Some significant number of Trump supporters, especially those with
college educations, are "less likely to say that they support him when
they’re talking to a live human” than when they are in the “anonymous
environment” of an online survey, said the firm's polling director, Kyle
Dropp.
__________________
Polls May Actually Underestimate Trump's Support, Study Finds
By David Lauter
Donald Trump leads the GOP presidential field in polls of Republican voters nationally and in most early-voting states, but some surveys may actually be understating his support, a new study suggests.
The analysis, by Morning Consult, a polling and market research company, looked at an odd occurrence that has cropped up repeatedly this year: Trump generally has done better in online polls than in surveys done by phone.
The firm conducted an experiment aimed at understanding why that happens and which polls are more accurate -- online surveys that have tended to show Trump with support of nearly four-in-10 GOP voters or the telephone surveys that have typically shown him with the backing of one-third or fewer.
Their results suggest that the higher figure probably provides the more accurate measure. Some significant number of Trump supporters, especially those with college educations, are "less likely to say that they support him when they’re talking to a live human” than when they are in the “anonymous environment” of an online survey, said the firm's polling director, Kyle Dropp.
With Trump dominating political debates in both parties, gauging his level of support has become a crucial puzzle. The Morning Consult study provides one piece of the solution, although many other uncertainties remain.
Among the complicating factors is this: The gap between online and telephone surveys has narrowed significantly in surveys taken in the last few weeks. That could suggest that Republicans who were reluctant to admit to backing Trump in the past have become more willing to do so recently.
Another issue is that not only can polls change over time, but Trump's support in pre-election surveys might not fully translate into actual votes. He has not invested as heavily as some of his GOP rivals in building the kind of get-out-the-vote operation that candidates typically rely on, particularly in early voting states.
Some of the polls that show heavy support for Trump have also shown him doing better among self-identified independents who lean Republican than among regular GOP voters. At least some of those independents may not be in the habit of voting in primaries and caucuses, which could make a robust turnout operation even more necessary.
On the other hand, a candidate of Trump's level of celebrity may simply not need much of a get-out-the-vote operation. No one really knows.
At the Time Jim Jones Was Calling Dan Mitrione His "Close Friend" Mitrione Was Teaching Latin American Dictatorships Torture Techniques. Mitrione is depicted by an actor in the classic film, "State of Siege." He was eventually kidnapped and executed by Tupamaro Guerrillas.
_____________
Jonestown "Death Tape"
(FBI File No. Q042)
Recorded November 18, 1978
Source: Internet Archive
_______________
LT. COL. JAMES “BO” GRITZ AND JONESTOWN: "All The Niggers Are Dead" (Excerpt)
By "Gunny G"
The officer in charge of all U.S. Army Special Forces
for Latin America at the time of the Jonestown holocaust was Lt. Col.
James “Bo” Gritz. Gritz was the original soldier after which the movie
character “Rambo” was patterned. Gritz was the most decorated soldier to
come out of the Vietnam war.
The Guyana massacre was carried out by Bo Gritz’ men (along with British SAS troops). *Flatland* (#10) magazine, in an interview with Gritz, asked him:
Question: You trained Special Forces that went into Jonestown? What was the precise nature of the operation?
“I
don’t know precisely because it was a compartmentalized operation. The
only thing that I do know for certain is what the Sergeant I quote
coming out of Jonestown, he was insistent because he was disgusted, on
writing this book. He was, without compromise, going to call it *All the
Niggers Are Dead.* I asked him, ‘Why would you want to entitle anything
such an offensive way?’ ‘It doesn’t make a difference what your color,
your creed, your sex,’ he said, ‘when you are treated the way they were,
that’s what you are; you’re a nigger, you’re nothing else.’ I think
that those soldiers saw things that affected them and made them very
angry. I’ve seen other things like that in combat where there have been
abuses. I wrote about one of them in my book where the Captain tortured
the young severely and the young Sergeant put on a swastika and said,
“If I’m going to act like a Nazi I’m going to look like one.’ I think
that the same kind of negative impact occurred in Jonestown.”
Gritz
has more about Jonestown in his autobiography, *Called to Serve.*
Perhaps you simply cannot believe what I am telling you. Will you
believe it if told to you by the Green Beret officer in charge of the
men who did the killing? He admits that the information was
“compartmentalized” and it was not until later that he learned what his
men were actually doing. The following information is from pages 584-587
of his book:
“The true story of the Jonestown camp in
Guyana has been brought to light through an extensive investigation
conducted by John Judge, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and
other dedicated researchers and investigators. The truth, which was
thoroughly suppressed by the American media, is that it was actually a
slave-labor camp run by Jones with the assistance of the CIA.
Most of the information which follows is from John Judge’s summary of
the investigation, supplemented with information provided by Special
Forces teams I had earlier trained and commanded, who were sent in to
‘clean up the remains of Jonestown.’
“Most of the
black and Hispanic poor people and social activists who became the
inmates of the camp were brought there either by force or coercion, or
lured under false pretenses, where extensive experiments of drug-induced
mind control were performed on them. Even before they were moved to
Guyana, reports of beatings, kidnappings, sexual abuse and mysterious
deaths had leaked out to the press about the earlier Peoples’ Temple in Ukiah, California.
“Jim Jones had a very interesting past which was overlooked by the media: During the time his friend Dan Mitrione
was teaching torture techniques to the Brazilian and Argentineans,
Jones was also sent to Brazil where his house, transportation and
groceries were provided to him by the U.S. Embassy, and he frequently
traveled to Belo Horizonte, the CIA headquarters in Brazil.
“Jones
had been contacted in Ukiah by ‘Christian missionaries’ from World
Vision (World Vision is a CIA controlled front operation), an
evangelical order which had performed espionage work for the CIA in
Southeast Asia. Most of Jones’ top lieutenants were from wealthy,
educated backgrounds, many with connections to the military or
intelligence agencies. These were the people who were involved in
setting up the bank accounts, complex legal transactions and financial
agreements which put people under the control of the Peoples’ Temple.
“Some of Jones’ Lieutenants were: Dr. Lawrence Layton was chief of Chemical and Biological Warfare Research at Dugway Proving Grounds
in Utah for many years and later worked as Director of Missile and
Satellite Development at the Navy Propellant Division at Indian Head,
Maryland. His wife, Lisa, was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, who had
represented the huge Nazi manufacturing cartel, I.G. Farben, as a
stockbroker. Their daughter, Debbie, met and married George Philip
Blakey, whose parents had extensive stock holdings in Solve Drugs, a
division of I.G. Farben.
“Blakey was reputed to be
training mercenaries in Jonestown who were sent to work with CIA-backed
UNITA forces in Angola. Terri Buford’s father, Admiral Charles T.
Buford, worked with Naval Intelligence. Marie Katsaris’ father was
minister with the Greek Orthodox Church, thought to be a conduit of CIA
funding, and she claimed she had proof he was a CIA agent. The ‘official
survivors’ were represented upon their return to the U.S. by Joseph
Blatchford, an attorney who had been named in a prior scandal involving
CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
“The people who
were taken from San Francisco to begin their ‘new life’ in Guyana were
bussed to Florida and arrived in Guyana bound and gagged, where they
were forced to work 16 hours or more daily, and were fed on minimum
rations. As more and more rumors began to filter back to the United
States of druggings, beatings, torture, sexual humiliations and coercion
at the Guyana site, Congressman Leo Ryan decided to go to Guyana and
verify the situation for himself.
“Ryan had challenged
the CIA’s overseas operations before, as a member of the House
Committee responsible for oversight on intelligence. He was co-author of
the controversial Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have required
advance CIA disclosure to the congressional committees of all planned
covert operations. The amendment would be defeated shortly after his
death in Jonestown.
“With Ryan on the way to
Jonestown, the secrecy surrounding the camp would be broken and
desperate measures would need to be taken to keep the truth from
escaping, much less the inmates. In a futile attempt to test their
conditioning methods, the leaders at Jonestown apparently tried to
implement an actual suicide drill, but it was obviously ignored.
Official stories first numbered the victims at 408, but later revised
the toll upward to 913. It was claimed that some 505 bodies had been
covered by those of the first 408 who had fallen directly on top of
them, confusing those who had been counting from aerial photographs. – a
blatant and ridiculous attempt at cover-up.
“However,
the first reports were true – 408 had died, and 700 fled to the jungle
where British Black Watch troops and American Special Forces were
conducting ‘training exercises.’ Of the 700, 505 who had been
deliberately shot in the jungle were added to the count of those who had
supposedly committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid.
Was There A CIA Conspiracy to Destroy Jonestown? (Excerpt)
By Laurie Efrein-Kahalas, San Diego State University
The last person to leave the scene alive, Stanley Clayton, told the coroner’s jury in Matthews Ridge (an adjoining town) that when he left, only 100-200 people were still alive, and that although the scene was gruesome, it was peaceful, with Marceline Jones hugging people saying "I’ll see you in your next life." Indeed, there was an explicit final letter left at Jonestown (see FINAL WITNESS), which is specific about people passing on in a peaceful, if grief-laden procession.
So who was it who desecrated the bodies at Jonestown in such a gruesome manner? First, what might be the motive? One motive is clear: Make Jim Jones look like a brutal murderer of his own people, to bolster the claim that he had "ordered" the assassination of the Congressman. That would deflect investigation of the facts, much less consideration of a frame. Surely Jim Jones was responsible for everything. Case closed.
Who was responsible for the desecration? Who arrived at Jonestown before the coroner; before, indeed, anyone else arrived "officially"? Had forces arrived clandestinely, and if so, who were they, and how much time did they have to make the scene appear as they wanted?
The answer to these two questions appears to be, respectively, "Yes" and "A lot of time." First, the tragedy happened the night of Saturday, November 18th. The first team brought in "officially" was the Guyanese Defense Force, along with survivors from Jonestown brought back to identify bodies. That did not happen until Monday morning, November 20th. For the entire day of Sunday, November 19th, presumably no one was at Jonestown at all.
Yet two completely separate sources confirm that U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) were in Jonestown within five or six hours. The first was a source from within the U.S. military, one Charles Huff from the U.S. Army Special Forces in Panama. According to FREEDOM Magazine, he was "one of the Green Berets who were the first American troops on the scene following the massacre." He said they were into Jonestown within about five hours. Indeed, Clayton told the coroner’s jury of the community falling completely silent following the deaths for 45 minutes, and that then, suddenly, there was a chorus of shouts, as well as gunfire. The source of the sounds and the gunfire, has never been identified.
Huff elaborated that "’We saw many bullet wounds as well as wounds from crossbow bolts." Huff noted that those with fatal bullet or bolt wounds appeared to have been running towards the jungle that surrounded Jonestown. Huff said that the adults who had not been shot had been killed by injections between the shoulder blades." Then enigmatically, "The killers escaped before the arrival of Huff and his team." Huff also claims that of the troops early into Jonestown, sixteen of them later "committed suicide." Given that only two Peoples Temple survivors committed suicide in the wake of the tragedy, sixteen "suicides" amongst trained combat personnel defies believability. But sixteen "suspicious deaths" is indeed a high figure, which compels investigation.
Who desecrated the bodies? Nearly no one "escaped" from Jonestown except for the tiny handful of people who ran into the jungle, and who were surely not responsible for any carnage. How could one not suspect that it was the Green Beret force itself who inflicted the purported damage?
An unexpected confirmation of U.S. troops clandestinely on site just showed up recently in a Russian book called "The Jonestown Carnage: A CIA Crime" printed by Progress Press in Moscow. Their claim was that "At about 18.00 [that’s 6 p.m. on November 18th], several S-141 military transport planes took off from military bases in Panama and Dover [Delaware] and headed for Guyana. The estimated time of flight was 3 hours 40 minutes. … Two hours later, without notifying the local authorities in the area of Venezuela where the Americans had their private missions (which served as a front for C.I.A. secret operations), three helicopters took off in the direction of Jonestown, which was 1 hour 10 minutes away."
What is startling in the Russian account, is that both their account and the American account of the arrival of Green Berets, designate the country of origin as Panama. The two independent reports tally with each other perfectly.
Equally ominous, the A & E special this past November, called "Jonestown: Mystery of a Massacre" revealed that the deaths at Jonestown were originally confirmed via a CIA radio channel, NOIWON, at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, November 19th. The producer speculated that Richard Dwyer, the alleged C.I.A. plant in the State Department who had accompanied the Congressman to Jonestown, was the only one on site who could have made this call. But now we can see that it could have just as easily been made by U.S. Green Berets already on site, and undoubtedly under the control of the C.I.A.
What were Green Berets doing at Jonestown in the middle of the night? The C-141 MEDEVAC plane to assist the survivors of the airport shooting, according to official State Department records, did not even arrive at Georgetown from Charleston, SC until 7:55 a.m.! The Green Berets, meanwhile, were flown in immediately, before the situation at Jonestown had even been officially ascertained. They arrived in the middle of the night, but not to assist medically – rather for secret, classified work specifically at Jonestown, leaving the injured at an airstrip only seven miles away, completely unattended. Meanwhile, the MEDEVAC plane shows up on the official State Department log, but the Green Berets do not.
Was there any real concern for the people of Jonestown – their deaths, rapid evacuation of the bodies, possible survivors? Medical personnel such as the Guyanese coroner, were not sent into Jonestown for two more days! This bizarre reversal of priorities, involving moreover clandestine forces under separate command, is unsettling if not appalling, and requires investigation. Even the fact that confirmation of the suicides was received at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of the 19th, yet the incoming MEDEVAC personnel were not sent to investigate the death of over 900 people a mere seven miles away, implies not just lack of coordination between open and secret military commands, but utter disregard for human life.
Lastly, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (also uncovered by Freedom Magazine), claimed that "The Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared air shipments of hundreds of body bags. … Within hours, they began to shuttle them down to Georgetown, the main city. They couldn’t possibly have done that without prior knowledge that it was going to happen. It shows that there was prior planning."
You can be absolutely sure that his ditching of right ideology will not get the same amount of publicity as his attack on president Obama and his support of Ted Cruz. —Ronald David Jackson
CJ Pearson: The 13-year-old social media phenom apparently grew tired of being pimped by right-wing manipulators
in the wake of the ongoing killings of black people by police.
(Screen capture from YouTube video)
By Tal Kopan
The 13-year-old Internet phenom who gained national attention criticizing President Barack Obama and briefly was a part of the Ted Cruz campaign is renouncing conservatism, saying he's looking to be a voice unbound by party ideology.
CJ Pearson told CNN on Friday that concerns about the Republican Party's viewpoints on racial and gender disparity as well as youth issues convinced him he could no longer be a mouthpiece for conservatism.
President Obama: Do you really love America?
"I was tired of being a champion of a party that turned a blind eye to racial discrimination. Tired of being a champion of any cause that denies equal rights to every American. Tired of being a champion of a party that doesn't care about the issues important to young people," Pearson wrote in an email.
The 13-year-old, African-American YouTube star from Georgia said in an interview that he began considering the change after a conversation with another teen friend, who asked why he doesn't speak out on racial discrimination -- to which he replied he was concerned his followers wouldn't be pleased.
"Over the past few days, I thought about essentially how I don't want people to follow me because I'm that anti-Obama kid, or who called out Hillary Clinton or who took Bernie Sanders to task," Pearson said. "I don't want to be the conservative wonder kid that people follow because I make them feel good and like young people are part of their movement. I want to be followed because I'm the voice of a generation that doesn't have a voice at the table."
He said the video of Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a police officer in Chicago helped open his eyes to the systemic problems of racial discrimination in America and the need to look at the issues objectively.
Pearson was also the chairman of Teens for Ted and part of the presidential campaign for the Republican Texas senator, but separated with the Cruz campaign at the beginning of the month. Pearson said Cruz wasn't doing enough for issues affecting young people.The teen also was accused September of faking a screenshot that Obama's account had blocked him on Twitter. Pearson admits he made a mistake and says he has moved on.
By Vladimir Platov, NEO
We used to think that cruel and inhuman experiments on human beings were conducted only in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. However, unfortunately, we ever more often find out that such experiments are performed almost regularly in the United States by US intelligence agencies, and even citizens of the United States are among those who suffer in these experiments on human beings.
Recently, the international community obtained yet another piece of evidence of criminal nature of the CIA – the main instrument of Washington’s ‘democracy’. As follows from the secret documents made public by “The Guardian” newspaper, the CIA, in its program of torture of alleged terrorists in US prisons, performed inhuman experiments on human beings in the style of Nazi Germany butchers.
The American Civil Rights Union got a secret document submitted by the journalists of The Guardian newspaper (UK), from which it becomes apparent that the CIA director authorized his employees to perform in prisons acts illegal under international law. The document notes that the CIA, according to the ‘guiding principles’ dated back to 1987 and then updated several times, should not sponsor, order, or conduct research on humans. However, the head of this agency was endowed with the authority ‘to approve, modify or reject all proposals concerning research on human beings’, and this ‘freedom’ conferred to him had not been publicly announced before.
Thus, according to the British newspaper, from 1997 to 2004 the CIA Director George Tenet authorized harsh interrogation techniques, including ‘waterboarding’, and instructed doctors to observe the process of torture and the prisoners’ reaction. These revelations about ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ of the CIA are in complete contradiction not only with international but also domestic US law, which clearly states that ‘research’ on humans can be done only with their informed consent. However, the CIA edited one of the four sections on experiments on human beings. After examining the declassified documents, one expert pointed out that the regulation proposed by the CIA manipulates the basic definitions of human experiments in order to ensure the continuation of the program of torture. According to the former investigator for war crimes and current researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Nathaniel Raymond: ‘The first crime by the CIA was torture. The second crime was ‘research without consent’.’
Having studied the document, experts noted that the National Security Agency and its medical staff, whose functions include regulation and supervision of research on human beings, violated the ‘guidelines’ emanating from Executive Law 12333 – which dates back to the Reagan years.
However, it should be noted that reports about experiments on its own citizens, carried out in the laboratories of the CIA, are not new. US intelligence agencies have throughout their existence repeatedly been accused of conducting cruel experiments on humans, including on its own citizens.
For example, in 1950, to simulate bacteriological warfare, two aircraft flew over San Francisco and sprayed a large amount of powder containing the bacteria Serratia marcescens, causing many residents to contract pneumonia and die. These experiments with the bacterium Serratia marcescens continued until 1969.
In 1955 in Florida near Tampa Bay pertussis bacteria were scattered, which immediately caused a massive epidemic of the disease. At least 12 people died.
In 1956 and 1957 in Georgia and Florida the CIA implemented another secret operation, during which millions of mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever were released.
From 1963 to 1969 within Shipboard Hazard and Defence Project (SHAD) several types of bacteriological and chemical weapons were released on US Navy ships, and the crews suspected nothing when they began to be inundated with sarin, VX gas, and cadmium salts.
In the late 1960s, during another secret US intelligence operation, called ‘Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers to Covert Attack with Biological Agents’, hay bacillus bacteria were released into New York and Chicago subways.
A secret medical research of the government of the United States on the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands – ‘Project 4.1′ is also well known: during the experiment people were exposed to radiation after the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. As a result of radioactive contamination, among women in the first five years after the tests the number of miscarriages and stillbirths doubled, and many of the newborns who survived soon developed cancer.
Another, possibly most infamous biomedical experiment on the residents of the United States in American history could be the study of syphilis in the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, which lasted from 1932 to 1972 and was conducted under the auspices of the US Public Health Service and was designed to investigate all stages of syphilis in African-Americans. During this ‘study’ American scientists hid the existence of penicillin from the subjects, and continued testing experimental materials, ostensibly in search medicine. As a result, many people were affected, some died of syphilis and infected their wives and children.
In 1974, The New York Times newspaper published a sensational journalistic investigation, which resulted in the exposure of one of the most sinister and mysterious projects – a CIA program code-named ‘MC-Ultra’, dedicated to searching for methods to establish full control over the mind and consciousness of a human being. During the existence of this project from the early 50s to late 60s thousands of people passed through the hands of the ‘experimenters’, some of the subjects developed serious mental disorders, and many just died. Soon after the appearance of this publication, the US Congress established a special commission to investigate the activities of the CIA, which was joined by a presidential commission headed by Nelson Rockefeller. However, the government investigation was seriously hindered by the fact that the CIA had managed by this point to destroy a significant portion of documents that could shed some light, and most of the surviving documentary evidence has not been declassified.
Another very famous psychological experiment on humans was so-called Stanford Prison Experiment, which was conducted in 1971 by the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo and was a study of a human response to restrictions of freedom in terms of prison life and an influence of a person’s social role. Twenty-four undergraduate students were the subjects of the test, which took place in the basement of the Faculty of Psychology, specially equipped to serve as prison premises.
Eight human rights organizations, including the very influential Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in 2010 filed a formal request for an investigation of the CIA, accusing it of conducting illegal medical experiments on the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004-2009. According to testimonies of human rights defenders, costly cancer drugs were tested on prisoners suspected of links to terrorists, which was supposed to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars of super-profits for pharmacists and medical centres. If human rights defenders are right, the Americans killed at least 300 people by testing Coley’s toxin in Iraq alone. Experiments with Burton’s serum were also widely conducted – in Iraq five hundred people were forced to participate.
At the end of the World War II, a significant number of the Nazis received death sentences at the Nuremberg trials for their inhuman experiments on human beings. But the US prefers to remain silent on its ‘human capabilities researchers’, keeping such activities classified. After all, there was a reason that in 1947 the US Commission on Nuclear Energy released ‘Medical Experiments on Humans,’ document that stated: ‘It is desirable that when conducting experiments on human beings no documents be created that might cause a negative public reaction… documents containing such information should be classified.’
As a result, up to date, no US official has been convicted of inhuman experiments on their own compatriots. However, the activities of different public and non-governmental organizations in the US are permitted by this ‘stronghold of world democracy’ to detect only failures on the part of countries that are foes of the White House.
Is it not the time for the United States itself to give account before its own people and the global public for the numerous experiments on human beings conducted by US intelligence agencies?
______________
Vladimir Platov, an expert on the Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” .
Reprinted with permission from New Eastern Outlook
TOP: Video footage of a police officer getting "shot in the head" after the Charlie Hebdo
massacre. Clearly the gunman missed and the bullet hits the sidewalk, yet we are told
that the police officer died from this "shot in the head." BOTTOM: What a human
head "should" look like after it takes a round from an AK47 rifle.
What Hebdo 'Execution Video' Really Shows
By Jonathan Cook
I am well aware that I’m stepping into a hornet’s nest by posting this video, which is going viral. Those who wish to silence all debate have an easy card to play here, accusing me of buying into a conspiracy theory. There’s only one problem: unlike the video-maker, I have few conclusions to draw about what the significance of this video is in relation to the official story. That is not why I am posting it.
But it does, at least to my mind and obviously a lot of other people’s, judging by how quickly it’s spreading, suggest that Ahmed Merabet, the policeman outside the Charlie Hebdo office, was not shot in the head, as all the media have been stating.
_________________
Video Punches A Major Hole in the Official Charlie Hebdo Terror Attack Story
_________________
That said, it does not prove much more. It doesn’t prove that Merabet did not die at the scene. Maybe he bled to death there on the pavement from his earlier wound. It certainly doesn’t prove that the Kouachi brothers were not the gunmen or that the one who fired missed on purpose. Maybe he just missed.
Nor does the video’s removal from most websites prove that there is some sort of massive cover-up going on. Ideas of good taste, especially in the immediate aftermath of a massacre close to home (ie here in the West), can lead to a media consensus that a video is too upsetting. That can occur even if it does not show blood and gore, simply because of what it implies. Herd instinct in these instances is very strong.
But the unedited video clip does leave a sour taste: because unless someone has a good rebuttal, it does indeed seem impossible that an AK-47 bullet fired from close range would not have done something pretty dramatic to that policeman’s head. And if the video is real – and there doesn’t seem much doubt that it is – it clearly shows nothing significant happened to his head either as or after the bullet was fired.
So what points am I making?
The first one is more tentative. It seems – though I suppose there could be an explanation I have overlooked – that the authorities have lied about the cause of the policeman’s death. That could be for several probably unknowable reasons, including that his being executed was a simpler, neater story than that he bled to death on the pavement because of official incompetence (there already seems to have been plenty of that in this case).
The second point is even more troubling. Most of the senior editors of our mainstream media have watched the unedited video just as you now have. And either not one of them saw the problem raised here – that the video does not show what it is supposed to show – or some of them did see it but did not care. Either way, they simpy regurgitated an official story that does not seem to fit the available evidence.
That is a cause for deep concern. Because if the media are acting as a collective mouth-piece for a dubious official narrative on this occasion, on a story of huge significance that one assumes is being carefully scrutinised for news angles, what are they doing the rest of the time?
The lesson is that we as news consumers must create our own critical distance from the “news” because we cannot trust our corporate media to do that work for us. They are far too close to power. In fact, they are power.
Official narratives are inherently suspect because power always looks out for itself. This appears to be a good example – whether what it shows is relatively harmless or sinister – to remind us of that fact.
By RT
Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 2 million American users during the 2012 presidential election without telling them. The manipulation led to a 3 percent increase in voter turnout, according to the company’s own data scientist.
In a stunning revelation, the three months prior to Election Day in 2012 saw Facebook “tweak” the feeds of 1.9 million Americans by sharing their friends’ hard news posts rather than the usual personal posts. The effect was felt most by occasional Facebook users who reported in a survey they paid more attention to the government because of their friends’ hard news feeds. Facebook didn’t tell users about this psychology experiment, but it boosted voter turnout by 3 percent.
The experiment was first shared with the public in two talks given by Facebook’s data scientist, Lada Adamic, in the fall of 2012, and more details were disclosed recently by Mother Jones. In those talks, Adamic said a colleague at Facebook, Solomon Messing, “tweaked” the feeds. Afterwards, Messing surveyed the group and found that voter turnout and political engagement grew from a self-reported 64 percent to more than 67 percent.
Michael Buckley, vice president for global business communication at Facebook, said the Messing study was an “in product” test designed to see how users would react with news feeds that were more prominent.
“This was literally some of the earliest learning we had on news,” Buckley told Mother Jones. “Now, we’ve literally changed News Feed, to reduce spam and increase quality of content.”
Buckley said the public will not receive full answers about that experiment until some point in 2015, when the academic papers are expected to be published.
It is not the first time that Facebook has been exposed for conducting psychological experiments on its users without their knowledge. In June, it was revealed that Facebook tried to manipulate users’ emotions when toying with the feelings of 689,003 randomly-selected, English-speaking Facebook users by changing the contents of their news feed. During a week-long period in January 2012, researchers staged two parallel experiments, reducing the number of positive or negative updates in each user’s news feed.
“These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks, and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network,” according to a paper published in the June edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS).
The Facebook users were not notified of the experiment. However, according to Facebook’s terms of service (to which every person agrees when they register on the social network), user data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” The researchers argue that their experiment was consistent with Facebook’s data use policy.
These experiments are raising eyebrows over the manipulation of voters, as well as the possibility that big data can eventually be used to “engineer the public” without the public’s knowledge, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci.
“At minimum, this environment favors incumbents who already have troves of data, and favors entrenched and moneyed candidates within parties, as well as the data–rich among existing parties. The trends are clear. The selling of politicians — as if they were ‘products’ — will become more expansive and improved, if more expensive,” said Tufekci in a report on the peer-reviewed journal First Monday.
“In this light, it is not a complete coincidence that the ‘chief data scientist’ for the Obama 2012 campaign was previously employed by a supermarket to ‘maximize the efficiency of sales promotions.’ And while the data advantage is held, for the moment, by the Democratic party in the United States, it will likely available to the highest bidder in future campaigns.”
Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.
By Thomson Reuters
The frailty of remembrance might have an upside: When a memory is recalled, two research teams reported on Wednesday, it can be erased or rewired so that a painful recollection is physically linked in the brain to joy and a once-happy memory to pain.
While lab rodents were used in the research, it adds to growing evidence that the malleability of memory might be exploited to treat disorders such as post-traumatic stress.
In both studies, scientists focused on a phenomenon called reconsolidation. Discovered in the 1990s, it refers to the fact that when a memory is retrieved, its physical manifestation in the brain is so "labile," or changeable, that it can be altered. False memories can form, and the associated emotions can flip.
[...]
"We could switch the mouse's memory from positive emotions to negative, and negative to positive," Tonegawa told reporters.
Human memory circuits similar
More research is needed before anything similar could be used in people, MIT's Roger Redondo said, "but the circuits appear to be very similar" as in mice.
In a separate study, researchers at Boston's McLean Hospital also exploited the malleability of reactivated memories to erase them completely.
Informing the white public that the percentage of black Americans in prison is far greater than the percentage of white people behind bars may not spur support for reform. Instead, it might actually generate support for the policies – such as stop-and-frisk and three-strikes laws – that created the situation.
By Shara Tonn
Although African-Americans constitute only 12 percent of America's population, they represent 40 percent of the nation's prison inmates.
But informing the white public of this disproportionate incarceration rate may actually bolster support for the very policies that perpetuate the inequality, according to a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Stanford psychology researchers Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found that when white people were told about these racial disparities, they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities.
The expansion of harsh policies – such as California's Three Strikes law and similar measures by other states – has led the United States to have the largest per-capita prison population in the world.
"Most people likely assume this must be due to rising crime rates, but the explosion in the prison population is better explained by harsh criminal justice policies," said Hetey, a postdoctoral scholar and the lead author on the study.
Real-life test
Hetey and Eberhardt, an associate professor of psychology, wanted to know whether making white people aware of racial disparities in incarceration would bolster or diminish their support for draconian policies.
Their first experiment unfolded at a train station near San Francisco. A white female researcher asked 62 white voters to watch a video containing mug shots of male inmates. Some of the participants saw a video in which 25 percent of the mug shots were of black men, while others saw a video in which the percentage of black men among the mug shots rose to 45 percent.
The participants then had an opportunity to sign a real petition aimed at easing the severity of California's three-strikes law. "It seemed like a great opportunity – a real-life political issue – to test this question of whether blacker prison populations lead people to accept these more punitive policies," Eberhardt said.
The results were clear. Over half of the participants who'd seen the mug shots with fewer black men signed the petition, whereas only 27 percent of people who viewed the mug shots containing a higher percentage of black inmates agreed to sign. This was the case regardless of how harsh participants thought the law was.
Stop-and-frisk policy
To determine whether fear of crime might explain these findings, Hetey and Eberhardt conducted a second experiment.
In 2012, the New York City Police Department detained people more than 500,000 times under the city's controversial stop-and-frisk law. Of that total, 55 percent were African-American. For their experiment, Hetey and Eberhardt showed 164 white New Yorkers statistics about the prison population.
The New York residents read about black inmates either in terms of the national incarceration rate (40 percent of prisoners are black) or the New York City rate (60 percent.) Next, they were asked about their support for the stop-and-frisk policy.
About 33 percent of the participants who saw the lower national statistic were willing to sign a petition to end the policy. But only 12 percent of those who saw the higher city rate of black incarceration were willing to sign the petition.
Participants who saw the higher rate of black incarceration were more likely to report concern over crime, which was associated with reluctance to sign the petition.
Social activists or policymakers trying to fight inequality often use statistical evidence to motivate people to join their cause. In light of this study, that strategy may backfire.
"Many legal advocates and social activists seem to assume that bombarding the public with images, statistics and other evidence of racial disparities will motivate people to join the cause and fight inequality," Hetey said. "But we found that, ironically, exposure to extreme racial disparities may make the public less, and not more, responsive to attempts to lessen the severity of policies that help maintain those disparities."
"Our research shows that numbers don't always speak for themselves," Eberhardt said. "Reducing inequality takes more than simply presenting people with evidence of extreme inequality."
Shara Tonn is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
Media Contact
Rebecca Hetey, Psychology: rhetey@stanford.edu
Jennifer Eberhardt, Psychology: jleberhardt@stanford.edu
Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu
Although African-Americans constitute only 12 percent of America's population, they represent 40 percent of the nation's prison inmates.
But informing the white public of this disproportionate incarceration rate may actually bolster support for the very policies that perpetuate the inequality, according to a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Stanford psychology researchers Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found that when white people were told about these racial disparities, they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities.
The expansion of harsh policies – such as California's Three Strikes law and similar measures by other states – has led the United States to have the largest per-capita prison population in the world.
"Most people likely assume this must be due to rising crime rates, but the explosion in the prison population is better explained by harsh criminal justice policies," said Hetey, a postdoctoral scholar and the lead author on the study.
Real-life test
Hetey and Eberhardt, an associate professor of psychology, wanted to know whether making white people aware of racial disparities in incarceration would bolster or diminish their support for draconian policies.
Their first experiment unfolded at a train station near San Francisco. A white female researcher asked 62 white voters to watch a video containing mug shots of male inmates. Some of the participants saw a video in which 25 percent of the mug shots were of black men, while others saw a video in which the percentage of black men among the mug shots rose to 45 percent.
The participants then had an opportunity to sign a real petition aimed at easing the severity of California's three-strikes law. "It seemed like a great opportunity – a real-life political issue – to test this question of whether blacker prison populations lead people to accept these more punitive policies," Eberhardt said.
The results were clear. Over half of the participants who'd seen the mug shots with fewer black men signed the petition, whereas only 27 percent of people who viewed the mug shots containing a higher percentage of black inmates agreed to sign. This was the case regardless of how harsh participants thought the law was.
Stop-and-frisk policy
To determine whether fear of crime might explain these findings, Hetey and Eberhardt conducted a second experiment.
In 2012, the New York City Police Department detained people more than 500,000 times under the city's controversial stop-and-frisk law. Of that total, 55 percent were African-American. For their experiment, Hetey and Eberhardt showed 164 white New Yorkers statistics about the prison population.
The New York residents read about black inmates either in terms of the national incarceration rate (40 percent of prisoners are black) or the New York City rate (60 percent.) Next, they were asked about their support for the stop-and-frisk policy.
About 33 percent of the participants who saw the lower national statistic were willing to sign a petition to end the policy. But only 12 percent of those who saw the higher city rate of black incarceration were willing to sign the petition.
Participants who saw the higher rate of black incarceration were more likely to report concern over crime, which was associated with reluctance to sign the petition.
Social activists or policymakers trying to fight inequality often use statistical evidence to motivate people to join their cause. In light of this study, that strategy may backfire.
"Many legal advocates and social activists seem to assume that bombarding the public with images, statistics and other evidence of racial disparities will motivate people to join the cause and fight inequality," Hetey said. "But we found that, ironically, exposure to extreme racial disparities may make the public less, and not more, responsive to attempts to lessen the severity of policies that help maintain those disparities."
"Our research shows that numbers don't always speak for themselves," Eberhardt said. "Reducing inequality takes more than simply presenting people with evidence of extreme inequality."
___________________
Shara Tonn is an intern at the Stanford News Service.
Media Contact
By Sean Gallagher
Facebook isn’t the only organization conducting research into how attitudes are affected by social media. The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them. While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research—including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program—has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.
One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. “A less investigated problem is once you’ve identified the network, how do you manipulate it toward an end,” said Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida’s Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group. Dixon was the principal investigator on an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded project, which published its findings in February in a paper entitled “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity.”
The research demonstrates that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots can be applied to social networks in order to control human behavior. If properly calibrated, the mathematical models developed by Dixon and his fellow researchers could be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors—perhaps in concert with some of the social media “effects” cyber-weaponry developed by the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.
When the claustrum was stimulated, the woman just stopped whatever she
was doing (speaking, reading, moving) and stared blankly into space;
when stimulation was removed, she continued as normal with no
recollection of what had just happened.
By Sebastian Anthony
Researchers at George Washington University are reporting that they’ve discovered the human consciousness on-off switch, deep within the brain. When this region of the brain, called the claustrum, is electrically stimulated, consciousness — self-awareness, sentience, whatever you want to call it — appears to turn off completely. When the stimulation is removed, consciousness returns. The claustrum seems to bind together all of our senses, perceptions, and computations into single, cohesive experience. This could have massive repercussions for people currently in a minimally conscious state (i.e. a coma), and for deciding once and for all which organisms are actually conscious. Are monkeys conscious? Cats and dogs? A fetus?
(Click to see full-sized image) The claustrum, below the neocortex, in a human brain
When it comes to human consciousness, much like the rest of our brain’s operation, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of actual scientific knowledge. Despite a century of “modern” neuroscience, we still only have a rough sketch of how the human brain works. Most theories, though, generally agree that consciousness is probably created by a part of the brain that integrates activity from different regions of the brain into a single, holistic experience. To put it in (very loose) computing terms, this seat of human consciousness would be somewhat like a CPU; without it, you’d just have a bunch of different parts that are theoretically functional, but not really capable of getting anything useful done.
The research, led by Mohamad Koubeissi at GWU in Washington DC, was originally tasked with analyzing a woman with epilepsy. The neuroscientists were stimulating regions of the brain with electrodes in an attempt to discover where her seizures originated from. Then, when they stimulated the claustrum — a thin region of the brain underneath the neocortex — the patient slowly lost consciousness. When the stimulation was removed, consciousness returned. When the claustrum was stimulated, the woman just stopped whatever she was doing (speaking, reading, moving) and stared blankly into space; when stimulation was removed, she continued as normal with no recollection of what had just happened.
By RT News
Facebook's experiment on over half-a-million unsuspecting users has
taken a new twist with the revelation that a researcher connected to a
Department of Defense-funded program to use the military to quell civil
unrest also participated in the study. . .
The attack on Facebook looks set to worsen as it was discovered
that one of the authors of the platform’s mind study, Jeffrey T.
Hancock of Cornell University, also received funding from the
Pentagon’s so-called Minerva Research Initiative to conduct a
similar study entitled ‘Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in
Authoritarian Regimes’.
Read the Facebook mind control experiment that was co-authored by Jeffrey T. Hancock for yourself (and a study Hancock co-authored on Facebook and self-esteem):
Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks
The full study can be found below: Click the arrow (<) on the left side to view the document without thumbnails.
By Ronald David Jackson
Facebook and its cronies (Cornell, and the University of California–San Francisco) violated the most fundamental principles of scientific ethics, especially when it involves conducting experiments on humans: Human subjects 1) must be informed of their participation in a psychological experiment, 2) must provide permission to be the object of an experiment, 3) must be properly debriefed (informed of the nature of the experiment and its fundamental hypotheses) , and 4) must leave the experiment in virtually the same condition they were in before they participated in the experiment. The Facebook experiment passed none of these ethical tests.
In effect, Facebook violated the civil and human rights of hundreds of thousands of its users by placing a "virus" in its newsfeed algorithm during a mind control test of "Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks." Facebook manipulated which friends' posts users would see; showered users with either negative or positive posts to make users either happy or depressed.
By Nikhil Dhingra
A girl's voice desperately cries for help from within a white van in
India, where she is presumably being raped, but many walk past
nonchalantly, ignoring her pleas. A few people try to intervene.
Thankfully, no one is actually in danger.
The jarring scene is choreographed, part of a viral social experiment video posted on June 4, 2014 by YesNoMaybe,
a local entertainment group from India, to draw attention to the “rape
culture” plaguing India. ”We hear about rapes every day in India, which
leads to widespread protest. Thousands of people attend candlelight
marches,” the video description reads. “But only a handful of people act
when it really matters.”
The video was posted not long after the recent brutal gang-rape and hanging of two young girls in a rural village in India. Within 24 hours of being posted, YesNoMaybe’s Facebook page reported that it had reached over 150,000 views. By June 12, 2014,
it had a million (and currently has 1.65 million). After a few days,
the video had received coverage from various Western media outlets such
as Time magazine and The Telegraph.
Many were appalled at the lack of concern shown by some of the
passersby in the video when screams could clearly be heard. The video
sparked widespread outrage at the way India handles the issue of rape,
and fueled even more frustration among those fighting to remedy the
problem.
Some, such as Urmi Agrawal, wrote on the Facebook page’s comment section that the video made an important point:
this movie should be shown to our so called youth who believe in candle march and talking on social media….but when the strom
hit the ground, they do nothing!
Others, however, focused their attention towards the coverage of the
video by major news outlets. Ruchika Tulshyan, a blogger for Forbes
Magazine, took issue with Time's headline, “Are Indians As Nonchalant
About Rape as This Video Suggests?”:
Some people in the YouTube comments section criticized the people behind the video. Tirthankar Dubey,
an Indian expat living in London, praised the video’s intentions, but
pointed out that the video made it seem as if the filmmakers didn't open
the van to prove to those concerned that there was no woman being
raped.
After numerous other comments similar to Dubey’s surfaced on the
video’s YouTube page, YesNoMaybe eventually issued an official response
via YouTube comment:
“Alright here's something you all should know -
1. We talked to all the heroes for a good 5 minutes.
2. We opened the door and showed them what's inside.
3. All of them (including the first guy appreciated what we were doing)
4. On being asked if they would do the same again if needed – ‘Definitely, why not?’”
Nonetheless, some people began to question the publicity that this
video gained for India and if the creators were actually damaging
India’s reputation rather than raising awareness.
A biker from Mumbai with the YouTube username “Oggy F” began to question what the video really accomplished:
To be honest, these “social experiments” only damage the
already horrible image India has globally. If you're so concerned about
what our society thinks, spend your time conducting workshops and
creating awareness (among women and men). Videos like these give the
world an opportunity to say India is the rape capital of the world.
Rape is certainly a serious issue in India, but do videos like this one help solve the problem? What do you think?
By DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
Work on DARPA’s Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program is set to begin with teams led by UC San Francisco (UCSF), and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The SUBNETS program seeks to reduce the severity of neuropsychological illness in service members and veterans by developing closed-loop therapies that incorporate recording and analysis of brain activity with near-real-time neural stimulation. The program, which will use next-generation devices inspired by current Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) technology, was launched in support of President Obama’s brain initiative.
UCSF and MGH will oversee teams of physicians, engineers, and neuroscientists who are working together to develop advanced brain interfaces, computational models of neural activity, and clinical therapies for treating networks of the brain. The teams will collaborate with commercial industry and government, including researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Medtronic, to apply a broad range of perspectives to the technological challenges involved.
SUBNETS is premised on the understanding that brain function—and dysfunction, in the case of neuropsychological illness—plays out across distributed neural systems, as opposed to being strictly relegated to distinct anatomical regions of the brain. The program also aims to take advantage of neural plasticity, a feature of the brain by which the organ’s anatomy and physiology can alter over time to support normal brain function. Plasticity runs counter to previously held ideas that the adult brain is a “finished” entity that can be statically mapped. Because of plasticity, researchers are optimistic that the brain can be trained or treated to restore normal functionality following injury or the onset of neuropsychological illness.
“The brain is very different from all other organs because of its networking and adaptability,” said Justin Sanchez, the DARPA program manager for SUBNETS. “Real-time, closed-loop neural interfaces allow us to move beyond the traditional static view of the brain and into a realm of precision therapy. This lack of understanding of how mental illness specifically manifests in the brain has limited the effectiveness of existing treatment options, but through SUBNETS we hope to change that. DARPA is looking for ways to characterize which regions come into play for different conditions—measured from brain networks down to the single neuron level—and develop therapeutic devices that can record activity, deliver targeted stimulation, and most importantly, automatically adjust therapy as the brain itself changes. The research teams we selected for SUBNETS will pursue bold approaches to reach those goals and we’re excited to get started because this research could prove to be transformative for people with mental illness.”
The UCSF team’s approach is to develop a device that focuses on regions of the brain involved in an individual’s psychiatric or neurologic disease. The device will use direct recording, stimulation, and therapeutic approaches to encourage neural plasticity, with the aim of rehabilitating the circuits that appear to be driving pathology and free an individual from psychiatric or neurologic symptoms. If successful, the approach would allow for the eventual removal of the device.
The MGH team will pursue a “trans-diagnostic” approach to assessing common components of psychiatric and neurologic diseases—traits common to many such syndromes, including increased anxiety, impaired recall, or inappropriate reactions to stimuli—through qualitative and quantitative behavioral testing combined with high-fidelity, real-time single-neuron recordings. If successful, this method will allow investigators to follow the traces of pathology from individually firing neurons, up through imaging studies of neural network behavior, and into tests that can be performed in the clinical setting. It could also lead to more targeted treatments for psychiatric disease and advance clinicians’ ability to make accurate diagnoses. The MGH team will also work with Draper Laboratories to deploy state-of-the-art advances in micro-fabrication of electronics, with the goal of generating a sophisticated, implantable device that will remain safe and effective through the lifetime of the recipient.
The SUBNETS program plan calls for research to be conducted over the next five years along a schedule of prescribed milestones, culminating in technology demonstrations and submission of devices for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“DARPA is in the business of creating not just science, but new technologies,” Sanchez said. “The neurotechnologies we will work to develop under SUBNETS could give new tools to the medical community to treat patients who don’t respond to other therapies, and new knowledge to the neuroscience community to expand the understanding of brain function. We believe this will be a foundational program.”
