Facebook Really Is Bad For You, Researchers Say

Apparently, Chamath Palihapitiya was on to something when he revealed earlier this week that he felt “tremendous guilt” for the role that he played in Facebook’s success as a social-media company.

To wit, Facebook"s director of research David Ginsberg and research scientist Moira Burke published a blog post this week explaining that, in some instances, the social network can have a deleterious impact on an individual’s overall mood and health.

"University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook," the blog post said. "A study from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey."

In other words, using Facebook to mindlessly browse through your feed or click posts can leave you in a foul mood after.

However, the research wasn’t exclusively negative. Facebook also worked with Carnegie Mellon University and found that "people who sent or received more messages, comments and timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness." Likewise, Facebook said students at Cornell who used Facebook for 5 minutes while viewing their own profiles saw "boosts in self-affirmation," while folks who looked at other profiles did not.

Chamath Palihapitiya

In other words, using Facebook to interact with people - as opposed to just "browsing" as the University of Michigan study analyzed - seemed to have a positive effect on people

Facebook says it"s going to take this data and work to encourage more social interaction among users  to try and cut down on those who spend it to waste time and, ultimately, feel worse after.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s research showed that social support can help prevent suicide.

Facebook is in a unique position to connect people in distress with resources that can help. We work with people and organizations around the world to develop support options for people posting about suicide on Facebook, including reaching out to a friend, contacting help lines and reading tips about things they can do in that moment.

Toward the end of its post, Facebook acknowledged that it hadn’t yet had time to discover “all the answers” – though the company recently pledged $1 million toward research to better understand the relationship between media technologies, youth development and well-being to determine how Facebook has affected the attention spans of its users.

While Palihapitiya later walked back his assertion that Facebook is “ripping apart the fabric of how society works” after being brutally flamed on Twitter for his purported hypocrisy, the notion that Facebook is making its users sick and miserable is certainly nothing new.

As we pointed out in August, even though post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. Social media has pushed them to the brink of a mental health crisis.

Equifax Accidentally Directs 200,000 Customers To Fake Phishing Website

And the hits just keep coming for Equifax, the once-trusted credit-monitoring firm that has been embroiled in one of the biggest corporate public-relations disasters in recent memory since disclosing that hackers had penetrated its cyber security defenses and absconded with sensitive personal and financial data belonging to 143 million Americans. Because of the types of data that were stolen, including drivers" license, social security and credit-card numbers, experts have described the hack as possibly the most damaging corporate hack yet.

As if this weren’t enough to permanently sully the firm’s reputation (amid cries of “you had one job!”) – the staggering irony of a credit monitoring firm inadvertently divulging the sensitive information that it was supposed to safeguard hasn’t been lost on consumers) a series of subsequent disclosures have portrayed the firm’s executives as bungling, at best, and nefarious, at worst.

In the nearly two weeks since the story broke…

• It was revealed that three of the firm’s executives, including its CFO, cashed out of stocks and options worth some $2 million in the month between when the company first learned about the hack, and when it was disclosed to the public. A federal prosecutor in Atlanta has opened a criminal investigation into Equifax that will focus both on whether the firm was criminally negligent in failing to patch a hole in its cybersecurity systems, as well as whether the suspect stock sales constitute securities fraud.


• The company’s head of cyber security was revealed to have no background in computer science or security – a fact the company tried to hastily cover up by scrubbing her social-media profiles. Susan Mauldin, Equifax’s chief information security officer, has a bachelor’s degree in music composition and a master’s in fine arts from the University of Georgia.


• Several Congressional committees have asked the company to turn over information relating to the hack as multiple investigations appear to be getting under way. The attorneys general of a handful of states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island, have joined a probe into the company’s handling of the breach.


• The company has been hit with dozens of lawsuits from consumers alleging fraud, abuse and negligence.


• Equifax CEO Rick Smith has been called to testify before a special House panel early next month.

When Equifax first set up a website to allow consumers to check whether their information was compromised, it carried a waiver stating that by using the service consumers would forfeit the right to sue Equifax. The internet quickly exploded in outrage, and the company quickly clarified that the waiver didn’t apply to this hacking incident, which…sure. Now, The Verge, The New York Times and a handful of other media outlets are reporting that Equifax accidentally tweeted the link to an imposter website set up by a white-hat hacker hoping to expose gllaring errors that the firm had made in setting up its verification website. This happened not once, but three times. And in at least one instance, the tweet with the phony link was left up for a whole day.

Here’s The Verge:

“Today, Equifax ended up creating that exact situation on Twitter. In a tweet to a potential victim, the credit bureau linked to securityequifax2017.com, instead of equifaxsecurity2017.com. It was an easy mistake to make, but the result sent the user to a site with no connection to Equifax itself. Equifax deleted the tweet shortly after this article was published, but it remained live for nearly 24 hours.”

Luckily for consumers, the fake site wasn’t malicious. Instead, it was set up by developer Nick Sweeting to try and expose the glaring security vulnerabilities that the company had embedded in its recovery website, which it set up as a separate domain, rather than making it a subdomain of Equifax’s main website.

“Luckily, the alternate URL Equifax sent the victim to isn’t malicious. Full-stack developer Nick Sweeting set up the misspelled phishing site in order to expose vulnerabilities that existed in Equifax"s response page. “I made the site because Equifax made a huge mistake by using a domain that doesn"t have any trust attached to it [as opposed to hosting it on equifax.com],” Sweeting tells The Verge. “It makes it ridiculously easy for scammers to come in and build clones — they can buy up dozens of domains, and typo-squat to get people to type in their info.”

Sweeting says no data will leave his page and that he "removed any risk of leaking data via network requests by redirecting them back to the user"s own computer," so hopefully data entered on his site is relatively safe. Still, Equifax"s team linked out to his page. That isn"t reassuring.”

Not only did they tweet the wrong link, they tweeted it 3 times. #Equihax pic.twitter.com/T8jrhSfhqw

— Nick Sweeting ???? (@thesquashSH) September 20, 2017

Prior to Equifax customer service sharing the imposter site, Sweeting says he emailed the company’s support team and tweeted to Equifax that he spotted a potential vulnerability. By the time the site was taken down, Sweeting says it had received more than 200,000 hits. In the spirit of transparency, Sweeting included a disclaimer on his site warning consumers that it was a fake – and blasting Equifax for its sloppy security practices.

According to the NYT, phishers cannot create a page on the equifax.com domain, so if the website were hosted there instead, it would be easy for users to tell that the page was legitimate.

“Fortunately for the people who clicked, Mr. Sweeting’s website was upfront about what it was. The layout was the same as the real version, complete with an identical prompt at the top: “To enroll in complimentary identity theft protection and credit file monitoring, click here.” But a headline in large text differed: “Cybersecurity Incident & Important Consumer Information Which is Totally Fake, Why Did Equifax Use A Domain That’s So Easily Impersonated By Phishing Sites?”

The legitimate Equifax domain was securityequifax2017.com. Sweeting’s was equifaxsecurity2017.com. And as one cybersecurity expert told the NYT, even the legitimate website looks fake because it’s not a subdomain of the larger Equifax site.

“You would think that would be the obvious place to start,” said Rahul Telang, a professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University. “Create a subdomain so that if somebody tries to fake it, it becomes immediately obvious.”

The company’s actions, Telang told the NYT, suggest that it had never anticipated or planned for a breach.

This has become clear in the last few weeks. Now, the only thing left to be decided is whether the fact that the company was almost comically unprepared for a hack rises to the level of criminal negligence.

Americans Spend More On Lottery Tickets Than On Movies, Video Games, Music, Sports Tix And Books Combined

It"s that time of the year again: with both the Mega Millions and the Powerball lotteries accumulating jackpots greater than $350 million, countless Americans - mostly those in lower income groups - are splurging on lottery tickets, hoping to get rich quick.

Unfortunately for virtually everyone, it will never happen: the odds of winning both (or either) are absolutely staggering, a bit worse than 1 in 75.6 quadrillion, or 1 in 75,648,252,765,957,300 to be precise. On a percentage basis, one only has a 0.000000000000000013% chance of holding both winning tickets. Putting these odds in context, they are about 6,000 times worse than the odds experts have calculated of being killed by a meteorite strike -- at the same time you"re being attacked by a shark. The odds of winning "only" one jackpot are not much higher: the Powerball winning odds are 1 in 292 million, while those for Mega Million are slightly better: 1 in 259 million. 

Here is an even more stunning statistic: in 2016, Americans spent more than $80 billion on lottery tickets last year, more than they spend on movies, video games, music, sports tickets and books - combined.

Some enjoy mocking American stupidity: "If you buy both tickets, you"ve doubled your odds of winning," said Ben Auerbach, lead data strategist for Allstate, which technically is correct; the odds are still pretty much zero.  Auerbach, who said he never buys lottery tickets himself, calculated the very long odds of a double win not for work but because "it"s fun to do this rather than run numbers about premiums and insurance."

Still, for many Americans in the declining middle class and growing lower class, this remains the only hope of success: "You see more people in line buying both tickets when both games are over $300 million," Jeff Lenard, spokesman for National Association of Convenience Stores, whose members sell about two-thirds of the nation"s lottery tickets told CNNMoney.

Yet while for actuaries the numbers above may be a joke, across the US they are another example of what is has become a social tragedy.

As ConvergEx" Nicholas Colas previously explained, "Lotteries essentially target and encourage lower-income individuals into a cycle that directly prevents them from improving their financial status and leverages their desire to escape poverty.  Yes, that’s a bit harsh, and yes, people have the right to make their own decisions.  Even bad ones…  Also, many people tend to significantly overestimate the odds of winning because we tend to assess the likelihood of an event occurring based on how frequently we hear about it happening.  The technical name for this is the Availability Heuristic, which means the more we hear about big winners in the press, the less uncommon a big payday begins to seem." Call it that, or call it what one wishes, the end result is that the lottery is nothing but society"s perfectly efficient way of, to use a term from the vernacular, keeping the poor man down while dangling hopes and dreams of escaping into the world of the loathsome and oh so very detested "1% ers". Alas, the probability of the latter happening to "you" is virtually non-existant.

Full explanation from Convergex" Nick Colas on how and why Americans are lining up in lines around the block to... pay more taxes.

What Seems To Be Is Always Better than Nothing

Summary: American adults spent an average of $251 on lottery tickets.  With a return of 53 cents on the dollar, this means the average person threw away $118 on unsuccessful lotto tickets – not a great investment.  So why are we spending so much?  Well, lotteries are a fun, cheap opportunity to daydream about the possibility of becoming an overnight millionaire (or in this case billionaire), but on the flip side people tend to overestimate the odds of winning.  Lower-income demographics spend a much greater portion of their annual earnings on lottery tickets than do wealthier ones. 

Since lotteries are state-run, that effectively means that the less affluent pay more in taxes (albeit by choice) than broadly appreciated.  And even winning the lottery doesn’t guarantee financial success.  More than 5% of lottery winners declare bankruptcy within 5 years of taking home the jackpot.  Despite their drawbacks, though, lotteries are no doubt here for the long haul – in states that have lotteries, an average of 11% of their total revenues come from lottery ticket sales, and the number is even as high as 36% in 2 states (West Virginia and Michigan).
 
Consider the following credit-card-advertisement style sequence of statistics:

• Lottery ticket sales in the US in 2010:  $59 billion


• Average spending per person:  $191


• Average spending per adult:  $251


• Chance at hitting the jackpot:  (Apparently) priceless.

I have never bought a lottery ticket and honestly don’t even know how.  And as far as I’m aware, I don’t know anyone who spends north of 200 bucks a year playing the lotto.  The only lottery my friends play is the NYC marathon lottery, where they’re gambling for maybe a 1 in 13 chance to fork over $255 for the privilege of slugging out 26 miles through the city’s streets.  Not quite hitting the jackpot in most people’s minds.

But someone, somewhere is buying all those tickets.  In Massachusetts, where the lottery is more popular than in any other state, people spend an average of $634 a year on Mega Millions, Powerball and the like.  Delaware comes in at number 2 with $504 spent per person, while Rhode Island ($469), West Virginia ($388) and New York ($357) round out the top 5.  North Dakota brings up the rear with per capita lottery spending of $34.  You can see the full list in the table following the text.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly who is investing so much money in a product that provides poor returns, but numerous studies show that lower-income people spend a much greater proportion of their earnings on lotteries than do wealthier people.  One figure suggests that households making less than $13,000 a year spend a full 9 percent of their income on lotteries.  This of course makes no sense – poor people should be the least willing to waste their hard-earned cash on games with such terrible odds of winning. (http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/05/31/poor-people-spend-9-of-income-on-...).

Why bother?  Well, one answer is obvious enough and applies to just about everyone who plays.  For a buck (now $2 for Powerball) we have a cheap opportunity to daydream what could happen if we suddenly won millions of dollars.  But lotteries return 53 cents to the dollar.  So why are poor people irrationally buying tickets when the probability of winning is so slim?  One study by a team of Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economists (Haisley, Mostafa and Loewenstein) suggests it isn’t being poor but rather feeling poor that compels people to purchase lotto tickets.

By influencing participants’ perceptions of their relative wealth, the researchers found that people who felt poor bought almost two times as many lottery tickets as those who were made to feel more affluent.  Here’s how they did it:

• Participants were asked to complete a survey that included an item on annual income.  One group was asked to provide its income on a scale that began at “less than $100,000” and went up from there in increments of $100,000.  It was designed so that most respondents would be in the lowest category and therefore feel poor. 


• The other group, made to feel subjectively wealthier, was asked to report income on a scale that began with “less than $10,000” and increased in $10,000 increments.  Therefore most participants were in a middle or upper tier.


• All participants were paid $5 for participating in the survey and given the chance to buy up to 5 $1 scratch-off lottery tickets.  The group who felt wealthier bought 0.67 tickets on average, compared with 1.27 tickets for the group who felt poor.

Lotteries essentially target and encourage lower-income individuals into a cycle that directly prevents them from improving their financial status and leverages their desire to escape poverty.  Yes, that’s a bit harsh, and yes, people have the right to make their own decisions.  Even bad ones…  Also, many people tend to significantly overestimate the odds of winning because we tend to assess the likelihood of an event occurring based on how frequently we hear about it happening.  The technical name for this is the Availability Heuristic, which means the more we hear about big winners in the press, the less uncommon a big payday begins to seem.  

Not that hitting the jackpot is guaranteed to substantially improve the winner’s life.  Economists at the University of Kentucky, University of Pittsburgh and Vanderbilt University collected data from 35,000 lottery winners of up to $150,000 in Florida’s Fantasy 5 lottery from 1993 to 2002.  Their findings are as follows:

• More than 1,900 winners declared bankruptcy within 5 years, implying that 1% of Florida lottery players (both winners and losers) go bankrupt in any given year, which is about twice the rate for the broader population.


• “Big” lottery winners, those awarded between $50,000 and $150,000 were half as likely as smaller winners to go bankrupt within 2 years of their win, however equally likely to go bankrupt 3 to 5 years after.


• 5.5% of lottery winners declared bankruptcy within 5 years of bringing home the jackpot.


• The average award for the big winners was $65,000 – more than enough to pay off the $49,000 in unsecured debt of the most financially distressed winners.

Lottery players tend to have below-average incomes, so they are probably less accustomed to budgeting when they receive a windfall.  There’s also a psychological term called Mental Accounting that explains how people might treat their winnings less cautiously than money they’ve worked for.  Money has come into their possession through luck, which similar to bonus payments, often induces an urge to purchase unnecessary items.

But whether you think state lotteries are awful or great, there’s another word for them: essential.  In both West Virginia and Michigan, for example, lottery sales accounted for 36% of total state revenues in fiscal year 2010, and on average state with lotteries take in 11% of total revenues in the form of lotto ticket sales.  We’ve included the full list in a table following the text.  There are still 7 states that don’t have their own lottery systems, so the national average would be lower.

A couple of closing thoughts on what this all means:

• Don’t make investment decisions when you are feeling poor.  The study we cited earlier clearly shows that you are likely to buy more “lottery tickets” (think of that as a metaphor for any long shot investment) when you feel less affluent than those around you.


• Lower income individuals likely pay more in “Taxes” than most economic commentators realize.  Assuming that the 80/20 rule applies to lottery participation, the bulk of that $59 billion in annual receipts likely comes from 20-25 million less affluent households.  That would be about $47 billion from this demographic, or roughly $2,400 per household.  Yes, I get the notion that this money is handed over in the hope of a payoff.  An ill-advised and mathematically unlikely hope, as it turns out.  But does that mean it doesn’t count as a societal contribution?


• Maybe the U.S. needs a national lottery.  Yes, these games don’t necessarily encourage the best financial planning among the less affluent.  But there is no denying that playing the lottery is entirely voluntary.  There are probably some anti-gaming factions in government who wouldn’t like this approach, to be sure.  But there’s also no doubt that the Federal budget could use the money.  And, hey, you never know…

Is The US Government On The Verge Of Reading Minds?

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently made a scientific breakthrough using machine algorithms to accurately guess what people are thinking. In other words, as the university referred to it, they have “harness[ed] ‘mind reading’ technology to decode complex thoughts.”

The researchers report that they can “now use brain activation patterns to identify complex thoughts, such as, ‘The witness shouted during the trial.’”

Though the technology does not identify the actual words, lead researcher Marcel Just, D.O. Hebb University Professor of Psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, has made enough progress that “machine learning algorithms with brain imaging technology” can effectively ‘read minds.’

As the researchers’ press release explains:

“The new study demonstrates that the brain’s coding of 240 complex events, sentences like the shouting during the trial scenario uses an alphabet of 42 meaning components, or neurally plausible semantic features, consisting of features, like person, setting, size, social interaction and physical action.”

According to the study, published in Human Brain Mapping:

“Regression models were trained to determine the mapping between 42 neurally plausible semantic features (NPSFs) and thematic roles of the concepts of a proposition and the fMRI activation patterns of various cortical regions that process different types of information. Given a semantic characterization of the content of a sentence that is new to the model, the model can reliably predict the resulting neural signature, or, given an observed neural signature of a new sentence, the model can predict its semantic content.”

Digital Trends explained for the less scientifically inclined:

“Using the smart algorithm, the team could discern what was being thought about at any given time — and even the order of a particular sentence. After training the algorithm on 239 of the 240 sentences and their corresponding brain scans, the researchers were able to predict the final sentence based only on the brain data.”

They were able to make predictions with 87% accuracy and, in a reverse exercise, accurately predicted brain activity based on sentence information.

The research has concerning implications for the future of the criminal justice system. In 2013, Marcel Just shared his earlier findings — which, at that time, were less advanced — with Alan Alda of PBS. He said he saw “brain research playing a role in courtrooms because the judicial process often includes not only what an accused person did, but also what he or she was thinking when they did it.”

This is cause for concern as the technology progresses, but even more unsettling is who is funding the research and, evidently, has a stake in it: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) via the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an organization within ODNI.

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s own website, the government organization’s roots can be traced back to the early years of the CIA:

“The idea of a Director of National Intelligence dates to 1955 when a blue-ribbon study commissioned by Congress recommended that the Director of Central Intelligence employ a deputy to run the CIA so that the director could focus on coordinating the overall intelligence effort.”

They claim this idea persisted, and following the 2001 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush codified the agency. In 2005, the ODNI was officially launched:

“In February 2005, the President nominated John D. Negroponte, ambassador to Iraq, as the first director of national intelligence and U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden as the first principal deputy DNI, promoting him to General. On April 21, 2005, in the Oval Office, Amb. Negroponte and Gen. Hayden were sworn in, and the ODNI began operations at 7 a.m. on April 22, 2005.”

John D. Negroponte is a British-born “diplomat” with questionable ties to authoritarian regimes. As Esquire reported after he endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election:

“In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala.”

Michael Hayden, who has also served as head of both the NSA and CIA, is known largely for lying to Congress and the American people about the CIA’s use of brutal torture techniques against detainees. He also insisted the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping was legal long before whistleblower Edward Snowden ever exposed the extent of the agency’s surveillance.

These are the founding leaders of the agency currently financing research into reading people’s minds via its research wing, IARPA. They reported directly to President Bush, as the Director of ODNI is a chief adviser to the commander-in-chief.

The current Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana, has a record similar to Hayden when it comes to protecting Americans’ privacy. He was appointed by President Trump, and during his confirmation hearing, he “said there need to be continued conversations about legal authorities to undermine encryption and called reauthorizing an authority that the government uses to spy on Americans’ Internet activities without a warrant his ‘top legislative priority,’” the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported.

He enthusiastically supports Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has allowed for widespread mass spying on American citizens. “In answers to written questions prior to the hearing as well as during the hearing,” EFF noted, “Coats repeatedly praised the surveillance authority, calling it ‘a critical tool’ and agreed when Sen. John Cornyn quoted FBI Director James Comey’s description of the authority as the ‘crown jewels of the intelligence community.’”

In 2015, while he was a senator, he voted against the USA Freedom Act, which provided minor reforms while keeping bulk data collection intact. He refused to get behind the overwhelmingly popular, bipartisan legislation, which ultimately became law.

Further, while Coats was a senator, he voted in favor of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which is now infamous for codifying the U.S. military’s right to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without trial. Coats also voted for the 2013 version of the Act, which allowed the same violations.

He also dismissed the Senate’s 2014 CIA torture report, which revealed gruesome torture techniques against detainees, as “partisan.”

Coats’ current deputy director, Dawn Eilenberger, spent 22 years working for the CIA as an attorney, chief legal adviser on the agency’s operations, and finance official.

Though the Trump Administration has indicated its intention to abolish the ODNI, currently, it remains in power under Coats direction. Its research arm, IARPA, touts its pursuit of “high-risk” research and is directly responsible for funding Carnegie Mellon’s mind-reading research. According to a post on its public Medium page, IARPA, founded in 2007,  serves all 17 agencies of the intelligence community and “has a singular goal —generating revolutionary capabilities for the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

Anti-Media has reached out to IARPA for comment on how they intend to apply the developing mind-reading technology and will update this article if they respond.

Though Coats is obviously not in charge of funding Just’s research directly, his positions on civil liberties and privacy inevitably color the attitude of the agency he controls. Should the American people trust this agency and its research wing with technology crafted to read their minds?

Is Israel, Not Russia, To Blame For Hillary's Election Loss?

Submitted by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Mainstream media, led by the Washington Post, put on a blistering attack blaming Russia for Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump.

Like lemmings over a cliff, the New York Times, CNN, and Newsweek all joined in on the rush to judgment accusing Russia of aiding Trump.

The final coup de grâce came when the politically-motivated Obama administration had the National Intelligence Agency issue its scam report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections”.

The intelligence report found “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” Let’s consider other possibilities.

Israel to Blame for Hillary’s Election Loss?

Please consider the possibility that it was not Russia, but rather Israel, that was behind the damning release of information by Wikileaks.

Before anyone hyperventilates, I am not saying Israel was responsible. Nor am I stating Russia was not responsible. I am simply going to present “evidence” in the same fashion as the intelligence report did regarding allegations, innuendo, and a smear campaign aimed at news agency RT.

Reasons Why Israel May Have Preferred Trump Over Hillary

1. Hillary was Obama’s Secretary of State in a period of strained diplomatic relations with Israel. As Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary called for a settlement freeze in 2009.


2. Hillary supported an Iran nuclear deal hugely unpopular with pro-Israel advocates and more importantly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


3. CNN Transcripts from 2014 provide this interesting Hillary Quote: “The continuing settlements which have been denounced by successive American administrations on both sides of the aisle are clearly a terrible signal to send if at the same time you claim you’re looking for a two-state solution. Now when I was negotiating and I had been able to put together three face-to-face meetings between Netanyahu and Abbas, it was clear that if we were working off the 67 borders which was our stated position that President Obama had outlined, some of the settlements would be within any reasonable drawing of borders for Israel. But a number of them would not. And those that would not would have to be either dismantled or live under Palestinian rule.”


4. August 5, 2016, Breitbart disclosed Hillary Clinton’s damaging Private Emails About Israel.


5. On May 17, 2016: The Intercept reported Hillary Clinton Wasn’t Always This One-Sided on Israel

Intercept Snips

Hillary Clinton the first lady embraced the wife of the leader of the Palestinian movement.

First lady Hillary Clinton went off script during a 1998 satellite address to a group of Israeli and Palestinian teens meeting as part of the organization Seeds of Peace.

“I think that it will be in the long-term interest of the Middle East for Palestine to be a state, to be a state that is responsible for its citizens’ well-being, a state that has responsibility for providing education and health care and economic opportunity to its citizens,” she said, responding to a question about why she had referred to “Palestine,” a country that does not yet exist.

In Israel, the leader of the Likud Party, Uzi Landau, denounced Clinton’s remarks as “a glaring mistake.”

Thoroughly chastened, a White House spokesperson told the press: “I doubt that she’ll be venturing into the Middle East peace process any time soon.”

The next year, Clinton again raised eyebrows during a trip to the Middle East. She attended a speech at which Suha Arafat, the wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accused Israel of using poisonous gas against Palestinians. Despite the controversial remarks, Clinton kissed Suha on the cheek, as is customary in the region.

Early in the first year of Obama’s presidency, Clinton’s State Department pressed Israel on its embargo of Gaza, provoking a backlash from pro-Israel figures. “I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state,” Mort Zuckerman, the publisher of the New York Daily News, said.

“I liked her a lot more as a senator from New York. … Now, I wonder as I used to wonder who the real Hillary Clinton is,” right-wing New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind said.

In mid-2009, Clinton publicly demanded an end to settlement expansion, saying the president “wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.”

The next year, the Israeli government announced the construction of 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem — Palestinian territory where the U.S. government opposes settlement building. The announcement coincided with a visit by Vice President Joe Biden to Jerusalem.

Clinton openly expressed her displeasure, saying that “the announcement of the settlements, the very day the vice president was there, was insulting, it was really a very unfortunate and difficult moment for everyone.” Her spokesperson P.J. Crowley told the press that she called Netanyahu to tell him that the announcement of settlements “had undermined trust and confidence in the peace process and in America’s interests.”

And the Real Hillary Clinton View Is?

[In April 2016] Clinton paid a visit to the New York Daily News editorial board — whose publisher, Mort Zuckerman, had denounced Clinton’s Israel-Palestine policy as secretary of state. Clinton succinctly summarized her new approach to Israel-Palestine: “I think any disputes or disagreements should be handled in a respectfully and preferably private way, so we don’t give any aid and comfort to Israel’s adversaries or drive any wedges between us.” In other words, if Israel’s doing anything wrong, she won’t call them on it, at least not in public. The paper endorsed Clinton a day later.

Israel Caught Plotting Against the UK

On January 7, an astonishing undercover video captured an Israeli diplomat conspiring to smear the UK’s Deputy Foreign Secretary. The Mail reported on the Israel plot to ‘take down’ Tory minister

On January 8, The Guardian reported Israeli diplomat who plotted against MPs also set up political groups

Got that? An Israeli diplomat conspired with Labour to oust a Tory MP and also set up political groups in the UK to do so.

Let me ask a simple question: If Israel would act to remove a Tory Minister in the UK, why wouldn’t they do the same in the US?

Israel Prefers Hillary?

Some might counter that Israel prefers Hillary.

Let me ask “What Israel is that?” Everyone? Netanyahu? Anyone?

Just as varying ideas exist in the US over Trump, so do varying ideas in Israel.

Even at the top level, Netanyahu may have preferred dealing with Trump.

Trump Family Supported Israeli Settlements

Please note the family of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump and is a trusted confidant of the president-elect, donated tens of thousands of dollars in recent years to projects in the settlements, including a small amount to one particularly radical yeshiva.

Is it so hard to believe that Netanyahu, other high up officials in Israel, or even private Israelis might have wanted Trump rather than Clinton?

What About Netanyahu?

The Financial Times reports Benjamin Netanyahu questioned again in corruption probe: Israeli PM grilled ‘under caution’ as investigation gathers pace.

Is Netanyahu at all trustworthy?

Russia the Bad Guy?

Since you cannot find intelligent commentary in US mainstream media, I invite you to read the Sydney Morning Herald: Russia isn’t the bad guy you’ve been led to believe.

What is it about Russia that winds everyone up so much? Why all the anger, the endless barrage of alarmist rhetoric and ruthless drive to isolate a great power with a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons?

From left to right, hyperventilating pundits and politicians warn that the Bear is on the prowl and that Vladimir Putin is the saboteur of American democracy.  As a result, they have spread exaggerations about the Russian threat, which have fuelled hatred and sowed misunderstanding.

I am no Putin apologist. The thuggish Russian leader commands near-absolute political dominance at home. Nor do I defend the Russian-backed rebels who badly mishandled the MH17 Ukraine plane-crash controversy in 2014.

My point is that there is nothing peculiar or pathological in Russia’s behaviour: it is protecting legitimate security interests in the Baltics and the Middle East and its objectives are limited. Any Western politician or propagandist who claims otherwise is either ignorant or suffering from Russiaphobia.

For decades, the US has itself interfered in the domestic affairs of other nations — not just enemies and competitors, but Western friends and allies. From 1946 to 2000, according to Carnegie Mellon University’s Dov Levin, the US interfered in foreign elections 81 times compared to 36 by the Russians.

Besides, there is a big difference between hacking and disseminating. The US report on Russian hacking, which justified new sanctions and recalling diplomats, provides no evidence that Putin’s regime gave emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman to Wikileaks in the lead-up to the November 8 election.

Election Interference Scorecard: US-81 Russia 36

How about that scorecard?

US mainstream media hypocrites along with warmonger-in-chief, Senator John McCain declared Russia interference in the US election an act of war, when no evidence has even been presented!

That is despite the fact the US is the worst nation in the world at running “acts of war” election interference.

I repeat my claim, McCain has Blood on his Hands for US meddling in Ukraine, for which McCain is personally responsible.

Hacking?

In contrast to mainstream media reports of hacking, there was absolutely no hacking, by Russia, Israel, anyone.

The DNC exposed itself via blatant stupidity. It was a phishing expedition, not hacking that landed the big one.

Someone at the DNC responded to an email to reset their password and they did so on a server that was intercepted. That’s not hacking folks. Zerohedge has the details at On Russian Hacking, The Only Narrative That Matters Is Truth.

Actual Acts of War

In contrast to unsubstantiated claims Russia waged war on the US by hacking the election, here are the cold hard facts.

How many countries did Russia bomb in 2016?

CIA Believable?

If you think the liars at the CIA or the Obama administration are believable, you are only nuts.

The fact of the matter is the CIA Liars, Torturers, Murderers are Worse Than Useless.

CIA “Experiments”

Wikipedia notes Unethical human experimentation in the United States.

Wikipedia also comments on Project MKUltra.

Project MKUltra – sometimes referred to as the CIA’s mind control program – is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects, at times illegal, designed and undertaken by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. Organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the CIA, the project coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps.

The operation began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967, and officially halted in 1973. The program engaged in many illegal activities, including the use of unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people’s mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis,sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture.

The scope of Project MKUltra was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA operated through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions were aware of the CIA’s involvement

Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress, and a Gerald Ford commission to investigate CIA activities within the United States. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms’ destruction order.

13 Evil US Experiments

Inquiring minds should also consider The 13 Most Evil US Government Human Experiments.

Simply put, anyone who believe the CIA point blank is a fool, a fake-patriot, or both.

Mish Position vs. CIA Position

Smear Tactics and Media Puppets

The intelligence report made a circumstantial presentation so flimsy it was laughable.

When you have no facts, you smear your opponent. Yes, I smeared the CIA, but with hard evidence, not allegations.

Russian Sloppiness vs. Israel Plant Theory

President Obama proclaimed nothing gets done in Russia without Putin. And the US intelligence report and Obama concluded that it took “sophisticated” groups to target the DNC.

Actually, a 12th grader could have done it with a routine phishing expedition. More importantly, someone truly sophisticated would not have left traces of Russian language behind for intelligence agencies to find.

But what about Israel? Might not have Israel left behind traces of code to pin the blame elsewhere?

Final Assessment

My assessment is this smear campaign was ordered by Obama, for the sole purpose of undermining the incoming Trump administration.

Obama did not care whether or not there were any facts to the matter, and clearly no facts have been disclosed.

I repeat my claim:

The intelligence report, highly focused on RT, is a shocking embarrassment to US intelligence agencies. Trump should fire them all.

— Mike Mish Shedlock (@MishGEA) January 7, 2017

The US mainstream media puppets did what they always do: Cheer-lead preposterous evidence in a rush to war on something or someone.