Wow. The combined glee club singing the National Anthem at the Army-Navy Game gave me goosebumps! pic.twitter.com/NMLtt6y8KM
— Derek (@DerekUtleyCEO) December 9, 2017
Happy Birthday @TheLeeGreenwood!#FlashbackFriday pic.twitter.com/MCrMK6Eurm
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2017
Uranium One
Fake Russian Dossier on Donald Trump
Other Scandals
FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow By John Solomon and Alison Spann - 10/17/17
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/355749-fbi-uncovered-russian-bribery-plot-before-obama-administration
Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews....
Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.
...
Rather than bring immediate charges in 2010, however, the Department of Justice (DOJ) continued investigating the matter for nearly four more years, essentially leaving the American public and Congress in the dark about Russian nuclear corruption on U.S. soil during a period when the Obama administration made two major decisions benefiting Putin’s commercial nuclear ambitions.
...
Then-Attorney General Eric Holder was among the Obama administration officials joining Hillary Clinton on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States at the time the Uranium One deal was approved.
...
The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.
Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.
...
Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who chaired the House Intelligence Committee during the time the FBI probe was being conducted, told The Hill that he had never been told anything about the Russian nuclear corruption case even though many fellow lawmakers had serious concerns about the Obama administration’s approval of the Uranium One deal.
“Not providing information on a corruption scheme before the Russian uranium deal was approved by U.S. regulators and engage appropriate congressional committees has served to undermine U.S. national security interests by the very people charged with protecting them,” he said. “The Russian efforts to manipulate our American political enterprise is breathtaking.”
A Russian nuclear firm under FBI investigation was allowed to purchase US uranium supply By Sara A. Carter 27 October 17, 2017
https://www.circa.com/story/2017/10/17/national-security/the-fbi-uncovered-russian-nuclear-kickback-scheme-months-before-the-obama-administration-passed-uranium-one-deal-with-moscow
Fifteen months before the 13 members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS, approved the sale of the Canadian company Uranium One to Russia’s nuclear arm giant Rosatom, the FBI began investigating persons who were connected to the Russian state corporation. The FBI said in court documents and in interviews conducted by Circa that by 2010 they had gathered enough evidence to prove that Rosatom-connected officials were engaged in a global bribery scheme that included kickbacks and money laundering. FBI officials said the investigation could have prevented the sale of Uranium One, which controlled 20 percent of U.S. uranium supply under U.S. law.The deal which required approval by CFIUS, an inter-agency committee who reviews transactions that leads to a change of control of a U.S. business to a foreign person or entity that may have an impact on the national security of the United States. At the time of the Uranium One deal the panel was chaired by then-Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and included then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-Attorney General Eric Holder.
...
In a 2015 affidavit, FBI officials said Mikerin, “with the consent of higher level officials at Tenex and Rosatom (both Russian state-owned entities), would offer no-bid contracts to U.S. businesses in exchange for kickbacks in the form of money...” made to offshore accounts, stated the affidavit in support of a search warrant. Mikerin pled guilty to the allegations.
The Justice Department didn’t move forward an indictment with prosecution of bribery by people tied to Rosatom, through subsidies and other entities, until 2014 after CFIUS approved the sale of Uranium One, leaving the American public without knowledge of the Russian company’s allegedly illegal actives as it went to procure one-fifth of U.S. uranium supply.
...
The case being built against Mikerin in 2010 was under the supervision of Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, then an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general. According to court documents, the case was also handled by then Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is currently the deputy FBI director under Trump.
Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that led to Russia dossier By Adam Entous, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman October 24
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html
Mueller Now Investigating Democratic Lobbyist Tony Podesta by TOM WINTER and JULIA AINSLEY,
OCT 24 2017
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mueller-now-investigating-democratic-lobbyist-tony-podesta-n812776
WASHINGTON — Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group are now the subjects of a federal investigation being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, three sources with knowledge of the matter told NBC News.
10/24/17
Tucker Carlson: Last night on this show we told you about how the Podesta Group, a lobbying firm co founded by Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta and his brother Tony had been sucked into independent counsul Robert Mueller's investigation of alleged Russian interference in American politics. Before last night's show was even over we got an e-mail from a man with direct personal knowledge of that story. The man who's name we can't reveal for the time being is a former senior employee of the Podesta Group. He worked there for years. He said he was motivated to contact us by the disgust he felt watching media coverage of the Russia story. Not only were most reporters getting it wrong he said they were getting it backwards. The Russians were in fact deeply involved in American politics but the real story had almost nothing to do with the 2016 presidential campaign....
Now the source we spoke to has been interviewed extesnsively by Robert Muller's independent investigators. In press accounts Muller's investigation is still framed as a hunt for collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia. Our source says investigators are in fact very interested in Manaforts behavior while he ran the Trump campaign but otherwise that discription is mostly bogus. The investigation has broadened now to determine which people and which organizations in Washington have spent years working secretly as de facto operatives on behalf of Russian government and business interests. The Podesta group is chief among these. Quote they are more focused on facilitators of influence in this country says our source than they are on election collusion. The Podesta group he says quote is in their crosshairs.
We Need an Investigation of the Entire Justice Department Now BY ROGER L SIMON OCTOBER 25, 2017
https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/need-investigation-entire-justice-department-now/
Bravo, Charles Grassley! The Iowa senator has turned into something of an aging Mr. Smith taking on corruption in the Obama administration (and its Justice Department) and calling for a special investigator for the metastasizing Uranium One Scandal....
Or should we now call this the Podesta, Podesta & Manafort Scandal, because an ongoing and related report on Tucker Carlson's cable show is unmasking a series of connections that make the most paranoid conspiracy theorist seem rational?
...
Meanwhile, over at the also related (phony) Trump Dossier Scandal:...
...
More disturbingly, indications are that the FBI itself relied on this execrable pack of nauseating lies to jump-start the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. They may even have made additional payments to Fusion GPS themselves.
...
... we also have the unanswered questions about Deborah Wasserman Schultz and her Pakistani computer expert who had access to the data of dozens of congressional Democrats, not to mention the unsolved mystery of the murder of Seth Rich and the hacking of the DNC server
...
And then's there's the Unmasking Scandal with its attendant mysteries. Who was ordering Samantha Powers to do hundreds of unprecedented unmaskings of U.S. citizens in foreign intelligence surveillances?
...
We have a systemic problem within the DOJ and FBI that has been going on for some years and has grown to the extent these organizations act like mini-states, impervious to supervision by anyone, especially the very people they are supposed to serve -- you and me. They are the Deep State taken to the tenth power.
...
The time has come for a thorough airing to renew the trust of the citizenry. That means a special investigator, but one with a wide berth to look into the entire DOJ and FBI, its patterns and practices, and, let's be honest, our intelligence agencies as well. We're living in a bureaucratic nightmare. As Mark Steyn put it so succinctly on Tucker Carlson's show Wednesday night, "Everyone is colluding with Russia except Trump!"
Hannity: 10/24/17
Tucker Carlson: 10/25/17
Hannity: 10/25/17
Hannity: 10/26/17
1:45 - Clips of prominent Democrats saying there is no actual evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to influence the election. (Hannity pointed out that the mainstream media gave a huge amount of coverage despite there being no evidence of it.)
16:05
Laws Potentially Broken in Uranium One Deal (According to Gregg Jarrett)
Laws Potentially Broken in Dossier Scandal (According to Gregg Jarrett. Criminal penalties apply)
Laws Potentially Broken in Clinton EMail Scandal (According to Gregg Jarrett)
33:16
Sean Hannity: Everything that they tried to say about Donald Trump and his campaign, they're guilt of, I'll add on steroids... That they sold out America's security in this case.
34:18
Sebastian Gorka: There's the Uranium One deal. That's treasonous.... There's the dodgy Dossier which is about Russian disinformation being used to slander Donald Trump. ... There's James Comey using that disinformation to create a special prosecutor to trigger that is used to investigate the president. ... There's Fusion GPS. How many stories are out there that are fake that came from Moscow and are peddled by Fusion GPS into the left wing media?Sean Hannity: The Russians lied to impact the election. The Russians infiltrated our national security to corner the uranium market.
“WHAT HAPPENED”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2017
“How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia”
➡️https://t.co/GqpIidk017
NOW WE KNOW! pic.twitter.com/SgWL1HZmkI
.@FoxNews Chris Wallace: “More evidence of Dem collusion with Russia than GOP” https://t.co/nACQerJSiu
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2017
Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC: When I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the Russians hacked our emails, I stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton campaign.
By DONNA BRAZILE | November 02, 2017
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774
...
I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process...
...
I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”
I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.
I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.
...
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
HANNITY’S “TICK TOCK” REVEALED: Obama Ensured Uranium Exportation — Ignored Glaring National Security Fears (VIDEO) November 2, 2017 by Joshua Caplan
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/11/hannitys-tick-tock-revealed-obama-ensured-uranium-export-approval-ignored-glaring-national-security-fears-video/
HANNITY: “Barack Obama purposely manipulated the process to allow this trucking company to be the conduit by which they got the uranium out of the country. Tell us what you found.”SOLOMON: “Yeah, there wasn’t just one decision, we look at Uranium One and say we let them buy the mine and 20% of the ore that was being mined at that time under there control. But there was a series of decisions made by the Obama administration time and time again, between 2010 and 2012 that are incredibly favorable to Russia’s ROSATOM, the state owned nuclear energy industry, time and again these decisions are being made while the FBI knowns that there criminality going on by that company’s executives”
HANNITY: “The bribery, exhortation, money laundering, the racketeering, and so on.”
SOLOMON: “Yeah, Kickbacks. And theres a second thing that i’m just starting to report on now. There we concerns in the Obama administration that where very specific concerns that Russia was engaged in a Uranium scheme that it was going to get enough control of uranium, dump it on the market, drive all the prices down –“
HANNITY: “Wow!
SOLOMON: “And put all the other people out of business. Those are two legitimate national security concerns that don’t seem to have had an effect on all these give aways.”
Uranium One deal led to some exports to Europe, memos show BY JOHN SOLOMON AND ALISON SPANN - 11/02/17
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/358339-uranium-one-deal-led-to-some-exports-to-europe-memos-show
"I'm calling for Mr. Mueller's resignation or his firing" pic.twitter.com/rEpobJCn8V
— RepMattGaetz (@RepMattGaetz) November 8, 2017
Clinton Corruption Update For November 12, 2017 BattleSwarmBlog
http://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=34162
The Wall Street Journal thinks Mueller is too compromised and should step down. ...
And remember: The FBI used the Fusion GPS Steele dossier to get a FISA warrant for Trump’s campaign. ...
“Clinton Emails, Trump Dossier, Russian Nukes: All Point To Corruption In Obama’s Justice Department.” Including Uranium One and the unmasking scandal. ...
For all Brazile’s “not illegal” blather, there’s a good chance Hillary’s team broke campaign finance laws paying for the Fusion GPS dossier and listing the line item as “legal fees.”
You know what else broke the law? The Clinton campaign shoving its hand into the puppet DNC to bypass campaign contribution limits: ...
Former FBI Director: Hillary Clinton’s crimes 20 times worse than Watergate.”
“New Documents Show FBI Deputy Director McCabe Did Not Recuse Himself from the Clinton Email Scandal Investigation until Week Before Presidential Election.” Despite the fact his wife’s campaign received $700,000 from Clinton “friends.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions: Why we've made restoring the rule of law our top priority By Jeff Sessions 11/13/17
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/13/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-why-weve-made-restoring-rule-law-our-top-priority.html
The rule of law is the foundation of our system of government. In the vision of our Founders, we have “a government of laws—and not of men.”Under President Trump’s strong leadership, the Department of Justice has made restoring the rule of law our top priority. Everything we do is guided by this principle.
Sessions directs prosecutors to 'evaluate certain issues' involving Uranium One and Clinton, leaves door open on special counsel By Brooke Singman 11/13/17
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/11/13/justice-dept-won-t-rule-out-another-special-counsel-to-investigate-uranium-one-and-clinton.html
Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate “certain issues” requested by congressional Republicans, involving the sale of Uranium One and alleged unlawful dealings related to the Clinton Foundation, leaving the door open for an appointment of another special counsel....
The Justice Department’s letter specifically said that some of the topics requested by Goodlatte and other committee members were already being investigated by the department’s Inspector General’s office.
I hope there will be an impartial investigation but many people are afraid that officials in the Justice Department who remain loyal to Democrats will whitewash these "matters" the way James Comey whitewashed the Clinton E-mail scandal.
28. You'll recall my thread noting the appointment of Christopher Wray, the new FBI Director. He's been appointed by Trump to lead a massive anti-corruption drive. https://t.co/HU275UpRHK
— Imperator_Rex (@Imperator_Rex3) November 14, 2017
I am not endorsing or denying Imperator's conclusions and inferences. I am referencing the facts he cites because they are relevant to the topic of this post.
Imperator_Rex @Imperator_Rex3
Replying to @Imperator_Rex3 @CharlesOrtel Imperator_Rex Retweeted Imperator_Rex28. You'll recall my thread noting the appointment of Christopher Wray, the new FBI Director. He's been appointed by Trump to lead a massive anti-corruption drive.
29. The new IRS Director is David Kautter. He was nominated by Trump on May 10 & designated as acting Commissioner on 26 October, effectively removing Obama prateorian & hack John Koskinen.
30. Kautter's a tax (avoidance) expert. It's highly probable that Wray knows Kautter and may well have worked with him professionally. There's a fair chance Kautter was engaged by Wray as an expert witness in the many white collar crime cases he ran as an attorney.
31. In June, 2017, Don Fort was appointed as the new head of the IRS Criminal Investigation Division. The CI is massive, employing some 3,100 employees across the world with a budget of $500 million. Speciality? Fraud, tax evasion & money laundering.
32. Hey, guess who came knocking on Don Fort's door just weeks after he was appointed? Why, Robert Mueller, SC, apparently. That's odd, given we're supposed to believe he's taking down the evil Drumpf (he's not):
Five new revelations in the Russian uranium case BY JOHN SOLOMON - 11/20/17
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/361290-five-new-revelations-in-the-russian-uranium-case
The FBI did have evidence that Rosatom officials were engaged in criminality well before the Obama administration approved Rosatom's purchase of Uranium One....
Russia saw its purchase of Uranium One as part of a strategy to dominate global uranium markets, including making the United States more dependent on Moscow's nuclear fuel.
...
Uranium One did export some of its U.S. uranium ore.
Congressional referrals sparked DOJ investigations like Uranium One and Clinton Foundation Sara A Carter 11/14/17
https://saraacarter.com/2017/11/14/congressional-referrals-sparked-doj-investigations-like-uranium-one-and-clinton-foundation/
The Department of Justice (DOJ) has confirmed it has received multiple congressional referrals for investigations over the past year regarding the sale of twenty percent of the American uranium supply to Russia’s nuclear arm, as well as calls for investigations into allegations of pay-for-play regarding the Clinton Foundation, Circa has learned.Multiple sources, including congressional officials, tell Circa that the requests sent to the Department of Justice over the past year have led to ongoing investigations, which they say also include investigations into the alleged leaking of classified information to the media and the improper unmasking of Americans.
The article below, critical of Robert Mueller, comes from a surprising source: the LA Times. Is it possible that Democrats are turning against Mueller because his indictment of Paul Manafort implicated the Podesta Group and now Democrats are afraid Mueller may indict Democrats in his investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election? Democrats have been praising Mueller for many months hoping his investigation will result in the removal from office of President Trump. They would have a hard time denying wrongdoing by Democrats indicted by Mueller after heaping such high praise on him for so long a time.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-mueller-record-20171122-story.html
As he investigates Trump's aides, Robert Mueller's record shows surprising flaws
What the Flynn Plea Means by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY December 1, 2017
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454269/michael-flynn-plea-no-breakthrough-russia-investigation
Nevertheless, as I explained in connection with George Papadopoulos (who also pled guilty in Mueller’s investigation for lying to the FBI), when a prosecutor has a cooperator who was an accomplice in a major criminal scheme, the cooperator is made to plead guilty to the scheme. This is critical because it proves the existence of the scheme. In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.That is not happening in Flynn’s situation. Instead, like Papadopoulos, he is being permitted to plead guilty to a mere process crime. A breaking report from ABC News indicates that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians — initially to lay the groundwork for mutual efforts against ISIS in Syria. That, however, is exactly the sort of thing the incoming national-security adviser is supposed to do in a transition phase between administrations. If it were part of the basis for a “collusion” case arising out of Russia’s election meddling, then Flynn would not be pleading guilty to a process crime — he’d be pleading guilty to an espionage conspiracy.
The Flynn Plea: A Quick and Dirty Analysis By Susan Hennessey, Matthew Kahn, Vanessa Sauter, Shannon Togawa Mercer, Benjamin Wittes Friday, December 1, 2017
https://lawfareblog.com/flynn-plea-quick-and-dirty-analysis
In early February, the Washington Post broke the story that, contrary to the White House’s multiple assertions, Flynn had discussed sanctions in calls with Kislyak. Not only that, but the contents of the communications had been picked up in intelligence intercepts (presumably targeting Kislyak) and the substance of the conversations was sufficiently concerning that Flynn was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.
National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say By Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima February 9, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/national-security-adviser-flynn-discussed-sanctions-with-russian-ambassador-despite-denials-officials-say/2017/02/09/f85b29d6-ee11-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html
FBI reviewed Flynn’s calls with Russian ambassador but found nothing illicit By Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller January 23, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html
The FBI in late December reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn — national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump — but has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government, U.S. officials said.The calls were picked up as part of routine electronic surveillance of Russian officials and agents in the United States, which is one of the FBI’s responsibilities, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterintelligence operations.
CNN: White House claims Obama admin approved Flynn calls with Russian ambassador BY MAX GREENWOOD - 12/01/17
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/362856-cnn-white-house-claims-obama-admin-approved-flynn-calls-with-russian
The White House said on Friday that it was the Obama administration that authorized former national security adviser Michael Flynn's contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during President Trump's transition, according to CNN....
According to court documents, Flynn lied to investigators when he told them that he did not ask Kislyak to refrain from retaliating against U.S. sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to the Russian meddling.
Flynn also lied when he told the FBI that he did not lobby Kislyak to oppose or delay a United Nations Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements, a resolution strongly condemned by Trump.
See the Charges: U.S. v. Michael T. Flynn DEC. 1, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/01/us/document-Flynn-FBI-Russia.html
State Department has 'no problem' with Trump team's Russia contacts by Joel Gehrke Jan 13, 2017
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/state-department-has-no-problem-with-trump-teams-russia-contacts/article/2611810
Catherine Herridge: The FBI had concluded Michael Flynn was NOT lying to them… DEC. 1, 2017
http://therightscoop.com/catherine-herridge-the-fbi-had-concluded-michael-flynn-was-not-lying-to-them/
Bret Baier received some information earlier today from a source who has knowledge of FBI Director Comey’s testimony to Congress earlier this year, that his agents felt that Flynn hadn’t deliberately mislead them, but that he was somehow mistaken in his conversations.
Because many internet applications make money from adverting, they are designed to keep people using them for as long as possible. And they use psychological tricks to produce compulsive behavior[Harris]. These tricks include: alert notifications and sounds to get you to use the application, hiding the clock so you can't tell how long you've been using the application, tracking streaks to make sure you use the application every day, auto playing videos to grab your attention whether you intended to watch a video or not, and games may use repetitive music to put users in a trance-like state.
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said[Parker]
... The thought process that went into building these applications ... was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators - it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people - understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
...
God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook vice president for user growth was quoted in a article in The Verge[Vincent]
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,”...
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.
He is saying that people post false information to the internet because they are addicted to likes.
Internet apps also reduce your attention span and intellectual capacity.[Hill] When you use the internet, you learn to expect to find something interesting right away. This stimulates the pleasure neurotransmitters in the brain, but if you don't get that hit of pleasure right away, or after it wears off, you go and look for it somewhere else.[Hill] This is why you might notice that sometimes you read a few sentences of an article or watch a minute of a video and then leave it to look at something else for a short time before moving on again and again. This reduction in attention span interferes with your ability to think things through at a deep level.
Smartphone apps designed to get users hooked[Greenwald] are causing an increasing number of accidents and fatalities. Technology companies are literally killing people[Stock et. al.], [Callahan] in their pursuit of profits.
Internet technology companies have billions of users. Their influence rivals that of nation states.[McNamee] Facebook has been shown to influence elections in the US by its ability to target ads to very specific groups of people without anyone except the advertiser knowing who is seeing the ads or what is in them.[Madrigal]
Technology companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, control what users see through search results, news feeds, advertising, suggestions, and by restricting access of account holders. They give preference to items in ways that reflect their employees' political biases. They control access to the public marketplace of ideas by ranking items they present to users and by banning users and account holders whose opinions they find objectionable.
There are many arguments offered by those attempting to defend the technology companies: they are just producing tools and cannot be responsible if people misuse them, people should take individual responsibility for their own actions, parents should supervise their children's use of technology, etc. However, none of these excuses are valid because technology companies deliberately use science and psychology to make products that cause people to use them compulsively. How are ordinary people supposed to stand up against large corporations putting out products scientifically designed to cause harm (compulsive use)? Many of these technology companies are the moral equivalent of drug pushers: trying to get children hooked early, ruining lives, and harming society, all for the sake of profits.
References
Facebook and Google get their revenue from advertising, the effectiveness of which depends on gaining and maintaining consumer attention. Borrowing techniques from the gambling industry, Facebook, Google and others exploit human nature, creating addictive behaviors that compel consumers to check for new messages, respond to notifications, and seek validation from technologies whose only goal is to generate profits for their owners....
Like gambling, nicotine, alcohol or heroin, Facebook and Google — most importantly through its YouTube subsidiary — produce short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term. Users fail to recognize the warning signs of addiction until it is too late.
...
Consider a recent story from Australia, where someone at Facebook told advertisers that they had the ability to target teens who were sad or depressed, which made them more susceptible to advertising.
...
In the United States, Facebook once demonstrated its ability to make users happier or sadder by manipulating their news feed.
...
The fault lies with advertising business models that drive companies to maximize attention at all costs, leading to ever more aggressive brain hacking.
...
The Facebook application has 2 billion active users around the world. Google’s YouTube has 1.5 billion. These numbers are comparable to Christianity and Islam, respectively, giving Facebook and Google influence greater than most First World countries. They are too big and too global to be held accountable. Other attention-based apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, SnapChat and Twitter — also have user bases between 100 million and 1.3 billion. Not all their users have had their brains hacked, but all are on that path. And there are no watchdogs.
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Incentives being what they are, we cannot expect Internet monopolies to police themselves. There is little government regulation and no appetite to change that. If we want to stop brain hacking, consumers will have to force changes at Facebook and Google.
“Think about the way digital information is conveyed, as short bits of information,” said Dr. Greenfield. “The idea of working on something in-depth over a long period of time is falling out of favor, because people are Googling, reading the first sentence of whatever comes up and then they’re done. People are using the Internet this way because most of the time they find what they want. When you find what you want you get a slight hit in your pleasure neurotransmitter because you’re getting satisfied, and as long as you get that hit you’re going to be more likely to keep doing it. We’re reinforced by that positive experience.”...
“A concern that we have,” said Dr. Greenfield, “is that if you’re not using some of these deeper capacities for thinking, because you’re using a digital device as a section of your brain, then those skill-sets will atrophy.”
Forging new habits has become an obsession among technology companies. In an age when commercial competition is only a click away, the new mandate is to make products and services that generate compulsive behavior: in essence, to get users hooked on a squirt of dopamine to the brain’s reward center to ensure that they’ll come back.
Hey, you know what happens when you read something really enraging on the internet? You get a hit of dopamine. And even though it's a "bad" feeling, you immediately want to feel it again, because anything is better than being bored. Well, people who know how to manipulate this mechanism rule the world. Here's what you need to know now:
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown....
I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.
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I learned to think this way when I was a magician. Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. Once you know how to push people’s buttons, you can play them like a piano.
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And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.
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Hijack #1: If You Control the Menu, You Control the Choices
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By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones.
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Hijack #2: Put a Slot Machine In a Billion Pockets
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If you want to maximize addictiveness, all tech designers need to do is link a user’s action (like pulling a lever) with a variable reward. You pull a lever and immediately receive either an enticing reward (a match, a prize!) or nothing. Addictiveness is maximized when the rate of reward is most variable.
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When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got.
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When we pull to refresh our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what new email we got.
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When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next.
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When we swipe faces left/right on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.
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When we tap the # of red notifications, we’re playing a slot machine to what’s underneath.
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Hijack #3: Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)
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Another way apps and websites hijack people’s minds is by inducing a “1% chance you could be missing something important.”
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Hijack #4: Social Approval
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When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place.
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Hijack #5: Social Reciprocity (Tit-for-tat)
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Like Facebook, LinkedIn exploits an asymmetry in perception. When you receive an invitation from someone to connect, you imagine that person making a conscious choice to invite you, when in reality, they likely unconsciously responded to LinkedIn’s list of suggested contacts.
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Hijack #6: Bottomless bowls, Infinite Feeds, and Autoplay
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News feeds are purposely designed to auto-refill with reasons to keep you scrolling, and purposely eliminate any reason for you to pause, reconsider or leave. It’s also why video and social media sites like Netflix, YouTube or Facebook autoplay the next video after a countdown instead of waiting for you to make a conscious choice (in case you won’t).
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Hijack #7: Instant Interruption vs. “Respectful” Delivery
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Companies know that messages that interrupt people immediately are more persuasive at getting people to respond than messages delivered asynchronously (like email or any deferred inbox).
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Hijack #8: Bundling Your Reasons with Their Reasons
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For example, when you you want to look up a Facebook event happening tonight (your reason) the Facebook app doesn’t allow you to access it without first landing on the news feed (their reasons), and that’s on purpose. Facebook wants to convert every reason you have for using Facebook, into their reason which is to maximize the time you spend consuming things.
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Hijack #9: Inconvenient Choices
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Businesses naturally want to make the choices they want you to make easier, and the choices they don’t want you to make harder.
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For example, NYTimes.com lets you “make a free choice” to cancel your digital subscription. But instead of just doing it when you hit “Cancel Subscription,” they send you an email with information on how to cancel your account by calling a phone number that’s only open at certain times. Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Hijack #10: Forecasting Errors, “Foot in the Door” strategies
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Lastly, apps can exploit people’s inability to forecast the consequences of a click.
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People don’t intuitively forecast the true cost of a click when it’s presented to them. Sales people use “foot in the door” techniques by asking for a small innocuous request to begin with (“just one click to see which tweet got retweeted”) and escalate from there (“why don’t you stay awhile?”). Virtually all engagement websites use this trick.
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I’ve listed a few techniques but there are literally thousands.
... it persuades us to spend as much time as possible online, with tactics ranging from Snapchat’s snapstreaks to auto-playing videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook....
... because tech companies’ business models largely depend upon advertising revenue, it’s not really in their best interest to push us toward, say, getting off the social network du jour and going outside to hang out with friends ...
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... a growing body of research suggests that the use of social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter may have negative consequences, like increasing your chances of depression or social isolation. Indeed, simply having your phone around could lower your cognitive capacity.
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“Everything [Facebook] knows about me can be used to persuade me toward a future goal,” he says. “And it’s very powerful; it knows exactly what would persuade me, because it has persuaded me in the past.
Last Christmas Day, 33-year-old Joshua Burwell walked right off a cliff and fell 60 feet to his death in California. “He wasn’t watching where he was walking,” Bill Bender of San Diego Lifeguards told NBC News. “He was looking down at the device in his hands.”...
According to the CDC, over eight people are killed and 1,161 are injured each day in the US by distracted driving. Texting while driving is now the leading cause of teenage deaths in this country. Anecdotally, emergency rooms are seeing an uptick of injuries to “petextrians” — people who text while walking and have, say, run into a 300-pound bear (California, 2012), fallen into a fountain at the mall (Pennsylvania, 2011) or fallen onto train tracks (Pennsylvania, 2012).
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According to a 2012 Time magazine study, 84 percent of people around the world said they couldn’t go a single day without their cellphones. Clearly, they mean it.
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According to the Time magazine study, 50 percent of American adults admitted to sleeping with their cellphone, holding it like a security blanket.
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Aside from research that shows our brains release dopamine and serotonin — those feel-good chemicals triggered by drugs, sex, and now text message alerts and likes on Instagram — there’s another, bleaker aspect to our dependence: an inability to tolerate our own thoughts, or to register that there are others around us.
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A few years after Steve Jobs died, reporter Nick Bilton revealed that the Apple co-founder wouldn’t let his own children use the iPad.
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“We have seen the dangers of technology firsthand,” then-Wired editor Chris Anderson said. “I’ve seen it in myself. I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
Amid a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of distracted driving are getting worse....
Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade.
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From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.
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These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day—all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice.
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Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians—all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than, say, a 4,000-pound SUV—especially if you’re glancing up from your phone rather than concentrating on the road.
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it....
The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.
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Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
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Any video game player worth their salt knows the feeling. Just ONE more level, ONE more achievement, ONE last item before dinner, sleep, or (shudder) some actual human interaction. Four hours later, and you’re still staring blankly at the screen, mouth ajar, hands balled up into an arthritic mass of digits, and any thoughts you once had about tending to your basic human needs are long since forgotten or pushed off indefinitely as you plug along for that never ending quest for virtual fulfillment....
It’s easy to forget that our own bodies need as much tending to as our farms or guilds, heck, maybe even more so. Here’s a list of people who died neglecting their real-life health bars for their video game equivalents.
Recent studies have shown a rise in both teen suicides and self-harm, particularly among teenage girls Sadie's age....
And just this past week, researchers in the U.K. published similar discoveries in a study on self-harm that showed a dramatic increase in the number of adolescent girls who engage in it: Self-harm rose 68 percent in girls ages 13 to 16 from 2011 to 2014, with girls more common to report self-harm than boys (37.4 per 10,000 girls vs. 12.3 per 10,000 boys).
PragerU: We're Suing YouTube To Defend Free Speech — And We're Going To Win ByJAMES BARRETT October 27, 2017
http://www.dailywire.com/news/22833/exclusive-prageru-were-suing-youtube-defend-free-james-barrett
This week PragerU, a conservative not-for-profit organization founded by Dennis Prager, filed a lawsuit against Google and YouTube for "unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech." In an interview with the Daily Wire on Friday, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit underscored the far-reaching free speech implications of her organization's legal action against what has become "two of the most important public forums in the world" and explained why their legal team feels "very strongly" that they can win.
Family of American killed in Barcelona terror attack sues Facebook, Google and Twitter By Christopher Carbone, October 4, 2017
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/10/04/family-american-killed-in-barcelona-terror-attack-sues-facebook-google-and-twitter.html
The family of a California man killed in the Barcelona terror attack filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Google, Facebook and Twitter, alleging the tech giants played a role in “aiding, abetting and knowingly providing support and resources” to the Islamic State group....
The three tech companies, the complaint argues, have “for years knowingly and recklessly provided the terrorist group ISIS with accounts to use its social networks as a tool for spreading extremist propaganda, raising funds and attracting new recruits."
Sean Parker - Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability (We Are Dopamine Addicts) - Youtube interview
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.' And then they would say, 'No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.' And I would say, well you're a conscientious objector that's okay you don't have to participate, but you know we'll get you eventually.'And like, I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it begins, it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
If the thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it, that thought process was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?' And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content, and that's going to get you more likes and comments.
It's a social-validation feedback loop it's like exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology." The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Our Love Affair With Digital Is Over By DAVID SAXNOV. 18, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/opinion/sunday/internet-digital-technology-return-to-analog.html
Thankfully, the analog world is still here, and not only is it surviving but, in many cases, it is thriving. Sales of old-fashioned print books are up for the third year in a row, according to the Association of American Publishers, while ebook sales have been declining. Independent bookstores have been steadily expanding for several years. Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States), while sales of instant-film cameras, paper notebooks, board games and Broadway tickets are all growing again.
Are You Addicted? Survey Finds 40 Percent Of Smartphone Use Is Compulsive 5Dec - by Daniel Steingold
https://www.studyfinds.org/smartphone-use-compulsive-survey/
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media....
Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
These Tech Insiders Are Shielding Their Children From The Technology They Work With BUSINESS INSIDER
31 MAR 2018
https://www.sciencealert.com/tech-insiders-are-shielding-their-children-from-the-tech-they-work-with
Instead of tricking out their homes with all the latest technology, many of today's parents working or living in the tech world are limiting – and sometimes outright banning – how much screen time their kids get.The approach stems from parents seeing firsthand, either through their job, or simply by living in the Bay Area – a region home to the most valuable tech companieson Earth – how much time and effort goes into making digital technology irresistible.
A 2017 survey conducted by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation found among 907 Silicon Valley parents that despite high confidence in technology's benefits, many parents now have serious concerns about tech's impact on kids' psychological and social development.
"You can't put your face in a device and expect to develop a long-term attention span," Taewoo Kim, chief AI engineer at the machine-learning startup One Smart Lab, told Business Insider.
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"The tech companies do know that the sooner you get kids, adolescents, or teenagers used to your platform, the easier it is to become a lifelong habit," Koduri told Business Insider.
It's no coincidence, he said, that Google has made a push into schools with Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the learning management suite Google Classroom.
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Erika Boissiere has little doubt that tech is poison to young brains.
The 37-year-old mum of two in San Francisco works as a family therapist alongside her husband.
She said they both make an effort to stay current with screen-time research, which, despite suffering a lack of long-term data, has nevertheless found a host of short-term consequences among teens and adolescents who are heavy users of tech.
These include heightened risks for depression, anxiety, and, in extreme cases, suicide.
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Boissiere will go to great lengths to prevent her kids, 2-year-old Jack and 5-year-old Elise, from having even the most basic interactions with technology. She and her husband haven't installed any TVs in the house, and they avoid all cell-phone use in the kids' presence – a strict policy the couple also requires of their 28-year-old nanny, who Boissiere said has been caught scrolling on the job.
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Silicon Valley's low- and anti-tech parents may seem overly cautious, but they actually follow longstanding practices of former and current tech giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook.
In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. Later it became family policy not to allow kids to have their own phones until they turned 14.
Today, the average American child gets their first phone around age 10.
Jobs, the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad.
"We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.
Even Cook, the current Apple CEO, said in January that he doesn't allow his nephew to join online social networks. The comment followed those of other tech luminaries, who have condemned social media as detrimental to society.
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One of the more hopeful studies, and one often cited by psychologists, was published in 2014 in the peer-reviewed journal Computers in Human Behaviour.
It involved roughly 100 pre-teens, half of whom spent five days on a tech-free retreat engaged in activities like archery, hiking, and orienteering. The other half stayed home and served as the control.
After just five days at the retreat, researchers saw huge gains in empathy levels among the participating kids. Those in the experimental group started scoring higher in their nonverbal emotional cues, more often smiling at another child's success or looking distressed if they witnessed a nasty fall.
The researchers concluded: "The results of this study should introduce a much-needed societal conversation about the costs and benefits of the enormous amount of time children spend with screens, both inside and outside the classroom."
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But around Silicon Valley, a number of low-tech schools have popped up in an effort to reintroduce the basics.
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In their 2017 book Screen Schooled, the co-authors make the case that technology does far more harm than good, even when it's used to boost scores in reading and maths.
"It's interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs's kids would be some of the only kids opted out," they wrote. ... As the authors wrote, "What is it these wealthy tech executives know about their own products that their consumers don't?".
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Peterson comes to this subject while answering the question of why Europe is clamping down on speech critical of Islam. Peterson answers that it is part of the progressive movement's efforts to restrict speech critical of all group identities including those groups which hold beliefs incompatible with progressive values such as Islam's rejection of feminism. This seeming contradiction is explained by the fact that progressive movement's goal of tearing down Western civilization takes precedence over everything else.
Peterson explains that under Islam everything has to be under its purview. That includes law and government. There's no separation between church and state so Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.
Since radical Islam and the progressive moment share the goal of tearing down Western civilization, they are natural allies. And this is in part why progressives want to restrict speech that is critical of Islam.
Progressives want to tear down Western civilization because of the historical harm they believe the West has done. And because they believe all hierarchies are based on power, they believe the hierarchical structure of Western civilization based on wealth and political power oppresses the ordinary people. This belief that society is composed of groups of people who are either oppressed or oppressors is called cultural Marxism and is derived from Karl Marx's theory that all of history can be explained as conflicts between oppressors and the oppressed.
Another reason Peterson gives for progressives' belief that Western civilization is flawed and should be torn down is related to the fact that many progressives "don't believe in hard work. And they don't believe that people get to where they're going by hard work." This is in part due to the "neo Marxist doctrine that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it".
Peterson defends Western civilization by pointing out that "history is a bloody nightmare. And it doesn't matter where you look". It is not just the West, but "at least the West has brought advantages along with its disadvantages. And I think that our attitude towards individuality is fundamentally correct and absolutely vital".
Peterson defends the hierarchical organization of the West by pointing out that the hierarchy is not based on power but on competence and authority granted due to competence. He says in the West, hierarchies are organized around achieving a goal and they are generally successful.
Peterson is also critical of the progressives' worship of diversity because it is inclusive of contradicting values and it assumes incorrectly that "we can all get along without a problem".
One point I would add to Peterson's discussion is the peculiar fact that progressives believe that "diversity" should embrace all groups except political conservatives and white men. This fact juxtaposed with the progressive's defense of Islam shows that "diversity" is not truly a value held by progressives, they don't really believe it. "Diversity" is just a rhetorical, political device used to achieve a political goal.
Jordan Peterson: Why is Europe clamping down on speech critical of Islam?
Transcript:
Can you hazard a guess why Europe is clamping down on speech critical of Islam when Islam is causing lots of problems with rape gangs, terrorism, and generally being a menace? Why?
Well I suppose, the first, um. Let's say if I was going to oppose that statement I would say well perhaps it's a propagandistic - what would you call it - conspiracy to blame what's happening in Europe on Islamic immigrants. I guess part of the problem is is that at least as far as I can tell the news has become sufficiently unreliable because it's so polarized that we can't really tell what's going on.
I mean I think the reason that Europe is clamping down on speech critical of Islam is partly the same reason that the entire Western world is clamping down on speech that's critical of anything that is associated with group identity. Which is pretty much any set of ideas that unites people. And it's, it's a consequence of the collective decision that we've made that egalitarianism and conflict avoidance constitute the two highest virtues and they Trump everything else including free speech.
Now why that's happened is a very very difficult thing to say. I mean um. I suspect to some degree that it's a consequence of women becoming involved in the political system which is something that we've never experienced before. And women are more agreeable by nature than men. And agreeable people are, are compassionate towards those they see as suffering. And that seems to include any minority, especially when you combine that with the kind of neo Marxist doctrine that claims that anyone who has an advantage swiped it.
And I think in the Islamic situation you get a real conflict there because it's obviously the case that many Islamic practices are not commensurate with postmodern neo-marxist feminism, let's say. But they seem to get a free pass and I guess that's because the idea that all cultures are equal Trump's the requirement for human rights for women.
And and maybe the other thing that's even darker is that there's a fair bit of revolutionary fervor in the more radical end of the left political spectrum and that radical further is devoted towards tearing down the patriarchy and of course that's basically Western civilization. And so if because Islam isn't part of Western civilization then it can be seen as an ally in that in that attempt that's what it looks like to me.
I also think you know that ignorance and and all of that contribute it isn't obvious that people who are afraid of such things as Islamophobia really understand anything about Islam. I wouldn't say I understand anything about Islam even though I've read a fair bit about it. It's very difficult to put yourself inside a different belief system.
I'm somewhat apprehensive about Islam because it looks to me like it's a totalizing system as well as a religion and it's a totalizing system because everything has to come under its purview including law and and everything that goes along with that there's no separation between church and state and so I don't see how that's commensurate with the Western mode of existence.
And I don't think people want to have that conversation because they want to say well no everyone - diverse as they are, and important as that diversity is apparently such that everyone has to be represented equally - the diversity isn't really of anything about anything fundamental, and we can all get along without a problem. And I'm afraid that that's extraordinarily naive.
And then I suppose there's also an element of something like Western guilt I guess perhaps for what has been described as our imperialist past. There's been a very long term assault on - on the what would you call moral - on the morality of the West. We're often viewed as the rapers and pillagers of the world. And that sort of goes along with the environmentalist ethos. And so I think we do have a fair bit of guilt about that whether it's warranted or not. I mean history is a bloody nightmare. And it doesn't matter where you look. And I would say at least the West has brought advantages along with its disadvantages. And I think that our attitude towards individuality is fundamentally correct and absolutely vital. And I would also say that the only countries in the world that are essentially worth living in, in any real sense, are the ones that are predicated on the Judeo-Christian tradition and manifested in Western, the Western body of laws. So but there's still plenty of guilt and there's plenty of people who, well, who are - what - contemptuous, of being as we discussed in the last question, and also angry with the political system because they're powerless. Or maybe they've been hurt by male authority figures. That happens very frequently and so they have absolutely no trust in higher, in hierarchical structures.
And there you might add to that too a certain amount of laziness because the thing about hierarchical structures is that they impose values on people and then in order to progress in that value structure you have to discipline yourself and work hard. And many of the radical leftists happen to be very low in conscientiousness and so they don't believe in hard work. And they don't believe that people get to where they're going by hard work.
And then, well, one other thing. There's a group of people I think who are basically personality disordered and those are the ones that have never had a positive relationship with anything that was masculine so whenever they see anything masculine that has motive power and that would include authority and confidence not just power they assume that that's tyrannical. And it's part of the postmodern assumption that all power higher all hierarchies are hierarchies of power. When the truth of the matter is is that hierarchies in the West are usually hierarchies of authority and competence and they're, like they're oriented towards getting a certain task done and they actually do get the task done. So but we're dubious about our own ethical - what would you say - integrity and I guess that's also why it's of particular importance for people to try to act honestly because if you don't act honestly and then you start to doubt your own integrity and then when people come after you you're going to be week and that's a really bad idea.
"Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns."
https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm
Fact Sheet: Guns Save LivesA. Guns save more lives than they take; prevent more injuries than they inflict
* Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year -- or about 6,850 times a day. [1] This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. [2]
* Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8% of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.[3]
* As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse.[4]
* Even anti-gun Clinton researchers concede that guns are used 1.5 million times annually for self-defense. According to the Clinton Justice Department, there are as many as 1.5 million cases of self-defense every year. The National Institute of Justice published this figure in 1997 as part of "Guns in America" -- a study which was authored by noted anti-gun criminologists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig.[5]
* Armed citizens kill more crooks than do the police. Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606).[6] And readers of Newsweek learned that "only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The 'error rate' for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high."[7]
* Handguns are the weapon of choice for self-defense. Citizens use handguns to protect themselves over 1.9 million times a year. [8] Many of these self-defense handguns could be labeled as "Saturday Night Specials."
B. Concealed carry laws help reduce crime
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C. Criminals avoid armed citizens
Gun ownership for conservatives is less than 50%. Blacks own guns at almost the same rate as whites. Many moderates own guns. Even among liberals gun ownership is 22%.
That means people who blame whites or conservatives for owning guns should also blame blacks and liberals.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/gun-ownership-statistics-demographics/
Demographics of Gun OwnersSex
Male 37 %
Female 31 %Race
White 37 %
Non White 32 %
Black 33 %Conservative 49 %
Moderate 37 %
Liberal 22 %
One woman, three armed men. That is why she needs a high capacity magazine.
http://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/security-video-shows-woman-defend-herself-against-armed-intruders"Woman hiding with kids shoots intruder ... The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved."
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/woman-hiding-kids-shoots-intruder_ntm7s/242785523"Firearms Rights are a Gender Equality Issue too. ... Firearms, especially lower recoiling ones such as handguns, allow any person to wield enough power to stop another person from attacking them."
https://www.learnaboutguns.com/2008/03/19/firearms-rights-are-a-gender-equality-issue-too/
"A Memphis woman protected herself against two men who forced their way into her home last month."
http://www.guns.com/2016/01/13/with-gun-to-her-neck-woman-defends-herself-kills-intruder-video/"A man who attempted to break into a California home twice went down with a bullet in the chest after the female occupant refused to be a victim, KHTS reports."
http://concealednation.org/2017/07/woman-defends-herself-with-handgun-after-home-intruder-comes-back-for-more/"Landrum police said they were called to a local business after a woman said two men tried to rob and sexually assault her, but she scared them off when she fired shots at them."
http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/17327090/landrum-woman-fights-back-after-attack"Pregnant Woman Defends Herself Against Home Invaders By Using A Shotgun"
https://learnaboutguns.com/2008/06/07/pregnant-woman-defends-herself-against-home-invaders-by-using-a-shotgun/"According to a preliminary investigation, a woman was approached by a man who put a knife to her throat demanding her belongings. Police then say the woman reached inside her purse as if she were going to give her wallet but instead grabbed her gun, pulled it out and shot him."
http://www.whas11.com/news/crime/man-injured-after-attempted-robbery-at-downtown-parking-garage/43696086
Nancy Sinatra wants NRA members to be shot. That would amount to millions of people.
Dear @NancySinatra there are 5 million NRA members Explain why
— Trad American Angel (@RightWingAngel) October 5, 2017
they should be killed. ALL Recent Mass Shooters Were #Dems NOT @NRA Members pic.twitter.com/sUNtctdsO4
Hayley Geftman-Gold, vp and senior counsel in strategic transactions at CBS, wrote just hours after last night’s massacre at an outdoor country music festival, “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often republican gun toters.”Geftman-Gold’s Facebook comments went viral, and CBS terminated her not long after.
If you want to know what causes school shootings, follow the money. The pharmaceutical industry makes tons of money selling psychiatric drugs that cause school shootings.
http://www.cchrflorida.org/antidepressants-are-a-prescription-for-mass-shootings/
Before the late nineteen eighties, mass shootings and acts of senseless violence were relatively unheard of. Prozac, the most well known SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant, was not yet on the market. When Prozac did arrive, it was marketed as a panacea for depression which resulted in huge profits for its manufacturer Eli Lilly. Of course other drug companies had to create their own cash cow and followed suit by marketing their own SSRI antidepressants.Subsequently, mass shootings and other violent incidents started to be reported. More often than not, the common denominator was that the shooters were on an antidepressant, or withdrawing from one. This is not about an isolated incident or two but numerous shootings. The question is, during the past twenty years is the use of antidepressants here a coincidence or a causation?
There have been too many mass shootings for it just to be a coincidence. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School. Eric was on Luvox, an antidepressant. The Virginia Tech shooter killed thirty-two people and he was on an antidepressant. While withdrawing from Prozac, Kip Kinkel murdered his mother and stepmother. He then shot twenty-two classmates and killed two. Jason Hoffman wounded five at his high school while he was on Effexor, also an antidepressant. James Holmes opened fire in a Colorado movie theater this past summer and killed twelve people and wounded fifty-eight. He was under the care of a psychiatrist but no information has been released as to what drug he must have been on.
Psychiatrists generally will tell you that these people were mentally ill and they weren’t treated in time or didn’t get enough help to prevent the tragedy. However, Dr. Peter Breggin, who is a psychiatrist, stated that depression rarely leads to violence and that it’s only since the SSRI’s came on the market that such mass shootings have taken place.
https://www.lifezette.com/polizette/to-stop-mass-school-shootings-re-think-anti-depressants/
To Stop Mass School Shootings, Rethink Antidepressants
Multiple studies provide substantial evidence that paroxetine has a dangerous effect on young people, may provide clues about how to prevent future tragedies
If you want to know what causes school shootings, follow the money. Journalists know coverage of school shootings causes copycat shootings. But they cover those stories because it increases ratings.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34385059
Research shows that, in fact, mass shooters may be more likely to act when there has recently been a high-profile mass killing, a model more attune to viral infection than pure copycat.
School Shootings Spread Like a Virus. The Media Can Help Stop Them.As researchers at Arizona State University wrote in 2015, “mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past.” They found that school shootings become more likely in the 13 days following a previous one. The fear is that media exposure helps fuel such “copycat” acts. While the ASU researchers’ conclusion didn’t go that far—it determined only that contagion exists—physicist Sherry Towers, who led the study, admitted, “it appears that yes, national media coverage does end up increasing the frequency of these tragedies.”
If you want to know what causes school shootings, follow the money. Cities refuse to arrest teens so the cities can qualify for federal grant money.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/966854507744374784.html
The Broward County School Board and District Superintendent, entered into a political agreement with Broward County Law enforcement officials to stop arresting students for crimes.5.The motive was simple. The school system administrators wanted to "improve their statistics" and gain state and federal grant money for improvements therein.
...
Initially the police were excusing misdemeanor behaviors. However, it didn't take long until felonies, even violent felonies (armed robberies, assaults and worse) were being excused. ...
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/02/1...fbi-cops-school-but-warning-signs-missed.html
Cruz reportedly had dozens of run-ins with law enforcement prior to Wednesday's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High dating back to 2010. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Friday that there were "20 calls for services in the last few years."
There Is No ‘Epidemic of Mass School Shootings’ By Eric Levitz March 1, 2018
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/there-is-no-epidemic-of-mass-school-shootings.html
Criminal victimization in American schools has collapsed in tandem with the overall crime rate, leaving U.S. classrooms safer today than at any time in recent memory.