Thursday, September 5, 2024

Thursday Tweets -- In normal times, this would be a big deal.

It still might.

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State September 4, 2024

As part of a series of coordinated actions across the U.S. Government, the Department of State is taking three steps today to counter Kremlin-backed media outlets’ malicious operations seeking to influence or interfere in the 2024 U.S. elections.

Moscow’s methods of targeting those it identifies as adversaries are well known – from its illegal and unwarranted invasion of sovereign nations to the unjust imprisonment of innocent persons, to cyberattacks and meddling in foreign elections, to conducting sham elections in Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine.

In addition, we now know that RT, formerly known as Russia Today, has moved beyond being simply a media organization. RT has contracted with a private company to pay unwitting Americans millions of dollars to carry the Kremlin’s message to influence the U.S. elections and undermine democracy. Moreover, RT’s leadership has direct, witting knowledge of this enterprise.

To counter Russia’s state-backed covert influence operations, the Department is acting to hinder malicious actors from using Kremlin-supported media as a cover to conduct such covert influence activities. The Department’s actions include introducing a new visa restriction policy, Foreign Missions Act determinations of RT’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya, and other subsidiaries RIA Novosti, RT, TV-Novosti, Sputnik and Ruptly, and announcing a Rewards for Justice offer.

Today’s announcement highlights the lengths some foreign governments go to undermine American democratic institutions. But these foreign governments should also know that we will not tolerate foreign malign actors intentionally interfering and undermining free and fair elections. The United States will continue to both expose those state-sponsored actors who attempt to undermine our democratic institutions and hold them accountable for those actions.


https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2024/09/04/indictment-russians-tennessee-company-tenet/75074263007/ 

 

An indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges a Tennessee content creation company was the tool a team of Russian propagandists used to infiltrate U.S. audiences with Kremlin-backed messaging.

Two Russian nationals who worked for Russia Today, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, were indicted on accusations they funneled nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based online content creation company to publish English-language videos on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube. The company's more than 2,000 videos posted in the last 10 months have been viewed more than 16 million times just on YouTube, according to the indictment.

The indictment, unsealed in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, doesn't identify the Tennessee company, but descriptions in the indictment match those of Tennessee-based Tenet Media.

The indictment states the company described itself on its website as "a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues." Tennessee-based company Tenet Media has the same message on its homepage. The indictment states the Tennessee-based company was incorporated around Jan. 19, 2022, which matches records from the Tennessee Secretary of State's Office. The indictment says the company applied to the Tennessee Department of State to conduct business on May 22, 2023.

Tennessean reporters have submitted a message seeking comment in the submission form on Tenet Media's website and emailed requests for comment to commentators listed on Tenet Media's website.




By my count we're at three to five black swans so far this election so we've all gotten a bit jaded but this does have potential and it's already apparently shaking some people up.




On a possibly related note.








Lots of major GOP and MAGA figures are linked with Tenet indirectly...


 

or directly.










This was originally going to be a multi-topic tweet ending on a light note. When the big news of the day provided me with too much material, I decided to save the rest for later but keep the bird where he was because I thought we could all use it. 

There's no intentional metaphor here but I'm sure you can come up with one.



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Wednesday, September 4, 2024

If today's New York Times were reviewing Our American Cousin, they wouldn't mention the assassination

Something is wrong with the paper of record.

The Republican candidate for president in what appears to be a very close race just said this.

Trump: But, eh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it, your kid goes to school and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

Listen for yourself.


You would think that this would be newsworthy in terms of hate and fear mongering, but even more so because it means the party's nominee is either spreading outrageous lies or is delusional or both. You would probably expect it to be the lede, but this is how the New York Times account of the event in question opened:

Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny by Shawn McCreesh

It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.

There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.

It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.

[Brief side note: Moms for Liberty has been labeled an extremist anti-government group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group's homophobic agenda gained an added level of irony when one of the co-founders step down after news broke of multiple menage a trois's with her husband and another woman. McCreesh was so determined to downplay their extremism that the paper had to issue a correction.  Not relevant for this post, but fun to know.]

The NYT didn't just bury the lede; it omitted it entirely. Sadly, most of the mainstream press followed suit, but the article in the paper record was one of the worst for its cutesy details and particularly aggressive sane-washing. The omission was even more bizarre given the amount of time the article spends reporting other comments that Trump made about transgender issues. What they reported on was certainly offensive, but nowhere near as bad as what they left out.

At least one New York Times opinion writer was willing to speak up about this (though you'll notice even Bouie, who is one of the paper's boldest and most independent voices, doesn't call out his employer by name). h/t LGM:

 

And just to make the story even more perfect.
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Tuesday, September 3, 2024

The Impact of X-Rays -- what fast looked like


Hand mit Ringen (Hand with Rings): print of Wilhelm Röntgen's first "medical" X-ray, of his wife's hand, taken on 22 December 1895 and presented to Ludwig Zehnder of the Physik Institut, University of Freiburg, on 1 January 1896

Conventional wisdom has it that our modern pace of technological change is so fast that someone from 100 years or so ago would find it incomprehensible. I don't buy that for at least a couple of reasons. First, we have a tendency to forget just how long some technologies are taking to get here (do you have any idea how long autonomous vehicles have been just around the corner?). Second, we tend to grossly underestimate how quickly many technologies of the past were disseminated.

For the canonical example of rapid adoption, check out the following excerpts from the Wikipedia article on the history of the x-ray starting with Röntgen's breakthrough, followed by some excerpts from Scientific American. Pay close attention to the timeline and keep in mind, this is how people reacted to a technology so new and unexpected that it bordered on unimaginable.

[Emphasis added for dates throughout.]

 On 8 November 1895, German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen stumbled on X-rays while experimenting with Lenard tubes and Crookes tubes and began studying them. He wrote an initial report "On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication" and on 28 December 1895, submitted it to Würzburg's Physical-Medical Society journal.

...

The discovery of X-rays generated significant interest. Röntgen's biographer Otto Glasser estimated that, in 1896 alone, as many as 49 essays and 1044 articles about the new rays were published.[25] This was probably a conservative estimate, if one considers that nearly every paper around the world extensively reported about the new discovery, with a magazine such as Science dedicating as many as 23 articles to it in that year alone.

...

Röntgen immediately noticed X-rays could have medical applications. Along with his 28 December Physical-Medical Society submission, he sent a letter to physicians he knew around Europe (1 January 1896).[29] News (and the creation of "shadowgrams") spread rapidly with Scottish electrical engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton being the first after Röntgen to create an X-ray (of a hand). Through February, there were 46 experimenters taking up the technique in North America alone.[29]

The first use of X-rays under clinical conditions was by John Hall-Edwards in Birmingham, England on 11 January 1896, when he radiographed a needle stuck in the hand of an associate. On 14 February 1896, Hall-Edwards was also the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation.[30]

Images by James Green, from "Sciagraphs of British Batrachians and Reptiles" (1897), featuring (from left) Rana esculenta (now Pelophylax lessonae), Lacerta vivipara (now Zootoca vivipara), and Lacerta agilis

In early 1896, several weeks after Röntgen's discovery, Ivan Romanovich Tarkhanov irradiated frogs and insects with X-rays, concluding that the rays "not only photograph, but also affect the living function".[31] At around the same time, the zoological illustrator James Green began to use X-rays to examine fragile specimens. George Albert Boulenger first mentioned this work in a paper he delivered before the Zoological Society of London in May 1896. The book Sciagraphs of British Batrachians and Reptiles (sciagraph is an obsolete name for an X-ray photograph), by Green and James H. Gardiner, with a foreword by Boulenger, was published in 1897.[32][33]

The first medical X-ray made in the United States was obtained using a discharge tube of Pului's design. In January 1896, on reading of Röntgen's discovery, Frank Austin of Dartmouth College tested all of the discharge tubes in the physics laboratory and found that only the Pului tube produced X-rays. This was a result of Pului's inclusion of an oblique "target" of mica, used for holding samples of fluorescent material, within the tube. On 3 February 1896, Gilman Frost, professor of medicine at the college, and his brother Edwin Frost, professor of physics, exposed the wrist of Eddie McCarthy, whom Gilman had treated some weeks earlier for a fracture, to the X-rays and collected the resulting image of the broken bone on gelatin photographic plates obtained from Howard Langill, a local photographer also interested in Röntgen's work.

 

 

 

 

 Scientific American, 25 July 1896.


 


 


 Scientific American, 7 August 1897

 


 

 

 


And to get a feel for the impact on the popular imagination.

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