[ChuckMcM]

Wow, this is just really really great. I am biased because I do this too, read all sorts of stuff, put articles together, make silly predictions to myself about how that will affect the world and then watch to see if I was close.

When you do this for a while it becomes habituated. And then you start seeing not the data points, but the connections. Stories that seem to cluster around certain events, or predict them. Some really obvious ones like in California when ever there is a call to 'cut spending' in the legislature, just like clockwork there will be 6 to 12 stories appearing about how important it is to keep teachers well paid and how they have already sacrificed so much. These sorts of 'dots' become predictive of future events, and knowing the future can tell you other things (like other people who are doing the same thing you are)

I explained it to a guy on the train once, if you ride a train from point A to point B, it is full of strangers. If you ride it every day for 6 months from point A to point B (and you are at all observant) you notice "That person works in Palo Alto and lives in Mtn View, that person only sits facing opposite the rest of the car, those two people are in a relationship but trying not to be obvious about it, that guy hates his job or wants a new job" etc. Because each day you right gives you a 'dot' and after a while some of those dots coalesce into meaning.

[bane]

Something else to watch for, whenever there's a really important piece of negative news about the government, there's almost always a piece of really trivial news about the entertainment industry or about a dramatic, but commonplace natural phenomenon (that's usually not reported at all) or a tragic death of an otherwise unremarkable, but photogenic young person, that will get far more news coverage and push the important bit off the front page.

I've found Western media is fairly subtle at it, but in some countries the media monopoly is such that it's done almost so ham-handedly as to be almost absurd. There's a few in the U.S. that are pretty clumsy about it too.

It's literally watching the shitty supermarket tabloids jump up from next to the candy bars to the number one national news story.

What's even more interesting is that the media, in a sort of faux meta-analysis, will acknowledge ways that stories are buried or minimized, that have nothing to do with the ways they actually bury and minimize important news -- the Friday bombshell press conference for example.