The Pope tweets

Yes I know the Pope has something of checkered past. People change over time. Let the person who has never done something they regret, or changed their mind about anything, be the first to sit in judgment. Me, I'm taking this tweet at face value.

Pope Francis: My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost.

Usually ignore the trolling replies but the crackpot con response to this one is so jaw dropping I read the whole thread. There are some very sick people on the internets.

How the NRCC redesigned their website

The GOP decided their only problem is they're not selling their "starve granny to feed the rich more caviar" agenda well enough. So in an effort to win the affection of the cool kidz, the National Republican Congressional Committee redesigned their site by stealing from others.

Yes. The committee that elects Republicans to the House is taking BuzzFeed's advice to heart... by copying BuzzFeed itself.

The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed's site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media -- but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site's sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC's redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts.

Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.

And by snark they mean, stealing other people's cute animal photos and memes and re-captioning with their same old tired lies.

To be fair, it's a pretty good redesign and so appropriate that it's based almost entirely on stealing creative work from others without compensation while they pay their own pack of grifters --er-- consultants millions for the thievery. How very GOP, if by GOP you mean Greedy Overbearing Predators.

May the Vulcanic Force be with you

As you know, the sequester went forward yesterday. President Obama held a little presser during the daily White House briefing after a futile meeting with Congressional leaders. When answering a typically inane question from the Big Media about why he can't just "lead" our legislators into doing the right thing, he made the mistake of saying he can't just do a Jedi mind meld on them. ZOMG! A mixed sci-fi metaphor!!!

Nothing else he said mattered after that. Twitter nerds immediately exploded into a snarkarama. BuzzFeed had a post up within two minutes and the rest of the intertoobz followed closely behind. Not to worry though, the crack White House rapid response team came to the rescue in the time it takes to construct a new meme.



If you don't do nerd speak, Olivier Knox explains the meme:

While the White House's default response is to find your lack of faith disturbing, this time it moved without Rancor to defuse the controversy with a tweet that quite deliberately blended both universes. (For those of you who don't speak the language, it's a play on "These aren't the droids you're looking for" and one of Mr. Spock's refrains, each in the appropriate font).

You can be sure, there are some more subtle sci-fi references in there too, but I'm not well versed in their language either.

In any event, the snarkers apparently aren't as clever as they think. This guy at MIT says they jumped the gun. It seems there really is a Jedi mind meld of some sort. I'm not a big Star Wars fan myself, so only guessing that a Vulcan mind meld would be better. Spock himself tweeted as much.

Leonard Nimoy ‏@TheRealNimoy: "Only a Vulcan mind meld will help with this congress. LLAP"

One problem with that though. One Vulcan is not enough. As I said to him, "Well yes, but where are we going to find 232 Vulcans to do it?"

Hoping for a better Pope

Big buzz today about the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, who will forever be fixed in my mind as Pope Ratzo. It's a weird thing. I'm very attracted to the trappings of the Catholic church. Growing up as a Protestant in Italian neighborhoods, I was consumed with Catholic envy. They got the all the cool stuff. Holy water. Rosaries. Scapulars. Mysterious confessionals. The great pagent of first holy communion. Early release from school to get ashes. And the saints. Patron saints.

The pagentry was brilliant. But even then, I was never down with the Pope. The whole concept of an infallible man offended me. So have no emotional attachment to the office and little interest in the doings of the Holy See. Still, to the extent I paid attention, I did not like this Pope. I thought he was the worst one ever.

To be fair, he did advocate for some good social values when it came to caretaking tenets of the Christian faiths. However, he failed so miserably otherwise in advancing the Church's role in civil society that it overshadowed those few offerings. Think we're well rid of him. Can only hope the next one will be better.

Meanwhile, the news broke early this morning which immediately launched the social nets into a new Battle of the Witticisms. Have no idea what The Thick of It is, nor who Father Dougal might be. I'd guess it's even funnier if you know the reference. Still, even absent that knowledge, I've seen about a billion Pope jokes today and oddly found this one the funniest.

Project @DroneStream

[photo via The Guardian]

As a project for an NYU graduate class, Josh Begley set out to tweet "a complete history of known U.S. drone strikes Tuesday with the goal of doing it all in ten minutes." The first one was:

Nov 3, 2002: In the first known US targeted assassination using a drone, a CIA Predator struck a car, killing 6 (Yemen)

Each tweet includes a link to the source news story reporting the strike.

It's going to take a little longer than ten minutes to complete the project. When this was posted at Atlanic Wire, @DroneStream had been at it for five hours with no end in sight. Plus "he's only documenting the strikes we know about, and doesn't include strikes in Afghanistan."

I'm against bombs in general -- always -- but the main reason I'm glad to see a focus on drones is because their use is becoming normalized and civilian police departments are quickly adopting them as tools to fight ordinary domestic crime right here in the U.S. Our civilian law enforcement is already disturbingly over-militarized. Not sure I'm right, but willing to bet, somewhere in America, surveillance drones are being used against us almost every day. Would love to see the same project done documenting that activity.

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

[xkcd cartoon]

Atrios touched on the nerdrage earlier and links to Digby this afternoon who did the longer. I've been watching this explode on the internets myself so I'll take the medium.

We go through this internal bickering every time the Hill shakes itself out of its stupor and tackles a big issue. You're either too shrill or too trusting. Too combative or too accomodating. A warrior for the cause or a tool of the establishment. Conflicts over priorities are the curse of diversity. But the strength of diversity is in our combined voice.

Nobody is doing it wrong. Everybody has a part to play in the kabuki. And Digby is right. Don't be so sure the "too" shrill among us don't prevent it from happening. We should appreciate the people who relentlessly come out early and hard against bad policy. I certainly do.

Middle-earth will swallow you

Fully engulfed in The Hobbit mania building on the internets. Love this from George Takei this morning on the facebook.

And haven't watched this whole video yet, but thanks to Atrios who uncovered this gem of a former adaption in the original Russian.


[via]

Come to think of it, there was also a hopelessly unsatisfying animated version that aired on the teevee at least two decades ago. Odd that hasn't turned up yet. Perhaps we're all trying to forget that one.

Why I love Charlie Pierce: Reason eleventy million

Sorry kids. Didn't plan to disappear for so long. Took the weekend off to drive a few hundred miles to go to a very long and really fun birthday party. Then the storm happened. And of course, our stupid politics never sleep. I'm on information overload, and it took a while to sort it all out.

Being mainly uninterested in internet spats I haven't closely followed the battle between Nate Silver and the very important pundits. I gather our leading media opinion makers are quite unhappy Nate is ruining their rosy scenarios of an exciting race to a photo finish with his tiresome scientific facts and mathematical equations. They're all, "Who the hell does he think he is, fking Harry Potter?" (not really an exact quote)

So what does this have to do with Charlie, you ask? Well, Charlie Pierce wrote about it at some length, but this is the line in his post that inspired the title.

2) I refuse to believe that the enjoyment of anything can be enhanced by the inclusion of math.

As someone who still refuses to accept the absolute value of numbers, those words resonate with me in various and inexplicable ways.

Oh, if you care about the roots of the spat, here's People Who Can't Do Math Are So Mad At Nate Silver. It explains everything.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

She's got a way about her

I've never understood the pininterest thing. I click on their links and the whole page doesn't scroll on my screen and often they don't give you a link with the picture. So I haven't spent any time there. Thus, I have no idea who Jane Wang is but I clicked on her name to find out and found her main page. The pininterest concept suddenly makes more sense to me in that context.

This comes up because Jane apparently pinned me and I noticed the traffic spike she generated. Which was very cool. Thanks so much Jane. And she also has a fabulous collection of images over there. Including a category for hats. Like this one.

I'm all about interesting images these days and there thousands more at Jane's link. Looking forward to getting lost there for hours someday soon.

Texts from Hillary

As I explained last night elsewhere,my sleep patterns are all screwed up. Didn't post a single thing yesterday besides that because there wasn't enough coffee in the world to jumpstart my brain. Overslept again this morning and spent the better part of my day posting at Balloon Juice. Having way too much fun over there this week. Getting almost nothing else done but that gig is almost over. I'll be home soon.

I do have some stuff I want to archive here though, starting with a new Text from Hillary that made me laugh this afternoon.

[via watertiger on the twitter]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

I will follow him

It seems Slippery Mitt enjoyed a sudden sharp spike in twitter followers in the last 24 hours. So did the Mittster pay for followers? Damned if I know though the evidence shows the accounts are mostly fake. Hilariously fake in fact. The twitterati are amusing themselves at the hashtag #MoreFakeMitt by pulling out the funniest profiles.

Team Rmoney claims they didn't buy Mitt's fake followers. I tend to believe them. The fake surge was painfully obvious. It's an epic bot infiltration. They were asking to be caught. I doubt his internet unit engineered this little fiasco.

So the question is, who would? There's a dozen delicious conspiracy theories lurking in that answer. I imagine we're hours away from a Breitbarblarian headline screaming sabotage by teh left.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Extreme

This the Facebook find of the day. Internet being what it is, a fountain of false quotes, have no idea if Bobby Kennedy really said this. But either way it's a damn cogent observation.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Mitt Romney - The Movie

Facebook find of the day. Love this.



[via]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

It's complicated

I'm so old I remember when TV news couldn't do live on the scene reporting and it could take three days to get video footage from China. Punditry was more reflective then. Now, it takes about 3 seconds for any breaking news to travel around the world on the social nets and everybody is an instant pundit and/or a trend spotter. It's changed the way we process information, and not, I think, for the better.

At Balloon Juice, Kay voices my frustration with the current state of our political discourse.

...I get so impatient with broad national theories or studies on politics. I find them reductive and ultimately, narrowing. ...

When I look at “politics”, now or at any other time, I’m looking at what seems to me to a very complex, layered, shifting picture. Maybe I’m wrong about that, and it all can be reduced to a formula, but that isn’t how I see it or approach it. Honestly, if I did see it like that I don’t know that I would bother with it, because if I did see it like that I would eventually decide I probably can’t have any effect on it.

... So if I read or hear something reductive and final and national…I find myself yelling “it’s more complicated than that!”

Amen to that. I've been watching politics long enough to think it's so fluid, you can't get boxed into statistical probabilities and fixed narratives. The tiniest unforeseen event can, and has, changed everything at the last minute.

And adding, I get impatient with the incessant clamoring for instant results. When did we forget change is incremental and you can't necessarily see it happen? It's like watching your kids grow. You see them every day so you don't really notice the differences. Someone who only sees them once a year marvels at how much they've changed.

In the explosion of information that bombards us every minute of every day, it's seems all too easy to get hysterical about the instant developments and lose sight of the big picture. Don't think that serves us well over the long haul.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Confused conservatives

This Atlantic piece doesn't tell us anything we don't know already. Poor, uneducated, religious, blue collar workers self-identify as conservatives. They fiercely support an ideology that is designed to keep them poor, stupid and under the thumb of the wealth holders.

What would be interesting would be to see how the numbers have changed over the years in relation to media consolidation and the decline of fact-based journalism. Because it's not that these people are genetically stupid. They believe the lies because the media allows the lies to not only go unchallenged, but reports them as if they're equivalent to facts. This is particularly true among the elderly who believe it's illegal to lie on the teevee and those who don't use the internet to fact check.

And of course, self-identify is the key word here. Because many studies also show that when presented with policy choices, the so-called conservatives actually support liberal policies. As long as you don't tell them it's liberal. Truth is most of these self professed conservatives don't really understand the ideology or the ultimate goals of the professional shills who make a very good living by lying to them. It's more like they're saying we are not liberals, because liberals are fascistmarxistcommunists, so we must be cons. Sadly, the con is on them, to the detriment of all.

Conservatives excel -- at cheating

Not really a surprise. Natural progression for the "right" to make from astroturfing to astrotweeting with fake accounts.

Political groups have been caught red-handed trying to create a false sense of grassroots momentum on Twitter.

The discovery made by Indiana University's Truthy data mining tool is just the latest example of how activists are using social networks to their advantage. [...]

One blatant example the team unearthed came from the Twitter accounts @PeaceKaren_25 and @HopeMarie_25.

Both tweeted the same 20,000 messages that included links to gopleader.gov and the Twitter handle belonging to Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), helping to increase the popularity of those links on Twitter and in Google searches.[...]

So far, Truthy's examples of Twitter astroturfing all lean right, a fact the researchers attribute that to the popularity of conservative activism in this election cycle.

Again, not a shock. Cons have been gaming the system all the back to the early days of blogging when they figured out how to raise their ranking in the in the TTLB Ecosystem. Seems like light years ago when that was the barometer of internet success.