Rowan Thorpe

Thanks. Had heard the name but didn’t really know “what they do” in that sense. Will check them out.

For others who, like me, haven’t yet heard what the 50501 Movement is, here you go

At least on that day he was.

I think a good tool against this could be to have an international nonprofit organization of investigative journalists, OSINT experts, and detectives (and experts in seeing through AI abuse and other fraudulent media behaviour, and as soon as they build reputation they would need damn good lawyers too). They would act as a fast-response crack-team to look under the covers every time any powers-that-be launch a news cycle chaos-offensive (which sadly these days is “all the time”). Not just as a side-hustle or section of a general publication, but as its own non-profit-beholden organisation dedicated to that task.

They would follow the timings and run contextual pattern recognition on all the big/fishy “look over here” announcements (or character hit-pieces attacking the credibility of people sharing uncomfortable or explosive information). Their explicit goal though would be surfacing the most promising other stories that are being buried, combine and tug on those threads to discover what kind of meta-stories and deeper narratives are being lost in the “manufactured mainstream” noise, and provide announcements/advice/guidance to other journalists and reporters on what to do next with those. They would need to all be highly experienced and disciplined expert investigators of impeccable integrity to provide adequate mental-vaccination against risks of sliding into conspiracy-hypothesising tin-hat territory due to the nature of the work.

In addition to the obligatory website for people to discover and learn about them, they could provide a non-paywalled RSS stream of their findings, tongue-in-cheek naming it “While you were out”, maybe with a sister podcast discussing their findings called “Excuse me, I think you dropped this”.

This is utterly heartbreaking. Only 11 years old.

I’m waiting to see the headline: “Fired NNSA employees can’t be found for reemployment because they moved to off-grid locations outside the blast-radius of all major centres”

Kanye -> Hitler -> Shopify -> Spotify -> Arrested Development -> …

Anyone else experiencing whiplash, or is it just me? I think I need to lie down for a bit.

Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).

EDIT: This turns out to just be a folklore factoid after all, see the comment replying to this one

Forgive the tangential side-note: Although I get that “news” vs. “olds” was justified punning, I still want to mention what I think is interesting about the term “news”, and seems to be in danger of being forgotten. I remember learning in school (pre-internet so I couldn’t easily verify) that the origin of the word “news” was “North, East, West, South”.