Hillary Clinton’s holiday party ‘like a wake’

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.
            Walter Anderson 


 “It was like a wake with a band,” quipped one guest who was at the Plaza on Thursday for Hillary Clinton’s holiday party to thank top-tier donors, VIP boosters and campaign advisers. 

The source said, “It was a little bit of group therapy and a lot of love” among the losing Democratic rainmakers. Spotted in the crowd were Clinton advisers Huma Abedin, John Podesta and Robby Mook, donors Alan Patricof, Bernard Schwartz, Marc Lasry, Jay Snyder and Robert Zimmerman, designers Vera Wang and Tory Burch, plus Anna Wintour, Harvey Weinstein and restaurateur Danny Meyer. Also there were Bill and Chelsea Clinton and Chelsea’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky.

 “No one has any illusion of ‘the band coming back together again,’ but it did bring a sense of closure,” said a Hillary backer of the possibility she’d come back as a candidate. 

 We have no idea of what the "Hillary backer" meant by this insane prediction but there is a saying by Einstein we would like to remind Hillary of: Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. 

The source added of the scene, “There was a spirit of, ‘We have taken the last eight years for granted.’ But people did walk out of there with a mission.


 

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The Fake News Conundrum and Facebook

         

                                              The spread of fake news on Facebook became a focal point of discussion after Donald Trump was elected president, drawing comments from the likes of President Obama, and had Hillary won the presidency, the hypocrite and the stuck up-for-Hillary-media, would have not only ignored fake-news, but it would have had upheld them.

A Twitter cofounder nailed the scope of Facebook's 'fake news' problem with one screenshot

On Tuesday, Twitter cofounder Ev Williams neatly pointed out how big Facebook's fake-news problem is with one screenshot.

Williams was reading Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's November 18 Facebook post, which updated the world on Facebook's progress and goals in tackling the spreading of fake news, when he noticed some suspicious posts on the side. Both turned out to be fake news.
Here is the screen shot:

"Despite appearances, the first one doesn't point to espn.com," Williams wrote in a Medium post. "It goes to espn.com-magazine.online and attempts to sell a muscle-building supplement using ESPN branding and a fake news story. The CNN-branded ad goes to less work. It just takes you to a site called Fine the Racers with an exclusive offer for a 12-week program to strengthen your toes. 

Though Facebook has already pledged to ban fake-news sites from its ad network, both of the posts that Williams highlighted were ads.
But, they do. 

"We do not integrate or display ads in apps or sites containing content that is illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news," Facebook said in a statement to Reuters on November 15.

The spread of fake news on Facebook became a focal point of discussion after Donald Trump was elected president, drawing comments from the likes of President Obama. A recent 46 by BuzzFeedshow showed that in the lead-up to the election, the top fake-news stories on Facebook outperformed legitimate news stories shared by some of the most popular media companies. One fake-news writer even said

 he thought he might have helped Trump win the election.

Facebook has said it's working on fixing the problem. Zuckerberg wrote on Friday (in the post cited by Williams) a few things that Facebook was working on to try to combat fake news. Here's a summary:

• Stronger detection: better technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
• Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake to catch more misinformation faster.
• Third-party verification via "respected fact-checking organizations."
• Warnings: labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties and the Facebook community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
• Working with journalists and others in the news industry to get input and better understand their fact-checking systems and learn from them.

But it seems that Facebook has a long way to go.

Williams does have a bit of a bias here, however, as he founded both Medium, a publishing platform that in some ways competes with Facebook, and cofounded Twitter. But his point is certainly still well-taken.