Facebook cracks down on spread of ‘fake news’

    
     Facebook is facing increasing criticism over its role in the 2016 US presidential election because it allowed propaganda lies disguised as news stories to spread on the social-media site unchecked.
The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad that President Barack Obama called Facebook a "dust cloud of nonsense."  With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook’s role in society continues to be closely scrutinized.  This should not surprise anyone who understands how Facebook works. People tend to read, like, and share stories that appeal to their emotions and play to their existing beliefs. Without robust countervailing forces favoring credibility and accuracy, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is bound to spread lies, especially those that serve to bolster people’s preconceived biases. And these falsehoods are bound to influence people’s thinking.

      Facebook updated its Audience Network policy Monday to make clear that it will not display ads in websites or mobile apps that contain fake news. Such outlets will now be included under the already banned category of misleading, illegal or deceptive sites. Earlier Monday, Google announced a similar policy prohibiting ads from being placed on websites that publish fake news.  This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully though. Identifying the "truth" is complicated. While some hoaxes can be completely debunked, a greater amount of content, including from mainstream sources, often gets the basic idea right but some details wrong or omitted. An even greater volume of stories express an opinion that many will disagree with and flag as incorrect even when factual. I am confident we can find ways for our community to tell us what content is most meaningful, but I believe we must be extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.

    








Yes, the truth is complicated, and Facebook should proceed carefully. But there is a growing sense, both inside and outside the company, that it may be proceeding rather too carefully, given its increasingly dominant role in the distribution of news online.  Yet in the long run, fake news on Facebook may prove to be a relatively short-lived concern compared with the deeper fault line that the tremors have exposed. It reveals a company increasingly torn between its self-conception as a neutral technology platform and its undeniable influence on the creation, distribution, and consumption of news and other media.



 

     Facebook does more too. It suppresses news about Facebook, for instance. It works to elevate coverage of issues politically important to Facebook’s largely left-leaning staff, such as the Black Lives Matter protests. When there’s energetic discussion of a hot story originating on a conservative site, Facebook’s curators look for a link to a non-conservative outlet, such as the New York Times, rather than directing Facebook users toward (angels and ministers of grace defend us!) a conservative publication. 

This is hardly without precedent. Twitter famously revoked the coveted blue checkmarks denoting “verified” accounts belonging to a number of conservative commentators and suspended the accounts of others. Federal workers have written to me complaining that their office firewalls will allow them to access pornography sites but block National Review. This is all painfully normal.

     Where the Left has power, it will use that power to try to crush dissent, debate, and criticism. It isn’t conservative student groups chasing nonconformist speakers off of college campuses or demanding indoctrination sessions. But it isn’t just the campus P.C. police, either. No, it’s the real police, too. 

The people who have the audacity to call themselves “liberals” are busily building an emerging police state. Don’t look for the heroic entrepreneurs behind Facebook or Twitter to spread the word about that.

 

     

     But Facebook has to be careful.  Facebook is popular and a lot of people use it, but if they say add something like  ''Fox News''  to the ''fake news list'' they can expect a lot of backlash.  And worse they might loose users.  They could easily destroy themselves.  If everyone except the liberals abandons Facebook, then it will be a shell of what it is today.  Maybe that will be a good thing?  Maybe we will get a new, fair, social website?  Maybe Facebook will just join the pile of websites that were once popular, like My Space.....remember My Space?

Why Men Are Fascinated with Big Breasts?

   

     Titties, tits, ta-tas, boobs, melons, jugs, knockers, honkers, headlights, twins, bazookas, bazongas, rack, cantaloupes, peaches, yabos, pomegranates, ya-yas, hee-haws, honeydews, boobs/boobies, cups, balloons, mammaries, hooters, bazookers, nips, coconuts, rascals, waps, baps, buns, cushions, dirty pillows, bust, chest, bosoms, bouncy castles, puppies, funbags, chubbas, and chebs.

   Why do men like breasts? Or, more specifically, why do some guys like big boobs more than smaller boobs?  But can there ever really be a clear answer to the question of why some men like bigger boobs? After all, isn’t everyone attracted to different things? Is it really true that certain groups of people are attracted to certain things? Basically, is there really a science behind physical attraction?

     The thing is, most women don't realize that our borderline mania isn't very complicated: we simply like boobs — a lot. And we like them in pretty much all shapes and sizes.
The most obvious reason boobs are a big deal is biological. To me, and to probably almost every other hetero man on the planet, breasts (and lips, and legs, and eyes, and hair, and all forms of women's beauty) are simply naturally appealing. We're born to like them. We see them, we appreciate them, they arouse us, and maybe we ogle a little (if we're not well-mannered).



     That said, to most men there's something even more magical about breasts than our biological imperative to love them. I once heard a woman say that if you wanted to distract a man, simply don't wear a bra, regardless of whether your boobs are large or small. And it's true!  As for what men prefer in terms of chest size, women need to understand that there's an enormously wide range of breasts that men like. Whatever you happen to have is probably pretty great to the eyes of most of us. So no, they don't have to be big to be appealing, though a lot of guys feel that the bigger they are, the better — including fake ones.


     So, why are some dudes really into D-cups while some dudes dig A-cups? According to one study, men who don’t have a lot of money are more into big boobs while men who are more financially secure like smaller boobs.  Doesn’t it sound crazy that the amount of money you have could influence what size breasts you like?   But apparently, one view on female breast size is that it acts as “a signal of fat reserves, which in turn advertises access to resources.” Psychologists tested out this idea by asking men from different socioeconomic backgrounds what size breasts they found more attractive. Sure enough, the idea seemed to be true – the men with less material goods liked bigger breasts more. Why? It sounds like they associate large breasts with more money and resources. Since poorer men are most likely striving for more money, it would make sense that they would like something that symbolizes more money.


   Men’s fascination with breasts is also due to the visible dominance of breasts. The other sex organs are more hidden and less accessible. In the cultural view, men aren't so much biologically drawn to breasts as trained from an early age to find them erotic.  children are exposed to seductive, sensual sexy advertising featuring busty female models. Children are taught to associate these images with arousal.  Fast forward: children are now adults. Marketers use the same types of images to attract their attention - and it works. So TV commercials, billboards and magazine ads perpetuate this big-breasted, sexy iconography. And children see it, too. Thus the cycle perpetuates itself.  Obviously, humans can learn to view breasts as sexually attractive. We can learn to prefer long, pendulous breasts, or upright, hemispherical breasts. We  learn to prefer large breasts.

     So do men really want women with big boobs? Some do, at least in fantasy.. But many prefer women with medium or small breasts, and many others don’t care. It turns out that men’s feelings about women’s breasts are more complex than the stereotype would have us believe.

Climatologists consensus?

                                                Global Warming!

   For years we have been told over and over again that there is a consensus amongst scientists that the earth will turn into a smoking cinder if we don’t abandon fossil fuels and the modern lifestyle that they make possible. There has never been a consensus on global warming amongst competent scientists, that is people whose paycheck is not dependent upon their finding an impending catastrophe. Freeman Dyson once gave his thoughts on how little predictive value current climate models have.

     It would not be hard for journalists to unearth this information were they not so dead set on finding the opposite for political purposes. Dyson attributes it to laziness on their part, but he doesn’t follow politics enough to understand that the type of institutions who turn out our journalists also hire domestic terrorists as teachers. Our colleges really are little more than political indoctrination camps these days.
And there has never even been the beginning of a rational discussion on global warming before governments leapt into the business of trying to correct it. Here are just a few of things that would have to be proven or considered before it would make sense to spend any money tilting at this particular windmill.


Here is the list:
1: We would have to prove the climate is warming.
2: We would have to prove that this warming is due to man introducing CO2 into the atmosphere and we would have to know what proportion of the warming is due to man’s influence.
3: We would have to show that the warming that would result from our pursuit of the modern standard of living is something of a scope outside of what the earth normally experiences.
4: We would have to show that there would be harmful effects from this warming.
5: We would have to know what the beneficial aspects of warming are and then compare them to the harmful effects.
6: We would then have to know the costs of fixing things before deciding to take action. For instance, if the benefits of warming and the costs of doing something about it outweigh the effects of doing nothing then we should do nothing. As Freeman Dyson mentions, about 15% of our current crop output is likely due to the increased concentration of CO2 in the air. It would be the height of stupidity to spend untold trillions of dollars just to make it more difficult for us to feed ourselves. I know such a thing is not exactly unheard of in the annals of leftism, but hopefully we have matured somewhat as a species since then.
7: We would also have to add in the fact that we would have to give governments huge powers to meddle in our lives. Those costs are less easy to quantify but we do know that all of the mass murders of humans in the past that have totaled in the millions have been due to governments being too powerful. Short of that, there are real liberty and quality of life concerns that cannot just be dismissed out of hand.
8: We would have to determine how to spread the costs around… by ability to pay or by the amount of damage a particular country is doing for instance.
9: We would have to examine if there are ways to remediate the damage or correct it that are cheaper than giving up the benefits of the modern world. And if we are forced to give up those benefits how are we going to decide who gets to keep certain aspects of that life? Will the president and his family still be able to take multiple jet trips, on multiple vacations every month? Will Al Gore get to continue living in his multiple houses, a single one of which uses more energy than an entire factory?

     Precisely none of these things have been done to any satisfactory degree, which is why it is so clear it is all a scam. None of the people behind ginning up concern over this putative crisis act as if they believe it truly is a crisis by modifying their behavior. None of the solutions they propose would cost them anything but would instead garner to them more power and more benefits. The focus has been almost entirely upon whose ox is Gored (so to speak) and whose ox is fattened.
We would have to have a good, solid answer to every one of the questions above before it would make sense to spend a dime on climate change. The fact that we do not, underscores the sheer folly of taking any action at this point.

America Wasn’t Pristine Wilderness Before the 1500’s

   

     It’s a common myth in Western study of American Indians that they lived lightly on the land, neither damaging nor improving their environment. They are assumed to have been more like an animal population than like Europeans in their placid acceptance of nature’s bounties and perils. Supposedly, then, the Americas were largely Pristine wilderness when the Europeans found them. Known as the pristine myth, this is a false and harmful characterization. Native communities were instrumental in shaping the land around them, often for better, sometimes for worse.  The idea that America was an untouched wilderness was mostly invented by 19th-century American writers pining for a past that never existed and seeing the long-term effects of radical Native American depopulation, which resulted in natural habitat regeneration. Before European colonists arrived, the human impact on the North American landscape was far from negligible. Despite the enduring imagery of the “crying Indian” conservation campaign, natives practiced a wide variety of approaches toward the natural world.


     When the first European colonists arrived, what they found was a carefully maintained landscape habituated to a large population’s hunting and farming needs. Before being decimated by disease, the Native Americans transformed New England and Midwestern forests into a mixture of fallow growth, open fields, and meadows via regular, controlled burning. Early colonists noted that the remaining forests weren’t a dense tangle of brush but wide, grassy pathways and openings among trees.  The paradisaical forests of America and the Midwest’s iconic prairies were also the result of carefully planned fires set by natives. After they were cleared from those lands, forest rapidly encroached upon the settlers’ fields, resulting in the lush growth we know today.


   
     Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks — they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country.

      One reason that this version of history continues to be taught is that it provides a way for schools to give lessons about conservation. In my experience, this has been transformed into the notion that we should return the land, as much as possible, to the wilderness it was before Columbus. Don’t litter, do recycle, don’t cut down the forests – we should learn from the Indians, the story goes, and leave the land alone. Much of what passes for environmentalism today is dedicated to taking humans out of the landscape so that it will be “pristine” as it was prior to European arrival. They do not understand that an authentic, pre-human environment for this continent would be far different than they think. In fact, it would have to be the environment of the Pleistocene.

Superstition

In our modern, enlightened society, most people claim not to be superstitious. Though, According to a Gallup poll, almost 50 percent of Americans are superstitious, believing that certain rituals, like wearing unmatched socks will influence the likelihood of an event like pitching a no-hitter. A superstition is a belief or behavior that’s inconsistent with conventional science and attributes functional mental properties into non-mental phenomenon. Essentially, a superstition is a belief that the universe is always watching you and changes depending on your actions or what you’re holding. At their core, superstitions are self-fulfilling prophesies. You plant an idea in your head, allow yourself to believe in magic and then believe doing something in a particular way or wearing a trinket will help you perform better. This seems insane, but it’s a common phenomenon. We have different theories as to why we believe in superstitions, even though most people know they’re entirely made-up.

     Many superstitions originated at a time when little was known about how the physical world functions. They were an early attempt at making sense of the world through legends and anecdotal tales of cause and effect. Superstitious beliefs may also be seen as more accessible than scientific facts. To be confirmed, scientific facts must be objective, verified observations. They must stand up to investigation with consistent results. Superstitions, on the other hand, defy logic and simply require belief. People can “just know” they are “true” instead of being bothered with proving them to others.



     Superstitious people often say, “I don’t know how it works, it just does.” When it comes to performance, maybe superstitions do work–in a way. A basketball player might score more points when wearing his lucky socks, but give those same socks to a kid off the street who doesn’t have the baller’s skills or dedicated training regime, and he’d still be riding the bench.
     Eric Hamerman, assistant professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Tulane University sought to better understand how control breaks down in a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Through a handful of experiments involving lucky pens, lucky and unlucky avatars, and science quizzes, they pinpointed key differences between how people approach luck depending on the goal. Both chronic and temporary performance goals employed some form of superstition. Learning goals never did. Even when achieving the goal was uncertain — “What if I choke on my slide whistle mid-solo?” — superstition only cropped up to help people cope with performance goals.
This raises the intriguing possibility that any belief, whether true or not, which increases our confidence might have the same power to get us what we want when the outcome depends on our own performance. Prayer in any religion, then, might be effective not because it actually invokes a supreme being or even a mystic law, but because it invokes our belief in those things, invokes a sense that we have an “ace in the hole,” which then provides us the confidence to perform better, to keep trying and to remain optimistic.



      Superstition should be seen as little more than emotional comfort. The pangs of worry we feel during the moments before an expected applause or getting a test back reminds us that we can’t choose how we’re judged. The best we can do is stay true to the parental wisdom of knowing we did our best. Superstition is what gives us hope before the hammer falls.

What if minority voters just won’t turn out for non-minority candidates any more?

     That’s a real problem for the Democrats, especially if all the racial politics they pursue in order to try to motivate minority voters (Black Lives Matter, immigration protests, etc.) actually serve to make minorities less likely to vote for whites, even if they’re Democrats. And if working-class whites start to vote Republican the way minorities have voted Democratic — and all that racial politics is likely to encourage that — the Democrats are in trouble.

     

      Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.  In the end, Mr. Trump’s simple promise to “Make America Great Again,” a catchphrase Mrs. Clinton dismissed as a vow to return to a racist past already long disappeared, would draw enough white Americans to the polls to make up for his low minority support.  People on both sides of the political spectrum tend to talk and think about minorities as a homogenous block. It is assumed that if a candidate says something bad about immigrants, of course Latinos will be upset. If a politician is bigoted against Muslims, of course black people would disapprove. If a public figure makes insensitive comments about trans citizens, of course women would be upset. Turns out, this is false.

      For instance, many African Americans are critical of immigrants. In fact, many Latinos are unsympathetic towards illegal immigrants, even from Latin America: they are concerned about border security; they often feel they’ve “earned” their place in America, and that others should do the same.

 After the example of Obama, whites will not be inclined to view minority candidates the same again. So if Dems decide to run nothing but minority candidates, I'm not sure that's going to work out for them, either.
Now, let's assume that Blacks, Hispanics and Whites are all racial identity voters, with Whites being the least likely to engage in "identity" voting, Hispanics being slightly more likely to engage in "identity" voting (because in reality there are multiple Hispanic identities that are not mutually compatible) and Blacks being the most likely to engage in "identity" voting.  In this lovely new world created by the racist Democratic Party and they pick a Hispanic candidate. This causes them to loose more Black support ("they ignore our issues again"). Or, instead, they pick another Black candidate. Hispanics are now upset -- "wait, it was our turn, why do Blacks get two nominees in a row?". Meanwhile, either way, Whites increasingly realize that the Democratic party has no home for them.

 When you are being attacked everywhere and every day because of your race, your hitting back is not only understandable, it is justified.


    It is hard to hold a coalition of diverse special interests together. In the long run, it can't be done, of course. Even in the short run, it is hard. Blacks don't give a damn about white women, gays, or Mexicans. Mexicans don't give a damn about blacks, gays, or white women. Etc.  And when your mark finally realizes that he in your mark, all bets are off.  But the elephant in the room is whether minority voters, especially male minority voters, just won't turn out for non-male candidates. The sexism within (what was previously known as) the left is the dirty secret no one wants to talk about. Both black and latino men will be shown to be more reluctant than white men to vote for a woman for President.

 Democrats know that their goose is about to be cooked.  The writing is on the wall.

Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?

    

     You’ll find them on Facebook, in bars, and at weekend barbecues: people, friends and loved ones you generally regard as level-headed who believe in the most implausible conspiracy theories. Where does this seemingly contradictory behavior take root?
Conspiracy theories are easy to propagate and difficult to refute. Fortunately, until a decade or so ago, few serious conspiracy theories haunted the natural sciences. More recently, however, conspiracy theories have begun to gain ground and, in some cases, have struck a chord with a public already mistrustful of science and government.
     ‘Conspiracy’ is an essentially contested rhetorical concept that people apply to different events depending on their point of view. It is almost always pejorative. The Oxford English Dictionary defines conspiracy quite loosely as “an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal or reprehensible”. While the law can precisely define the criminal act in any conspiracy, ‘reprehensible’ is in the eye of the beholder. Calling something a conspiracy makes it sound much worse than just saying, “people are ganging up on me.” Invoking the word conspiracy also implies that something is secret and hidden.
     Conspiracy theories appeal to people who are discontented with the established institutions of their society and especially with elites in that society. They are likely to believe that conditions are worsening for people like themselves and that the authorities do not care about them. A conspiracy theory gives believers someone tangible to blame for their perceived predicament, instead of blaming it on impersonal or abstract social forces. The meme becomes a habit of thought: the more people believe in one conspiracy, the more likely they are to believe in others. The logic of the conspiracy meme is to question everything the ‘establishment’—be it government or scientists—says or does, even on the most hypothetical and speculative grounds, and to demand immediate, comprehensive and definitive answers to all questions. A failure to give convincing answers is then used as proof of conspiratorial deception. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists offer their own alternative theories with the flimsiest of evidence, challenging the authorities to prove them wrong.



     Studies have shown that your average person seems worryingly susceptible to conspiracy theories. There are many possible reasons for this, such as how humans seem inclined toward Pareidolia (a tendency to see patterns and shapes in random occurrences). There are numerous factors that can affect how readily you believe in conspiracy theories, but no real strong indicator, so it could be any one. Humans are social creatures, so require acceptance from others. Conspiracy theory networks seem like a friendly bunch if you believe what they do, so do some find conspiracy theorising offers this a sense of belonging? And this may lead to the next level of needs: achievement, recognition and respect. Finding connections and evidence that points to conspiracies, cover ups etc would undoubtedly lead to big kudos in the conspiracy group you’re part of.  People desperately want to think there’s some order in the Universe, that there’s someone, or someones, in charge, and that things happen for a reason. They can’t handle the truth: that there’s a lot of crazy random non-deterministic stuff out there and things happen for no reason at all. It is also true (and folks like the FCC and FTC and whatnot actually use game theory to figure this out when this is the case) that people who appear to be in collusion are actually just responding rationally to a common set of incentives, and are not cooperating or collaborating at all. But that’s also too much for some folks to handle since they can’t perceive or understand the incentives.

     That means you must first wade through and weed-out public opinion, pseudoscience and half-truths, understand that not everything that is presented will be true and then go forth with the simplest, educated opinion. There are always going to be, at least, two divisive sides to matters of public opinion.
People who bend the truth or misconstrue information to their own means are the true conspirators. They work their respective side of the coin of public opinion to alter the truth or heart of a given matter.
In a world of fabricated  ‘Facebook alter egos’ and ‘bandwagon mentality’, isn’t it time to begin to engage the bombardment of photos, memes and 18 second videos for ourselves?