Employees at Atlanta City Hall were handed instructions as they came through the front doors Friday.
Channel 2 Investigative Reporter Aaron Diamant obtained a copy of the flyer that requested employees not turn on computers or log onto their workstations.
Friday’s action comes
as city officials are struggling to determine how much sensitive
information may have been compromised in a Thursday cyber-attack.
The city has also received demands that it pay a ransom of $50,000, according to Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Bottoms kicked off a Friday news conference by assuring the public
that investigators haven't found any evidence that sensitive customer,
resident or employee information was compromised.
Bottoms said federal investigators will advise her on the best course of action.
"This is a marathon, not a sprint," Bottoms said.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are working with city officials to identify the source of the attack.
NewYorker | Twelve years later, the fixation on data as the key to political
persuasion has exploded into scandal. For the past several days, the
Internet has been enveloped in outrage over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,
the shadowy firm that supposedly helped Donald Trump win the White
House. As with the Maoist rebels, this appears to be a tale of data-lust
gone bad. In order to fulfill the promises that Cambridge Analytica
made to its clients—it claimed to possess cutting-edge “psychographic
profiles” that could judge voters’ personalities better than their own
friends could—the company had to harvest huge amounts of information. It
did this in an ethically suspicious way, by contracting with Aleksandr
Kogan, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who built an app
that collected demographic data on tens of millions of Facebook users,
largely without their knowledge. “This was a scam—and a fraud,” Paul
Grewal, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, told the Times over the weekend. Kogan has said
that he was assured by Cambridge Analytica that the data collection was
“perfectly legal and within the limits of the terms of service.”
Despite
Facebook’s performance of victimization, it has endured a good deal of
blowback and blame. Even before the story broke, Trump’s critics
frequently railed at the company for contributing to his victory by
failing to rein in fake news and Russian propaganda. To them, the
Cambridge Analytica story was another example of Facebook’s inability,
or unwillingness, to control its platform, which allowed bad actors to
exploit people on behalf of authoritarian populism. Democrats have
demanded that Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, testify before
Congress. Antonio Tajani, the President of the European Parliament,
wants to talk to him, too. “Facebook needs to clarify before the
representatives of five hundred million Europeans that personal data is
not being used to manipulate democracy,” he said. On Wednesday
afternoon, after remaining conspicuously silent since Friday night,
Zuckerberg pledged to restrict third-party access to Facebook data in an
effort to win back user trust. “We have a responsibility to protect
your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” he wrote on Facebook.
But, as some have noted,
the furor over Cambridge Analytica is complicated by the fact that what
the firm did wasn’t unique or all that new. In 2012, Barack Obama’s
reëlection campaign used a Facebook app to target users for outreach,
giving supporters the option to share their friend lists with the
campaign. These efforts, compared with those of Kogan and Cambridge
Analytica, were relatively transparent, but users who never gave their
consent had their information sucked up anyway. (Facebook has since changed its policies.) As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written, Facebook itself is a giant “surveillance machine”:
its business model demands that it gather as much data about its users
as possible, then allow advertisers to exploit the information through a
system so complex and opaque that misuse is almost guaranteed.
NewYorker | When Facebook finally acknowledged that Cambridge Analytica was using
Facebook data it had obtained surreptitiously, the company’s response
was not to alert its users or audit its partners or engage in any sort
of meaningful reform. Rather, it sent a polite request to Cambridge
Analytica asking it to delete the GSR-sourced material, some of which, according to the Times, remains on the company’s servers.
This
weekend’s reports about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica did introduce
us to Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data
scientist, who conceived and helped construct C.A.’s psychographic
tools. For at least a year, it seems, Wylie had been feeding information
to Carole Cadwalladr and her team at the Guardian and its sister paper, the Observer. Now he is out of the shadows. In a thirteen-minute video posted on the Guardian’s
Web site on Saturday, Wylie details the story of the creation and
deployment of “the weapon” that he and Nix sold to Bannon, and then to
Mercer, to fight their “culture war.” It was in those early days of
2014, Wylie says, that he and Bannon began testing slogans like “drain
the swamp” and “the deep state” and “build the wall,” and found a
surprising number of Americans who responded strongly
to them. All they needed was a candidate to parrot them. Cambridge
Analytica promised that psychographics could not only target people as
voters but also as personalities. “We would know what kind of messaging
you’d be susceptible to and where you are going to consume it and how
many times we are going to have to touch you with it to change how you
think about something,” Wylie told the Guardian. “Web sites
will be created. Blogs will be created—whatever we think this target
profile will be receptive to. See it, click it, and go down the rabbit
hole until they start to think something different.” The goal was to
break society. “It is only when you break it can you remodel the pieces
into your vision of a new society.” As one former executive of Mercer’s
hedge fund told The New Yorker’sJane Mayer, last year, “He wants it to all fall down.”
Perhaps the most telling revelation from the recent reporting—aside from the U.K.’s Channel 4 catching Alexander Nix on camera explaining
how his company could supply beautiful Ukrainian women to entrap
politicians—is that Cambridge Analytica is essentially a shell company
created by the British firm Strategic Communications Laboratories.
During the 2016 campaign, according to Cadwalladr, C.A. was staffed
primarily by non-U.S. citizens, in possible violation of American
campaign-finance laws. This included the contractors the firm brought to
Austin, Texas, to work with Trump’s digital team there.
“We were
really speaking directly to the voters in a number of states,” one
former C.A. employee, who worked with a number of non-U.S. citizens or
green-card holders, told the Guardian.
"Google has partnered with the United States Department of Defense to
help the agency develop artificial intelligence for analyzing drone
footage, a move that set off a firestorm among employees of the
technology giant when they learned of Google’s involvement." — Gizmodo / March 6, 2018
Gizmodo's report on Google's work for the Pentagon has been making
headlines all day. It's also thrown the normally placid halls of
Google's Mountain View HQ into chaos. Seems that Googlers can't believe
that their awesome company would get involved in something as heinous as
helping the Pentagon increase its drone targeting capability.
But the fact that Google helps the military build more efficient
systems of surveillance and death shouldn't be surprising, especially
not to Google employees. The truth is that Google has spent the last 15
years selling souped-up versions of its information technology to
military and intelligence agencies, local police departments, and
military contractors of all size and specialization — including outfits
that sell predictive policing tech deployed in cities across America
today.
As I outline in my book Surveillance Valley,
it started in 2003 with customized Google search solutions for data
hosted by the CIA and NSA. The company's military contracting work then
began to expand in a major way after 2004, when Google cofounder Sergey
Brin pushed for buying Keyhole, a mapping startup backed by the CIA and
the NGA, a sister agency to the NSA that handles spy satellite
intelligence.
Spooks loved Keyhole because of the "video game-like" simplicity of
its virtual maps. They also appreciated the ability to layer visual
information over other intelligence. The sky was the limit. Troop
movements, weapons caches, real-time weather and ocean conditions,
intercepted emails and phone call intel, cell phone locations — whatever
intel you had with a physical location could be thrown onto a map and
visualized. Keyhole gave an intelligence analyst, a commander in the
field, or an air force pilot up in the air the kind of capability that
we now take for granted: using digital mapping services on our computers
and mobile phones to look up restaurants, cafes, museums, traffic
conditions, and subway routes. "We could do these mashups and expose
existing legacy data sources in a matter of hours, rather than weeks,
months, or years," an NGA official gushed about Keyhole — the company
that we now know as Google Earth.
Military commanders weren’t the only ones who liked Keyhole's ability to mash up data. So did Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
The purchase of Keyhole was a major milestone for Google, marking the
moment the company stopped being a purely consumer-facing Internet
company and began integrating with the US government. While Google’s
public relations team did its best to keep the company wrapped in a
false aura of geeky altruism, company executives pursued an aggressive
strategy to become the Lockheed Martin of the Internet Age. “We’re
functionally more than tripling the team each year,” a Google exec who
ran Google Federal, the company's military sales division, said in 2008.
It was true. With insiders plying their trade, Google’s expansion
into the world of military and intelligence contracting took off.
medium | A new Intercept article
by George Joseph and Murtaza Hussain reports on never-before-seen
documents obtained from the FBI via Freedom of Information Act by the
civil rights groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional
Rights. The FOIA request for FBI files pertaining to Black Lives Matter
activism was answered with a stack of heavily-redacted documents
revealing evidence of police stakeouts at the homes and vehicles of
activists, as well as the use of police informants, with no mention of
any potential crimes suspected of the people they were monitoring.
One such document
is a report provided “for coordination with Monsanto” describing a
single Black Lives Matter activist’s plans to fly from New York City to
Ferguson for a 2014 protest against racially motivated police brutality.
The document covers the protesters’ plans to begin their demonstration
at a Monsanto factory, as well as money raised for protest materials and
bail money, without a single visible mention of potential crimes or
violence.
“Coordination with Monsanto.” To protect them from Black Lives Matter protesters.
Welcome to the real face of the FBI.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has enjoyed an obscene resurgence in
popularity among purportedly left-wing Americans lately as the current
administration locks horns with them over the imperialist Russiagate psyop,
but the FBI has never been the friend of anyone other than
establishment power structures. The FBI does not exist to protect and
serve the American people, and it certainly doesn’t exist to protect the
rights of black Americans to protest the violence of an increasingly
militarized police force. The FBI exists to protect Monsanto, and all
the other seats of real corporatist power in the United States.
consortiumnews | What prompted former CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday to accuse
President Donald Trump of “moral turpitude” and to predict, with an
alliterative flourish, that Trump will end up “as a disgraced demagogue
in the dustbin of history”? The answer shines through the next sentence
in Brennan’s threatening tweet:
“You may scapegoat Andy McCabe [former FBI Deputy Director fired Friday
night] but you will not destroy America…America will triumph over you.”
It is easy to see why Brennan lost it. The Attorney General fired
McCabe, denying him full retirement benefits, because McCabe “had made
an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor —
including under oath — on multiple occasions.” There but for the grace
of God go I, Brennan must have thought, whose stock in trade has been
unauthorized disclosures.
In fact, Brennan can take but small, short-lived consolation in the
fact that he succeeded in leaving with a full government pension. His
own unauthorized disclosures and leaks probably dwarf in number,
importance, and sensitivity those of McCabe. And many of those leaks
appear to have been based on sensitive intercepted conversations from
which the names of American citizens were unmasked for political
purposes. Not to mention the leaks of faux intelligence like that
contained in the dubious “dossier” cobbled together for the Democrats by
British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
It is an open secret that the CIA has been leaking like the
proverbial sieve over the last two years or so to its favorite
stenographers at the New York Times and Washington Post. (At one point, the obvious whispering reached the point that the Wall Street Journal saw
fit to complain that it was being neglected.) The leaking can be traced
way back — at least as far as the Clinton campaign’s decision to blame
the Russians for the publication of very damning DNC emails by WikiLeaks
just three days before the Democratic National Convention.
This blame game turned out to be a hugely successful effort to divert attention from the content of the emails, which showed in bas relief the dirty tricks the DNC played on Bernie Sanders. The media readily fell in line, and all attention was deflected from the substance of the DNC emails to the question as to why the Russians supposedly “hacked into the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks.”
This media operation worked like a charm, but even Secretary
Clinton’s PR person, Jennifer Palmieri, conceded later that at first it
strained credulity that the Russians would be doing what they were being
accused of doing.
strategic-culture |On March 17, the Russian General Staff warned about an imminent attack on Syria. The statement did
not elaborate. Of course, some information is classified but an
independent and impartial analysis of publicly available information
leads one to the same conclusion. Let’s look at the facts.
There
are warships deployed by US Navy in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and
the Persian Gulf. They are ready to launch roughly 400 long-range
Tomahawks against a target in the Middle East on any given day.
Sea-launched cruise missiles were used to strike Syria in April.
Anything that is at all related to the military operations on the island of Diego Garcia in
the Indian Ocean is hush-hush information, but it’s an open secret that
the strategic bombers based there can launch at least a hundred cruise
missiles and then use other high-precision munitions in a follow-up
attack. On average, one bomber carries 20 AGM-86 ALCMs.
Five bombers are believed to be normally stationed on this island that
is off-limits to inquisitive outsiders. This means that at least 500
cruise missiles can be fired on short notice.
On March 17, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that
Great Britain, France, and some additional countries besides the US had
special forces operating in Syria that were engaging the Syrian Army
directly. But it’s not just commandos.
It was reported on
March 16 that the UK would be stationing a significant number of troops
at the US-controlled Al-Tanf military base, adjacent to the Iraqi
border. This facility is prominently eatured
in NATO’s war planning in Syria. It blocks the corridor linking Iran to
Lebanon via Syria and Iraq. The size of the deployment — about 2,300
troops accompanied by tanks and helicopters — is too significant just to
be intended to fight Islamic State militants who are already on the
run.
politico | Even if President Donald Trump is able to reach an agreement with Kim
Jong Un, with North Korea promising to freeze or even dismantle its
nuclear program, there will always be uncertainty about possible
cheating.
Just ask Israel—which, despite having one of the world’s most
competent and aggressive intelligence services, the Mossad—nearly missed
the fact that North Korea was helping build a nuclear reactor in
next-door Syria, a country long viewed by Israel as a dangerous threat.
The American CIA missed it, too, and now, 11 years after Israeli air
force jets bombed the clandestine Syrian facility, Israel’s military
censor is finally lifting the veil of secrecy and permitting locally
based reporters to publish interviews with participants in the operation
for the first time. We spoke with dozens of former cabinet ministers,
including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as well as military and
intelligence chiefs and commanders and even some of the pilots who took
part in the operation. The codename for the Sept. 6, 2007, raid,
conducted near the remote desert city of Deir ez-Zur: “Outside the Box.”
Before today, Israel has never officially acknowledged its existence.
Years later, Israeli spooks are still raising bitter questions about
the CIA’s intelligence failure. Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo asked
in an interview with us: “Where were the Americans? North Korea is a
highly important target for them. And it still isn’t clear whether
[Syrian President Bashar] Assad was running the nuclear project, or was
it the North Koreans?” The former spy chief added that he has some
doubts that Syria was going to keep the plutonium, or perhaps it was
going to be shipped to North Korea as a supply of which the West would
be unaware. “This is a resounding failure by the Americans,” Pardo said.
Pardo’s questions raise another: If one of the best intelligence
communities in the world, and certainly the most formidable in the
Middle East, could be fooled by North Koreans and Syrians, what might
the CIA be missing? That could be true in Korea, in Iran, or almost
anywhere on Earth.
The Israeli air force raid on a secluded, unmarked building in
northeastern Syria took place—a few minutes after midnight between 5th and 6th
of September. To attack deep in enemy territory is easy, but Israel’s
American-made F-15 and F-16 jets enjoyed protection by sophisticated
electronic jamming that blinded Syria’s air defenses, and they had no
trouble dropping tons of explosives on the target and confirming
visually that it had been flattened. (Photos, many provided by Israeli
intelligence, were released by the CIA to Congress – and immediately
leaked to the media in Washington.)
The Syrian facility was almost identical to the Yongbyon nuclear
complex in North Korea that produced plutonium for nuclear bombs,
according to Israeli intelligence officials, and it was only weeks away
from beginning to produce highly radioactive materials.
ForeignPolicy | The scenario in South Sudan
is hardly unique. Something similar plays out across many African
countries torn by conflict, including the Central African Republic, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. Oil, gold, diamonds,
cobalt, copper, and a variety of other mineral deposits and trafficked
wildlife provide immense opportunity for those in power to line their
own pockets. Brutally repressing all forms of opposition is seen as the
only way to maintain control of the spoils.
Remarkably,
there is currently no coordinated strategy to disrupt the illicit
siphoning of money by leaders and their foreign business partners. For
leaders, giving up power almost certainly means losing access to their
spoils, and it might even mean facing prosecution. Every year, billions
of aid dollars pour into Africa: taxpayers and donors around the world
fund peacekeeping forces, state-building programs, humanitarian
assistance, elections, and peace processes. But none of this support has
been able to keep corrupt leaders and their network of beneficiaries from stealing billions of dollars.
Every
year, billions of aid dollars pour into Africa: taxpayers and donors
around the world fund peacekeeping forces, state-building programs,
humanitarian assistance, elections, and peace processes. But none of
this support has been able to keep corrupt leaders and their network of
beneficiaries from stealing billions of dollars.
This is the fatal flaw of peacemaking in Africa: those supporting mediation lack the leverage
necessary to stop corrupt figures from using their forces to bomb,
burn, imprison, silence, torture, starve, impoverish, kill, and rape to
maintain or gain power. South Sudanese peace talks, for example, are
currently stuck because Kiir and his allies have rejected any notion of
sharing power with the rebels, since such an arrangement would require
giving up their exclusive grip on the crudely-constructed looting
machine masquerading as a government.
For years, the tool of
choice for building leverage against actors undermining peace or human
rights has been to impose targeted sanctions. But sanctions have been
used sparingly in Africa. They have been applied to only a few
individuals at a time, with very little enforcement, and are rarely
extended to predatory commercial collaborators, both inside and outside
Africa, who facilitate and enable official misdeeds. Over time, warring
parties have come to regard sanctions as a vague annoyance for their
public relations rather than as any serious threat to their power. The
Obama and Trump administrations recently removed comprehensive sanctions
against neighboring Sudan, but were unable to extract meaningful
changes in Khartoum’s behavior. This move is a potent example of the
folly of current peace efforts in Africa, which have for the most part
eschewed the use of readily available tools for applying pressure that
are both more sophisticated and better focused.
This
standard but failing approach can change. Serious financial pressure
with real bite is not only possible; it has proved effective in the
past.
As a start, sanctions must be levied against
entire networks, not just individuals. That was the approach the United
States took with Iran and North Korea in order to drive them to the
negotiating table. The United States deployed extensive sanctions
targeting Iran’s leadership and military networks in an effort to
disrupt the illicit funding streams used by the country’s ruling elites
to maintain their grip on Iran’s economy. For example, in June 2013, the
U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s
Order, a state-owned entity that includes 37 ostensibly private
businesses located around the world, many of which were used as front
companies meant to evade sanctions. They generated and controlled
massive, off-the-books investments that they hid from both the Iranian
people and international regulators.
LATimes | Such
an approach, and the resulting film, is a manifestation of the unique
vantage point Berlanti brings to projects as a gay man. As Hollywood
continues conversations about inclusion and diversity, the distinctive
outlooks LGBTQ filmmakers bring have become a calling card. Call it the
"queer gaze."
The
"male gaze," a term coined in 1975 by film theorist Laura Mulvey,
describes how film — and art of all sorts — is created through the lens
of a heterosexual man. Such a gaze has manifested itself in
stereotypical roles for women and minorities, including the busty dumb
blond and the sassy black woman.
Over
the last couple of years, awareness has risen for an unofficial retort,
the "female gaze," as women have taken and been given more
opportunities to write and direct their own narratives with female
characters at the center. Look no further than the boom of women behind the scenes in television
— from the all-female directing teams of "Queen Sugar" and "Jessica
Jones" to the writers rooms of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "Jane the
Virgin" — for representations of women toppling patriarchal conventions.
The
"queer gaze," meanwhile, remains less known and discussed as a creative
perspective. A direct response to the oft unspoken of yet ever-present
"straight gaze," the queer gaze recognizes how lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and queer people create and view art. Moreover, it
challenges binary notions of existence and storytelling employed in many
male gaze versus female gaze conversations where the context is nearly
always heterosexual.
LATimes | I
have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans
now believe "the movie and television industries are pretty much run by
Jews," down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which
released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory
against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has
gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
How deeply Jewish is
Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los
Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild
settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President
Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish),
Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures
Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman
Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so
Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM
Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff
Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed,
this group would have not only the power to shut down all film
production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a
mikvah.
Quillette | For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews.
Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website,
explains: “the only thing in our movement that really matters [is]
anti-Semitism.” If only the Jews were gone, he argues, the white race,
freed from bondage, would immediately overcome all of its problems.
Where does this attitude come from?
Jews are a conspicuous people, small in number but large in footprint. As Mark Twain wrote in 1899:
If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one
quarter of one percent of the human race….Properly, the Jew ought hardly
to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as
prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is
extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk….What is
the secret of his immortality?
For many people throughout history, the answer to Twain’s question
was simple: Jews conspire among themselves to dominate and disadvantage
gentiles. This answer fell out of fashion, at least in polite society,
after World War II. Since the 1990s, however, the conspiratorial account
of Jewish prominence has taken on a new, more meretricious form in the
work of (now retired) California State University, Long Beach
psychologist Kevin MacDonald, known affectionately among alt-righters as
“KMac.” According to Richard Spencer, the inventor of the term
“alt-right” and unofficial leader of the movement: “There is no man on
the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around
which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald.” And: “KMac…may be the
most essential man in our movement in terms of thought leader[ship].” To
understand the alt-right’s anti-Semitism, we must understand
MacDonald’s ideas, particularly as outlined in his most influential
book, The Culture of Critique.
According to MacDonald, Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.”
Jews possess both genetic and cultural adaptations (including, on the
genetic side, high IQ and ethnocentrism) that allow them to develop
successful intellectual movements that undermine gentile society and
promote their own group continuity. “Jewish intellectual movements,”
MacDonald argues, are led by charismatic figures analogous to rabbis.
They attack white nationalism while promoting Jewish nationalism, and
use pseudoscience to “pathologize” anti-Semitism, which in reality is a
justified response to “Jewish aggression.” According to MacDonald,
Jewish intellectual movements include Freudianism, Frankfurt School
critical theory, and multiculturalism. These movements, MacDonald
claims, taught white gentiles to reject ethnocentrism and accept high
levels of nonwhite immigration to their countries while tolerating Jewish ethnocentrism and racially restrictive immigration policies in Israel.
MacDonald’s theory and the anti-Semitism of many on the alt-right are
largely reactions to the perceived liberalism of Jews. One of us
(Cofnas) has just published an academic paper that examines MacDonald’s most influential book, The Culture of Critique,
and finds that it is chock full of misrepresented sources,
cherry-picked facts, and egregious distortions of history. MacDonald and
the alt-righters are, nevertheless, correct that many liberal leaders
over the last hundred years have been Jewish. We’d like to offer an
explanation for this phenomenon, as well as determine whether Jewish
liberalism is the cause or the result of anti-Semitism.
rantt |Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center for the first time added two male supremacy groups to its hate group watch list, noting in their announcement
that “the vilification of women by these groups makes them no different
than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT
community, Muslims or Jews, based on their inherent characteristics.”
The
decision to officially track the actions of two groups espousing male
supremacy ideology comes at a time in which fringe and extremist groups
have become increasingly emboldened through many factors, such astheir
unprecedented access to key political leaders. And it also comes at a
time when these groups are affecting tangible, real-world damage—to
women, to marginalized people, to media, and to the overarching
landscape of American politics.
The
rise and embrace of male supremacy groups has yielded violence and
provably damaging anti-woman White House policies. But perhaps most
terrifying of all, groups that operate on the premise of white male
victimhood, of the equation of female empowerment and diversity to
anti-male persecution, are spreading the message that marginalized
voices are a threat to free speech that must be expunged. This ideology
of invalidating modern feminist speech is most recognizable in that
innocuous term, “political correctness” — the idea that basic demands
for respect and recognition are somehow far from basic, and rather, an
oppressive overreach; that speech in opposition to misogynistic, hateful
speech is somehow not free speech, but rather, the hate speech that it
responds to is.
The
very concept of political correctness, espoused by the same thinkers
who founded male supremacy activism, is meant to trivialize oppression,
and through that trivialization, silence, rewrite history, and make
marginalized groups vulnerable to political attacks.
CounterPunch | You may not recognize names like Amy Cuddy, Kristina Durante, or Brian
Wansink but if you listen to NPR, watch TED talks, or read popular
online news sites or local and national outlets such as the New York
Times, you have probably stumbled across their work. They are among a
growing number of academics who have produced one or more exciting,
novel, too-amazing-to-be-true research studies that have caught the
attention of the media and have been widely disseminated through
American culture to the point that we may have internalized their
findings as fact. Yet their work has since been debunked, shown to be
unscientific and irreproducible. It is all part of what has been dubbed
the “replication crisis” in science. Since replication is one of the
basic tenets of science, failure to reproduce the results of a study
(especially after several attempts) indicates a lack of support for the
original findings. How does this happen time and time again, and what
does it say about science and the news media?
Case 1 – Amy Cuddy
Amy Cuddy’s famous study on how an assertive “power pose” could
elevate testosterone levels and increase a person’s confidence and
risk-taking was published in the prestigious Psychological Science,
one of the top journals in that field. Then a professor in the Harvard
Business School, Cuddy went on to give the second most-popular TED talk
ever, sign a book deal, and travel around the world commanding huge fees
on the lecture circuit based on the general theme of her study. In the
meantime, other skeptical researchers Joe Simmons and Uri Simonsohn questioned the veracity of her claims and Eva Ranehill and collegues failed to replicate the results of the study. One of Cuddy’s co-authors, Dana Carney, has since withdrawn her support of the study, saying “I do not believe the effects are real.” But Cuddy, having voluntarily left her academic position, still stands by her work.
In truth, not only is the power pose study a replication failure, it
is a failure of peer review. No one needs a particularly specialized
expertise to see some of the problems with the study. One glance at the methods section of the paper
and you see the sample size of 42, hardly sufficient or statistically
powerful. In addition, like in many studies, specific subjective proxies
were used to indicate a much more general, supposedly objective,
finding. Here, risk taking was measured by participants’ willingness to
perform a certain gambling task. Yet one’s interest in gambling is not
necessarily directly proportional to one’s interest in other risky
activities. Further, participants’ levels of confidence were
self-reported on a scale of 1-5. Self-reporting is always error prone,
because your level of “2” may not be equivalent to my level of “2.” And
yet, all of these subjective measurements are treated as concrete
quantifiable data. Finally, the study assumed no cultural differences;
demonstrations of power or confidence might not be viewed as beneficial
and positive as they are assumed to be in the American culture.
You can see how the reliability of the study deteriorates under
scrutiny. But no study is perfect. One of the biggest problems with this
study and many similar ones is not just how unreliable the results are,
but that the results are treated as generalizable to everyone
everywhere. If Cuddy had defined the results as provisional and
contingent upon certain assumptions, and circumstances, then her
research might have been more defendable, but instead she presented her
shoddy science as universal immutable fact. This practice appears to be
too widespread.
medium | This Red Scare reboot keeps getting stranger and stranger.
In a recent discussion with Infowars‘
Alex Jones, Luis Elizondo of To The Stars Academy spoke about new video
footage of UFO phenomena recently released by the Pentagon, and says
the three videos that have been released so far comprise just a small
fraction of the strange and compelling evidence that he has accessed
personally.
“These
are just three videos now that have come out that everybody’s looking
at,” Elizondo said as Jones downed an entire pitcher of CAVEMAN True
Alpha Bone Broth Formula™ without pausing to breathe or breaking eye
contact with the camera. “But there is far more compelling evidence that
I was privy to that — you know, I think you’re looking at the tip of
the iceberg.”
“It
could be anything, so I wouldn’t rule anything out, and that’s why I
think we need to look at it,” Elizondo added. “I mean it could be
Russian. It could be Chinese. It could be little green men from Mars. We
don’t know what the hell it is.”
Oh wait, sorry, I got mixed up. That wasn’t Infowars, it was CNN.
The
mass media propaganda machine is very busy. It’s got wars to
manufacture consent for, it’s got Russia to lie about, it’s got a CIA-packed
midterm election to sell as healthy democracy, it’s got end-stage
ecocidal neoliberalism to disguise as freedom and sanity, and it’s got a
corporatist oligarchy to dress up as a constitutional representative
republic. How is it finding the time to talk about space aliens so much
all of a sudden?
Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!
theconservativetreehouse | Don’t be so blinded by the tripwire flares you fail to see the
obvious. Within the statement from Attorney General Sessions hopefully
you’ll note: “Including Under Oath”
The
IG doesn’t place the internal investigative target “under oath”. An
outside prosecutor who is assisting the IG does. Hence Attorney General
Jeff Sessions is telling us what is going on –SEE HERE– Just like he did before:
… I have appointed a person outside of Washington, many years in the
Department of Justice to look at all the allegations that the House
Judiciary Committee members sent to us; and we’re conducting that
investigation. (read more)
AG’s office confirms this is NOT the IG, but a separate “senior federal prosecutor” outside DC. https://t.co/x7OFhZB30s
hollywoodreporter | If superhero stories, as many have argued, offer a contemporary mythology, then the Fourth World Saga at the center of New Gods, ups that ante considerably. The DC Entertainment property is getting its highest profile yet, with the news that director Ava DuVernay will be tackling a film adaptation of the project for Warner Bros.
So, who are the New Gods?
Since its creation in the early 1970s, when Jack Kirby abandoned the
Marvel Universe to create something altogether new at competitors DC,
the Fourth World Saga has endeavored to tell stories on a scope that
make even the most cosmic of superhero epics seem unambitious by
comparison. Not for nothing did the first issue of 1971’s New Gods open with the gloriously melodramatic narration,
“There came a time when the old Gods died!”
Told, initially, across four separate comic book series running in
parallel — and then, in subsequent years, through even more revivals,
guest shots and graphic novels — the Fourth World Saga is a sprawling
storyline with a truly vast cast of characters that would take a long
time to fully introduce. In order to get a quick handle
on DuVernay’s film project, however, here is a brief primer on some of
the primary players.
thesaker | Assuming mankind finds a way not to destroy itself in the near future
and assuming that there will still be historians in the 22nd or 23rd
centuries, I bet you that they will look at the AngloZionist Empire and
see the four following characteristics as some of its core features:
lies, willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and hysterics. To illustrate my
point I will use the recent “Skripal nerve-gas assassination” story as it really encompasses all of these characteristics.
I won’t even bother debunking the official nonsense here as others
have done a very good job of pointing out the idiocy of the official
narrative. If you are truly capable of believing that “Putin” (that is
the current collective designator for the Evil Empire of Mordor
currently threatening all of western civilization) would order the
murder of a man whom a Russian military court sentenced to only 13 years
in jail (as opposed to life or death) and who was subsequently released
as part of a swap with the USA, you can stop reading right now and go
back to watching TV. I personally have neither the energy nor the
inclination to even discuss such a self-evidently absurd theory. No,
what I do want to do is use this story as a perfect illustration of the
kind of society we now all live in looked at from a moral point of view.
I realize that we live in a largely value-free society where moral
norms have been replaced by ideological orthodoxy, but that is just one
more reason for me to write about what is taking place precisely
focusing on the moral dimensions of current events.
I see a direct cause and effect relationship between
the denial of moral reality and the denial of physical reality. I can’t
prove that, of course, but here is my thesis: Almost from day one, the
early western civilization began by, shall we say, taking liberties with
the truth, which it could bend, adapt, massage and repackage to serve
the ideological agenda of the day. It was not quite the full-blown and
unapologetic relativism of the 19th century yet, but it was an important
first step. With “principles” such as the end justifies the means and
the wholesale violation of the Ten Commandants all “for the greater
glory of God” the western civilization got cozy with the idea that there
was no real, objective truth, only the subjective perception or even
representation each person might have thereof. Fast forward another 10
centuries or so and we end up with the modern “Gayropa” (as Europe is
now often referred to in Russia): not only has God been declared ‘dead’
and all notions of right and wrong dismissed as “cultural”, but even
objective reality has now been rendered contingent upon political
expediency and ideological imperatives.
I went on to quote George Orwell by reminding how he defined “doublethink” in his book 1984:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete
truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold
simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be
contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it
(…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to
forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes
necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is
needed, to deny the existenceof objective reality“
and I concluded by saying that “The necessary corollary from this state of mind is that only appearances matter, not reality”.
This is exactly what we are observing; not only in the silly Skripal
nerve-gas assassination story but also in all the rest of the
Russophobic nonsense produced by the AngloZionist propaganda machine
including the “Litvinenko polonium murder” and the “Yushchenko dioxin poisoning“.
The fact that neither nerve-gas, nor polonium nor dioxin are in any way
effective murder weapons does not matter in the least: a simple
drive-by shooting, street-stabbing or, better, any “accident” is both
easier to arrange and impossible to trace. Fancy assassination methods
are used when access to the target is very hard or impossible (as was
the case with Ibn al-Khattab, whose assassination the Russians were more than happy to take credit for; this might also have been the case with the death of Yasser Arafat).
But the best way of murdering somebody is to simply make the body
disappear, making any subsequent investigation almost impossible.
Finally, you can always subcontract the assassination to somebody else
like, for example, when the CIA tried and failed, to murderGrand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussain Fadlallah
by subcontracting his bombing to its local “Christian” allies, killing
over 80 innocent people in the process. There is plenty of common crime
in the UK and to get somebody to rob and stab Skripal would have
probably been the easiest version. That’s assuming that the Russians had
any reason to want him dead, which they self-evidently didn’t.
But here is the important thing: every single criminal or
intelligence specialist in the West understands all of the above. But
that does not stop the Ziomedia from publishing articles like this one “A Brief History of Attempted Russian Assassinations by Poison” which also lists people poisoned by Russians
paulcraigroberts | By now one would think that Russians, both government, media, and
public, would understand that all the West is capable of is to lie. The
purpose of the lies is to demonize Russia and to set up Russia for
military attack.
But somehow Russians can’t get the message. Russians think it is all
some kind of mistake that facts and legal processes and diplomacy can
clear up. “Please just listen to us, we can clear up all the
misconceptions!” As if the West cares. Washington wants “the
misconceptions.” That is why Washington creates them.
The inability of Russians to understand the West, which Russia
stupidly wants to join, is the reason that World War 3 is near at hand.
What if, instead of reciting the legal process and the law governing
it that the UK PM refused to follow before publicly accusing Russia
without the presentation of any evidence, the Russian UN Ambassador had
simply said: “If the UK exists tomorrow, it will be due entirely to the
forbearance of the Russian government.”
By relying on law, about which no Western country gives a hoot, the
Russian UN ambassador permitted Washington’s French puppet and other of
Washington’s European puppet states to say that they supported the
British charges against Russia despite the absence of evidence. Perhaps
the Russians noticed that none of those European governments required
any evidence that Russia was responsible. All that was required was the
accusation.
In the exceptional, indispensable Western World ruled by Washington,
accusation alone is proof of Russian mendacity. When British Labour
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn asked PM May if she actually had any real
evidence that Russia had tried to kill the former British double-agent,
Corbyn was shouted down not only by the corrupt Conservatives but also
by members of the Labour Party that he heads. How much more evidence
does Russia need that facts are not important to the West?
Will Russia wake up? Or will its demented desire to be part of the
West leave Russians unprepared for Washington’s nuclear strike, which is
coming.
NYMag | We now live in a world where the attorney general going out to dinner
with two top Justice Department officials is not only news, but a sign
that he’s rebelling against the president. As a senator, Jeff Sessions
was one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters, and he served as one of
his campaign’s top foreign-policy advisers. But the seeds of the
attorney general’s rift with the president were planted during his
confirmation hearing, when he offered up some thoughts about Russia
collusion that turned out to be not entirely accurate. Here’s how the
Trump-Sessions relationship devolved to the point that two 71-year-old
lawmakers are barely speaking, lobbing insults on Twitter, and sending
passive-aggressive messages with their choice of dinner companion.
Sessions’s Russia Contacts Are Revealed
Exactly one year ago, President Trump was basking
in the unusually positive reviews from his first address to Congress.
The very next day, we learned that Sessions met with Russian
ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least twice while working with the Trump campaign — yet during his confirmation hearing he denied, under oath, having any such contacts.
“I’m
not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said of Trump
officials’ Russia contacts, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or
two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the
Russians.”
NYTimes | Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing a recommendation to fire the former F.B.I. deputy director, Andrew G. McCabe, just days before he is scheduled to retire on Sunday, people briefed on the matter said. Mr. McCabe was a frequent target of attack from President Trump, who taunted him both publicly and privately.
Mr. McCabe is ensnared in an internal review that includes an examination of his decision in 2016 to allow F.B.I. officials to speak with reporters about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that Mr. McCabe was not forthcoming during the review, according to the people briefed on the matter. That yet-to-be-released report triggered an F.B.I. disciplinary process that recommended his termination — leaving Mr. Sessions to either accept or reverse that decision.
Lack of candor is a fireable offense, but like so much at the F.B.I., Mr. McCabe’s fate is also entangled in presidential politics and the special counsel investigation. He was involved from the beginning in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He is also a potential witness in the inquiry into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have tried to cast Mr. McCabe as part of a “deep state” that operates in secret to undermine the administration. Mr. Trump has goaded Mr. Sessions into taking action against him.
libertyblitzkrieg |When the director of the CIA, an unelected public
servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,”
“coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should.
Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a
“non-state hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at
Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about
their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by
bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings…
Words matter, and I assume that Pompeo meant his when he
said, “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in
an embassy in London. He’s not a U.S. citizen.” As a legal matter, this
statement is simply false. It underscores just how dangerous it is for
an unelected official whose agency’s work is rooted in lying and
misdirection to be the sole arbiter of the truth and the interpreter of
the Constitution.
What’s most unique about Mike Pompeo isn’t the fact he’s a terrible
human being, it’s the fact he’s so transparent and shameless about it.
This became crystal clear last April when I read the transcript of a
speech he gave at UAE-funded think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
timesofisrael | Moscow rejects accusation of responsibility for
attack on Sergei Skripal, likening it to previous attacks against
Russians on UK soil.
Moscow on Monday rejected British Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement
to parliament that it was “highly likely” Russia was responsible for
the poisoning of a former spy in Britain.
The statement was part of an “information and political campaign based
on provocation,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria
Zakharova, in comments carried by news agencies.
“This is a circus show in the British parliament,” she added.
“Rather than think up new fairy tales, maybe someone in the kingdom
could explain how the previous ones ended up — about Litvinenko,
Berezovsky, Perepilichny and many others who have mysteriously died on
British soil,” Zakharova said.
timesofisrael | The White House on Monday condemned the chemical attack on a former
Russian spy in Britain as “an outrage,” breaking a week-long silence.
“The use of a highly lethal nerve agent against UK citizens on UK
soil is an outrage,” said press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “The
attack was reckless, indiscriminate and irresponsible.”
Sanders stopped short of pointing the finger of blame at Moscow, as
British Prime Minister Theresa May did earlier in parliament.
The United States and Britain have a long-standing intelligence-sharing agreement.
When asked whether Russia was to blame, Sanders demurred: “We stand by our ally and fully support them.”
For a week, the White House had refused to comment on the attempt to
kill Sergei Skripal, who sold secrets to Britain and later moved there
in a 2010 spy swap with Russia.
wsws | An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military
operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State
Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress
in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in
US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives
on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the
military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new
Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in
the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are
actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence
background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of
ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently
clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three
tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security
Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte,
the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement
in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a
principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international
security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare,
“homeland defense” and cyber warfare.
thesaker | Russia and the USA have been at war since at least 2014 (I have been warning about this year, after year, after year).
So far, this war has been about 80% informational, 15% economic and 5%
kinetic. But this could very well change, and very suddenly. Russia has
therefore embarked on an immense effort to prepare against both a
conventional and a nuclear attack by the AngloZionist Empire. Here are
some of the measures which have been taken in this context: (partial,
non-exhaustive list!)
In response to the conventional NATO threat from the West:
Putin has ordered the re-creation of the First Guards Tank Army. This Tank Army will include two Tank Divisions (the best ones in the Russian military – 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division and the 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division),
and a total of 500+ T-14 Armata tanks. This Tank Army will be supported
by the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army (in progress). This will be what
was called a “Shock Army” during WWII and the Cold War.
The deployment of the Iskander-M operational-tactical missile system (completed)
The doubling of the size of the Russian Airborne Forces from 36’000 to 72’000 (in progress).
Creation of aNational Guard:
which will include troops of the Interior Ministry (about 170’000
soldiers), personnel from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the OMON
riot police forces (about 40’000 soldiers), the SOBR rapid-reaction
forces (about 5000+ soldiers), the Special Designation Center of the
Operational Reaction Forces and Aviation of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs including the Special Forces units “Zubr”, “Rys’” and “Iastreb”
(about 700+ operators) for a total of about 250’000 soldiers which will
probably reach the 300’000 men figure in the near future.
The procurement and deployment of advanced multi-role and air
superiority fighters and interceptors (MiG-31BM, Su-30SM, Su-35S and,
soon, the MiG-35 and Su-57).
Deployment of S-400 and S-500 air defense systems along with very long range radars.
The adoption of about 70% of new, modern, systems across all the armed forces.
In response to the ABM “encirclement” of Russia by the USA:
The deployment of the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM with hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicles
The deployment of conventionally armed very long-range cruise missiles
The deployment of a nuclear powered cruise missile with a basically unlimited range
The deployment of a nuclear powered unmanned submersible with
intercontinental range, very high speed, silent propulsion and capable
of moving a great depths
The deployment of the Mach 10 hypersonic missile Kinzhal with a 2’000 kilometer range
The deployment of a new strategic missile Avangard capable of Mach 20 velocities
This list is far from being exhaustive, there is much more missing
from it including new submarines, (air-independent propulsion,
conventional diesel-electric, nuclear attack and SSBNs), strike
aircraft, new armored vehicles of various types, new advanced (high
tech) individual soldier equipment, new artillery systems, etc. etc.
etc. But by far the most important element in the Russian readiness to
confront and, if needed, repel any western aggression is the morale,
discipline, training, and resolve of Russian soldiers (so powerfully
illustrated in several recent examples in Syria). Let’s just say that in
comparison US and EU servicemen (or their commanders, for that matter)
are not exactly an impressive lot and leave it at that.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The reality is, of course, that nobody in Russia plans for a war,
needs a war or wants a war. In fact, Russia as a country needs many more
years of (even relative) peace. First, because time is obviously on
Russia’s side and that the military balance with the USA is very rapidly
shifting in Russia’s favor. But no less important is the fact that,
unlike the USA which strives for conflicts, wars, and chaos, Russia
badly needs peace to deal with her still very numerous internal problems
which have been neglected for all too long. The problem is that the
entire US political system and economy are completely dependent on a
permanent state of war. That, combined with an imperial hubris boosted
by an increasingly vocal russophobia is a potent and potentially
dangerous mix leaving Russia no other options than “bare her fangs” and
engage in some saber rattling of her own. So will Putin’s speech be
enough to wake up the Empire’s ruling elites from their delusional
slumber?
Probably not. In fact, in the short term, it might have the opposite effect.
Remember when the Russian’s deflected Obama’s planned attack on
Syria? The US reaction was to trigger the Maidan. Sadly, I expect
something very similar will happen soon, most likely in the form of a
full-scale Ukronazi attack against the Donbass this Spring or during the
World Cup this summer. Of course, regardless of the actual outcome of
such an attack (already discussed here),
this will not in any way affect the actual correlation of forces
between Russia and the Empire. But it will feel good (Neocons love
revenge in all its forms). We can also expect further provocations in
Syria (already discussed here).
Hence and for the foreseeable future, the Russians will have to
continue on their current, admittedly frustrating and even painful
course, and maintain a relatively passive and evasive posture which the
Empire and its sycophants will predictably interpret as a sign of
weakness. Let them. As long as in the real world the actual power (soft
or hard) of the Empire continues to decline, as long as the US MIC
continues to churn out fantastically expensive but militarily useless
weapon systems, as long as US politicians are busy blaming everything on
“Russian interference” while doing nothing to reform their own,
collapsing economy and infrastructure, as long as the USA continues to
use the printing press as a substitute for actual wealth and as long as
the internal socio-political tensions in the USA continue to heat up –
then Putin’s plan is working.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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