What does bibliography mean in a science fair project mean ...

“Domestic divisions are the greatest threat to our national security.” -Susan Rice.
Note: My apologies if I at times engage in “both-sides-ism” in this post, it was meant for a more general audience than NeoLiberal and often times that is the best way to make a point about tribalism to mixed (and tribal) audience. Additionally, I am not highly familiar with Reddit formatting and as such some things might look peculiar. Thank you for reading.
Identity with a political tribe has taken supreme precedence over matters such as ideology. Blind allegiance is rewarded, not independence, thoughtful consideration, or compromise. Dissent has lost much of its political prestige, the respect, if begrudging, for those “profiles in courage” has largely evaporated. Courageous senators of a time not long past were once applauded for their courage, if not their action (Wayne Morse on the Gulf of Tonkin, James Buckley on Watergate, Charles Goodell on Vietnam, or Howard Baker on the Panama Canal)a When we do see courageous political dissent (e.g from John McCain on the Affordable Care Act or Joe Manchin on the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh), its emissaries are greeted with only contempt. The descent of politics into a conflict between groups held in near religious reverence by their followers is antithetical to democracy itself and seems to absolve its participants from the basic rigors of civility. Civil disagreement is trumped by a hatred reminiscent of that between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. From Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, or the “Tea Party” on the right to Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and the “Justice Democrats” of the left, polarization has grown steadily worse.
These partisan tribes develop norms that are then used as the standards for partisan to be conforming group members. As people identify with a group more strongly, they conform to these tribal norms to appear as “good” members of their tribe, and those who do not conform to the tribal norms are targeted by the extremists within the tribe through systems such as primaries. For instance, Republican Representative Bob Inglis of South Carolina lost a 2010 primary to Trey Gowdy by 40 points despite having a 93% rating from the American Conservative Union due to Inglis’s support of climate legislation, a post recession bailout, and his opposition to the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. Even dissent as minor as Representative Inglis’s can trigger a tribal reaction from the group. Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler campaigns extensively on her voting record of siding with President Trump on 100% of votes, in my view it is a sad reflection on the state of our political process if an absolute lack of dissent is applauded by one’s supporters.
In 2016 researchers assembled 1,178 Washingtonians for a study on how partisanship affected their perception of a ballot measure that would institute a carbon tax. The group was divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats; those groups were further divided into a groups viewing Republican endorsements of the policy and Democratic opposition, and a group viewing Republican opposers to the policy and Democratic endorsers. While Republicans continually opposed the policy, they were much more prone to supporting it when told that famous Republicans such as George Shultz (An advisor to the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon’s Secretary of Labor and the Treasury, and finally Reagan’s Secretary of State) had endorsed the policy. This gap was only more pronounced among the well educated in these groups. Global warming is an existential threat to humanity itself, yet our views on it are largely informed due to partisan biases as opposed to scientific fact.
The Media’s Role:
The Soviet Union’s propaganda newspaper was entitled Pravda, Russian for truth, so too does Fox News’ motto of “Fair and Balanced” disguise propaganda and an impartiality taken seriously by few. Politics is not a sport, to create policy and build a united nation compromise is second only to the understanding of other’s beliefs. Media-be it from the right or left-portrays political happenings as a conflict between two teams, with a “win” being valued over the nation’s wellbeing, and, as the saying goes, perception often becomes reality. The facile portrayal of politics as a sport in news has led political discourse to increasingly adopt these characteristics. Media gains views through sensationalism and the portrayal of politics as a horse race, but in doing so it preys on our divisions and often provides a platform to those such as climate change deniers or other conspiracy theorists who normally would be shut from the arena of mainstream political belief. As Carlton University professor Jim Davies explains, “everything about the news—from the dramatic headlines to the riveting background music to the colors on the screen (lots of red, which experts agree is one of, if not the most, emotionally charged color)—is engineered to prey on our hardwired impulses to pay attention to what seems exciting and important. The manner in which the news is presented—be it on television or the social feeds on our phone—often triggers the release of dopamine, a powerful neurochemical that tags experiences as meaningful and makes us want to seek them over and over again.”
The national motto of the United States is “E Pluribus Unum” or “Out of Many, One”. Humans are naturally tribal creatures, but our founders understood that democracy requires us to embrace pluralism and unite our many tribes into one united nation. Social media is in diametric opposition to these principles, sorting us into tribal echo chambers by way of clandestine algorithms that dehumanize our opposition and do no more than confirm our biases. Social media has also opened the door to foreign interference in our elections and the inflammation of our tribal instincts by way of Russian, Chinese, or Iranian propaganda. Foreign disinformation now colors our view of our fellow Americans and of our democratic processes themselves. Anti-democratic actors such as Father Coughlinb harnessed the new technology of radio to fan the flames of fascism, but today we are faced with thousands of Fathers Coughlin spreading disinformation not in weekly radio broadcasts, but in a never-ending firehose of social media extremism that pushes our society deeper into division. Tom Wheeler of the Brooking’s Institution put it well; “digital technology is gnawing at the core of democracy by dividing us into tribes and devaluing truth.”
The Importance of Interaction:
I would argue that the best way to stymie hateful tribalism in the media is not to legislation, but often very minor actions taken by us. I would argue two primary actions should be taken; firstly, one should view media from across the political spectrum; secondly, one should engage in discussion with those you disagree with. As Zachary Wood explained in a “Ted Talk”, “tuning out opposing viewpoints doesn't make them go away, because millions of people agree with them. In order to understand the potential of society to progress forward, we need to understand the counterforces.” People increasingly do not interact with ideas they oppose, and in doing so they lose an understanding of those ideas and come to regard their opponents as what is known as “strawmen”, as Krysta Scripter explains “Especially when we hold a strong opinion, it's increasingly less likely that we're talking [..] with anyone who disagrees.” Interaction with those we disagree with also fosters intellectual humility, defined by the Journal of Positive Psychology as “the ability to have an accurate view of one’s intellectual strengths and limitations and the ability to negotiate ideas in a fair and inoffensive manner. “ It has been shown that this intellectual humility can not only improve one’s learning abilities, but their social skills as well.
The engagement with other’s ideas also reinforces the ideal of pluralism, which is often considering an underpinning of democracy. Pluralism, defined by Oxford as “a condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, sources of authority, etc., coexist.”, allows for a democracy in which diverse ideas are expected to compete, if we cannot coexist with others, we cannot properly function as a democracy. For instance, Marwan Muasher, a Middle Eastern policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that a lack of pluralism has been a defining factor in the destabilization of many areas in the Middle East. By interacting with others, we are learning for ourselves while helping support the foundations of democracy.
System of the Fringes:
The factors contributing to partisanship can be traced to the very roots of our electoral systems themselves. Closed partisan primaries, gerrymandering, and our first past the post voting system collaborate to enable a vocal minority of extremists to hold final sway over our electoral process. Only a small percentage of eligible voters even bother to vote in primaries, and these are commonly the most extreme of the electorate. As former U.S Representative Mickey Edwards(R-OK) notes, only 8% of the total Alabama electorate voted for far-right Judge Roy Moore over incumbent Senator Luther Stranged in the 2017 Republican special election primary, and Strange was by all means more popular among the general electorate than Moore, yet it was Moore who advanced to the general election. In Nebraska’s Second Congressional District progressive Democrat Kara Eastman lost to Republican Don Bacon by 4.8% even as Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden carried the district by nearly 6 points; Eastman’s moderate Democratic primary opponent Ann Ashford would have been very likely to win the seat. Candidates such as Moore or Eastman are able to win primaries, and thus advance to be one of two, or even the only, competitive candidate in a general election by appealing to small yet vocal aspects of the electorate. This issue goes all the way to the top; the mostly closed, low turnout 2016 Republican primary led to the rise of the unpopular Donald Trump. The Republican Party was moved into the position to facilitate the rise of Trump by its fringes controlling primaries for years beforehand. The bottom line is clear: primaries do not represent the electorate.
The second issue I would cite is gerrymandering, which is closely connected to the first. Gerrymandering, named for Vice President Elbridge Gerrye, is a practice in which legislatures draw legislative districts in such a way as to maximize the benefits of one political party; Gerrymandering has been a persistent issue throughout American history, but it has become more significant than ever as of late. Competitive elections are a cornerstone of democracy yet Gerrymandering reduces the value of elections while removing competition, allowing politicians to become increasingly radical without facing serious electoral hurdles. A study by Antoine Yoshinaka and Chad Murphy found that “members of the out-of-power party tended to have more drastic changes made to their districts as a way for the in-power party to insulate its members”. For instance, as the Brenna Center for Justices notes that gerrymandering in Maryland removed Republican Roscoe Bartlett in 2012. Maryland’s gerrymandering also means that (relatively) far left Representatives such as Kweisi Mfume and (relatively) far right Representative Andy Harris are both consistently re-elected by large margins; ideally both districts would overlap with more significant support for the other party and ensure competitive elections. Furthermore, if congressional districts were drawn to ensure and encourage competition, the congressional balance would be taken out of the hands of a small number of voters in swing districts. Some would argue that this would allow parties to seize supermajorities, I would disagree as in a congressional map drawn to be as competitive as possible it is unlikely that any party would be able to win all of the competitive seats, and if this were to happen the party would have to have moved to the center enough that it would represent the majority will.
Thirdly, our “first past the post” voting system is flawed. The system allows for phenomena such as “vote splitting” and allows candidates to win with small shares of the vote, as low as under 30% in some primaries or 35% in general elections. This system allows candidates to succeed with wedges of the public and disempowers third parties. For instance, in 1974 former U.S Representative Ray Blanton won the Democratic primary with 22.7% of the vote, Blanton would defeat Republican Lamar Alexander in the general election but his single term as Governor would be marred by scandal and RealClearPolitics would name him one of the “Ten Most Corrupt Politicians” in American history, in the final days of his governorship, he would infamously pardon two dozen convicted murderers and 28 others in exchange for money. More recently, Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican Primary while regularly winning under 40% of the vote due to his divided opposition.
Great political leaders of the past-LBJ, Sam Rayburn, Howard Baker, Bob Dolef-understood the importance of compromise, and only through that understanding were they able to achieve the legislative reforms they did, yet legislative leaders today stifle the legislative process and focus instead on their own interests, putting party above democracy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY) has long been known as a master of legislative obstruction not seen since the days of James Allen, while Representative Justin Amash has said of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (and every Speaker he has experienced-this is not unique to her) tactics “We have not been allowed to offer amendments on the House floor in more than four years. In effect, every bill we vote on is take it or leave it.”. That being said, there are still those who value compromise, such as Senator Diane Feinstein(D-CA) or retiring Senator Lamar Alexander(R-TN), but our legislative leaders, enabled by primaries and our voting system, largely stymie attempts at compromise.
A Framework for Unity:
The majority of Americans are exhausted with partisan tribalism. Most Americans are not far right or far left, yet both sides maintain caricatures of one another, and an increasing number of Americans confine themselves to partisan-not necessarily ideological-echo chambers that fail to provide them with the support for pluralism and understanding of opposing views that is critical to democracy. I argue that three crucial electoral reforms should be instituted, a commission to end gerrymandering, a blanket primary, and ranked choice voting. States have consistently altered their primary systems since Robert La Follette popularized the idea in the early 1900s, one, Indiana, went farther. Indiana was a hotbed of the Klux Klan during the organization’s second wave and officials as influential as the state’s Governor were members of the terrorist group. Members of the Klan were significantly more likely to vote in primaries than any other group and could seize control of the political system due to their high turnout rates in these primaries, this led Indiana to largely do away with the primary system for local elections in 1928; they would not be restored until the mid 1970s. That being noted, I would not advocate for the abolition of primaries, instead I would argue for abolishing the partisan requirements tied to primaries. States such as Vermont allow one to choose whether to vote in the Republican or Democratic primaries in the state regardless of party affiliation, allowing independents and others into the fold and enabling the primary to be more representative.
That being said, some have gone farther and instituted the now largely forgotten “blanket primary”, which I would argue would be the best alternative. A blanket primary system allows voters to vote in any party’s primary for different offices, with the candidate with the best showing from each party advancing to the general election, : this system commonly produced consensus candidates. Washington and Alaska long maintained a “blanket primary” system, which contributed to both states being quite competitive, as liberal Republicans such as Daniel Evans won in the generally Democratic state of Washington. A blanket primary was adopted by California in the 1996, but the Supreme Court overruled decades of precedent in the 2001 decision California Democratic Party v. Jones and deemed the blanket primary unconstitutional. The reasoning in this decision, put forth by Justice Scalia in a 7-2 decisionh, was that parties can govern their own affairs; I would disagree and argue that this falls out of the scope of a “party affair” and would posit that it is an affair of the people and furthermore argue the decision was a violation of states’ rights. As Justice Stevens puts it in his dissent “A State's power to determine how its officials are to be elected is a quintessential attribute of sovereignty.”
Secondly how can gerrymandering be stymied, and how should we redraw the maps? I would suggest one of two solutions, either an algorithm or a nonpartisan committee to redistrict. I would argue congressional maps are best drawn in a manner that would ensure the highest number of competitive districts. FiveThirtyEight, a polling and analysis website ran by Nate Silver, recently released a series of 8 congressional maps gerrymandered in various ways, one of these is drawn to maximize competition. The maximized competition map includes 242 highly competitive districts, this ensures that one’s vote is likely to have a significant impact while ensuring that elections are not confined to several dozen congressional districts, practically disenfranchising large portions of the electorate. As David Daley of the electoral reform organization FairVote notes “If your goal is to reduce polarization, this system would reduce the oversized influence of partisan voters in low-turnout primaries, give moderate and independent voters more choices, and empower the broader electorate that turns out in November general elections”.
Finally, how we can reform our voting system itself. Several ideas have gained popularity, including approval voting (utilized in Bismarck, North Dakota), but by and large the most popular is ranked choice voting, Maine uses ranked choice voting in its elections, and Alaska recently approved a referendum to do so as well. Ranked choice voting would allow people to rank every candidate for an office in order of preference, candidates are eliminated in each round and their votes redistributed to their second choice until a candidate possesses a majority vote. The majority requirement ensures that candidates possess a true mandate for their policies: other effects of ranked choice voting include more moderate candidates as candidates are required to appeal to a larger segment of the electorate, less tribalism and a more civil political culture as candidates are competing for the second or third choice votes of those who may support another candidate as their first-choice vote, and the negation of the “spoiler effect”.
Opponents of ranked-choice voting make several arguments, well summarized in the Heritage Foundation piece “Ranked Choice Voting Is A Bad Choice” but the primary argument is the claim that in a ranked-choice system, one could vote for a candidate they greatly dislike, whom they ranked quite low. I would object vehemently to this argument. Firstly, one would never vote for the candidate they ranked last, and if one were not comfortable voting for multiple candidates they could leave them out of their rankings. Secondly, one will only vote for a candidate ranked low on their ballot if the election is down to that candidate and the candidate or candidates one has ranked lower. For example, if one were to have ranked every third-party presidential candidate above Joe Biden and Donald Trump in this election but still ranked Biden above Trump, their vote would have gone to their second least favored candidate, but only because the alternative was a candidate they favored even less. Our political system is in chaos, and technologies such as social media exacerbate these issues. Electoral reform and reforms to our manner of politics are, frankly, the only way we can escape this political quagmire for brighter pastures.
Footnotes:
a.. The four acts of “political courage” I reference here are as follows; Wayne Morse(D-OR) being one of two Senators to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; James Buckley(C-NY) being the first conservative Senator to call for the resignation of President Nixon; Appointed Senator Charles Goodell(R-NY) opposing the Vietnam War, an action which led to his defeat in the 1970 election, losing the support even of the Nixon White House; and Republican Senate Leader Howard Baker(R-TN) aiding President Carter with negotiations surrounding the Panama Canal, which may have cost him the 1980 Republican presidential nomination.
b. Father Charles Coughlin was a radio priest from the late 1930s and early 1940s infamous for his advocacy for, arguably, fascist policies and for sympathizing with the enemy during WWII, his weekly broadcasts attracted millions of listeners until he was removed from air early in WWII, although he continued to preside over his church until his death in the late 1970s.
c. The strawman fallacy is defined by Wikipedia as “a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the proper idea of argument under discussion was not addressed or properly refuted.”
d. I would note that Senator Strange was an appointed incumbent, but an incumbent nonetheless, and one who had demonstrated relative popularity with the general electorate in the past in other races.
e. Gerry was Governor of Massachusetts at the time of the redistricting, and in fairness to him, he was reluctant to support the redistricting bill. The term “gerrymander” comes from a political cartoon soon after the bill was passed.
f. LBJ refers to Lyndon Baines Johnson, I refer more so to his work as Senate Majority Leader from 1953-1960 than to his work in the Presidency. Sam Rayburn, the longest serving Speaker of the House in American history, was LBJ’s counterpart from 1953-1960 and served as Speaker until his death in 1961, both Texans, Rayburn was a significant influence on LBJ and in some ways served as a father figure. Howard Baker served as Republican Senate Leader from 1977-`985, the last four of those years at Majority Leader. Bob Dole served as Baker’s successor, both were influential legislators who valued bipartisanship. Dole himself would cite his work for progressive 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern to end hunger as the work he is most proud of.
g. James “Jim” Allen served as a Senator from Alabama from 1969-1977 and was an infamous master of senate rules. Allen’s behavior almost single handedly led to the lowering of the filibuster threshold from 67 votes to 60, I would recommend Walter Mondales’s account of the matter, which may be found in his memoir, “The Good Fight”.
h. Justices Ginsburg and Stevens dissented.
Bibliography:
Daley, David. “This Is How We End Gerryamandering.” FairVote, 26 Jan. 2018, www.fairvote.org/this_is_how_we_end_gerrymandering.
Ehret, Phillip J., et al. “Partisan Barriers to Bipartisanship.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, vol. 9, no. 3, 2018, pp. 308–318., doi:10.1177/1948550618758709.
ACU Ratings of Congress: 111th Congress, Second Session (40th Edition). American Conservative Union, 2010. p. 32
Cillizza, Chris. “Analysis: This Republican Senator Is Taking Being pro-Trump to a Whole Other Level.” CNN, Cable News Network, 29 Oct. 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/10/29/politics/kelly-loeffler-donald-trump-georgia-senate-race/index.html.
Packer, George, et al. “A New Report Offers Insights Into Tribalism in the Age of Trump.” The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-new-report-offers-insights-into-tribalism-in-the-age-of-trump.
Farrell, William E. “2 In Indiana Face Stiff Primary Tests.” New York Times, 4 May 1976.
Kraushaar, Josh (April 7, 2009). "Inglis faces fight from the right". Politico.com.
Edwards, Mickey, and Jason Davis. GovLove - A Podcast About Local Government - #187 The Parties vs. the People with Mickey Edwards, Former Congressman.
“Nebraska Election Results: Second Congressional District.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-nebraska-house-district-2.html.
“ NE District 02 - D Primary Race - May 12, 2020.” Our Campaigns , www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=873307.
“2018 United States House of Representatives Elections in Maryland.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 June 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Maryland
Heaton, Andrew, et al. “America Had a Coup in 2010.” The Political Orphanage, 2020, politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/steroids-for-gerrymandering.
Wheeler, Tom. “Technology, Tribalism, and Truth.”
Brookings, Brookings, 7 Feb. 2020, www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/02/07/technology-tribalism-and-truth/.
Glynn, Anisha Singh and Nathaniel. “Mitch McConnell: A Legacy of Obstruction.” Center for American Progress, 15 July 2016, www.americanprogress.org/issues/courts/news/2016/07/14/141210/mitch-mcconnell-a-legacy-of-obstruction/.
Amash, Justin. “We Have Not Been Allowed to Offer Amendments on the House Floor in More than Four Years. In Effect, Every Bill We Vote on Is Take It or Leave It.This Is Not Legislating.” Twitter, Twitter, 14 Oct. 2020, twitter.com/justinamash/status/1316417188836839424.
Stulberg, Brad. “Step Away from the 24-Hour News Cycle.”
Outside Online, Outside Magazine, 1 Dec. 2018, www.outsideonline.com/2371546/break-your-digital-addiction.
Fish, Greg. “How The Media Fuels Hyper-Partisanship By Treating Politics Like A Sport.” Rantt Media, Rantt Media, 29 June 2018, rantt.com/how-the-media-fuels-hyper-partisanship-by-treating-politics-like-a-sport.
Wood, Zachary R. “Why It's Worth Listening to People You Disagree With.” Why It's Worth Listening to People You Disagree With, by Unknown Yet, www.dailygood.org/story/2180/why-it-s-worth-listening-to-people-you-disagree-with/.
Muasher, Marwan. “Pluralism Is Necessary for Democracy.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, carnegieendowment.org/2014/02/20/pluralism-is-necessary-for-democracy-pub-54609.
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“California Democratic Party v. Jones.” Casebriefs, www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/constitutional-law/constitutional-law-keyed-to-cohen/protection-of-penumbral-first-amendment-rights/california-democratic-party-v-jones/.
Miller, Peter. “Maryland's Extreme Gerrymander.” Brennan Center for Justice, 7 Mar. 2019, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/marylands-extreme-gerrymander.
Borger, Julian. “Susan Rice: 'Domestic Divisions Are the Greatest Threat to Our National Security'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 23 Nov. 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/23/susan-rice-interview-trump-family-son.
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Livni, Ephrat “Ranked choice voting and the quest to save democracy in the U.S’, Quartz, 31 July 2019
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Vaimanika Shastra by Rishi Bharadwaja

Books on Epistemology, Critical thinking, beliefs etc - A comprehensive list

A comprehensive list of books that might be of interest to people whom want to, or do practice SE.
They can also work as book recommendations for people whom you have spoken to, that want to read something that might improve their thinking or as gifts.
I have not read most of these, thus I can not personally vouch for them or recommend one over the other.
But if you do read any of them, or have any opinion it would be nice if you could create a post.
I'm not affiliated with Goodreads, but linked to them since they have links to several sources including libraries if you want to get any one of these, and often some quality reviews.
How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43885240-how-to-have-impossible-conversations by Peter Boghossian (Goodreads Author), James A. Lindsay (Goodreads Author)
3.99 · Rating details · 928 ratings
"This is a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate, and gently persuade. The authors admit to getting it wrong in their own past conversations. One by one, I recognize the same mistakes in me. The world would be a better place if everyone read this book." -- Richard Dawkins, author of Science in the Soul and Outgrowing God
In our current political climate, it seems impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone who has a different opinion. Whether you're online, in a classroom, an office, a town hall -- or just hoping to get through a family dinner with a stubborn relative -- dialogue shuts down when perspectives clash. Heated debates often lead to insults and shaming, blocking any possibility of productive discourse. Everyone seems to be on a hair trigger.
In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation -- whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
4.10 · Rating details · 12,354 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/774088.Difficult_Conversations
Whether you're dealing with an under performing employee, disagreeing with your spouse about money or child-rearing, negotiating with a difficult client, or simply saying "no," or "I'm sorry," or "I love you," we attempt or avoid difficult conversation every day. Based on fifteen years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations walks you through a step-by-step proven approach to having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success.
You will learn: -- how to start the conversation without defensiveness -- why what is not said is as important as what is -- ways of keeping and regaining your balance in the face of attacks and accusations -- how to decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation
Filled with examples from everyday life, Difficult Conversations will help you on your job, at home, or out of the world. It is a book you will turn to again and again for advice, practical skills, and reassurance.
The Thinker's Guide to Socratic Questioning by Dr. Linda Elder
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7276284-the-thinker-s-guide-to-socratic-questioning
Focuses on the mechanics of Socratic dialogue, on the conceptual tools that critical thinking brings to Socratic dialogue, and on the importance of questioning in cultivating the disciplined mind.
About author:
Dr. Linda Elder is an educational psychologist and a prominent authority on critical thinking. She is President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking.
From a review:
"...it is primarily a set of instructions detailing how to lead a Socratic dialog among (different ages of) K-12 students."
-Feliks
A Manual for Creating Atheists
by Peter Boghossian (Goodreads Author), Michael Shermer (Foreword) 3.93 · Rating details · 1,983 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17937621-a-manual-for-creating-atheists
For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith—and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith—but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than twenty years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition, and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
by Michael Shermer 3.93 · Rating details · 6,985 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9754534-the-believing-brain
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.
In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths.
Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Professional and Personal Life
by Richard Paul,Linda Elder 3.93 · Rating details · 1,082 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17296839-critical-thinking
Critical Thinking is about becoming a better thinker in every aspect of your life: in your career, and as a consumer, citizen, friend, parent, and lover. Discover the core skills of effective thinking; then analyze your own thought processes, identify weaknesses, and overcome them. Learn how to translate more effective thinking into better decisions, less frustration, more wealth Ñ and above all, greater confidence to pursue and achieve your most important goals in life.
The Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking by Linda Elder,Richard Paul
3.89 · Rating details · 163 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19227921-the-thinker-s-guide-to-analytic-thinking
This guide focuses on the intellectual skills that enable one to analyze anything one might think about - questions, problems, disciplines, subjects, etc. It provides the common denominator between all forms of analysis.
It is based on the assumption that all reasoning can be taken apart and analyzed for quality.
This guide introduces the elements of reasoning as implicit in all reasoning. It begins with this idea - that whenever we think, we think for a purpose, within a point of view, based on assumptions, leading to implications and consequences. We use data, facts and experiences (information), to make inferences and judgments,based on concepts and theories to answer a question or solve a problem. Thus the elements of thought are: purpose, questions, information, inferences, assumptions, concepts, implications and point of view. In this guide, authors Linda Elder and Richard Paul explain, exemplify and contextualize these elements or structures of thought, showing the importance of analyzing reasoning in every part of human life. This guide can be used as a supplement to any text or course at the college level; and it may be used for improving thinking in personal and professional life.
The Thinker's Guide to Intellectual Standards by Linda Elder, Richard Paul
4.19 · Rating details · 16 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19017637-the-thinker-s-guide-to-intellectual-standards
Humans routinely assess thinking – their own thinking, and that of others, and yet they don’t necessarily use standards for thought that are reasonable, rational, sound.
To think well, people need to routinely meet intellectual standards, standards of clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, logic, fairness, significance, and so forth.
In this guide authors Elder and Paul offer a brief analysis of some of the most important intellectual standards in the English language. They look at the opposites of these standards. They argue for their contextualization within subjects and disciplines. And, they call attention to the forces that undermine their skilled use in thinking well. At present intellectual standards tend to be either taught implicitly, or ignored in instruction. Yet because they are essential to high quality reasoning in every part of human life, they should be explicitly taught and explicitly understood.
The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide by Gleb Tsipursky (Goodreads Author) 4.24 · Rating details · 63 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36800752-the-truth-seeker-s-handbook
How do you know whether something is true? How do you convince others to believe the facts?
Research shows that the human mind is prone to making thinking errors - predictable mistakes that cause us to believe comfortable lies over inconvenient truths. These errors leave us vulnerable to making decisions based on false beliefs, leading to disastrous consequences for our personal lives, relationships, careers, civic and political engagement, and for our society as a whole.
Fortunately, cognitive and behavioral scientists have uncovered many useful strategies for overcoming our mental flaws.
This book presents a variety of research-based tools for ensuring that our beliefs are aligned with reality.
With examples from daily life and an engaging style, the book will provide you with the skills to avoid thinking errors and help others to do so, preventing disasters and facilitating success for yourself, those you care about, and our society.
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not
by Robert A. Burton 3.90 · Rating details · 2,165 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2740964-on-being-certain
You recognize when you know something for certain, right? You "know" the sky is blue, or that the traffic light had turned green, or where you were on the morning of September 11, 2001--you know these things, well, because you just do. In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know.
He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge.
In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact.
Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason.
But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, Robert Burton explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our thoughts and what we actually know.
Provocative and groundbreaking, On Being Certain, will challenge what you know (or think you know) about the mind, knowledge, and reason.
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking
by M. Neil Browne, Stuart M. Keeley
3.94 · Rating details · 1,290 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394398.Asking_the_Right_Questions
The habits and attitudes associated with critical thinking are transferable to consumer, medical, legal, and general ethical choices. When our surgeon says surgery is needed, it can be life sustaining to seek answers to the critical questions encouraged in Asking the Right Questions This popular book helps bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysing the things we are told and read. It gives strategies for responding to alternative points of view and will help readers develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject.
On Truth by Simon Blackburn 3.60 · Rating details · 62 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36722220-on-truth
Truth is not just a recent topic of contention. Arguments about it have gone on for centuries. Why is the truth important? Who decides what the truth is? Is there such a thing as objective, eternal truth, or is truth simply a matter of perspective, of linguistic or cultural vantage point?
In this concise book Simon Blackburn provides an accessible explanation of what truth is and how we might think about it.
The first half of the book details several main approaches to how we should think about, and decide, what is true.
These are philosophical theories of truth such as the correspondence theory, the coherence theory, deflationism, and others.
He then examines how those approaches relate to truth in several contentious domains: art, ethics, reasoning, religion, and the interpretation of texts.
Blackburn's overall message is that truth is often best thought of not as a product or an end point that is 'finally' achieved, but--as the American pragmatist thinkers thought of it--as an ongoing process of inquiry. The result is an accessible and tour through some of the deepest and thorniest questions philosophy has ever tackled
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
4.16 · Rating details · 317,352 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZNhf1bAIxd&rank=1
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking.
He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by John A. Bargh (Goodreads Author)
3.97 · Rating details · 788 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35011639-before-you-know-it
Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a “brilliant and convincing book” (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times—giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.
For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was “the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.
Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction.
With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more.
Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better.
Before You Know It is “a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research” (Publishers Weekly) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38315.Fooled_by_Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 4.07 · Rating details · 49,010 ratings
Fooled by Randomness is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand.
Philosophy books
Epistemology by Richard Feldman 3.84 · Rating details · 182 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/387295.Epistemology
Sophisticated yet accessible and easy to read, this introduction to contemporary philosophical questions about knowledge and rationality goes beyond the usual bland survey of the major current views to show that there is argument involved. Throughout, the author provides a fair and balanced blending of the standard positions on epistemology with his own carefully reasoned positions or stances into the analysis of each concept. KEY TOPICS: Epistemological Questions. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Modifying the Traditional Analysis of Knowledge. Evidentialist Theories of Justification. Non-evidentialist Theories of Knowledge and Justification. Skepticism. Epistemology and Science. Relativism.
Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology by Michael J. Williams
3.79 · Rating details · 86 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477904.Problems_of_Knowledge
"What is epistemology or 'the theory of knowledge'? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge 'philosophical'? And why do some philosophers argue that epistemology - perhaps even philosophy itself - is dead?" "
In this introduction, Michael Williams answers these questions, showing how epistemological theorizing is sensitive to a range of questions about the nature, limits, methods, and value of knowing.
He pays special attention to the challenge of philosophical scepticism: does our 'knowledge' rest on brute assumptions? Does the rational outlook undermine itself?"
Williams explains and criticizes all the main contemporary philosophical perspectives on human knowledge, such as foundationalism, the coherence theory, and 'naturalistic' theories. As an alternative to all of them, he defends his distinctive contextualist approach.
As well as providing an accessible introduction for any reader approaching the subject for the first time, this book incorporates Williams's own ideas which will be of interest to all philosophers concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge by Robert Audi
3.54 · Rating details · 176 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477976.Epistemology
This comprehensive book introduces the concepts and theories central for understanding knowledge. It aims to reach students who have already done an introductory philosophy course. Topics covered include perception and reflection as grounds of knowledge, and the nature, structure, and varieties of knowledge. The character and scope of knowledge in the crucial realms of ethics, science and religion are also considered. Unique features of Epistemology:

Provides a comprehensive survey of basic concepts and major theories
Gives an up-to-date account of important developments in the field
Contains many lucid examples to support ideas
Cites key literature in an annotated bibliography.

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14829260-the-oxford-handbook-of-thinking-and-reasoning
by Keith J. Holyoak (Editor), Robert G. Morrison (Editor)
4.08 · Rating details · 12 ratings
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a distinct direction from the field from which it originated.
The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is a comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and reasoning.
Written by the foremost experts from cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience, individual chapters summarize basic concepts and findings for a major topic, sketch its history, and give a sense of the directions in which research is currently heading.
Chapters include introductions to foundational issues and methods of study in the field, as well as treatment of specific types of thinking and reasoning and their application in a broad range of fields including business, education, law, medicine, music, and science.
The volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in developmental, social and clinical psychology, philosophy, economics, artificial intelligence, education, and linguistics.
Feminist Epistemologies
(Thinking Gender) by Linda Martín Alcoff, Elizabeth Potter 4.14 · Rating details · 43 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477960.Feminist_Epistemologies
Noticed this review by an evangelical:
"I have found this an immensely suggestive book, collecting as it does essays from both prominent and rising figures in feminist philosophy of knowledge--albeit from about two decades ago. I am struck by how little impact feminist thought, even of this high and generally temperate quality, has had on evangelical theology, to the shame of my guild."
-John
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
by Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons 3.91 Rating details · 13,537 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7783191-the-invisible-gorilla
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely 3.94 · Rating details · 13,620 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13426114-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty
The New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality returns with thought-provoking work to challenge our preconceptions about dishonesty and urge us to take an honest look at ourselves.
Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more honest or less so? Does religion improve our honesty?
Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat.
From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's the white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning, bestselling author Dan Ariely turns his unique insight and innovative research to the question of dishonesty.
Generally, we assume that cheating, like most other decisions, is based on a rational cost-benefit analysis.
But Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not.
For every Enron or political bribe, there are countless puffed résumés, hidden commissions, and knockoff purses. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about; how getting caught matters less than we think; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards.
But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.
How to Stop Believing in Hell: a Schizophrenic's Religious Experience: Intellectual Honesty and Hallucinations - A Memoir
by Robert Clayton Kimball
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22020049-how-to-stop-believing-in-hell
it was amazing 5.00 · Rating details · 1 rating Kirkus Reviews:
“…Kimball’s debut explores his hallucinatory religious mania, from his early childhood onward, beginning when he attended Catholic school. The early pages guide readers through narratives of his uncomfortable childhood traumas, sometimes in ugly detail…. Various other moments of shame revolved around school. Finding sex repugnant and sinful, he decided early on to remain celibate; he avoided sex until his eventual institutionalization. Meanwhile, hallucinatory monsters—including Lorus, “a turbulent face, golden like the comedy mask…”—and company pushed him away from religion, though he did convert to Pentecostalism in spite of them. Through this process, Kimball developed a solipsistic worldview, in which he was never sure others existed. Ultimately, though, it was his fear of damnation that became his greatest obsession, driving all the rest of his delusions and fears. He does exhibit a flair for description…: “On summer evenings, I liked to stand on the arroyo side of the house at night, alone, feeling the desert breeze through the tamarisks and smelling the clean desert smells in the warm darkness. The long row of tamarisks, with its tens of thousands of insects of a thousand species, hummed like the telephone network in The Castle, a beautiful, accidental music.’”
Author’s Description:
How to Stop Believing in Hell, describes the narrator's passage from a golden childhood to an adolescence of cringing guilt and religious fear. By the age of thirty, he had become a deranged street person, screaming horrible obscenities on crowded sidewalks in broad daylight. He desperately tried to stop but couldn’t. He was still filled with the fear of Hell. Then he had a spiritual awakening, broke free of his dementia, and learned to act deliberately. A paperback copy of this book can be purchased through my publisher, Chipmunka Publishing at their web site.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (Goodreads Author)
4.27 · Rating details · 59,893 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349.The_Demon_Haunted_World
How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.
How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age
by Theodore Schick Jr. Lewis Vaughn, Martin Gardner (Foreword)
4.00 · Rating details · 530 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41756.How_to_Think_about_Weird_Things
This text serves well as a supplemental text in:

critical thinking
logic
introduction to philosophy
philosophy of science
epistemology
metaphysics
introduction to psychology
anomalistic psychology
perception and cognition

as well as any introductory science course.
It has been used in all of the courses mentioned above as well as introductory biology, introductory physics, and introductory chemistry courses. It could also serve as a main text for courses in evaluation of the paranormal, philosophical implications of the paranormal, occult beliefs, and pseudoscience.
Popular Statistics
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
by Charles Wheelan 3.94 · Rating details · 10,367 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17986418-naked-statistics
Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.
And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't by Nate Silver
3.98 · Rating details · 43,804 ratings · 3,049 reviews
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13588394-the-signal-and-the-noise
One of Wall Street Journal's Best Ten Works of Nonfiction in 2012
New York Times Bestseller
"Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade." -New York Times Book Review
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century." -Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction-without academic mathematics-cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism." -New York Review of Books
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair's breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger-all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight.com.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the "prediction paradox": The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good-or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary-and dangerous-science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver's insights are an essential read.
Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way: Understanding Statistics and Probability with Star Wars, Lego, and Rubber Ducks
by Will Kurt 4.21 · Rating details · 128 ratings
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41392893-bayesian-statistics-the-fun-way
Fun guide to learning Bayesian statistics and probability through unusual and illustrative examples.
Probability and statistics are increasingly important in a huge range of professions. But many people use data in ways they don't even understand, meaning they aren't getting the most from it. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way will change that.
This book will give you a complete understanding of Bayesian statistics through simple explanations and un-boring examples. Find out the probability of UFOs landing in your garden, how likely Han Solo is to survive a flight through an asteroid shower, how to win an argument about conspiracy theories, and whether a burglary really was a burglary, to name a few examples.
By using these off-the-beaten-track examples, the author actually makes learning statistics fun. And you'll learn real skills, like how to:

How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief
Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for
Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions
Calculate distributions to see the range of your data
Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from them

Next time you find yourself with a sheaf of survey results and no idea what to do with them, turn to Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way to get the most value from your data.

Tartaria: The Supposed Mega-Empire of Inner Eurasia

Introduction

For those not in the know, the Tartaria conspiracy theory is one of the most bizarre pieces of pseudo history out there. Its core notion is that the region known as ‘Tartaria’ or ‘Grand Tartary’ in Early Modern European maps was not simply a vague geographical designate, but in fact a vast, centralised empire. Said empire emerged… at some point, and it disappeared… at some point, but for… some reason, its existence has been covered up to suit… some narrative or another. As you can tell, there’s a lot of diverse ideas here, and the fact that there hasn’t been the equivalent of a Christological schism every time a controversial thread goes up is really quite impressive. While this post will primarily address one particular piece of writing that is at the core of Tartaria conspiracy theorising, I’ll include a few tidbits to show you just how much madness its adherents have come up with. But first, some background.

State of Play, and why I’m doing this

The Tartaria theory has a small but active following on subreddits such as Tartaria, tartarianarchitecture, and CulturalLayer, which as of writing have around 5,300, 2,400 and 23,000 subscribers, respectively, but it’s clear from the 8 questions on the topic asked at AskHistorians since January 2019 and this debunk request from June that it’s a theory that has somewhat broad appeal and can reach beyond its core niche. This is unsurprising given how little education most people in the West receive about basically anything east of Greece: simply put, the reality of Eurasian history is just not something most of us are taught. And if we don’t know the reality of Eurasian history to begin with, or if we do then it's all in bits and pieces where we might not even know a basic set of dates and names, then what seems to be a pretty developed narrative about a lost empire actually turns out rather plausible.
Unfortunately, many debunks of the Tartaria narrative come from people pushing competing conspiracy theories, like this guy claiming that there’s a global ~~Jewish~~ Phoenecian conspiracy and that Tartaria is simply rehashing the notion that Khazars were Jews in order to distract from the real Phoenecian threat at the heart of global society or some nonsense like that. (I don’t really care, I died of laughter after page 3.) Now, there are those coming from serious perspectives, but they focus largely on the problems with Tartaria as a concept rather than addressing the more specific claims being made. This is of course valuable in its own right (shoutout to Kochevnik81 for their responses to the AskHistorians threads), but we can go deeper by really striking at the roots of this ‘theory’ – what is the ‘evidence’ they’re presenting? But to do that, we need to find out what the origins of the ‘theory' are, and thus what its linchpins are. Incidentally, it is because of some recent events regarding those origins that I’ve been finally prompted to write this post.

Where does it come from?

My attempts to find the exact origins of the Tartaria conspiracy have been not entirely fruitful, as the connections I’ve found have been relatively circumstantial at best. But as far as I can tell, it at least partially originates with that Russian pseudohistorian we all know and love, Anatoly Fomenko. Fomenko is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his 7-volume ‘epic’ from 2002, History: Fiction or Science?, but in fact he’s been pushing a complete ‘New Chronology’ since the publication of Novaia khronologia in Russian in 1995. While the New Chronology is best known for its attempt to explain away most of the Middle Ages as a hoax created by the Papacy on the basis of bad astronomy, it also asserts a number of things about Russian history from the Kievan Rus’ to the Romanovs. Key to the Tartaria theory is its claim that there was a vast Slavo-Turkic ‘Russian Horde’ based out of ‘Tartaria’ which dominated Eurasia until the last ‘Horde’ ruler, Boris Godunov, was overthrown by the European Mikhail Romanov. This, of course, is a clear attempt at countering the notion of a ‘Tatar Yoke’ over Russia, as you can’t have a ‘Tatar Yoke’ if the Tatars were Russians all along. Much as I’d like to explain that in more detail here, I don’t have to: in 2004, Konstantin Sheiko at the University of Wollongong wrote an entire PhD thesis looking at the claims of Fomenko’s New Chronology and contextualising them within currents of Russian nationalism, which can be accessed online.
But I personally suspect that if there are Fomenko connections as far as Tartaria specifically is concerned, they are limited. For one, at one stage users on the Tartaria subreddit seemed unfamiliar with Fomenko, and there are those arguing that Fomenko had ‘rewritten’ Tartarian history to be pro-Russian. This is why I said that the evidence was circumstantial. The only other link to Fomenko is indirect: the CulturalLayer sidebar lists the ‘New Chronology Resource Collection’ and the audiobook of History: Fiction or Science? under ‘Essential Resources’, and Tartaria in its ‘Related Subs’.
As far as I can tell, the ultimate origin of its developed form on the Anglophone web traces back to this post on the StolenHistory forums, posted on 17 April 2018. This makes some chronological sense: only one top-level post on CulturalLayer that mentions Tartaria predates this. Moreover, KorbenDallas, the OP of the thread, was also the forum’s chief admin, and given that StolenHistory is still (as of writing) the top resource on CulturalLayer’s sidebar, that suggests significant influence. However, using the search function on camas.github.io, it was mentioned in comments at least 9 times before then, with the first mention, on 10 January 2018, mentioning that the ‘theory’ had been doing the rounds on the Russian web for at least 5 years. Nevertheless, as the detail in these early comments is sparse and generally refers only to speculation about maps, it is probably fair to say that the first in-depth English-language formulation of the Tartaria ‘theory’ was thus the April 2018 forum post. Funnily enough, it is not cited often on Tartaria, but that subreddit was created on 27 December, long after discussion had been taking place on places like CulturalLayer, and combined with the ‘mudflood’ ‘theory’ and the notion of giant humans, which are not significant features of the StolenHistory thread. This more convoluted and multifaceted version of the Tartaria theory doesn’t really have a single-document articulation, hence me not covering it here.
It is this StolenHistory thread which I will be looking at here today. Not just because it seems to be at the heart of it all, but also because it got shut down around 36 hours ago as of writing this post, based on the timestamps of panicked ‘what happened to StolenHistory’ posts on CulturalLayer and Tartaria. So what better occasion to go back to the Wayback Machine’s version, seeing as it’s now quite literally impossible to brigade the source? Now as I’ve said, this is not the most batshit insane it gets for the Tartaria crowd, in fact it’s incredibly tame. But by the end of it, I bet you’ll be thinking ‘if this is mild, how much more worse is the modern stuff!?’ And the best part is, I can debunk most of it without recourse to any other sources at all, because so much of it involves them posting sources out of context or expecting them to be read tendentiously.
But that’s enough background. Let us begin.

Part 1: The Existence

Exhibit 1: The Encylcopædia Britannica, 1771

”Tartary, a vast country in the northern parts of Asia, bounded by Siberia on the north and west: this is called Great Tartary. The Tartars who lie south of Muscovy and Siberia, are those of Astracan, Circassia, and Dagistan, situated north-west of the Caspian-sea; the Calmuc Tartars, who lie between Siberia and the Caspian-sea; the Usbec Tartars and Moguls, who lie north of Persia and India; and lastly, those of Tibet, who lie north-west of China.” - Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. III, Edinburgh, 1771, p. 887.

Starting a post about the ‘hidden’ history of Central Asia with an encyclopædia entry from Scotland is really getting off to a good start, isn’t it? Anyone with a sense of basic geography can tell you that Tibet lies due west of China, not northwest. But more importantly, this shows you how single-minded the Tartaria advocates are and how tendentiously they read things. ‘Country’ need not actually refer to a state entity, it can just be a geographical space, especially in more archaic contexts such as this. Moreover, the ethnographic division of the ‘Tartars’ into Astrakhanis, Circassians, Dagestanis, Kalmuks, Uzbeks, and, for whatever reason, Tibetans, pretty clearly goes against the notion of a unified Tartary.

Now compare to the description given by Wikipedia, ”Tartary (Latin: Tartaria) or Great Tartary (Latin: Tartaria Magna) was a name used from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century to designate the great tract of northern and central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, settled mostly by Turko-Mongol peoples after the Mongol invasion and the subsequent Turkic migrations.”

Obviously, Wikipedia is not a good source for… anything, really, but the fact that they’re giving a 349-year-old encyclopaedia primacy over the summary sentence of a wiki article is demonstrative of how much dishonesty is behind this. And it only gets worse from here.

Exhibit 2: Hermann Moll’s A System of Geography, 1701

THE Country of Tartary, call'd Great Tartary, to distinguish it from the Lesser, in Europe, has for its Boundaries, on the West, the Caspian Sea, and Moscovitick Tartary; on the North, the Scythian, or Tartarian Sea; on the East, the Sea of the Kalmachites, and the Straight of Jesso; and on the South, China, India, or the Dominions of the great Mogul and Persia : So that it is apparently the largest Region of the whole Continent of Asia, extending it self [sic] farthest, both towards the North and East: In the modern Maps, it is plac'd within the 70th and 170th Degree of Longitude, excluding Muscovitick Tartary; as also between the 40 and 72 Degree of Northern Latitude.

Immediately underneath the scan of this text is the statement, clearly highlighted, that

Tartary was not a tract. It was a country.

Hmm, very emphatic there. Except wait no, the same semantic problem recurs. ‘Country’ need not mean ‘state’. Moreover, in the very same paragraph, Moll (or rather his translator) refers to Tartary as a ‘Region’, which very much disambiguates the idea. Aside from that, it is telling that Moll refers to three distinct ‘Tartaries’: ’Great Tartary’ in Asia, ‘Lesser Tartary’ in Europe, and ‘Muscovite Tartary’ – that is, the eastern territories of the Russian Tsardom. If, as they are saying, ‘Great Tartary’ was a coherent entity, whatever happened to ‘Lesser Tartary’?

Exhibit 3: A 1957 report by the CIA on ‘National Cultural Development Under Communism’

Is a conspiracy theorist… actually believing a CIA document? Yep. I’ll add some context later that further complicates the issue.

Or let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people’s cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issued a directive ordering the party’s Tartar Provincial Committee “to proceed to a scientific revolution of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history.” In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten—let its be frank, was to be falsified—in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tartar-Russian relations.
[similar judgement on Soviet rewriting of histories of Muslim areas to suit a pro-Russian agenda]

What’s fascinating about the inclusion of this document is that it is apparently often invoked as a piece of anti-Fomenko evidence, by tying New Chronology in with older Russian-nationalist Soviet revisionism. So not only is it ironic that they’re citing a CIA document, of all things, but a CIA document often used to undermine the spiritual founder of the whole Tartaria ‘theory’ in the first place! But to return to the point, the fundamental issue is that it’s tendentious. This document from 1957 obviously is not going to be that informed on the dynamics of Central Asian ethnicity and history in the way that a modern scholar would be.
In a broader sense, what this document is supposed to prove is that Soviet coverups are why we don’t know about Tartaria. But if most of the evidence came from Western Europe to begin with, why would a Soviet coverup matter? Why wasn’t Tartarian history deployed as a counter-narrative during the Cold War?

Exhibit 4: ‘An 1855 Source’

This is from a footnote in Sir George Cornwalle Lewis’ An Inquiry into the Credibility of the Early Roman History, citing a travelogue by Evariste Huc that had been published in French in 1850 and was soon translated into English. From the digitised version of of Huc’s book on Project Gutenberg (emphasis copied over from the thread):

Such remains of ancient cities are of no unfrequent occurrence in the deserts of Mongolia; but everything connected with their origin and history is buried in darkness. Oh, with what sadness does such a spectacle fill the soul! The ruins of Greece, the superb remains of Egypt,—all these, it is true, tell of death; all belong to the past; yet when you gaze upon them, you know what they are; you can retrace, in memory, the revolutions which have occasioned the ruins and the decay of the country around them. Descend into the tomb, wherein was buried alive the city of Herculaneum,—you find there, it is true, a gigantic skeleton, but you have within you historical associations wherewith to galvanize it. But of these old abandoned cities of Tartary, not a tradition remains; they are tombs without an epitaph, amid solitude and silence, uninterrupted except when the wandering Tartars halt, for a while, within the ruined enclosures, because there the pastures are richer and more abundant.

There’s a paraphrase from Lewis as well, but you can just read it on the thread. The key thing here is that yes, there were abandoned settlements in the steppe. Why must this be indicative of a lost sedentary civilisation, and not instead the remnants of political capitals of steppe federations which were abandoned following those federations’ collapse? Places like Karakorum, Kubak Zar, Almaliq and Sarai were principally built around political functions, being centres for concentration of religious and ritual authority (especially monasteries) and stores of non-movable (or difficult to move) wealth. But individual examples of abandoned settlements are not evidence of broad patterns of settlement that came to be abandoned en masse. Indeed, the very fact that the cited shepherd calls the abandoned location ‘The Old Town’ in the singular implies just how uncommon such sites were – for any given region, there might really only be one of note.

Exhibit 5: Ethnic characteristics in artistic depictions of Chinggis and Timur

I… don’t quite know what to make of these.

Today, we have certain appearance related stereotypes. I think we are very much off there. It looks like Tartary was multi-religious, and multi-cultural. One of the reasons I think so is the tremendous disparity between what leaders like Genghis Khan, Batu Khan, Timur aka Tamerlane looked like to the contemporary artists vs. the appearance attributed to them today.

Ummm, what?
These are apparently what they look like today. These are ‘contemporary’ depictions of Chinggis:

Except, as the guy posting the thread says, these are 15th-18th century depictions… so NOT CONTEMPORARY.
As for Timur, we have:

In what bizzaro world are these contemporary?
We’ll get to Batur Khan in a moment because that’s its own kettle of worms. But can this user not recognise that artists tend to depict things in ways that are familiar? Of course white European depictions of Chinggis and Timur will tend to make them look like white Europeans, while East Asian depictions of Chinggis will tend to make him look Asian, and Middle Eastern depictions of Chinggis and Timur will make them look Middle Eastern. This doesn’t prove that ‘Tartaria’ was multicultural, in fact it you’d have an easier time using this ‘evidence’ to argue that Chinggis and Timur were shapeshifters who could change ethnicities at will!

Exhibit 6: Turkish sculptures

Why this person thinks modern Turkish sculptures are of any use to anyone baffles me. The seven sculptures shown are of Batu Khan (founder of the ‘Golden Horde’/Jochid khanates), Timur, Bumin (founder of the First Turkic Khaganate), Ertugrul (father of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman empire), Babur (founder of the Mughal Empire), Attila the Hun, and Kutlug Bilge Khagan (founder of the Uyghur Khaganate). They are accompanied (except in the case of Ertugrul) by the dates of the empires/confederations that they founded – hence, for instance, Babur’s dates being 1526 to 1858, the lifespan of the Mughal Empire, or Timur’s being 1368 (which seems arbitrary) to 1507 (the fall of Herat to the Shaybanids). To quote the thread:

A few of them I do not know, but the ones I do look nothing like what I was taught at school. Also dates are super bizarre on those plaques.

Again, Turkish sculptors make Turkic people look like Turks. Big surprise. And the dates are comprehensible if you just take a moment to think.

Do Turks know something we don't?

Turkish, evidently.

Exhibit 7: A map from 1652 that the user can’t even read

The other reason why I think Tartary had to be multi-religious, and multi-cultural is its vastness during various moments in time. For example in 1652 Tartary appears to have control over the North America.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/1652-nova-totius-terrarum-orbis-geographica-ac-hydrographica-tabula_1-1-jpg.37277/
This speaks for itself.
The thread was later edited to include a link to a post on ‘Tartarians’ in North America made on 7 August 2018, but that’s beside the point here, read at your own leisure (if you can call it ‘leisure’). Except for the part where at one point he admits he can’t read Latin, and so his entire theory in that post is based on the appearance of the word ‘Tartarorum’ in an unspecified context on a map of North America.

Part 2: The Coverup

The official history is hiding a major world power which existed as late as the 19th century. Tartary was a country with its own flag, its own government and its own place on the map. Its territory was huge, but somehow quietly incorporated into Russia, and some other countries. This country you can find on the maps predating the second half of the 19th century.

…Okay then.

Exhibit 8: Google Ngrams

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/tartary_ngram-jpg.37276/
This screenshot shows that the use of ‘Tartary’ and ‘Tartaria’ declined significantly over time. This is apparently supposed to surprise us. Or maybe it shows that we actually understand the region better…

Part 1a: Back to the existence

You know, a common theme with historical conspiracy theories is how badly they’re laid out, in the literal sense of the layout of their documents and video content. Don’t make a header called ‘The Coverup’ and then only have one thing before jumping back to the evidence for the existence again.

Exhibit 9: A Table

Yet, some time in the 18th century Tartary Muskovite was the biggest country in the world: 3,050,000 square miles.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/tartary_huge-13-jpg.37329/
I do not have enough palms to slap into my face. Do they not understand that this is saying how much of Tartary was owned… by foreign powers?

Exhibit 10: Book covers

You can look at the images on the thread itself but here’s a few highlights:

1654: Bellum Tartaricum, or the Conquest of China By the Invasion of the Tartars, who in the last seven years, have wholly subdued that empire
1670: Historia de la Conquista de la China por el Tartaro

Histories of the Qing conquest of China, because as far as Europeans were concerned the Manchus were Tartars. Proof of Tartaria because…?

1662: The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors of the Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia… Containing a compleat History of Muscovy, Tartary, Persia, and Other Adjacent Countries…

An ambassador who never set foot in ‘Tartary’ itself, cool cool, very good evidence there.
There’s also three screenshots from books that aren’t even specifically named, so impossible to follow up. Clearly this is all we need.

Exhibit 11: Maps

The maps are the key think the Tartaria pushers use. All these maps showing ‘Grand Tartary’ or ‘Tartaria’ or what have you. There’s 20 of these here and you can look for yourselves, but the key thing is: why do these people assume that this referred to a single state entity? Because any of these maps that include the world more generally will also present large parts of Africa in generic terms, irrespective of actual political organisation in these regions. And many of the later maps clearly show the tripartite division of the region into ‘Chinese Tartary’, ‘Russian Tartary’, and ‘Independent Tartary’, which you think would be clear evidence that most of this region was controlled by, well, the Chinese (really, the Manchus) and the Russians. And many of these maps aren’t even maps of political organisation, but geographical space. See how many lump all of mainland Southeast Asia into ‘India’. Moreover, the poor quality of the mapping should give things away. This one for instance is very clear on the Black Sea coast, but the Caspian is a blob, and moreover, a blob that’s elongated along the wrong axis! They’re using Western European maps as an indicator of Central Asian realities in the most inept way possible, and it would be sad if it weren’t so hilarious. The fact that the depictions of the size of Tartaria are incredibly inconsistent also seems not to matter.

Exhibit 12: The Tartarian Language

There’s an 1849 American newspaper article referring to the ‘Tartarian’ language, which is very useful thank you, and definitely not more reflective of American ignorance than actual linguistic reality.
The next one is more interesting, because it’s from a translation of some writing by a French Jesuit, referring to the writing of Manchu, and who asserted (with very little clear evidence) that it could be read in any direction. In April last year, Tartaria users [claimed to have stumbled on a dictionary of Tartarian and French](np.reddit.com/Tartaria/comments/bi3aph/tartarian_language_dictionary/) called the Dictionnaire Tartare-Mantchou-François. What they failed to realise is that the French generally called the Manchus ‘Tartare-Mantchou’, and this was in fact a Manchu-French dictionary. In other words, a [Tartare-Mantchou]-[François] dictionary, not a [Tartare]-[Mantchou]-[François] dictionary. It is quite plausible, in fact probable, that the ‘Tartarian’ referred to in the newspaper article was Manchu.

Exhibit 13: Genealogies of Tartarian Kings

Descended From Genghiscan

Reads the comment above this French chart. How the actual hell did OP not recognise that ‘Genghiscan’ is, erm, Genghis Khan? Is it that hard to understand that maybe, just maybe, ‘Tartars’ was what they called Mongols back in the day, and ‘Tartaria’ the Mongol empire and its remnants?

Exhibit 14: Ethnographic drawings

These prove that there were people called Tartars, not that there was a state of Tartaria. NEXT

Exhibit 15: Tartaria’s alleged flag

Images they provide include
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/tartary_flags-11-jpg.37367/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/tartary_flag_6-jpg.37307/
Except there’s one problem. As any EU4 player will tell you, that’s the flag of the Khanate of Kazan. And while they can trot out a few 18th and 19th century charts showing the apparent existence of a Tartarian naval flag, the inconvenient fact that Tartaria would have been landlocked seems not to get in the way. To be sure, their consistent inclusion is odd, given the non-existence of Tartary as a country, and moreover its landlocked status. It seems plausible that the consistent similarity of the designs is just a result of constant copying and poor checking, but on its own it means relatively little.

Exhibit 16: 19th-century racism

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/flags_of_all_nations_1865-mongolian-1-jpg.37369/
That I think speaks for itself.

Exhibit 17: Flags of Moscow on one particular chart

It is also worth mentioning that in the British Flag Table of 1783, there are three different flags listed as a flag of the Tsar of Moscow. There is also an Imperial Flag of Russia as well as multiple naval flags. And all of them are proceeded by a flag of the Viceroy of Russia.

By that logic, the Royal Navy ran Britain because the Royal Navy ensigns precede the Union Jack. It’s simply a conscious decision to show the flags of individuals before the flags of states. The ‘Viceroy’ (unsure what the original Russian title would be) and ‘Czar’ of Muscovy would presumably be, well, the Emperor of Russia anyway, so as with the British section where the Royal Standard and the flags of naval officers came first, the same seems true of Russia. Also, as a side note, the placement of the USA at the end, after the Persians, the Mughals and ‘Tartarians’, is a fun touch.

Significance of the Viceroy is in the definition of the term. A viceroy is a regal official who runs a country, colony, city, province, or sub-national state, in the name of and as the representative of the monarch of the territory. Our official history will probably say that it was the Tsar of Russia who would appoint a viceroy of Moscow. I have reasons to doubt that.
Why is the flag of the Viceroy of Moscow positioned prior to any other Russian flag? Could it be that the Viceroy of Moscow was superior to its Czar, and was "supervising" how this Tartarian possession was being run?

No.

Part 3: 1812

This, this is where it gets really bonkers. A key part of this post is arguing that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was a cover story for a joint invasion against Tartaria gone horrendously wrong. All the stops are being pulled out here.

There is a growing opinion in Russia that French invasion of Russia played out according to a different scenario. The one where Tsar Alexander I, and Napoleon were on the same side. Together they fought against Tartary. Essentially France and Saint Petersburg against Moscow (Tartary). And there is a strong circumstantial evidence to support such a theory.

Oh yes, we’re going there.

Questions to Answer:
1. Saint Petersburg was the capitol of Russia. Yet Napoleon chose to attack Moscow. Why?

He didn’t, he was trying to attack the Russian army. (credit to dandan_noodles).

2. It appears that in 1912 there was a totally different recollection of the events of 1812. How else could you explain commemorative 1912 medals honoring Napoleon?

Because it’s a bit of an in-your-face to Napoleon for losing so badly?

And specifically the one with Alexander I, and Napoleon on the same medal. The below medal says something similar to, "Strength is in the unity: will of God, firmness of royalty, love for homeland and people"

Yeah, it’s showing Alexander I beating Napoleon, and a triumphant double-headed Russian eagle above captured French standards. Also, notice how Alexander is in full regalia, while Napoleon’s is covered up by his greatcoat?

3. Similarity between Russian and French uniforms. There are more different uniforms involved, but the idea remains, they were ridiculously similar.

Ah yes, because fashions in different countries always develop separately, and never get influenced by each other.

How did they fight each other in the dark?

With difficulty, presumably.
Basically, he’s saying that this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/1_rus-jpg.37322/
Is too similar to this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/1_rus-jpg.37322/
To be coincidental.
OK, whatever. Here’s where it gets interesting:

There was one additional combat asset officially available to Russians in the war of 1812. And that was the Militia. It does appear that this so-called Militia, was in reality the army of Tartary fighting against Napoleon and Alexander I.

Russian VolunteeMilitia Units... Tartarians?
Clearly this man has never encountered the concept of a cossack, an opelchenie, or, erm, a GREATCOAT.

4. Russian nobility in Saint Petersburg spoke French well into the second half of the 19th century. The general explanation was, that it was the trend of time and fashion. Google contains multiple opinions on the matter. * Following the same logic, USA, Britain and Russia should've picked up German after the victory in WW2.

Clearly never heard of the term lingua franca then.

5. This one I just ran into: 19th-century fans were totally into a Napoleon/Alexander romance

https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/treaties_of_tilsit_miniature_-france-_1810s-_side_a-jpg.37314/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/napoleonxalexander2-jpg.37310/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200701065421im_/https://www.stolenhistory.org/attachments/napoleon-alexander-jpg.37312/
It is true that after the Treaty of Tilsit, Napoleon wrote to his wife, Josephine, that

I am pleased with [Emperor] Alexander; he ought to be with me. If he were a woman, I think I should make him my mistress.

But Napoleon’s ‘honeymoon period’ with Russia following the Treaty of Tilsit should not be seen as indicative of a permanent Napoleonic affection for Russia. Notably, Napoleon’s war with Russia didn’t just end in 1812. How are the Tartaria conspiracists going to explain the War of the Sixth Coalition, when Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops drove the French out of Germany? Did the bromance suddenly stop because of 1812? Or, is it more reasonable to see 1812 as the end result of the bromance falling apart?

Conclusions

So there you have it, Tartaria in all its glorious nonsensicalness. Words cannot capture how massively bonkers this entire thing is. And best of all, I hardly needed my own sources because so much of it is just a demonstration of terrible reading comprehension. Still, if you want to actually learn about some of the history of Inner Eurasia, see below:

Bibliography

The Cambridge History of Inner Asia – 2 volumes so far, covering up to 1886. Not really a single contiguous narrative, as each chapter has its own individual author, but a good general coverage.
Scott C. Levi, The Bukharan Crisis: A Connected History of 18th Century Central Asia (2020) – A book about actual Central Asian history, focussing on the global and local factors that led to the weakening and collapse of the Chinggisid state in Bukhara and the rise of the Uzbek-led Emirate. Also a very good historiographical examination of lay understandings of the period.
Mark C. Elliott, ‘The Limits of Tartary: Manchuria in Imperial and National Geographies’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3 (2000) – A discussion of conceptions of Manchuria by Manchu, Chinese, Japanese and European cartographers and geographers, with the section on European geographers being important for getting at the ‘Tartary’ aspect.
David Christian, ‘Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History’, Journal of World History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1994) – A somewhat older view, presenting Inner Eurasia as a distinct unit in world history, but largely in terms of effects on the rest of Eurasia.
Nicola di Cosmo, ‘State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History’, Journal of World History, Vol.10, No.1 (1999) – A partial response to Christian, offering an alternate periodisation based more on the internal dynamics of nomadic state formations and stressing viewing Inner Asian history in terms of those internal dynamics, rather than relegating it to a subordinate place in the histories of ‘Outer Eurasian’, sedentary states.
Konstantin Sheiko, ‘Lomonosov’s Bastards: Anatolii Fomenko, Pseudo-History and Russia’s Search for a Post-Communist Identity’ [PhD Thesis] (2004) – Specifically deconstructs Fomenko’s version of Tartaria.

Smart contracts on Blockchain as an alternative to the proposed Online Court as a way to reduce the Magistrates Court of Victoria's workload

Access to justice by way of using the Magistrates Court of Victoria (MCV) is currently impracticable in low value civil disputes as it is too costly, too slow and too complicated due in part to its outdated way of operation. As the public waits for modernisation of the MCV, companies such as eBay have been forced to take dispute resolution into their own hand’s and surprisingly appear to be successful in settling disputes arising on their platform. However, relying on large private companies for solutions neglects occasional sellers , and stifles public pressure on government to find a practical solution. A current idea is to modernise the court using technology with an online dispute resolution (ODR) system, however, what exact type of online system and whether a system could work is a hot topic and still in its infancy phase. This article surveys whether an online dispute resolution platform may be able to draw upon the use of ‘smart contracts’ on a ‘blockchain’. It finds ideas built on blockchain technology in the private sector that may be a more successful alternative in regard to the status quo ODR systems because they contain a fully automated, immutable transaction recording system and a ‘self-execution’ mechanism. The federal government is using blockchain technology to make the NDIS system more efficient and it is argued here that the same could be done to inexpensively modernise the MCV.

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What is a smart contract In the technical sense, the idea of a smart contract is a database inside a network that can be added to, but not modified or removed from, and can be thought of as programable transactions that automate business processes.

In the academic literature scholars are grappling with the term ‘smart contract’ as there is an overlap in the fields of science an law. Computer scientist Nick Szabo, in the genesis paper introduced smart contracts through the analogy of a vending machine being a device implemented in physical hardware that implements and safe guards the conditions of an agreement. In other words, you put money in and water comes out; if you do not put money in, water does not come out and the vending machine is an encoding of these rules that also comes with some sort of mechanism keeping it secure.
Eliza Mik, points out that actually a vending machine is an offer to the world, not a contract. Riikka Koulu, argues that a smart contract is similar to a traditional contract in that the declaration of intent is given through a transaction to the smart contract itself.
In any case, it is conceded that hundreds of years of case law and the nature of the real world cannot be fully written into code; thus, the phrase ‘smart contract’ is confusing. The more likely scenario will be software wrapped within a legal framework that links the code with the traditional contract, so words such as ‘automated contract tool’, ‘automated transaction tool’ or ‘programable money’ should be used to reduce confusion.
Nevertheless, in theory such an innovation could be an alternative to orders from an ODR within the MCV because it is the smart contract itself that upholds itself, not the court; eliminating the need for parties to seek enforcement orders from the court. Also, considering cases of fraud, the transaction records are irrefutable which allows them to be trusted for evidentiary purposes, something an ODR system could benefit from. Thus, discovery processes and forensic analysis that require substantial resources, expensive technologies or special methods are significantly reduced. This ‘digital’ evidence can non-discriminately be accepted by the MCV under the guiding principles of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures 2001, the principal referred to as “technology neutrality”.
5 NDIS myplace participant portal and commbank app An interface using smart contracts has been produced by the Australian government and the Commonwealth Bank to automate individualised payments for people on the NDIS to pay for services provided by e.g. power scooter repair people, to stop disabled people from being defrauded. This platform recognises the repair man is accredited and releases the specified digital tokens that are redeemable in AUD once the job is done. It would not take much to take this system and modify it in a way that would support an ODR system within the MCV, if funding were made available If funding is not given to incorporate such an innovation into some sort of online platform within the MCV it may not stop the technology being used in dispute resolution, set out below is what is on the verge of being functional and freely usable in the ‘off the grid’ world of cryptography.

Peer to peer to peer … (Multi signature) smart contracts and the internet of things The popular understanding of the blockchain is that it is a peer to peer mode of transacting with no third-party facilitator. That is no longer the case, as developments have allowed for a centralised, or decentralised third parties by way of a function described as multi signatures. Some blockchain traditionalists are not pleased with the involvement of a centralised third party, because it starts to undermine the original benefits (no single point of failure) of putting smart contracts on the blockchain. Nonetheless applications using decentralised third parties are proving to be innovative, namely using the ‘Internet of things’ (IoT) as third-party signatory’s; as of 2017 there are 12.32 billion connected devices such as fridges, gps, etc.

For example, Alice and Bob have a $100 bet on the weather. Alice believes the average temperature in Melbourne will not reach 30 degrees Celsius on the 21st of January 2020, and Bob thinks it will. The bet is coded into a smart contract in a way that allows the contract to receive input from multiple weather stations in Melbourne. The weather stations are the third parties or more correctly the third signatory in this multi signatory contract.
If the combined weather stations data report an average of over 30 degrees, the contract will recognise it and immediately self-execute by allowing Bob to use his private key transfer to the funds, but not Alice. Such a design could be used to help farmers with crop insurance with records of rainfall where a farmer would instantly access an insurance claim if a drought hit.

Smart contracts as an alternative to the Online Court What if the weather stations were freelance arbiters? Would this fit into the hard to define definition of ODR? Or is it simply a pre cursor to an MCV ODR? Or does it make ODR unnecessary? There are still many questions to answer.

In any case, opt-in blockchain driven online dispute resolution platforms have been conceptualised in the private sector and are currently entering the testing phase using the multi signatory approach, ‘Kleros’ and ‘Jury online’ are two such projects the MCV can draw ideas from.
4.1 The overarching idea Alice from Melbourne engages Bob, a freelance programmer from Ballarat to build her a website. Alice creates a smart contract with the payment embedded, entailing that if she is unsatisfied with Bob’s work the contract can be modified to require the vote of a pre-agreed online court. This way Bob does not need to worry about being paid and Alice does not need to worry about Bob doing a good job.
After the job is done and a pre-agreed amount of time Bob could use his private key to access the money. If Alice is unhappy with Bobs work, she can digitally add to the contract in the online platform which results in a digital complaint which engages the third party. This will block both her and Bob’s access to the funds and prompt Bob to click a button to defend, which he does. They are then both prompted to submit evidence to support their claim. Now a decision is required from arbiters in a pre-agreed online court; from which a third signature is now required to access the funds.
Within the online court, financially incentivised arbiters weigh in to decide on whether Bob held up his end of the bargain or not. If the majority believe Bob did fulfil the conditions of the agreement, Bob’s defence will be successful, and the arbiter’s addition to the contract will allow Bob’s private key to access the money embedded in the contract.
4.2 Who are the arbitrators The arbitrators are members of the public, the example used in Kleros for a type of arbiter in the afore mentioned dispute is: Thousands of miles away, in Nairobi, John is a software developer. In his “dead time” on the bus commuting to his job, he is checking Kleros website to ﬁnd some arbitration work. He makes a couple thousand dollars a year on the side of his primary job by serving as a juror in software development disputes between freelancers and their clients.
This could be anyone, plumbers, mechanics, architects etc may want to find work as freelance arbiters. They get involved by meeting the skill requirements that the dispute court requires. For example, the contract of building a website would require skills in html, javascript and web design. Problems regarding what substantive and procedural rules will be applied are still to be solved, this is due to lack of legal expertise not technical reasons. The benefits are immense as there is no delay or way of influencing the public arbiters as they are simply random experts sub-contracting their free time.
Depicted below is a limited hypothetical example of different types of courts an arbitrator could find work in. When Alice and Bob create the smart contract, they choose which court their case will be ruled in, which has the option to appeal.
They will also pre-select specific options arbitrators can select e.g. a) Reimburse Alice b) Give Bob and extra week c) Pay Bob
4.3 Discovery Evidence is submitted online through the online interface Kleros provides, this could be oral, video or written and all stored in one online searchable location that both sides can see. This is encrypted for privacy and the process has already been proven in simple civil cases in other e-commerce ODR applications,
4.4 How to keep isolated arbiters honest Nobel prize winning Game theorist Thomas Schelling’s focal point theory is used here as a solution Consider the picture below:
Imagine two people are isolated, know nothing about each other and cannot communicate, they are told that they will win a prize if they select the same square as the other person, despite not being able to communicate, and assuming they want to win the prize people will most likely select the red square.
This theory is then coded into the contract, whereby once the ballot has been finalised the arbiters who voted with the majority will be rewarded financially, and those in the minority will be penalised financially, this is the cornerstone of how arbitrators are incentivised to act reasonably.
4.5 How arbitrators are selected from the specific dispute courts The arbiters self-select by depositing a token into the specific dispute, the more tokens deposited the higher the chance of being selected to stop inactive arbiters from being selected.
4.6 Bribe resistance If Alice is not happy with the outcome, she can appeal to a higher court much like the current system works. At the next level, twice the number of arbitrators plus one is used. By the time it gets to the general court a bribing party would simply have too many people to bribe and it would be too expensive, relative to the claim.

Conclusion In the Australian economy disruptive digital technologies are a pervasive force, these technologies develop innovations and drive growth, which lead to improved living standards, thus accepting they are here, and humbly recognising their potential early, is important as Australia moves into the digital age.

Clearly, in the face of globalisation and disputes arising across borders something like smart contracts may be the only way to get enforcement, because traditional streams will struggle to manage different jurisdictions laws and enforcement.
There is concern around terminology and that decentralised consensus provides absolute certainty by removing ambiguity completely. Eliza Mik argues from a legal perspective that ambiguity is something very useful to contract, and that computer scientists mistakenly believe that it is not. However, there simply may have to be increased lawyer-programmer collaboration and some giving up of ambiguity in traditional contracts to get easier pathways of access to justice and enforcement.
Bibliography
A Articles/Books/Reports
Amy J. Schmitz, 'A blueprint for online dispute resolution system design' (2018) 21(7) Journal of Internet Law 3.
Daniel Royal, Paul Rimba, Mark Staples, Sophie Gilder, An Binh Tran, Ethan Williams, Alex Ponomarev, Ingo Weber, Chris Connor, Nicole Lim Making Money Smart Empowering NDIS participants with Blockchain technologies. (Report, CSIRO Canberra, 2018)
Eliza Mik, 'Smart contracts: terminology, technical limitations and real world complexity' (2017) 9(2) Law, Innovation and Technology 269.
Federico Ast Cl´ement Lesaege, Kleros Short Paper v1.0.6 (November 2018) https://kleros.io/assets/whitepaper.pdf.
Hanson RT, Reeson A, Staples M ‘Distributed Ledgers: Scenarios for the Australian economy over the coming decades’. (Report, CSIRO Canberra, 2017).
Katarina Palmgreen, ‘Explore the use of online dispute resolution to resolve civil disputes: how to best integrate an online court into the Victorian public justice system’ (2018) Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.
Koji Takahashi, "Implications of the Blockchain Technology for the UNCITRAL Works" (Paper presented to the Congress of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), Vienna, 4-6 July 2017 [unpublished]. This paper-which the author expressly considers be subjected to a final revision-is online: .
Nick Szabo, ‘Smart Contracts: Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks’ (1997) First Monday, Volume 2, No. 9 https://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469
Pietro Ortolani, 'Self-Enforcing Online Dispute Resolution: Lessons from Bitcoin' (2016) 36(3) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 595, 605
Riikka Koulu, 'Blockchains and Online Dispute Resolution: Smart Contracts as an Alternative to Enforcement' (2016) 13(1) SCRIPTed 40.
Richard E. Susskind, The end of lawyers? : rethinking the nature of legal services (Oxford New York : Oxford University Press, Rev. ed. ed, 2010) 93
Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ (2008) < https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>.
Vitalik Buterin, ‘Ethereum White Paper: A Next Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform’ (2015) http://blockchainlab.com/pdf/Ethereum_white_paper-a_next_generation_smart_contract_and_decentralized_application_platform-vitalik-buterin.pdf’.

Evidence for Ritual Abuse

From https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/

Ritual Abuse
Proof That Ritual Abuse Exists
Ritual abuse exists all over the world. There have been reports, journal articles, web pages and criminal convictions of these horrific crimes against children and adults.
(This page also has day care and other child abuse cases at the bottom.)

List of Ritual Abuse references
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/satanic-ritual-abuse-evidence-with-information-on-the-mcmartin-preschool-case/
http://ritualabusearticles.wordpress.com/category/satanic-ritual-abuse-evidence/

What is Ritual Abuse?
“…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36) “Safe Passage to Healing”, by Chrystine Oksana, 1994, HarperCollins, which is an excellent source for survivor and co-survivors on the topic, though there is a newer edition out by iuniverse.com (2001)
List of legal cases:
Believe the children (1997). “Conviction List: Ritual Child Abuse”. http://ra-info.org/faqs/ra-convictions/

Web pages proving the existence of ritual abuse:
Noblitt, PhD, J. R. – An Empirical Look at the Ritual Abuse Controversy (2007) http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/an-empirical-look-at-the-ritual-abuse-controversy-randy-noblitt-phd/
Ritual Abuse Bibliography http://ra-info.org/for-researchers/bibliographies/ritual-abuse-primary-and-secondary-source-books/
Ritual Abuse Statistics & Research http://web.archive.org/web/20071210161357/http://home.mchsi.com/~ftio/ra-stats.htm
Searchable releases on satanic ritual abuse http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psnews/
Frequently Asked Questions about Ritual Abuse and Mind Control https://survivorship.org/frequently-ask-questions/
Satanic Ritual Abuse: The Evidence Surfaces By Daniel Ryder, CCDC, LSW http://web.archive.org/web/20080125051057/http://home.mchsi.com/~ftio/ra-evidence-surfaces.htm
2008 Publications on Ritual Abuse and Mind Control http://endritualabuse.org/publications-on-ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-in-2008/ Lacter, E (2008-02-11). “Brief Synopsis of the Literature on the Existence of Ritualistic Abuse”. http://endritualabuse.org/brief-synopsis-of-the-literature-on-the-existence-of-ritualistic-abuse/
Information on Ellen Lacter and Her Research https://ritualabuse.us/smart/ellen-lacte
Information on Valerie Sinason and Her Research https://ritualabuse.us/smart/valerie-sinason/
Information on Randy Noblitt and His Research https://ritualabuse.us/smart/randy-noblitt/
Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/ritual-abuse-diagnosis-research-2/
Bottoms, Shaver and Goodman in their 1993 study to evaluate ritual abuse claims found that in 2,292 alleged ritual abuse cases, 15% of the perpetrators in adult cases and 30% of the perpetrators in child cases confessed to the abuse. Data from Brown, Scheflin and Hammond (1998).”Memory, Trauma Treatment, And the Law” (W. W. Norton) ISBN 0-393-70254-5 (p.62) Bottoms, B. Shaver, P. & Goodman, G. (1993) Profile of ritual abuse and religion related abuse allegations in the United States. Updated findings provided via personal communication from B. Bottoms. Cited in K.C. Faller (1994), Ritual Abuse; A Review of the research. The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children Advisor , 7, 1, 19-27
On Page 170 (first edition), of Cult and Ritual Abuse – Noblitt and Perskin (Praeger, 1995) states “One of the best sources of evaluative research on ritual abuse is the article “Ritual Abuse: A Review of Research” by Kathleen Coulborn Faller (1994)….in a survey of 2,709 members of the American Psychological Association, it was found that 30 percent of these professionals had seen cases of ritual or religion-related abuse (Bottoms, Shaver & Goodman, 1991). Of those psychologists who have seen cases of ritual abuse, 93 percent believed that the reported harm took place and 93 percent believed that the alleged ritualism occurred. This is a remarkable finding. Mental health professionals are known to be divergent in their thinking and frequently do not agree with one another regarding questions of the diagnosis and etiology of psychiatric problems…this level of concurrence in a large national sample of psychologists…would be impressive….the similar research of Nancy Perry (1992) which further supports (the previous findings)…Perry also conducted a national survey of therapists who work with clients with dissociative disorders and she found that 88 percent of the 1,185 respondents indicated”belief in ritual abuse, involving mind control and programming” (p.3).”
Journal of Psychology and Theology – Satanic Ritual Abuse: The Current State of Knowledge
Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Question of Memory http://journals.biola.edu/jpt/volumes/22/issues/3/articles/167 …Leading memory researchers such as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk of Harvard Medical School maintain that traumatic memories, which typically are engraved in the sensorimotor processes, are not subject to the same kinds of contamination that can affect normal memory. Traumatic amnesia, described in the dsm-iii-r as psychogenic amnesia, is a phenomenon which has been known to mental health professionals for more than 100 years. The clinically observed characteristics of traumatic memory formation and retrieval match precisely the patterns of memory recovery exhibited by sra survivors, and strongly confirm the reality of their cult abuse. Author D. McCulley Pages 167 – 172
http://journals.biola.edu/
Adults who report childhood ritualistic abuse. By: Cozolino, L.J.; Shaffer, R.E. Volume 20, Issue 3 Fall 1992 Therapists are finding an increasing number of patients uncovering memories of ritualistic forms of abuse from childhood. To gain a fuller understanding of this phenomenon, twenty outpatients reporting memories of ritualistic abuse were interviewed. Questions focused on the nature of the abuse and its perceived impact on interpersonal, occupational, and spiritual development. Reasons for entering psychotherapy as well as the nature and course of treatment were also discussed. Subjects entered therapy with similar psychological complaints. Reported psychiatric sequelae included dissociative, affective, somatization, and eating disorders. Abuse experiences were reported to have affected every aspect of their adult functioning. Subjects began therapy with little or no knowledge of the phenomenon of ritualistic abuse, and only one patient reported vague memories of ritualistic abuse before entering therapy. Reports from this sample reflect striking convergence among subjects and with data from previous research and clinical reports. A composite clinical case study is presented based on these data. excerpts from the article:
“Skeptics question the legitimacy of these reports,but many factors point to the reality of the phenomenon of ritualistic abuse. First of all, the degree of consistency between reports of individuals from different parts of the country is very high. The fact that children as young as 2 and 3 report ritualistic abuse experiences that mirror those reported by adult victims is especially striking in light of the fact that young children do not have access to the kind of printed information that might conceivably allow an older person to fabricate such experiences (Gould, 1987). Second, experiences of ritualistic abuse reported by victims of all ages are virtually identical to written historical accounts of Satan worship and the like (Hill & Goodwin, 1989; Russell, 1972), findings that substantiate our present-day understanding of Satanism and ritualistic abuse as intragenerational phenomenon. Third, the symptoms from which individuals reporting histories of ritualistic abuse tend to suffer are consistent with our current understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and the dissociative disorders. The progression in which ritualistic abuse survivors respond to psychotherapy places these victims squarely within the category of individual who have suffered real-not imagined-trauma. That is, when memories of the dissociated traumatic event have been fully surfaced into conscious awareness and re-associated in all their aspects, the often extremely debilitating symptoms from which the individual has suffered abate dramatically and over the course of treatment frequently disappear altogether (Ray & Reagor, 1991). Comments on study: Shaffer and Cozolino (1992) interviewed 19 women and one man who reported types and aftereffects of ritualistic abuse consistent with those reported by Young et al. All subjects reported witnessing the murder of animals, infants, children and/or adults. All reported suicidal ideation and half reported suicide attempts. The majority reported severe and sadistic forms of abuse by multiple perpetrators. Some reported continued recontact/revictimization into their adult years.
describes crimes Journal of Psychology and Theology – Satanic Ritual Abuse: The Current State of Knowledge Gould, C., & Cozolino, L. (1992). Ritual abuse, multiplicity, and mind control. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 20, 194-196. As a result of the psychologically intolerable nature of their early childhood experiences, victims of ritual abuse frequently develop multiple personality disorder (MPD). Therapists who treat these victims often assume that all MPD stems from a system of spontaneously created defenses against overwhelming trauma. As a result, these therapists tend to focus on treating the post-traumatic stress elements of the disorder and on integrating alter personalities. Recent experience with victims of ritual abuse suggests the presence of “cult-created” multiplicity, in which the cult deliberately creates alter personalities to serve its purposes, often outside of the awareness of the victim’s host personality. Each cult-created alter is programmed to serve a particular cult function such as maintaining contact with the cult, reporting information to the cult, self-injuring if cult injunctions are broken, and disrupting the therapeutic process that could lead to the individual breaking free of the cult. A majority of ritual abuse victims in psychotherapy may maintain cult contact unbeknownst to either the host personality or the treating therapist.
Selected quotes: “Ritual abuse is conducted on behalf of a cult whose purpose is to establish mind control over the victims. Thus, these perpetrators have a conscious motive for the abuse beyond compulsively repeating their own childhood abuse in an effort to gain mastery over the original trauma. Most victims state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship, for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs (Los Angeles County Commission for Women, 1989). Mind control is originally established when the victim is a child under 6 years old. During this formative stage of development, perpetrating cult members systematically combine dissociation enhancing drugs, pain, sexual assault, terror, and other forms of psychological abuse in such a way that the child dissociates the intolerable traumatic experience. The part of the child that has been split off to handle the overwhelming trauma is maximally open to suggestion as the abuse is occurring. The cult perpetrators exploit the vulnerability of the child who is being tortured by directing the child to create a new personality who is to answer to a particular name as well as to other specific cues. During the abuse, the newly formed alter personality is imbued with particular qualities and functions by the cult programmer. Alter personalities which are structured by the ritually abusing cult in this fashion are created to serve particular cult functions. These functions usually lie outside of the awareness of the core (or host) personality. Such cult functions typically include, but are not limited to, maintaining contact with the cult, reporting information to the cult, self-injuring if the cult injunctions are broken, and disrupting the therapeutic process that could lead to the individual breaking free of the cult (Neswald, 1991).
Ritualistic child abuse, psychopathology, and evil. By: Cozolino, L.J. – Journal of Psychology and Theology Volume 18, Issue 3 Fall 1990 p.218 Ritualistic abuse is an extreme form of psychological, physical, and sexual maltreatment of children in the context of “religious” ceremony. The clinical presentation of the victims of such abuse is complex and raises many issues related in the diagnosis and treatment of psychopathology as well as the importance of spiritual counseling. The acknowledgment of belief systems so repugnant to the Judeo-Christian world view and the addressing of our own negative emotional reactions to the reality of ritualistic abuse are important first steps in responding to these issues. The phenomenon of ritualistic child abuse forces us to consider the relationship between theological notions of evil and psychological concepts of psychopathology. This article addresses the phenomenon of ritualistic child abuse, the psychological sequelae of victimization, and possible motivations for this form of abuse. Psychological sequelae in adult females reporting childhood ritualistic abuse Kathy J. Lawrence, Louis Cozolino and David W. Foy – Child Abuse & Neglect Volume 19, Issue 8, August 1995, Pages 975-984 doi:10.1016/0145-2134(95)00059-H Abstract: The present study sought to increase current scientific knowledge about the controversial issue of subjectively reported childhood ritualistic abuse by addressing several key unresolved issues. In particular, the possibility that those reporting ritualistic abuse may be characterized primarily by the severity of their abuse histories or the severity of their present psychological symptoms, rather than the veridicality of the ritualistic events, was explored. Adult female outpatients reporting childhood sexual abuse with ritualistic features were compared with a second group of women who reported childhood sexual abuse without ritualism. Measures included characteristics of childhood sexual and physical abuse, current posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnostic status and symptom severity, and severity of current dissociative experiences. Women reporting ritualistic features scored significantly higher on measures of childhood sexual and physical abuse. Neither PTSD diagnostic status nor severity for PTSD nor dissociative experiences were significantly different between the groups. While preliminary in nature, these results suggest that it may be helpful to conceptualize reported childhood ritualistic abuse as indicative of the need to assess carefully for severe abuse and its predictable sequelae within existing traumatic victimization conceptual frameworks. http://www.nctsnet.org/nctsn_assets/Articles/115.pdf
Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children – LLOYD DEMAUSE The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) 1994 describes graphic crimes of abuse “Cult abuse is increasing, only that-as with the increase in all child abuse reports-we have become more open to hearing them. But it seemed unlikely that the surge of cult memories could all be made up by patients or implanted by therapists. Therapists are a timid group at best, and the notion that they suddenly begin implanting false memories in tens of thousands of their clients for no apparent reason strained credulity. Certainly no one has presented a shred of evidence for massive “false memory” implantations.” http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/why-cults-terrorize-and-kill-children-lloyd-demause-the-journal-of-psychohistory/
The Dark Tunnels of McMartin – Dr. Roland C. Summit The opportunity came in April, 1990 with permission from the new owner of the preschool to search for the tunnels before he demolished the building and redeveloped the property. These soiled but solid citizens managed to find what the district attorney had disclaimed: solid, scientific evidence that someone had not only dug tunnels under the preschool, but also had taken the trouble to try to undo them. The results of this definitive excavation are described in meticulous detail in the 185 page Report of the Archaeological Excavation of the McMartin Preschool Site by E. Gary Stickel, Ph.D., the UCLA archaeologist commissioned to do the study….Dr. Stickel’s report (p.95) concludes: There is no other scenario that fits all of the facts except that the feature was indeed a tunnel. The date of the construction and use of the tunnel was not absolutely established, but an assessment of seven factors of data all indicate that it was probably constructed, used and completely filled back in after 1966 (the construction date of the preschool). This age assessment has also been corroborated by the consulting Geologist for the project, Dr. Don Michael. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/the-dark-tunnels-of-mcmartin-dr-roland-c-summit-journal-of-psychohistory/
Common Programs Observed in Survivors of Satanic Ritualistic Abuse describes crimes of abuse and programming techniques Increasingly, cases of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and Satanic Ritualistic Abuse (SRA) are being reported in the psychotherapeutic community. Though controversy concerning authenticity remains, such cases are slowly gaining in acceptability as a genuine social and psychopathological phenomenon. Concurrently, the etiological underpinnings and treatment demands of these special patients are being unraveled and understood as never before. As a result, it is becoming increasingly clear that perhaps the most demanding treatment aspects of such cases concern the problems posed by what is known as “cult programming.” http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/common-programs-observed-in-survivors-of-satanic-ritualistic-abuse/
Report of the Ritual Abuse Task Force – Los Angeles County Commission for Women Ritual abuse is a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices. Ritual abuse rarely consists of a single episode. It usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time….Mind control is the cornerstone of ritual abuse, the key element in the subjugation and silencing of its victims. Victims of ritual abuse are subjected to a rigorously applied system of mind control designed to rob them of their sense of free will and to impose upon them the will of the cult and its leaders. Most often these ritually abusive cults are motivated by a satanic belief system [only on the surface.] The mind control is achieved through an elaborate system of brainwashing, programming, indoctrination, hypnosis, and the use of various mind-altering drugs. The purpose of the mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members who serve the cult by carrying out the directives of its leaders without being detected within society at large. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/report-of-the-ritual-abuse-task-force-los-angeles-county-commission-for-women/
Believing Rachel JEANNE HILL The Journal of Psychohistory 24 (2) Fall 1996 describes graphic crimes of abuse Rachel’s story is one of suffering, courage and hope. As a young child she was the victim of unspeakable crimes, but because she received therapy and the support of a loving family, she has emerged intact. I hope that parents of other abused children will be reassured by our story. When I look at the strong, confident young woman my daughter is becoming, I know that believing Rachel was the right thing to do. Believing Rachel made her whole. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/believing-rachel-jeanne-hill-the-journal-of-psychohistory/
Denying Ritual Abuse of Children – Catherine Gould The Journal of Psychohistory 22 (3) 1995 The evidence is rapidly accumulating that the problem of ritualabuse is considerable in scope and extremely grave in its consequences.Among 2,709 members of the American Psychological Association who responded to a poll, 2,292 cases of ritual abuse were reported(Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1993). In 1992 alone, Childhelp USA logged 1,741 calls pertaining to ritual abuse, Monarch Resources of Los Angeles logged approximately 5,000, Real Active Survivors tallied nearly 3,600, Justus Unlimited of Colorado received almost 7,000, and Looking Up of Maine handled around 6,000. Even allowing for some of these calls to have been made by people who assist survivors but are not themselves survivors, and for some survivors to have called more that one helpline or made multiple calls to the same helpline, these numbers suggest that at a minimum there must be tens of thousands of survivors of ritual abuse in the United States. Evidence also continues to accumulate that the ritual abuse of children constitutes a child abuse problem of significant scope. In1988, Finkelhor, Williams and Burns published the results of a nationwide study of substantiated reports of sexual abuse in day care involving 1,639 young child victims. Thirteen percent of these cases were found to involve ritual abuse. Other studies of ritually abused children have been relatively small. Kelly (1988; 1989; 1992a; 1992b;1993) report-ed on 35 day care victims of ritual abuse, Waterman et al.(1993) reported on 82 children complaining of ritual abuse in preschool, Faller (1988; 1990) studied 18 children who had disclosed ritual abuse in their preschool, and Bybee and Mowbray (1993) from the Michigan State Department of Mental Health identified 62 children alleging ritual abuse in their preschool and 53 children who reported seeing others be ritually abused. Snow and Sorenson (1990) studied 39 children reporting ritual abuse in five neighborhoods in Utah, and Jonker and Jonker-Bakker (1991) reported on a total group of 98 children, at least 48 of whom were believed to be victims of ritual abuse. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/denying-ritual-abuse-of-children-catherine-gould/
McCulley, D. “Satanic ritual abuse: A question of memory.” Journal of Psychology and Theology Fall 1994 22(3) p.167-172 In spite of reports by thousands of adults who describe satanic ritual abuse in their backgrounds, the Special Issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theology reveals obdurate skepticism regarding their credibility on the part of several contributors. Some of these disbelievers currently are citing experiments demonstrating extreme malleability for human memory as evidence that survivor accounts, especially those involving delayed memory, are fantasies implanted by incompetent clinicians. However, leading memory researchers such as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk of Harvard Medical School maintain that traumatic memories, which typically are engraved in the sensorimotor processes, are not subject to the same kinds of contamination that can affect normal memory. Traumatic amnesia, described in the DSM-III-R as psychogenic amnesia, is a phenomenon which has been known to mental health professionals for more than 100 years. The clinically observed characteristics of traumatic memory formation and retrieval match precisely the patterns of memory recovery exhibited by SRA survivors, and strongly confirm the reality of their cult abuse. Quotes: If satanic ritual abuse is a question of memory, the data redound to the credibility of those thousands of individuals who identify themselves as SRA survivors. All the scientific studies of memory under trauma indicate that the bimodal response described by van der Kolk (1994), whether hyperpotentiated or dissociative, heightens the reliability of recall. The phenomenon of recovered memory is not a new therapeutic fad created by irresponsible clinical experimentation, but a well established aspect of trauma. The connection between trauma and memory disturbance is made clear by the definition of psychogenic amnesia in the DSM-III-R (1987) which states that “The predominant disturbance is one or more episodes of inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness” (p. 273). Further, there often is corroboration for these retrieved memories. Judith Herman and Emily Schatzow (1992) found that in a sample of 53 women who disclosed memories of abuse for which they had been amnesic, 74% of the subjects were able to find independent confirmation from family members, pornographic photos, or diaries. Ivor Browne (1990a) found the “internal consistency of the traumatic account” persuasive, and also discovered that in the sizeable minority of cases where there was an available witness that “in every instance, the traumatic events . turn out to be true” (p. 30). There is no longer room for denial and disbelief – for evading the grim reality of SRA – by recourse to memory research which simply does not apply. Solid scientific inquiry does not allow us that luxury; neither should Christian conscience. https://wisdom.biola.edu/jpt
Jonker, F; Jonker-Bakker, I “Reaction to Benjamin Rossen’s Investigation of Satanic Ritual Abuse in Oude Pekela” Journal of Psychology and Theology 1992 20(3) p.260-262 quotes: The authors, Jonker and Jonker-Bakker, respond to Benjamin Rossen’s criticisms of their handling of an alleged satanic ritual abuse incident in Oude Pekela, The Netherlands. This response in turn criticizes the quality of Rossen’s scientific work, especially in respect to his judgments made without having had direct contact with the children or their parents, or other principals in the incident….All Rossen’s statements about the children and their parents, about Professor Mik, about school teachers and about ourselves were based on no contact whatsoever with any of us. https://wisdom.biola.edu/jpt
Ritual Abuse-Torture Within Families/Groups Authors: Jeanne Sarson, Linda MacDonald DOI: 10.1080/10926770801926146 Published in: Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, Volume 16,Issue 4 July 2008, pages 419 – 438 Abstract – Case studies provide insights into identifying 10 violent thematic issues as components of a pattern of family/group ritual abuse-torture (RAT) victimization. Narratives from victimized women suggest that victimization generally begins in infancy or soon thereafter. A visual model of RAT displays the organization of the co-culture. Examples of the family/group gatherings known as “rituals and ceremonies” provide insights into how these gatherings are used to normalize pedophilic violence. Global activism afforded the first effort ever to track RAT and human trafficking. Recognizing RAT as an emerging form of non-state actor torture, discontinuing the use of language that sexualizes adult-child relationships, and promoting human rights education are suggested social solutions. Available at : http://www.informaworld.com/index/903766904.pdf html article : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/ftinterface~content=a903766904~fulltext=713240928
Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief – Michael Salter (p.243 – 283) Faculty of Law – Faculty of Medicine – University of New South Wales in Proceedings of the 2nd Australian & New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference 19 – 20 June 2008 Sydney, Australia – Presented by the Crime & Justice Research Network and the Australian and New Zealand Critical Criminology Network Edited by Chris Cunneen & Michael Salter – Published by The Crime and Justice research Newtork University of New South Wales December, 2008 http://www.academia.edu/2042170/Organised_abuse_and_the_politics_of_disbelief ISBN: 9780646507378 (pdf)
“Since the 1980s, disclosures of organised abuse have been disparaged by a range of activists, journalists and researchers who have focused, in particular, on cases in which sexually abusive groups were alleged to have behaved in ritualistic or ceremonial ways…Whilst these authors claimed to be writing in the interests of science and social justice, what has emerged from their writing are a familiar set of arguments about the credibility of women and children’s testimony of sexual violence; in short, that women and children are prone to a range of memory and cognitive errors that lead them to make false allegations of rape. This paper argues that this body of literature has systematically misconstrued allegations of organised abuse, and used organised abuse as a lens through which the debate on child abuse could be re-envisioned along very traditional lines, attributing victim status to accused men and constructing liars out of women and children complaining of sexual abuse.”
Journal of Child and Youth Care – ISSN 0840-982X – SPECIAL ISSUE 1990 – CONTENTS A Case of Multiple Life-Threatening Illnesses Related to Early Ritual Abuse Rennet Wong and Jock McKeen Ritual Child Abuse: A Survey of Symptoms and Allegations Pamela S. Hudson Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Cause of Multiple Personality Disorder George A. Fraser Differentiating Between Ritual Assault and Sexual Abuse Louise M. Edwards The Choice – Gerry Fewster http://www.cyc-net.org/Journals/jcyc/jcycSpecial1990.html
Recent worldwide survey of ritual abuse
The Extreme Abuse Survey final results are online with findings,questionnaires and presentations for download as pdf-files. More than 750 pages of documentation http://extreme-abuse-survey.net/ Understanding ritual trauma: A comparison of findings from three online surveys – Handout for Karriker, Wanda. (2008, November). Understanding ritual trauma: A comparison of findings from three online surveys. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, Chicago, IL.
10 Extreme Abuse Survey Findings Helpful to Understanding Ritual Trauma

Ritual abuse/mind control (RA/MC) is a global phenomenon.
A diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder is common for persons who report histories of RA/MC. (84% of EAS respondents who answered that they have been diagnosed with DID [N=655] reported that they are survivors of RA/MC).
Ritual abuse (RA) is not limited to SRA, i.e., satanic ritual abuse, sadistic abuse, satanist abuse.
RA is reported to involve mind control techniques.
Some extreme abuse survivors report that they were used in government-sponsored mind control experimentation (GMC).
RA/MC is reported to be involved in organized “known” crime.
RA/MC is reported to be involved in clergy abuse.
Most often reported memories of extreme abuse are similar across all surveys.
Most often reported possible aftereffects of extreme abuse are similar across all surveys.
In rating the effectiveness of healing methods, therapists tend to favor stabilization techniques; survivors are more open to alternative ways to cope with indoctrinated belief systems.

http://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/eas-studies/understanding-ritual-trauma-a-comparison-of-findings-from-three-online-surveys
MEDIA PACKET – Torture-based, Government-sponsored Mind Control Experimentation on Children – Documentation that torture-based,government-sponsored mind control (GMC) experimentation was conducted on children during the Cold War. Data from two international surveys that give voice, visibility, and validation to survivors of these crimes against humanity….SURVEYS – EAS: Extreme Abuse Survey for Adult Survivors (An International Online Survey for Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse) January 1 – March 30, 2007 with 1471 respondents from 31named countries. P-EAS: Professional – Extreme Abuse Survey (An nternational Online Survey for Therapists, Counselors, Clergy, and Other Persons Who Have Worked Professionally with at Least One Adult Survivor of Extreme Abuse) April 1 – June 30 2007 with 451 respondents from 20 named countries. Contact: Wanda Karriker, PhD [email protected] http://my.dmci.net/~casey/GovernmentSponsoredMindControlExperiments-MediaPacket.pdf
Rutz, C. Becker, T., Overkamp, B. & Karriker, W. (2008).Exploring Commonalities Reported by Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse:Preliminary Empirical Findings. In Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations,J.R. Noblitt & P. S. Perskin (Eds), pp. 31- 84. Brandon, Oregon:Robert D. Reed Publishers.
Becker, T., Karriker, W., Overkamp, B. Rutz, C. (2008). The Extreme Abuse Survey: preliminary findings regarding dissociative identity disorder. In A. Sachs & G. Galton (Eds.), Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder, pp. 32-49. London: Karnac. Karriker, Wanda (November, 2007). “Helpful healing methods: As rated by approximately 900 respondents to the “International Survey for AdultSurvivors of Extreme Abuse (EAS).” http://endritualabuse.org/data-on-survivors-of-ritual-abuse-mind-control-and-healing-methods/
Karriker, W. (2008, September). Torture-based mind control as a global phenomenon: Preliminary data from the 2007 series of Extreme Abuse Surveys. In Torture-based mind control: Empirical research, programmer methods, effects and treatment. Workshop conducted at the 13th International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma, San Diego,CA. http://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/eas-studies/torture-based-mind-control-as-a-global-phenomenon/
http://eassurvey.wordpress.com/extreme-abuse-survey-final-results/
Other organizations with data proving the worldwide existence of ritual abuse
http://www.ra-info.org
http://www.survivorship.org
http://web.archive.org/web/20071218103952/http://www.aches-mc.org/
http://www.endritualabuse.org/
http://nonstatetorture.org/
A Nation Betrayed – The Chilling True Story of Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on our Children and Other Innocent People by Carol Rutz http://www2.dmci.net/users/casey
Pepinsky, H – PEACEMAKING – Reflections of a Radical Criminologist by Hal Pepinsky – The University of Ottawa Press ISBN10: 0776606409 2006 “I have mentioned that since 1993 I have come to know many people whom I believe to be genuine survivors of “ritual abuse.”
http://critcrim.org/sites/default/files/Pepinsky_proofs_0.pdf
Craighead, W. E.; Corsini, R.J.; Nemeroff, C. B. (2002) The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science Published by John Wiley and Sons ISBN 0471270830 – Sadistic Ritual Abuse (p.1435 – 1438)
http://books.google.com/books?id=JQMRmyOfpJ8C&pg=PA1435&lpg=PA1435&focus=viewport&vq=ritual+abuse&output=html
(I left out the part "Books on Ritual Abuse" because of the text-length restriction. I will post it in a comment.)
The McMartin Preschool Case – What Really Happened and the Cover-up
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/mcmartin-preschool-case-what-really-happened-and-the-coverup/
Day Care and Child Abuse Cases
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/day-care-and-child-abuse-cases/ This page has information on the McMartin Preschool Case, Michelle Remembers, the Fells Acres – Amirault Case, the Wenatchee, Washington Case, the Dale Akiki Case, the Glendale Montessori – Toward case, the Little Rascals Day Care Center case, Fran’s Day Care case, the Baran case, the Halsey case, the West Memphis 3 case, the Friedman’s case and the Christchurch Civic Creche sex abuse – Peter Ellis case.
Sexual Abuse in Day Care: A National Study – Executive Summary – March 1988 – Finklehor, Williams, Burns, Kalinowski “The study identified 270 “cases” of sexual abuse in day care meaning 270 facilities where substantiated abuse had occurred involving a total of 1639 victimized children….This yielded an estimate of 500 to 550 reported and substantiated cases and 2500 victims for the three-year period. Although this is a large number, it must be put in the context of 229,000 day care facilities nationwide service seven million children….allegations of ritual abuse (“the invocation of religious, magical or supernatural symbols of activities”) occurred in 13% of the cases.” The authors divided these cases into “true cult-based ritual,” pseudo-ritualism” with a primary goal of sexual gratification and ritual being used to intimidate the children from disclosing and “psychopathological ritualism” the activities being “primarily the expression of an individuals obsessional or delusional system.” https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/113095NCJRS.pdf

what does bibliography mean in a science project video

noun, plural bib·li·og·ra·phies. a complete or selective list of works compiled upon some common principle, as authorship, subject, place of publication, or printer. a list of source materials that are used or consulted in the preparation of a work or that are referred to in the text. a branch of library science dealing with the history, physical ... A bibliography is a list of works (such as books and articles) written on a particular subject or by a particular author. Adjective : bibliographic. Also known as a list of works cited , a bibliography may appear at the end of a book, report , online presentation, or research paper . The science project abstract gives a brief snapshot of the important aspects of the experiment, including the problem or hypothesis, process, results and conclusion. Science fairs often require abstracts as part of the display. Learn to write a succinct science project abstract to make a positive impression with your ... While planning a project, it is essential to take notes of sources/references, so that it will be easy to mention when preparing a project guide. It facilitates the reader to utilize your sources so it should be precise and in the standard format. The following mentioned is a complete bibliography guide on how to write a bibliography for the ... How to Write a Bibliography For a Science Fair Project . When conducting a science fair project, it is important that you keep track of all the sources you use in your research.This includes books, magazines, journals, and Web sites. You will need to list these source materials in a bibliography.Bibliographic information is typically written in either Modern Language Association or American ... A bibliography is a listing of the books, magazines, and Internet sources that you use in designing, carrying out, and understanding your science fair project. But, you develop a bibliography only after first preparing a background research plan — a road map of the research questions you need to answer. Before you compose your bibliography, you will need to develop your background research plan. Anonymous. 1 decade ago. A bibliography is a list of books, articles, websites that you read in order to do your science project. There are rules about writing the bibliography and you should ask... What bibliography mean? A bibliography is a list of sources used in a scholarly work. Bibliographies frequently include book sources, articles, websites, news journals, and interviews. Answered. 2008-12-11 22:49:28. 2008-12-11 22:49:28. A bibliography is a list of what sites or books or articles you used in your project. 0 1 2.

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Types of Variables in Science Experiments - YouTube

What is bibliography & what is reference - bibliography meaning explained in simple terms and easy to understand - what is annotated bibliography - what is t... Learn how to write a project proposal that gets your project funded.Try our award-winning PM software for free: https://www.projectmanager.com/?utm_source=yo... Top scoring student-created video. A project baseline can distinguish between a failed or successful project. Try our award-winning PM software for free: https://www.projectmanager.com/?utm_so... Full Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLALQuK1NDrh9HgAQ22wep8X18Fvvcm8R--Watch more How to Write Essays and Research Papers videos: http://ww... The 3rd step for a science fair project is to research and form a hypothesis. A place where an organism lives is its habitat. It provides the organism with food, water, air, and shelter. Deserts, forests, freshwater habitats, ocean hab... About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators ... LiveScience is where the curious come to find answers. We illuminate our fascinating world, and make your everyday more interesting. We share the latest discoveries in science, explore new ...