Tribal Animosity Fuels The Insatiable Social Media Dopamine Buzz....,

pnas |  There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.

According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, a Facebook research team warned the company in 2018 that their “algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” This research was allegedly shut down by Facebook executives, and Facebook declined to implement changes proposed by the research team to make the platform less divisive (1). This article is consistent with concerns that social media might be incentivizing the spread of polarizing content. For instance, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has expressed concern about the popularity of “dunking” (i.e., mocking or denigrating one’s enemies) on the platform (2). These concerns have become particularly relevant as social media rhetoric appears to have incited real-world violence, such as the recent storming of the US Capital (3). We sought to investigate whether out-group animosity was associated with increased virality on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter.

A growing body research has examined the potential role of social media in exacerbating political polarization (4, 5). A large portion of this work has centered on the position that social media sorts us into “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” that selectively expose people to content that aligns with their preexisting beliefs (6⇓⇓⇓⇓–11). However, some recent scholarship questions whether the “echo chamber” narrative has been exaggerated (12, 13). Some experiments suggest that social media can indeed increase polarization. For example, temporarily deactivating Facebook can reduce polarization on policy issues (14). However, other work suggests that polarization has grown the most among older demographic groups, who are the least likely to use social media (15), albeit the most likely to vote. As such, there is an open debate about the role of social media in political polarization and intergroup conflict.

Other research has examined the features of social media posts that predict “virality” online. Much of the literature focuses on the role of emotion in social media sharing. High-arousal emotions, whether they are positive (e.g., awe) or negative (e.g., anger or outrage), contribute to the sharing of content online (16⇓⇓⇓–20). Tweets expressing moral and emotional content are more likely to be retweeted within online political conversations, especially by members of one’s political in-group (21, 22). On Facebook, posts by politicians that express “indignant disagreement” receive more likes and shares (23), and negative news tends to spread farther on Twitter (24). Moreover, false rumors spread farther and faster on Twitter than true ones, especially in the domain of politics, possibly because they are more likely to express emotions such as surprise and fear (25).

Yet, to our knowledge, little research has investigated how social identity motives contribute to online virality. Group identities are hypersalient on social media, especially in the context of online political or moral discussions (26). For example, an analysis of Twitter accounts found that people are increasingly categorizing themselves by their political identities in their Twitter bios over time, providing a public signal of their social identity (27). Additionally, since sharing behavior is public, it can reflect self-conscious identity presentation (28, 29). According to social identity theory (30) and self-categorization theory (31), when group identities are highly salient, this can lead individuals to align themselves more with their fellow in-group members, facilitating in-group favoritism and out-group derogation in order to maintain a positive sense of group distinctiveness (32). Thus, messages that fulfill group-based identity motives may receive more engagement online.

 

Is Somebody Hiding A "Secret" Bad White Boi Who Could Bring White Supremacist Sexy Back?!?!?

medium |  I rage against all of you, white, Christian nationalists; against Republicans who think voter suppression is somehow good for America. I rage against anyone who thinks that talking about how our country’s 245 years of hating on Black people is somehow divisive.

Why wasn’t red-lining divisive? Why wasn’t segregation divisive? Why wasn’t Trump’s support for white nationalists divisive? Why aren’t the suppressive laws designed to prevent minorities from voting divisive? How can asking these questions be divisive?! How can you melt so readily, snowflake, when all we do is ask these questions?

I know how: because my fellow white brothers and sisters are weak. They are whiners and spoiled. They are sore losers. The Republican Party builds its power base on divisiveness and hate because it is a failed political movement. It is intellectually bankrupt offering absolutely zero for the solving of our most pressing problems.

Many of my more hateful white brothers and sisters are suffering economically; and, while Democrats try to, say, slow the concentration of wealth that causes debilitating income inequality, the Republicans obstruct them thus preventing any legislation, or programs, from passing that might actually help Main Street. Then, rather than blame their failed polices for the suffering of their constituents, policies which only benefit the super rich, they say things like “racism against white Americans” is the cause. They blame critical race theory, which really no one but Fox, and the dumbest of the dumb in the Republican Party, is talking about.

I am raging. I rage against ignorance and my fellow white brothers and sisters who choose hate over love. No Black person is taking your job. Your refusal to think makes you feel they are. You insistence on voting for Republicans makes you think they are. If you dared to challenge the lies of the Republicans, of Fox News, you would see that what you suffer from is not related to race. It is related to class.

The problem is, they have you so perfectly worked up into a hateful froth that you are blinded. You are destroying us. You are embarrassing the rest of us white folks.

Turn off your Fox News and dare to think for yourselves white people before evolution decides we are not needed and made obsolete.

It Is A Thought Crime To Confabulate Black Nationalism And Critical Race Theory

mdcbowen  |  It is this idea of a zero-sum game of liberty that misguides many Americans into believing that double standards are necessary for ethnic minorities. Not a few of them enjoy the halo they think they’ve earned by confessing their racist sins, encouraging all of us to follow suit, like some kind of perverted collectivist alter call. That’s not the worst of it.

Part of the worst of it is the kind of stilted tyrannical leadership such blinded thinking inevitably generates. For if you think you’ve identified the problem and ossify its priorities into political correctness, you end up policing thought rather than liberating it. This ought to be one object lesson of the failures of black nationalism itself, something many have attended to thoroughly. The necessity of being the top black dog led to a dog eat dog world. Murder is murder. Ask the ghost of Bunchy Carter. Why indeed is there no black nationalist leadership in America today? Why wasn’t it the programmatic agenda of the National Urban League that invented and funded the research behind Critical Race Theory? Such national organizational unity was not necessary. Indeed unity gets in the way of diversity. So we should be thankful and we should be about trust-busting when it comes to the reinvigoration of freedom. Freedom wants to be free and no one should be slaves to ideological conformity. Everyone knows how they are held back, and they must push accordingly. The price of freedom varies for every man. There will never be a singular plan to solve the problem once and for all. 

However there will be an incremental plan, which will be sold just like Tide detergent. It promises to make you cleaner if you just buy in for your family. Then if enough families buy and put the sticker on their minivans, then you’ll have a clean vanguard. That’s what the Wokies consider themselves - the newest, latest and greatest who have always been at war with racist Eurasia, since Obama left office.

It is not ironic that the same existential dilemma is in effect for other moral agents. There’s nothing quite so pathetic as some Boomer who tells you how important it was that they marched with Dr. King. It has become something of a cliche, a buffalo nickel, an anachronism whose value has deflated over time. And yet it is clear to me that MLK’s vision was superior to that of the miserable Wokies and their neo-racist Critical Theorist enablers. Misery loves company, but it absolutely worships theoretical ideological company.

Is There A Common Cultic Language Pattern And Praxis?

newrepublic |  Among L. Ron Hubbard’s most pressing concerns was a singular problem: how to get his followers to turn their nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Like a Californian Hamlet, the founder of Scientology pondered the dilemma of “to be or not to be” and settled on beingness. There was no real basis for Hubbard’s morphological experiments, as linguist Amanda Montell explains in her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism; he simply “liked the sound of technical jargon.” So much so, in fact, that he published two extensive Scientology dictionaries filled with thousands of terms, many of which were borrowed (and subsequently mangled) from fields like psychology and software engineering “to create the impression that Scientology’s belief system was rooted in real science.”

Hubbard also wanted to establish, through language, a clear way of demarcating believers from nonbelievers (or, sorry—“suppressive persons”). A nonbeliever, for instance, would very likely struggle to parse the following exchange without the aid of Montell’s annotations:

“How are you doing?”

“I’ve been a bit out ruds [rudiments: tired, hungry, or upset] because of a PTP [present time problem] with my second dynamic [romantic partner] because of some bypassed charge [old negative energy that’s resurfaced] having to do with my MEST [Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, something in the physical universe] at her apartment.”

While this all comes across as profoundly idiosyncratic, Montell says there is in fact nothing unique or special about Scientology’s fascination with language. “The most compelling techniques” espoused by cults have had “little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or ‘Kool-Aid,’” says Montell. As she breaks down the glossary of terms espoused by members of QAnon, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, and even Crossfit, Montell says it is language that can best clue us in as to whether an organization we have joined is a cult or is at least engaging in cultlike behavior to extract resources out of its members. She develops a taxonomy of “cultish” linguistic tendencies from “the crafty redefinition of existing words” (i.e., calling a gym a “box” for no real reason), thought-terminating clichés (labeling good-faith doubts and concerns as “limiting beliefs”), and monikers that establish an us-versus-them binary (the “truth seekers” versus “sheeple” of QAnon).

Montell’s first book, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language (2019), explored everything from the history of sexist slurs like skank and hussy to the gendered assumptions about what it means to “speak with authority.” With Cultish, Montell is still writing about feminism, arguing that many of these organizations often target working-class and minority women who, feeling failed by capitalism, begin looking for some semblance of a social safety net. Nearly half of the victims of the Jonestown massacre were Black women, she points out, and the majority of people working for multilevel marketing companies are unemployed women living in blue-collar towns. An empathetic listener, Montell takes careful note of the empty words that cult members turn to for solace. Though written in punchy and fun prose style, Cultish is more than a fascinating guide to the workings of cults; it’s also an infuriating window into just how starved people have been made to feel for community and structures of collective care. 

Googling "Largest Teacher's Union Says Critical Race Theory" Reveals The "Hit Dog" In This Dispute

nationalreview |   "The attacks on anti-racist teachers are increasing, coordinated by well-funded organizations such as the Heritage Foundation. We need to be better prepared to respond to these attacks so that our members can continue this important work,” the item says, noting that the Heritage Foundation has pledged to reject CRT.

“Woke teachers unions have been put on notice that Americans will not stand for their racist CRT ideology,” Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson told The Federalist. “Now those same unions are funding a coordinated misinformation campaign to retaliate against Heritage Action and the Heritage Foundation for our defense of American students, parents, and teachers. But the American people will not be deterred, and their smear campaign will ultimately fail.”

The measure is not the union’s first foray into “social justice” — it supports Black Lives Matter and encourages teachers to sign a “pledge to grow the movement for racial justice in education.”

“We are working tirelessly to dismantle systems of oppression that prevent children from accessing a great public education because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, or nationality,” the NEA’s website says.

The union also lauds its commitment to forming partnerships “to build equitable systems” and offers links to resources on topics such as “Confronting White Nationalism,” “anti-racist” video “primers,” and “implicit bias” training.

Farmer Brown Fitna Play You With A Centralized Myth And Localized ___________________?

thehill |  President Biden promised to unify a fractured country. At the same time, his administration pledged to usher in a new era of transparency. Following the release of a highly anticipated government report on UFOs, Biden has a rare opportunity to live up to both commitments.

The UFO report prompted a flurry of bipartisan calls for a robust, open-minded investigation into these perplexing phenomena. If members of Congress can set aside seemingly intractable differences to take this issue seriously, the Biden administration – and the American public – should take note.

Beyond acknowledging that intelligence analysts are thoroughly stumped by mysterious objects – some of which appear to exhibit remarkable technology in restricted airspace – the report marks an extraordinary shift in how the government perceives UFOs. After seven decades of deflection, ridicule and brushing aside such encounters, the Pentagon is following in Congress’s footsteps and taking such phenomena seriously. Very seriously.

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Moreover, by demanding the report, Congress stumbled upon an issue that can unite Americans of all political stripes. Indeed, if strong, bipartisan statements on these encounters are any indicator, the UFO mystery could ultimately transcend the deep polarization of the post-Trump era.

America, after all, is at its best when it is united by curiosity about the unknown.

To that end, the Biden administration should declassify some basic, non-sensitive information, focusing on objects that seem to exhibit remarkable technology.

Of 143 unexplained encounters, 18 involved “unusual” “movement patterns or flight characteristics.” According to the report, analysts are attempting to determine if these objects demonstrated “breakthrough technologies.” This aligns with reporting by the New York Times that some of these craft accelerated, changed direction and submerged in seemingly extraordinary ways.

The report’s equivocation on these perplexing encounters stands in stark contrast to former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s unambiguous comments that “there are technologies that we don’t have and frankly that we are not capable of defending against.

According to Ratcliffe, intelligence analysts “ruled out” weather incidents, visual disturbances, foreign adversaries or ultra-secret U.S. technology as possible explanations for the most exotic phenomena.

If Ratcliffe’s statements are accurate, this is an extraordinary development. More to the point, the Biden administration has a rare opportunity to live up to its pledges to restore transparency and national unity. It can begin by releasing a numbered list of the report’s 18 “unusual” encounters alongside the intelligence community’s preliminary confidence levels (low, medium or high) that each object exhibited some sort of “breakthrough technology.”

Democracy Dies In Darkness...,

caitlinjohnstone |  We also caught a strong whiff of this new trend in the near-total blackout on the Hunter Biden October surprise last year, which only went mainstream because it stood to benefit one of America’s two mainstream political factions. After the New York Post first broke the story we saw mainstream media figures publicly explaining to each other why it was fine not to cover it with reasoning that was all over the map, from it’s a waste of time to it’s just too darn complicated to it’s not our job to research these things to the Washington Post’s notorious “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”

Anyone who dared publicize the leaks anywhere near the mainstream liberal echo chamber was bashed into submission by the herd, and without any legitimate reason it was treated like a complete non-story at best and a sinister Russian op at worst. And then, lo and behold, in April of this year Hunter Biden acknowledged that the leaks could very well have come from his laptop after all, and not from some GRU psyop.

And I think that whole ordeal gives us some answers into this disturbing new dynamic of complete blackouts on major news stories. Last year The Spectator‘s Stephen L Miller described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton’s 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to be uncritical of Trump’s opponent and suppress any news stories which might benefit them.

“For almost four years now, journalists have shamed their colleagues and themselves over what I will call the ‘but her emails’ dilemma,” Miller writes. “Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server and spillage of classified information have been cast out and shunted away from the journalist cool kids’ table. Focusing so much on what was, at the time, a considerable scandal, has been written off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a Clinton scandal when they should have been highlighting Trump’s foibles. It’s an error no journalist wants to repeat.”

The Lie And The Cover-up Only Ever Magnify The Heinousness Of The Crime...,

medialens  |  As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.

A major witness in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricat­ing key accusati­ons in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. These dramatic revelations emerged in an extensive article published on 26 June in Stundin, an Icelandic newspaper. The paper interviewed the witness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, who admitted that he had made false allegations against Assange after being recruited by US authorities. Thordarson, who has several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and financial fraud, began working with the US Department of Justice and the FBI after receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution. He even admitted to continuing his crime spree while working with the US authorities.

Last summer, US officials had presented an updated version of their indictment against Assange to Magistrate Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser at the Old Bailey in London. Key to this update was the assertion that Assange had instructed Thordarson to commit computer intrusions or hacking in Iceland. 

As the Stundin article reported:

‘The aim of this addition to the indictment was apparently to shore up and support the conspiracy charge against Assange in relation to his interactions with Chelsea Manning. Those occurred around the same time he resided in Iceland and the authors of the indictment felt they could strengthen their case by alleging he was involved in illegal activity there as well. This activity was said to include attempts to hack into the computers of members of [the Icelandic] parliament and record their conversations.

‘In fact, Thordarson now admits to Stundin that Assange never asked him to hack or access phone recordings of MPs.’

Judge Baraitser’s ruling on 4 January, 2021 was against extradition to the US. But she did so purely on humanitarian grounds concerning Assange’s health, suicide risk and the extreme conditions he would face in confinement in US prisons.

The Stundin article continued:

‘With regards to the actual accusations made in the indictment Baraitser sided with the arguments of the American legal team, including citing the specific samples from Iceland which are now seriously called into question.

‘Other misleading elements can be found in the indictment, and later reflected in the Magistrate’s judgement, based on Thordarson’s now admitted lies.’

The Stundin article further details Thordarson’s lies and deceptions, including mispresenting himself as an official representative of WikiLeaks while a volunteer in 2010-2011, even impersonating Assange, and embezzling more than $50,000 from the organisation.

By August 2011, Thordarson was being pursued by WikiLeaks staff trying to locate the missing funds. In fact, Thordarson had arranged for the money to be sent to his private bank account by forging an email in Assange’s name. That month, Thordarson sought a way out by contacting the US Embassy in Iceland, offering to be an informant in the case against Assange.

2021 Fourth Of July Open Thread...,

Civic Virtue Is Dead In America...,

charleshughsmith  |  Though no one dares confess this publicly, America is now a moral cesspool. As a result, the moral legitimacy of the nation’s leadership has been lost. Every nook and cranny of institutionalized America is dominated by self-interest, and much of the economy is controlled by profiteering monopolies and cartels which wield far more political power than the citizenry.

Civic virtue has been lost. What remains is elite self-interest masquerading as civic virtue.

In his Farewell Address, President Carter explained that "The national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests. We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility."

Social cohesion, civic virtue and moral legitimacy are the foundation of every society, but they are especially important in composite states.

America is a composite state, composed of individuals holding a wide range of regional, ethnic, religious and class-based identities. The national identity is only one ingredient in a bubbling stew of local, state and regional identities, ethnic, cultural and religious identities, educational/alumni, professional and tradecraft identities, and elusive but consequential class-based identities.

Composite states are intrinsically trickier to rule, as there is no ethnic or cultural identity that unifies the populace. Lacking a national identity that supersedes all other identities, composite states must tread carefully to avoid fracturing into competing regional, ethnic or cultural identities.

Composite states must establish a purpose-based identity that is understood to demand shared sacrifice, especially in crisis. In the U.S., the national purpose has been redefined by the needs of the era, but never straying too far from these core unifying goals: defending the civil liberties of the citizenry from state interference, defending the nation from external aggressors, and serving the common good by limiting the power of special interests and privileged elites.

We've failed to limit the power of privileged elites, failed to demand greater sacrifices of the wealthy in exchange for power, and so the moral legitimacy of the regime has been lost. And with the ascendance of self-interest and the elite's abandonment of sacrifice, social cohesion has been lost.

This loss is reflected in the bitter partisanship, the increasingly Orwellian attempts to control the mainstream and social media narratives, the debauchery of "expertise" as dueling "experts" vie for control, the fraying of social discourse, the substitution of virtue-signaling for actual civic virtue, the institutionalization of white-collar crime (collusion, fraud, embezzlement, etc.), the increasing reliance on Bread and Circuses (stimulus, Universal Basic Income) as real opportunity dissipates, and the troubling rise in shootings, crime, random violence and plummeting marriage and birth rates.

The unraveling of social cohesion has consequences. Once social cohesion unravels, the nation unravels.

Future Good Jobs: Not About Technology As Much As Corrupt Law And Tax Policy

technologyreview  |  A major question is not whether there will be enough jobs but whether there will be enough good jobs—jobs that provide middle-class earnings, safe working conditions, legal protections, social protections, and benefits (e.g., unemployment and disability benefits, health benefits, family benefits, pensions). The slow growth of pretax incomes for the bottom 50% of earners has been the main driver of increasing income inequality over the past half-century. Access to good jobs—as well as to education and health care, so people have the knowledge and good health required to work—is key to lifting these incomes and making technology-­enabled growth inclusive.

Several types of policies could make good new jobs more likely to be created in the United States. These include taxes on labor and capital that affect business investment decisions; R&D policies that can direct technological change and influence both the pace and extent of new technologies’ adoption by business; training policies that enable workers to gain new skills; direct labor market interventions that provide benefits to temporary and contract workers; and measures that strengthen workers’ voice in business decisions.

Rethink tax policies 

Tax policies influence businesses’ decisions to invest in new production technologies. In the United States and other advanced economies, labor is taxed at a much higher rate than the physical capital and knowledge capital required to produce goods, encouraging investments that use capital and save labor. A reduction in payroll and other employment-related taxes would moderate this bias. So would an increase in taxes on capital, including corporate income. Recently, the US corporate tax rate was cut dramatically. Proponents argued that the cut would increase business investment and that this in turn would increase employment and wages. As technology becomes more labor-saving, however, business investment in physical and knowledge capital becomes less likely to create good jobs, and the new US tax law does nothing to offset that effect. 

Another issue is that as capital has become more mobile across national borders, many multinational companies have been able to make their profits “stateless” for tax purposes by shifting them to locations where they have little or no real economic activity and pay little or no tax. Stateless corporate income erodes the tax base and reduces the capacity of individual countries to raise revenues for infrastructure and social protection programs. It also exacerbates the tax disadvantage of labor, which is far less mobile than capital. In their recent book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman discuss the consequences of stateless capital income for income inequality and suggest national remedies as stopgap measures in the absence of an international agreement to tax such income. In the long run, given the magnitude of cross-border capital flows, such an agreement is essential

In the US, taxes on capital income should also be increased by raising the rate on capital gains (which are now taxed at a lower rate than personal income) and by eliminating the carried-interest loophole. Both the preferential capital gains rate and the carried-interest feature of current tax law have encouraged technology investments favoring capital and profits over labor and wages. They have also fueled the “financialization” of the US economy and increased income inequality.

Reductions in payroll taxes and other direct taxes on labor, even if offset in part by higher taxes on capital, would leave less government revenue available to fund health care, education, and benefits for workers—all key components of good jobs. A national carbon tax should be used to offset this revenue loss. Lower taxes on labor to promote employment, and higher taxes on carbon to discourage carbon use, are a wise recipe for a future of good jobs and a sustainable environment.

 

The Constitution Was Engineered To Prevent Political Corruption And Has Utterly Failed...,

nakedcapitalism |  A final example from everybody’s favorite obstructionist Democrat, Joe Lieberman Joe Manchin. From Ryan Grim:

On Monday, Joe Manchin met with a group of wealthy donors to coordinate a strategy to defend the filibuster. The biggest threat to it, he argued, was Republicans’ refusal to support a January 6th commission, because it made anybody who claimed bipartisanship is still possible look like a buffoon, with people saying to him, “How’s that bipartisan working for you now, Joe?”

The obvious solution, then, he argued, is to find a handful of Republicans who will switch their votes and support a commission. A key target, he said, is Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. His suggestion was extraordinary for how explicit it made the link between legislative behavior and the pursuit of post-career riches.

“Roy Blunt is a great, just a good friend of mine, a great guy,” Manchin said in audio The Intercept obtained. “Roy is retiring. If some of you all who might be working with Roy in his next life could tell him, that’d be nice and it’d help our country. That would be very good to get him to change his vote. And we’re going to have another vote on this thing. That’ll give me one more shot at it.”

Forget it, Jake. It’s K Street.

Looking back at Article I, Section 8, there’s a loophole you could drive a trump: It really ought to read “accept any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.” (I thought it was simpler to generalize it, rather than attempt to parse out all the kinds of private entities that might seek to curry favor with the government.) I doubt that would stamp out gift-giving entirely, but it would sure put a crimp in the culture. The same should be written into the bylaws of professional associations (which I assume would cover institutions like CalPERS, a fine example of the culture of gift-giving; see NC here at “junket“).

If the Framers had access to a Time Machine, and could fast-forward to the present day, they would see a culture, and a political culture, that had become — at least with respect to corruption — everything they sought to avoid, and tried to engineer the Constitution to prevent.

The Common Root Of Obvious American Dysfunction Is Corruption

pluralistic |   In a technologically complex world, there will always be official advice whose technical arguments we can't understand. Our only reassurance is the process by which that advice is arrived at.

We may not understand the arguments, but we can recognize an open, independent process refereed by neutral regulators who show their work and recuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest.

We don't always understand what goes on inside the box, but we can tell whether the box itself is sound. We can tell judges are financially interested in outcomes, whether they publish their deliberations, whether they revisit their conclusions in light of new evidence.

That's all we've got, and it depends on a balance of powers that arises from a pluralistic, diffused set of industrial interests.

When an industry says with one voice that West Virginians are so fat that we can poison them without injury, it carries a lot of weight.

(so to speak)

It's a stupid argument. It's a wicked argument. It's a lethal argument. It's the kind of argument that might get you laughed out of the room if it is filled with hundreds of squabbling chemical companies looking to dunk on one another.

That's the thing about conspiracies (and Dow was, in fact, engaged in a conspiracy to poison West Virginians to enrich its shareholders) – they require a lot of discipline, with all the conspirators remaining loyal to the conspiracy and no one breaking ranks.

The bigger a group is, the more it struggles to keep a united front. That's why there's so much billionaire class solidarity. Sure, it's hard to maintain unity among a clutch of grandiose maniacs, but it's much harder to maintain unity among billions of their victims.

Monopolization is corruption's handmaiden – not just because it lets Dow hire fancy lawyers and "experts" to dress up "fat people are immune to poison" as sound policy, but because the industry can sing that awfful song with one voice.

Dow spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to win a policy that will save it millions – and cost the people of WV hundreds of millions or even billions in health costs, lost productivity, and, of course, the intergenerational trauma of ruined and lost human lives.

The reason millions in gains can trump billions in losses is that that the millions are reaped by just a few firms, who can wield them with precision to secure the continued right to impose costs on the rest of us, while the losses are spread out across the whole state.

For Dow to corrupt West Virginia's legislature, it need only tithe a small percentage of its winnings to political causes and dark money orgs.

For West Virginians to fight corruption in the cash-money world of political influence campaigns, they have to overcome their collective action problem and outspend Dow – all while bearing the human and monetary costs of Dow's corruption.

America is a land of manifest, obvious dysfunctions, and close examination reveals their common root in corruption.

With Trump Out Of The Way -The Elite War On Reality Continues Unabated...,

consentfactory |  So, the War on Reality is going splendidly. Societies all across the world have been split into opposing, irreconcilable realities. Neighbors, friends, and even family members are bitterly divided into two hostile camps, each regarding the other as paranoid psychotics, delusional fanatics, dangerous idiots, and, in any event, as mortal enemies.

In the UK, Germany, and many other countries, and in numerous states throughout the US, a “state of emergency” remains in effect. An apocalyptic virus is on the loose. Mutant variants are spreading like wildfire. Most of society is still shut down or subject to emergency health restrictions. People are still walking around in public with plastic face shields and medical-looking masks. The police are showing up at people’s homes to arrest them for “illegally gathering outdoors.” Any deviation from official reality is being censored by the Internet corporations. Constitutional rights are still suspended. Entire populations are being coerced into being injected with experimental “vaccines.” Pseudo-medical segregation systems are being brought online. And so on … you’re familiar with the details.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, and a few other countries, and in various other states throughout the US, there is no apocalyptic pandemic. People are just going about their lives as normal. OK, sure, there is a nasty virus going around, so people are taking common sense precautions, as people typically do for any nasty virus, but there is no “state of emergency” in effect, and no reason to radically transform society into a paranoid, pathologized-totalitarian dystopia.

This state of affairs, in which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have been subjected to since March of 2020 or there doesn’t. It really is as simple as that.

Except that it isn’t as simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.

I’m not going rehash the whole War on Populism — I covered it extensively at the time — but that’s when the current global-capitalist War on Reality was officially launched. It wasn’t just the usual lies and propaganda. It was a full-scale ideological assault. By the end of it, people actually believed that (a) Donald Trump was a Russian agent, (b) that he was literally Hitler, and so was going to stage some sort of “coup,” declare himself American Führer, and launch the “Trumpian-White-Supremacist Fourth Reich,” and (c) that he had actually attempted this by sending a few hundred unarmed protesters — violent domestic extremist grandmothers, father-and-son kill squads, and bison hat loonies — to “storm the Capitol” and overthrow the government during the so-called “January 6 Insurrection.”

True Conspiracy Practice...,

edwardsnowden |  The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious — not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens —  all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.

The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.

This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.

Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.

In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a Top-Secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing — and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press — I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse — Facebook.

Not Content With Writing Narrative, The NYTimes Concocts Some January 6th Video Too....,

NYTimes |  The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence.

What we have come up with is a 40-minute panoramic take on Jan. 6, the most complete visual depiction of the Capitol riot to date. In putting it together, we gained critical insights into the character and motivation of rioters by experiencing the events of the day often through their own words and video recordings. We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump’s own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.

Here are some of the major revelations.

 

There's Nothing Virtuous About The Professional And Managerial Frauds Serving The Empire

danwright  |  Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

Liu admits the book is a polemic against the PMC, which is refreshing if for no other reason than most of the work posing as professional scholarship on politics and culture today makes polemical arguments under the guise of sober expertise. There is nothing more PMC than laundering your particular personal agenda under the mask of objective technical analysis.

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

Liu analyzes some of the tactics the PMC use to mystify class relations, and concludes that “whenever it addresses economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into passion plays, focusing on individual acts of ‘giving back’ or reified forms of self-transformation.”

Think global, act local. And what is more local than yourself? I just ate some fully organic non-GMO trail mix. I’m saving the world one nutty crap at a time. You’re welcome.

But it goes beyond delusional upper class savior complexes and I’m a good person branding exercises. There is an underlying logic to the mystification of class relations by the PMC as Liu says that “As a class the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation.”

Is there any doubt that this is so? For when it comes to economic exploitation, the PMC has a PhD in changing the subject. They manage to always come up with an explanation for economic problems that ensures the blame never falls on capitalism itself. We could have higher wages if people stopped being racist!

Liu breaks down her analysis of the PMC into their standpoint on: professionalism, child-rearing, art, and sex. Mercifully, the book is a short read (77 pages in my copy) because the PMC are some of the most trite and boring people you will ever encounter and reading about their lifestyle and cultural pretensions is less pleasant than listening to one of those neurotic trust fund brats scream about a triggering Halloween costume.

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

Assange Momentarily Democratized Information - For That - His Life Has Been Destroyed

craigmurray  |   Thordarson has now told Icelandic magazine Stundin that his allegations against Assange contained in the indictment are untrue, and that Assange had not solicited the hacking of bank or police details. This is hardly a shock, though Thordarson’s motives for coming clean now are obscure; he is plainly a deeply troubled and often malicious individual.
Thordarson was always the most unreliable of witnesses, and I find it impossible to believe that the FBI cooperation with him was ever any more than deliberate fabrication of evidence by the FBI.

Edward Snowden has tweeted that Thordarson recanting will end the case against Julian Assange. Most certainly it should end it, but I fear it will not.

Many things should have ended the case against Assange. The First Amendment, the ban on political extradition in the US/UK Extradition Treaty, the CIA spying on the preparations of Assange’s defence counsel, all of these should have stopped the case dead in its tracks.

It is now five months since extradition was refused, no US government appeal against that decision has yet been accepted by the High Court, and yet Julian remains confined to the UK’s highest security prison. The revelation that Thordarson’s allegations are fabricated – which everyone knew already, Baraitser just pretended she didn’t – is just one more illegality that the Establishment will shimmy over in its continued persecution of Assange.

Assange democratised information and gave real power to the people for a while, worldwide. He revealed US war crimes. For that his life is destroyed. Neither law nor truth have anything to do with it.

For Adam Serwer Radically Distorting The Truth Appears To Be The Point

theamericanconservative |  Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point” is the most toxic piece of journalism of the Trump era. After the shocking election of 2016, the liberal establishment showed glimmers of willingness to ask hard questions about how it had happened. If millions of Obama voters were now switching their allegiance to a reality show billionaire, perhaps the Democratic party had done something to ill-serve these people? Then along came Serwer in the Atlantic to tell them that, no, Trump voters did not have any legitimate grievances. They were evil racists, simple as that.

The phrase took on a life of its own. Politicians from presidential candidate Julian Castro to “Squad” member Rep. Ayanna Pressley started using it. “Do these five words define the Trump years?” asked Brian Stelter on CNN. It became ubiquitous on cable news and Twitter.

Now Serwer has published a book under the same title. You might think the 2020 election, which saw Trump gain among black and Hispanic voters, would have caused him to reconsider his thesis that the source of Trump’s appeal is racist hate. Not a bit. Each essay in this collection comes with a short introductory essay describing how Serwer came to write the piece and how he thinks it has held up in retrospect. He makes very clear that, with the benefit of hindsight, he has no regrets.

Looking at the title essay fresh, two and a half years after it was first published, one is struck by how offensive it is, and with how little justification. It opens with a lynch mob. “Grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street,” writes Serwer, describing an old photograph. He leaps from this haunting image to a Trump rally, where he detects the same “rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them.”

His evidence for this incendiary claim is a rather hasty list of talking points, very few of which live up to his tendentious billing. He accuses Trump of “seeking to ethnically cleanse 193,000 American children,” which refers to his not renewing temporary protected status for certain Salvadoran refugees. “Mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria” refers to this clip, which you can watch for yourself to see how innocuous it is.

Demonizing Political Opposition Seems To Be The Point

theatlantic |   The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Jason Whitlock And Adam Curry Meet Near The Truth Adjacent Middle...,

theblaze  |  Why won't your favorite white cable newsman or newswoman tell you what I'm telling you? Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo, Joe Scarborough, aren't they our allies? No. They're not. They're political lobbyists working on behalf of the corporations and politicians pushing the reset.

OK. What about me? You might think I'm a political partisan working on behalf of conservative Republicans. That is certainly how I've been painted by left-leaning media outlets and social media platforms. And I'm now partnered with Blaze Media, a platform that leans right.

Judge my career. I have been at this for more than 30 years. I have been equally despised by the left and the right. I have publicly feuded with Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann. I've been a guest on their old Fox News and MSNBC shows. I've worked and/or written for ESPN, Fox Sports, the Huffington Post, Playboy Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I spent years bashing Sarah Palin.

I don't play for any political team. I've never voted. I go wherever I believe I can speak, follow, and write the truth. The truth I believe the most is that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior.

I believe Jesus is under attack. That's why I'm at Blaze Media. You can't defend Jesus at corporate media outlets. Advertisers won't allow it. You can discuss the religion of racism every day at ESPN, CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox Sports. But it's taboo to discuss the cure for racism — Jesus — on those platforms.

I'm not saying any of this because there's a big paycheck for black men espousing my views. The money for black broadcasters and journalists is connected to preaching the race-bait religion.

Let me be clear. I'm not broke by any stretch. I've earned and saved a substantial sum of money. But I've bypassed far more money than I've earned with the choice I've made to follow the truth wherever it leads and my refusal to support the racial groupthink dictated by global elites.

My faith won't allow me to jump on board with the lunacy, racism, and sacrilege of Black Lives Matter, a movement founded by three lesbian self-admitted trained Marxists. BLM is an atheist movement in support of LGBTQ issues and the reshaping of America into a communist country. BLM is part of the deception.

Black people tell me all the time: "I don't support the BLM organization, but I support the slogan and sentiment."

Let me translate that. You despise the devil's tree but love the fruit it produces. That's some Don Lemon-Lori Lightfoot-Van Jones-Colin Kaepernick level of hypocrisy. You know, all the Malcolm X-wannabe, anti-white radicals in relationships with white partners. They hate the white tree but can't live without the white fruit.

We have to stop letting everyone use us. We're being played. We're all being played, black and white working-class people. It's all a giant setup. Look at what they did to Trump supporters. They were manipulated into storming the Capitol, and then the corporate media portrayed it as a bloody, violent KKK rally intended to overthrow democracy. The so-called "insurrection" is an excuse for the government to seize more power and crush dissent.

We, black people, have been convinced the crushing of working-class white people is good for us.

It's not. Working-class white people, Christian white people, are our true allies, not the elites. We can't see that because of the made-for-TV hyper-focus on racial conflict.

The defunding and demoralizing of police are tactics deployed to increase violence in major cities. Local media outlets are focusing on this rise in crime, national media outlets have followed suit, and social media platforms are generating viral videos exposing the crime wave.

Guess who are the stars of this content. Black perpetrators.

It's all a massive setup. The stirring of racial animus between Obama worshippers and Trump worshippers is orchestrated by billionaire elites, executed by trained Marxists, promoted by millionaire influencers in the media, sports, and entertainment worlds, and co-signed by religious leaders pursuing popularity.

ADOS Advocacy Foundation Rebuts Harvard's Replacement Negroe Disinformation Attack

adosfoundation  |  At a time when our wealthiest colleges and universities ought to be reckoning with the distinct role that slavery played in creating and sustaining them, and working with Black communities outside of academia to secure racial justice, it is regrettable to see Harvard University using its institutional might to try and discredit and libel activists most committed to that cause.

The Harvard Kennedy School's Misinformation Review's recent publication, "Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news", is a clear attempt to use the Ivy League institution's esteemed name to legitimize an ongoing smear campaign directed at the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement. The report ascribes a familiar set of demonstrably false motivations to our political advocacy, with the authors frequently substituting subjective claims, innuendo, and outright lies for the sort of empirically-backed assertions one would expect to find in a publication from such a prestigious university.

Indeed, Disinformation creep's own language highlights the authors' corrupt and biased approach: "The tweets in Figures 2-5," they write, "are examples of breaking news stories which led to a spike of activity within the ADOS network (which do not necessarily correspond to the overall spikes shown in Figure 1). We then chose the ones that best illustrated the point we wanted to make" (emphasis ours).

In other words, the authors acknowledge combing through the data and seeking to make their findings conform to a predetermined opinion of what the ADOS movement represents. Leaving aside the matter of how this method is the very antithesis of the kind of spirit that should animate and guide honest inquiry and investigation into a particular subject, the examples used by the report's authors do not actually bear out the "point [they] wanted to make". Instead, the authors' careless relationship to methodology and analysis frequently propels the material squarely into the terrain of libel.

We intend to enumerate the report's chief claims and supply evidence to the contrary that will lay bare the defamatory nature of the report. In so doing we will prove how, in an attempt to police the acceptable bounds of black political agency in America, it maliciously conveys false information to its audience.

We demand a formal apology from Harvard and that the publisher issue a full and timely retraction of this document. The retraction must appear in Misinformation Review's next issue so its readers can gain a full understanding of the report's unsound scholarship and how the authors have baselessly vilified our movement and directly violated the journal's own stated mission of combating misinformation.

Harvard Uses Mercenary Replacement Negroe To Launch Disinformation Attack On ADOS

harvard |  ADOS leverages legitimate moral and legal arguments for reparations and grievances about the failure of the Democratic party to adequately support one of its most loyal and critical voting blocs but brings in immigration.  Including  immigration  as  a  distinguishing  factor  is  justified  by  legitimate  statistics  around how Black immigrants have much higher levels of wealth and educational achievement, as well as better health outcomes (Brown etal., 2017) versus native-born Black Americans, differences that can indeed be directly attributed to racial stress and intergenerational trauma that started in slavery and persists today (Doamekpor  &  Dinwiddle,  2015),  despite  evidence  that  this  divergenceis  the  fault  of  treatment  by  the dominant white culture (Iheduru, 2013), and not of the immigrants. Animating ADOS grievances are the negative attitudes that Black immigrants can hold about native-born Black Americans (Nsangou & Dundes, 2018; Telusma, 2019), as well as perceptions of dominant cultural narratives favoring those who are apart from  the  direct  legacy  of  the  trauma  of  slavery  and  the  indictment  that  legacy  presents  for  the  moral foundations of the United States.

ADOS also resents what it sees as justice claims of other groups being prioritized over those of native-born Black  Americans. However,  it  sees  the  solution as  narrowly advocating  for  the  interests  of  native-born Black  Americans  alone,  and rejecting  any  solidarity  or  larger  coalitions  (N’COBRA, 2020), including trans-national movements for reparations or coalitions that address how systematic racism also lethally affects   Black   immigrants   and   other   groups.   Significantly,   Carnell  previously   sat   on   the   board   of Progressives  for  Immigration  Reform  (PFIR),  a  subsidiary  of  the  Federation  for  American  Immigration Reform (FAIR), which has been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (Boehlert, 2019) because of its violent opposition to foreign nationals living in the United States.

The ultimate impact that ADOS may have had on the 2020 election will be hard to ascertain; however, it  did have  a notable  media moment  when  rapper  Ice  Cube  talked  with the  Trump campaign about  his “Contract WithBlack America” in October, which was heavily based on ADOS ideas (Watts, 2020). The Trump campaign used this moment to claim approval from Ice Cube, an example of disinformation creep in trying to distract from Trump’s often outright racism and deep hostility  and  opposition  to  the  far broader Movement for Black Lives coalition.

We scraped a set of 534 thousand tweets using “#ADOS” or two related terms (“#LineageMatters,” “AmericanDOS,” which we found were not widely used) and posted between November 1, 2019,and September  30,  2020,  running  analyses  on  weekly  subsets  to  first  understand  the  content  of  the  ADOS network  and  to  select  tweets  on  which  to  carry  out  descriptive  content  analysis.  The  status_ids  of  the tweets, and scripts for both collection and analysis, are available from the Harvard Dataverse (Nkondeet al.,  2021).  For  having  accurate  counts  of  daily  frequencies  to  compare  to  real-world  events,  we supplemented this scraped set with access, via a third-party service, to a set of 1.36 million tweets pulled from the Twitter firehose. This includesa total of 1.1 million tweets using the #ADOS hashtag that were publicly visible on Twitter as of the end of 2020.

While The Woke Sleep - Plutocrats And Their Political SockPuppets Continue Their Plunder...,

commondreams  |  After President Joe Biden and U.S. lawmakers on Thursday announced a bipartisan deal on infrastructure that Democrats say they will only support alongside a reconciliation bill, progressives doubled down on concerns about the compromise proposal's financing plans.

Rather than pushing for taxes targeting rich individuals and corporations, a White House fact sheet on the bipartisan package outlines various other potential financing sources, from unused unemployment insurance relief funds to reinstating Superfund fees for chemicals.

The proposal that has progressives alarmed is relying on "public-private partnerships, private activity bonds, direct pay bonds, and asset recycling for infrastructure investment."

Asset recycling involves the sale or lease of public assets to the private sector so the government can put that money toward new investments. The policy was previously encouraged by former U.S. President Donald Trump, despite lessons from Australia about its pitfalls.

As negotiations over the infrastructure deal dragged on last week, Rianna Eckel, an organizer with Food & Water Watch, cautioned that it could "facilitate a Wall Street takeover of public services like water." Mary Grant, the advocacy group's Public Water for All director, echoed that warning Thursday.

"This White House-approved infrastructure deal is a disaster in the making," Grant said in a statement. "It promotes privatization and so-called 'public-private partnerships' instead of making public investments in publicly owned infrastructure."

Grant noted that "communities across the country have been ripped off by public-private schemes that enrich corporations and Wall Street investors and leave the rest of us to pick up the tab."

One infamous example, as Common Dreams recently reported, is the privatization of Chicago's parking meters. Illinois drivers filed a class-action lawsuit on Thursday alleging that Chicago granted a private company "monopoly control over the city's parking meter system for an astonishing 75-year-long period, without regard for the changes in technology and innovations in transportation taking place now and for the rest of the century."

Grant charged that "privatization is nothing more than an outrageously expensive way to borrow funds, with the ultimate bill paid back by households and local businesses in the form of higher rates." She called the White House's decision to support the proposal "disappointing and outrageous."

 

 

In Terms Of Public Trust U.S. Media Ranks Dead Last

jonathanturley |  For years, we have been discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a newly released report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media. The most tragic aspect is that it does not matter. The media has embraced the advocacy journalism and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation.  The result is a type of state media where journalists are bound to the government by ideology rather than law.

The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press.  This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories. Even waiting for the facts is viewed as unethical today by journalism professors who demand that reporters make political or social declarations through their coverage.

One of the lowest moments came with the New York Times’ mea culpa for publishing an opinion column by a conservative senator.  The New York Times was denounced by many of us for its  cringing apology after publishing a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Ark.). and promising not to publish future such columns. It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong. Cotton was arguing that the use of national guard troops may be necessary to quell violent riots, noting the historical use of this option in past protests. This option was used most recently after the Capitol riot.