S01E56: Jackass and Jackass
Tarot: https://tarotx.net/tarot-card-meanings/marseilles/cavalier-de-coupe.html
Freaks of Hazard: Kitty Tarleton @ 50.00 with a BD check, SirVo @ 0.00055 BTS, SirSpencer and DameDuhLaurien @ $11.11 and SirSirSirSirSeatSeatSeatSitterererer was a champ and redirected BadRadio.live to the Scaly Show homepage. That’s short for champion.
SirSpencer and DameDuhLaurien’s Note:
Happy Birthday Boobs! Hope you have a wonderful celebration to kick off the start of your 4th decade on the Earth (this time around!! 😉)
Thank you for your courage, keep pokin' holes in them sch3m3s!
Sir Spencer & Dame DuhLaurien
You Too Can Be A Ghost Hunter
Surely y’all know about the Winchester “Murder” Mansion? A sprawling building with 160 rooms and endless trips tricks and traps. It was built by the heiress to the Winchester Family (the pew pew kind of Winchester). Legend says that she felt she was haunted by all the spirits of those slayed by Winchester firearms. Sarah Winchester started work on the eventual 24,000 sq. ft mansion in 1886 hoping to dissuade the spirits from haunting her ass. Spooky! It was worked on almost daily until her death in 1922.
Get excited! The estate has announced it will conduct a “theatrical paranormal investigation adventure” from Sep 10 to Oct 31.
You Can Go On A Paranormal Investigation Of The Winchester Mystery House This Halloween
“During the “Lost in the House Tour,” guests will be guided through the dark and dizzying hallways of the estate. While there will be some special effects for Halloween, the 40-bedroom house has plenty of its own architectural haunts like a séance room and the spider web window with 13 blue and amber stones. (In fact, the number 13 is frequently used in the house, including the 13 stair risers that lead into a bathroom with 13 windows and the 13 glass cupolas in the greenhouse).”
Cold Read
New Rules from Corporate for Ghosts
50 Cents Little Man Put That Shit In My Hand
Turns out this is a thing. China allegedly employs upwards of 2,000,000 people to troll along on the internet, with a staggering 448 million fake accounts “but muh Russia!”.
Surprise surprise they post in favor of the C.P.C (on this show we will refer to the Chinese Communist Party as Communist Party of China). Rather than tackling naysayers directly however, they “circle back” the conversation to something more favorable of the party.
“The 50 Cent Army was mobilized by the Chinese government as a vehicle for diverting critical discussion of the government in online forums.”
“Researchers speculate that the 50 Cent Army disrupts dissidents’ organizational efforts with the use of cheerleading, positive discussion, and complex coordination strategies that inhibit collective action. So, although individuals are not censored, their ability to organize politically is seriously constrained. By swamping social media sites with content, members of the 50 Cent Army are able to interrupt the organic flow of information. It is much harder for users to coordinate with one another when they must wade through a ton of irrelevant content to do so.”
It seems part of the process is to flood Social Sesame with bullshit so it’s harder for those who actually want to engage to see content, interact with other “real” users, and “diverting anger”
“Sockpuppets can successfully redirect civic discontent by posting controversial content that makes people angry. In a recent interview, an anonymous member of the 50 Cent Army explains how this works. He asks us to imagine a scenario in which the price of gas has jumped from $3.50 to $5.50 a gallon. In most nations, one would expect citizens to complain online about the sharp increase in price. To deflect blame away from the Chinese government, the propagandist might post a message saying “Rise, rise however you want, I don’t care. Best if it raises to 50 yuan (~$7.5 USD) per liter: it serves you right if you’re too poor to drive. Only those with money should be allowed to drive on the roads.”
This article goes on further to state after this user makes this post, he or she uses “sockpuppet” accounts to respond moving it further up any thread it might be posted on. Total Judo Move!
“Contrary to popular belief, these fake accounts do not attempt to silence dissenting voices. They prefer to flood social media sites with positive content that disrupts the flow of information between authentic users.”
Here’s a 42 page paper hitting the nitty gritty details. It’s Harvard baby, it even details some of the type of posts you see! Neat! https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf?m=1464790150
“Over a year, the researchers identified nearly 43,800 online messages posted accordingly, finding virtually all of them – more than 99 per cent – were generated by employees at more than 200 government agencies.”.
This information came about when a series of emails were leaked detailing the interaction between the C.P.C and these “employees” between 2013-2014.
Red astroturf: Chinese government makes millions of fake social media posts
“And while the "50c" posts had long been assumed to be focused on attacking critics of the government and the Party, the researchers found instead that "the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime." In essence, the fake posts are a government-sponsored "astro-turfing" campaign—an attempt to create the impression of a grassroots groundswell of support for the Party and the government.”
Not sure where the same came from (I’m not at least) the term 50 Cent Army seems to be more a meme rather than their actual wage per post i.e. they’re not necessarily making 50 cents per post. Shit, I’d be posting all day every.
To quote from the article above “We cannot be sure of current practices in the absence of evidence but, given that they already hold government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) jobs, we would guess this activity is a requirement of their existing job or at least rewarded in performance reviews.”…“other duties as assigned”. That’s my quote there at the end.
Further reading: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1947376/revealed-digital-army-making-hundreds-millions-social
We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Base
More Lights! More Cameras! More Booms!
China is building a “New”clear (get it?) base in Northern Xinjiang. It’s big, bad, and to the point with the new facility housing 14 missile silos and covering 300 sq. miles.
“Researchers believe the site could eventually expand to 110 silos, each one of which can be filled with a missile carrying up to three nuclear warheads.”
“It comes after another new site with space for 120 silos was uncovered 300 miles away near the city of Yumen, in addition to around a dozen silos being built at a site in Jilantai another 450 miles to the east.”
“It is thought China currently has around 20 silos loaded with an unknown number of missiles and nuclear warheads, in addition to around 100 mobile launch pads.”
“Researchers believe there are at least 250 silos currently under construction at various sites in China, meaning a tripling of the number of missiles that Beijing can wield at any one time.”
It looks like the new estimated total of warheads would jump to 415. Just five shy what the fuck y’all?
Maybe it’s not much to fear because it seems Russia and the U.S. have China outgunned with 4,000 big band boom sticks on hand.
Researchers have a couple of ideas on why the build up, with one of them being posturing and trying to act like the new school yard badass. Remember Hong Kong? Kinda…just disappeared from the news….
“The second is that it intends to use the threat of increasing its arsenal as an expensive but potentially key bargaining chip in any upcoming negotiations with the US and Russia over nuclear weapons.”
The third reason is maybe there are spreading out their supplies into multiple locations to avoid the “all your eggs in one nukeable target”.
J&J Settles Lawsuit
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/07/21/jj-and-other-drug-companies-strike-26-billion-opioid-settlement-with-states/?sh=14fb9a9e7647 - Carlie Porterfield (f)
Various government sites, Forbes, CNBC Articles
Forbes - In a deal to help inoculate them from liability for an opioid crisis that has killed roughly half a million Americans, some of the health industry’s biggest companies—Johnson & Johnson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson—settled with a group of state attorneys general.
The bipartisan contingent said going forward, state and local governments can formally sign on to the deal, which would free up billions of dollars of funds to cover problems stemming from the opioid crisis like addiction treatment, counseling, and harm reduction services, like syringe programs.
If they accept the funds, cities and states would be forced to drop any legal action against the companies in return, though the deal only covers the four companies and not other firms involved in the opioid industry.
Johnson & Johnson will pitch in $5 billion to the fund over 9 years, while the other 3 drug distributors will pitch in $21 billion over double that time frame.
States part of the deal include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
The deal is the result of two years of back-and-forth over whether the four companies helped fuel the epidemic by profiting off opioid painkillers even as thousands of Americans died, and will settle about 3,000 lawsuits against the firms if accepted.
Forbes says that J&J reported in 2019 $85 billion in revenue, $81 billion in 2018, $77 Billion in 2017, $72 Billion in 2016, $70 billion in 2015, and $74 billion in 2014
Averaging $75B a year, that’s $374B in what is really an educated guess by Forbes.
“To value private businesses, we coupled revenue or profit estimates with prevailing price-to-sales, price-to-earnings, or similar ratios for similar public companies and applied a 10% discount, or more in cases where information is scarce.”
Compound Annual Growth Rate calculations, etc.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently shows provisional data that 2020 was a record year for overall drug overdose deaths with 93,331, up 29% from a year earlier. Of that 93 thousand, 69 thousand were specifically opioid related
According to drugabuse.gov, Opioids are a class of drugs that include the illegal drug heroin, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and pain relievers available legally by prescription, such as oxycodone (OxyContin®), hydrocodone (Vicodin®), codeine, morphine, and many others.
12 Month Dec 2019- Dec 2020 Provisional Number of Drug Overdose Deaths
https://soundcloud.com/akira-42/black-knight