Most likely. There is a VERY thin line between their content and their advertising. I wish I could find this article I read about a year ago about how the whole right wing media got started with this mail order company that was selling some scammy thing or another, and then they grew into a bigger outfit. It was all in the days of snail mail. And so the whole system just morphed; I think a bunch of other people got on the scam product train.
It’s fascinating to listen to Patriot Radio because it’s sort of an art form; almost like a free verse expression of fear words just pattered over and over again in a random assortment, and then a commercial break to sell you whatever they just ginned up the fear machine over, and then back to the fear verse.
In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall , which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax , the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events , one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value.
Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers. Who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs? That’s why, for instance, the other day I (and probably you) got an advertisement by way of liberal magazine The American Prospect seeking donations to Mercy Corps, a charity that helps starving children in the Third World. But back when I was getting emails every day from Newsmax and Townhall , the come-ons were a little bit different.
I’ve done this too, although not so deep or with such discipline.
One thing I noticed was how often my special email address was being sold/given to other groups – particularly political – despite having privacy statements that swore they would never do such a thing. When you know that a particular email address has only ever been given directly to one political group, for example, it’s easy to see how it proliferates. A lot harder for someone who has chosen to be on a handful of these sorts of lists…how do you determine where the breech is?
This is why I use an email provider that lets me use alias addresses. Whenever I provide my email address for something, I can add in a “-blah” at the end of the username that identifies where that address was provided. They all go to the same account, but i can easily create rules to shuffle certain ones into their own folder, block specific ones entirely if they end up on a spam list, etc. It’s handy for knowing when a company has sold their soul to the devil email list to spammers, or had a breach.
Though one downside is that if you need to send emails from that address, you need to use an email client that lets you set up multiple identities and keep in mind which alias relates to which group. I know Thunderbird is pretty easy to do this with, and if you have an identity set up that matches the destination of an email it usually picks that one to use if you’re replying to that email.
Makes sense to me - the brain subjected to many, many brief periods of mild hypoxia over a long period of time. I can see that causing incremental (ha) damage over the long term. I’m talking say 50-100 hypoxic episodes per hour of sleep over years.
Why on right wing news? That’s weird. Watching out for their own maybe.
Political groups and activist NGO charities like Amnesty are terrible for this. They have huge blurbs right on the signup form about respecting privacy… and then don’t.
My little stint of volunteering (before I burnt out) exposed me to a lot of people who are just soooo passionate about a cause, their ethics go out the window. I wonder how many of them ever clue in to how much damage they’re doing to that cause they claim to love so much.
If it’s used as a catalyst, that shouldn’t matter too much, so long as they can recover it (or neutralize it) before storing the carbon.
That’s not a caveat; that’s amazing efficiency.
You’re never going to be able to convert CO2 back to C12+12xO2 for less energy than the energy you got from burning the coal in the first place; that’s forbidden by the laws of thermodynamics. Getting close to only needing as much energy as was produced by the initial combustion is a huge milestone.