It has said only that it will brief the press on Thursday and that the discovery has been made by the Kepler space telescope. It also said that Google has been involved in the breakthrough discovery.
But beyond that it said very little. Still, some clues give us a little insight into what the major announcement might be about to actually reveal.
Perhaps the strangest and most mysterious thing about the announcement – at least, beyond what the announcement actually is – is the fact that Google is involved.
"The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google," the otherwise mysterious and not very detailed announcement reads. "Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analysing Kepler data."
Nasa and Google haven't talked about this focus on machine learning much before, so it's not clear how exactly it's being used and to what purpose. But we can have a decent guess: Google is expert at using artificial intelligence to find patterns and learn like a human, and it's probably using the technology to sort through the data being sent by Kepler to pick out things that are of interest.
TheAtlantic | The email about “a most peculiar object” in the solar system arrived in Yuri Milner’s inbox last week.
Milner,
the Russian billionaire behind Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million
search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, had already heard about
the peculiar object. ‘Oumuamua barreled into view in October, the first interstellar object seen in our solar system.
Astronomers
around the world chased after the mysterious space rock with their
telescopes, collecting as much data as they could as it sped away. Their
observations revealed a truly unusual object with puzzling properties.
Scientists have long predicted an interstellar visitor would someday
coast into our corner of the universe, but not something like this.
“The
more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder
whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an
alien civilization,” Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy
department and one of Milner’s advisers on Breakthrough Listen, wrote in
the email to Milner.
A
day later, Milner’s assistant summoned Loeb to Milner’s home in Palo
Alto. They met there this past Saturday to talk about ‘Oumuamua, a
Hawaiian word for “messenger.” Loeb ran through the space rock’s
peculiarities, particularly its elongated shape, like a cigar or
needle—an odd shape for a common space rock, but ideal for a ship
cruising through interstellar space.
For Milner, the object was becoming too intriguing to ignore. So he’s decided to take a closer look.
Breakthrough Listen announced
Monday that the program will start checking ‘Oumuamua this week for
signs of radio signals using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
The interstellar asteroid is now about twice the distance between the
Earth and the sun from our planet, moving at a brisk clip
of 38.3 kilometers per second. At this close distance, Green Bank can
detect the faintest frequencies. It would take the telescope less than a
minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a
cellphone. If ‘Oumuamua is sending signals, we’ll hear them.
motherjones | Later in the review, Magnet summarizes The Dream and the Nightmare, which he wrote in the 90s:
In that book, I argued that the counterculture’s remaking
of mainstream white American culture in the 1960s — the sexual
revolution; the fling with drugs…the belief that in racist America, the
criminal was really the victim of society…[etc.] — all these attitudes
that devalued traditional mainstream values trickled down from young
people and their teachers in the universities, to the media, to the
mainstream Protestant churches, to the ed schools, to the high schools,
and finally to American culture at large.
And when these
attitudes made their way to the ghetto, they destigmatized and validated
the already-existing disproportionate illegitimacy, drug use, crime,
school dropout, non-work, and welfare dependency there, and caused the
rate of all these pathologies to skyrocket startlingly in the 1960s and
beyond.
….Aghast at the minority-crime explosion that rocked not just the
ghettoes but much of urban America, voters began electing officials,
especially in New York, who believed that the real victim of a crime was
the victim, not the criminal — who ought to be arrested and jailed — and crime fell accordingly.
In other words, blacks today have no cause to blame their troubles on
anyone but themselves. Unless they want to blame it on lefty
counterculture. This is pretty putrid stuff, and I don’t feel like
taking it on right now. Instead, I’m going to change the subject so
suddenly you might get whiplash.
Here we go: it’s hardened beliefs like this that make it so hard for
many people to accept the lead-crime hypothesis that I’ve written about frequently and at length. A lot of teen pathologies did
start to skyrocket in the 60s, but the primary cause was almost
certainly lead poisoning. Certainly lead was the proximate cause of
increases in crime, teen pregnancy, and school dropout rates. And these effects were
more pronounced among blacks than whites, because blacks lived
disproportionately in areas with high levels of lead. The opposite is
true too: the decline in these pathologies starting in the 90s was due
to the phaseout of lead in gasoline.
In theory, none of this should be too hard to accept. The evidence is
strong, and given what we know about the effects of lead on brain
development, it makes perfect sense. In practice, though, if lead
poisoning was the primary cause of the increase in various pathologies
in the 60s and beyond, then the counterculture wasn’t. And if the
phaseout of leaded gasoline was responsible for the subsequent decline,
then the EPA gets the credit, not tough-on-crime policies. And that
can’t be tolerated.
On the left, the problems are similar. Liberals tend to dislike
“essentialist” explanations of things like crime rates because that
opens the door to noxious arguments that blacks are biologically more
crime prone than whites. As it happens, lead poisoning isn’t truly an
essentialist explanation, but for many it’s too close for comfort. And
anyway, liberals have their own explanations for the crime wave of the
60s: poverty, racism, easy availability of guns, and so forth.
nydailynews |
Campaigning against Alabama’s lightning-rod Senate candidate Roy Moore,
a leading Democrat called on President Trump to resign over sexual
harassment claims several women have made against him.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made the comments at a weekend campaign
appearance in Alabama for Democratic candidate Doug Jones, who is locked
in a tight race against Moore, the Republican nominee facing his own
allegations of sexually abusing minor girls.
“I just watched Sen. Al Franken (inset left) do the honorable thing and
resign from his office,” Booker told Vice News. “My question is, why
isn’t Donald Trump doing the same thing — who has more serious
allegations against him, with more women who have come forward.”
Franken (D-Minn.) announced Thursday he would be resigning from the
Senate in the “coming weeks” after eight women accused him of either
groping or trying to kiss them.
breitbart | Booker’s efforts to push inaccurate information about both Moore and
Trump—and his decision to use a Jones campaign event to call for Trump’s
resignation as president of the United States—only serve to undermine
Jones’ efforts to win the election in Alabama. Jones has already had a
tough time claiming he is a moderate who can work with Republicans, and
he is literally running television ads right now claiming he is not a
radical leftist Democrat, despite his record on the issues.
But when his surrogates are pushing for President Trump’s removal
from office—and they consider this election a referendum on whether
Trump should remain president—it makes it much easier for Moore to
publicly support Trump’s agenda and note that Jones is a radical leftist
who will oppose the president at every turn. It also helps President
Trump’s criticisms of Jones on the issues, for which he has many, and
Trump’s call for Alabamians to back Moore for the Senate resonate
further in Alabama.
Booker may have just blown whatever slim chance Jones has left, and
if Moore does end up pulling through and winning on Tuesday as expected
now, Booker may have just handed the moral high ground back to Trump and
Moore and the anti-establishment by making this a referendum on Trump’s
presidency.
NYTimes | It’s a legitimate observation. It’s also a dead end. Turnabout may be fair play, but it’s foul morality. It’s also foolish politics. Mirroring the ugliness of white nationalists and the alt-right just gives them the ammunition that they want and need.
Which is precisely what some fevered activists at Evergreen State College did when they shouted down a white biology professor and the school’s white president, who stood there as one woman screamed: “Whiteness is the most violent system to ever breathe.” (I deleted the profanity between “violent” and “system.”)
It’s what an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware did with a Facebook post saying that Otto Warmbier — the American student who was imprisoned in North Korea, came home comatose and died soon after — “got exactly what he deserved.” The professor wrote that like other “young, white, rich, clueless white males” in the United States, Warmbier thought “he could get away with whatever he wanted.”
Meanwhile a professor at Trinity College in Hartford used his Facebook page to post an incendiary story about the Republican lawmakers who found themselves under gunfire on an Alexandria, Va., baseball field. Its headline included the language “let them die,” a phrase that the professor also folded into a hashtag accompanying a subsequent Facebook post.
Thanks in large part to social media, which incentivizes invective and then magnifies it, our conversations coarsen. Our compasses spin out of whack. We descend to the lowest common denominator, becoming what we supposedly abhor. I’m regularly stunned by the cruelty that’s mistaken for cleverness and the inhumanity that’s confused with conviction.
berkeley | Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than
800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC
Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and
created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re
connected.
“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to
account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in
response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC
Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.
Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an
island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion
between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement
and adoration,” Keltner said.
“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because
everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a
doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences
are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”
“Our hope is that our findings will help other scientists and
engineers more precisely capture the emotional states that underlie
moods, brain activity and expressive signals, leading to improved
psychiatric treatments, an understanding of the brain basis of emotion
and technology responsive to our emotional needs,” he added.
nautil.us | A more optimistic view would expect us to learn the cultural habits
of being part of a collective intelligence—better able to share, listen,
or take turns. It would hope too that we can learn the wisdom to cope
with opposites—to understand suspicion as necessary for truth, fear for
hope, and surveillance for freedom.
It’s
tempting to link possible future evolutions of collective intelligence
to what we already know of evolution. John Maynard Smith and Eörs
Szathmary offered one of the best summaries of these processes when they
described the eight main transitions in the evolution of complexity in
life. These were the shift from chromosomes to multicellular organisms,
prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, plants to animals, and simple to sexual
reproduction. Every transition involved a new form of cooperation and
interdependence (so that things that before the transition could
replicate independently, afterward could only replicate as “part of a
larger whole”), and new kinds of communication, ways of both storing and
transmitting information.
It’s entirely plausible that future
evolutions of intelligence will have comparable properties—with new
forms of cooperation and interdependence along with new ways of handling
communication that bring with them deeper understanding of both the
outer as well as inner world. The idea of an evolution of consciousness
is both obvious and daunting. It is obvious that consciousness does
evolve and can in the future. But social science fears speculation, and
much that has been written on this theme is either abstract or empty. We
see in films and novels visions of machines with dramatically enhanced
capacities to calculate, observe, and respond. They may be benign or
malign (they’re more interesting when they are evil), but we can grasp
their implications when we see them scanning emotions on faces, shooting
down swarms of attacking missiles, or manipulating complex networks to
direct people.
NewYorker | Still, the force works selectively. “I, of all people, am aware that
there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has
bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval
Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for
the Senate with the full support of his party,” said Franken, referring
to Donald Trump and the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. Trump and Moore are immune because the blunt irresistible force works only on the other half of the country.
That half is cleaning its ranks in the face of—and in clear reaction
to—genuine moral depravity on the other side. The Trump era is one of
deep and open immorality in politics. Moore is merely one example.
Consider Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican who won his
congressional race earlier this year after not only being captured on
tape shoving a newspaper reporter but then also lying to police about it. Consider the tax bill,
which is stitched together from shameless greed and boldface lies.
Consider the series of racist travel bans.
Consider the withdrawal from a series of international agreements aimed
at bettering the future of humanity, from migration to climate change to
cultural preservation. These are men who proclaim their allegiance to
the Christian faith while acting in openly hateful, duplicitous, and
plainly murderous ways. In response to this unbearable spectacle, the
roughly half of Americans who are actually deeply invested in thinking
of themselves as good people are trying to claim a moral high ground.
The urge to do so by policing sex is not surprising. As Susan Sontag
pointed out more than half a century ago, Christianity has “concentrated
on sexual behavior as the root of virtue” and, consequently, “everything
pertaining to sex has been a ‘special case’ in our culture.”
NYTimes | “I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.”
This irony reveals the limits of the #MeToo movement. This week, Time magazine named those who’ve spoken out against sexual harassment — collectively called “The Silence Breakers” — as its Person of the Year. “When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former ‘Today’ show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door,” the cover article says. In truth, however, this new door is open for only some people — those whose harassers are either personally or professionally susceptible to shame.
Since October, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was outed as a serial sexual predator and shunned by the social worlds he once ruled, an astonishing number of powerful and famous men have been fired and disgraced. It sometimes feels as if we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution where the toll of sexual harassment on women’s lives and ambitions will finally be reckoned with.
But the revolution is smaller than it first appears. So far, it has been mostly confined to liberal-leaning sectors like entertainment, the media, academia, Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party. It hasn’t rocked the Republicans, corporate America or Wall Street — with some exceptions — because these realms are less responsive to feminist pressure.
CNBC | Finally, it's important to remember that the actions that constituted
serious misconduct several years ago are not the same as they are now.
The resignations of Sen. Al Franken and Rep. Trent Franks on Thursday
seem to be much more the result of something closer to a new
zero-tolerance policy on harassment and lower-level assault.
That doesn't excuse
Franken, Franks, Ford or anyone else recently ensnared in this wave of
scandals. And there's a lot to be said for holding our elected leaders
to a much higher standard on this issue. But it's also fair to say that
Wall Street may have only purged itself from the most egregious examples
of bad behavior toward women based on standards from the 1990s or even
the early 2000s.
That's the assessment financial journalist Susan Antilla,
author of the groundbreaking book, "Tales From the Boom-Boom Room: The
Landmark Legal Battles that Exposed Wall Street's Shocking Culture of
Sexual Harassment." Antilla has recently spoken out
about how she believes Wall Street has made strides to battle
harassment over the past two decades, but adds that bias still very much
exists.
In a world where sitting
senators and congressmen can be forced out in a matter of days over
unproven allegations, that means Wall Street is still very vulnerable.
This is something everyone from the lawyers fighting for Goldman Sachs
in federal court to the H.R. departments at every other big firm need to
realize.
Getting back to Ford, it's important to note he isn't going quietly.
"I have never forcibly grabbed any woman or man in my life," Ford said
in a statement released Thursday. In an even more telling comment, a
lawyer for Ford said that, "Morgan Stanley has still not told Harold
directly of his termination, and unlike every other circumstance I've
been in, the company has refused to provide me with a reason. This all
demonstrates how this was a matter of convenience during a
hyper-sensitive time and not based on real facts."
Those comments stand as
very strong proof that rules are already starting to change on Wall
Street. If the standards for Ford are extended industry wide, expect a
dozen or so managing partners and higher-level executives to be ousted
in the coming year.
Once the dust settles
from those firings and resignations, Wall Street will have to join
Congress, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Main Street in a major
re-evaluation of its workplace rules. Anyone who thinks we're even
halfway through this process is fooling themselves.
CNN | What did Franks do, you ask? Let's let Franks tell you himself. Here's an excerpt from his statement announcing his resignation:
"Due
to my familiarity and experience with the process of surrogacy, I
clearly became insensitive as to how the discussion of such an intensely
personal topic might affect others.
"I
have recently learned that the Ethics Committee is reviewing an inquiry
regarding my discussion of surrogacy with two previous female
subordinates, making each feel uncomfortable. I deeply regret that my
discussion of this option and process in the workplace caused distress."
Um, what?
So, here's how the Franks statement -- in meticulous detail -- casts how this whole thing came about:
1.
He and his wife had problems conceiving and carrying a baby to term.
(Franks notes in the statement his wife had three miscarriages.)
2. Eventually they found a woman to be a surrogate. That woman gave birth to twins.
3.
He and his wife wanted more children. So did their kids. ("We
continued to have a desire to have at least one additional sibling, for
which our children had made repeated requests," writes Franks.)
4. He discussed the possibility of surrogacy with two women who worked for him.
theintercept | The Trump transition team — in the form of key Trump advisers Kushner
and Flynn — reached out to the Russian government in order to undermine
the U.S. government because the Israeli government asked them to.
Where’s the outrage? How is the sheer “scope and audacity” of the
Trump-Netanyahu backchannels — to quote one U.S. official who spoke to
me on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak
publicly on this issue — not a bigger story? For a start, as University
of Chicago law professors Daniel Hemel and Eric Posner argued in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, the much-mocked Logan Act
of 1799 remains “a serious criminal statute that bars citizens from
undermining the foreign policy actions of the sitting president.” These
two legal scholars point out that “if Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act,
then so did the ‘very senior’ official who directed his actions. If that
official is Mr. Kushner, then Mr. Kushner could go to jail.”
Then there is the issue of Middle East policy itself. It wasn’t
outsourced to the Israelis by Trump and Co. only during the transition
or only over settlements. The outsourcing has continued in office.
Tomorrow, Trump is expected to announce
that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel — another key Israeli demand that every single previous
president, Republican and Democrat, has resisted. The decision on
Jerusalem is so contentious that it both undermines any chance of reviving the peace process and threatens to cost lives — not just those of Israelis and Palestinians, but of Americans too.
thesoundingline | The logical next question that sprung to mind was: “how has the
average age of members of Congress changed since its inception?”
The cynic might suspect that, in addition to being increasingly
disliked and out of touch, Congress may be getting increasingly old. It
should come as little surprise that that is exactly the case. The two
charts below show the average age of serving members of the House of
Representatives and the Senate every year since 1789 (the few members
whose birth dates are unknown were excluded). Both charts show the
unmistakable trend toward an older and older Congress. Remarkably, the
average age in the House of Representatives has surged from around 52 in
1995 to its all-time high of nearly 60 today and the average age in the
Senate is even higher at nearly 65.
It would be baseless to say that seniority, and the experience that
it brings, should be viewed negatively across the board as there have
been great leaders much older than 65. Yet, when taken within the
context of Congress’s dismal approval rating, the overwhelming feeling
of Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and the
fact that members of Congress are serving for longer and longer, the
aging of Congress does not seem emblematic of a healthy institution. To
the contrary, it seems symptomatic of an insular and out of step group
that is failing to create a relevant vision for America.
In nearly all ways: technological, social, and economical, we are
living in a rapidly changing world. It seems that perhaps the only thing
that isn’t changing is the people’s representation in Congress.
thesoundingline | Perhaps most principle on the list of grievances against Congress is
the sentiment that they simply don’t get anything done. Any bill, no
matter how routine, is hijacked by an increasingly insular, partisan,
and corrupt political class. Bills are so full of divergent add-ons,
riders, and pet projects that they become so long that it is often
physically impossible for any single person to read them before the vote
is held. If one could read them, it would be impossible to reconcile
the opposing elements of the bill to permit anything resembling a
principled vote. It has often been said that it is the fate of republics
to devolve into oligarchies as power is consolidated by a few corrupt
families who hold it for too long.
This begs the following question whose answer may explain the
increasingly insular, partisan, and unproductive nature of Congress. Are
members of Congress trending to serving longer terms?
To answer that question, we have compiled a database of every member
of Congress every year since 1789. Using this database it is possible to
determine, for every year, the number of years each member of Congress
had previously served.
Having accounted for the careers of over 13,000 Congress men and
women, over a period of 227 years, we are able to chart the average
years served, or ‘tenure’, of the House of Representatives and the
Senate every year from 1789 until today.
As you might suspect, and as the charts below testify, there has been
an unmistakable trend towards Representatives and Senators serving more
and more terms. Until the start of the 20th century, the
average years served in the House was typically less than four years,
equivalent to about two terms. After that, the average tenure started to
rise dramatically, hitting a high of 12 years or six terms in 2008. The
Senate follows a similar trend going from four to five years (a single
term is six years) for the first 100 plus years of American history to a
high of about 15 years (nearly three terms) in 2008.
DailyMail |Location-based apps like Tinder have transformed the dating world.
But how will technology help us find Mr or Mrs Right 25 years from now?
According to a new report, the future of romance could lie in virtual reality, wearable technology and DNA matching.
These
technologies are set to take the pain out of dating by saving single
people time and effort, while giving them better matches, according to
the research.
Students from Imperial College London were commissioned by relationship website eHarmony.co.uk to produce a report on what online dating and relationships could look like by 2040.
They put together a report based on analysis of how people's lifestyle habits have evolved over the past 100 years.
Washington | Imagine a bottle of laundry detergent that can sense when you’re
running low on soap — and automatically connect to the internet to place
an order for more.
University of Washington researchers are the first to make this a reality by 3-D printing plastic objects and sensors that can collect useful data and communicate with other WiFi-connected devices entirely on their own.
With CAD models
that the team is making available to the public, 3-D printing
enthusiasts will be able to create objects out of commercially available
plastics that can wirelessly communicate with other smart devices. That
could include a battery-free slider that controls music volume, a
button that automatically orders more cornflakes from Amazon or a water
sensor that sends an alarm to your phone when it detects a leak.
“Our goal was to create something that just comes out of your 3-D
printer at home and can send useful information to other devices,” said
co-lead author and UW electrical engineering doctoral student Vikram Iyer.
“But the big challenge is how do you communicate wirelessly with WiFi
using only plastic? That’s something that no one has been able to do
before.”
MIT | MIT engineers have devised a 3-D printing technique that uses a new kind of ink made from genetically programmed living cells.
The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of
stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells
can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive
structures and devices.
The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living
tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells
in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells
sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound. When the patch
is adhered to skin that has been exposed to the same compounds,
corresponding regions of the tree light up in response.
The researchers, led by Xuanhe Zhao, the Noyce Career Development
Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Timothy Lu,
associate professor of biological engineering and of electrical
engineering and computer science, say that their technique can be used
to fabricate “active” materials for wearable sensors and interactive
displays. Such materials can be patterned with live cells engineered to
sense environmental chemicals and pollutants as well as changes in pH
and temperature.
What’s more, the team developed a model to predict the interactions
between cells within a given 3-D-printed structure, under a variety of
conditions. The team says researchers can use the model as a guide in
designing responsive living materials.
Zhao, Lu, and their colleagues have published their results today in the journal Advanced Materials.
The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Xinyue Liu, Hyunwoo Yuk,
Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada, Tzu-Chieh Tang, Eléonore Tham, and
postdoc Cesar de la Fuente-Nunez.
See, I thought global private "security" would be part of Rex Tillerson's portfolio, but evidently Exxon is compromised on multiple fronts and multiple levels:
theintercept | Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his
Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged
program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for
money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private
funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized.
“They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their
operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed
on the fundraising efforts.
Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of
Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their
intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they
hoped would be a broader program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to
provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then
hire Amyntor for economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that
some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign
intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.
“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the
previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they
were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a
person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To
support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at
the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon
and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential
donors he also had evidence McMaster used a burner phone to send
information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus
owned by George Soros.
Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel
in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure
communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters
came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one
person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another
source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that
the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a
year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said
they were protecting the president.”
Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.
Counterpunch | With the Senate and House all but assured to pass the $4.5 trillion
in tax cuts for businesses, investors, and the wealthiest 1% households
by the end of this week, phases two and three of the Trump-Republican
fiscal strategy have begun quickly to take shape.
Phase two is to maneuver the inept Democrats in Congress into passing
a temporary budget deficit-debt extension in order to allow the tax
cuts to be implemented quickly. That’s already a ‘done deal’.
Phase three is the drumbeat growing to attack social security,
medicare, food stamps, medicaid, and other ‘safety net’ laws, in order
to pay for the deficit created by cutting taxes on the rich. A whole new
set of lies are resurrected and being peddled by the media and
pro-business pundits and politicians.
Counterpunch | Pay no attention to the ongoing palace intrigue. Mueller’s
investigation will at most act as a speed bump of sorts. Don’t mistake
symptoms for the disease. Should the President or one of his minions be
dismissed they will almost certainly be replaced by another donor class
proxy. There’s no shortage of political mercenaries (in either party)
willing to ply us with carefully crafted distortion.
Despite internecine squabbles the majority of lawmakers in congress can all agree on more military spending, more surveillance, more
money for corporate executives… and less for everyone else. And so a
parade of talking heads trot out the usual pleasant fiction about
trickle-down economics. And it is fiction. Corporate leaders have openly
conceded they have no intention
of creating jobs or raising wages with money attained through tax cuts.
They’re simply going to take it and pass it on to their shareholders.
This is what happens when business interests call the shots. Society ends up in a place where three oligarchs own as much as the bottom half of society and allegations of Russian “interference” somehow overshadow the reality of a billion dollar presidential race which is funded heavily by concentrated sources of private power.
Counterpunch | By associating success (e.g. physical, emotional, financial, etc.)
with evolutionary value, this ideology ignores historical structures of
power and inequality and distorts the public’s understanding of their
true conditions.
When people come to believe individuals’ conditions are determined
solely by their genetics, or by how hard they fight to survive,
impoverished people are seen as lacking the abilities or motivation to
reach a privileged place in society, while privileged people are seen as
having the abilities which brought them their success.
The origin and history of this phrase, which understandably misleads
people, explains why there is this deep-seeded psychological inclination
to equate “fittest” to the best.
The phrase is often and incorrectly attributed to the father of
evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and though Darwin did use this
language later in his life, the phrase was actually coined by Herbert
Spencer — an English philosopher, sociologist, and social Darwinism’s
most enthusiastic proponent.
Spencer believed that Darwin’s biologic theory of evolution could be
applied to society, arguing that social transformation was a progressive
process leading to more perfect human beings and social formations. He
claimed that if people should struggle or die because of their
conditions, it was because they were not biologically fit enough to
achieve a better position in life.
“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world
of them, and make room for better … If they are sufficiently complete
to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not
sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die”
[10]. He used this system of thought to theorize about the evolutionary
benefits of warfare and to justify a laissez faire approach to the
economy as well.
Prominent American philosophers, theologians, scientists, and
politicians espoused and popularized Spencer’s ideas. Andrew Carnegie,
who at the time was the richest man in America, and Edward Youmans, the
founder of the magazine Popular Science, were among his
American admirers. “Successful business entrepreneurs apparently
accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to
portray the conditions of their existence.” [6]
Countless instances of social Darwinist messaging can still be
observed in our media. Publications like The Economist (where Spencer
was once an editor), The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, provide examples of this.
theintercept |The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation
that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure
Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members
of the Trump administration.
The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept
on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter
perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince
denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request
for comment.
“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.
Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be
opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said
she was unaware.
Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.
“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random
person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.
And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.
“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.
A White House official later told
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed
pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the
president himself was briefed.
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