Strangled by Google's algorithms

 Early on in the life of this blog it enjoyed a lovely covid-like growth curve. Since then, unfortunately, Google's algorithms have done a great job "flattening the curve," so to speak.

I suspect I sealed my fate with this post about Seven World Trade Center. Suggesting there was more to 9/11 than the official narrative revealed is heresy, of course. Nine years later I think that post stands the test of time. Why not waterboard Silverstein and Giuliani? It's a harmless enough "interrogation technique" when applied to brown terror suspects. Why should white terror suspects be treated any differently?

There's actually another angle to the Frankel Steel story. Several times during my tenure as an inspector there, I flagged structural columns that had already been approved for shipment but had been fabbed out of the wrong grade of steel, making them substantially weaker than what the design specs called for. It's not unreasonable to assume that some such columns found their way into the building. Could that have contributed to its collapse?

But I digress; back to the algos. Not long after I started the blog, somebody from Before It's News requested permission to post my blog on their site, and it remains there to this day. It's basically a click-bait site and I'm relegated to the "alternative" section, the fringe of the fringe, where you'd think no one would ever find it.

Here's the thing; I routinely get at least two to four times, and frequently more than ten times as many views on any given story on that fringe website than I do at Google-owned Blogger, the biggest blog hosting site on the internet.

How is such a thing even possible?

9/11 through the prism of POTUS 45

Donny J made it official yesterday; he's turning his back on the last campaign promise that he hasn't already broken; ending the longest war in US history. The particulars of his announcement are beyond laughable. He will ramp up boots on the ground by some 4,000 pairs and serve notice that we're now officially in it to win it.

Complete bullshit obviously. If the USA/NATO combine couldn't win Afghanistan with over 100,000 troops, bumping the numbers up to 12,000 from 8,000 is a joke.

I'm guessing that this is not so much a case of Mr. Trump changing his mind, but rather the acknowledgement that it's not actually the president of the country who is running the show.

Which raises a multi-trillion dollar question; if it's not the democratically elected leader running the country, who is?

That's not a question a lot of Americans seem to concern themselves with. No, Americans are far more concerned with where a trans person gets to take a shit, whether a NFL player stands for the national anthem, or if Civil War statuary should be removed from public spaces. These are issues that so divide Americans that they will gleefully beat one another to a pulp in defense of their respective opinions.

Questions of who is actually at the helm as the world's most dangerous state careens off the cliff isn't something most Americans can roust themselves off the couch over. After all, even raising the question will get you tarred with the "conspiracy theorist" brush.

It's not really going off the cliff of course. The only thing that really matters to those who call the shots is that the American war machine keeps pumping profits to those who own it. Making the Afghanistan campaign open-ended guarantees lots more of that. As do the dozens of other intrigues simultaneously greasing the war machine, from Ukraine to Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Israel and on and on and on.

From the point of view of those actually steering the ship, this is not "going off the cliff." This is everything going to plan.

Which is what Trump is in the process of figuring out. Who the hell was Trump, after all? Until he ran for the 2016 election he was anything but this racist, misogynist, nativist, etc, etc, beast who now fronts every newscast. He was a fairly typical Manhattan uber-rich liberal who was relentlessly fawned over by the same media that now denigrates him non-stop. Oprah had no qualms about conducting deferential interviews with him. Google Images has a vast trove of pictures showing the racist beast yucking it up with the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

In fact, if you were an A-list American socialite, politician, sports or entertainment star in the decades before Trump's White House run, chances are there's a picture somewhere of you posing with Donald J Trump.

So what happened?

What happened was that he unexpectedly won the election, and America's deep state propaganda machine, often referred to as "the free press," swung into action. Trump was not supposed to win. What's this nonsense about improving relations with Russia and ending wars for regime change? No arms race with Russia or China? No perpetual wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria? OMG, the gushing taps of the war profiteers will be down to a trickle in no time flat...

We gotta stop that man!

And I think they have. The beast has been tamed. Sure, he'll keep up with those silly tweets, but that doesn't hurt the war machine.

The last time America's propaganda infrastructure closed ranks so effectively in the interests of preserving the folks behind the curtain was circa 2001. I was a welding inspector at Frankel Steel where the structural steel for Seven World Trade Center was fabbed up. Nobody I've ever met who has hands-on experience with structural steel buys the official narrative, nor do the over two thousand professional architects and engineers who have put their professional reputations on the line to say so, yet sixteen years on it's that official narrative that holds sway.

If Americans were not so stupefied by their exceptionalism they might be asking themselves why.

Four days on, Dubai skyscraper gutted by fire still standing

Silly me!

I went on the record a couple of times predicting the imminent collapse of that 63 floors of steel and glass.

After all, that's what happens when steel and glass buildings go up in flames, isn't it?

So, my face is red... sorry folks!

Obviously it takes a lot more than a fire to bring down one of those!

Dubai hotel collapse blocked from mainstream news

That 63 storey hotel in Dubai must surely have fallen down by now. After all, it was engulfed in flames for hours!

After all, we all know those big buildings just collapse when they've been ablaze...

Why are the mainstream media blocking the news of the Address Hotel falling into its footprint after a four hour fire?

Oh... maybe because it's not fallen down?

Really?

Then what about....

Dubai skyscraper burns for hours, collapse imminent!

That's what happens when tall steel-glass-concrete buildings burn, isn't it?

Oddly enough, aside from those mysterious collapses in NYC a few years ago, it tends to never happen... but I'm sure this time will be different!

Any second now...

Real News, Fake News, and Conspiracy Theories

For months on end the lead news story on the CBC was some report or another about how our Syrian Rebels were faring out.

At every juncture it was made clear that our Syrian Rebels were not like our Libyan Rebels and that in any event Syria was not Libya.

All of this could be categorized under the label of Real Fake News.

It's real in the sense that there is in fact a rise-up of some sort against Syrian President al-Assad.

It's fake whenever you extrapolate away from that to some sort of big-picture fantasy about Arab Spring.

But overall it loosely qualifies as news.

Lately CBC has cut away from Syria to cover the latest developments in Tori's Trial.

Tori was a little girl abducted a year ago in Woodstock. Her body was found a month later. One of the perpetrators is set to go to trial soon. That's why a national news program will devote its top shelf to a story about how Tori's parents feel about this.

They feel really bad, and have for over a year.

That is undoubtedly true, but is it news?

Has there ever been a parent of a murdered child who wasn't devastated by their loss? But is their suffering "news"?

Is their suffering newsworthy enough to pre-empt the story of a revolution in the most volatile part of the planet?

And on the pre-emption continuum, once we pass fake news we get to the land of the conspiracy theory.

When there is a real news story that can't be shuffled aside by fake news, we give it the label of "conspiracy theory."

That's the news we ignore but for whatever reason it doesn't go away.

Maybe it doesn't go away because it should have been real news.

I wrote a post six months ago about Seven World Trade Center, a project I worked on. It continues to be the most viewed post on this blog. It hints at an abiding mystery; how do ten ton steel beams give way after having been exposed to a minor fire for a few hours?

That blog post has been relegated to the realm of the conspiracy theory.

Serious media never have to address such a question because it's not real news, not fake news, it's a conspiracy theory.

Just like how a terrorist's passport floats safely to earth while a black box can never be found is a question that will never have to be answered because it has been relegated to the realm of the conspiracy theory.

What I'd like to see on the news is less about people's feelings and more answers to hard questions.