Bezos Got No Dogs In The Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act Hunt...,

WaPo  |  You might think cracking down on child sex traffickers would be a legislative layup. You’d be wrong. The bill — authored by Republican Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), John McCain (Ariz.) and John Cornyn (Tex.) and Democrats Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) — was hard to pass. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman.) 

The act faced a wall of opposition from Silicon Valley because it amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gave blanket immunity to online entities that publish third-party content from civil and criminal prosecution. Big Tech wanted to preserve that blanket immunity, even if it gave legal cover to websites that were using it to sell children for sex. When child sex trafficking survivors tried to sue Backpage, and state attorneys general tried to prosecute the owners, federal courts ruled against them, specifically citing Section 230. This did not move Big Tech. Chief among the culprits was Google, which apparently forgot its old corporate motto of “Don’t Be Evil” and lobbied fiercely against the bill. 

How did the senators overcome Big Tech’s lobbying campaign? First, Portman and McCaskill, the chairman and then-ranking minority-party member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, used their subpoena power to gather corporate files, bank records and other evidence that Backpage knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and children, and then covered up that evidence. They fought Backpage all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce their subpoenas. The subcommittee then published a voluminous report detailing the findings of its 20-month investigation, including evidence that Backpage knew it was facilitating child sex trafficking and that it was not simply a passive publisher of third-party content. Instead the company was automatically editing users’ child sex ads to strip them of words that might arouse suspicion (such as “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,” “amber alert,” “little girl,” “fresh,” “innocent” and “school girl”) before publishing them and advised users on how to create “clean” postings.

Then Portman, McCaskill and their co-authors used the result of their investigation to craft a narrow legislative fix that would allow bad actors such as Backpage to be held accountable. The bill they produced allows sex trafficking victims to sue the websites that facilitated the crimes against them and allows state law enforcement officials, not just the Justice Department, to prosecute websites that violate federal sex trafficking laws. The committee also turned over all its raw documents to the Justice Department last summer, urging it to undertake a criminal review, which Justice did.

Despite all the Silicon Valley money against them, the senators never wavered. Through the sheer power of the testimony of trafficking survivors; Mary Mazzio’s documentary “I Am Jane Doe;” the evidence of crimes committed by Backpage; and the support of law enforcement, anti-trafficking advocates, 50 state attorneys general, the civil rights community and faith-based groups — as well as carefully negotiated language — they wore down most of Big Tech’s opposition. In November, Facebook finally came on board. But Google shamefully never relented in its opposition. Despite this, the act overwhelmingly passed both chambers of Congress.

You Don't Own and Cannot Access or Control Facebook's Data About You

theatlantic |  But the raw data that Facebook uses to create user-interest inferences is not available to users. It’s data about them, but it’s not their data. One European Facebook user has been petitioning to see this data—and Facebook acknowledged that it exists—but so far, has been unable to obtain it.

When he responded to Kennedy, Zuckerberg did not acknowledge any of this, but he did admit that Facebook has other types of data that it uses to increase the efficiency of its ads. He said:

My understanding is that the targeting options that are available for advertisers are generally things that are based on what people share. Now once an advertiser chooses how they want to target something, Facebook also does its own work to help rank and determine which ads are going to be interesting to which people. So we may use metadata or other behaviors of what you’ve shown that you’re interested in News Feed or other places in order to make our systems more relevant to you, but that’s a little bit different from giving that as an option to an advertiser.

Kennedy responded: “I don’t understand how users then own that data.” This apparent contradiction relies on the company’s distinction between the content someone has intentionally shared—which Facebook mines for valuable targeting information—and the data that Facebook quietly collects around the web, gathers from physical locations, and infers about users based on people who have a similar digital profile. As the journalist Rob Horning put it, that second set of data is something of a “product” that Facebook makes, a “synthetic” mix of actual data gathered, data purchased from outsiders, and data inferred by machine intelligence.

With Facebook, the concept of owning your data begins to verge on meaningless if it doesn’t include that second, more holistic concept: not just the data users create and upload explicitly, but all the other information that has become attached to their profiles by other means.

But one can see, from Facebook’s perspective, how complicated that would be. Their techniques for placing users into particular buckets or assigning them certain targeting parameters are literally the basis for the company’s valuation. In a less techno-pessimistic time, Zuckerberg described people’s data in completely different terms. In October 2013, he told investors that this data helps Facebook “build the clearest models of everything there is to know in the world.”

Facebook puts out a series of interests for users to peruse or turn off, but it keeps the models to itself. The models make Facebook ads work well, and that means it helps small and medium-size businesses compete more effectively with megacorporations on this one particular score. Yet they introduce new asymmetries into the world. Gullible people can be targeted over and over with ads for businesses that stop just short of scams. People prone to believing hoaxes and conspiracies can be hit with ads that reinforce their most corrosive beliefs. Politicians can use blizzards of ads to precisely target different voter types.

As with all advertising, one has to ask: When does persuasion become manipulation or coercion? If Facebook advertisers crossed that line, would the company even know it? Dozens of times throughout the proceedings, Zuckerberg testified that he wasn’t sure about the specifics of his own service. It seemed preposterous, but with billions of users and millions of advertisers, who exactly could know what was happening?

Most of the ways that people think they protect their privacy can’t account for this new and more complex reality, which Kennedy recognized in his closing remark.

“You focus a lot of your testimony ... on the individual privacy aspects of this, but we haven’t talked about the societal implications of it ... The underlying issue here is that your platform has become a mix of ... news, entertainment, and social media that is up for manipulation,” he said. “The changes to individual privacy don’t seem to be sufficient to address that underlying issue.”

Did I Miss Eric Schmidt's Testimony Before the Senate?

antimedia |  With all the attention paid to Facebook in recent weeks over ‘data breaches’ and privacy violations (even though what happened with Cambridge Analytica is part of their standard business model), it’s easy to forget that there are four other Big Tech corporations collecting just as much — if not more — of our personal info. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are all central players in “surveillance capitalism” and prey on our data. New reports suggest that Google may actually harvest ten times as much as Facebook.

Curious about just how much of his data Google had, web developer Dylan Curran says he downloaded his Google data file, which is offered by the company in a hub called “My Account.” This hub was created in 2015, along with a tool called “My Activity.” The report issued is similar to the one Facebook delivers to its users upon request. Whether or not these reports are comprehensive is still up in the air, but Curran says his was 5.5 GB, which is almost ten times larger than the one Facebook offered him. The amount and type of data in his file, Mr. Curran says, suggests Google is not only constantly tracking our online movements but may also be monitoring our physical locations.

Curran’s Google report contained an incredible amount documentation on his web activity, going back over a decade. But perhaps more importantly, Google had also been tracking his real-life movements via his smartphone device or tablet. This included fairly random places he’d frequented, many of the foreign countries and cities he visited, the bars and restaurants he went to while in these countries, the amount of time he spent there, and even the path he took to get there and back.

This, of course, is not new. It has been well-known for some time that Google silently tracks you everywhere you go and creates a map of your physical movements through its Location History feature. You can deactivate it by going to your timeline and adjusting the preferences.

Another Google user downloaded his file and discovered the company had been archiving his data even when he browsed in Incognito mode, a setting that advertises itself as one that does not save browsing history.

Like Facebook, Google gathers your info for sale to 3rd-party advertisers, including your name, email address, telephone number, credit card, specific ways you use Google’s services, your mode of interaction with any website that uses Google technology (such as AdWords), your device, and your search queries. And if you don’t enter your account and make adjustments, pretty much anything you do online while deploying a Google tool is tracked. Google’s policy states:

“If other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, we may show them your publicly visible Google Profile information, such as your name and photo.”

But much of the location data stems from the use of Google apps like Maps or Now, which broadcast your location. If you want to stop this information from being shared, you have to go into your account settings and make adjustments.

The ostensible purpose of this data-sharing is to fine-tune your user experience, but who is benefitting more is arguable. The same year it released its new activity hub, Google also unveiled a new program that shares your email with high-value advertisers. Called Customer Match, this system streamlines consumer info so that an advertiser’s “brand is right there, with the right message, at the moment your customer is most receptive.”

Google’s policy also lists the three major categories of data collection: Things you do; Things you create; and Things that make you “you.”

The Underlying Nature of the Divide in American Politics

medium |  For several years now, political journalists, analysts, and pundits have been arguing that U.S. politics has increasingly turned into a struggle between urban and rural voters. Regional differences were once paramount, Josh Kron observed in the Atlantic after the 2012 election. “Today, that divide has vanished,” he declared. “The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside.” Two years later, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote that there are “really two Americas; an urban one and a rural one,” going on to observe that since Iowa was growing more urban, Democrats could count on doing better there. Instead, an ever-more urbanized and diverse nation turned not just toward Republicans, but also toward the authoritarian nationalism of Donald Trump, prompting further hand-wringing over the brewing civil war. “It seems likely that the cracks dividing cities from not-cities will continue to deepen, like fissures in the Antarctic ice shelf, until there’s nothing left to repair,” concluded a lengthy New York story on the phenomena this April.

I don’t disagree that the United States is in crisis, with fissures breaking apart our facade of national unity and revealing structural weaknesses of the republic. Our federation — and, therefore, the world — is in peril, and the stakes are enormous. As the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, however, I strongly disagree with the now-conventional narrative that what ultimately divides us is the difference between metropolitan and provincial life. The real divide is between regional cultures — an argument I fleshed out at the outset of this series—as it always has been. And I now have the data to demonstrate it.

So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald Trump?

scientificamerican |  When I was a teenager, my parents often asked me to come along to the store to help carry groceries. One day, as I was waiting patiently at the check-out, my mother reached for her brand new customer loyalty card. Out of curiosity, I asked the cashier what information they record. He replied that it helps them keep track of what we’re buying so that they can make tailored product recommendations. None of us knew about this. I wondered whether mining through millions of customer purchases could reveal hidden consumer preferences and it wasn’t long before the implications dawned on me: are they mailing us targeted ads?

This was almost two decades ago. I suppose the question most of us are worried about today is not all that different: how effective are micro-targeted messages? Can psychological “big data” be leveraged to make you buy products? Or, even more concerning, can such techniques be weaponized to influence the course of history, such as the outcomes of elections? On one hand, we’re faced with daily news from insiders attesting to the danger and effectiveness of micro-targeted messages based on unique “psychographic” profiles of millions of registered voters. On the other hand, academic writers, such as Brendan Nyhan, warn that the political power of targeted online ads and Russian bots are widely overblown.

In an attempt to take stock of what psychological science has to say about this, I think it is key to disentangle two prominent misunderstandings that cloud this debate.

First, we need to distinguish attempts to manipulate and influence public opinion, from actual voter persuasion. Repeatedly targeting people with misinformation that is designed to appeal to their political biases may well influence public attitudes, cause moral outrage, and drive partisans further apart, especially when we’re given the false impression that everyone else in our social network is espousing the same opinion. But to what extent do these attempts to influence translate into concrete votes? 

The truth is, we don’t know exactly (yet). But let’s evaluate what we do know. Classic prediction models that only contain socio-demographic data (e.g. a person’s age), aren’t very informative on their own in predicting behavior. However, piecing together various bits of demographic, behavioral, and psychological data from people, such as pages you’ve liked on Facebook, results from a personality quiz you may have taken, as well as your profile photo (which reveals information about your gender and ethnicity) can improve data quality. For example, in a prominent study with 58,000 volunteers, a Stanford researcher found that a model using Facebook likes (170 likes on average), predicted a whole range of factors, such as your gender, political affiliation, and sexual orientation with impressive accuracy.

In a follow-up study, researchers showed that such digital footprints can in fact be leveraged for mass persuasion. Across three studies with over 3.5 million people, they found that psychologically tailored advertising, i.e. matching the content of a persuasive message to an individuals’ broad psychographic profile, resulted in 40% more clicks and in 50% more online purchases than mismatched or unpersonalized messages. This is not entirely new to psychologists: we have long known that tailored communications are more persuasive than a one-size-fits all approach. Yet, the effectiveness of large-scale digital persuasion can vary greatly and is sensitive to context. After all, online shopping is not the same thing as voting!

So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald Trump?

According To The Washington Post, Trump Is America's First African President...,

WaPo  |  President Trump says that in many ways, the United States’ infrastructure is like “a Third World country” and is an “embarrassment.” I don’t often agree with our Twitter warrior in chief, but the guy’s got a point. America’s roads are crumbling. Our airports are retrograde: Only four are in the global top 50, and Denver’s takes the top U.S. spot at No. 29. Sad!

This gives me an idea. If Trump thinks that the United States is truly like “a Third World country,” maybe it’s time to start treating him the same way we treat the leaders of such nations. My immodest proposal: Let’s save America from itself and the ravages of this presidency by offering Trump a big bundle of money to leave. I’m serious. There’s an African precedent for this. Let me explain.

As I said, America does resemble a developing country in many ways. It is embarrassing that one of the most powerful countries in the world still can’t get clean drinking water to citizens in Flint, Mich. Our maternal mortality rate is the worst among wealthy nations. We are awash in gun violence. Extreme poverty is so bad in parts of Alabama that some communities are testing positive for hookworm, long thought to be eradicated from the United States.

But back to Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah once said Trump, then a candidate, would be America’s first African president. He compared Trump to some of Africa’s most notorious leaders and dictators. Like former South African president Jacob Zuma, Trump blames migrants for crime. Like Gambia’s former president Yahya Jammeh, who claimed he had an herbal cure for AIDS, Trump has cast doubt on vaccines. As president, Trump has attacked the press, run a Cabinet mired in corruption scandals and given his children incredible — and undeserved — political power and access. That’s a familiar story in Africa: If you think Ivanka Trump is getting a sweet deal out of her father’s presidency, read about Angola’s Isabel Dos Santos, who was given the control of the country’s state oil firm and became Africa’s richest woman. Noah was right: Trump, not Barack Obama, is America’s first African president.

Confronting Concentrated, Autocratic Economic Power Is What Democrats Used To Do

Guardian |  In threatening a single business because of some personal quarrel with its CEO – apparently in order to squeeze friendlier coverage out of a newspaper that the CEO happens to own – Donald Trump has clearly violated the basic rules of democratic government. But it is also important to remember that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Amazon has been the subject of critical reporting for a number of years; anyone who reads the Guardian or the New York Times knows about the company’s alarming labour practices and its imperial economic ambitions.

Yet some critics of the president took his tweets as a signal to rally round Amazon and its chief executive. They joked about how jealous Trump must be of Bezos’s billions. They fantasised about how Bezos might contrive to humiliate the president by buying still more media properties. They clucked over Trump’s stupidity on the matter of the postal service. They snickered at his inability to understand modern internet enterprises.

Given the chance to remind the public of American liberalism’s instinctive tendency to defend cyber-oligarchs like Bezos against the claims of those it sees as uncomprehending luddites, Team Liberal jumped at it.

Along the way, they gave us a vivid reminder of why modern liberalism keeps generating – and losing to – unbelievably awful antagonists such as Trump. Put it this way: yes, Trump hates Amazon, and its chief executive, and his newspaper the Washington Post. But Trump’s blustering animosity doesn’t make Amazon an admirable company. Nor does it make the Washington Post a temple of objectivity, untainted by the capital’s culture of influence-peddling.

Take the matter of the postal service’s contract with Amazon – the cause of so much self-assured guffawing among the know-better set. Guess what? The president’s complaint here is kind of legit. While it might be technically correct that the US postal service makes a “profit” on its current arrangement with Amazon, it would also be correct to say that it could easily be making a lot more.

If you care about the postal service workforce, maybe you too might want to show some concern about the question rather than brush it off as yet more idiocy from the comb-over caudillo.

Or take the larger question of Amazon’s overwhelming and unaccountable market power, which journalists and scholars have documented painstakingly and at great length – and yet which many commentators seem to have forgotten the instant Trump started bad-mouthing Bezos. “Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly,” is how the Atlantic journalist Franklin Foer put it in 2014, and what he said then is even truer today.

Bet You Didn't Know That Predatory Eviction Is An American Business Model

NYTimes |  Before the first hearings on the morning docket, the line starts to clog the lobby of the John Marshall Courthouse. No cellphones are allowed inside, but many of the people who’ve been summoned don’t learn that until they arrive. “Put it in your car,” the sheriff’s deputies suggest at the metal detector. That advice is no help to renters who have come by bus. To make it inside, some tuck their phones in the bushes nearby.

This courthouse handles every eviction in Richmond, a city with one of the highest eviction rates in the country, according to new data covering dozens of states and compiled by a team led by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond.

Two years ago, Mr. Desmond turned eviction into a national topic of conversation with “Evicted,” a book that chronicled how poor families who lost their homes in Milwaukee sank ever deeper into poverty. It became a favorite among civic groups and on college campuses, some here in Richmond. Bill Gates and former President Obama named it among the best books they had read in 2017, and it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

But for all the attention the problem began to draw, even Mr. Desmond could not say how widespread it was. Surveys of renters have tried to gauge displacement, but there is no government data tracking all eviction cases in America. Now that Mr. Desmond has been mining court records across the country to build a database of millions of evictions, it’s clear even in his incomplete national picture that they are more rampant in many places than what he saw in Milwaukee.

Now We Know EXACTLY How Blacks Were Left Out Of Federal Middle Class Creation...,

NYTimes |  Critics of the Fair Housing Act have glibly attempted to dismiss attempts to end segregation as “social engineering” — as if rigid racial segregation in housing were a natural phenomenon. In fact, the residential segregation that is pervasive in the United States today was partly created by explicit federal policies that date back at least to World War I. It is now widely acknowledged that the federal insistence on segregated housing introduced Jim Crow separation in areas of the country outside the South where it had previously been unknown. It stands to reason that dismantling a system created by a set of government policies will require an equally explicit set of federal policies.

The scholar Richard Rothstein exposed the roots of this shameful process in his recent book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.” He reported that the government’s first effort to build housing for defense workers near military installations and factories during World War I was founded on the premise that African-American families would be excluded “even from projects in northern and western industrial centers where they worked in significant numbers.”

The same toxic pattern prevailed under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, when the government created the first public housing projects for nondefense workers, building separate projects for black people, segregating buildings by race or excluding African-Americans entirely. Particularly telling is the fact that racially integrated communities were razed to make way for Jim Crow housing.

The federal insistence on rigid racial separation found its most pernicious expression in the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to promote homeownership by insuring mortgages. As the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton document in “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,” the government typically denied mortgages to African-Americans, shutting out even affluent black people from the suburban homeownership boom that remade the residential landscape during the middle decades of the 20th century.

Government at all levels embraced racial covenants that forbade even well-to-do African-Americans from purchasing homes outside of black communities. Cut off from homeownership — the principal avenue of wealth creation — African-Americans lost the opportunity to build the intergenerational wealth that white suburban families took for granted. The vast wealth gap that exists today between whites and African-Americans has its roots in this era.

The argument for what became the Fair Housing Act emerged forcefully in the 1968 Kerner Commission report, which blamed segregation in large measure for the riots that ravaged the country in the 60s and called for national fair housing legislation. The housing law might well have died in committee had the country not erupted in fresh violence after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. It was signed into law a week later.

The housing act put the federal government on record as supporting open housing and prohibiting the pervasive discrimination that had locked most African-Americans out of decent accommodations and homeownership. But the version that passed in 1968 had been declawed — stripped of enforcement provisions that would have given HUD strong authority to root out discrimination. Nearly a quarter-century would pass before Congress strengthened the law. So during that time, African-Americans were left subject to the harsh discrimination the original act was supposed to preclude.

This progressive sounding law — which requires entities that receive federal money to “affirmatively further” fair housing goals — was consistently undermined by officials of both parties who had little appetite for confronting entrenched segregation.

Now We Know EXACTLY Why Black Students Were Left Out Of #NeverAgain

wlrn |  At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Black History Month Show, a student walked out on stage to read a one-page statement defending the Black Lives Matter movement.

This part of the show was not rehearsed ahead of time, it was a last-minute decision by some of the black student organizers to respond to a letter that ran in the school’s paper. 

The headline was “All Lives Matter.” In the letter, a student wrote Black Lives Matter was “ridiculous” and “they seem to be good for nothing but creating mistrust between civilians and police.”

The black students planned on submitting their rebuttal to the school paper, but they also saw an opportunity to read their response at the Black History Month Show.

“The rebuttal was pretty much saying that that the Black Lives Matter movement is a respected movement,” said Mei-Ling Ho-Shing, a junior who helped plan the Feb. 9 show.

She said she wanted to address the very real threat of police violence against black bodies.

“Just because you don't have to experience it doesn't mean that it's absurd and ridiculous,” she said.

The message wasn’t fully delivered at the assembly. A teacher had the speakers’ microphone cut off and asked the student to leave the stage before she could finish reading it.

Kyrah Simon, a junior, was watching from the audience.

“They just didn't handle it in the way that I thought would be compassionate to all the minorities,” she said of the school.

The Black Lives Matter statement was an unapproved presentation that was not rehearsed as part of the show, explained a Broward County Public School spokesperson in an email to WLRN.

“Due to the potential for disruption and breach in protocol, the student was asked to stop and leave the stage.” The email goes on to state the school “is committed to providing learning environments that foster inclusion and respect.”

Another Musty Old War Criminal Calls Trump Fascist...,

NYTimes |  If freedom is to prevail over the many challenges to it, American leadership is urgently required. This was among the indelible lessons of the 20th century. But by what he has said, done and failed to do, Mr. Trump has steadily diminished America’s positive clout in global councils.

Instead of mobilizing international coalitions to take on world problems, he touts the doctrine of “every nation for itself” and has led America into isolated positions on trade, climate change and Middle East peace. Instead of engaging in creative diplomacy, he has insulted United States neighbors and allies, walked away from key international agreements, mocked multilateral organizations and stripped the State Department of its resources and role. Instead of standing up for the values of a free society, Mr. Trump, with his oft-vented scorn for democracy’s building blocks, has strengthened the hands of dictators. No longer need they fear United States criticism regarding human rights or civil liberties. On the contrary, they can and do point to Mr. Trump’s own words to justify their repressive actions.

At one time or another, Mr. Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come. His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions. Overseas, rather than stand up to bullies, Mr. Trump appears to like bullies, and they are delighted to have him represent the American brand. If one were to draft a script chronicling fascism’s resurrection, the abdication of America’s moral leadership would make a credible first scene.

Equally alarming is the chance that Mr. Trump will set in motion events that neither he nor anyone else can control. His policy toward North Korea changes by the day and might quickly return to saber-rattling should Pyongyang prove stubborn before or during talks. His threat to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement could unravel a pact that has made the world safer and could undermine America’s reputation for trustworthiness at a critical moment. His support of protectionist tariffs invites retaliation from major trading partners — creating unnecessary conflicts and putting at risk millions of export-dependent jobs. The recent purge of his national security team raises new questions about the quality of advice he will receive. John Bolton starts work in the White House on Monday.

What is to be done? First, defend the truth. A free press, for example, is not the enemy of the American people; it is the protector of the American people. Second, we must reinforce the principle that no one, not even the president, is above the law. Third, we should each do our part to energize the democratic process by registering new voters, listening respectfully to those with whom we disagree, knocking on doors for favored candidates, and ignoring the cynical counsel: “There’s nothing to be done.”

Motives for the Skripal Poisoning Narrative and Sanctions Regime

CounterPunch |  In this episode we discuss the economic and political implications of the attempted murder of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. We also touch upon the long history of collaboration between Russian oligarchs and Western banks and how it fits into the larger neoliberal project pursued after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Michael Palmieri: Professor Hudson welcome back to the third episode of The Hudson report. It’s great to have you here.

Michael Hudson:It’s good to be here.

Michael Palmieri: So everyone who’s been following the news media for the last week or so has become–even if they didn’t want to be–pretty familiar with the case of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. He was once a double agent for British intelligence and recently there’s been allegations that he’s been poisoned by or attempted to be poisoned by Russian intelligence services. Although much of the coverage seems to be pretty breathless in condemning Russia for an attempted assassination. You seem to have a different perspective or perhaps believe that we should be looking somewhere else and the kind of larger implications of what this may mean. So can you start us off and kind of explain what you see to be going on here right now?

Michael Hudson: Well I was puzzled at first about the whole treatment of the affair of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter because the treatment is so out of proportion–the reaction is so out of proportion–that it’s obvious that the issue is not about the poisoning itself. First of all there’s no evidence to show Russian involvement. But the important thing to realize is that even if there were a government assassination attempt, the reaction is entirely different things. It’s really about international diplomacy and NATO maneuvering for a military posturing and the reaction has no connection at all according to the poisoning, they’re only using the poisoning as an excuse to wrap a policy that was already thought of and sort through before the actual Skripel Gate occurred. I think anyone who’s seen James Bond movies knows that 07 can kill enemies. And the U.S. assassinates people all the time. It’s killed foreign leaders like the president Allende in Latin America and the whole wave of political terrorism that followed–killing tens of thousands of union leaders, and university professors, and land reformers, and the Obama administration targeted foreigners for drone strikes. Even when this kills large numbers of civilians as collateral damage.

No foreign country broke relations with Britain, or the United States, or Israel, or any other countries using targeted assassination as a policy. So this pretense that Russia has killed someone even without any evidence or with any trial is implausible on the very surface.

So, the question is why are they doing this with Russia? Why are they imposing sanctions and mounting a great publicity campaign? And I think the answer has to lie in looking at why are they doing this now. Timing is the key. So let’s step back a minute and note what seems to be out of the ordinary in the British and US and NATO reaction.

Blooms

aeon |  Using rotating, 3D-printed sculptures that he displays under a strobe light, the US designer John Edmark, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, creates dynamic ‘blooms’ that look like sophisticated computer-animation exercises come to life. As Edmark explains:

[The] animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronised so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5º (the angular version of phi). Each bloom’s particular form and behaviour is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome (/fī nōm/).

For the video Blooms 2, Edmark used a camera with a very short shutter speed rather than a strobe. The result is both visually and conceptually mindbending – digital art that borrows from nature to both imitate and expand on it.

Russiagate About Petered Out, Authoritarianism Now The Indictment Du Jour...,

NYTimes |  In an email, Stenner provided figures from a recent EuroPulse survey showing that authoritarianism is stronger in the United States than it is in the European Union: In the E.U., 33 percent of the electorate can be described as authoritarian, while in the United States, it’s 45 percent.

The animosity between authoritarians and non-authoritarians has helped establish what Johnston, Lavine and Federico describe as the “expressive dimension” of policy choices:

In this view, the influence of personality on economic opinion arises not because the expected outcomes of a policy match an individual’s traits, but because those traits resonate with the social meaning a policy has acquired.

They explain further:

Citizens care less about the outcomes a policy produces and more about the groups and symbols with which a policy is associated.

Mason enlarged on this argument in her 2015 paper, “‘I Disrespectfully Agree’: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Behavioral and Issue Polarization.” Her argument is a direct challenge to those who take, as she puts it,

an instrumental view of politics, in which people choose a party and decide how strongly to support it based solely on each party’s stated positions and whether the party shares interests with them.

Instead, she writes,

Contrary to an issue-focused view of political decision making and behavior, the results presented here suggest that political thought, behavior, and emotion are powerfully driven by political identities. The strength of a person’s identification with his or her party affects how biased, active, and angry that person is, even if that person’s issue positions are moderate.

While much of this research uses the “preferred traits in child-rearing” questions to measure authoritarianism, two sociologists at the University of Kansas, David Norman Smith and Eric Hanley, observe in “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?” that those questions do not capture the full scope of authoritarianism, especially the more aggressive authoritarianism that they believe drives voters to Trump.

Smith and Hanley used what they call a “domineering leader scale” to measure

the wish for a strong leader who will force others to submit. The premise is that evil is afoot; that money, the media and government authority — and even “politically correct” moral authority — have been usurped by undeserving interlopers. The desire for a domineering leader is the desire to see this evil crushed.

The domineering leader scale is based on responses to two statements: “Our country will be great if we honor the ways of our forefathers, do what the authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything” and “What our country really needs is a strong, determined leader who will crush evil and take us back to our true path.”

If an aggressive, domineering authoritarianism is a prime motivator for many Trump supporters, as Smith and Hanley contend, the clash between Republicans and Democrats is likely to become more hostile and warlike.

Federico, Feldman and Weber note that

since the early 2000s, many especially acrimonious political debates have focused on threats to social stability and order — debates surrounding abortion, transgender rights, immigration, and the role of the federal government in protecting the rights of marginalized social groups.

The rising “salience of these debates,” they write, “has contributed to a growing ‘authoritarian divide’ within the United States, at least among White Americans.”

Trump has purposefully exacerbated the “many especially acrimonious political debates” now dominating public discourse, deepening not only the authoritarian divide, but the divide between open and closed mindedness, between acceptance and racial resentment, and between toleration of and aversion to change. He evidently believes that this is the best political strategy for presiding in the White House and winning re-election, but it is an extraordinarily destructive strategy for governing the country and for safeguarding America’s interests in the world.

Is Jordan Peterson Leading Young Men to Authoritarianism?

foreignpolicy |  Peterson’s philosophy is difficult to assess because it is constructed of equal parts apocalyptic alarm and homespun advice. Like the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom he cites as an intellectual influence, Peterson is fond of thinking in terms of grand dualities — especially the opposition of order and chaos. Order, in his telling, consists of everything that is routine and predictable, while chaos corresponds to all that is unpredictable and novel.

For Peterson, living well requires walking the line between the two. He is hardly the first thinker to make this point; another of his heroes, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, harking back to the ancient Greeks, suggested that life is best lived between the harmony of Apollo and the madness of Dionysus. But while Peterson claims both order and chaos are equally important, he is mainly concerned with the perils posed by the latter — hence his rules.

In his books and lectures, Peterson describes chaos as “feminine.” Order, of course, is “masculine.” So the threat of being overwhelmed by chaos is the threat of being overwhelmed by femininity. The tension between chaos and order plays out in both the personal sphere and the broader cultural landscape, where chaos is promoted by those “neo-Marxist postmodernists” whose nefarious influence has spawned radical feminism, political correctness, moral relativism, and identity politics.

At the core of Peterson’s social program is the idea that the onslaught of femininity must be resisted. Men need to get tough and dominant. And, in Peterson’s mind, women want this, too. He tells us in 12 Rules for Life: “If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men.… If they’re tough, they want someone tougher. If they’re smart, they want someone smarter.” “Healthy” women want men who can “outclass” them. That’s Peterson’s reason for frequently referencing the Jungian motif of the hero: the square-jawed warrior who subdues the feminine powers of chaos. Don’t be a wimp, he tells us. Be a real man.

This machismo is of a piece with Jung but also a caricature of Nietzsche’s philosophy, particularly the thinker’s Übermensch (superman), who escapes the stultifying effects of a culture in decline. “I am no man,” Nietzsche once claimed. “I am dynamite!” Dynamite, from the Greek dunamis, meaning “power.” That is what Peterson’s acolytes are after. It is no accident that one of his video lectures is titled “How to Rise to the Top of the Dominance Hierarchy.”

We Won't Engineer Superhumans Any Time Soon...,

aeon |  A paper published in Nature Genetics in 2017 reported that, after analysing tens of thousands of genomes, scientists had tied 52 genes to human intelligence, though no single variant contributed more than a tiny fraction of a single percentage point to intelligence. As the senior author of the study Danielle Posthuma, a statistical geneticist at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and VU University Medical Center Amsterdam, told The New York Times, ‘there’s a long way to go’ before scientists can actually predict intelligence using genetics. Even so, it is easy to imagine social impacts that are unsettling: students stapling their genome sequencing results to their college applications; potential employers mining genetic data for candidates; in-vitro fertilisation clinics promising IQ boosts using powerful new tools such as the genome-editing system CRISPR-Cas9.

Some people are already signing on for this new world. Philosophers such as John Harris of the University of Manchester and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford have argued that we will have a duty to manipulate the genetic code of our future children, a concept Savulescu termed ‘procreative beneficence’. The field has extended the term ‘parental neglect’ to ‘genetic neglect’, suggesting that if we don’t use genetic engineering or cognitive enhancement to improve our children when we can, it’s a form of abuse. Others, like David Correia, who teaches American Studies at the University of New Mexico, envisions dystopian outcomes, where the wealthy use genetic engineering to translate power from the social sphere into the enduring code of the genome itself.

Such concerns are longstanding; the public has been on guard about altering the genetics of intelligence at least since scientists invented recombinant DNA. As long ago as the 1970s, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel Prize, questioned whether his pioneering work might show that ‘the differences between people are genetic differences, not environmental differences’.

I say, dream on. As it turns out, genes contribute to intelligence, but only broadly, and with subtle effect. Genes interact in complex relationships to create neural systems that might be impossible to reverse-engineer. In fact, computational scientists who want to understand how genes interact to create optimal networks have come up against the kind of hard limits suggested by the so-called travelling salesperson problem. In the words of the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in The Origins of Order (1993): ‘The task is to begin at one of N cities, travel in turn to each city, and return to the initial city by the shortest total route. This problem, so remarkably simple to state, is extremely difficult.’ Evolution locks in, early on, some models of what works, and hammers out refining solutions over millennia, but the best computer junkies can do to draw up an optimal biological network, given some input, is to use heuristics, which are shorthand solutions. The complexity rises to a new level, especially since proteins and cells interact at higher dimensions. Importantly, genetics research is not about to diagnose, treat or eradicate mental disorders, or be used to explain the complex interactions that give rise to intelligence. We won’t engineer superhumans any time soon.

Social Inequality Leaves An Outsized Genetic Mark

nautil.us |  In humans, the profound biological differences that exist between the sexes mean that a single male is physically capable of having far more children than is a single female. Women carry unborn children for nine months and often nurse them for several years prior to having additional children.¹ Men, meanwhile, are able to procreate while investing far less time in the bearing and early rearing of each child. So it is that, as measured by the contribution to the next generation, powerful men have the potential to have a far greater impact than powerful women, and we can see this in genetic data.

The great variability among males in the number of offspring produced means that by searching for genomic signatures of past variability in the number of children men have had, we can obtain genetic insights into the degree of social inequality in society as a whole, and not just between males and females. An extraordinary example of this is provided by the inequality in the number of male offspring that seems to have characterized the empire established by Genghis Khan, who ruled lands stretching from China to the Caspian Sea. After his death in 1227, his successors, including several of his sons and grandsons, extended the Mongol Empire even farther—to Korea in the east, to central Europe in the west, and to Tibet in the south. The Mongols maintained rested horses at strategically spaced posts, allowing rapid communication across their more than 8,000-kilometer span of territory. The united Mongol Empire was short-lived—for example, the Yüan dynasty they established in China fell in 1368—but their rise to power nevertheless allowed them to leave an extraordinary genetic impact on Eurasia.²

A 2003 study led by Chris Tyler-Smith showed how a relatively small number of powerful males living during the Mongol period succeeded in having an outsize impact on the billions of people living in East Eurasia today.³ His study of Y chromosomes suggested that one single male who lived around the time of the Mongols left many tens of millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory that Mongols occupied. The evidence is that about 8 percent of the male population in the lands the Mongol Empire once occupied share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence and a cluster of similar sequences differing by just a few mutations. Tyler-Smith and his colleagues called this a “Star Cluster” to reflect the idea of a single ancestor with many descendants, and estimated the date of the founder of this lineage to be 1,300 to 700 years ago based on the estimated rate of accumulation of mutations on the Y chromosome. The date coincides with that of Genghis Khan, suggesting that this single successful Y chromosome may have been his.

Star Clusters are not limited to Asia. Geneticist Daniel Bradley and his colleagues identified a Y-chromosome type that is present in 2 to 3 million people today and derives from an ancestor who lived around 1,500 years ago.⁴ It is especially common in people with the last name O’Donnell, who descend from one of the most powerful royal families of medieval Ireland, the “Descendants of Niall”—referring to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a legendary warlord from the earliest period of medieval Irish history. If Niall was real, he would have lived at about the right time to match the Y-chromosome ancestor.

Star Clusters capture the imagination because they can be tied, albeit speculatively, to historical figures. But the more important point is that Star Cluster analysis provides insights about shifts in social structure that occurred in the deep past that are difficult to get information about in other ways. This is therefore one area in which Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analysis can be instructive, even without whole-genome data. For example, a perennial debate among historians is the extent to which the human past is shaped by single individuals whose actions leave a disproportionate impact on subsequent generations. Star Cluster analysis provides objective information about the importance of extreme inequalities in power at different points in the past.

Race Is A Social Construct, But I'm Desperate To Make It A Genetic One...,

NYTimes |  In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.

The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Monetized American Mcdonalds-Fiend Sex Addict Tweeter

rightweb |  Last August, shortly after John Kelly replaced Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Steve Bannon was fired as the president’s chief strategist, John Bolton complained that he could no longer get a meeting with Donald Trump.

Just three months later, however, on the eve of Trump’s belligerent address to the United Nations, Bolton was once again in direct contact with the president. How did this turnabout take place? The reconnection was reportedly arranged by none other than Sheldon Adelson, the Trump campaign’s biggest donor.

Politico reported that the most threatening line in Trump’s UN speech—that he would cancel Washington’s participation in the Iran nuclear deal if Congress and U.S. allies did not bend to his efforts to effectively renegotiate it—came directly from Bolton and wasn’t in the original marks prepared by Trump’s staff.

The line was added to Trump’s speech after Bolton, despite Kelly’s recent edict [restricting Bolton’s access to Trump], reached the president by phone on Thursday afternoon from Las Vegas, where Bolton was visiting with Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Bolton urged Trump to include a line in his remarks noting that he reserved the right to scrap the agreement entirely, according to two sources familiar with the conversation.

Some analysts have suggested that Bolton, an anti-Iran uber-hawk, has the visit to Washington of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to thank for his imminent elevation. But Adelson, a huge supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, likely played a critical role in Bolton’s ascendancy.

Demonetized Iranian Vegan Muslim Sexbot Youtube Shooter

Nasim Aghdam's website

Time |  Here’s what to know about suspected YouTube shooter Nasim Aghdam.

Video of YouTube HQ shooter from 10 days ago asking if USA or Iran is better for freedom of speech https://t.co/xFOnXeX1Qs pic.twitter.com/zS8fPbhYa4

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 4, 2018

Aghdam, a 39-year-old Southern California resident, worked for her father’s electrical company and at one time operated a business called Peace Thunder, NBC News reports. She was listed on Facebook as an artist, NBC adds.

Aghdam, who was found dead by law enforcement officials Tuesday, wore glasses and a scarf and carried a “big huge pistol,” according to a YouTube employee who witnessed the incident from a second-floor window.

San Bruno police said they found Aghdam, who died of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, at 12:53 p.m. in a courtyard area inside the YouTube complex.

Little is known about her motive, according to law enforcement officials. San Bruno police said there is no evidence that the shooter was previously acquainted with any of the victims.

Aghdam was an animal rights activist, according to the Associated Press, who participated in a 2009 protest with the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Oceanside, Calif.

She was also a prolific YouTube user, posting videos on a range of topics from multiple accounts, according to a report by NBC’s Bay Area Investigative Unit. In a video posted in January, Aghdam alleged that the company “discriminated and filtered” her videos to reduce their number of views; she also published rants attacking the company on her personal website. A photo posted on her Facebook page last February also shows her standing on a street corner with a sign that reads “YouTube Dictatorship” and “Hidden policy: Promote stupidity discrimination, suppression of truth,” NBC News reports.

Aghdam’s father, Ismail Aghdam, said that he told police earlier this week that Nasim was “angry” at YouTube and “hated” the company. Aghdam had reported his daughter missing on Monday, and early Tuesday morning was informed that she had been found sleeping in her car in Mountain View, about an hour from YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters. Ismail said he warned the police that she might be headed toward YouTube.