilk these days. Edgelords regurgitating illiberal rhetoric and thinking they're so cool for it. I believe and hope the peak of this particular tendency has passed.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
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An empire of fraud, Made in America

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:32 pm

.

Before it disappears, allow me to summarize the most important article yet about the Life of Trump. (Link. It is 13,000 words. Read it.)

On the front end, Fred Trump's fortune drew from decades of post-World War II federal housing development loans and subsidies worth tens of millions. On the back end, tax evasion was vast, multifarious and constant. That was the business model. Properties were wildly undervalued, expenses inflated, revenues hidden. Tenants were systematically victimized. The family cultivated a deep contempt for the government that provided them with such largesse.

Over decades, hundreds of millions were shifted from Fred to his children via untaxed gift-loans and hidden property-transfer schemes. Donald received tens of millions in such never-to-be-repaid "loans" on a near-quarterly basis, contrary to his ridiculous legend that he made billions starting with nothing more than a million-dollar stake from Fred. A friend of the family enacted one payoff from Fred to Donald by buying 3.5 million in casino chips and leaving Atlantic City without making a bet. In Fred's final years, the children set up a scam company that overcharged on building services to drain the father's holding companies of $50 million in excess cash. After Fred's death, his properties were assessed at a small fraction of the value, allowing the children to evade at least $50 million in estate taxes. The IRS let almost all of this pass, sometimes making minor revisions in assessments. All of the late father's holdings were sold in 2004 at near full value for more than $800 million.

The lion's share of all this went to the "self-made" son and chosen successor, Donald. He was probably never a billionaire until recently, but for many years a gambler entangled in many schemes, often on the knife's edge of ruin. He got away with it in large part thanks to the corporate media.

The New York Times confesses to jump-starting Donald's celebrity career with a 1976 puff-piece that legitimated his absurd claim to be worth $200 million. This helped launch him as a suitor in the lobbies of higher-level finance. Today the paper describes their own article as a con-job. This kind of media coverage became routine and enabled the many side-scams based on the Trump name: the airline, the golf clubs, the steaks, the "university." Trump was made synonymous with the good life, with the American vision of success.

Now, finally, the Times presents the underbelly they mostly failed to cover for 42 years, drawing on thousands of documents to expose the workings of a crime family. Nothing about it is surprising, but confirmation in this much detail is big news. This was never a "business" in the sense that many Americans still believe.

Two vital takeaways:

1. Of course the system is designed to favor the rich, but tax evasion and scams with public money on this scale for this long do not happen without protection. New York developers exploiting government welfare in the postwar era could hardly have avoided collaboration with the mobsters that controlled the construction trades and the protection rackets, but this is not merely a truism. The Trump links to New York-New Jersey mafia figures and their shared lawyers (like Roy Cohn) are known. The most explosive parts of this story are implicit but still need to be told: payoffs to officials, bought politicians, the likelihood of blackmail and extortion. In the Donald years, this morphed into global money laundering through real estate and casinos. For all the legal mutations and shell-games, the resulting concerns remain active today. Anything done after 2012 is still liable to prosecution.

2. Given that, and with this piece landing on the desks of attorney generals from New York to California, the speculation no longer appears outlandish that Trump needs to get Kavanaugh seated before the Supreme Court considers the Gamble "double jeopardy" case, which could end state-level investigations into Trump Organization emoluments and scams.

3. The corporate media was complicit at every stage. They did not report on the businesses. They did not take up the investigative research published by the likes of David Cay Johnston, Wayne Barrett, and several others starting already in the 1980s. They did devote decades of puff to the fake playboy. This relationship blossomed into 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the WWE venture, and the years of uninterrupted transmission of his every poisonous word that powered the presidential campaign, long before the first primary. Today they still enable him by coddling the violent, racist politics as "populist" and, paradoxically, by pretending anything bad about the regime is the product of an obscure foreign conspiracy.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:11 pm

The above was in Counterpunch, too.

Here to log my own idiocy. 1) Shouldn't have bothered, neurotic waste of time. 2) Should have posted here rather than some disposable of 30,000 identical Russiagate threads, so that I can find it. So 3) crossposting here.

JackRiddler » Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:46 am wrote:.

If you want to know how aversion to Clinton among #BLM exploded, you only need see the video of how she treated the woman who spoke out to her at her rich-people fundraiser. Or the 1990s TV interview in which she popularized the term "super-predator." It is so fucking insulting to imply this came from 13 one-handed keyboarders in Petrograd. In fact, it's implicitly racist, as if black radicals wouldn't be thinking and tweeting their thoughts without help from Uncle Vanya. Some Russians repeating the predictable reactions to police shootings among Americans is a mere echo, even if the data-head presents a graphic that makes it look like the Eyes of the Devil. And this is also insulting to the American racists. As if they wouldn't have reacted the same way to #BLM as they have been reacting to everything for decades, long before even the Internet. Racists have agency too, it doesn't come from Petrograd. [And it's insulting to everyone who spent any time on the Internet since it became a mass thing, as if mean posting and "divisiveness" and "fake news" first arrived when a Russian thought of it.]

0_0 » Sat Mar 03, 2018 5:12 pm wrote:Slad i think we can agree this whole thing started with allegations of Russian meddling in the US elections and i find it amusing that after more than a year of research it now appears that this meddling constituted of some 13 russian clickbait schemers posting links to news stories from major american news sources that were generally factually accurate. Talk about disrupting democracy! It becomes less funny and even somewhat alarming when you consider a choir of bigshots call this "an act of war on the scale of pearl harbor" or even a "cyber 911" if you will.


I would dispute "generally factually accurate" but it's also immaterial. The point is American. That is, the familiar U.S.-based capitalist enterprises manufacturing daily news for American audiences. Corporate-media news sources that cumulatively (and some individually) already have massive reach and readership. Case already closed.

So, some tiny fraction of those retweeting stories from these American news-manufacturing sites happened to be Russian clickbait schemers. We are never shown how their volume of retweeting compares to the total number of retweets or "foreign" retweets (except in laughably delimited cherrypicked arrangements like the article purporting to show that American "divisiveness" between anti-racism and racism was invented by Russians on Twitter in 2016). We are never told what happened when one clicked on their links, presumably because that would only make it more obvious that it was just another for-profit spam scheme.

If that's the main evidence, it is an absurdity and insulting to all when the Russiagaters style it into a central Russian state plot -- indeed, a successful GRU coup d'etat! Pearl Harbor! 9/11! -- that swung the U.S. elections for their remote-controlled Manchurian candidate.

But the damage is even greater than that, because it successfully strangles examination of the actual 2016 GOP voter suppression operations that elected Trump, as well as the gerrymandering, the billionaire dark-money, the corporate-media imbalance and all the rest. American crisis and corruption transposed to bogus foreign plot. And the biggest voter suppression operations of the modern era have been geared up to swing the Nov. 6 vote -- what's happening in Georgia is beyond incredible and in your face -- since it is clear the GOP is demographically and politically in dire straits but need only win this one to secure the 2020 census and gerrymander.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 22, 2018 5:28 pm

.

Returning to October 2016, a Bloomberg article went into detail on how the Trump campaign was practicing on a mass scale EXACTLY THE SAME FORMS OF TROLLING and seeking to exploit the same "divisiveness" in American society that is attributed to the "Russian troll farm." These operations were hundreds or thousands of times bigger, infinitely more "granular" and targeted, and absolutely standard for the GOP. They were run by Americans with lifetimes of experience with stupid things Americans can be made to think. Compared to this, as I have often said, the alleged operations run out of Petrograd are less than an echo. They are a baby-fart in the middle of a shit-storm. The Russiagaters' obsession with these trivialities has done double damage: it blinds people to the real enemy at home, while constructing an enemy for the next world war. The GOP gets a relative free pass to attempt the exact same crimes against democracy again in 12 days, as the corporate media focuses on nightmare scenarios about Russia, or China, "hacking another election." If the GOP pulls it off successfully, the same corporate media will sweep it all straight under the rug and once again make discussion of the voter suppression and election frauds anathema for all right-thinking people who fear the whiff of "conspiracy theory." They will continue to distract with false alarms about Russia, or China, or other foreign enemies.


www.bloomberg.com
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... days-to-go

Business
Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go
Win or lose, the Republican candidate and his inner circle have built a direct marketing operation that could power a TV network—or finish off the GOP.

By Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg

October 27, 2016, 6:00 AM EDT


On Oct. 19, as the third and final presidential debate gets going in Las Vegas, Donald Trump’s Facebook and Twitter feeds are being manned by Brad Parscale, a San Antonio marketing entrepreneur, whose buzz cut and long narrow beard make him look like a mixed martial arts fighter. His Trump tie has been paired with a dark Zegna suit. A lapel pin issued by the Secret Service signals his status. He’s equipped with a dashboard of 400 prewritten Trump tweets. “Command center,” he says, nodding at his laptop.

Parscale is one of the few within Trump’s crew entrusted to tweet on his behalf. He’s sitting at a long table in a double-wide trailer behind the debate arena, cheek to jowl with his fellow Trump staffers and Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee. The charged atmosphere and rows of technicians staring raptly at giant TVs and computer screens call to mind NASA on launch day. On the wall, a poster of Julian Assange reads: “Dear Hillary, I miss reading your classified emails.”

10:02 p.m.: Trump, onstage, criticizes Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign money. “Fire it off!” Parscale barks. Instantly, a new Trump tweet appears: “Crooked @HillaryClinton’s foundation is a CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE. Time to #DrainTheSwamp!”

10:04 p.m.: Trump blames Clinton for $6 billion that went missing during her tenure at the State Department (actually a bookkeeping error). “Hit that hard,” shouts Jason Miller, Trump’s senior communications adviser. Parscale already has: “Crooked’s top aides were MIRED in massive conflicts of interest at the State Dept. WE MUST #DrainTheSwamp.”

10:09 p.m.: Trump deploys a carefully rehearsed WikiLeaks attack: “Podesta said some horrible things about you—and he was right.” The trailer erupts. “There it is!” someone shouts. “Push that,” Parscale commands. Within seconds, Trump’s roiling social mediasphere is bestowed with a curated Clinton burn from their leader: “Bernie Sanders on HRC: Bad Judgement [sic]. John Podesta on HRC: Bad Instincts #BigLeagueTruth.”

When the debate wraps, Parscale leaps up, open laptop still in hand, and bolts from the trailer with Priebus and the rest of the senior staff to congratulate Trump as he comes off the stage. In the wings, Parscale joins Steve Bannon, Trump’s Machiavellian campaign chairman, on leave from Breitbart News Network; Dan Scavino Jr., his social media director; and a clutch of Trump children and their spouses, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom Parscale considers nearly a brother. Up on stage, Trump had been visibly upset, snapping at Clinton (“nasty woman”) and tearing a page from his notebook. But a moment later, when he emerges from a dark corridor with a phalanx of Secret Service agents, he’s thronged by his worshipful band of advisers, quasi-celebrities, and hangers-on. Parscale, tweeting as he walks, nearly misses him. Trump leans over to whisper into Bannon’s ear, and a Secret Service officer ushers Trump, Bannon, and Parscale toward a row of black SUVs. A moment later, they’re gone. Trump reclaims possession of his virtual self.

Parscale, now tweeting from his own account, celebrates the night’s haul: “HUGE 24hrs of online donations for @realDonaldTrump. 125,000+ unique donors grossing over $9,000,000! Thank you America! #MAGA.”



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Almost every public and private metric suggests Trump is headed for a loss, possibly an epic one. His frustrated demeanor on the campaign trail suggests he knows it. Yet even as he nears the end of his presidential run, his team is sowing the seeds of a new enterprise with a direct marketing effort that they insist could still shock the world on Election Day.

Beginning last November, then ramping up in earnest when Trump became the Republican nominee, Kushner quietly built a sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign that’s become the locus of his father-in-law’s presidential bid. Trump’s top advisers won’t concede the possibility of defeat, but they’re candid about the value of what they’ve built even after the returns come in—and about Trump’s desire for influence regardless of outcome. “Trump is a builder,” says Bannon, in a rare interview. “And what he’s built is the underlying apparatus for a political movement that’s going to propel us to victory on Nov. 8 and dominate Republican politics after that.”

If Trump wants to strengthen his hold on his base, then his apocalyptic rhetoric on the stump begins to make more sense. Lately he’s sounded less like a candidate seeking to persuade moderates and swing voters and more like the far-right populist leaders who’ve risen throughout Europe. Most Republican Party officials ardently hope he’ll go away quietly if he loses. But given all that his campaign—and Kushner’s group especially—has been doing behind the scenes, it looks likelier that Trump and his lieutenants will stick around. They may emerge as a new media enterprise, an outsider political movement, or perhaps some combination of the two: an American UK Independence Party (UKIP) that will wage war on the Republican Party—or, rather, intensify the war that Trump and Bannon have already begun.

To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed. But after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, Kushner tapped Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo. With Trump atop the GOP ticket, Kushner was eager to grow fast. “When we won the nomination, we decided we were going to do digital fundraising and really ramp this thing up to the next level,” says a senior official. Kushner, this official continued, “reached out to some Silicon Valley people who are kind of covert Trump fans and experts in digital marketing. They taught us about scaling. There’s really not that much of a difference between politics and regular marketing.”

When Bannon joined the campaign in August, Project Alamo’s data began shaping even more of Trump’s political and travel strategy—and especially his fundraising. Trump himself was an avid pupil. Parscale would sit with him on the plane to share the latest data on his mushrooming audience and the $230 million they’ve funneled into his campaign coffers. Today, housed across from a La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery along Interstate 410 in San Antonio, the digital nerve center of Trump’s operation encompasses more than 100 people, from European data scientists to gun-toting elderly call-center volunteers. They labor in offices lined with Trump iconography and Trump-focused inspirational quotes from Sheriff Joe Arpaio and evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. Until now, Trump has kept this operation hidden from public view. But he granted Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive access to the people, the strategy, the ads, and a large part of the data that brought him to this point and will determine how the final two weeks of the campaign unfold.

Several things jump out. Despite Trump’s claim that he doesn’t believe the polls, his San Antonio research team spends $100,000 a week on surveys (apart from polls commissioned out of Trump Tower) and has sophisticated models that run daily simulations of the election. The results mirror those of the more reliable public forecasters—in other words, Trump’s staff knows he’s losing. Badly. “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Parscale, referring to the polling analyst and his predictions at FiveThirtyEight, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.” The campaign knows who it must reach and is still executing its strategy despite the public turmoil: It’s identified 13.5 million voters in 16 battleground states whom it considers persuadable, although the number of voters shrinks daily as they make up their minds.

Trump’s team also knows where its fate will be decided. It’s built a model, the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” to weight and rank the states that the data team believes are most critical to amassing the 270 electoral votes Trump needs to win the White House. On Oct. 18 they rank as follows: Florida (“If we don’t win, we’re cooked,” says an official), Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Trump believes he possesses hidden strength that may only materialize at the ballot box. At rallies, he’s begun speculating that the election will be like “Brexit times five,” implying that he’ll upend expectations much as the Brexit vote shocked experts who didn’t believe a majority of Britons would vote to leave the European Union. Trump’s data scientists, including some from the London firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit initiative, think they’ve identified a small, fluctuating group of people who are reluctant to admit their support for Trump and may be throwing off public polls.

Still, Trump’s reality is plain: He needs a miracle. Back in May, newly anointed, he told Bloomberg Businessweek he would harness “the movement” to challenge Clinton in states Republicans haven’t carried in years: New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Connecticut, California. “I’m going to do phenomenally,” he predicted. Yet neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.



Campaign staff in Trump Tower.

Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.

Regardless of whether this works or backfires, setting back GOP efforts to attract women and minorities even further, Trump won’t come away from the presidential election empty-handed. Although his operation lags previous campaigns in many areas (its ground game, television ad buys, money raised from large donors), it’s excelled at one thing: building an audience. Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”

Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”

Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as “disenfranchised new Republicans,” are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign’s goal all along. It’s why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it’s smarter than political professionals. “We knew how valuable this would be from the outset,” says Parscale. “We own the future of the Republican Party.”

Like so many Trump die-hards, Parscale, 40, is an up-from-nothing striver who won a place in the Trump firmament by dint of his willingness to serve the family’s needs—and then, when those needs turned to presidential campaigning, wound up inhabiting a position of remarkable authority. He oversees the campaign’s media budget and supervises a large staff of employees and contractors, a greater number than report for duty each day at Trump Tower headquarters. “My loyalty is to the family,” he says. “Donald Trump says ‘Jump’; I say, ‘How high?’ Then I give him my opinion of where I should jump to, and he says, ‘Go do it.’ ”

Parscale was born in a small town outside Topeka, Kan., a self-described “rural jock” whose size—6-foot-8, 240 pounds—won him a basketball scholarship to the University of Texas at San Antonio. When injuries derailed his playing career, his interest turned to business. “The day I graduated, I skipped the ceremony to go straight to California for the dot-com boom,” he says. It was 1999. He became a sales manager for a video streaming company, taught himself programming, and eventually bought some of the company’s intellectual property, in digital video and 3D animation, and struck out on his own. But after the dot-com crash, his company failed, he got divorced, and by 2002 he was back in San Antonio, broke and unemployed.



Parscale and his colleagues in his Trump Tower office.

Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek

He hustled consulting gigs, going door to door and cold-calling local businesses. “My first year, I tapped on shoulders in a bookstore to get my first customers, people who were buying web books, and asked if they needed help,” he says. One day in 2010, the phone rang. It was Kathy Kaye, the new head of Trump International Realty. “She said, ‘Would you like to bid on building the Trump website?’ ” Parscale recalls. “I said yeah. I bid $10,000 on the first website. I think they were shocked how cheap it was. Next thing I know, I’m talking to Ivanka. So they signed a contract with me, and I wrote the website by myself. I told ’em I’d give all the money back if they didn’t like it.”

The Trumps liked it. He eventually built sites for Trump Winery and the Eric Trump Foundation. When Trump launched a presidential exploratory committee, he knew who could build a website for him on the cheap: Parscale charged $1,500.

By then he’d partnered with a local designer and expanded into a design and marketing agency, Giles-Parscale. Trump’s own approach to self-promotion, reinforced by Kushner’s advice, was at odds with the highly targeted logic of the web. “If you’re running a burger shop, you have to let people know that your burgers are good and get them into your shop to buy them,” says a source close to the candidate. “It’s pretty similar with voting: You have to find out what people want and then convince them why your product is the right one.”



A poll map.

Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek

Trump’s digital operation was focused primarily on tracking down the people who already liked his burgers and getting them to buy more. Parscale began toying with a list of registered voters acquired from a nonpartisan database vendor to learn more about who Trump’s backers were. Because the campaign hadn’t cultivated his supporters as donors or volunteers, most of what it knew about them came from requests for tickets to his rallies. After a March event in Chicago devolved into a melee, Parscale decided to stop relying on the ticketing service Eventbrite and build his own tool to accept RSVPs. He says he coded the program himself in two days so eventgoers would have to confirm via mobile phone. The added layer would weed out fraudulent requests placing tickets in protesters’ hands—and also collect supporters’ phone numbers.

Parscale was given a small budget to expand Trump’s base and decided to spend it all on Facebook. He developed rudimentary models, matching voters to their Facebook profiles and relying on that network’s “Lookalike Audiences” to expand his pool of targets. He ultimately placed $2 million in ads across several states, all from his laptop at home, then used the social network’s built-in “brand-lift” survey tool to gauge the effectiveness of his videos, which featured infographic-style explainers about his policy proposals or Trump speaking to the camera. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale says. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”

As Kushner, who shares his father-in-law’s disdain for political professionals, became more active in the campaign’s operations, Parscale emerged from among dozens of vendors into a unique role. “Once Jared found Brad,” says a campaign official, “we were able to avoid building a big team and ran a lot of our back end through his office in San Antonio.”

After Trump won the Indiana primary, vanquishing his remaining rivals, Parscale had to integrate his do-it-yourself operation with two established players who would jostle for primacy as supplier of Trump’s data. The first was Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. Among its investors is the hedge fund titan Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who were about to become some of the largest donors to the Trump cause. Locations for the candidate’s rallies, long the centerpiece of his media-centric candidacy, are guided by a Cambridge Analytica ranking of the places in a state with the largest clusters of persuadable voters. The other was the Republican National Committee, to which Trump relinquished control over many of its tactical decisions. “I told him he’s going to want to use the RNC once he’s the nominee,” says Newt Gingrich. “Reince has built a real system, and it can be very valuable to him.”

Soon after Trump secured the nomination, a team from the RNC flew to San Antonio to meet Parscale at his favorite Mexican restaurant and discuss what party officials began describing as “the merger.” Priebus boasted then of having put “more than $100 million into data and infrastructure” since Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. More than 10 percent of that cash went solely to beefing up the RNC’s e-mail list, which now has a dedicated department of a dozen people managing a list of more than 6 million supporters. To win access to them, Trump negotiated a partnership. The party’s online fundraising specialists would use his name and keep 80 percent of the revenue, while Trump’s campaign would get the remainder. “This is exactly what the party needed the RNC to do—building assets and infrastructure and the nominee gets to benefit from it,” says Chief Digital Officer Gerrit Lansing.

Trump’s team, which hadn’t actively raised money during the primaries, was unprepared. “I was put in the position of ‘We need to start fundraising tomorrow,’ ” says Parscale. That turn was so hasty that when, in late June, Trump sent out his first e-mail solicitation, it ended up in recipients’ spam folders 60 percent of the time. Typically marketers in that situation would have begun quietly blasting less important messages from a new server to familiarize spam filters with the sender’s address. Parscale shrugs off the ensuing criticism from technologists. “Should I have set up an e-mail server a month earlier? Possibly,” he says. “We also raised $40 million in two weeks. Woo-hoo, spam rating.”

Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts. Each time Parscale returned to San Antonio from Trump Tower, he would find that some vendors had been booted from their offices.

Parscale’s department not only paid for itself but also was the largest source of campaign revenue. That endeared it to a candidate stingy with other parts of the budget. When Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Parscale’s responsibilities grew, then further still when Lewandowski’s replacement, Paul Manafort, flamed out. In June, Parscale, whose prior political experience was a Bexar County tax assessor’s race (his client lost), became Trump’s digital director and, in many ways, the linchpin of his unusual run.

By the time Bannon became chief executive officer, Parscale had balanced the competition between the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, with different sources of data being tapped for the campaign’s fundraising appeals, persuasive communication, and get-out-the-vote contacts. “I’m the only one that hasn’t gained from any of this,” he says pointedly about the data rivalry.

In June, Parscale granted his first national interview, to Wired, to preemptively explain why the Federal Election Commission was about to report that an unknown agency in San Antonio was the Trump campaign’s largest vendor. In August, Giles-Parscale handled $9 million in business from Trump’s campaign; two months later, the company’s total haul had cleared $50 million, most of it money passing through to online ad networks at little markup. Parscale was delivering his services at such a discount that Kushner even worried that the agency’s efforts might have to be classified as an in-kind contribution. “Jared’s a big part of what gave me my power and ability to do what I’ve been doing,” says Parscale, who sees himself as more than just a staffer. “Because you know what I was willing to do? I was willing to do it like family.”

There are signs that Trump’s presidential run has dealt a serious blow to his brand. His inflammatory comments about Mexican “rapists” and demeaning comments about women triggered a flood of busted deals and lost partnerships. Macy’s stopped making Trump-branded menswear, Serta halted its line of mattresses emblazoned with his logo, and celebrity chefs fled his new luxury hotel in Washington. Booking websites show that visits to Trump-branded hotels are down. Win or lose, Trump’s future may well lie in capitalizing on the intense, if limited, political support he has cultivated over the past year.

According to a source close to Trump, the idea of a Trump TV network originated during the Republican primaries as a threat Kushner issued to Roger Ailes when Trump’s inner circle was unhappy with the tenor of Fox News’s coverage. The warring factions eventually reconciled. But Trump became enamored by the power of his draw after five media companies expressed interest. “One thing Jared always tells Donald is that if the New York Times and cable news mattered, he would be at 1 percent in the polls,” says the source. “Trump supporters really don’t have a media outlet where they feel they’re represented—CNN has gone fully against Trump, MSNBC is assumed to be against Trump, and Fox is somewhere in the middle. What we found is that our people have organized incredibly well on the web. Reddit literally had to change their rules because it was becoming all Trump. Growing the digital footprint has really allowed us to take his message directly to the people.”

It’s not clear how much of this digital audience will remain in Trump’s thrall if he loses. But the number should be substantial. “Trump will get 40 percent of the vote, and half that number at least will buy into his claim that the election was rigged and stolen from him,” says Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign chief and an outspoken Trump critic. “That is more than enough people to support a multibillion-dollar media business and a powerful presence in American politics.”



Kushner and Bannon at a Trump rally in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 14.

Photographer: Alex Welsh for Bloomberg Businessweek

Digital strategists typically value contact lists at $3 to $8 per e-mail, which would price Trump’s list of supporters anywhere from $36 million to $112 million. The Trump enterprise could benefit from it in any number of ways. The easiest move would be for Trump to partner with Bannon’s global Breitbart News Network, which already has a grip on the rising generation of populist Republicans. Along with a new venture, Trump would gain a platform from which to carry on his movement, built upon the millions of names housed in Project Alamo. “This is the pipe that makes the connection between Trump and the people,” says Bannon. “He has an apparatus that connects him to an ever-expanding audience of followers.”

As it happens, this cross-pollination of right-wing populist media and politics is already occurring overseas—and Trump’s influence on it is unmistakable. In early October, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart London, Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage, announced he would run for leader of UKIP. His slogan: “Make UKIP Great Again.”

The final ignominy for a Republican Party brought low by Trump is that its own digital efforts may undermine its future. The data operation in which Priebus and the RNC invested so heavily has fed into Project Alamo, helping Parscale build Trump’s base. “They brought to the table this movement and people who were willing to donate and activate, and we brought to the table a four-year investment and said we can process that for you,” says Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist. “That willingness to embrace what the RNC built allowed them to harness that movement.”

If the election results cause the party to fracture, Trump will be better positioned than the RNC to reach this mass of voters because he’ll own the list himself—and Priebus, after all he’s endured, will become just the latest to invest with Trump and wind up poorer for the experience.






.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:16 pm

.

Hmmmmm... something I wrote after the 2016 election, and a comment now:

JackRiddler » Sun Jan 15, 2017 1:30 am wrote:
...what war has Trump promised?

"He will cut the head off ISIS and TAKE THEIR OIL."

The take-their-oil war. Repeated statements and presented as campaign platform (see that ad if you still have not). In clarifying, he made clear he would have kept "a group" in Iraq [AFTER THE BUSH INVASION] to secure their oil fields.

Otherwise constant talk about American weakness and need to massively increase military. [ACCOMPLISHED, MORE SO] And now he's appointed neocons to the command portfolios so rabid that they had been kept at arm's length even by the Bush crew. [CHECK, MORE SO]

I'd also characterize his promises to round up and deport millions, build a wall, and make Mexico pay for it as forms of war. [ON TRACK TO WARLIKE ESCALATIONS]

Overturning the Iran deal (through findings that they are not complying, new provocations, etc. etc.) would be a big step. [DID IT]

And the shift on China has all kinds of idiot risks (the Taiwan call, South China Sea, etc.). [DEVELOPING]

It matters that his style is constantly about bullying the weak, finding enemies, and expressing things in violent and brutal terms. Those who defend him for "straight talk" may come to appreciate the braking effects of "liberal hypocrisy." Or not.

.


If the MbS regime unravels in the wake of the Kasshoggi affair I could see US troops "securing the oil" there. Even being invited in by the new royal heir-designate or strongman-general or democratic reformer. At which point, necessarily, declaration of domestic CODEORANGE-PLUS.

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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 2:08 pm

Cross-posting merely to make it easier later to keep track of another basically Trump thread in which I wrote a lot for some reason.

JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 12:59 pm wrote:.

All of this stuff about the bombs apparently being toys or props is also consistent with a mentally ill incompetent fantasist in desperate straits (no doubt damaged by many years of masculinism and wounds to it) desiring some kind of cathartic action to overcome the pain of his powerlessness, set off by the current media crescendo leading up to the election. If so, it doesn't matter that these were toy bombs, the act of sending the totems was a fulfillment in itself.

I won't argue for or against that scenario, since I cannot know, but its plausibility is rock-solid to me. I have met enough people at the intersection of sick, stupid and violent, as have all of you.

I don't even think this constitutes a general indictment of Trumpdom. (Voting for Trump is indictment enough, and I don't mean that as a joke. We all heard the things he said.) The incitement for Trump followers to target his enemy list with acts of violence is thick in the air these days. But individuals vulnerable to such action could also be set off by other incitements, or by endogenous fantasy.

This is why I feared not the institutional false flag operation (I feel this is too peanuts for that) but the possibility of a perpetrator who could be characterized as something other than a member of Trumpdom. By a stereotype justified in hundreds of such cases, most everyone expected a white middle-aged man with right-wing ideology (living in a parking lot in Florida is overkill but consistent). At least this has no consequences for others fitting that description. They need not fear a round-up or violent popular backlash of middle-aged right-wing white men. Certain deviations from this set of attributes -- black, leftist, most especially Muslim -- would have meant a general campaign and increased state repression aimed at a group as a whole.

I would agree that the state and corporate media reaction to this, the construction of it as a One Big Thing to consume all attention for several days, is by far the most important element. I remember stories over the decades about bombs or fake bombs sent to celebrity hate objects through the mail that were mere sidebars in the press. I'm too lazy, but a LexisNexis search would probably find dozens of these. The Unabomber case (opposite case in competence) took years to build up general attention, and even then was moderate by comparison. In any case, if this is anything other than an institutional action, if this is as expected and now considered confirmed the action of a lone man, then it has been blown wildly out of proportion and turned into some kind of general zeitgeist indicator.

This is why all news including real news feels fake. It's always coming to us through standardized tropes and layers of editorial and aesthetic construction.

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We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby dada » Sat Oct 27, 2018 5:36 pm

JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 2:08 pm wrote:This is why all news including real news feels fake. It's always coming to us through standardized tropes and layers of editorial and aesthetic construction.


This conclusion feels forced. I'm not understanding why you would dignify the unthinking snarliness of 'fake news' by taking it up here. Legitimizing the smack-talk weakens the argument. I mean, are you criticizing the news, or aren't you.

This is why all news including real news is poor journalism. Why not just say it?
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 5:57 pm

Okay, I don't see a difference other than rhetoric in your version of the sentence, it's equally what I meant.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby dada » Sat Oct 27, 2018 6:22 pm

Rhetoric, eh? I guess I missed my calling. I should be writing for the Times. ha

'Seems fake' could equally apply to flash fiction, or a half-hour television drama. Poor journalism is direct.

edited to add: Speaking of the Times, I've noticed that the first two paragraphs of any Times piece could be cut without any loss. In fact I think editing the hooky lead-ins would give the articles more integrity. The form of the NYTimes article is closer to flash fiction or the half-hour television drama than journalism. So perhaps 'seems fake' is not so far off the mark, after all. I will reconsider.
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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 27, 2018 7:25 pm

.

Well, the words that the current monster uses did exist before him, and we should be able to use them if they apply. Now that you mention it, I'd say I meant more than poor journalism. I'm talking about how the media work, in their nature as media and due to the specific practices used. Because of tropes and staging and narratives, and perhaps most of all the disproportionality in attention given to certain often arbitrary topics (along with wild swings in attention), there is always an unreality in what comes across, even at those times when it is factually correct reporting. That's what I meant by feeling fake. Some guy sent some toy or dud bombs around and they give it the nuclear war treatment for several days, of course it has a fake feel to it whether or not it's true. And they do this every day and have been doing it every day for 25 years or so. The Spectacle, current version.

The first two paragraphs of (almost) any Times piece can be cut without a loss. It's their fucking trademark. I think it's gotten much worse as every piece nowadays is also kind of an argument for why they are different and should continue to exist.

That Trump Taxes report was a great example of why they should continue to exist. Bought a paper for the first time in years. It was a whole section. (Sunday Times is now SIX DOLLARS! Last time I bought one it was 2.50, I think.) As was the amazing report on Latour in the Sunday mag.

.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Congratulations, Stupid.

Postby dada » Sat Oct 27, 2018 11:09 pm

Fine, I will grant that almost any Times piece could be edited to look more like journalism than flash fiction, but not all. Of course that isn't the only thing that makes the Times poor journalism. It's the words. All the little things. Like the 'brash' Saudi monarch, a Times favorite. Brash is simply not a journalism word, not in that context.

And yes, it's more than just a six dollar Sunday crossword puzzle, there can be an important article in there sometimes. And if the Times disappeared, the important articles would have nowhere else to go, since we all know there are only two possible realities. One with the Times, with all that entails, and one without the Times, with all that entails. I can see this when I peer along the alternate timelines as well as you or anyone else.

Still the question remains, Should the Times continue to exist? I don't know if that's for me to answer. I will say it's a good thing the Times isn't a professional ball player, with that kind of batting average. Or as Don Quixote puts it, "one solitary swallow does not make summer." Then again, Don Quixote is out of his mind.

Unreality and facts working together, what a funny suggestion. I have an even funnier one: facts can be used rhetorically. Which facts, where they're used. What goes on in the words around them. Strange, right?

But I don't mean to derail the Congratulations, Stupid thread with a debate over which is worse, the fake newsyness nature of media practices (which isn't the same as calling it fake news, I understand) or poor journalism. It really doesn't matter, it's only the Times. I mean this is the paper that just last Sunday had an article about a real war on the front page, and next to it an article that compared fighting with trolls on the internet to being in an actual war. (Poor Khashoggi would get up in the morning and see the trolls attacking, it was just like 'waking up under machine gun fire.' Nice way to treat a dead guy, using him in that way.) I can't take a paper seriously that doesn't see how juxtaposing a real war and internet 'war' is just plain stupid.

I don't know, maybe it's just the copyeditors that are stupid. So in the spirit of this thread, I congratulate them.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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