We’ve seen this before, and it’s worth noting again. A tweet from a blue-checked Elon Musk is all it takes to set a Bitcoin giveaway frenzy into motion. The only problem is that it’s just the same hoary old advance fee scam.
Hijacked verified Twitter accounts masquerading as Elon Musk are again being used to tweet messages, complete with typos, and a link to a webpage that’s supposed to be connected with Musk’s SpaceX. All this from a Twitter account complete with a verified blue check.
Motherboard’s Joseph Cox noted that the hijacked account actually retweeted genuine tweets from the real Elon Musk to appear more convincing. Other compromised accounts complete with blue check join in the thread, telling the marks that they’ve sent in Bitcoin and received more in return, just by retweeting the message to their own followers.
Scammers earn a tidy sum exploiting Twitter users’ gullibility, so shutting one scam down is just a small bump in the crooked road. As one is shuttered, another takes its place to entrap the gullible and greedy. Sometimes the scammers even get the spelling and grammar correct. One quick lesson to draw from this episode is that the blue check may not be much more help than the old green padlock as a marker of trustworthiness.
Sinister figures lurk around our careless president
With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trump’s adolescent bidding with last Sunday’s preplanned virtue pageant of scripted indignation — his flight from the predictable sight of players kneeling during the national anthem
.. No unblinkered observer can still cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him to his current glory.
.. no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
.. Hell is truth seen too late
.. instinct to pander to those who adore him as much as he does
.. they are impervious to the Everest of evidence that he disdains them as a basket of gullibles.
.. He gives his gullibles not governance by tantrum, but tantrum as governance.
.. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right.
.. Trump’s election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged.
.. the alt-right sees society as inevitably “a zero-sum contest among fundamentally competing identity groups.” Hence the alt-right is explicitly an alternative to Lincoln’s affirmation of the Founders’ vision. They saw America as cohesive because of a shared creed.
The Scammers, the Scammed and America’s Fate
all of these proposals share a family resemblance: Like his health plan, each involved savage cuts in benefits for the poor and working class, with the money released by these cuts used to offset large tax cuts for the rich. All were, however, sold on false pretenses as plans for deficit reduction.
Worse, the alleged deficit reduction came entirely from “magic asterisks”: claims about huge savings to be achieved by cutting unspecified government spending, huge revenue increases to be achieved by closing unspecified tax loopholes. It was a con job all the way.
So how did Mr. Ryan reach a position where his actions may reshape the lives of so many of his fellow citizens, in most cases very much for the worse? The answer lies in the impenetrable gullibility of his base. No, not his constituents: the news media, who made him what he is.
You see, until very recently both news coverage and political punditry were dominated by the convention of “balance.”
.. There’s an important lesson here, and it’s not just about health care or Mr. Ryan; it’s about the destructive effects of false symmetry in reporting at a time of vast asymmetry in reality.