As IF Times

Source: When Silicon Valley Took Over the New Republic – The Atlantic

We seldom get to see the kind of naked honesty about the present state of journalism discussed in such candor as in the linked article.  Of course this will be a shock to those that have their worldview shaped by Facebook news or for that matter, many of the popular news outlets.  In the parlance of phone email services, the trends are all about push news, not pull news.  In other words, you don’t look for news; news is pushed onto you.

I have extensively pointed out the sinister creep of push news for years, starting with of course, my favorite, Climate Change, tactfully re- branded from Global Warming.  Given the recent inconvenient publicity that Al Gore has received once again by the supportive media, we are expected to believe that his discredited bleats are in the forefront of the average person’s consciousness.  The first fantasy movie that he produced was such a success, that apparently, people are waiting in rapt anticipation for his newly released sequel…well, at least those that didn’t sell everything and are hunkered in the mountains waiting for high tide Armageddon.

That Gore continues to attract the media spotlight is amazing until you consider all of the other annoying spam that gets media exposure…like a staph infection that won’t go away. I refer to regular revelations of the Kardashian Clan, the Jenners, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, etc etc.  On a too often basis, we get the most recent Michael Moore utterance.  If you believe the media, at this very moment, the life of Diana has suddenly attained must know status for people.  Diana.  She’s been dead for 20 years!  Yet the entire media are splashing headlines about her as if she just had breakfast.  You know the tabloids are running out of ideas if they revive a long dead story to get clicks.  Next in line; is JFK really dead?

Most people don’t even know that they are the victims of push news.  The effectiveness of modern push media is such that confirmation bias is rampant among much of the populace. If your peer group confirms the same worldview based on their sources of news, then an entire fake reality becomes real…without anyone knowing why.  They’ve become parrots who regurgitate what’s been repeatedly heard.  Let me say this: if climate change is really the number one concern among your peer group, you may have been co-opted by push news.  If you think transgender bathroom issues are at the top of society’s concerns, you may need to expand your news sources.  Do people really think Russia, Russia, Russia is a valid news thread?  The linked article confirms what many have known for years and perhaps many more are awakening to:  News is no longer news. It’s structured to get the most clicks.  It’s a business…with a world of unwitting customers.

link Gwyneth Paltrow Named Most Beautiful Woman by People Magazine – The Hollywood Reporter.

How sublime is that?  On top of a successful and lucrative career, Miss Paltrow is named as the world’s most beautiful woman.  Out of approximately 3.5 billion contenders on the planet, she is the pinnacle of pulchritude.   Sneering observers should note that this is no marginal feat.   The odds of being struck by lightning is reported to be 1 in 1,000,000.   The odds of winning a Powerball lottery is 1 in 175,000,000.  A web search reveals that the odds of being struck by a meteor is only at 1 in 250,000.

So to be that person who defies all mathematical odds to be the absolute most beautiful woman is truly a miracle.  And, what are the odds that she lives in the U.S.A. and is a film actress?  In fact, what are the odds that more than a handful of the last so-named people, such as Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansen, Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Julia Roberts etc, also live and work within the same 10 square miles of real estate and are also in the film business?  People who don’t understand math cannot comprehend the truly astronomical odds of this occurrence.  Odder still, it happens every year.

We don’t know who sits on the selection committee at People magazine, the undisputed arbiter of this award, but surely they must all be bleary eyed because of having to judge the 3.5 billion possible contenders every year.   I suspect that over the years however, they  have determined that since many of the winners were right from their own backyard, they’d just refine their search to exclude 99.99% of the world’s women and just look out their windows.

According to an O.Hooge, who oddly happens to live here in B.C., the odds of anyone even being born is almost zilch, specifically:

“…If you go back 1 million years or 40 000 generations (each generation is considered 25 years), your chance of being born is at most 1 in 1.8 x 10⁴⁰³¹⁶⁷ or 18 with 403,166 zeros after the 1.

In other words your chances of existing is essentially zilch, even if we were considering this possibility only a short 250 years ago. Right now you do exist, so the actual chance is 100%, but the predicted likelihood in the past of you being born would be essentially zero…”

Be that as it may, Miss Paltrow is indeed lucky enough, at least statistically, to be immortal in terms of human history.  And we are lucky to be here when it happened.