Alt, Rogue, and Ungagged Twitter accounts may change more than social media
Side-stepping censorship
[dropcap]Amidst all the tension and worries regarding the actions of the 45th president this week, someone, somewhere, brilliantly side-stepped the new government’s apparent ban on climate science by creating an alternate Twitter account for Badlands National Park and tweeting climate facts. The tweets have since been removed, but the act of defiance struck a nerve and people allegedly, somehow, related to other government agencies started doing the same.[/dropcap]
Here are some samples:
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it”
– Mark Twain#Resist #Sciencehttps://t.co/dyiTZAltlN— NOT ALT WORLD (@NotAltWorld) January 28, 2017
A climate-literate person: understands the essential principles of Earth’s climate system, knows how to assess scientifically credible info
— Alt-Badlands NPS (@AltBadlandsNPS) January 27, 2017
97% of scientists agree climate change is real and that it’s caused by human activity. Denying science is no longer an option. #climatefacts
— AltEPA (@ActualEPAFacts) January 27, 2017
There was a time when US Government meteorologists were not allowed to say the word “tornado”. Thankfully, those days are over. #resist
— Alternative NOAA (@altNOAA) January 27, 2017
“It poses a dangerous question: What, when summer comes, are we going to do when forest fires inevitably happen?” https://t.co/ihwgkwNRpG
— AltUSForestService (@AltForestServ) January 27, 2017
Why science matters: The first images from the new weather satellite were released this week—and they are stunning. https://t.co/zr62UdxqJC pic.twitter.com/2jDzq9dmgK
— Rogue NASA (@RogueNASA) January 27, 2017
As of October 2015, the Earth had warmed by about 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880 #climatechange #ClimateChangeIsReal
— ALTUSNatParkSer (@ALTUSNatParkSer) January 27, 2017
Questioning what is or isn’t true online? Why not do some independent & scholarly research to find out? We like #ScienceFacts– not #AltFacts
— U.S. EPA – Ungagged (@ungaggedEPA) January 28, 2017
Nearly half of our bird species are severely threatened by #climatechange. https://t.co/O8CiR8eXhs #climatefacts pic.twitter.com/pNP3y5b6Ij
— AltEPA (@ActualEPAFacts) January 27, 2017
There may be more, and if so, please let me know, but these are the ones we’ve located so far. Follow them. All of them. This movement is pretty damn important.
Why the sudden resistance?
The new president doesn’t believe in climate change. Since the fateful day of his inauguration, a number of different memos and email have gone out to the heads of various federal agencies, specifically those who deal in some way with climate change, curtailing their publishing activities. Everyone from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Health and Human Services was included.
Public furor immediately rose up and social media exploded over the censorship, especially that regarding science. What the new administration has yet to figure out is that they work in a glass bubble. They don’t get to do things in secret and sneak up on us. They don’t like that situation, which is one of the reasons they’ve taken to calling the press the opposition party. However, given that the uproar against those memos and emails was so severe, they backtracked quickly, at least on the public front.
Still, once their intentions were made public, people began to respond. We already knew we would have to fight this administration tooth and nail, every step of the way. The hashtag #Resist was already procured and ready to go; it’s even been hung on a large banner from a tall crane thanks to the folks at Greenpeace. Americans have never been too keen on government censorship and we’re certainly not going to start supporting it now.
No #AlternativeFacts here
As the number of alternative social media accounts continues to grow (we’re following @Alt_FAA, @Alt_DeptofEd, @ALT_USCIS [immigration], and @AltStateDpt), so does the battle against misinformation, or what the administration has referred to as #AlternativeFacts. Other people call them lies, which is more accurate but carries an inflammatory inference that seems to upset those who are part of the current regime. Real facts do exist and in the presence of a concerted effort to mute those facts, someone has to stand up and make sure they are sufficiently unmuzzled, even if doing so draws no small amount of criticism.
There is no question that the new White House wants to control all the information it has so that they are presenting a unified voice. They want to make sure that no matter which agency one contacts, no matter who one talks to on the phone or through email, the information all spews the same lies, recites the same canon, pours the same kool-aid. If they’re going to take over the nation, that has to happen. Official sources of information must all be consistent in the lies they are telling.
What the dear folks inhabiting the White House seem to have forgotten is that the press, and subsequently the free flow of factual information, is protected under the first amendment of the constitution. The administration can only control information up to a point. Our founding fathers were very suspicious of each other and especially of other governments. They had seen what corruption had done across Europe. Hell, they were rebelling against King George III, who is largely considered to have been completely insane (new details about him have just been released, by the way) and was known to have “secret” agents. They wanted to make sure that there was always someone, namely the press, watching every move the government made so that there could be no secret acts of treason undermining the country.
While the White House can try to manipulate the mainstream press and even intersperse false reporters from fake news sites among those sitting in the White House briefing room, it has absolute zero control over what is put on social media. In fact, as we’ve seen to sometimes disgusting proportions, no one really has much control over what is put on social media. For better or worse, it is an absolute bastion of free speech. While the president has used it to circumvent the press, the same tools can also be used to circumvent and repudiate the president and his staff.
We see in all these new rogue accounts exactly what should happen in a free and open society. Where one person tries to hide and quiet information they don’t like, someone else stands up and shouts it. The more the administration tries to put a stranglehold on science and studies that are in opposition to their agenda, the more those involved with those studies are likely to find ways to make sure that information finds its way to the public. We need these new social media accounts to maintain a balance in the flow of information.
There is a dark side
If there is a negative aspect to all these new #Alt accounts, it is the fact that they are, perhaps necessarily, anonymous. We can certainly understand why. While most claim to not be associated with the actual federal agencies, there’s every possibility that those claims are a smoke screen. At the most, we would be surprised if the sources are more than one step removed from someone who is employed by the federal government. Revealing the persons behind these accounts could subject them to danger and possibly even prosecution. The need to be anonymous is real.
However, with anonymity comes certain risks, especially considering the fact that social media is full of security holes. It is difficult to verify an anonymous account without giving away personal information that might be used against the originator of the account. We don’t really know who these people are, what their connection to the various agencies might be, or their ultimate intentions. For the moment, they all look good and are saying things that are verifiable, but what happens if that changes?
Forbes magazine has an article on this same topic that made for some very uncomfortable reading. They bring up things like how easy it might be for someone to attach a virus or piece of malware to an otherwise legitimate PDF document. The social media account links to the document and everyone who opens it is unknowingly infected. One of the fears we’ve seen this week is the possibility that client scientists might be forced to delete large amounts of information. Imagine the security risks if hackers were to get ahold of that information, which is certainly not out of the bounds of possibility, and presented it through an #Alt account. Very little effort would be required to turn those legitimate documents into a stream of digital infection.
The system is far from fool-proof.
Resistance is not futile
Still, these new accounts are present for good reason and are doing a good thing. Our government, every government, needs to be held accountable. Through all his business dealings, our president has never had anyone standing above him telling him “no, you can’t do that.” He is now in a system where checks and balances are written into the constitution. Those checks and balances are required of a democracy and without them, we slip all too easily into fascism or communism.
The threat to our country, our way of life, and even our very existence is real. Climate change is real. Science is real. Diseases that defy immunization are real. We have an urgent need to not only know about the world’s problems but what we can do to mitigate them. We need to understand that our carbon footprint is a very serious matter and that there are simple and practical things we can do to reduce our carbon emissions. We need to know how to eat more safely as some foods to which we’ve grown accustomed may no longer be safely edible. There are mountain ranges full of information we need and if we cannot rely on official government agencies to provide that information then we desperately need sources that fill that gap.
We must, on every level possible, #Resist. We must resist the misinformation and lies. We must resist the attempts at censorship. We must resist the attempts to hide, delete, and obfuscate information. Not only is this our country, this is our planet. We live here. We have an inalienable right to keep it inhabitable and no government has a right to stand in our way, no matter how they think they were elected.
#Resist
#Dissent
#BeActive
What A Fool Believes
What he sees he don’t believe
The Short Version
While the president and those sympathetic to him rant on about fake news and lying reporters, the true onus is on citizens who are far too willing to believe anything they read or hear based on their existing biases. If the narrative of a story supports their belief system, a person is more likely to believe something at face value without checking for validation of the source.
The Dirty Details
I have been a fan of the rock group The Doobie Brothers since I was in high school, which as a very, very long time ago. One of the band’s biggest hits, penned by Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, is What A Fool Believes. The song is about a guy who refuses to accept that the girl for whom he longs wasn’t into him back in the day and he still doesn’t stand a chance now. Yet, he keeps believing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He, therefore, is a fool.
The song is catchy enough to make abject desperation sound attractive. Take a listen.
I’m going to guess that anyone over 30, maybe younger depending on one’s life experience, knows someone like this. You can’t tell them anything. They have their mind made up, whether it’s about a girl or the quality of food at a restaurant or how “dope” their first car was. We see them trying to get a girl they’ll never get, or still trying to relive 1979, and we just shake our heads. There’s nothing anyone can do to sway their course.
When a fool latches onto a belief, they don’t let go no matter how much evidence to the contrary one presents them with. Facts are irrelevant. Like the guy in the song, they keep replaying the fantasy in their mind and even as she stands up to walk away, he doesn’t realize his mistake. Fools never do. They’re blind to what is so obvious to everyone else.
Part of the problem with people like this is that we have always tolerated their foolishness. So he wants to pine for a girl that he can’t have. Okay, just let it go. What harm can it do to let him have that fantasy?
Yet, one fantasy leads to another. Fools surround themselves with the tales they want to hear, blocking out reality piece by piece until they are totally out of touch and disconnected. Eventually, they are no longer able to function within society. At that point, we often stop calling them fools and start calling them crazy, which is a bit insulting to people with real mental illness. With such a strong disconnect from reality, these people become a danger to themselves and others.
How bad can it get? Let me show you what happens when a fool is confronted with reality (with apologies should an ad run in front of the embedded video):
See what he did there? The deflection is first, “Well, that was just information that was given to me,” and then seconds later, “I saw it around somewhere.”
Let’s not be confused by the facts, is what the president means to say. He doesn’t even get the number of his own electoral college votes correct. For the record, that number is 304, not 306, and yes, it matters because it’s the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. As for the claim that his victory was the biggest? Again, let’s not engage in any form of information other than the facts:
That last one, Bush Sr.’s 462 electoral votes, is especially important because the president attempts to head off the reporter’s facts by saying interrupting with “among Republicans.” No sir, not even among Republicans.
One has to wonder why the president continues to engage in this electoral college penis measuring contest when time after time he’s proven to lose. His victory is not the largest. Not even close.
Oh yeah, the song explains that, doesn’t it?
He came from somewhere back in here long ago
The sentimental fool don’t see
Tryin’ hard to recreate what had yet to be created
Repetition. That’s the name of the game. Building off the concept that if one repeats a lie often enough that it becomes truth, the president and those around him continue to claim their victory was large because they want the lie to become truth. Repeat. Rewind. Repeat. Rewind.
Fools believe some incredible things and we’ve tolerated them for years and years. Only now, with fools in charge of the government, what a fool believes can actually put the rest of us in danger.
Let’s take, for example, the whole concept that we need clean drinking water to live. Only a fool would believe anything different, right? The amount of evidence is overwhelming. I mean, all we have to do is point toward Flint, Michigan as an example, right?
But then, THIS happened just this week:
Because, you know, who needs clean water when it puts a few hundred (not thousands) of jobs at risk?
What a fool believes, he sees
No wise man has the power
To reason away
What it seems to be
Is always better than nothin’
And nothin’ at all
Foolishness isn’t limited only to certain heads of state, of course. There are fools all over the place saying all kinds of crazy things. Let’s consider this fool for a moment:
Take a really good look at those pictures. I dare you. Try to not laugh too hard, I’d hate for you to hurt yourself. If you think you’re seeing a depiction of really burly humans fighting really small dinosaurs in gladiator-style combat, you’re not mistaken. That would be exactly what Ken Ham and the fools at Ark Encounter believe.
Never mind that dinosaurs were extinct more than 64 million years before homo sapiens ever began evolving, let alone learned how to work out and get all buff. Fools can’t be bothered with things like science because it gets in the way of their fantasy. In fact, fools like this do their best to demonize science so that they can believe whatever the hell they want without those nasty little facts spoiling their totally unrealistic story.
Now, it would be one thing if we were pulling stories from, say, twenty-five years ago. Something pre-Internet where there was no wealth of factual information not only at your fingertips but sufficiently indexed so that you can find it in a reasonable amount of time. AKA: the Dark Ages. We’re not going that far back, though. Everything I’ve mentioned so far has happened this week! And guess what? I’m not done! There’s still more!
This next one really pains me a bit because it involves someone whose work I’ve respected for a very long time. I’m going to post a video that is over an hour long. Watch as much of it as you wish. However, be very much aware that these are fools talking.
https://youtu.be/DqWhzKewILk
Please, allow me to fast forward through the horseshit for you. What is being claimed here is that vaccines, you know the shots we get starting at birth to prevent really horrible and deadly disease, are dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that famed actor Robert De Niro, and cousin that always pops up looking for free food Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are offering a $100,000 reward for anyone who can “prove” that vaccines are safe.
Dear Mr. DeNiro, Here’s your proof: How many people do you know with polio? None, correct? There’s your proof that the vaccine works. Please give Dr. Jonas Salk the reward. Okay, since he’s not around, perhaps the Salk Legacy Foundation could use the funds. The science has endured over 60 years of continued research and still shows to be effective in defending us against disease.
Now, does every vaccine work with such a high rate of efficacy? Nope. We’re not silly enough to believe that, either. What we do believe, though, is that, among the general population, vaccines are the best way of preventing common forms of disease.
What’s scary about this particular set of fools is that they’ve been telling this same lie, perpetuating this same fantasy, for so very long now that people whose opinions we once respected are being taken in. If otherwise intelligent beings can be fooled, what does that do to the very large portion of the population for whom intelligence is a pipe dream? Those are the ones who fail to vaccinate their children, thereby putting all the other children around them at risk. These people aren’t just fools, these people are dangerous!
There are times when I am tempted to think that the Internet is nothing more than one giant tabloid. The kind of things that fools are willing to believe is extensive and, quite honestly, embarrassing to the human race. When we have mountains of evidence supporting the facts and we still refuse to believe them, can our own extinction be very far behind? I remember laughing at the people we would see picking up tabloids at the grocery. I can’t laugh at all the people reading the same kind of nonsense on the Internet because there’s too many of them! I’d crack a rib from laughing if it wasn’t so scary at the same time.
What gets me is that young people, people who have had the opportunity to be educated in such matters, are still believing in some of the same fairy tales that were common when I was a kid. Again, sticking with things that happened just this week.
No, I didn’t blur the names. Fools need to be called out on their foolishness. Part of what bothers me is that this is such an old myth and has been disproven so many times that it isn’t even funny. Yet, just as with everything else we’ve listed, people are still believing this nonsense. The whole issue of chemtrails goes back to 1958 when NASA started using lithium in the launch of certain rockets in order to better observe certain atmospheric conditions. Conspiracy theorists twisted the science and ran with it.
NASA is now and always has been very open about the vapor trails they use, what’s in them, the amounts used, and why the use is necessary. They have an entire section of their website devoted to this funny thing we keep mentioning called the facts.
What might be even more disturbing from Amee’s post, however, is the belief shared by many like her that the government is trying to kill us. Kill us all. Dead. I have some problems with this concept.
First, if jet vapor is the means of dispersal for whatever poison is being spread among us, it’s not working. We are, generally speaking, living longer and healthier than any generation before us. So much so, in fact, that the leading causes of death in the US are our own fault due to silly things such as overeating and lack of exercise. We are doing a much better job of killing ourselves than the government is.
I’ve been watching jet vapor trails since I was a small boy. If anyone was in a position to be poisoned at an early age, it would be me. Yet, here I am, perhaps not the healthiest person in the world, but what ails me is in no way the result of any kind of external poisoning, either by the government or that cook I accidentally insulted back in SoHo.
The nonsense surrounding ways in which the government is allegedly trying to poison us is nothing short of insane. Do a quick search and you see claims that the government is really heavily involved in this whole trying to kill us scheme. They’re allegedly using:
On and on this list goes and it leaves the logical mind thinking that if the government really is trying to poison then, they’re really, really bad at it. Why would I say that? We’re all still alive. We have more centenarians living now than at any time in the past two thousand years. In fact, we’re so very good at staying alive that we have exceeded the planet’s level of sustainability for all of us. We passed that point back in 2009.
Oh, and let’s not bother thinking about the lack of logic in trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problems by killing off Americans. The population of the United States is largely insignificant on a global scale that encompasses some 7.5 BILLION people. Now, for those of you who are not stellar at math, the current US population is only around 375 million, so we don’t even take up the .5 in the global calculation. If one is going to perform a mass genocide in the name of sustainability, one needs to start on a different, more populous continent.
She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale
Never comin’ near what he wanted to say
Only to realize
It never really was
The frightening thing at this juncture is that the list of fools goes on and on. We’ve not even touched on those who still believe things such as trickle-down economics or that a “paleo” diet is healthy. There are hundreds of belief systems that are nothing more than pure foolishness and believed by pure fools. Trying to list them all would be exhausting and, quite honestly, I have better things to do.
People whose wisdom far surmounts mine have written of fools before. Perhaps we would do well to heed their advice:
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. -Voltaire
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. -Plato
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. -Bryant H. McGill
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. -Bertrand Russell
Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it. -Benjamin Franklin
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite. -Arthur Schopenhauer
And then, there’s the Doobie Brothers, who know what a fool believes. And every time there’s a White House press conference now, I keep hearing that song in the back of my mind.
Immediately followed by this:
When will they ever learn?
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