Many references to “climate engineering” are actually a part of climate denial & disinfo narratives.

When media attempts to both-sides coverage of climate engineering disinfo, they walk right into the hands of controlled opposition, led up the garden path by tech hype decoys.


This is a problem not confined to climate change reporting, it’s also in AI hype, where Emily Bender reviews an article and points out that “The reporter doesn’t seem to have asked anyone if the tech really does work as advertised.”1 The information landscape is completely infiltrated by PR for industry, pushing pseudoscience minimizing and associated red herring tech hype, and where perverse clickbait incentivizes prioritizing tantalizingly outrage inducing weird hot button political stories. The system is clearly the problem. So we can’t blame one reporter here and there, individually, since the whole of media is made up of underpaid overworked journalists at vanishing venues under continual inundation by garbage incentives. 

But this example I have read is one of the most obvious of this particular tricky genre of climate misinformation and fossil fuel PR flying right in under the radar. The headline itself on this article about chemtrails and Pennsylvania’s Insurrectionist Doug Mastriano is a real problem because it’s a de facto innuendo equating climate science to be on par with conspiracy theory right at the jump. 

Headline: “Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science.”


Pennsylvania Capital-Star - Headline: Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science BY: PETER HALL - MARCH 22, 2024 5:14 PM Screenshot of article includes a question mark written in purple marker next to the words climate science, and in the margin in marker is written Climate science is not conspiracy theory & isn't driving this nonsense.
Pennsylvania Capital-Star – Headline: Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science BY: PETER HALL – MARCH 22, 2024 5:14 PM Screenshot of article includes a question mark written in purple marker next to the words climate science, and in the margin in marker is written Climate science is not conspiracy theory & isn’t driving this nonsense. 

The article itself doesn’t explicitly equate the asserted false equivalency in the headline, but what the piece includes, and more importantly what it leaves out, speaks volumes. Missing from the article’s depiction of the issue are truly sensible voices on these matters. Just a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture government official stating factually that there’s been no applications or reports for cloud seeding in the state.2

It may appear superficially that “two sides” of an issue have been represented, but in reality it winds up meshing together things like cloud seeding, solar geoengineering, and conspiracy theories about chemtrails, and then calling all that “rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science” when what they’re really talking about is a right-wing crackpot insurrectionist who is pushing nonsense legislation, and fanciful and flawed climate engineering concepts rooted in tech hype. It seems poised to smear climate activists, experts, and officials, who call for regulation of reckless tech hype solutions3 as rooted in conspiracy theory the same as election deniers and crackpots.

It’s some kind of inverted woke-washing – a surreptitious tactic prolifically used by many climate deniers and pandemic contrarians4 and this DARVO tactic (deny, attack, and reverse victim offender)5 and Accusation in a Mirror6 are well-worn, and too often effective tactics hiding in plain sight and unleashed upon an unwitting majority of the public who rely on functional community leadership because we’re all too busy and spend most of the time on autopilot not stopping to think through7 and taking note about how the anti public health voices never really make any logical sense or even just common sense.

Solar geoengineering is climate engineering rooted in tech hype. It is not something climate scientists are pushing, indeed, many are pushing against leaning on these hopium fantasies, especially since they appear to be hyped to help industry delay doing anything else.8 It also seems that climate deniers are starting conspiracy theories to assert that “cloud seeding” is to blame as a cause of torrential rains that cause flooding, rather than climate change itself.9


Why relying on new technology won't save the planet Date: April 20, 2020 Source: Lancaster University Summary: Over-reliance on promises of new technology to solve climate change is enabling delay, say researchers. They ar- gue instead for cultural, social and political transformation to enable widespread deployment of both behavioral and technological responses to climate change.
Why relying on new technology won’t save the planet Date: April 20, 2020 Source: Lancaster University Summary: Over-reliance on promises of new technology to solve climate change is enabling delay, say researchers. They ar- gue instead for cultural, social and political transformation to enable widespread deployment of both behavioral and technological responses to climate change.

This is not a maybe — decoys to distract and slow down government regulation and public backlash is a known tactic of industry PR operations.10 You don’t actually need new technology to cut down on fossil fuel usage, and a lot of the new technology research and development is often actually being funded by the fossil fuel industry11 in what certainly appears to be a conflict of interest controlled opposition. A lot of the tech “innovation” like AI, is actually accelerating the usage of fossil fuel, which runs counter to the argument that it could help.12 Or in the case of carbon capture, it’s doing very little for a lot of effort, and almost nothing to mitigate the public health threat of fossil fuel emissions.13

What almost always gets mentioned in sober reviews of all the ‘tech will save us from climate change’ ideas is that every one of these ideas seems to be great for slowing down regulation of fossil fuel, and distracting from efforts to get reduced emissions. But yet that’s not even mentioned as a possibility in the Penn Capital Star piece. Very remiss. 


Rand Waltzman on Linkedin. Image text, Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (7) • Impede Government Regulation Overwhelm governmental regulatory agencies to slow or stop their function - Alter Product to Seem Healthier - Make modifications to harmful product to reduce ostensible negative effects • Influence Government / Laws • Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage policy that supports narratives favorable to your industry. A cartoon shows 3 people in white lab coats lined up at a printer and the caption says "Heads up, new healthcare legislation coming in!" another cartoon shows a tangle of traffic lights and 2 people in hard hats looking up at them and the caption reads WHAT WE NEED HERE IS MORE RULES with emphasis on More.
Rand Waltzman on Linkedin. Image text, Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (7) • Impede Government Regulation Overwhelm governmental regulatory agencies to slow or stop their function – Alter Product to Seem Healthier – Make modifications to harmful product to reduce ostensible negative effects • Influence Government / Laws • Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage policy that supports narratives favorable to your industry. A cartoon shows 3 people in white lab coats lined up at a printer and the caption says “Heads up, new healthcare legislation coming in!” another cartoon shows a tangle of traffic lights and 2 people in hard hats looking up at them and the caption reads WHAT WE NEED HERE IS MORE RULES with emphasis on More.

The nonsense chemtrails legislation being pushed in Tennessee and in Pennsylvania, is almost a comically obvious probable example of bombarding government – (“flooding the zone” one might even say) – with bogus “climate science” legislation. So you have to examine why most journalists don’t report upon it that way, and instead they’re linking it, with all Serious Face, supposedly to actual climate change, by citing climate engineering tech bro hype funded by rich billionaires14 who seem to often want to, as Douglas Rushkoff has described it, “escape their own externalities”15 in a fit of what disaster researchers call “elite panic”16 where they do PR spin and hype instead of actually solving problems.17 The very wealthy, corporations and the elites who run them, never seem to panic over the right things,18 or at least not often enough over the things ordinary people are concerned about,19 and I suspect that’s why so many things leaders do often look like a bait and switch20 and feel to the rest of us like getting the rug pulled out from under us.21

This is all part of an overarching anti public health pro business wealth guarding happenstance coalition of interests. That’s why you see the business oriented Heritage Foundation putting together Project 2025 with fringe religious extremists, because some of these bonkers agendas aid in their own business interests. Despite what some seem to think, Project 2025 isn’t some “conspiracy theory” –  they’ve published their agenda and it’s been covered by many already.22

And we see this tech saviorism hopium over and over, used to sell keeping a system, and removing safeguards, because that works for the few who can then game the system – even if it means putting lives in danger or even destroying the planet’s habitability. 

They sell this bunk to science-minded people, with sciency sounding stuff. It’s like how “race science” proponents try to sell racism to affluent educated white people, to justify racist acts, racist discrimination, and racist policies. And how corporations defend defective, deadly, or dangerous products with what Dr. David Michaels has described as “public relations disguised as science” in his book from 2020, The Triumph of Doubt,23 where he says:

“It is public relations disguised as science. The company’s PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian soundbites that play well with reporters who are mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were injured by the product in question. The corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as sound science, but actually they just sound like science. Such bought and paid for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interest is vilified. There’s a word for that, Orwellian. Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment – debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy.”

— Dr. David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt (2020)

So many players in industry have used what Climate Action Against Disinformation has called “Deny, Deceive, Delay”, where they point out that climate contrarians equate climate activism with mental illness, and attack “woke” Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights as people with psychological disorders,24 really harkening back to Draptemonia, the discredited idea that Black people who objected to being slaves were somehow mad.25

What I would call “manufacturing mild” – either convincing people a real threat is minimal or normalizing the harm from it – has also been used by pandemic minimizers and tobacco industry defenders,26 in service of slowing or halting any mitigations of threats to public health they even just suspect might stymie their business interests.27 Tip: even “Anti-Mask” was also always a dark money campaign.28


Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign. Mar 28th, 2024 wat3rm370n on tumblr Image Alt Text: The disinformation didn’t just happen, it was deliberate. Teams Human. State Government Leadership Foundation openly bragged on social media about an advertising campaign that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of the lie that masks supposedly do more harm than good.16 There is evidence that mask requirements are beneficial. But the State Government Leadership Foundation appears to have used old school advertising and simple repetition that uses the mere exposure effect, where people come to believe something simply because it seems familiar after hearing it a lot.17 teamshuman.substack.com/p/anti-mask-woke-washing Dark money from big corporations funded a right-wing think tank to do a deliberate advertising propaganda campaign to convince liberal Democrats that masks are bad. ProPublica headline: Buying Your Vote Big Corporations Put Up Seed Funding for Republican Dark Money Group IRS files show that some of the biggest companies in the country provided more than a million dollars a decade ago to launch a Republican dark money group. by Justin Elliott Feb. 14, 2013, 8 a.m. EST Tweet from State Government Leadership Foundation brags about an anti-mask advertising campaign targeting liberals.
Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign. Mar 28th, 2024 wat3rm370n on tumblr Image Alt Text: The disinformation didn’t just happen, it was deliberate. Teams Human. State Government Leadership Foundation openly bragged on social media about an advertising campaign that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of the lie that masks supposedly do more harm than good.16 There is evidence that mask requirements are beneficial. But the State Government Leadership Foundation appears to have used old school advertising and simple repetition that uses the mere exposure effect, where people come to believe something simply because it seems familiar after hearing it a lot.17 teamshuman.substack.com/p/anti-mask-woke-washing Dark money from big corporations funded a right-wing think tank to do a deliberate advertising propaganda campaign to convince liberal Democrats that masks are bad. ProPublica headline: Buying Your Vote Big Corporations Put Up Seed Funding for Republican Dark Money Group IRS files show that some of the biggest companies in the country provided more than a million dollars a decade ago to launch a Republican dark money group. by Justin Elliott Feb. 14, 2013, 8 a.m. EST Tweet from State Government Leadership Foundation brags about an anti-mask advertising campaign targeting liberals.

And it’s been pretty obvious with cryptocurrency schemes, and now the AI tech product boom. The tech solutions touted as “solving the future” somehow more often are shown to be largely vaporware, or worse than that, sources of war profiteering scams,29 general disinformation production, exploitive data collection,30 and built on a house of techno-optimism cards that requires untold “huge amounts of water and energy” to operate.31 And the people wanting to use it are often drunk on their own tech hype and reciting hopium about geoengineering and radical breakthroughs in nuclear power.32 When in reality they’re using energy from right in my home state Pennsylvania, that comes with air pollution that people are worried about,33 and noise pollution that many are already finding unacceptable to live with.34

And this isn’t new, there’s been evidence of empty pointless financial grift for ages now as I cast my mind back to over a decade ago when I thought High Frequency Trading was a bridge too far in terms of pointless fossil fuel expenditure on behalf of essentially unfair profiteering.35 But then everyone collectively shrugged their shoulders and went back to sleep while they cooked up more machinations to sink the planet’s habitability faster. A clear explanation of High Frequency Trading’s power hunger was well explained in a WIRED piece from 2011 as a self-building influence.36

And the same ramped up demand for fossil fuel powered energy is absolutely expected with the AI boom.37 It’s really uncanny how there are repeating themes with all this stuff.38 We have new hype cycles and ways people are gaming the system, but the HFT issue never even went away, it’s still going on.39 The author of that WIRED piece, Jon Stokes, has since gone on to not only work in an AI business which provides tools for monetized publishing, he himself appears to be an AI influencer, promoting LLMs and pooh-poohing regulation of it with vague unclear hand waving criticism of “safety” in air quotes.40

It’s not just scientists or doctors who have sold out to big tobacco, fossil fuel, big tech, or anti-vax. We live in a world where as Mark Galeotti says, there’s been a “Weaponization of Everything” where online influencers pivot from products to political causes and we’re heading toward having an Uber for PR lobbying.41 People say things that sound like science, but really they’re using sleight of hand tactics like decoys and distraction, fraudulent appeal to authority (the practice of citing a reference that doesn’t actually back up the claim), or truth with a lie chaser.42

Sorry to say it seems pretty clear the reporter got PR rolled and taken for a ride when he tried to write about Mastriano’s chemtrails. It’s just such a perfect way to demonstrate how this PR propaganda operation works, and exploits journalists who are barely treading water in this ridiculous information cesspool of rot that we’re all swimming in. It slips in this nonsense, and even while trying to call out the nonsense, totally misses the real story.

The real story is disinformation. Flooding the zone with disinformation.

The reporter legitimately tries to differentiate cloud seeding from solar geoengineering. Cloud seeding is a thing that’s real in some places in the world, including in some states in the U.S., to try to make it rain, but it’s actually very questionable in itself. Nobody knows for sure if it actually helps to really increase rainfall, according to actual scientists, who say there’s little evidence after decades to show it’s even worth it.43

The reporter also seemed to have only talked to David Keith, a physicist and professor at University of Chicago in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, and a founder of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative. When he was interviewed on a University of Chicago podcast about the project, the show notes described him as “leading a team that will research solar geoengineering and other novel solutions to climate change.”44 He leads a group funded to do research on the idea of solar geoengineering, so of course he’s bullish on this and taking it very seriously. And this is not to say I think nobody should research it, it should be researched like anything else, it’s just that there’s a bias and financial incentive there which should be noted and considered when taking his opinions.

And begging your pardon, but “novel solutions to climate change” sounds like just another way of saying “alternative solutions” which I’m sorry but sounds to me a lot like alternative medicine or alternative facts. What they’re not saying is that this is a deliberate search for some alternative to actually cutting fossil fuel emissions. And a lot of actual climate scientists are skeptical and have been warning not to get swept away with these novel tech solutions as the answer to climate catastrophe. I say “actual climate scientists” because you can’t talk to geophysical engineers or people who might be best described as futurists, just call them climate scientists and call it a day. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a statement about solar geoengineering opposing deployment because they say “it poses unacceptably high environmental, social, and geopolitical risks”.45 A CNN article that did both-sidesing of the issue, got several people to quote immediately after David Keith, like Chris Field who said “there are good reasons to be skeptical of solar geoengineering.” And others who pointed out that suggesting it should be done experimentally in Africa is distracting from policies that actually would aid Africa.46 David Keith conceded to risks of harm, and that was included in the Penn Capital Star article.47 But If you want to both sides this issue – there are more aspects to consider clearly. And being against solar geoengineering is not a conspiracy theory or weird stance. Solar geoengineering is not “the other side” it’s also not “climate science” either. It’s geophysical weather engineering at best, or worse, simple futurism like a scenario out of the sci-fi tv series The Ark, where characters are left with something they call “Klampkin’s Disease” from the billionaires having deployed solar geoengineering of some kind and put something they didn’t think was toxic into the air but it wound up making some people sick with a terminal illness. Very believable plotline of course, if you’ve ever seen the movie Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo about DuPont, which was apparently mostly based in actual events, other than maybe the choice of drinking Mai Tais by the environmental attorney Robert Bilott.48

But being concerned about air pollution is NOT what makes Doug Mastriano a crackpot. It’s that he’s pushing a weird conspiracy theory that airplane condensation trails in the sky are really some “unknown experimental and potentially dangerous chemicals” and that the truth is supposedly being kept from us. 

Mastriano’s memo quoted in the Penn Capital-Star piece is said to include a citation of the Pennsylvania Constitution: “Spraying unknown, experimental, and potentially dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution,” Mastriano’s memo states.”49 There’s nothing wrong with that being in the PA Constitution. Preventing potentially toxic pollution from being introduced into the air willy-nilly is a good rule to have. I’m not an expert on the Pennsylvania Constitution, but I do know it’s got more environmental equity rules, like that Pennsylvania State Parks cannot charge admissions fees. So I’m going to assume this is something coming from the Rachel Carson or Gifford Pinchot era about pollution. We have a national historic site in PA at Gifford Pinchot’s mansion and he has a state park and a state forest named after him. The main building for the Dept of Conservation and Natural Resources in the capitol in Harrisburg is named the Rachel Carson building. In northeastern Pennsylvania public lands have robust support from many across the political spectrum because the public parks and forests and game lands and fish & boat facilities serve people like me, decidedly not right-wing, but also I’m sure a good portion of the people I interact with at boat launches and on trails probably voted for Mastriano. A lot of those same people do have the same concerns those on the left do, but just don’t realize it, because we’re all kept in little silos in the current configuration of the media information landscape, and we know that’s not conducive to productive community organizing.50


Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)

I realize that if a reporter writes honest depictions of the climate change in the PR battlefield, they might not be very employable, and not everyone has the privilege of Jane Mayer.51 Fossil fuel’s tendrils are everywhere. It’s why anti-vaxxers have thousands and thousands of paid subscribers on substack, and tech hype cheerleaders and contrarian experts, who’ve been wrong dozens of times, are endlessly invited onto the most lucrative and popular podcasts and cable news shows. And people following the money are relegated to independent outlets or putting stuff behind paywalls. As Sarah Kendzior explained, the reason misinformation is spread so easily is because “When well-researched investigative reporting is hidden behind a paywall, you’re going to end up with a population that — even if they’re making their best attempts to find the truth — is going to have a very difficult job doing so,”52

Of course disinformation and advertising is always free!

And so many of the most prominent and popular people covering the intricacies of right-wing conspiracies, Qanon characters, and insurrectionists, tend to stick to a rather clownish depiction of the people who put out the disinformation content, and the people who get suckered in by it, because it’s entertaining or what people want to hear. If someone is doing this for a living they have to encourage paid subscribers, and get at least the most interested and affluent audiences with FOMO, sick burns and jokes, or gossip. That gig leaves little time for investigative peeking behind the curtain to look at who and what is really driving this stuff. In some cases it’s been suggested that people do this deliberately to distract from what’s behind the curtain, and that’s definitely a possibility in some cases. But because of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle,53 uncovering the twisted tactics on The Internet of Fakes54 is incredibly time consuming. And for some reason people tend not to get fans willing to pay to be told the horrible truth, the messenger is more likely to be, if not actually shot, then attacked and shunned. But at some point we need to stop with the bubblegum coverage of these seedy deceptive practices, if only because it just floods the zone with entertaining but distracting pointlessness, that leads to inaction55 induced by informational learned helplessness from cognitive overload.56


References

1

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter – Doing their hype for them – Defeatist, second-hand hype goes to college By Emily April 2, 2024 Also frustrating, as usual, is that the only dissenting voices quoted in the piece don’t contradict any of the hype claims. The reporter doesn’t seem to have asked anyone if the tech really does work as advertised. Instead, the dissents remarks like that from Emelia Probasco (of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology) who is quoted as saying “Could this create another level of haves and have-nots? That would be the equity issue.” Suggesting that the real problem is who doesn’t have access to the technology is missing the point.

2

Pennsylvania Capital-Star – Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science – Pennsylvania requires those seeking to modify the weather to get a license, but no one has ever applied BY: PETER HALL – MARCH 22, 2024 5:14 PM The department’s Weather Modification Board has never received a license application and has never investigated unauthorized cloud seeding, Deputy Press Secretary Jay Losiewicz said in an email.

3

Scientific American – Solar Geoengineering Should Be Regulated, U.N. Report Says – A panel of independent experts urged international leaders to set rules for the stratosphere and solar geoengineering – By Corbin Hiar, John Fialka, E&E News on February 28, 2023 But the field of study, also known as solar geoengineering, remains controversial because it doesn’t address the primary cause of climate change — the burning of fossil fuels — and could lead to unintended consequences. Releasing aerosols into the stratosphere, for instance, could damage the ozone layer, which protects people and the planet from the sun’s cancer-causing ultraviolent rays. The UNEP report was written by Govindasamy Bala, an atmospheric and ocean sciences professor at the Indian Institute of Science, along with eight other independent experts from around the globe. They urged international leaders to not only adopt stratospheric regulations, but also support additional research of SRM. The experts also suggest that leaders consider establishing regulatory frameworks that differentiate between small-scale experiments and large-scale interventions in the Earth’s climate system.

4

Anti-mask Woke-washing. The moral distortion of social justice. CHLOE HUMBERT AUG 31, 2023 Michael Shellenberger has attempted to frame climate activists as doing “colonialism” and claim that reducing fossil fuel usage, to preserve the habitability of the planet for humans, is supposedly a human rights offense against people of the Global South.3 In a Climate Action Against Disinformation report titled ‘DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY’ this framing of “withholding fossil fuels” strangely overlaps with “anti-woke” narratives, and not surprisingly climate skepticism. In those PR spin zones they don’t mention how people in the Global South have already been harmed by the fossil fuel industry,4 and how people in the Global South are among the first harmed by climate change, such as in Bangladesh.5

5

MEDPageToday: Who’s Really the Victim Here? — It’s time to end DARVO behavior in the healthcare workplace by Resa E. Lewiss, MD, David G. Smith, PhD, Shikha Jain, MD, W. Brad Johnson, PhD, and Jennifer Freyd, PhD Perpetrators use DARVO because it works. In one study researchers found that targets of DARVO were more likely to blame themselves. Self-blame is associated with self-silencing. In another study, researchers found that observers of DARVO tended to doubt the credibility of the true victim, believing the perpetrator instead. There is not yet systematic data on what makes certain institutions and certain people more likely to DARVO. Yet, there appear to be relevant characteristics associated with other types of harassment, and the field of medicine checks all the boxes: high prestige, male-dominated institutions and industries, hierarchical leadership structures, inadequate safeguards for employees and trainees, and a climate which tolerates harassment.

6

Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror, 43 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 357 (2012). Loyola University Chicago Law Journal Volume 43 Issue 2 Winter 2012 Article 5 The basic idea of AiM is deceptively simple: propagandists must “impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do.” 9 In other words, AiM is a rhetorical practice in which one falsely accuses one’s enemies of conducting, plotting, or desiring to commit precisely the same transgressions that one plans to commit against them. For example, if one plans to kill one’s adversaries by drowning them in a particular river, then one should accuse one’s adversaries of plotting precisely the same crime. As a result, one will accuse one’s enemies of doing the same thing despite their plans.,, It is similar to a false anticipatory tu quoque: before one’s enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed.”

7

PBS – HACKING YOUR MIND – Living on Autopilot – Episode 101 – Aired: 09/09/20 It’s especially hard to overcome our autopilot biases because, much of the time, we’re not even aware we’re experiencing them. For instance, here’s an autopilot bias I can almost guarantee you’re not aware of — being biased in favor of one person over many people. One of Kahneman and Tversky’s closest colleagues studies how that bias distorts the decisions we make.

8

Lancaster University. “Why relying on new technology won’t save the planet.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 20 April 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200420125510.htm>. Summary: Over-reliance on promises of new technology to solve climate change is enabling delay, say researchers. They argue instead for cultural, social and political transformation to enable widespread deployment of both behavioral and technological responses to climate change.

9

What is cloud seeding and did it cause Dubai flooding? By Mark Poynting & Marco Silva ,BBC News April 17. 2024 “The intensity of the rain was record breaking, but this is consistent with a warming climate, with more moisture available to fuel storms and make heavy rainfall events and associated flooding progressively more potent,” explains Richard Allan, professor in climate science at the University of Reading. A recent study suggested that annual rainfall could increase by up to about 30% across much of the UAE by the end of the century as the world continues to warm. “If humans continue to burn oil, gas and coal, the climate will continue to warm, rainfall will continue to get heavier, and people will continue to lose their lives in floods,” says Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.

10

Rand Waltzman on Linkedin. Image text, Strategies for Manufacturing Doubt (7) • Impede Government Regulation Overwhelm governmental regulatory agencies to slow or stop their function – Alter Product to Seem Healthier – Make modifications to harmful product to reduce ostensible negative effects • Influence Government / Laws • Gain inappropriate proximity to regulatory bodies and encourage policy that supports narratives favorable to your industry. A cartoon shows 3 people in white lab coats lined up at a printer and the caption says “Heads up, new healthcare legislation coming in!” another cartoon shows a tangle of traffic lights and 2 people in hard hats looking up at them and the caption reads WHAT WE NEED HERE IS MORE RULES with emphasis on More.

11

The Nation – February 15, 2024 I Saw the Future of Climate Technology—and Its Big-Oil Investors At the Cleantech North America conference, the fates of climate-tech start-ups are tangled into the balance sheets of companies who caused the crisis in the first place. Molly Taft I wondered if fossil fuel money was necessary to keep this industry running—if it was possible to have a cleantech economy without dirty money. Oil and gas companies are not totally necessary, one cleantech investor told me; there are plenty of funding sources that aren’t Big Oil. But existing energy companies do make good partners for a lot of start-ups, and are ponying up some cash for certain ventures.  The investor encouraged me to notice which initiatives fossil fuel funders were taking interest in at the conference: not in near-term technologies that could replace or knock out their product, like solar or EVs, but in longer-term ideas that will take a lot of research and capital, and give them room to keep producing as much oil as possible in the next decade. A start-up that works in hydrogen or carbon capture makes sense for an oil company to invest in. Besides, fossil-fuel companies have a lot of money to throw around, the investor told me, and it makes sense to diversify.  Isn’t there an innate conundrum, I asked, in a start-up ostensibly committed to helping to solve climate change partnering with an oil company that has no plans to stop producing? If there’s a bottom line to bring on funding to get the company off the ground, not really, the investor told me.

12

Disconnect – We don’t need new tech to fight climate change Tech fantasies are a distraction, not a solution to the crisis Paris Marx Mar 23, 2023 But it’s not just about these companies’ business models; they’re also supporting the extraction of fossil fuels as they claim to be doing the opposite. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all been caught selling their cloud services and AI tools to oil and gas companies to help them increase their extraction of fossil fuels. An anonymous Microsoft employee described how the company signed a deal with Chevron and unleashed its tech against the oil company’s workers in Kazakhstan. Amazon made a big push into the oil business as well, even as it stalled on its own renewable targets. Meanwhile, Google claimed it would stop making custom oil and gas tools in 2020 after those relationships were revealed, yet continues to greenwashing a deal it signed with Saudi Aramco. Tech companies don’t want the public to see them as climate villains, but the reality is that they’re driven to pursue profit at all cost — even if that means accelerating the crisis.

13

Scientific American – December 4, 2023 Don’t Fall for Big Oil’s Carbon Capture Deceptions Carbon capture technology is a PR fig leaf designed to help Big Oil delay the phase-out of fossil fuels By Jonathan Foley Industrial carbon capture also does nothing to reduce the health damage caused by fossil fuels. Most notably, sucking CO2 out of the air fails to relieve the tremendous air pollution effects of burning fossil fuels, which cause 8–9 million people to die prematurely each year. More fundamentally, the biggest problem with industrial carbon capture schemes is that they are largely a ploy by Big Oil to delay action to phase out fossil fuels.

14

Scientific American – Solar Geoengineering Looks to Silicon Valley for New Wave of Funding Tech billionaires are funding research into controversial methods for cooling the planet By Corbin Hiar & E&E News February 15, 2024 Supporters of the idea — including billionaires Bill Gates and George Soros — argue that human efforts to redirect sunlight could shave a few fractions of a degree off of global temperatures while the world economy kicks its addiction to fossil fuels. But early research suggests that blanketing the stratosphere with aerosols for years or decades could damage the ozone layer and disrupt weather patterns, putting subsistence farmers and rain-dependent ecosystems at risk. It would also do nothing to address other harms associated with oil, gas and coal, such as local air and water pollution as well as ocean acidification. Another risk of solar geoengineering is the potential for global temperatures to spike if large-scale spraying programs using planes, balloons or other machines were to end before carbon dioxide concentrations fall enough to avoid dangerous levels of warming. Those concerns are often cited by scientists and activists as reasons to study geoengineering and to set guidelines for how it should be used — if it ever is.

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Tech Won’t Save Us with  Paris Marx – 22 12 08 [#145] Trusting Tech Billionaires is a Recipe for Disaster – Douglas Rushkoff But what I realized was, what we were looking at was a bigger guilt paranoia, where they have always been trying to build a car that could go fast enough to escape from its own exhaust — that they’ve been living with trying to escape externalities. And back in the days when it was people of color in faraway places and their resources that you were taking and their children that you were enslaving, it wasn’t quite as bad as when it was right in your own country. When your own Northern California, Indigenous-made log cabin Wigwam is now being singed with forest fires from your own deforestation practices. What do you think’s going to happen? Now they’re starting to worry, when they see the storming of the Capitol. It got a lot of them scared. It’s like: Uh oh, what power have we unleashed? It’s one thing to not let my own kid use any of the stuff and they don’t. Their kids are going to Rudolf Steiner Schools and Waldorf academies.

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Commentary: Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace by James B. Meigs, MAY 2020 For the police, fear of public chaos outweighed, at least temporarily, concern for possible victims. Before dispatching those casually deputized citizens to keep order in the streets, the Anchorage police chief suspended the search for survivors in damaged buildings. “Arguably, the city was protecting its ruins from looters more conscientiously than it was looking for people trapped in them,” Mooallem writes. Disaster researchers call this phenomenon “elite panic.” When authorities believe their own citizens will become dangerous, they begin to focus on controlling the public, rather than on addressing the disaster itself. They clamp down on information, restrict freedom of movement, and devote unnecessary energy to enforcing laws they assume are about to be broken. These strategies don’t just waste resources, one study notes; they also “undermine the public’s capacity for resilient behaviors.” In other words, nervous officials can actively impede the ordinary people trying to help themselves and their neighbors. As in war, the first casualty in disasters is often the truth. One symptom of elite panic is the belief that too much information, or the wrong kind of information, will send citizens reeling.

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Toxic Sludge is Good for You – Documentary 2002 – “In today’s corporate culture major PR firms promote crisis management as a necessary business expense. Whenever something bad happens to a corporation, often its first move is not to deal with the actual problem, but to manage the negative perception caused by that problem.”

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Elite Panic. Big shots have different goals than the rest of us. Politicians should be representatives, businesses shouldn’t lead, even billionaires can’t seem to buy common sense, and tech won’t save us. CHLOE HUMBERT JUL 13, 2023 The people in high places and big positions will never panic over the right things –  they do elite panic. Left to their own devices, people in charge panic over the wrong things & try to fix things other than the actual crisis because they’re often more concerned with their own position within the status quo, and are more concerned about the upheaval of the status quo, than the damage that upheaval is causing. Ordinary people tend to respond with the appropriate alarm and an impulse to do a practical emergency response to protect oneself and one’s community, but are often at odds with the status quo in doing so, and are often stymied by the very people who should be providing support and leadership. Recognizing this phenomenon is vital in determining strategies to overcome it.

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It Could Happen Here Podcast: Into The Wild Orange Yonder, Robert Evans (audio podcast) Most of these [elites] are just as blindsided by the disasters racking our world as anyone else. Because they’re the kind of people who are capable of taking power they look out for themselves first. And in chaotic and dangerous times they default to what they know best – leaning on culture war bullshit and hiding from scrutiny. The sheer amount of information coming in can be blinding and the best course of action is generally unclear. Elites are actually more likely to be blinded in these situations than the rest of us. A mayor or a president has much more info incoming & his concern is always more complex than what needs to be done to protect people – What is politically safe? What do my donors want? And how will what I do be spun by the media? – are also on his mind. People like us worry will my community & I survive & people like them worry will I lose power? This tug of war between disaster & political experiences between preparing… and protecting your ass leads to a phenomenon called turbo paralysis.

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The CDC, Media & PR: a public health disinformation campaign. Officials appear to have deliberately planted inaccurate PR disinformation regarding infection control isolation guidelines changes. CHLOE HUMBERT MAR 04, 2024 The official from the Department of Health and Human Services assured us that there were “lots more consultations to be had”2 – but I sure wasn’t consulted. And this bait & switch was a very hypocritical move too, considering that the Biden administration has boasted most particularly about how it’s “including more public input into agency rulemaking.”

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Christmas movie propaganda, job creator myths, and “sides” in perpendicular axis People frame things as “conservative vs. liberal” but there’s also “regular people vs. elites” and successful fiction writers know this, because “All art is propaganda” after all. CHLOE HUMBERT DEC 26, 2023 For over 30 years I’ve watched people claim they’re “bringing jobs to the area” only to see what seem to be bait and switch operations. But it’s even worse than that. When you say hey wait, these jobs suck, or hey this is not good for our area actually, then the politicians and pundits tell you some version of “well, then better yourself with education and training so you can work and live somewhere else!” Facepalm! Okay smartass, if you’re saying I need to “better myself” to avoid those terrible jobs, and worse, leave the only home I’ve ever known in Pennsylvania, why did you try to tell me bringing those jobs here, to the place you claim to love too, was such a wonderful idea if they suck so bad the answer is “bettering yourself” and leaving?  I don’t want to leave, and I shouldn’t have to – Pennsylvania is my home.

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Project 2025: Righties ready to roll. (Heads up, yes it’s real & you might not like it.) A list of some coverage from left of Project 2025. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 02, 2024 I’m publishing this list of links because I still encounter people thinking I’m talking about some conspiracy theory about a secret plan and they don’t realize it’s something actually proudly published on a website.

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Dr. David Michaels, The Triumph of Doubt (2020) “It is public relations disguised as science. The company’s PR experts provide these scientists with contrarian soundbites that play well with reporters who are mired in the trap of believing there must be two sides to every story equally worthy of fair minded consideration. The scientists are deployed to influence regulatory agencies that might be trying to protect the public, or to defend against lawsuits by people who believe they were injured by the product in question. The corporations and their hired guns market their studies and reports as sound science, but actually they just sound like science. Such bought and paid for corporate research is sanctified, while any academic research that might threaten corporate interest is vilified. There’s a word for that, Orwellian. Individual companies and entire industries have been playing and fine tuning this strategy for decades, disingenuously demanding proof over precaution in matters of public good. For industry there is no better way to stymie government efforts to regulate a product that harms the public or the environment – debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy.”

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DENY, DECEIVE, DELAY Exposing New Trends in Climate Mis- and Disinformation at COP27 (Vol 2) Climate Action Against Disinformation, January 2023 Michael Shellenberger – A longstanding critic of the environmental movement, in and around COP27, Shellenberger focussed on a relatively new line of attack: the supposed link between climate activism and mental illness. He continued to produce high-traction posts attacking renewable energy – a long-standing pillar of his outputs – but content discussing so-called ‘narcissism’ and ‘anxiety disorders’ was more prominent. He also launched attacks against ‘woke’ activists by connecting movements like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights to psychological disorder. In the process, he has begun to explicitly reference the Great Reset conspiracy and alleged plans for energy and food shortages. 

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PBS – “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” by Dr. Cartwright (in DeBow’s ReviewDRAPETOMANIA, OR THE DISEASE CAUSING NEGROES TO RUN AWAY. It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers… In noticing a disease not heretofore classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. The cause in the most of cases, that induces the negro to run away from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away, can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves be located on the borders of a free state, within a stone’s throw of the abolitionists.

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Manufacturing MILD.  MILD: A longtime PR word to downplay threats, normalize harms, and manufacture consent by manufacturing doubt. CHLOE HUMBERT AUG 05, 2023 They specifically described cigarettes as mild “so as not to provoke anxiety about health, but to alleviate it, and enable the smoker to feel assured about the habit and confident in maintaining it over time.”

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And Voila, An Anti-Mask Twitter Rando Chloe Humbert · Apr 7, 2023 It seemed pretty clear that it was all based on The Economy, and seemed very much to me like leaders everywhere are buying into this fever dream nonsense of sacrificing people on the altar of The Economy. Unmask and urge people to forget there is danger by coaxing people to feel shame about not wanting to get sick by revving up their friends and family to demonize them for protecting themselves, convincing people not to worry about spreading disease with moral disengagement, and normalizing bad outcomes. All just to get people back on cruise ships and airplanes, by not having them “reminded” about the danger.

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Anti-mask was always a dark money campaign. Mar 28th, 2024 wat3rm370n on tumblr Image Alt Text: The disinformation didn’t just happen, it was deliberate. Teams Human. State Government Leadership Foundation openly bragged on social media about an advertising campaign that specifically targeted liberals to persuade them of the lie that masks supposedly do more harm than good.16 There is evidence that mask requirements are beneficial. But the State Government Leadership Foundation appears to have used old school advertising and simple repetition that uses the mere exposure effect, where people come to believe something simply because it seems familiar after hearing it a lot.17 teamshuman.substack.com/p/anti-mask-woke-washing Dark money from big corporations funded a right-wing think tank to do a deliberate advertising propaganda campaign to convince liberal Democrats that masks are bad. ProPublica headline: Buying Your Vote Big Corporations Put Up Seed Funding for Republican Dark Money Group IRS files show that some of the biggest companies in the country provided more than a million dollars a decade ago to launch a Republican dark money group. by Justin Elliott Feb. 14, 2013, 8 a.m. EST Tweet from State Government Leadership Foundation brags about an anti-mask advertising campaign targeting liberals.

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The Crypto Grift Descends on Ukraine – Scam Economy Episode #7 Mar 17, 2022 – Matt Binder Scam Economy host Matt Binder breaks down how grifting cryptocurrency founders, entrepreneurs, investors, and hustlers are trying to pump their money making schemes for a profit and generate good PR for the crypto industry under the guise of charity for Ukraine.

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Disconnect – Don’t look into the Orb – Worldcoin is an exploitative crypto project with a new coat of AI paint. PARIS MARX AUG 9, 2023 Reporting from MIT Technology Review and Buzzfeed News last year examined the company’s operations in countries throughout Africa, Asia, and South America where it recruited locals to be Orb operators and set up a system where they’d convince people to have their eyes scanned in exchange for Worldcoin tokens, free t-shirts, local currency, and even the chance to win a pair of Apple AirPods — whatever would get users to part with the biometric data.

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Financial Times – Beware AI euphoria Like all great bubble stories, the latest tech narrative conveys a sense of inevitability – Rana Foroohar MARCH 25 2024 While Nvidia isn’t Pets.com — it has tangible revenues from selling real things — the overall AI narrative depends on many uncertain assumptions. For example, AI requires huge amounts of water and energy. There’s a push in both the US and EU to get companies to disclose their usage. Whether via carbon pricing, or a tax on resource usage, it’s quite likely that those input costs will rise significantly in the future.  Likewise, AI developers don’t now have to own the copyright to content on which the models are trained. They don’t have to make profits on AI itself, of course; the assumption of future gains is enough to fuel the froth. Relentless techno-optimism and the illusion of inevitability is how Silicon Valley creates paper wealth. But remember, many of the proponents of “AI everywhere” were touting web3, crypto, the metaverse and the benefits of the gig economy not so long ago. One big difference, of course, is that AI has been validated by huge, cash-rich, market-leading companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. But even within those companies developers have their doubts. One senior staffer at a leading AI company recently admitted to me, when pushed, that the profit assumptions around the technology were based “more on speculation than substance”, and that it has major kinks still to be worked out.

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Disconnect – Sam Altman’s self-serving vision of the future The OpenAI CEO expects the most marginalized to pay the price of his ambition Paris Marx Jan 24, 2024 In Altman’s future, the AI tools made by OpenAI will not only become even more resource-intensive as the company seeks to make them more capable, but they will be built into virtually every aspect of our lives. That will require an even greater buildout of hyperscale data centers around the world as our demand for computation grows, requiring a lot more energy to power them — not to mention water and computer parts like graphics processing units (GPUs). Altman believes that energy should come from nuclear fission reactors and that a breakthrough in the technology will usher in a future of abundant and radically cheaper energy. However, while we wait for a breakthrough that may never materialize, he told Bloomberg the planet is “going to have to do something dramatic” and use “geoengineering as a stopgap” as emissions and temperatures continue to increase. That should set off some serious alarm bells.

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The Allegheny Front – Violation at a Pennsylvania drilling site raises questions about lack of Bitcoin regulation Anne Danahy – April 21, 2023 A gas and oil company mining for cryptocurrency in Elk County, Pennsylvania, was found to be in violation of state regulations when it installed equipment before getting approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection, but the company says it is following the rules. A March 1 DEP inspection at Diversified Gas and Oil’s Jay Township site found the company had put in place tools for cryptocurrency operations. The company does have a General Permit. But, according to the DEP, Diversified did not have a permit to install the air pollution sources used to generate power for crypto mining. That specific permit is currently under review.

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Daily Mail – Residents of small Pennsylvania town are being driven mad by huge BITCOIN MINE whose two large cooling towers vibrate and hum more loudly than a waterfall By Dominic Yeatman For Dailymail.Com Published: 14:40 EDT, 13 December 2023 ‘I have a little pond in front of my house where I used to sit and have my coffee at,’ he added. ‘I can’t even enjoy that because I can’t even hear the water over the Bitcoin. It is louder than the waterfall.’ Talen Energy won over locals with promises of hundreds of news jobs and an economic boom in the township of 6,000 when they announced plans for the operation last year. ‘Amazon, Google, all those cloud computing applications, those are the potential clients, customers that we will have in the data center buildings,’ said Dustin Wertheimer, VP and Division CFO Talen Cumulus and Susquehanna Data Center. ‘On the coin mining side, there will be computers again located in those buildings and those computers will run computations that will trigger and generate the issuance of coins.’ The controversial cryptocurrency has been in the news again after a wild ride since the start of December. A rally last week saw it rise above $44,000 to reach its highest level in almost two years – then on Sunday it lost 6.5 percent of its value in just 20 minutes and dipped below $41,000. Global bank Standard Chartered thinks bitcoin could surpass $100,000 before the end of 2024 – yet well-known JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon said last week that US lawmakers should ‘close it down’. The first 1,500 Bitcoins out of Salem Township were sold for $37.6 million after the 180 megawatt mine was plugged in this summer, but that was little consolation to residents at an angry town hall meeting on Tuesday.

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CEPR – Beat the Press  – High Speed Trading and Slow-Witted Economic Policy April 01, 2014 Dean Baker The issue here is that people are earning large amounts of money by using sophisticated computers to beat the market. This is effectively a form of insider trading. Pure insider trading, for example trading based on the CEO giving advance knowledge of better than expected profits, is illegal. The reason is that it rewards people for doing nothing productive at the expense of honest investors. On the other hand, there are people who make large amounts of money by doing good research to get ahead of the market. For example, many analysts may carefully study weather patterns to get an estimate of the size of the wheat crop and then either buy or sell wheat based on what they have learned about the about this year’s crop relative to the generally held view. In principle, we can view the rewards for this activity as being warranted since they are effectively providing information to the market with the their trades. If they recognize an abundant wheat crop will lead to lower prices, their sales of wheat will cause the price to fall before it would otherwise, thereby allowing the markets to adjust more quickly. The gains to the economy may not in all cases be equal to the private gains to these traders, but at least they are providing some service. By contrast, the front-running high speed trader, like the inside trader, is providing no information to the market. They are causing the price of stocks to adjust milliseconds more quickly than would otherwise be the case. It is implausible that this can provide any benefit to the economy. This is simply siphoning off money at the expense of other actors in the market.

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WIRED – One Day, the Stock Market Could Eat the Power Grid 12/2011 – Jon Stokes High-frequency trading shops are basically in the business of taking electricity as an input and producing money as an output; then they use some of their profits to buy more hardware in order to take in more electricity, so that they can make more money, and on it goes. So at an individual level, a successful HFT platform’s appetite for electricity is theoretically unlimited. But the bigger problem is that, taken as a whole, the entire HFT industry’s appetite for electrical power is also theoretically unconstrained. And, unlike the manufacturing sector, which sees its aggregate power usage rise and fall along with the rest of the economy, HFT’s power consumption exists in a perpetual upwards spiral that’s unrelated to direction that the markets and the economy are going at any given moment. HFT’s appetite for CPU cycles and electrical power is unlimited because, as Rick Bookstaber and others have pointed out, it’s an arms race. In other words, to win at HFT, you have to own the fastest, lowest-latency machines in the datacenter; so every time a competitor upgrades and becomes faster than you, you’re forced to upgrade so that you can get back on top. There is no theoretical limit to the one-upsmanship here, and HFT firms will always buy as much computing horsepower as they can afford.

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Financial Times – AI revolution will be boon for natural gas, say fossil fuel bosses. Data centres’ need for reliable power supply set to soar. Myles McCormick in Houston and Jamie Smyth and Amanda Chu in New York – April 1, 2024 A surge in demand for electricity to feed data centres and to power an artificial intelligence revolution will usher in a golden era for natural gas, producers say. AI’s soaring energy needs will rise well beyond what renewable energy and batteries can deliver, executives argue, making more planet-warming fossil fuel supplies crucial even as governments vow to slash their use. “It will not be done without gas,” said Toby Rice, chief executive of EQT, the country’s biggest gas producer, of the coming AI boom. Rice said the tech sector would offer a bonanza for shale producers comparable to the US’s liquefied natural gas industry, whose rapid emergence in recent years offered drillers new customers for their product. “We’ve got a really amazing emerging market with LNG. But there’s a new emerging market that people are getting equally as excited about — and it’s power demand,” Rice said.

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Cats in Wonderland – the Uncanny Valley of lying AIs It’s just a huge coincidence that AI chatbot services are very much like a lot of other tech products with problematic tradeoffs and just happen to be useful to a lot of the same questionable actors. CHLOE HUMBERT MAY 29, 2023 That an AI service just so happens to be gamified, and just a happy accident that the marketing model they’re using, offering people a taste of the AI service for free at first, is just the perfect marketing model for a product that entices you to to re-roll and play again or keep scrolling. This is a known thing in tech products.17  Game apps. Online casinos. Cryptocurrency MLMs. And of course social media. It all seems to be designed in this way. But in the case of AI chatbots – this was all just a big coincidence?

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Morningstar – Remember When High-Frequency Trading Was a Bad Thing? Nothing has changed, except that the controversy has vanished. John Rekenthaler Jul 6, 2020 Few complain. Some of this acceptance owes to ignorance, as without Lewis to lead the Rebel Alliance, most investors do not realize that order-flow payments occur. Companies bury basic information about such payments in their fine print. The details only appear in an obscure filing called SEC Rule 606. (Not to be confused with Chicago’s 606 Trail.) Ultimately, though, order-flow payments don’t strike many nerves, because brokerage customers have learned not to expect transparency. How can Fidelity afford to offer its Fidelity Zero FZROX fund series, which levies no expense ratio whatsoever? Fidelity’s customers don’t know the specific answer, but they realize that somehow, in some fashion, the company must be collecting excess revenue elsewhere. Brokerages, after all, exist to make money. And the people, by and large, are fine with that arrangement, because it is convenient.

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How To Regulate AI, If You Must The rules are definitely coming, so let’s make sure they lead to a future we want. Jon Stokes Jun 22, 2023 But as much as I’d like to ramble on about LLMs as a type of can-opener problem, and explore what it would look like to develop a new companion discipline to hermeneutics that’s aimed at theorizing about text generation, the rule-making around AI has already started in earnest, and I am by and large not a fan of the people who are making the rules and I am not expecting good results. [crossed swords emoji] So this post is aimed at people who, like me, are eyeing most of the would-be AI rule-makers with extreme suspicion and a sense that they are up to no good.

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The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War by Mark Galeotti – Feb 2023 Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause. This may be the age of multinational corporations, mass social movements, and powerful governments, but a coincidence of technological, social, and political change means that it is also the age of the individual, and many of them are for hire. Suddenly the world is full of people who seem to be doing the work of states. Yet not as direct employees, nor even out of ideological commitment or patriotic passion. Journalists hired to write hit pieces. Scholars saying the right things for a grant. Think tanks producing recommendations to order. There may no geopolitical equivalent of uber yet, but lobbying, strategic communications – were I a cynic I would suggest this is what we call propaganda when we do it ourselves – and similar consultancy and service companies often act as the middlemen.

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Fraudulent Appeal to Authority. The tactic of citing sources that don’t actually back up a claim. This ploy utilizes the halo effect, anchoring bias, the mere exposure effect, autopilot thinking, and informational learned helplessness. And it’s fraud. CHLOE HUMBERT FEB 09, 2024 Truth with a lie chaser is what I call when someone leads with something that they know you already believe, to get you on board with where they’re going, to artificially induce the halo effect – where people who already like or trust a particular person or entity, are more likely to believe what they say so as to avoid cognitive dissonance.8 Sales professionals call this “The Yes Set” sales technique, described as “creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree” and which they openly admit is a type of hypnotherapy.9 Someone looking to push lies would start with something that’s self-evident or well-proven, or something you will agree with, before introducing new information that might be false or harder to swallow otherwise.

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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN – MARCH 16, 2021 – Eight States Are Seeding Clouds to Overcome Megadrought But there is little evidence to show that the process is increasing precipitation BY CHELSEA HARVEY & E&E NEWS Weather experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. The scientific gold standard would be a study that proves cloud seeding produced an outcome that definitely would not have happened without it. But that kind of research requires a combination of specialized experimental design and highly advanced technology. For most of cloud seeding’s long history, it just wasn’t possible. Only within the last few years has technology advanced enough for researchers to really dig into the problem. That means cloud seeding research has mainly relied on statistical studies instead. These studies measure the precipitation produced with cloud seeding in one location, and then they compare it to a different location where no cloud seeding took place. The two settings aren’t identical in these kinds of studies. That means they don’t definitively prove that the precipitation produced by cloud seeding in one area would not have happened without it. In 2003, the National Research Council published a comprehensive report on weather modification, highlighting these problems. It concluded that “there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts.” Still, NRC recommended continued research on weather modification—in no small part because of its potential to address the West’s worsening water concerns. That same hope has led state water agencies to keep funding cloud seeding operations, even after federal research efforts dropped off in the 1980s.

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On the Big Science Podcast A radical solution to address climate change, with David Keith (Ep. 125) (Episode published November 30, 2023) “Keith is leading a team that will research solar geoengineering and other novel solutions to climate change.”

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How does it work, what are the risks, and why should we study it? Published Oct 29, 2020 Updated Dec 4, 2020 The Union of Concerned Scientists opposes the deployment of solar geoengineering because it poses unacceptably high environmental, social, and geopolitical risks. Instead, UCS supports continued modeling research, observational studies, and strong, inclusive public participation in decision-making over whether and how further research should include possible small-scale outdoor experiments.

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This controversial climate solution could be exactly what the planet needs. Or it could be a colossal disaster By Laura Paddison, CNN  Updated 12:43 PM EST, Sun February 12, 2023 “Just because we’re desperate doesn’t suddenly make solar geoengineering a good idea, because the risks are so immense,” Lili Fuhr, from the Center for International Environmental Law, told CNN. There are fears fiddling with the planet’s thermostat could alter rainfall patterns and shift monsoons, with potentially devastating consequences for crops. Effects could vary across regions, with some areas reaping benefits while others are harmed, increasing the chance of conflict. “When things go wrong, it is usually the poor people that suffer the most,” said Chukwumerije Okereke, professor of global climate and environmental governance at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria. People are already suggesting African countries as a testing ground for the technologies, Okereke said. “It is a distraction from the sort of policies and help that should be coming to Africa.”

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Pennsylvania Capital-Star – Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science – Pennsylvania requires those seeking to modify the weather to get a license, but no one has ever applied BY: PETER HALL – MARCH 22, 2024 5:14 PM The process referred to in Mastriano’s tweet is even more experimental. Called solar geoengineering, it could provide a method to mask global warming as a result of accumulated greenhouse gasses. But if it is ever used on a large scale, there’s a risk of physical harm and socio-political impacts, according to Harvard University Applied Physics Professor David Keith, who leads a group researching the idea. The group said on its website it is confident that there is no program testing solar geoengineering outdoors.

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SLATE – What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in Dark Waters – Did DuPont test chemicals on its own employees? Did they send a helicopter to frighten a farmer? We break down the new movie. By Matthew Phelan Nov 22, 2019 The film’s portrayal of the physical toll that the excruciating, decadeslong legal battle against DuPont seems to have had on Bilott’s health is also accurate. As he does in the film, the real Bilott did begin to experience strange symptoms in 2010 similar to the strokelike transient ischemic attack seen in the movie. In his memoir, Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, and One Lawyer’s Twenty-Year Battle Against DuPont, published earlier this year, Bilott says that doctors could only really diagnose the issue as “unusual brain activity” after an MRI similar to the one he undergoes in the film. Trial lawyer Harry Deitzler, who’s played by Bill Pullman in the film, told Slate in a telephone interview that while Dark Waters captured Bilott’s sense of “commitment” and “general modesty,” it was less accurate in its depiction on one particular issue: Robert Bilott has not been known to be an especially big fan of Mai Tais, either in general or on special occasions. “I don’t recall him drinking,” Deitzler says.

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Pennsylvania Capital-Star – Mastriano proposes bill to combat ‘chemtrails’ rooted in conspiracy theory and climate science – Pennsylvania requires those seeking to modify the weather to get a license, but no one has ever applied BY: PETER HALL – MARCH 22, 2024 5:14 PM “Spraying unknown, experimental, and potentially dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere without the consent of the people of Pennsylvania is a clear violation of Article 1, Section 27 of the PA Constitution,” Mastriano’s memo states.”

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Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469 Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements,or other methods could insure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization; but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass-media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Rogers 1962)

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Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016

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Detroit Today: Author Sarah Kendzior explains why misinformation spreads so easily – August 22, 2023 Sarah Kendzior is the co-host of the Gaslit Nation podcast and author of several books. She recently wrote “They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.” She says lack of access to good information can contribute to the spread of bad information. “When well-researched investigative reporting is hidden behind a paywall, you’re going to end up with a population that — even if they’re making their best attempts to find the truth — is going to have a very difficult job doing so,” Kendzior explains.

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Williamson, P. Take the time and effort to correct misinformation. Nature 540, 171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540171a Most researchers who have tried to engage online with ill-informed journalists or pseudoscientists will be familiar with Brandolini’s law (also known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle): the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Is it really worth taking the time and effort to challenge, correct and clarify articles that claim to be about science but in most cases seem to represent a political ideology? I think it is. Challenging falsehoods and misrepresentation may not seem to have any immediate effect, but someone, somewhere, will hear or read our response. The target is not the peddler of nonsense, but those readers who have an open mind on scientific problems. A lie may be able to travel around the world before the truth has its shoes on, but an unchallenged untruth will never stop.

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The Internet of Fakes — PR Tactics, Troll Farms, Sock Puppets, Botnets, Influencers, Operatives, & Chaos Agents. A collection of evidence of persuasion, advertising, sales, target marketing, propaganda, agent provocateurs, and cognitive warfare – the true reality of the media landscape. CHLOE HUMBERT SEP 14, 2023

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First NATO scientific meeting on Cognitive Warfare (France) — 21 June 2021 The impairment of cognitive processes has two harmful consequences: i) Contextual maladaptation, resulting in errors, missed gestures or temporary inhibition; and ii) Lasting disorder, which affects the personality and transforms its victim by locking him or her into a form of behavioral strangeness or inability to understand the world. In the first case, it is a question of causing transitory consequences, circumscribed by a particular critical environment. The second concerns the transformation of the decision-making principles of individuals who then become disruptors or responsible for erroneous actions, or even non-action.

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Psychology Today – Giving Up: Informational Learned Helplessness. It’s exhausting when it’s hard to figure out what is true and what is false. December 23, 2021 |  Susan A. Nolan, Ph.D., and Michael Kimball, Reviewed by Jessica Schrader The plodding repetition of conspiratorial lies can lead to “cognitive exhaustion.” But it goes deeper than that. Peter Pomerantsev, author of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, popularized the concept of “censorship by noise” in which governments “create confusion through information—and disinformation—overload.” In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore. They may then “like” or share information without critical review because they lack the energy and motivation to take the extra steps to check it out.