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The New York Times lists Emmy winners. The AP has an overview story here.

New York Times: “Hvaldimir, a beluga whale who had captured the public’s imagination since 2019 after he was spotted wearing a harness seemingly designed for a camera, was found dead on Saturday in Norway, according to a nonprofit that worked to protect the whale.... [Hvaldimir] was wearing a harness that identified it as “equipment” from St. Petersburg. There also appeared to be a camera mount. Some wondered if the whale was on a Russian reconnaissance mission. Russia has never claimed ownership of the whale. If Hvaldimir was a spy, he was an exceptionally friendly one. The whale showed signs of domestication, and was comfortable around people. He remained in busier waters than are typical for belugas....” ~~~

~~~ Marie: Oh, Lord, do not let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., near that carcass. ~~~

~~~ AP Update: “There’s no evidence that a well-known beluga whale that lived off Norway’s coast and whose harness ignited speculation it was a Russian spy was shot to death last month as claimed by animal rights groups, Norwegian police said Monday.... Police said that the Norwegian Veterinary Institute conducted a preliminary autopsy on the animal, which was become known as 'Hvaldimir,' combining the Norwegian word for whale — hval — and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin. 'There are no findings from the autopsy that indicate that Hvaldimir has been shot,' police said in a statement.”

New York Times: Botswana's “President Mokgweetsi Masisi grinned as he lifted the diamond, a 2,492-carat stone that is the biggest diamond unearthed in more than a century and the second-largest ever found, according to the Vancouver-based mining operator Lucara, which owns the mine where it was found. This exceptional discovery could bring back the luster of the natural diamond mining industry, mining companies and experts say. The diamond was discovered in the same relatively small mine in northeastern Botswana that has produced several of the largest such stones in living memory. Such gemstones typically surface as a result of volcanic activity.... The diamond will likely sell in the range of tens of millions of dollars....”

Click on photo to enlarge.

~~~ Guardian: "On a distant reef 16,000km from Paris, surfer Gabriel Medina has given Olympic viewers one of the most memorable images of the Games yet, with an airborne celebration so well poised it looked too good to be true. The Brazilian took off a thundering wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti on Monday, emerging from a barrelling section before soaring into the air and appearing to settle on a Pacific cloud, pointing to the sky with biblical serenity, his movements mirrored precisely by his surfboard. The shot was taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Jérôme Brouillet, who said “the conditions were perfect, the waves were taller than we expected”. He took the photo while aboard a boat nearby, capturing the surreal image with such accuracy that at first some suspected Photoshop or AI."

Washington Post: “'Mary Cassatt at Work' is a large and mostly satisfying exhibition devoted to the career of the great American artist beloved for her sensitive and often sentimental views of family life. The 'at work' in the title of the Philadelphia Museum of Art show references the curators’ interest in Cassatt’s pioneering effort to establish herself as a professional artist within a male-dominated field. Throughout the show, which includes some 130 paintings, pastels, prints and drawings, the wall text and the art on view stresses Cassatt’s fixation on art as a career rather than a pastime.... Mary Cassatt at Work is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through Sept. 8. philamuseum.org”

New York Times: “Bob Newhart, who died on Thursday at the age of 94, has been such a beloved giant of popular culture for so long that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was that he became one of the founding fathers of stand-up comedy. Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album 'The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart' — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.... Bob Newhart holds up. In fact, it’s hard to think of a stand-up from that era who is a better argument against the commonplace idea that comedy does not age well.”

Washington Post: “An early Titian masterpiece — once looted by Napolean’s troops and a part of royal collections for centuries — caused a stir when it was stolen from the home of a British marquess in 1995. Seven years later, it was found inside an unassuming white and blue plastic bag at a bus stop in southwest London by an art detective, and returned. This week, the oil painting 'The Rest on the Flight into Egypt' sold for more than $22 million at Christie’s. It was a record for the Renaissance artist, whom museums describe as the greatest painter of 16th-century Venice. Ahead of the sale in April, the auction house billed it as 'the most important work by Titian to come to the auction market in more than a generation.'”

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Tuesday

Feb202018

Some Right-Wing Lies Are Subtle

This morning, the Hill was running an ad for Newsmax, the right-wing "news" operation founded by Trump BFF Christopher Ruddy. The ad included links to Newsmax stories. I clicked on one of them, a story by Cathy Burke. Her lede: "President Donald Trump's massive tweetstorm after the indictment of Russian nationals and companies for trying to influence the U.S. election might have made it harder to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, Politico reported."

Really? I hadn't seen that story when I looked at Politico's headlines, so I clicked on the linked Politico "report." I don't know who Cathy Burke is. Maybe she's so dumb she thinks the linked "report" is a report. It is not. Rather, it is an opinion piece in Politico Magazine by Renato Mariotti. At the bottom of the opinion piece, Politico identifies Mariotti as "a former federal prosecutor and a Democratic candidate for attorney general of Illinois."

The founding CEO of Politico was Fred Ryan, who was at one time chief-of-staff for Ronald Reagan. He is a Republican. (Oh, & he is now the publisher of the Washington Post. Nice.) I would not call Politico a right-wing news outlet as it has always employed some liberal reporters & commentators, and quite a few Politico reporters do a good job at straight reporting. But it definitely is not the Daily Worker, either.

Most newspapers & many news magazines publish opinion pieces by people who disagree with their own editorial outlook. Unfortunately, the dimwits who read Newsmax are very likely unable to distinguish the difference between "reports" and "opinion pieces." Newsmax not only counts on its readers' ignorance, it amplifies that ignorance by characterizing an opinion piece written by a Democrat as a "report."

The effect on Newsmax readers, whether or not they read Mariotti's opinion piece, will be to suddenly discover that Politico is a leftist rag flogging "Democrat reporters" hostile to Donald Trump. So if these Newsmax readers also had been turning to Politico as a news source, they're more likely to turn off Politico now, or at least to discount Politico reports they don't like as "fake news."

The right wing has a thousand ways of misleading the public. Many are flat-out lies & loopy conspiracy theories. But some are more subtle. And I'll bet the subtle ones are more convincing to confederates than Pizzagate.

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Maybe we need a "Today In Bots" section:
One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-shooting.html

February 20, 2018 |

CaptRuss

Disinformation has been the rage on the right for decades. Some is deliberate, some could be the result of readers/viewers/consumers of that disinformation being unable to process it as such and simply passing it on as if it were the god's honest truth. Trump is a master at playing this game, with his "People are all saying" and "Everybody knows this" set ups for whatever lie comes next.

But truthful, or at least largely factual information (truth being somewhat separate from fact since those facts have to be considered in proper order and context in order to derive a conclusion that could be called truthful) is also subjected to the right-wing treatment as it is processed and scrubbed through ideological filters and reshaped to fit the desired outcome. So incontrovertible evidence of Russian meddling in the recent election becomes "proof" of how insidious the deep state is and how compromised all non-right-wing media outlets are.

The problem we have today, and it's one that is used on a daily basis by not only the Russians, but the shapers and deliverers of right-wing propaganda, is the speed at which factual information can be perverted into disinformation and the whole spread like wildfire alongside actual lies.

It's like a hyperspeed version of the Telephone Game in which players form a line and something is whispered from one to the other to see how it can be changed by the time it comes back to the first player. Prior to the internet, much political folderol was transmitted in a Telephone Game manner in the form of tidbits of half-heard information or gossip passed on in barber shops, grocery stores, bars, neighbor to neighbor, or friend to friend. But this was a lengthy process and if you happened not to be in the chain or connected to someone in the chain, you missed it entirely.

Those of us old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination can recall how long it took (years, really) for all the crazy backstory and conspiracy stuff to come out. I was 9 in 1963 but I was in high school before I saw the documentary "Rush to Judgment" based on the Mark Lane book on the background to that event. Today, information like that can be had within the hour. It doesn't have to be factual or in any way truthful, but it's there. Today, the game of Telephone (or I suppose, the Game of Facebook) is played at lightning speed. And an opinion piece, written by a crazy person, by the time it comes back around, literally hours later, becomes the considered opinion of some official investigative body.

The whole idea, of both wingers and the Russians, in effect, anyone who traffics in propaganda, is to force everyone to question what they hear and what they see. You think Trump lies? No. He never lies. That's a deep state conspiracy you're seeing. That's liberals and CNN and NBC and the NY Times screwing with "real Americans".

And for low information voters, there's little to no chance that they'll go out of their way to seek out a more authoritative source or multiple authoritative sources.

Mission accomplished, as the Decider liked to say.

February 20, 2018 |

Akhilleus

For perspective we need to remember that disinformation has been a fact of life for centuries. My own favorite example for home grown disinformation is the success of Hearst, Pulitzer and the Spanish American war.

February 20, 2018 |

Whyte Owen

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