Big Data Won't Make People Unsee the Democratic Party's Shrivelled Nakedness....,

nakedcapitalism |  It has long been the case that “Big Data” has been treated as a magical, unstoppable force that will reap power and profits for those who can channel it effectively. In the 2016 Presidential election, the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee relied heavily on Ada (named after Lord Byron’s mathematician daughter, a perfect identitarian for Clintonian Democrats, combining as she does into one symbolic person aristocratic status, the creative class, feminism and computing). Ada was the Democrats’ attempt at a Big Data Election-Winning Machine, apparently created for it in secret in a dark cave at the top of a mountain by Eric Schmidt and unknown coding slaves who were probably killed as soon as Eric carried his prize down the mountain to Hillary’s waiting arms.

That last part is made up.

But the Democrats did have Ada, which only top aides were allowed to use or even see. Very little is known about Ada, because (spoiler alert) Clinton lost and the brain trust leading the party (if you can call it that) didn’t want anyone to focus on their incompetence and wasteful spending because RUSSIA. Ada said Wisconsin was a safe state. Ada said paying Jay Z to perform would win Ohio. Ada failed, along with Clinton.

Yet now there are rumblings that there is a REAL Death Star, a Big Data system perfect in its design, malevolent in its intent, and all-powerful in its capacity to segment and manipulate every human being on Earth. (No, not the NSA – how silly of you to worry about an arm of the government!) It’s Cambridge Analytica, of which Robert Mercer, right wing hedge fund billionaire, is a major investor. That Robert Mercer, who backed Donald Trump, the crazy-haired real estate hair and game show host who won the 2016 Presidential election.

The thinking is, now that Trump has access to all that otherwise completely benign NSA data, he and Mercer can conspire to feed all of America into the gaping maw of this algorithmic monster, and manipulate otherwise good-thinking Americans into…I’m not sure, exactly. Trump already won the Presidency. The Republican Party – the party notably less aligned with Silicon Valley, although that is rapidly changing because Silicon Valley boys know to go where the money is – is already so dominant, it controls not only every branch of the Federal Government,¹ but such a large percentage of the states it only needs one or two more to call a Constitutional Convention. It did all of this without an Election-Winning Death Star.

This suggests a number of questions:

• How much should we fear Big Data?
• How much should we fear Cambridge Analytica?
• Are we on the verge having of a new, uniquely powerful propaganda tool?
• And the secret question, the one unsaid in most of these pieces: Can the Democrats get their hands on it to win back power?

The short answers are:

• A lot
• No more or less than every other Big Data operation
• No
• No

All this extensive data gathering and mining of people without their full knowledge and consent is bad. It’s bad when the NSA does it. It’s bad when Facebook does it. It’s bad when Cambridge Analytica does it. There is the potential for tremendous harm. There is also the potential (which is, to some degree, already occurring) for massive manipulation of people’s emotions in new ways. Targeted segmentation and messaging works for many purposes. Here’s a primer.

"Truth" is Whatever Those in Authority Say It Is

consortiumnews |  On Nov. 20, the Times published a lead editorial calling on Facebook and other technology giants to devise algorithms that could eliminate stories that the Times deemed to be “fake.” The Times and other mainstream news outlets – along with a few favored Internet sites – joined a special Google-sponsored task force, called the First Draft Coalition, to decide what is true and what is not. If the Times’ editorial recommendations were followed, the disfavored stories and the sites publishing them would no longer be accessible through popular search engines and platforms, essentially blocking the public’s access to them. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What to Do About ‘Fake News.’”]

On Thanksgiving Day, the Post ran a front-page story citing an anonymous group, called PropOrNot, blacklisting 200 Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com and other important sources of independent journalism, because we supposedly promoted “Russian propaganda.”

Although PropOrNot and the Post didn’t bother to cite any actual examples or to ask the accused for comment, the point was clear: If you didn’t march in lockstep behind the Official Narrative on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria, you were to be isolated, demonized and effectively silenced. In the article, the Post blurred the lines between “fake news” – stories that are simply made up – and what was deemed “propaganda,” in effect, information that didn’t jibe with what the U.S. State Department was saying.

Back then, in November, the big newspapers believed that the truth was easy, simple, obvious, requiring only access to some well-placed government official or a quick reading of the executive summary from some official report. Over the last quarter century or so, the Times, in particular, has made a fetish out of embracing pretty much whatever Officialdom declared to be true. After all, such well-dressed folks with those important-sounding titles couldn’t possibly be lying.

That gullibility went from the serious, such as rejecting overwhelming evidence that Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels were deeply involved in drug trafficking, to the silly, trusting the NFL’s absurd Deflategate allegations against Tom Brady. In those “old” days, which apparently ended a few weeks ago, the Times could have run full-page ads, saying “Truth is whatever those in authority say it is.”

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Embracing AI and Shedding Useless Humans

bloomberg |  At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours.

The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work each year by lawyers and loan officers. The software reviews documents in seconds, is less error-prone and never asks for vacation.

While the financial industry has long touted its technological innovations, a new era of automation is now in overdrive as cheap computing power converges with fears of losing customers to startups. Made possible by investments in machine learning and a new private cloud network, COIN is just the start for the biggest U.S. bank. The firm recently set up technology hubs for teams specializing in big data, robotics and cloud infrastructure to find new sources of revenue, while reducing expenses and risks.

The push to automate mundane tasks and create new tools for bankers and clients -- a growing part of the firm’s $9.6 billion technology budget -- is a core theme as the company hosts its annual investor day on Tuesday.

Behind the strategy, overseen by Chief Operating Operating Officer Matt Zames and Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy, is an undercurrent of anxiety: Though JPMorgan emerged from the financial crisis as one of few big winners, its dominance is at risk unless it aggressively pursues new technologies, according to interviews with a half-dozen bank executives.

Uber-Loving DNC Created Useless Class of Humans

easydns |  Today, the mainstream media, rather than objectively and rationally report on facts, are instead complicit in a sustained, wide-ranging campaign of demonization of “all things non-Democrat”. There is blanket categorical denial of any valid basis for why the citizenry worldwide are rejecting what they increasingly see as an “Establishment Elite” agenda.

Greece, Brexit, Trump and quite possibly soon, Marine Le Pen in France are all continuations of a theme. These events are referendums unto themselves and those “Global Elites” are on a losing streak. Instead of trying to understand the basis of these rejections (that the populace are sick and tired of having a two-tiered society in which their civil rights are eroded and they get saddled with all the debt, while the elites get to operate under a different set of rules and gobble up all the assets); they have mounted a concerted campaign of outright propaganda and mind-numbingly nonsensical narratives to dismiss away these acts of “defiance”.

As alt-market.com’s Brandon Smith commentary  observes:

“One of the most favored propaganda tactics of establishment elites and [those] they employ … is to relabel or redefine an opponent before they can solidly define themselves. In other words, elites [and their media] will seek to “brand” you (just as corporations use branding) in the minds of the masses so that they can take away your ability to define yourself as anything else.” (emphasis added)

And this is exactly what’s happening. For example, when you say “Breitbart”, your average person is so inculcated from the repetition of the words “white supremacist”, “racist”, and “ nazi” that people just assume that’s what it is. From there people think that it’s ok to #boycottshopify simply for supplying basic online ecommerce services to them (where does it stop? Btw, Breitbart derives 100% of it’s revenues from the internet, perhaps everybody in a twist about it should do us all a favour and boycott that too).

Is Breitbart really white supremacist, racist nazi hate site? Actually, no it isn’t. Most people think it is however, because they’ve been conditioned to believe it, and they’ve never actually gone there to see for themselves.

AI Will Create Useless Class of Humans

ted |  The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?

This is not an entirely new question. People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future. The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. The current scientific answer to this pipe dream can be summarized in three simple principles:

1. Organisms are algorithms. Every animal — including Homo sapiens — is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.

2. Algorithmic calculations are not affected by the materials from which the calculator is built. Whether an abacus is made of wood, iron or plastic, two beads plus two beads equals four beads.

3. Hence, there is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that non-organic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass. As long as the calculations remain valid, what does it matter whether the algorithms are manifested in carbon or silicon?

Would You Trust A Robot to Perform Surgery?

sciencefriday  |  Forget about finding the best surgeon in town. Why not undergo your operation by a robot, which has learned from the best, without the element of human error? Researchers have now developed a robot that can perform sutures and other delicate operations completely autonomously. But would you trust it? Physician Peter Kim and his colleagues recently detailed their invention, which they call the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, in Science Translational Medicine. Kim says his goal is to get the robot into hospitals nationwide by keeping the price well below the cost of the surgeon-assisted robots used today. 

technologyreview |   A robot surgeon has been taught to perform a delicate procedure—stitching soft tissue together with a needle and thread—more precisely and reliably than even the best human doctor.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), developed by researchers at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., uses an advanced 3-D imaging system and very precise force sensing to apply stitches with submillimeter precision. The system was designed to copy state-of-the art surgical practice, but in tests involving living pigs, it proved capable of outperforming its teachers.

Currently, most surgical robots are controlled remotely, and no automated surgical system has been used to manipulate soft tissue. So the work, described today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, shows the potential for automated surgical tools to improve patient outcomes. More than 45 million soft-tissue surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year. Examples include hernia operations and repairs of torn muscles.

Status Quo Token "Latino" Tops DNC Bowl With A Cluster of Democrat Floaters....,

freebeacon |  Labor Secretary Tom Perez, one of Hillary Clinton’s top choices for vice president, misrepresented his grandfather’s relationship to a Dominican dictator, according to a report.

Perez has lauded his grandfather, Rafael Brache, for “standing on the right side of history” against the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. He said that Brache was expelled for speaking out against the regime, but a new Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Brache exited the country after years of support for the regime.

“In his comments, Mr. Perez rarely, if ever, mentions that Mr. Brache was one of the dictator’s champions during at least the first five years of his repressive three-decade regime, a fact documented in dozens of cables, letters and memos in public archives in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic,” the article states.

“In addition, Mr. Perez testified in 2013 at his Senate confirmation hearing that his grandfather ‘was declared ‘non grata’ for speaking out against the dictator following the brutal massacre of thousands of Haitians’ in 1937. But in fact, Mr. Brache had left the Dominican Republic about two years earlier, according to State Department memos and media accounts at the time.”

Memos from the State Department reveal that Trujillo was angry at Brache for his inability to get a loan. A friend of Trujillo referred to Brache as a leech.

bloomberg |  Holder’s law firm, Covington & Burling, advises Uber on safety issues, according to the company. Margaret Richardson, Holder’s former chief of staff and a Covington employee, has sat on Uber’s safety advisory board since it was formed last fall.

A spokesman for Covington said Uber “is a client of the firm” and declined to make Holder available for an interview.

There’s also another link between Holder and the ride-hailing giant: Former Obama strategist David Plouffe is now a senior adviser to the company and a member of its board. Several former White House staff members have decamped to the company since Plouffe was hired.

Holder’s letters on background checks went out to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale and Paul Sarlo, the deputy majority leader of the New Jersey Senate.  Fist tap Vic.

Trump – All Words, No Action, But Good Words...,

thesaker |  In the meantime, Trump has been busy doing speeches. Which sounds pretty bad until you realize that these are good speeches, very good ones even. For one thing, he still is holding very firmly to the line that the “fake news” (which in “Trumpese” means CNN & Co. + BBC) are the enemies of the people. The other good thing that twice in a row now he has addressed himself directly to the people. Sounds like nothing, but I think that this is huge because the Neocons have now nicely boxed Trump in with advisors and aides which span from mediocre, to bad to outright evil. The firing of Flynn was a self-defeating disaster for Trump who now is more or less alone, with only one loyal ally left, Bannon. I am not sure how much Bannon can do or, for that matter, how long until the Neocons get to him too, but besides Bannon I see nobody loyal to Trump and his campaign promises. Nobody except those who put him in power of course, the millions of Americans who voted for him. And that is why Trump is doing the right thing speaking directly to them: they might well turn out to be his biggest weapon against the “DC swamp”.

Furthermore, by beating on the media, especially CNN and the rest of the main US TV channels, Trump is pushing the US public to turn to other information sources, including those sympathetic to him, primarily on the Internet. Good move – that is how he won the first time around and that is how he might win again.

The Neocons and the US ‘deep state’ have to carefully weigh the risks of continuing their vendetta against Trump. Right now, they appear to be preparing to go after Bannon. But what will they do if Trump, instead of ditching Bannon like he ditched Flynn, decides to dig in and fight with everything he has got? Then what? If there is one thing the Neocons and the deep state hate is to have a powerful light pointed directly at them. They like to play in the dark, away from an always potentially hostile public eye. If Trump decides to fight back, really fight back, and if he appeals directly to the people for support, there is no saying what could happen next.

I strongly believe that the American general public is deeply frustrated and angry. Obama’s betrayal of all his campaign promises only made these feelings worse. But when Obama had just made it to the White House I remember thinking that if he really tried to take on the War Machine and if he came to the conclusion that the ‘deep state’ was not going to let him take action or threaten him he could simply make a public appeal for help and that millions of Americans would flood the streets of Washington DC in support of “their guy” against the “bastards in DC”. Obama was a fake. But Trump might not be. What if the Three Letter Agencies or Congress suddenly tried to, say, impeach Trump and what if he decided ask for the support of the people – would millions not flood the streets of DC? I bet you that Florida alone would send more than a million. Ditto for Texas. And I don’t exactly imagine the cops going out of their way to stop them. The bottom line is this: in any confrontation between Congress and Trump most of the people will back Trump. And, if it ever came to that, and for whatever it is worth, in any confrontation between Trump-haters and Trump-supporters the latter will easily defeat the former. The “basket of deplorables” are still, thank God, the majority in this country and they have a lot more power than the various minorities who backed the Clinton gang.

There are other, less dramatic but even more likely scenarios to consider. Say Congress tries to impeach Trump and he appeals to the people and declares that the “DC swamp” is trying to sabotage the outcome of the elections and impose its will upon the American people. Governors in states like Florida or Texas, pushed by their public opinion, might simply decide not to recognize the legitimacy of what would be an attempted coup by Congress against the Executive branch of government. Now you tell me – does Congress really have the means to impose it’s will against states like Florida or Texas? I don’t mean legally, I mean practically. Let me put it this way: if the states revolt against the federal government does the latter have the means to impose its authority? Are the creation of USNORTHCOM and the statutory exceptions from the Posse Comitatus Act (which makes it possible to use the National Guard to suppress insurrections, unlawful obstructions, assemblages, or rebellions) sufficient to guarantee that the “DC swamp” can impose its will on the rest of the country? I would remind any “DC swamp” members reading these lines that the KGB special forces refused not once, but twice, to open fire against the demonstrators in Moscow (in 1991 and 1993) even though they had received a direct order by the President to do just that. Is there any reason to believe that US cops and soldiers would be more willing than the KGB special forces to massacre their own people?

Donald Trump has probably lost most of his power in Washington DC, but that does not entail that this is the case in the rest of the USA. The Neocons can feel like the big guy on the block inside the Beltway, but beyond that they are mostly in “enemy territory” controlled by the “deplorables”, something to keep in mind before triggering a major crisis.

This week I got the feeling that Trump was reaching out and directly seeking for the support to the American people. I think he get it if needed. If this is so, then the focus of his Presidency will be less on foreign affairs, were the USA will be mostly paralyzed, than on internal US politics were he still might make a difference. On Russia the Neocons have basically beat Trump – he won’t have the means to engage in any big negotiating with Vladimir Putin. But, at least, neither will he constantly be trying to make things worse. The more the US elites fight each other, the less venom they will have left for the rest of mankind. Thank God for small favors…

I can only hope that Trump will continue to appeal directly the people and try to bypass the immense machine which is currently trying to isolate him. Of course, I would much prefer that Trump take some strong and meaningful action against the deep state, but I am not holding my breath.

Tonight I spoke with a friend who knows a great deal more about Trump than I do and he told me that I have been too quick in judging Trump and that while the Flynn episode was definitely a setback, the struggle is far from over and that we are in for a very long war. I hope that my friend is right, but I will only breathe a sigh of relief if and when I see Trump hitting back and hitting hard. Only time will tell.

Leslie Wimes Burned the DNC Down On Morning Edition Today

Her article nicely states what she said to a dumbfounded interviewer on air, this morning. Establishment democrats appear to genuinely despise Ms. Wimes truth bombs and her willingness to detonating them.

sunshinestatenews |  Make no mistake about it, Keith Ellison is not the chair of the Democratic National Committee because of a combination of things.

First is the racist bigotry of a group of people who couldn't stand the thought that a Black Muslim would be leading the Democratic Party.

The Alan Dershowitzes of the Democratic Party, you know, the ones who threaten to leave, should let the doorknob hit them where the good Lord split them.

Get out. Go. Leave.

They are just as racist and bigoted as they claim Donald Trump is, yet establishment Democrats will condone their despicable behavior, and the despicable behavior of those who waged that smear campaign against Keith Ellison, all for money.

Speaking of money.

That's what drove the Clinton/Obama wing to insert into the race Tom Perez, who is nothing more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz with XY chromosomes.

Nothing will change with the DNC.

Ellison had the momentum, and the guys giving the Democrats the big bucks who also suffer from Islamophobia, had to, again, stop that at all costs.

So, like they did in Florida with Dwight Bullard and Stephen Bittel, they had to find a viable candidate to run against Ellison.

They used President Obama this time, since Podesta-stamped candidate Jaime Harrison turned out to be a big fat dud.

Let's be clear, folks.

President Obama didn't care about the DNC.

He did not give a rat's crack about the DNC.

He didn't use them in his first election, nor did he use them in his second.

He let the DNC wither on the vine. Furthermore, he left a clearly toxic Debbie Wasserman Schultz in place, after she showed she not only was losing seats across the country, but she ran a losing strategy that kept candidates away from HIM.

So this newfound love of President Obama's for the DNC isn't passing the smell test with me.

He was helping someone out all right, but it wasn't the DNC.

When 2018 rolls around and Democrats get crushed, the establishment will blame everyone and everything except its own blind greed.

Establishment Democrats have clearly gotten comfortable with losing, as long as they maintain their position and power within the rotting party.

And make no mistake, it is rotting from the head, just like a fish!

Real War on Drugs = War on the Deep State

The situation is this: PhDs in the Philippines flip hamburgers, and they are very lucky to get even that job.  Ten elite families basically control 90% of the country's wealth, and the entire economy is based on sending workers(probably 20% of the population), to foreign countries, to wire money back home. (like Mexico?)

How long before economic conditions in the U.S. mirror this state of affairs?

Instead of fueling our own street violence and funding the drug cartels in Mexico and the Opium farmers in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle (Intelligence Community Drug Dealing). Executing high-level drug dealers, manufacturers and traffickers is the only way to wage a "war on drugs". No nation has ever successfully fought drug manufacturing and importation without a death sentence for the perpetrators. (This would literally entail specifically targeted extrajudicial war against the Intelligence and Banking Communities)

Drug pushing and manufacture, like any other business, is a network. A loosely hierarchical network. If you are going to carry out what essentially amount to extra-judicial killings, then there needs to be targeted executions.

This is the major problem in developing countries, and in a place like the Philippines.

The system is so utterly disorganized, that there is a large amount of [ultimately unacceptable] collateral damage.

The number of executions in this case is extremely high, and is focused primarily on the deterrent effect of slaughtering lowest level peasant drug-addicts and pushers. If such a policy is carried out over an extended period of time, and the underlying (Manufacture/Import/Money Laundering) supply chains remain intact, then public malaise can set in - without ever damaging the root cause network underlying the problem.

This is dangerous, as the policy can in the future be rolled back, with re-distribution beginning rather quickly [the growth in demand will more than pay back for any lost earnings for the real drug-supplier networks].

So the policy must be short, sharp, and to-the-point. Head shots, and head shots only - taking out the thought and profit leadership of the supply networks.

This requires a lot of research and planning.

This latter aspect is totally missing from the Philippines scenario.

Hence the exorbitant body count.

Better to cut off the specific, high-level nodes on the supply and profit-chains of the network, than to blindly shoot at anything in sight, totally missing the key networks and causing a LOT of collateral damage.

Anything else is merely window dressing for low information political followers.

The low-level drug-war in the U.S. is a perfect long-term example of the exact failure to wage real war against the top-level nodes on the drug supply and profit chain.

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109. 

Low-information "Just say no" Drug Warriors refuse to process these facts.

The American Drug War has been the most intractable, anti-science exercise in all-pervading State Oppression in American history. At best, an entirely inappropriate over-reaction targeting the low-hanging fruit users and dealers; at worst, a fear-driven witch-hunt driven by superstition, corruption, and cynically partisan fascist political advantage.

Fascism is capitalism plus murder.

Presidential Agent II (1944), ISBN 1-93131-318-0 

I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be more effective and responsive for the Philippine universal health care system (yes, they have one) to simply provide the methamphetamine users with prescriptions for Dexedrine or Desoxyn, to pull them out of the street life of chasing shabu on the black market and replace it with a stable daily regimen under medical supervision.

It's entirely possible that most of the shabu users have undiagnosed ADD; it's a rarely discussed fact that the vast majority of "normal people" don't like the effects of psychostimulants, particularly when taken over a protracted period of time (except for Nazis)

Although the way it plays out in the USA, once someone has a meth conviction or rehab on their record, their physicians are strongly discouraged from prescribing amphetamines to them- because that would mean they're "using" again. So while they might have been effectively self-medicating undiagnosed ADD with an illegal stimulant (albeit without medical supervision, in a criminal environment, and very often overusing the substance while concommitantly abusing alcohol)- once they get pulled into the criminal justice system or mandated rehab, thereafter, as a rule, they're practically forbidden from ever receiving a similar substance from a physician as an ADD treatment.

100 Strange Russian Deaths - Deep State Hitting Licks

anthraxvaccine |  Vitaly Churkin, Russia's UN ambassador since 2006,  died unexpectedly at age 64 in the consulate, two days ago.  And while it was said initially that Churkin died of a heart attack, that is not the case, according to his autopsy.

He is the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly in 3 months.  Turkish ambassador Karlov was shot at an art exhibition in December, Soviet Foreign Ministry officer Polshikov was shot in his Moscow apartment in December, Indian ambassador Kadakin died "from illness" in January, and Greek consul Malanin's death in January is unexplained. 

Putin's chauffeur is the sixth politically important Russian to die recently and suspiciously. 

Don't forget that on Christmas day, a Russian military jet went down over the Black Sea, killing 60 members of the Red Army choir and 33 others.

Sergei Krivov, said to be a security officer, died in the Russian consulate in NY on election day 2016 from an undisclosed cause, possibly head trauma.

The video of Putin's chauffeur crashing and dying (passenger less) looked like no ordinary wreck.

And here is another odd coincidence:  none of the western mainstream media have reported this spate of Russian diplomat deaths, at least not with my Google search.

Hapless Peasant Guilty of Getting Setup and Running His Mouth Reckless

theintercept |  THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE announced the first FBI terror arrest of the Trump administration on Tuesday: an elaborate sting operation that snared a 25-year-old Missouri man who had no terrorism contacts besides the two undercover FBI agents who paid him to buy hardware supplies they said was for a bomb — and who at one point pulled a knife on him and threatened his family.

Robert Lorenzo Hester of Columbia, Missouri, didn’t have the $20 he needed to buy the 9-volt batteries, duct tape, and roofing nails his new FBI friends wanted him to get, so they gave him the money. The agents noted in a criminal complaint that Hester, who at one point brought his two small children to a meeting because he didn’t have child care, continued smoking marijuana despite professing to be a devout Muslim.

One of the social media posts that initially caught the FBI’s attention referred to a group called “The Lion Guard.” Hester told one of the undercover agents the name came from “a cartoon my children watch.”

But according to the DOJ press release, Hester had plans to conduct an “ISIS-sponsored terrorist attack” on President’s Day that would have resulted in mass casualties had it succeeded.

News reports breathlessly echoed the government’s depiction of Hester as a foiled would-be terrorist. But the only contact Hester had with ISIS was with the two undercover agents who suggested to him that they had connections with the group. The agents, who were in contact with him for five months, provided him with money and rides home from work as he dealt with the personal fallout of an unrelated arrest stemming from an altercation at a local grocery store.

Hester, who had briefly enlisted in the U.S. Army before being discharged in 2013, had posted images of weapons and a flag sometimes associated with terrorist groups on a social media platform. He had also written “Burn in hell FBI” and “Brothers in AmurdiKKKa we need to get something going here all those rednecks have their little militias why shouldn’t we do the same.” In another post, he asserted that ISIS was created as part of a conspiracy by the United States and Israel.

Deconstruction of the Administrative State Will Require Unending Daily Battle

WaPo |  Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s reclusive chief strategist and the intellectual force behind his nationalist agenda, said Thursday that the new administration is locked in an unending battle against the media and other globalist forces to “deconstruct” an outdated system of governance.

In his first public speaking appearance since Trump took office, Bannon made his comments alongside White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus at a gathering of conservative activists. They sought to prove that they are not rivals but partners in fighting on Trump’s behalf to transform Washington and the world order.

“They’re going to continue to fight,” Bannon said of the media, which he repeatedly described as “the opposition party,” and other forces he sees as standing in the president’s way. “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”

Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.

“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said. He posited that Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history.”

When Argentina Elected a Populist President - Some Companies Left the Country

NPR |  A charismatic populist president in Argentina wanted to boost manufacturing and create jobs. So she told companies that if they wanted to sell their products in Argentina, they had to build them there, too.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Ten years ago, Argentina was in a situation that may sound a bit familiar. The country had just elected a populist president, Cristina Kirchner, with big plans for their economy. Kirchner wanted to control imports and exports and bring manufacturing to Argentina, so she placed huge tariffs on items made overseas. For some products, she said, if you want to sell this in Argentina, you'll have to make it in Argentina. One of those items was the cell phone. Stacey Vanek Smith from our Planet Money podcast has the story.

STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Cristina Kirchner's made-in-Argentina rule drove some companies away. Apple stopped selling iPhones in Argentina, but other companies played ball, including the company that made Blackberry phones.

HUGO BONOFACCINI: In Argentina, everybody was crazy for BlackBerry.

Good Only for Rotting Fish - CIA's Newspaper Wrapping Itself in Patriotism and Service...,

spokesman |  Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a fourth-generation military man, deployed twice to Afghanistan. The second time, as a 22-year-old Marine corporal in 2010, he led an eight-man infantry team into combat. Two of his men were wounded by enemy sniper fire, and one of his best buddies later died in combat.

Now President Trump says Thomas is an enemy of the American people.

Thomas, a Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post, was so labeled, along with everybody else in the media, by the commander in chief on Friday. “The FAKE NEWS media,” Trump tweeted, “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

I asked my colleague, who went to Georgetown University on the G.I. Bill before joining the Post two years ago, how it felt to be called an enemy of the country he volunteered to serve in combat.

“It’s alarming, like a bunch of other things these days,” Thomas said. “It also feels like bait.”

And Thomas isn’t taking the bait. Like the rest of us, he’s keeping his head down and doing his job.

Trump’s Stalinist labeling of the media is his latest attempt to delegitimize the structures of civil society, following similar attacks on the courts and the intelligence community. We in the press are an easy mark because we’re already held in low esteem. In this case, the charge, using the universal language of autocrats, probably shouldn’t be dignified with a refutation: To be forced to make the case that a free press isn’t the enemy of a free people is to fight on Trump’s terms.

Enemy or Friend of the Deep State - It's ALWAYS About the MONEY!!!

theatlantic |  Ben Rhodes, one of Barack Obama’s top advisers, once dismissed the American foreign-policy establishment—those ex-government officials and think-tank scholars and journalists in Washington, D.C. who advocate for a particular vision of assertive U.S. leadership in the world—as the “Blob.” Donald Trump had harsher words. As a presidential candidate, he vowed never to take advice on international affairs from “those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.” Both men pointed to one of the Beltway establishment’s more glaring errors: support for the war in Iraq.

Now the Blob is fighting back. The “establishment” has been unfairly “kicked around,” said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former official in the Reagan administration. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, President Harry Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, “invented a foreign policy and sold it successfully to the American people. That’s what containment was and that’s what the Truman Doctrine was. … That was the foreign-policy establishment.” During that period, the U.S. government also helped create a system for restoring order to a world riven by war and economic crisis. That system, which evolved over the course of the Cold War and post-Cold War period, includes an open international economy; U.S. military and diplomatic alliances in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East; and liberal rules and institutions (human rights, the United Nations, and so on).

WaPo |   Security Minister Ben Wallace said in support of the bill: “We need to make the UK a hostile environment for those seeking to move, hide and use the proceeds of crime and corruption. In an increasingly competitive international marketplace, the UK simply cannot afford to be seen as a haven for dirty money.” He added, “They all have expensive properties in London and think they are untouchable.”

Not only cutting off but also exposing the flow of money outside Russia, the result of widespread graft, should be part and parcel of our countermeasures to check Russian assault (physical and otherwise) on democracies.

Beyond that, Congress should consider a financial-crimes bill that would provide tools to seize assets of Russian and other foreign plutocrats who abscond with millions upon millions of dollars, thereby contributing to the misery of the Russian people. Vladimir Putin’s friendly oligarchs do not support Putin for ideological reasons. It’s about the money — and the more effective the West can be in depriving them of the fruits of their ill-gotten gains, the better.

The Deep State Lies About the Deep State

strategic-culture |  The «deep state» is the aristocracy and its agents. Wikispooks defines it as follows:

The deep state (loosely synonymous with the shadow government or permanent government) is in contrast to the public structures which appear to be directing individual nation states. The deep state is an intensely secretive, informal, fluid network of deep politicians who conspire to amplify their influence over national governments through a variety of deep state milieux. The term «deep state» derives from the Turkish »derin devlet», which emerged after the 1996 Susurluk incident so dramatically unmasked the Turkish deep state.

Nothing that’s alleged here is denying that there are divisions within the aristocracy (or «deep state»). Nothing is alleging that the aristocracy are «monolithic.» It’s instead asserting that, to the extent the aristocracy are united around a particular objective, that given objective will likely become instituted, both legally and otherwise, by the government — and that, otherwise, it simply won’t be instituted at all. This is what the only scientific analysis that has ever been done of whether or not the U.S. is controlled by an aristocracy found definitely to be the case in the U.S.

(And, of course, that’s also the reason why this momentous study was ignored by America’s ‘news’ media, except for the first news-report on it, mine at the obscure site Common Dreams, which had 414 reader-comments within just its first four months, and then the UPI’s report on it, which, like mine, was widely distributed to the major ‘news’ media and rejected by them all — UPI’s report was published only by UPI itself, and elicited only two reader-comments there. Then came the New Yorker’s pooh-poohing the study, by alleging «the politicians all know this, and we know it, too. The only debate is about how far this process has gone, and whether we should refer to it as oligarchy or as something else.» Their propagandist ignored the researchers’ having noted, in their paper, that though their findings were extremely inconsistent with America’s being a democracy, the problem was almost certainly being understated in their findings: «The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy is all the more striking because it goes against the likely effects of the limitations of our data,» and, especially, «our ‘affluent’ proxy is admittedly imperfect,» and so, «interest groups and economic elites actually wield more policy influence than our estimates indicate.»

In fact, their «elite» had consisted not of the top 0.1% as compared to the bottom 50%, but instead of the top 10% as compared to the bottom 50%, and all empirical evidence shows that the more narrowly one defines «the aristocracy,» the more lopsidedly dominant is the ‘elite’s relative impact upon public policies. Then, a month after the press-release on their study was issued, the co-authors were so disappointed with the paltry coverage of it that had occurred in America’s ‘news’ media, so that they submitted, to the Washington Post, a reply to their study’s academic critics, «Critics argued with our analysis of U.S. political inequality. Here are 5 ways they’re wrong.» It was promptly published online-only, as obscurely as possible, so that there are also — as of the present date — only two reader-comments to that public exposure. This is typical news-suppression in America: essentially total suppression of samizdat information — not merely suppression of the officially top-secret information, such as propagandists like Ambinder focus upon. It’s deeper than the state: it is the deep state, including far more than just the official government.)

the false promise of black political representation (REDUX from 6/12/15)

theatlantic |  The recent unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, and other cities is puzzling in one important respect. Unlike in earlier eras, when African Americans’ political exclusion drove them to protest, blacks today are as likely to vote as whites and are well represented at all levels of government. The mayor of Baltimore and a majority of its city council are black. So are forty-five members of Congress—an all-time high. And, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, so is the current occupant of the White House. Why all the turmoil, then, at a time when blacks—finally—seem to be enjoying the fruits of American democracy?

One answer is that the appearance of black political clout is deceiving. Despite their gains in participation and representation, blacks continue to fare worse than whites in converting their policy preferences into law. This poor performance is more revealing than statistics on turnout or black electoral success. And even though its causes remain mysterious, it is very much a rationale for frustration with the status quo. 

In a recent study, I analyzed group political power at the federal and state levels. At the federal level, I relied on a remarkable database compiled by Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens. It includes responses to thousands of survey questions from the last few decades. Crucially, it also tracks whether each policy referred to by a question was adopted by the federal government over the next four years. At the state level, I measured people’s ideologies using exit polls that asked whether they are liberal, moderate, or conservative. And I assessed state laws using an index of overall policy liberalism created by another pair of scholars. 

At both levels, I found that blacks hold much less sway than whites. For example, a federal policy with no white support has only a 10 percent chance of being enacted, while one with universal white support has a 60 percent shot of adoption. But while a proposal with no black support has a 40 percent chance of becoming law, one enjoying unanimous approval has only a 30 percent probability of enactment. In other words, as support for a policy rises within the black community, the odds of it being achieved actually decline.  

Likewise, whether most black voters are conservative or liberal, state legislative outcomes barely budge. But vary the views of white voters to an equivalent degree, and a state’s policies go from looking like Alabama’s to resembling Michigan’s, even controlling for black and white population size.

The story is similar for several other groups. The more that women, the poor, or Hispanics support a federal policy, the less likely the policy is to be enacted. Strikingly, as women move from universal opposition to a proposal to universal support, its odds of adoption plummet from 75 percent to 10 percent. Changes in the ideology of female or poor voters also have no effect on state legislative outcomes (although shifts in the views of Hispanic voters do). In contrast, both federal and state laws are acutely sensitive to the preferences of whites, men, and the rich.

How India Became Bill Gates De-Monetization Guinea Pig

norberthaering |  Microsoft’s Bill Gates is one of the richest and most influential people on earth. He announced in 2015 that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was aiming at achieving full digitalization of the payment systems of India and other populous developing countries by 2018. This “financial inclusion” program for India dates back to well before Narendra Modi came to power. It was elevated to official US policy by Executive Order in 2012, because the President saw vital US security interests are at stake.

Speaking for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at the “Financial Inclusion Forum” in Washington, organized by the Treasury Department and USAID on December 1, 2015, Bill Gates said (min 17): 

“Full digitalization of the economy may happen in developing countries faster than anywhere else. It is certainly our goal to make it happen in the next three years in the large developing countries. We have very significant efforts in Nigeria, Pakistan and India, (and) a dozen other countries, where we work with the central banks to make sure that the right kind of transaction switch is available…(min 20)…We worked directly with the central bank there (India) over the last three years and they created a new type of authorization called the payments bank, and those customers will be able to use their mobile phones to perform basic financial transactions. And 11 entities applied, including all the mobile phone providers, and were granted that payment bank status.”  

"Financial Inclusion" was defined by PayPal-CEO Dan Schulman in an interview during the forum as:

“Financial Inclusion is a buzz word for bringing people into the system.”

The cooperation of the Gates foundation and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is and has been a very tight one. Nachiket Mor, a “Yale World Fellow”, is head of the Gates Foundation India. He is also a board member of the RBI, with responsibility for financial supervision. He chaired the RBI Committee on the Licensing of Payment Banks and a financial inclusion committee that the RBI convened in 2013.

+++Note: Since this text puts forward a conspiracy theory, I want to let the actors and their documents speak  for themselves as much as possible. Where my own judgement and additional information figure in significantly, as in the following lines, it will be in italics and clearly marked. If you are skeptical, you may want to jump over those sections in italics in a first round, to not be unduly influenced in your interpretation of the quotes from the main actors and their documents.

If the cooperation of Gates Foundation and RBI had been ongoing already for three years in early December 2015, this implies a start in late 2012 or early 2013. This would be more than a year before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India. It would also have been almost two years, before Modi visited Barack Obama, told him about his plans to do something for financial inclusion and receive the happy message that the US was willing to help. It would have started three years before the partnership of USAID and the Indian Finance Ministry on financial inclusion was officially announced at that same forum and five years before the RBI and Narendra Modi performed the great and brutal experiment of starving the whole of India of cash for months. All this time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was quietly working closely and directly with the RBI towards Gates’ declared goal of making the Indian payment system totally cashless by the end of 2018. He did so with backing and involvement of the US-government and with help of allies such as the World Economic Forum.+++

Gates' quotes stood in a context where he stressed that a government’s assistance to the poor and needy should not be delivered by the “incredibly inefficient” method of providing cash or grain to the recipient. “Digitalization helps targeting”, he said, if payments are done via mobile banking. He praised Mexico (min 18), whose Finance Minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, was present, announcing: 

“We are going to use government income support programs as financial inclusion tools”,

as tools to bring everybody into the system. The idea endorsed by Gates and the financial inclusion “community” at the forum was to steer poor people into participating in the digital payment system by making it a condition for receiving any or certain forms of support.

Battlefield America: The War on the American People

rutherford |  Here’s a truth few Americans want to acknowledge: nothing has changed (at least, not for the better) since Barack Obama passed the reins of the police state to Donald Trump.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, relentless pace under President Trump as it did under President Obama.

Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip, shoot and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials are no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace. Indeed, they continue to keep the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families. Nationwide, SWAT teams continue to be employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activities or mere community nuisances including angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession. With more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans for relatively routine police matters and federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions, the incidence of botched raids and related casualties continue to rise.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police. Police forces continue to be transformed into heavily armed extensions of the military, complete with jackboots, helmets, shields, batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, assault rifles, body armor, miniature tanks and weaponized drones. In training police to look and act like the military and use the weapons and tactics of war against American citizens, the government continues to turn the United States into a battlefield.

Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners. School districts continue to team up with law enforcement to create a “schoolhouse to jailhouse track” by imposing a “double dose” of punishment for childish infractions: suspension or expulsion from school, accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, the paradigm of abject compliance to the state continues to be taught by example in the schools, through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior.

For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense. States continue to outsource prison management to private corporations out to make a profit at taxpayer expense. And how do you make a profit in the prison industry? Have the legislatures pass laws that impose harsh penalties for the slightest noncompliance in order keep the prison cells full and corporate investors happy.

Censorship hasn’t stopped. First Amendment activities continue to be pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state. The courts continue to be dominated by technicians and statists who are deferential to authority, whether government or business. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years have most often been characterized by an abject deference to government authority, military and corporate interests. They have run the gamut from suppressing free speech activities and justifying suspicionless strip searches to warrantless home invasions and conferring constitutional rights on corporations, while denying them to citizens.

Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals. The average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day, thanks to an overabundance of vague laws that render otherwise innocent activity illegal, while reinforcing the power of the police state and its corporate allies.

The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether it’s your local police, a fusion center, the National Security Agency or one of the government’s many corporate partners, is still monitoring and tracking you.

The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers. Under the pretext of protecting the nation’s infrastructure (roads, mass transit systems, water and power supplies, telecommunications systems and so on) against criminal or terrorist attacks, TSA task forces (comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams) continue to do random security sweeps of nexuses of transportation, including ports, railway and bus stations, airports, ferries and subways, as well as political conventions, baseball games and music concerts. Sweep tactics include the use of x-ray technology, pat-downs and drug-sniffing dogs, among other things.

Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the NDAA. These laws—which completely circumvent the rule of law and the constitutional rights of American citizens, continue to re-orient our legal landscape in such a way as to ensure that martial law, rather than the rule of law, our U.S. Constitution, becomes the map by which we navigate life in the United States.

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” Is the DHS capable of plotting and planning to turn the national guard into a federalized, immigration police force? No doubt about it. Remember, this is the agency that is notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad. America’s expanding military empire continues to bleed the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour). The Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. Yet what most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense.

The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government continues to be the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our so-called representatives. It’s every facet of a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep. In fact, many Americans have been so carried away by their blind rank-and-file partisan devotion to their respective political gods that they have lost sight of the one thing that has remained constant in recent years: our freedoms are steadily declining.