You say that because you've never had the good stuff. :-P

Thank you!

I'm so sorry.

Why can't the U.S. buy decent sauerkraut at the store? Why must we make it ourselves or get awful kraut? Germany has a unique and delightful kraut for seemingly every town and village, but the U.S. has exactly one type from a handful of companies that all make it the same. Well, maybe two types if you count 'canned' but I don't reckon that to be actual sauerkraut. What was the topic? Sandwiches? Well, if I could find a good kraut, I would spend my days trying to recreate a reuben-like masterpiece.

Context?

Without knowing how this compares to other states, which areas have higher counts of rental properties, how other states compare, and things like average or percentage of: ages, incomes, ethnicities, and probably party affiliation, this doesn't tell us much by itself.

I am encouraged that it is given as a percentage of the voting population instead of a numeric count (XKCD's pet peeve #208), but it still looks a lot like a population map. I had to find a straight population map to compare where it differs, and as a quick visual trend they are similar. From https://www.someka.net/blog/ohio-zip-code-map/ :

*removed externally hosted image*

Overlap that with an income map (from https://proximityone.com/srdmi/ohdmi.htm):

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With only a visual examination, I still have little idea of what the map says about voter purging. I can't tell if old people are getting purged as they die, if college students are getting purged as they fail to change from their school address, or if a particular party is getting purged just to sway elections.

It is much worse than that. CNBC had a recent piece on how America PAC is partially funded by Musk and is collecting specific user data.

You see an ad that says it will help you vote. If you are NOT in a battle ground state, it will actually help you register. But if you ARE in a battleground state, CNBC states (archive):

[...] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk's political confidants -- which is interesting because he's at Palantir which was you'd think of as his old buddy Peter Theil's gig. Palantir sells info. More precisely, they know how to intake truthful data and turn it into actionable details. I've no idea how they check for validity, though. Some days it feels like everything on Twitter is a lie and hearing that this 'help you vote' program is also a lie just makes me wonder if anyone is honest over there.

Decades ago, before the internet, when your local radio stations and newspapers paid for service to a special machine that constantly churned out stories from stringers and main branches, there was a saying that I no longer remember but went something like, "Associated Press gets the story first; United Press gets it right."

We never doubted that AP/UP/Reu/(etc.) were feeding most the news. The sources were right there in print.

It is good to remind people that while there are an endless number of websites, most news still comes from a handful of sources. I will even agree that our sources are all biased.

That said there are some stories where bias should be expected; where there aren't really two sides. Example: "Locals outraged by villian's kicking puppies!" Good reporting might include the reasoning, but the public is not going to side with the puppy-kicker. Surely there was a better way to handle the situation before it got to that.

The public does not side with Hitler, either. Personally, I am thankful that the larger public has been 'brainwashed' into thinking Hitler was 'bad'. It saddens me that there are Nazis (or neo-Nazis) in countries that fought to end that vile cause. The citizenry should know better. More than that, the citizenry should know that all autocrats are bad. Any benevolent dictator is still mortal and will cede the position to someone else, and it won't be long before the 'someone else' is not benevolent.

So: thank you for posting the link reminding everyone to be critical of all news sources, but also remember that some things are fairly reported. Sometimes a point of view is valid. Sometimes there is an actual solid truth that is being told. Yes, sometimes that truth is getting sensationalized, but that doesn't it make it less true.

For this particular case, I will re-iterate that I am worried about potential strife. If my family was living in Venezuela, I would want a stable and well funded government without corruption and without dictatorship. I don't think the people had that as a ballot option, and I don't trust any of the players. I do miss Chavez, though. The U.S. gave him a raw deal.

I just love it when someone posts propaganda and then goes into their own thread attempting to discredit everyone else as propaganda.

I'm anticipating strife and reporting from additional sources. This could get ugly and people should be aware of it.

Note that al-jazeera itself reported this in the article you linked:

“Everything we have seen so far indicates the results of the government are just produced,” Phil Gunson, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Venezuela, told Al Jazeera. He claimed the tallies announced by the government-controlled electoral authority did not correspond to the votes cast.

“The result that the opposition claims is the correct one … corresponds very closely to what opinion polls have been saying for the last several months,” Gunson said. “All the partial results we have seen so far indicate the opposition got something like three-fifths of the vote.”

Maybe. APnews says:

Authorities delayed releasing the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering attempts to verify the results.

After finally claiming to have won, Maduro accused unidentified foreign enemies of trying to hack the voting system.

Per bbc:

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result "hard to believe".

• Uruguay's president said of the Maduro government: "They were going to 'win' regardless of the actual results."

• In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: "Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil."

That said, I didn't really want Maria Machado “—derided by the Chavista leadership for her pro-market views and her upper-class background“ — to lead a puppet government after getting kicked off the ballot.

yeah yeah yeah, and not just there and not just the U.S. DoD. I think we all understand that psyops are a common military tactic. We can't even be assuaged by the idea that the U.S. government isn't 'allowed' to run such campaigns on its own citizens because: why would they even worry about that when they can just ask a dark-money PAC or the media to do it for them?

lol!

Edit: ok, I laughed, but I wanna be clear: not at you. I don't think any of it SHOULD work like that, but in my imagination, I can visualize it happening, and some of the crap that went down what with the National Weather Service agreeing with a sharpie edit to their map... I just can't exclude the idea that such craziness could have happened.

-- but I totally admit I was just riffing on a concept

No, but I think he likes to order the military around and might give a rambling 'order' like, 'China bad. China vaccines bad. Why send good vaccines to those sh-thole countries for free?' -- and then in so many words telling the Pentagon to make them all f-off and die.

The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.

According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”

... so Trump?

I imagine Biden had a lot of fires to put out once he became President in January 2021, but it would have been nice if this scheme ended sooner.

Not sure if the boy works here, but... @aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me REAL Americans FIGHT Nazis!

Style:sovietpropaganda

I feel sorry for the kid. This sort of crap makes me angry.

I'm tickled pink! All 50 Democratic party chairs endorse Harris already. ActBlue got $47 million today in just 7 hours from Biden stepping out. The world looks a little brighter when Steven Miller doesn't get his way.

Hoping that'd be a good resource, I started at the top and started clicking some links that interested me. Deleted. Suspended for violating rules. And so on.

Finally found one on Bill Gates that worked, but when I searched for more info, I found it was FALSE: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/false-claim-bill-gates-faces-trial-in-india-for-testing-vaccines-on-children-idUSKBN22V262/

All that disinformation tells me to take anything in the list with a grain of salt.

But she has name recognition now that she's been VP. That is a huge bonus.

He's now announced that he's endorsing Harris. https://www.vox.com/politics/361827/biden-drops-out-2024-kamala-convention

Moments later, Biden released another statement endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to take his spot atop the ticket.

"My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made," the statement said. "Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this."

What is clear is that the presidential contest is entering uncharted territory for the modern era.