Haaretz | Washington gave Israel a green light to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Monday.
TheAmericanConservative |Speaking at the annual Reagan National
Defense Forum, CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently disclosed that he sent
a direct communication to Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, the
longtime commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force
division responsible for Iran’s overseas paramilitary and intelligence
activity. “What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we
will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests
in Iraq by forces that are under their control,” Pompeo told the audience. “We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.”
To some who have operated in the
clandestine and murky world of intelligence tradecraft,
Pompeo’s maneuver was a surprise. Former CIA director Mike Hayden told Newsweek that
he couldn’t recall ever doing such a thing during his tenure, while
others labeled Pompeo’s move a too-clever-by-half strategy to signal
toughness to Soleimani, who retains enormous power and influence within
the Iranian political system.
Breitbart | “The President of the United States is a great man,” said Breitbart
News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon on Wednesday’s edition of
SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Bannon’s comments came in response to Justin from California, a caller-in to Breitbart News Tonight noting President Donald Trump’s recent criticisms of Bannon.
Partial transcript below.
JUSTIN: First of all, I
think [Donald Trump] made a huge mistake, Steve, bashing you like he did
today on Twitter. That was devastating to me. I hope in the future you
can forgive him for that when we come to 2020, because I’m sure he’s
going to need your help. BANNON: The President of the United
States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out,
whether going through the country giving the Trump Miracle speech or on the show or on the website, so I don’t you have to worry about that. But I appreciate the kind words. JUSTIN: Yeah, that just made me sick to my stomach, though.
“[Donald Trump] got sucked in by fake news, or trolled,” said Gayle
in Alabama, another caller-in toe Breitbart News Tonight, framing the
president as being fooled by cultivated drama via the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff.
Guardian | Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon
has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a
group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and
“unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
Bannon,
speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into
alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and
predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national
TV.”
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more
than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in
and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited
political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House
lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some
of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.
Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final
three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before
returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the
nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.
He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving
Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman
Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya
at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised
documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of
alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a
foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”
NYTimes | He is known as the Dark Prince or Ayatollah Mike, nicknames he earned as the Central Intelligence Agency officer who oversaw the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the American drone strike campaign that killed thousands of Islamist militants and hundreds of civilians.
Now the official, Michael D’Andrea, has a new job. He is running the C.I.A.’s Iran operations, according to current and former intelligence officials, an appointment that is the first major sign that the Trump administration is invoking the hard line the president took against Iran during his campaign.
Mr. D’Andrea’s new role is one of a number of moves inside the spy agency that signal a more muscular approach to covert operations under the leadership of Mike Pompeo, the conservative Republican and former congressman, the officials said. The agency also recently named a new chief of counterterrorism, who has begun pushing for greater latitude to strike militants.
Iran has been one of the hardest targets for the C.I.A. The agency has extremely limited access to the country — no American embassy is open to provide diplomatic cover — and Iran’s intelligence services have spent nearly four decades trying to counter American espionage and covert operations.
The challenge to start carrying out President Trump’s views falls to Mr. D’Andrea, a chain-smoking convert to Islam, who comes with an outsize reputation and the track record to back it up: Perhaps no single C.I.A. official is more responsible for weakening Al Qaeda.
“He can run a very aggressive program, but very smartly,” said Robert Eatinger, a former C.I.A. lawyer who was deeply involved in the agency’s drone program. The C.I.A. declined to comment on Mr. D’Andrea’s role, saying it does not discuss the identities or work of clandestine officials.
aljazeera | The Islamic Republic of Iran is the platypus of humanity's political evolution.
Episodic Iranian unrest, from the focused, reformist uprising of 2009
(led by middle-class protesters of Tehran) to the current, wildly
rejectionist riots (spearheaded by the underclass and the unemployed in
the poor neighborhoods of provincial towns) cannot be understood in
isolation from that melange of procedural democracy and obscurantist
theocracy that was crammed into the constitution of revolutionary Iran, four decades ago.
Deep within Iran's authoritarian system there is a tiny democratic
heart, complete with elective, presidential and parliamentary chambers,
desperately beating against an unyielding, theocratic exoskeleton. That
palpitating democratic heart has prolonged the life of the system -
despite massive mismanagement of the domestic and international affairs
by the revolutionary elites.
But it has failed to soften the authoritarian carapace. The reform
movement has failed in its mission because the constitution grants three
quarters of the political power to the office of the "Supreme Leader":
an unelected, permanent appointment whereby a "religious jurist" gains
enormous powers, including command of the armed forces and foreign
policy, veto power over presidential cabinets and parliamentary
initiatives, and the world's most formidable Pretorian Guard (IRGC),
with military, paramilitary, intelligence, judicial and extrajudicial
powers to enforce the will of its master.
The democratically-elected president and parliament (let alone the
media and ordinary citizens) have no prayer of checking the powers of
the Supreme Leader. As a result, the system has remained opaque, blind
to its own flaws, resistant to growth and incapable of adaptation to its
evolving internal and external environments.
theverge | Nearly every web browser now comes with a password
manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by
plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, those same managers are being exploited as a way to track users from site to site.
The researchers examined two different scripts — AdThink
and OnAudience — both of are designed to get identifiable information
out of browser-based password managers. The scripts work by injecting
invisible login forms in the background of the webpage and scooping up
whatever the browsers autofill into the available slots. That
information can then be used as a persistent ID to track users from page
to page, a potentially valuable tool in targeting advertising.
The plugins focus largely on the usernames, but according
to the researchers, there’s no technical measure to stop scripts from
collecting passwords the same way. The only robust fix would be to
change how password managers work, requiring more explicit approval
before submitting information. “It won't be easy to fix, but it's worth
doing,” says Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor
who worked on the project.
fox4kc | A man has died Tuesday night after being shot in the parking lot of the Independence Center, police say.
Independence Police spokesman John Syme confirmed officers were
dispatched to the homicide at 18801 E. 39th St. around 8:30 p.m. Syme
said the man's body was found outside a vehicle in the parking lot.
The man's identity has not yet been released, and suspect information
was not immediately available, Syme said. Police do not have a suspect
in custody yet and are asking anyone with information about the shooting
to call police.
Syme said it's too early to determine if the shooting was a targeted incident or not.
This is a developing story. Fox 4 will update as more information is available.
therealnews | Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Gregory Wilpert coming to you from Quito, Ecuador. The year 2017 is turning out to be another banner year for the centralization of capital, that is, according to an article in the Financial Times this week, “Global mergers and acquisitions exceeds three trillion dollars for the fourth straight year.” The article goes on to point out the following: Faced with the prospect of Amazon's entry into the pharmacy business, the US's biggest drugstore chain, CVS Health, agreed to acquire health insurer, Aetna for about $69 billion. Encroachment by Facebook and Netflix into sports, media and film production led Rupert Murdoch to sell most of his 21st Century Fox empire to Disney in a $66 billion deal.
The US remained the most active region for mergers and acquisitions with $1.4 trillion in deals. The numbers of US deals struck in 2017 combined climbed above 12,400 for a record figure. The largest deal in 2017 has yet to be resolved as Broadcom pursues a hostile $130 billion bid for rival chip maker, Qualcomm. Joining me to analyze the causes and consequences of this massive centralization of capital in 2017 is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He's author of several books. The most recent among them is J is for Junk Economics. Welcome back, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be back here.
GREGORY WILPERT: So, what at heart is causing all of this frenetic activity for companies to gobble up one another and thereby creating and ever greater centralization of capital?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it's part of the neoliberal strategy to inflate the wealth of the 1%, basically by inflating the stock market and the real estate and the bond prices. At the same time, the central banks are pursuing quantitative easing that offer money at almost zero interest rates. You have the tax system, tax giveaways, to the... sector, which are encouraging these mergers and acquisitions by, essentially, dismantling the antitrust legislation that has been in place since the New Deal, and the tax giveaways that make it possible for all of this huge, hundreds of billions of dollar tax giveaways in the Republican tax law of two weeks ago that enables companies that have kept hundreds of billions of their earnings tax-free in offshore banking enclaves and tax avoidance centers.
Since 2004, all this money can now be replaced under the name of the head companies instead of their just-pretend foreign affiliates in these tax avoidance centers. So, the companies are going to be very tax rich. They've anticipated most of this and essentially, you can look at these mergers and acquisitions as part of an arbitrage operation. If you can get money at about 1%, if you're a hedge fund, a bank or a large corporation, if you can borrow at 1%, then you can borrow stocks that are yielding 10% or even more. Or, for that matter, even less and you can make up all the difference between the 1% you pay and the stocks whose dividends pay a higher rate of return, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9%.
Counterpunch | I wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post[1]about
the Thomas Hill case in which Thomas was accused of accosting Anita
Hill with ugly sexist language. I suggested that it would be a boon for
corporate feminists who had co-opted the feminist movement. Instead of
exposing the hands-on assaults against them by their employers upon whom
they depended for their prosperity, they could blame Black guys for
sexism in the workplace. It was Maureen Dowd who pointed to the
hypocrisy of some of Hill’s White feminist supporters. When Bill
Clinton’s hands-on sexism came to light, she noted that some of those
liberal and progressive feminists who condemned Clarence Thomas defended
Clinton’s offenses against women.
Clarence Thomas has been ridiculed for years for pleading that he was
subjected to a “hi-tech lynching.” But now that powerful corporate
White men, among them predators, who, for decades, have been shielded by
corporate feminists, their defenders are insisting upon due process,
which is what Thomas was demanding. To cross examine his accusers.
Timesman Bret Stephens complains about hi-tech lynchings now that the
shoe is on the other foot and outfits like NPR, The New Republic, MSNBC, The New York Times
and other media outlets, which have competed for revenue from what
could be called “The Black Boogeyman” racket, have uncovered predators
among their personnel. Now that they’re feeling the heat from feminists
they’ve come up with something called “a spectrum of behavior.”
In the Post article, I also pointed out that regardless of
Thomas’s right-wing views, in the Anita Hill vs. Thomas case, Blacks
supported Thomas. White progressives didn’t pay attention to this fact.
For them, Blacks are to be interpreted. Not listened too. Maybe they
agree with Jeffrey Toobin, who has made a fortune from a slipshod
examination of the Simpson case. Toobin says that Blacks can’t deal with
reality and shouldn’t be patted on the head,[4] like the reward that a dog receives after retrieving a ball for his owner.
endgadget | The new replay tools offered in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
are so much more than standard video-capture technology. In fact, it
isn't video capture at all -- it's data capture. The 3D replay tools
allow players to zoom around the map after a match, tracking their own
character, following enemies' movements, slowing down time and setting
up cinematic shots of their favorite kills, all within a 1-kilometer
radius of their avatar. It's filled with statistics, fresh perspectives
and infinite data points to dissect. This isn't just a visual replay;
it's a slice of the actual game, perfectly preserved, inviting
combatants to play God.
PUBG is an ideal test case. It's a massively popular online
game where up to 100 players parachute onto a map, scavenge for
supplies, upgrade weapons and attempt to be the last person standing.
Even though it technically came out in December, PUBG has been
available in early access since March and it's picked up a considerable
number of accolades -- and players -- in the process. Just last week, SteamDB reported PUBG hit 3 million concurrent players on PC, vastly outstripping its closest competitor, Dota 2, which has a record of 1.29 million simultaneous players.
Part of PUBG's
success stems from developers' relentless focus on making the game fun
to watch. Live streaming is now a major part of the video-game world,
with sites like Twitch and YouTube Gaming growing in prominence and
eSports bursting into the mainstream.
Kim says PUBG
creator Brendan Greene and CEO Chang Han Kim built the idea of
data-capture into the game from the beginning, and Minkonet's tech is a
natural evolution of this focus. Minkonet and PUBG developers connected in late 2016 and started working together on the actual software earlier this year.
"One of their first visions was to have PUBG
as not just a great game to play, but a great game to watch," Kim says.
"So they were already from the very beginning focused on having PUBG as a great live streaming game; esports was also one of their sort of long-term visions."
The first step in this direction of technology imitating ideology was
taken a couple of years ago by Pranav Mistry, a member of the Fluid
Interfaces Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab,
who developed a wearable “gestural interface” called “SixthSense.”**
The hardware—a small webcam that dangles from one’s neck, a pocket
projector, and a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in
one’s pocket—forms a wearable mobile device. The user begins by handling
objects and making gestures; the camera recognizes and tracks the
user’s hand gestures and the physical objects using computer
vision-based techniques. The software processes the video stream data,
reading it as a series of instructions, and retrieves the appropriate
information (texts, images, etc.) from the Internet; the device then
projects this information onto any physical surface available—all
surfaces, walls, and physical objects around the wearer can serve as
interfaces. Here are some examples of how it works: In a bookstore, I
pick up a book and hold it in front of me; immediately, I see projected
onto the book’s cover its reviews and ratings. I can navigate a map
displayed on a nearby surface, zoom in, zoom out, or pan across, using
intuitive hand movements. I make a sign of @ with my fingers and a
virtual PC screen with my email account is projected onto any surface in
front of me; I can then write messages by typing on a virtual keyboard.
And one could go much further here—just think how such a device could
transform sexual interaction. (It suffices to concoct, along these
lines, a sexist male dream: Just look at a woman, make the appropriate
gesture, and the device will project a description of her relevant
characteristics—divorced, easy to seduce, likes jazz and Dostoyevsky,
good at fellatio, etc., etc.) In this way, the entire world becomes a
“multi-touch surface,” while the whole Internet is constantly mobilized
to supply additional data allowing me to orient myself.
Mistry emphasized the physical aspect of this interaction: Until now,
the Internet and computers have isolated the user from the surrounding
environment; the archetypal Internet user is a geek sitting alone in
front of a screen, oblivious to the reality around him. With SixthSense,
I remain engaged in physical interaction with objects: The alternative
“either physical reality or the virtual screen world” is replaced by a
direct interpenetration of the two. The projection of information
directly onto the real objects with which I interact creates an almost
magical and mystifying effect: Things appear to continuously reveal—or,
rather, emanate—their own interpretation. This quasi-animist effect is a
crucial component of the IoT: “Internet of things? These are nonliving
things that talk to us, although they really shouldn’t talk. A rose, for
example, which tells us that it needs water.”1 (Note the
irony of this statement. It misses the obvious fact: a rose is alive.)
But, of course, this unfortunate rose does not do what it “shouldn’t”
do: It is merely connected with measuring apparatuses that let us know
that it needs water (or they just pass this message directly to a
watering machine). The rose itself knows nothing about it; everything
happens in the digital big Other, so the appearance of animism (we
communicate with a rose) is a mechanically generated illusion.
nautil.us | Considerable evidence suggests that dividing the world into Us and Them
is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy.
For starters, we detect Us/Them differences with stunning speed. Stick
someone in a “functional MRI”—a brain scanner that indicates activity in
various brain regions under particular circumstances. Flash up pictures
of faces for 50 milliseconds—a 20th of a second—barely at the level of
detection. And remarkably, with even such minimal exposure, the brain
processes faces of Thems differently than Us-es.
This has been studied extensively with the inflammatory Us/Them of
race. Briefly flash up the face of someone of a different race (compared
with a same-race face) and, on average, there is preferential
activation of the amygdala, a brain region associated with fear,
anxiety, and aggression. Moreover, other-race faces cause less
activation than do same-race faces in the fusiform cortex, a region
specializing in facial recognition; along with that comes less accuracy
at remembering other-race faces. Watching a film of a hand being poked
with a needle causes an “isomorphic reflex,” where the part of the motor
cortex corresponding to your own hand activates, and your hand
clenches—unless the hand is of another race, in which case less of this
effect is produced.
The brain’s fault lines dividing Us from Them
are also shown with the hormone oxytocin. It’s famed for its pro-social
effects—oxytocin prompts people to be more trusting, cooperative, and
generous. But, crucially, this is how oxytocin influences behavior
toward members of your own group. When it comes to outgroup members, it does the opposite.
The
automatic, unconscious nature of Us/Them-ing attests to its depth. This
can be demonstrated with the fiendishly clever Implicit Association
Test. Suppose you’re deeply prejudiced against trolls, consider them
inferior to humans. To simplify, this can be revealed with the Implicit
Association Test, where subjects look at pictures of humans or trolls,
coupled with words with positive or negative connotations. The couplings
can support the direction of your biases (e.g., a human face and the
word “honest,” a troll face and the word “deceitful”), or can run
counter to your biases. And people take slightly longer, a fraction of a
second, to process discordant pairings. It’s automatic—you’re not
fuming about clannish troll business practices or troll brutality in the
Battle of Somewhere in 1523. You’re processing words and pictures, and
your anti-troll bias makes you unconsciously pause, stopped by the
dissonance linking troll with “lovely,” or human with “malodorous.”
We’re
not alone in Us/Them-ing. It’s no news that other primates can make
violent Us/Them distinctions; after all, chimps band together and
systematically kill the males in a neighboring group. Recent work,
adapting the Implicit Association Test to another species, suggests that
even other primates have implicit negative associations with Others.
Rhesus monkeys would look at pictures either of members of their own
group or strangers, coupled with pictures of things with positive or
negative connotations. And monkeys would look longer at pairings
discordant with their biases (e.g., pictures of members of their own
group with pictures of spiders). These monkeys don’t just fight
neighbors over resources. They have negative associations about
them—“Those guys are like yucky spiders, but us, us, we’re like luscious
fruit.”
Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by the: speed
and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group
differences; tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and
then imbue those differences with supposedly rational power; unconscious
automaticity of such processes; and rudiments of it in other primates.
As we’ll see now, we tend to think of Us, but not Thems, fairly
straightforwardly.
motherjones | On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin
by nearly 23,000 votes. The state, which ranked second in the nation in
voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000.
More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee,
which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer
people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white
middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. In Anthony’s
old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are
interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped
by 23 percent from 2012. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with
it, the larger narrative about the election.
Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to
campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a
lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on
voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the
candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”
The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention.
When it did, it was often dismissive. Two days after the election, Talking Points Memo
ran a piece by University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen
under the headline “Democrats Blame ‘Voter Suppression’ for Clinton
Loss at Their Peril.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was “a load of crap” to claim that the voter ID law had led to lower turnout. When Clinton, in an interview with New York magazine, said her loss was “aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” the Washington Examiner
responded, “Hillary Clinton Blames Voter Suppression for Losing a State
She Didn’t Visit Once During the Election.” As the months went on,
pundits on the right and left turned Clinton’s loss into a case study
for her campaign’s incompetence and the Democratic Party’s broader
abandonment of the white working class. Voter suppression efforts were
practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.
Stories like Anthony’s went largely unreported. An analysis by Media Matters for America
found that only 8.9 percent of TV news segments on voting rights from
July 2016 to June 2017 “discussed the impact voter suppression laws had
on the 2016 election,” while more than 70 percent “were about Trump’s
false claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.” During the 2016
campaign, there were 25 presidential debates but not a single question
about voter suppression. The media has spent countless hours
interviewing Trump voters but almost no time reporting on
disenfranchised voters like Anthony.
Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it,
noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the
required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than
whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be
able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more
likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one
thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s
11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a
struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s
victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the
factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers,
and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter
suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.
WaPo | On the Internet, the logic of road rage reigns supreme: Alone before
your screen, without trusted friends and other social mediators to
provide context or perspective, and with no relationship between
yourself and the offender, vastly disproportionate responses to
perceived slights begin to make sense. In daily life, you might respond
to an obnoxious joke or snide remark with an eye-roll or a barb of your
own, but online, the temptation to retaliate in much stronger terms
looms.
Often — too often — it takes the form of campaigns to get people fired.
Last
week, Vanity Fair released short video features of several of its
staffers providing New Year’s resolution ideas to various politicians,
among them Hillary Clinton.
Their suggestions for Clinton essentially amounted to don’t run again.
The tone of the video struck many, including our own Erik Wemple, as “snotty and condescending,” and some felt the content of some suggestions (one writer quipped that Clinton should take up knitting, for instance) was sexist. Backlash came swiftly, Vanity Fair apologized, and an infuriated twitter mob has been demanding that the editors and writers involved in the video be summarily fired ever since.
Firing the Vanity Fair staff responsible for the video wouldn’t make
the video go away, nor would it do anything for the candidate’s low favorables.
The urge to drive people who have said or done offensive things out of
their jobs isn’t about pragmatism; it’s punitive, and remarkably
unprincipled.
WaPo | the centerpiece addiction of this year, widespread and growing, is to
outrage itself — to the state of being perpetually offended, to the
need not only to be angry at someone or something, or many people and
issues, but also to always and everywhere be, well, hating. We are all
trapped in this ongoing carnival of venom, a national gathering of
unpleasant souls like that assembled in C.S. Lewis’s 1959 essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”
in the Saturday Evening Post (written two decades after Lewis’s famed
“Screwtape Letters”). Google and read it. It is remarkably resonant with
the times.
This
outrage isn’t a current that is always on full strength, like Boston’s
Citgo sign. But it never quite turns off either, as once upon a time the
television stations did with a ritual playing of the national anthem.
(Quaint, especially this year.)
Outrage, rather, pulses,
sometimes quicker and sometimes slower, like the human pulse. And like
the human pulse, it is nowadays a sign of life. Not to be outraged is to
be almost disqualified in the eyes of many from being a participant in
politics, even though the perpetually outraged fall across the political
spectrum. Not only can they not imagine anyone not being outraged, but
also they can’t imagine any kind of outrage save their own.
This
may be the fault of Silicon Valley’s algorithms, which provide us with
near-constant friendly echoes of what we already believe and a steady
stream of bias-confirming stories from bias-bent sources that further
bend our biases along the arc they were already traveling (and it isn’t,
believe me, some preordained arc of history). All very convenient,
these self-congratulatory seances with the unseen millions who agree
with us about our own particular outrage.
Wait
a bit after this column posts online, then check the comments. It will
be a cut and paste of every other comment section of every other column,
left, right and center. Just as cable news talking heads are beginning
to blur into one long declarative sentence of certainty surrounded by
nodding heads.
The amplification of the incendiary and the
extreme in the comments section has broken through into podcasts and
some into talk radio, cable and network news. Outrage is the kudzu of
all media platforms. It will cover us all completely soon enough.
theburningplatform |The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized
habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our
country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our
ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a
logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.
Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are
to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act
of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in
our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the
relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes
and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which
control the public mind.
– Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”
Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) was a famous pioneer in the field of public relations and is, today, often referred to as the Father of Propaganda.
Perhaps Bernays became thus known because he authored the above quoted
1928 book titled with that very term. He was actually the nephew of the
famed psychopathologist Sigmund Freud and was very proud of his uncle’s
work. More than that, however, Bernays accepted the basic premises of
Freud towards the use of emotional manipulation of the masses through
advertising. It was, in fact, Bernays, who changed the term propaganda
into “public relations”.
If the excerpt above from Bernays’ book “Propaganda” is true, then it
would imply there are men of great power who utilize psychology in
order to message and manipulate the minds of the masses. Are these the
men that Thomas Jefferson, supposedly, once warned about?
Indeed. They are the ones who control the issue of currency; the ones
who first by inflation, then by deflation, caused the banks and
corporations to grow up around the people thus depriving them of all
property until the people’s children woke up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered.
These are the men who financially and politically manage sovereign governments as well as the handful of corporations
that control 90% of the media today. It is not hard to imagine,
therefore, why it would be in the best interests of these men to
mentally maneuver the masses into complacency. But how is this
psychological manipulation implemented?
Through lies, of course.
Adolf Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, once asserted that:
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
In like manner, I now question if this sentence could be modified as follows:
A lie told to a few people is still a lie but a lie told to thousands, even millions, of people becomes the truth.
Yet, it is those who question the lies today that are labeled the conspiracy theorists. What irony.
Carroll Quigley in his book “Tragedy and Hope: The History of the World in Our Time” exposed the takeover of the world’s financial system by these few, powerful men when he wrote on page 51:
In time the (the “Order”) brought into their
financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as
commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to
form all of these into a single financial system on an international
scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were
able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and
industries on the other.
It appears control is the result of money equaling power
as both give rise to an alternative reality which, paradoxically, is
subsidized by the vanquished; by those who want to believe. Yes, it is
the masses of people who finance their own dreams via various monthly
installment plans while their own eyes rely upon what they see on any
number of electronic screens before them. The people pay their taxes,
they borrow, they consume, they believe.
NewYorker | In 2010, Marc Estrin, a novelist and far-left activist from Vermont,
found an online version of a paper by Cass Sunstein, a professor at
Harvard Law School and the most frequently cited legal scholar in the
world. The paper, called “Conspiracy Theories,” was first published in
2008, in a small academic journal called the Journal of Political Philosophy. In it, Sunstein and his
Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule attempted to explain how conspiracy
theories spread, especially online. At one point, they made a radical
proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage
in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy
theories.” The authors’ primary example of a conspiracy theory was the
belief that 9/11 was an inside job; they defined “cognitive
infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies
(acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or
anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by
planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate
within such groups.”
Nowhere in the final
version of the paper did Sunstein and Vermeule state the obvious fact
that a government ban on conspiracy theories would be unconstitutional
and possibly dangerous. (In a draft that was posted online, which
remains more widely read, they emphasized that censorship is
“inconsistent with principles of freedom of expression,” although they
“could imagine circumstances in which a conspiracy theory became so
pervasive, and so dangerous, that censorship would be thinkable.”)* “I
was interested in the
mechanisms by which information, whether true or false, gets passed
along and amplified,” Sunstein told me recently. “I wanted to know how
extremists come to believe the warped things they believe, and, to a
lesser extent, what might be done to interrupt their radicalization. But
I suppose my writing wasn’t very clear.”
Sunstein has studied the spread of information since the mid-nineties,
when he co-wrote a series of law-review articles about “cascade
theory”—a model describing how opinions travel across juries, markets,
and subcultures. He was particularly interested in what he called the
Law of Group Polarization: how ideologically homogenous groups can
become “breeding grounds for unjustified extremism, even fanaticism.” In
2001, his first book on political polarization on the Internet,
“Republic.com,” warned that, even when people have access to a range of
robust and challenging views, many will favor information that confirms
what they already believe. He updated the book in 2007, as “Republic.com
2.0: Revenge of the Blogs,” and again this year, as “#Republic: Divided
Democracy in the Age of Social Media.” When he wrote “Republic.com,”
social media didn’t really exist; when he wrote “Republic.com 2.0,”
social media’s impact was so negligible that he could essentially ignore
it; in “#Republic,” he argues that services such as Facebook comprise
the contemporary agora, and that their personalized algorithms will
make it ever more difficult for Americans to understand their
fellow-citizens.
In the endless debates about what constitutes “fake news,” we tend to
invoke clear cases of unfounded rumor or outright deceit (“Melania has a
body double,” or “President Trump saves two cats from drowning after
Hurricane Harvey”). More prevalent, and more bewildering, are the
ambiguous cases—a subtly altered photograph, an accurate but misleading
statistic, a tendentious connection among disparate dots. Between the
publication of “Republic.com 2.0” and “#Republic,” Sunstein became a
target of the same online rumor mill he’d been studying from a distance,
and many of the conspiracy theories about “Conspiracy Theories” fell
into this gray area—overheated, but not wholly made up. “If you had told
me that this obscure paper would ever become such a publicly visible and
objectionable thing, I would have thought it more likely that Martians
had just landed in Times Square,” Sunstein said. “In hindsight, though,
I suppose it’s sort of appropriate that I got caught up in the
mechanisms I was writing about.”
Buchanan | The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it?
Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir
Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak
the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?
A year and a half into the investigation, and, still, no “collusion”
has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the
never-Trump media and Beltway establishment.
Hence, and understandably, suspicions have arisen.
Are the investigators after the truth, or are they after Trump?
Set aside the Trump-Putin conspiracy theory momentarily, and consider a rival explanation for what is going down here:
That, from the outset, Director James Comey and an FBI camarilla were
determined to stop Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Having failed, they
conspired to break Trump’s presidency, overturn his mandate and bring
him down.
Essential to any such project was first to block any indictment of
Hillary for transmitting national security secrets over her private
email server.
It is tempting to think that an institution like the F.B.I. enjoys such
credibility and public support that its agents and officials—and Mueller
himself—can rely on cross-party backing in a crisis, even if Republicans
remain silent now. Perhaps. But this was a party that refused to
challenge Trump’s backing of Roy Moore in Alabama’s Senate race. And an
understanding of what core Trump supporters believe about the F.B.I. and
Mueller has to take into account Gallup’s trend lines. While celebrating
this new year, it will require a certain degree of evidence-light
optimism to be convinced that the center will hold.
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4/3
43
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