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March 10 to March 16, 2024 An emerging international network of online groups has targeted thousands of children with a sadistic form of social media terror. The perpetrators – identified by authorities as boys and men as old as mid-40s – seek out children with mental health issues and blackmail them into hurting themselves on camera. They belong to a set of evolving online groups, some of which have thousands of members, that often splinter and take on new names but have overlapping membership and use the same tactics, according to an examination by the Washington Post, Wired magazine, Der Spiegel in Germany and Recorder in Romania. Unlike many “sextortion” schemes that seek money or increasingly graphic images, these perpetrators are chasing notoriety in a community that glorifies cruelty, victims and law enforcement officials say. The FBI issued a public warning in September identifying eight such groups that target minors between the ages of 8 and 17, seeking to harm them for the members’ “own entertainment or their own sense of fame.” The group that targeted the Oklahoma girl [eventually urging her to commit suicide] and others interviewed for this report is called “764,” named after the partial Zip code of the teenager who created it in 2021. Its activities fit the definition of domestic terrorism, the FBI recently argued in court. “I had the feeling that they really loved me, that they cared about me,” said an 18-year-old woman from Canada who described being “brainwashed” and then victimized by the group in 2021. “The more content they had of you, the more that they used it, the more that they started to hate you.” In a separate article, a Washington Post investigation “has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of police officers have preyed on children, while agencies across the country have failed to take steps to prevent these crimes. At least 1,800 state and local police officers were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022, The Post found." Abusive officers were rarely related to the children they were accused of raping, fondling and exploiting. They most frequently targeted girls who were 13 to 15 years old – and regularly met their victims through their jobs.” In a separate article in The Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt reports that rates of depression and anxiety in the United States – fairly stable in the 2000s – rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent. Haidt attributes much of this, along with other declines to the emotional, physical and intellectual well-being of young people, to the rise of smartphones, which “moved much more of their social lives online – particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity – all were affected.” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books NY’s $700 Million Film Credit Not Boffo, RCI
$4.3M in Video Games for Navy Recruits, RCI
San Antonio Gun Buyback Includes Toys, RCI
Trump Tower in Tampa That Never Was, RCI
$236B in Improper Medical Outlays, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway As Chair of the Joints Chief of Staff, Gen. Mike Milley earned the acclaim of progressives as he broke many military discipline and tradition to harshly criticize former commander-in-chief Donald Trump. Since retiring from the military last year, he has begun cashing in on his resistance credentials. This article reports that the general, who made $204,000 a year when he retired, has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit, where he is represented by the same high-powered speakers’ agency as Hillary Clinton: Transitioning from capped government salaries to defense industry, private consulting for global risk management, or work with venture capital brings in lavish paydays. For retired generals, the invasion is swift. The recently retired chief of space operations for the Space Force, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, for example, has joined the board of directors for aerospace companies Impulse Space and Axiom Space, as well as becoming senior managing director for investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. Gen. James C. McConville, who served as chief of staff of the Army before retiring last year, has joined the board of directors of drone manufacturer Edge Autonomy and aerospace investment firm AE Industrial Partners, as an operating partner. Milley's emergence as ardent critic of Trump is unusual for high-ranking military officers who typically eschew politics, this article reports. In his final speech as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year, Milley swiped at Trump by saying, “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.” The article does not say how much Milley is charging for speeches, but notes: Speaker’s fees for former top officials like Milley are often substantial. During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Clinton came under fire for receiving over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs alone in one year. Along with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, the couple raked in over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Repeated Mental Lapses by Biden in Hur Transcript, Axios
VROOOM! Biden Made Car Sounds During Hur Interview, HotAir
Transcript: Special Counsel Hur's Interview with Biden, Department of Justice
In House, Hur Defends Findings as Political Knives Come Out, New York Times
Top Jill Biden Aide Is Called a #MeToo Nightmare, New York Post
Hunter Biden Retracts Offer to Publicly Testify, Washington Free Beacon
Hunter Biden Aided China Bid to Corner Nuclear Energy Market, Just the News
Conservatives Build Their Own 'Get Out the Vote' Machine, Federalist
Trump Driver Disputes Jan. 6 'Lunge' Narrative, New York Times
Spouse of VP Harris in Country Club Accused of Racism, Los Angeles Times Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Kenn Dahl, was surprised when car insurance on his Chevy Bolt spiked by 21% even with no history of accidents. He learned that the spike could be due to a heightened “risk score” based on detailed information about his driving habits General Motors had gleaned from its own-board computers and then provided to a data broker, this article reports: LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act. What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car. The manufacturer of Dahl’s Chevy Bolt—General Motors—provided his trip details to LexisNexis to create a “risk score” for more personalized insurance coverage, and eight insurance agencies requested Dahl’s LexisNexis report. Some cars offer apps that give driving tools like navigation, roadside assistance, or driver ratings. The article reports many drivers are unaware that turning on such features consents to some automakers providing information to data brokers about their driving. The data brokers, in return, make money by selling that information to insurance companies. The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up its efforts to penetrate college campuses under the guise of fighting “foreign malign influence,” according to documents and memos obtained by the Intercept. DHS plans and goals are not clear but this article suggests it includes asking Congress to address laws prohibiting it from providing certain resources, such as training and information, to private universities and schools: The push comes at the same time that the DHS is quietly undertaking an effort to influence university curricula in an attempt to fight what it calls disinformation. In December, the department’s Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council, or HSAPC, sent a report to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining a plan to combat college campus unrest stemming from Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. DHS has used this advisory body — a sympathetic cohort of academics, consultants, and contractors – to gain support for homeland security objectives and recruit on college campuses. … The DHS maintains multiple outreach efforts and cooperation programs with public and private universities, particularly with regard to foreign students, and it shares information, even sensitive law enforcement information, with campus police forces. Cooperation with regard to speech and political leanings of students and faculty, nevertheless, is far murkier. In a separate article about government encroachment, the Daily Signal reports the Biden Justice Department continues to claim presidential privilege to block release of its strategic plan to turn out the vote, although at least two other federal agencies have made their plans public. As part of Walmart’s ongoing efforts to be a major player in the lucrative consumer banking market, a Walmart-controlled partnership acquired two companies in 2022, combining them as One Finance. While the retailer's previous efforts had targeted its customers, this acquisition focused on signing up Walmart’s 1.6 million employees and getting them to deposit their paychecks into One accounts. The goal, this article reports, was to keep associates’ pay in the Walmart ecosystem and induce them to spend it with the retailer. Instead, it has been plagued by fraud and customer dissatisfaction: Con artists took advantage, spurring a litany of customer complaints to regulators and the Better Business Bureau and across social media platforms. One froze some accounts and blocked access to its app and website from several countries, according to current and former customers and employees. … One’s problems echo the fraud and compliance issues revealed in a recent ProPublica investigation of Walmart’s financial services business. That article found that the company resisted calls to rein in fraud and skimped on employee training as more than $1 billion in consumer fraud losses were routed through Walmart’s financial systems over the past decade. The reporter of this piece, NPR presenter Steve Inskeep, was adopted at birth and for much of his life had little interest in identifying his birth parents. In 2012, when he and his wife decided to adopt a child from China, he was spurred to look into his own history. “In the past,” he writes, “my search would have been difficult or impossible, forbidden by custom and law. For much of the 20th century, adoptions were cloaked in secrecy. … Secrecy fit a mid-20th-century sensibility – the impulse to leave uncomfortable truths unsaid, like World War II veterans who never talked about their service, or the John Wayne character in The Searchers who avoids telling a man that his fiancée is dead: ‘I thought it best to keep it from you.’ ” But things have changed, Inskeep writes: In recent decades, open adoptions have become the norm. A lot of adoptees grow up knowing their birth parents, or at least knowing about them. Adults who still lack this information have gained new tools to puncture secrecy: the internet and DNA testing. Commercial DNA databases can help identify unknown relatives or show that people are not related. … But many people still can’t find their identity without access to their paper trail. Most states have opened at least some records, but the two most populous—California and Texas – have not. Inskeep informs readers of how he followed a paper trail to identify his birth mother and used genetic samples to identify a list of potential birth fathers. |
