Bit of a Misstep

I was listening to a recent episode of Slate Money, and Felix Salmon was noting that there still wasn't a particularly compelling use case for Bitcoin. Co-host Elizabeth Spiers immediately chimed in with "money laundering." Mr. Salmon and guest co-host Stacy-Marie Ishmael stepped in with corrections, noting that Bitcoin is a terrible vehicle for money laundering.

While it's a fairly common misconception, I was somewhat surprised that a veteran financial journalist and former analyst would make that sort of error, which requires a fundamental lack of understanding of how blockchains work, and therefore how crypto/digital currencies can even be viable. As an aside, while Mr. Salmon and Ms. Ishmael didn't take the time to explain just why Bitcoin isn't a good money-laundering too, and I felt this was something of a miss, I understand it from the point of view of time-limits on a podcast.

But it's a useful reminder of something that it may be easy to forget when it comes to the news media, even relatively specialized news media; a lot of even narrow-seeming topics still contain vast bodies of knowledge within them, and it's hard to know all of it. While Ms. Spiers error caught me off-guard, in hindsight, it's understandable; cryptocurrencies (not the best name for them, really) aren't something that most people have to deal with very often, so the details aren't always relevant. And one can report on, say, the airline industry without needing a working understanding of how airplanes work, after all.

Part of the thing about trusting the media, or any other sort of informed party, about topics one doesn't know much about is the need to assume that the person presenting the information actually has accurate sources themselves. In this sense, I suspect that the media isn't any more biased than anyone else... because why should journalists be any better about knowing what they don't know than the butcher, baker or candlestick maker?

I get it, however, because it's not always comfortable to have the feeling that one can spend a significant amount of time engaged in learning about the world around one, only to not be use that one knows any more than they did before. 

Limelight

One of the great things about just being out and conversing with random people is that one never knows that sorts of topics might come up. I had the opportunity to tell someone my theory on why people would set their resale prices for Trader Joe's mini tote bags (which are on sale again, by the way) at levels that no rational person would pay, and it spiraled into a conversation about the incentive structure of the attention economy.

My interlocutor was a bit conspiratorial for my tastes, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless. I should come up with random things to talk to people about more often.

Because otherwise, I find, discussions tend to turn to things that cause people anxiety, and while it can be good to help soothe people's worries, sometimes it seems that it just reinforces those anxieties, or people become agitated if their concerns are not shared. Which I get; I understand the logic behind "misery shared is misery halved," after all. What I don't really understand is what I get out of my half-measure of someone else's misery. I'd rather take a stab at simply making them less miserable.

Which, like a lot of things, is more easily said that done. Now that I'm middle aged, I can look back on life and see something of a pattern. While people have always had worries about "the rich and powerful," there's been a general ratcheting up of who qualifies as that. The sorts of wealthy people that someone might tell you ran the world in the 1990s barely qualify as influential now; the bar for being "an élite" has risen much faster than the rate of inflation. Mainly, I think, because it tracks with visibility. Someone with the current equivalent of Bill Gates' fortune back in the day wouldn't command the same level of public attention that Mr. Gates did at the time, because they wouldn't be as close to the top of the list of wealthy people that one regularly hears about.

So now I'm curious about the role of visibility, and hence, the overall media landscape, in shaping people's general notions of who, or what, it running the show. I understand that my own limited media diet insulates me from a lot of this, but I'm starting to wonder if it plays a bigger role than I would have given it credit for. 

Rejected

And the kind of helplessness that people feel, that leads to this kind of violence, is also unacceptable. And it's worth more scrutiny, from both the industry and our political leaders.
Nilay Patel. "Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman's 'unconstrained' relationship with the truth." Decoder with Nilay Patel. Thursday, 16 April, 2026.

Mr. Patel was giving an obligatory condemnation of violence, in response to the attacks on Sam Altman's home, which took place between when the Decoder episode was recorded, and when it was released. And I use "obligatory" here deliberately. Not in the sense that Mr. Patel felt some sort of pressure to make a statement that he didn't agree with, but in the sense that speaking out against violence is something that's expected. Mr. Patel had noted that the attacks on the Altman home didn't come up during the actual discussion with Mr. Farrow, and so it was clear that he was looking to head off criticism over that.

But what stood out for me was his labeling of a feeling of helplessness as "unacceptable." It seems that he was casting the blame for such emotions on the generative automation industry and the government, but the short statement that he made didn't offer anything to be done about it, other than have it scrutinized. Which is unlikely to happen. Because the kind of helplessness that people feel, that then leads to violence, has been around for quite some time. One wonders just what it would be about Sam Altman that would inspire people to look into it more deeply when the same people who Mr. Patel expects to do the looking have done such an excellent job of ignoring all of its previous incarnations. And the general public hasn't yet cared enough to punish them for it.

Because when people like Mr. Patel make the obligatory condemnations of violence, and advocate for someone (else) to do something about it, they tend not to offer an accountability mechanism to ensure that it's done. And maybe that's because, in the face of violence, they also feel a kind of helplessness, perhaps born of the realization that while they may have an audience, it's fairly tenuous. The public wants what it wants, and so while there are any number of people who will insist that the media leads the public, I'm of the opinion that the public more often leads the media.

And the public doesn't really have a problem with helplessness leading to violence, so long as it's directed somewhere else. Mainly, I think, because people don't see any other options. While Luigi Mangione is quite some distance from being a hero to the general public, there wasn't much in the way of condemnation for the killing of Brian Thompson on the grounds that it had foreclosed on, or even ignored, some better way of dealing with the problem. And so while Mr. Thompson's murder didn't solve anything, it did give people the idea that "one of the bad guys" had received what was coming to him. And, I suspect, had Mr. Altman been killed when his home was attacked, the same sentiment would have surfaced.

I don't think you can win [the War on Terror]. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.
President George W. Bush. (NBC's "Today" show, 30 August, 2004.)

Creating conditions so that those who use violence as a tool are less acceptable requires large-scale disapproval of violence for its own sake, rather than out of disapproval for the specific ends to which violence (or terror) is being deployed. Even when those ends are punishing wrongdoers or acting in perceived self-defense. Violence of the sort that gains some level of public acceptance tends to occur when someone sees it as a reasonable response to the other person's actions (or inaction). It's rare for people, even a minority, to celebrate escalation. And the angrier and more upset people are, the less likely they are to see any given level of violence as an escalation.

I think that Mr. Patel's call for "industry and our political leaders" to scrutinize a general feeling of helplessness that then comes to be seen as the result of aggression against people, and therefore, a rationale for violence, may let the public off the hook, out of an agreement with the idea that most everyday people are, in fact, helpless. And maybe that's the problem that needs solving. But I think that the general public will need to be the ones who solve it. Which, when social trust is remarkably low, it something of a tall order. But trust is, in a lot of ways, a choice. So maybe step one is convincing people to make different ones.

Ticced Off

The fallout from John Davidson shouting "nigger," at this year's British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards continues. I'd like to say that I understand, but I don't. Jamie Foxx can claim all he wants that Mr. Davidson meant what he said, but the random shouting of obscenities (otherwise known as "coprolalia") is what Tourette's Syndrome is all about for many people, despite it not being a consistent feature of the disorder. (Not that Mr. Davidson himself hasn't joined in the pile-on, questioning why the BBC would chose to seat him near a live microphone.)

The word doesn't have intent grafted on to it. Its history is not an integral part of it. Yes, it had a lot of baggage. But there's no need to be saddled with that baggage, regardless of the circumstances. The word is a word. Nothing more, nothing less. And in this circumstance, it wasn't an expression of bigotry or anger; it was simply a vocal tic, of a sort that's been been known about for 200 years.

Beating up on the BBC is not going to make "nigger" go away. Just like accusing Mr. Davidson of bad faith can't suddenly rid him of his disease. And treating him as if he is just using it as cover for racial animus is to give into the generalized distrust that the Black community (especially here in the United States) seems to have for the rest of the world.

I'm still of the opinion that treating this as anything more than an unfortunate side effect of mental disease or defect grants "nigger" the very power that people seem so afraid that it has. Treating it much like any other six-letter word would go much farther towards defanging it than outrage and recrimination every time it appears on-air. 

Talking the Talk

The State of the Union address was yesterday, and today there were multiple fundraising e-mails in my inbox, laying out the partisan talking points that people would only hear if they coughed up some money, apparently. It makes sense that I would see a spike in fundraising appeals, since the address captures so much media attention, but it all left me with a question.

Just who, exactly, is the State of the Union address (and the opposition response, for that matter) for?

I get that for the President, it's basically a chance for self-promotion that the media will carry and talk about, and for the opposition, it's the opportunity to get someone in front of the camera who might not otherwise have such a large stage, but who would miss the State of the Union were it to go on hiatus and simply never resume? For whom is the address actually important?

Sure, a lot of different actors have turned it to their own advantage. As I noted the President was able to get up and tell the story the nation that he wanted voters to share. The Democrats were able show themselves protesting during the address, and spotlight Abigail Spanberger as a spokesperson. The media was able to show loyalty to their audiences by highlighting either their uncritical acceptance of the President's speech or their often-ignored fact-checking of same, and fundraisers were able to cherry pick the parts that seemed the most likely to prompt partisans to open their wallets.

But just about any speech by a sitting President can accomplish these goals. There's nothing genuinely informative about the State of the Union; it's generally a recitation of White House talking points that everyone already knows. So why bother with it?

It seems like a relic that exists now because it existed then, and no-one wants to be the person who asks what purpose it serves. 

Grimelight

Perhaps the real problem with the video, shared by President Trump on his Truth Social account, that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, is that it triggered calls for its removal, rather than an examination of why it was posted. I don't believe for a moment that President Trump allowed some anonymous staffer to post the video to his account without anyone knowing what was in the entire video. The President's previous comments about Africa and the African diaspora have made no secret of his disdain. Which is nothing new... I suspect it would be silly of me to say that Donald Trump is the only racist to have occupied the White House during my lifetime.

The idea that there are members of the MAGA movement who are simply unreconstructed racists is simply taken as given by many. But, okay... the United States has had its share, if not more of unreconstructed racists for as long as I've been around, too... but the White House giving an implicit stamp of approval to such messaging seems unique to the Trump Administration, at least in modern times.

Even if we accept (and I don't) the idea that the video was posted to the social media account of the President of the United States without anyone vetting it thoroughly for its message, the fact that it originated with a meme account points to it being a form of "red meat" for the President's base of voters. And that raises the question, at least for me, of why memes? Of all of the things that the President's Truth Social account could be sharing, why bother with random stuff like this; especially if it's going to be hand-waved through? One would think the last thing the White House wants is for some random message to be seen coming from the President. Donald Trump has pretty much zero in the way of "regular guy" credentials, so why engage in the bored teenager act?

When I was in high school, I knew a number of people who had no compunctions against calling me "nigger" to my face. Most of them didn't strike me as racists, and I concluded that it wasn't racist, but personal. They were seeking to get a rise out of me. And I suspect that this is what's at work here. The President is like a class clown who craves the spotlight badly enough to do whatever he can to keep it trained on themselves.

The thimble thunderstorm of the video spread internationally pretty quickly, and generated a lot of heat, even if there was little light. I'm not in the camp that says the President is attempting to distract people from other things... the news cycle can present multiple things to the public at once. Donald Trump simply needs for one of those things to be him.

Democrats were, of course, going to take the bait on this one; their political incentives demand that they constantly decry this or that random bit of inanity that the President's engaged in, even if the smart move would be to simply roll their eyes and find something more constructive to do with their time. But enough people demand constant vigilance, and responsiveness, that they're force to play ball, and keep themselves in the spotlight as well. And this time, even a few Republicans felt the need to get in on the act, despite the fact that it has likely earned them the moniker RINO from the MAGA faithful. But it ensured that reporters would be rushing to get comment from the press secretary and the President himself, both of whom said pretty much the same things they say every other time.

The constituency for this is hard to pin down, because it seems that so many people are on the lookout for, and responsive to, signs that President Trump is doing something; even when that something is not governing. Elements of the political Left and Right alike seem to have little better to do than to boo or cheer the President, who responds with a constant stream of random acts for them to respond to. But what I don't understand is why these groups must never be allowed to go hungry. Why does Congress and the news media dutifully play the same tired role, over and over again. What does the outrage machine offer in return, that the rest of the public cannot match? 

Generation Narrow

I was watching YouTube over dinner, and "the algorithm" suggested "Psychology of Gen X." Being a member of "Generation X" myself, I decided I'd have a watch, and see if I recognized anything of myself. I'm of the opinion that age cohort, as the informal groupings known as "The Baby Boomers," "Generation Z" et cetera are known have become the new Zodiac; clustering broad swaths of the population together and assigning them a pithy list of traits seen as so universal that all members of the group may as well be the same person, just with different haircuts and outfits.

What made "Psychology of Gen X" slightly different than the other profiles that I've come across now and again was that it didn't simply list random traits... it attempted to explain them. It was all very surface-level; the video is, after all, only eight minutes long, and so there wasn't much room for specifics.

But even with that, I quickly realized that the video was really seeking to explain the White, middle-class, urban/suburbanites that I grew up around. Very little of the video seemed relevant to the lives of my cousins who lived in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. It was taking the kids from Stranger Things and extrapolating out from them to all of the millions of people born in a 15-year period.

And realizing that gave me a bit of insight into the Trumpist/Make America Great Again movement: of course they see themselves as the legitimate Americans, they see themselves in the broad generalizations that people make about the United States. Sure, Psychology of Gen X did as much to leave out rural Americans from Appalachia as it did Native Americans, but its viewpoint was very much White and male, and there was no indication that it even understood that other people existed, let alone had something worth mentioning to contribute to the experience of being "Generation X." (And that leaves aside the fact that the age cohorts are often taken as worldwide phenomena.)

Part of it seemed to stem from the fact that it was short, and the fact that the channels seems based in the United Kingdom could also play a part, but a lot of just seemed perfunctory. If you've seen one video claiming to explain the psychology of a given age cohort, you've seen them all, and this one was no exception. The stills that played in the background to illustrate the narration were of the bland, generative automation-created style that's come to typify artwork that needs to be done, as opposed to illustration that really adds to the experience.

And a quickly-made, short video about a group of people is going to focus on the mainstream, because that's what there's time to do. And this wasn't a video for Gen X, to lay out the breadth of the cohort... It's a video for today's young people, to offer an easily digestible explanation of their parents, and other older people they encounter at work and in other aspects of their lives. The fact that it only deals with a minority of the overall group would be lost on many of them.

Not that I expect that the target audience would be fooled into thinking they had the complete picture. They likely understand as well as anyone else the difficulties of cramming decades of people's lived experiences into 8 minutes. But it's one thing to understand that one is seeing snippets of the lives of a certain group versus seeing a slice of nearly everyone's lives. That important distinction struck me as missing, and when it did, I realized how many other times it hadn't been made.

While much has been made of the fact that so much of American history is focused on the White middle and upper classes, I'm not convinced that the idea that this means there should be a greater focus on other people has really sunk in. I doubt that the person or people behind this particular Psychology Simplified channel set out to ignore the lived experiences of most of Gen X. When one's making short videos on an every-other-day basis, there likely isn't a lot of time for deep research without a fairly extensive team; and while the video does cite references, there aren't a lot of them, and nothing about any cultural differences in the experience. (Okay, granted, I don't often have a lot of citations here, but Nobody In Particular is intended to be about the United States as I experience it, personally.) So it's understandable that for someone like me, who lived through the time period in question, a lot would seem to be missing. But there are people for whom the narrow focus reinforces an understanding of themselves as the center of the world.

Sloganeering

On a recent episode of "The Opinions" podcast from The New York Times, host Michelle Cottle was discussing whether adopting "Abolish ICE" as a slogan, was, in effect, simply asking for the Republicans to take it and turn it against them. Which, in the wake of "Defund the Police" is a rational way of looking at it, but the idea that a different slogan could be proofed against a conservative-lead backlash, I believe, mistakes the forces in play.

In short, it's never about the actual slogan. It's about the people who identify with it. The problem with "Critical Race Theory" or "Woke" wasn't that there was some built-in negative connotation to either of them. It's that they are associated with Black people and Liberals; two groups that, on the whole, Conservative White Americans feel are unjustly resentful of and hostile towards them. And so it was easy for Conservative activists, like Christopher Rufo, to convince them that these terms were code for all sorts of terrible things.

So declining to chant "Abolish ICE" in favor of the more anodyne "Smarter Immigration Policy," for example, wouldn't prevent Republicans from branding it as code for "open borders," because their target audiences already believe that the American Left wants open borders, and is willing to allow them to be victimized by non-White immigrants in exchange for votes from Black and Hispanic communities. Just was with Critical Race Theory, Conservative activists would be able to attach "Smarter Immigration Policy," or whatever else someone decided the slogan should be, to anxieties around immigration via anxieties around people who understand ideal immigration policy differently that they do.

Accordingly, as long as the anxieties are present, there is no slogan that one can imagine couldn't be linked to them. I think that Ms. Cottle doesn't really grasp this part of the equation. And given the general lack of understanding that the American Left has for the American Right (which, I would submit, is not completely mutual), she's not the only person whose fingers it slips through.

Misread

Print magazines are no less susceptible to a bit of bait-and-switch to lure in readers than online news sources. After all, sometimes, they're the same publication. The cover headline of the February issue of The Atlantic proclaims Donald Trump Wants You To Forget This Happened, under a photograph of January 6th, 2021. Mr. Thompson's actual story is titled: Is this what patriotism looks like? And it's the story of one of the January 6th rioters; one who assaulted police officers, but was pardoned by President Trump.

But let me stick with the cover headline for a bit, because while I think that it will resonate with a lot of people (after all, these things are not chosen casually), I also happen to think that it isn't true. There's a difference between seeking to erase a narrative, and seeking to change one. Historical revisionism is just that... revisionism, and that's closer to what I think that President Trump is after.

For a lot of people, mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats or Democratic-leaning, January 6th 2021 is a story of partisans being sore losers. Deluded, or cynically dishonest, about the nation's opinion of Donald Trump and his performance in his first term in office, they sought to use violence to overturn a free and fair election and act out their grievances against Congress.

Trumpists, unsuprisingly, profess (honestly or otherwise) to see things differently. For them, the President's nationwide popularity is an article of faith; the idea that enough people would vote for the Biden-Harris ticket that Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, let alone the Electoral College, was unthinkable. Malfeasance was the only possible explanation. And so the events of January 6th weren't a crime; they were a principled, even heroic, stand against the forces of corruption and the people who enabled it.

And that's what Donald Trump wants the historical record to reflect. An angelic light on the people who support him. Yes, there are things that the President would prefer to have removed from the annals of history. The Trail of Tears, for instance, is not something that can be readily spun into a narrative of American moral superiority. But revolutions, even failed ones, can be turned into tales of national (and perhaps ethnic) greatness. And so that's the way that Donald Trump, his acolytes and supporters would prefer it to be remembered.

I offer no opinion on whether they will succeed, and, if they do, on what timeline. But that it is the goal, I'm reasonably certain of. 

Understanding the Assignment

The cover story for the January issue of The Atlantic is "The Most Powerful Man in Science." It's ostensibly a story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it's really a story about Secretary Kennedy's worldview and his feuding with the "medical establishment." And, as such, the phrase "trust in science" came up.

It was misplaced. Many people, and I would count Secretary Kennedy among them, don't have a problem with science; they has a problem with people. What they suspect is going on is that the policy prescriptions that they're receiving are not neutral, but motivated by people who stand to benefit. Opaque, technical studies are being used as weapons against them.

And once the specter of human dishonesty enters the picture, all bets are off. Because a study, or one hundred studies, can say whatever; once someone believes that the outcomes of the studies have been manipulated, none of it matters anymore.

Social trust is a tool, not a moral imperative. People have to feel that trusting other people comes with some direct benefit to themselves. The public-health and perhaps the broader scientific communities have a problem in the sense that people feel that not trusting them is the best way to go. High profile arguments, or even future data, aren't going to solve that. A sense that trust is rewarded with a better life will. 

Paper Chase

I was listening to a Wired podcast in the car today, and the subject of the Chicago Police Department sharing data on certain people with the Federal Department of Homeland Security. The two journalists hosting the podcast kept referring to this information sharing as a "data breach."

And this is why I dislike listening to many news-related podcasts; journalists can be as partisan as anyone else, and that partisanship tends to manifest itself in, let's call it a certain sloppiness with terminology. The sort of intentional sharing of information that the CPD had engaged in was not a data breach. DHS did not break into the CPDs systems and exfiltrate the data without authorization. The collection and sharing of the data may have been inappropriate, even illegal, and it certainly ran afoul of the host's sensibilities, but there was no intrusion or compromise of systems involved. Proper or not, the data was formally requested, and given over.

There is a lot of data floating around out there that many younger people have come to regard as some sort of state secret, when this simply isn't the case. Law enforcement agencies routinely share data. There is nothing out of the ordinary here. Referring to the sharing as a breach is to imply that the Chicago Police Department had an affirmative duty to keep the information in strict confidence and that it failed to do so due to a failure of data security procedures. But that isn't what happened. Rather, the CPD was keeping an internal database on people, and sharing that with DHS. Casting this as a breach casts the issue as a problem without actually needing to delve deeper into whether compliance lapses actually posed a data breach, where people who were unauthorized to access and view the data actually did so.

While mishandling of data can lead to data being breached, mishandling is not, in and of itself, a breach. Wired never explained who viewed or used the data who was not supposed to be, only that the data was not deleted in accordance with instructions to do so in a timely manner.

To be sure, I don't expect all journalists to be certified information privacy professionals. But they should be conversing with people who have that sort of background before publicly calling out incidents; if only to ensure that they have their terminology straight. 

Post-it Pessimism

Back in August, NPR asked the under-40 set some questions:

If you're under 40, how have concerns about affordability shaped your life? Have they changed how you typically vote? Delayed a big life decision?

The whole exercise seemed calculated to bring out the gloom in people, and judging from the responses, it did.

The answers are short; they're presented as if typed onto Post-it Notes, and all of the responses printed in the story fit on to one or two of them. And because it was simply an open call for responses, they are, as NPR points out, not a representative sample.

But what readers shared helps highlight a steep challenge facing Democrats and Republicans alike as they work to win over these voters, who are collectively expected to make up more than half the electorate in 2028.

I'm not so sure about that. Mainly because while it's clear that the respondents aren't a representative sample of the American public, it's also likely true that they aren't a representative sample of NPRs under-40 audience. Remember the questions were asking about how financial concerns were shaping people's lives and politics. Audience members whose response was "I've got this," or "I think I'm managing," wouldn't have written in... there would have been no reason to.

Not that there's nothing there. American economic policy has been something of a train wreck for some time now. But that's because, as I remember George Will putting it once, American society doesn't really take steps to avoid problems; it allows them to happen, and then cleans up the mess. And there are plenty of recent examples of that tendency. It's also worth noting that the American political system apparently thrives on pessimism, stoking it at every turn to raise the stakes of elections. Once the message from any given candidate is that a win by the other will be the end of the world as we know it, it is any wonder that people's views of the current state of the world are more easily predicted by their partisan identities than the actual fundamentals?

And the media isn't blameless here, either. We all know that "if it bleeds, it leads" is a common journalistic outlook, but there's also the habit of talking about issues in terms of "how worried people should be" in order to convey a sense of seriousness to the audience. It might be good for that, but it also conveys the sense that anxiety is, in and of itself, as appropriate response to the broader world, even though there's nothing about change that requires anxiety. In fact, anxiety tends to push back against the idea that change is possible.

It's this passivity that eventually becomes the problem. The collective we, as in American society as a whole, and I count myself in that number, have made a myriad of individual and group (if not collective) choices that have brought us to this place. And to the degree our choices have brought us here, they can take us somewhere else. It's going to be slow, and it's likely going to be expensive and/or painful. And I think that's what's really in play here... the "young" people who responded to NPR's call for input are seeing that the pain that other people are working to avoid is going to be visited upon them later. And they're understandably pessimistic about that. But I'm not sure of the utility of constantly reminding people of that, or of presenting it as the outlook of entire age cohorts, rather than just a self-selected sampling.

Got It Dave; I Can Do That

While it strikes me as a little late to the party, the New York Times has picked up on the trend of "prompt injection" into résumés. The idea is, put simply, that job seekers are placing generative automation prompts into their résumés, hiding them by using white fonts on white backgrounds. When an employer's applicant tracking system (ATS) reads the document, it encounters the prompt, and acts on it.

I'm going go out on a limb here (although I'm convinced it's a very sturdy one, and say that this doesn't actually work, and hasn't for some time, if it ever did (which, honestly, I'm dubious about). It's always being presented as a clever job application hack, but in reality, it would be an enormous security flaw.

In the New York Times article, no-one in recruiting comes out and says that their generative automation systems had ever been successfully controlled by an injected prompt... the anecdotes all come from job seekers who claim to have landed interviews by having done it, or are simply counts of attempts. There are no quotes from engineers or the ATS companies. So this is really a story about people's perceptions of what's going on in systems. And that's worth keeping in mind.

Because if someone could hide a prompt in a random document and have a reasonable expectation that a system would act on that, it would be threat actor heaven. Why bother with social engineering or doing the work to find zero-day exploits when spamming a company with résumés could reliably result in an applicant tracking system opening a back door, exfiltrating data on all of the other applicants or sending over login credentials? It's worth understanding that not all of these systems are home-grown. If companies were selling systems this easily controlled by outside actors, there would have been highly-publicized lawsuits by now, especially considering these attacks have been talked about for months already.

And if this sort of thing worked, "A.I. poisoning" (mention of which is conspicuously absent) would be trivially easy, because it's not hard to hide messages in various forms of media. Steganography goes back to 400 B.C.; hiding machine-readable messages in files is nothing new, given that the bulk of most computer documents is machine-readable code that most human users never see. Sanitizing inputs is not something companies are just now figuring out.

These stories peddle a message of hope (There are jobs out there, and you can get them if you're smart!) and affirmation (You're cleverer than the idiots in corporate HR departments.), and play on people's suspicions that "A.I." is not all it's cracked up to be. But by focusing tightly on job seekers, and not potential threat actors, articles like this New York Times piece ignore the fact that if this has been taking place since "the first half of the year" it would no longer be a zero-day exploit. It would have been patched by now. Technology stories that avoid educating people on how technology actually works don't do anyone any good.

Misprint

These two news stories turn out to be more alike than one would expect from their headlines.

Mainly because the text in each case is the same. The story about whether Democrats are at risk of losing the Gubernatorial race in New Jersey is completely absent from the page; its text is the copy about the Noble Peace Prize. Given that this is part of yesterday's Evening Review, it seems that this error has been up at least all night, supposedly without anyone at The Week noticing and having it fixed.

This is how news outlets die; their staffs become so small that there aren't enough people to make sure that major items, like having stories match the headlines that lead them, are done properly. Maybe the editor overseeing the page was overworked and just sort of glazed over it. Maybe there was a problem in the software that translated the stories to the final production page. Maybe the job was outsourced to a generative automation system, the capabilities of which were overestimated. I have no idea. I just know that this isn't the first time I've noticed something glaringly wrong with The Week's website recently.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is. A lot of advertising-supported news sites are suffering from low advertising rates, driven by the fact that the number of places available to place ads dwarfs the number of high and middle-quality advertisers out there. YouTube has gone to war with ad-blockers, and the site users who employ them, in a bid to demonstrate greater reach to advertisers, and thus justify higher rates. But it's not at all clear that Alphabet has managed to force everyone to either watch the advertising that YouTube presents or pay for a subscription. It's also not clear that the advertising is any better that it had been before. Having a video interrupted mid-word for a poor-quality ad, or one that's almost certainly fraudulent, is a poor user experience, and it's understandable that people feel that having to pay to avoid them is somewhat extortionate.

The Week could implement a subscription wall, either free or paid, but I don't know if that really solves the problem, either, as readership would certainly decline. Axios tends to gate stories behind a free subscription to the website, but it's really clear that signing up is going to lead to a lot of new inbox traffic, a hassle that people might not want to deal with.

Given that The Week tends to offer roundups of other coverage of the stories presented, tracking down information on the Democratic Party's woes in New Jersey shouldn't be difficult. But that's kind of the point of The Week, it tracks these things down, so that readers don't have to. If the problems with the website are indicative of big enough problems that the outlet is at risk of becoming non-viable, readers could lose a useful piece of the overall news landscape.

Blowhard

Back in August, the President signed an Executive Order that purports to criminalize burning the American flag... Or so some media outlets would have one believe.

Reading the actual text of the Executive Order tends to belie the President's assertion that “We took the freedom of speech away.” Mainly because it's little more than an instruction to Attorney General Bondi to find existing laws that can be used to prosecute people who happened to have burned a flag while they were up to something else.

My Administration will act to restore respect and sanctity to the American Flag and prosecute those who incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating this symbol of our country, to the fullest extent permissible under any available authority.

The President is, however, fairly clearly hoping that a case can be brought to the Supreme Court. Texas v. Gregory L. Johnson was decided 5 to 4 back in 1989, and one doesn't have to read much into the Order to understand that he's hoping the current 6 justice Conservative majority will reverse the earlier precedent. 

(c)  To the maximum extent permitted by the Constitution, the Attorney General shall vigorously prosecute those who violate our laws in ways that involve desecrating the American Flag, and may pursue litigation to clarify the scope of the First Amendment exceptions in this area.

This likely means that the Justice Department will start looking for some or another Red state to prosecute someone specifically for burning the flag. After all, a conviction for some other violation wouldn't provide the requisite go-ahead to ban flag burning as an act of protest in and of itself.

For me, the real problem with all of this is that it's the President, once again, going after random Culture War grievances rather than solving any sort of real problem. While sure, I suspect there are people whose biggest concern is that some random left-wing protestor won't spend enough time in jail to make them love the United States again, most of the nation has bigger fish to fry, and this Executive Order offers no help for them. The flap over the whole thing, generally from left-leaning media outlets, obscures that fact.

One can make the case, though, that President Trump has actually been quite clever. He's given people something to get worked up about. Conservatives can cheer for what they hope will happen to protestors that they don't like, and Liberals can overreact to the President's bloviating (which is easier than reading the actual executive order). And the media on both sides can encourage them. It's the worst kind of win-win.

Dark Strokes

 So I saw this headline on the BBC this morning: "Tories pledge to remove 750,000 migrants under borders plan." Given the fact that the United Kingdom's Conservative Party feels that the most pressure on it is coming from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party to their political right, this makes sense. But I'll come back to this.

Because there was another headline that caught my attention: "'I have everything to ruin you' - BBC tracks down sextortion scammer targeting teenage boys." I have a passing interest in Internet fraud, and the media coverage thereof; accordingly, I wanted to see if the article had anything interesting or new in it. The piece is bookended by the stories of Kari and Brad Boettler and South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey (R-48th District). Each had a son, Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey, respectively, who committed suicide after who they thought was a young woman turned out to be an internet blackmailer, or "sextortionist" in common parlance.

But the headline notes that the BBC tracked down one of these Internet extortionists, and that's what I was interested in. The trail takes them to Nigeria, and they start talking to people there. The Nigerians, unsurprisingly, do not come off well. This statement about Nigeria's "Yahoo Boys" sets the tone for much of the middle of the story:

These young men, often in their 20s, live in impoverished areas but dream of fast cars and quick money.

The first young man they speak to is identified only as "Ola." He comes across as callous, due to poverty; he's quoted as saying "I don't feel bad because I need the money." Interestingly, it's not noted what he needs the money for. The reader is left to presume that he simply wants to wealth, and the status in his community that comes with it. Ola is also presented as being ignorant, "It was apparently impossible for Ola to believe a British or American teenager couldn't pay. In his mind, being born in the West automatically meant privilege." Which is easy enough to understand, I suppose, but Ola is also shown as being Internet-savvy enough to create fake profiles of young women, using internet-based tools to generate names. As an aside, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to use these properly... otherwise one can wind up creating a LinkedIn profile for a woman named "Keith."

Of the prestigious "Mc" family, no less!

When the BBC talks to "Ghost," a leader of a "Hustle Kingdom" or group of young men collectively engaged in online frauds of various sorts, he "said they were mainly conducting financial scams, mostly romance, not sextortion, as he was a 'God-fearing person.' He said only people with a 'black heart' did this." One wonders precisely which school of Christian theology allows for defrauding people by tricking people into thinking they've found a new (if financially needy) life partner, but frowns on the rug-pull of attempting to blackmail them.

"Ghost's" religiosity becomes a convenient segue to the next bit of the story, in which we're told that the Yahoo Boys engage in "visiting local priests to bless scams, and to cast spells they believed would make victims more compliant, or protect the scammers from being caught." Case in point being one "Ade," who allows the BBC to tag along as he visits a "cyber-spiritualist" for a ritual "a ritual the spiritualist said would bind him to wealth and protection," and involved the sacrifice, and partial consumption, of a dove.

When I asked how common this was, the healer told me he saw six or seven Yahoo Boys a day. For Ade, it was not superstition but a business expense.

I suspect that for most of the BBC's readers, especially in (but not limited to) the industrialized West, it is simply superstition. Backwardness pressed into service to facilitate crime. Not that Nigerians are above using the tools of high-technology; and shelling out for them. The next fraudster the BBC speaks to reporting hiring a woman to facilitate his frauds, and spending $3,500 on a deepfake face-swapping tool, claiming that the returns justified the investment.

The story turns back to the United States for a time, getting responses to the concerns raised from Meta and Snap. To be sure, they don't come off all that great, either, but corporate CYA-speak rarely does. But we do go back to Nigeria one last time, as it turns out that the BBC was specifically looking for whomever had extorted Evan Boettler. They were unable to find him, because the Nigerian ISP GloWorld, had failed to keep user information as it was supposed to. Whether out of incompetence or deliberate non-compliance (among other possibilities) is a mystery.

None of the Nigerians photographed or on video in the piece show their faces; apparently ski masks are all the rage there these days. (Maybe they hit the slopes after a hard say in the fraud mines.) Which raised a question for me: Who were they afraid would be able to identify them? And if what they were doing was illegal enough in Nigeria that fear of arrest and prosecution was reasonable, why did the BBC not present any interviews with authorities there, seeking to understand what was being done to combat the problem?

As I  noted before, Nigerian, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africans more broadly, do not come off well in this story. There's pretty much nothing positive in the picture the BBC article paints of them. And that takes us back to Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, and her pledge that if the Conservatives win the next election (and she becomes Prime Minister), a Trump-style purge of illegal migrants is on the agenda.

The part of "the Global South" that is closest to the United Kingdom is Africa, and so a good number of migrants to the United Kingdom, and also the European Union, come from there. And a good portion of the hostility to them is driven by the idea that they don't bring anything worthwhile with them; they're simply needy people with a penchant for criminality. So for many people, having them around is all cost, and no benefit. And while nothing about the BBC piece comes across as intending to play on the prejudices of Britons, such intent isn't really necessary. The contrast between the partially-named or pseudonymous Nigerians and the Boettlers and Representative Guffey is no less clear for not being deliberate. And yes, Ms. Badenoch and the Conservatives (or the Reform Party, for that matter) can create their own stereotypes, but why pass on work that the BBC has done for them?

In the end, the biggest problem with the piece is that it hinted at a "gotcha" moment, when an intrepid BBC reporter tracks down a sinister extortionist, and confronts them on camera, leads the authorities to them, or both. And that's not an entirely reasonable expectation, after all, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal was extradited from Nigeria to face five federal charges in connection with Gavin Guffey's extortion and death. Although it must be said that Mr. Lawal didn't know when to quit, and that likely had a lot to do with his being tracked down. (Not to mention the fact that if convicted, he'll be well into middle age by the time he completes even the minimum possible sentence.)

But perhaps a story on how to protect one's loved ones, or oneself, from these schemes would have been more useful. The story's referencing of the various tools available to people being targeted by such schemes comes across as boilerplate, and besides, it's all reactive, rather than proactive, with the BBC placing the sole onus for protection on the providers of online services who have both weak incentives and poor tools to do such work well. "Ola" notes that "young boys are scared of their pictures being released to their class groups, their parents and their friends," and there seems to be a general acceptance of that fact. But young men are always likely to do dumb things when pursuing relationships and sex. Evan Boettler and Gavin Guffey killed themselves because they perceived that being dead was better than being outed as having sent explicit pictures to someone who turned out to be someone other than who they claimed. And the whole scheme works on the presumption that paying ever-escalating amounts of money is preferable to one's friends and family knowing that one's willing to do something dumb in the hope that one gets an attractive girlfriend out of the bargain.

The problem is that there no longer a good way to make the case that part of the problem lies with Anglo-American society without casting people like the Boettlers and Representative Guffey as culpable in the tragedies that have been visited upon them. And this is a common dilemma. Telling people that taking precautions makes it more difficult for perpetrators to act is often seen as casting those people as perpetrators themselves and absolving wrongdoers of culpability. And so there's a singular focus on bad actors; even at the risk of casting entire swaths of humanity as undesirables to be kept away from one's shores.

Not As I Do

Looking back on today's post now that I've written it, I think that this could have simply said "Partisanship encourages the tendency to deny that the failures of one's preferred party are, in fact, the party's own," and been another entry in The Short Form. I may have gone off on a rant, instead. But, what's done is done, so...

The Week's most recent Saturday Wrap kicks off with its "Controversy of the week; Trump: Demanding the prosecution of his political foes," which offers a quick summation of what various news outlets are saying about it. One of the sites it draws from this week is the conservative National Review.

Trump’s demands of Bondi are an “outrage,” said National Review in an editorial. But “Democrats paved the way here.”

The Week tends to paraphrase things in its wrap-ups, sometimes in ways that obscure the broader meaning, so I went to the National Review's editorial to read it for myself.

President Trump’s weekend social media post pressuring Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute his political enemies is an outrage against the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.

Sadly, it is also more of the same. Democrats paved the way here with the lawfare abuses on which Trump is doubling down.

One can make the case that American politics only dislikes Whataboutism until it's a useful tool to be deployed against one's rivals and has little risk of being clearly inaccurate, but there's another tendency from American politics on display here: Claiming that "they started it."

Personally, I'm not convinced of the truth of that claim; accusations of lawfare against Donald Trump necessarily come with the presumption that there is no legitimate reason to think that any of the cases against the Mr. Trump had any genuine legal merit. And the National Review's cheerleading is on weak ground here. The only legal case they actually seem to take aim at is New York v. Trump*, which it describes as "an abusive prosecution with no fraud victims in which the absurdly astronomical damage award was recently voided by an appellate court."

Fraud and theft, however, are not the same thing. The National Review is attempting to make the case that lying about one's assets to receive favorable treatment from a lender, or simply to receive a loan in the first place, doesn't count as fraud, so long as the loan is repaid. But that's not how the law works. Sam Bankman Fried is not in prison because he stole money from people... but because he made them take risks that they were not aware of. Now that his investments are being unwound, the investors (or, more accurately, the current holders of those claims... many people, incorrectly convinced their money was simply gone, sold their claims for less than face value) are looking at anywhere from 20%-40% over and above their original deposits. Why should the Trump Organization get off any easier than a fraudster who actually made money for the victims of the fraud? And besides, in the very ruling that vacates the disgorgement portion of the penalty as excessive, the Court notes:

As to the Attorney General’s motion for summary judgment on the first cause of action, Supreme Court found that Executive Law § 63(12) required that the Attorney General prove only that the [statements of financial condition] were false and misleading, and found that defendants repeatedly or persistently used the SFCs to transact business. Supreme Court found that “the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying the Attorney General’s burden.”

And this sort of cherry-picking, siting rulings only to the degree that they are favorable to one's case, is common in American politics. Granted, in this case, the lack agreement between the court's five justices lends itself to such selective interpretations.

While it's true that the appelate court voided the high judgement against the Trump Organization, again, in the ruling it says: "Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals."

So while it seems that the court did find the disgorgement order excessive, it was struck down, rather than being sent back to be recalculated, so that the appeals process could move forward. This has been cast as a victory for the President, but it seems more of an administrative matter to me.

The problem with claims of "lawfare" is that the underlying allegation, that court cases are being brought for political reasons, doesn't have a formal process to find fact. When the National Review's editorial notes...

The tension has been resolved over time by the norm that, while presidents guide the DOJ’s enforcement priorities as to subject matter (e.g., more emphasis on border enforcement, even if that means less on, say, public corruption), the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference — conducted by theoretically nonpartisan prosecutors, applying the law as written and checked by the independent judiciary.

Trump is grossly disregarding this practice.

...They then proceed to insinuate that Democrats had done the same. Whether my own basic research into things refutes that insinuation is left to the reader, but more to the point, if President Trump is "grossly disregarding" the precedent of "the administration of justice in individual cases proceeds without political interference," why does it matter if someone else didn't?

Here I would note that the National Review avoids claiming that either the Biden Administration or the Governor of New York actively sought to push unwarranted prosecutions of Donald Trump. "Former FBI director James Comey" and "New York State Attorney General Letitia James" are not the chief elected executive officers of any federal or state jurisdiction. They did not pressure anyone to bring cases against Mr. Trump. And even if one believes that they were incorrect in their assessments of Mr. Trump, nothing has come forward to say that they were acting in bad faith.

And this (finally) gets me to my biggest gripe with the National Review's take on things. By claiming that "Democrats paved the way here" the National Review absolves President Trump for what is a clear escalation. "The Democrats" did not do what President Trump is doing. President Biden did not publicly lean on Merrick Garland to bring United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, Waltine Nauta, and Carlos De Oliveira. Likewise, New York v. Trump was not the result of a pressure campaign by Governor Hochul. This is not a case of partisan business as usual. The President is demanding the targeting of people he feels have wronged him out of personal pique, and a sense that since they are bad people (as is everyone who opposes him) they must be guilty of some culpable illegality.

Claiming "they started it" because people like President Biden and Governor Hochul didn't step in to forcibly quash the proceedings is, in effect, to justify the President's open interference in the workings of the Department of Justice on the grounds that Democratic politicians didn't previously openly interfere in the workings of the Federal and New York Departments of Justice.

While it's commendable that the National Review is willing to risk the ire of Republican members of Congress and President Trump's voter base to come out at say that the President's open political interference in the workings of justice is bad, their inability to seek placing ultimate blame elsewhere demonstrates one of the biggest problems with partisanship; the inability to admit that parties, including the parties one supports, have interests, rather than principles. The National Review's conclusion references "the public’s disdain for lawfare." If such a disdain existed, we wouldn't be seeing this. Republicans not liking it when they believe that Democrats have behaved badly, and Democrats not liking it when they believe that Republicans have behaved badly, does not add up to a broader public disdain for bad behavior. Especially when each group of partisans believes its members can do no wrong. It's simply partisanship. Genuine disdain does not engage in "they started it," or "whataboutism." It simply condemns. And as long as the public of the United States is divided against itself, no such simple condemnation will be forthcoming. And it's disingenuous to pretend that it will. 

* More specifically: People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Allen Weisselberg, Jeffrey McConney, The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, The Trump Organization, Inc., Trump Organization LLC, DJT Holdings LLC, DJT Holdings Managing Member, Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, 401 North Wabash Venture LLC, Trump Old Post Office LLC, 40 Wall Street LLC, Seven Springs LLC 

Teetering

 "I don't know" what Newsom is "trying to do," said Fox News host Trace Gallagher, but it "comes across as childish." Given the longstanding rumors of Newsom's 2028 presidential ambitions, if he "wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little bit more serious," said Fox News host and former George W. Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino.
Newsom's trolling roils critics and thrills fans

I've never been clear on why The Week seems to think that balanced political coverage seems to be just reporting what the various partisan cheer squads have to say about something. Of course Fox News hosts think that Gavin Newsom is being immature or unserious. Projecting disdain for whatever Democratic politicians are doing is effectively their whole job. If Trace Gallagher or Dana Perino honestly thought that Governor Newsom asking more like President Trump was an idea that would actually pay off, they certainly couldn't say so on air; there would be a revolt among the Republican faithful who have been shown willing to punish Fox News before when it didn't toe the party line. So why are necessarily partisan television hosts making predictably partisan comments considered newsworthy?

While the answer could be that The Week is primarily a UK publication, whose base readership might not be well-versed in American politics, it seems to me that a framing that educates those readers in the general partisan biases of news organizations (or perhaps, their audiences) would serve them better. I doubt that it's an unfamiliar concept; I've been given to understand that there are partisan news outlets in the United Kingdom, just as in the United States. (Although, to be fair, I don't read enough of The Week's UK coverage to know if they treat their partisan outlets in the same way they cover the ones stateside.)

But then, I alluded to audiences before, and that's a tougher nut to crack. Fox News has its deep-seated partisan bias, because the audience that it has cultivated over its lifetime is very much Republican, and for them, it doesn't feel like a bias. Just like for many people who consider themselves Left-of-Center, "reality has a liberal bias," or least that's how the saying went back in the day.

And this can result in news outlets judging things by who is doing them, rather than the thing being done. So Fox News hosts call out Governor Newsom as childish and unserious, while Slate writers level the same charges at President Trump. Because Fox's Republican-dominated audience and Slate's primarily Democratic one have made making those charges part of the price of watching or reading. And the advertisers, the people who really pay the bills at the end of day, want to make sure that their material is getting in front of as many eyeballs as it possibly can. And no-one is making a name for themselves by graphing out where they spend their money. And no one is selling advertising space by noting the public's role in all of this.

Wrong Bottle

MAGA turns on Trump!

Oh, really now? I must have missed that. Because if Congress is any indication, Donald Trump still has a very secure voter base that he can use as a weapon against any Republican legislator that dares to disagree with him.

Sure, there are people who were positive that the alleged "Epstein Files" were going to prove their suspicions that prior Democratic administrations colluded with the "Deep State" and an international secret society of wealthy pedophiles to do damage to the United States. And once the cat was out of the bag, they'd all be marched off to prison and/or a firing squad and all would be right with the world. And they're a bit miffed that there doesn't seem to be a cat, or a bag, for that matter.

And, okay. So what? These people may not be as enthusiastic about President Trump as they were a few months ago, but that's not the President's problem. Okay, they can agitate for someone whose thinking is more to their liking to mount a primary challenge against Republicans in Congress who aren't being vocal enough about getting the "evidence" out there, but the rest of the Trump electorate isn't likely to go along with them.

And so the (left leaning) media stories that have come out recently, purporting to explain how this time, President Trump may have actually alienated voters his coalition depends on seem like just so much more wishful thinking. The hoping that President Trump has finally made one misstep too many is understandable. The President is playing the role of Culture Warrior in Chief, and he's willing to go to great lengths to punish organizations he deems as being opposed to him and the people who support him. If something doesn't change, and relatively soon, he's going to inflict irreparable harm on a lot of people. And given the fact that Republicans in Congress have no real reason to pick a fight with him (after all, if things blow up, he'll be a convenient target for the blame) and the current Supreme Court may as well be on his payroll, mass defections by Republican voters are pretty much the only chance they have.

But I don't think that there's a djinni here to grant that wish. The President's core voters don't have anywhere else to go... non-Trumpist Republicans have pretty much been run out of the party and they're certainly not going to vote Democratic, so if they want to have any hope of Washington D. C., continuing to privilege their interests, then Trump it is. Abandoning this project simply has no upside for the majority of people who identify with the MAGA movement. While it's unlikely that a change of control in Congress would result in President Trump being removed from office, it would certainly remove any momentum his administration has left, and leave him a lame duck.

Given this, I don't see President Trump being in any real jeopardy, at least at the moment. There's simply no-one he could cross that his base holds in higher esteem than Mr. Trump himself. Of course, that can change; anything can change, so I should likely decline to make predictions about how this is going to turn out. But for the time being, wishes are what the President's detractors have. But it's a means of making them come true that they need.

Headlining

News, due to the fact that it is a business, tends to go where it believes the public's attention is going to be. And that can make looking up the latest headlines into an exercise in understanding where news organizations and aggregators think the most interest will be, as opposed to actually becoming more informed.

Consider these top headlines when I looked up the Technology section of Google News:

It's pointless to ask if the fact that Walmart will have more Switch 2 consoles to sell is genuinely newsworthy, because, in a sense, of course it is, that's why Google is leading with that story. And I think that it's because this is, as the saying goes "News you can use." People who are looking for the new Nintendo system can now plan to go get one, or order it online. The fact that the Switch is back in stock is actionable by people who are interested in it, unlike a lot of news stories today.

Due the short shelf life of the information, it's not the sort of thing that feels particularly informative, big picture. And maybe that's part of the reason why is garners so much attention; it's not just another thing happening somewhere that readers can't do anything to change or improve. It's not the media mining the public's anxieties for clicks. It's "Hey; that thing you wanted? There are more of them now." I can see why that would be appealing to people.