Fusion | What’s missing from the press coverage of the Clinton Foundation is a basic question: What do its activities and outcomes reveal about Hillary Clinton’s political values?
Colombiashouldbe the Clinton Foundation’s best case study. Ground zero for the drug wars of the 1980s and 90s, racked by uneven development and low-intensity conflict for half a century, Colombia has received more foundation money and attention than any other nation outside the United States.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have visited the country often and enjoy close relationships with members of Colombia’s ruling party. Colombia has also been home to the vast oil and natural gas holdings of the man who is reportedly the Clinton Foundation’s largest individual donor, Canadian financier Frank Giustra. In short, conditions were right for Colombia to be the shining example of what the Clinton Foundation’s philanthropy can accomplish in the world, and what makes Hillary so proud of its efforts.
TheAmerican Media Institute, a nonprofit news service based in Alexandria, Virginia, partnered with Fusion to send us to Colombia to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s impact. We found ground realities that contrast, often starkly, with the nonprofit’s platitudes about its good work.
Many of the Colombian “success stories” touted on the foundation’s website – the ones specific enough for us to track down – were critical about the foundation’s effect on their lives.Labor leaders and progressive activists say foundation programs caused environmental harm, displaced indigenous people, and that it concentrated a larger share of Colombia’s oil and natural gas reserves in the hands of Giustra, who was involved in a now bankrupt oil company that worked closely with the Clinton Foundation and which used the Colombian military a 1984-stylesurveillance program to smash a strike by its workers.
It was a shocking record that belies the progressive principles on which the Clintons have based their political dynasty and philanthropy, embodied in the Clinton Foundation’s advertising copy: “Everyone deserves a chance to succeed.”
petras-lahaine |Introduction:Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a well-organized, carefully planned operation among the corrupt Brazilian political elite, closely linked to the stock-market, financial institutions and foreign energy companies.
This ‘legislative coup d’état ‘eliminated the democratically-elected ‘political intermediaries’ and installed a regime directly controlled by the CEO’s of leading multi-nationals. The corporate composition of the post-coup regime insured there would be a radical restructuring of the Brazilian economy, with a massive shift from wage support, social spending and public ownership toward profits, a foreign capital take-over of strategic sectors and foreign-domestic elite dominance over the entire economy.
This paper will describe the socio-economic dynamics of the coup and its aftermath, as well as the strategy and program that Brazil’s new rulers will pursue. In the second half of the paper, we will discuss the Workers Party regimes’ policies (under Lulu and Rousseff) that prepared the political and economic ground-work for the right-wing seizure of power.
There are plenty of secondary reasons for this distress, but it seems
to me that the underlying cause is everywhere the same: human beings,
the ultrasocial mammals, whose brains are wired to respond to other
people, are being peeled apart. Economic and technological change play a
major role, but so does ideology. Though our wellbeing is inextricably
linked to the lives of others, everywhere we are told that we will
prosper through competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.
In Britain, men who have spent their entire lives in quadrangles – at
school, at college, at the bar, in parliament – instruct us to stand on
our own two feet. The education system becomes more brutally
competitive by the year. Employment is a fight to the near-death with a
multitude of other desperate people chasing ever fewer jobs. The modern
overseers of the poor ascribe individual blame to economic circumstance.
Endless competitions on television feed impossible aspirations as real opportunities contract.
Consumerism fills the social void. But far from curing the disease of
isolation, it intensifies social comparison to the point at which,
having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. Social media
brings us together and drives us apart, allowing us precisely to
quantify our social standing, and to see that other people have more
friends and followers than we do.
As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett has brilliantly documented,
girls and young women routinely alter the photos they post to make
themselves look smoother and slimmer. Some phones, using their “beauty”
settings, do it for you without asking; now you can become your own
thinspiration. Welcome to the post-Hobbesian dystopia: a war of everyone
against themselves.
rpsych | This article proposes a reformulation of the social brain theory of
schizophrenia. Contrary to those who consider schizophrenia to be an
inherently human condition, we suggest that it is a relatively recent
phenomenon, and that the vulnerability to it remained hidden among our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hence, we contend that schizophrenia is the
result of a mismatch between the post-Neolithic human social environment
and the design of the social brain. We review the evidence from human
evolutionary history of the importance of the distinction between
ingroup and out-group membership that lies at the heart of intergroup
conflict, violence, and xenophobia. We then review the evidence for the
disparities in schizophrenia incidence around the world and for the
higher risk of this condition among immigrants and city dwellers. Our
hypothesis explains a range of epidemiological findings on schizophrenia
related to the risk of migration and urbanization, the improved
prognosis in underdeveloped countries, and variations in the prevalence
of the disorder. However, although this hypothesis may identify the
ultimate causation of schizophrenia, it does not specify the proximate
mechanisms that lead to it. We conclude with a number of testable and
refutable predictions for future research.
thenewcivilrightsmovement | An Unleashed and Unhinged Trump Threaded His Denial Accusations of Sexual Assault With Even Darker, Uglier Rhetoric
Donald Trump delivered one of the most disturbing and fiery speeches of his entire campaign Thursday afternoon to cheering supporters in Florida that was, as many on Twitter noticed, threaded with anti-Semitism, fascism, and sexism.
The Atlantic's Senior Editor tweeted this disturbing section of Trump's speech:
Newsmax | Yesterday, I stopped short of asking Hillary Clinton to fire John Podesta,
her campaign chairman. In light of the latest Wikileaks revelations,
she has no choice but to cut all ties with this man. The man is hell
bent on creating mutiny in the Catholic Church and must therefore be
fired.
We have long known that George Soros is the single most influential
donor to dissident, and anti-Catholic, organizations. Now we know from
Wikileaks what I long have suspected: John Podesta has been the most
influential point man running offense for Soros.
Together, they have sought to manipulate public opinion against the Catholic Church.
In 2012, Sandy Newman, founder of the left-wing group, Voices for Progress, asked Podesta
for advice on how best to "plant the seeds of the revolution." The
revolution he sought was an attempt to sunder the Catholic Church.
Newman, who is Jewish, confessed that he was a rookie at trying to
subvert the Catholic Church. But he was determined to do so. "There
needs to be a Catholic Spring," Newman told Podesta, "in which Catholics
themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the
beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the
Catholic Church."
Podesta not only endorsed the plan to create a revolution within the
Catholic Church — he boasted that he had been working on this for years.
"We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a
moment like this," he said. "Likewise Catholics United. Like most
Spring movements, I think this one will have be bottom up."
He recommended that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend be consulted on this effort.
The evidence is indisputable: Both of these groups, Catholics in
Alliance and Catholics United, were created by Podesta, and funded by
Soros, for the express purpose of staging a revolt within the Catholic
Church.
sltrib | "No American citizen or institution [should] be
labeled by their government as bigoted because of their religious
views, and dismissed from the political life of our nation for holding
those views," the letter declared. "And yet that is precisely what the
Civil Rights Commission report does."
Labeling ideas and arguments with which one
disagrees "racist" or "phobic," these leaders argued, "not only cheapens
the meaning of those words, but can have a chilling effect on healthy
debate over, or dissent from, the prevailing orthodoxy."
The letter closed with a plea to Obama, Hatch,
R-Utah, and Ryan, R-Wis., to "renounce publicly the claim that
'religious freedom' and 'religious liberty' are 'code words' or a
'pretext' for various forms of discrimination."
Last month, one of the signers, Charles Haynes,
founding director of Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute,
held up Utah's efforts on behalf of religious freedom and
nondiscrimination as an example of genuine balance between the two.
In 2015, with the blessing and encouragement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Utah Legislature approved a measure
protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals from
housing and workplace discrimination while safeguarding some religious
liberties.
"Peace between those who worry that religious
claims are code for bigotry and those who seek religious accommodations
will not be possible," Haynes wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece, "without setting aside name-calling, committing to civil dialogue and working for common-ground solutions."
Though the religious leaders' letter was
addressed to Hatch as well as the other two officeholders, Utah's senior
senator already has responded to the civil rights report.
"The report adopts a stunted and distorted
version of religious liberty, suggesting that claims of religious
conscience are little more than a cloak for bigotry and hatred," Hatch said. "I reject the false picture of religious liberty presented."
vox | As America becomes more unequal, it’s ever harder to claim that it is a meritocratic country. It still looks like one to the people at the top, who continue to prosper. However, their view of the world is increasingly at odds with the view of people below, who like the idea of equal opportunity but don’t believe it is working.
The people at the top and the middle class are increasingly distant from each other. Elites don’t understand the challenges and frustrations of middle-class people. (As Hayes puts it, "Power narrows the vision of the powerful.")
But many middle-class people don’t believe elites when they say that the system is working well. They see institutions that are failing and corrupt. They interpret the government’s response to the economic crisis as evidence that well-connected people will get bailed out while other people are screwed over. They do not trust the traditional press anymore, and are able to find alternative sources of information that may often be wrong but at least reflect their understanding that there is something basically wrong with American politics.
While poorer people have always been at a disadvantage in the American system, middle-class people have historically had more faith in it, yet they are increasingly finding their expectations frustrated.
Hayes argues that the angriest voters are not going to be the people at the bottom, but the people in the middle, who used to expect that they and their kids could do well through enterprise and don’t believe that anymore. Experts have disagreed over whether Trump supporters are richer or poorer than the average. Yet emerging evidence is beginning to portray a more nuanced portrait of Trump's supporters than those earlier takes.
Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, has used survey data on nearly 113,000 Americans to ask what really drives Trump support. He finds that support for the mogul turned politician is concentrated in the middle-income categories; in contrast, those who are relatively rich and those who are relatively poor are less likely to support him. Furthermore, economic insecurity is a huge factor – those who worry about their economic future are much more likely to vote for Trump. Rothwell builds on work by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren at Harvard to find that people in living in areas with weak mobility for kids from middle-class families are more likely to vote for Trump.
These findings are only the start of what is likely to be a long debate. Nonetheless, they support Hayes’s argument. People seem to be more likely to support an anti-system candidate like Donald Trump when they have a middling income, when they feel economically insecure, and when they live in places where middle-class kids have worse prospects for getting ahead.
Huff Po | Washington D.C. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Megan Kelly and true Christians are outraged by attacks on Catholics and Evangelicals by Team Hillary. Begging the burning question: “Who has place in Hillary’s America?” She and her team obviously despise these Christian denominations. Catholic and Evangelical Democrats must make a choice between Christ or the Evil One. Mother Teresa’s nuns are praying the rosary daily for voters to receive clarity of truth from The Holy Spirit and vote for the candidate who supports life and religious liberty (Trump) against the party engendering a culture of death and new atheism disguised as liberalism. Sadly, the Democratic Party has been taken over by spiritually bankrupt global conglomerates and foreign billionaire elites like George Soros desiring power over the people. Responding to breaking news of the sinister Team Hillary plot, Bill Donahue, President of the Catholic League informed Neil Cavuto the funding source for the strategy to divide Catholics and elect Hillary is George Soros.
He is the same foreign billionaire influence funding “legalize marijuana” initiatives in America to control youth and undermine our workforce just as the nefarious global elites did during the 19th century Opium Wars against China to control their people and trade. Military strategist Sun Tzu teaches in“The Art of War,”divide and conquer. Soros makes his billions based on currencies and global conflict. Take away guns, religion and addict people to drugs and you have no resistance. Voters, it’s power, money and greed. It’s anti-Christ, as religion must be mocked and removed from the public square and families divided, just as Team Hillary has advanced while plotting to control the people. Marx taught it and Soros et al through the Democratic Party is funding it. That’s the truth. No new strategies, just repeat what worked in history, fine tune it, grab power, control people. Similar strategy to divide Christians was undertaken surrounding Kennedy’s presidency. By the way, there are some notable Republicans part of the elite-domination circle. Sounds like the Illuminati, New World Order story, Narnia Chronicles or James Bond thriller. Many a truth is disguised. Follow wiki-leaks, Team Hillary emails and money funding the anti-Catholic, anti-pope, anti-Evangelical plots before voting.
This current devious plot unfolds while being suppressed by mainstream media in concert with Team Hillary. Biblical experts see it as signs inThe Book of RevelationsdescribingThe Apocalypse.We better watch and pray for ourselves and America’s future, is the mantra of the faithful. Surprising reaction to these attacks from humble, holy nuns across America. To my surprise, Religious are not surprised. On the contrary they believe these revelations are God’s way of unveiling the truth about Hillary and her deeply-rooted anti-Christian agenda carried out by her like-minded team, with the pretense of being Christians. Conversations with selfless sisters helping poor families in America’s inner-cities inform voters:
“We must pray the rosary every day as Our Lady of Fatima revealed in 1917 and stay on the side of Christ and fight the enemy. All Christians must unite and not scatter the vote. Even if some believe it is the lesser of two evils, all true Christians must vote for Trump. There are only two choices and Hillary is a vote for the Evil One.”
Faith Trumps Politics for Faithful People
Christians, irrespective of political party, cannot in good conscience vote anti-Christ. Team Hillary emails and aftermath are unapologetic and anti-Christian. They stridently continue to try to divide both Catholics and Evangelicals. Hillary will discover, voters are not deceived or deplorable just because they don’t trust her. Light is shining on Hillary and her team, the real agenda is to further divide America. Every true Christian on Team Hillary starting with purportedly Catholic running mate Tim Kaine should resign and be counted as standing for Christ. This is a rare opportunity to be among the elect that truly matters. Christ taught we must choose God or Evil. The same is expected of Nancy Pelosi and all Catholics. Jesus warned, “What good is it to gain the whole world but lose your soul?” Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, John Kasich should stand and be counted for Christ, like Marco Rubio, Dr. Ben Carson, Chris Christie, even Ted Cruz. Put self aside and fight for Trump to help stop the forces of evil from prevailing. Faithful Catholics know the truth. If you choose to hide from it or rationalize it, like Newt Gingrich said “you join Team Hillary” and the Evil One. It’s life or death for souls. That’s the truth.
October: Month of Revelations, Reckoning and The Rosary.
For Jews, October is time of atonement. For Catholics, time of reflection of what really matters, living for the now or preparing for the future. Remember life is short for our bodies but our soul is eternal, where do we want it to go? Trump’s past transgressions, of which he has expressed shame, remorse and apologies, pale in comparison to the revelations we now know about the plot against Christians and the strategy of creating a Catholic Spring, dividing Catholics and undermining the authority of the pope by Team Hillary and the global elite. That’s the truth. On October 13, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima appeared to 70,000 observers for the“Miracle of the Sun.”This prophetic event predicted future wars and disasters if humanity did not change its ways. Documented by media, historians and theologians with relevant news that continues to become reality in the unfolding drama of salvation history. Looking very sad, Our Lady said to the world:“Do not offend the Lord our God anymore, because he is already so much offended.”The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph appeared reminding the world of the sanctity of life and family, which is under attack today. Similar to current America, secular media and humanist government then mocked religion and people of faith. Interestingly, skeptical journalists, atheist government officials and intellectual elite witnesses converted becoming promoters of the truth.
Fatima for Today-The Urgent Marian Message of Hope”
Franciscan Friar, author Andrew Apostoli insightfully states:“We must survive warfare, but it is most often the spiritual warfare brought on by the evils of our times, with its attacks on life, the family and our faith.”Sums up the unfolding real agenda of Team Hillary, evidenced by emails, policies and tactics to win and rule at any cost including the soul of America and her people. Interestingly, like now, there was “great tension and turmoil “preceding the 1917 miraculous events for the elect, bringing about “one of the greatest manifestations of God’s power in the history of the Catholic Church.” The smell test for diabolical interference according to respected theologian Louis J. Camelli in“The Devil You Don’t Know”is counted on one hand:deception, division, diversion, discouragement- leading todeath.Fellow Christians and Americans of all faiths, let us choose life, uniting with Christ and vote for Trump-Pence. Conversely a vote for Team Hillary is a vote for bigotry, deception, division, diversion, discouragement and death. Hallmarks of the Evil One. That’s the truth.
God bless America, land that we love. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us all and keep us in your Immaculate Heart.
NYTimes | The
2014 election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his B.J.P. emboldened
every variety of Hindu nationalist group. The primary aim of these
groups is an aggressive form of nationalism. But there is a
contradiction at the heart of this ideology: As Mr. Paz wrote in 1995,
the idea of the nation itself is “incompatible with the institution of
caste.” It was not possible to want everyone to be homogeneous while at
the same time believing them to be fundamentally unequal.
The contradiction presented by caste and nationalism was never clearer than in the searing images that emerged
from Mr. Modi’s own home state, Gujarat, in July. They showed Dalit
boys being stripped and beaten with iron rods. They were accused of
killing a sacred Indian cow. But they claimed they were only skinning a
cow that was already dead, work that is typically reserved for people of
low caste. The irony could not have been more stark: It was caste on
one hand that had forced this occupation upon them, and it was caste
that was degrading them further.
Modernity
should be the natural enemy of caste. And, in many ways, it is. Urban
life, apartment buildings, restaurants — even something as simple as
municipal water and housing — have the power to erase the prohibitions
under which caste functions. Democracy, too, is an enemy of caste: The
low-caste groups form a powerful voting bloc, and so politicians are
obliged to be responsive to them. But by upsetting hierarchies,
modernity can also exacerbate old tensions. It can make the higher
castes, whose numbers are small, insecure about their place in the world
and drive them to reinforce it.
The
spread of modernity in India has certainly undermined caste, but it has
also made the need to assert it more vehement. And the unfolding story
in India is not one about the disappearance of caste, but rather of its
resilience. Brahmins still have an outsize presence in intellectual
life; the armed forces are still dominated by the martial castes; a
majority of rich businessmen and industrialists are still of the
mercantile castes; the lower castes still do the least desirable jobs.
In
the cloistered, English-speaking world where I grew up, caste seemed
hardly to exist. As a child in Delhi, I could no more tell a Brahmin
name like Mishra or Sharma from any other. And even if I could, I would
not have held it in regard. Our only category was class, and it was
determined by privilege, education and how well one spoke English. But
there are some categories so deep that they hold without needing to be
enforced. What I didn’t realize was that in one very important respect,
caste did exist among us: because the lowest castes were not
represented.
For
the last two years, I have been speaking with a Brahmin from Bengal, a
philosopher and a teacher of ancient logic, a man conversant with both
Eastern and Western intellectual traditions. I admire him in many ways —
his immense learning, his defense of tradition in the face of Western
influence — but when I questioned him about the prohibitions of caste he
gave me an answer that turned my stomach.
“If
a person is suffering from a communicable disease, you would not let
him touch your utensils,” he said. “You have this one idea of
contamination, but you refuse to accept that there might be certain
spiritual conditions …” His voice trailed off. He seemed to know that he
had lost me. As if wanting to clear the air, he said: “You have to
understand that modern European culture is based on the idea that all
men are born equal, and later become differentiated. The Indian idea is
different. We believe that men are born unequal, but we are all —
Brahmin, sage, cobbler, outcaste — heading toward the same destiny.”
It
was a valiant attempt at a defense, but in the end absurd. It would
mean that millions of lower-caste Indians, like Rohith Vemula, had to
forfeit the aspirations of this life in exchange for the promise of some
ultimate destiny, many lifetimes away, in which all differences would
be obliterated.
anonews | With so much exposed already, why do we continue to follow, allow, and accept people like Hillary and Trump as potentials to be country leaders? Truly think about it. Can we even take a system that puts these two so high up in the ranks seriously?
Is this not the perfect storm to allow us to wake up to the reality of our current state? We should be thankful that this is going on so we can help wake up the world and begin a conversation about what we can legitimately do next.
This isn’t about Trump vs Clinton. That is merely the illusion we are being invited to believe. This is about awakening to the fact that our system is absurd and that it’s time to do something different. What is the answer? That is what we must discuss instead of playing this broken political game of dividing and choosing who to “vote” for.
RT | Hillary Clinton’s campaign has dubbed WikiLeaks “Russian propaganda,” accusing it of supporting Republican candidate Donald Trump. The comments came after a cache of leaked emails from the campaign’s chairman were published by the whistleblowing website.
Addressing the site from his Twitter account on Monday, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said:“You are no media organization. You are a propaganda arm of the Russian govt, running interference for their pet candidate, Trump.”
“As a longtime political activist with deep ties to our party, I supported all of our candidates for president. I often shared my thoughts with each and every campaign, and any suggestions that indicate otherwise are simply untrue. As it pertains to the CNN Debates, I never had access to questions and would never have shared them with the candidates if I did.
“But let’s get one thing straight. Our Intelligence Community has made it clear that the Russian government is responsible for the cyberattacks aimed at interfering with our election, and that WikiLeaks is part of that effort. This revelation should deeply trouble all Americans in both parties. And yet, Donald Trump continues to deny that Russia is behind these attempts to meddle with our electoral process and cheer on these efforts to undermine our democracy.
“This is the same man who called for more Russian cyber-espionage against us, who has extensive business ties to Russia, and who regularly coddles Vladimir Putin by praising his leadership and refusing to call him out. I am deeply disappointed that the Republican leaders of the party of Reagan are publicly using information illegally obtained by the Russians, because the national security of our country should not be a partisan issue.
“We are in the process of verifying the authenticity of these documents because it is common for Russia to spread misinformation and forge documents, but we cannot bow down to Putin’s wishes and allow foreign actors to try and divide our country with the hope of affecting the outcome on Election Day. There is too much at stake.” – DNC Interim Chair Donna Brazile
theintercept |Verizon’s general counsel and head of public policy made a public case this week for reconsidering legal protections on customer data in light of evolving technology that allows companies to almost continuously track cell phone users’ location.
Craig Stillman’s opinion piece published Monday in Bloomberg Law comes just days after Reuters revealed that Yahoo, the company Verizon is reportedly buying, helped the U.S. government scan millions of emails for a specific “digital signature,” outraging privacy activists. It also follows several years of controversy since Verizon was implicated in the NSA’s mass surveillance program through the 2013 Snowden disclosures, which revealed the collection of thousands of its customers’ phone records.
The piece describes the legal ins-and-outs of location privacy, including a specific issue courts have been pondering over the last few years: whether or not customers, when they make phone calls or log into apps on their smartphones, are voluntarily handing over to private companies’ information about where they are and what they’re doing — making that information available to law enforcement without a warrant.
After detailing Verizon’s rapidly evolving ability to collect more and more specific location data on its own customers, Silliman urged courts to consider how the law might need to adapt. “I hope that [the court] takes into account how quickly technology — including the volume and precision of location information — is changing,” he wrote.
Verizon says the timing of the piece is unrelated to the recent related to Yahoo and email surveillance. “In fact, the piece was finished several weeks ago. We were preparing to post it when we got news of the Yahoo breach,” wrote Rich Young, Verizon policy spokesman, in an email to The Intercept. “We decided to delay the posting because we did not want the two to appear related, which they are not.”
According to Silliman and Verizon’s official Twitter account, the piece was born out of conversations that took place during company business meetings.
bbc | Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have revoked access to their data to an analytics firm accused of selling information that allowed US police to track activists and protesters.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Chicago-based Geofeedia had allowed police to "sneak in through a side door" to monitor protests.
Geofeedia said it was committed to the principles of personal privacy.
It comes amid growing concern about government access to social media.
ACLU said Geofeedia had been marketing its services to police agencies to help track activists using location data and social media posts.
The group said it had seen internal documents in which Geofeedia said that it "covered Ferguson/Mike Brown nationally with great success," referring to protests which erupted in 2014 after an unarmed African-American man was shot dead by police.
"The ACLU of California has obtained records showing that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provided user data access to Geofeedia, a developer of a social media monitoring product that we have seen marketed to law enforcement as a tool to monitor activists and protesters," the group said in a statement.
"We know for a fact that in Oakland [California] and Baltimore [Maryland], law enforcement has used Geofeedia to monitor protests."
phys.org | What do profit-driven bosses do if they are not satisfied with an employee's conduct? They use their strategic advantage to blackmail their subordinates: "If you don't want to do the job, I'm sure we'll find somebody else who does". Together with researchers from Harvard University and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria), researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have found that asymmetrical power encourages extortionate behaviour. Both in a model and an experimental setup, such 'blackmailing' strategies proved successful for the extortionists. An especially surprising finding was that subordinates were in fact better off if they played along in the unfair game. However, extortionists shouldn't be too obviously selfish; they are only successful if they maintain a well-measured degree of friendliness.
Nearly one in two people will take advantage of others if the opportunity arises: that is the sobering conclusion of a study recently published by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. The scientists asked 160 students to take part in the so-called 'prisoner's dilemma' game where two players choose, over several rounds, if they will cooperate with each other or not to receive a cash payoff. In this scenario, cooperation only pays off if the respective opponent also cooperated.
This means that particularly Machiavellian players can lull their opponents into a false sense of security by initially cooperating, only to unexpectedly withhold cooperation in the next round. In this case, the selfish player receives an especially large payoff, whereas their opponent is left empty-handed. Such strategies, however, are only successful in the short term. Ultimately, extortionate players often emerge as losers, because their opponents tend to stop cooperating with them altogether.
cnbc | Amid an exodus of other high-profile supporters, Donald Trump is keeping one key ally in his corner.
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn
said Monday he is holding ranks with the Republican presidential
nominee, despite revelations in recent days that Trump made more
disparaging comments about women in the past.
"Over my years I've
listened to a lot of salacious talk in locker rooms, bachelor parties,
et cetera, by a lot of high-level people, some of whom are now
supposedly so outraged," Icahn told CNBC.com in a phone interview. "All I
can do is refer to that great quote, 'Let he who has not sinned cast
the first stone.'"
Trump is under fire after a video surfaced from 2005
in which he made comments criticized as endorsing sexual violence. He
described walking up to women and kissing them and grabbing their
genitalia.
Since the video surfaced, a slew of supporters have ditched the candidate. Key congressional Republicans including Arizona Sen. John McCain, himself a presidential nominee in 2008, have withdrawn their endorsements, with former GE CEO Jack Welch joining them. House Speaker Paul Ryan, the vice presidential nominee in 2012, told his colleagues Monday that he is done defending Trump and is now focusing on maintaining congressional majorities for his party.
greyenlightenment | This ties with ‘shared narratives’, as all introverts, regardless of
their politics, are unified in their dislike of ‘small talk’ and other
vapid, atavistic social rituals that we voluntarily impose on each other
and ourselves, which could explain why the article above went viral. We
carry out these motions not because we derive pleasure from them, but
because we have become so accustomed to doing them that to refuse is
inconceivable. One such ritual is voting and the ‘democratic process’,
and I’m pleasantly surprised to see millennials losing
faith in democracy. Politicians promise ‘more freedom’ in exchange for
your vote, but that results in diddly-squat. If you vote, it’s because
the candidates embodies values you agree with, not because you expect a
specific outcome or result.
This is also related to the decline of ‘careerism’. Careerism, which
thrived in the 80′s and 90′s, wasn’t about creating economic value;
rather, it was about sycophantism, of millions of people ‘showing up’
and carrying out these ritualistic motions, everyday exchanging their
livelihoods for steady remittances needed to ‘keep up with the Joneses’.
As I wrote in Millennials and Misconceptions,
millennials are abandoning careerism in droves, choosing introspection,
MGTOW, ‘being alone’, and introversion, rather than gregariousness and
‘office politics’. But it’s not laziness, as many wrongly assume. When
millennials choose to work, they do so to maximize economic value and
their own productivity, meaning that they prefer not to dither with
‘small talk’ and ‘office politics’, and they want to work on their own
terms, preferring autonomy instead of sucking up to a boss, who is is
often overpaid relative to the economic value he or she produces. This
is why personal finance (budgeting, investing, etc.) is so important to
millennials, because financial independence and self-sufficiency is
necessary to have freedom, or more specifically, autonomy, instead of
careerism. It doesn’t mean having money for the sake of consumption, but
money for autonomy.
NYTimes | In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.
The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.
Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.
In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.
dilbert | The word “narcissist” gets tossed around a lot, especially when Donald Trump is in the news. That word can mean at least three different things, depending on who is saying it. For example, calling someone a narcissist could mean…
1. I don’t know what big words mean, but I use them anyway. (That’s at least 30% of cases.)
Or…
2. The target of the accusation has “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” as defined by the Mayo Clinic to include these traits:
Inflated sense of importance
Deep need for admiration
Lack of empathy for others
Fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism
Or…
3. The person doing the accusing has “Narcissistic Accuser Syndrome” as I define to have these characteristics:
Dislike of confident, successful people.
Hallucinating that you have the diagnostic skills of a trained psychiatrist.
Hallucinating the ability to determine a stranger’s level of empathy, and their need for admiration, based on limited evidence seen out of context.
Inability to distinguish between a smart operator with a strategy of aggressive response to critics versus a person with fragile self-esteem.
Inability to understand that labeling one individual with an inflated sense of importance and fragile self-esteem at the same time is harder to explain than you want it to be.
A deep desire to rationalize one’s own lack of success by imagining the only way that other people attain it is with the help of some sort of personality disorder.
Did I write this defensive-sounding post because I’m a narcissist? I hope so, because that’s what I strive to be.
I’m a big fan of being admired, assuming I did something worthy. I find the goodwill of others to be one of several sources of personal motivation, and a legitimate one. Am I allowed to make the world a better place and enjoy the fact that others appreciate the effort? That seems like a reasonable deal for everyone. If you do something good for the world, I promise to admire you, and I hope you enjoy the feeling. Maybe it will encourage you to do more good stuff.
FP | Blatant ideological bias faded from scientific endeavors in the
post-1978 reform era, but the ultimate goal of Chinese archaeology — to
piece out the nation’s history — remained. The best-known example from
that era is the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, directly inspired by
the achievements of Egyptian archaeology. State Councilor Song Jian
toured Egypt in 1995 and was particularly impressed by a genealogy of
the pharaohs that went back to the third millennium B.C. This prompted
him to campaign for a project — included in the government’s ninth
five-year plan — that would give Chinese dynasties a comparable record.
Mobilizing over 200 experts on a budget of around $1.5 million over five
years, the Chronology Project has been considered the largest
state-sponsored project in the humanities since 1773, when the Qianlong
emperor commissioned the Siku quanshu, an encyclopedia roughly 20 times the length of the Britannica.
Some questioned the Chronology Project’s motives. One of the most
prominent detractors was University of Chicago historian Edward L.
Shaughnessy, who complained,
“There’s a chauvinistic desire to push the historical record back into
the third millennium B.C., putting China on a par with Egypt. It’s much
more a political and a nationalistic urge than a scholarly one.” Others
criticized the project’s methods and results. The Stanford archaeologist
Li Liu, for instance, took issue
with the fact that it regarded the Xia as historical and fixed dates
for it, when there is still no conclusive archaeological evidence for
its existence.
But the project also had defenders, including Harvard anthropologist Yun Kuen Lee, who pointed out
that “the intrinsic relationship between the study of the past and
nationalism does not necessarily imply that the study of the past is
inherently corrupted.” The usefulness of archaeology in bolstering a
nation’s pride and legitimacy — explaining and, to some extent,
justifying its language, culture, and territorial claims — means that
most archaeological traditions have a nationalistic impulse behind them.
Thus, in Israel, archaeology focuses on the period of the Old
Testament; in the Scandinavian countries, it focuses on that of the
Vikings. “The important question that we should ask,” Yun went on to
say, “is if the scientists of the project were able to maintain
scientific rigor.”
In some ways, Sun’s current theory is an unintended result of the Chronology Project’s scientific rigor.
At the project’s launch in 1996, he was a Ph.D. student in the
radiation laboratory of the University of Science and Technology. Of the
200 or so items of bronze ware he was responsible for analyzing, some
came from the city of Yin. He found that the radioactivity of these
Yin-Shang bronzes had almost exactly the same characteristics as that of
ancient Egyptian bronzes, suggesting that their ores all came from the
same source: African mines.
Perhaps anticipating serious controversy, Sun’s doctoral supervisor
did not allow Sun to report his findings at the time. Sun was asked to
hand over his data and switched to another project. Twenty years after
the start of his research and now a professor in his own right, Sun is
finally ready to say all he knows about the Yin-Shang and China’s Bronze Age culture.
Although the public has mostly received Sun’s theory with an open
mind, it still lies outside the academic mainstream. Since the 1990s,
most Chinese archaeologists have accepted that much of the nation’s
Bronze Age technology came from regions outside of China. But it is not
thought to have arrived directly from the Middle East in the course of
an epic migration. The more prosaic consensus is that it was transmitted
into China from Central Asia by a slow process of cultural exchange
(trade, tribute, dowry) across the northern frontier, mediated by
Eurasian steppe pastoralists who had contacts with indigenous groups in
both regions.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
