RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/video/apple-exec-our-top-news-stories-are-hand-picked-by-our-editorial-team/

An Apple executive today said that the top news stories for Apple News are “handpicked” by an editorial team, arousing suspicion that left-wing bias is at play in the stories we see on its news app.

Apple News editor-in-chief Lauren Kern told an audience at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), that Apple’s popular news app serves users the “stories you want to read pulled together from trusted sources.”

“Our top stories are handpicked by the Apple editorial team to make a great collection of curated content,” she said.

Facebook ran into trouble with conservatives two years ago when former editors blew the whistle on the practice of using “news curators” to handpick news content and weed out conservative points of view.

Former editors for Facebook’s news aggregation service told Gizmodo that they had “the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to.” While selections for stories are automated, the “news curators” claimed some sources and topics were “blacklisted” to avoid exposing readers to conservative points of view.

In an effort to resolve allegations of bias against conservatives, Facebook changed its process for trending topics.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/what-facebook-and-google-do-with-your-information-should-not-be-a-surprise/

The recent fuss about Facebook and Google’s tracking programs, and the ad targeting they offer has caused me to realize that most people either don’t understand or don’t care how advertising works. As the former CTO of an Internet advertising startup, I’ve given it a lot of thought in the last few years. This being me, the math geek, I’ve done a lot of this thinking mathematically, but I promise that I won’t inflict the math part on you.

Or at least not much.

So, let’s think about what advertising is for. The idea is to entice, and even convince, potential customers to become actual customers, and to buy things.

There are a million ways to do this, from old-fashioned word-of-mouth, to newspaper and magazine ads, to ShamWow pitchmen on late-night TV, to computer games that give you some kind of in-game goodies for watching an ad. (I’ve recently been compulsively playing a “terraform the universe” game that works like this; I hope to write a review soon.)

Every advertising method has some inherent cost. Word-of-mouth is low cost; national TV is expensive; others are in between. Every advertisement also has an inherent potential reward when someone is convinced, but not every person who sees an advertisement will actually buy the product. (I regularly see ads for products I already own; I imagine most everyone else has the same experience.)

This means we’ve wandered into the world of probability. Here’s the first of the two equations I’m going to mention, and I promise there’s nothing more than multiplication and division in either one. This first equation is called the expectation value, and it’s

https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/31/the-carnivores-

After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the 1974 elections.

Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the Nixon Administration.

Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to mask their wrongdoing under the cover of “national security” or institutional “professionalism.”

All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like abuses of power by the former Barack Obama Administration.

Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign. Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of those names then were leaked illegally to the press.

Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican candidate Donald Trump—largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.

Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and politically motivated Steele dossier.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/when-is-it-okay-to-drop-the-c-word-bomb-on-a-woman/

When her dad is a POTUS from the wrong party.

It’s been a little over 24 hours since Roseanne Barr blew up her career (again) for saying something really stupid and hateful (again). And now, yet another alleged comedienne is in the news for being a loony, vulgar piece of garbage.

First, some background. On Sunday, Ivanka Trump tweeted the following with a picture of herself and her baby:
Ivanka Trump
✔ @IvankaTrump

My ♥️! #SundayMorning

If you think that’s just a nice photo of a mother with her baby, you’re obviously not #Resisting enough.

Ladies and gentlemen: the comedic stylings of Ms. Samantha Bee.

Samantha Bee’s response:
Jon Levine
✔ @LevineJonathan
Samantha Bee to @IvankaTrump on Full Frontal tonight:

“Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless cunt!”

As David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon notes:

The remark came at the end of her weekly program “Full Frontal’s” A block, where the left-wing comic blasted the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their parents at the border. Bee acknowledged this policy did not begin under President Trump, but she said he had made it worse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/netflix_ceo_bundles_money_for_obama_netflix_gets_net_neutrality_obamas_get_huge_contract.html

I was surprised yesterday when I read that the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, was a bundler for the 2012 Obama campaign, because with the media’s deep interest in political corruption, equality, and especially income equality, I would think such political connections would be widely reported.

From April 2012’s Hollywood Reporter:

Billionaire mogul Haim Saban threw open his arms as he arrived to meet first lady Michelle Obama at the Beverly Hills home of Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos and his wife of 2½ years, Nicole Avant, the newly returned U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas.

“I’m here!” Saban announced to all within earshot of the no-press-allowed crowd of 135 – a who’s who of Hollywood political power players, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steve Bing, Harvey Weinstein and Mike and Irena Medavoy; Sarandos’ boss, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings; and Quincy Jones, Avant’s godfather.

Now this, from RedState:

Ex-President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle just signed a deal with Netflix to “produce television shows and films for the streaming service.” It could be worth as much as $50 million.

Which makes perfect business sense for Netflix – given the Obamas’ extensive experience in story development, screenwriting, direction and production.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270299/bay-pics-lloyd-billingsley

Over the Memorial Day weekend, photos of Central American children at a U.S. holding facility began to appear online. Democrats and their media allies quickly hailed the pics as the latest exhibit of anti-Trump hysteria.

“Look at these photos,” Linda Sarsour tweeted.

“Speechless,” tweeted Antonio Villaraigosa, former Los Angeles mayor and candidate for governor of California. “This is not who we are as a nation.”

“All of these photos are disturbing, but the first two are especially awful,” tweeted New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, linking to headline hailing “First glimpse of immigrant children at holding facility.” And so on.

For the breathless tweeters, the photos were prima facie evidence that, as CNN’s April Ryan wondered, “is the Trump administration involved in a child sex-trafficking ring?”

Antonio Arellano, who claims to work for ABC in Houston, circulated a story about an ICE detention center in Texas with “a prison bus just for babies.” CNN’s Ana Navarro responded, “America, this cannot be who we are” and those who picked up Arrellano’s story included Kasie Hunt of NBC, Sharon Waxman of TheWrap, actor Alyssa Milano, and POTUS 44 staffer Michael Simon and Democrat Party strategist Zac Petkanas.

Trouble was, the story was from 2014, long before the Trump administration. Likewise, As Saagar Enjeti noted in the Daily Caller, the detention center photos “stem from a 2014 Arizona Central story showing migrant children in steel cages. The cages were implemented at the height of the Central American migrant crisis under the Obama administration.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/28/media-double-down-after-new-york-times-gets-busted-peddling-fake-news/

There may have been a real White House briefing with real White House officials, but The New York Times couldn’t be trusted to accurately summarize what the White House official said. And it wasn’t on a minor point.

On the path to the June 12 summit with North Korea, journalists claimed President Donald Trump would not be willing to walk away from the negotiating table because he was too desperate for a win.

The Washington Post’s David Nakamura wrote that “critics fear that a president determined to declare victory where his predecessors failed will allow his desire for a legacy-making deal to override the substance of the negotiations.” On the same day, the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman mocked Trump’s desire for a win, which he said was turning Trump into a fool who was getting played.

Then President Trump did what media outlets said he’d never do. He walked away from the negotiating table due to North Korea’s behavior. The media outlets didn’t acknowledge their previous analytical missteps so much as come up with new lines of attack on Trump.

Mark Landler and David Sanger of The New York Times wrote an article arguing there were deep divisions between Trump and his advisors. To support the claim, the Times argued that Trump said a June 12 summit was still possible, while his top aides said it was “impossible”: