Suffice it to say that, in all my experience, 43 years, there has been one seat change in our body politic and that I would suggest is the fact is that we no longer have a “free media” in any meaningful sense of the term.

You have to really try, you have to go out of your way, to get the real story – and most Americans are working two jobs or taking care of their kids and they get home at night and they put their feet up and they think that they’re getting news from the likes of Fox News and they’re of course getting anything else but news – they’re getting the kind of thing we used to get on Radio Moscow … they’re getting a steady diet of disinformation.

- Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – or this guy.

Actually, if you are reading this, you are not presently a resident fossil in the brand-new Operator Speaking Tar Pit.

… but watch yourself – you never know …

What this means for those I have banned: this site simply will not work the way you’d expect. Strange things will happen. Binary will be served (very slowly) instead of the text that you were anticipating. Your feed monitoring software will let you down.

I was plotting to release a WordPress plugin when I realized that the tar pit script is simple enough to work with just about any PHP-driven application… so I’ll have some source code to post as soon as I come up with a working administrative interface (though if you really want to play around with the code and you’re comfortable using SQL, e-mail me and I’ll send something your way).

For now, the MySQL schema:

SET SQL_MODE="NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO";

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_agents` (
  `ban_agent_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `ban_agent_name` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
  `ban_agent_reason` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `ban_agent_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`ban_agent_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_ips` (
  `ban_ip_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `ban_ip_name` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
  `ban_ip_reason` text COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `ban_ip_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`ban_ip_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ban_ranges` (
  `ban_range_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `ban_range_start` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `ban_range_end` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `ban_level` enum('deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'poison',
  `ban_range_reason` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `ban_range_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`ban_range_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `hits` (
  `hit_id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `hit_context` enum('page','feed','feed-atom','feed-rss','feed-rss2','sitemap') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'page',
  `hit_ip_address` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `hit_user_agent` varchar(150) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,
  `hit_timestamp` datetime NOT NULL,
  `hit_disposition` enum('pass','tested','deny','poison') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'pass',
  `ban_reason_table` enum('none','ban_agents','ban_ips','ban_networks','ban_ranges') COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL DEFAULT 'none',
  `ban_reason_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`hit_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

All I ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don’t affect you. If in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde, 1890

I love the subtle distortions employed by Wilde’s characters Lord Henry and, later, Dorian Gray – but a small sampling of the power of words over reality and a prescient indictment of such manipulation which, in many ways, seems far ahead of its time…

Politics – Public Relations – Disinformation – News Media

What’s in a name?

That which we call “persuasion”
by any other name has results the same

Falsehoods – Distortions – Manipulations – Prevarications

Neuro-linguistic Programming places great deal of importance on non-verbal communication and body language. However, our language also plays a significant role in effective communication. It embodies not just the vocabulary we use in our dialect, which is around seven percent of the communication, but also the language we use in our brain. Every word we use has an impact on the communication and individual words can carry deep meanings.

- NLP E-Prime Technique

If you’re in a custody battle, your ex’s lawyers would love to present you as the nonnurturing type. Delete all the crazy party photos.

- Five Facebook No-Nos for Divorcing Couples
TIME 2009-09-28

The lawsuit alleges that not only did the teens in question create the profile with the plaintiff’s real name, but they also include his real cell phone number, posted photos of the boy, shared status updates with obscenities and descriptions of sexual acts, included profile data that depicted the boy as racist and gay, and even managed to friend 580 facebookers. The document also goes into detail including some of the hideous comments and replies from those who were exposed to the fake profile.

- 4 Teens Sued for Obscene Fake Facebook Profile
by Jennifer Van Grove
2009-09-25

Not the first instance in which disinformation (or simply objectionable information) on a social networking site has been used maliciously with real-life consequences… (to say nothing of virtual consequences)

The internet never forgets – expect to see defamation blackmail and counter-defamation services arise in arenas (politics, law, medicine, entertainement) which feature high publicity or a strong reliance on individual character as a selling point.

It’s just business, after all.

A 19-year-old Pennsylvania man was arraigned earlier this week on a charge of felony daytime robbery. How did police catch him? Simple: the burglar left a trail, by way of checking his Facebook account before leaving the house with two diamond rings and forgetting to log out.

- BUSTED: Burglar Arrested After Checking Facebook During Robbery
by Barb Dybwad
2009-09-17

… but we already know that Facebook colludes with law enforcement to “bring runaways home” and reporting on an individual’s present location is trivial.

Could Facebook be used to frame a patsy? Computers never lie.

Now that there’s DateCheck (by Intelius), an iPhone app launched at DEMO for instant social web and background checks, situations like the one we painted above could become quite common place. The free mobile app that advises you to “look up before you hook up” conducts a comprehensive background check using just a name, a phone number, or an email address.

DateCheck is practically omniscient, working not only to weed out the real creeps, but to alert you to deadbeats, and even help you find compatible matches. The search application filters social web and public record results for the following factors: Sleaze Detector, Compatibility, Net Worth, Living Situation, and Interests.

- Deadbeats, Freaks, and Creeps: Your Dating Days Are Numbered
by Jennifer Van Grove
2009-09-22

No need to ask “What’s your sign?” or waste any time with those whose income does not match your requirements – sounds like an efficient way to go about things… but now that your phone number is a unique identifier which can lead to other records you may be hesitant to disclose to a relative stranger (or whomever else happens to be listening).

Do you really want to be giving out that kind of information? It depends, in part, upon how much you have to hide. There is no question that a service of this nature would be useful and appropriate to expose convicted criminals, however, one must call into question the appropriateness of conditioning consumers to the use of (and exposure to) systems which actively intrude into others’ financial information and supposedly-private affairs.

Hey, it’s me – Big Brother – remember me from the other night?

A rather amazing thing happened this week in the often somewhat sorry state of reporting of medical research: a newspaper allowed an author of a scientific paper the chance to correct what he felt were misperceptions in the reporting of his work.

[...] Although the article in the Guardian was, as Baron Cohen noted “mostly correct”, its headline “New research brings autism screening closer to reality” was not and its strapline “Call for ethics debate as tests in the womb could allow termination of pregnancies” likely to cause unnecessary alarm.

- Man bites dog: researcher gets chance to counter inaccurate reporting of article by Virginia Barbour

How often is legitimate science obscured by media hype? Often enough that it is considered quite novel that a scientist should have the opportunity to refute the distortion.

The Public Library of Science’s medical division has prepared a substantial paper regarding this media practice:

[...] The 24-hour news cycle means that media organizations are battling for audience share, which in turn means that “the press has moved towards sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion”. Headlines are often written by news editors, rather than the article’s reporter, and are particularly prone to exaggeration. All of this sensationalism strays far from the reality of biomedical research, a slow process that yields small, incremental results based on long-term studies that always have weaknesses.

The origin of hype in health stories goes even deeper than journalists’ lack of training and the hurried pace of broadcasting. Ransohoff and Ransohoff have described medical researchers and reporters as “complicit collaborators,” both of whom may benefit from a sensationalized story. Researchers benefit from the publicity because it may increase citations to their study and help their chances of promotion or tenure, while a highly visible story of a dramatic medical breakthrough can boost a journalist’s career. Sensationalism occurs, they say, “when the participants stand to benefit from publicity without a corresponding penalty for misleading reports.”

- False Hopes, Unwarranted Fears:
The Trouble with Medical News Stories
PLoS Editors

Now that the news media has thoroughly discredited itself by pandering to viewer market share rather than providing an actual service with reporting, can anyone honestly claim to be informed by it?

There have always been elements of muckraking and sensationalism in print and televised reporting, however, there appears to be a diminished demand for accuracy in reporting outside of the scientific community. The mark of an informed individual is the amount of time which he or she refuses to devote to the “news”.

Hardly just another isolated incident.