As part of his research into Trump’s $1+B disinformation campaign, journalist McKay Coppins “tried to live in the same information world as Trump supporters so that he’d receive the same disinformation supporters did.”

He said he ended up believing everything and nothing. Rumors, lies and reported journalism ended up seeming roughly equal in credibility, even though he was following the impeachment hearings closely and could see for himself that Trump supporters were lying about what transpired there.

This is exactly how censorship works in autocratic regimes nowadays, Coppins notes – no need to shut down opposition journalism; better to just flood the information channels with bullshit.

Journalist Details ‘Brazen Ways’ Trump Will Use His Power To Get Reelected - Fresh Air

A brief history of the "I, Claudius" TV series

The TV production had a lot of problems, but Robert Graves, who wrote the 1930s novels on which the series is based, had faith:

“I’ve communed with Claudius,” he said at the time, “and he reassured me that this would be a great success.”

The series launched Derek Jacobi’s career.

“I owe ‘Claudius’ so much on both sides of the Atlantic,” Mr. Jacobi said in a telephone interview. “If he has haunted me, it’s been a beneficent ghost.”…

The durability of “I, Claudius” began with Graves’s books. Cast as the secret memoirs of Claudius himself, they were grounded in exhaustive scholarship but imbued with a novelist’s imagination. They had plenty of skulduggery, perversion and other delectable malfeasance, set against the marble majesty of Roman antiquity.

The TV version, however, came close to missing the mark. “It was so badly received in its first two weeks,” recalled Sian Phillips, who played the empress Livia, “because it was so different.”

That difference lay in the series’s down-to-earth treatment of epic material. Despite its imperial setting “I, Claudius” was a small studio effort devoid of huge sets and sprawling battle scenes.

In whittling down Graves’s tomes (which total some 1,000 pages in paperback) to a little over 11 hours of television, the scriptwriter Jack Pulman, who died in 1979, effectively rendered them as a soap opera, emphasizing the dysfunctional relations inherent in any extended clan. At various points he called his teleplay a Jewish family comedy and a treatment of a Mafia dynasty.

The TV show used natural language, rather than the high prose that was common in previous Roman stories. Scenes were small. The action encompassed huge battles and riots sweeping the city, but we don’t see those. We just see and hear a few people talking about them.

Phillips, who played the ruthless villain Livia, had difficulty finding her character, but finally, director Herbert Wise told her to just ham it up.

‘Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more terrifying it is.’ ”

In the TV series and books, Rome is portrayed as being in decay, due to its transition from republican government to monarchy. But this is a bit of authorial fudging.

In reality, Rome peaked long after the action of the stories.

The Emperor Claudius died in AD 54. The land area of the empire peaked around 100 AD.

Prior to the empire, Rome wasn’t a republic as we think of it today. Only a very small aristocracy participated in government, and millions of people were slaves. Many historians say that the life of a Roman citizen was best in the period 100-200 AD., and Rome extended citizenship broadly to the people who lived within its borders.

Rome finally fell in 476 AD, four centuries after the action of I, Claudius. And that’s only the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire, which we now call Byzantium, continued on until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.

We’ve started rewatching “I Claudius.”

“I Claudius” is the story of a great empire that decays as its chief executive seizes dictatorial power while the Senate flatters him and otherwise stands idly by.

It’s nice to escape from the news into a TV fantasy now and then.

I am prepared to call the 2020 presidential election: it’s going to be Amy Klobuchar.

The Democrats will be split between Sanders and Bloomberg going into the convention. Supporters of each will loathe and despise the other.

On the 60 gazillionth ballot, some desperate person will suggest Amy Klobuchar and everyone will look at each other and say actually, yes, I kind of like her.

And she will easily trounce Trump, who will prove to be too chickenshit to stage a coup d’état. Trump’s supporters will crawl back to their basements and conspiracy theories. And a new golden age for America will dawn.

Fresh Air: Michael Pollan Explains Caffeine Addiction & Withdrawal

As part of the research for a new audiobook about caffeine, author Michael “Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan gave up caffeine cold turkey for three months. Now that’s sacrificing for the craft!

‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’ author Michael Pollan talks about his new audiobook, ‘Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World.’ He describes caffeine as the world’s most widely-used psychoactive drug. “Here’s a drug we use every day. … We never think about it as a drug or an addiction, but that’s exactly what it is,” Pollan says. “I thought, why not explore that relationship?”

www.npr.org/2020/02/1…

Affluent parents are giving their children growth hormones, to keep the kids from growing up short.

Seems like a bad idea. There’s nothing medically wrong with the kids, and studies have shown that short people’s lives are no less satisfying and happy than anybody else.

Being short just isn’t a disability to be corrected. And we don’t know what the long-term effects of the treatments might be.

I’m 5'9" tall – precisely average.

www.thisamericanlife.org/687/small…

Merle Oberon, a star actress of Hollywood’s golden age, was biracial, passing as white, and the product of two generations of rape. She was born in Bombay to a 12-year-old girl who was raped by an Englishman. Oberon’s mother was herself the product of rape.

omny.fm/shows/you…

Anybody tried posting automatically from Flickr to micro.blog? Should be do-able, right – last I checked, Flickr produces RSS feeds.

I’d like there to be some differentiation between Flickr and other images. I post a lot of found images from the Internet, as well as a few of my own photos, and I like differentiating the two.

Maybe pipe Flickr through IFTTT.com first? Hmmmmm……

Meet the Unlikely Hero Saving California’s Oldest Weekly Paper: I love this story so, so much

“High in the Sierra, Downieville, Calif., was about to become the latest American community to lose its newspaper. In stepped Carl Butz, a 71-year-old retiree.”

DOWNIEVILLE, Calif. — The night before his first deadline, Carl Butz, California’s newest newspaper owner, was digging into a bowl of beef stew at the Two Rivers Café, the only restaurant open in town.

“Tomorrow I have to fill the paper,” he said with only mild anxiety. “The question is, will it be a four-page paper or a six-page paper?”

At 71, Mr. Butz is trim, with wire-rimmed glasses and a close-cropped silver beard, and he dresses in flannel shirts and cargo pants. Since his retirement and his wife’s death in 2017, he considered traveling — to England or Latvia, or riding the Trans-Siberian Railway. But here he was, a freshly minted newspaper proprietor, having stepped in at the beginning of the year to save The Mountain Messenger, California’s oldest weekly newspaper, from extinction.

The Messenger was founded in 1853. Its most famous scribe was Mark Twain, who once wrote a few stories — with a hangover, the legend goes — while hiding out here from the law.

www.nytimes.com/2020/02/1…

An Oklahoma University journalism professor likened the phrase "OK Boomer" to the N-word. This is such a weird story

An OU professor in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication used a racial slur during a class Tuesday morning, according to multiple students present in the class….

Gade was discussing the changes in journalism related to technology and social media and made the point that journalism should stick to its more traditional roots, according to multiple students in the class.

Gade is right. With rumors and misinformation spreading like a pandemic, it’s more important than ever for journalism to get its facts right and tell the audience what’s actually going on.

Gade then called on a student who said journalists have to keep up with the younger generations as they continue to change

The student is right too! Journalism needs to report on younger people and the issues they care about. And journalism needs to deliver news through the channels that young people care about – Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and whatever comes next. (This does, however, present business challenges that journalism needs to address.)

Gade said the student’s comment was the equivalent of saying “OK, boomer” to him.

Wait, what? No it’s not.

Maybe the professor was kidding.

The class broke into light laughter….

OK, he was kidding.

… but was interrupted by Gade’s next comment.

“Calling someone a boomer is like calling someone a n—–,” Gade said.

Oh noooooooooo.

Calling someone a boomer is not the equivalent of using the N-word. “Boomer” is a neutral phrase used to describe an American born between 1946 and 1964.

www.oudaily.com/news/ou-g…

MWC 2020 canceled over coronavirus health concerns

Mobile World Congress is the biggest telco conference of the year, worldwide. Maybe there’s a bigger one in China but if there is I don’t know about it.

This is a prudent measure in the face of a potential health crisis. It’s not a good idea for 100K+ people from all over the world to fly to a central location, spend a week sneezing on each other in an enclosed conference center, with their immune systems compromised due to short-sleeping, and then disperse to their homes all over the world again.

Shoot, half the time I go to MWC I come home with a bad cold or the flu, and that’s in years without coronavirus. (Not last year though. Last year I’m pretty sure it was food poisoning. 72 hours of not fun!).

The biggest telco vendors and their customers had already pulled out of the show so this next step is not surprising.

www.theverge.com/2020/2/12…

The tricky economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

They put the cheap, filling stuff first. They charge for extras. They save money on personnel, of course.

One thing I would not have guessed: Preparing foods in bulk, as you do for a buffet, is far less expensive than one meal at a time. Much less food waste. And you can re-use stuff. Today’s fresh vegetable side-dish is tomorrow’s vegetable soup.

thehustle.co/the-econo…

I’ve never cared for buffet dining. If I’m eating out, I want somebody to bring me my food.

My work takes me to a lot of professional conferences, where I eat a lot of buffet hot lunches. Two tips:

Skip the leafy salad. It had nearly zero nutritional value. It isn’t even filling, and it just takes up room on your plate. You may not have a chance to go back for seconds.

Also, there’s usually some kind of roasted green veggie. Fill at least half your plate with that.

The making of “2001: A Space Odyssey”

www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/2001–a-f…

Stanley Kubrick didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. Which means his production staff had to give him a lot of choices, and he shot a lot of scenes that were never used – expensive!

In a sense, Kubrick’s process matched Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the evolution of humanity. Clarke’s vision was it was that we didn’t just invent tools. Instead, we invented tools and then the tools changed us, and we changed the tools to match our new needs, in a continuous feedback loop and cycle.

Kubrick was originally going to have a score for the movie, but ended up dumping it at the last minute and just using the classical music that he had left on the soundtrack as a placeholder.

Kubrick’s perfectionism continued throughout his career. In “The Shining,” he did 127 takes of a single scene, which made the Guinness Book of World Records and drove actress Shelley Duvall mad.

2001 originally had a voice-over, which, like the original soundtrack, was scrapped. The movie is designed to be enigmatic, to ask questions that don’t necessarily have answers. That’s a contrast to science fiction movies and TV today, where every detail needs to be explained and contradictions are considered by fans to be deep flaws.

Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Santopadre interview not one but TWO Catwomen: Lee Meriwether and Julie Newmar! I feel a stirring beneath my utility belt! gilbertpodcast.com

Amazon pulled out of this month’s Mobile World Congress because of the coronavirus outbreak, in another blow to one of the telecom industry’s biggest gatherings, which attracts over 100,000 visitors to Barcelona. reuters.com

The GSMA is putting restrictions on Mobile World Congress attendees from China as big companies, including Ericsson and – reportedly – Amazon, pull out. - lightreading.com

I’ve switched my podcast player from Castro.fm back to Overcast on the iPhone. Castro has advantages in its user interface – it’s much easier to decide on which order you’re going to listen to podcast episodes – but the audio clarity on Overcast is just plain clearer, particularly at the 2X+ speeds I listen to podcasts at. That means I can get through my massive podcast queue faster.

However, when you have 260+ unlistened podcast episodes, as I do, switching between podcast players is tedious. Fortunately, there is some part of my brain that finds that kind of fussywork soothing.

Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy.

Aimee Groth at Quartz:

Six years ago, Amazon-owned Zappos began upending its traditional management structure. In lieu of a typical corporate structure, with power concentrated at the top, the online shoe retailer would adopt a decentralized system with “no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy.”…

But in the last few years, Zappos has been quietly moving away from holacracy. It has done away with its at-times rigidly (and ironically) bureaucratic meetings and brought back managers, while retaining its circular hierarchy, a key artifact of holacracy.

Forget self-driving cars. We already have technology that can transform cities and help save the planet: Buses

Missing the Bus on 99% Invisible:

If you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change, you might think about driverless cars, or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation technologies that get lots of hype these days. But there is a much older, much less sexy piece of machinery that could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more liveable, and more fair: the humble bus. Steven Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called Better Buses Better Cities. And the central thesis of the book is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better. But he says that if we want the bus to reach its potential, we’re going to have to make the experience riding one, a lot more pleasant.

These days when I hear about proposals for light rail or trains, I ask, “What about buses?”

The Justice Department indicted four members of the Chinese military for the Equifax breach.

This will be a buzzkill for making relations between the two countries more friendly.

www.axios.com/equifax-b…

None of the movies nominated for an Oscar deserved to win, because none of them has Luis giving exposition or an ant playing drums.

I’ve been on a nostalgia kick the past couple of days. This morning, I hit YouTube and found and listened to the theme song to a kiddie TV show I adored when I was 5: Winchell Mahoney.

The good news is it drove the F Troop earworm out of my brain. Hooray, hooraw!

Person who offered $500 for lost cat gets mad when cat finder wants the reward

boingboing.net/2020/01/2…

WTF? If you offer a $500 reward for whoever finds your lost cat you should not be surprised and offended if the person who finds your cat asks for the reward.

College essay writing services – contract cheaters –are using aggressive email marketing and on-campus parties to attract customers, many of whom are unaware of the shadiness of the business. www.edsurge.com/news/2020…

ME: I have very important financial documents I need to review today.
ALSO ME: Helllooooooo, social media!

After a vote in Iowa that reeked of third-world treachery – from monolithic TV propaganda against the challenger to rumors of foreign intrusion to, finally, a “botched” vote count that felt as legitimate as a Supreme Soviet election – the Democrats have become the reactionaries they once replaced.

The Iowa Caucus Was Waterloo for Democrats - Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone

Tyler Cowen coins the phrase “state capacity libertarianism” as an evolution of libertarianism that recognizes that a big, muscular, strong state is necessary to preserve and extend markets and individual freedom.

(1) This is just plain silly. The defining characteristic of libertarianism is that governments should be tiny, ideally only providing police, military and contract enforcement. To call yourself a “state capacity libertarian” is like being a “meat eating vegetarian.”

(2) I have always considered myself a liberal or progressive but I may in fact be a “state capacity libertarian.”

Fortunately, this is perfectly compatible with being a Democrat. The Democratic Party is the natural home in the US for every political philosophy other than moron racist kleptocrats.

“Now we’re going to hear more suggestions from the failed mayor of Chicago and New Jersey’s corrupt ex-governor, who should be in prison.”

Marie Dressler was the biggest female star of American movies in 1933. She wasn’t a sex symbol like Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich. Dressler was homely, overweight, in her 60s – and moviegoers adored her.

You Must Remember This:

The public loved nothing better than to see their Marie play a drunk or a dowager and steal every scene from the glamour girls less than half her age. Dressler had been down and out for most of the 1920s. That she became a star at age 60 was an achievement that told Depression-battered audiences it was never too late.

The Ukraine was part of a broad pattern of behavior that makes Trump manifestly unfit to be President. Why didn’t Congress go after all of it rather than just one, very narrow incident?

On Impeachment: A Daily Podcast with Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and host Brian Lehrer.

Ezra Klein: America is a better country today than it has ever been: More inclusive and more prosperous. There has been no better time to be alive and be American. But the trend is going in the wrong direction. Things are not getting better. They’re declining rapidly.

Acquitted [Today, Explained]