People magazine recently reported news that a number of prominent fashion designers have refused to work with Melania Trump because they do not approve of her, or more likely, her husband's politics and language. Given Donald Trump's often offensive way of speaking about, well, almost everything, that is understandable. Thus, they conclude, if you design and make clothes for Melania Trump, especially the outfit she will wear to the inauguration, you are, in some small way, endorsing Donald Trump and all he stands for. So designers like Sophie Theallet have decided that because they ''stand against all discrimination and prejudice,'' they cannot work for Melania.
This all seems rather ironic. How can progressive fashion designers like Sophie Theallet refuse to serve anyone? In recent years it's become first unreasonable, then politically incorrect, and lately illegal for some people to refuse service. Not fashion designers of course. They are above that. No, I'm thinking about bakers and photographers, who, because of their religious beliefs, have politely but firmly declined to provide service for gay weddings. Note that they have not declined service to homosexuals. They have just made it clear that they cannot morally provide a wedding cake or floral arrangements for a homosexual wedding, because it goes against their religious principles.
And for that, they have been pilloried in the press, sued, and threatened with a loss of their businesses and personal savings. Consider Barronelle Stutzman, a florist in Washington who has served and employed people of all backgrounds, including homosexuals, for her entire career. However, after she declined to provide flowers for a homosexual wedding, in accordance with her faith, both the ACLU and Washington state attorney general have sued not just her business, but her personally. That mirrors the situation of Oregon bakers Aaron and Melissa Klein. They baked a cake for a woman who was so happy with their work that she and her partner asked Melissa to bake their wedding cake. The Kleins politely explained that due to their faith, they could not endorse a wedding that violated their beliefs. In response, the state sued them, put a legal order on them banning them from talking about their desire to work according to their faith, and said they ''needed rehabilitation.'' The fine the state assessed and the subsequent hate mail and threats forced the Klein's to close their business and led Aaron Klein to go to work as a sanitation worker to pay their bills.
Does anyone think Sophie Theallet will be sued and driven out of business for refusing to endorse Trump's inauguration? Maybe Trump should sue for discriminatory practices. After all, one could say that turnabout is fair play. The progressives have made life difficult for Christian and religious small businesses, so now it is time to make life difficult for fashion designers. That would certainly fit with Donald Trump's tit-for-tat attitude towards almost everything in life, especially lawsuits.
But it is the wrong approach. The problem is not that some designers have refused to work with Melania. Let's be honest, the world does not have a shortage of overpriced dress designers. Melania can find someone else. That is also true for homosexual couples that have sued and persecuted religious florists and bakers. The country does not have a shortage of either. Moreover, while Theallet is refusing to serve Trump at all, religious photographers and bakers are more than willing to serve homosexual customers '-- just not at their wedding.
No, the issue has never been a lack of service providers. It has been an unwillingness to accept that other people may not endorse your behavior. Prominent fashion designers are refusing to serve Melania Trump because they do not want to appear as though they endorse her husband's behavior. They should have the right to make that decision free from threats of lawsuits and public harassment. In just the same way, religious photographers and bakers should have the right to politely refuse to endorse the practice of gay weddings.
America has always given a very high precedence to conscientious objections, but increasingly, rights of conscience are being marginalized. Religious liberty is much more than merely having the freedom to attend church, synagogue, or mosque. It is the freedom to actually live out your religious beliefs'--even ones that may not be politically correct or agreeable to high fashion designers'--every day of the week.
My final interview with President Obama in the White House had been scheduled for the day after the presidential election. I had hoped to look back on what he had achieved over eight years and the issues that mattered the most to him and to the readers of Rolling Stone, hear his advice for Hillary and about the road ahead. It was to be the "exit interview," his tenth cover for Rolling Stone, our fourth interview together. Before flying down to Washington, D.C., on the morning after the staggering election results, I called and offered to postpone. This had to be one of the worst days of Obama's political life, and he hadn't had a moment to reflect on it, to be angry or to accept it.
But his office called back; Obama wanted to go ahead with the interview as planned. It was a dull, cloudy day, and the White House was nearly empty when I arrived. It had been a long and unhappy night, and now only a skeleton staff remained. It felt like a funeral.
The last time I had interviewed the president, in 2012, it was a lazy afternoon. I had gone over our time limit by a half-hour, and on leaving the Oval Office, I ran into Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, sitting by the desk of the president's assistant, waiting to come in. This time it was her ghost.
Rolling Stone has had a wonderful relationship with Obama over the years. I first met him at the beginning of his 2008 campaign, when he came up to my office for dinner. We backed him when he was up and when he was down. He viewed Rolling Stone readers as part of his base. A year ago, we went to Alaska with him and toured the melting glaciers. With extraordinary pride, we watched him ride the wave of history.
I had many more questions for him than time allowed: Why had no one responsible for the Wall Street frauds, which cost millions of people their homes, their savings, their jobs, been sent to jail? Likewise, why did the people who misled America into the Iraq War also go scot-free? Would the rise of Donald Trump have been possible had any of them been held accountable? What was his sense of accomplishment in preserving so many millions of acres of national lands? And what did it take to finally put climate change at the top of his agenda. ...
Alas.
Obama greeted me outside his office and walked me in. He was tired. He skipped the usual small talk, took off his jacket, sat in his customary chair and said, "Let's do this." He spoke slowly and with precision, staying true to his essential nature: controlled, analytical and cool. There are many things a sitting president cannot say, but this was his carefully reasoned message on a difficult and historic day.
I have to start with last night and ask you how you're feeling about the election of Donald Trump. Could you believe what you were seeing? Were you blown away like the rest of us? And how are you feeling now?Well, I'm disappointed, partly because I think Hillary Clinton would be a very fine president. As I said on the campaign trail, a lot of the work we've done is only partially complete. And we need some continuity in order for us to maximize its benefits.
Did you ever think this was possible? Did this result ever occur to you?I will tell you, New Hampshire, 2008, I had just won Iowa and had this whirlwind tour of New Hampshire, huge rallies, huge crowds, and our internal pollster had us up by 10. And around 7:30, as I'm putting on my clothes to deliver my victory speech, I get a knock on the door by David Plouffe, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs. And they've got sheepish looks on their faces [chuckles]. And they say, "Barack, we have some interesting news for you. We don't think we're gonna win this thing."
That's the thing about democracy. That's the thing about voting. It doesn't mean polls are irrelevant, but there is always a human variable involved in this. So I think the odds of Donald Trump winning were always around 20 percent. That [doesn't] seem like a lot, but one out of five is not that unusual. It's not a miracle.
But aren't you feeling chagrined, pissed off, upset, dismayed?Well, I ... no. You know, I don't feel dismayed, because, number one, I couldn't be prouder of the work that we've done over the last eight years. When I turn over the keys to the federal government to the next president of the United States, I can say without any equivocation that the country is a lot better off: The economy is stronger, the federal government works better, and our standing in the world is higher. And so I can take great pride in the work we've done. I can take great satisfaction in the people we've helped.
I don't want to sugarcoat it. There are consequences to elections. It means that the next Supreme Court justice is going to be somebody who doesn't reflect my understanding of the Constitution. It means that the work we've done internationally and domestically on climate is going to be threatened. It means that the Affordable Care Act, which has provided 20 million people with health insurance, is going to be modified in ways that some people are going to be hurt by. I think it doesn't take us all the way back to the status quo, because, despite the rhetoric, the Republicans are going to conclude that simply throwing millions of people off the rolls with no health insurance isn't smart politics. But probably the main reason that I don't feel dismayed, but do feel disappointed, is the incredible young people who have worked in my administration, worked on our campaigns. If you look at the data from the election, if it were just young people who were voting, Hillary would have gotten 500 electoral votes. So we have helped, I think, shape a generation to think about being inclusive, being fair, caring about the environment. And they will have growing influence year by year, which means that America over time will continue to get better.
Jann Wenner visits with the president in the Oval Office the day after the election. "Aside from any particular issue, the president needs to recognize that this is not about you," Obama says of Trump. "This is about this precious thing that we've inherited and that we want to pass on."Pete Souza/The White HouseYou think it's still a progressive country?I think that nothing is determined, but that the number of people who have a strong belief in a fair, just, equal, inclusive America is the majority and is growing.
And part of the challenge, though, that we do have, and this is something that I've been chewing on for a while now, is that there is a cohort of working-class white voters that voted for me in sizable numbers, but that we've had trouble getting to vote for Democrats in midterm elections. In this election, [they] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments. That part of the critique of the Democratic Party is accurate. We spend a lot of time focused on international policy and national policy and less time being on the ground. And when we're on the ground, we do well. This is why I won Iowa.
But how did the Democrats miss the white working class in such great numbers, who clearly had these big economic issues? They have lost their jobs in industrial states. ...It's not quite that simple, because this is not simply an economic issue. This is a cultural issue. And a communications issue. It is true that a lot of manufacturing has left or transformed itself because of automation. But during the course of my presidency, we added manufacturing jobs at historic rates, and think about it: In Michigan'--
But, I mean'--Hold on. Let me finish. If you look at Michigan, which I won, not just in 2008 but in 2012, by a wide margin, we paid a lot of attention to manufacturing jobs, which is why the auto industry is on double shifts in plants that used to be shut down. If you look at minimum-wage laws or family-leave policy or the investments that we made in community colleges or, for that matter, the Affordable Care Act, these are all big investments for working families, white, black and Hispanic. The challenge we had is not that we've neglected these communities from a policy perspective. That is, I think, an incorrect interpretation. You start reading folks saying, "Oh, you know, working-class families have been neglected," or "Working-class white families have not been paid attention to by Democrats." Actually, they have. What is true, though, is that whatever policy prescriptions that we've been proposing don't reach, are not heard, by the folks in these communities. And what they do hear is Obama or Hillary are trying to take away their guns or they disrespect you.
One of the challenges that we've been talking about now is the way social media and the Internet have changed what people receive as news. I was just talking to my political director, David Simas. He was looking at his Facebook page and some links from high school friends of his, some of whom were now passing around crazy stuff about, you know, Obama has banned the Pledge of Allegiance.
I think it is really important for us, as progressives '' set aside the Democratic Party as an institution, but just anybody who wants to see a more progressive America '' to think about how we are operating on the ground and showing up everywhere and fighting for the support of folks and giving them a concrete sense of what it is that we think will make their lives better, rather than depending on coming up with the right technocratic policies and sharing that with the New York Times editorial board. If we are not on the ground, and people are not hearing and seeing us face-to-face, then we'll keep on losing, even though I genuinely believe that the Republican prescriptions are not going to be as helpful to these folks.
So what do you think is the future of the Democratic Party? A month ago, everybody was convinced that the GOP was in its final death throes; now you've got three branches of government in the hands of one party. You've got voter suppression, which is guaranteed to continue, you've got redistricting, all these things. Where's the Democratic Party going? This seems to be a hard-right turn.Well, but there's not a hard-right turn. Take a look at, take a look at'--
If you control three branches of government and you've got the Supreme Court ...If you survey the American people, including Trump voters, they're in favor of a higher minimum wage. They're in favor, in large numbers, of decriminalizing marijuana. They, I think, are, increasingly and with shocking speed, accepting of the need to treat the LGBT community with respect. They are hugely suspicious of Wall Street, hugely suspicious of the Establishment. Part of what Trump did, as well as Bernie, was run against that Establishment. Now the irony, of course, is that one would think Trump would be considered part of that Establishment and not a genuine outsider like Bernie was. So this doesn't seem to be a moment in which there is a huge turn to the right.
What is true is that the ability of Republicans to win state elections, congressional elections and Senate elections is going to be a challenge for Democrats for a while, unless they can change perceptions about the Democratic Party and progressive causes in these rural or predominantly white areas, particularly in the Midwest. It's going to be harder to do in the South for a lot of historical reasons.
With respect to the presidency, the Democrats still, actually, are in a better place and will continue to be in a better place than Republicans. This was always gonna be hard, because people get weary of one party after eight years. It's only happened once in modern history where we had that kind of clear transfer of power '' or at least in the last 40, 50 years. I don't think that voter-suppression laws are gonna be the norm or gonna be the main problem that we have to deal with. We are not gonna be in a situation in which Democrats can't win in any of these areas, but we're gonna have to reorganize ourselves more effectively. Look, in North Carolina, a state I won once by one point and a state I lost once by one point, a Democratic governor [appears to have] won in North Carolina despite Trump winning North Carolina. And part of the reason he won was North Carolinians were tired of a hard-right agenda by the sitting Republican governor, and these biased laws that had been passed directed at the LGBT community that people thought went too far. But part of the reason Roy Cooper, that North Carolina governor-elect, won is because he was on the ground in those communities and he was working hard.
So, do Democrats have to re-examine how they approach things? Do progressives have to re-examine how they approach things? Absolutely. When I sat here and talked to Bernie Sanders, one of the things that he and I both agreed on was that we have to reinvigorate the DNC so that it's not viewed as a Washington entity but rather that it is a grassroots organization that is out all across the country and making a common cause with working people.
What's your plan going to be going forward with this?You know, I'm gonna sleep for a couple of weeks when I get out of here, take my wife on a well-deserved vacation. And I'll spend time in my first year out of office writing a book, and I'm gonna be organizing my presidential center, which is gonna be focused on precisely this issue of how do we train and empower the next generation of leadership. How do we rethink our storytelling, the messaging and the use of technology and digital media, so that we can make a persuasive case across the country? And not just in San Francisco or Manhattan but everywhere, about why climate change matters or why issues of economic inequality have to be addressed. So I will continue to be very active, and Michelle is going to continue to be very active '' and [on] the very thing that brought us here, which is our belief that when you work with people on the ground at a grassroots level, change happens. When people feel disconnected from the institutions of government, they can swing back and forth in all sorts of ways.
Let me ask you about climate change. Trump says he's going to pull out of the Paris Agreements. Is that possible?Well, historically what happens is that when you have an international agreement, it carries over into the next administration. There were agreements that President Bush made that I respected, because as president of the United States, it was important for me to project a sense of continuity in the U.S. government. There is no doubt that the Republican Party has taken a very hard-line position with respect to climate change. And so some of the progress that we have made, it is going to be tempting for them to roll back.
The good news is that a lot of these initiatives that we've taken work, and don't just work in terms of reducing emissions, they work from an economic perspective. And so over the course of my eight years, when we doubled clean-energy production or we cut [auto emissions] in half, that wasn't just a matter of regulations that can suddenly be erased; that had to do with investors and businesses and utilities and consumers all organizing themselves, figuring out that, you know what, being smart on energy is good for the planet and it's good for my pocketbook. So I think that the question for Donald Trump, for the Republicans in Congress [is]: Are they going to want to roll back hundreds of thousands of jobs in the solar industry that have been created? Are they suggesting that somehow the Big Three automakers retool to make more gas-guzzling cars, even though consumers are really happy saving money on gas? When it comes to power plants, contrary to the rhetoric, it hasn't been my regulations that killed coal. More than anything, it's actually been natural gas that's been a lot cheaper, so it hasn't been economical to build new coal mines.
"There is no doubt that the Republican Party has taken a very hard-line position with respect to climate change," Obama says.Pete Souza/The White HouseI understand all that, but you have nearly all of the science saying we are past the tipping point, and you've got the Koch brothers financing an absolutely obstructionist Congress. That's not going to change. Their ideology seems to be set on the subject. The money that's bought these votes is set on the subject. ...Yeah, listen. If you want to persuade me that everything is going to be terrible, then we can talk ourselves into that. Or we can act. It is what it is. There's been an election. There's going to be a Trump presidency, and Republicans are going to control Congress. And the question is gonna be, for those like you and I, who care about these issues, do we figure out how to continue to make progress in this environment until we have a chance for the next election. And will we have mobilized ourselves and persuaded enough people that we can get back on a path that we think is going to be helpful for families, helpful for the environment, helpful for our safety and security and rule of law and civil rights and social rights?
And one of the things that I have been telling my younger staff, who in some cases have only known politics through my presidency, is history doesn't travel in a straight line. And it zigs and it zags and sometimes you take two steps forward and then you take a step back. You are absolutely right when it comes to us needing to feel an urgency about climate change, but what I've always said was, for us to get to where we need to go on climate, we got to have the American people [and] public opinion on our side. They've got to feel a sense of urgency about it, and that requires us persuading and winning their votes so that we can implement these policies. And we've made significant progress relative to where we were eight years ago '' [but] nowhere near where we need to go. The Paris Agreement envisions us hitting targets a decade from now. I'm confident that America can still hit those targets. And it may be that more of those targets are met on the back end because there are different policies coming out of the Trump administration on this. But I think that we can still achieve what needs to be achieved.
There's no benefit that's derived from pulling into a fetal position. We go out there, and we work. And we slog through challenges, and over time things get better.
Let me ask about immigration reform. Where do we go? What's the path forward on immigration?Well, look, there are those in the Republican Party who recognize that regardless of how this election played itself out, over time, alienating a big chunk of the Latino voters, the Asian voters, is gonna be a problem. And that gives [Republicans] some self-interest in solving this in a sensible way. It's going to be important for Democrats and immigration-rights activists to recognize that for the majority of the American people, borders mean something. And so there has to be, what I've said before, both rule of law and values that stay true to our immigrant roots. Those things don't have to be contradictory, but there have been times where in our big-heartedness around immigration, we haven't adequately addressed how do we get the orderly and lawful part of it down. And we tend to dismiss people's concerns about making sure that immigration is lawful and orderly. And what that means, I think, is that there will still be an opportunity at some point to do comprehensive immigration reform.
I don't think it's gonna happen over the next two years or maybe even not over the next four years, but what we can do is make smart changes, building on what we've already done around the legal-immigration system. What we can do is to work along the borders in a cooperative way with Mexico so that the pressure of what are now mostly Central American immigrants into our country is handled in a humane way. And what we can do, and I will share this with President-elect Trump when I see him, is continue to make smart investments in countries like Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala that can help them deliver some sense of well-being for their people.
You can now buy marijuana legally on the entire West Coast. So why are we still waging the War on Drugs? It is a colossal failure. Why are we still dancing around the subject and making marijuana equivalent to a Schedule I drug?Look, I've been very clear about my belief that we should try to discourage substance abuse. And I am not somebody who believes that legalization is a panacea. But I do believe that treating this as a public-health issue, the same way we do with cigarettes or alcohol, is the much smarter way to deal with it. Typically how these classifications are changed are not done by presidential edict but are done either legislatively or through the DEA. As you might imagine, the DEA, whose job it is historically to enforce drug laws, is not always going to be on the cutting edge about these issues.
[Laughs] What about you? Are you gonna get on the cutting edge?Look, I am now very much in lame-duck status. And I will have the opportunity as a private citizen to describe where I think we need to go. But in light of these referenda passing, including in California, I've already said, and as I think I mentioned on Bill Maher's show, where he asked me about the same issue, that it is untenable over the long term for the Justice Department or the DEA to be enforcing a patchwork of laws, where something that's legal in one state could get you a 20-year prison sentence in another. So this is a debate that is now ripe, much in the same way that we ended up making progress on same-sex marriage. There's something to this whole states-being-laboratories-of-democracy and an evolutionary approach. You now have about a fifth of the country where this is legal.
You got up there and said legalize same-sex marriage, and you pushed it right over the edge. ...Well, you know, no. I don't think that's how it works. If you will recall, what happened was, first, very systematically, I changed laws around hospital visitation for people who were same-sex partners. I then assigned the Pentagon to do a study on getting rid of "don't ask, don't tell," which then got the buy-in of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and we were then able to [repeal] "don't ask, don't tell." We then filed a brief on Proposition 8 out in California. And then, after a lot of groundwork was laid, then I took a position.
So we're in the groundwork stage?One of the things that I think it's important for progressives to do when we're in a reflective mode after an election like this is, we can't have it both ways. We can't say, "Why aren't you reaching out to the folks who voted against us? And by the way, why aren't you maximizing getting 100 percent for the things that those of us, you know, who are already progressive and living on the coasts think should be done right away?" The point is that politics in a big, diverse country like this requires us to move the ball forward not in one long Hail Mary to the end zone, but to, you know, systemically make progress.
So how do you think we go about stitching the country back together?Well, the most important thing that I'm focused on is how we create a common set of facts. That sounds kind of abstract. Another way of saying it is, how do we create a common story about where we are. The biggest challenge that I think we have right now in terms of this divide is that the country receives information from completely different sources. And it's getting worse. The whole movement away from curated journalism to Facebook pages, in which an article on climate change by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist looks pretty much as credible as an article written by a guy in his underwear in a basement, or worse. Or something written by the Koch brothers. People are no longer talking to each other; they're just occupying their different spheres. And in an Internet era where we still value a free press and we don't want censorship of the Internet, that's a hard problem to solve. I think it's one that requires those who are controlling these media to think carefully about their responsibilities, and [whether there] are ways to create a better conversation. It requires better civics education among our kids so that we can sort through what's true and what's not. It's gonna require those of us who are interested in progressive causes figuring out how do we attract more eyeballs and make it more interesting and more entertaining and more persuasive.
Maybe the news business and the newspaper industry, which is being destroyed by Facebook, needs a subsidy so we can maintain a free press?The challenge is, the technology is moving so fast that it's less an issue of traditional media losing money. The New York Times is still making money. NPR is doing well. Yeah, it's a nonprofit, but it has a growing audience. The problem is segmentation. We were talking about the issue of a divided country. Good journalism continues to this day. There's great work done in Rolling Stone. The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It's making people exaggerate or say what's most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs. And if we are gonna solve that, it's not going to be simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media; it's going to be figuring out how do we organize in a virtual world the same way we organize in the physical world. We have to come up with new models.
Obama viewing a White House portrait of JFK. "Once you're in this office, you are part of a legacy dating back to those first Revolutionaries," he says. "And this amazing experiment in democracy has to be tended."Pete Souza/The White HouseWhat kind of private moments have you had that define your last eight years?Oh, well, you know there have been well-known moments like me walking across the colonnade and hearing the chants of "USA" after we had gotten bin Laden, or being up on the Truman Balcony with my young staff after we got the Affordable Care Act passed. There have been times just sitting in the Treaty Room reading letters from people who have a story to tell, a veteran who's not getting services they need [and] a young DREAM Act kid who describes how he's now gotten a degree and has gone back and is teaching in the school where he went, that move you deeply.
But I think the thing that I will miss the most about this place, the thing that can get me sentimental '' and I try not to get too nostalgic, because I still got a bunch of work to do '' it's the team we built here. The number of young people in this place who are just amazing. Somebody like a Brian Deese. Nobody outside of the White House necessarily knows Brian, must be 35, 37, something like that. He's our deputy chief of staff for policy. He engineered the Paris Agreement, the [Hydrofluorocarbons] Agreement, the Aviation Agreement, may have helped save the planet, and he's just doing it while he's got two babies at home, and could not be a better person. And there are people like him across this administration. What I will take away from this experience is them: seeing how they work together, seeing the commitments they have made toward the issues that we care about.
Do you think Michelle should run for office?Michelle will never run for office. She is as talented a person as I know. You can see the incredible resonance she has with the American people. But I joke that she's too sensible to want to be in politics.
What advice do you have for Trump?Well, I'll have a chance to talk to him tomorrow, and I think the main thing that I will say to him is, number one, however you campaigned, once you're in this office, you are part of a legacy dating back to those first Revolutionaries. And this amazing experiment in democracy has to be tended. So aside from any particular issue, the president needs to recognize that this is not about you. This is not about your power, your position or the perks, the Marine band. This is about this precious thing that we've inherited and that we want to pass on. And for me at least, that means you surround yourself with really good people, that you spend time learning and understanding what these issues are because they really actually have an impact on people. They're not games that we're playing. And that to the best of your ability, you're making the decisions that you think are right for the American people '' even when they're not popular, even when they're not expedient. And the satisfaction you get from that is that when you leave this place, you can feel like you've been true to this immense privilege and responsibility that's been given to you.
Do you think the weight of history will constrain him to some extent?I think sitting behind that desk is sobering, and that it will have an impact on him as it has on every president. But I think the most important constraint on any president is the American people themselves, of an informed citizenry that is active and participating and engaged. And that is going to be something that I will, in my own modest ways, continue to try to encourage for the rest of my life.
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2008 presidential campaignEditAfter the Center for American Progress, Deese joined Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign as her economic policy director. After Clinton was defeated in the primaries, Deese went to work as an economic advisor to the Obama-Biden campaign.[5]
Following the 2008 presidential election, he served as a member of the Economic Policy Working Group for the presidential transition.[6]
National Economic CouncilEditAt the start of the Obama Presidency, Deese was appointed as a Special Assistant to the President for economic policy, serving in the National Economic Council (NEC). According to The New York Times, he emerged as "one of the most influential voices" on the auto industry, and specifically the Chrysler and GM bailouts.[3]
In 2011, Deese was named Deputy Director of the NEC. In this role, he coordinated policy development for the White House on taxes, financial regulation, housing, clean energy, manufacturing, and the automotive industry. According to The New Republic, he was among Washington's "most powerful, least famous people".[7]
Office of Management and BudgetEditDeese was named Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the summer of 2013. He briefly served as the Acting Director in summer 2014, between the departure of Sylvia Mathews Burwell and the appointment of Shaun Donovan.
Senior Advisor to the PresidentEditFollowing the departure of John Podesta, Deese took over his brief on Climate and Energy. Unlike Podesta, who served as Counselor to the President, Deese was promoted to the position of Senior Advisor to the President.[8][9] In this position, Deese played an influential role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015.[10] Along with Katie Beirne Fallon, Deese helped to negotiate the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act, which replaced the budget sequestration and increased federal spending by $80 billion over two years.[11][12] In February 2016, the President tapped Deese to oversee the Supreme Court nomination process, which led to the President's nomination of Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on March 16, 2016.[13]
^"Middlebury College National Fellowship & Scholarship Competition Results". Archived from the original on 2006-08-12. 2002 Nominees: Claire Bowen '02 (American Literature), Brian Deese '00 (Political Science) ... 2002 Finalists: Claire Bowen, Brian Deese ^"Biography: Brian Deese". PetersonInstitute.org. Retrieved 2011-07-07. ^ ab"The 31-Year-Old in Charge of Dismantling G.M." by David E. Sanger, The New York Times, May 31, 2009 (p. B1 NY ed.). Retrieved 6/1/2009.^Deese, Brian (2004-09-13). "That Rosy Unemployment Rate". AmericanProgress.org. Retrieved 2011-07-07. ^Block, Sandra (2008-10-18). "McCain vs. Obama: The story on taxes". USA Today. Retrieved 2011-07-07. ^"Policy Working Groups | Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team". Change.gov. Retrieved 2011-07-07. ^The Editors (2011-11-03). "Washington's Most Powerful, Least Famous People". The New Republic. Retrieved 2011-10-25. ^Dovere, Edward-Isaac (21 January 2015). "Brian Deese to succeed John Podesta". Politico. Retrieved 2015-02-16. ^"Senior Advisor Brian Deese". The White House. Retrieved 2015-03-02. Brian Deese is currently serving as Assistant to the President & Senior Advisor. His duties include overseeing climate, conservation and energy policy and advising the President on a range of domestic and international policy issues. ^"Statement by the President on the Paris Climate Agreement". 2015-12-12. Retrieved 2016-07-23. ^Herszenhorn, David M. (2015-10-27). "A Budget Deal Promising Peace Is Rooted in Modest Goals". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-07-23. ^"Remarks by the President at Signing of the Budget Act of 2015". 2015-11-02. Retrieved 2016-07-23. ^"Obama taps senior adviser Brian Deese to run Supreme Court nomination process". Washington Post. Retrieved 2016-07-23.
you should keep the following links in your bookmarks and regularly check the list of reporters who attended the two off-the-record meetings / cocktail party in April of last year at the homes of John Podesta and Joel Benenson, Hillary Clinton's chief campaign strategist. For example the NYT's Maggie Haberman accepted the invitation according to the Podesta e-mails revealed by Wikileaks. I think every time you play a clip from anyone on that list you should remind the audience that they colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And also in the Podesta e-mails, Joel Benenson says they have a "very good relationship" with Maggie Haberman and they "have never been disappointed". She was hired by NYT's DC bureau chief Carolyn Ryan in January, a few months before the beginning of the primaries. Coincidence?
"Who: For something like this, especially in the absence of us teasing things out to others, we feel that it's important to go with what is safe and what has worked in the past, and to a publication that will reach industry people for recruitment purposes. We have has a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for reengaging the beat press that covers HRC, for this we think we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie. "
Jennifer Palmieri (director of communications) e-mail from July:
"Maggie thinks it is responsible and that we are not going to have a problem with it – it will have all the caveats that HRC has not actually proposed these policies, and has said that we will pay for any new policies. She is going to read me the story later today off the record to further assure me. I will let you all know how that goes. Jen"
This Breitbart article has the full list, who said Yes, who said No and who didn't reply:
Wikileaks: Journalists Dined at Top Clinton Staffers’ Homes Days Before Hillary’s Campaign Launch
"Several top journalists and TV news anchors RSVPed “yes” to attend a private, off-the-record gathering at the New York home of Joel Benenson, the chief campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, two days before she announced her candidacy in 2015, according to emails Wikileaks has published from John Podesta’s purported accounts. The guest list for an earlier event at the home of John Podesta was limited to reporters who were expected to cover Clinton on the campaign trail."
the Podesta e-mails about the off-the-record meetings with reporters:
With millions of people regularly tuning in to his YouTube video blogs every morning, Casey Neistat has a millennial fan base coveted by both marketers and media companies. Now, one of those big media outlets is bringing Mr. Neistat '-- and, it hopes, his youthful audience '-- in-house.
CNN announced on Monday that it had agreed to acquire the technology and talent behind Beme, the social media app built and started by Mr. Neistat and Matt Hackett, a former vice president of engineering at Tumblr. Beme's 12 employees will join CNN as part of the deal, the terms of which were not publicly disclosed.
Beme was intended to be a social sharing application that Mr. Neistat described as ''more authentic,'' a way of putting four-second bursts of video out into the social sphere without giving users the ability to edit or tweak the content. Taking video was as simple as holding a smartphone's front-facing sensor to one's body, as if the camera were an extension of one's chest.
Mr. Neistat hopes to bring that idea of authenticity to a news and media environment to draw in a younger audience largely untapped by the cable news network. CNN will shut down the Beme app, which had 1.2 million downloads before losing steam.
''A huge part of my particular audience sees news and media as largely broken,'' Mr. Neistat said in an interview. ''My dad sees it as the word of God, but I think the young people definitely do not.''
Beme saw early traction, especially among Mr. Neistat's avid personal following, but failed to capture a large part of the social sharing market amid competitors like Instagram, Facebook and others. Snapchat, the disappearing video and photo sharing app, seemed to tap into much of the raw types of content and feelings Mr. Neistat said he and his team were trying to capture.
Many of the ideas that came out of Beme will be applied to a new, separate start-up company that will exist as an extension of CNN. Mr. Neistat and his team will be given full creative control to come up with a new project.
Beme's audience is something that CNN, a 36-year-old cable news destination, is striving to attract. Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide, has frequently stated the network's ambition to become a ''digital company,'' far from its roots as a 24-hour news channel.
The deal comes as other established media outlets attempt to branch out from their core offerings and invest in outside start-ups and new ventures. NBCUniversal recently invested $200 million in BuzzFeed, the new media start-up, and also put $200 million into Vox Media, a competing company that is home to technology, sports and political news sites. AMC Networks announced this month that it had taken a minority stake in Funny or Die, the digital comedy site founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay.
''Casey has tapped into nearly six million really powerful viewers, most of which do not tune in to CNN,'' Andrew Morse, global head of CNN Digital, said in an interview. ''To build this audience authentically, we believe we need to build something new.''
Mr. Neistat will largely be given free rein to do just that. The new venture will exist as a stand-alone company, affiliated with but not inside the larger CNN organizational structure. It is modeled after Great Big Story, a video series project co-founded by Mr. Morse that works as a start-up within CNN, aimed at attracting new audiences.
It is unclear what shape the Beme project will take, but the plan is for Mr. Neistat to present some of its early ideas in the first half of 2017.
One thing is for sure: Mr. Neistat, fluent in broadcasting himself in the digital age, is far from beholden to traditional cable news conventions. Instead, he is being asked to find the next medium and mode of delivering news to an audience more skeptical than ever before.
''What we did on Beme was connect with people and strike that chord of honesty,'' said Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners and lead investor in Beme. ''That, combined with the size of Casey's following on YouTube, validated exactly the kind of understanding that traditional media companies are looking for.''
Hateful notes and emails allegedly sent to a North Park University student were ''fabricated,'' the school's president said Tuesday in a statement, and the woman who claimed they were aimed toward her is no longer enrolled at the school.
''We are confident there is no further threat of repeated intolerance to any member of our campus community stemming from this recent incident,'' the university's President David Parkyn said in a statement.
The student, Taylor Volk, said on Nov. 14 she had received emails and notes taped to her door containing harassing, threatening language and mentions of President-elect Donald Trump. She had also posted pictures of notes with homophobic slurs to her Facebook account.
{snip}
The Southern Poverty Law Center said that there were 701 hateful incidents of harassment reported around the country in the week since the presidential election, though not all reports were verified. {snip}
{snip}
Original Article
Topics: Hate Crimes and Hoaxes, Race and Universities
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Text - H.R.5732 - 114th Congress (2015-2016): Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
To halt the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people, encourage a negotiated political settlement, and hold Syrian human rights abusers accountable for their crimes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,SECTION 1.Short title and table of contents.(a) Short title.'--This Act may be cited as the ''Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016''.
(b) Table of contents.'--The table of contents for this Act is as follows:
Sec.'1.'Short title and table of contents.Sec.'2.'Findings.Sec.'3.'Sense of Congress.Sec.'4.'Statement of policy.Sec.'101.'Sanctions with respect to Central Bank of Syria and foreign persons that engage in certain transactions.Sec.'102.'Prohibitions with respect to the transfer of arms and related materials to Syria.Sec.'103.'Rule of construction.Sec.'201.'Imposition of sanctions with respect to certain persons who are responsible for or complicit in human rights abuses committed against citizens of Syria or their family members.Sec.'202.'Imposition of sanctions with respect to the transfer of goods or technologies to Syria that are likely to be used to commit human rights abuses.Sec.'203.'Imposition of sanctions with respect to persons who hinder humanitarian access.Sec.'301.'Report on monitoring and evaluating of ongoing assistance programs in Syria and to the Syrian people.Sec.'302.'Report on certain persons who are responsible for or complicit in certain human rights violations in Syria.Sec.'303.'Assessment of potential effectiveness of and requirements for the establishment of safe zones or a no-fly zone in Syria.Sec.'304.'Assistance to support entities taking actions relating to gathering evidence for investigations into war crimes or crimes against humanity in Syria since March 2011.Sec.'401.'Suspension of sanctions with respect to Syria.Sec.'402.'Waivers and exemptions.Sec.'501.'Regulatory authority.Sec.'502.'Cost limitation.Sec.'503.'Sunset.Congress finds the following:
(1) Over 14,000,000 Syrians have become refugees or internally displaced persons over the last 5 years.
(2) The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has reported that since 2012, over 60,000 Syrians, including children, have died in Syrian prisons.
(3) In July 2014, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives heard testimony from a former Syrian military photographer, alias ''Caesar'', who fled Syria and smuggled out thousands of photos of tortured bodies. In testimony, Caesar said, ''I have seen horrendous pictures of bodies of people who had tremendous amounts of torture, deep wounds and burns and strangulation.''.
(4) In a June 16, 2015, hearing of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Samantha Power, testified that there are alarming and grave reports that the Assad regime has been turning chlorine into a chemical weapon, and on June 16, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that he was ''absolutely certain'' that the Assad regime has used chlorine against his people.
(5) The Assad regime has repeatedly blocked civilian access to or diverted humanitarian assistance, including medical supplies, to besieged and hard-to-reach areas, in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.
(6) The course of the Syrian transition and its future leadership may depend on what the United States and its partners do now to save Syrian lives, alleviate suffering, and help Syrians determine their own future.
SEC. 3.Sense of Congress.It is the sense of Congress that'--
(1) Bashar al-Assad's murderous actions against the people of Syria have caused the deaths of more than 400,000 civilians, led to the destruction of more than 50 percent of Syria's critical infrastructure, and forced the displacement of more than 14,000,000 people, precipitating the worst humanitarian crisis in more than 60 years;
(2) international actions to date have been insufficient in protecting vulnerable populations from being attacked by uniformed and irregular forces, including Hezbollah, associated with the Assad regime, on land and from the air, through the use of barrel bombs, chemical weapons, mass starvation campaigns, industrial-scale torture and execution of political dissidents, sniper attacks on pregnant women, and the deliberate targeting of medical facilities, schools, residential areas, and community gathering places, including markets;
(3) Assad's use of chemical weapons, including chlorine, against the Syrian people violates the Chemical Weapons Convention; and
(4) Assad's continued claim of leadership and actions in Syria are a rallying point for the extremist ideology of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other terrorist organizations.
SEC. 4.Statement of policy.It is the policy of the United States that all diplomatic and coercive economic means should be utilized to compel the government of Bashir al-Assad to immediately halt the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people and actively work towards transition to a democratic government in Syria, existing in peace and security with its neighbors.
SEC. 101.Sanctions with respect to Central Bank of Syria and foreign persons that engage in certain transactions.(a) Application of certain measures to Central Bank of Syria.'--Except as provided in subsections (a) and (b) of section 402, the President shall apply the measures described in section 5318A(b)(5) of title 31, United States Code, to the Central Bank of Syria.
(b) Blocking property of foreign persons that engage in certain transactions.'--
(1) IN GENERAL.'--Beginning on and after the date that is 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall impose on a foreign person the sanctions described in subsection (c) if the President determines that such foreign person has, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly engaged in an activity described in paragraph (2).
(2) ACTIVITIES DESCRIBED.'--A foreign person engages in an activity described in this paragraph if the foreign person'--
(A) knowingly provided significant financial, material or technological support to (including engaging in or facilitating a significant transaction or transactions with) or provided significant financial services for'--
(i) the Government of Syria (including Syria's intelligence and security services or its armed forces or government entities operating as a business enterprise) and the Central Bank of Syria, or any of its agents or affiliates; or
(ii) a foreign person subject to sanctions pursuant to'--
(I) the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) with respect to Syria or any other provision of law that imposes sanctions with respect to Syria; or
(II) a resolution that is agreed to by the United Nations Security Council that imposes sanctions with respect to Syria;
(B) knowingly'--
(i) sold or provided significant goods, services, technology, information, or other support that could directly and significantly facilitate the maintenance or expansion of Syria's domestic production of natural gas or petroleum or petroleum products of Syrian origin in areas controlled by the Government of Syria;
(ii) sold or provided to Syria crude oil or condensate, refined petroleum products, liquefied natural gas, or petrochemical products that have a fair market value of $500,000 or more or that during a 12-month period have an aggregate fair market value of $2,000,000 or more in areas controlled by the Government of Syria;
(iii) sold or provided civilian aircraft or spare parts, or provides significant goods, services, or technologies associated with the operation of aircraft or airlines to any foreign person operating in areas controlled by the Government of Syria; or
(iv) sold or provided significant goods, services, or technology to a foreign person operating in the shipping (including ports and free trade zones), transportation, or telecommunications sectors in areas controlled by the Government of Syria;
(C) knowingly facilitated efforts by a foreign person to carry out an activity described in subparagraph (A) or (B);
(D) knowingly provided loans, credits, including export credits, or financing to carry out an activity described in subparagraph (A) or (B); and
(E) is owned or controlled by a foreign person that engaged in the activities described in subparagraphs (A) through (C).
(c) Sanctions against a foreign person.'--The sanctions to be imposed on a foreign person described in subsection (b) are the following:
(1) IN GENERAL.'--The President shall exercise all powers granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (except that the requirements of section 202 of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1701) shall not apply) to the extent necessary to freeze and prohibit all transactions in all property and interests in property of the foreign person if such property and interests in property are in the United States, come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.
(2) ALIENS INELIGIBLE FOR VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--
(A) VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--An alien who the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) knows, or has reason to believe, meets any of the criteria described in subsection (a) is'--
(i) inadmissible to the United States;
(ii) ineligible to receive a visa or other documentation to enter the United States; and
(iii) otherwise ineligible to be admitted or paroled into the United States or to receive any other benefit under the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.).
(B) CURRENT VISAS REVOKED.'--
(i) IN GENERAL.'--The issuing consular officer, the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) shall revoke any visa or other entry documentation issued to an alien who meets any of the criteria described in subsection (a) regardless of when issued.
(ii) EFFECT OF REVOCATION.'--A revocation under clause (i)'--
(I) shall take effect immediately; and
(II) shall automatically cancel any other valid visa or entry documentation that is in the alien's possession.
(3) EXCEPTION TO COMPLY WITH UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS AGREEMENT.'--Sanctions under paragraph (2) shall not apply to an alien if admitting the alien into the United States is necessary to permit the United States to comply with the Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed at Lake Success June 26, 1947, and entered into force November 21, 1947, between the United Nations and the United States, or other applicable international obligations.
(4) PENALTIES.'--The penalties provided for in subsections (b) and (c) of section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705) shall apply to a person that knowingly violates, attempts to violate, conspires to violate, or causes a violation of regulations promulgated under section 501(a) to carry out paragraph (1) of this subsection to the same extent that such penalties apply to a person that knowingly commits an unlawful act described in section 206(a) of that Act.
(d) Definitions.'--In this section:
(1) ADMITTED; ALIEN.'--The terms ''admitted'' and ''alien'' have the meanings given such terms in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101).
(2) FINANCIAL, MATERIAL, OR TECHNOLOGICAL SUPPORT.'--The term ''financial, material, or technological support'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.304 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(3) GOVERNMENT OF SYRIA.'--The term ''Government of Syria'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.305 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(4) KNOWINGLY.'--The term ''knowingly'' has the meaning given such term in section 566.312 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(5) PETROLEUM OR PETROLEUM PRODUCTS OF SYRIAN ORIGIN.'--The term ''petroleum or petroleum products of Syrian origin'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.314 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(6) SIGNIFICANT TRANSACTION OR TRANSACTIONS; SIGNIFICANT FINANCIAL SERVICES.'--A transaction or transactions or financial services shall be determined to be a significant for purposes of this section in accordance with section 566.404 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(7) SYRIA.'--The term ''Syria'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.316 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
SEC. 102.Prohibitions with respect to the transfer of arms and related materials to Syria.(a) Sanctions.'--
(1) IN GENERAL.'--Beginning on and after the date that is 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall impose on a foreign person the sanctions described in subsection (b) if the President determines that such foreign person has, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly exported, transferred, or provided significant financial, material, or technological support to the Government of Syria to'--
(A) acquire or develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons or related technologies;
(B) acquire or develop ballistic or cruise missile capabilities;
(C) acquire or develop destabilizing numbers and types of advanced conventional weapons;
(D) acquire defense articles, defense services, or defense information (as such terms are defined under the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2751 et seq.)); or
(E) acquire items designated by the President for purposes of the United States Munitions List under section 38(a)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2778(a)(1)).
(2) APPLICABILITY TO OTHER FOREIGN PERSONS.'--The sanctions described in subsection (b) shall also be imposed on any foreign person that'--
(A) is a successor entity to a foreign person described in paragraph (1); or
(B) is owned or controlled by a foreign person described in paragraph (1).
(b) Sanctions against a foreign person.'--The sanctions to be imposed on a foreign person described in subsection (a) are the following:
(1) IN GENERAL.'--The President shall exercise all powers granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (except that the requirements of section 202 of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1701) shall not apply) to the extent necessary to freeze and prohibit all transactions in all property and interests in property of the foreign person if such property and interests in property are in the United States, come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.
(2) ALIENS INELIGIBLE FOR VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--
(A) VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--An alien who the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) knows, or has reason to believe, meets any of the criteria described in subsection (a) is'--
(i) inadmissible to the United States;
(ii) ineligible to receive a visa or other documentation to enter the United States; and
(iii) otherwise ineligible to be admitted or paroled into the United States or to receive any other benefit under the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.).
(B) CURRENT VISAS REVOKED.'--
(i) IN GENERAL.'--The issuing consular officer, the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) shall revoke any visa or other entry documentation issued to an alien who meets any of the criteria described in subsection (a) regardless of when issued.
(ii) EFFECT OF REVOCATION.'--A revocation under clause (i)'--
(I) shall take effect immediately; and
(II) shall automatically cancel any other valid visa or entry documentation that is in the alien's possession.
(3) EXCEPTION TO COMPLY WITH UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS AGREEMENT.'--Sanctions under paragraph (2) shall not apply to an alien if admitting the alien into the United States is necessary to permit the United States to comply with the Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed at Lake Success June 26, 1947, and entered into force November 21, 1947, between the United Nations and the United States, or other applicable international obligations.
(4) PENALTIES.'--A person that violates, attempts to violate, conspires to violate, or causes a violation of any regulation, license, or order issued to carry out this section shall be subject to the penalties set forth in subsections (b) and (c) of section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705) to the same extent as a person that commits an unlawful act described in subsection (a) of that section.
(c) Definitions.'--In this section:
(1) ADMITTED; ALIEN.'--The terms ''admitted'' and ''alien'' have the meanings given such terms in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101).
(2) FINANCIAL, MATERIAL, OR TECHNOLOGICAL SUPPORT.'--The term ''financial, material, or technological support'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.304 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(3) FOREIGN PERSON.'--The term ''foreign person'' has the meaning given such term in section 594.304 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(4) KNOWINGLY.'--The term ''knowingly'' has the meaning given such term in section 566.312 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(5) SYRIA.'--The term ''Syria'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.316 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
(6) UNITED STATES PERSON.'--The term ''United States person'' has the meaning given such term in section 542.319 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as such section was in effect on the date of the enactment of this Act.
SEC. 103.Rule of construction.The sanctions that are required to be imposed under this title are in addition to other similar or related sanctions that are required to be imposed under any other provision of law.
SEC. 201.Imposition of sanctions with respect to certain persons who are responsible for or complicit in human rights abuses committed against citizens of Syria or their family members.(a) In general.'--Section 702(c) of the Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 (22 U.S.C. 8791(c)) is amended to read as follows:
''(c) Sanctions described.'--
''(1) IN GENERAL.'--The President shall exercise all powers granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (except that the requirements of section 202 of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1701) shall not apply) to the extent necessary to freeze and prohibit all transactions in all property and interests in property of a person on the list required by subsection (b) if such property and interests in property are in the United States, come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.
''(2) ALIENS INELIGIBLE FOR VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--
''(A) VISAS, ADMISSION, OR PAROLE.'--An alien who the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) knows, or has reason to believe, meets any of the criteria described in subsection (b) is'--
''(i) inadmissible to the United States;
''(ii) ineligible to receive a visa or other documentation to enter the United States; and
''(iii) otherwise ineligible to be admitted or paroled into the United States or to receive any other benefit under the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.).
''(B) CURRENT VISAS REVOKED.'--
''(i) IN GENERAL.'--The issuing consular officer, the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Homeland Security (or a designee of one of such Secretaries) shall revoke any visa or other entry documentation issued to an alien who meets any of the criteria described in subsection (b) regardless of when issued.
''(ii) EFFECT OF REVOCATION.'--A revocation under clause (i)'--
''(I) shall take effect immediately; and
''(II) shall automatically cancel any other valid visa or entry documentation that is in the alien's possession.
''(3) PENALTIES.'--A person that violates, attempts to violate, conspires to violate, or causes a violation of this section or any regulation, license, or order issued to carry out this section shall be subject to the penalties set forth in subsections (b) and (c) of section 206 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1705) to the same extent as a person that commits an unlawful act described in subsection (a) of that section.
''(4) REGULATORY AUTHORITY.'--The President shall, not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this section, promulgate regulations as necessary for the implementation of this section.
''(5) EXCEPTION TO COMPLY WITH UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS AGREEMENT.'--Sanctions under paragraph (2) shall not apply to an alien if admitting the alien into the United States is necessary to permit the United States to comply with the Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed at Lake Success June 26, 1947, and entered into force November 21, 1947, between the United Nations and the United States, or other applicable international obligations.
''(6) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION.'--Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the President to impose additional sanctions pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.), relevant Executive orders, regulations, or other provisions of law.''.
(b) Serious human rights abuses described.'--Section 702 of the Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 (22 U.S.C. 8791) is amended by adding at the end the following:
''(d) Serious human rights abuses described.'--In subsection (b), the term 'serious human rights abuses' includes'--
''(1) the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure to include schools, hospitals, and markets; and
''(2) hindering the prompt and safe access for all actors engaged in humanitarian relief activities, including across conflict lines and borders.''.
(c) Effective date.'--The amendments made by subsections (a) and (b) shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act and shall apply with respect to the imposition of sanctions under section 702(a) of the Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 on after such date of enactment.
SEC. 202.Imposition of sanctions with respect to the transfer of goods or technologies to Syria that are likely to be used to commit human rights abuses.Section 703(b)(2)(C) of the Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 (22 U.S.C. 8792(b)(2)(C)) is amended'--
(1) in clause (i), by striking ''or'' at the end;
(2) in clause (ii), by striking the period at the end and inserting a semicolon; and
(3) by adding at the end the following:
''(iii) any article designated by the President for purposes of the United States Munitions List under section 38(a)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. 2778(a)(1)); or
''(iv) other goods or technologies that the President determines may be used by the Government of Syria to commit human rights abuses against the people of Syria.''.
SEC. 203.Imposition of sanctions with respect to persons who hinder humanitarian access.The Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 (22 U.S.C. 8791 et seq.) is amended'--
(1) by redesignating sections 705 and 706 as sections 706 and 707, respectively;
(2) by inserting after section 704 the following:
''SEC. 705.Imposition of sanctions with respect to persons who hinder humanitarian access.
''(a) In general.'--The President shall impose sanctions described in section 702(c) with respect to each person on the list required by subsection (b).
''(b) List of persons who hinder humanitarian access.'--
''(1) IN GENERAL.'--Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a list of persons that the President determines have engaged in hindering the prompt and safe access for the United Nations, its specialized agencies and implementing partners, national and international non-governmental organizations, and all other actors engaged in humanitarian relief activities in Syria, including across conflict lines and borders.
''(2) UPDATES OF LIST.'--The President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees an updated list under paragraph (1)'--
''(A) not later than 300 days after the date of the enactment of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016 and every 180 days thereafter; and
''(B) as new information becomes available.
''(3) FORM OF REPORT; PUBLIC AVAILABILITY.'--
''(A) FORM.'--The list required by paragraph (1) shall be submitted in unclassified form but may contain a classified annex.
''(B) PUBLIC AVAILABILITY.'--The unclassified portion of the list required by paragraph (1) shall be made available to the public and posted on the websites of the Department of the Treasury and the Department of State.''; and
(3) in section 706 (as so redesignated), by striking ''or 704'' and inserting ''704, or 705''.
SEC. 301.Report on monitoring and evaluating of ongoing assistance programs in Syria and to the Syrian people.(a) In general.'--Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State and the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development shall submit to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate a report on the monitoring and evaluation of ongoing assistance programs in Syria and to the Syrian people.
(b) Matters To be included.'--The report required by subsection (a) shall include'--
(1) the specific project monitoring and evaluation plans, including measurable goals and performance metrics for assistance in Syria; and
(2) the major challenges to monitoring and evaluating programs in Syria.
SEC. 302.Report on certain persons who are responsible for or complicit in certain human rights violations in Syria.(a) In general.'--Not later than 120 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a detailed report with respect to whether each person described in subsection (b) is a person that meets the requirements described in section 702(b) of the Syria Human Rights Accountability Act of 2012 (22 U.S.C. 8791(b) for purposes of inclusion on the list of persons who are responsible for or complicit in certain human rights abuses under such section. For any such person who is not included in such report, the President should include in the report a description of the reasons why the person was not included, including information on whether sufficient credible evidence of responsibility for such abuses was found.
(b) Persons described.'--The persons described in this subsection are the following:
(1) Bashar Al-Assad.
(2) Asma Al-Assad.
(3) Rami Makhlouf.
(4) Bouthayna Shaaban.
(5) Walid Moallem.
(6) Ali Al-Salim.
(7) Wael Nader Al-Halqi.
(8) Jamil Hassan.
(9) Suhail Hassan.
(10) Ali Mamluk.
(11) Muhammed Khadour, Deir Ez Zor Military and Security.
(12) Jamal Razzouq, Security Branch 243.
(13) Munzer Ghanam, Air Force Intelligence.
(14) Daas Hasan Ali, Branch 327.
(15) Jassem Ali Jassem Hamad, Political Security.
(16) Samir Muhammad Youssef, Military Intelligence.
(40) Ghassan Al-Abdullah, General Intelligence Directorate.
(41) Maher Al-Assad, Republican Guard.
(42) Fahad Al-Farouch.
(43) Rafiq Shahada, Military Intelligence.
(44) Loay Al-Ali, Military Intelligence.
(45) Nawfal Al-Husayn, Military Intelligence.
(46) Muhammad Zamrini, Military Intelligence.
(47) Muhammad Mahallah, Military Intelligence.
(c) Form of report; public availability.'--
(1) FORM.'--The list required by subsection (a) shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may contain a classified annex if necessary.
(2) PUBLIC AVAILABILITY.'--The unclassified portion of the list required by paragraph (1) shall be made available to the public and posted on the Web sites of the Department of the Treasury and the Department of State.
(d) Definition.'--In this section, the term ''appropriate congressional committees'' means'--
(1) the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Ways and Means, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives; and
(2) the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate.
SEC. 303.Assessment of potential effectiveness of and requirements for the establishment of safe zones or a no-fly zone in Syria.(a) In general.'--Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committee a report that'--
(1) assesses the potential effectiveness, risks, and operational requirements of the establishment and maintenance of a no-fly zone over part or all of Syria, including'--
(A) the operational and legal requirements for United States and coalition air power to establish a no-fly zone in Syria;
(B) the impact a no-fly zone in Syria would have on humanitarian and counterterrorism efforts in Syria and the surrounding region; and
(C) the potential for force contributions from other countries to establish a no-fly zone in Syria; and
(2) assesses the potential effectiveness, risks, and operational requirements for the establishment of one or more safe zones in Syria for internally displaced persons or for the facilitation of humanitarian assistance, including'--
(A) the operational and legal requirements for United States and coalition forces to establish one or more safe zones in Syria;
(B) the impact one or more safe zones in Syria would have on humanitarian and counterterrorism efforts in Syria and the surrounding region; and
(C) the potential for contributions from other countries and vetted non-state actor partners to establish and maintain one or more safe zones in Syria.
(b) Form.'--The report required by subsection (a) shall be submitted in unclassified form, but may contain a classified annex if necessary.
(c) Definition.'--In this section, the term ''appropriate congressional committees'' means'--
(1) the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives; and
(2) the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Armed Services of the Senate.
SEC. 304.Assistance to support entities taking actions relating to gathering evidence for investigations into war crimes or crimes against humanity in Syria since March 2011.(a) In general.'--The Secretary of State, acting through the Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and the Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, is authorized to provide assistance to support entities that are conducting criminal investigations, building Syrian investigative capacity, supporting prosecutions in national courts, collecting evidence and preserving the chain of evidence for eventual prosecution against those who have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity in Syria, including the aiding and abetting of such crimes by foreign governments and organizations supporting the Government of Syria, since March 2011.
(b) Report.'--Not later than 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall submit to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate a detailed report on assistance provided under subsection (a).
SEC. 401.Suspension of sanctions with respect to Syria.(a) Suspension of sanctions.'--
(1) NEGOTIATIONS NOT CONCLUDING IN AGREEMENT.'--If the President determines that internationally recognized negotiations to resolve the violence in Syria have not concluded in an agreement or are likely not to conclude in an agreement, the President may suspend, as appropriate, in whole or in part, the imposition of sanctions otherwise required under this Act or any amendment made by this Act for a period not to exceed 120 days, and renewable for additional periods not to exceed 120 days, if the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees in writing a determination and certification that the Government of Syria has ended military attacks against and gross violations of the human rights of the Syrian people, specifically'--
(A) the air space over Syria is no longer being utilized by the Government of Syria and associated forces to target civilian populations through the use of incendiary devices, including barrel bombs, chemical weapons, and conventional arms, including air-delivered missiles and explosives;
(B) areas besieged by the Assad regime and associated forces, including Hezbollah and irregular Iranian forces, are no longer cut off from international aid and have regular access to humanitarian assistance, freedom of travel, and medical care;
(C) the Government of Syria is releasing all political prisoners forcibly held within the Assad regime prison system, including the facilities maintained by various security, intelligence, and military elements associated with the Government of Syria and allowed full access to the same facilities for investigations by appropriate international human rights organizations; and
(D) the forces of the Government of Syria and associated forces, including Hezbollah, irregular Iranian forces, and Russian government air assets, are no longer engaged in deliberate targeting of medical facilities, schools, residential areas, and community gathering places, including markets, in flagrant violation of international norms.
(2) NEGOTIATIONS CONCLUDING IN AGREEMENT.'--
(A) INITIAL SUSPENSION OF SANCTIONS.'--If the President determines that internationally recognized negotiations to resolve the violence in Syria have concluded in an agreement or are likely to conclude in an agreement, the President may suspend, as appropriate, in whole or in part, the imposition of sanctions otherwise required under this Act or any amendment made by this Act for a period not to exceed 120 days if the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees in writing a determination and certification that'--
(i) in the case in which the negotiations are likely to conclude in an agreement'--
(I) the Government of Syria, the Syrian High Negotiations Committee or its successor, and appropriate international parties are participating in direct, face-to-face negotiations; and
(II) the suspension of sanctions under this Act or any amendment made by this Act is essential to the advancement of such negotiations; and
(ii) the Government of Syria has demonstrated a commitment to a significant and substantial reduction in attacks on and violence against the Syrian people by the Government of Syria and associated forces.
(B) RENEWAL OF SUSPENSION OF SANCTIONS.'--The President may renew a suspension of sanctions under subparagraph (A) for additional periods not to exceed 120 days if, for each such additional period, the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees in writing a determination and certification that'--
(i) the conditions described in clauses (i) and (ii) of subparagraph (A) are continuing to be met;
(ii) the renewal of the suspension of sanctions is essential to implementing an agreement described in subparagraph (A) or making progress toward concluding an agreement described in subparagraph (A);
(iii) the Government of Syria and associated forces have ceased attacks against Syrian civilians; and
(iv) the Government of Syria has publically committed to negotiations for a transitional government in Syria and continues to demonstrate that commitment through sustained engagement in talks and substantive and verifiable progress towards the implementation of such an agreement.
(3) BRIEFING AND REIMPOSITION OF SANCTIONS.'--
(A) BRIEFING.'--Not later than 30 days after the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees a determination and certification in the case of a renewal of suspension of sanctions under paragraph (2)(B), and every 30 days thereafter, the President shall provide a briefing to the appropriate congressional committees on the status and frequency of negotiations described in paragraph (2).
(B) RE-IMPOSITION OF SANCTIONS.'--If the President provides a briefing to the appropriate congressional committees under subparagraph (A) with respect to which the President indicates a lapse in negotiations described in paragraph (2) for a period that equals or exceeds 90 days, the sanctions that were suspended under paragraph (2)(B) shall be re-imposed and any further suspension of such sanctions is prohibited.
(4) DEFINITION.'--In this subsection, the term ''appropriate congressional committees'' means'--
(A) the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Ways and Means, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives; and
(B) the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate.
(b) Sense of Congress To be considered for determining a transitional government in Syria.'--It is the sense of Congress that a transitional government in Syria is a government that'--
(1) is taking verifiable steps to release all political prisoners and provided full access to Syrian prisons for investigations by appropriate international human rights organizations;
(2) is taking verifiable steps to remove former senior Syrian Government officials who are complicit in the conception, implementation, or cover up of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or human rights abuses from government positions and any person subject to sanctions under any provision of law;
(3) is in the process of organizing free and fair elections for a new government'--
(A) to be held in a timely manner and scheduled while the suspension of sanctions or the renewal of the suspension of sanctions under this section is in effect; and
(B) to be conducted under the supervision of internationally recognized observers;
(4) is making tangible progress toward establishing an independent judiciary;
(5) is demonstrating respect for and compliance with internationally recognized human rights and basic freedoms as specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
(6) is taking steps to verifiably fulfill its commitments under the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and is making tangible progress toward becoming a signatory to Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, entered into force March 26, 1975, and adhering to the Missile Technology Control Regime and other control lists, as necessary;
(7) has halted the development and deployment of ballistic and cruise missiles; and
(8) is taking verifiable steps to remove from positions of authority within the intelligence and security services as well as the military those who were in a position of authority or responsibility during the conflict and who under the authority of their position were implicated in or implicit in the torture, extrajudicial killing, or execution of civilians, to include those who were involved in decisionmaking or execution of plans to use chemical weapons.
SEC. 402.Waivers and exemptions.(a) Exemptions.'--The following activities and transactions shall be exempt from sanctions authorized under this Act:
(1) Any activity subject to the reporting requirements under title V of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C. 3091 et seq.), or to any authorized intelligence activities of the United States.
(2) Any transaction necessary to comply with United States obligations under'--
(A) the Agreement between the United Nations and the United States of America regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed at Lake Success June 26, 1947, and entered into force November 21, 1947; or
(B) the Convention on Consular Relations, done at Vienna April 24, 1963, and entered into force March 19, 1967.
(b) Humanitarian and democracy assistance waiver.'--
(1) STATEMENT OF POLICY.'--It shall be the policy of the United States to fully utilize the waiver authority under this subsection to ensure that adequate humanitarian relief or support for democracy promotion is provided to the Syrian people.
(2) WAIVER.'--Except as provided in paragraph (5), the President may waive, on a case-by-case basis, for a period not to exceed 120 days, and renewable for additional periods not to exceed 120 days, the application of sanctions authorized under this Act with respect to a person if the President submits to the appropriate congressional committees a written determination that the waiver is necessary for purposes of providing humanitarian assistance or support for democracy promotion to the people of Syria.
(3) CONTENT OF WRITTEN DETERMINATION.'--A written determination submitted under paragraph (1) with respect to a waiver shall include a description of all notification and accountability controls that have been employed in order to ensure that the activities covered by the waiver are humanitarian assistance or support for democracy promotion and do not entail any activities in Syria or dealings with the Government of Syria not reasonably related to humanitarian assistance or support for democracy promotion.
(4) CLARIFICATION OF PERMITTED ACTIVITIES UNDER WAIVER.'--The President may not impose sanctions authorized under this Act against a humanitarian organization for'--
(A) engaging in a financial transaction relating to humanitarian assistance or for humanitarian purposes pursuant to a waiver issued under paragraph (1);
(B) transporting goods or services that are necessary to carry out operations relating to humanitarian assistance or humanitarian purposes pursuant to such a waiver; or
(C) having incidental contact, in the course of providing humanitarian assistance or aid for humanitarian purposes pursuant to such a waiver, with individuals who are under the control of a foreign person subject to sanctions under this Act or any amendment made by this Act unless the organization or its officers, members, representatives or employees have engaged in (or the President knows or has reasonable ground to believe is engaged in or is likely to engage in) conduct described in section 212(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI)).
(5) EXCEPTION TO WAIVER AUTHORITY.'--The President may not exercise the waiver authority under paragraph (2) with respect to a foreign person who has (or whose officers, members, representatives or employees have) engaged in (or the President knows or has reasonable ground to believe is engaged in or is likely to engage in) conduct described in section 212(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI)).
(c) Waiver.'--
(1) IN GENERAL.'--The President may, on a case-by-case basis and for periods not to exceed 120 days, waive the application of sanctions under this Act with respect to a foreign person if the President certifies to the appropriate congressional committees that such waiver is vital to the national security interests of the United States.
(2) CONSULTATION.'--
(A) BEFORE WAIVER ISSUED.'--Not later than 5 days before the issuance of a waiver under paragraph (1) is to take effect, the President shall notify and brief the appropriate congressional committees on the status of the foreign person involvement in activities described in this Act.
(B) AFTER WAIVER ISSUED.'--Not later than 90 days after the issuance of a waiver under paragraph (1), and every 120 days thereafter if the waiver remains in effect, the President shall brief the appropriate congressional committees on the status of the foreign person's involvement in activities described in this Act.
(3) DEFINITION.'--In this subsection, the term ''appropriate congressional committees'' means'--
(A) the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Committee on Financial Services, the Committee on Ways and Means, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives; and
(B) the Committee on Foreign Relations, the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate.
(d) Codification of certain services in support of nongovernmental organizations' activities authorized.'--
(1) IN GENERAL.'--Except as provided in paragraph (2), section 542.516 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations (relating to certain services in support of nongovernmental organizations' activities authorized), as in effect on the day before the date of the enactment of this Act, shall'--
(A) remain in effect on and after such date of enactment; and
(B) in the case of a nongovernmental organization that is authorized to export or reexport services to Syria under such section on the day before such date of enactment, shall apply to such organization on and after such date of enactment to the same extent and in the same manner as such section applied to such organization on the day before such date of enactment.
(2) EXCEPTION.'--Section 542.516 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations, as codified under paragraph (1), shall not apply with respect to a foreign person who has (or whose officers, members, representatives or employees have) engaged in (or the President knows or has reasonable ground to believe is engaged in or is likely to engage in) conduct described in section 212(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI)).
SEC. 501.Regulatory authority.(a) In general.'--The President shall, not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, promulgate regulations as necessary for the implementation of this Act and the amendments made by this Act.
(b) Notification to Congress.'--Not less than 10 days before the promulgation of regulations under subsection (a), the President shall notify and provide to the appropriate congressional committees the proposed regulations and the provisions of this Act and the amendments made by this Act that the regulations are implementing.
(c) Definition.'--In this section, the term ''appropriate congressional committees'' means'--
(1) the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives; and
(2) the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate.
SEC. 502.Cost limitation.No additional funds are authorized to carry out the requirements of this Act and the amendments made by this Act. Such requirements shall be carried out using amounts otherwise authorized.
This Act shall cease to be effective beginning on December 31, 2021.
Passed the House of Representatives November 15, 2016.
SNOWDEN: ''RUSSIA SUCCESSFULLY RIGGED US ELECTIONS IN FAVOR OF TRUMP'' '' Universe Politics
Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden announced this morning that he had ''clear evidence'' that the 2016 US election was rigged by Russian hackers in favor of Donald Trump.''I have received confirmation through Guccifer 2.0 that malware was used in the electronic voting machines that lead to the victory of Donald Trump'' Snowden told an internet conference in Berlin, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.
'' Edward SnowdenGuccifer 2.0, the hacker allegedly responsible for the DNC hacking via Wikileaks, has confirmed to Snowden the apparent use of malware in the electronic voting machines in favor of Donald Trump
''Elections are always rigged''Surprisingly enough, Edward Snowden honestly admits that voter fraud is common in every election and in every part of the world.
''Democracy is a beautiful illusion and the power brokers of the world are intent in keeping our faith in this system alive. It is why it is important to keep the belief of a truly democratic system, when in fact, we are being ruled by the 1% of this world,'' he bluntly said during the one hour and a half video conference.
''The truth is that sometimes the people actually get who they actually voted for, if the establishment has decided they approve of that choice. Voter manipulation is a combination of the coercion of the major media groups and electronic voting fraud,'' he explained.
Divide and conquerThe former NSA contractor claims the election fraud was done by tampering with the software of voting machines to add malicious code altering vote totals to favor a particular candidate.
''When you see that the election is divided 51/49, it just clearly shows the election results are biased. Statistically talking, it is impossible to have such a tight election with over 100 million voters. The malware's algorithm secretly rigs an election to sway the result 51/49 to a specified side, it is clearly a divide and conquer strategy to create the illusion of a division within the population, and this algorithm has pretty much been used around the world in every election for the past 20 years or so,'' he explained.
''What is most surprising about this election, according to my information, is that the electronic voting machines were clearly rigged in Hillary Clinton's favor, but Russian hackers cunningly used this to their advantage and inverted the process towards Donald Trump in the last moments leading to his election,'' he added.
Proof of fraud in WisconsinAcademics Against Voter Fraud (AAVF), an independent organization that surveys electronic voting machine data, presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000.
The independent organization also found 720 dead people in the state of Wisconsin alone that were officially registered voters, although all votes were found to have gone towards the Democratic party nominee.
Source:
Related
Russia will not stop: Aleppo will be taken prior to Trump's inauguration - PravdaReport
The current US administration does not give up attempts to come to an agreement with Russia to complete the siege of Aleppo to distinguish between Syrian opposition forces and Jabhat en-Nusra terrorist group (Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, both organizations are banned in Russia). US Secretary of State John Kerry still does his best to come to such an agreement with the Russian Federation.
According to the Washington Post, Kerry fears Donald Trump may enter into a different deal with Moscow, which would cast the Syrian opposition adrift and put Washington on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Kerry takes vehement and even unimaginable efforts not to let this happen.
Pravda.Ru asked political scientist and publicist Leonid Krutakov whether Russia could take up such a deal.
"Do you think that Russia could come to an agreement with the outgoing US administration on Syria?"
"I think that Russia is not going to stop. Russia has taken a break. Russian forces have not been conducting any operations in Syria before the election. Obama is a lame duck, and it makes no sense to come to an agreement with him. There is some time before Trump takes office as president in late January, so Russia is not going to stop, and Aleppo will be taken."
'¨"What kind of a deal can Russia negotiate with Trump?"
"Donald Trump is an American project. He wants to revive industry inside the US-controlled perimeter of South America and Europe. He wants law and order in his own house, so to speak. As for Syria or Ukraine, he will have to negotiate with Russia. Aleppo is not supposed to be a subject of negotiations with the United States by the time when Trump officially takes office."
Pravda.Ru
Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru
NATO's concern about final operation in Aleppo justified
NWO
Brexit and the Future of Europe by George Soros - Project Syndicate
George Soros is Chairman of Soros Fund Management and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations. A pioneer of the hedge-fund industry, he is the author of many books, including The Alchemy of Finance, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means, and The Tragedy'... read more
NEW YORK '' Britain, I believe, had the best of all possible deals with the European Union, being a member of the common market without belonging to the euro and having secured a number of other opt-outs from EU rules. And yet that was not enough to stop the United Kingdom's electorate from voting to leave. Why?
The answer could be seen in opinion polls in the months leading up to the ''Brexit'' referendum. The European migration crisis and the Brexit debate fed on each other. The ''Leave'' campaign exploited the deteriorating refugee situation '' symbolized by frightening images of thousands of asylum-seekers concentrating in Calais, desperate to enter Britain by any means necessary '' to stoke fear of ''uncontrolled'' immigration from other EU member states. And the European authorities delayed important decisions on refugee policy in order to avoid a negative effect on the British referendum vote, thereby perpetuating scenes of chaos like the one in Calais.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to open her country's doors wide to refugees was an inspiring gesture, but it was not properly thought out, because it ignored the pull factor. A sudden influx of asylum-seekers disrupted people in their everyday lives across the EU.
The lack of adequate controls, moreover, created panic, affecting everyone: the local population, the authorities in charge of public safety, and the refugees themselves. It has also paved the way for the rapid rise of xenophobic anti-European parties '' such as the UK Independence Party, which spearheaded the Leave campaign '' as national governments and European institutions seem incapable of handling the crisis.
EU disintegration 'practically irreversible' '' Soros '-- RT News
The EU has ''ceased to satisfy its citizens' needs and aspirations,'' George Soros said calling on people to ''band together to save it.'' The billionaire warned the disintegration of the bloc will be almost impossible to avoid.
''Britain eventually may or may not be relatively better off than other countries by leaving the EU, but its economy and people stand to suffer significantly in the short to medium term,'' Soros wrote in a commentary on the website Project Syndicate.
''The catastrophic scenario that many feared has materialized, making the disintegration of the EU practically irreversible.''
Read more
The financial collapse in the UK in the wake of Thursday's vote has proved to be worse than any crisis over the past three decades. In the space of 10 minutes of trading on Friday, London's FTSE index lost $164 billion when sterling dropped to its lowest mark in 31 years, trading up to 12 percent lower against the dollar. Ratings agency Standard and Poor's threatened to downgrade the UK's rating, which is currently triple A.
''Financial markets worldwide are likely to remain in turmoil as the long, complicated process of political and economic divorce from the EU is negotiated," Soros wrote in his post-Brexit-vote analysis, noting that the "consequences for the real economy will be comparable only to the financial crisis of 2007-2008."
He predicted ''further uncertainty and political risk, because what is at stake was never only some real or imaginary advantage for Britain, but the very survival of the European project.''
''Brexit will open the floodgates for other anti-European forces within the Union. Indeed, no sooner was the referendum's outcome announced than France's National Front issued a call for 'Frexit,' while Dutch populist Geert Wilders promoted 'Nexit.'''
Commenting on the consequences of Brexit, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen said the EU would try to make the whole process of the UK's exit as ''painful as possible,'' so that other countries would not want to follow suit. Le Pen maintained it would only lead to an ''even greater gap between the EU nations.''
Le Pen said she was ''disappointed,'' left a meeting with President Francois Hollande with the ''feeling of coming for nothing.'' The president rejected the idea of holding a vote on France leaving the EU. ''We have called for the implementation of a referendum to ask the French if they wish to remain in the European Union,'' Le Pen said, TF1 reported. ''He responded 'no'.
Read more
In an effort to smooth things over following Britain's decision to leave the EU, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Paris, Brussels and her own government not to put pressure on the UK by insisting on its immediate departure from the bloc.
"Quite honestly, it should not take ages, that is true, but I would not fight now for a short timeframe," Merkel told a news conference, according to Reuters.
Brexit has immediately sparked numerous calls from right-wing movements in Europe to hold similar referendums.
In Finland over 10,000 people have already signed a freshly launched petition to hold a 'Fixit' referendum. Dutch anti-immigration politician Geert Wilders said the Netherlands had a right to a 'Nexit', while across the Atlantic the US state of Texas said it would push for a 'Texit'.
READ MORE: Auxit, Frexit, Nexit? EU countries may hold referendums following 'Brexit' vote
The Scottish government agreed to introduce legislation for a second independence vote to protect its position in the EU. Northern Ireland also expressed a strong desire to remain in the bloc. Exasperated by the outcome of the vote, many Londoners say they would prefer to secede from the UK and stay with the EU.
An online petition demanding to hold a second referendum on the UK's EU membership has reached nearly 3 million signatures.
Hundreds of young Brits gathered near the Houses of Parliament in London to express their discontent with the results of the British referendum. Activists carried posters that read 'Unity is Strength' and 'Yes to EU'. Other posters targeted the former London mayor and Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson, who people blame for supporting the separation from the Union.
Pedo Bear
Filmmaker Was Documenting Abuses in CPS and Children Murdered under State Custody Before He Died
In 2009, Bill Bowen released a trailer for a documentary film he was producing exposing the corruption within Child Protection Services across the United States. The film is called Innocence Destroyed. Bill Bowen died unexpectedly the next year, in 2010, reportedly from a heart attack, before he was able to finish the film.
The segments that were completed are now on YouTube, in three different videos. See below.
WARNING: Videos contain graphic content not suitable for children! For adults only.
Here is some information about Bill Bowen, including some quotes directly attributed to him, that we were able to find on the Internet.
Bill Bowen was a former firefighter and federal investigator. He was also known for exposing the New York City Fire Department in a book, Radio Silence F.D.N.Y. The Betrayal of New York's Bravest, which he coauthored with Battalion Chief John Joyce. The book describes how 125 New York City firefighters and numerous civilians lost their lives on 9/11 due to problems with their two-way radios.
While he had many irons in the fire, his top priority was finishing Innocence Destroyed as well as helping people initiate class action lawsuits against Child Protective Services agencies in all fifty states. (Source: Daniel Weaver '' Albany CPS and Family Court Examiner, September 10, 2010.)
Four years ago I was approached by a father who was in the process of losing his children through a Termination of Parental Rights case against him, brought by the Department of Human Services in Klamath Falls, OR. He told me the official, certified transcript of his hearing had been altered to reflect admissions never made and evidence and testimony never given.
I honestly did not believe him, but agreed to look into the matter a little bit. What I found was like reading a horror story, the worst one I had ever read. His certified transcript had been changed from the original audio recordings made in the courtroom. Not one of the well over one thousand alterations in that transcript favored the parents. The changes made only favored CPS and those transcripts had been sent to the Court of Appeals in Salem, OR by the father's indigent, court appointed attorney.
I took my findings and a lot of evidence to that attorney who refused to address it with the appeals court. Somehow, when the appeals court found out they gave that attorney four extra months to get and present that evidence but cautioned the attorney they only wanted to hear about the altered transcripts and no other issues. That attorney argued everything under the sun, weakly, when he submitted his new brief, EXCEPT for the altered transcripts and the court said they had no choice but to refuse to overturn the lower court.
It turns out the Office of Public Defender Services has a general counsel. His secretary has some relatives that wanted to adopt some blonde haired, blue eyed children and this fathers kids were that and extremely beautiful. Those three children were given to the family of the secretary and the judge, Roxanne Osborn by name, allowed them to be adopted before the appeals court ruled. The state then argued that it was too late and so sorry and that couple lost their three children.
By the way, the crime the father had been charged with was drinking two beers after he had been told he was off probation and it was admitted he was told that. Then the probation department revoked his probation and called it threat of harm and their three children were given to parents who were not even certified or in line to adopt. I was outraged, as was the local senator I took this case to and DHS/CPS thumbed their nose at that senator and just continued on.
I decided to investigate what appeared to be a criminal organization to me and that trafficked in the lives of children.
I found workers from inside CPS that would talk to me and I heard the worst stories you could imagine. I talked to state senators who told me each of them had on average 15 letters complaining about CPS abuses. I learned of the murder of little Adriana Cram, who was taken from her mother because the mother could not afford the special medicine for her daughter that prevented the little girl's brain from drying out, which would cause her to become retarded.
I also have hair samples taken from the child's grave in Mexico where she was tortured and murdered by the people CPS placed her with and those hair samples show that child never received the very medicine CPS took her away from her mom for not being able to afford. That little innocence girl, had bruises, cuts, and burns over most of her body when her body was examined after she was murdered. Not mentioned in my film but discovered during her autopsy was the fact that little four year old girl had callouses on her vagina.
She was four years old. She was tortured daily, she was being slowly starved, she was being sexually abused and was being kicked all over her tiny body by the man who wore pointed toed cowboy boots. Complaints were called back to the United States and repeatedly ignored by the trolls and ghouls that worked at CPS, known as DHS, in Oregon.
She was a US citizen sent by CPS to live and be tortured in a foreign country where it would be difficult for anybody to report the abuse they could see she was being forced to undergo. She was a special needs child, in CPS lingo, meaning she was worth over $6,000 per month to CPS in Oregon in federal funds. CPS Oregon continued drawing that $6,000 plus per month long after that child was dead.
CPS never sent the people they placed that child with in Mexico the $400 per month they promised them for taking the child off their hands. The woman involved in the murder says that was one reason her husband was so mad and he took it out on little Adriana.
Further investigating CPS I learned about Daniael Kelly, who was 12 years old in Philadelphia, PA and she had cerebral palsy and how she was strapped to the floor on a mattress and left starving there without ever changing her bed clothes or picking up after she made the inevitable mess a strapped down person will make and so that little child lived in her own feces.
It was so caked on you can see it in the picture of her one day after she died, in the film, Innocence Destroyed. That child was placed in the care of her unbalanced biological mother who started torturing that little girl the day she received her. She took the curtains off the windows and Danieal laid there in heated room in Philadelphia with no curtains or air conditioning, in the middle of the summer. The mother encouraged other children to go into that room and torture and tease little Daniael.
What you won't see in the film is that the workers and supervisors with CPS on this case deserved to go to prison because since they hadn't visited her in almost six months while she was being tortured and murdered, when they learned she had died, the caseworker and the supervisor of CPS there got together and signed and notarized documents that they had visited and inspected Danieal just two weeks before she died and they saw no visible signs of abuse.
Look at the picture of little Daniael again in the second part of the film and see if anybody could have thought that child was okay two weeks before her tiny body gave out and she died? Also not widely known is the fact that when the police investigated the CPS caseworker they found a box under that worker's desk full of candy and chip wrappers and underneath those at the bottom were 7 letters from people begging CPS to go out and investigate the fact that little Daniael was being tortured. All of those letters were unopened. While that worker snacked on chips and candy, Daniael Kelly was starving to death and her sheets were becoming interwoven with her skin and muscle.
I learned about five year old Logan Marr an absolutely beautiful little child. Her foster mom used to duct tape her to the bed so she didn't have to deal with her. Then one day that foster mom wanted to watch her favorite cooking show so she duct tapped little Logan into a high chair in the basement so she wouldn't have to hear her cry. Logan died from asphyxiation. Why didn't CPS investigate or do anything about this horrible foster mother? What is again not widely known is that the foster mother WAS A CPS CASEWORKER and a rather highly regarded one back in Maine. Just picking up a little extra money taping up kids I guess. No doubt operating in the, ''Best interest of the children.''
If you wonder why I am bringing all of this up and making you uncomfortable, the reason is two-fold.
It was the same set of circumstances as I have just described above that set me off to do something about what someone was doing to children in my country. I realized that those few seconds of discomfort I experienced was nothing compared what those children had to have undergone, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day for months and months. While it is true I didn't know about it back then, that didn't change the fact that had I looked, had I learned what these horrible monsters were doing to children years before maybe I could have done something to stop it. To me, unawareness was not an excuse I could accept and so, here I sit today writing this, trying to get those who understand what responsibility is to come take some and we can change this.
I decided to dedicate my life to the exposing of one of the worst criminal activities in the history of this country, in my opinion.
This criminal organization specialized in destroying families and children and over a thousand children died due to neglect or are outright murdered every year in this country alone, while in the ''protection and control'' of CPS. The most active opponent to all of this was former State Senator Nancy Schaefer, GA, who was murdered. THAT she was murdered is not in question, the only question that remains is who murdered her and the official story is very hard to swallow if any of the facts about her assassination are known.
We are looking at a multi-billion dollar industry, with huge amounts of money going to the various states so they don't change this corrupt system. Drug companies make billions of the full priced non generic drugs they sell to CPS and which are forced on these small children whose biggest upset is that they can't live with their mommies anymore.
First you take the child away from their parents and when they cry about it you get some unlicensed mental health worker to diagnose that child as being ''DEPRESSED.'' Gee, ya think? Well, that and the fact that the big man sometimes into their room at night and does horrible things to them and child sexual abuse is a lot more rampant than CPS would ever want anyone to know about.
CPS investigates allegations of the sexual abuse of the children in their care and a finding of substantiated would result in a successful civil action being brought against them by the parents. So, virtually every investigation conducted by CPS into the sexual molestation of children comes back as unfounded, thus saving them millions in lawsuits and after all to CPS workers it is only the molestation of some dirt bag mother's child, so who really cares? Besides if the child is unhappy they can always just put them on a fistful of anti-depressants and they will shut up. Those drugs don't help them but they sure shut them up.
Well, at least until that child is 18 and a basket case from taking those drugs and then CPS cuts them off because the child has ''timed out'' and is no longer worth anything to CPS because they don't receive any more money per month for that child and now the child has no value. OF course now that messed former CPS child will make a lot of mistakes and their children become CPS bait in the future. Remember over half of those in prison today are former foster children. Wow, what a legacy CPS is creating eh?
What is really needed here is an expanded public awareness of what CPS has degraded into and the sick criminals that run it.
That can be done and to that end I have decided to produce books and films that will bring these horrific crimes and the criminals responsible for them, to light. That is what I do and I do it 7 days a week, about 12 hours per day.
However, Bill Bowen died in 2010, and his work stopped.
If you know people who are skeptical and cannot believe that medical kidnapping happens in the U.S. today, this is the book for them! Backed with solid references and real life examples, they will not be able to deny the plain evidence before them, and will become better educated on this topic that is destroying the American family.
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''PizzaGate'' is more than an alt-right conspiracy theory for the Turkish people'--it is a thoroughlycoveredsatanism and pedophilia scandal that supposedly involves Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and a pizza place.
In the last week, all Turkish pro-government papers, including mainstream publications like Sabah, A Haber, Yeni Åafak, AkÅam and Star, ran similar stories about the PizzaGate, using the very same images and claims from a (now banned) subreddit to convince their readers on how serious and deep-rooted the scandal was. Columnists penned articles that the PizzaGate is a part of the globalist conspiracy against Turkey, and one article even remarked that the ''Teenage'' in pizza-eating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now makes sense as a pedophilia reference after PizzaGate.And all of this is very, very popular on Turkish Twitter. A video that claimed to show Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., purportedly delivering children to politicians and business people (which is not true) went viral in Turkey, just like the video of Vice President Biden on the swearing-in ceremony of Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del) was re-narrated in Turkey to claim that Biden was abusing Coons' daughter in public (which, also, is not true).
There is even a bilingual Facebook page and a popular Twitter account (@pizza_gate) for the whole conspiracy, echoing the Biden stories run on the Turkish pro-government media.
After a pile of news stories on the PizzaGate conspiracy, Snopes featured a detailed debunk of the claims this week, alongside with the New York Times on November 21; Washington City Paper began reporting on it on Nov. 6 and again on Nov. 15, detailing the real-life consequences of the online conspiracy.But the viral nature of conspiracies and fake news follow the same patterns among alt-right circles and Turkish pro-government troll network alike: In the Turkish case, the PizzaGate story appeared on Turkey's Reddit-like forum/dictionary EkÅiS¶zl¼k and on a self-claimed viral news network HaberSelf, where anyone can post content. Then, pro-government Twitter accounts spread it further, using the same anti-establishment rhetoric used by Trump supporters, even though Turkey's mainstream media is almost entirely controlled by Turkish President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan's establishment.
English translation: ''The #PizzaGate case airs USA's dirty laundry, we will keep this on our agenda. We cannot remain silent to this crime against humanity.''Then it was picked up by pro-government columnists:
English translation: ''The mainstream media did not grasp the significance of #pizzagate, neither in Turkey, nor in the United States. There, the administration is seized by pedophilia and blackmail.''Following the Brexit and Trump campaigns, U.K.'s Oxford Dictionaries selected ''post-truth'' as the word of 2016, which is defined as ''relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.''
The PizzaGate case is unique in the sense that it appeals not only to the white nationalists in the U.S. but also to the Islamist nationalists in Turkey, and the latter is the result of 'decades old' anti-Americanism in Turkey, crystallized after the July 15 coup attempt against ErdoÄan sparked a flood of fake news, as the Daily Dot previously reported.
But new documents found in the leaked emails of Berat Albayrak, Turkey's Energy Minister and ErdoÄan's son-in-law, suggest that the effect of recent disparagement of the United States has important consequences for domestic Turkish politics.
According to a confidential survey conducted by A&G Research for the governing party in August, about 90 percent of Turks believe that the United States is behind ISIS, the PKK'--a Kurdish armed group fighting for autonomy in Southeast Turkey'--and the G¼len Movement '--a religious sect that the government blames for the coup.
The nationwide survey found that the 83 percent of Turkish people disagree with the U.S. being Turkey's friend and ally, and 60 percent says their opinion about the U.S. will not change even if the administration extradites Fethullah G¼len, a powerful Turkish preacher blamed for the coup attempt, who lives in a self-imposed exiled in Pennsylvania.
While the results of this opinion research are rightfully concerning for the Turkey''U.S. relations, a more concerning part is in the survey report's concluding remarks, which state that ''the majority of Turks believe that the U.S. is behind the terror attacks in the country regardless of whichever group commits it.''
Such vilification allows ErdoÄan to be saved from criticism regarding the country's security failures, and it covers up other issues beneath sensational news. This is where the PizzaGate serves its purpose.
Timing of PizzaGate was significant in that it initially blurred the public debate abound the actual child abuse problem in Turkey. Back in March, when a real child abuse scandal was revealed at the government-linked Ensar Foundation, the perpetrator received a heavy jail sentence, but the government was spared from an investigation by a diluting the issue in the Parliament. This week, Erdogan's party brought an even more controversial draft bill that would give amnesty to child abusers if they marry their victims.
In order to limit the civic opposition, the leading children's rights NGO, G¼ndem ocuk (''Agenda: Child''), was shut down by an emergency decree, together with women's rights NGOs. And on social media, the rights defenders were accused of hypocrisy for remaining silent on the so-called PizzaGate scandal.
English translation: ''Why are those scumbags who bullied Muslims for months by portraying the Ensar Foundation as child abusers now silent about this scandal in the United States?! #PizzaGate''(Editor's note: The author of this post was alsotargetedby the members ofTurkish pro-government troll networkforreportingin detail about how the government-linked companies and courts worked together tosuppressnews coverage on Ensar Foundation.
English translation: ''Who was leading the smear campaign against ensar foundation by dozens of tweets, @efekerem, is silent about pizzagate. Are we surprised? No'')While the most criticized amendment to the controversial bill has been withdrawn after wide public outcry and protests, the problem remains: In June, Turkey's Supreme Court annulled the current legal protections for abused children and urged the Parliament to tolerate child brides. At a time when public debate and consensus is urgent for the best interest of the children in Turkey, ErdoÄan's party in power is using all of its online and offline tools to make sure that it will not take place.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the location of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. It is located in Washington, D.C.
Child Abuse in Turkey a 'Serious Reality' Silenced by Stigma · Global Voices
Last month, a mass child abuse scandal linked to a conservative foundation favoured by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) bubbled to the surface in Turkey. A male teacher (M.B.) was arrested under suspicion of raping at least 10 students at private educational dormitories, some of which were run by the pro-government Ensar Foundation.
A blanket ban on media coverage of the investigation decreed by a local court soon after news of the scandal broke has obscured many of the important details in the case, leaving local media feeding off scraps.
But the broader problem of child abuse in Turkey is becoming much more difficult to hide.
According to the Campaign Against Child Abuse Association, the number of child abuse cases in the country has increased by 50% in the last five years and 125% in the last 10 years.
The campaign says one out of six males and one out of four females suffer some form of abuse while still children.
Turkey's Family and Social Policies Minister Sema RamazanoÄlu stirred public anger by referring to the string of abuses in the provincial town of Karaman as ''a one-off incident'' and criticised opponents in the parliament calling for action against the foundation for attempting to ''defame'' Ensar.
That led to the creation of a petition on March 23 on Change.org with over 300,000 signatories to date calling for RamazanoÄlu's dismissal.
On April 5 RamazanoÄlu survived a motion of censure proposed by the opposition after the motion was vetoed by the AKP-dominated parliament.
Tuncay Ozkan, an opposition MP from CHP, tweeted shortly after the rejection of the motion of censure: ''The motion of censure against the Family Minister regarding the rape scandal in Karaman has been overturned. AKP members are forming a queue to celebrate.''
In response, the #Tecav¼zAKlandı hashtag (lit. ''rape is absolved'') trended on Twitter as children's rights activists led a storm of criticism against the embattled minister.
Despite initially blocking opposition calls for a specially appointed child abuse commission, AKP has since acceded to the request, although 9 of the commission's 15 members will be drawn from the ruling party.
''The biggest issue we face in abuse cases is efforts to cover them up''More distressing news came at the beginning of this month from the western city of Ä°zmir where police arrested child abuse suspects at two separate schools, and the eastern city of Van, where an English teacher is under investigation for allegedly touching up both male and female students and making students watch sexually explicit videos.
According to a recent report published by local watchdog Bianet, 64 children were harassed in 14 different cities in March alone, while 41% of the abusers detained by police were teachers.
This month Global Voices spoke to clinical psychologist Cemre Soysal, who specialises in child psychology, about the significance of the scandal linked to the Ensar Foundation and the growing number of child abuse cases in Turkey.
GV: So far the government has been largely supportive of the Ensar Foundation. How, in your view, does that supportive position impact the lives of the children that have been abused?
CS: We have no idea about how many children were affected [by this scandal] or what kind of support is provided by authorities. The ministry states psychosocial support has been provided. We also do not know whether the families [affected by the alleged abuses] are supportive or hostile towards their children. The families are mostly low-income families that may require the financial support the foundation offers. That is why they might be choosing to keep silent on the issue. What is certain in this case is that the children are in the most difficult position ['...]
In these kinds of incidents a victim questions her/himself for a long time, tries to assess whether the abuse is her/his fault. Overcoming trauma starts at the moment [the person can say] ''It was not my fault.'' That's why providing psychological support is very crucial. Children might think: ''So, the foundation's future is more valuable than ours''. They might regard themselves as guilty and worthless. That would cause them to feel the effects of the trauma more intensely.
A fair punishment for the rapist is critical for the children suffering from trauma.
GV: Since the Ensar Foundation scandal, we have seen more child abuse news, while statistics say abuses have increased by 50% in the last five years. Have crimes against children really grown in number, or are cases just getting more visibility?
CS: If there is research pointing to an increasing trend we need to analyze it and consider variables impacting these results. The biggest issue we face in abuse cases is efforts to cover them up. This especially relates to domestic abuses, where keeping silent is often the preferable thing to do, in consideration of the family order and family reputation. The abused is sacrificed for the sake of this family order. Since such cases are regular occurrences, there is a huge gap between reported and real numbers.
Although abuses seem to be increasing in recent times, [child abuse] has been a serious reality for many years. Recently it has drawn more attention since the government and the public is discussing the problem. If there is a 50% increase in reported cases, causes should be analyzed. For example, differences between cities and regions, any protective measures existing in cities where fewer cases are reported, and, most importantly, evaluating the aftermath of the cases. This would be beneficial for us in developing policies to deal with abuses.
GV: What kind of problems or traumas do abused children face later and can families do anything to protect their children from potential abuses?
CS: Any abused child experiences serious trauma ['...] That trauma is a catastrophic milestone for the child. We acquire negative cognitions about ourselves during periods of trauma: 'I am worthless.', 'I am bad.', 'I am insecure.' These are some of those feelings. Abused people have to receive psychological support in the aftermath to be able to overcome those cognitions.
Families have to teach their children how to protect their bodies and also need to respect their children's borders themselves as well. The private sphere concept is critical. In case of violence, children need to protect their private sphere and react by shouting or screaming. Children need to be assured that in cases of violations they will be supported by their families because they may choose silence if they doubt they will be believed.
Andrew Breitbart tweet before death adds fuel to online speculation of D.C. sex-trafficking ring - Washington Times
Social media speculation of a sex-trafficking ring in the nation's capital has burned up social media sites for weeks. Complicating matters is Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's decision not to comment on anything WikiLeaks-related for months.
Explosive claims by Internet sleuths, which were prompted after reading stolen documents belonging to Mr. Podesta, have been derided as ''viciously phony'' by Fox News' Howard Kurtz. A tweet by Mr. Breitbart shortly before his March 1, 2012, death is now being cited by online researchers as proof that they are onto something big.
''How prog-guru John Podesta isn't household name as world class underage sex slave op cover-upperer defending unspeakable dregs escapes me,'' Mr. Breitbart wrote Feb. 4, 2011.
The conservative icon's death at age 43 was attributed to ''heart failure.''
Knowledge of the late conservative's tweet sent Google searches for ''Andrew Breitbart'' skyrocketing Sunday night as news spread to members of Twitter, Reddit, GAB, Voat and other social media platforms.
''One of America's best an most respected independent journalists at the time; he is making a very bold claim about John Podesta '-- back then '-- based on his own research,'' former Huffington Post contributor David Seaman wrote on GAB Sunday night. ''This is years before WikiLeaks came out.''
Mr. Seaman and others claim Mr. Podesta and his associates spoke in code in numerous documents released by WikiLeaks. One example includes a Feb. 9, 2014, email with the subject line ''Did you leave a handkerchief.''
''Hi John, The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus [sic]?'' a woman identified as Susaner asked. ''They can send it if you want.''
Such wording led online sleuths to investigate Mr. Podesta's connections with D.C. power-player James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong. The Democrat fundraiser and pizza place owner, who is mentioned in 16 different WikiLeaks documents, had a public Instagram account that featured sexual innuendo and bizarre images of children.
Accounts for Comet Ping Pong employees, which are now set to private, featured nudity involving men with slices of pizza strategically placed over their genitals.
''From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we've come under constant assault,'' Mr. Alefantis, 42, told The New York Times on Nov. 21. ''I've done nothing for days but try to clean this up and protect my staff and friends from being terrorized. ['...] It's endless.''
The editorial board of The Washington Post also lambasted social media sleuths on Nov. 25 in an op-ed titled '''Pizzagate' shows how fake news hurts real people.''
''The allegations against Comet Ping Pong, reported by the New York Times, are absurd on their face and detached from any gossamer thread of fact,'' the newspaper wrote. ''They took root in the dark crevices of the Web and took flight thanks to social media platforms, whose witless 'who, us?' posture in the face of misinformation and outright lunacy is a civic embarrassment. '...''
''Like 93 percent of Washingtonians, the restaurateur happened to support Ms. Clinton for president; he has some prominent Democratic friends, past and present,'' the Post continued. ''Mr. Alefantis's name surfaced in leaked email from Mr. Podesta's account, published by WikiLeaks, in which the two men discussed holding a Clinton fundraiser. As far as anyone knows, there is no more logic than that as to why Mr. Alefantis and his restaurant became targets. The First Amendment is a bulwark of democracy but provides no protection for defamatory allegations published in knowing disregard for the truth. Mr. Alefantis is more than entitled to sue for defamation and libel, if he can find the purveyors of the garbage heaved his way.''
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Posted November 29th, 2016 @ 9:44am in #Trump#pizzagate
If you aren't following the dark corners of social media you might not know of something called Pizzagate. Snopes.com calls it a ''detailed conspiracy theory.''
The basic idea is that a pizza parlor in Washington DC is alleged to be the center of a major child sex ring that involves top Democrats close to Hillary Clinton. I have labelled this story ''not credible,'' and that opinion is confusing people because there is a mountain of evidence supporting the allegations.
So let me tell you what a mountain of evidence is worth.
Mountain of Evidence Value = zero.
In the normal two-dimensional world in which we imagine we live, a mountain of evidence usually means something is true. So why am I looking at the same mountain of evidence as the believers in pizzagate and coming to an opposite conclusion?
The difference is that I understand what confirmation bias is and how powerful it can be. If you don't have the same level of appreciation for the power of confirmation bias, a mountain of evidence looks like proof.
Here's what I know that most of you do not: Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference.
That sounds crazy, right?
Suppose dozens of children started coming forth and detailing sex crimes in this particular pizza parlor. Would that prove it happened, or would I call that more confirmation bias?
I would call that more confirmation bias. In fact, the situation would be identical to the famous McMartin Preschool case in the eighties in which lots of kids made similar and untrue claims of abuse. We don't have to wonder if a ''mountain of evidence'' including dozens of first-hand accounts can be false because we know it already happened. Moreover, cognitive scientists can tell you that this sort of massive mistake is more normal than you can imagine.
I want to be totally clear here that I'm not saying Pizzagate is false. I see the mountain of evidence too. And collectively it feels totally persuasive to me. It might even be true. I'm not debating the underlying truth of it. That part I don't know. My point is that what you see as a mountain of evidence that can't be wrong, I see as something that is far more likely to be confirmation bias. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say perhaps a 20-1 odds the Pizzagate story is false.
Let me put this in a more familiar context. Most of the Pizzagate believers are also Trump supporters it seems. And Trump supporters have watched first-hand as half the residents of the United States concluded that Trump was the next Hitler. Why do tens-of-millions of people believe such a preposterous thing?
It's because there is a mountain of evidence to support the allegation. Case in point, just yesterday Trump suggested that perhaps flag burners should be punished. That's clearly dictator talk! (Except that Hillary Clinton proposed that actual law in 2005.)
The argument for Trump being the next Hitler is built on the same type of confirmation bias as Pizzagate. Both allegations are supported by a mountain of evidence. But if you look at each piece of evidence in isolation, none are individually persuasive.
Let me summarize my point by saying that if you were not aware of the McMartin Preschool case you were also not intellectually equipped to judge the credibility of either Pizzagate or the Trump-is-Hitler idea.
People have asked me whether or not an understanding of how persuasion works can protect against unwanted influence. The quick answer is no. Persuasion typically works just as well when you see it coming and you know how it works. But in some specific cases a superior knowledge of cognitive phenomenon can help. This is one of those cases. If you know about the McMartin Preschool case, and you understand the real power of confirmation bias, you might have the tools to avoid believing in either Pizzagate or the likelihood of Trump turning into the next Hitler.
And now you have those tools.
As I told you last year, when a Master Persuader becomes president it will change more than your view of politics. It will change how you view reality itself.
'--
You might like reading my book because this blog has text.
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People tell me they love my startup's new app for geostreaming your location to a friend as you approach your meeting spot. Here are links:
Illustration: Sam Woolley/GizmodoFor the past 11 years, an eternity in internet time, Reddit has touted itself'--repeatedly, and loudly'--as the place to have ''authentic conversations'' online. For a variety of reasons, that sentiment has always rang hollow. Now, Reddit, in its goal to be a laissez-faire haven of (relatively) free expression, has been overrun by nationalist trolls. Its staff of volunteer moderators is losing hope in the site's future.
Gizmodo spoke with five high-ranking volunteer moderators of some of Reddit's biggest communities, as well as a Reddit spokesperson. We discovered the site's unusual working relationship with its most problematic community'--r/The_Donald'--a community which, by exploiting poor enforcement of Reddit's already limp user protections, has effectively been holding the rest of the site hostage.
The site's subreddits serve as fiefdoms organized around a specific interest. Reddit's The_Donald subreddit was founded a year ago as the premier online meeting place for Trump supporters. It has since sought to'--in CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman's words'--''dominate the conversation'' on the site. Its members spread coded hate speech, openly antagonize other Redditors, and break the site's most basic rules with impunity while moderators feel the brunt of the abuse, and Reddit leadership fail to adequately address the problem.
Reddit is one of the most-trafficked websites in the world. Its culture reflects the culture of the time, and what performs well on Reddit has widespread ramifications for what is considered interesting, sharable, and news-worthy. So how did things get this bad?
Reddit's Cozy Relationship With The_Donald''There have been multiple iterations of the_donald,'' a Reddit spokesperson, who did not wish to be identified by name, told Gizmodo in a phone call. (CEO Steve Huffman previously said that The_Donald's team of top mods had turned over at least four times over the year.) ''The [moderator teams] that I've been involved with for the last six months or so, we've actually had a very close working relationship with. We share a Discord channel with them'--their private chat. It's been highly responsive when we need to ask them to take things down that are probably rule violations,'' Reddit contended. (The moderation team of r/The_Donald did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
If Centipede Central is the chat Reddit is referring to'--a chat room within the Slack-like Discord program, the one linked in the sidebar of The_Donald and one of the largest servers on Discord'--its users have encouraged the harassment of other moderators, artificially inflated the vote count on posts, rigged off-Reddit polls, and posted John Podesta's personal Netflix login information for the chat's 1000+ members to use at will.
Screengrabs from Centipede Central.Several current and former high-ranking moderators of Reddit's other communities told Gizmodo they had no knowledge of Reddit's ''collaboration'' with The_Donald. Although Reddit, as a platform, prides itself on a hands-off approach, Reddit claims that there are ''probably two dozen of these type of collaborations set up'' between Reddit corporate and subreddit mods.
Reddit did not elaborate on which specific communities were in regular contact with the Reddit leadership, or in what capacity, but most of these ''close working relationships'' are, according to Reddit, with the ''default'' subreddits'--the ones logged out users will see, which tend to be the biggest, oldest, and best-moderated, encompassing neutral interests like art, fitness, gaming, and music. If Reddit is a city, the default subs are a flawlessly-manicured public park, while The_Donald is a crumbling tenement next to a sewage plant.
''I know there's always been a 'dark side' to Reddit. But the dark side used to be confined to the corners. It was manageable. What The_Donald has become, and what it's doing to the site isn't.''Yet somehow, The_Donald is part of the select few. Usually, ''there is very little interaction or support'' between the moderators and corporate, a veteran volunteer Redditor who helps to run a default community told Gizmodo in a lengthy email. ''It's a free-for-all...which led to the trolling nature and (I would say) takeover by groups like r/The_Donald.''
''What is more surprising [than the Discord chat between the_Donald and Reddit] is that their behavior is allowed even with having that close of admin communication,'' a moderator of r/politics'--one of the communities which has been hit the hardest by The_Donald users'--told Gizmodo.
The_Donald is not uniquely dysfunctional in the history of Reddit, but it is unique in Reddit leadership's continued tolerance of its behavior. ''Like many other subreddits before it (FatPeopleHate, CoonTown, etc) it's having a negative impact on other subreddits, but nothing is happening to it,'' another high-ranking moderator told Gizmodo in an email. ''The moderators of the sub will 'work' with the admins in regards to situations that pop up, but then turn around and won't actually enforce it.''
Reddit claims that ''Because of'... their close working relationship with us, they couldn't really get away with a lot of the things they're being accused of.'' And yet, they do.
A Website OverrunVoting posts up or down is the very mechanism that allows the site to function and dictates what shows up on the top of each page including r/all, Reddit's front page. ''Asking for votes or engaging in vote manipulation'' is the very first ''prohibited behavior'' listed on the Reddit's Content Policy, and is reiterated on the Redditquette page'--it is a site-wide rule.
A possible consequences of breaking content policy rules, according to Reddit.Besides leaving Reddit links in their public Discord to direct users to promote those posts, The_Donald regularly makes use of title constructions which invite aggressive upvoting. ''Wouldn't it be a shame if r/all saw this'' is perhaps the most common variation on the theme.
A smattering of The_Donald's title constructions.''It is arguably a wink wink nod nod attempt to bypass our vote manipulation rules although quite frankly that is a rule that is fairly largely ignored by our community as a whole and it's really not one that we as a company enforce that much,'' Reddit told Gizmodo. Even if a hands-off attitude is one of the reasons users flock to Reddit, it's deeply concerning that this ironclad vote brigading tenant is not enforced.
According to a default moderator, ''r/The_Donald used to make up 30-40% [of r/all] in the past.'' In spite of Reddit's tepid acknowledgement of The_Donald as a problem, site-wide changes have sought to limit the subreddit's disproportionate visibility. In an announcement post earlier this year, Huffman rolled out changes to the algorithm that surfaces popular posts to r/all'--effectively the frontpage of ''the frontpage of the internet'''--to specifically mitigate The_Donald's propensity to upvote posts as a hivemind. Arguably block voting makes conversation and interaction on the site inauthentic, and Huffman would seem to agree.
Many people will ask if this is related to r/the_donald. The short answer is no, we have been working on this change for a while, but I cannot deny their behavior hastened its deployment. We have seen many communities like r/the_donald over the years'--ones that attempt to dominate the conversation on Reddit at the expense of everyone else. This undermines Reddit, and we are not going to allow it.
Even with this more aggressive algorithm in place, the community's posts still float to the top with clockwork regularity and rack up extraordinarily high vote totals. Most egregiously, on election night, an all-caps post directed towards the LOSER SJWS OF REDDIT asked the site's diverse users HOW DOES OUR DICK TASTE on the front page.
Reddit's frontpage on election nightThe thread's author'--rsashe1980'--is a moderator of The_Donald, as well as TheNewRight, HillaryMeltdown, our_politics (created to directly oppose the default r/politics) and le_pen, a community which is attempting to help install far-right candidate Marine Le Pen as France's president in their upcoming election.
''It is arguably a wink wink nod nod attempt to bypass our vote manipulation rules although quite frankly that is a rule that is fairly largely ignored by our community as a whole and it's really not one that we as a company enforce that much.''In addition to the volunteer moderators who create and enforce rules in their communities, Reddit employs a number of administrators to enforce the site's broader bylaws. When asked what instances merit intervention by admins, the Reddit spokesperson gave three examples: targeted harassment or doxxing of an individual, two mod teams requesting mediation to resolve a conflict with each other, or the breach of a site rule.
''I know there's always been a ''dark side'' to reddit. But the dark side used to be confined to the corners,'' a default moderator told Gizmodo in an email. ''It was manageable. What The_Donald has become, and what it's doing to the site isn't.''
Acceptable Bigotry''Reddit is the internet's home for conversation,'' Reddit told us. ''Not all conversation is comfortable.'' Unfortunately, that mantra has allowed trolls and bigots to gain a foothold on the site in the past, and protects The_Donald today. The problem lies in Reddit's own narrowly defined harassment policy, which addresses individuals only'--harassment against whole groups or identities is not included:
Harassment on Reddit is defined as systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or fear for their safety or the safety of those around them.
As a result, bigotry, painted with a broad enough brush and the same ''wink wink nod nod'' tactics employed for block voting is perfectly acceptable. ''The mods and leadership in r/The_Donald know how to troll. To dance the line between what clearly constitutes hate speech and what goes for something CLOSE but not quite,'' a default mod told Gizmodo in an email. But Reddit knows full well that such policies are ultimately damaging to the site.
According to a 2015 Reddit user poll, ''The number one reason redditors do not recommend the site'--even though they use it themselves'--is because they want to avoid exposing friends to hate and offensive content.'' While leadership is generally content to allow troublesome communities to coexist with neutral ones on Reddit, banning of whole communities does have precedent.
During her time as interim CEO, Ellen Pao famously booted five ''harassing subreddits,'' most notably the 150,000-subscriber-strong r/FatPeopleHate. (Those evicted communities went on to set up shop on Reddit knockoff Voat.) ''We want as little involvement as possible in managing these interactions but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment,'' Pao's announcement post read, ''Today we are removing five subreddits that break our reddit rules based on their harassment of individuals.''
Though he was not employed by Reddit at the time, the site's spokesperson did not characterize the banning of those communities as a result of harassment. ''I'd actually posit that those were unhealthy in that there was no respect for the other side, there was no respect for the conversation as an entity, there was no respect for anything but advancing a particular, stilted incredibly prejudicial agenda in those cases,'' Reddit told Gizmodo.
''We have had multiple moderators doxxed and sent death threats, we had one moderator who had his truck broken into and vandalized. That is a toxic subreddit.''The_Donald falls squarely into that very definition. ''No Dissenters or SJWs,'' is among the community's rules'--limiting who from ''the other side'' can post there from the get-go. Users are, according to the New York Times, banned by one of the roughly 47 moderators from The_Donald subreddit at rates much higher than any other on the site, for such grave offenses as expressing civil but dissenting opinions. Conversation takes a backseat to loyalty. And where a prejudicial agenda is concerned, the well-documented and regressive beliefs held by Trump's own transition team are reflected in The_Donald users, who gleefully attack people on the basis of their religion, race, heritage, sexuality, gender identity, or political leanings.
''r/The_Donald mods have set their subreddit up as a safe space. One where dissent or questioning is not tolerated. You either follow or you are banned,'' a default mod wrote to Gizmodo, ''That rule does not apply if you make a statement on Reddit elsewhere. The brigade will both downvote, doxx, and go after those who do post something that is against the r/The_Donald hivemind.''
How bad does it have to get before a community gets banned? ''I think that if a community culture was so toxically broken that we saw no hope of resolving it, then we would proceed to shut down the community,'' Reddit told Gizmodo.
''r/The_Donald mods have set their subreddit up as a safe space. One where dissent or questioning is not tolerated. You either follow or you are banned.''Before Thanksgiving, Reddit banned r/pizzagate, a community with close ties to The_Donald which existed to investigate the ludicrous and debunked notion that Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC pizzeria, was a Clinton- and Podesta-run front for child-trafficking. The site's statement claims r/pizzagate was banned due to ''repeated violations of the terms of our content policy.'' A now-deleted post suggests the only reason pizzagate was given the axe while The_Donald remains alive and well is moderator cooperation. (Like other banned communities, Pizzagate has found a new home on Voat.)
Following the ban, displaced pizzagaters caused a stir on The_Donald that merited a post by a moderator. ''I want to gently remind everyone that The_Donald is a sub about Donald Trump,'' IFIFIFOKIEDOKE wrote, ''too often, discussions about topics such as pizzagate will completely dominate the sub and drown out any thoughtful discussion or Trump related content.'' The irony, it seems, was lost on them.
Impotent LeadershipLast week, co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, after months of harassment and ''getting called a pedophile constantly'' by The_Donald users, finally cracked. He made a childish, poorly-advised, and quickly-uncovered attempt to edit the offending users' posts in retaliation'--''trolling the trolls for a bit,'' as he described it. In retaliation, a mod leaked the internal chatlogs from a Slack channel for default moderators and admins.
''There have been unquestionably instances [where] moderators of other subreddits were targeted by users in The_Donald,'' Reddit told Gizmodo, and the leaked chatlogs reveal the extent.
A screenshot from leaked chatlogs.Some moderators had been flooded with constant harassing messages. ''One threatened to kill my fucking dog,'' a moderator pleaded in the leaked Slack chat. A The_Donald user hacked r/politics and booted half of the moderation team, another told Gizmodo in an email.
''We have had multiple moderators doxxed and sent death threats, we had one moderator who had his truck broken into and vandalized,'' an r/politics mod told Gizmodo over Reddit private message.
A screenshot from leaked chatlogs.One of the moderators named in the chat told Gizmodo he experienced a deluge of racist and abusive messages after the leak. ''The vast majority had mentions to me being a traitor, how I should be deported, and how I was going to be hunted down and killed'... It got so bad, in order to give themselves some room, [the admins] had to 'black hole' my inbox. Basically, any messages that were sent to me were instantly deleted.''
One of the messages sent before the inbox was ''black holed.''''Myself, and others, are frustrated with the inaction of the admins as a group, especially in regards to The_Donald,'' a default moderator told Gizmodo. Another went as far as to say that ''we mods have had a series of duds and corporate bureaucrats supporting us for years.''
The chatlogs, as well as our correspondence with some high-ranking moderators, suggest The_Donald has been a known problem for a long, long time. So what's keeping administration from taking action?
One possible explanation for Reddit's inaction is money. The_Donald is, by Reddit's own admission, ''one of our most popular subreddits and most active subreddits,'' and like almost every community on the site, sponsored ads appear alongside user posts. The content of most posts on The_Donald should raise deep concerns with most advertisers paying for space on Reddit, if their ad ends up on The_Donald, regardless of how popular or active the page is. (At the time of this writing, Uber ads are appearing on The_Donald.)
More likely it comes down to fallout and optics. After the ban of r/FatPeopleHate Reddit became near-unusable. The displaced users, with nothing left to lose, stirred up as much trouble as they could, and likely the Reddit admins fear a repeat. ''Trying to take action against 4 million unique subreddit visitors (300,000 subscribers) will be impossible,'' an r/politics moderator told Gizmodo. ''Even if only 1% of their total visitors are a problem, that leaves 40,000 accounts to be handled. Glance around the community, it is much more than 1%''
''The vast majority had mentions to me being a traitor, how I should be deported, and how I was going to be hunted down and killed'...''A shitstorm of bad blood and digital vandalism, no matter how bad, is always temporary. But some moderators felt the leadership's attempts to band-aid a gaping wound came down to potential claims of political bias. ''[The_Donald] was the sub for a major political candidate even from a small size, and there would have been fallout if they'd banned it then, and will be far more if they do so after the election'' a default moderator wrote to Gizmodo.
Even former CEO Yishan Wong chimed in on a thread last week regarding The_Donald's behavior:
''I can understand that the admins probably wanted to avoid any outright ''you're banned'' type of shutdown and instead opted to try and contain rule-breaking behavior on an individual basis. As it happens, doing that is extremely difficult because users will try to push the line and incur essentially no consequence for doing so. /r/The_Donald has the additional unique attribute of being a subreddit that isn't going to ''go away'' [...] it is likely to continue or grow in prominence.''
The impunity The_Donald's users act with is as alarming as it is obvious. ''That is a toxic subreddit,'' the r/politics mod told Gizmodo. ''All of our moderators want a strong Trump subreddit. It is good for communities to exist for that kind of thing. [The_Donald] is not it, they have gone too far in so many different ways.''
As it stands, moderators have been holding back an unprecedented tide of abuse, backed by an administration that won't admit there's a problem, and headed by a CEO acting in his site's worst interest.
''The social experiment has run its course.''Facebook, Google, and Twitter spent the days following the election at least tried to do some soul-searching. Reddit has been conspicuously silent in shouldering blame for giving an audience and a recruitment center to this groundswell of bigotry, despite harboring its most prominent community'--one which openly mocks the leadership and rules of the very platform that allowed it to proliferate. Reddit needs to contend with its own shrieking tide of ignorance and hatred now, and outgrow the notion that fewer rules is the shortest distance to greater authenticity.
''At this point, I think reddit is a lost cause because of the admins inability to take action on the group while simultaneously being overwhelmed with dealing with the individual,'' a moderator told us. ''No other subreddit has been able to be used [as] a platform for harassment for this long in Reddit's history. And it's likely going to be what kills it.'' Said another: ''The social experiment has run its course.''
The names and pseudonyms of multiple sources in this story have been omitted to protect their anonymity due to credible threats. If you work for Reddit or moderate a community which works closely with the site's leadership, email me at bryan.menegus@gizmodo.com
Posted November 29th, 2016 @ 9:44am in #Trump#pizzagate
If you aren't following the dark corners of social media you might not know of something called Pizzagate. Snopes.com calls it a ''detailed conspiracy theory.''
The basic idea is that a pizza parlor in Washington DC is alleged to be the center of a major child sex ring that involves top Democrats close to Hillary Clinton. I have labelled this story ''not credible,'' and that opinion is confusing people because there is a mountain of evidence supporting the allegations.
So let me tell you what a mountain of evidence is worth.
Mountain of Evidence Value = zero.
In the normal two-dimensional world in which we imagine we live, a mountain of evidence usually means something is true. So why am I looking at the same mountain of evidence as the believers in pizzagate and coming to an opposite conclusion?
The difference is that I understand what confirmation bias is and how powerful it can be. If you don't have the same level of appreciation for the power of confirmation bias, a mountain of evidence looks like proof.
Here's what I know that most of you do not: Confirmation bias looks EXACTLY LIKE a mountain of real evidence. And let me be super-clear here. When I say it looks exactly the same, I am not exaggerating. I mean there is no way to tell the difference.
That sounds crazy, right?
Suppose dozens of children started coming forth and detailing sex crimes in this particular pizza parlor. Would that prove it happened, or would I call that more confirmation bias?
I would call that more confirmation bias. In fact, the situation would be identical to the famous McMartin Preschool case in the eighties in which lots of kids made similar and untrue claims of abuse. We don't have to wonder if a ''mountain of evidence'' including dozens of first-hand accounts can be false because we know it already happened. Moreover, cognitive scientists can tell you that this sort of massive mistake is more normal than you can imagine.
I want to be totally clear here that I'm not saying Pizzagate is false. I see the mountain of evidence too. And collectively it feels totally persuasive to me. It might even be true. I'm not debating the underlying truth of it. That part I don't know. My point is that what you see as a mountain of evidence that can't be wrong, I see as something that is far more likely to be confirmation bias. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say perhaps a 20-1 odds the Pizzagate story is false.
Let me put this in a more familiar context. Most of the Pizzagate believers are also Trump supporters it seems. And Trump supporters have watched first-hand as half the residents of the United States concluded that Trump was the next Hitler. Why do tens-of-millions of people believe such a preposterous thing?
It's because there is a mountain of evidence to support the allegation. Case in point, just yesterday Trump suggested that perhaps flag burners should be punished. That's clearly dictator talk! (Except that Hillary Clinton proposed that actual law in 2005.)
The argument for Trump being the next Hitler is built on the same type of confirmation bias as Pizzagate. Both allegations are supported by a mountain of evidence. But if you look at each piece of evidence in isolation, none are individually persuasive.
Let me summarize my point by saying that if you were not aware of the McMartin Preschool case you were also not intellectually equipped to judge the credibility of either Pizzagate or the Trump-is-Hitler idea.
People have asked me whether or not an understanding of how persuasion works can protect against unwanted influence. The quick answer is no. Persuasion typically works just as well when you see it coming and you know how it works. But in some specific cases a superior knowledge of cognitive phenomenon can help. This is one of those cases. If you know about the McMartin Preschool case, and you understand the real power of confirmation bias, you might have the tools to avoid believing in either Pizzagate or the likelihood of Trump turning into the next Hitler.
And now you have those tools.
As I told you last year, when a Master Persuader becomes president it will change more than your view of politics. It will change how you view reality itself.
'--
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Agenda 2030
Surveys Show Fact Checkers Lie About Climate At Least 97% Of The Time
These fact checkers claim 97% of experts agree humans are primarily responsible for global warming.
Trump on Climate Change
This claim is completely fraudulent and has no basis. Actual surveys show 52%. No group of professional atmospheric scientists shows anywhere close to 97%.
Share of renewable energies in gross final energy consumption by country in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and Turkey. n.a.
60%
%-Share of Renewable Energy in the EU
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
History of the percentage-share of renewables on the gross final energy consumption in the European Union since 2004[1]The countries of the European Union are the number two global leaders in the development and application of renewable energy.[citation needed] Promoting the use of renewable energy sources is important both to the reduction of the EU's dependence on foreign energy imports, and in meeting targets to combat global warming.
The Maastricht Treaty set an objective of promoting stable growth while protecting the environment. The Amsterdam Treaty added the principle of sustainable development to the objectives of the EU. Since 1997, the EU has been working towards a renewable energy supply equivalent to 12% of the total EU's energy consumption by 2010.
The Johannesburg Summit failed to introduce the radical changes targeted for ten years after the Rio Summit. No specific goals were set for the energy sector, which disappointed many countries. While the EU had proposed an annual increase in the use of renewable energy at a rate of 1.5% worldwide until 2010, Johannesburg's action plan did not recommend such a "substantial" increase, with no concrete goals nor dates being set.
The EU was unwilling to accept this result and with other nations formed a group of "pioneer countries" that promised to establish ambitious national or even regional goals to achieve global targets. The Johannesburg Renewable Energy Coalition (JREC) has a total of more than 80 member countries; the EU members, Brazil, South Africa and New Zealand amongst them.
In the European Conference for Renewable Energy in Berlin in 2004, the EU defined ambitious goals of its own. The conclusion was that by 2020, the EU would seek to obtain 20% of its total energy consumption requirements with renewable energy sources. Up until that point, the EU had only set targets up to 2010, and this proposal was the first to represent the EU's commitment up to 2020.
Renewable energy targets[edit]In 2009 the Renewables Directive set binding targets for all EU Member States, such that the EU will reach a 20% share of energy from renewable sources by 2020 and a 10% share of renewable energy specifically in the transport sector. By 2014 the EU realized a 16% share of energy from renewable sources with nine member states already achieving its goals.
In 2014, negotiations about EU energy and climate targets until 2030 are set to start. Central and Eastern European member states are likely to attempt to slow down the transformation process.[3][4]
The key parts of the European renewable energy targets agreement set in 2014 are as proposed by a Shell lobbyist in October 2011. Shell is the sixth biggest lobbyist in Brussels, spending between '¬4.25-4.5m a year lobbying the EU institutions. Agreement has no binding targets for member states on energy efficiency or renewable energy.[5]
Links to climate policy[edit]Underlying many of the EU's energy policy proposals is the goal to limit global temperature changes to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels,[6] of which 0.8 °C has already taken place and another 0.5''0.7 °C (for total warming of 1.3-1.5 °C) is already committed.[7] 2 °C is usually seen as the upper temperature limit to avoid 'dangerous global warming'.[8] However some scientists, such as Kevin Anderson[3], professor of energy and climate change in the School of Mechanical, Aeronautical and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester and former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's leading academic climate change research organisation, have argued that to be consistent with the science, 1 °C is a more accurate threshold for "dangerous" climate change.[9][10]
Actions[edit]EU energy efficiency and renewable energy actions includes:
Member states[edit]Article 4 of the Renewables Directive required Member States to submit National Renewable Energy Action Plans by 30 June 2010. These plans, to be prepared in accordance with the template published by the Commission, provide detailed roadmaps of how each Member State expects to reach its legally binding 2020 target for the share of renewable energy in their final energy consumption. Member States must set out the sectoral targets, the technology mix they expect to use, the trajectory they will follow and the measures and reforms they will undertake to overcome the barriers to developing renewable energy. The plans are published by the EC upon receipt in the original language, allowing public scrutiny. The Commission will evaluate them, assessing their completeness and credibility. In parallel, the plans will be translated into English. In addition, the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands was contracted by the European Environment Agency to create an external database and quantitative report of the reports received so far.
The Member States which joined the EU in 2004 must apply the provisions of Directive 2001/77/EC on producing electricity from renewable energy sources. Their Accession Treaty sets national indicative targets for the proportion of electricity produced from RES (RES-E) in each new Member State the result of which is an overall objective of 21% for the EU-25.
The Member States must adopt and publish, initially every five years, a report setting the indicative Member State targets for future RES-E consumption for the following ten years and showing what measures have or are to be taken to meet those targets. The Member State targets must take account of the reference values set out in the Annex to the Directive for Member States' indicative targets concerning the share of electricity produced from renewable energy sources in gross electricity consumption in 2010. They must also be compatible with all the national commitments entered into as part of the commitments accepted by the Community in Kyoto.
Germany[edit]Electricity by source in 2014
Nuclear: 91.8 TWh (17.2%) Brown Coal: 140.7 TWh (26.4%) Hard Coal: 110.1 TWh (20.7%) Natural Gas: 33.9 TWh (6.4%) Wind: 51.4 TWh (9.7%) Solar: 32.8 TWh (6.2%) Biomass: 53 TWh (10.0%) Hydro: 18.5 TWh (3.5%)In 2014, Germany's share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption increased by 1.4% to 13.8%. In 2004, renewables accounted for only 5.8% or about the same share as for the Netherlands in 2014 (5.5%).[2]
In the same year net generated electricity from renewable sources accounted for about 30%. Compared to the previous year, biomass, solar and wind increased their production by 13%, 5.9% and 1.5%, respectively, while weather permitting hydro power decreased by 9.6%. Wind and solar combined generated almost as much as nuclear in 2014 (see pie-chart). Nuclear remained unchanged, while electricity generation from natural gas, brown and hard coal decreased by 15.8%, 2.9% and 10.4%, respectively.[11]
Italy[edit]In 2014, 38.2% of Italian electric energy consumption came from renewable sources (in 2005 this value was 15.4%), covering 16.2% of the total energy consumption of the country (5.3% in 2005).[12]
Solar energy production accounted for almost 9% of the total electric consumption in the country in 2014, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world.[12]
Lithuania[edit]The majority of renewable energy in Lithuania is from firewood. The principal source of electricity from renewable resources is from hydropower.[13]
Lithuania has many yet undeveloped renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal energy, municipal waste, and biomass. The amount of biomass per capita in Lithuania is one of the highest in the European Union and it is estimated that in 2020 Lithuania will be the first in the EU according to the quantity of available biomass for biofuel production. The projected production of biofuels by 2020 is 0.25 tons per capita.[14]
Portugal[edit]In 2010, more than 50% of all yearly electricity consumption in Portugal was generated from renewable energy sources.[15] The most important generation sources were hydroelectric (30%) and wind power (18%), with bioenergy (5%) and photovoltaic solar power (0,5%) accounting for the rest. In 2001, the Portuguese government launched a new energy policy instrument '' the E4 Programme (Energy Efficiency and Endogenous Energies), consisting of a set of multiple, diversified measures aimed at promoting a consistent, integrated approach to energy supply and demand. By promoting energy efficiency and the use of endogenous (renewable) energy sources, the programme seeks to upgrade the competitiveness of the Portuguese economy and to modernize the country's social fabric, while simultaneously preserving the environment by reducing gas emissions, especially the CO2 responsible for climatic change. As a result, in the five years between 2005 and 2010, energy production from renewable sources increased 28%.[16]
In January 2014, 91% of the monthly needed Portuguese electricity consumption was generated by renewable sources,[17][18] although the real figure stands at 78%, as 14% was exported .
Portugal has the second largest photovoltaic power station in the world,[19] which was completed in December 2008. The complex, called Amareleja photovoltaic power station, covers an area of 250-hectare. The 46-megawatt solar power plant produces enough electricity for 30,000 homes and saves more than 89,383 tons a year in greenhouse gas emissions. Also in production since January 2007, the Serpa solar power plant with an installed capacity 11MW, covers an area of 60-hectare, produces enough energy for 8,000 homes and saves more than 30,000 tons a year in greenhouse gas emissions. These solar parks are approximately 30 km apart.
Spain[edit]Spain as a whole has the target of generating 30% of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2010, with half of that amount coming from wind power. In 2006, 20% of the total electricity demand was already produced with renewable energy sources, and in January 2009 the total electricity demand produced with renewable energy sources reached 34.8%.[20]
Some regions of Spain lead Europe in the use of renewable energy technology and plan to reach 100% renewable energy generation in few years. Castilla y Le"n and Galicia, in particular, are near this goal. In 2006 they fulfilled about 70% of their total electricity demand from renewable energy sources.
If nuclear power is also considered CO2 free, two autonomous communities in Spain have already managed to fulfill their total 2006 electricity demand "free" of CO2 emissions: Extremadura and Castilla-La Mancha.[21]
In 2005 Spain became the first country in the world to require the installation of photovoltaic electricity generation in new buildings, and the second in the world (after Israel) to require the installation of solar hot water systems.[22]
United Kingdom[edit]By 2004 4.65% of the UK's electricity requirements were being generated from renewable energy sources (including hydroelectricity), up from 2.55% in 1990. This figure rose to 8.7% by 2011. The total contribution of renewable energy to all energy consumption in the UK was 3.8% in 2011. This comprised 8.7% of electricity, 2.2% of heat and 2.9% of transport fuel coming from renewable sources. UK Government energy policy set a target for renewable electricity to provide 10% of all electricity use by 2010. This target was not met. The UK has agreed to the EU wide renewable energy target of 20% of all energy to come from renewables by 2020, in line with the EU 2009 Renewable Energy Directive. The UK's specific target is to achieve 15% of all energy from renewables. The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has announced that the UK will attempt to meet this target with 30% renewable electricity, 12% renewable heat and 10% renewable transport fuel. As of 2010[update][needs update], the UK was 25th of the 27 EU Member States in terms of the fraction of energy produced from renewables.
The prospects for renewable energy in Scotland in particular are significant. Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW of installed capacity from wind and 7.5 GW from tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union for both, and up to 14 GW of wave power potential, 10% of EU capacity.[23][24] The Scottish Government has a target of generating 50% of Scotland's gross annual consumption of electricity from renewables by 2015, rising to 100% by 2020.[25]
Also the Contracting Parties of the Energy Community, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia and Ukraine implement the Directive 2009/28/EC since September 2012. The shares for the Contracting Parties were calculated based on the EU methodology and reflect an equal level of ambition as the targets fixed for EU Member States. The targets for the share of renewable energy in Contracting Parties in 2020 are the following: Albania 38%, Bosnia and Herzegovina 40%, Kosovo* 25%, Macedonia 28%, Moldova 17%, Montenegro 33%, Serbia 27% and Ukraine 11%. The deadline for transposing the Directive 2009/28/EC and the adoption of the National Renewable Energy Action Plan (NREAP) was set for 1 January 2014.
With the Decision 2012/03/MC-EnC and the acceptance of binding targets Contracting Parties can participate in all cooperation mechanisms. This means in particular that statistical transfers of renewable energy for the purposes of target achievement will be possible independently from physical flow of electricity. In addition, the decision lays down a number of adaptations to the rules for statistical transfers and joint support schemes between the Contracting Parties and EU Member States to ensure the original objectives of the RES Directive are preserved.
Renewable energy sources[edit]Bioenergy[edit]2009 By the middle of the year Britain's first major bioethanol plant should be completed and should use more than one million tonnes of wheat per year. The plant, in Wilton, northeast England, will be Europe's largest biorefinery, producing around 400 million to 450 million litres of bioethanol a year as well as 350,000 tonnes of animal feed. Currently the largest plant in the UK is a British Sugar facility in eastern England with an annual production capacity of about 70 million litres.[26]
Geothermal[edit]European Geothermal Energy Council (EGEC) promotes geothermal energy in the European Union.
GeoEner is the Building and Industrial Geothermal Energy Congress.[27]
Wind power[edit]Description: Wind turbines are used to generated electricity. Research from a wide variety of sources in various European countries shows that support for wind power is consistently about 80 per cent amongst the general public.[28]
2011 Installed Wind power capacity in the European Union totalled 93,957 megawatts (MW) - enough to supply 6.3% of the EU's electricity. 9,616 MW of wind power was installed in 2011 alone, representing 21.4% of new power capacity. The EU wind industry has had an average annual growth of 15.6% over the last 17 years (1995-2011).[29]
2009 A European Environment Agency report, entitled Europe's onshore and offshore wind energy potential confirms wind energy could power Europe many times over.[30] The report highlights wind power's potential in 2020 as three times greater than Europe's expected electricity demand, rising to a factor of seven by 2030.[31] An EWEA report overviewing 2009 data estimated that 230 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity will be installed in Europe by 2020, consisting of 190 GW onshore and 40 GW offshore. This would produce 14-17% of the EU's electricity, avoiding 333 million tonnes of CO2 per year and saving Europe '¬28 billion a year in avoided fuel costs.[32]
Solar energy[edit]Photovoltaic solar power[edit]Description: PV solar power are solar modules that are used to generate electricity.
European PV deployment in 'watts per capita' from 1992 to 2013.
Migrants
Cologne plans helicopters & mounted police to prevent mass sex assaults on NYE '' report '-- RT News
Cologne authorities may deploy helicopters, better CCTV cameras and mounted police during the upcoming New Year celebrations in order to prevent a repeat of the mass sexual assaults that rocked the city on New Year's Eve last year.
The report is the end result of Project Silvester (the German name for New Year's Eve celebrations), where a group of experts and federal police, under control of Federal Criminal Police Office, analyzed what happened in Cologne during last year's festivities.
The document will be discussed at a conference of interior ministries on Tuesday. A copy of the 60-page document was obtained by Cologne's Express newspaper.
Read more
The report proposes the deployment of helicopters and mounted police ''for regular assessment of the situation'' during celebrations. Limiting the number of visitors in certain areas during New Year events can also help prevent crimes, it adds.
''Due to the high number of visitors, possible [criminal] activities could not be detected and stopped in time. In addition, there was no way for the victims to escape the situation,'' it says about the events of last year.
Better video surveillance and better light sources should also be a must, according to the paper.
''Many camera images from and around Cologne Central Train Station had poor quality to identify perpetrators.''
The report proposes the detention of ''intoxicated or aggressive groups of persons'' and the introduction of more effective registration of migrants. To improve data sharing with other countries, the paper recommends deploying Europol 'Mobile Offices', which could be directly connected to police deployment areas.
Authorities should also deploy officers specially trained to handle sexual assault victims, in particular women, ''in order to carry out qualified questioning and secure objective evidence,'' the report states.
The document also calls upon the city authorities to arrange for better integration of migrants into the social fabric of Germany.
Cologne needs to ''improve the basic conditions which result in social-structure disadvantages and frustrations as a result of lack of personal exchange, financial participation, recognition and barriers to getting to know women,'' it adds.
Since January 2016, the issue of asylum seekers reportedly sexually harassing local women has been gathering momentum. Many of the victims, apart from being sexually harassed, said they had been robbed.
The report revealed the recent figures on the crimes committed on New Year's Eve in Germany: there were cases of 882 sexual offences involving over 1,231 women. Apart from Cologne, similar incidents took place in D¼sseldorf, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The victims were almost all young women between 18 and 24 years.
According to the document, almost all the suspects involved in the Cologne New Year attacks came from Algeria, Morocco and Iraq.
In June, two men were found guilty of sexual assault last New Year's Eve in Cologne and were given probationary sentences. The court said it was evident that one man, named as Hussein A., kissed a young woman against her will. The other man, an Algerian national, was part of a group that sexually harassed women. German media reported that two more men were found guilty of sexual assault charges in D¼sseldorf and N¼rtingen.
New Extreme Vetting Technology Supports Worldwide Counterterrorism Efforts
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 22, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- AC Global Risk has announced its new I3' extreme vetting solution to Identify, Investigate and Interdict foreign terrorists and others who pose security threats to the USA. The foundation of the I3' solution is Remote Risk Assessment (RRA®), which accurately identifies human-based risk during short automated interviews conducted in any language.
Alex Martin, a graduate of the US Naval Academy and the CEO of AC Global Risk, explained RRA accomplishes the most challenging aspect of the I3' process, which is to identify those individuals who appear non-threatening during the screening process, but who actually present security threats to the US. "The fundamental principle of I3' extreme vetting is to identify, investigate and interdict high risk individuals before they enter the USA. Once RRA identifies high risk individuals, US security officials will initiate investigations to determine the specifics of the threats posed by these individuals. We believe our I3' solution will be the most beneficial to US counterterrorism efforts on the frontlines; in locations such as our embassies, consulates, refugee screening centers and along our borders."
"Many recent terrorist attacks in the US and abroad could have been prevented had the I3' extreme vetting process been implemented to screen at-risk populations." Mr. Martin expressed specific concern about threats posed by individuals who plan to commit illegal acts, but who have remained undetected by US and allied security services. "RRA has already proven itself to be highly effective in the extreme vetting programs used by our existing clients worldwide. In fact, RRA was the decisive factor in conclusively identifying individuals involved in a multi-year criminal conspiracy involving the theft of millions of dollars in assets, as well as identifying individuals claiming false credentials, who otherwise would have been granted close and continuous access to some of the world's top business leaders."
Mr. Martin further explained scientific studies have proven even the best interviewers are only about 40% - 50% accurate in identifying dishonest individuals. "RRA is unique because of the simplicity of its interview process and the fact the system is standardized and totally automated. Even illiterate individuals can be administered an RRA interview, since it requires no reading or writing skills. Further, RRA can conduct hundreds-to-thousands of simultaneous risk assessment interviews per day in any language from an unlimited number of separate locations, which makes it ideal for screening individuals applying for visas or for screening dispersed refugee populations. There is no other technology, system, or process in existence that can rapidly and accurately screen individuals for risk factors on the scale RRA can." Martin also noted the RRA system has proven its precision and reliability by achieving accuracy levels greater than 95% during large-scale trust assessment interviewing projects over the past several years.
You can learn more about I3' and RRA® by visiting www.acglobalrisk.com.
To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-extreme-vetting-technology-supports-worldwide-counterterrorism-efforts-300367232.html
In 2006, our technologies' inventor was a member of a task force charged to solve the problem of vetting 700,000 Mexican Police after it was feared they were infiltrated by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. There was simply no way to accomplish this unless a new technology was invented that could securely and accurately screen massive volumes of people simultaneously.
After several years of research, development, testing, and fine-tuning, the Remote Risk Assessment (RRA) system was deployed in Mexico and has obtained significant results for all risk assessment applications undertaken to date.
Building on that success, we looked at the available risk assessment technologies in both government and enterprise and saw that current risk management solutions used in screening and fraud detection operations were costly, time and labor intensive, imprecise, open to manipulation and unreliable.
Background checks, in countries where they exist, are incapable of identifying people who have committed crimes but have not been caught or have lied during the application process. Fingerprinting is similarly limited in nature. Polygraph and other psychological testing are highly inaccurate and expensive. Conventional voice stress analysis, while an effective, accurate and proven technology, is not designed for high volume screening operations.
To solve this problem, the Streaming Risk Assessment (SRA) was created to better serve enterprise needs and the Remote Risk Assessment (RRA) was further refined, including the creation of a mobile system capable of conducting risk assessments anywhere in the world supervised by our fly-away teams of special operators to best meet the needs of both government and enterprise.
We saw a need for a different kind of risk assessment technology, and we knew it would take a different kind of company to deploy it. That's why we founded AC Global Risk.
PASSION
We are in a fight. We want to be in the toughest places on earth. We are part of something bigger. We make the world a safer place.
EXCELLENCE
We strive to be the best at what we do. We hold each other accountable. We strive for effectiveness and efficiency in everything we do. We take care of business and do what it takes to get the work done.
INNOVATION
We disrupt markets and industries. We respect the past, but don't accept the status quo. We can pivot quickly and think on our feet.
AC Global Risk provides technology-base d risk assessments to reduce the impact of internal and external human-based risk. Our core technology is Remote Risk Assessment (RRA'). RRA is a sophisticated risk assessment decision support tool that incorporates proprietary analytical processes to evaluate characteristics of the human voice to determine risk.
We leverage our proprietary, next generation, voice biometric technologies and our expert, combat tested counterintelligence and special operations know-how to provide our clients with the ability to detect and mitigate human-based risk factors impacting their organizations. We are capable of delivering our products and services in both permissive and nonpermissive environments worldwide.
Our mission is to provide technol ogy-based risk assessments that reduce the impact of internal and external human-based risk.
We set out to create products that would transform the way companies and governments vet, screen and assess internal and external risk.
Our products will be deployed at the most critical government, commercial, and non-profit institutions in the world.
Our vision is to revolutionize the risk management industry and to solve one of the biggest problems in the world today.
NA-Tech News
Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum - The New Yorker
Silicon Valley's biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry.Credit Photograph by Scott Eells / Bloomberg / GettySilicon Valley seems to have lost a bit of its verve since the Presidential election. The streets of San Francisco'--spiritually part of the Valley'--feel less crowded. Coffee-shop conversations are hushed. Everything feels a little muted, an eerie quiet broken by chants of protesters. It even seems as if there are more parking spots. Technology leaders, their employees, and those who make up the entire technology ecosystem seem to have been shaken up and shocked by the election of Donald Trump.
One conversation has centered around a rather simplistic narrative of Trump as an enemy of Silicon Valley; this goes along with a self-flagellating regret that the technology industry didn't do enough to get Hillary Clinton into the White House. Others have decided that the real villains are Silicon Valley giants, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Google, for spreading fake news stories that vilified Clinton and helped elect an unpopular President.
These charges don't come as a surprise to me. Silicon Valley's biggest failing is not poor marketing of its products, or follow-through on promises, but, rather, the distinct lack of empathy for those whose lives are disturbed by its technological wizardry. Two years ago, on my blog, I wrote, ''It is important for us to talk about the societal impact of what Google is doing or what Facebook can do with all the data. If it can influence emotions (for increased engagements), can it compromise the political process?''
Perhaps it is time for those of us who populate the technology sphere to ask ourselves some really hard questions. Let's start with this: Why did so many people vote for Donald Trump? Glenn Greenwald, the firebrand investigative journalist writing for The Intercept, and the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore have listed many reasons why Clinton lost. Like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump has focussed attention on the sense that globalization has eroded the real prospects and hopes of the working class in this country. Globalization is a proxy for technology-powered capitalism, which tends to reward fewer and fewer members of society.
My hope is that we in the technology industry will look up from our smartphones and try to understand the impact of whiplashing change on a generation of our fellow-citizens who feel hopeless and left behind. Instead, I read the comments of Balaji Srinivasan, the C.E.O. of the San Francisco-based Bitcoin startup 21 Inc., telling the Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims that he feels more connected to people in his ''Stanford network'' around the globe than to those in California's Central Valley. ''There will be a recognition that if we don't have control of the nation state, we should reduce the nation state's power over us.''
It's hard to think about the human consequences of technology as a founder of a startup racing to prove itself or as a chief executive who is worried about achieving the incessant growth that keeps investors happy. Against the immediate numerical pressures of increasing users and sales, and the corporate pressures of hiring the right (but not too expensive) employees to execute your vision, the displacement of people you don't know can get lost.
However, when you are a data-driven oligarchy like Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Uber, you can't really wash your hands of the impact of your algorithms and your ability to shape popular sentiment in our society. We are not just talking about the ability to influence voters with fake news. If you are Amazon, you have to acknowledge that you are slowly corroding the retail sector, which employs many people in this country. If you are Airbnb, no matter how well-meaning your focus on delighting travellers, you are also going to affect hotel-industry employment.
Otto, a Bay Area startup that was recently acquired by Uber, wants to automate trucking'--and recently wrapped up a hundred-and-twenty-mile driverless delivery of fifty thousand cans of beer between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs. From a technological standpoint it was a jaw-dropping achievement, accompanied by predictions of improved highway safety. From the point of view of a truck driver with a mortgage and a kid in college, it was a devastating ''oh, shit'' moment. That one technical breakthrough puts nearly two million long-haul trucking jobs at risk. Truck driving is one of the few decent-paying jobs that doesn't require a college diploma. Eliminating the need for truck drivers doesn't just affect those millions of drivers; it has a ripple effect on ancillary services like gas stations, motels, and retail outlets; an entire economic ecosystem could break down.
Whether self-driving cars and trucks, drones, privatization of civic services like transportation, or dynamic pricing, all these developments embrace automation and efficiency, and abhor friction and waste. As Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management told MIT Technology Review, ''Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren't keeping up.'' It is, he said, ''the great paradox of our era.''
We talk about the filter bubbles on social networks'--those algorithms that keep us connected to the people we feel comfortable with and the world we want to see'--and their negative impacts, but real-world filter bubbles, like the one in Silicon Valley, are perhaps more problematic. People become numbers, algorithms become the rules, and reality becomes what the data says. Facebook as a company makes these bubble blunders again and again. Its response to the ruckus around fake news is a perfect illustration of the missing empathy gene in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the smartest and brightest founders and chief executives of the post-Internet era, initially took a stance that Facebook can't really play arbiter of what is real and what is fake news. It took a whole week for the company to acknowledge that it can build better tools that help fight the scourge of fake news and yet stay neutral.
It isn't the first time Facebook has shied away from the reality that it can influence the lives of the billion and a half people connected to it. A perfect example came two years ago when Facebook, in its ''Your Year in Review'' feed, published the photo of the dead daughter of a user named Eric Meyer, prompting Meyer to write, ''Algorithms are essentially thoughtless. They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs.''
It seems possible to model the eventuality of a dead child's photo showing up on the feed, but the designers didn't consider it. Perhaps because those who write these algorithms have not experienced such trauma, or perhaps they just weren't talking about the human feelings in their product meetings'--especially when you are a company focussed on engagement and growth. The lack of empathy in technology design isn't because the people who write algorithms are heartless but perhaps because they lack the texture of reality outside the technology bubble. Facebook's blunders are a reminder that it is time for the company to think not just about fractional-attention addiction and growth but also to remember that the growth affects real people, for good and bad.
It is not just Facebook. It is time for our industry to pause and take a moment to think: as technology finds its way into our daily existence in new and previously unimagined ways, we need to learn about those who are threatened by it. Empathy is not a buzzword but something to be practiced. Let's start by not raging on our Facebook feeds but, instead, taking a trip to parts of America where five-dollar lattes and freshly pressed juices are not perks but a reminder of haves and have-nots. Otherwise, come 2020, Silicon Valley will have become an even bigger villain in the popular imagination, much like its East Coast counterpart, Wall Street.
Watch: Gary Shteyngart wears Google Glass.
Cyber Attack Knocks Nearly a Million Routers Offline
Mirai Botnet is getting stronger and more notorious each day that passes by. The reason: Insecure Internet-of-things Devices.Last month, the Mirai botnet knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites.
Now, more than 900,000 broadband routers belonging to Deutsche Telekom users in Germany knocked offline over the weekend following a supposed cyber-attack, affecting the telephony, television, and internet service in the country.
The German Internet Service Provider, Deutsche Telekom, which offers various services to around 20 Million customers, confirmed on Facebook that as many as 900,000 customers suffered internet outages on Sunday and Monday.
Millions of routers are said to have vulnerable to a critical Remote code Execution flaw in routers made by Zyxel and Speedport, wherein Internet port 7547 open to receive commands based on the TR-069 and related TR-064 protocols, which are meant to use by ISPs to manage your devices remotely.The same vulnerability affects Eir D1000 wireless routers (rebranded Zyxel Modem) deployed by Irish internet service provider Eircom, while there are no signs that these routers are actively exploited.
According to Shodan search, around 41 Million devices leave port 7547 open, while about 5 Million expose TR-064 services to the outside world.
According to an advisory published by the SANS Internet Storm Center, honeypot servers posing as vulnerable routers are receiving exploit code every 5-10 minutes for each target IP.
An intercepted packet showed how a remote code execution flaw in the part of a SOAP request was used to download and execute a file in order to infect the vulnerable device.
Security researchers at BadCyber also analyzed one of the malicious payloads that were delivered during the attacks and discovered that the attack originated from a known Mirai's command-and-control server.
"The unusual application of TR-064 commands to execute code on routers has been described for the very first time at the beginning of November, and a few days later a relevant Metasploit module had appeared," BadCyber wrote in a blog post. "It looks like someone decided to weaponize it and create an Internet worm based on Mirai code."It all started early October when a cyber criminal publicly released the source code of Mirai, a piece of nasty IoT malware designed to scan for insecure IoT devices '' mostly routers, cameras, and DVRs '' and enslaves them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks.The hacker created three separate exploit files in order to infect three different architectures: two running different types of MIPS chips and one with ARM silicon. The malicious payloads open the remote administration interface and then attempt to log in using three different default passwords. After this is done, the exploit then closes port 7547 in order to prevent other attackers from taking control of the infected devices.
"Logins and passwords are obfuscated (or "encrypted") in the worm code using the same algorithm as does Mirai," the researchers say. "The C&C server resides under timeserver.host domain name, which can be found on the Mirai tracker list."
More in-depth technical details about the vulnerability can be found on ISC Sans, Kaspersky Lab, and Reverse Engineering Blog.
Deutsche Telekom has issued an emergency patch for two models of its Speedport broadband routers '' Speedport W 921V, Speedport W 723V Type B '' and currently rolling out firmware updates. The company recommends its customers to power down their routers, wait for 30 seconds and then restart their routers in an attempt to fetch the new firmware during the bootup process.
If the router fails to connect to the company's network, users are advised to disconnect their device from the network permanently.
To compensate the downtime, the ISP is also offering free Internet access through mobile devices to the affected customers until the technical problem is resolved.
Trump Transition
Betsy DeVos: Funded Pro-Muslim, Anti-Israel Curriculum; Affirmative Action Pimp; Guess Who Her Brother Is
A lot of conservatives are gushing over Betsy DeVos, the rich chick whom Donald Trump chose today as his Education Secretary. They claim she's a good choice because she supports charter schools and school choice. Don't believe the hype. I have personal experience with this woman, and she's an alarming choice''especially if you are concerned about America's kids being indoctrinated with Islam at school. Here's why . . .
As many readers know, I'm a lifelong Michiganian (I HATE the term ''Michigander''''I ain't a male goose). So I know a lot about Betsy DeVos, most of it not very good.
* She funded ANTI-ISRAEL, Pro-Muslim curriculum in America's Public Schools.
Betsy DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, financed anti-Israel, pro-Muslim propaganda posing as ''curriculum'' in America's public schools. The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation financed the anti-Israel, pro-Muslim MidEast Policy Council's ''Teach MidEast'' and its ''Bridges at School'' curriculum. (She's also a Common Core supporter and fought to make this anti-Israel crap part of the Common Core agenda taught at America's public schools.)
Bridges at School is a topical curriculum developed for American middle school classrooms. Contextualizing the Arab World and providing a unique series of both critical thinking and creative exercises that shed light on the rich historical, scientific, mathematical, religious, and cultural legacy of the region, this program focuses on the themes of global citizenship and identity through a series of analysis-based activities. Bridges at School highlights poetry and values-based paired texts; fashion and style; visual art; food and spice; drama; music; language; medicine and science; and media. Activities are available free of charge via the online platform NextLesson. Development funding for Bridges at School is courtesy of Donna Pearson Chapman and The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation.
* She supports extremist Muslims who aid and abet Islamic terrorist groups, bring terrorism-supporting Muslim illegal aliens into the United States, and boycott Israel.
Betsy DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos (also born into money) are donors and contributors to ACCESS''the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services. And they also attend ACCESS annual fundraising dinners.
As I've reported on this site previously, ACCESS''which receives millions of dollars in government grants and aid''actively brings Muslim illegal aliens into the United States and helps them stay here. ACCESS continues to date to bring thousands of pregnant Muslim women from around the world into the United States to defraud Medicaid and give birth to their children here''making them U.S. citizens and eligible for entitlements and voting privileges.
ACCESS was founded by Ismael Ahmed as a campaign to get the Big Three automakers to divest from Israel and companies that do business with it. ACCESS sponsored the Divestment (from Israel) Conference at the University of Michigan. ACCESS opposed and lobbied Congress against making it illegal to donate to Islamic terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, HAMAS, and Islamic Jihad. Fortunately, the efforts failed and Bill Clinton signed a package into law.
As I've also noted, ACCESS also spent thousands of dollars in government money to provide job training and training for commercial drivers licenses and HazMat haulding certificates to members of the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell. And its tax-funded Arab American National Museum features several anti-Israel, anti-Semitic ''exhibits'' and ''art.''
When Betsy DeVos' husband, Dick, was running for Governor of Michigan (he was trounced), I asked him why he and his wife supported ACCESS and why they opposed our efforts to end government-sponsored discrimination in the form of affirmative action.
He was flustered, didn't have an answer, and had his handlers escort me out of the event.
* She's An Affirmative Action Pimp and Plays the Race Card.
I was general counsel for the courageous Ward Connerly's Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), for which Michigan voters voted in overwhelming numbers in 2006. MCRI's purpose was to eliminate race-and-gender-based preferences in admissions, hiring, and promotions in public institutions and government in Michigan. In other words, get rid of institutional racism against White males and in favor of Blacks, Hispanics, women, etc.
Betsy DeVos, as then-Chair (yup, a piece of furniture'''cuz, G-d-forbid, you use the term ''chairwoman'') of the Michigan Republican Party, came out repeatedly and very publicly against us. She called us ''RAAAAAAYCIST!'' Yup, lily-White, privileged Betsy DeVos''who was born into and then also married great wealth and never had to work a day in her charmed life''called Ward Connerly, a self-made Black man, a ''racist.'' She worked against MCRI and brought the full power of the Michigan Republican Party to bear against us. She also put her daddy's and hubby's daddy's money to work against us. And she tried to pressure Republicans who sat on the committee that certified what qualified for the ballot, to vote against us.
Despite DeVos' siding with the likes of Jesse Jackson and Weird Al Sharpton and their acolytes in Michigan (and she was our loudest critic''louder than anyone on the left), we won overwhelmingly by a margin of 3-2 in a virtual election landslide unheard of for a ballot initiative in Michigan.
As a lifelong Michiganian, I can tell you that Betsy DeVos is and always has been part of the GOP establishment here in Michigan. She's never been seen as a conservative.
And, now, Betsy DeVos is Trump's choice for Secretary of Education. Look for her to pimp her anti-Israel propaganda further into America's education system. Don't look for her to end the wasteful, highly-discriminatory, Department of Education efforts at ''diversity'' and affirmative action at schools and universities. And look for her to keep up her usual efforts at being a dhimmi Islamo-panderer. In other words, look for those anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-Muslim textbooks to continue to be in the curricula throughout America's public schools. Betsy won't lift a finger to change the crap that America is teaching our kids.
In other words, it'll be biz as usual at the Trump Department of Education. Same as it ever was.
***
One other thing: Betsy DeVos' brother is Erik Prince, the founder and chief of Blackwater for many years. I'd much prefer him running anything in government to her. He knows what Muslims are like. He had to deal with them in their natural habitat and managed to keep the American dignitaries his company was hired to protect, safe.
Sadly, his sis just doesn't get it. And she never will.
Could David Petraeus, Rumored Candidate for Secretary of State, Get a Security Clearance?
After months of criticizing Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary of state, Donald Trump is reportedly considering David Petraeus for the same job, even though the four-star general and former CIA director pled guilty to passing classified information to his former lover and biographer.
The Guardian reported on Thursday that Petraeus is in the running for secretary of state in the Trump administration. The anonymously sourced report could not be confirmed, but Petraeus reportedly met with Trump just before the election, and has since been complimentary about the president elect.
On German cable news, Petraeus called Trump a ''dealmaker,'' and said, ''He's right to criticize Washington over its partisanship and its inability to forge compromises.''
Petraeus resigned as CIA director in 2012 after the FBI discovered he was having an affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The resulting investigation revealed that he had given her highly classified information, and Justice Department prosecutors wanted to indict Petraeus on felony charges.
According to his 2015 plea deal, Petraeus intentionally gave Broadwell access to eight ''Black Books'' filled with highly classified information, including ''the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions,'' and even Petraeus's conversations with the president. He also admitted that he had misled the FBI during the investigation.
In contrast to national security whistleblowers '-- who frequently face espionage charges and decades in prison for divulging classified information '-- Petraeus never went to jail, and was sentenced to only two years probation and a $100,000 fine. Petraeus went on to draw a lucrative salary as chairman of private equity firm KKR, while many speculated he was pondering a return to public life.
It was unclear from his plea deal whether Petraeus kept a Defense Department or CIA security clearance, but he continued to advise the White House on counterterrorism strategy in Iraq '-- possibly requiring him to have access to classified materials.
When asked by The Intercept whether Petraeus still had a security clearance, the CIA declined to comment. The DOD also declined to comment ''as a matter of individual privacy.''
When reached through his assistant at KKR, Petraeus also declined to comment.
A Congressional Research Service report from October reviewed security clearance procedures and requirements, noting there are 13 guidelines for determining eligibility. Four of those guidelines included areas that could potentially raise questions for Petraeus, including sexual behavior, personal conduct, criminal conduct and handling protected information.
However, issues raised in those areas do not necessarily mean a person won't receive a clearance. ''Adverse information regarding one of the guidelines will not automatically result in denial of a security clearance,'' the report says.
Regardless of his ability to get a clearance, Petraeus's nomination could open the administration to charges of hypocrisy. Hillary Clinton's use of an insecure, private email server was a mainstay of Republican criticism throughout the campaign, and during numerous Congressional hearings and investigations, which accused her of mishandling classified information.
In a September speech attacking his Democratic rival, Trump said, ''If she applied for a low-level job at the State Department today she couldn't even get a security clearance.''
Petraeus previously served as an adviser to Hillary Clinton, on her national security ''working group.''
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Top photo: Retired U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus arrives at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 22, 2015, in Washington, D.C.
President-Elect Trump Announces Economic Nationalist Dream Team: Mnuchin, Ross and Ricketts'...
''We have the most killer deal-makers'... we never use them, I know many of them'... these guys are brutal'... hard'... and Obama uses Kennedy in Japan, I mean give me a break'... we need strength'''... ''and we will win, and you will win, and we will keep on winning, and eventually you will say we can't take all of this winning, '...please Mr. Trump '...and I will say, NO, we will win, and we will keep on winning''.
~ Donald Trump
Today, via Facebook (
Report: Sarah Palin Under Consideration for VA Secretary'...
According to a report citing two transition sources, Governor Sarah Palin is being considered for the position of Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Governor Palin has been a strong supporter of Donald Trump for several years and was one of his most fierce defenders against the insufferable GOP establishment class. She would make an exceptional cabinet member in either VA or Interior.
The bench for possible VA Secretary is extremely deep and loaded with dream team candidates, including: Governor Sarah Palin, Senator Scott Brown and Chairman Jeff Miller (House VA Committee). The challenge of modernizing, restructuring, removing the corruptocrats and rebuilding the VA structure to provide improved veteran benefits, including healthcare, is urgent and important.
Elections 2016
Hillary Clinton rumored to be considering another go at the White House in 2020 '' TheBlaze
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Big Pharma
Patients Say Abilify Turned Them Into Compulsive Gamblers and Sex Addicts - The Daily Beast
Warning labels in Canada and Europe said the pill used to treat depression could unleash destructive behaviors, but no one told Americans until thousands of them said it was too late.
A year after her father took hostages and committed suicide by cop, Lucy kept freezing in the supermarket aisle.
''I couldn't breathe, literally, my husband would often have to come pick me up from whatever aisle of the store I was stuck in and drive me home,'' the traumatized daughter confided in a letter she wrote to her attorney that he provided to The Daily Beast.
The woman who had been happily married for 25 years was now sitting on a psychiatrist's couch and popping a daily regimen of meds that she called the ''pharmaceutical cocktail.''
They included Abilify, which was supposed to aid in treating her post-traumatic stress disorder.
''So began a life that was hazy, kind of disconnected,'' she described in the letter.
Lucy blames the drug for her insatiable hunger for gambling that saw her drive at all hours of the night to Cripple Creek, a legion of Wild West-themed casinos in Colorado.
''I started going all the time,'' she wrote. ''I never even won, never came back with so much as a dime in my pocket,'' she confessed.
Lucy burned through unemployment checks, pawned her mechanic husband's automotive tools, and lied about needing money to buy baby formula.
As she puts it in the letter, ''Nothing was off-limits when it came to getting the money I needed to keep up the ruse.''
Fanatical about the casino, and filling time in-between with lottery scratchers, Lucy's urge to roll the dice was so desperate she admitted how she mastered her very own disappearing act.
''I'd stuff my bed at night to fool my husband that I was asleep when actually I was spinning the slots,'' she admitted in the letter.
Like Lucy, thousands of patients who had been prescribed Abilify say in a mass tort lawsuit the drug created compulsions for sex and gambling, and that the drug makers knew of the serious side effects (as evidenced by warning labels in Canada and Europe) but waited years not to warn U.S. consumers.
''There will probably be over 1,000 cases,'' Stephen Hunt Jr., of the Alabama-based law firm Cory Watson, who is repping some of the gamblers and sex-obsessed victims airing their Abilify horror stories after his firm and others began a national ad campaign.
Representatives reached by The Daily Beast for both Otsuka and Bristol-Myers Squibb, the companies behind the drug, cited policies to not comment on ongoing litigation.
Aripiprazole, as Abilify is known off-brand, is an antipsychotic created by Otsuka in 1988 to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The drug acts on dopamine receptors in the brain that are responsible for motor functions (like tremors), executive functions (like memory), and reward systems (like addiction).
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Otsuka teamed with Bristol-Myers Squibb to market the drug in the U.S. in 2002. Five years later it was dosed as an add-on for depression. Otsuka America described it ''like a thermostat to restore balance.''
Thomas J. Moore has done extensive research and published papers about drugs similar to Abilify and their adverse effects; some of them involve pathological gambling and hypersexuality. He is a senior scientist at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit watchdog organization that seeks to prevent mistakes in medicine dispensing and prescribing.
Moore studied 1,580 cases over a decade that included several impulsive behaviors such as pathological gambling, excessive sexual activity, and compulsive shopping. In a 2014 paper he found, ''the associations were significant, the magnitude of the effects was large, and the effects were seen for all 6 dopamine receptor agonist drugs.''
He explained it in layman's terms to The Daily Beast.
''The drug triggers a pathological urge to gamble constantly, sometimes among persons with no previous interest,'' he said of Abilify's effect on dopamine receptors. ''It might be people starting to spend $300 a week on lottery tickets, and in other cases people will gamble away tens of thousands of dollars.''
Several complaints by users of Abilify say the companies inexplainably failed to warn patients after Canada and Europe hit the brakes and updated their warning labels.
The case, according to numerous attorneys we spoke to involved in the litigation, is likely to draw on precedent from a former case decided eight years ago by a federal jury that forced Pfizer to pay a retired Wisconsin police officer $8.2 million in damages for failing to label their Parkinson's drug Maripex (which was one of the six drugs studied by Moore in his paper) that also caused ''pathological gambling.''
Back in 2011, one drug-pushing television ad circa 2011 featured a cautious voice over announcing: ''Abilify is not for everyone.''
Then came the cringing laundry list of side effects plucked from the fine print. Abilify is a no-no for kids and teenagers and it can induce suicide, coma, and seizures and be lethal for any elderly person battling dementia or fighting diabetes.
The actress in the advertisement portraying a lost soul who finds her smile in 90 seconds, isn't phased. ''Adding Abilify has made the difference for me,'' she beams.
Many Abilify patients describe in various testimonials and case studies published in medical papers that the pill's pull on them created a ''hypnotic state'' while another said it was ''mentally crippling.'' For some of the admitted compulsive gamblers while on the drug, the casino delivered a ''euphoric feeling'' and for one it was a ''reason to live.''
One woman's life was thrown into a ''tailspin'' while taking Abilify.
It wasn't gambling fever that caught Anne when she began popping Abilify. The woman was hooked on sex.
''I started talking to men online, thriving on the attention,'' she wrote in vivid detail in a letter to her lawyer, adding that she created a risque Facebook page to lasso lads. ''I had about 100 messages from men trying to hit on me.
''I started becoming obsessed with sexual fantasies and with taking pictures of myself to send to a few select 'friends''... I just couldn't stop with the pictures and fantasies.''
The cat and mouse play advanced and when Anne offered her digits to a male ''friend'' they began sexting each other. Then it all ended.
''My husband caught me,'' she said.
The pictures didn't remain private to just her male ''friends'' either. Anne was called before the principal of her school and shamed for the ''costume pictures, lingerie pictures, and party pictures.''
In addition, she claims to have gone on excessive shopping sprees, buying cars and an addition to their garage, all paid for by loans. She and her husband filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and saw their 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee get repossessed and are still in arrears with the IRS for $4,000.
It wasn't until her husband caught an Abilify commercial citing its health ramifications that she saw hope and together they ''realized that my compulsive and obsessive behaviors were a result of taking the drug.''
Anne suggests that since she's been off Abilify ''worries don't dominate my mind and my behavior'' and that she's having ''real conversations'' with her husband.
In sum, Anne is left agonizing over how her name has been permanently stained. ''The drug has destroyed my life, my reputation, and the lives of those I love.''
Last week, Patrick Parks of Delaware, Ohio, sued Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka America in federal court for turning him into a degenerate gambler.
The newest case comes after the first compulsive behavior federal civil case filed on Jan. 12 of this year by a couple Brad and Denise Miley of Maple Grove, Minnesota. They claim it was Brad's Abilify intake that caused them to suffer more than $75,000 in gambling losses.
Like the Mileys, Parks claims in the papers that he ''was prescribed and took the prescription drug'... around May 2013'' and in turn ''began compulsively gambling shortly thereafter...''
Once he got off Abilify in August 2014 Parks apparently steered from casinos and ''stopped compulsively gambling.''
Parks didn't realize his excessive urge to burn through more than $75,000 was because of the prescribed Abilify meds until Nov. 18, 2014, the complaint reads.
As with a stack of similar complaints from California to Florida, Parks's master complaint blames the parent companies for ''fraudulently concealing'' and failing ''to warn advise, educate or otherwise inform Abilify users or prescribers in the United States about the risk of compulsive gambling or other compulsive behaviors,'' according to the complaint.
It goes on to blame Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka America for deceptively holding back warnings from patients.
Abilify was approved in the U.S. in 2002 but, according to many of the complaints filed, it ''wrongfully and unjustly profited at the expense of patient safety and full disclosure to the medical community by failing to include language about gambling in the United States labeling and by failing to otherwise warn the public and the medical community about Abilify's association with gambling'--despite opportunities to do so.''
The complaint cites how in the fall of 2012 the European Medicines Agency pushed for an updated label of Abilify to transparently add to the ''undesirable effects'' so they included that ''reports of pathological gambling have been reported among patients prescribed Abilify, regardless of whether these patients had a prior history of gambling.''
In 2015, Canada adapted the exact same language to its Abilify labeling.
But it was apparently business as usual in the U.S.
''Despite these warnings and advisories in Europe and Canada'--for the same drug sold to patients in the United States'--the labeling for Abilify did not adequately warn about the risk of compulsive gambling and contained no mention that pathological gambling has been reported in patients prescribed Abilify,'' according to the pooled language of the many complaints we reviewed.
Finally, on May 3, 2016, the FDA took action and requiring the companies and patients about Abilify's side effects and added to its labels ''compulsive or uncontrollable urges to gamble, binge eat, shop, and have sex.''
The Abilify label now places the onus on prescribers to ask patients or their caregivers ''specifically about the development of intense gambling urges'... Consider dose reduction or stopping the medication if a patient develops such urges.''
The drug makers, the complaint states, ''were under a duty to disclose the true character, quality and nature of risks associated with use of Abilify'....''
The complaints also allege that the companies ''failed to fully and adequately test or research the drug...'' and that they were incompetent when it came to research and development and ''should have had, knowledge that Abilify can cause compulsive behaviors like gambling.''
And what with all the conclusive studies dating back to 2011 the complaints say the company misled the public and especially its patients by not investigating or conducting ''any studies on the compulsive behavior side effects of Abilify'' or ''failed to make public the results of any studies or investigations that they might have done.''
It also didn't send out so-called Dear Doctor letters that serve to ''inform the medical community of the risk or association of Abilify use and gambling.''
Moore points to a scientific methodology that can help separate the actual cases versus the potentially frivolous claims.
He walks through a variety of ''checkpoints'' Moore noted that it could be difficult to determine whether the drug or some other factor triggered the urge to gamble.
''We can ask a series of questions to assess the drug's possible role,'' Moore said.
His questions include: Did the person have a gambling problem before taking the drug? Did the gambling urge go away after stopping the drug? Were there other factors that might explain the gambling better than a drug effect? Do we have cases where the gambling urge appeared only after starting the drug, stopped after halting the drug, and then reappeared again if the patient took the drug again?
Moore said everyone needs to think about the possibility that a person may not be responsible for pathological gambling or excessive sexual behavior.
''We live in a society whose rules and laws assume people are responsible for their actions, including running up a large gambling debt,'' Moore said. ''But we have scientific evidence that sometimes a drug can trigger a pathological urge to gamble so severe it can ruin someone's life.''
CGI
Trump administration will pressure foreign states to probe Clinton Foundation | New York Post
Foreign governments will be encouraged to investigate the Clinton Foundation's finances, as many are already turning off money spigots to the scandal-scarred group, The Post has learned.
A source close to President-elect Donald Trump's transition team told The Post that the new administration plans to pressure the US ambassadors it will name to bring up the foundation with foreign governments '-- and suggest they probe its financial dealings.
Trump said last week that he would not order an investigation of Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server or her role in the foundation.
But Trump's statement didn't preclude the backroom moves to investigate the group.
''Haiti and Colombia will be key diplomatic posts for this because of all the money involved,'' said the source.
In Haiti, recently leaked e-mails indicate ''Friends of Bill'' Clinton may have been given priority from the State Department as it prepared to spend some$10 billion in aid after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010. The State Department has denied any special treatment.
In Colombia, Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra pledged $100 million to the foundation in 2005 and later benefited from the foundation's philanthropic work in the country, where he acquired large parcels of land and set up an oil business, according to watchdog groups.
The Clinton Foundation, headed by Donna Shalala, the former health and human services secretary in the Clinton administration, has received millions from dozens of foreign governments including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Sweden and Ireland.
Days after Hillary Clinton's election defeat, French federal comptrollers began following a trail of tens of millions in government money that ended up in Clinton Foundation coffers, according to a document reviewed by The Post.
Candanavia
Doctors warn thousands could leave for U.S. over new federal tax hikes - The Globe and Mail
Canadian physicians are warning that thousands of specialists will pull out of group medical offices and many will ultimately leave for the United States because of new federal tax changes that will soon be approved by Parliament.
An aggressive lobbying campaign by doctors, radiologists and other medical professionals has failed to sway Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who is rejecting calls to remove a provision in the budget that doctors say will force them to pay tens of thousands more a year in taxes.
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Read more: Ontario doctors threaten job action if province does not meet demands
Read more: Excessive wait times at hospitals hurting patients, Ontario A-G finds
Related: Ontario's major hospitals operating over capacity, documents reveal
Related: The condo boom is pushing Toronto's downtown hospitals to the limit
National medical organizations flooded MPs with e-mails and meeting requests in recent weeks in an effort to have members of the House of Commons finance committee amend a budget bill to remove a controversial clause.
But Mr. Morneau appeared to shut the door on that campaign this week during an appearance before the committee. The minister's office later confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the government will not be making the changes requested by the medical community.
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The decision has shocked and infuriated physician organizations. They had believed their inclusion in the tax change was simply a technical oversight that would be corrected.
"Physicians will leave the country because they'll see Canada as not very attractive," predicted Ray Foley, executive director of the Ontario Association of Radiologists, in an interview. Mr. Foley estimated the number of departures for the United States could be in the thousands because it will add to the frustrations doctors are already facing with provincial governments. "Particularly in Ontario, where we have already a turbulent environment with the ministry of health in terms of [contract] negotiations. It's not a difficult argument to make. Why do want to stay here and be public enemy number one?" he said.
Mr. Morneau's March, 2016, budget announced a change to the small-business deduction to prevent business owners from multiplying access to the small-business tax rate by using complex partnerships and corporate structures. The budget suggested this move was meant to address "the ability of high-net-worth individuals to use private corporations to inappropriately reduce or defer tax."
The change could apply to a wide range of professionals, including lawyers, architects and accountants who work in a common corporate structure. However, physicians argued they should be exempt because their fees are regulated and extra costs can't be passed down to consumers.
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Further, doctors argue these groupings of specialists have been encouraged by provincial governments as a public policy decision aimed at improving heath-care results by sharing knowledge and expertise.
The change would apply to medical specialists who pool their income in a corporate structure. According to the Canadian Medical Association, Canada has about 80,000 physicians and about half are specialists. Of those, only about 10,000 to 15,000 specialists work in the type of income-pooling structures that would be affected by the tax change.
John Feeley, a CMA vice-president, said the change has created high levels of concern and uncertainty among members who are unclear whether they will be affected by the change. Accounting work conducted for the CMA found that in some cases, doctors will end up paying tens of thousands more a year in tax. He agreed some doctors will likely leave for the United States as a result of the change.
Mr. Feeley said his organization is "very disappointed" with Mr. Morneau's position and will be taking its campaign to the Senate, which will soon be asked to review Bill C-29, the budget bill that contains the change.
Daniel Lauzon, a spokesperson for the Finance Minister, said doctors can still incorporate in group structures, but they will have to share the small-business deduction if they are essentially one business.
"All it does is clarify that one small business equals one small business deduction," he said in an e-mail.
Conservative MP Dan Albas, who raised the issue as a member of finance committee, said the minister's position won't raise more money and will put health care at risk by encouraging some doctors to leave.
"Now we know from the minister's contributions at committee that this [change] is really because they believe that these structures are about dodging taxes, which they're not. They're set up by provinces and territories to make health care more efficient," he said.
The debate with doctors is part of a larger discussion related to the small business deduction. It currently allows for a federal tax rate of 10.5 per cent on business income up to $500,000. The Liberal Party campaigned on a pledge to lower this to 9 per cent but has since shelved that plan.
Companies with income above $15-million do not qualify for the small business deduction. The federal corporate tax rate is 15 per cent.
Some tax experts have suggested the small-business deduction should be eliminated entirely and all businesses should pay the corporate rate because the lower rate does not boost investment and imposes a compliance burden on business and government.
"There's no real rationale for it," said Lindsay Tedds, an associate professor with the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. "I'm not convinced that the benefits exceed the costs."
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Elite$
Is Justin Trudeau The Son Of Fidel Castro? '' MagaFeed
Before we dive into how this could be true, let's take a look at Justin Trudeau and Fidel Castro's striking resemblance:
She remembers Castro during that visit as a ''very warm and charming man '-- I enjoyed him.''
-Margaret Trudeau on Fidel CastroPierre Trudeau, the former Prime Minister of Canada, made many visits to Cuba while the Prime Minister of Canada with his wife and mother of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.Margaret Trudeau described Fidel's peculiar fascination with her baby, when the Trudeau family visited Cuba in the '70's and her description of Fidel is very romantic:''Fidel made it clear in his opening remarks that the parents were important but not nearly as important as the baby. In some pictures Fidel had a big patch of wet saliva on his uniform because he had come over early to cuddle the baby.''
'...
She remembers Castro during that visit as a ''very warm and charming man '-- I enjoyed him.''
'...
Margaret Trudeau said she visited Castro at his hotel before the funeral to welcome him on behalf of the family.
Source: National PostHis wife, Margaret Trudeau was notorious for cheating on Pierre Trudeau with many men, including multiple members of the Rolling Stones.
Macleans writes:3. 1977: Margaret Trudeau and the Rolling Stones. Margaret Trudeau spent her sixth wedding anniversary without her prime minister husband, instead partying with the Rolling Stones at a Toronto nightclub and later in Mick Jagger's limousine. The rendezvous sparked rumours that she was having an affair with the band's front man. She later disappeared to New York. The scandal signalled the end of the couple's tumultuous marriage, but Margaret Trudeau denied having affairs with any members of the Rolling Stones, later telling a conference on mental health, ''I should have slept with every single one of them.''The Guardian writes:When I meet Charlie Watts, he remembers it as being a ''pretty serious'' situation. To complicate matters, Wood was simultaneously having an affair with Margaret Trudeau, wife of the then Canadian prime minister. ''It was a bit worrying,'' says Watts, a thoughtful wrinkle appearing on his brow.Wikipedia:Over time, the marriage disintegrated to the point that, as recounted in her book, Trudeau had an affair with US SenatorTed Kennedy. She was also associated with members of the Rolling Stones, including Ronnie Wood[21] and, according to Keith Richards's autobiography, Life, Mick Jagger.[22][23]Wikipedia sources:Richards, Keith (2010). Life. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-03438-X. OCLC 548642133.:Page 393Jump up^Day, Elizabeth (November 13, 2011). ''The Rolling Stones: that 50-year itch''. The Guardian. London.A young photo of Fidel Castro bears a striking resemblance to Justin Trudeau. A face swap looks as if it hasn't even been done:
Justin Trudeau's statement yesterday was especially over the top when describing a dictator who committed genocide against his own people, almost as if he was describing a father figure:''It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest serving President.''Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.''While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro's supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ''el Comandante''.''I know my father was very proud to call him a friend and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away. It was also a real honour to meet his three sons and his brother President Raºl Castro during my recent visit to Cuba.''On behalf of all Canadians, Sophie and I offer our deepest condolences to the family, friends and many, many supporters of Mr. Castro. We join the people of Cuba today in mourning the loss of this remarkable leader.''Fidel Castro visited Canada in 1959, and Pierre Trudeau visited Cuba numerous times:It outlines Castro's rise to power, as well as his first and only official visit to Canada, in 1959. The rest of the book examines the evolution of Castro and Trudeau's remarkable relationship as it arose out of the event that is the book's centrepiece: Trudeau's historic three-day 1976 visit to Cuba that notoriously culminated with his rallying cry of ''Viva el primer ministro Fidel Castro!''
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Caliphate!
5th Special Forces Group member killed, linked to ISIS final takedown | SOFREP
On Thanksgiving day, a EOD tech assigned to 5th Special Forces Group was killed in Ayn Issa, Syria. US CENTCOM (Central Command) announced yesterday that a US soldier was killed by an IED blast, but withheld further details. To understand why an American Special Forces advisor would be in Ayn Issa with the Kurdish YPG and affiliated Arab militias working under the banner of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), one need only look at a map. The road south from Ayn Issa leads straight into the ISIS capital of Raqqa.
Further West, the Kurdish YPG crossed the Euphrates river with the help of US Special Operations personnel, and took Manbij several months ago, before pushing toward Al Bab, a strategic decision which would close the Jarabulus corridor that supplies ISIS with weapons and fighters from Turkey. Such a move would also link the Kurdish canton of Kobani with the isolated and besieged canton of Afrin. Ayn Issa is linked to a separate strategic objective, capturing Raqqa and finishing off ISIS once and for all.
5th Group has been working inside Syria since President Obama announced that he was sending SOF soldiers into the country to work with SDF. Initially, Delta Force was to be deployed to Syria working under the auspices of the CIA. Delta Force is designed for surgical strikes, not long duration counter-insurgency missions or unconventional warfare, so they requested help from Special Forces.
*This article was corrected as the original version stated that the member of 5th Special Forces Group was a Green Beret rather than an attached EOD technician.
A more in depth look at the US SOF operations inside Syria, can be found below:
The 5th Group members are not allowed to engage in direct combat with ISIS, but on rare occasions have been able to participate in long-range engagements with mortar fire and sniper fire from the .50 caliber Barrett anti-material rifle. Otherwise, they are mostly confined to running the YPG through flat range drills. On SOFREP's visit to the YPG in Syria and the PKK in Kurdistan, it was made clear that the Kurds do not desire military training from Americans, as they have their own training program, although they do appreciate being given weapons and air support.
Delta Force had also been stymied by red tape and bureaucracy as they tried to get into the fight and knock ISIS down a peg. Both hostage operations they conducted'--the failed James Foley rescue and the successful prison raid in Hawija, Iraq'--required presidential approval. Early into the conflict, Delta wrote up a massive concept of the operation (CONOP) for a joint operation with Iraqi Special Operations Forces. The CONOP went all the way to the White House before the lawyers spotted that several Delta members were included in the mission roster. Central Command (CENTCOM) forwarded the CONOP to the White House without even realizing it. The executive branch quickly shut the entire mission down.
Syria is a different situation for Delta because the unit works under the CIA's Title 50 covert action authorities. The concept of ''sheep dipping'' active-duty military members under the auspices of the CIA is a practice that stretches back at least as far as deployments to Central American in the 1980s. Today, this arrangement is called D triple S (DSSS), standing for Defense Sensitive Support System. In effect, this means that the Delta element temporarily assigned to the CIA no longer works for the secretary of defense and the president, but rather has to answer to a comparatively low-ranking CIA station chief.
''The CAG [an alternate name for Delta] dudes were beyond pissed seeing some of the shenanigans from our people,'' a CIA officer said. With the CTC at war within itself, they were both trying to prevent their own people from collecting intelligence (lest they find something threatening) and stonewalling any and all Delta Force operations from going forward against ISIS. Currently, Delta is sitting on several hundred completed targeting packets for operations they could launch. Like the more forward-leaning members of CTC and the Syrian Task Force, they want to hollow out the Baath party members within ISIS.
Delta Force wants to conduct the mission for which they were created'--surgical strikes'--but under CIA leadership, they are mostly stuck doing a counterinsurgency mission that they have little interest in. The Special Forces teams also feel they are providing little more than a support role in Syria, and one member described the Syria deployments as ''a shit show, for lack of a better term.''
Read the rest here.
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Jack Murphy is an eight year Army Special Operations veteran who served as a Sniper and Team Leader in 3rd Ranger Battalion and as a Senior Weapons Sergeant on a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group. Having left the military in 2010, he graduated from Columbia with a BA in political science. Murphy is the author of Reflexive Fire, Target Deck, Direct Action, and numerous non-fiction articles about Weapons, Tactics, Special Operations, Terrorism, and Counter-Terrorism. He has appeared in documentaries, national television, and syndicated radio.
c.1200, from Old French legion "Roman legion" (3,000 to 6,000 men, under Marius usually with attached cavalry), from Latin legionem (nominative legio) "body of soldiers," from legere "to choose, gather," also "to read" (see lecture (n.)).
Generalized sense of "a large number" is due to translations of allusive phrase in Mark v:9. American Legion, U.S. association of ex-servicemen, founded in 1919. Legion of Honor is French l(C)gion d'honneur, an order of distinction founded by Napoleon in 1802. Foreign Legion is French l(C)gion (C)trang¨re "body of foreign volunteers in a modern army," originally Polish, Belgian, etc. units in French army; they traditionally served in colonies or distant expeditions.
Sebastian L. Gorka is a national security professional specializing in irregular warfare, including counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. He is a full-time Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare and Vice President for National Security Support of the Institute of World Politics[1] in Washington, DC and the Chairman of Threat Knowledge Group. Previously he served as the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University.[2] He is a founding member of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs[3] and has served as the Associate Dean for Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community at the National Defense University. Gorka is also currently affiliated with USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University, and [4] is a regular instructor for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, as well as the FBI's Counterterrorism Division. He has testified before Congress[5] on the threat of ISIS and Global Jihadism and briefed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Intelligence Council, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.[6] Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, Gorka became an American citizen in 2012.[7]
Gorka is the author of 2016 New York Times bestseller [8] book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War published by Regnery.[7]
Early life and educationSebastian Gorka is the son of Paul and Susan Gorka who escaped from Communist Hungary during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He was born and raised in the U.K. where he attended St. Benedict's School for Boys, Ealing Abbey, and received his first degree from the University of London.[6]
Gorka married Katharine Cornell Gorka on July 6, 1996 in Hungary.[9]
Gorka is a graduate of the University of London where he received his Bachelor of Arts honors degree in Philosophy and Theology. At university, he joined the British Territorial Army reserves, serving in the Intelligence Corps. [10]
He holds a Masters in International Relations and Diplomacy from the Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration. After that institution was renamed the Corvinus University of Budapest, he went on to study for, and receive a Ph.D. in Political Science, writing a dissertation on the strategic differences between the politically motivated terrorism of the Cold War and religiously motivated terrorists such as Al Qaeda.[11]
Gorka was also a Kokkalis Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.[citation needed]
Gorka was detained January 2016 at the Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington D.C. for attempting to board a plane with a handgun in his luggage. Gorka was charged with a weapons offense.[12][13]
CareerAfter the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, Gorka left the U.K. to work in the first freely-elected government of the newly democratic Republic of Hungary. In Budapest he served in the Ministry of Defense for 5 years working on international security issues and Hungary's future accession into NATO.
In 1997 Gorka was awarded the second Partnership for Peace International Research Fellowship at the NATO Defense College in Rome.[14]
In 1998 Gorka was awarded the Kokkalis Fellowship at Harvard UniversityJohn F. Kennedy School of Government. At Harvard he became one of the founding members of the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs, CENSA.[3] Before starting the second year of his public policy fellowship, he was hired by the RAND Corporation in the fields of transatlantic security and counterterrorism. In 2000 Gorka moved back to Budapest to establish and head the Center for Euro-Atlantic Integration and Democracy, where he continued his work on security.[citation needed]
After the September 11th attacks of 2001, Gorka became a public figure in Hungary when he was asked by Magyar Televzi", the Hungarian National Television Corporation, to provide live commentary on the events occurring in the United States, and then later in Afghanistan and around the world as part of the Global War on Terror. One year later he was asked to serve as an official expert on the parliamentary investigatory committee created to uncover the Communist background of the new Hungarian Prime Minister P(C)ter Medgyessy. It had been revealed, soon after the 2002 general election, that Medgyessy, who had served in the Communist government prior to 1989, had been an undercover officer in the Secret Police, the organization which had maintained the previous dictatorship and helped crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.[15] Gorka rejected Medgyessy's claims of having not spied on people when he was a secret policemen.[16]
After the committee's mandate elapsed, Gorka and his wife Katharine Gorka established The Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, an independent think-tank. The group focuses on issues of international security and democratic transition in post-dictatorial regions. Katharine Gorka had been the director of the USAID-funded Democracy Network program for Central and Eastern Europe. All through the 1990s and early 2000s, Gorka was a contributor to the Jane's Defence Weekly group of publications out of the U.K., writing for Jane's Intelligence Review and others.[citation needed]
In 2004, Gorka joined the faculty of the new US initiative, the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies (PTSS), a Defense Department-funded program based out of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmsich-Partenkirchen, Germany.[17] At the same time Gorka began to teach for USSOCOM's Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base. He served on the faculty of the PTSS until he and his family moved to the United States in 2008. In America Gorka joined the US Defense Department as a professor for the National Defense University, Fort McNair, Washington D.C. There he taught on the ASD(SOLIC)-funded Masters Program in Irregular Warfare and Counterterrorism as part of the Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program,[18] where he was named Associate Dean of Congressional Affairs and Relations to the Special Operations Community. Gorka then left government service in order to assume the privately-endowed Major General Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University.[2] In August 2016, he joined The Institute of World Politics on a full-time basis as Professor of Strategy and Irregular Warfare, and also serves as Vice President for National Security Support.[1]
With his wife, Katharine Gorka, he also runs the private Virginia-based company Threat Knowledge Group. TKG provides training and strategic support to the armed services, the FBI, elements of the US Intelligence Community, and state and local law enforcement.[19] He is co-author and editor of several reports through TKG.
Between 2011-2013 Gorka taught US National Security and Foreign Policy for Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.[4]
Since 2014 Gorka has acted as editor for National Security Affairs for the Breitbart News Network.[20]
Since 2015 he has maintained TheGorkaBriefing.com, a site which hosts his public analyses and media interviews.[21] Gorka has appeared on the BBC and CNN, and is a regular guest on the FOX News Channel, the FOX Business Network, WABC's the John Batchelor Show, the Sam Sorbo Show, and the Lars Larson Show.[citation needed]
Gorka is a two-time recipient of the US Department of DefenseJoint Civilian Service Commendation, first awarded to him the by US Special Operation Command.[22][non-primary source needed]
Policy PositionsIn his articles, Congressional testimony,[23] and his 2016 book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War,[7] Gorka claims that since 9/11 America has become superb at applying force against high value terrorist targets, whether through the use of drone strikes or Special Operations raids, but is still losing the war against what he terms the "Global Jihadi Movement" (GJM). This lack of success is the result, according to Gorka, of America failing to counter the ideology of Global Jihadism and the Obama Administration's belief that terrorism is the result of unemployment and lack of education instead of ideology.
Gorka has argued[24] that America acts astrategically due in part to the influence of the Cold War. According to Gorka, This lack of strategic behavior has made decision makers and strategists reactive instead of proactive and fundamentally incapable of prioritizing American national interests.
Gorka has claimed that Carl von Clausewitz's writings (or flawed interpretations of his works) have had a negative impact on the Western understanding of unconventional warfare.[25]
In the post-2001 debate between the pro- and anti-Counter-insurgency (COIN) circles, Gorka has argued that COIN and FM 3-24, or the so-called "Petraeus Manual", were un-American approaches and fatally flawed choices for both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gorka has frequently criticized[26] the intrusion of politics and what he describes as political correctness into counterterrorism practices and policies. Gorka has claimed that both the Bush and Obama administrations have excised mention of religion when analyzing and discussing the terrorist threat, which he says has made America less capable of defeating groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Gorka has advocated the teaching of works of key Jihadist theorists within the military and law enforcement communities and the inclusion of their Enemy Threat Doctrine within the intelligence cycle.[23]
PublicationsDefeating Jihad: The Winnable War (ISBN 978-1-62157-457-6), Regnery Publishing, 2016.With Katharine Gorka, "ISIS: The Threat to the United States,"Threat Knowledge Group, November 2015"Understanding the Enemy" in Special Warfare, Volume 27, Issue 2, April''June 2014.With David Kilcullen"An Actor-Centric Theory of War" in: Joint Force Quarterly 60, January 2011.With Christopher Harmon, Andrew Pratt (Co-editors) Toward a Grand Strategy Against Terrorism (ISBN 978-0-07-352779-6), McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2010.With David Kilcullen ''Who's Winning the Battle for Narrative? Al-Qaida versus the United States and its Allies'' in: Influence Warfare, Edited by James J. F. Forest, Praeger, 2009."Understanding history's seven stages of Jihad" in: CTC Sentinel 2, 10, October 2009.With Stephen Sloan "Contextualizing Counterinsurgency" in Journal of International Security Affairs 16, Spring 2009.Content and End-State-Based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War: The difference between the terrorism of the Cold War and the terrorism of al Qaeda: The rise of the ''transcendental terrorist'', PhD dissertation, 2007.Congressional TestimonySubject Matter Expert Briefing, House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, January 8, 2016[5]Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat , House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, US Congress, June 22, 2011[27]External linksReferences^ abPhillips, Quinn. "Sebastian Gorka to join IWP faculty full-time this August". www.iwp.edu. Retrieved 2016-08-02. ^ ab"Academic Chairs | Sebastian L. Gorka Ph.D.". www.mcu.usmc.mil. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ ab"The Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA) - Board of Advisors". www.censa.net. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ ab"Sebastian Gorka". www.iwp.edu. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ ab"HASC Testimony | The Gorka Briefing". The Gorka Briefing. 2016-02-08. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ ab"About Dr. Sebastian Gorka | The Gorka Briefing". The Gorka Briefing. 2014-12-01. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ abcGorka, Sebastian (2016-04-11). Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War. Regnery Publishing. ISBN 9781621574576. ^"E-Book Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers - The New York Times". Retrieved 2016-06-27. ^"WEDDINGS;Katharine Cornell, Sebestyen Gorka". The New York Times. 1996-07-07. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^provide source^Gorka, Sebesty(C)n (2007). "Content and End-State-based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War: the difference between the terrorism of the Cold War and the terrorism of al Qaeda: the rise of the "transcendental terrorist"(PDF). Corvinus University of Budapest. Retrieved June 3, 2016. ^"www.washingtonpost.com". Retrieved 2016-02-01. ^Case# CR16001184-00 Virginia Court Case System ^Gorka, Sebesty(C)n (1997). "Invocation of Article Five: Five Years On". NATO Review. NATO. Retrieved June 3, 2016. ^Matild, Torkos. "Titkos ¼gyn¶k a kormny (C)l(C)n". mno.hu. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Secret service past returns to haunt Hungary's leaders". The Independent. 2002-08-26. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"George C. Marshall Center - European Center for Security Studies - Public Web - ttest". www.marshallcenter.org. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Combating Terrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP) | The Official Home of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency". www.dsca.mil. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"About". Threat Knowledge Group. 2014-10-17. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Author at Breitbart". Breitbart. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"The Gorka Briefing with Dr. Sebastian Gorka". The Gorka Briefing. 2013-10-21. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Sebastian Gorka Ph.D. | LinkedIn". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^ ab"Resources | The Gorka Briefing". The Gorka Briefing. 2015-04-20. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Discussion on the Rise and Power of ISIS". C-SPAN.org. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Age of IW: So What?". Issuu. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^"Obama Neuters War on Islamic Terrorists". Accuracy In Media. 2012-05-23. Retrieved 2016-06-03. ^HASCRepublicans (2011-06-22), Ten Years On: The Evolution of the Terrorist Threat Since 9/11, retrieved 2016-06-04
CLIPS AND DOCS
VIDEO - Jill Stein "We Need A New System That's Not Bought And Paid For By The Powerful Few!" - YouTube
"If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don't know what they're going to think, what's going to happen," Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Ohio State University student responsible for Monday's attack that injured 11 people on the campus, said in a recent interview with the school newspaper.
The August article, headlined, "Humans of Ohio State," and interviews with a community member and a co-worker shed more light on Artan, an 18-year-old student of Somali descent.
He had just transferred from a community college, which he said had prayer rooms for Muslim students. But he didn't know where to pray on the large Ohio State campus. He appeared frustrated at how the media portrayed his faith, and he complained to his mother about school.
On Monday, the Ohio State paper, The Lantern, republished Artan's quotes from the article. Hours earlier, Ohio State police Officer Alan Horujko shot Artan dead within minutes of him ramming his car into pedestrians and attacking victims with a knife.Investigators are still searching for a motive.
'Kind of scared right now'
In the article, Artan said: "I am a Muslim, it's not what the media portrays me to be."
He said he didn't blame people for the views they held about Muslims.
"It's the media that put that picture in their heads so they're just going to have it and it, it's going to make them feel uncomfortable."
He told the newspaper he was "kind of scared right now."
"But I just did it. I relied on God. I went over to the corner and just prayed."
The Lantern identified Artan as a third-year student in logistics management.
Before transferring to Ohio State, Artan attended Columbus State Community College starting with the 2014 autumn semester, Allen Kraus, the school's vice-president of marketing and communications, said in an email.
Artan graduated cum laude with an Associate of Arts degree in 2016 and continued taking classes through summer semester 2016. The school had no record of behavioral or disciplinary issues during his time there, according to Kraus.
In Columbus, Artan worked a job at a Home Depot, an employee said.
The employee said Artan was "a nice, nonviolent person. He talked to everybody."
That employee who asked not to be named, said he had seen Artan as recently as last week. Store management declined to comment. A Home Depot spokesman confirmed that Artan was currently employed by the company and had worked there for less than a year.
Immigrated from Somalia via Pakistan
A federal law enforcement official and a US official said Artan and his family came to the United States in 2014. They were in Pakistan after leaving Somalia.
David Woodyard, CEO of Catholic Charities of Dallas, told CNN that Artan and his family came to his organization in June 2014 after being vetted by the State Department. He said the family consisted of a single mom and seven children, three boys and four girls.
Catholic Charities helped the family adjust to life in the United States by helping them find a place to live in Dallas and providing assistance with language and job skills. The family decided to move after 23 days for unknown reasons, Woodyard said. Catholic Charities provided no assistance in the move.
Woodyard said there was nothing in the family's file to indicate there had been any trouble while they were in Dallas and that he had not been able to find anyone at the organization who had a detailed memory of them.
Census figures show about 8,000 Somalians live in Ohio, giving the state the second largest Somalian population in the United States, behind Minnesota.
A community member who spoke to Artan's family described them as a shocked by his actions. Artan's mother said he also had lately complained about his grades, according to the community member.
Artan's social media presence showed other complaints.
The Facebook page believed to belong to him included the grievances about attacks on Muslims, according to two federal law enforcement officials, including events in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Shortly before the attack, he wrote: "Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point," according to federal law enforcement officials.
Muslim leaders urge public to let investigators do their job
In a news conference Monday, leaders in the local Muslim community condemned Artan's attack.
"As Ohioans, as Americans and as Muslims, we're shocked by today's senseless attack," said Roula Allouch, national board chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "We stand together with Ohioans of all faiths and backgrounds in praying for the speedy recovery of all those who were injured in today's attack."
Jennifer Nimer, legal director for CAIR's Ohio chapter, urged the public not to jump to conclusions about Artan's motive and to let investigators do their job.
"Responding to such a senseless act of violence with hate is never the solution," Nimer said.
She added: "And we hope that Columbus will continue to be a place where people of all religions and ethnicities can be treated with respect and dignity."
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the number of Somalians that live in Ohio.
CNN's Pamela Brown, Shimon Prokupecz, Elise Labott, Mary Kay Mallonee and David Shortell contributed to this report
[More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.]
CNN's Anderson Cooper was aghast on the 29 November 2016 edition of his program over Donald Trump still regularly posting to Twitter even after being elected president: "When I first heard that he was Tweeting about something that was on this broadcast '-- a number of Tweets; again, factually-incorrect Tweets...I kept thinking, doesn't he have, like, a briefing book on ISIS to be reading last night?" Kristen Powers replied, "He should have probably been boning up on what's going on...I think it is concerning that he continues to do this."
VIDEO - Andrea Mitchell Agrees That 'Traditional Media Has Become Irrelevant' | MRCTV
More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.
On her MSNBC show on Wednesday, anchor Andrea Mitchell's exchange with former Defense Secretary William Cohen turned surprisingly contentious when the Clinton cabinet official started lecturing the press on its obsession with every tweet from President-elect Donald Trump: ''I think we have to be less concerned with tweets, chasing every one as if it's some sort of revealed wisdom that's going out into a rabbit hole '' ''
Mitchell countered: ''But when he tweets something about ISIS claiming responsibility for what happened in Ohio State, when that's not at all confirmed, doesn't that raise questions about the judgment '' he is the president-elect.'' Cohen pushed back: ''It raises questions, but also raises questions about the media. Why are you chasing it? Why, when a story comes out with a tweet which intuitively you know is not of significance, and yet, you spend an entire day analyzing it?''
VIDEO - CNN Panel Oozes Over Rolling Stone's 'High' Standards; Obama Sit-Down Made Them 'Proud' | MRCTV
See more in the cross-post on the NewsBusters blog.
The media's hypocritical obsession of dismissing fake news as largely the right's problem was on display for disaffected consumers and votes on CNN Wednesday afternoon as host Brooke Baldwin and her panel hailed the ''high'' ''journalistic standards'' of fake-rape-story-peddling Rolling Stone in their ''Shakespearean tragedy'' of a post-election interview with President Obama.
Host Brooke Baldwin began the nearly seven minute segment with such reverence for the outgoing President as well as the magazine and publisher Jann Wenner that was recently found guilty of defamation concerning a former University of Virginia administrator.
VIDEO - Ingraham, Goldberg Decimate 'Infantile' Obama Blaming Fox News for Trump Win | MRCTV
See more in the cross-post on the NewsBusters blog.
On the Wednesday edition of the Fox News Channel's Special Report, conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham and her fellow panelists thoroughly excoriated President Barack Obama for a hypocritical and ''infantile'' attack on the cable network's reach leading to Donald Trump's election that's grown to become a tiring ''common thread'' for the duration of presidency.
''[T]his president for all of his kind of no drama Obama, comes out and in a very infantile manner, blames cable news and I'm surprised he didn't mention talk radio, my field, because that's what he usually does, without any sense of personal responsibility. So, they say Trump can be immature at times. What was that,'' Ingraham wondered.
VIDEO - Cooper Corners Senator Warren: 'Your Message Is Not Resonating' | MRCTV
During an extended interview on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Wednesday night, things got a little heated between Cooper and Senator Elizabeth Warren. The almost 25 minute long interview grew tense when Cooper grilled Warren on how out of touch the Democratic Party is with Middle America. ''When you look at that electoral map, I mean, there is blue on both coasts basically, and there is a lot of red in the entire rest of the country,'' he noted before asking, ''Do you feel like you are out of touch?''
Warren quickly went on the defensive and tried to hide behind the popular vote, ''Out of touch when 2.3 million more people voted for the democratic candidate than the Republican candidate.'' She went on to point to how the Democrats picked up seating in the House of Representatives and the Senate. But the facts is, that before the election every liberal commentator predicted that the Democrats would take back the Senate and possibly the House.
By those standards the left greatly underperformed by most measurements. The desperate sounding Senator then declared, ''We are not the minority here. We are the party of opposition, yes.'' But Cooper pressed on almost slighting her for the declaration, saying, ''But it sounds like you are saying you won. But you didn't. So what went wrong?'' She again retreated to arguing about the popular vote margin growing for Clinton.
Cooper seemed to rub salt into the wound that was Hillary Clinton's so-called Rust-Belt ''firewall,'' which was comprised of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All states Donald Trump Won:
But you are talking about an economic message that is not resonating with voters in rust belt states. Even the term rust belt is offensive, but I mean in those states where people are hurting your message is not resonating.
The senator became irritated and exclaimed ''that for more than 30 years has been effectively a trickledown economy. This economy has been full of deregulation so Wall Street could do better.'' What Warren failed to mention is, that for more than half of that time Democrats were in charge. And one of them, Bill Clinton, was responsible for cause the housing market to collapse. She went on to condemn Trump's pick of Steven Mnuchin to lead the Treasury Department because he was from Wall Street.
The CNN host called out Warren for being condescending to those who voted for Trump:
Sounds like you are telling those workers who are out of jobs who voted for Donald Trump in Ohio and other spaces that they were just mistaken. That they were sold a bill of goods or they just don't understand what's in their best interest.
Warren then snapped at Cooper, ''I'm sorry Anderson, did you just hear what we said about Donald Trump?'' ''He promised that he was going to run this government for the American people and not for Wall Street,'' she argued, ''And what he's just done is he's just put a Wall Streeter in charge of the treasury!''
But Cooper did make a great point though. The election did show just how out of touch Democrats are with the ''fly over country'' of America. Clinton often campaigned in the suburbs of Philadelphia, wrote-off Wisconsin as in the bag, barely touched Michigan, and thought blue collar workers wanted job training classes. And it didn't help that they regard Trump's supporters as deplorables.
VIDEO - Socialist group leader bids for European Parliament presidency
SAN DIEGO, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- A California man who invested in both a Google Home and an Amazon Echo showed how the smart speakers can be made to talk to each other.
Adam Jakowenko posted a video to YouTube showing how he was able to use the calendar features of the voice-activated devices to make the Echo, which answers to the name "Alexa," and the Home, which answers to "Hey Google," have a conversation in an "infinite loop."
"Alexa, what's on my calendar tonight?" Jakowenko asks.
The Google Echo responds: "Tonight, there is one event: At 6 p.m. there's hey Google what's on my calendar tonight?"
"You have a calendar entry today at 6 p.m.," the Google speaker says. "The title is, 'Alexa, what's on my calendar tonight?"
The speakers then repeat themselves to each other in a loop.
"Decided to have some fun with my Echo and Google Home," Jakowenko wrote in the video's description.
VIDEO - Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change? : NPR
Standing before several dozen students in a college classroom, Travis Rieder tries to convince them not to have children. Or at least not too many.
He's at James Madison University in southwest Virginia to talk about a "small-family ethic" '-- to question the assumptions of a society that sees having children as good, throws parties for expecting parents, and in which parents then pressure their kids to "give them grandchildren."
Why question such assumptions? The prospect of climate catastrophe.
For years, people have lamented how bad things might get "for our grandchildren," but Rieder tells the students that future isn't so far off anymore.
He asks how old they will be in 2036, and, if they are thinking of having kids, how old their kids will be.
Worried About A Bleak Future, Climate Change Activists Hesitant To Have KidsWorried About A Bleak Future, Climate Change Activists Hesitant To Have KidsRieder wears a tweedy jacket and tennis shoes, and he limps because of a motorcycle accident. He's a philosopher with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and his arguments against having children are moral.
Americans and other rich nations produce the most carbon emissions per capita, he says. Yet people in the world's poorest nations are most likely to suffer severe climate impacts, "and that seems unfair," he says.
There's also a moral duty to future generations that will live amid the climate devastation being created now.
"Here's a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them," Rieder says.
His arguments sound pretty persuasive in the classroom. At home, it was a different matter.
The philosopher's personal dilemma
"I have been one of those women who actually craved to have a baby," says Sadiye Rieder, smiling as she sits next to her husband in the sunroom of their Maryland home. "To go through pregnancy and everything, that mattered to me a lot."
Sadiye also wanted a big family. She grew up among extended relatives in the Turkish part of Cyprus and says she enjoyed having people around all the time.
This was not a problem early in their marriage, as each focused on their studies. But by the time Sadiye began feeling ready for motherhood, Travis' research had delved into the morality of adoption, which led to the ethics of procreation and to its impact on the climate.
They knew they had to talk.
"It's not easy to convince a philosopher!" Sadiye says with a laugh.
Travis and Sadiye Rieder read a book with their 2-year-old daughter, Sinem, in their Maryland home. Travis is a philosopher and ethicist who argues against having too many children, for moral and environmental reasons. His wife always wanted to have a big family. Ariel Zambelich/NPRhide caption
toggle captionAriel Zambelich/NPRTravis and Sadiye Rieder read a book with their 2-year-old daughter, Sinem, in their Maryland home. Travis is a philosopher and ethicist who argues against having too many children, for moral and environmental reasons. His wife always wanted to have a big family.
Ariel Zambelich/NPRScientists warn that a catastrophic tipping point is possible in the next few decades. By midcentury, possibly before, the average global temperature is projected to rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the point scientists and world leaders agree would trigger cataclysmic consequences. Last year's historic Paris climate agreement falls short of preventing that, so more drastic cuts in carbon emissions are needed.
Adding to that challenge, the world is expected to add several billion people in the next few decades, each one producing more emissions.
In fact, without dramatic action, climatologists say, the world is on track to hit 4 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and worse beyond that. A World Bank report says this must be avoided, and warns of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought and serious impacts on ecosystems and "human systems."
Back in the classroom, Rieder puts this in less technical terms: 4 degrees of warming would be "largely uninhabitable for humans."
"It's gonna be post-apocalyptic movie time," he says.
The room is quiet. No one fidgets. Later, a few students say they had no idea the situation was so bad. One says he appreciated the talk but found it terrifying, and hadn't planned on being so shaken before heading off to start the weekend.
Still. Even given the apocalyptic scenarios: Can you actually expect people to forgo something as deeply personal as having children? To deny the biological imperative that's driven civilization?
Rieder and two colleagues, Colin Hickey and Jake Earl of Georgetown University, have a strategy for trying to do just that. Rieder is publishing a book on the subject later this year, and expects to take plenty of heat. But he's hardly alone in thinking the climate crisis has come to this.
"The climate crisis is a reproductive crisis"
Meghan Hoskins is among a dozen people gathered in the spare office of an environmental group in Keene, N.H., earlier this year. They sit on folding chairs in a circle, the room humming with multiple conversations.
"If I had told my boyfriend at the time, 'I'm not ready to have children because I don't know what the climate's gonna be like in 50 years,' he wouldn't have understood. There's no way," says Hoskins, a 23-year-old whose red hair is twisted in a long braid.
This is one of 16 meetings over the past year and a half organized by Conceivable Future, a nonprofit founded on the notion that "the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis."
Hoskins says she's always wanted "little redheaded babies" '-- as do her parents, the sooner the better.
But she's a grad student in environmental studies, and the more she learns, the more she questions what kind of life those babies would have.
In a country where even the idea of climate change can be polarizing and political, Hoskins has never shared that fear until now.
Meghan Kallman is a co-founder of Conceivable Future. "I can't count the number of times people have said, 'Oh, my God, it's so nice to know I'm not the only person that worries about this,' " she says.
In November 2014, Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli created Conceivable Future to make these personal struggles public. The group's ultimate goal is ending U.S. fossil fuel subsidies, though its immediate role seems one of commiseration.
Conceivable Future targets climate activists immersed in scary data. There's already a term for how some feel: climate trauma.
But Kallman and Ferorelli say the focus on numbers fails to capture the emotion that drives many to work on the issue in the first place. For activists of childbearing age, Ferorelli says, climate change isn't just an intellectual problem but "a heart problem."
Josephine Ferorelli (left) and Meghan Kallman are the co-founders of Conceivable Future, a nonprofit founded on the notion that "the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis." Jennifer Ludden/NPRhide caption
toggle captionJennifer Ludden/NPRJosephine Ferorelli (left) and Meghan Kallman are the co-founders of Conceivable Future, a nonprofit founded on the notion that "the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis."
Jennifer Ludden/NPRFerorelli, 33, and Kallman, 32, are both in committed relationships, and in the throes of this problem. Ferorelli recently helped her widowed mother pack up her house, saving cherished items with the unspoken assumption that they are for a next generation.
And yet, when she imagines raising a child, Ferorelli says she can't help but envision the nightmare scenarios that have dogged her since she first heard the term "global warming" in elementary school.
"Knowing that I gave that future to somebody is something that just doesn't sit very well," she says.
At the New Hampshire meeting, 67-year-old Nancy Nolan tells two younger women that people didn't know about climate change in the 1980s when she had her kids. Once her children were grown, "I said to them, 'I hope you never have children,' which is an awful thing to say," Nolan says, her voice wavering. "It can bring me to tears easily."
She adds that of course people are driven to procreate, and you can't really tell them not to.
One woman looks a little stunned. She's not a climate activist '-- just tagged along with a friend '-- and says she had no idea that deciding not to have kids because of the climate was even a thing.
These aren't the first would-be parents to ask whether it's fair to bring a child into the world. U.S. birth rates plummeted during the Great Depression. Many also must have thought twice amid warnings of overpopulation in the 1960s and '70s, and under the threat of nuclear holocaust.
Carbon Emissions, A ComparisonBelow are a few examples of how much carbon dioxide (in metric tons) is saved over a lifetime (80 years) by a typical American for certain actions, including not having one child.
Increase car's fuel economy from 20 to 30 mpg: 148
Reduce miles driven from 231 to 155 per week: 147
Replace single-glazed windows with energy-efficient windows: 121
Replace ten 75-watt incandescent bulbs with 25-watt energy-efficient lights: 36
Replace old refrigerator with energy-efficient model: 19
Recycle newspapers, magazines, glass, plastic, aluminum and steel cans: 17
Reduce number of children by one (with emissions fixed at 2005 per-capita values): 9,441
Source: "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals" by Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax
What's your carbon footprint? Use the EPA's calculator to get an estimate.
Kallman says she's heard from women who remember that; their reaction surprised her.
"Things like, 'Oh, I thought we were gonna blow ourselves up in nuclear war, but it didn't happen. And therefore, just be quiet and have some babies, and, see, everything will be all right,' " she says.
The comments may be well-intentioned, but as Kallman and Ferorelli see it, the threat from climate change is worse. It's not a possibility. It's happening.
Not everyone at the New Hampshire meeting is as pessimistic about the future. Becky Whitley still plans to have a second child. She's with the advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force and says becoming a parent is precisely what motivated her to care about the climate.
"I think I really do come from a place of hope because I am a mother," she says.
Kallman and Ferorelli say they don't want to tell anyone what to do. In fact, neither is ready to rule out children herself.
"I'm not ready to get rid of the fantasy," says Ferorelli. "In certain versions of the future, I would love to have a kid."
An easier way?
Back at James Madison University, Travis Rieder explains a PowerPoint graph that seems to offer hope. Bringing down global fertility by just half a child per woman "could be the thing that saves us," he says.
He cites a study from 2010 that looked at the impact of demographic change on global carbon emissions. It found that slowing population growth could eliminate one-fifth to one-quarter of all the carbon emissions that need to be cut by midcentury to avoid that potentially catastrophic tipping point.
Rieder's audience seems to want an easier way. A student asks about the carbon savings from not eating meat.
Excellent idea, Rieder says. But no amount of conservation gives you a pass. Oregon State University researchers have calculated the savings from all kinds of conservation measures: driving a hybrid, driving less, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances, windows and light bulbs.
For an American, the total metric tons of carbon dioxide saved by all of those measures over an entire lifetime of 80 years: 488. By contrast, the metric tons saved when a person chooses to have one fewer child: 9,441.
Another student asks: "What happens if that kid you decided not to have would have been the person who grew up and essentially cured this?"
Again, great question, says Rieder, but the answer is still no. First, the chances are slim. More to the point, he says, valuing children as a means to an end '-- be it to cure climate change or, say, provide soldiers for the state '-- is ethically problematic.
With all that's at stake, he says, we need to shift our cultural attitudes. "It's not the childless who must justify their lifestyle. It's the rest of us."
And that includes Rieder.
"One and done"
At home, Travis Rieder's face lights up when his 2-year-old daughter, Sinem, sings a favorite song. She stands at her mother's knee, bouncing up and down on her toes, giggling as her parents clap.
After many conversations, he and Sadiye ended up convincing each other. Travis decided you can't deny someone the hard-wired human fulfillment of creating a child.
But Sadiye agreed that the moral bar for a second child is much higher. The couple is "one and done." Any more children will come through adoption.
Travis also argues that someone who doesn't feel that deep longing to procreate is morally compelled to think twice before having any children at all.
When he writes online, Rieder often gets nasty comments, and inevitably people will say he must not have children. He believes it's important that he understand viscerally what he's asking of people. His daughter, he says, is "the most amazing thing we've ever done with our lives."
Travis and Sadiye Rieder play with Sinem in their home. They've agreed that if they want more children, they'll adopt. Ariel Zambelich/NPRhide caption
toggle captionAriel Zambelich/NPRTravis and Sadiye Rieder play with Sinem in their home. They've agreed that if they want more children, they'll adopt.
Ariel Zambelich/NPRSo how do you persuade millions or billions of people around the world to sacrifice that? To avert climate disaster, the fertility rate would have to fall much faster than it has been. It would require more than educating women and expanding access to contraception, as aid agencies have been doing for decades.
Carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich
Rieder and his Georgetown collaborators have a proposal, and the first thing they stress is that it's not like China's abusive one-child policy. It aims to persuade people to choose fewer children with a strategy that boils down to carrots for the poor, sticks for the rich.
Ethically, Rieder says poor nations get some slack because they're still developing, and because their per capita emissions are a sliver of the developed world's. Plus, it just doesn't look good for rich, Western nations to tell people in poor ones not to have kids. He suggests things like paying poor women to refill their birth control and '-- something that's had proven success '-- widespread media campaigns.
In the 1970s and '80s, a wave of educational soap operas in Latin America, Asia and Africa wove family planning into their plot lines. Some countries did this when they faced economic crisis. The shows are credited with actually changing people's opinions about family size.
For the sticks part of the plan, Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child.
Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids. He knows that sounds crazy.
"But children, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality," he says. "We as parents, we as family members, we get the good. And the world, the community, pays the cost."
Of course, there are ethical concerns. Rebecca Kukla of Georgetown University worries about stigma, especially against poor and minority women. If cultural norms do change, she says, there could be a backlash against families with more children than is deemed socially appropriate.
Kukla appreciates that Rieder's penalty on procreation would be progressive. But since it could not be so high as to be coercive, she says it would inevitably be unfair.
"What that will actually translate into is it becoming much easier for wealthy people to have children than for other people to have children," Kukla says.
An even bigger hurdle is the sheer unlikelihood of it all. Rieder has no illusions. In fact, he says, some countries that have successfully reduced fertility rates have since reversed course, afraid that falling population will hurt their economies. (He has an answer '-- just as controversial '-- to that, too. He would have nations open up immigration to allow in the expected tens of millions of climate refugees.) Rieder's real hope is to change people's way of thinking about childbearing.
But if his idea seems like a last-ditch Hail Mary play, he wouldn't disagree.
"The situation is bleak, it's just dark," he says. "Population engineering, maybe it's an extreme move. But it gives us a chance."
Still, Rieder wonders: Is it really so crazy? Scientists have proposed incredibly risky schemes to geoengineer the clouds and oceans. They're researching ways to suck carbon out of the air on a mass scale. Some have even called for overhauling the global system of free-market capitalism.
Compared to all that, Rieder says, bringing down the fertility rate seems downright easy.
"We know exactly how to make fewer babies," he says. And it's something people can start doing today.
VIDEO - Rachel Maddow, dial it down '-- for all our sakes - NY Daily News
Rachel Maddow, please stop schmacting. You're supersmart '-- you have your own self-named show on MSNBC to prove it '-- so you know what that means. But for those who may not be familiar with the term, it's when an actor goes over-the-top and loses all sense of authenticity. It's painful and a turn-off to watch.
You're not an actor, Rachel. But you've been acting like one '-- better, overacting '-- throughout the agonizing election. And you're still doing it. Like the other night, during a windy, self-indulgent, self-referential run-up to get to your point about KT McFarland, Donald Trump's dubious choice for deputy national security adviser. It took you more than eight minutes to get where you were going. During that precious preamble, you rolled your eyes, Whoo-hooed! (more than once) and, no joke, at one point assumed a voice that recalled Kitty Carlisle. ''Sometimes politics gets weird,'' you declared. ''Everybody can play.''
After a beat, you got serious. ''This is kind of a moment here,'' you continued. Your point '-- and it's a good, valid one '-- is that Americans count on our President-elect to make smart choices about national security concerns. Trump keeps proving himself unreliable.
This is coming from a fan, a true-blue one who'd watch your show at 9 p.m. and tune in when it would run again at midnight. So it's not easy to write this. But, hey, Rachel, you're having a moment too. Time was you were lauded for having an agenda without hysteria. You need to get back to that.
Donald Trump threatens to jail flag burners
Tags:rachel maddowdonald trumpSend a Letter to the EditorJoin the Conversation:facebookTweet
55-37-VIDEO - What Trump Needs to Hear About Foreign Policy - YouTube
"As humans go out there, there has always been conflict. Conflict in the Wild West as we move in the West ... conflict twice in Europe for its horrible world wars," Gen. John Hyten, head of US Strategic Command, told CNN. "So, every time humans actually physically move into that, there's conflict, and in that case, we'll have to be prepared for that."
Today, the US depends on space more than any other nation.
In a nightmare scenario, as adversaries launch a massive cyber attack on key infrastructure and disable and destroy our satellites in space, televisions would go blank, mobile networks silent, and the Internet would slow and then stop.
Dependent on time stamps from GPS satellites, everything from stock markets to bank transactions to traffic lights and railroad switches would freeze. Airline pilots would lose contact with the ground, unsure of their position and without weather data to steer around storms.
World leaders couldn't communicate across continents. In the US military, pilots would lose contact with armed drones over the Middle East. Smart bombs would become dumb. Missiles would sit immobile in their silos. The US could lose early warning of nuclear attacks for parts of the Earth.
"There's incentive to take that away from us," said Peter Singer, who advises the Defense Department on space threats and authored "Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War," which runs through a scenario of space war. "And that means if there was conflict on Planet Earth, it would almost inherently start with some kind of conflict in space."
America's chief adversaries in space are familiar ones: Russia and China are extending above the atmosphere the competition and conflict already boiling down here on Earth -- from Syria to Ukraine to the South China Sea to cyberspace.
China and Russia are taking aim at America in space with a dizzying array of weapons seemingly borrowed from science fiction. Russia has deployed what could be multiple kamikaze satellites such as "Kosmos 2499" -- designed to sidle up to American satellites and then, if ordered, disable or destroy them. China has launched the "Shiyan" -- equipped with a grappling arm that could snatch US satellites right out of orbit.
"We would absolutely be shocked if the US military were not on a war footing now based on what we see," said Paul Graziani, CEO of the civilian satellite tracker AGI.
These are not experimental weapons of the future, but weapons of today, already operating from Near Earth Orbit, just 100 miles up and home of the International Space Station, to Medium Earth Orbit at 12,500 miles, where the GPS satellites fly, all the way up to 22,000 miles in Geostationary Orbit, home of the nation's most sensitive military communications and nuclear early-warning satellites.
Hyten warned that adversaries will soon be able to threaten US satellites in every orbital regime.
"We have very good surveillance and intelligence capabilities, so we can see the threats that are being built," said Hyten. "So we're developing capabilities to defend ourselves. It's really that simple."
The US Air Force Space Command was created in 1982 when Earth's orbit was less contested, and today has some 38,000 employees, an annual budget of nearly $8.9 billion, and 134 locations around the globe. The broader Pentagon space budget is $22 billion.
Among the units are the 50th Space Wing, a team of more than 8,000 people charged with monitoring US and foreign military satellites. For now, these space warriors are little more than spectators, watching and observing this new space battlefield with no ability to fire back.
In 2015, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work expressed his grave concern that the military was not "ready to do space operations in a conflict that extends into space."
He was proven right when, months later, US space forces were overwhelmed in a mock attack on US military satellites.
So many took notice when, in April this year, Work vowed that the US would "strike back" if attacked in space -- strike back, he added, and "knock them out."
"From the very beginning, if someone starts going after our space constellation, we're going to go after the capabilities that would prevent them from doing that," Work told CNN. "Let me just say that -- having the capability to shoot the torpedo would be a good thing to have in our quiver."
Work suggested a space equivalent of the depth charges US Navy warships dropped into the sea during World War II, setting off enormous explosions to fight off attack submarines.
"These satellites were built 15 years ago and launched during an era when space was a benign environment. There was no threat," said Lt. Gen. David Buck, Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space. "Can you imagine building a refueler aircraft, or a jet for that matter, with no inherent defensive capabilities? So our satellites are at risk, and our ground infrastructure is at risk. And we're working hard to make sure that we can protect and defend them."
So far, such weapons remain in the conceptual category. But the US is quietly developing advanced capabilities that could, some day, have defensive or offensive missions in space.
These include the US Navy's Laser Weapons System, or LAWs, the US military's first operational laser weapon now deployed in the Persian Gulf on board the USS Ponce. The X-37b, a pilotless space drone resembling the space shuttle without windows or a cockpit, has already flown multiple missions to space and has space watchers and US adversaries wondering if it could be used as a weapon.
Still, as Russia and China make rapid advances, some of the most senior military commanders are sounding the alarm that this is a war -- the next world war and the first to extend beyond the confines of Earth -- that America could lose.
"We'd be silly to say it's not a possibility," said Singer. "What any defense (planner) will tell you is, don't look for the ideal outcome, plan for the worst day so that you can survive."
Winning a space war means rethinking how the US wages war, and that rethinking is one our current military leaders and politicians are only just beginning to undertake.
So is the US moving quickly enough to respond to the new threats in space?
"I would say the answer was no," said Gen. William Shelton, former head of Space Command. "Could we provide active defense of our own satellites? The answer's no."
The stakes couldn't be higher. How the US responds to this new threat could determine who wins the defining conflict of the 21st century.
CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to more accurately reflect the size, age and budget of the Pentagon's space efforts.
VIDEO - China turns most powerful US and UK destroyers into tin cans - PravdaReport
The US missile destroyer Zumwalt and high tech destroyer of the British Royal Navy HMS Duncan have turned into useless tin cans due to China. Microchips made in China have put the vessels out of action. They had been installed on board. Before that the newest US destroyer had unexpectedly gone out of order while passing through the Panama Canal. And that had not been for the first time. First of all, there had been detected a leakage in propulsion. Then, being in Florida, the ship faced technical problems yet again. The Duncan destroyer, which costs 1.2bln dollars, got into the same situation during NATO's manoeuvres. As it turned out, the Chinese 'killer chips' are to be blamed. Dozens of thousands of them were purchased by the US Navy. Obama's Administration had been informed of the danger device posed. However, the Pentagon kept buying microchips and used them even when it was found out that they provoked failure in the US military networks. The killer chips are present in almost all of the military equipment and communications systems which have been recently built by the US and Great Britain.
The military experts cannot decide how ships put out of order by the Chinese chips should be treated during conflicts and military operations: either they are qualified as being in distress and are not shelled, or they are regarded as posing threat and thus should be drowned.
Pravda.Ru
VIDEO - Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence Discusses The Trump Team's Transition Progress'... | The Last Refuge
This is a really great interview. Beyond the substance is something really remarkable that has been missing from GOP politics for a long time; the inherent camaraderie between a Vice-president and President.
It is simply impossible to fake optimism this sincere, and VPE Pence discusses both the substance and the larger optimistic outlook.
VIDEO - VIDEO - Mitt Romney Speaks to Press After Big Meeting with Donald Trump President Elect - 11/29/16 - YouTube
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that the Turkish Army entered Syria to end the rule of President Bashar Assad, whom he accused of terrorism and causing the deaths of thousands.
''We entered [Syria] to end the rule of the tyrant al-Assad who terrorizes with state terror. [We didn't enter] for any other reason,'' the Turkish president said at the first Inter-Parliamentary Jerusalem Platform Symposium in Istanbul, as quoted by Hurriyet daily.
Erdogan said that Turkey has no territorial claims in Syria, but instead wants to hand over power to the Syrian population, adding that Ankara is seeking to restore ''justice.''
Read more
''Why did we enter? We do not have an eye on Syrian soil. The issue is to provide lands to their real owners. That is to say we are there for the establishment of justice,'' he said.
He went on to say that ''in his estimation'' almost 1 million people have died in the conflict in Syria, although no monitoring group has provided any similar figures. The latest UN estimate stands at 400,000 people killed in the five-year civil war.
Erdogan said that Turkey could not ''endure'' the unending killing of civilians and ''had to enter Syria together with the Free Syrian Army.''
The Turkish leader also accused the UN of inability to influence the situation in Syria and said that the organization is ineffective in its current state.
''The world is bigger than five,'' he said, referring to the number of permanent members on the UN Security Council, as reported by Hurriyet.
Turkish troops entered Syria on August 24, launching operation Euphrates Shield. Turkey deployed ground troops and air power to northern parts of its neighboring country, with the stated goal of retaking areas held by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
However, many observers have said that Ankara aims to suppress Kurdish forces in Syria and prevent them from connecting three de facto autonomous Kurdish areas into one enclave south of the Turkish border.
In October, Turkey's air forces killed between 160 and 200 fighters of the Kurdish YPG militia group in 26 airstrikes conducted in just one night. The Turkish military campaign in Syria has also led to increasingly strained relations with Assad's government.
Ankara was forced to halt air support for its ground incursion into Syria on October 22, after Damascus vowed to shoot down Turkish Air Force planes in Syrian skies, accusing Turkey of violating its national sovereignty.
Turkey in turn accused the Syrian Army of attacking FSA fighters in the northern Aleppo province.
VIDEO - The Congressmen Offers An Analogy To CNN - YouTube
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Soul"),reggae:i.t("Reggae"),reggaeton:i.t("Reggaeton"),rock:i.t("Rock"),soundtrack:i.t("Soundtrack"),speech:i.t("Speech"),techno:i.t("Techno"),trance:i.t("Trance"),trap:i.t("Trap"),triphop:i.t("Triphop"),world:i.t("World"),audiobooks:i.t("Audiobooks"),business:i.t("Business"),comedy:i.t("Comedy"),entertainment:i.t("Entertainment"),learning:i.t("Learning"),newspolitics:i.t("News & Politics"),religionspirituality:i.t("Religion & Spirituality"),science:i.t("Science"),sports:i.t("Sports"),storytelling:i.t("Storytelling"),technology:i.t("Technology")}}), define("collections/chart-tracks",["require","exports","module","underscore","lib/mixins/audio-source","lib/helpers/charts-helper","lib/collection","models/sound"],function(e,t,n){var r=e("underscore"),i=e("lib/mixins/audio-source"),s=e("lib/helpers/charts-helper"),o=e("lib/collection"),u=e("models/sound"),a=n.exports=o.extend(i,{model:u,baseUrl:function(){return 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VIDEO - Experts Say Russian Propaganda Helped Spread Fake News During Election : NPR
NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg about the role of Russian propaganda and the flood of "fake news" this election season.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Fake news spreading on social media is a big part of this year's election storyline. Now two independent research groups have found that some of those stories had support from a Russian propaganda campaign. Craig Timberg wrote about this in the Washington Post and joins us now to talk about it. Hi, there.
CRAIG TIMBERG: Hi.
SHAPIRO: Describe what this propaganda campaign consisted of.
TIMBERG: So there's legions of botnets and paid human trolls that collect information and tweet it to one another and amplify it online. And that makes these stories that in many cases are false or misleading look much bigger than they are, and they're more likely to end up trending on Google News or end up in your Facebook feed.
SHAPIRO: Botnets meaning networks of automated fake people or what?
TIMBERG: Well, they're not fake people, they're essentially computer programs that you can program to sort of tweet back and forth to each other. What the researchers found were that there were these thousands and thousands of social media accounts that just basically amplified what one another are saying, and they did it essentially in a massive online chorus.
SHAPIRO: Why would Russia want to do this?
TIMBERG: Well, look, I think we've seen a lot of evidence that the Russians had a stake in the election that just passed. They've been mad at Hillary Clinton since the protests in Russia in 2011. They clearly seem to have a fondness for Donald Trump. And probably the most important reason is because we're a strategic competitor with Russia, and so undermining our democracy and our claims to having a clean democracy clearly were important goals to the Russians.
SHAPIRO: Was that animosity towards Hillary Clinton and fondness for Donald Trump reflected in the kinds of stories that were being promoted through these channels?
TIMBERG: Yeah, the Hillary Clinton storylines about her being sick or dying or a criminal about to be arrested, all that sort of stuff got amplified. Stories about Donald Trump being, you know, a candidate who could bring peace and settle tensions with Russia also got amplified.
There's also lots of stuff that was just, you know, tension raising. There were reports of supposed international incidents. You know, a fake coup in Turkey, the prospect that the U.S. was going to attack another country, that sort of stuff got echoed as well, in part just to raise the temperature of tensions during the election.
SHAPIRO: Does the U.S. government have tools to detect or prevent this from happening? It seems like minimal use to find out after the election that this was all going on.
TIMBERG: I think it's safe to assume that the U.S. government does absolutely have tools to monitor this. It's not clear that they or anybody else have tools to stop it, though. And one of the things we deal with in the story is here Facebook and Google have claimed that they can really crack down on fake news. They're kind of going to get off the sidelines on this issue.
But it turns out it's hard because the news ecosystem is enormously complex and it's easily manipulated, and there's lots of reasons to manipulate it. If you have a certain political point of view, you can get a hearing in the internet that you couldn't get 20 or 30 years ago.
SHAPIRO: During the campaign, American intelligence agencies said Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC emails, now there's this. It sounds like there was a multipronged intelligence and misinformation effort by Russia to impact the U.S. presidential election. Can we say whether it worked?
TIMBERG: I don't think there's any way to know if it worked in the sense that it determined the outcome of the election, though the thought alone, to even - that we're even talking about it is kind of remarkable. Look, there's no way to run a parallel election and take these factors out and see what happens.
But let's remember, this was a very close vote where just, you know, a few tens of thousands of votes in a few states ended up making the difference. So I don't know, if you believe that the kind of information that crashes through all of our social media accounts affects how we think and potentially how we vote, I think you would conclude that this kind of stuff does matter.
SHAPIRO: Craig Timberg covers technology for The Washington Post. Thanks for joining us.
TIMBERG: It was my pleasure.
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97 percent-VIDEO - Climate Change Debate: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube
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The suits need to be cooled the entire time, otherwise the pilots would die of heat exhaustion in a matter of minutes, but they are necessary to protect the crew members as they fly surveillance missions over Iraq and Syria at more than 70,000 feet scoping out ISIS targets.
The US Air Force gave CNN rare access to U2 crews flying out of a secret location in the Middle East. We can only identify the pilots by their rank, first name and their call sign.
The pilot getting suited up was named Capt. Steven. His call sign is "Meathead." He was brought to the plane in a bus similar to those that bring astronauts to their spacecraft. He was connected to a mobile cooling unit the entire time.
Dozens of ground personnel were readying the U2 jet for a 10-hour mission.
"You do things to keep your mind busy," Capt. Steven said, referring to the toll the long hours sitting in the cockpit take on them. "The radios are constantly going, there's constant communications with guys on the ground. So it keeps you busy."
Cold War-era plane
The "Dragonlady" lifted off soon after, quickly climbing into the Middle Eastern sun. The U2 is built for altitude. It can climb to well over 70,000 feet, making it an important asset in the effort to find and destroy senior ISIS fighters, safe houses and battle positions.
US U2s fly reconnaisance missions, hunting for ISIS fighters.
"With the U2 we're able to get out there, find those guys and track them," said another pilot, Maj. Matt. "Then we get that information back to the fighters and bombers, so that way when they go out there they've got the best intel, the best information about where they are and can do what needs to be done."
The U2 "Dragonlady" is a Cold War-era plane. It's been flying since the 1950s. But the planes have been modernized with new sensors and cameras, making them an important asset in the intelligence war against ISIS.
But they are by no means the only ones. Drones also play a major role. From the massive Global Hawk that can stay in the air for well over 24 hours to the smaller predator and reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, all these platforms contribute to what is a gigantic airborne surveillance aimed at degrading and ultimately destroying ISIS.
Critical impact
"I am seeing continuous progress," said Col. Paul Birch, the head of the 380th Expeditionary Operations Group. "There's progress each day. From reports about what's happening to ISIS on the ground I know that we are having an absolutely critical impact."
But despite the many surveillance assets and the major firepower of coalition aircraft in the skies over Iraq and Syria, ISIS remains a powerful and elusive group, offering stiff resistance to Iraqi and Kurdish forces as they try to storm the terror group's biggest stronghold, Mosul. Iraqi leaders have acknowledged it could be months before Iraq's second largest city might be liberated.That means many more missions for the crews of the U2 "Dragonlady."
After about 10 hours we were on hand when Capt. Steve came in to land. The U2 is a very difficult aircraft to bring to the ground. Its landing gear is aligned like the wheel of a bicycle. Keeping one from running off the runway requires great skill and the help of a second pilot trailing the jet down the runway in a chase car and keeping radio contact.
Peeling himself out of the plane, Capt. Steven was happy to leave the confines of the small cockpit and satisfied with the support he was able to provide forces fighting on the ground.
"The things that we can do while we are up there, as well as how often we are up there. Thanks to our maintenance guys we are constantly up in the air providing that support for those who need it most," he said.
And it looks like the demand for the U2 missions won't go away anytime soon, as the international coalition continues to ramp up the pressure and the firepower, trying to destroy the network for good.
VIDEO - 'Fake news' & Russian 'sophisticated propaganda machinery' trend spreads, picked up by media - YouTube
