Policy change is not reliably driven by electoral outcomes or public opinion. It is instead a product of intense insider activity to overcome profound status quo biases in the political system—biases that are not easily moved by external political pressure or material resources. A review of the political histories of the most significant policy changes over the past 70 years (a universe of 790 legislative …
Former defense leaders warn White House it’s ‘dangerous’ to downplay climate change
Former defense leaders warn White House it’s ‘dangerous’ to downplay climate change, NPR A group of 58 former military and national security officials have written to Donald Trump to warn against his plans for a committee to dispute administration climate change assessments, reports NPR. The letters says: “It is dangerous to have national security analysis conform to politics. Our officials’ …
The 20-year-old playbook that explains Republicans’ attacks on the Green New Deal: Republicans’ meaningless words on climate action come from 2002 Bush and Luntz playbook
The 20-year-old playbook that explains Republicans’ attacks on the Green New Deal: Republicans’ meaningless words on climate action come from 2002 Bush and Luntz playbook JOE ROMM, Climate Progress, FEB 15, 2019 FOX NEWS HAS DEVOTED MORE TIME TO COVERING THE GREEN NEW DEAL THAN OTHER TV MEDIA OUTLETS. Republicans are gearing up to attack the Green New Deal — the latest …
Underestimated Power of Fossil Fueled Misinformation Campaigns
Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, Yale University’s Professor Justin Farrell and Kathryn McConnell, together with Brown University’s Professor Robert Brulle, say people working on responses to climate change “cannot afford to underestimate the economic influence, institutional complexity, strategic sophistication, financial motivation, and societal impact of the networks” behind climate misinformation campaigns. By Graham Readfearn on DeSmog Blog, January 18, 2019 Climate action advocates have …
Customers are the product: At Facebook, the private data of 87 million people have been used without authorization by the micro-target marketing company Cambridge Analytica, used to target 100s of millions more ads
Excerpt from: https://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2018/apr/15/why-the-politicians-must-set-their-sights-on-facebook The private data of 87 million people have been used without authorisation by the marketing company Cambridge Analytica and used to target ads to still more tens and hundreds of millions. Cambridge Analytica, the micro-targeting firm – partly owned by the rightwing billionaire Robert Mercer and used by the Trump campaign in the 2016 election – uses psychometric data to …
Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL Elections had access to secret info from Defense Ministry, which praised SCL for training it gave to psychological warfare group
Revealed: graphic video used by Cambridge Analytica to influence Nigerian election: Whistleblower says firm directed AggregateIQ to target voters with Islamophobic video in 2015 By Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian, Wed 4 Apr 2018 Play Video 2:05 How Cambridge Analytica tried to intimidate Nigerian voters – video report Cambridge Analytica sought to influence the Nigerian presidential election in 2015 by using graphically violent imagery to …
Simulating being great again with PR and fake news
By Public Radio International The Internet Research Agency, or IRA, in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Russian journalist Vitaly Bespalov worked. Credit: Charles Maynes/PRI Long before Americans heard about Russians using social media as part of a broader interference campaign in the 2016 US presidential elections, the Kremlin was trolling its own citizens. For years, reports have surfaced of nondescript buildings in …
Study of non-human animals demonstrates exchange of different kinds of favors, a core human competency
“This result indicates that reciprocal trading among non-human animals may be much more widespread than currently assumed. It is not limited to large-brained species with advanced cognitive abilities,” says Manon Schweinfurth, in Science Daily Researchers of the University of Bern have shown for the first time in an experiment that also non-human animals exchange different kind of favours. Humans commonly …
Cities are turning into ecosystems for democracy, collaboration, cooperation, and sharing
Two opposite trends are growing globally: On the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing. These …
Americans who think global warming is happening outnumber those who think it is not by more than 5 to 1
Nov 16, 2017, Climate Change in the American Mind: October 2017, by Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Seth Rosenthal, Matthew Cutler and John Kotcher. Filed under: Beliefs & Attitudes Executive Summary This report from the Yale Program on Climate and Communication documents an upward trend in Americans’ concern about global warming, as reflected in several key indicators tracked since 2008, including substantial increases in Americans’ certainty that global warming …
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