Educational CyberPlayGround ®

K12 Education: Learn and Teach the public how to identify Fake News

MEDIA LITERACY and the Trust Deficit:
A lack of trust for business and government is "contagious"
and spreading to other sectors.

"Just cause you know about something - doesn't mean - it's going to make any difference, you've got to act on it. What's political is personal." ~ KE

#INTERDISCIPLINARY #EDTECH #EDCHAT #SECURITY #K12

 

Stop fake news The whole point of this exercise was to stop the spread of misinformation, so it gives me great pleasure to share that model with you. We call it Fakebox, and its really easy to use.

The Era of Fake Video Begins
The digital manipulation of video may make the current era of “fake news” seem quaint. MAY 2018The Atlantic
EXCERPT:

in a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can't easily detect the hoax.
This development, which has been the subject of much hand-wringing in the tech press, is the work of a programmer who goes by the nom de hack “deepfakes.” And it is merely a beta version of a much more ambitious project. One of deepfakes's compatriots told Vice's Motherboard site in January that he intends to democratize this work. He wants to refine the process, further automating it, which would allow anyone to transpose the disembodied head of a crush or an ex or a co-worker into an extant pornographic clip with just a few simple steps. No technical knowledge would be required. And because academic and commercial labs are developing even more-sophisticated tools for non-pornographic purposes—algorithms that map facial expressions and mimic voices with precision—the sordid fakes will soon acquire even greater verisimilitude.
The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook's News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet's history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what's to come.​.. ​

Cook Political Report : Just 3 counties — Macomb in Michigan, York in Pennsylvania, and Waukesha in Wisconsin were responsible for Trump's Electoral College win: “If those three counties had cast zero votes, Trump would have lost all three states and the election.” 2017 Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index November 3, 2016 Cook Political Report 2016 Electoral College Breakdown New Electoral College Ratings Show a Tightening Race, Math Continues to Favor Clinton - 270 electoral votes are needed to win the election.

VirusTotal lists the findings of cybersecurity firms that analyze URLs suspected of being associated with malware. For many but not all of the Trump-related subdomains, according to the VirusTotal listings, Kaspersky, the Russian antivirus company, detected a possible association with malware. “Any basic security audit would show the existence of these subdomains, and what servers they're leading to. This is sloppy at best, and potentially criminally negligent at worst, depending on the traffic that is being run through these servers.”

Watch the movie Get Me Roger Stone that chronicles the history of the Republican Party party up to the Trump Election where you will understand the history of Trump's grandfather and Roy Cohn.

The Secrecy World of Billionairs Avoiding Taxes using Shell Companies

11/29/17 The Russian billionaire next door: Putin ally is tied to one of D.C.'s swankiest mansions. How Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska was behind an LLC that bought a Washington, D.C. mansion. Sold by discount retail magnate Herbert Haft's widow for $15 million in cash to a company incorporated in Delaware, according to filings. D.C. property records show it was purchased in 2006 by yet another entity: a limited-liability company incorporated that year in Delaware called Hestia International. The mansion is connected to a Russian billionaire aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska who is a key ally of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort, the recently indicted former chairman of President Trump's campaign. With a net worth recently estimated by Forbes at $5.2 billion, Deripaska, 49, is one of Russia's richest men and considered part of Putin's inner circle. Charles Davidson, executive director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute, said the mansion is a striking example of how the world's uber-wealthy can quietly invest in high-end real estate, obscuring their identities through front companies. Deripaska said that he established a trust in the British Virgin Islands that purchased two homes in Manhattan — a $4.5 million townhouse in the West Village in 2006 and a different $42.5 million house on the Upper East Side in 2008. Each was purchased by separate companies controlled by the billionaire.

11/20/17 Journalist Explains How Panama Papers Opened Up The World's Illicit Money Networks Listen· Jake Bernstein helped break the story of the Panama Papers, the leaked documents that detail the offshore tax havens of the super rich. Among the people whose offshore interests are revealed in these documents are 13 Trump administration members, advisers and major donors. For example, in the Paradise Papers, you have Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce for Donald Trump. And those are people who either did business with Donald Trump or were campaign contributors. So you have the Mercers - show up in the Paradise Papers and other big donors such as Steve Wynn, the head of the Golden Nugget. And then you have Sheldon Adelson who is a big Trump supporter and mega-gambling tycoon. And then you also have all of these people who actually did business with Donald Trump. And what's so remarkable about the constellation of Trump's business partners found in these leaks, you know, as well as the people connected to his family, funders and campaign staff, is how much they all have in common. You know, they all seem to embrace a sort of dynastic approach. You know, accumulate as much money and power as possible and then hand it off to your children. And then you have the Agalarovs, who were Russian father and son real estate developers who were Trump business partners on the beauty pageant in Moscow. It's a family enterprise just like it is with Trump - their disdain for following the rules of any given nation and instead sort of embracing the anything-goes rules of the secrecy world, the fact that, you know, that - the deep Russian ties in this world. And then with the Paradise Papers, we can really see, you know, how the people who came later, the people who funded Trump's campaign, the people who are in Trump's cabinet - how they use the secrecy world, too, you know, because they're all incredibly wealthy. They are the American version of the Russian oligarch. And they're, you know, billionaires who are pushing their own agendas but hiding a lot of their money through the secrecy world.
Is Trump or other people in his administration - are they indebted to Russian oligarchs or to Ukrainian oligarchs? You know, Paul Manafort offered to run the Trump campaign for free apparently (laughter). You know, why would he do that, you know? Well, he happened to have business relationships and owe a lot of money to Russian oligarchs closely tied to Vladimir Putin.

[... you do these investigations. And then you release them into the world, and you never really think about - or you can't really think too hard about what will happen. Nobody knows. But it never occurred to any of us (laughter) that writing a story about the secret business dealings of Putin's inner-circle and possibly Putin himself would then be a factor in the Russian government launching a massive cyberattack against the U.S. electoral process.] archive

6/18/16 From out-of-control lobbyists to the influence of Wall Street, the Democratic Party The Democrats double album of skullduggery. Colorado is voting this year on Amendment 69 which would create a system to pay every state resident's (except Medicare recipients) health care costs. Democratic consultants are raking it in to help Coloradans for Coloradans, a health care industry group defeat the measure. On the payroll are Global Strategies Group who advise one of Hillary's super pacs, Priorities USA, The Hilltop group (composed of ex-Obama campaign staff) and the Trimpa Group (run by a Democratic strategist). In Pennsylvania the Democratic party is spending over $1 million to foist fracking lobbyist Katie McGinty off on voters in the Senate election against Pat Toomey. They are trying to stop former three term Congressman Joe Sestak who will not accept the party's directives. Sestak who has a stellar labor voting record defeated ex Republican Arlen Specter also the recipient of massive Democratic party support in 2010 and narrowly lost 51-49 to Toomey in one of the worst years for Democrats ever.

What the Democratic platform should actually be about: The business of China is business. The business of America is war' - Gerald Celente The Democratic platform should be concentrated on economic growth and prosperity of its citizens

Why Free Trade Economics? the illusion is it prevents WAR that global capitalism would lead to permanent peace. Twenty years ago, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proposed his “golden arches theory of conflict prevention”. This holds that “no two countries that both have McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other since they each got their McDonald's”. He didn't mean that McDonald's ends war, but that its arrival in a nation symbolised the transition. Under the onslaught of the placeless, transnational capital that McDonald's exemplifies, democracy as a living system withers and dies. The political power that should belong to us has flitted into confidential meetings with the lobbyists and donors who establish the limits of debate and action. It has slipped into the diktats of the IMF and the European Central Bank, which respond not to the people but to the financial sector. It has been transported, under armed guard, into the icy fastness of Davos. Above all, the power that should belong to the people is being crushed by international treaty. Contracts such as Nafta, Ceta the proposed TransPacific Partnership and Trade in Services Agreement and the failed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are crafted behind closed doors in discussions dominated by corporate lobbyists. And those lobbyists are able to slip in clauses no informed electorate would ever approve of, such as the establishment of opaque offshore tribunals, through which corporations can bypass national courts, challenge national laws and demand compensation for the results of democratic decisions. These treaties limit the scope of politics, prevent states changing social outcomes and drive down labour rights, consumer protection, financial regulation and the quality of neighbourhoods. They make a mockery of sovereignty. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/06/mcdonalds-democracy-corporate-globalisation-trump-le-pen-farage

About The eCONomists From Nixon going into China making their middle class rich and eviserating the American middle class, giving all our jobs away to them. Since the eCONomists started globalization in the 1970's the only thing that happened was China ate the world's lunch. Forty years later the american working class revolts and throws all the bums out. The Globalists chase slave labor and don't care where they're buisness is done. Sanders and Trump are right about the Deep State the .01% elite who controlled the money, the wars, the policies, and the programs of the last 40 years. It is they who are responsible for $200 trillion of debt worldwide. The Levy Institute study that us 9 out of 10 people in the U.S. have roughly the same real earnings today as they did in the early '70s. That makes FOUR LOST DECADES, thanks to the feds, with no advance in the material well-being of the American people (aside from technological marvels) since the new money system came on the scene. 99% of the families in the USA now have less wealth than they did before the crisis of '08 began. But wait - it gets worse. It is now 45 years since the PhDs took control of America's money. Over those four and a half decades, how much financial progress do you think the average family has made? Approximately zero. “The greed, incompetence, and irresponsibility of elites.” This has “brought great populist rage,” Deep State newspaper of record, the Financial Times, written by Elitist-in-Chief, Martin Wolf. Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze — an Update to 2007 by Edward N. Wolff Levy Economics Institute of Bard College http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf

Income and net worth in the U.S. by class, 2013 Exactly how rich are the Top 1%? http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The economists are leveraging their academic prestige with secret reports justifying corporate concentration. Their predictions are often wrong and consumers pay the price. https://archive.is/GkxMF https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers

The 'outrageous' 40-year-old film that predicted the future President Trump This general populist backlash that we're seeing now isn't new. It was born out of the 2008 financial crisis.

If a person is born ignorant, to parents that are ignorant, in a society that is ignorant, lives a life of ignorance, and eventually dies in ignorance.... IGNORANCE IS THE NORM
Thus, indoctrination can be called education, hypnotism can be called entertainment, criminals can be called leaders, and lies can be called truth, because this person's mind was never educated!

It's easy to condust psychological warfare and corrupt human reasoning with ignorant people.

The 99% want to Take Them Down. The have nots - would rather burn the house down than allow the DNC & Wall Street get away with their jobs, pensions, homes, without getting punished. They believe and rightly so that "coarseness, corruption and moral corrosion" that describes Trump also describes the behavior of Wall Street and equally belongs to the Bush / Obama / Clinton reign. They have no illusions. They don't care about any of that. They just don't want to enable the DNC insiders to get away with it any longer. The 99% is going to deliver their punishment.

CLASS Urban Institute scholar Stephen Rose's classification = Family of Three Upper-middle class must make $100,000 to $350,000 Middle class must make $50,000 to $100,000 Lower middle class must make $30,000 to $50,000. A net worth of $1 million has the same buying power today that $341,000 did in 1980 and that $45,000 did 100 years ago, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl The average, four-year, private-college tuition now at $33,480 a year, according to the College Board. Long-term-care expenses: A private room in a nursing room now costs $7,700 a month, according to Genworth Financial. This means that a long-term illness such as Alzheimer's can bankrupt all but the wealthiest people. The 99% knows the campaign-finance system allows “legalized bribery” and that it is rigging the economy to benefit billionaires. Podesta Part 25: Wikileaks Releases Another 2,460 Emails, Total Is Now 41,969 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-01/podesta-part-25-wikileaks-releases-another-2460-emails-total-now-41969 Remember Bernie said 'The Business Model Of Wall Street Is Fraud' “Wall Street, play by the rules? Who are we kidding?” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-wall-street-fraud_us_5647fb78e4b08cda3489294a

Which makes it easy to believe FAKE NEWS

Culture of Celebrity - High-brow, Low-brow or No-brow?
This is what you get when you elect a merchant which has always been considered low class person to a position that warrants someone with an education who will conduct themselves for the good of the public interest and the good of the commons - see tracking hate since the election.

PT Barnum owned a brothel and so did Trump's Grandfather but it's worth noting, that Trump is a showman first and foremost just like PT Barnum! the knowledge that he was wearing a lav mic on that Access Hollywood bus didn't make him circumspect or cautious. We Loved the progression of "I have nothing to do with Russia" to "I assume I was videotaped all the time in Russia." On smoking gun tape, Nixon told Haldeman CIA should make FBI stop Watergate probe. Comey says Trump asked directly.
Texas Democratic Congressman Al Green believes it is "indisputable fact" that Trump obstructed justice in his firing of Comey. The Texas lawmaker believes the president fired Comey in an effort to stop "this Russia thing" - referring to the FBI's probe of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow during the 2016 election. "The president will not be indicted while in office," Green told reporters on Capitol Hill Wednesday. "The impeachment process will bring him to justice.

Donald Trump's money originally came from his grandfather Friedrich Trump a German immigrant, who ran a whore house /restaurant - bar, in British Columbia.
Buried in a ghost town in Canada's subarctic are the roots of the family fortune that paved Donald Trump's path to prominence.
Trump's grandfather Friedrich Trump started the family fortune in an adventure that involved the Klondike gold rush, the Mounties, prostitution and twists of fate that pushed him to New York City. Friedrich Trump (ne: Drumpf} had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon. Trump wanted a life outside the barber shop, far from the family-owned vineyards his ancestors had been working since they'd settled in Germany's Kallstadt region in the 1600s carrying the soon-altered surname Drumpf. He sailed in steerage to join his sister in New York.
The Arctic's business model was built on food, booze and sex with "Hoochi Mama's". The nest egg he generated in just two years grew into the fortune that has supported his grandson's bid for the U.S. presidency.

Etymology of "Hooch" goes back to Alaska of 1867.
There the Hoochinoo First Nation People had a a small Tlingit tribe named Hutsnuwu who made a liquor dubbed "hoochinoo" or "hoch" (slang) used by American soldiers who were sent there when Alaska was sold to the U.S. by Russia. Hooch in their own language, means brown bear or grizzly bear fort. This tribe, in the 19th century, had a reputation for drunkenness and as a source for illicit liquor, which they distilled themselves from molasses and other ingredients. <more>

Donald's Father Fred Trump was arrested when anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klansmen attacked police in New York in 1927. Fun fact: On Memorial Day of 1927, Trump's father was arrested at a KKK rally in Queens, NY
What is known, according to a New York Times article about clashes between the Klan and New York City's "Catholic" police force, s that Trump's father was arrested and released by police in relation to the march. According to the Post, a flyer passed around the neighborhood ahead of the Klan rally described the need for the rally. 1920 HATE GROUPS - Donald's Father Fred Trump was arrested when anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klansmen attacked police in New York in 1927
"The predication for the Klan to march, according to a flier passed around Jamaica beforehand, was that 'Native-born Protestant Americans' were being "assaulted by Roman Catholic police of New York City,'" Post reporter Philip Bump wrote in February 2016. "'Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon,' it continued, 'when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.'"
Trump's Mom Mary Anne MacLeod, was born in 1912 in Tong, Scotland about three miles from Stornoway, the main town on the isle of Lewis and brought up on the Hebridean island but emigrated to New York. Mary Anne left 1930, at the age of 18, to seek work as a domestic servant. Six years later she was married to successful property developer Frederick Trump. The couple lived in a wealthy area of Queens. Trump's mother who was the youngest of 10 children always spoke Gaelic and became a US citizen in 1942 and died in 2000, aged 88.

Trump's Background https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPT0CaoeSA

1939
Documentary footage of an "American patriot" rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 enlivened by the beating of a protestor. When 20,000 American Nazis Descended Upon New York City In 1939, the German American Bund organized a rally of 20,000 Nazi supporters at Madison Square Garden in New York City. When Academy Award-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry stumbled upon footage of the event in historical archives, he was flabbergasted. Together with Field of Vision, he decided to present the footage as a cautionary tale to Americans. The short film, A Night at the Garden, premieres on The Atlantic today. “The first thing that struck me was that an event like this could happen in the heart of New York City,” Curry told The Atlantic. “Watching it felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone where history has taken a different path. But it wasn't science fiction - it was real, historical footage. It all felt eerily familiar, given today's political situation.”

 

How Trump became a President

Get Me Roger Stone

Roger Stone
Created the Modern Sleezeball Lobbiest. He Created Donald Trump as a Political Figure and revels in your hatred. Stone hates the "Elites" but he honestly aspired to and loves being an "Elite".
Stone started by using lies, aka disinformation to get people angry and use their hate as his political strategy.
No morals, No Standards and friends with Roy Cohn who also represented Trump during his early business career. Trump's original Mentor was Roy Cohn All New Yorkers know that Trump's favorite legal tactic is to sue them when he wants to get his way just like Cohn 2:19. "Roy was not gay, Stone told me. "he was a man who liked having sex with men." ~ Roger Stone - Toobin, Jeffrey (June 2, 2008). "The Dirty Trickster" The New Yorker p. 58
Washington Post reveal that infamous attorney Roy Cohn influenced Donald Trump's brash style. Trump did business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present.

How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Casinos, Left Contractors Unpaid, Ruined Investors & Made Millions

11/3/16 Sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump: 15 women say he groped, kissed, or assaulted them

1/10/17 Document prepared by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the former Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI Director James Comey about Trump's ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain gave a "full copy" of the memos to Comey on Dec. 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos. The British ex-spy behind the Trump dossier was an FBI asset.

Discovering truth through lies on the internet - FCC comments analyzed “For this post, the Gravwell analytics team ingested all 22 million+ comments submitted to the FCC over the net neutrality issue. Using Gravwell we were able to rapidly conduct a variety of analysis against the data to pull out some pretty interesting findings. We scraped the entirety of the FCC comments over the course of a night and ingested them into Gravwell afterward. It took about an hour of poking around to get a handle on what the data was and the following research was conducted over about a 12 hour period. So we went from zero knowledge to interesting insights in half a day. We're kinda nerding out about it.”

Russia is a very formidable adversary

 

Only one-third of Americans say Russia influenced 2016 election Forty-four percent of the 2,000 voters polled Dec. 15 through Dec. 17 said they do not think Russia influenced November's election, while a quarter are still unsure

10/6/17 At the center of 2016's most intense weekend: How America overlooked the Russia election hack in one crazy day. How America overlooked the Russia election hack in one crazy day Rachel Maddow revisits how the Donald Trump "grabbing" tape, the release of hacked Clinton campaign e-mails, and the arrival of a major hurricane, obscured the U.S. government's announcement that Russia was interfering in the election. At the center of 2016's most intense weekend Jennifer Palmieri and Glen Caplin, former Clinton campaign officials, talk with Rachel Maddow about the day the Trump "grabbing" tape was revealed while the U.S. government announced that Russia was hacking the election and their campaign e-mails were being published to Wikileaks. Michael Isacoff yahoo news documentary explains.

 

Khrushchev's Granddaughter Just Compared Trump To Stalin Nina Khrushcheva slams Trump over attacks on the media. Trump on Tuesday accused NBC of “fake new” and said broadcast licenses should be “challenged” and “revoked.” “Here, President Trump defined 'fake news' the way Joseph Stalin defined 'enemies of the people': if they offer a slightest objection to his rule they must be wrong. And they must be silenced,” Nina Khrushcheva, an international affairs professor at The New School in New York City, told The Washington Examiner. She told the website: “Somewhere on the way to his real estate/reality TV career he forgot his lessons in civics and American democracy from high school. Or maybe he always had an 'F' in those subjects; being rich, he didn't and still doesn't think they apply to him. For that we are all paying dearly. And the longer he stays in, offering more and more somewhat Stalinesque amendments to American democracy, the more autocratic erosion to this once wonderful system we will experience.” Khrushcheva is the great-granddaughter of the former Soviet leader, who ran the country from 1953 to 1964. When Khrushchev's son ― Nina's grandfather ― was killed in World War II, Nikita Khrushchev adopted his son's 2-year-old daughter, Julia. Julia would become Nina's mother.

NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA ~ Guilty Man By weaponizing "news," Rupert Murdoch set the stage for Brexit, Donald Trump's election, and the eruption of neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Murdoch is one of the truly guilty men of our times, and he must be stopped.

Trump's 'Grab 'em by the Pussy' Video Will Play Near White House for 12 Hours Access Hollywood tape's release, a group devoted to fighting sexism wants to make sure President Trump and the rest of the country remember what he told Billy Bush while on a tour bus in 2005. Access Hollywood video “a vulgar display of Trump's true colors. It was not so-called 'locker room talk,' it was a man bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Manafort Had $60 Million Relationship With a Russian Oligarch @RichardEngel @NBCNews Chief Foreign Correspondent: in a review of docs in several countries @nbcnews uncovers millions in loans previously unreported from a Russian oligarch to Paul Manafort. Since 80s Trump, Manafort, Roger Stone, Roy Cohen, Lee Atwater interacted. Black, Stone, Manafort, Kelly ran a lobbying firm.

The ultimate guide to bust fake tweeters: A video toolkit in 10 steps Twitter is full of false information. Even Twitter co-founder Ev Williams recognizes that there is a “junk information epidemic going on,” as "[ad-driven platforms] are benefiting from people generating attention at pretty much any cost." This video toolkit is intended to help you debunk dubious tweets. It was first developed in research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Arena Program at the London School of Economics to detect Russian social media influence during the German elections. It was also the basis for a related BuzzFeed article on a Russian bot farm and tweets about the AfD  — the far-right party that will enter the German parliament for the first time. But first: Where do these bots come from?

FACT CHECK: Were The 1800s Steve Bannon's Kind Of America? President Trump's former strategic adviser offered this riff about American history on CBS's 60 Minutes. He was responding to interviewer Charlie Rose, who said that "people have been able to come here, find a place, contribute to the economy. That's what immigration has been in America." Bannon said he was "dead wrong." So let's explore: Does the history Bannon cited support his case?

SLAVERY IS STILL LEGAL IN THE UNITED STATES Slavery is still legal in the United States, so long as it is pursuant to a criminal conviction and if it is limited to compulsory uncompensated labor—and indeed that is precisely the system America maintains today.

See the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Formally abolishing slavery in the United States, the 13th Amendment was passed by the Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.

Lee"Willie Horton" Atwater, Republican Tactician, RNC Chairman, Advisor to Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush

MERCER FAMILY

 

The Mercers own Cambridge Analytica which targeted Americans with propaganda. Mercer money bankrolled Steve Bannon. Mercer Money lines the Facebook Mark Zuckerberg's pocketsDetails of Cambridge's acquisition and use of Facebook data have surfaced in several accounts since the business began working on the 2016 campaign, setting off a furious debate about the merits of the firm's so-called psychographic modeling techniques.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who helped found the data firm Cambridge Analytica and worked there until 2014, has described the company as an "arsenal of weapons" in a culture war. Wylie, who helped set up Cambridge Analytica and worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, as saying the system could profile individual voters to target them with personalized political advertisements. But the full scale of the data leak involving Americans has not been previously disclosed — and Facebook, until now, has not acknowledged it. Interviews with a half-dozen former employees and contractors, and a review of the firm's emails and documents, have revealed that Cambridge not only relied on the private Facebook data but still possesses most or all of the trove. Cambridge paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher who, Facebook says, claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes. Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, and other officials had repeatedly denied obtaining or using Facebook data, most recently during a parliamentary hearing last month. But in a statement to The Times, the company acknowledged that it had acquired the data, though it blamed Mr. Kogan for violating Facebook's rules and said it had deleted the information as soon as it learned of the problem two years ago. In Britain, Cambridge Analytica is facing intertwined investigations by Parliament and government regulators into allegations that it performed illegal work on the “Brexit” campaign. The country has strict privacy laws, and its information commissioner announced on Saturday that she was looking into whether the Facebook data was “illegally acquired and used.” http://www.newsweek.com/trump-campaign-psyops-firm-harvested-data-millions-american-voters-and-has-850333

Professor David Carroll Help to expose a foreign “database of ruin,” de-anonymizing every US voter, hacking our Electoral College.

Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant's biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica - a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump's key adviser Steve Bannon - used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with an academic at Cambridge University to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people's profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis that the entire company was built on.” Documents seen by the Observer, and confirmed by a Facebook statement, show that by late 2015 the company had found out that information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals. The New York Times is reporting that copies of the data harvested for Cambridge Analytica could still be found online; its reporting team had viewed some of the raw data. The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers' Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook's “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook's role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.

Russian bots dropped 45,000 garbage tweets on us during the Brexit referendum Less well-known is Russia's interference in the UK's referendum on European Union membership in 2016. But now a paper — still incomplete — by data scientists at Swansea University and the University of California, Berkeley, is digging into the magnitude of Russian Brexit-related tweets — and the provisional results are astonishing. Russian accounts that normally tweet in Russian and whose main subject was the Ukrainian conflict swiftly switched to English ahead of the June 2016 referendum and dumped a staggering 45,000 tweets in 48 hours with the hashtag “#Brexit,” paper co-author Tho Pham told Mashable. The study observed a total of 156,252 Russian accounts for one month before and one month after the 23 June referendum. As with the U.S. elections, many of these Russian accounts were bots or semi-automated accounts that spread mostly Leave propaganda in an attempt to influence the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Researchers "observe that the influence of pro-leave bots is stronger the influence of pro-remain bots." "Similarly, pro-Trump bots are more influential than pro-Clinton bots. Thus, to some degree, the use of social bots might drive the outcomes of Brexit and the U.S. election," they said.

Fox News Viewers Less Informed Than People Who Watch NO News
YOU ARE BETTER OFF NOT WATCHING ANY NEWS THAN WATCHING FOX NEWS
May 24, 2012 Farleigh Dickinson University just released the results of a nationwide study they recently did polling how informed the American population is on foreign and domestic affairs. Cenk Uygur discusses which media outlet ranked last video

11/29/17 SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES ARE HAPPY TO TAKE ALL ADD THE MONEY

Google/Twitter/Facebook gave us the f*** METADATA from each ad the Russians posted! Find the landing page - what age group was targeted - desk top or mobile - trigger words - ad clicks - ad spend - start and end dates

GOOGLE MAKES MONEY ON FAKE NEWSGOOGLE makes a lot of money on fake news by targeting for advertisement and content selection, distribution, and creation.

Google's Mass-Shooting Misinformation Problem When no reputable information is available, the search engine promotes fake news. in Congressional hearings last week on the role of Russian meddling on social media in the 2016 election, Google got off easy. YouTube was barely mentioned, despite suffering from the same, if not worse, fake-news problems as Facebook and Twitter. And crucially, Google can give a temporary fake-news phenomenon a much longer life. Google, as we can see in the example above, becomes the repository of the unreliable information that people are spewing into social media. Congress appears to have missed a key point in its questioning last week. It's clear that fake news and outright lies are, in fact, a small portion of the total content on any of the big tech platforms. But what matters are the routes that these companies provide to unreliable sources of information.

Google Transparency 2017 Google, democracy and the truth about internet search CONGRESS NEEDS TO ARREST Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Photo of Google/Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt wearing Clinton campaign "staff" badge https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/799059880204177408

US PATENT 20110218850 A1 ABSTRACT Scientific targeting for advertisement and content selection, distribution, and creation.
The invention is a computer-aided method of optimizing advertisements and content by grouping viewers into scientific segments, optimizing an advertisement and pieces of content by scientific segments, selecting an advertisement or content to display to a scientific segment, and creating a scientific targeted advertisement or piece of content.

Google is search. It's the verb, to Google founded in 1998

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search
Tech-savvy rightwingers have been able to 'game' the algorithms of internet giants and create a new reality where Hitler is a good guy, Jews are evil and… Donald Trump becomes president.

10/9/17 Google uncovers Russian-bought ads on YouTube, Gmail and other platforms The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google's many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company's DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world's largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world's largest online video site. The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

4/17 Google Rewrites Its Powerful Search Rankings to Bury Fake News and Google is applying the same new parameters for its “auto-complete” function, which finishes search questions based on popularity. Some of the auto-completes that are deemed offensive (such as “are women evil”) will be eliminated. Google is adding a feature to allow searchers online to flag these instances with a feedback form. Google is finally set new rules encouraging its “raters” -- the 10,000-plus staff that assess search results -- to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories and what the company calls “low-quality” content.
“Google's outsources the ratings to contractors Leapforce and Lionbridge, who employ home workers,” the article reveals. “According to one Leapforce job ad there are 1,500 raters. The work is flexible but demanding - raters must pass an examination and are consistently evaluated by Google. For example, a rater is given a “TTR” score - “Time to Rate” measures how quickly they make their decisions.” Even this is not new information. Lionbridge has been mentioned by several publications, including 2012 Search Engine Land.

FACEBOOK

 

11/4/17 Facebook estimates 200 million users may be fake, Kremlin-linked ad campaign reached about 146 million Americans,Twitter also reports that nearly 5 percent of its user base, or more than 16 million accounts, are fake "spam" account report

10/30/17 Facebook Says Russian-Backed Election Content Reached 126 Million Americans Twitter also revealed Russian-backed entities played a larger role than previously disclosed. Two sources told NBC News Monday that the company found 36,746 automated accounts — or bots — that were linked to Russia between September 1 and November 15, 2016. The accounts tweeted 1.4 million times and were seen 288 million times. Twitter also found 2,752 accounts associated with the Russia-run Internet Research Agency, up from the 201 the company originally disclosed.

9/27/17 Facebook sold ads to Russian-linked accounts during election The social network says the ad spending was north of $100,000.

9/18/17 Facebook and Google Helped Anti-Refugee Campaign in Swing States The big tech companies worked closely with Secure America Now to target an audience the group felt could be swayed by the message.

How Facebook ads helped elect Trump Trump campaign digital director Brad Parscale says Donald Trump won election on Facebook with highly targeted ads -- and infrastructure was a key issue

Facebook to turn over thousands of Russian ads to Congress, reversing decision Democratic lawmakers in recent days had demanded that Facebook be more open about what it knows and to dig more deeply into its troves of data to analyze the propaganda effort, which the company has acknowledged involved at least 470 fake accounts and pages created by a shadowy Russian company that spent more than $100,000 targeting U.S. voters. Lawmakers particularly wanted copies of the ads bought through the fake accounts, some of which Facebook officials showed to Hill investigators and then took away, making further study impossible. The company said sharing the ads would compromise users' privacy.

Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. THEY KNEW EXACTLY HOW TO FIND THE ANSWERS CONGRESS WANTED THE DOJ SHOULD ARREST ZUCKERBERG FOR TAKING MONEY FROM THE ENEMY OF THE uNITED sTATES.

Facebook deletes data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation A researcher used FB's own data to show that Russian posts reached 340m people. Now Facebook has scrubbed the data. Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis Jonathan Albright had done just days earlier. Facebook says they killed a social media analytics tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook bought last year. CrowdTangle enables advertisers to view metrics about the performance of their Facebook and Instagram campaigns. Albright also copied CrowdTangle's definition of its metrics directly into the spreadsheet he was building and soon would make public. The results of his data download startled him.

For those six pages alone, Albright found 19.1 million “interactions,”. Two other researchers who had been working with the Facebook data, Joan Donovan and Becca Lewis of the nonprofit Data and Society Institute, also noticed that it had suddenly disappeared.

FB shut down 470 Russian-controlled pages and accounts that had bought more than 3,000 ads, and that those ads had reached an estimated 10 million people, based on the company's own modeling. Facebook has declined to say how many people saw the free posts created by the Russian accounts and pages.

WASHINGTON POST Russian propaganda may have been shared hundreds of millions of times, new research says!

Itemized Posts and Historical Engagement - 6 Now-Closed FB Pages That left open the question of what else those 470 accounts and pages had been doing. Albright also found that, according to CrowdTangle, this same content had been “shared” 340 million times. That meant that the disinformation could have potentially reached the feeds of users that many times, but it didn't reveal how many users had actually read or even seen it. If “interactions” was the floor of the possible reach of the Russian content, then “shared” was the theoretical ceiling. But given that Albright was working with just six pages out of 470, it was clear to him that the Russian campaign reached far beyond the 10 million people Facebook had acknowledged saw the ads alone.

Where Zuckerberg makes his billions.

2016 Where Zuckerberg makes his money. About 85% of revenue comes from advertising and this is the first distinct difference between Facebook and Google. The cost of showing an ad per 1000 impressions (CPM, cost per mille) is about 22c on Facebook, versus 50c for other websites. And Google charges more than $2.00. Facebook found ads bought by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency — about 3,000 ads with a spend in the low six figures. That doesn't get you a ton of reach on Facebook. The Russian operation, while concerning and in obvious need of regulation, likely did not affect the election outcome in any discernible way. But the fervor over it, tied into overarching suspicion of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, allows Zuckerberg to apologize for a minor oopsie and publicly fix a problem, while skirting the much larger issue: that Facebook has exacerbated partisanship to extreme levels and tilted the media environment toward the right wing as a result.

TWITTER

 

THE COLLEGE KIDS DOING WHAT TWITTER WON'T

If 2 data science students with no funding can figure out how to ID Twitter's bad-actor bots, why can't Twitter? THE 20 YEAR OLD KIDS BEHIND RBHAT LABS ARE UNEARTHING THE HIDDEN BOTS THAT PLAGUE THE SOCIAL MEDIA GIANT!! The duo launched a Google Chrome browser extension that inserts a button onto every Twitter profile and tweet that reads, snappily, “Botcheck.me.” Click it, and you get a diagnosis of whether the account appears to be run by a person or by some sort of automation, based on the duo's own machine learning model. Their model is targeted exclusively to hunt propaganda bots about US politics.

Twitter has deleted tweets and other user data of potentially irreplaceable value to investigators probing Russia's suspected manipulation of the social media platform during the 2016 election, according to current and former government cybersecurity officials. Federal investigators now believe Twitter was one of Russia's most potent weapons in its efforts to promote Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the officials say. Twitter has aggressively enforced a “permanent deletion” policy across the board, including publicly shaming at least two companies not adhering to it via cease and desist orders. Twitter did only the bare minimum of investigating, searching its records for information about accounts with Russian ties that had already been disclosed by Facebook after its own probe. Russian news site RT, which Twitter linked to the Kremlin, spent nearly $275,000 on its platform last year.

Twitter Offered Russian Television Network RT 15% Of Its Total Share Of US Elections Advertising A Russian news outlet described by the US intelligence community as "the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet" was once a top sales prospect for Twitter's US elections ad team. Twitter wanted RT to spend big ahead of the 2016 US election, offering a significant portion of its election-related ad inventory in return. The social media company offered the Russian state-owned television network up to a 15% share of voice ("SOV") on US election advertising — or the percent of all ads run on that topic — for $3 million. ~ via @kantrowitz

SNAPCHAT no fake news at all ! ! !

 

How Snapchat Has Kept Itself Free Of Fake News They are commited to traditional news values ! ! !

Analysts say the problem is the near-monopoly power of Google and Facebook Inc., which together control the most popular social networks and most of the mobile ad market. It's also tough for Snapchat to add to its 173 million daily users when Facebook, with a daily audience almost eight times that size, relentlessly copies its best features. But while Snap hasn't figured out how to be a profitable advertising business, it's proving to be a much more competent media company than either Facebook or Google. There are signs of Russian activity on almost every American social network of any consequence, including Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even the smartphone video game Pokémon Go. (Bloomberg LP is developing news programming for the Twitter service.) Snapchat, however, has found no evidence of political ad buys by anyone in Russia. In fact, Snapchat appears to have no fake news at all. The secret? “Humans,” says Nick Bell, Snap's vice president for content. “We only work with authoritative and credible media companies, and we unashamedly have a significant team of producers, creators, and journalists.” Whereas Facebook deliberately blurs the line between personal status updates, news articles, and ads—sticking all three in its constantly updating, algorithm-driven News Feed—Snapchat has taken a more old-fashioned approach.

"What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust." ~ Evan Osnos

How to Spot Bullshit: A Primer by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt

USING SEARCH
BUT NOT GOOGLE !!!

 

 

THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE IS FROM OUR WONDERFUL LIBRARIANS WHO TEACH INFORMATION LITERACY!

Librarians are not marketers. The majority of information seekers are not making much use of the array of electronic resources online magazines, databases and reference assistance, for example that libraries make available to their communities. 84% of information searches begin with GOOGLE search engine.

 

ETHICS / CREDIBILITY VS. LIESForgers Use Fake Web Users to Steal Real Ad Revenue
"In a twist on the peddling of fake news to real people, researchers say that a Russian cyberforgery ring has created more than half a million fake internet users and 250,000 fake websites to trick advertisers into collectively paying as much as $5 million a day for video ads that are never watched."

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2016 is fake news. A pundit blatantly fabricates what's said in an interview. Is mindlessly RT'd by 100s, including journalists. Then they denounce Fake News.

Propaganda

Professor Al Greenberg & Director Frank Capra
Orco Development Community Service Program Dedicated to teaching primarily foreign-born students about American culture, politics, military, history, etc.​
Educator Allan Greenberg was students' middleman to the stars
When Capra was approached by a group of star-struck Japanese students studying film at the University of Southern California, Greenberg inquired about their curious green textbook. Capra, who directed most of the Why We Fightdocumentaries commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II (also shown in England at the request of Winston Churchill), lit up, Greenberg recalled. However, when Capra and Greenberg leafed through the Japanese textbook, what they found was “the most lopsided version of World War II you've ever heard,” Greenberg recalled. “You would have thought we attacked the Japanese,” he said. “Mr. Capra was very, very discouraged and depressed after that meeting was over. He said, 'Let's tell the truth to the students. Let's not have it biased on my side or their side.' ” Having heard Greenberg lecture on real estate and finance, Capra was convinced he would do a stellar job conducting the free lectures — the first of which were intended solely to correct factual and perceptual inaccuracies on the U.S.' role in World War II. ~ Videos

Why We Fight is a series of seven propaganda films commissioned by the United States government during World War II to justify to U.S. soldiers their country's involvement in the war. Later on, they were also shown to the U.S. public to persuade them to support U.S. involvement in the war.

How a Putin Fan Overseas Pushed Pro-Trump Propaganda to Americans
Tucked away on a corner of the site, next to links for Twitter and YouTube, is a link to another social media platform VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It is a clue that Patriot News, like many sites that appeared out of nowhere and pumped out pro-Trump hoaxes tying his opponent Hillary Clinton to Satanism, pedophilia and other conspiracies, is actually run by foreigners based overseas. Patriot News had an explicitly partisan motivation: getting Mr. Trump elected.
Patriot News postings were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times in the United States -- is among a constellation of websites run out of the United Kingdom that are linked to James Dowson, a far-right political activist who advocated Britain's exit from the European Union and is a fan of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. A vocal proponent of Christian nationalist, anti-immigrant movements in Europe, Mr. Dowson, 52, has spoken at a conference of far-right leaders in Russia and makes no secret of his hope that Mr. Trump will usher in an era of rapprochement with Mr. Putin. https://archive.is/XM8R9

How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics 10/10/17
Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election. The Russians paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate most widely, and among which audiences. Content and engagement metrics for hundreds of posts were captured by CrowdTangle, a common social analytics tool. The Russian campaign also appears to have been tailored to exploit the companies' own strategies for keeping users engaged. LinkedIn owned by Microsoft, is geared toward encouraging users to create articles and other content. "Foreign powers are playing within the rules of the game that we wrote."
As lawmakers debate tighter regulation for companies like Facebook, the trail of Russian digital bread crumbs underscores how difficult it will be to purge social media networks of foreign influence, or even to hamper the covert propaganda campaigns carried out on social platforms by Russia, China and other countries.

2016 Russia organized an anti Islam White Supremacist heavily armed rally in Houston
Organizers behind armed white supremacist protest in Houston revealed as Russian "It really gives an indication of the extent to which there must be a major Russian apparatus." As CNN reported last week, the protest was put together by the “Heart of Texas” Facebook page - a page that was revealed last month as one of the fake accounts operated out of Russia.

 

Think you're reading the news for free? New research shows you're likely paying with your privacy @tim_libert

Want to see how different TV networks covered the news terms such as "emails"? The Internet Archive Television Explorer that lets you trace how any keyword-think “emails”, “tax returns”, “alt-right”- has been covered on U.S. television news over the past half-decade.

"Fake news" didn't come out of nowhere.
I was birthed by "real news" not doing its job for decades.

If prejudice lurks among us, can our analytics do any better?
Revelations that predictive analytics are reproducing discriminatory practices in society. For instance Propublica's claim that one tool used for sentencing is prejudiced against African-Americans is part of some work that members of the ACM are doing to come up with principles for creating fair algorithms, and a technical explanation of what does and doesn't work in that area. Andy Oram | Editor O'Reilly Media

Twitter suspends racist accounts but what about GOOGLE?
Since 2008, Google has attempted to predict what question you might be asking and offers you a choice. And this is what it did. It offered me a choice of potential questions it thought I might want to ask: “are jews a race?”, “are jews white?”, “are jews christians?”, and finally, “are jews evil?”
Are Jews evil? It's not a question I've ever thought of asking. I hadn't gone looking for it. But there it was. I press enter. A page of results appears. This was Google's question. And this was Google's answer: Jews are evil. Because there, on my screen, was the proof: an entire page of results, nine out of 10 of which “confirm” this. The top result, from a site called Listovative, has the headline: “Top 10 Major Reasons Why People Hate Jews.”

YouTube Bans North Korea's Propaganda Channel
But… “…North Korea's YouTube channel wasn't taken down because of the actual propaganda produced by a brutal dictatorship, but because North Korea could have made money from the videos though YouTube's built-in advertising system.”

The internet is a distribution platform.
It's all about the on demand culture.

Internet excitement has run its course. The internet is a distribution platform.

It's all about the on demand culture. Its what sells, what delivers mania, what shoots up like a unicorn, is inventive authenticity. You've got to be different, and you've got to be honest. Which is why experiences have become so big. They're one of a kind and they're flesh and blood. They make you feel alive. In the end it's the people who remain, not their tools, but we play with the gadgets cause if passes the time it entertains, it keeps us connected.

It's what sells, what delivers mania, and delivers is inventive authenticity. Until 2008 religious institutions, academia, and media set out the parameters of acceptable discourse now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them!

Twitter, Facebook, Google combined are worth more than money they have the mindshare and is why experiences have become so big.

Trump is different, because he can use the platforms for free! and spread his message. January 20th 2017 all his tweets will be part of the public record and if he chooses as president he can force YOU to get all his txts directly to your cell phone!

What is the difference

between fake news
and real news?

The answer is accuracy that comes from investigative reporting.

If all you have is a so called "reporter" repeating a press release that is nothing more than an advertisement then you aren't getting actual authentic facts. We're living in the era of the content creator.

NPR: Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them

THE CONTENT CREATOR

 

People play with the platform because it passes the time it entertains, it keeps us connected. This is a foundational change. We're living in the era of "The Donald" the content creator.

Through social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate your thoughts and opinions. Anyone can read it and believe it, it's immediate and makes you feel alive. This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable.

Trump's Lies Worse Than Nixon's by Carl Bernstein the investigative journalist who broke open the Watergate scandal, issued a stark warning about President-elect Donald Trump's penchant for lying.

Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with 'sinister' advice on using Facebook data https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit The UK's privacy watchdog is launching an inquiry into how voters' personal data is being captured and exploited in political campaigns, cited as a key factor in both the Brexit and Trump victories last year. The intervention by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) follows revelations in last week's Observer that a technology company part-owned by a US billionaire played a key role in the campaign to persuade Britons to vote to leave the European Union. To have a foreign billionaire's fingerprints left all over such a seismic moment in British history is deeply concerning and requires urgent further investigation as to whether electoral law was broken.”

A 2015 presentation by one of Cambridge Analytica's analysts, until recently available on YouTube, explained how it had used “Facebook likes … as an input to machine-learning models.” In the US, companies are free to use third-party data without seeking consent. But Gavin Millar QC, of Matrix Chambers, said this was not the case in Europe. “The position in law is exactly the same as when people would go canvassing from door to door,” Millar said. “They have to say who they are, and if you don't want to talk to them you can shut the door in their face.That's the same principle behind the data protection act. It's why if telephone canvassers ring you, they have to say that whole long speech. You have to identify yourself explicitly.”

Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics Investigation follows revelations of digital firm's involvement in Brexit
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/04/cambridge-analytics-data-brexit-trump

*Follow the data: does a legal document link Brexit campaigns to US billionaire? We reveal how a confidential legal agreement is at the heart of a web connecting Robert Mercer to Britain's EU referendum*
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/14/robert-mercer-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu-referendum-brexit-campaigns
Mr Baker set out how Vote Leave had worked out how to use front organisations to get around these spending limits. He wrote: 'It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities, each of which could spend £700,000: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3451588/Pat-McFadden-reports-leading-Brexit-campaigner-Steve-Baker-police-plot-break-spending-limits-EU-referendum.html

Using your personal data is now second nature for politicians https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/08/personal-data-politicians-election The core focus of big data electioneering is identifying marginals - key demographic groups or geographical areas that could go either way, with enough combined weight to pull the overall result in their direction. The Trump team's move was to hire Cambridge Analytica. It was a natural fit - Trump's trusted adviser Steve Bannon was formerly a board member and his friend and supporter, the billionaire Robert Mercer, is said to be a major shareholder. Their methods involve building up detailed psychological profiles of individuals based on up to 5,000 data points per person.

Monopolies

 

100 years ago, people demanded the big monopolies be broken up rather than be suckered into an argument about whether Standard Oil was worse than the Railroads. The question is not which monopoly is the worst, it is what to do about massive firms that prevent markets from working well.
Historically, the solution has come from sensible people within existing parties working together to support policy that prevented this consolidation. The longer we wait to deal with it, the harder it will be ... especially as they eclipse the power of government.

The conversations the characters have are eerily familiar in our present day. Read Upton Sinclair's Dragon Harvest, which takes place in Europe in 1939.

Forget AT&T. The Real Monopolies Are Google and Facebook.
The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner has drawn censure from both sides of the political aisle, as well as a Senate hearing that looked into the potential for the combined company to become a monopoly.
But if we are going to examine media monopolies, we should look first at Silicon Valley, not the fading phone business. Mark Cuban, the internet entrepreneur, said at the meeting of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee last week that the truly dominant companies in media distribution these days were Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon.
“Facebook is without question in a dominant position, if not the dominant position, for content delivery,” he said.
Look at the numbers. Alphabet (the parent company of Google) and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion.
Alphabet has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt, according to the research company MoffettNathanson. Compare that to Alphabet's balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion.
In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley. Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. Instead, they both have built their advertising businesses as “free riders” on content made by others, some of it from Time Warner. The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country.
Every pirated music video or song posted on YouTube or Facebook robs the creators of income, and YouTube in particular is dominated by unlicensed content. Google's YouTube has an over 55 percent market share in the streaming audio business and yet provides less than 11 percent of the streaming audio revenues to the content owners and creators. But Facebook, which refuses to enter into any licensing agreement on music or video, is challenging YouTube in the free online video and music world.
In the past decade, an enormous reallocation of revenue of perhaps $50 billion a year has taken place, with economic value moving from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms.
I reached this conclusion from the following statistics: Since 2000, recorded music revenues in the United States have fallen to $7.2 billion per year from $19.8 billion. Home entertainment video revenue fell to $18 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2006. United States newspaper ad revenue fell to $23.6 billion in 2013 from $65.8 billion in 2000. [snip]

LANGUAGE



Words Matter: You Can't Think Without Words
If a "reporter" can't be bothered to use the correct words - that have real meanings but instead uses the wrong vocabulary then the public can't think about anything correctly. You can't think without words and you can't think correctly if the words used are inaccurate wrong words.

Example: "hacker" vs. "cracker"
The difference between a hacker and a cracker is malicious, destructive intent.
Most reporters don't know what a "cracker" is or actually does and instead uses "hacker" for everything which means the public doesn't know what they need to know about security, code, networks, programming, ethics, and a dozen other things. And all because, the talking heads are too lazy to investigate anything and are just happy to go on and on blathering away on a "news" show about things they don't know anything about.

If the TV talking head doesn't even know what the words mean, doesn't use the correct words and spell out what they mean then the public doesn't have the words to think with and you can't think without words!

If the talking head isn't investigating the information to verify that something is in fact true and news worthy then they have betrayed the public's trust who allows them to use our airwaves in the first place. They are there being paid to do a job for the public! NOT for advertising money. But .... In America you would think the ONLY obligation a business entity has is to make money!

SCIENCE

 

 

You are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts.

6 Tips for Identifying Fake News

Rapid Arctic ice melt sets the stage for economic disaster under Trump The great ice sheets are unstable, ice melt is speeding up, and deniers will soon be in charge. What could go wrong?

5 Nightmarish Things Trump Did This Week Science, reason, the First Amendment, and decency are all under threat.

 

Trump nominates AG Scott Pruitt to head the EPA Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA for doing its job. He is a climate change denialist.

Debate Trolling: "Treating this as a scientific debate rather than a political fight means we've already lost. Climate debates seem to have much in common with evolution/creationism debates: science advocates ignored/ridiculed.

Agreeing to debate well-established facts is how denialists win the fight. The mere agreement to debate is a loss. Acting like there is a legitimate "other site" means you've gotten played. Being respectful of opinions which attempt to play up uncertainty about the climate impacts or the viability of low-carbon solutions is acting (however unintentionally) as an agent of denialism. Tens of thousands of smart people have, in the last 10 years, been unwitting facilitators of propaganda." ~ Alex Steffen

GENERATION Z TURNS TO SECRET ONLINE ACCOUNTS IN 'FRUSTRATION' WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
This is a culture of personality,” said Pereira. “It's all about presentation, selling yourself, first looks, and not so much about your real value. Finstagram, short for “fake Instagram,” has begun to dominate the social media currents of young smartphone users who value online privacy in a place meant just for friends. Acting as the opposing counterpart of Rinstagram (or, you guessed it, “real Instagram”), Finstagram is a digital realm composed of private accounts within the Instagram app created to free users from the pressures of staged perfection on social media. Instead of strictly adhering to their “brand,” or Internet identity, Finstagram offers users a respite from the modern necessity of social media performance. My Finsta is a lot more for just myself. I don't really care if people see it or like it, it's just for me. I use it more than a physical diary or journal.”

Who Owns Big Media

If the "News Company" only uses our airwaves to provide a "news show: that delivers nothing but "entertainment" and fake news to gather enough "eyeballs" so they can charge advertising fees to make them profitable and "rich" then they aren't providing the service they are supposed to provide in the contract with the American public which allows them to use our airwaves.

WAPO WRITES: Logic doesn't't matter to online trolls.
TRUMP now has more than 17 million and has bragged that having a Twitter account is “like owning the New York Times without the losses.” Twitter has become Trump's cyber-magic wand, allowing him to quickly act on a fleeting idea, a fit of anger or something he sees on television. With one tweet, Trump can change headlines on cable news, move financial markets or cause world leaders to worry.
He will soon inherit the @POTUS account, which has 12.5 million followers. During an interview with the “Today” show this week. “Frankly, it's a modern-day form of communication. I get it out much faster than a press release. I get it out much more honestly than dealing with dishonest reporters. So many reporters are dishonest.”

FAKE FOLLOWERS @realdonaldtrump with a big Twitter following includes many dodgy accounts.
Sixty-four percent of Donald Trump's 7.51 million Twitter followers have not been in use for at least the past six months, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

This is how the PropOrNot fake news Washington Post conducts itself. @CNN @MSNBC @AP

CONSCIENCE AND INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM
There used to be standards that the country trusted when we watched Walter Chronkite.

The days when the Washington Post brought us the Pentagon Papers and Watergate are long gone. They have become irrelevant. They are so desperate for eyeballs they have tried to command mind share online by saying alternate legitimate news sites that actually do investigative reporting are the "fake news sites".

Donald Trump twitter following 13% Fake, 65% Inactive, and 22% Good. Donald Trump Just Proved Buying Fake Twitter Followers Works

@realDonaldTrump Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!

Donald J. Trump @realTonaldTrump @wikileaks You are the best!

Trump's last press conference was July 27 2016 when he encouraged Russia to hack Clinton's emails. Trump' s press conference about conflicts of interest is postponed until January 2017 so all the electoral college will have to vote without knowing how he will handle anything.

Interfering with the election

 

 

Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say

Here's a list of all the Foreign Governments who interfered with the Presidential election when they donated to the Clinton Foundation.

It's official: @HillaryClinton lost Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes. @DrJillStein got 49,941.

FAKE NEWS ABOUT WMD'S

 

 

September 11th
World Trade Center Curriculum
8:46am September 11, 2001 Never forget!


So CIA Director George Tenet *didn't* tell Bush there was a "slam dunk" case?
@Nancy Pelosi: The intel didn't state that Iraq had WMDs. The Bush-Cheney WH made that misrepresentation.

THE INTERNET AND YELLOW JOURNALISM

 

FACEBOOK DELIVERS HATE AND TERROR

HOW TO GET OFF FACEBOOK NOW

SOCIAL NETWORKS EXPLAINED

RULES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

Twitter Networking Tools for business

A look at Facebook's billion dollar 2016 hit on the fake news ecosystem

PR: Have it Your Way Advertising Message - only read what you believe because everything is true and nothing is true it all becomes disinformation. Filter bubbles and social-media silos “information” reached people shaped by what they wanted to be true. Some of the biggest fake news providers were run by experienced political operators well within the orbit of Donald Trump's political advisers and consultants.

Andrew Breitbart / Laura Ingraham, a close Trump ally to be Trump's White House press secretary, owns an online publisher called Ingraham Media Group that runs a number of sites, including LifeZette. Ingraham's site regularly receives links from the Drudge Report and other powerful drivers of Internet traffic. But LifeZette, for all its influence, pales in comparison to the sites run by Floyd Brown, a Republican consultant close to Trump's inner circle of advisers.
Thanks to views sourced largely to referrals from Facebook, Brown's websites now outrank web traffic going to news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, and NPR, according to data compiled by Alexa. Both Western Journalism and Conservative Tribune are certified by Facebook as bonafide news providers. Jeff Bezos's takeover of the Washington Post has been a vector for “fake news” for decades.
This is the paper which used Edward Snowden's whistle-blowing work to grab a Pulitzer … then publicly advocated prosecuting their source! In the run-up to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, the Post led American media's cheering section, cheerfully publishing one bald-faced administration lie after another concerning Saddam's “weapons of mass destruction” — then in the aftermath assisting the administration in taking revenge on Joseph Wilson (who had exposed one of the lies) by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. Why do media organizations - network execs and anchors - need to have cooperative access agreements with politicians?
Media Corps Stars Agree to Off-The-Record Meeting with Trump, Break Agreement, Whine About Mistreatment, meaning they would conceal from their viewers what they discussed. If you're a journalist, what is the point of speaking with a powerful politician if you agree in advance that it's all going to be kept secret? Is it subservient ring-kissing in exchange for access, it certainly appears to be that. Media stars who want to believe they are friends and colleagues with the President forget they are supposed to protect the public from people in government who are pulling rotten dirty deeds. "Fake news" used to be called yellow journalism. It has existed throughout our history. It's not new. It is not in any way a 2016 innovation. example: ZeroHedge

FACEBOOK MAKES MONEY WITH FAKE NEWS

We arrive at the justifiable conclusion that the “fake news” controversy is itself a fake one, that outfits such as CNN that are reporting on it are fake and that Internet facilities charged with identifying fake news items like Facebook are also fake. Those behind this gambit obviously intend to use it to attack the alternative media, which has been very effective in puncturing the propaganda of the Deep State. The very largest irony is that this fake news meme is aimed at truth-telling in the alternative media.

How two unemployed guys got rich off Facebook, fake news and an army of Trump supporters

These two people are making $40k+ a month with fake political news “We're the new yellow journalists,” Wade will say after a day and night when the number of people following LibertyWritersNews on Facebook will swell by more than 20,000. “We're the people on the side of the street yelling that the world is about to end.” Jobless in May, Paris Wade and Ben Goldman were ruling an empire built on Facebook shares by the time of the vote, influencing millions with rumors, exaggeration, conspiracy theories and lies.

How Fake News Goes Viral

This infamous troll is almost certain his fake Facebook news helped Trump get elected

Mark Zuckerberg Commits To Fixing The Fake News Problem On Facebook - only after Facebook makes over ONE BILLION dollars from fake news advertisng during the election cycle.

Zuckerberg denying how FB has anything to do with running fake news when he actually knew all along - because his company made over one billion dollars from advertising - spreading this crap using his lame algorithms.

Report: Fake election news performed better than real news on Facebook

Facebook's new errors includes metrics BuzzFeed, NYT used in recent fake news investigations.
Facebook discloses new measurement errors, continues to hone its math Facebook misreported engagement numbers for links and live videos and is refining the ad reach estimates it shows advertisers.

Math is hard, even for Facebook.
And it's getting harder to trust Facebook's math, even as the social network fine-tunes its calculations.

Facebook's Graph API and mobile app report mismatched engagement rates for outside links.

The two metrics in question are:
1) the total number of shares, likes and comments a link has received on and off Facebook, reported through Facebook's Graph API and
2) the number of people who have shared or commented on that link, reported through search results in Facebook's mobile apps.
The problem with those metrics:
For some links — including ones examined by BuzzFeed — Facebook reported that the number of people who shared or commented on the link exceeded the sum of shares, likes and comments for that link.
That shouldn't happen, since the shares and comments stat reported in the mobile search results is a subset of the shares, likes and comments stat reported by the Graph API, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed. It's unclear whether the inconsistent stats mean that Facebook's Graph API is overcounting engagements or that its mobile search results are undercounting them.

For the third time since September, Facebook is disclosing new measurement errors.
The two new errors affected the reaction counts Facebook reports on Pages' Live videos, as well as the engagement figures Facebook reports for off-Facebook links; the latter link engagement metrics were recently used in investigations by BuzzFeed and The New York Times into fake news articles' performance on Facebook.
In addition to acknowledging the two new errors — of which one has been corrected and one is still being inspected — Facebook has refined a measurement marketers may reference when buying ads through the social network. None of the aforementioned metrics had any impact on how much money Facebook charges advertisers for their campaigns. But they may have informed brands' Facebook ad-buying strategies as well as brands', publishers' and others' Facebook-related content-publishing strategies.

Who is going to fix the Chat Bots?
Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions. An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election. NYT

TWITTER MAKES MONEY WITH FAKE NEWS

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says a white-supremacy ad the company showed users was a 'mistake'.

12/13/16 Twitter reinstated the account of prominent white nationalist Richard B. Spencer after suspending it on Nov. 15 2016 for hate speech on the platform. Twitter said Spencer's accounts were actually removed for serving overlapping purposes. "Our rules explicitly prohibit creating multiple accounts with overlapping uses,” When we temporarily suspend multiple accounts for this violation, the account owner can designate one account for reinstatement." So his account is back!

PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGY
How to Predict the Spread of News on Twitter

Computer scientists have discovered the four factors that make news stories popular on Twitter. "Our experiments show that it is possible to estimate ranges of popularity with an overall accuracy of 84% considering only content features." We examine both regression and classification algorithms and demonstrate that despite randomness in human behavior, it is possible to predict ranges of popularity on twitter with an overall 84% accuracy. Our study also serves to illustrate the differences between traditionally prominent sources and those immensely popular on the social web.


Did you see TWITTER 'Mute Words' feature?

This is the best thing Zuckerboy has done, all thanks to his his employees who demanded that punk get in line

TWITTER Now gives the user has the ability to mute certain words, phrases, hashtags, emojis, or usernames. Keeps specific words out of your life!

You can mute one word, phrase, or hashtag at a time or @username like before.

Be honest: Facebook and Twitter maxed out election frenzy revenues and cracked down once the cash was harvested also once political backlash or risk of political backlash had largely subsided.

see: 2016 in a nutshell: basis of fake news investigation was fake news

 

ETHICS

 

@OfficeGovEthics

U.S. Office of Government Ethics was set up after Watergate.
Providing leadership in the executive branch to prevent conflicts of interest. Performance Management & Budget OGE is building a culture of performance that relies on using data to make informed decisions. Read about OGE's long-term strategic goals, annual plan to achieve those strategic goals, and success in using the taxpayers' dollars to achieve its mission.
Privacy: http://1.usa.gov/1731Cf1 Washington, D.C. oge.gov

Very proud to be supporting @OCCRP and @anticorruption partnership: the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium on this tremendously important endeavor.


TREASONOUS TRUMP
That's 10 billionaires/millionaires & 3 generals. Fascism's the marriage of the corporation,the military, and the state.

A majority of Americans are concerned about Trump and conflicts of interest.

11/19/16 Donald Trump Agrees To Pay $25 Million in fines and restitution to settle three fraud Trump University lawsuits. Just 74 more law suits to go

Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 #NobelPrizeLiterature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” During the awards ceremony on December 10th, singer-songwriter Patti Smith will perform Dylan's song "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" off his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Dylan sent an acceptance speech, which will be read during the banquet to follow later in the day at City Hall

"Maybe we can get the Electoral College to elect Bob Dylan. Dark horse candidate. Start appointing musicians to the cabinet."~ Carl Malmud

Trump can write off $25 million fraud settlement as tax deduction

@SenWarren It is totally unprecedented for a President-elect of the United States to have to settle fraud lawsuits before taking office.

TRUMP AND HIS NOT "BLIND TRUST" with HIS NOT SO SMART SON IN LAW GIVEN TOP LEVEL CLEARANCE
President-elect Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was accepted into Harvard University shortly after his father donated $2.5 million to the Ivy League school in 1998. An official at Kushner's high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”

The imperial presidency of Donald Trump

THE END RUN AROUND TPP AND TIPP

A Cabinet full of corporatists

NOW OWN THE GOVERNMENT

Donald Trump's Potential Conflicts of Interest
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became the first foreign head of state to meet in person with President-elect Donald Trump, a photograph taken of the official event at Trump Tower in Manhattan showed a curious attendee: Trump's daughter Ivanka http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-conflict-of-interest_us_582f8e62e4b030997bbf83a2? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us/politics/ivanka-trump-shinzo-abe.html

Email sent to journalists by an @IvankaTrump employee, hawking the goods she wore on @60Minutes. pic.twitter.com/aCpNbBBArg Under a Trump administration, wealthy American families may find it much easier to amass dynastic levels of wealth. http://nyti.ms/2fKWZzU

@EricLiptonNYT Trump, belatedly, essentially confirms accuracy of our story today. Trump used this meeting to push Brits to block wind farms from disturbing views at Trump's Scotland golf course.

@dannyhakim With a Meeting, Trump Renewed a British Wind Farm Fight http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/business/with-a-meeting-trump-renewed-a-british-wind-farm-fight.html
President-elect of the United States admitting to asking for a business favor. @maggieNYT "I might have brought it up," Trump says of Farage meeting and wind farms. #Art1Sec9Clause8 #Emolument

Everybody is afraid of looking bad, except Trump. Trump's Tax Bill will only help the rich "You could see, as a first level of attack on the poor in America, a kind of savaging of social welfare." http://www.attn.com/stories/12866/heres-what-trumps-tax-plans-mean-americans
http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/trump-settles-fraud-case-and-zomg-he-said-something-on-twitter/

What's the difference?

DISINFO VS. THE CIA

Trump says again that the U.S. is among the highest taxed nations in the world. This is not true or close to being true.

Who is calling the shots in State Politics ~ Public Integrity
Meet the 10 shadowy groups that snuck into your state races. A field guide to the national power brokers trying to shape elections.

FreedomofPress Check out our brand new look, and read about our plans for protecting press freedom in 2017 and the age of Trump.

6/21/16 Guccifer 2.0 out - Cozy Bear, Fancy Bear hacked DNC, Fidelis analysis shows - SEE CROWDSTIKE

Threatgeek blog post - analyzing the DNC Malware 6/20/16

OUR GOVERNMENT BLOCKS INTEL

 

 

12/16 “Is it in our interest to act?” Lisa O. Monaco, Obama's adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, said at a Washington Post cybersecurity summit Thursday. “The primary guiding and overarching focus in these discussions is: What is in the national security interest of the United States? That's the North Star for those discussions.”

Donald Trump, who once said he knows more than the generals, won't listen to his intelligence briefings.
Leon Panetta said, “If you're president of the United States, you better be in touch on a daily basis with your intelligence briefers,” Panetta went on, “so that you have an understanding as to what's — what's happening in the world, what are the crises you have to pay attention to, and what steps do you have to take in order to deal with those crises?” ~ Salon

Mike McConnell, when he was still national director of intelligence at the tailend of the Bush administration said The Chinese government -- seeking to steal valuable secrets -- has hacked into the computers at every major American company, according to the nation's former spy director. ~ Money

McConnell gave Russia the green light, refused to sign on to protecting election.

Mitch McConnell's efforts to keep this secret putting party over country is suboptimal, some might say treason...

Old dynamic: Republicans v. Democrats

GOVERNMENT SACHS
THE Vampire Squid IS

the third rail
of US government-appointee politics.

Goldman Sachs Heads Up Trump Era W/O getting prosecuted for 2008 Fraud

poo Former Goldman banker Stephen Bannon will be in the West Wing as chief advisor to incoming US president Donald Trump. Former Goldman partner Steven Mnuchin will be seeking Senate confirmation to run the Treasury Department.

pooGary Cohn, is currently Goldman's president and chief operating officer, will join the administration as an advisor to Trump and director of the National Economic Council and be his chief strategist in developing his economic policy. He does NOT require Senate confirmation since exactly what he knew about Goldman selling bogus investments to its clients while the firm made billions of dollars betting the instruments would fail might be raised in Senate questioning of Cohn's fitness to serve. In the two years leading up to the epic 2008 financial crash on Wall Street, Cohn was Co-President of Goldman. Cohn became a multi-millionaire from the business done in those years, earning $27.5 million in restricted stock and options just in the year 2006. However, as Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers would report in 2009, a key part of Goldman's business in the years before the crash operated like this: “In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.”

New dynamic: Trump + Goldman + Exxon + Russia + white nationalists v. everyone else. He deserves a chance to hand the country over to Russia, Goldman and Exxon while we sit around and watch.

<the role of gossip>

Who needs the CIA when TRUMP doesn't believe that Russia interfered in the election even though the CIA said they were sure the electing Trump was Russia's goal. The White House and CIA officials declined to comment.

Podesta on Bernie Sanders: "I agree.. Where should we stick the knife in?" or here
It shows the DNC establishment's contempt for its base -- the working class, the anti-war vote, the Occupy Wall Street folks. The rich and powerful are at their most thuggish when their backs are up against the wall, and they will corrupt their justice departments and courts to protect the cool insiders.

'An email from early September 2008 outlines how Google helped President Barack Obama's transition team to set up 'secure data rooms' for sharing information such as “policy promises, as well as legal documents like expense reimbursements and contribution forms”.

'Keep this whole enterprise under wraps
The email from Obama aide Chris Lu, who is currently the deputy secretary of labor, explains how the “data rooms” can be accessed by staff - and emphasizes the importance of maintaining secrecy over their discussions.
“The one thing you should know is that contrary to the log-in instructions, we're not giving out "transition2008.com" email addresses. We think that would compromise our ability to keep this whole enterprise under wraps,” he writes. The secrecy reminder is somewhat surprising, given the role Citigroup played in picking Obama's cabinet even before the election.

#WikiLeaks emails shows #Citigroup's major role in shaping Obama administration's cabinet

GOP trying to block intel showing Russian govt intervened in a US election to help elect candidate of their choice.~ WAPO

 

The Justice Department could bring indictments for hacking. The National Security Agency could take a covert action in cyberspace to send a signal to the Kremlin. Or the State Department can decide to eject Russian diplomats.

poo The almost surreal moment when Jake Sullivan informs @HillaryClinton that #AlQaeda "is on our side in #Syria " https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23225 … #USA https://twitter.com/ZlatkoPercinic/status/807202050077585410

pooNate Silver ‏@NateSilver538
Clinton lost 4 states (FL, MI, WI, PA) by ~1 point. If not for Comey/Russia, she probably wins them all by ~2 points & strategy looks great. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/807640627101900800

Name that Whistleblower
#FBI doesn't consider #NSA SIGINT classified up to TS/SI-G level to be classified.

"Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility."~ Professor Neil Postman

Back in 2000, Trump bragged about keeping tabs on politicians who had affairs in his hotels @DafnaLinzer "I happen to know that one U.S. senator leading the pack of attackers spent more than a few nights with his twenty-something girlfriend at a hotel I own. There's also a conservative columnist, married, who was particularly rough on Clinton in this regard. He also brought his girlfriend to my resorts for the weekend."

Privacy International says European companies keen to sell mass surveillance gear to Syria AGT's activities are yet another example of how a slew of little-known companies, mostly based in Europe profit and peddle their spy products to questionable governments.

WHO NEEDS TPP
OR the TIPP NOW THAT
CORPORATE AMERICA
OWNS our government
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bernie Sanders ‏@SenSanders
Romney was right
. Trump's a "fraud" and "phony." Does he have any intention of keeping his promises or has he played Americans for suckers?

Here is Republicans and Democrats on Vladimir Putin since July 2014.

If "DID NOT VOTE" was a candidate in the 2016 US election, it would have won by a landslide.

pooExxon's Rex Tillerson
Is Top Candidate for Secretary of State
CEO with ties to Russia's Vladimir Putin would bring an executive's experience to the diplomatic role, a transition official said. Mr. Tillerson has perhaps the closest ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, having negotiated a 2011 energy partnership deal with Russia that Mr. Putin said could eventually be worth as much as $500 billion. In 2012, the Kremlin bestowed the country's Order of Friendship decoration on Mr. Tillerson. The CIA has determined Russia hacked into our election to help elect Donald J. Trump. Now Trump names Putin best friend as OUR Sec of State! Rex Tillerson's Wikipedia page was edited overnight. What was removed? His award of the Russian Order of Friendship

George Shultz was the executive vice president of engineering giant Bechtel before he became secretary of state under [make america great again slogan originator] President Ronald Reagan.

pooTrump picks Myron Ebell Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA
He waged intimidation campaigns against climate scientists.

pooTrump Picks former Texas governor Rick Perry to lead the Energy Department, which it is worth noting he wanted to do away with in 2011.

The questions the Trump team asks show they don't know what the Department of Energy does.

Trump DOE team: GOP hired gun McKenna.
His lobbying clients in 2016 include Koch Companies Public Sector LLC, Southern Company Services, Dow Chemical Co. and Competitive Power Ventures Inc.

Bernhardt, co-chairman of the Natural Resources Department at the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck is head of the Department of Interior Interior

Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.) was picked to lead the Interior Department.. If confirmed by the Senate, she would Trump's efforts to open up federal lands and waters to fossil-fuel development and reverse environmental policies the Obama administration has pursued.

pooDeloitte problems with audit quality and professionalism
Deloitte partners have frequently been the reason why the Big 4 global audit firms are thriving financially, but audit quality and professionalism is not. A Deloittle Brazil whistleblower from 2002 is now one of 12 senior partners charged by the audit regulator with falsifying audit workpapers and covering up fraud.

Price Waterhouse Cooper is attempting security by litigation.

pooRandian / Greenspandian nightmare
If Trump Nominates John Allison as Bank Supervisor at the Fed, It Will Be a Triumph for Charles Koch and the Loony Ideas of Ayn Rand and Greenspan. Rand's philosophy is that the selfish desires of the individual should have no restraints by government; the poor deserve their lot and should receive no tax support from other citizens while the rich have a right to unrestricted power.

poo@realDonaldTrump education secretary pick Betsy DeVos accuses media of spreading "false news" about her http://politi.co/2heXDKA

pooTrump pic Andy Puzder for Labor secretary “prefers foreign labor to American workers.” Puzder's advocacy for immigration reform, citing a number of op-ed's and speeches he's made praising immigrant workers for their willingness to fill difficult jobs. Puzder, the article states, “stands diametrically opposed to Trump's signature issues on trade and immigration — which won him the election.”

pooPhysician Tom Price, currently the chairman of the House Budget Committee is picked for the Department of Health and Human Services secretary. He will have more than 1 TRILLION for the budget and can rewrite regulations and guidance on virtually everything people do every day. HHS responsibilities include food and drug safety, biomedical research, disease prevention and control, as well as oversight over everything from medical laboratories to nursing homes. He opposes the Affordable Care Act, abortion and funding for Planned Parenthood, among other things, could have a rapid impact without even a presidential order or an act of Congress. GOP to start #Obamacare repeal Jan. 3 (but might not finish until 2019)

poo Timeline: The Republicans' Abysmal Record on the CFPB
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
is our nation's first and only watchdog dedicated solely to protecting students, servicemembers, seniors and other borrowers from unfair, deceptive and abusive practices. To date, the Bureau has accomplished a tremendous amount, returning $12 billion to 27 million consumers.

CLASS WARS

 

Don't kid yourself. Every cabinet appointment Trump has made is terrible for the little guy. Have you seen one single appointee for the WORKING CLASS? The con artist at work, showing what he does best.

Brace yourself: the most disruptive phase of globalization is just beginning. The most disruptive phase of globalization is just beginning. #BasicIncom

tTrump exploits our inability to discuss the 99% - the intersection of class and race and the Democrates discomfort with it. A new study shows that areas in the US hit hardest by trade have become more polarized.

Why Social Fragmentation Suits The Powers That Be
A society that has fragmented into a media-fed cultural war of hot-button identity-gender-religious politics is a society that is incapable of resisting concentrations of power and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The Elites have successfully revolted against the political and economic constraints on their wealth and power, and now the unprivileged, unprotected non-Elites are rebelling in the only way left open to them: voting for anyone who claims to be outside the privileged Elites that dominate our society and economy.

STEVE BANNON: "I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist.
I'm an economic nationalist," he tells me. "The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver" — by "we" he means the Trump White House — "we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about."

Al Gore's business partner, David Blood, was in Steve Bannon's section at @HarvardHBS (also overlapped at Goldman Sachs) h/t @JamesPindell

Hamilton/Pence Artists are the tuning forks vs "No place for this at the theatre"

How “Grab 'em by the pussy” Trump stopped the gaslighting of America.

Hamilton" the greatest artwork of 2015/16 on the bleeding edge of politics and culture.

Trump is brash, opinionated, and unapologetic, now EVERYWHERE is the right place! You can give Trump credit for making "Grab them by the Pussy" sexual assult words and deeds de rigueur. Decorum went out the window. "You can say what you feel right up front and what the cast of "Hamilton" were ready and the public has a 24/7 distribution platform. At least Hamilton still has a union, when organized labor seems to have disappeared throughout the rest of the land. We own it and are entitled to an opinion about it just like everybody else.

"Immigrants, WE GET THE JOB DONE!" Everybody sing: This is our land too, from California to the New York island.

ARTISTS AND HAMILTON This is what artists do. They speak truth to power. They make people uncomfortable. And when there's a reaction, they know they've done their job. Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become. Artists are tuning forks, saying what's right as opposed to what's expedient. They have the people on their side. And corporations are no match for the public, no way.

In the movie Senator Jay Billington Bulworth spoke truth to power and shocked a nation providing the Trump blueprint. Bulworth In 2013, artist Jim Kirwan remarked: “Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become . . . The film is about a disillusioned Senator who tires of the lies and begins to tell it like it is. Bulworth, like Trump nearly 20 years later, seems to present the people, the voters, with a fresh perspective.” Senator Bulworth begins to rhyme, to a roomful of stunned corporate backers. “And over here, we got our friends from oil/ They don't give a shit how much wilderness they spoil/ They tell us they are careful, we know that it's a lie/ As long as we keep driving cars, they'll let the planet die/ Exxon, Mobil, the Saudis and Kuwait, if we still got the Middle East, the atmosphere can wait/ The Arabs got the oil, we buy everything they sell/ But if the brothers raise the price, we'll blow them all to hell.”

President Xi Jinping has called for allegiance to the Communist Party from colleges and universities, the latest effort by Beijing to tighten ideologial control over education. Party official from university in Guangdong says it made database to track political opinions of 2 million+ students. The party bosses at several key universities also attended the meeting, and pledged renewed loyalty to the party. ~SCMP


Nationally Recognized
TeachER
of the YeaR

"I want to thank you for all the diverse resources you post for me to learn from. They are always of value and interest. Thanks for your continuing to uncover such information." 2011 ~ Al Haskvitz Teacher of the Year