As IF Times

Source: The Doomsday Clock just advanced, ‘thanks to Trump’: It’s now just 2½ minutes to ‘midnight.’ – The Washington Post

You know what they say about a broken clock.  In that case, a broken clock would be more accurate than the ‘doomsday clock’ propagated by this cabal of atomic scientists for decades now.

The recent claim from this group is that because of Trump, the clock now figuratively points to a few minutes before kaboom day. Not North Korea’s version of Elmer Fudd playing with matches, not Iran enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, not Pakistan and India whom are already in possession of them and not Russia with their aggressive leader Putin.  Apparently, it’s the election of Donald Trump that pushes the minute hand on the death clock.

This of course is just one of the numerous swords of Damocles looming above the human race if you paid attention to the numerous chicken little industries that always seem to flourish.  The tin foil hat business should be booming.  When not paralyzed by the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, people are also paying through confiscatory taxes to assuage the effects of hysterical global warming, also incidentally on the verge of irreversible damage.  Or at least, was a while ago.  They’ll have to push the date back a bit to get more money. But we get it; the end of the world isn’t always that easy to pinpoint.

No less than Stephen Hawking has raised the imminent possibility of alien takeover, not to mention the likelihood of a catastrophic asteroid strike. At various points in my lifetime, hysteria has been pushed on imminent human extinction events ranging from: starvation, disease, overpopulation, religious retribution, Y2K, global cooling, now of course, global warming, atomic war, asteroid crashes and alien takeover.  The one that will soon be in vogue will be robot takeover, so we may want to stock up on metal detectors.

Someone can certainly make a lot of money on this.  There’s no point being paralyzed like myotonic goats awaiting death. As mentioned earlier, fashionable tin foil hats can be offered for sale on Amazon.  What about worry beads? They’d have to be sustainable of course…though that shouldn’t really matter.  How about special lotion for all the hand wringing brought on by on-going angst? We hear of billionaires building bunkers in anticipation of the final kabing, so someone’s already taking advantage of the gullible.  Whatever the product, it may as well be shameless because there’s no downside.  If it all ends, well then you’ve done your bit.  If it doesn’t end, you at least get rich. Now that is a good ending.

Source: The 7 Worst Examples of Fake News From the Mainstream Media – John Hawkins

The current rage over the preponderance and influence of ‘fake news’ is amusing because I’ve been writing about this stuff for many, many years.  From the smallest of manufactured news items concerning some straw man issue to the grand scale concoctions regarding Global Warming, fantasy narratives have been common reportage in the mainstream media for a long time. What seems to have turned the zeitgeist from tolerance to outrage is that now, fake news is widely blamed for causing the election loss of the candidate from the left.

Not to be deterred, the fake news business is turning its guns against Donald Trump, attempting to discredit his creds even before he puts his hand on the swearing in bible.  We’ve alluded many times to one of the biggest ironies in modern culture and that is,  historically, people’s access to information has never been better, yet they are as likely to be uninformed, or more correctly, misinformed as ever.

We can blame to some degree, the internet business model.  Many ‘news’ sites have been created over the past decade to compete somewhat with the established oligarchy of news outlets.  With free access notionally provided by the internet news sites, whose revenue models are based on clicks instead of subscriptions,  people increasingly defer to them as information sources rather than read more in depth coverage.  Who hasn’t turned on their browser and scanned through Google News or MSN News?

While this may give an overview of the headlines of the day, nobody makes money on headlines, so the tactic is to make people click further on the page.  The standard model is to create an attention grabbing headline such as “Dog has sex with man” and then follows up with clickbait such as “12 reasons why this can ruin your marriage“.  Internet users have to navigate a minefield of “What celebrity X looks like today is amazing” stories in order to get to legitimate news stories.  How else to explain the ubiquity of Kim Kardashian stories if not for their ability to attract clicks from people desperate to catch up on her most recent adventures? When stories such as “10 things that Trump did in Moscow” come to light, the line between fake and reality truly disappears.  (I mean, who doesn’t want to know at least what 5 of those things were?)

They’ve dumbed down the news business to emulate the format pioneered by Cosmopolitan magazine, famous for cover stories such as ” 6 best ways to keep your man” and “7 ways to a sexier butt“.  With the ascension of Donald Trump to the Presidency, we can expect at least 4 years of fanciful news from some of the more hysterical partisan news websites.  But that’s not the root of the issue; the real threat is the proliferation of fake journalists.  While it’s easy to disregard anything from sites with names such as TMZ, MTV, or Rolling Stone, there is more and more evidence that stories from outlets such as CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, are nakedly partisan and often fanciful in their telling.

One of these days, Donald Trump will actually do something shocking… and we won’t know if it’s true.