Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

My Rabbit Hole

I lead a monastic life, a theater unto myself, sequestered from the tumults and troubles of the world.

— Robert Burton

Crime, violence, vanity, ignorance, disease, poverty, corruption: I'm done with them. 

Done with the day's news stories and current events. 

Done with the real world—with the theater of the forlorn. Done with sorrows, follies, afflictions, and lies.

I can't take them any more.

I'm heading down my rabbit hole, where I can escape the world's heaviness and be a "theater unto myself."

If you care, you can find me there painting.

"A simple line painted with a brush can lead to freedom and happiness," the painter Joan Miro said.

He got that right.

How about you?

What's your rabbit hole? 

Above: Baron von Hoppin' by Jan Weir. Oil on linen. 6 x 8 inches. The Rabbit King by Joan Miro. Etching, aquatint and carborundum on paper. 38 x 28 inches.

Trump's Undeniable Charm

I so want to ignore Trump, but cannot. His name comes up every day. He's the car wreck you can't look away from.

Yesterday, at the America First Policy Institute Summit in Washington, he outlined his authoritarian vision of his next presidential term.

It was the speech of a crackpot through and through.

And scary as hell.

Yes, Trump is an unlettered buffoon, but he has his certain appeal.

It's the appeal of the reluctant savior, the hero and patriot whose hour has come.

Ours is a “failing nation,” a “cesspool of crime,” he told the crowd of 600. "I have to save our country.”

In March 1940, George Orwell reviewed the first English translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf, overlooking the book and reflecting instead on Hitler's charm.

"Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality," Orwell wrote. 

While der Führer promotes a "monstrous vision," "the fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him." Perhaps it's his face, Orwell suggested. 

"It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs," he wrote. "In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself."

Hitler harbors a personal grievance of unknown origin, Orwell said. His impulse is to avenge himself.

"He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to."

But charm alone isn't Hitler's secret weapon, Orwell wrote. He also knows that all aggrieved people crave vengeance.

"Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also want struggle and self-sacrifice. Hitler has said, 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

The similarities to Trump are unnerving.

We all don't fling ourselves at his feet, thank goodness, but millions of Americans worship him.

It's that undeniable charm—and the craving for vengeance—that explain Trump’s attraction.

Down

Well, I caught Covid.

I have been down for three days with the standard array of symptoms, which are now in retreat, thanks to Paxlovid.

Down is our metaphor for ill.

Well is up, ill is down. 

When we're well, we feel up, upbeat, high-flying, on top of things.

When we're ill, we feel down. We fall ill, come down with a disease, keel over, are laid low, feel under the weather, and—if we don't recover—are cut down. 

In a pandemic, we sink fast and drop like flies.

When we suffer symptoms we're afflicted, from the Latin verb affligo, meaning "to throw down." We feel low, run down, down and out, down for the count, or just plain down.

Feeling down sucks. The chronic fever and chills, soar throat and body ache make it impossible to feel anything but down. 

I sleep a lot and watch old mysteries on TV.

Does illness have any upside?

Thoreau thought so. "'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes," he wrote in his Journals.

We can only guess what he meant; there's no more to the entry.

But we can assume Thoreau had in mind recovery.

An illness is an opportunity, first off, to recover our bodies, because in illness, bodily events become the events of the day.

In illness, we can reflect on the unforgiving primacy of our bodies; take inventory of the bad habits we should shed; and remember that our bodies are impermanent—that time's awasting and there's much to be done.

In illness, we can recover our selves. We can read good books—at least until brain fog recurs. (I'm reading, in fits and starts, a delightful biography of the painter Monet). We can read and reflect on our values, our goals, our weaknesses, our debts, and the things we've left undone. We can also cultivate the "attitude of gratitude" for our partners and caregivers—in my case, the same person—and for our family members, friends, and neighbors.

Last, but not least, in illness, we can recover leisure. We can be mellow, indulging ourselves with "extreme self-care." An illness is an excuse to take hot baths, drink soothing fluids, eat comfort food, crawl under a blanket, lounge on the sofa, and take constant naps. We can do these things any day, of course, but not with impunity, because over-indulgence can quickly turn self-care into torpor and sloth.

"I don't respond well to mellow," Woody Allen's character says in Annie Hall. "You know what I mean? I have a tendency, if I get too mellow, to ripen and then rot."

Complaining

Many people are never happier than when they get the opportunity to complain.

— Julian Baggini

Complaining is my hobby.

Sure, I could quit my hobby, but only by replacing it with an equally engrossing one.

Woodworking comes to mind.

But then I'd have to invest in a lot of fancy lumber and tools and find a place in the house to build a workshop, whereas I'm already fully equipped to complain.

Unlike woodworking, complaining also has the advantage of being a portable hobby.

I can complain any time, anywhere, about any subject you can imagine.

Despite all the possible subjects, I tend to limit my complaints to a finite set.

You could call me a specialist.

My perennial subjects are other drivers, bureaucrats, banks, phone trees, blister packaging, and auto-fill.

When it comes to complaining, many people have a much wider range than mine.

Their complaints are panoramic.

They will complain about summer days, newborn kittens, gourmet meals, world heritage sites, and virtuoso performances. 

When the market goes up, they'll complain that it was down.

When the movie was fabulous, they'll complain that it was too long.

When the line is short, they'll complain that it's moving slowly.

For these people, complaining is less a hobby than an occupation.

We call them pains in the ass.

Complaining as an art form has a spotty reputation among thinkers.

Aristotle called it "wailing" and said it was a disagreeable habit of women, servants, and "soft" men.

Seneca said it was pointless—like trying to evade taxes.

Kant thought complaining was undignified and unworthy of a gentleman. "No true man will importune a friend with his troubles," he said.

Eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison thought that complaining signaled a character defect. "It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect," he said.

But complaining has its defenders, too—especially among contemporary thinkers.

"Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be," Julian Baggini has said.

When it's not simple whining, Baggini points out, complaining can take the form of protest, often the basis of important social and political reforms.

Complaining can also relieve common miseries.  

As social creatures, according to Kathryn Norlock, we need to complain, if for no other reason than to "make the unchangeable easier for complainers to bear."

This "cathartic" variant of complaining not only provides us a much-needed psychic safety valve, but underpins many of the greatest passages of world literature, as Emily Shortslef has observed.

Through an "array of rhetorical modes and literary forms of complaint," Shortslef says, writers through the centuries have elevated complaining from mere kvetching to tragedy, giving readers the chance to contemplate the "inherent vulnerability of humans to loss and injury."

Just imagine if Job, Hamlet, Ahab, Yossarian, or Portnoy had been told never to complain.