How Much Of Your Life Is Lived Online?

This is real... ah, for the good old days

You may have noticed DWT doesn't accept advertising-- let alone chase it. The concept repulses me and I've always thought the ad world is a scam with everyone scamming everyone and that it's incompatible with any attempt I could make in searching for any semblance of Truth. Friday night, one article-- this one by Max Read for New York captured the zeitgeist. I heard about it first when Rewad was a guest on Chris Hays' MSNBC show. How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually doesn't come to many conclusions you probably didn't already know, or at least suspect. But now you have the benefit of some real reporting to back up your suspicions. Read wrote that "In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and 'premium' websites-- i.e., established and legitimate publications-- on which to host them." Show does this relate to Russia handing Trump the white House in 2016 or China's plans to manipulate U.S. elections goings forward? Keep reading.

The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites-- “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites-- the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience-- the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day-- though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as The Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views-- 30 seconds of a video counts as a view-- for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content-- that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free-- to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

The businesses are fake.

The money is usually real. Not always-- ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year-- but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

The content is fake.

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find-- for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another-- putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake-- simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

Our politics are fake.

This is real-- and now Gillibrand wants to run for presidente

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity-- a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling”-- the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward-- against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

We ourselves are fake.

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills-- does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even?-- so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity-- to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online-- to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort-- than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

Looking for a challenge? Think you could explain to me how to insert audio (or fake-video) clips in this space?

by Ken

Can we, you know, talk? This is kind of embarrassing, but part of being a grown-up is knowing your limitations, facing up to them, in really extreme cases asking for help.

OK, I need help.

First I have to ask you, do you remember that Mad About You episode where Paul is supposed to register Jamie for her grad-school classes, and of course he forgets, and then when he finally shows up he doesn't have a clue what he's supposed to do or where he's supposed to go, so he's asking people, and everyone is giving him these incredibly detailed instructions, and he utters that immortal line:

"Talk to me like I'm seven."

Guy points and says, "Go there," and we're in business.

OK, here's the deal. We're going to be resuming the weekly (I hope) classical-music posts this Sunday, and I'm still stuck with my frustration at not being able to produce my own clips. Personally, I'd be happy if I could just insert straight audio clips, but I don't know how to do that, and everyone tells me, what's the big deal, just put it on YouTube. So I would be happy if I knew how to, you know, just slap some dopey still image on top of like maybe an MP3 music file.

Now I can do the music file, in iTunes anyway. (Is that OK?) And you would figure, what could be simpler than, you know, just slapping some dopey still image on top of it? What could be simpler? Who couldn't do that? A child of seven could do it.

OK, bad example -- there's all sorts of computer stuff a child of seven can do that I can't. Probably even the child's pet turtle could do it.

So I've read on the Blogger help sites maybe 16 different ways of inserting audio, step-by-step instructions, and I usually get through the step where I register on some site where I'm supposed to park the files (at this point I don't even remember which sites I'm registered on), and then . . . I'm clueless. If I wanted to share my past years' tax returns, I could probably figure out how to upload those for you to look at. But a few minutes of music so you could listen and enjoy, feel a bit of spiritual enrichment? Not a clue.

As for the video thing, I did the iMovie tutorial, I understood maybe 2 percent of it, but I stuck with it, and now I'm doing it -- importing my MP3 file, picking out the images, even changing them at the precise second, adding titles, choosing fonts. I come out of it with a "clip" that plays OK on my machine, even if it looks like it was done by the pet turtle, and not the swiftest of turtles at that. First warning sign is that YouTube refuses to accept them for upload, with some cockamamie excuse so inscrutable, I don't even remember it. (This was many months ago.) Nevertheless, I do maybe two of these so-called clips, still unuploadable, and I send the files for the alleged clips to Howie, and when he tries to "open" them, there's nothing, nada, zilch.

One thing I know is, there's loads of smart people out there. Smart people who might be willing to try to hold the hand of the retarded guy.

So here's the deal. I'm working on a Mac, a nice newish Mac. I got your regular Mac software, your iTunes, your iMovie, your iPhoto, your iEverything. If there's better software I should use, especially if it's free or really cheap, you could tell me about that. (I know some of the fancier audio-editing software lets you define your own file, rather than just taking a track from a CD. That could come in handy.)

Take your pick, you can either walk me through the way to be able to post audio-only clips right here on DWT, so readers can, you know, click and listen. Or you can walk me through slapping that dopey still image on the MP3 file (or could you use MPEG4, which iTunes seems to produce now? they really do seem to sound better) to create some stinking clip that YouTube would just take in politely without casting snide aspersions on my technical competence.

Just remember, talk to me like I'm seven -- or better, like you're talking to the turtle. The prize for the most successful tech consult is . . . oh, you know there's gonna be a swell prize, who wouldn't give a prize for help like that? What did you think there wasn't going to be a prize? OK, listen, we'll talk about the prize after I'm clogging up the Intertubes with audio and nonvideo-video clips.

Do you hear what I'm saying? Of course this is going to be too complex for the comments section, you can e-mail me -- regular address, kenfromdwt@aol.com. OK?

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So who was the world's greatest tunesmith? Owing to a sudden, er, schedule availability, my answer will come in tomorrow's classical music post

Raina Kabaivanska (at age 56) and Luciano Pavarotti (age 55, in a role I don't think he ever sang all that effectively) sing most of the Act I duet from Puccini's Tosca, with Daniel Oren conducting. On the plus side, the clip has subtitles. (It begins at Tosca's "Al tuo fianco sentire.") The phrase "Qual occhio al mondo . . ." comes at 4:29.

by Ken

Owing to technical difficulties (mine, and trust me, you don't want to get me started on that -- after staying up an entire night trying to do a couple of pathetically simple "clips," consisting of nothing more than an image tacked onto an MP3 audio file -- I'm prepared to swear that this whole Internet thing is a cruel hoax, and this YouTube thing a ridiculous scam that'll never catch on), this week's music program has been pushed back to next week.

We were going to have a name-the-composer quiz in anticipation of tomorrow's Sunday classical music post. I'm going to allow that damned Internet and YouTube a week to get their act together. For now, though, I want to pursue an issue that comes up in the course of the now-delayed discussion: What the heck makes a great melody a great melody?

Oh no, I'm not going to try to answer that question. I'm not that crazy. I'm simply going to register astonishment at how ill-equipped I am to even consider it, and I'm not sure there's anybody much better equipped. I don't see any fancier alternative to the reality that we recognize great tunes after the fact, by the power they have to take control of the consciousness, and burrow into the unconscious, of large numbers of listeners.

By way of an obvious example of how hopeless it seems to me to try to define or analyze this, I return to that great moment I wrote about last week in the Act I "love duet" of Tosca, a duet that barely manages to be one as Tosca and Cavaradossi, preoccupied with their own problems, mostly talk past one another. Finally comes that remarkable moment when Cavaradossi, responding to Tosca's jealous fixation on the eyes he has painted in his portrait of the Madonna, for which he has used the beautiful Marchese d'Attavanti as a model.

Suddenly Floria has Mario's full attention, and Puccini has given him one of the great opportunities in the tenor literature. "Qual occhio al mondo puo star di paro all'ardente occhio tuo nero?" "What eyes in the world can stand comparison with your ardent black eyes?" (For the record, Mario refers in both instances to "eye," singular, but it seems to me that in English that just sounds silly, especially when we're confronted with the image of Tosca's "black eye.") This is the kind of take-charge moment for which good singers pay their career dues, and great singers announce themselves. If our tenor can take charge of it, can pour forth the wash of honeyed tenor magic for which the composer set him up, this can be as arrestingly beautiful moment as has ever been conjured by the mind of man.

(Not entirely surprisingly, if I could hear only one singer here, it would be Jussi Bjoerling -- in the RCA Tosca with Zinka Milanov and Leonard Warren, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf -- even though his was a lighter grade of tenor than the role calls for. No tenor has matched, not just his vocal refulgence, but his seemingly intuitive sense of how to shape a Puccinian phrase for maximum buildup and release. No, I'm not thrilled with the above clip, but I decided it was the best I could do. A significantly younger Kabaivanska, a fine artist of whom I have some lovely memories, can be heard from Japan with tenor Flaviano Labo in 1973. And I've heard worse performances than the Standard Hour one, apparently from 1953, by the improbably cast Licia Albanese and Jan Peerce, who actually did sing these roles a little.)

But as I pointed out last week, from the analytical standpoint, the "melody" Puccini has given the tenor is mostly just a series of upward-and-downward scale passages. This is supposed to be melodic genius? Uh, well, 'fraid so.

Obviously there's no rational answer to as preposterous a question as "Who was the greatest melody-writer of all time?" But it can be a fun question to speculate on. And the field is wide open -- anyone who wants to throw in the name of Irving Berlin can make an awfully good case, based on both quality and the astonishing volume.

It's not hard to think of candidates for the title. What I find kind of surprising is that, at least in my mind, there's not much question about the answer. And obvious as the answer seems to me, I can't offer any kind of rational defense of it. Tomorrow I will content myself with a couple of examples.

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2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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