****************

Oh my. More huffin refuges. Hope you like truthdig. Robert
Scheer has done a good job of getting good reporters/writers
who can and do spark the brain.

Blogging on Huffington post is like standing on a street corner in New York City.  Huffington posts concept of breaking news and opinion seems a big stretch, almost up there with Fox’s fair and unbalance?  I find so many of the article Headers amusing, but seldom read them.  For instance Huffington Post has many articles covering people I never heard of, nor really care to hear about so I see headers that sound like this;... “someone I never heard of hates someone else I never heard of”  or this breaking newsy ......“Some actor is breaking up with someone who may be an actor because someone else caused it who could be an actor”  like I need to know?  I find keeping up with these so called celebrity shenanigans my mostest important prioritys in the world.

Just for the hell of it;...  I jumped over to HP and found this jewel of an article header: ..... “USDA: Eggs Aren’t As Bad For You As We Thought”  ...... I suppose breaking news, if you are an egg?

****************

By No_Man’s_Land, February 8 at 5:23 pm

Exactly how I stand on what ebooks are about, though I usually
suggest just what will someone read when the power goes off?
But yes it just simply has much to do with the copyright date in
the beginning of most publish material. That date can be altered
but when that date is totally disappeared, well it just may as well
have never existed and/or the book a total fairy tale.

@bonobo65

The problem with ebooks is that in time, we’ll have no reference point to gauge what we read against previous texts. They are connected to the internet and to the publisher that sells them. There has already been talk of various business models where readers “rent” the text for a period of time before it erases automatically. That is only one step removed from direct control of ereader content by whomever sold the text.

As we’ve seen with television, web sites and even text books, there is a proclivity to alter the narrative based on the day’s events, public relations, the author’s preference or political popularity. For example, it was recently discovered that the author of a history textbook in Virginia included analysis from the Sons of the Confederacy web site stating that the Civil War was divorced from the cause of slavery. Similar efforts are underway with history books in Texas schools where lessons are being altered to emphasize fealty to capitalism and Christianity while deemphasizing equally important forces of societal impact like the Progressive or Civil Rights eras. Considering that publishers base most of their textbooks on the Texas market, states across the country will be forced to adopt those textbooks. And, of course, the revisionist history of mainstream news goes without saying.

All of that said, imagine a paperless society where publishers can “update” text at will. We are moving in the direction cloud-computing which means that files will no longer be stored locally on your computer but instead on a server just like sending a file through your Google email so you can access it from another computer. Google is already making an effort to place every book ever written into electronic format. Why pay taxes for a library or harvest trees when we can access everything we need through the web?

Once information is centralized, a simple burst to the server can alter history, literature, philosophy, news or perhaps even the law at the whim of whomever controls it. If that happens, how would we know anything changed? How do we know the books that Google is converting are a one-for-one match with the original text? We don’t and won’t. We’ll just feel crazy just like we do when Fox News ignores its previous reporting to manipulate its audience.

Couple that with the demise of net neutrality which is going to usher in monopoly control of the web (similar to cable television but with even fewer players), and we’re talking about the eventual control of all information in very few hands. As the recent political influence of the national Chamber of Commerece over our election suggests, it’s not such a leap to see the business community conspire and mass their financial power to achieve whichever end they find suitable.

Mergers of independent media like the Huffington Post with AOL are one step closer to that reality without any political will to regulate their business practices. In many cases we’re already there. It’s been imagined. It’s been learned. It’s being implemented. We will not fight it. We will celebrate it.

Excerpt from 1984 by George Orwell

“By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak ... will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” (1.5.30, Syme)

It didn’t take long. Arianna is already shilling for AOL with an “interview” promoting the importance of sleep.

It certainly worked as I nodded off several times trying to read through it. Yawn!

Huffington is as dense as she sounds some times… I predict, if she has a clue, to leave your new deal in about two years…. once she realizes her editing is overruled by the shareholders and those holding the interest in AOL / HuffPost.

She sold out.  To the corporate government.  What about going public oneself or bringing in private capital?  Why sell something that works so well?

She’s following Schwartznegger’s ride from immigrant to government… and ethics and justice be damned. 

$315M sure is quite the pacifier.

If the H-Post is worth 315 million, Democracy Now
with Amy Goodman must be worth at least 315
Billion…Robert Scheer and Chris Hedges should be
able to command at least 100 million for
Truthdig….

H-Post has been on the decline with their
aggregating of news for quite some time now.

With a little policy from the Web Master, maybe
Truthdig can fill the breech. The interactive
features on H-Post were more robust than Truthdig.

****************

““so your posts will have an even bigger impact on the national
and global conversation.”“

And I don’t believe arianna will get her wish of her new venue
and modus operandi that will make ‘an even bigger impact on
national and global conversation’. What is the obviousness of
this is that it is NOT AOL buying huffpo, it is AOL TIME WARNER,
one of…what, the only 3 or 4 or 5 owners of the american
mainstream media. Come on, give us a break.

What will happen is more likely that content will be even more
‘regulated’ at her ‘funny/bunny’ new installment and possibly an
increase of surveillance. Makes me think she really doesn’t know
what she is doing, thinking that her little garden will still ‘lead’
the conversation. After all the complaints from many of her
members showing up here and at other sites were pretty explicit
about being kicked off for content and ideas that have all the
markings of ‘content and idea’ controls’. More like having a
rupert mudrock blog site.

But as I said earlier on this post, I quit going to huffpo about 3
years ago as it had, to me, became filled with all the trappings
of a supermarket tabloid.

Go comment on usatoday and try to use the word ‘crap’.

When’s TruthDig going to sell out?

Or has that already happened?

I can’t tell anymore with these online ‘news’ sources.

Bueller?

****************

Huff was just the internet version of the ‘national inquirer. I stop
going there 3 years ago.

Hi Truthdig! I’m here from HuffPo.  Looking good so far!

Arianna has forgotten her hot times in bed with Al Franken and what she learned there.

No surprise, since HuffPo has long modeled itself as a mainstream news source
wannabe. Its 25 million (that is a surprise) visitors attest to its middling leanings
and room-temperature pandering.

We await the same corporate groping here at TD, with a growing sense of
inevitability.

-Mergers.
-Smiling cleavage instead of news.
-The creeping death of net neutrality.
-Revisionist history on a 24-hr cycle.
-The transition to ebooks with no discernable way to determine that what we read today is the same as it was yesterday.
-100% surveillance on communications.
-Habeus Corpus gone.
-Constitutionally codified corruption.
-War and imprisonment for profit normalized.
-The evangelical takeover of the military.
-Political movements eager to investigate “Anti-Americanism,” tote guns into the Congress and stomp the heads of those they disagree with.

Not looking too good, folks. I’d say it’s already gone.

I wonder what Robert Scheer has to say about this.

Ms. Huffington, if anyone remembers, changed parties some time ago… claiming she ‘saw the light.’

More like she took the advice and now has received her payoff… as promised, contracted for and agreed to.

My oh my, how bright that light must be… or NOT, for it seems that the love of money has once again blinded the eyes from seeing the truth.

Hello Truthdig.  I just arrived from HuffPost!  I read pages of comments there and found a few links to alternate sites which brought me to your shores.  I’m now registered and glad to be here.  I hope you don’t merge with Comcast or GE or Nabisco.  You’re now in my favorites and I’ll be back daily.  Like your style!

The Great Exodus has started. People are abandoning HuffPost
in droves, but this was just the straw that broke the camel’s
back. The increasing level of political censorship has just
become intolerable. People have been complaining for a long
time, but this AOL thing was the push needed to get many of
them to migrate elsewhere.

AOL now owns a site visited by 25 million unique visitors…. Minus 1.

Hello Truthdig.

I logged out of the huffpost some time ago. there moderators suck! Now they climb in bed with ao-lamer. The vast majority of our press is not FREE it is owned by the plutocracy! Wake up people!
Join the Zeitgeist movement. Its about empathy and sharing. We must evolve beyond the old and evil ideas that rule us now!

I wonder if all the folks who provided The Huffington Post with free content (including myself) now realise why Joe Bageant despised their operation. The so-called liberal rich, like their conservative brethren, take care of their own. The shared vision: $$$$$$$$$!

Another Korporate sellout. Huffpo has been sliding towards the Right for years, and now they’ve made it official.

Comcast buys MSNBC—and Keith Olberman, the hottest property they have, is on the skids, with one foot out the door and the other on a banana peel…then he’s gone, with legal gags to keep his mouth shut for a year.  Can Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz be far behind?

Now AOL, one of the great and early violators of its users’ privacy, has bought out Ariana Huffington.  She’s SUPPOSED to be the new editorial head of all of all of AOL, but how soon before they put pressure on her to “hold back on that story on how Monsanto is killing family farms”? (as an example).

And how long before they are selling HuffPo’s subscriber list to every corporation and conservative group who wants personal data on liberals? 

If there’s one thing AOL is good at it’s breaking its word to keep users’ data private.

I guess I’m signing off HuffPo…too bad.