FAKE NEWS ANALYSIS
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Posted:Sep 22, 2018 4:09 am
Last Updated:Sep 22, 2018 4:11 am 15567 Views
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Fake news published in the U.S. was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by right-wing social media users, a study from the University of Oxford revealed.
Research from Oxford's "computational propaganda project" investigated the sources of "junk news" shared in the three months leading up to President Donald Trump's first State of the Union address in January 2018.
On Facebook, they found that "extreme hard-right" conservatives shared more fake news stories than all other political groups combined, while on Twitter, Trump supporters consumed the most fake news.
MY CAPITALS
"ON TWITTER, A NETWORK OF TRUMP SUPPORTERS CONSUMES THE LARGEST VOLUME OF JUNK NEWS, AND JUNK NEWS IS THE LARGEST PROPORTION OF NEWS LINKS THEY SHARE" they said.
Researchers monitored 13,500 politically-active U.S. Twitter users and 48,000 public Facebook pages, investigating the external websites they shared links to.
Researchers said there was "limited overlap" of news sources shared between Democrats and Republicans, which they said speaks to the polarization that exists across the U.S. political divide.
They warned that social media algorithms can be used to distribute polarizing political content and misinformation, adding that "filter bubble effects," which select what information to show in news feeds based on user preferences and behavior, have "polarized public life," which could leave consumers vulnerable to propaganda campaigns.
"Given the central role that social media plays in public life, these platforms have become a target for propaganda campaigns and information operations," researchers wrote.
They pointed to a recent U.S. elections review by Twitter that found that more than 50,000 automated accounts were linked to Russia.
Links to the original report can be found at comprop dot oii dot ox dot uk front slash wp-content front slash uploads front slash sites /93/2018/02/Polarization-Partisanship-JunkNews. dot pdf (take out spaces and front slash = /
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"The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump: Everyone and Everything He Touches Rots."
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Posted:Aug 28, 2018 2:23 am
Last Updated:May 6, 2024 4:4 am 15169 Views
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Peter Wehner, who served in the three previous Republican administrations and is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, weighs in on the Opinion Pages of The New York Times:
"The Full-Spectrum Corruption of Donald Trump:
Everyone and Everything He Touches Rots.
There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.
When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.
For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.
Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.
It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.
For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.
Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.
In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.
But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative. (“Truth isn’t truth,” in the infamous words of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.) They are stripping politics of its high purpose and nobility.
That’s not all politics is; self-interest is always a factor. But if politics is only about power unbounded by morality — if it’s simply about rulers governing by the law of the jungle, about a prince acting like a beast, in the words of Machiavelli — then the whole enterprise will collapse. We have to distinguish between imperfect leaders and corrupt ones, and we need the vocabulary to do so.
A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.
Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?"
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Mass shootings
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Posted:Mar 15, 2018 3:43 pm
Last Updated:Aug 2, 2018 2:55 am 15126 Views
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Can somebody explain this to me?
The definition of a MASS SHOOTING used by the NRA, every gun nut and any right wing medium you care to name in the USA is that used by the FBI for MASS MURDER - to whit when 4 or more people are KILLED (not including the perpetrator) in a single incident or related incidents at nearby locations.
Surely the sensible definition would be that used by the Gun Violence Archive "The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as four or more victims injured or killed in a single incident, “at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.” If we want to define mass shooting it stands to reason that it should include people who are SHOT not just those who are KILLED. Is the USA so besotted with guns that 'merely' being shot is not enough to make you a victim of a mass SHOOTING; you have to be KILLED or you do not count?
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Faced with a mother's grief for a murdered , Donald Trump only thinks about himself
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Posted:Aug 17, 2017 2:21 am
Last Updated:Oct 24, 2019 7:57 am 15555 Views
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From USATODAY ----
Trump Tower presser proved our president is far worse than a racist
The most tumultuous week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with his threats to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and ended with mayhem and murder in Charlottesville, Va. After more than half a year, our national crisis appears to be building toward some sort of climax, a swelling crescendo that was topped off by Trump’s flabbergasting news conference Tuesday afternoon in Trump Tower.
What strikes one first about Trump’s remarks is the absence of rationality, of any attempt to connect means to ends. The normal question one might ask of a politician’s pronouncements is: What was he trying to accomplish, what ball was he seeking to advance toward what goal? Here such a line of inquiry makes no sense. Instead of purpose and positioning and strategy, we were witnessing — and not for the first time — a volcanic eruption, a lava flow of anger.
The explosion should not come entirely as a surprise. After all, the view from the White House these days is bleak. Trump boasts incessantly, as he did at this news conference, of his economic accomplishments: record unemployment and a soaring stock market. Whatever credit he does or does not deserve for those developments is irrelevant. What is highly relevant is special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, which has begun digging into Trump’s family finances, where there is dirt aplenty. What is just as relevant are opinion polls, which Trump dwells on obsessively, showing his standing at a record low. The walls are closing in on him.
Charlottesville added combustible ingredients to the dismal picture. Just as Trump has shown an unaccountable unwillingness to criticize Vladimir Putin, he has shown the same unwillingness, not quite so unaccountable, to single out and challenge the hardcore right. We saw the most vivid example of this in the campaign when, following David Duke’s endorsement of his candidacy, he refused to disavow it, affecting falsely not to know who the white supremacist leader was.
Yet in Charlottesville here they were again, the very people he evidently conceives of as a core element of his base, carrying torches, chanting “blood and soil,” adorning themselves with swastikas, running riot and allegedly committing murder. Trump came under enormous pressure to criticize them. And then, when he declined to do so in a full-throated way, pinning blame for the violence instead on “many sides,” he came under intense criticism for being mealy-mouthed. Forty-eight hours later, by the time he succumbed to the pleas of his desperate advisers and agreed to read from the teleprompter the words they told him the nation was waiting to hear, it was too late.
The result, for Trump, was the worst of all worlds. He meant not a syllable of what he had said and was being slammed for it all the same. Republican politicians were now joining Democrats in castigating him. Even worse, a growing list of CEOs of megacompanies were bidding adieu to his vaunted manufacturing council, adding cutting public farewell notes for his maximum embarrassment.
On Tuesday at Trump Tower, we saw all these crosscurrents converge. The result was a rant that made even his advisers visibly cringe. Trump effectively retracted the words he had struggled not to say on Saturday. He showered praise on the fanatical racist losers who invaded Charlottesville.
To be sure, some of them were “bad,” he said, using his characteristic infantile vocabulary. But many others were “fine people,” with a perfectly valid permit, “protesting very quietly” against the “the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”
Given such ardor in defense of racists, the question naturally arises: Is Donald Trump a racist himself? From the Judge Gonzalo Curiel affair to the Central Park Five to his illegal practices as a New York landlord, there is a wealth of evidence. The question, however, ultimately revolves around an unknowable grasp of what is in his heart. My own view is that Trump might not be a racist and might well be something worse.
Consider that to those injured in the murderous rampage that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Trump tweeted “best regards.” Consider also that at the Trump Tower presser, Trump focused on how Heyer’s grieving mother went on social media and wrote “the nicest things” about him and “thanked me for what I said.”
Who chooses such odd words to say such peculiar things about such sensitive subjects? These utterances suggest a person lacking in empathy, a person incapable of feeling anyone’s pain but his own. They are hardly the only and certainly not the most egregious examples of their kind.
Recall Trump’s cruel mocking of a disabled reporter. Recall Trump’s attacks on Khizr Khan, who had to bury a who died fighting for our country. Asked by George Stephanopoulos to compare that terrible sacrifice with his own, Trump responded: "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. ... I've created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I've had tremendous success.”
Racists are all too human. They are propelled by hatred based upon a set of perverted core beliefs. Trump’s rage over Charlottesville has nothing to do with a particular set of beliefs about race or anything else. And it has nothing to do with hatred. It has everything to do with something else.
As the head of a family business in New York, luxuriating in his inherited millions or billions, Trump could live in a fantasy world of infallibility and invulnerability. In the White House, that fantasy world is repeatedly being punctured. For the first time the entire world is seeing — he himself is seeing — how severely limited he is.
Believing in nothing but his own greatness, concerned with no one but himself and the extensions of himself who are his , the man we watched boiling over in Trump Tower, the president of the United States, the man who boasts “I’ve had tremendous success,” is a solipsist whose defective self is being inexorably destroyed as it falls under the relentless scrutiny that attends public life in our democracy.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law, was a senior adviser to the 2012 Romney for President campaign.
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An open letter from Pastor John Pavlovitz
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Posted:May 30, 2017 11:41 am
Last Updated:May 6, 2024 4:4 am 15602 Views
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I remember the day after the Election, a friend of mine who happens to be white, remarked on social media that he “finally wasn’t embarrassed of America and our President.”
I sprained my eyes rolling them and they have never fully recovered.
Since then I’ve heard this sentiment echoed by more white folks than I can count, especially in recent months; supposed relief at once again having a leader who instils pride.
Since I don’t have the time to ask each of the individually, I’ll ask here:
So, you were embarrassed for the past 8 years, huh?
Really?
What exactly were you embarrassed by?
Were you embarrassed by his lone and enduring twenty-five year marriage to a strong woman he’s never ceased to publicly praise, respect, or cherish?
Were you embarrassed by the way he lovingly and sweetly parented and protected his daughters?
Were you embarrassed by his Columbia University degree in Political Science or his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School?
Maybe you were embarrassed by his white American and Black Kenyan parents, or the diversity he was raised in as normal?
Were you embarrassed by his eloquence, his quick wit, his easy humor, his seeming comfort meeting with both world leaders and street cleaners; by his bright smile or his sense of empathy or his steadiness—perhaps by his lack of personal scandals or verbal gaffes or impulsive tirades?
No. Of course you weren’t.
Honestly, I don’t believe you were ever embarrassed. That word implies an association that brings ridicule, one that makes you ashamed by association, and if that’s something you claim to have experienced over the past eight years by having Barack Obama representing you in the world—I’m going to suggest you rethink your word choice.
You weren’t “embarrassed” by Barack Obama.
You were threatened by him.
You were offended by him.
You were challenged by him.
You were enraged by him.
But I don’t believe it had anything to do with his resume or his experience or his character or his conduct in office—because you seem fully proud right now to be associated with a three-time married, serial adulterer and confessed predator; a man whose election and business dealings and relationships are riddled with controversy and malfeasance. You’re perfectly fine being represented by a bullying, obnoxious, genitalia-grabbing, Tweet-ranting, Prime Minister-shoving charlatan who’s managed to offended all our allies in a few short months. And you’re okay with him putting on religious faith like a rented, dusty, ill-fitting tuxedo and immediately tossing it in the garbage when he’s finished with it.
None of that you’re embarrassed by? I wonder how that works.
Actually, I’m afraid I have an idea. I hope I’m wrong.
Listen, you’re perfectly within your rights to have disagreed with Barack Obama’s policies or to have taken issue with his tactics. No one’s claiming he was a flawless politician or a perfect human being. But somehow I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. I think the thing President Obama did that really upset you, white friend—was having a complexion that was far darker than you were ever comfortable with. I think the President we have now feels much better.
Because objectively speaking, if what’s happening in our country right now doesn’t cause you great shame and doesn’t induce the continual meeting of your palm to your face—I don’t believe embarrassment is ever something you struggle with.
No, if you claimed to be “embarrassed” by Barack Obama but you’re not embarrassed by Donald Trump—I’m going to strongly suggest it was largely a pigmentation issue.
And as an American and a Christian committed to diversity and equality and to the liberty at the heart of this nation—that, embarrasses me.
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Paradise on Earth?
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Posted:Mar 4, 2017 6:16 am
Last Updated:Mar 4, 2017 12:08 pm 17050 Views
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Unfortunately the internet connection here is so slow it will only upload pictures if you are VERY lucky. I am posting this blog without pics but will add them if the connection allows and/or in Australia next week- (assuming more reliable internet)
Borneo is everyone’s idea of a tropical island paradise. Sitting directly on the equator the island is exactly as you would picture it with virgin rain forests growing on rugged mountains under a blazing hot sun and surrounded by the blue waters of the South China sea. The island is divided between three nations; Malaysia occupies the North western half of the island and Indonesia the South eastern half. The tiny kingdom of Brunei, with its vast wealth of oil, sits on the coast in the middle of the Malaysian half of the island.
In the northernmost part of the island is the Malaysian state of Sabah and the coastal city of Kota Kinabalu which has a busy international airport welcoming visitors from all over the world but mainly from China, Korea, the Philippines, Japan and Australia/New Zealand. It is obvious that KK (as it is called) has expanded rapidly since the British left in 1963 with high rise hotels and brand new malls dominating the city but it has retained a flourishing Chinatown and hidden bazaars selling local produce and inexpensive clothes as well as the ‘gold’ jewellery which it seems is de rigeur for all Chinese and Indian women to wear.
The harbour at KK is blessed with a plethora of tropical islands dotted around and beyond its entrance ranging from the large islands of Gaya, Manukan and Sapi with extensive tourist development, to the smaller Islands of Mamutik and Sulug which are less developed and less crowded. All of the islands sit in the Tunku Abdul Rahman national park and conservation area. Boat trips out to the islands are frequent and relatively inexpensive through the morning with return trips until 5 pm, bearing in mind that the sun sets at the equator very quickly and regularly at around 6 pm.The islands offer sandy beaches with coral growing only 20 - 30m from the sea’s edge along with many native plants and short jungle walks. We chose the smaller island of Mamutik and spent the day lazing around the beach and scrambling on the rocks, chasing monitor lizards (baby ones only- the adults grow up to 2m or 6’6’’ long) and trying to identify the native flowers and birds. I have come to the conclusion that I could have been a beach bum in an earlier life.
The island’s highest mountain (Mount Kinabalu - 4095m/13,345ft) overlooks the town and thunderclouds form over the mountain most afternoons, but we have not had a single drop of rain in 4 days here or for 6 days in India so our luck is holding.
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Taj Mahal
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Posted:Feb 27, 2017 9:28 am
Last Updated:May 6, 2024 4:4 am 17034 Views
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Highlight of the trip to India had to be Taj Mahal, and it did not disappoint. Despite a pretty dire journey there and back in an arthritic taxi with more things wrong with it than my knee the Taj itself was as spectacular as its reputation suggests.
Built by Shah Jahan (in Persian 'King of the World') as a tomb for his third wife (Mumtaz Mahal) the Taj or mausoleum was primarily made from white marble which is so translucent that it actually changes colour at different times of day - Pink at dawn, White in the daytime and Orange/Red at sunset; it even looks Pale Blue at the full moon. The construction took 22 years in total from her death in 1631 to 1653.
Taj is meticulously symmetrical in all respects with 4 minarets at the corners and a great dome laid out with the tomb of Mumtaz exactly at the centre. There is a mosque on the West of Taj and the emperor's quarters, identical in design and equidistant to the east. The only lack of symmetry is in the positioning of the tomb of Shah Jahan which is directly to the west of Mutaz as he was deposed by his in 1658 before he could build an identical black Taj facing Taj Mahal across the Yamuna river which flows to the rear of the tomb. If his plans had been carried out he would have built a symmetrically exact copy of the Taj Mahal in black marble, facing the original as a mirror image.
An excellent guide helped us set up some memorable photographs and even took some for us so that we could both be seen together.
An eventful trip home culminated in not one but two punctures and an amusing/interesting 45 minutes waiting on an island in the middle of the anarchic Delhi evening rush hour traffic for a pair of mechanics on a motorbike to take away and replace the second punctured tyre. Only in India!
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The most beautiful temple in Delhi
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Posted:Feb 26, 2017 10:20 am
Last Updated:Mar 31, 2020 3:28 pm 18263 Views
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Following the recommendation of a local tuktuk driver we went to the Swaminarayan Akshardham today to see what must be one of the modern wonders of the world.
Built over 2 days short of 5 years and completed in 2005 the temple extends over 90 acres and has some of the most intricate red sandstone carvings anywhere in the world Unfortunately they do not allow you to take ANYTHING electronic into the temple so the pictures are copies of the pictures in the souvenir booklet we bought.
The temple is a centre for cultural and spiritual research in the Swaminarayan Hindu tradition and represents the seat of god on earth - the dwelling place of the god or Akshardham.The gold covered image of the holy figure Bhagwan Swaminarayan is the centrepiece of the whole site and takes your breath away as you enter the central hall (barefoot of course)
The entrance to the complex is surrounded by ten gates through which the spirit and will of people from every direction can enter in search of enlightenment and through which those who seek wisdom can reach out to all the world.
There is absolutely no way to describe the size and grandeur of the whole temple as it really has the sort of wow factor rarely seen anywhere else. Each part is lovingly carved from red sandstone or white marble with intricate figures of gods and Hindu symbols.
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Indian takeaway
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Posted:Feb 24, 2017 12:07 pm
Last Updated:Feb 24, 2017 6:49 pm 16774 Views
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After getting away from the UK just before Doris shut down Heathrow we made it safely, if not without mishap, to Delhi. The big city is full of crooks (with taxi drivers some of the worst culprits) and we ended up at the wrong hotel but it is serviceable and staff are fine, Curry and pasta for breakfast is something of a shock to the system though-and no hot tea? India without a char wallah; what is the world coming to.
Delhi is a fusion of noise, bustle and suicidal drivers, run down shops and high end fashion, massive temples and grinding poverty but everywhere people and more people. There is nowhere to get away from the crush of humanity in the streets near the centre or on the roads.
A Big Mac meal in India is a new experience. No beef (Hindus never eat beef) but chicken patties and lashings of curried mayo (with added extra hot jalapenos). Welcome to India and the Maharaja burger.
A short ride in a cycle rickshaw (most of them have electric motors now so not the old fashioned man powered type) to the central area and Laxmi Narayan temple. . Laxmi Narayan is an incarnation of the God Vishnu.
It was Friday so a holy day. Everyone dressed in their 'Sunday best' and out for the afternoon sun .
The temple is built on 7 acres of land so plenty of interest in the grounds and beautiful weather (27C, 81F) made for a pleasant hour and a half exploring . Lots of very polite young kept sidling up and asking if they could practice their English - with the parents asking for the shy ones.As teachers it is always a pleasure seeing eager to learn, even when you have been asked what is your name, where do you come from and how do you like India for the 20th time.
Then back to stroll through the crowded streets and look in a few shop windows. Our hotel is not quite in the slums but it is an 'earthy' area and plenty of 'colour' to be found in the area around it . .
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