Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 106
April 13, 2018
Psychological weapons of mass persuasion
When I was a teenager, my parents often asked me to come along to the store to help carry groceries. One day, as I was waiting patiently at the check-out, my mother reached for her brand new customer loyalty card. Out of curiosity, I asked the cashier what information they record. He replied that it helps them keep track of what we’re buying so that they can make tailored product recommendations. None of us knew about this. I wondered whether mining through millions of customer purchases could reveal hidden consumer preferences and it wasn’t long before the implications dawned on me: are they mailing us targeted ads?
This was almost two decades ago. I suppose the question most of us are worried about today is not all that different: how effective are micro-targeted messages? Can psychological “big data” be leveraged to make you buy products? Or, even more concerning, can such techniques be weaponized to influence the course of history, such as the outcomes of elections? On one hand, we’re faced with daily news from insiders attesting to the danger and effectiveness of micro-targeted messages based on unique “psychographic” profiles of millions of registered voters. On the other hand, academic writers, such as Brendan Nyhan, warn that the political power of targeted online ads and Russian bots are widely overblown.
In an attempt to take stock of what psychological science has to say about this, I think it is key to disentangle two prominent misunderstandings that cloud this debate.
First, we need to distinguish attempts to manipulate and influence public opinion, from actual voter persuasion. Repeatedly targeting people with misinformation that is designed to appeal to their political biases may well influence public attitudes, cause moral outrage, and drive partisans further apart, especially when we’re given the false impression that everyone else in our social network is espousing the same opinion. But to what extent do these attempts to influence translate into concrete votes?
The truth is, we don’t know exactly (yet). But let’s evaluate what we do know. Classic prediction models that only contain socio-demographic data (e.g. a person’s age), aren’t very informative on their own in predicting behavior. However, piecing together various bits of demographic, behavioral, and psychological data from people, such as pages you’ve liked on Facebook, results from a personality quiz you may have taken, as well as your profile photo (which reveals information about your gender and ethnicity) can improve data quality. For example, in a prominent studywith 58,000 volunteers, a Stanford researcher found that a model using Facebook likes (170 likes on average), predicted a whole range of factors, such as your gender, political affiliation, and sexual orientation with impressive accuracy.
In a follow-up study, researchers showed that such digital footprints can in fact be leveraged for mass persuasion. Across three studies with over 3.5 million people, they found that psychologically tailored advertising, i.e. matching the content of a persuasive message to an individuals’ broad psychographic profile, resulted in 40% more clicks and in 50% more online purchases than mismatched or unpersonalized messages. This is not entirely new to psychologists: we have long known that tailored communications are more persuasive than a one-size-fits all approach. Yet, the effectiveness of large-scale digital persuasion can vary greatly and is sensitive to context. After all, online shopping is not the same thing as voting!
So do we know whether targeted fake news helped swing the election to Donald Trump?
Political commentators are skeptical and for good reason: compared to a new shampoo, changing people’s minds on political issues is much harder and many academic studies on political persuasion show small effects. One of the first studies on fake news exposure combined a fake news database of 156 articles with a national survey of Americans, and estimated that the average adult was exposed to just one or a few fake news articles before the election. Moreover, the researchers argue that exposure would only have changed vote shares in the order of hundredths of a percentage point. Yet, rather than digital footprints, the authors mostly relied on self-reported persuasion and recall of 15 selected fake news articles.
In contrast, other research combing national survey data with individual browser histories estimates that about 25% of American adults (65 million) visited a fake news site in the final weeks of the election. The authors report that most of the fake news consumption was Pro-Trump, however, and heavily concentrated among a small ideological subgroup.
Interestingly, a recent study presented 585 former Barack Obama voters with one of three popular fake news stories (e.g. that Hillary Clinton was in poor health and approved weapon sales to Jihadists). The authors found that, controlling for other factors, such as whether respondents liked or disliked Clinton and Trump, former Obama voters who believed one or more of the fake news articles were 3.9 times more likely to defect from the Democratic ticket in 2016, including abstention. Thus, rather than focusing on just voter persuasion, this correlational evidence hints at the possibility that fake news might also lead to voter suppression. This makes sense in that the purpose of fake news is often not to convince people of “alternative facts,” but rather to sow doubt and to disengage people politically, which can undermine the democratic process, especially when society’s future hinges on small differences in voting preferences.
In fact, the second common misunderstanding revolves around the impact of “small” effects: small effects can have big consequences. For example, in a 61-million-person experiment published in Nature, researchers show that political mobilization messages delivered to Facebook users directly impacted the voting behavior of millions of people. Importantly, the effect of social transmission was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves. Notably, the voter persuasion rate in that study, was around 0.39%, which seems really small, but it actually translates into 282,000 extra votes cast. If you think about major elections, such as Brexit (51.9% vs. 48.1%) or the fact that Hillary ultimately lost the election by about 77,000 votes, contextually, such small effects suddenly matter a great deal.
In short, it is important to remember that psychological weapons of mass persuasion do not need to be based on highly accurate models, nor do they require huge effects across the population in order to have the ability to undermine the democratic process. In addition, we are only seeing a fraction of the data, which means that scientific research may well be underestimating the influence of these tools. For example, most academic studies use self-reported survey experiments, which do not always accurately simulate the true social dynamics in which online news consumption takes place. Even when Facebook downplayed the importance of the echo chamber effect in their own Science study, the data was based on a tiny snapshot of users (i.e. those who declared their political ideology or about 4% of the total Facebook population). Furthermore, predictive analytics companies do not go through ethical review boards or run highly controlled studies using one or two messages at a time. Instead, they spend millions on testing thirty to forty thousand messages a day across many different audiences, fine-tuning their algorithms, refining their messages, and so on.
Thus, given the lack of transparency, the privatized nature of these models, and commercial interests to over-claim or downplay their effectiveness, we must remain cautious in our conclusions. The rise of Big Data offers many potential benefits for society and my colleagues and I have tried help establish ethical guidelines for the use of Big Data in behavioral science as well as help inoculate and empower people to resistmass psychological persuasion. But if anything is clear, it’s the fact that we are constantly being micro-targeted based on our digital footprints, from book recommendations to song choices to what candidate you’re going to vote for. For better or worse, we are now all unwitting participants in what is likely going to be the world’s largest behavioral science experiment.
How farmers on the Great Plains are changing the local climate
Getty/JamesBrey
For the past century, the world’s climate has rapidly warmed, spurred by a precipitous increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, preventing it from rebounding into space. However, around 30 years ago, one region in North America began bucking the trend. A decline in the agricultural practice of summer fallow — leaving wheat fields devoid of growth for a year between crop harvests — coincided with cooler springs and summers than those experienced by much of the rest of the planet, and with increasing rainfall in the northern Great Plains.
It turns out that rather than leaving fields bare, planting fields with shallow-rooted crops, such as corn and teff, in between wheat harvests has myriad advantages. The direct benefits include more economic success for farmers due to increased crop harvests, as well as improved soil health thanks to the stabilized, nutrient-rich topsoil, which would otherwise be eroded by the wind — think Dust Bowl. But the indirect benefits are even cooler (pun intended). The increased crop-cover absorbs, rather than releases, carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas); it cools the region in late spring; and it increases atmospheric moisture. This additional moisture leads to higher rainfall during crucial months of the growing season. To put it simply, farmers altered their land use to increase income, which caused a change in local climate that counteracted the human-caused warming trend.
The traditional belief — one that still prevails in some regions — was that leaving fields fallow for alternating growing seasons conserved soil water and nitrogen necessary for plant growth, and also broke agricultural pest cycles. Additionally, tilling the land, or turning the soil, during fallow periods controlled weeds and allowed soils to “breathe.” The conventional wisdom went something like this: rigorous planting and harvesting exhausts the Earth, and the soil needs to rest. And without plants to feast on, fewer pests survive to attack crops next year.
Then, about five decades ago, research began to reveal the negative consequences of summer fallow. We now know that summer fallow fails to conserve soil moisture in most places, because the water simply evaporates from the bare soil and into the atmosphere. Fallow also depletes soil carbonand nutrients, and increases the salt concentration in soil. Taken together, this makes land less productive in the long term.
To minimally disturb soil during planting, most farmers in the Great Plains now use crop-rotation techniques combined with a practice known as direct seeding. Alternating different crops on the same farmland, while also maintaining soil’s structural integrity, conserves soil nutrients and moisture, while also keeping weeds, fungal pathogens, and crop-munching insects at bay.
The conversion from traditional fallow to more sustainable techniques was slow to start, stunted by a technological lagand social resistance born of the cultural value farming communities placed on tilling the land. But many factors eventually brought about massive change in land use across the Great Plains: increased scientific research, the economic incentive of crop yields, advances in technology, local outreach events, farmer-to-farmer communication, and farmer-scientist collaborations. Since 1970, the regional area under fallow has gradually declined from 77 million to 20 million acres, with most of this decline between 1985 and the early 2000s.
Climate control
Scientists’ curiosity about what land use was doing to the local climate did not stop there. Environmental scientists Tobias Gerken and Paul Stoy, and PhD student Gabriel Bromley, all from Montana State University, recently published a paper in the Journal of Hydrometeorology that linked the increase in summer planting to a heightened probability of a certain type of rainfall, called convective precipitation, that forms when thermal energy lifts moisture to a cold part of the atmosphere.
Importantly, raindrops do not all originate the same way. Frontal precipitation, also called cyclonic, occurs when cold air meets warm air and the dense cold air slides beneath the warm air, forcing it to rise. Orographic precipitation forms when aggregated, warm, moist air meets mountains and is forced to rise over the ridges. For both orographic and frontal precipitation, the air cools as it rises in altitude, condensing the water vapor into liquid rain.
Convective precipitation occurs when there is sufficient energy to lift water vapor from the ground to the part of the atmosphere cold enough for it to condense into clouds. In the Great Plains, increased crop cover in late spring and early summer results in increased atmospheric moisture, because when plants need to cool down or obtain carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, water molecules escape in a process called evapotranspiration. With hundreds of miles of plants across the plains, their collective evapotranspiration increases the likelihood of rainfall by convective precipitation.
Agricultural scientists often visit farms and give presentations at local farm bureaus to help farmers see the broader changes they create. Farmers care about the health of the land beyond their own bottom lines.
“They are interested to know what is happening locally and why,” Stoy said.
Working together, farmers and the scientists increasingly understand how crop practices can have multiple benefits for productivity, soil conservation, and regional climate. The conservation of carbon within the soil helps grow healthier crops and prevents carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere, where it would contribute to global warming. And increased growth means cooler and wetter growing seasons in a region where water is crucial, i.e. more profits for farmers harvesting more crops.
Some regions, such as areas of the Central Great Plains, still rely heavily on fallow. There, the climate is so dry that alternative farming techniques, such as crop sequencing, are not currently possible. This is a concern because, as Stoy said, “fallow makes convective precipitation less likely, and those rain storms, especially earlier in the growing season, help a farmer out.”
Managing Expectations
Regional land-use change is only responsible for part of local climate control. As the global climate changes, the delivery of cold and moist air from the Arctic, and warm and moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, may also change. Adding to this, extreme climatic events, such as droughts and floods, are increasing globally, even in the northern Great Plains.
“Large droughts can be hugely devastating,” Gerken said. Now, the research team is working to improve the forecasting of rapid onset droughts (one of which plagued the region in 2017), “to help farmers better manage the risk.”
Amid such precipitous change, there is at least one certainty: as economics, policy, and social networks continue to influence the region, and as the global climate continues to change, strategies for improved land management and climate adaption are increasingly vital to managing our own future. Collaborative efforts between scientists and stakeholders, such as those ongoing in the northern Great Plains, are key.
The necessary discomfort of “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas”
HBO/Anne Marie Fox
Weekly or monthly community public affairs programming is, by and large, an artifact of a long gone era. In the 1970s and ’80s, even well into the ’90s, a number of larger cities had localized versions of such shows covering topics pertinent to a given metropolis. On a national level, too, issues-driven interview and debate series such as “Tony Brown’s Journal” examined issues related to specific audiences interested in learning more about public policy or socioeconomic topics.
Little by little these series peeled away as local station budgets dwindled and funds were re-prioritized, and viewers migrated to cable. The internet further whittled down that audience as blogs, boards and social media made debates and discussions about community issues hyper-local, as in neighborhood by neighborhood. A format that once had a solid berth on public television is now mostly found, when and where it exists, on cable public access. It’s an unfortunate casualty of progress. But as “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas” proves, such series still have their use when they’re executed thoughtfully.
A caveat: “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas,” going by strict definition, is not a community public affairs program. It airs on HBO, in fact, debuting Friday at 11:30 p.m. But whether intentionally or by scheduling coincidence its late-night placement can be thought of as a sly wink at the fact that these necessary, vital series often are buried for night-owls or hardcore news junkies to seek out.
Cenac isn’t a journalist, although in this context a person is sure to recall his tenure as a correspondent on “The Daily Show” during the Jon Stewart years. He’s since built a solo career in comedy with roles in independent movies and starring in TBS’s dry, witty alien abduction series “People of Earth.”
“Problem Areas” also apes the familiar format established by the likes of “The Daily Show” or its progeny such as “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (Oliver has a producing credit on Cenac’s show) with headline segments leading into a main story. But in every other way “Problem Areas” operates more like a community public affairs program, thought absent a live studio audience, than those other talk and interview series, though its concept of community is in the macro.
Cenac’s approach to problems and things that have been bugging him, as he puts it, takes the position that humankind needs to behave like we’re a community. To sell this effectively, “Problem Areas” accentuates Cenac’s laid-back personality and deadpan delivery.
The set itself is an extension of his casual but earnest personality, an odd combination of ’60s- and ’70s-era retro futurism and Midwestern basement chic, all wood paneling, radios with dials and, as one might expect, devices featuring Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa perched nearby to pipe in with robotic commentary. Picture the DNA of Charles and Ray Eames’ designs merged with the guts of the T.A.R.D.I.S. on “Doctor Who” – a charming place, but also a little off-putting.
Cenac, standing at the center of al this, makes the viewer feel like she’s on the listening end of a profound, loopy and at times hilariously paranoid but concisely informed discussion about a number of crazy, alarming events the public ignores at our peril.
He even calls out why we’re distracted, opening with, “I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to talk about Donald Trump and how we’re all fucked, but you already know that.”
Instead, he segues into a couple of topics concerning actual billionaires we should be worried about, including Elon Musk, and biofuel. Those are interesting, and Cenac energizes his dialogue with data, drama and amusement to strap us in to the main focus of the series' 10-episode run: policing in America.
You know, the story we believe to be all talked out. Even Cenac acknowledges that people may be over it. “I’m not saying all this to bum you out,” he insists before presenting his case and the reason “Problem Areas” could end up being one of the most vital informational series of the year.
Cenac’s reason for making “Problem Areas” about a single subject region, as it were, with multiple problems, is that the conversation and most news coverage has been limited to talking about abuse of authority and prejudice in the judicial system. Nothing changed, nothing seems to be in the process of ameliorating the system because it’s not just one problem that needs to be addressed, but many – enough to fill 10 half-hour episodes if not more.
And the premiere tackles the lack of universal standards in police training, venturing into dark comedic territory as Cenac shows clips from a few terrible in-service videos. Vastly more frightening are scenes from a conference by a popular police trainer named Dave Grossman, who peddles a pseudoscientific philosophy known as “killology” that encourages cops to embrace lethal force.
But Cenac also travels to specific cities that are dealing with these issues and innovating with their own solutions, starting with Minnesota’s Minneapolis and Saint Paul area, where Philando Castile was killed after being pulled over by police officer Jeronimo Yanez — an attendee of one of Grossman’s presentations.
Here’s a truth that “Problem Areas” can’t get around, and it’s also true of community public affairs programming in general: the average viewer isn’t necessarily going to gravitate toward such heavy subject matter on a Friday night, or any time, regardless of how effervescent but meaningful the presentation.
Remember that point I made about the show being on at 11:30 p.m.? The fate of such intensely nutritional, eat-your-vegetables informational programming — even shows as flavorful as Cenac’s — is to be buried in late night or planted in the middle of the day on the weekend, where it competes with televised golf, and golf broadcasts often win.
Right now, though, a series like “Problem Areas” is a necessity if only as a work of recording, a resource to be called upon and perhaps binged at a later date. A population distracted and inundated with the mindless, gut-churning sideshow passing as presidential politics needs to be reminded of the life-or-death predicaments much closer to their doorstep.
Post-traumatic stress, mental illness, bias, poverty, gun regulation, all of these issues fall under the umbrella of policing in America in some fashion. That grants Cenac plenty of ground to cover, along with the other legitimately interesting quibbles with life he sprinkles along the way.
“Maybe we roll up our sleeves and start figuring out how to make this shit on Earth work for us,” he says, injecting this mission statement with passion. “I’ll be honest, it’s tough shit, but it’s our shit. And maybe we should try to figure this shit out.”
What it’s really like to grow up black in America
Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz
In “A Conversation About Growing Up Black,” young African-American men look straight into the camera and earnestly, lucidly, tell it like it is. The film is disarmingly revealing.
You can watch the full documentary "A Conversation About Growing Up Black" on Salon Premium, our new ad-free, content-rich app. Here's how.
Salon spoke with the directors, Joe Brewster and Perri Peltz, about how they teamed up to make this unflinching and insightful short documentary.
How did you find your subjects?
Perri Peltz: Our goal was to find young black men from varied backgrounds who would be comfortable sharing their experience of growing up black. We cast a relatively wide net and were encouraged by the number of young men who were willing and wanted to share their stories.
How long were the interviews?
Joe Brewster: The interviews were done in two stages, an initial pre-interview followed by an on-camera interview. During the initial interviews, parents and older adolescents were contacted and participated in a 10-15 minute long discussion of consent and the child’s familiarity with the concept of racial bias. The length of the on-camera interviews varied by age — the conversations with the younger kids ran no more than 15 minutes. The interviews with the young men ran anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour.
Perri, you're white, and Joe is black; how did your racial difference inform the filmmaking?
Peltz: The premise behind the Conversation series grew out of our collective belief that our current media landscape is dominated by the filmmaker vantage point or “gaze.” We also believe that we are disadvantaged by a dominant gaze — usually white male gaze — and attempted to advantage the "Conversation Series on Race" with filmmaker teams that brought together co-maker teams that would inherently guarantee a more nuanced view of our participants. If the filmmaker is white, which is all too often the case, the viewer’s experience is being colored by that experience and vantage point. We brought our own experience to the shoots and then into the editing room, and the result reflects our push and pull, our own tensions — individual and shared — around race.
Joe, one of the subjects is your son, right? How was it, filming him?
Brewster: Our son was delighted to participate in the series for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the issue of implicit racial bias was a part of his curriculum at his primary school, The Brooklyn Friend’s School. Miles had been an avid participant in the school-based discussion. Secondly, my wife and I produced “American Promise,” a PBS longitudinal documentary about the rearing of our eldest son, Idris. In a sense, The Conversation Series was his opportunity to join the family business.
The interview subjects' concerns about race often focused on their concern about their parents' worries about them. How did that evolve?
Peltz: You are right; we were both struck by the children's concern for their parents. It is heartbreaking that as these young men of color struggle to cope with the obstacles related to their race and gender, they often struggle with the burden of worrying about their parents’ well-being as well.
What feedback have you received from the distribution of the film so far?
Brewster: We have been overjoyed by the feedback, but more importantly, we are gratified by the Conversation Series' ability to amplify both the national and international dialogue about structural bias. This conversation is long overdue, and we hope it continues.
You shot the film before the 2016 election. How does the Trump presidency color the themes raised in the film?
Peltz: Unfortunately, Trump’s presidency colors all themes raised in this film. His egregious actions make the call to action, the need to discuss, that much more urgent.
What are you working on now?
Peltz: I just finished a documentary about the opioid epidemic for HBO called “Warning, This Drug May Kill You"
Brewster: I am producing and directing a feature documentary about the life of the American poet Nikki Giovanni, “Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”
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Democrats: Firing Rod Rosenstein would ignite constitutional crisis
AP/Patrick Semansky
It’s Friday the 13th, which means the strange parallel universe that exists solely behind the front gate of the White House could be getting even stranger. Indeed, NBC has reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been whispering to confidants that he’s about to get axed. Reports regarding Rosenstein’s termination have been floating around all week, but if Rosenstein is coming to terms with an impending reality, it’s possible that the public should be, too.
According to the report:
“In those conversations, he has repeated the phrase, "Here I stand," a reference to Martin Luther's famous quote, "Here I stand, I can do no other." Coincidentally, former FBI Director James Comey, whom Rosenstein fired, repeated the same phrase to President George W. Bush in a conversation that has been widely reported and that Comey describes in his forthcoming book.
One source who spoke to Rosenstein said he seemed fully aware he may soon lose his job and was at peace with the possibility, confident he had done his job with integrity.
Rosenstein has said in recent private conversations that history will prove he did the right thing by firing Comey in May 2017, claiming that the American people do not have all the facts about what led to his decision to write the memo that led to Comey's dismissal, the sources said.
NBC added that the sources claim he’s been less anxious than he has in the past when he received public criticism. If Rosenstein is fired, Solicitor General Noel Francisco could replace him and oversee Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. Alternatively, Trump could choose a replacement from anyone who has been confirmed by the Senate.
CNN reported yesterday that the White House is preparing “talking points” to undermine Rosenstein’s credibility. The Justice Department declined to comment. The report claimed that the talking points are still in “preliminary form” and “not yet finalized.”
Rosenstein’s firing appears to be related to backlash from Mueller’s encroaching probe. Indeed, the White House was reportedly rattled by the recent raid on the office of Michael Cohen, Trump's erstwhile lawyer.
A source told CNN that Trump will be “pissed about it until he dies.” Trump shared his anger on Twitter, using one of his favorite turns-of-phrase, "witch hunt," to refer to the ongoing investigation that has ensnared many of his close confidants:
A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2018
As my colleague Matt Rozsa explained, firing Rosenstein would give Trump the advantage of avoiding the firestorm that would ensue if he fired Mueller directly. Thus, by firing Rosenstein Trump could replace him with someone who could stop the special counsel from digging into areas of the president's life that he would rather not be investigated.
“Although the various legal rationales that Trump could use to justify firing Rosenstein are flimsy — a consensus view among all but the most rabid pro-Trump artisans — politically speaking, the move could give Trump what he has long wanted: Protection from any investigation into his conduct,” Rozsa wrote.
Yet if Trump fires Rosenstein, it could wreak political and constitutional havoc — giving fresh ammunition to Democrats and progressives, who have been vocal about the possibility of Rosenstein's ouster and the corruption it would imply.
"This weekend, Not One Penny is planning 100 events across the country to hold Republicans responsible for their tax law that lines the pockets of the wealthy, but if Trump fires Rod Rosenstein, we are facing a constitutional crisis,” spokesperson Tim Hogan of Not One Penny, a California-based progressive tax organization, told Salon. “Americans from across the country will take to the streets to send one clear message: Donald Trump is not above the law and the people will hold him and every complicit GOP member of Congress accountable."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also recently told reporters that such a firing would ignite a “constitutional crisis.”
“If Rosenstein or Mueller gets fired, it will be the clearest signal yet that Trump is willing to trigger a Constitutional crisis to save himself. Nixon tried the same move in 1973, and ten months later he was out of office. The Democratic base is passionate and energized, and any move against Rosenstein or Mueller will only strengthen our determination to take back Congress and bring this corrupt, colluding White House to heal.”
John G. Vigna, the Communications Director of the California Democratic Party, told Salon such a move would not bode well with the Democratic base.
“If Rosenstein or Mueller gets fired, it will be the clearest signal yet that Trump is willing to trigger a Constitutional crisis to save himself," Vigna said. "Nixon tried the same move in 1973, and ten months later he was out of office. The Democratic base is passionate and energized, and any move against Rosenstein or Mueller will only strengthen our determination to take back Congress and bring this corrupt, colluding White House to heal.”
Only time will tell — though we may have our answer by the end of day today. Trump has previously been fond of Friday night firings.
Stephen Colbert makes a golden joke after James Comey admits the “pee tape” could exist
Getty/Frederick M. Brown/AP/Evan Vucci
Stephen Colbert made a golden joke Thursday night as he briefed his "Late Show" audience on the new developments surrounding the so-called "pee tape" that allegedly features the president of the United States and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.
In his upcoming new memoir, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," former FBI Director James Comey recalls a salacious conversation he allegedly had with President Donald Trump about the then-unreleased Steele dossier – a report compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which claims that the Russian government has compromising information on Trump.
Comey alleges that the president asked him to look into the dossier's accusations that he had allegedly paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed once used by the Obamas in 2007. Although Trump claimed that the tape did not exist, Comey writes that the president still wanted the FBI to investigate the allegations in order to reassure his wife, first lady Melania Trump.
In other words, Trump wanted to stop the leak.
"According to Comey, he brought up what he called the golden showers thing, adding that it bothered him if there was even a one percent chance his wife Melania thought it was true," Colbert explained. "Yes, it would bother him, because she'd be off by 99 percent."
"In the book, Comey wonders why Trump would need to give his wife that kind of reassurance, claiming there's zero chance Comey's own wife would believe such a claim," the late-night host continued.
That question prompted Colbert to take a serious jab at the kind of strings that come along with some marriages.
"Oh, come on! Sanctimonious much, James Comey?" Colbert joked. "Not everyone's lucky enough to be in one of those rare fairytale marriages with a 100 percent no hooker-pee-pee guarantee."
TONIGHT: We are one step closer to seeing the "pee pee tape" thanks to author (and #LSSC guest on April 17th) - James Comey! pic.twitter.com/Srix7UwhXZ
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) April 13, 2018
Friday on Good Morning America, in his first interview since Trump fired him from his job at the FBI, Comey admitted that the "golden showers" tape could actually exist.
"I honestly never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013,” the former FBI director said in one of the most stunning sentences ever broadcast about a president on breakfast television. “It’s possible, but I don’t know.”
Later in the interview, Comey told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that he discussed the allegations with Trump on more than one occasion — experiences he described as “really weird."
"It was almost an out-of-body experience for me," he continued. "I was floating above myself, looking down, saying, 'You're sitting here briefing the incoming president of the United States about prostitutes in Moscow.'”
Comey alleged that the president brought up the pee tape again during a private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, claiming that "he may want me to investigate it to prove that it didn’t happen. And then he says something that distracted me, because he said, 'You know, if there’s even a one percent chance my wife thinks that’s true, that’s terrible.'"
The former FBI director continued, "And I remember thinking, 'How could your wife think there's a one percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow?' I'm a flawed human being, but there is literally zero chance that my wife would think that was true. So, what kind of marriage to what kind of man does your wife think [that] there's only a 99 percent chance you didn't do that?"
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Meet the watch that skyrocketed on Kickstarter
It's important to use a watch for all its common utilities: helping you stay on track and be on time. But that doesn't mean that your timepiece can't pull from some dreamy, interstellar inspiration — and this Xeric Trappist-1 Moonphase Watch does just that.
Produced by one of Kickstarter's most successful watch brands ever, this handsome watch draws its design inspiration from NASA's groundbreaking discovery of the Trappist-1 seven-planet solar system — "just" 39 light years away from our own.
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America doesn’t have a Holocaust problem. It has a history problem
AP/Czarek Sokolowski
A survey released Thursday, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, revealed a startling lack of Holocaust awareness by a large percentage of Americans — and experts are troubled by its implications.
The study discovered that, although 93 percent of Americans believe that students should learn about the Holocaust at their schools, 31 percent (as well as 41 percent of millennials) wound up severely undercounting the death toll, believing that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed during the genocide, according to The New York Times. The actual number of Jews killed during the Holocaust is roughly 6 million, more than three times what the average American believes it to be.
The survey also revealed that 41 percent of Americans (as well as 66 percent of millennials) have never heard of the Auschwitz concentration camp, while 52 percent incorrectly believe that Adolf Hitler came to power through force rather than through an election. One of the few silver linings of the survey was the observation that Holocaust denialism was very rare: 96 percent of Americans agreed that the atrocity was historical fact.
So how can we explain the disconnect between Americans' seeming good intentions when it comes to the Holocaust and their lack of understanding about its most basic details?
"I think one has to keep in mind that Americans are people, as a whole (obviously it's just unfair or injudicious to talk about 'Americans'), but they just don't know history of any kind," Professor Hasia Diner, who researches American Jewish History as well as Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, told Salon. "I mean, my guess is that if you polled those same Americans and asked them 'Who was Franklin Roosevelt?' 'What was the New Deal?' 'Who did America fight during World War II?' 'When was the Vietnam War?' et cetera[,] I think you'd get the same response."
She added, "I find with my students — these are select students who have done well in high school, gotten great SAT scores — and except for those who are history majors, who are interested in history, their knowledge of history is like, 'What happened yesterday?' And even that's a little fuzzy. So there's nothing about it that shocked me because the general orientation in the society is very ahistorical. So why we would expect that they'd know vast amounts about the Holocaust is, on some level, kind of silly."
Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, felt that his students did tend to be knowledgeable about the Holocaust, although he cautioned that the people who attended his classes were not representative of the American community as a whole.
"I would say that at Brandeis University, in Jewish studies classes, most students know a lot about the Holocaust," Sarna told Salon. "Many of them still have grandparents or great-grandparents who were directly affected. We are not a cross-section of America."
Sarna also expressed concern that the ignorance reflected in the survey could be the result of Americans feeling increasingly detached from the horrors of Nazi Germany.
"I think that there were many phrases and ideas and comments that were utterly unthinkable in the wake of the Holocaust because Americans didn't want to be like 'them,' meaning the Nazis whom we had just defeated in a war," Sarna told Salon. "And today it's not unthinkable. And the sensitivities that would once have precluded people from saying, doing, expressing certain things, those sensitives are dimmed and this report helps to explain why. But I don't think that we want to reverse that and say 'ignorance is caused by anti-Semitism.' I think most of us imagine that the reverse is more true: 'Anti-Semitism is often caused by ignorance.'"
He added, "My sense is that this is a story about the failure to educate people, which has consequences, rather than a story about anti-Semitism directly."
Diner likewise insisted to Salon that she didn't "think there's anti-Semitism at all" in the survey's conclusions, a position echoed by Kenny Jacobson, the Deputy National Director of the Anti-Defamation League.
"We've done surveys of the whole world. We did a survey on global antisemitism in 2014. We asked questions about knowledge of the Holocaust and we were very disturbed by the findings which found 30 to 40 percent of people around the world either didn't have awareness or diminished it," Jacobson told Salon. "In the United States we had never found that issue specifically to be a major problem, which is the numbers of those people who are not aware of the Holocaust are very small. Somewhere ranging from 5 to 10 percent."
He added, "That doesn't mean we don't have real concerns about knowledge of the Holocaust, because there's a huge distinction between just saying that we've heard of the Holocaust and then knowing anything about it."
As Jacobson pointed out, ignorance about the Holocaust is about much more than just that specific historical event in its own right. People need to know "how it all came to pass, how such a horrible thing came [to] happen in Western civilization, and the whole history of anti-Semitism and all that led up to it." The issue is "not really theoretical," Jacobson mused, "because part of teaching about the Holocaust is not only to fight anti-Semitism, but to fight all kinds of hate. And teaching about the Holocaust is one of the most important tools to get people to care about standing up against hate of all kind, and of course against genocides."
Because Holocaust denial is so rampant throughout the world (even if it isn't in the United States), it is necessary to look at studies like the one produced by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany with an eye toward the possible prejudices that they could reveal. It is very good news that this one doesn't expose a rise in anti-Semitism in the United States, especially as events like the Charlottesville riots last year have created understandable alarm in the Jewish community. At the same time, there is a danger that lack of awareness about the Holocaust could create an opening through which individuals who do hate Jews can plant the seeds of their hatred.
The news from the survey isn't as bad as it could be — but it's still quite bad.
A peace movement blooms at Google
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Three-thousand Google employees have signed a letter protesting the internet giant’s contract with the Defense Department to develop artificial intelligence in order to analyze imagery collected by drones.
The employees are calling on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to cancel the project immediately and to “enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
Google is collaborating with the Pentagton’s Project Maven, which was established in April 2017 “to deploy computer algorithms to war zones by year’s end, “according to one Defense Department press release. The focus of the project is “38 classes of objects that represent the kinds of things the department needs to detect, especially in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”
The protest is a signal moment in the global campaign against lethal autonomous weapons, otherwise known as killer robots. The increasingly plausible of specter of warfare in which machines automatically target and kill people without human control has given rise to an international movement to ban such weapons. The Google antiwar letter shows the movement has arrived in Silicon Valley.
Since 2014, the nations that have signed the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) have convened biannual conferences of experts to study the issue. Academics, policymakers and activists have found widespread agreement on the importance of controlling autonomous weapons, yet failed to reach consensus on how to do it.
Technologists Speak Out
Along the way, technologists have become increasingly vocal on the issue.
Last August, 116 computer scientists and founers of AI firms called on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. The open letter, signed by Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk, warned that an urgent ban was needed to prevent a “third revolution in warfare,” after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
The letter asserted:
“Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”
“We do not have long to act,” the AI experts concluded. “Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close."
The Google employees made the same point. While a top Google executive has assured the employees that the AI technologies under development will not “operate or fly drones” and “will not be used to launch weapons,” the employees have rejected the claim.
“The technology is being built for the military,” they note, “and once it’s delivered it could easily be used to assist in these tasks.”
Follow the Leader
Google's involvement in Project Maven follows the lead of Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Since 201X, Schmidt has led the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board, which he says seeks “to get the military up to speed with things which are going outside the military.”
In a speech last November about the board’s work, Schmidt mentioned Project Maven twice, and said, “One of the most important points we made is that the military is not leading in AI.”
Schmidt acknowledged “a general concern in the tech community" that "the military-industrial complex [is] using their stuff to kill people incorrectly….it’s essentially related to the history of the Vietnam War and the founding of the tech industry.”
Schmidt's oddly detached comments embody the sort of abstract utilitarianism that assumes technological solutions are inherently beneficial. They exemplify the mindset Google's employees are now questioning.
Mary Wareham, a leader of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, told AlterNet that the campaign wrote to Google last month seeking more information about Project Maven. “We received a swift and friendly but vague response that did not address our questions,” she said.
“I hope the company will realize the public relations benefits of speaking directly to the concerns over autonomy in weapons systems and publicly support the call to ban fully autonomous weapons,” Wareham said. “These questions are only going to intensify."
Read the full text of the Google employees' letter.
