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benjaminwatchworld · 4 years

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My review of the decade is kicking off my first blog of 2020, still debating if I should do a review of 2019 it’s self. Anyway, where to start is a bit of a problem but I have to write this and it’s supposed to be long but I will make it short since a few of my readers complain about the length of my write-ups.

I am going to do more of outlining those special events that happened this ending decade and will surely impact the starting decade. Will start with 2013 when Benedict XVI shocked the world in February when he became the first pope to resign in almost 600 years Which makes us a special generation to have been a life when that historical event happened. After the guys did the surprise announcement all the attention shifted so fast to the succession, and the election of the new Pope, Francis. In the next decade one question will maybe fully be answered, “why did Benedict quit?”

Before going to the rest of the world, my Uganda should come first, the decade has been doted by a raise of violence in the pearl of Africa some that were a result of political events since we hard two elections in there that were more of scripted unless in the last on the biggest opposition figure took the oath of office for presidency on his own inspiring Kenya an the likes of Venezuela where it seemed to have worked that side in the initial stages making Dr. Besigye more of a world experiment since his work to work events were more of a blueprint for the Arab spring. It’s laughable but sad, the cries of human rights violations with the talks of safe houses and torture as a mode of investigation, murders and assassinations have been trend of the decade which started with religious clerics then a judge and later there was an Amy office, a member of Parliament and two high ranking police officers all done in a MOSSAD style.

Let me speed through the bad ones but are their goods the oil production has still not yet started, middle-income delusion has not materialized. There are memorable ones, like Uganda making 50 years of independence, and hosting the biggest number of refugees in the world because of the instabilities that are around us, we have our brothers coming from South Sudan, Burundi, DRC and many from the Horn of Africa putting our hospitality to a whole new level that other countries are coming into a benchmark on our methods only that along the way the UN found out that the numbers were being exaggerated for some reason that would need there own blog.

In this ending decade, there a few sporting achievements that really united the county but the government seemed to learn nothing from the results of the events. In the 2012 London Olympics Uganda managed to get a Gold medal taking the country by storm since it was like 4 decades since it last happened, I was not there am not sure if it’s even true. Then again after about 3 decades the Uganda Cranes the National Football team qualified for the African Cup of Nations which to me is still a dream I have to wake up from. World Cup is not a statement related to Uganda but the She Cranes has been able to go for two world events in the last ten years. Those sports moments made Ugandans feel like one. The other event that made Uganda feel like it was not in a milky way was a political event, the second of the two presidential candidates debates before an election.

Moving to other things away from Uganda that will always be remembered about the decade which started with South Africa host the 2010 FIFA world cup on the continent for the first time. The aftermath of the seven resulted in the change of leadership at the Football organization because of serious crimes in how money was moving around.

The United States of America has a Russian agent as President am joking but the truth is that Donald Trump is the head of the Free world crazy just like the predicted end of the world in December 2012 but when you take a close look we are not far from a Mad max situation going to the next decade.

This decade has seen the most advancement in tech, can you believe it that before this ending decade there was no iPad first came out this decade, and many other companies joined the Apple revolution. When it first comes out, it was quite a special tech item but now we are using them to play Fruit Ninja. Companies like SpaceX, Boeing shaped a lot of the technology of the decade. Then come to the raid hailing apps for transport that in Uganda we even use them for boda bodas. Hybrid and fully electronic cars are no longer things for the future.

But with all the technological achievements it’s this decade when our phones track our every activity and location that a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet disappeared without a trace in early 2014, the fate of the plane and the 239 passengers and crew on board has become one of the biggest aviation mysteries. The missing plane captured the attention of millions around the world, triggering a multinational search and plenty of conspiracy theories. In the middle of last year, The Atlantic gave us a report of what could have happened the plane was likely intentionally crashed by the pilot which I don’t want to believe.

This decade has also been a roller coaster in the entertainment industry and for me my mark was boyhood but there was a whole range of movies, TV shows and music albums that will surely be classics. From 2012 to 2013 was truly the time of viral videos and Ylvis’ “The Fox” was truly the strangest one to ever become an internet hit. Then the Oscars Twelve years of Slaves was special for Africa because Lupita, the movement of Oscars are so white which I don’t feel was justified followed by Oscars are so male, I can’t imagine a woman or black person playing Hitler just saying. Leonardo finally got a win at the 88th Academy Awards in 2016 when he awarded Best Actor for his role in The Revenant, and I still believe he put upper a better show in The Wolf at Wall Street but the academy decided to give him an award for a role he barely sides anything all movie. This decade saw the end of Harry Potter and the Massive Game of Thrones a TV show that really had an impact on television history.

In the last decade, there has been some very nice Music coming from the likes of Adele, Ed screen, Beyonce, Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, Common and John Legend, Cold Play to the Renegades but the song of the decade fell from nowhere pictures a man doing horse-riding-like dance in July 2012 all the way from South Korea called Psy released a new song called Gangnam Style and it’s the only song on YouTube with a billion views.

It was that decade when The Harlem Shake happened in 2013, thousands of bizarre 30second versions of the “Harlem Shake” a dance set to the electronic song by DJ Baauer were being uploaded on the daily, from sports clubs to military men, to government officials.

What am I living out, sports a lot happened, from that World Cup in South Africa to Japan beating up South Africa in a rugby world cup tipping tables in the sport to the Golden State Warriors taking the NBA by storm but for me, my moment was Leicester City winning the English Premier League. It has become a turn of some sort we a now calling surprises “A Leicester City”.

About 19 million tweets kicked of the Me Too campaign leading to widespread awareness and discussion of the topic of sexual assault against women and have since then become a historic feminist movement, it’s another thing we can partly credit to the internet and technology.

It was that decade when the rainbow was everywhere in the world every single day after Same-sex marriage became legal in the U.S.A on June 26, 2015, it opened another door for LGBTQ+ Community in the whole world. So that past decade we were lucky to witness two royal weddings the one in 2011 and the last one in 2018 that seemed to be more special because many things about it rewrote human history.

In that last decade Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia all went out of office in the same year in what came to be known as the Arab spring. Later down the decade, Omar Bashir of Sudan was overthrown a prior to him Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe also left office.

I will end with war in Syria, it’s a Civil war against the government of Assad, it’s a proxy war between Russia and America, it’s a religious war with between the Sunni and Shia Muslims who are backing a president from the Alwhyt side of Islam and its an international war against the self-proclaimed Caliphate called ISIS that has seen almost every nation on the planet get involved. Since 2011 the end is not yet in sight producing the greatest numbers of refugees since the Second world war making it the climax of the third world war generation. War is war.

The greatest thing of the decade is the awareness concerning climate change even if it has come at a very high cost at least for now everyone on the planet knows what we have got ourselves into going to the next 10 years.

I will end with a light one but it still fascinates me to this date. Never before has the world been so divided over something so simple as the color of a dress but that’s exactly what happened back in February 2015 when a picture of a dress originally posted on Tumblr suddenly went viral overnight. To me “The dress is gold and white”

That Decade My review of the decade is kicking off my first blog of 2020, still debating if I should do a review of 2019 it’s self.

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disappearingground · 5 years

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“I’m speaking about stuff I’ve never talked about”

AV Club March 19, 2019

Jenny Lewis on her best solo album to date

By Erik Adams

Jenny Lewis has been making music for more than 20 years, on her own and with bands like Rilo Kiley and Nice As Fuck. But she’s never recorded anything quite like On The Line. Her fourth solo album and first since 2014’s The Voyager sounds humongous: rafter-raising vocals, pianos that seem to ring out endlessly, and, on “Red Bull & Hennessy” and “On The Line,” an earth-shaking double-drum attack courtesy of session warhorse Jim Keltner and Ringo Starr. On The Line is the crispest-sounding entry in Lewis’ catalog, and the most emotionally complex, written in the wake of a breakup and the death of her mother. Yet, as she discussed by phone this month, the true nature of those songs is a little more complicated. The A.V. Club talked with Lewis about “summoning” a former Beatle, the links between The Voyager and On The Line, and whether knowing the recipe ruins the cake.

The A.V. Club: I’ve been listening to On The Line a lot, and I feel like every time I do, I come out of it with a new favorite among the songs.

Jenny Lewis: That’s the hope—that people listen to it all the way through, and maybe more than once. How much do people listen to one album now? I know I do, because I have to limit myself to fall in love with something—like one side at the time.

AVC: How do you listen to music these days? Is it streaming, is it physical media?

JL: I have a cassette player that I love, in the kitchen. I really like listening to cassettes because of the parameters. A couple songs, let me digest it, flip the side. I listen to vinyl. I also listen to a lot of Howard Stern [Laughs.] in the car. A ton.

AVC: So you’ve got that satellite radio hook-up?

JL: Yeah, I’ve got that Sirius. When I’m driving, I like Howard, and the Grateful Dead channel, and the Beatles channel, which is so fun to listen to, because it’s just like trivia.

AVC: And now you have a Beatle on your record!

JL: It’s crazy. It’s crazy!

AVC: How does that feel?

JL: In the words of Larry David: Pretty, pretty, pretty good.

AVC: How did Ringo Starr end up playing on “Heads Gonna Roll” and “Red Bull & Hennessy”?

JL: I feel like we may have channeled him from the East Village. We may have summoned Ringo without realizing it. A friend of mine [Nice As Fuck drummer Tennessee Thomas] had a shop called The Deep End Club on 1st Avenue, and one day this Frenchman drove up on a motorcycle, and he just rode it right up to the shop door, came into the shop—just the two of us in there, myself and Tennessee—and the guy was watching something on his iPhone. He showed it to us, and it was this video of Ringo in a blue onesie with a silver star on it, singing “Only You (And You Alone)” with Harry Nilsson on background vocals, and a giant spaceship made out of papier mâché on top of the Capitol Records Building. [Laughs.] And I became obsessed with this video. I must have watched it a hundred times.

And there’s a little shop down the street called Flower Power—it’s like a little witches’ shop—and they have this oil called Come To Me Oil. And it was for romantic reasons that I bought this oil, but then I think it sort of got crossed with this Ringo video. [Laughs.]

AVC: It’s not just Ringo—it’s the studio, too.

JL: I would have never considered Capitol Records as a place that I could record. Honestly. My motto in life is “One up from the cheapest.” I want that to be my headstone. It’s a great way to choose a bottle of wine. So to end up at Capitol, that was a real trip.

AVC: How do you feel like the studio wound up influencing the album? How is it heard in the final product?

JL: I think the part of record-making that is magical, and mysterious, and human—it’s in the air, it’s in the space. When you record on a computer, you’re recording in a vacuum. When you record on tape, it’s alive. The hiss is the room. So when you’ve got the tape—which, we recorded on tape—and then you’ve got a room like that, which is just resonating energy, sound, air. I think that’s where the magic is, in the air.

And then you’ve got someone like Benmont Tench, who plays on the record, whose specialty is fog. He adds a layer of fog to music. He is so amazing at creating tension—melodic tension. Sometimes dissonance. But the fog and the air, I think that is the space.

AVC: Is there anywhere on the record where that fog is particularly prevalent? Or is it throughout the whole thing?

JL: It’s in there, and you can just feel it. On The Voyager as well. It’s this pristine, modern recording, which is cool as well. That’s why I think Auto-Tune is so popular, because it adds an otherworldly element that you’re not getting in the digital form. It’s so tight, digital recording, that Auto-Tune is a little bit magical, mystical, and creates space and fog. I think it’s almost like a reaction to the sterile environment of digital recording. You can still make something amazing on your phone, but I think there’s this humanness that people are drawn to in music.

AVC: And tracking the songs live in the studio provides its own energy, too. “Red Bull & Hennessy” feels muscular and electric.

JL: We call that “the big boy pirate ship.” “Red Bull & Hennessy” feels muscular because there are two men drumming on the track—Ringo and Jim Keltner, arguably the two best drummers alive—and the power of that.

So we started in the studio at Capitol, and then I mixed the record with Shawn Everett, who’s a different kind of artist and technician. He changed the sound. He put the sail on the big boy pirate ship.

AVC: You’ve talked in other interviews about getting the drum sound on the record by taking the midrange out—in layperson’s terms, how does that affect the sound?

JL: That isn’t necessarily specific to the drum sound. The drum sound was an organic drum sound through Shawn’s filter, which is: He is on his own trip, and I was there to go on that trip with him.

What I meant by removing the midrange: That relates to the whole track and creating space in the middle for the vocal. With guitar music, guitars eat up the same sonic space as vocals. By scraping some of that out—in the same way that a hip-hop track would be produced, where it’s bass, vocal in the middle, and then cowbell or hi-hat—sonically, those kinds of productions are really clean and sparse, and you can hear what’s going on. So Shawn and I were referencing some hip-hop for a clean, but muscular, track.

AVC: That hip-hop influence really comes across on “Do Si Do.” The percussiveness of the lyrics, the way they flow—they could be rapped or sung.

JL: Beck produced that song, and it feels so Beck to me. Although it’s Jim, and it’s Capitol Records—you know, it’s, like, singer-songwriter music—Beck is really so great at finding the groove. I wrote the lyrics like I wrote my first lyrics as a kid: I wanted to be an MC when I was 10. And I think the first poems I wrote were actually verses. They were rap. I had a freestyle battle with Biz Markie when I was 17, in Hollywood at this place called The Gaslight. And I realized that I wasn’t a very good rapper—I was probably a better writer. So that was the end of my rapping career, but that’s my formative writing skill, in that form. And then I learned about indie rock later, and then country music. So I’m aping those genres, but through a hip-hop prism, because that’s all I kind of know how to do.

(In addition to Beck and Everett, On The Line was in small part produced by Ryan Adams; following the sexual misconduct allegations against Adams published in The New York Times, Lewis tweeted the following: “I am deeply troubled by Ryan Adams’ alleged behavior. Although he and I had a working professional relationship, I stand in solidarity with the women who have come forward.”—Ed.)

AVC: Another of the Beck songs on the album is “Little White Dove,” which is about your mother’s death, though that might not be immediately apparent because of the groove and the bounce that it has. Can you talk about writing and recording that song?

JL: I started that with a guitar, with a drum machine—I have a little music room [at home]. My mom was ill, and in the hospital, and I would spend the day with her and then come back home and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Nothing was working: The weed wasn’t working, and I didn’t want to drink tequila, or go on a hike. Really music was—it was just something to do. That song came out of those days I spent with her.

AVC: There’s overlap between some of the themes and subject matter of The Voyager and On The Line—both deal with the death of a parent—and the albums’ cover photos are similar. Do you view them as companion pieces?

JL: They are. The Voyager, I didn’t have a title track for it. I needed to write another song for it. And there was a motel in Van Nuys called The Voyager that burned down. And my mom was living in that motel. This is years ago. And I just happened to turn on the news and saw it on channel 5. And I wrote “The Voyager,” which isn’t really about that. But it gave me the idea of this song, which is about everyone’s journey.

So [On The Line]—life just happens. Shit happens. You keep going. It’s definitely linked to The Voyager. Which I just realized right now. [Laughs.] Interviews are so weird! I don’t even know why I make this shit, but then I have these conversations, and I’m like, “Wait a minute: This is deeply coded.”

AVC: And that’s inherent in your songwriting. There’s always an ambiguity: “Heads Gonna Roll” has that line “I’m gonna keep on dancing ’til I hear that ringing bell,” which rings of “for whom the bell tolls”—but it’s actually a reference to boxer Floyd Mayweather.

JL: That’s one of the things it could be. I like to write lines that have, like, five different meanings, where it really is open to interpretation. And the album title, On The Line, means so many things. To find the meaning underneath the meaning, it’s the true meta vibe of the song—or to just uncover some clue. Or listening to something over and over again, learning more about it. I hope I don’t blow it by talking about it so literally. I feel like I’ve opened up and I’m speaking about some stuff that I’ve never talked about before. When you know the recipe, is it going to ruin the cake? Or does it still taste good?

AVC: It’s all context. It’s all additional understanding. Hearing about the experiences that inspired these songs and these lyrics might strengthen people’s connection to them.

JL: But it’s also a little embarrassing. I feel really vulnerable. It’s easier to just have a poem. When you start addressing your own life, like your family and your relationships—but it’s my own fault. I’m just [Laughs.], “Blab, blab, blab.”

But the songs are not true, through and through. I take many, many liberties. They’re not not true, but they’re not true. You know what I mean.

AVC: They blend memoir and fiction.

JL: And I’m not consciously doing it—I’m just doing it. I just write every day. I live and I write, and hopefully I’ll always be able to write. Because if not, then I’d just have to live, and that’s terrifying.

AVC: From what I hear, that’s the best way to do it. I interviewed Paul Williams recently, and he compared his creative process to juggling: “I think you have to just throw the balls up in the air and catch them. You start thinking about it, they wind up on the floor.”

JL: Yeah, I don’t think you want to analyze too much. There’s a magical element to creation, if you’re an artist. Some people listen to a song, and then they write another song: “I want to write a song like this!” But the other part of it is pretty mystical. And I think you maybe follow the bread crumbs. It’s all right there in front of you, if you just open your eyes.

#publication: av club #album: on the line #year: 2019 #mention: life motto #person: ringo #person: benmont tench #mention: recording process #song: red bull #person: beck #mention: songwriting #song: little white dove #song: the voyager #song: heads gonna roll #mention: album title #mention: mother

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krystlecoombs-blog · 6 years

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Microsoft's Xbox Was The Last Great CES Reveal.

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jeffrmayhugh · 4 years

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Anthony Pompliano says get ready for the bitcoin halving and price escalation to $100k

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

We are talking the ultimate safe havens in this time of crisis. And for my next guest, that reassurance lies in Bitcoin. He even thinks it could go to a hundred thousand dollars. Anthony promptly. A.. Known as Pompe on Twitter as an American entrepreneur investor, a former U.S. Army veteran. He’s also the co-founder and managing partner of Full Tilt Capital and Morgan Creek Digital Assets. And he is the host of the Pop podcast. He joins me now. Anthony, nice to finally meet you. I’ve been following you on Twitter for years. So welcome to the show. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. How are you? First off, before we get into the interview, how are you holding up with, you know, remote working and this, you know, self-isolation and all that? How’s it going for you? Yeah, these are great. I think most people who are involved in a lot of the lines of business that we are already we’re pretty familiar with remote work. And so really no change of course there. Obviously, not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to do that. But for us, hasn’t been so disruptive. And so we’re kind of business as usual. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Same here. I’ve been used to working remotely and under varying degrees of conditions, so I want to just dive into it here. I listened to one of your podcasts from March 20th. Were you graded? Gave a score to bitcoin, oil, gold, equities. So you rated bitcoin and I’ll leave it on 10 equities, eight on 10 oil, five on 10. Bottom of the list is gold at a three on 10. So I want to understand your rankings here because yesterday we saw that stocks had the worst first quarter ever. Bitcoin is down 10 percent yet. Gold, Anthony, last man or woman standing up 4 percent. One of that’s still one of the best performing assets out there for sure. So I think part of this is a lot of the analysis that I’m doing is looking out over the next two years or so. Right. So I don’t really worry about kind of short term price performance and said much more interested in the long term medium to long term price performance. And the reason why I kind of rate of the things I did was to take gold to start with. It’s very stable. It’s done the job that a lot of people want it to do, but that volatility works in its favour in times of market drawdowns. But it works against it in times of market recovery, meaning that you just don’t get a lot of volatility in gold. And so what I said was over the next two years, given all the quantitative easing, kind of the inflation hedge aspect of gold, I could see us moving into kind of the two thousand to twenty-five hundred-hour range for gold, but that’s just not a very material increase in value compared to what I think other assets will do from here. And so if you then look at something on the other end of the spectrum, like Bitcoin, Bitcoin’s incredibly volatile. It drew down 50 percent at one point and you know, it’s down 30 percent or so depending on what date you look at. But over a year-long period, it’s still up, you know, 35, 50 percent depending on when you go back to. And over the next two years, I think that it will have hundreds of percent of appreciation given the quantitative easing and the volatility it brings in. So it’s less about kind of what’s happened in the past and it’s much more about forward-looking. What do I think will happen to that asset given the environment we’re going to. OK. So you invite volatility. Do you want assets with this volatility? Well, volatility, I think gets a bad rap because it has this negative connotation to it. But in order to get outsized returns, you need high levels of volatility. So I always say that volatility works in both ways up and down. So if you look at, you know, the best-performing stocks over the last decade or 20 years, they have high levels of volatility. And that volatility actually leads to outsized gains. Now, it can work against you in that it also could lead to large losses. But if you generally think something over a long period of time is going to appreciate at price and it has high levels of volatility, that appreciation in price is likely to be very large. And so I think that’s where something like Bitcoin actually it works to its advantage versus gold, which is much more stable, much more liquid and much less volatile. Now, I know you’ve had many debates with Peter Schiff, a well-known gold bug on this on this topic. But could you not see room for both assets in a portfolio? Wouldn’t you just have bitcoin and gold? Anthony Yeah, so that’s actually my argument is, you know, we’re in this kind of deflationary environment where there’s a liquidity crunch, the dollar strengthening. Obviously there will be some kind of manipulation of the market and flooding of the market with dollars will actually systematically weaken the dollar. And you’ll see, just like we did in 2008, 2011, most asset prices will rise, right? The dollar will weaken, asset prices will rise. And so at some point, whether you own equities, commodities, gold, oil, bitcoin, whatever, it won’t really matter. They’ll all go up in price to some varying degree. I actually think that gold and bitcoin will do very well in that environment. And so it doesn’t surprise me people would want both. But if you ask me which assets are going to appreciate more, obviously that’s bitcoin. Now, why would appreciate it? Because you’re also taking more risk, right? Gold’s got. Thousand years of track record, whereas Bitcoin’s only got about 11 years, and so I’m kind of the risk-reward is there with Bitcoin. But as you get the higher rates of return, you also get the higher rates of risk as well. Which gold doesn’t have. Now we have a major event happening in Bitcoin somewhat. Are you the greatest event for the cryptocurrency happening, happening and may. Can you shed some light on what you expect to happen to the price here in May? Yeah, so I’ve been writing about this now for almost a year. Really? Since last like May or June saying, look, we’re headed into an environment where the Fed was going to cut interest rates to near-zero or zero. They’ve obviously done that. We’ve been saying that they’re gonna have to generate lots of quantitative easing dropsy doing that on a historic level. And those two things were to coincide at the same time or near the same time as the Bitcoin has, which is the incoming daily supply gets cut in half from eighteen hundred Bitcoin a day to nine hundred. Now, if you go back to 2008 2009, remember, gold drew down 30 percent in 2008 during the liquidity crisis. But coming out of that when quantitative easing was announced, et cetera, from 2009 to 2011, we saw a massive increase in price about 3x. And gold eventually hit an all-time high. Now imagine in 2009, 2010 and into eleven fifty percent of the gold miners basically shut off their operations. So 50 percent of the incoming daily supply just disappeared. It would take a scarce asset, make it scarce or right at a time when all these investors are running to it and the value of gold would have gone higher. That’s essentially what I think is about to happen here. Everyone’s going to look for inflation, hedge assets, whether it’s bitcoin or gold. As they do that, you’re going to get the bitcoin having 50 percent of the daily incoming supply gets taken away. And so you’re taking a scarce asset, making it scarce. You’re right at the moment that everyone wants it in their portfolio. And therefore, I think that it provides this rocket fuel kind of for the future outlook of bitcoin. But your forecast is anywhere between twenty thousand to a hundred thousand. Right now we’re sitting a little over 6000. So a pretty wide range there, Anthony. Yeah. So I actually believe in a kind of gone out publicly on record and saying I believe Bitcoin will hit one hundred thousand dollars by the end of December. 2021 So a little over 18 months from now. The reason why I talk about twenty thousand is kind of barriers in the absolute worst-case scenario, if you’re the biggest bear for bitcoin, one of the decisions yet to make on the lower end of that bound is do you think bitcoin will make a new all-time high or not ever write an all-time high being twenty thousand? It was there for just, you know, just a couple of hours, really. But if you don’t think bitcoin will never make another all-time high, then we’ll never see twenty thousand dollars again. But if you believe at least that would happen that we haven’t seen The All-Time High ever for bitcoin, then you’re talking about at least eclipsing twenty thousand. My personal view though is that we’ll see bitcoin hit one hundred thousand dollars before the end of December. 2021, though. Moving on to equities, Anthony. You know, you tweeted that with the pandemic, we’re going to see entire industries possibly disappear, including the movie industry. Yet you still gave equities a pretty high rating there, you know. How are you handling equities? Would you be touching them right now? Yes, I’m pretty well known for never investing in public equities. It’s just not my forte. I don’t like the fact that you don’t have a lot of control. You don’t have any sort of information, advantage, et cetera, over other people. But the reason why I gave equity such a high rating is you’ve already seen a pretty material drawdown. And so unless you think that even the United States is going to fail or equities are gonna go to zero. Obviously, any sort of recover, you could see 30, 40, 50, 100 percent type recovery in the short to medium term. And then you could see over a kind of a longer period of time. New all-time highs, et cetera. And so any time you get an asset that’s not going to go to zero, that has a material drawdown. It should perform pretty well over the next kind of, you know, five years or so. Now, there are specific equities that I think will do even better. Right. So if you look at something obvious like a United Airlines. Right, one of the things that I think people need to kind of keep in their heads is United USA trade at eighty eighty-five dollars a share at the top if you’re down at twenty twenty-five bucks. They did five billion dollars in IB. in 2019 at twenty. Twenty-five bucks are trading around five points seventy-five point eight billion dollars of market cap. But a lot of people look at that and say wow, United Airlines is a complete discount. It’s so cheap generational buy. You have to remember though that revenue basically disappeared for the company. So as it stands, you’ve got a company that’s not doing six point five billion dollars in eBay to do something much, much less buy 80, 90 percent less than that. And so there’s still actually an argument that even at a five-point seven billion dollar market cap, that stock may still be overvalued. Right. Even though it’s dropped to 80 percent or whatever it’s been. And so I think people are going to be really, really careful about kind of hindsight bias of saying, well, look, what the stock’s trading at today, used to trade at this other number. It’s so much it’s so cheap. That might not initially be true because the performance of the company has drastically changed. And you brought up movie theatres, I think is a great example in the week, March 20th. Twenty-sixth last year, it did about 200 million dollars at movie theatres in top-line revenue in March, twenty to twenty-six in 2020. The movie theatres combined domestic Berkoff box office did less than six thousand dollars in revenue. You’re talking about a ninety-nine percent evaporation of revenue in an entire industry in the United States. I just don’t know how you come back from that in any material way over the short to medium term. All right. Well, I guess then my final question to Anthony is, you know, talking about coming back when could you see us open for business again? How long is this road in your eyes? Yeah, there’s a lot of people who are super optimistic. But all I keep saying is we’re not coming back from this as long as all of us are sitting our asses at home. We have a government-mandated shutdown of entire industries of many businesses. And you’ve got coronavirus, which is ground to the global economy to a halt. And that’s not going to recover until we get out of our homes. And I continue to say the road to recovery for the American economy and really the globe is to get businesses turned back on and get people back to work. So if you want the American economy to recover, get American businesses back to work, but American workers back to work. And I think you’ll see that recovery. It’s not going to be a V-shaped recovery because you’re just not going to see us going from spending almost no money while sitting at home to all of the sudden spendings what we were spending in the good times. I just don’t see that happening. I think we’re in for a long run. So would you do it sooner than later? Even at the risk of people’s health? Yes. So I tend to think that one of the big concerns here is we’re faced with two crises. We have a health care crisis that’s causing an economic crisis. But the problem with a lot of the decisions that are being made right now is we have bad data. Right. So if I asked you right now, how many people in the United States have Coronavirus, nobody can answer that question. I can’t answer it. And neither can anybody else because we’ve only tested about eight hundred ninety-five thousand people out of the three hundred thirty million Americans as of Saturday. This past Saturday, eight hundred ninety-five thousand people been tested. We don’t know how many people actually have it. And then even when you look at the death toll, there’s a lot of situations wherein Italy, for example, ninety-nine percent of the deaths that have been reported actually had other health issues. And so what ends up happening is we’re getting the conflation between somebody who dies, who test positive for Copan 19 and somebody who dies from Koven, 19. Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t bad. I actually think it’s a really serious health issue and we have the potential to overwhelm the health industry if we’re not careful. So we have to take this seriously. And I think it’s a good idea that we’ve actually put these shelters in place and quarantines. But I also think that we have to be careful about making massive decisions with bad data, because no matter how much analysis you do have, bad data, you’re still gonna get bad outcomes. You’re gonna make bad decisions. And I think just given the lack of testing right now, we don’t know what the data actually is and therefore, we can’t make good decisions. All right. Anthony Polyanna, thank you for your thoughts. Thank you so much for joining me. Stay safe and we’ll talk soon. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I hope you guys stay safe as well. And we’ll do it again soon. Thanks. Thank you. You can follow Anthony out at pump and you can follow me acting at a company. We’ll have much more for you on Go.com. Thanks for watching.

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for-the-bitcoin-halving/ source https://cryptosharks1.tumblr.com/post/614323177316892672

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scottmapess · 4 years

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Anthony Pompliano says get ready for the bitcoin halving and price escalation to $100k

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for-the-bitcoin-halving/ source https://cryptosharks1.blogspot.com/2020/04/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for.html

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cryptosharks1 · 4 years

Text

Anthony Pompliano says get ready for the bitcoin halving and price escalation to $100k

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for-the-bitcoin-halving/

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heatherrdavis1 · 4 years

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Anthony Pompliano says get ready for the bitcoin halving and price escalation to $100k

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Via https://www.cryptosharks.net/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for-the-bitcoin-halving/

source https://cryptosharks.weebly.com/blog/anthony-pompliano-says-get-ready-for-the-bitcoin-halving-and-price-escalation-to-100k

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yahoonews7 · 5 years

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(Bloomberg) -- Even for investors hardened by more than a year of trade-war headlines, it’s been a chaotic few hours.Conflicting signals on the prospects for a deal between the U.S. and China sent S&P 500 futures on one of their wildest rides in recent memory, triggering four 1%-plus swings in contracts that track $24 trillion of U.S. equities in a span of three hours.The moves in early Asia trading hours underscored just how jittery investors have become as negotiators meet in Washington to attempt a deal that could have major consequences for the global economy.Read more: China-U.S. Set to Talk With Global Economy Facing Trade CrucibleAfter a September with only two S&P 500 moves of more than 1%, October has seen four sessions registering that magnitude in the first seven trading days. Maxwell Grinacoff, a derivatives and quantitative strategist at Macro Risk Advisors, called the index’s 1.9% month-to-date drop a “spooky ‘Vol-tober’ sell-off” in a note on Wednesday, advising investors to employ hedges to manage the swings.“Trade talks will make for twitchy trades,“ said Vishnu Varathan, head of economics and strategy at Mizuho Bank Ltd.Shortly after U.S. stock markets closed with gains amid optimism about trade talks on Wednesday, S&P 500 futures began tanking on a South China Morning Post report that deputy-level discussions had made “no progress” and that principal Chinese negotiators might cut short their stay.The market rallied on separate reports that top Chinese envoy Liu He would remain in Washington through Friday, then turned lower on another wave of selling. The next rebound came on news that the White House may roll out a previously agreed currency pact with China as part of a deal that could also suspend a planned tariff increase next week.By 8:18 a.m. in London, S&P 500 futures were almost back to where they started. The yen, oil, gold and Treasury futures saw similar fluctuations.Read more: Treasuries Trading Electrified in Asia by Trade ConfusionInvestor nervousness has increased against a backdrop of deteriorating economic data and escalating tensions between the U.S. in China.On Monday, the Trump administration moved to blacklist Chinese tech firms including video-surveillance company Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., alleging that they were complicit in human-rights violations in Xinjiang. U.S. officials are also reportedly moving ahead with discussions around possible restrictions on portfolio flows into China. A fight over free speech between China and the NBA, triggered by a tweet backing Hong Kong’s protesters, has added to the tense mood.“Overall the market is pretty on the edge as we’ve seen bigger negative reactions toward trade news,” said Mingze Wu, a foreign-exchange trader at INTL FCStone Global Payments in Singapore.Some investors have responded by adding hedges, helping push the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX, steadily higher since late September. October futures on the index rose 2.3% on Thursday.“The difficulty in predicting the final outcome of the trade dispute poses a challenge for investors,” Mark Haefele, global chief investment officer at UBS Wealth Management, wrote in a note on Wednesday. “Not even the negotiators themselves can yet be confident of the final result.”(Updates markets in eighth and 12th paragraphs.)\--With assistance from Jenny Leonard, Ruth Carson and Stephen Spratt.To contact the reporter on this story: Joanna Ossinger in Singapore at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: Christopher Anstey at [email protected], Michael PattersonFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.

from Yahoo Finance https://ift.tt/2B09sMG

#World news

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wellesleyunderground · 5 years

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Patriot Act reviewed by Lakshmi Gandhi (@LakshmiGandhi) & Asha Sundararaman ‘04 (@mixedtck)

This review first appeared on Lakshmi and Asha’s weekly newsletter - sign up here to get these gems delivered straight to your inbox!

The second we saw the first previews for Hasan Minhaj's new Netflix show "Patriot Act" we knew that this would be a very Indian American (and Muslim American show).

The first extensive preview for it absolutely blew up Twitter and Facebook because it featured Hasan and Queer Eye star Tan France as they talked about clothes, being immigrant kids and (of course) how they handle people who bungle their names. As the name suggests, Patriot Act also does not shy away about what it is like being a young Muslim American in today's United States.

As big fans of Minhaj's work on the Daily Show and his one man special ‘Homecoming King,’ we were eager to see what he'd do with a show that was completely his own.

(Editor’s note: We also wanted to say that we’re thinking of all of our readers in Calfornia who are affected by the recent fires. For those looking for how they can help, we suggest heading here and here.)

Lakshmi: I've watched that little preview with Tan at least ten times. I still love it EVERY TIME I queue it up.

Asha: You know, I haven't actually watched the preview. It made the rounds on my Facebook feed but I never clicked on it.

Lakshmi: I can see that. As soon as I saw people oohing and ahhing over it I was skeptical because my heart is sometimes made of stone when it comes to these things. But OMG it's so good! They managed to turn it into something really endearing. (Readers can see for themselves how endearing it is by heading here!)

There were a bunch of little interesting bits in that segment with Hasan and Tan. I liked how Tan basically says he changed his name because no one could handle Tanvir (Plus, he is married to a dude named France, which is where his surname comes from. His name at birth was Tanvir Safdar.) But it made me really want a show where we just see Tan and Hasan go shopping all day. it would be a great buddy comedy.

Asha: It would be! OK, I’m watching it now. I like the quote about looking like he's a Rajneeshee.

Lakshmi: I loved how easily Tan cut the hoodie to make a perfect crop top. That's skill!

Asha: I know! I was impressed.

Lakshmi: There really was so much to love. For example, Hasan says he only styles his hair with tel (coconut oil) and prayer. I think the reason the South Asian corners of the internet in particular loved this trailer was because there was absolutely no pandering. It was just two South Asian Muslim dudes being South Asian Muslim dudes. While there were little explanatory asides (they did explain what tel was), it did feel as if we got a little peek into what they are like away from the cameras and the white gaze. To manage to do that with cameras everywhere during what is clearly a promo video is an art.

Asha: Haha, agreed.

Lakshmi: And it was a perfect lead in to the actual show because Hasan felt as if he was talking directly to a South Asian and/or Muslim audience at times,but in a way that also felt inclusive?

It's hard to explain, but there were a bunch of little things that he never did on the ‘Daily Show’ and that would be really hard to do on network tv.

Asha: What jumped out at you in that way?

Lakshmi: For example, there was a whole discussion about the lota (which is a cup in the bathroom used for personal washing). I thought that whole bit was a bit much to be honest, but you don’t see that kind of thing on other shows!

More extensively, it happened when when he talked directly to Asian Americans during the Affirmative Action episode (Which is episode two). You don't see anyone ever talking directly to Asian Americans, especially in comedy.

Asha: It's true. It did feel like he was speaking to a brown audience directly without worrying about whether white people would understand. I admit, i'd never heard the word lota before. I knew what he was talking about, but i didn't know there was a word for it!

Lakshmi: And! I feel like (this isn't the case with Hasan ever that I’ve seen) but a lot of South Asian comedians are pretty anti black in their acts

Asha: Yes, that’s also true.

Lakshmi: so to have a comedian actually call out anti black racism is quietly a big deal

And of course this isn’t limited to comedy. No one talks about anti blackness in the community in general. It's swept under the rug A LOT (not by your two correspondents, dear readers- — we yell at people!)... but that's why we aren't particularly popular at parties.

Asha: HA.

Lakshmi: But really, it’s true.

Asha: The whole segment he did calling out terrible Indian-Americans definitely felt like an in thing. Because as people who are underrepresented, we bristle when the terrible people in our communities are called out.

Lakshmi: it's our own version of 'a shanda fur di goyim."

Asha: the only thing i'd wished in that segment was that he'd specified American-born vs naturalized. I don't know why, but i feel like someone like Dinesh D'Souza needs to be called out for their shit in a different way than Bobby Jindal.

Lakshmi: Oh really? I feel like Bobby Jindal is actually worse. First he actually had power. And secondly, he's from here and is a trained scientist and doctor.

Asha: i definitely think it's worse when they're born in the States

Lakshmi: Yes. His state is extremely vulnerable to poverty and global warming and he doesn't care.

But anyway, I liked the Amazon episode of Patriot Act especially watching it now in light of today’s news about the new Amazon HQ2 or whatever they are calling it in Long Island City.

Asha: Oh yeah, that one was really good! I learned a lot about Amazon's reach. I had no idea they did web services!

Lakshmi: I only knew that because I've worked with sites that work use Amazon web services extensively.

Asha: also, what Amazon did should be illegal. He talked about how they purposefully losing money so they could benefit later.

Lakshmi: And also imagine being the richest person on earth, but not letting your employees go to the bathroom. he isn't letting them take care of the most basic of human needs!

Asha: i assume Jeff Bezos is a sociopath and possibly a grifter. He's gamed the system in a similar way to Trump in terms of being able to lose a lot of money without it affecting your bottom line.

Lakshmi: And if you look up workplace injuries that regularly occur in Amazon warehouses, it's all horrific. There's no reason for all of this suffering.

Asha: None at all. And i've heard those that work on the corporate side of Amazon don’t have it much better (although at least they can go to the bathroom). i'm definitely not renewing my Prime account

and I make a concerted effort to shop other places.

Lakshmi: Yeah, I think I am going to completely change my consumer relationship with Amazon moving forward. Did you watch the latest ‘Patriot Act’ episode, which is about oil?

Asha: I did! It especially relevant to me, since i'm an oil brat.

Lakshmi: I didn't know that there has been an ongoing oil spill for almost a decade!

Asha: I didn't either.

Lakshmi: Also I appreciate that Hasan could do that episode because he doesn't have to worry about advertisers. No one on Network television could tweet this, for example:

Now is the time to talk about America's obsession with oil and the impact it will have on future generations. This is a problem with a deadline we have to address.

Asha: Yep.

Lakshmi: Also (and this isn't particularly a secret because people like Chris Hayes have tweeted it) but discussions about global warming don't get ratings. People literally turn off the TV when it's discussed so it is also bold to devote an episode to it.

Asha: In some ways you can take more risks with a show on Netflix. I think people are more invested.

Lakshmi: Yes and it's a given that your audience will be much smaller. but hopefully they will also be more devoted.

Asha: Right.

Lakshmi: That's the one thing I'm worried about though in terms of this show. weekly news/comedy shows haven't been doing well on Netflix. Chelsea Handler’s show was cancelled after a year. Michelle Wolf only lasted a season. So I'm worried about this show just because the track record is not there.

Asha: well, this one seems be more in the style of a one-man show.

Lakshmi: But also, it’s hard to find! Yype Hasan Minhaj into netflix and Patriot act is the SECOND result, after ‘Homecoming King.’ Never underestimate people's laziness… if they can’t find it right away, they might not watch!

Asha: Haha. I think number five in the article you linked above is key. If it's on the homepage, then it will get more traction.

Lakshmi: Yeah, but I don't think it's been on the homepage when I have logged on?

Asha: I think it was in my case, but i had to scroll. But it might also be because i'd watched it before.

Lakshmi: This point from that Netflix analysis article was also key:

"But even though I was clearly interested in these shows, Netflix rarely if ever recommended them to me. This meant that the weeks when I forgot to check out the latest episode of the shows I was clearly interested in, Netflix never reminded me."

Because people need reminders. with regular TV you have the luxury of it always being there, so the extra step of logging on is a deterent to success for many.

Asha: Yep, especially when there's so much info out there, there's no thought involved. That extra step makes it so hard.

Lakshmi: That's also why I wonder if Hasan will get guests in the future. It's easier to hype something up if there is another person doing it as well.

Asha: True.

Lakshmi: Also, I know this is new to him and that they've already done a twitter video making fun of it but Hasan's pretty jumpy in these early episodes. He talks fast and waves his hands around. Sometimes it’s a lot.

Asha: It's true. It was hard to binge watch because of it (and people are going to be binging).

Lakshmi: I'm hoping that as the season continues he'll start growing into the role and start going a little slower. Because sometimes there are a LOT of in jokes. Anyone who has seen ‘Homecoming King’ knows that he loves basketball and 90s hip hop. He definitely peppers references to both of those things here. But he talks SO FAST that even when I kind of know what he's talking about it's hard to follow on occasion.

Asha: Fair and not everyone is going to process information as fast as he talks!

Lakshmi: Right, and I say this as a fast talker!

Asha: It's A LOT of info packed into less than 30 min.I appreciate how detailed it is.

Lakshmi: I generally have liked the show a lot, but there is definitely a lot of nervous energy. Also, he tried a jacket on in his preview with Tan but he hasn't worn a jacket yet on the show. Hahaha. Do you have a final thought?

Asha: It'll be interesting to see where this show goes.

Lakshmi: Yeah! I've liked it a lot. So I want to see how it (and Hasan) grow in the future.

Asha: And my final, final thought is that "he's so right about toilet paper!"

#wu review #hasan minhaj #patriot act #netflix

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

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Let's start calling the Russian 'troll' attack what it really is

It's Troll Week on Mashable. Join us as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of internet trolling.

Fellow citizens of the internet, it's time to face facts: We are at war.

An authoritarian nation state invaded our beloved platform with a shady shape-shifting army of paid writers, and did its best to populate it with highly divisive, truth-obscuring garbage. Now other authoritarian nation states are attempting to do the same.

And because not enough of us are truly aware of this fact — hey, who can blame us, it's really bizarre! — we are losing the war. We aren't even using the right terminology to describe the problem, so how can we ever hope to fight back?

Here's the issue in a nutshell: We seem to have collectively decided to call members of this shape-shifting army "trolls." That's exactly how they want us to think of them. The internet knows trolls: They annoy, they harass, they attack targets in swarms. They've always been with us, and always will be.

What trolls don't do is systematically assume hundreds of fake identities or work toward a geopolitical goal on behalf of a foreign adversary. It would be more accurate to call these invaders undercover intelligence operatives. Or in a word, spies.

Cold War Redux

Because the nation state that started all this is Russia, we carry a set of historical assumptions that work against a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. We remember the Joseph McCarthy-led "Red Scare" of the 1950s as a shameful moment in American history, and rightly so. The bullying and blacklisting should never be forgotten.

We also hear "Russian spies" and our minds go to James Bond, you know, campy undercover agents in tuxes and slinky dresses. Didn't we leave that all behind in the 1980s?

Well, yes, we did. And then in 2000, a former East Berlin KGB agent named Vladimir Putin won a presidential election after a series of so-called terrorist bombings, about which intelligence experts remain dubious. Putin then made common cause with Russia's oil-rich oligarchs — and thus began nearly two decades of murders, or assassination attempts, on opposition leaders and investigative journalists.

The internet-based information warfare can be traced back to 2013. That's when the St. Petersburg Times first alerted the world to an entity in that city calling itself the Internet Research Agency, which was paying employees to flood the comments sections of stories about opposition leaders and Russia's rollback of rights for LGBT citizens.

The IRA operatives "react to certain news with torrents of mud and abuse," an activist named Vladimir Volokhonsky told the St. Petersburg Times. "This makes it meaningless for a reasonable person to comment on anything there."

IRA activity ramped up in 2014, and crossed to U.S. shores for the first time that year — where it made its first foray into fake news. This just so happened to coincide with the 2014 midterm elections for Congress.

Via YouTube videos, tweets, and phone texts, the IRA convinced much of a Louisiana town that there had been an explosion in a nearby chemical factory. Seeing similar media three months later during the Ebola panic, Georgia voters believed that the flesh-eating virus had arrived in Atlanta. On the same day, a different fake video told of a black woman being gunned down by police.

The IRA found every fresh wound in American society, stuck its finger in, and tugged. Via a fake account called Blacktivist, it encouraged a demonstration at the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It created a Facebook group of "2nd Amendment patriots" and one called "LGBT United;" their Facebook ads received millions of impressions. The IRA designed hundreds of Twitter accounts to look like heartland newspapers, such as @KansasDailyNews, @JacksonCityPost, @MilwaukeeVoice and @StLouisOnline.

To the IRA, the politics of these accounts didn't matter. All that mattered was the potential for havoc.

SEE ALSO: An ad industry group nominated Russia's election hack for all the awards

In 2015, the IRA faked a video of a U.S. soldier shooting a Qu'ran, likely hoping to cause an uproar in the Muslim world. It didn't even seem to matter that the video was disprovable when you looked closely — the soldier's helmet was something you could buy online for $25, not Army issue. By the time viewers disproved it, the shape-shifting army of info-spies had moved on to its next issue.

If you haven't heard of any of these greatest hits, it's because they have been drowned out by the controversy over the IRA's involvement in the 2016 presidential election. But the facts of each case are surprisingly clear.

Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's role in the 2016 election, is famously silent on most things. But he has told us exactly what the IRA did next, in a damningly methodical indictment that named 12 major players — his first and only Russia-related charges to date.

(Separately, on Friday, the Justice Department indicted another IRA figure on information warfare charges related to the 2018 midterm elections — showing clearly that the threat is not over yet.)

Trolls provide cover

While those first IRA forays were happening in the U.S., a parallel development was unwittingly helping to provide cover. Swarms of actual trolls (read: people, mostly men, with a grudge and too much time on their hands) emerged from sites such as 4Chan and Reddit.

Spurred on by rising alt-right figures such as Milo Yiannopolous and Mike Cernovich, who were reportedly working to a playbook called Trust Me I'm Lying, these troll swarms saw diversity and feminism as the enemy. They brought us concentrated harassment campaigns such as GamerGate, ComicsGate, and the backlash against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.

The scale of the trolling was unprecedented, and it took some time for the internet to fully figure out what was going on. As the various hate-gates are studied and reassessed, there is a legitimate argument for defining their collective trolling as what Wired recently called "domestic information terrorism."

But the Internet Research Agency activity is a different order of magnitude. We're talking international information terrorism: tens of thousands of accounts operated by paid individuals on every major web platform, each one given a quota of a hundred posts a day. We're talking hundreds of millions of users who saw these posts, thinking they were genuine.

The full scale of the attack is still emerging, and the numbers keep going up. Last week alone, Twitter released a dataset with 10 million tweets and 2 million images from Russian-linked accounts going back to 2009. "It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease," the company wrote.

With an oligarch-funded budget of $1.25 million per month on one influence project alone, the thousand-strong IRA aimed "to conduct what it called 'information warfare against the United States of America' through fictitious U.S. personas on social media platforms and other Internet-based media," the Mueller indictment says.

Enter the Jedi

Another reason to call this a spy campaign is the way that those fictitious personas tried to blend in. Last month, a study of a thousand Twitter accounts that attacked Star Wars director Rian Johnson concluded that 16 of them were IRA members.

In January and February 2018, the accounts latched on to an early wave of criticism of Johnson's movie The Last Jedi, then ceded the stage to disgruntled fans.

Those who noted that it was a small number of accounts, or claimed this was a way to smear everyone who disliked The Last Jedi as Russian operatives, missed the point. Which is that the shape-shifting army did not miss a single opportunity to jump into any debate that divided American society, even a debate about a movie.

"They're method acting," says Morton Bay, the Ph.D behind the Last Jedi study, who has been tracking what he calls "Russian influence operatives" since 2015. "If the Grammys are on, these accounts will be commenting on it to give themselves a sense of legitimacy ... they latch on to every cultural division, however small."

Such tactics, Bay concluded, were similar to those used by the infamous spy service where Putin cut his teeth. "Their methods are very close to what the KGB was doing during the Cold War," Bay says. "The only difference is the KGB was pushing a specific ideology, and these guys aren't."

Instead of ideology, the IRA aimed to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It consistently aimed to flood the zone with shit, to echo the infamous words of Steve Bannon. Fill the comments section of honest stories and harass their writers, and soon there'll be fewer honest stories. The same holds true for social media as a whole. They want to exhaust us to death.

In a recent study, Hungarian security researcher Anatoly Reshetnikov described this process as "neutrollization" — or "creating conditions where political mobilization becomes absurd, so any risk to the regime is neutralized."

One of the few employees interviewed since leaving the IRA directly compared himself with Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Working there felt like "you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line."

Doesn't sound an awful lot like trolling, does it? Sounds like something worse.

Sounds like information war.

The internet strikes back

Understandably, there is reluctance in the U.S. to describe any of these activities as acts of war. For one thing, many of us are employing a Cold War perspective: Don't antagonize the Russians! They're armed to the teeth! Do we really want to return to those dark decades of superpower conflict?

To answer that question, we have to change our definition of what conflict actually is. And here we're dealing with another 20th century mindset: Aren't wars fought over physical territory? Aren't they won with tanks and bombs?

Not since 9/11, no. As America learned painfully in Iraq, nation states are won and lost in the hearts and minds of the people. These days, the only wars that matter are in those minds, on the plain of ideas. Propaganda's younger, hipper cousin, information terrorism, is now the most important weapon of war on the planet.

SEE ALSO: Twitter shuts down spambots spreading pro-Saudi hashtags related to Khashoggi disappearance

We saw that clearly in the past week, as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia fought a desperate rear-guard action against reports that it had killed Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Turkish consulate. Twitter had to step in again to shut down bots that were flooding the online discussion with pro-Saudi hashtags.

But it isn't just Russia and Saudi Arabia. Syria, Iran, China, North Korea: Everyone's getting into the info-war game.

Of course, we shouldn't use the word "war" lightly. And thanks to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the phrase "info war" is tainted — but we also shouldn't shrink from using it. Allowing a state of war to exist in the shadows is exactly how Putin approached his invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

The eastern half of the country came under assault from "little green men" — Russian special forces that Russia denied belonged to them. The last thing he wanted was global economic sanctions, so that's exactly what we gave him.

In the case of the IRA, no one is suggesting we ramp up tensions or rattle any nuclear sabers. This isn't a matter for the Pentagon. If this information war is being fought on the internet, then the internet is where we must fight back. If the object is to wear us down with lies, then we must not be worn down. If truth is under attack, then the truth is what we must protect.

That means calling out bullshit whenever you see it, even if you see it all the time. It means maintaining skepticism about no-name news sources and oddly-named social media accounts. It means staying in touch with that crazy Trump-loving uncle who forwards the conspiracy theory emails; it means repeatedly speaking calmly and clearly about a Russian influence operation that is both ridiculous and demonstrably true.

And it means that we stop using a cutesy word like "trolling" to describe a massive, coordinated, ongoing military-style affair. "Don't feed the trolls" is a piece of advice as old as the internet; to that truism we should add, "Don't confuse the spies with trolls."

WATCH: Google's new Home Hub won't spy on you ... maybe — Technically Speaking

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Al Gore: ‘The riches have subverted all reason’

With the sequel to his blockbuster documentary An Inconvenient Truth about to be released, Al Gore tells Carole Cadwalladr how his role at the forefront of the fight against climate change eats his life

In the ballroom of a conference centre in Denver, Colorado, 972 people from 42 countries have come together to talk about climate change. It is March 2017, six weeks since Trumps inauguration; eight weeks before Trump will announce to the world that he is withdrawing America from the Paris Climate Agreement.

These are the early dark days of the new America and yet, in the conference centre, the crowd is upbeat. Theyve all paid out of their own pockets to travel to Denver. They have taken time off work. And they are here, in the presence of their master, Al Gore. Because Al Gore is to climate change well, what Donald Trump is to climate change denial.

Disaster zone: extermination in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in New Jersey. Photograph: Mike Groll/ AP

Its 10 years since the reason for this, the documentary An Inconvenient Truth , was released into cinema. It was an improbable project on almost every level: a film about what was then practically a non-subject, starring “the mens” best known for not winning the 2000 US election, its beating heart and the engine of its narrative drive a PowerPoint presentation.

When the filmmakers approached him, he explains to the room, I thought they were nuts. A movie of a slideshow, delivered by Al Gore, what doesnt scream blockbuster about it? Except it was a blockbuster. In documentary words, anyway. The careful accretion of facts and figures genuinely shocked people. And its a measure of the impact it had, and still continues to have, that Gore delivers this vignette to a rapt crowd who, over the course of three days, are learning how to be Climate Reality Leaders.

Its the reason why we are all here his foundation, the Climate Reality Project, an initiative that grew out of the film, provides intensive training in talking about climate change, combating climate change denial and the tone might be described as activist upbeat. This is a crisis that is solvable, were told. Trump is just another hitch, another impediment to overcome. And it will be overcome. Only occasionally does a sliver of desperation leak around the edges. You have to stay positive, a man called David Ellenberger tells the audience. Though sometimes, he acknowledges: Theres not sufficient Prozac to get through the day.

Its almost a relief to hear person acknowledge this. Because before there was FAKE NEWS !!! and the FAILING New York Times ! Trump was tweeting about GLOBAL WARMING hoaxsters! and GLOBAL WARMING bullshit! The war on the mainstream media may capture the headlines currently, but the war against climate change science has been in play for years. And its this that is one of the most fascinating aspects of Gores new cinema, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power . Because if the US had a subtitle at the moment, it might be that, too, and the struggle to overcome fake facts and false narrations shall be financed by corporate interests and politically motivated billionaires is one that Gore has been at the frontline of for more than a decade.

Breaking phase: a huge fissure in the Larsen C ice shelf in the Antarctica. Photograph: Nasa/ John Sonntag/ EPA

The film runs through a host of facts that 14 of the 15 hottest years on record have passed since 2001 is just one. And the accompanying footage is biblical, frightening: tornadoes, deluges, rainfall bombs, exploding glaciers. We find roads falling into rivers and fish swimming through the street of Miami.

The nightly news, Gore says, has become a nature hike through the Book of Revelations. But what his run has shown and continues to show is that evidence is sufficient to. The film opens with clips from Fox News ridiculing global warming. In recent weeks, the New York Times has started describing the Trump administration as waging a war on science, a full-on assault against evidence-based science that runs in parallel with his attacks on evidence-based reporting. And Gore is in something of a unique position to understand this. What becomes clear over the course of several conversations is how entwined he believes it all is climate change refusal, the interests of big capital, dark money, billionaire political funders, the dominance of Trump and what he calls( hes written a volume on it) the assault against reason. They are all pieces of the same puzzle; a puzzle that Gore has been tracking for years, because it turns out that climate change denial was the canary in the coal mine.

In order to fix the climate crisis, we need to first fix the government crisis, he says. Big money has so much influence now. And he says a phrase that is as dramatic as it is multilayered: Our democracy has been hacked. Its something I hear him recur to the audience in the ballroom, in a room backstage, a few a few weeks later in London, and finally on the phone earlier this month.

Popular backlash: protesters demonstrate against the Koch brothers, funders of climate change denial. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/ AFP/ Getty Images

What do you entail by it exactly? I mean that those with access to large amounts of fund and raw power, says Gore, have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch friends are the largest funders of climate change refusal. And ExxonMobil claims it has stopped, but it genuinely hasnt. It has given a one-quarter of a billion dollars in donations to climate denial groups. Its clear they attempt to cripple our ability to respond to this existential threat.

One of Trumps first acts after his inauguration was to remove all mentions of climate change from federal websites. More overlooked is that one of Theresa Mays first actions on becoming prime minister within 24 hours of taking office was to close the Department for Energy and Climate Change; subsequently gifts from oil and gas companies to the Conservative party continued to roll in. And what is increasingly apparent is that the same think tank that operate in the Nations are also at work in Britain, and climate change denial operating the a bridgehead: unifying the right and providing an entry road for other tenets of Alt-Right notion. And, its this network of power that Gore has had to try to understand, in order to find a way to combat it.

In Tennessee we have an expression: If you consider a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didnt get there by itself. And if you watch these levels of climate denial, you can be pretty sure it didnt merely spread itself. The big carbon polluters have expended between$ 1bn and$ 2bn spreading false doubt. Do you know the book, Merchants of Doubt ? It documents how the tobacco industry discredited the consensus on cigarette smoking and cancer by creating doubt, and shows how its linked to the climate denial movement. They hired many of the same PR firms and some of the same think tanks. And, in fact, some of those who work on climate change refusal actually still dispute the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

End of the road: the Gave de Pau river overflows after unseasonal storms in France. Photo: Laurent Dard/ AFP/ Getty Images

The big change between our first dialogue in Denver and our last, on the phone this month, is the news that Gore had been desperately hoping wouldnt happen: Trumps announcement on 1 June that he was pulling America out of the Paris Agreement. The negotiations in Paris are right at the heart of the new movie, its emotional centre, and when I watch it in March, the ending still find Gore carrying guarded optimism.

So , what happened? I was wrong, he says on the phone from Australia, where hes been promoting the film. Based on what he told me, I definitely supposed there was a better than even chance he might choose to stay in. But I was wrong. I was fearful that other countries for whom it was a close call would follow his result, but Im thrilled the reaction has been exactly the opposite. The other 19 members of the G20 have reiterated that Paris is irreversible. And governors and mayors all over the country have been saying we are all still in and, in fact, its just going to stimulate us redouble our commitments.

The film “mustve been” recut, the ending changed, the gloves are now off. What changed Trumps mind? I suppose Steve Bannon and his crowd set a big push on Trump and persuaded him that he needed to give this to his base advocates. He had blood in his eyes. Its instructive because Bannon, Trumps chief strategist, is also the ideologue behind Trumps assault on the media. And Bannons understanding of the news and information space, and make further efforts to manipulate it via Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, both funded by another key climate change denier, Robert Mercer, are at the heart of the Trump agenda.

And what becomes clear if you Google climate change is how effective the right has been in owning the subject. YouTubes results are dominated by nothing but climate change denial videos. This isnt news for Gore. He has multiple high-level links to Silicon Valley. Hes on the board of Apple and used to be an adviser for Google. We are fully aware of their own problems, he says with what sounds like resigned understatement. Gore has had more than a decade fighting climate change refusal, and in some respects, the problem has simply worsened and deepened.

On the other hand, two-thirds of the American people are convinced that its an extremely serious crisis and we have to take it on, he says. And there is a law of physics that every action makes an equal and opposite reaction. And I do think there is a reaction to the Trump/ Brexit/ Alt-Right populist authoritarianism around the world. People who took liberal democracy more or less for granted are now awakening to a sense that it can only be defended by the people themselves.

Man on a mission: Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. Photo: Paramount Pictures

And its in this, his belief in social progress against all odds, that he takes his result from the civil rights motion. The cut of the cinema I see compares the climate change movement to the other great social movements that eventually won out: the abolition of slavery, womens suffrage, civil right. Something profound and disturbing is happening right now, though, he admits. The information system is in such a chaotic transition and people are deluged with so much noise that it devotes an opening for Trump and his forces to wage war against facts and reason.

Is it, as some people describe, an info war? Absolutely, he says. Theres no question about it.

What there isnt much of, in the film, is Al Gore, “the mens”. In 2010, he split from Tipper, his wife of 40 years and the mother of his two grown-up daughters, and what becomes clear is just how much of his life the fight takes up. When I catch up with him next, hes in London for a board meeting of his green-focused investment firm, Generation Investment Management, and I ask him to tell me about his recent travels.

Two weeks ago, I had three red-eyes in five days. Ive been in Sweden, the Netherlands, Sharjah, then lets insure, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles. Where else? he asks his assistant.

Vegas, she says. We did CinemaCon.

Vegas, we did that. And then, lets ensure, Nashville, on my farm.

Focus on facts: Al Gore in An Inconvenient Sequel. Photo: Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

I assume this sum of travelling is connected to the release of the film, but no. Ive been at this level for the past 10 years and longer. He hesitates to use the word mission, he says, and then use it. When you feel a sense of purpose that seems to justify pouring everything you can into it, it induces it easier to get up in the morning.

He does tell me a bit about his parents though. He describes his father, Al Gore Sr, who grew up poor then became a lawyer and a legislator, as a hero to me. And it was at the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, that he held the first Climate Reality training, an informal get-together of 50 people that has morphed into the event I witnessed in Denver. Theres no type or demographic, I shared a table with a disparate group including a consultant for the aerospace industry, a French lawyer and an American cook. And they seemed to have almost nothing in common aside from their passion to do something about climate change. Im a gardener so Im assuring whats happening with my own eyes, the cook, Susan Kutner, told me. You cant ignore it.

In light of Trumps fixation with fake news, its fascinating to find. Gore has been fighting disinformation for more than a decade. And, hes developed his educate program counter to the predominating ideology. The answer is not online. Social media will not save us. We will not click climate change away. The answer hes come up with is low-tech, old-fashioned, human. He takes the time to talk to people immediately, one to one, in the hope they will speak to other people who will speak to other people.

The course is run by Gore. He is on stage virtually the entire time over three intensive days. And the heart of it is still the slideshow. One of his aides tells me how he was up until 2am the night before. Hes preoccupied with his slides, he has 30,000 of them and he switches them around all the time.

Tinder dry: changing climate has find an upturn in woodland flames around the world. Photo: Jae C Hong/ AP

In the movie, you consider him perpetually hustling, calling world leaders, rounding up solar energy entrepreneurs, developing activists. Hearing information from people you know is at the heart of his strategy. You need people who will look you in the eye and say: Look, this is what Ive learned, this is what you need to know. It works. Ive watched it run. It is working. And its just getting started. Weve get 12,000 trained leaders now.

How many people do you think its impacted?

Millions. Honestly, millions. And a non- trivial percentage of them have gone on to become pastors in their countries governments or take leadership roles in international organisations. Theyve had an outsized impact. Christiana Figueres[ the UN climate chief ], who operated the Paris meeting, she was in the second training session I did in Tennessee. And, right now, people are get really fired up.

Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his efforts in combating climate change, but in some way it feels like hes just getting started. The rest of the world is only now cottoning on to the enlightenment battle thats at the heart of it a battle royal to defend facts and reason against people and forces-out for whom its a truth too inconvenient to permit. For Gore, the US oil companies are the ultimate culprits, but its only just becoming apparent that Russia has also played a role, amplifying messages around climate change as it did around the other issues at the heart of Trumps agenda, and we segue into his visits to Russia in the early 90 s, during one of which he fulfilled Putin for the first time.

What did you induce of him? I would not have thought of him as the future chairperson of Russia. I once did a televised town hall event to the whole of Russia and Putin was the one who was in charge of inducing sure all the cables were connected and whatnot.

Revenge is tweet: an image of Trump is projected by Greenpeace on to the US Embassy in Berlin after he declared that America was pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Photo: Michael Sohn/ AP

What does he construct of the investigations into Russian interference? I guess the investigation of the Trump campaigns collusions with the Russians and the existence of fiscal levers of Putin over Trump is proceeding with its own rhythm beneath the news cycle, and may well ten-strike pay dirt. Its also worth pointing out that when someone passed his campaign stolen information about George W Bushs debate research, he handed it to the FBI.

And then he astounds me by pulling out a reference to an interview I conducted with Arron Bank, the Bristol businessman who funded Nigel Farages Leave campaign. Hes been reading up about the links between Brexit and Trump, and Bankss and Farages support of Putin and Russia. He told you: Russia needs a strong man, didnt he? And you hear that in the US, and I dont think its fair to the Russians. I am a true disciple in the superiority of representative republic where there is a healthy ecosystem characterised by free speech and an informed citizenry. I genuinely defy the slur against any nation that theyre incapable of governing themselves.

Brexit, Trump, climate change, oil producers, dark fund, Russian influence, a full- frontal assault on facts, evidence, journalism, science, its all connected. Ask Al Gore. You may want to watch Wonder Woman the summer months, but to understand the new reality were living in, you really should watch An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power . Because, scaring because this is, in some ways the times of typhoons and exploding glaciers are just the start of it.

Al Gore Live in Conversation followed by a screening of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power , for one night merely Friday 11 August in cinemas everywhere. Book your tickets at po.st/ aninconvenientsequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is in cinema everywhere from 18 August. The cinema also opens the Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House, 10 -2 3 August, somersethouse.org.uk

The Observer Ethical Awardings: how to enter

To vote, going to see theguardian.com/ environment/ 2017/ jul/ 25/ vote-in-the-observer-ethical-awards-2 017 or email ethical.awards @observer. co.uk with the category title in the subject header. Then tell us in no more than 200 words why you, or your nominee, deserves to be recognised. Feel free to attach paintings, a short movie or relevant connections. The closing date is 15 September. For more information, going to see observer.co.uk/ ethical-awards