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My original stamp order also got canceled and funds returned, but I also ordered from three other different sellers from different cities in Ukraine (both the F and W stamp series). Tracking numbers of two of them have been sent through the Ukraine postal system and to the foreign international dispatch and may or may not make it through actual customs process which can take 30 days to make to customs here in US. That was true even before the war, not sure what kind of time is now to make it through or their capabilities for getting foreign mail out of Ukraine. The other of the three only has a tracking provided and hasn't made it into the Ukraine postal system, so not sure at all about that one.
Hoping for at least one order to make it through but definitely have doubts.
New stamp video clip.
https://twitter.com/RussCastella/status/1515174445463359491
Steps have already been taken. "Consultations" have already been done. I can't really see that as an issue if Putin lops of a nuclear bomb or attacks a NATO nation. I believe this latest resolution is just a matter of procedures, I'm sure that this discussion has already been had and continuing to be had amongst the effected countries. There's also agreements of involvement even before Putin invaded that have been in place for years. Again, as opposed to what? Wait until Putin actually does something drastic, then go through the "consultations", procedural, and clarifications of agreements?
Time is now. We, the US, are at war NOW, this very minute, and will be in the foreseeable future. Economically, politically, cyber, and militarily. Whether it's our proxy, our ally, or a threat to our being (which it is), or whatever you want to call it, we are at war. No matter what side a person's beliefs are, right or wrong, the untenable fact is, we are at war. And a big part of the world is in it along with us. Past time to plan for different scenarios, only review, updating, and clarifications are now.
US Congressman proposes to send troops to Ukraine if Putin goes on a chemical or nuclear attack
May 1, 8:07 p.m.
https://nv.ua/ukr/world/geopolitics/viyna-v-ukrajini-u-kongresi-proponuyut-dozvoliti-vvedennya-amerikanskih-viysk-ostanni-novini-50238447.html
PRESS RELEASES
With Russia’s War on Ukraine, Kinzinger Introduces New AUMF
f t # e
Washington, DC, May 1, 2022 | Maura Gillespie (202-225-3635) | comments
https://kinzinger.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=402924
Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) announced his introduction of a joint resolution that would authorize the use of U.S. Armed Forces to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the event that Vladimir Putin escalates his unjust war against our democratic allies
Washington, DC – Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) announced his introduction of a joint resolution that would authorize the use of U.S. Armed Forces to defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine in the event that Vladimir Putin escalates his unjust war against our democratic allies. This Authorization for Use of Military Force to Defend America’s Allies Resolution of 2022 would authorize the President of the United States to utilize our forces to respond to a scenario in which the Russian Federation uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
In making this announcement first on CBS’ Face the Nation—and following Secretary of State Blinken’s appearance in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week—Congressman Kinzinger released this statement:
“After World War II, America made our position clear—our commitment to freedom put autocrats on the defense and strengthened democracies around the world. In the last decade, we have seen this determination waver and tyrants, like Vladimir Putin, have exploited those vulnerabilities. Today, America has an opportunity to re-affirm our support to freedom-seeking people and firmly stand up to authoritarianism. After speaking with Secretary Blinken and hearing his grave concerns over Putin’s use of chemical weapons, I’m confident that the United States will show the international community that we will not stand for senseless violence. My staff and I look forward to following up with Secretary Blinken to ensure Russia is held accountable for any and all violations to international law.
“We know millions of Ukrainians are displaced, thousands have been killed, and the damage that continues to besiege them is utterly inhumane. The targeting of civilians, mass executions, and countless reports of rape by Russian forces have gone largely unchecked. We must take action to put a stop to these atrocities. Words matter, but so do our actions.
“I’m introducing this AUMF as a clear redline so the Administration can take appropriate action should Russia use chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons. We must stand up for humanity and we must stand with our allies.
“As the President of the United States has said, Putin must be stopped. Accordingly, the Commander in Chief to the world’s greatest military should have the authority and means to take the necessary actions to do so.”
The full text of the joint resolution can be found attached and on the Congressman’s website here. And the Congressman’s exchange with Secretary of State Antony Blinken from last week's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing can be found here.
This will be a major cause of continued market downturn, inflation, and broken economies way beyond the causes that most are paying attention to now. It is not only the two largest manmade reservoirs being at record level lows with science stating that those reservoirs will NEVER be filled again, but the entire US and the whole world is becoming a serious problem in overall water shortages. It is also projected that this coming season will be worse in heat, fires, and drought (less replenishing water supply). FYI; Last year Lake Powell suffered a water level drop of 44 feet (currently about -40 ft from exactly one year ago).
Lake Powell officials face an impossible choice in the West's megadrought: Water or electricity
Rene Marsh-Profile-Image
By René Marsh, CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/30/us/west-drought-lake-powell-hydropower-or-water-climate/index.html
Updated 1:03 PM ET, Sat April 30, 2022
The country's second largest reservoir is drying up, this is why
There is no water. See what Lake Powell looks like today
The placement of wind turbines has fractured this Midwest community
The situation is critical: if water levels at the lake were to drop another 32 feet, all hydroelectricity production would be halted at the reservoir's Glen Canyon Dam.
The West's climate change-induced water crisis is now triggering a potential energy crisis for millions of people in the Southwest who rely on the dam as a power source. Over the past several years, the Glen Canyon Dam has lost about 16 percent of its capacity to generate power. The water levels at Lake Powell have dropped around 100 feet in the last three years.
The West's megadrought
Why the Great American Lawn is terrible for the West's water crisis
Southern Californians told to reduce outdoor watering in 'unprecedented' order
Lake Mead plummets to unfathomable low, exposing original 1971 water intake valve
Experts say the term 'drought' may be insufficient to capture what is happening in the West
The Colorado River irrigates farms, powers electric grids and provides drinking water for 40 million people. As its supply dwindles, a crisis looms.
Bob Martin, deputy power manager for the Glen Canyon Dam, pointed toward what's called the "bathtub ring" on the canyon walls. The miles of white rock represent this region's problem.
"That's where the water has bleached out the rock -- and that's how high the water was at one point," Martin told CNN.
As water levels decline, so does hydropower production. The dam harnesses the gravitational force of the Colorado River's water to generate power for as many as 5.8 million homes and businesses in seven states, including Nevada and New Mexico.
Bryan Hill runs the public power utility in Page, Arizona, where the federal dam is located, and likens the situation to judgment day.
"We're knocking on the door of judgment day -- judgment day being when we don't have any water to give anybody."
As water levels decline in Lake Powell, so does hydropower production.
Forty percent of Page's power comes from the Glen Canyon Dam. Without it, they'll be forced to make up that electricity with fossil fuels like natural gas, which emits planet-warming gases and will exacerbate the West's water crisis.
Loss of power at the dam would also mean higher energy costs for customers as the price of fossil fuels skyrockets.
Lake Mead plummets to unprecedented low, exposing original 1971 water intake valve
"If nothing changes, in other words, if we don't start getting some moisture for Page, in particular, we are looking at an additional 25 to 30% in power costs," Hill told CNN.
Arash Moalemi, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority's deputy general manager, told CNN a loss of power at the Glen Canyon Dam would be devastating for the Navajo community.
"We have 40% unemployment, and our per capita income is a little over 10 thousand dollars," Moalemi said. "Higher energy prices could mean some people aren't able to heat or cool their homes."
The federal government -- which technically owns the hydropower flowing through federally managed dams -- sells the electricity to states for what is often far less than the commercial market price. In a worst-case scenario, the Interior Department projects the dam could stop producing power by January.
The agency is now weighing an emergency action that would buy the dam more time.
If the water level falls another 32 feet, Glen Canyon Dam will no longer produce electricity.
In a letter to seven Western states this month, the Interior Department recommended releasing less water from Lake Powell to downstream states this year. The proposal calls for holding back the equivalent of 42.6 billion gallons of water in Lake Powell, which will mean deeper cuts to the amount of water people can use in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
More than 110 billion gallons of water have already been held back so far this year.
Why the Great American Lawn is terrible for the West's water crisis
This impossible choice comes as new images show that Lake Mead -- Powell's downstream neighbor and the country's largest reservoir -- has dropped to such historically low levels that one of the lake's original 1971 water intake valves is now exposed above the water line.
Inside the Glen Canyon Dam, the current water level is still producing energy.
At the dam's power plant there are eight generators. The force of water traveling through 15-foot diameter pipes hits and spins turbines which then generate power. If water levels at Lake Powell drop just another 32 feet, those generators will stop spinning.
The climate crisis is forcing both federal and state governments to make tough choices and take drastic measures just to keep both power and water flowing to Americans in the Southwest.
The Interior Department is expected to make a final decision on how to handle the dire situation at the dam by early May.
Ukrainian resistance may destroy Russia's plans to create sham republic in Kherson Oblast
30 April, 15:15
https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukrainian-resistance-may-destroy-russia-s-plans-to-create-sham-republic-in-kherson-oblast-50238206.html
Support NV
The resistance of Ukrainian citizens in the temporarily occupied territories may disrupt a sham referendum in Kherson Oblast and Russia's plans to create a so-called "Kherson People's Republic" Vadym Skibitsky, a spokesman for Ukraine's Defense Ministry, told the Current Time television channel on April 30.
Read also:
An apartment block in Mariupol destroyed by Russian troops. (Photo:REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko)
Day 66 of Putin's war. Ukraine destroys enemy command post near Izyum, Russians fire on two evacuation buses near Popasna
"Putin wants to demonstrate his success by May 9," the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Defense Ministry quoted Skibitsky as saying.
"He will do his best to hold a referendum by any means and say that the 'people of Kherson Oblast' have proclaimed the 'Kherson People's Republic' and want to join Russia. This will be presented as one of the victories of the Russian occupation forces on the territory of Ukraine. Zaporizhzhya and Odesa Oblasts may be the next steps."
The spokesman noted that this strategy, of holding sham referendum to ‘legitimize’ puppet authorities, is a strategy that the Russian dictator has used multiple times.
"The establishment of strict control over the territory by law enforcement agencies and the appointment of puppets to positions in local authorities, who will follow all the Kremlin's instructions, are the tactics of the occupying country in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine," Skibitsky added.
Read also: Russian invaders reconsider holding sham referendum in Kherson Oblast
Earlier, Volodymyr Saldo, the Russian-appointed "governor" of Kherson Oblast, who is suspected of treason, said that the occupation authorities in Ukraine's southern Kherson Oblast would not now hold a "referendum" on the creation of the so-called "Kherson People's Republic."
On April 19, the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine's Defense Ministry announced that the Russians were preparing sham referendums to "legalize" the occupation administrations in the temporarily occupied areas.
According to the intelligence, "bulletins," posters and other literature are being printed in the occupied territory of Kherson Oblast to encourage residents to vote in the "referendum."
Read also: Local journalist talks about occupation and resistance in Kherson
The Russian edition of Latvian-based news website Medusa, citing sources in the Kremlin, said the "referendum" in Kherson Oblast might be held on May 14-15.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in response that the invaders were forcing locals to hand over personal data, in particular when receiving "humanitarian aid," in order to falsify the "referendum." At the same time, humanitarian aid from the Ukrainian side has been blocked or stolen.
Read also: Russia ‘legalizes’ stealing Ukrainian grain from Kherson
The president emphasized that Ukraine would withdraw from negotiations with Russia if the invaders held sham referendums in the temporarily occupied territories, in particular in Kherson and Zaporizhzhya oblasts.
On April 28, the deputy chairman of Kherson Regional Council, Yuriy Sobolevsky, said that the Russian invaders in Kherson Oblast did not have enough people to organize and hold the sham referendum.
Lloyd Austin Says Ukraine's Resistance Will 'Go Down in Military History'
https://www.newsweek.com/lloyd-austin-says-ukraines-resistance-will-go-down-military-history-1702393
BY AILA SLISCO ON 4/29/22 AT 11:42 PM EDT
Lloyd Austin Military History Ukraine Defense Russia
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Ukraine's courage in the face of invading Russians is a historic showing of resistance.
Austin is pictured during a press conference in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, on April 26, 2022.
THOMAS LOHNES/GETTY
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has praised the Ukrainian military for responding to the Russian invasion in a way that he says "will go down in military history."
Austin stressed alleged atrocities by Russian forces in Ukraine while tweeting praise for the defensive effort on Friday. Despite heavy losses mounting on both sides, Ukrainian forces have managed to fend off the much larger Russian Army for more than two months, despite many experts predicting a swift defeat at the beginning of the war.
"Ukraine's hospitals have been bombed," Austin tweeted. "Their citizens have been executed. Their children have been traumatized. And yet, despite all that, they have done a magnificent job defending their sovereignty. Ukraine's valor and skill will go down in military history."
Austin's tweet echoed remarks that he made earlier this week during a speech at Germany's Ramstein U.S. Air Base, where he met with military leaders from more than 40 countries as part of the new Ukraine Defense Consultative Group.
Austin added in Germany on Tuesday, "You know, the Battle of Iwo Jima took 36 days," he continued. "The Battle of the Bulge lasted 40 days. And Ukraine has now beaten back the Russian military for 62 days."
Austin added that Ukrainian resistance had "brought inspiration to the free world," while the U.S. and other countries had provided assistance that Russian President Vladimir Putin "never imagined" would happen "so swiftly and surely."
The defense of Ukraine has exceeded the expectations of many. Just before the invasion began, three U.S. officials told Newsweek that they expected Kyiv to fall "within days" and that Ukrainian leadership would crumble about a week later.
An end to the war is not currently in sight, with peace negotiations between the warring countries having stalled after Russia shifted its focus to a large-scale attack in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
READ MORE
Putin May Declare War Against 'World's Nazis' on 'Victory Day:' UK Official
John Kirby Calls Putin Depraved, Gets Emotional About Ukraine War's Cruelty
Ukraine War: U.S. Training Ukrainian Forces in Germany
During a joint press conference with Austin in Poland this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Russia had "already failed" in achieving its goals while "Ukraine is succeeding" and could win the war.
On Friday, NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana predicted that the war could stretch on for many more months or years during an interview with the BBC.
"It's clear that the next few days and weeks could prove decisive, but the war would probably take longer," Geoana said. "Could be weeks, could be months, could be even years—it depends on a lot of factors."
"But, in the end, probably this will be fought and won, hopefully, by Ukraine on the battlefield," he added.
Newsweek reached out to the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., for comment.
Lloyd Austin Says Ukraine's Resistance Will 'Go Down in Military History'
https://www.newsweek.com/lloyd-austin-says-ukraines-resistance-will-go-down-military-history-1702393
BY AILA SLISCO ON 4/29/22 AT 11:42 PM EDT
Lloyd Austin Military History Ukraine Defense Russia
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Ukraine's courage in the face of invading Russians is a historic showing of resistance.
Austin is pictured during a press conference in Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany, on April 26, 2022.
THOMAS LOHNES/GETTY
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has praised the Ukrainian military for responding to the Russian invasion in a way that he says "will go down in military history."
Austin stressed alleged atrocities by Russian forces in Ukraine while tweeting praise for the defensive effort on Friday. Despite heavy losses mounting on both sides, Ukrainian forces have managed to fend off the much larger Russian Army for more than two months, despite many experts predicting a swift defeat at the beginning of the war.
"Ukraine's hospitals have been bombed," Austin tweeted. "Their citizens have been executed. Their children have been traumatized. And yet, despite all that, they have done a magnificent job defending their sovereignty. Ukraine's valor and skill will go down in military history."
Austin's tweet echoed remarks that he made earlier this week during a speech at Germany's Ramstein U.S. Air Base, where he met with military leaders from more than 40 countries as part of the new Ukraine Defense Consultative Group.
Austin added in Germany on Tuesday, "You know, the Battle of Iwo Jima took 36 days," he continued. "The Battle of the Bulge lasted 40 days. And Ukraine has now beaten back the Russian military for 62 days."
Austin added that Ukrainian resistance had "brought inspiration to the free world," while the U.S. and other countries had provided assistance that Russian President Vladimir Putin "never imagined" would happen "so swiftly and surely."
The defense of Ukraine has exceeded the expectations of many. Just before the invasion began, three U.S. officials told Newsweek that they expected Kyiv to fall "within days" and that Ukrainian leadership would crumble about a week later.
An end to the war is not currently in sight, with peace negotiations between the warring countries having stalled after Russia shifted its focus to a large-scale attack in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
READ MORE
Putin May Declare War Against 'World's Nazis' on 'Victory Day:' UK Official
John Kirby Calls Putin Depraved, Gets Emotional About Ukraine War's Cruelty
Ukraine War: U.S. Training Ukrainian Forces in Germany
During a joint press conference with Austin in Poland this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Russia had "already failed" in achieving its goals while "Ukraine is succeeding" and could win the war.
On Friday, NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana predicted that the war could stretch on for many more months or years during an interview with the BBC.
"It's clear that the next few days and weeks could prove decisive, but the war would probably take longer," Geoana said. "Could be weeks, could be months, could be even years—it depends on a lot of factors."
"But, in the end, probably this will be fought and won, hopefully, by Ukraine on the battlefield," he added.
Newsweek reached out to the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., for comment.
Idaho Republican’s rape conviction a rare victory for sexual assault victims
Only 5% of reported sexual assaults in the US result in arrest, according to Rainn, and just 2.8% result in felony convictions
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/30/idaho-republican-aaron-von-ehlinger-rape-conviction-victims
Associated Press in Boise, Idaho
Sat 30 Apr 2022 10.41 EDT
The rape conviction of the Republican Idaho lawmaker Aaron von Ehlinger on Friday was a rare victory for prosecutors in a criminal justice system that can be fraught for victims of sexual assault, experts said.
When a legislative intern accused von Ehlinger of rape last year, she was subjected to online harassment and abuse. When she testified at an ethics hearing, some Von Ehlinger supporters filmed her and chased her through the statehouse. This week, when the young woman took the stand to testify in her attacker’s criminal trial, she became so distraught she fled.
According to to Rainn, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, about a third of US sexual assaults are reported to police and only about 5% result in arrest. Convictions are even rarer, with only about 2.8% of sexual assaults resulting in felony convictions.
“It really means that we are not very good at prosecuting it and that the survivors very rarely get the desired results,” said Elizabeth Jeglic, a professor of psychology at John Jay College in New York. “We have to really focus on prevention. I think that’s where we’re going to see the largest change.”
Von Ehlinger faces anywhere from a year to life in prison. A jury acquitted the 39-year-old on a second count of sexual penetration with a foreign object. He maintained he had consensual sex with his accuser. His attorney, Jon Cox, did not respond to a request for comment.
The verdict came after a dramatic trial in which the young woman fled during testimony, saying: “I can’t do this.” The judge instructed the jury to disregard her statements since the defense could not cross-examine her. He also asked the defense if they wanted to request a mistrial but Cox declined. Cox has not said if Von Ehlinger will appeal.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted, and has referred to the woman in this case as “Jane Doe”, at her request.
Doe was 19 and interning at the Idaho statehouse when she met Von Ehlinger and agreed to go to dinner. She told investigators he brought her back to his apartment under false pretenses, overpowered her and forced her to perform oral sex.
Doe reported the assault to her supervisor on 11 March, followed by police. A sexual assault examination revealed DNA that matched von Ehlinger.
Survivors must weigh the risk of not being understood or believed, Jeglic said, as well as the intrusiveness of the investigation process.
“While most of the Sane (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) nurses are well-trained, having someone touch you and look at your private parts and ask you intimate questions immediately after can feel like another violation,” Jeglic said.
Von Ehlinger faced an ethics investigation and a committee required Doe to testify. A black fabric screen protected her from view in the packed public hearing but as she left some von Ehlinger supporters chased her, filming as she fell to the floor distraught. The ethics committee recommended von Ehlinger be banned from the statehouse. He resigned.
Supporters of von Ehlinger released Doe’s name, photo and personal details in far-right blogs and social media posts. While some lawmakers lauded her courage, others questioned her integrity or called her names like “honey trap”.
“The constant attack on her really prevented her from starting the healing process,” said Ada county deputy prosecuting attorney Katelyn Farley, who argued the case against Von Ehlinger. “It is something that happens all the time at this point.”
Data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that as many as a fifth of sexual violence survivors who chose not to report crimes to police cite fear of retaliation as a primary reason.
“This was a very public case, so people got to see kind of a real-time view into why people don’t report sexual assaults: what a tough journey it is, and the scrutiny they face, and the ongoing trauma of having to retell your story and have people attack you constantly,” said Annie Hightower, director of law and policy with the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, representing Doe.
Successful prosecutions can help the public better understand the dynamics of power and control in sexual assault cases, Jeglic said.
“I think one of the issues that we face as a society is the understanding of consent, what a rape looks like, and how power differentials come into play,” she said. “The more success we have in prosecutions, and the more we can prevent these things from happening to begin with, the better.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
A current article from the same source with the latest raid and notes some of the past with Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank under pressure after money laundering raids
https://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-bank-under-pressure-after-money-laundering-raids/a-61644712
Date 30.04.2022
Germany's biggest bank was raided on suspicion of filing money laundering reports too late. The probe reportedly concerns a transaction involving the family of Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
Dark clouds gather over the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, Germany
Deutsche Bank's headquarters saw fresh raids over allegations the bank waited years to flag a suspicious transaction
Deutsche Bank is facing increasing scrutiny following fresh raids at the bank's offices in the financial hub of Frankfurt.
Although employees are required by law to flag suspicious transactions,the German financial giant has gained a reputation for neglecting to flag suspicious transfers or potential money laundering attempts.
What do we know about the raids?
The raids were carried out on Friday, with officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and Germany's financial watchdog BaFin taking part.
The Frankfurt prosecutor's office did not release details about the background of the probe "due to ongoing investigative measures."
Deutsche Bank said in a statement that the raids were linked to "suspicious activity reports" that had been flagged by the bank itself. The bank added that it was cooperating with the investigation.
German financial newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the latest case involved a transaction linked to the family of Syrian leader Bashar Assad.
The transaction was carried out several years ago and involved Assad's uncle, Rifaat Assad. Although he did not have an account with Deutsche Bank, the bank still processed and distributed money to the Assad family in its role as a correspondence bank.
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Money laundering, oligarchs, terrorists: How corrupt are the banks?
Bank employees are legally obligated to immediately report suspicions of money laundering — particularly transactions that could be linked to criminal or terrorist financing
In this case, however, the bank only reported the transaction last year, Handelsblatt reported.
Has this happened before?
Authorities raided Deutsche Bank's offices in December 2018 and September 2019 with scores of officers. Those investigations were carried out in connection with money laundering suspicions flagged in the Panama Papers leak.
Deutsche Bank later wound up paying millions in fines over allegations it failed to flag potential money laundering transactions, although no charges were brought against the bank.
Friday's operation, however, involved "far fewer" officers than the prior raids, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.
The bank has also faced scrutiny abroad, especially fore its role in handling foreign transactions for the Estonian branch of Danske Bank — which was at the center of a €200 billion ($212 billion) money laundering scheme that ran from 2007 – 2015.
In 2019, Deutsche Bank separately agreed to pay a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fine of $16 million to resolve separate allegations of corrupt dealings in Russia and China.
News of the latest money laundering raids caused Deutsche Bank's stocks to fall on Friday, dropping 3% to €9.34 ($9.85) per share.
rs/jcg (dpa, AFP, AP)
Deutsche Bank is notorious for funneling money for every drug lord, despot, criminal kingpin, and evil leaders money for decades and has been designated the most corrupt bank in the world. There are many other big banks involved in this, but Deutsche is the king of them all. The loans to Trump came through Russian mafia/gov/Putin and was part of the money laundering along with Trump's RE and Kushner family in the mix (a good read: Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction By David Enrich).
The bank has been raided several times before and have paid 100's of millions of $ fines (small pittance for the billions and trillions, maybe decillions of $ of fraud and money laundering). A couple of years ago Deutsch paid over a 100 million fine to the US connected to Jeffrey Epstein and Saudi Arabia, but payoff is a more likely scenario. (https://asiatimes.com/2019/08/with-epstein-dead-saudi-links-become-a-black-hole/).
The top people involved (like Trump) get protected, charges dropped, or investigations discontinued (www.straitstimes.com/business/banking/australia-drops-landmark-criminal-cartel-case-against-citi-deutsche-bank). Any people that even might be a danger to this criminal system "commit suicide" sometimes killing their family or friends along with them. Maybe just found dead or poisoned, but the fad today is labeling everything a "suicide".
Not sure what they are going to label Valentin Broeksmit death, they are "investigating" and "the final medical examiner's report is not expected until summer". Said appeared to be homeless but that could be just living of the grid or running with fears of his demise, the public will never truly know. His father, an executive of Deustche Bank, committed "suicide" back in 2014.
The latest raid reported to be about Syrian leader Bashar Assad (again), but I'm sure if one just Googles the bank and corruption, they would get pages and pages and pages on the subject. Not just enough to write a book, but a large set of encyclopedias or an entire library.
You have the Paradise Papers, Panama papers, the finCEN files, and massive amount of USARs that don't get processed, among others. It just continues. Threw a dart in my files with this older article, but no matter what date of article, it always says the same things. Even though banks may take a temporary cut in share price (then recover), it is exponentially more lucrative to continue their illegal practices regardless of sp.
We not only shake corruption's hand and call them doners, but half of society elects them to run and ruin our lives. Gladly bending over and believing them to be saviors. It can be said, those that support the fraud deserve what they get, but that doesn't really fly with the other half that don't.
https://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-bank-shares-crash-fincen-files/a-55010357
Deutsche Bank shares plummet following FinCEN investigation
Deutsche Bank shares fell by nearly 9 percent, similar to other major banks around the world. Banks were accused of handling more than $2 trillion in dirty money for 18 years.
Deutsche Bank headquarters next to a red traffic light
Shares in major banks took a beating on Monday after the FinCEN leak revealed several institutions may have handled more than $2 trillion (€1.7 trillion) worth of dirty money between 1999 and 2017.
Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest bank in terms of assets, saw its shares fall by 8.8%, according to the Xetra trading system. On the Frankfurt and New York exchanges, the bank's shares fell by 8.4% and 8.2% respectively.
The bank appeared prominently throughout the investigation and has been under intense scrutiny for several years.
The bank agreed to pay the US state of New York $150 million to settle claims that it broke compliance rules in dealing with alleged sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The bank's Frankfurt headquarters were raided on suspicion of helping clients set up offshore companies that were used to launder hundreds of millions of euros in 2018. The raid came from the release of the Panama Papers.
Deutsche Bank shares hovered around 7 euros on Monday, compared to roughly 110 euros just before the 2008 global financial crisis.
Read more: Opinion: Witnessing Deutsche Bank's tailspin
The FinCEN papers, which included more than 2,000 suspicious activity reports (SARs), were released following an investigation b Buzzfeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). While some banks said the transactions happened long ago, the reports revealed massive problems with the monitoring system of policing money laundering and other criminal activities.
"It confirms what we already knew: that there are huge amounts of SARs being filed with relatively low numbers of cases brought through to prosecution," said Etelka Bogardi, a Hong Kong-based financial services partner at Norton Rose Fulbright.
Other banks hit hard
Germany's Commerzbank was also mentioned in the report. It's shares fell by 5.4% on the day according to Xetra.
British banks HSBC and Standard Chartered saw their shares fall to their lowest level in as much as 25 years after the release of FinCEN.
The UK government said it would work on reforms to its corporate registry system and require more checks on company directors.
Watch video02:40
What are the FinCEN Files?
"If the government cares at all about the UK's reputation globally, it must stop rolling out the red carpet to the criminal and corrupt, and refuse to legitimize their money through our companies and banks," said international NGO Global Witness.
American banks JPMorgan and Bank of New York Mellon also watched their shares tumble on Monday. They fell by more than 4% by mid-day trading in New York.
Bank of New York Mellon said it has complied with "all applicable laws and regulations." JPMorgan said it has "thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to this important work."
Compliance experts said part of the problem that lead to the FinCEN document release was banks were struggling to distinguish between transactions that were and were not suspicious. The were filing so many SARs that enforcement agencies could not keep up.
"Lots of banks are struggling with high false positive rates and the backlog (of existing cases). That's why you see that sometimes SARs were raised over 100 days after the transaction," said Cliff Lam, a director at AlixPartners in Hong Kong.
Watch video02:14
What is a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR)?
kbd/aw (AFP, AP, Reuters)
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Deutsche Bank HQ in Frankfurt raided over suspected money laundering
Officers from financial regulator, federal police and public prosecutor raid Germany’s largest lender
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/29/deutsche-bank-hq-frankfurt-raided-suspected-money-laundering
Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt
Deutsche Bank said the issue had been self-reported and it was ‘fully cooperating’ with police and prosecutors. Photograph: Ralph Orlowski/Reuters
Kalyeena Makortoff
@kalyeena
Fri 29 Apr 2022 09.57 EDT
German authorities have raided Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt over suspected money laundering at the country’s largest lender.
Officers from the financial regulator BaFin, the federal police, and the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office launched a raid on the bank’s glass-panelled offices – known locally as the “twin towers” – on Friday morning after securing a search warrant from the local court.
Deutsche Bank said the issue had been self-reported and it was “fully cooperating” with police and prosecutors who launched the raid on its offices at 10am.
“This is an investigative measure by the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office in connection with suspicious activity reports [SARs] filed by the bank,” the lender said in a statement. “Deutsche Bank is fully cooperating with the authorities.”
Banks and other financial institutions file SARs with law enforcement bodies when they suspect a client may be using their services for potential criminal activity. However, SARs do not mean a client is guilty of wrongdoing or require a bank to cease doing business with the client.
It is understood that the issue is linked to the late filing of an SAR related to Deutsche Bank’s role as a correspondent bank, where it does business on behalf of another lender.
A spokesperson for Frankfurt’s public prosector said they could not provide any further information while the investigation was ongoing.
Deutsche Bank shares fell nearly 2.6% following the news.
Deustche Bank is Germany’s largest lender and employs nearly 3,000 staff at its headquarters in Frankfurt.
The Deutsche Bank offices were also subject to a two-day raid by 170 police in 2018, with staff later accused of helping wealthy clients evade tax. Prosecutors later dropped its investigation into two employees but fined the lender over shortfalls in its compliance procedures.
Deutsche Bank has struggled to repair its reputation after a number of scandals and affiliations with controversial clients including the former US president Donald Trump.
The lender was fined $630m (£501m) in 2017 after US and UK authorities accused the bank of failing to spot fraudulent trades worth up to $10bn that allowed money to be laundered out of Russia. Two years earlier, it was fined $2.5bn by the same authorities for its role in rigging the Libor interest rate between 2003 and 2007.
It was also fined €13.5m (£11.3m) by Frankfurt prosecutors in 2020 for failing to submit a suspicious report over transactions processed on behalf of Danske Bank’s Estonian branch in a timely manner.
EU warns Elon Musk over Twitter moderation plans
EU commissioner Thierry Breton tells Tesla chief executive: ‘Elon, there are rules’
https://www.ft.com/content/22f66209-f5b2-4476-8cdb-de4befffebe5
Brussels has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with the EU’s new digital rules under his ownership, or risk hefty fines or even a ban, setting the stage for a global regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, told the Financial Times that Musk must follow rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online after Twitter accepted the billionaire’s $44bn takeover offer.
Breton said: “We welcome everyone. We are open but on our conditions. At least we know what to tell him: ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here.’”
Musk’s take-private deal for Twitter could transform the Tesla chief executive, who has used the platform to attack regulators and critics, into a social media baron, given that millions of people rely on the San Francisco-based platform for news.
He said on Monday that “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy” and described Twitter as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.
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The comments from Breton, one of Europe’s most influential digital regulators, come just days after Brussels signed off a new piece of legislation that will force Big Tech to more aggressively police content online.
In pitching his offer for Twitter, Musk outlined plans to loosen the social media platform’s content moderation policies, describing himself as a “free speech absolutist”. Republican politicians in the US are hopeful that the deal could pave the way for Donald Trump to return to Twitter, after the former president was banned for repeatedly breaching its rules around hate speech and misinformation.
But Breton said he wanted to offer a “reality check” to Musk’s plans for less stringent moderation. The EU commissioner, who was key in negotiating the new Digital Services Act, warned that a lack of compliance from Twitter risked a ban for the platform in Europe.
He said: “Anyone who wants to benefit from this market will have to fulfil our rules. The board [of Twitter] will have to make sure that if it operates in Europe it will have to fulfil the obligations, including moderation, open algorithms, freedom of speech, transparency in rules, obligations to comply with our own rules for hate speech, revenge porn [and] harassment.”
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“If [Twitter] does not comply with our law, there are sanctions — 6 per cent of the revenue and, if they continue, banned from operating in Europe,” he added.
The Digital Services Act forces the likes of Twitter to disclose to regulators how they are tackling content such as disinformation and war propaganda. The groundbreaking rules are part of a bigger push by Brussels to curb the power of large online platforms, including Facebook and Google.
Last month, the EU also unveiled the Digital Markets Act, aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech, including a ban on platforms promoting their own services ahead of rivals.
Canadian MPs unanimously back motion calling Russian attacks in Ukraine a 'genocide'
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/canadian-mps-unanimously-back-motion-calling-russian-attacks-in-ukraine-a-genocide-1.5878900
Updated April 27, 2022 5:13 p.m. MDT
Published April 27, 2022 1:38 p.m. MDT
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Canadian members of Parliament voted unanimously on Wednesday to label Russia’s attacks in Ukraine a “genocide.”
The vote was triggered after NDP MP and foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson presented a motion asking that the House recognize that “the Russian Federation is committing acts of genocide against the Ukrainian people.”
MPs agreed that there is “clear and ample evidence of systemic and massive war crimes against humanity” being committed by Russian Armed Forces directed by President Vladimir Putin and others within the Russian Parliament.
Those crimes include, among other offenses, mass atrocities, systematic instances of willful killing of Ukrainian civilians, the desecration of corpses, forcible transfer of Ukrainian children, torture, physical harm, mental harm, and rape, the motion reads.
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Russia’s invasion of the eastern region of Ukraine began on Feb. 24. There have been widespread accusations of war crimes since then, with some leaders going as far as to say that the situation amounts to genocide.
International law defines genocide as the deliberate killing or causing other serious harms “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it’s “absolutely right” the term genocide was being used to describe Russia’s conduct. His comments came a day after U.S. President Joe Biden used the term in reference to the Ukrainian invasion.
However, Trudeau was quick to note there are “official processes” in places to formally apply that designation.
"As President Biden highlighted, there are official processes around determinations of genocide," Trudeau said at the time. "But I think it's absolutely right that more and more people be talking and using the word 'genocide' in terms of what Russia is doing."
Ukraine's impact on C4ISR and future warfare | Defense News
Highlights from the annual C4ISRNET conference focus on how the U.S. and other countries are learning volumes from the ongoing war in Ukraine.
https://www.militarytimes.com/video/2022/04/25/ukraines-impact-on-c4isr-and-future-warfare-defense-news-weekly-full-episode-42322/
2 Air Force staff sergeants charged with stealing ammunition
By The Associated Press
Apr 27, 04:30 PM
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/04/27/2-air-force-staff-sergeants-charged-with-stealing-ammunition/
SPOKANE, Wash. — Two Fairchild Air Force Base staff sergeants face charges of stealing thousands of rounds of ammunition from the Spokane, Washington, base in a case with antigovernment overtones.
John I. Sanger and Eric Eagleton were named in a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Spokane on Tuesday. The complaint accused both men of taking the ammunition for personal use at a shooting range near Fishtrap Lake, The Spokesman-Review reported Wednesday.
Marine sentenced for stealing ammunition says he was pressured by recon community
It was the culture of the recon community that put Sgt. Gunnar I. Naughton in the position he’s in, he claimed.
By Jared Morgan
The Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force had been investigating Sanger after linking him with a pair of social media accounts that made antigovernment statements in the months between the 2020 presidential election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to court documents.
In a comment posted Dec. 2, 2020, one of the accounts linked to Sanger said: “I think the capital needs to be seized … No trial or chance to escape,” according to court records.
Four days later, the same account wrote, “They defrauded our election system and are getting away with it. That means this system has run it’s course. People have to die,” according to court documents.
An undercover agent working with the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations began chatting with Sanger, who “told the (agent) he is actively recruiting in hopes of forming a local cell of like-minded individuals.”
Last month, the undercover agent and Sanger met Eagleton at a truck stop before going target-shooting. The agent was wearing a recording device, and Eagleton told the agent that members of the base’s Combat Arms Training Management section routinely stole ammunition, “up to 3,000 rounds in a day,” according to court documents.
During the meeting, Eagleton also discussed “his anti-Semitic views and dislike for Jews,” according to court documents.
Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents observed the men shooting ammunition taken from cans that appeared similar to those used for combat arms training. The packaging contained numbers that a check of base records showed had been expended on-base in training exercises, according to court documents.
Both men face charges of conspiracy to commit theft of government property and possession of stolen ammunition. The offense can carry up to a five-year prison sentence.
The office of the Federal Defenders of Eastern Washington had not yet assigned an attorney to Sanger. Eagleton’s attorney David Miller could not be immediately reached for comment
In a statement, U.S. Attorney for Eastern Washington Vanessa Waldref commended FBI and Air Force investigators for working together to build the case.
“So many of those who serve at Fairchild Air Force Base are career public servants who sacrifice their time, energy, and even their lives to keep America safe,” Waldref said. “When individuals put their own interests ahead of others and abuse the public trust, those individuals dishonor the countless public servants who dedicate their lives to government and military service.”
“I am in awe of how our law enforcement partners came together to halt this dangerous conspiracy,” said Brig. Gen. Terry Bullard, commander of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, in a written statement.
Maybe Rand Paul can offer his wife and young kids to the Russians if he feels so strongly about it.
Russian invaders raped at least 400 Ukrainian children and adults, reports Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman
27 April, 20:34
https://english.nv.ua/nation/russian-invaders-raped-at-least-400-ukrainian-children-and-adults-50237438.html
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Ukrainian support hotlines for victims of sexual violence have received over 400 calls regarding the rape of women and children by Russian invaders since the end of March and the liberation of Kyiv region, the Ombudsman for Human Rights in Ukraine, Lyudmyla Denisova, stated in an interview with Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne on April 26.
These people bear serious psychological wounds and are often reluctant to testify about their experience to law enforcement, Denisova said, and many have suffered memory loss due to the trauma of the assault.
“They only remember the beginning of the tragedy and the end,” the Ombudsman explained.
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At what point do Russian war crimes in Ukraine qualify as genocide?
“But talking about what happened takes time. The project manager says that when three, five, six, sometimes eight sessions are over, the person only then says: “Thank you, now I feel better.” That is, we are talking about the crimes committed by the Russian Federation.”
????? ???
She noted that reports of rape are received not only from the liberated regions but also from the occupied territories, as soon as the communication is established in those areas.
“There are two features (of this rape),” Denisova said.
“The first is that the rapists are young people aged 20-25. That is, those who grew up on Putin’s rule, on his propaganda. This is the first (notable feature). And the second is that they do it publicly. It’s done necessarily in front of other people and groups, so that others can see how the rape victim is degraded.”
Five faces of Russian killers involved in the murder and rape of Ukraine’s Bucha
Often, the Ombudsman related, Russian soldiers will target families to deliberately break them, providing an example of two sisters.
“We have evidence that she is 25 years old and her sister is 16,” Denisova said.
“They hold the 25-year-old down, she is screaming, begging, on her knees: ‘Don’t do this to my sister, do this to me!’ And the other two (Russians) do whatever comes to mind with her younger sister. Both of them need help.”
These rapes have resulted in pregnancies among teenage victims, who then often suffer from suicidal thought and guilt, in addition to the direct effects of the assault.
“And when five Russian orcs rape an 11-year-old boy in his mother’s presence, how can you stand it?” Denisova asked, rhetorically.
“And when a 14-year-old is raped by three Russian orcs? Then, when Bucha was liberated, her mother took her to the doctor, who said that she was pregnant. And it’s impossible to perform an abortion. What’s next, how do you save both the mother and this child? You must understand, they rape and scream, ‘See? This will happen to every Nazi whore.’”
“And (what do you do) when the child no longer wants to live, an 11-year-old girl?” Denisova continued.
“The mother called the hotline, asking ‘What should I do?’ Because she considers herself guilty of not listening to her mother. Her mother forbade her from going out. This was in Hostomel, and she wanted to do something kind for her mother: to pick some flowers. And there’s the rapist. (The child0 only remembers the beginning, and then she remembers nothing, only when she was already thrown to the ground.”
What is known about scale of sexual violence committed by Russian troops in Ukraine
These cases of rape, of both adults and children, by Russian occupying forces was revealed to be widespread after their retreat from Kyiv Oblast. These, and other atrocities, were revealed to the world, in the bodies of civilians tortured and murdered, and dumped on the streets of Bucha, Irpin, Borodianka, and along the Zhytomyr highway.
According to Denisova, it is now impossible to estimate the scale of sexual crimes committed by Russian forces during the occupation of Ukrainian settlements. The unwillingness of victims to testify may complicate things further, the Ombudsman says – law enforcement authorities are unable to record crimes that are not reported.
However, the need for massive psychological support for victims of sexual violence is paramount, she stressed.
Editor: Veronika Melkozerova
Nearly three-fourths of Americans support US helping supply weapons to Ukraine: poll
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3467203-nearly-three-fourths-of-americans-support-us-helping-supply-weapons-to-ukraine-poll/
BY CAROLINE VAKIL - 04/26/22 9:40 PM ET
Close to 75 percent of Americans back the United States assisting in supplying weapons to Ukraine, according to a new poll.
A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 73 percent of people support the U.S. aiding in arms shipments to the former Soviet Union nation, up from 68 percent in March, Reuters reported.
When it comes to President Biden’s job regarding Ukraine, 46 percent of Americans give the president a thumbs-up. Broken down by party, the partisan divisions are stark: 24 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats approve of the job he is doing regarding Ukraine, according to the poll, the news outlet noted.
Biden polls lower among Americans when it comes to his general approval rating, on fuel and gas prices, and on the economy.
Forty-two percent of Americans approve of Biden’s performance as president, according to a separate poll. In addition, the poll completed on Tuesday found a 32 percent approval rating regarding the handling of fuel and gas prices and 37 percent on the economy, according to Reuters.
Democrats are in for challenging November midterms amid Biden’s lagging approval ratings, high inflation and already tight margins of control in both the House and Senate.
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Still, the poll also demonstrated how, in light of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, political parties can rally together over common interests, even if fleetingly.
For example, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats polled said they would rather choose candidates in the midterms who are in favor of providing military aid to Ukraine; majorities on both sides polled also indicated they supported sanctioning Russia, Reuters reported.
The Reuters-Ipsos poll was completed on Tuesday and surveyed 1,005 adults. The poll had measures of precision of around 4 percentage points.
Yes it does seem plausible. Heard some of the same rumors, can't verify, past their paygrades, but saved this from last week. Even though the military isn't saying where, but only that the trained Ukrainian forces will be returning home to train others on the shipped hardware that is going over about the same time. May be at a foreign US base, but just the same, it's definitely our US military and doesn't matter where.
Small group of Ukrainian troops begins training on US howitzers
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/04/21/small-group-of-ukrainian-troops-begins-training-on-us-howitzers/
By Meghann Myers
Thursday, Apr 21
Ninety howitzer artillery systems are heading to Ukraine. (Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)
About 50 Ukrainian artillerymen are getting a crash course in the howitzer weapon system this week, a senior defense official confirmed on Wednesday, but details are slim on who is training them and where.
The training is part of two aid packages: the first including 18 howitzers and 40,000 rounds announced April 13; and a second, announced Thursday, including 72 howitzers, 72 vehicles to tow them and 144,000 rounds.
“I want to stress again that what we’re providing is done in full consultation with the Ukrainians and that they believe that these systems will be helpful to them in the fight,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. “Where and when they employ them and how they employ them is, of course, up to them.”
The Pentagon is not confirming where the training will take place or which country will facilitate it, but Kirby said Thursday that there will likely be more training cohorts following this initial group of 50.
Kirby told Military Times on April 14 that there wasn’t a plan to deploy more troops from the U.S. to handle the mission, adding that the Ukrainian trainees will return home to train the rest of their artillery units receiving howitzers.
In 2 weeks the Ukrainian army will launch an offensive. Interview with military expert Agil Rustamzade
https://nv.ua/ukr/ukraine/events/2-misyaci-viyni-rosiji-v-ukrajini-interv-yu-nv-z-agilem-rustamzade-novini-ukrajini-50236615.html
April 25, 12:01 p.m.
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Agil Rustamzade, Azerbaijani military expert, is convinced that Moscow's statements about plans to establish a land corridor to the border with unrecognized Transnistria do not meet the capabilities of the Russian army (Photo: DR)
Agil Rustamzade, Azerbaijani military expert, is convinced that Moscow's statements about plans to establish a land corridor to the border with unrecognized Transnistria do not meet the capabilities of the Russian army (Photo: DR)
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Author: Olga Dukhnich
Authoritative Azerbaijani military expert Agil Rustamzade assesses Russia's new plans to seize eastern and southern Ukraine, as well as access to Transnistria, and talks about the real state of affairs on the battlefield.
Russia's war in Ukraine crossed the two-month mark, during which the country lost many lives of soldiers and civilians, suffered tragic destruction, but did not lose the war. Ukraine's armed forces continue to hold the front line, preventing the enemy from advancing further than it did in the first days of the offensive. The military talks with the authoritative Azerbaijani military expert Agil Rustamzadeh about the military result of two months of battles and what the Ukrainian army can achieve in the coming weeks.
VIDEO OF THE DAY
- A few days ago, Russia announced a new plan that envisages not only the capture of Donbass and southern Ukraine, but also a land corridor to the border with unrecognized Transnistria, which cuts off Ukraine from the seas. How plausible is this plan, considering how the Armed Forces work now and how the fighting is going?
- The Russian side is always different in its statements, but these statements are rarely confirmed in real life. What Russia has said does not fit in with its capabilities. I would like to remind you that on March 25, they changed the whole operation and announced that they would go to the administrative borders of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. A month has passed, but we do not see any large-scale operations. I think that the same fate awaits the new stated goals. And if in the Donbass the Russian army has some opportunities and resources, in the south the Russian army certainly has no reserves to, say, go at least to Mykolayiv, let alone go further - to Odessa and go to the border with Transnistria. Most likely, this is a political statement, a horror that is traditional for Russian diplomacy. The Russian army does not have the capacity to implement such a plan.
- And if we talk about Zaporozhye, where the Russian army is also trying to attack?
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In a village in Zaporizhia, the occupiers fired on places where the consecration of Easter cakes was announced
- With this state of affairs and with such resources involved in the Russian army, the maximum it can achieve is some kind of local success, either in the Donetsk or Luhansk regions - to take some medium-sized settlement, a maximum of two. As we can see, Ukrainian and Russian troops have achieved equal opportunities. The Russian army has more opportunities for long-range weapons, but this is temporary. As for Zaporozhye, I do not think that the Russian army can have any success there. As we can see from the Ukrainian army, the flow of weapons is as large as possible. Weapons are being used that will seriously increase the firepower of the Ukrainian army. These are guns, multiple rocket launchers, and I think that in two weeks the Ukrainian army will deprive the Russian army of all offensive capabilities and will conduct offensive operations itself,
- So the Ukrainian army needs to survive 10-12 days?
- 10-14 days, absolutely correct.
- How successful will be the attempts of the Russian army to surround the Ukrainian army during the offensive in Donbass?
- There they planned two boilers - a large boiler as an attempt to surround the OOS forces simultaneously from the north and south and a small boiler in the Severodonetsk region. The worst-case scenario for the Ukrainian army is an unfavorable coincidence, when the Russians can either close the small cauldron or semi-deploy the troops there. But we can't talk about a large-scale cauldron, a great victory for the Russian army.
The fact that they have an advantage in long-range fire means nullifies the advantage of the Ukrainian army in anti-tank systems. The Ukrainian army destroys any military equipment that approaches a distance of 4-5 km. Therefore, in this context, neither side has the opportunity to inflict a powerful fire defeat on each other. Achieved albeit uneven, but still parity of forces.
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Yuri Butusov
Will Russia's offensive in Donbass be stopped?
- In recent weeks, many have been waiting for a large-scale battle in the Donbass. We see that this battle still does not exist. Is it not there because Russia has changed its tactics because they are not capable of such an operation or is the operation still ahead?
- I no longer read Russian horror movies and do not believe in them. Well, how can a group of 100 thousand carry out a large offensive? I saw the Russian army prepare as they gradually introduced their forces. They did not gather all their strength in one fist and did not advance in one direction. They have scattered their efforts and are advancing in six or seven directions with 100,000 groups.
- Does such actions have a military meaning?
- No. This contradicts military canons. Both during the planning and conduct of this military operation, I was always amazed by the non-standard military component. This is due to the fact that the political and tactical component has always weighed heavily on this military operation. When politicians drastically change their " wants", the troops do not have time to react. It takes at least a month or two to prepare for a 100,000-strong military operation. It is the political " wants" at the tactical level, their abrupt change, that prevent the Russian military from planning and conducting normal military operations.
- Heavy self-propelled artillery from the allies has already left for Ukraine. Isn't the critical delay with these deliveries, or is the delay, which experts estimate about a month, threatening some difficult scenarios for Ukraine?
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Biden has supported Ukraine since the first day of the war (Photo: Leah Millis / Reuters)
Biden on two months of war in Ukraine: Kyiv is still standing, the United States will continue to support Ukrainians
- There can be different things in war. It may happen that due to the coincidence of unfavorable circumstances, a unit of the Ukrainian army will have problems with logistics or, say, the command will be destroyed. But this will soon be a tactical success of the Russian army, they will be able to take some settlement. Something more is unlikely from a military point of view, because there is no advantage of the Russian army over the Ukrainian in human resources. And the presence of large fire capabilities eliminates the fact that Ukraine is in echeloned pre-prepared defensive positions, which, say, are designed to hold back artillery strikes.
- Is Ukraine getting the necessary weapons in sufficient quantities?
- In my opinion, there are no problems with the number. In addition, it is a very high quality weapon. For example, you are given M777 howitzers. In the A2 version, it can fire Excalibur shells indicating the target from the drone. That is, you can destroy targets with each projectile, and protected targets. The Russian army has such analogues, these are Krasnopol shells. But, firstly, they are few, and secondly, their drones are unable to make such precise targets as Western drones. So this is a very high quality high-precision weapon, and you will have a very big advantage in the strength and accuracy of your artillery strikes. Another thing is that if these systems came at least a month earlier. You would now be dealing not with a group of 150 thousand, but somewhere in the 80-90 thousand, and you would dictate the conditions on the battlefield.
Read also: Johnson suggested that the war in Ukraine could last until the end of next year
- Recently, the Prime Minister of Great Britain Boris Johnson said that the war could last until the end of next year. Do you share such assumptions?
- Most likely, Johnson said the maximum possible scenario. Next week, the US Congress is likely to decide on a land lease, and the Ukrainian army will have no problems with either the quantity of weapons or the quality.
In my opinion, if the Ukrainian army is able to inflict a very strong fire defeat on the Russian army within a month, the Russian army will not have the tools to carry out hostilities on the territory of Ukraine. But I do not know what the military-political goal of the Ukrainian leadership will be after that. Because victory in this military campaign will not lead to a solution to the Ukrainian-Russian conflict.
- We understand that.
- Perhaps Johnson means that the fighting will continue after the Ukrainian army enters the border on February 24, or, in good circumstances, on the Ukrainian border in 2014. The war will become a kind of positional, but the full resolution of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, ie the destruction of the political system of Russia, may take a long time.
- In your opinion, will Putin be able to prolong the war without declaring a general mobilization?
- No. Everything the Russian army has is already fighting and firing. Yes, it is possible to recruit 30-50 thousand volunteers from the PMC and any other structures for a lot of money. This will simply prolong the agony of the Russian army, but will not give it the advantage of being able to fight the Ukrainian army.
- Does Ukraine have an opportunity today to cut off the southern group of the Russian army, to cut it off from the Crimea, or are these far-reaching plans?
Read also:
Russia has not confirmed the ceasefire in Mariupol on Easter (Photo: Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
Ukraine failed to evacuate people from Mariupol on Easter due to Russian actions - Vereshchuk
- The first goal of the Ukrainian army, after the victory in Donbass, is to unblock Mariupol, and it is necessary to distance Russian troops from Kharkiv so that civilians can live there without artillery missile strikes - these are the primary goals. In the future, the Ukrainian army can attack the Russian army in the direction of Kherson and Zaporozhye, divide it into two parts, as well as carry out operations in other directions. I think it will depend on the tactical situation. But it is already clear that the number one task, which even in good circumstances can go hand in hand with the collapse of the Russian army in the Donbass - is the unblocking of Mariupol.
- How do you see the situation around Mariupol now? Intense bombing of the city continues.
- I believe that such fortified structures near Azovstal are designed to protect against tactical nuclear weapons. The plant was built during the Soviet era, and then built according to this scenario.
Yes, the Russians are bombing, but the Azovs are more likely to be neither cold nor warm. This is a deep, fortified huge structure. Yes, they are experiencing bomb blasts, but their lives are not in danger. The question is how long they will last with available resources. Even if the Azovs had food, water, and ammunition in abundance, they were joined by marines, border guards, and civilians. And if the resources were sufficient, they began to deteriorate sharply. Therefore, it is difficult to predict without knowing the situation inside or how much water, ammunition, etc. they have. But if they have it all, they will last for two weeks, a month and a half. It is very difficult to enter this building. Otherwise, how to clean up there? Any.
- At present, there are often calls to strike at the Crimean bridge. In your opinion, how much does it make sense?
- Just as Russia cannot disable Azovstal, it is just as difficult with the Crimean bridge. Such structures are erected due to the fact that someone wants to strike. I remember on duty that in order to destroy an ordinary railway bridge, you need at least 12 Su-24 planes with bombs of 500-1,500 kg. And this bridge is a much more powerful structure than a conventional railway bridge. It can be partially damaged by a bomb of 1,500 - 3,000 kg, which will hit exactly the target. But she will damage it, not destroy it. Now imagine how many such bombs are needed there, or the equivalent of such bombs. What is needed is either a 3-ton air bomb dropped on Azovstal or a missile with a 1,000 to 1,500 kg warhead. The Ukrainian army does not have such missiles and such bombs. The Ukrainian army can not only destroy, but also seriously damage this bridge. It was built not only taking into account Ukrainian capabilities,
Read also:
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken talks to journalists on the border with Ukraine in Poland after returning from a trip to Kyiv and meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky (Photo: Alex Brandon / Pool via REUTERS)
Ukraine will last much longer than Putin-Blinken after his visit to Kyiv
- The war has been going on for two months. Let's summarize the victories and defeats of Russia and Ukraine in this war, as well as the main mistakes of the parties to date.
- At the moment we can talk about the strategic defeat of Russia. Because in 60 days they changed the military goals and objectives of this operation twice and could not fulfill any of the stated tasks. We talked a lot about the weaknesses of the Russian army, I do not want to repeat. But I would like to point out the weaknesses of the Ukrainian army. Now, on the 60th day of the war, when large numbers of weapons began to flow, we all understand that Western society is late, but I believe that there is also the fault of the Ukrainian military, which demanded the supply of weapons.
I have always been indignant and said that you do not have enough artillery, and you want tanks and planes. I believe that the Ukrainian army fought well, even wonderfully, but there are no limits to perfection. It was necessary to demand the weapons systems that were needed to win on the battlefield. Instead of making some cosmic demands like " close the sky for us", it is equivalent to "let's fight for us". Or give us planes, tanks. You have about 800 tanks, why another 200-300? Tanks do not fight in modern wars.
Instead, you had to demand from the first day not the "closed sky", but the guns that are given to you now. Please regard this as a positive critique. I admire the Ukrainian army, which was able to stop the second army in the world. But it is always good to draw conclusions from your mistakes.
- In your opinion, is there enough missiles in Russia to continue bombing cities?
- It is difficult to judge, but we see that they are saving their missiles. The situation in Odessa is tragic, but it is important to understand: Russians do not fly for peaceful purposes, they are crooked. They have oblique, inaccurate missile systems. What will the death of a baby give them when the world sees that they are in an apartment building?
Read also:
Rocket of the Russian occupiers hit a house in Odessa (Photo: NV)
During the two months of the war in Ukraine, Russia has already used 70% of its high-precision missiles - Bellingcat
In Odessa, they could shoot from ships with some light inexpensive missile. No, they aimed at a military facility and made a mistake. They fired an air-based cruise missile. It is Soviet times, how can it be accurate? These missiles were not made very accurate, because they thought that this missile would carry a nuclear warhead. That's why such a picture emerges. I am 100% sure that they were aiming at a military facility.
- So, in your opinion, they are starting to save missiles?
- Of course, there has been no such tension, such a daily number of missile launches in Ukraine for a long time. Let's remember the first weeks of the war. How many missiles flew? Now much less. This suggests that they save charges. There is another positive - they do not have the components to assemble new missiles. For the Caliber rocket, they used stuffing supplied from different countries. They have always had air-based cruise missiles on their components, but the fact is that their production has long been stopped, and their X101 missiles are already on modern components, but they are not. They also have no components for Iskander missiles.
Lack of components, lack of ability to mass-produce new missiles - this is a plus for you. What they have remains. Hardly anyone knows the exact number, perhaps American or British intelligence.
Leave it to the young for the experience in food fighting. It's all over practically everywhere in all the news (doubt it will show up on Faux other than maybe to use as more hate mongering). These so called "truckers" (right wing extremist the ones behind it) are being made out as the fools they are. Going to be hard to live this down and it will encourage more to do the same. Might run out of eggs and have to use tomatoes or something given the bird flu going on.
Let the battles begin;
No. It was just part of the Brandon crowd and beliefs in that is what Musk is going to do and the animosity and beliefs that some have towards Gates and the love towards Musk. Couldn't find where I originally saw it where the conversation was, and it popped up again with something else. Didn't see it April 1st, guess it's a little late. And it is something Musk would do.
Don't give a shit. It was only an example of the crap going on, Reich's isn't the only one that has that opinion, it's the right side vs left side. You're the one that asked what the joke was like you didn't understand what it was all about. There's some that think what you write is crap and don't bother. I didn't make the twit, just posted it. If it goes over your head, oh well, don't laugh. Know it was dry humor, never claimed to be a comedian, don't get your panties up in a wad over it. Lot worse things to get upset over.
Musk and Gates are regularly going at each other. Along with all the Covid conspiracy and extreme right theater against the left side that's playing out there right now. Latest;
https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/why-elon-musk-took-aim-at-bill-gates-on-twitter/
One opinion on Musk;
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-doesnt-want-free-speech-he-wants-freedom-accountability-opinion-1700651
Elon Musk Doesn't Want 'Free Speech.' He Wants Freedom from Accountability | Opinion
ROBERT REICH , NEWSWEEK COLUMNIST AND CHANCELLOR’S PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
ON 4/25/22 AT 10:41 AM EDT
00:59Internet Divided Over Elon Musk's $43 Billion Offer To Buy
Elon Musk struck a deal today to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world's richest man. Twitter agreed to sell itself to Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company's share price this month before he revealed he was the firm's single largest shareholder. Twitter's founder and top managers had offered Musk a seat on the board but he didn't take it because he'd have to be responsible to all other shareholders. Now, he doesn't have to be accountable to anyone.
Hey, it's a free market, right?
Musk says no one should object to what he wants to do with Twitter because he's a "free speech absolutist," and who can be against free speech? Besides (he and his apologists say) if consumers don't like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere. Freedom to choose.
Free market? Free speech? Free choice?
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When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using "freedom," beware. They actually seek freedom from accountability. They want to use their vast fortunes to do whatever they please, unconstrained by laws or regulations, shareholders, even consumers.
Consider that the "free market" increasingly reflects the demands of big money. Unfriendly takeovers, such as Musk threatens to mount at Twitter, weren't part of the "free market" until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before then, laws and regulations constrained them.
Then came corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken. Their MO was to find corporations whose assets were worth more than their stock value, borrow against them, acquire enough shares to force them to cut costs (such as laying off workers, abandoning their communities, busting unions, and taking on crushing debt), and cash in.
The raiders' antics often imposed huge social costs. They pushed America from stakeholder capitalism (where workers and communities had a say in what corporations did) to shareholder capitalism (where the sole corporate goal is to maximize shareholder value).
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Inequality skyrocketed, insecurity soared, vast swaths of America were abandoned, and millions of good jobs vanished.
Elon musk russia factory
Elon Musk denied a rumor that Tesla will be building a new factory in Russia. In this photo, Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020, in Washington, DC.
WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES
The raiders altered the "free market" to allow them to do this. That's what the super-rich do. There's no "free market" in nature. The "free market" depends on laws and rules. If you have enough money, you can lobby (read: bribe) legislators to make changes in those laws and rules that make you even more money. (You can also get the government to subsidize you; Musk has received a reported $4.9 billion so far.)
Moreover, "free speech" is just another freedom that turns on wealth. As a practical matter, your ability to be heard turns on the size of the megaphone you can buy. If you're extremely rich, you can purchase the Washington Post or own Fox News. If you're the wealthiest person in the world, you can buy one of the biggest megaphones in the world called Twitter—and then decide who can use it, what its algorithms are going to be, and how it either invites or filters out big lies.
Musk said last week that he doesn't care about the economics of the deal and is pursuing it because it is "extremely important to the future of civilization." Fine, but who anointed Musk to decide the future of civilization?
Finally, consumers of social media just don't have much freedom of choice. If consumers don't like what Musk does with Twitter, they cannot simply switch to another Twitter-like platform. There aren't any. The largest social media platforms have grown gigantic because anyone who wants to participate in them and influence debate has to join them. After they reach a certain size, they're the only megaphone in town. Where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach tens of millions of people other than Twitter?
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With social media, the ordinary rules of competition don't apply. Once a platform is dominant, it becomes even more dominant. As Donald Trump discovered with his "Truth Social" fiasco, upstarts don't stand much chance.
All of which is to say, Musk's real goal has nothing to do with the freedom of others. His goal is his own unconstrained freedom: the freedom to wield enormous power without having to be accountable to laws and regulations, to shareholders, or to market competition, which is why he's dead set on owning Twitter.
Unlike his ambitions to upend transportation and interstellar flight, this one is dangerous. It might well upend democracy.
Robert B. Reich is an American political commentator, professor and author. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Reich's latest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
No, I don't suppose he wasn't. But who knows, history is many times rewritten, and for the people back then, he might have been for many. History also repeats itself. The quote was talking for Brutus and of course the evil in Caesar, as was I talking about Biden, the few good Republicans, and any of the rest that actually want's to support a good Democracy and productive society instead of the Putin style hate mongering for evil power Trumpian acceptance.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest
(For Brutus is an honorable man;
"The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones"
William Shakespeare
I've come to the realization that I might not live long enough to see the "Democracy after Babel". I agree with Haidt when he writes this part, after which he goes into some solutions that society might just take too long to figure out or just destroy itself completely;
It’s Going to Get Much Worse
in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).
Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.
In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
Here's the longer version of that, long but a decent read;
WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID
It’s not just a phase.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
By Jonathan Haidt
APRIL 11, 2022
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What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
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The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
From the December 2001 issue: David Brooks on Red and Blue America
Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
The Rise of the Modern Tower
there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
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The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
JONATHAN HAIDT AND TOBIAS ROSE-STOCKWELL
Illustration of a smartphone with a sad girl on the screen.
The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
JONATHAN HAIDT
A ballooning spider
Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity
ED YONG
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.
In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans. “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” he wrote in a letter to investors. Facebook hoped “to rewire the way people spread and consume information.” By giving them “the power to share,” it would help them to “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.”
In the 10 years since then, Zuckerberg did exactly what he said he would do. He did rewire the way we spread and consume information; he did transform our institutions, and he pushed us past the tipping point. It has not worked out as he expected.
Things Fall Apart
historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow. But what is it that holds together large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States and India, or, for that matter, modern Britain and France?
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements—from the Postal Service through the telephone to email and texting—that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.
But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social networks
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.
Babel is not a story about tribalism. It’s a story about the fragmentation of everything.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
Shortly after its “Like” button began to produce data about what best “engaged” its users, Facebook developed algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a “like” or some other interaction, eventually including the “share” as well. Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions––especially anger at out-groups––are the most likely to be shared.
illustration with an 1820 painting of outdoor feast with people in historical dress fleeing a giant flaming Facebook logo in a colonnaded courtyard
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Belshazzar’s Feast, John Martin, 1820.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
From the October 2018 issue: America is living James Madison’s nightmare
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
Read: The Ukraine crisis briefly put America’s culture war in perspective
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
From the April 2021 issue: The internet doesn’t have to be awful
When people lose trust in institutions, they lose trust in the stories told by those institutions. That’s particularly true of the institutions entrusted with the education of children. History curricula have often caused political controversy, but Facebook and Twitter make it possible for parents to become outraged every day over a new snippet from their children’s history lessons––and math lessons and literature selections, and any new pedagogical shifts anywhere in the country. The motives of teachers and administrators come into question, and overreaching laws or curricular reforms sometimes follow, dumbing down education and reducing trust in it further. One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.
Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. In a comment to Vox that recalls the first post-Babel diaspora, he said:
The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another.
Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening” on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.
The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.
Politics After Babel
“politics is the art of the possible,” the German statesman Otto von Bismarck said in 1867. In a post-Babel democracy, not much may be possible.
Of course, the American culture war and the decline of cross-party cooperation predates social media’s arrival. The mid-20th century was a time of unusually low polarization in Congress, which began reverting back to historical levels in the 1970s and ’80s. The ideological distance between the two parties began increasing faster in the 1990s. Fox News and the 1994 “Republican Revolution” converted the GOP into a more combative party. For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich discouraged new Republican members of Congress from moving their families to Washington, D.C., where they were likely to form social ties with Democrats and their families.
So cross-party relationships were already strained before 2009. But the enhanced virality of social media thereafter made it more hazardous to be seen fraternizing with the enemy or even failing to attack the enemy with sufficient vigor. On the right, the term RINO (Republican in Name Only) was superseded in 2015 by the more contemptuous term cuckservative, popularized on Twitter by Trump supporters. On the left, social media launched callout culture in the years after 2012, with transformative effects on university life and later on politics and culture throughout the English-speaking world.
From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind
What changed in the 2010s? Let’s revisit that Twitter engineer’s metaphor of handing a loaded gun to a 4-year-old. A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since.
Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major platforms offered. However, the warped “accountability” of social media has also brought injustice—and political dysfunction—in three ways.
First, the dart guns of social media give more power to trolls and provocateurs while silencing good citizens. Research by the political scientists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen found that a small subset of people on social-media platforms are highly concerned with gaining status and are willing to use aggression to do so. They admit that in their online discussions they often curse, make fun of their opponents, and get blocked by other users or reported for inappropriate comments. Across eight studies, Bor and Petersen found that being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims. Even a small number of jerks were able to dominate discussion forums, Bor and Petersen found, because nonjerks are easily turned off from online discussions of politics. Additional research finds that women and Black people are harassed disproportionately, so the digital public square is less welcoming to their voices.
illustration with detail from 19th-century painting of hand holding dart with an email "send" logo in place of its flights
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Venus and Cupid, Pierre-Maximilien Delafontaine, by 1860.
Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.
From the October 2021 issue: Anne Applebaum on how mob justice is trampling democratic discourse
Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
Structural Stupidity
since the tower fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.
From the September 2018 issue: The cognitive biases tricking your brain
The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.
In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.
In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions for generating knowledge from the interactions of biased and cognitively flawed individuals. English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
Part of America’s greatness in the 20th century came from having developed the most capable, vibrant, and productive network of knowledge-producing institutions in all of human history, linking together the world’s best universities, private companies that turned scientific advances into life-changing consumer products, and government agencies that supported scientific research and led the collaboration that put people on the moon.
But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?
This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. The shift was most pronounced in universities, scholarly associations, creative industries, and political organizations at every level (national, state, and local), and it was so pervasive that it established new behavioral norms backed by new policies seemingly overnight. The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution. Participants in our key institutions began self-censoring to an unhealthy degree, holding back critiques of policies and ideas—even those presented in class by their students—that they believed to be ill-supported or wrong.
But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.
The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.
Only within the devoted conservatives’ narratives do Donald Trump’s speeches make sense, from his campaign’s ominous opening diatribe about Mexican “rapists” to his warning on January 6, 2021: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The traditional punishment for treason is death, hence the battle cry on January 6: “Hang Mike Pence.” Right-wing death threats, many delivered by anonymous accounts, are proving effective in cowing traditional conservatives, for example in driving out local election officials who failed to “stop the steal.” The wave of threats delivered to dissenting Republican members of Congress has similarly pushed many of the remaining moderates to quit or go silent, giving us a party ever more divorced from the conservative tradition, constitutional responsibility, and reality. We now have a Republican Party that describes a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol as “legitimate political discourse,” supported—or at least not contradicted—by an array of right-wing think tanks and media organizations.
The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now into Congress. “Pizzagate,” QAnon, the belief that vaccines contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won reelection—it’s hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and Twitter.
illustration with 17th-century painting of woman looking in mirror that is shattered around the thumbs-up "like" symbol
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: Vanity, Nicolas Régnier, c. 1626.
The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.
Liberals in the late 20th century shared a belief that the sociologist Christian Smith called the “liberal progress” narrative, in which America used to be horrifically unjust and repressive, but, thanks to the struggles of activists and heroes, has made (and continues to make) progress toward realizing the noble promise of its founding. This story easily supports liberal patriotism, and it was the animating narrative of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is also the view of the “traditional liberals” in the “Hidden Tribes” study (11 percent of the population), who have strong humanitarian values, are older than average, and are largely the people leading America’s cultural and intellectual institutions.
But when the newly viralized social-media platforms gave everyone a dart gun, it was younger progressive activists who did the most shooting, and they aimed a disproportionate number of their darts at these older liberal leaders. Confused and fearful, the leaders rarely challenged the activists or their nonliberal narrative in which life at every institution is an eternal battle among identity groups over a zero-sum pie, and the people on top got there by oppressing the people on the bottom. This new narrative is rigidly egalitarian––focused on equality of outcomes, not of rights or opportunities. It is unconcerned with individual rights.
The universal charge against people who disagree with this narrative is not “traitor”; it is “racist,” “transphobe,” “Karen,” or some related scarlet letter marking the perpetrator as one who hates or harms a marginalized group. The punishment that feels right for such crimes is not execution; it is public shaming and social death.
You can see the stupefaction process most clearly when a person on the left merely points to research that questions or contradicts a favored belief among progressive activists. Someone on Twitter will find a way to associate the dissenter with racism, and others will pile on. For example, in the first week of protests after the killing of George Floyd, some of which included violence, the progressive policy analyst David Shor, then employed by Civis Analytics, tweeted a link to a study showing that violent protests back in the 1960s led to electoral setbacks for the Democrats in nearby counties. Shor was clearly trying to be helpful, but in the ensuing outrage he was accused of “anti-Blackness” and was soon dismissed from his job. (Civis Analytics has denied that the tweet led to Shor’s firing.)
The Shor case became famous, but anyone on Twitter had already seen dozens of examples teaching the basic lesson: Don’t question your own side’s beliefs, policies, or actions. And when traditional liberals go silent, as so many did in the summer of 2020, the progressive activists’ more radical narrative takes over as the governing narrative of an organization. This is why so many epistemic institutions seemed to “go woke” in rapid succession that year and the next, beginning with a wave of controversies and resignations at The New York Times and other newspapers, and continuing on to social-justice pronouncements by groups of doctors and medical associations (one publication by the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, advised medical professionals to refer to neighborhoods and communities as “oppressed” or “systematically divested” instead of “vulnerable” or “poor”), and the hurried transformation of curricula at New York City’s most expensive private schools.
Tragically, we see stupefaction playing out on both sides in the COVID wars. The right has been so committed to minimizing the risks of COVID that it has turned the disease into one that preferentially kills Republicans. The progressive left is so committed to maximizing the dangers of COVID that it often embraces an equally maximalist, one-size-fits-all strategy for vaccines, masks, and social distancing—even as they pertain to children. Such policies are not as deadly as spreading fears and lies about vaccines, but many of them have been devastating for the mental health and education of children, who desperately need to play with one another and go to school; we have little clear evidence that school closures and masks for young children reduce deaths from COVID. Most notably for the story I’m telling here, progressive parents who argued against school closures were frequently savaged on social media and met with the ubiquitous leftist accusations of racism and white supremacy. Others in blue cities learned to keep quiet.
American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy.
It’s Going to Get Much Worse
in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).
Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.
In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
Democracy After Babel
we can never return to the way things were in the pre-digital age. The norms, institutions, and forms of political participation that developed during the long era of mass communication are not going to work well now that technology has made everything so much faster and more multidirectional, and when bypassing professional gatekeepers is so easy. And yet American democracy is now operating outside the bounds of sustainability. If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.
What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.
Harden Democratic Institutions
Political polarization is likely to increase for the foreseeable future. Thus, whatever else we do, we must reform key institutions so that they can continue to function even if levels of anger, misinformation, and violence increase far above those we have today.
For instance, the legislative branch was designed to require compromise, yet Congress, social media, and partisan cable news channels have co-evolved such that any legislator who reaches across the aisle may face outrage within hours from the extreme wing of her party, damaging her fundraising prospects and raising her risk of being primaried in the next election cycle.
Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one.
A second way to harden democratic institutions is to reduce the power of either political party to game the system in its favor, for example by drawing its preferred electoral districts or selecting the officials who will supervise elections. These jobs should all be done in a nonpartisan way. Research on procedural justice shows that when people perceive that a process is fair, they are more likely to accept the legitimacy of a decision that goes against their interests. Just think of the damage already done to the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by the Senate’s Republican leadership when it blocked consideration of Merrick Garland for a seat that opened up nine months before the 2016 election, and then rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.
Reform Social Media
A democracy cannot survive if its public squares are places where people fear speaking up and where no stable consensus can be reached. Social media’s empowerment of the far left, the far right, domestic trolls, and foreign agents is creating a system that looks less like democracy and more like rule by the most aggressive.
illustration with 1861 engraving of the arch-heretics from Dante's "Inferno" with two people looking at glowing smartphone screen surrounded by people climbing out of tombs with fires smoking and city wall in background
Illustration by Nicolás Ortega. Source: The Arch Heretics, Gustave Doré, c. 1861.
But it is within our power to reduce social media’s ability to dissolve trust and foment structural stupidity. Reforms should limit the platforms’ amplification of the aggressive fringes while giving more voice to what More in Common calls “the exhausted majority.”
Those who oppose regulation of social media generally focus on the legitimate concern that government-mandated content restrictions will, in practice, devolve into censorship. But the main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009. The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen advocates for simple changes to the architecture of the platforms, rather than for massive and ultimately futile efforts to police all content. For example, she has suggested modifying the “Share” function on Facebook so that after any content has been shared twice, the third person in the chain must take the time to copy and paste the content into a new post. Reforms like this are not censorship; they are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral, and they work equally well in all languages. They don’t stop anyone from saying anything; they just slow the spread of content that is, on average, less likely to be true.
Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.
Read: Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obligation to verify (perhaps through a third party or nonprofit) that you are a real human being, in a particular country, and are old enough to be using the platform. This one change would wipe out most of the hundreds of millions of bots and fake accounts that currently pollute the major platforms. It would also likely reduce the frequency of death threats, rape threats, racist nastiness, and trolling more generally. Research shows that antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable.
In any case, the growing evidence that social media is damaging democracy is sufficient to warrant greater oversight by a regulatory body, such as the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. One of the first orders of business should be compelling the platforms to share their data and their algorithms with academic researchers.
Prepare the Next Generation
The members of Gen Z––those born in and after 1997––bear none of the blame for the mess we are in, but they are going to inherit it, and the preliminary signs are that older generations have prevented them from learning how to handle it.
Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”
From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?
And while social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor—the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms. Correlational and experimental studies back up the connection to depression and anxiety, as do reports from young people themselves, and from Facebook’s own research, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.
Read: Why I cover campus controversies
The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty. Congress should update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it.
More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play. Stop starving children of the experiences they most need to become good citizens: free play in mixed-age groups of children with minimal adult supervision. Every state should follow the lead of Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas and pass a version of the Free-Range Parenting Law that helps assure parents that they will not be investigated for neglect if their 8- or 9-year-old children are spotted playing in a park. With such laws in place, schools, educators, and public-health authorities should then encourage parents to let their kids walk to school and play in groups outside, just as more kids used to do.
Hope After Babel
the story i have told is bleak, and there is little evidence to suggest that America will return to some semblance of normalcy and stability in the next five or 10 years. Which side is going to become conciliatory? What is the likelihood that Congress will enact major reforms that strengthen democratic institutions or detoxify social media?
Yet when we look away from our dysfunctional federal government, disconnect from social media, and talk with our neighbors directly, things seem more hopeful. Most Americans in the More in Common report are members of the “exhausted majority,” which is tired of the fighting and is willing to listen to the other side and compromise. Most Americans now see that social media is having a negative impact on the country, and are becoming more aware of its damaging effects on children.
Will we do anything about it?
When Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was impressed by the American habit of forming voluntary associations to fix local problems, rather than waiting for kings or nobles to act, as Europeans would do. That habit is still with us today. In recent years, Americans have started hundreds of groups and organizations dedicated to building trust and friendship across the political divide, including BridgeUSA, Braver Angels (on whose board I serve), and many others listed at BridgeAlliance.us. We cannot expect Congress and the tech companies to save us. We must change ourselves and our communities.
What would it be like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? We know. It is a time of confusion and loss. But it is also a time to reflect, listen, and build.
This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “After Babel.”
Read more of Jonathan Haidt’s writing in The Atlantic on social media and society:
The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus
Facebook’s Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which originated as a September 2015 Atlantic story.
Michigan state senator blasts colleague who accused her of grooming in fundraising email
BY KELSEY CAROLAN - 04/19/22 4:10 PM ET
https://thehill.com/news/state-watch/3273302-michigan-state-senator-says-colleague-accused-her-of-grooming-in-fundraising-email/
For gophers, you need to just increase the gas a little bit more (and use a longer match).
Ants in the garden ? Run a hose from your bbq gas cylinder and put it into the ants nest and turn it on, just a little, removed hose and carefully light the hole… what could possibly go wrong??
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514594342865936384
Seems like all Putin has got is rockets for destruction of the civilian population and an army that can only fight and kill mostly women and children well. What a cowardly schmuck. A vicious one, but still a schmuck.
New shelling of Kharkiv. Russia attacked a residential area, killing ten people, including a baby
https://nv.ua/ukr/kharkiv/harkiv-obstrili-15-kvitnya-rosiyani-vdarili-po-htz-desyat-zagiblih-ta-ponad-30-poranenih-novini-50234246.html
April 15, 7:32 p.m.
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You can also read this material in Russian
The Russians struck with a jet of artillery on the playground at HTZ (Photo: National Police of Ukraine)
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Russian artillery struck one of Kharkiv's sleeping areas, killing eight and wounding more than 40. Among the dead and wounded are children.
Russia's war against Ukraine is the main event on April 15
Updated at 22:20. The Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office reported that ten people were killed and 35 were injured in the shelling of the Kharkiv Industrial District by the occupiers . The occupiers struck at the residential area of ??MLRS Hurricane.
VIDEO OF THE DAY
A criminal case has been opened for violating the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder.
The head of the Kharkiv Military-Civil Administration Oleg Sinegubov announced another Russian war crime on Friday evening, April 15.
Among the dead - a seven-month-old child. Sinegubov said that three children and 31 adults were injured. Doctors provide emergency care to the victims.
Later, the regional Department of Health clarified that the death toll had risen to eight, with nine children and 33 adults injured.
According to Public , the enemy fired on a playground in the Industrial District.
Sinegubov urged Kharkiv residents not to be on the streets unnecessarily.
" The Second Army of the World, as it turns out, can only fight the civilian population… No war crime of the occupiers will go unpunished!" - Summed up the head of the region.
Read also: "Demilitarization and denazification". Komarovsky showed a video of the Russians destroying Gorky Park in Kharkiv
According to police, at least 503 civilians , including 24 children , were killed in 50 days of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine in the Kharkiv region . These figures are not conclusive, and there is no complete information on civilian casualties in the war zone and in the occupied territories.
Here's an interesting take on Putin and the deadly game he's playing. An interview with The New Voice of Ukraine and Ukraines' news agency director general.
Russian war in Ukraine 'may pause in May-June'
https://english.nv.ua/nation/russian-war-in-ukraine-may-pause-in-may-june-50233789.html
14 April, 13:31
1242
Why Putin doesn't like Lukashenko and why he envies Zelensky
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Russia's war against Ukraine may take a pause in May-June 2022, suggests Oleksandr Martynenko, director general of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
Journalist Roman Kravets interviewed Martynenko on Radio NV about whether a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin would be needed to create a truce or a lasting peace, whether peace agreements would be signed in Belarus or Turkey, why the Kremlin head envies the Ukrainian leader, and why Putin dislikes Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
NV: Lukashenko and Putin met at the Vostochny spaceport in the Far East in Amur Oblast. What was that about? Does that meeting mean anything?
Martynenko: It doesn’t matter where they met. They could meet in the Arctic Circle, somewhere in Sochi or the Maldives – it doesn't matter. It turned out that they met on the Day of Cosmonauts.
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Russia recruiting volunteers in Belarus to fight in Ukraine
From time to time, Putin likes to poke fun at Lukashenko and put him in an unfavourable light. He does not like him, we've been seeing that for many years. So Putin made Lukashenko fly (to Amur Oblast) for 12 hours.
So that's why it happened there. As for what happened at this meeting, it does not matter at all. We live in a time when epoch-making, defining decisions are made not during meetings, but on the battlefield.
NV: Why does Putin not like Lukashenko?
Martynenko: It all started when Alexander Grigorovich (Lukashenko) thought that he could be the leader of the Eurasian Union of Belarus and Russia. At one time, especially when (former Russian President Boris) Yeltsin had health problems, they considered a situation where there would be such a union state, with an election of its president. (They considered Lukashenko's candidacy).
He is a charismatic man, of course, he will beat any Russian politician. This idea did not last long, because Putin came to power – it became clear to everyone in a year or two or three that there would never be another election. Or any, since then.
Lukashenko has been living all these 20 years, trying to deceive the Russian leadership, promising it God knows what, getting paid for it. And he is still doing it successfully. Everyone understands this and can do nothing about it. Therefore, of course, Moscow doesn't like him.
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Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu speaks with Vladimir Putin (Photo:Sputnik/Alexey Nikolsky/Kremlin)
Next fortnight decisive. What's going on around Putin
NV: A few days ago, Lukashenko himself said that he wanted to be a party in the talks between Ukraine and Russia. Now Putin says talks need to be held in Belarus. What game are they playing?
Martynenko: This is a tactical game. Of course, Russia is more comfortable in Belarus than in Turkey, under various devices installed by (Turkish President Recep Tayyip) Erdogan's people in all the rooms.
NV: Negotiations are quite difficult now. Do the Russians expect what will happen in the Donbas in the coming days? Are they procrastinating to look at the result?
Martynenko: Of course. From Russia's point of view, negotiations can bring results of two varieties: before the victory or after the victory. Conditionally – after the enemy's military defeat. It is believed that negotiations can be most effective for them during these two phases. Now there is neither one nor the other: neither the understanding that an unconditional victory would be guaranteed, nor any achievements.
(To capture) Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts is the main goal.
The third point is that the army has to put something real on Putin's table to show people. At least for themselves. Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts within their administrative borders are, of course, not a victory for Russia, but at least something.
In fact, the Russians do not need to explain anything, they will "eat" anything. But the system fell into disrepair during this war: a stratum of society emerged that was eager to seize Kyiv. Something needs to be done about them because they're active. What should they be told now? "We fought, fought, and decided to compromise?" No! There must be something. If the army can't even reach the administrative borders, then it will be interesting, because then it already smells like a defeat, not just a draw.
Read also:
Russia is redirecting all its efforts to eastern Ukraine (Photo:Joint Forces Operation)
Fighting in Donbas to intensify over next two to three weeks, says UK intelligence
NV: That’s what’s most interesting: how will they react to this?
Martynenko: The war has been going on for a month and a half, and there has been no success at all. There is nothing on any of Putin's stated goals – either on demilitarization, or on denazification, or on non-aligned status, or on reduction of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or on recognition of the so-called "DPR" and "LPR" as independent states. Nothing!
Since the ultimatum to Ukraine was issued, it has become clear that the strategy failed because it was based on incorrect data, and there is no new one! Therefore, many different people in the Russian leadership are saying something different. Some say that "we are defending the LPR/DPR," some say that "we are at war with NATO," some say that "we are destroying nationalists.
"However, it is unknown which ones – no surname has been (named). Someone says that 80% of the population of Ukraine are nationalists, so they all need to be destroyed.
Now they have to find some ideas on the go. And the Russian system has never worked in as tense conditions as it does now. And, of course, it began to fail.
NV: Will there be any agreements in the coming months, in May, June? In my opinion, the public expects that there will be some kind of agreement, a break.
Martynenko: This is possible at least because any war is either stopped or suspended when neither side can achieve the goals it has set for itself – because of equal forces, because it's just impossible.
It seems to me that this Ukrainian-Russian war may reach such a stage in May-June, when it will be clear that Russia will not be able to do everything it has planned, and Ukraine will not be able to drive Russian troops out of its territory. Then, of course, there will be a pause, which will need to be fixed. I assume it is an option when this can happen – either a truce or a more or less stable peace.
But we understand very well that this is all short-lived. Because one way or another, Russia has entered a long phase of ending its existence: it has challenged the whole world, and the world does not like it.
NV: Will Putin sit down at the negotiating table with Zelensky? Will other people do that?
Martynenko: (He will sit down) when he comes to the conclusion that he can look bright against Zelensky's background. I don't understand what needs to happen for this. Anyone who looks at two presidents understands who's bright and who isn't. But, as we know, all ideas about the beautiful, about the deserving, are distorted in Russia, so, perhaps, he will somehow come to the conclusion that "I'm a winner, and this is a loser."
First of all, Putin envies (Zelensky). He's jealous of his youth, he's jealous of his energy, he's jealous because Zelensky is now one of the main, shining, political leaders in the world, not Putin. This is envy, which often turns into hatred, so it will be difficult to talk about this meeting. But if we talk about political decisions to suspend hostilities, they can be made without leaders, even at the level of governments, at the level of foreign ministries, for example.
NV: I didn't believe that Putin could envy Zelensky, but it makes sense.
Martynenko: I was in Paris in 2019 (at the Normandy Four summit), sitting in that hall. I deliberately followed Putin when Zelensky spoke. Even then it happened. Like any person who is, frankly, old (Putin is 70 years old soon), he sees before him a (really) not very experienced, frivolous man, but young and, most importantly, energetic. He understands that (Zelensky) has energy that he no longer has, and moreover, never will again. Of course, this is envy.
Support NV: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine is more than halfway through its second month. Today, April 14, is the 50th day of Putin's war. Here, NV tracks the main events of the day.
I received my order confirmation right after I ordered yesterday from Ebay, Paypal, and my CC. You should of received your order confirmation pretty much right away automatically. Check Junk email folder, sometimes it goes in there. They are listing any of the low price stamp listings as "out of stock". My seller still has stock, yet his listing got listed that way. He's working on getting his listings back on, he's been with Ebay for 8 years now with a 100% feedback, so it's a little frustrating for him given everything else he has to contend with. Also check that your CC charges aren't just "pending", it can stay there until eBay Commerce Inc. actually processes the order or Amazon shipping an item.
Hopefully we both get our stamps a month or two from now.
Wondering if you have received any notice back on your stamp purchase? I ordered mine and then saw that the sellers store emptied and his stamps were no longer available. Sent seller a message and his response was this;
New message from: 2antvysfpf (803 PURPLE_STAR Star)
Hi because of my low price on ebay stamps, they limited my store, they thought it was suspicious, I sent only 160 lots, and they limited me, I deal with them, they all froze, I find out why
Checked other sellers on Ebay and looks like all low price Ukrainian War stamps are no longer on Ebay including your link to your purchase was also "out of stock". Other sellers' stores were froze also but many of them have gotten back minus any low price new Ukrainian soldier war stamps. So it seems my seller is on the up and up as far as that goes. Not sure if Ebay's policy would stop scammers just listing theirs at a higher price for a larger scam, but it does seem Ebay is actively addressing the issue. I have communicated more with Andrey (seller) and it seems that I will still get my stamps, given if he or the stamps don't get blown up along the way.
Don't know about the luck. I chose a seller (2antvysfpf) that had 100% positive feedback, has a YouTube channel