Naveena Shine attracts attention with “Proof” of Breatharian claim. Does the “Proof” exist?

June 13th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Mysteries | Science - (2 Comments)

Woman hasn’t eaten since May 3, plans to go on

So reads the breathless headline of a United Press International story published on June 10, 2013. Is it true?

Naveena Shine of Seattle declares in a press release and a website that:

On May 3rd 2013, the Spiritually based endeavor, “Living On Light” began an experiment designed to demonstrate that the human body is capable of thriving without food. In order to test the validity of this assumption, one subject, Naveena Shine (the founder of “Living On Light”) has put herself in a controlled environment for a period of four to six months with no food and only water, tea and coffee to drink. She is now at day ten. Her every move is being filmed and archived for future reference. Eventually the whole experiment can be viewed live on the internet.

At “Living On Light” we propose that we have a nutritional source already embedded within our body/mind/Spiritual systems that can give us exactly what we need to be healthy and well. Since we do not yet know exactly what that source is I am symbolically calling it Light. If this capacity is real, it will change everything we know about ourselves, everything we do in our lives and everything we do on our planet.

Throughout history there have been many people who have claimed this capacity. They say they have stopped eating, sometimes for years, and it seems they thrive very well. Today there are many people in this world who say they live on light. They call themselves Breatharians or they call themselves Sungazers….

The only problem with this is that we do not believe it. We hear about it but, how can we possibly believe somebody who says that they don’t eat? Even family and friends don’t believe them sometimes. The solution is very simple. We have to put it to the test. This is what I intend to do through “Living On Light”. Put it to the test. The only way to prove it is by doing it….

Of course, to have all of these benefits we would have to prove that it is possible. To achieve the first objective it is VERY simple. Here is how we are going to do that.

One subject, that’s me, is going to be in a controlled environment for a period of four to six months. Eight cameras will be set to view every corner of that controlled environment. I will not go outside of those cameras.

We are hoping to live-stream the event so that you, from anywhere in the world, will be able to see me every moment of every day and night, by tuning in to my internet live-stream at www.livingonlight.co for as long or as little as you like. You can just check in and the only question that matters is, “Is she eating or is she not?”

We are having many issues with live-streaming and it might take a while to get it operational. In the meantime, each moment is being recorded and the files are being archived for future verification.

There cannot be any cheating!

Naveena Shine has set the parameters for her “experiment,” which is now supposedly in Day 45:

  • The “experiment” must keep Naveena Shine in a controlled environment for a period of four to six months.
  • Observers anywhere must be “able to see me every moment of every day and night, by tuning in to my internet live-stream.”
  • Naveena Shine “will not go outside of those cameras.”
  • “The only question that matters is, ‘Is she eating or is she not?’”

How is Naveena Shine performing, based on the parameters she set for herself?

  • There is no live stream at Naveena Shine’s website. Setting one up is neither difficult nor expensive. Naveena Shine just hasn’t done it.
  • Observers are not able to see Naveena Shine at every moment of every day and night. They are only able to visit Shine’s YouTube channel, where she posts a short video once every few days.
  • We have no idea whether Naveena Shine is going outside of camera range, since video is not being shared as Shine said it would be.
  • Naveena Shine actually is eating. If you read the UPI article, you’ll see that Naveena Shine is regularly consuming tea with milk. That’s food. And in an update [June 14 2013] Naveena Shine now acknowledges that she is consuming 25-calorie Emergen-C packets that contain multiple vitamins and 25 calories of fructose. That’s food too.

There’s no sense in Naveena Shine continuing the experiment, since it has already been a failure: her own standard for proof has not been met, and she’s eating…

…or has it been a success after all? That depends on the goal: at her “Living on Light” website, Naveena Shine is selling her books, asking for monetary contributions, and inviting advertisers to place their products on her website.

Naveena hawks products and solicits contributions for Living on Light, LOL.

The acronym for Living on Light is LOL, after all.

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The Incidence of Trent Franks Thinking is Very Low

June 12th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Buttons | Legislation | Politics | Republicans | Sex and Gender - (0 Comments)

It is possible, even from the great distance of Maine, to hear the DC press corps exhale with a collective “OMiGod” at the remarkably ignorant declaration of Republican Congressman Trent Franks, who Aaron Blake and Laura Bassett and Garance Franke-Ruta explain, available research indicates that rape does not result in a lower pregnancy rate than consensual sex, and tens of thousands of pregnancies in the United States every year occur as the result or rape. In short, Trent Franks couldn’t be more wrong — and it’s on the back on his simply wrong claims that he’s trying to pass H.R. 1797, bill to force the criminalization of abortion upon the citizens of the District of Columbia, even in the case of rape.

The Incidence of Trent Franks Thinking is Very Low ButtonAs you hear partisan spinners declare Trent Franks’ counterfactual assertions to be an anomaly among Republicans, remember that it was less than a year ago that Republican Senator Todd Akin made the same claim.

As you watch his fellow Republicans back away rapidly from Trent Franks due to his impolitic manner of speaking, remember that until this afternoon, Trent Franks’ efforts were well-supported within Republican ranks. His bill to punish victims of rape out of ignorance is supported by a group of 171 cosponsors, a group that is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly Republican.

As Republican leaders everywhere feign shock that a member of Congress like Trent Franks could dream up such a thing, look at the long-standing record of Trent Franks’ kooky extremism — it’s all a matter of public record.

These are just a few examples of Trent Franks’ extremist political practices. It’s been fairly clear for some time that Trent Franks’ thought-starved agenda was out of step with mainstream American ideals. But until he proved an embarrassment, the Republican Party held Trent Franks in a tight embrace as one of its own.

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No, Actually, Most Terrorists Threatening the USA AREN’T Muslims

April 23rd, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity - (5 Comments)

“Most terrorists are Muslim,” say the ultraconservative supporters of religious-based profiling and surveillance in America. The claim is resurfacing in the last week:

Christopher Cook, April 19 2013:

Whatever the specifics, the general fact is always the same: Not all Muslims are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Muslims…. Islamist terrorism is now a fact of life. The left would like to create an alternate reality in which they were not the perpetrators of most of the domestic terrorism in United States’ history, but they cannot. So they do the next best thing: they lie.

Craig R. Kelso, April 21 2013:

We were attacked again by terrorists; Muslim terrorists. I know that not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslim.

Pappy’s Rants, April 22 2013:

I read recently………not all muslims are terrorists but most terrorists are muslim.

Ruth King, April 23 2013:

Unfortunately, Obama seems driven by a desire to befriend Muslims and demonize those who recognize that, while not all Muslims are terrorists, most terrorists are Muslims and that radical Islam is a clear, present, and dangerous threat…. Many analysts are now questioning whether the atrocity that befell the citizens of Boston will become the “new normal.” It is clear that future attacks are inevitable as long as our government and the president in particular do not call a spade a spade and begin to take all necessary measures to protect American citizens from the evil deeds of Islamists.

Not one of these claims is backed up by an actual count comparing the number of terrorist threats by non-Muslims to those made by Muslims. That’s what you’d need to be able to make a claim like “most terrorists are Muslims”, at least if you cared about facts. These posters don’t care about facts. They just know what they know because they think they know it, facts be damned.

The rest of us who do care about facts can refer to Alejandro J. Beutel’s yearly report, Data on Post-9/11 Terrorism in the United States. Beutel stacks the deck in favor of finding more Muslim terrorists by including both American and foreign Muslim threats against the United States, while only counting American non-Muslims and leaving foreign non-Muslims out.

I last looked at this dataset two years ago, but with data in through June of 2012 and the war-on-Islam freakout voices rising again, it’s time to take another look. The following are the latest available year-by-year statistics on Muslim versus non-Muslim terrorist threats against the United States:

2002
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 5
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 6

2003
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 2
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 8

2004
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 3
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 4

2005
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 2
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 3

2006
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 7
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 2

2007
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 3
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 4

2008
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 3
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 9

2009
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 11
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 19

2010
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 11
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 32

2011
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 10
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 19

First half of 2012
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American or foreign Muslims: 3
# of terrorist threats against the United States by American non-Muslims: 11

The actual, observable and sourced facts show that in every year, the majority of those making terrorist threats against the United States have been non-Muslims.

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Social Media Infographic Hype Doesn’t Help

March 10th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Tech - (1 Comments)

This morning, a contact of mine recommended an infographic to me.

Go ahead and click on the infographic (uploaded April 2012) if you’d like to read it in detail on its original website, whitefireseo.com; I can’t find the space to post the graphic at its full size and write about it at the same time. Infographics are fun to look at because they’ve got splashy pictures and shiny colors, but most of them are just plain incompatible with accompanying words because they’re so gosh-darned big. This one is 2,227 pixels tall in the original. That height is unnecessary; did you notice that most of the infographic is consumed by empty space or uninformative graphics? If we reduced that infographic down to its text, it would take up one paragraph’s space. That’s my first frustration with infographics like this.

My second frustration with infographics like this is that often they don’t link back to primary sources, which is how you can check their facts. This infographic doesn’t back up any of its claims with a source, so you either must accept the graphic’s authority (based on what? the quality of color choices?) or do your own fact-checking. Even the original page on which the infographic was hosted fails to indicate where the graphic’s claims come from.

In this particular infographic, I was drawn to the claim that “Tweeting cuts indexation time by 50% and reduces the time it takes Googlebot to find your content from Hours (2:00) to Seconds (0:02).” Is that really true?

A little searching of the WhitefireSEO.com website turns up an undated post by Mitch Monsen on the Whitefire blog, which in turn refers to a study carried out for the website SEOmoz by Casey Henry. The study is three years old, which for rapidly-changing tech firms like Google and Twitter terms is long out of date and no longer a reliable indicator. A more recent data dive by Rand Fishkin, also on SEOmoz, found that Twitter linking correlated fairly weakly with search ranking. Heading back to Henry’s 2010 study, a close read reveals that Tweeting a link alone was a relatively rotten strategy for getting a web page indexed on Google — with the process taking anywhere from 9 to 26 hours that way. Henry found that it was the particular combination of an “internal link” on the website and a Twitter post that most effectively cut the time for Google to index a web page. That time was cut by 50% only if the Twitter post received 3 or more retweets.

What about the claim that Tweeting cuts the time for “Googlebot to find your content” from 2 hours to 2 seconds? The claim seems ridiculous on its face given a paper published in 2012 by Twitter employees indicating that “usually, tweets are searchable within 10 seconds after creation.” Google’s bot would have to be magic to work more quickly to index the Twitter website than Twitter does itself. And indeed, Henry’s study found that the time for a Googlebot to index a web page wasn’t cut down to 2 seconds when the link to a web page was tweeted; the time was cut down to 1 minute 18 seconds on average.

Who cares about the difference between 2 seconds and 1 minute 18 seconds? Who cares how old a study is? Why be so picky? There’s something to be said to these objections; one of the problems with the SEO [search engine optimization] industry is that it sells a quick fix when the real solution is to keep at the task of original “content creation” (also known as writing) across a long period, writing something new and interesting over and over again. And perhaps that problem is the point; if SEO and social media firms build their reputation on the ability to shave off seconds like this, they at least ought to substantiate their claims with sourced accuracy. White Fire SEO’s inaccurate claim is now being repeated as if it were original gospel on other SEO websites, and that’s not how it should be. An unsourced infographic might capture eyes, but it shouldn’t capture an attentive head.

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The Evolution of a Quote: Misconceived, Misattributed, Misconstrued

March 3rd, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Mysteries | Tech | War and Peace - (4 Comments)

Yesterday a professional contact of mine shared the following message on Facebook:

"Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

This contact of mine is a business marketer with a highly entrepreneurial approach to living, and frequently posts quotes like these as a motivation to keep trying, never give up, and have faith that things will work out if we strive and believe.

Misconstrued
There’s a virtue-by-persecution aspect to this quotation that suggests criticism and opposition are irrelevant or, what’s more, a sign that you’re on the right track. It may be true that people are often criticized for work of high quality, but it’s also true that people are often criticized for work of low quality. There may always be someone to tell you that you are wrong, but sometimes that’s because you actually are wrong. There may be difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right, and we all have been told with resist temptation, but what if your critics are right after all? To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires courage, and we all have been told how virtuous courage is, but what if you’ve mapped out a course of action that takes you over a cliff? Courageous + blind = dead.

Misattributed
I was so disappointed in this quote that I began to question whether the thoughtful mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered it at all. This question is easily resolved with a visit to the online index of the complete lectures, letters and other written works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a quick search of which reveals that Emerson wrote no such thing. Someone has tried to grant legitimacy to this questionable idea by attaching the fictional authorship of Emerson in an appeal to literary authority. I suppose they might courageously say that I’m a naysayer doubting the wisdom of their course, but nothing will change the fact that they’ve misquoted.

[Update: a handy tip in the comments section indicates that the online source linked to above is not entirely complete. However, see below for indications that Emerson is not the source.]

If Ralph Waldo Emerson didn’t write this misguided motivational treacle, who did write it? Thanks to technology, sleuthing this sort of question out is not as hard as it used to be. A search of Google’s extensive archive of phrases in books reveals that the phrase “map out a course” does not appear in books until 1864, at the fading end of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s long career as an author:

The phrase "map out a course" does not appear in books until 1864

The earliest search result in the Google Books archive for the more complete phrase “map out a course of action and follow it” is the 1908 book Keep Up Your Courage: Keynotes to Success by Mary Allette Ayer. Keep Up Your Courage is one of many books in which Ayer lists motivational quotations on various themes from various sources; this book features the following quotation:

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always some one to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to the end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men to win them. - Young People's Weekly

The attribution to the magazine Young People’s Weekly is important, because Ayer makes plain in the introduction to her book that she admires Ralph Waldo Emerson and considers him a valuable source. Ayer provides 11 quotes of Ralph Waldo Emerson with the explicit permission of his publisher, and always cites him by name without source. According to Ayer, the Young People’s Weekly quotations come from its producer, the Christian tract publisher David C. Cook.

Misconstrued
Did you notice the transformation in the quote’s content from its apparently original publication in Young People’s Weekly to its modern version? The last sentences have been truncated: “To map out a course of action and follow it to the end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men to win them.” This thought, that peace takes courage and that courage lies not merely in physical fights but in conscientious non-violent deeds, has been deemed culturally unworthy in modern times.

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Fact Check: is Lewiston, Maine riddled with Crime since Somali Immigrants Came to Town?

February 6th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Questions | State and Local - (2 Comments)

When I listen to people talk about the most “dangerous” places to live in Maine, the city of Lewiston constantly comes up. You wouldn’t want to live in Lewiston, people tell me. All the Somalis have made Lewiston a dangerous place to live, they say. You can see these kind of remarks online, too:

Madeleine, October 2012:

"Hey Happy Somali. Your Kinsman are behaving like entitled jerks. Why?

Do you think it's OKAY to come here to the USA and get away with lawlessness?... When your kinsmen come here, the quote of "YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT" applies. So show some respect. Stop your kinsmen from attacking old ladies and bringing in gangs to fight with the natives in Lewiston and Auburn.

Stop your kinsmen from sex trafficking and other illegal and evil crimes."

Feces Peces, Augusta 2012:

"Lewiston used to be a beautiful place in synch with the rest of Maine. Now that some putrid trash libs imported these people Lewiston is a crime ridden run? down dump. I wish I could put into words the utter disdain we have for liberal fecal matter. I just can't think of a strong enough word to label vile pig liberals with."

DrewciferFSA, October 2012:

"I grew up in downtown Lewiston from 1982 until 2003, it's been a dump as far as I can remember. From what I've seen? when I go back to visit, the Somali's certainly didn't help.
It seemed to go from just poor alcoholics to a more violent type. Glad I'm 1400 miles away now."

Ancient Legacy, February 2011:

"Somali refugees completely fucked up Maine.
Instead of assimilating into maine and into the american way of life, they brought their crime, gangs, bad habits, and disgusting behavior to? maine.
They've made lewiston into a "little Somalia" basically turning it into a shit hole.
Fuck you somali's go back to your damn country, stop fucking ours up."

Stuff Black People Don’t Like, September 2012:

Lawrence Auster made mention of the importation of crime to Lewiston that came with the “Great Somali Wave of 2002″ back in an entry at View from the Right in 2009. Well, CNS News (CNSNEWS.com) published a hard-hitting article on July 25, 2012 that dared to expose the importation of “crime that normally only Black people in America will commit” courtesy of Somali refugee…

Is this all true? Has Lewiston, Maine descended into crime because of the influx of Somali immigrants?

It’s time for a fact check.

Lewiston, Maine is almost a perfect test case for this sort of claim because the history of Somali immigration is recent and well-documented: the very first Somali family moved to the city of Lewiston in 2001, and having recommended the city to other Somalis, triggered an influx soon afterward (on this point, see Andrew Cullen’s history of Somali immigration to Lewiston in the Kennebec Sun Journal). 2001 is the clear date marking Lewiston before Somalis and Lewiston after Somalis.

If the presence of Somali immigrants led to high crime rates, then crime report data from the FBI (here and here)should show the crime rate in Lewiston rising from a lower pre-2001 level to a higher post-2001 level.

Here’s the data, courtesy of the Uniform Crime Reports:

Violent Crime in Lewiston is lower since Somalis immigrated.

Violent crime in Lewiston is actually lower than average since the arrival of Somali immigrants.

Property Crime in Lewiston is down since Somalis arrived.

Property crime in Lewiston is actually lower than average since the arrival of Somali immigrants.

Reality doesn’t support the racist delusion of a Somali crime wave in Lewiston. It’s a shame that reality hasn’t stopped people from spreading race-based tall tales of danger.

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Armed Guards in School? Fact Check: Kids are Safer in School than out of School

December 21st, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Questions - (7 Comments)

In the Bangor Daily News of December 20 2012, Daniel Patterson of Presque Isle Maine writes that armed guards should be posted in all public schools:

"We need armed guards where masses of people, especially children, gather because crazed gunmen target masses of people. I know we might not like the image of soldiers at our schools and malls, but I’d rather see that than lifeless bodies of children."

The next day, National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre called a national press conference at which he also called for armed guards to posted in all public schools:

"The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security."

Do guards armed with guns belong at schools? The answer to that question might be “yes” if schools are especially dangerous places. If on the other hand schools are not especially dangerous places, then there is clearly no safety or budgetary reason to put armed guards in schools.

It’s time for a fact check: are schools in the United States dangerous places for kids to be? Are they more dangerous for kids than they used to be? Is being in school more dangerous for kids than being out of school?

Existing data from the National Center for Education Statistics and a new report released just yesterday by the the Bureau of Justice Statistics address these questions succinctly and definitively.

NCES’ most recent data on the number of homicides in school and out of school, combined with Census Bureau data on the number of school-aged children in the United States, allow us to chart the rate of homicide in the United States in school and out of school:

Homicide Rate for Youth Aged 5-18 from 1992-2009

The youth homicide rate in schools is negligible at the national level, consistently less than 1 in 10,000,000 people. If you’re going to worry about children being killed, worry about the still-small but much-bigger youth homicide rate outside of school, which is far, far higher. Schools are safe places for children. Schools are havens from murder — and they have been getting safer, not more dangerous, over time.

What about other serious violent crimes, like rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults? The National Crime Victimization Survey asks people aged 12 and older about the crimes like these that they’ve suffered in school and out of school. A report by Janet Lauritsen and Nicole White of the University of Missouri, released on December 20, 2012 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, includes data on the rape, robbery and aggravated assault rate in school and out of school:

Serious Violent Crime Rate per 1,000 Youth aged 12-17 from 1994-2010

As with homicide, the rate of these serious violent crimes is quite low in school, higher outside of school than inside school, and decreasing over time.

Schools are safe. The call to stuff the schools with armed guards is not based in reality.

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Despite Mega Media Connections, The Can Kicks Back “Viral” Video Can’t Actually Go Viral

December 5th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Economy | Media | Politics - (1 Comments)

The Can Kicks Back is an paper-front organization that describes itself to the public as a “grassroots” campaign of “Millenials” but was actually started by a core group of rich old white men. It acts as if it is independent but actually occupies the office space held by “The Campaign To Fix The Debt” and The New America Foundation, both of which are funded by the billionaire Peter G. Peterson, aka Pete Peterson.

For years now, Peter G. Peterson has worked to create the appearance that large numbers of Americans actually want to tax poor people more and tax rich people less while slashing social security, medicare and medicare benefits. What’s the policy position of The Can Kicks Back? Read it here:

"Reforms to all areas of the budget should be included. The plan should:
- Reform Medicare and Medicaid, improve efficiency in the overall health care system, and limit future cost growth;
- Strengthen Social Security, so that it is solvent and will be there for future beneficiaries; and
- Include comprehensive and pro-growth tax reform, which broadens the base, lowers rates, raises revenues, and reduces the deficit."

In the language of Washington:
“Broaden the base” equals tax poor people more.
“Pro-growth tax reform” equals tax rich people less.
“Reform Medicare and Medicaid,” “limit future cost growth,” and “Strengthen Social Security, so that it is solvent,” equals slash social security, medicare and medicare benefits.

One asset that billionaire Pete Peterson “The Can Kicks Back” has in spades is insider connection to the news media, which is why the billionaire organization was able to get mention of its YouTube video mentioned in all of the following outlets within a matter of hours of one another:

ABC News
CBS News
CNBC/NBC News
Politico
The Atlantic
United Press International
USA Today
Washington Post
Denver Post
Salon
The Daily Caller
NewsMax
Huffington Post
Gawker
CNet
Comedy Central
The Hill
Business Insider
The Blaze
Digital Journal
KQED
The Billings Gazette
Examiner
Policy Mic

Either all of these reporters, all of a sudden, just happened to hit upon the same YouTube video and independently decide that it made an important news story they had to write about right now, just after the video was produced, or billionaire Pete Peterson “The Can Kicks Back” is pulling some strings.

Those last two sources — Examiner and Policy Mic — claim that the video is going “viral.” Really? Viral?

It’s fact-check time. Here’s my screen cap of the number of views of the video after the publication of all these major-outlet stories:

Alan Simpson, Gangnam Style, Shilling for Billionaire Pete Peterson and the Peterson Front organization calling itself The Can Kicks Back.

323 views. That’s all that the 24 news stories someone massaged into being could produce. 7.5% of those views were by the reporters who wrote the story — if they watched the video at all before promoting it upon request their own independent initiative.

After enough newspapers, magazines and news channels on TV promote this video, it may get a higher number of viewers, but that’s wouldn’t reflect a “viral” process either. A viral video spreads spontaneously from person to person who thinks it’s amazing. Before anyone starts talking about it, it’s been engineered to appear repeatedly in the corporate mass media. It isn’t now, and won’t ever be, viral.

The video is not viral because the concept of cutting social security, medicare and medicaid is not viral.
The video is not viral because the concept of “broadening the base” by taxing more poor people is not viral.
The video is not viral because the concept of “pro-growth” tax cuts for the rich is not viral.

None of this is viral. You, being a normal sane individual who talks to other normal sane individuals, know none of this is viral. But a billionaire and the front group he funded into existence are betting that if they keep using their connections to insert this stuff into news, and if they keep calling it “Millenial” or “grassroots” or “viral,” Representative Hosenpants and Senator Billingsworth will believe it’s viral — and if they believe it, they’ll make it happen.

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