Free Republic

While the eyes of most of the faithful who follow Church news remain fixated on the near-constant drumbeat of new information about Clerical Abuse Scandal 2.0, another papal document has dropped, and in it, another likely time bomb.This morning, Pope Francis issued the Apostolic Constitution Epicopalis Communio (EC) – “Episcopal Communion” – which aims to “reform” the synodal process. The document, available thus far only in Italian, makes changes that should be of familiar concern to anyone who paid attention to the 2014 & 2015 synods on the Family. From Chris Altieri’s commentary today at the Catholic Herald: The role of the General Secretary...

Never before have there been so many political and corporate interests with so many tools at their disposal to manipulate our opinions. Thanks to the internet and a changing news landscape, “astroturf” tactics surround us every day. Astroturf, in this case, means “fake grassroots.” In other words, entities deploy surreptitious methods to make us believe ordinary people in grassroots efforts are speaking to an issue when, in fact, organized, paid corporate and political interests are pulling the strings. It’s cloaked propaganda. Astroturf aims to shape public opinion through a wide variety of tactics involving social media, news, popular culture, magazines,...

An Iranian general has accused Israel of ‘manipulating weather’ to prevent rain over the Islamic republic – aka, stealing the country’s clouds. Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran’s Civil Defence Organisation, alleged that his country was facing cloud ‘theft’ during a press conference. However he was later contradicted by the nation’s weather chief.

By inserting negative search suggestions under the name of a candidate, search engines like Google can shift the opinions of undecided voters by up to 43.4 percent, according to new research by a team at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and reported exclusively by Breitbart News. The lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Epstein, has previously conducted research into what he calls the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). This research showed that the manipulation of results pages in search engines can shift the voting preferences of undecideds by anywhere between 20 and 80 percent, depending on...

[Appears to be sourced from Bloomberg]See article.

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"Looking back it's clear that I was gaslighting the women and slowly making them second-guess their version of reality," he says. He's speaking out now to give insight into the mind of a gaslighter, and to warn women of the tell-tale signs. Gaslighting has been described as psychological abuse where false information is deliberately presented to the victim - the purpose being to make the victim question their own memory and perception of events. ---snip--- "From my experience it's not true that it is vulnerable or insecure women who are susceptible to gaslighting. These were successful women but that came...

“One of the first things you have to do to give someone permission to change their mind, is to lower their defences and prevent them from digging their heels in to the position they already staked out,” Marman told SBS. “If I immediately start to tell you all the ways in which you’re wrong, there’s no incentive for you to co-operate. But if I start by saying, ‘Ah yeah, you made a couple of really good points here, I think these are important issues,’ now you’re giving the other party a reason to want to co-operate as part of the...

'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention by Paul Lewis in San Francisco Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of...

Lost in all this talk about the league losing 10% viewership is the effect on the hot dog vendor and his ability to earn a living because a bunch of overpaid social justice warriors need to make a point about a lie and complete fabrication of statistics by mere innuendo. So, doing a quick back of napkin calculation of what a loss of $200 million means, in terms of economics of hourly employees to revenue, I concluded 500 people would necessarily need to have their hours drastically reduced or would be laid off. That is a staggering amount of people...

According to author Leo Tolstoy, born at the very end of the Little Ice Age, in quite a cold country: The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him. So, our new technical paper in GeoResJ (vol. 14, pages 36-46) will likely be ignored. Because after applying the latest big data technique to six...

Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study finds. Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say. Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be...

Manipulation and misdirection This country has very big problems, and none of them – at least not the serious ones – were created by Donald Trump. Take your pick. The debt, the unfunded entitlement obligations, the messed up health care system, the crime, the cultural disintegration, the tax code . . . the political class gave us these problems over the course of many decades. Whether by neglect or active foolishness, they have imperiled our fiscal stability, our economic vibrancy and even the safety of ordinary people. They’ve also made it harder for us to protect ourselves against external threats.

The Trump administration is hitting Canada with stiff tariffs of up to 24% on lumber shipped into the United States. These are the first tariffs imposed by President Trump, who during his election campaign threatened to use them on imports from both China and Mexico. The decision on Monday is bound to lead to a standoff and could stoke fears of a trade war between the US and Canada, two of the world's largest trade powers. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the tariffs, or taxes, announced Monday evening were being imposed after trade talks on dairy products fell through. Trump's...

With the repeal of Obamacare gathering a considerable amount of corporate media attention, it is important to remember the UniParty, Democrats and Republicans, have been paid by the U.S. CoC to retain it at all costs. ♦ The U.S. Chamber of Commerce constructed a short list of Wall Street-centric legislative priorities back in 2014 for legislative years ’15 and ’16. Among those priorities was: Retention of Obamacare Implementation of Common Core federal education standards. Passage of the Trans-Pacific Trade Deal (TPP) Comprehensive immigration reform to include amnesty. the-big-club-2 U.S. CoC President Tom Donohue has spent hundreds of millions via K-Street...

December 16, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Many Star Wars fans flocking to see Rogue One this weekend don't know the dark side of Mark Hamill, the actor who plays Luke Skywalker. When Los Angeles model Maegan Chen found out earlier this year that she was pregnant with Hamill's grandbaby, Hamill and his son Nathan pressured her to have an abortion. But despite the attempted coercion, Maegan courageously resisted, and her baby, Autumn, was just born and is thriving. Maegan was unavailable for comment on this story, but she discussed the situation with LifeSiteNews for a previous report. She found out she...

This week, in a volley of angry tweets, Donald Trump ridiculed the "badly defeated ... Dems," claimed he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," and said anyone who burned the American flag shouldlose his or her citizenshipor spend a year in jail. Trump’s outbursts set off alarms. How could he believe such nonsense about voter fraud? Why would a man who had just been elected president gloat, threaten protesters, and insult half the country? What’s going on in his messed-up head?

THE MEDIA DIDN’T GET IT WRONG – The pollsters did not work from the wrong data set; the media pollsters, consultants and professional political class did not work from the wrong assumptions, or use the incorrect baselines….. THEY LIED. The professional media polling agents knew exactly what the truth was. They lied and manipulated their data in a concerted effort to intentionally falsify reality. There should be no doubt, EVER, in the mind of any political observer as to what took place within the expressed and broadcasted polling which fueled over two years of broadcast news. The media intentionally lied....

If you haven’t read the latest book on Pre-suasion by professor Robert Cialdini, a persuasion expert, let me detail below how the mainstream media is actively deploying pre-suasion tricks in order to secure a Clinton “win”. Or rather, how they intend to make the American people comply with a rigged election. Dilbert creator Scott Adams, himself a persuasion expert, also believes professor Cialdini has been helping the Clinton campaign. Besides, as Cialdini writes, something of this scale has been done before. In order to win the people’s support for continued wars in the Middle East, the establishment media decided to...

Hackers have made their way into state election systems “in a few cases,” but the federal government hasn’t found “any manipulation” so far of voting information, the Homeland Security secretary said Saturday. Twenty-one states have contacted the agency for help in safeguarding their election systems, and Jeh Johnson is urging additional requests for cybersecurity assistance. “We hope to see more,” Secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement. A department official told The Associated Press on Friday that hackers have targeted the voter registration systems of more than 20 states in recent months. The official, who was not authorized to publicly...