Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"

The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.
"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.
Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.
FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
Never mind most of these disabled people weren't even looking at the keyboard while their helper guided their hands over it to spell out words. Or that most never went to school and learned to spell in the first place.

People WANTED TO BELIEVE it worked, so they did.
Moral panics/hoaxes like the Satanic Panic, Repressed Memory Syndrome, and FC flourish because they are abuses of the POWER OF BELIEF.

"I believe the children!" - no matter how absurd the stories got.
"I believe the therapy!" - I just remembered my dad killed 20 people!, etc.
FC was the most sympathetic hoax, since these parents desperately wanted to believe actual communication was happening, that their kids were typing real words.

But a delusion is a delusion. Humoring people has limits.
Once a moral panic gets started it's hard to stop. That's why there MUST be good solid evidence, and assuming it gets to the court state, all due process rights for the accused.
We had a minor panic just a year and a half ago where some moron looking for the satanic dungeon in the basement of a pizza parlor that didn't have a basement showed up with a f**king rifle to investigate and 'free the kids'.
Social media is not reality. 1 of the most troublesome aspects of it is how quickly bullshit spreads on here.

I'd ask people to be smarter and far more skeptical, but I know I'd be wasting my time if I did that.
Frontline documentary on the Facilitated Communication scandal:

https://t.co/RX0QIN0IiA
To get an idea of what massive problems were created by FC, watch this segment when a 'therapist' helping a child to spell, 'spelled out' that her parents were sexually abusing her & the legal case that resulted.

https://t.co/chxOwMofy5
Mistype: the child was a male, not a female.

this court case resulted in one of the FIRST attempts to scientifically verify whether FC was actually real or not.

Ponder that.

It was already being used in many schools by that time.
Of course, in a double blind test, the investigators proved the facilitator was faking it. They would show the child a cup, and the facilitator would type out the hat that they saw.

Even with this evidence, many parents refused to believe FC wasn't real.
The brutal truth is these facilitated communication facilitators who were 'helping' their students to type words were putting these words in their mouths. And it turned out many of these facilitators had very active imaginations.
Like the child therapists in the McMartin & Little Rascals day care cases, the stories tended to get more and more fantastic over time.

As you can see from the video, like the McMartin/Little Rascals cases, FC ended up with people facing CRIMINAL CHARGES.
A simple double blind test NOBODY had thought to try before managed to keep a man from being sent to prison based on a bogus hoax.

Now watch this part, which points out most of the students aren't even LOOKING at the Keyboard while typing:

https://t.co/uJ15ugs0gZ
What you're watching there is the power of belief; people simple WANTED some thing to be true so badly, they simply discounted all the evidence against it.

That's your first sign. BACK AWAY. TAKE ANOTHER LOOK. Put your skeptic cap on.
Wow. People are not too bright. I am in no way saying Jeff Sessions didn't spent the last 2 years rolling up sex trafficking & pedo rings like a mofo. That's one of the main reasons Sessions was an awesome AG.

Are people really this stupid?
I guess have to explain to the stupid people out there the Satanic Panic in the daycare centers in the 1980's, that wasn't real.

You don't like my pointing that out? I could care less.

More from Brian Cates

Yes, Trump and his team had seen this stunt before. THIS time they have the Mexican gov't on our side to protect the new trade agreement.


How many got through the last time they pulled this stunt? Did they get the huge photo op of the kids being separated from their parents that they wanted?

Would people STOP PRETENDING they don't know Trump is ready for this?

Sheer panic in my mentions. 'OMG THEY GOT THROUGH A FENCE NOTHING'S GONNA STOP THEM NOW ARGLE BARGLE BARF!"

Grow the hell up.

Some of them are still coming, you say? Well my goodness, I guess that means there's nothing Trump can do now.

He's finished, isn't he? 🤔

I'm reminded again why Thomas Wictor had to frequently tell people DON'T BRING ME YOUR FEAR, I'm not interested in it. Take it somewhere else.

If this caravan actually DOES make it our border, Trump will have measures ready to deal with it.

Stop the hysteria.
Here's the great thing: JW is eventually going to get those Benghazi emails. Don't know about getting Clinton & Co. to testify under oath, but all JW really needs is those emails.


The emails from Clinton's server on Benghazi are going to show:

1) they knew it was a AQ terrorist attack from the start
2) they decided to leave those people in Benghazi hanging out there on their own.

Since plenty of 'missing' Hillary Clinton emails have turned up [remember the 700,000 Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop? I do! *gigglesnort!*] you can bet they are covered in JW's FOIA lawsuit.

Reminder: Comey managed to BULLSHIT everybody that 'all' the emails had been reviewed using this cool new technique to sort through 700,000 emails in just a few days. Then this came out:

The fact that Comey claimed his crack FBI team - with Peter Sztrok on it! managed to review 700,000 emails in a marathan 12 hour span was clearly bullshit.

And now it's been proven to be bullshit.

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The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details):
https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.