Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1109
February 7, 2018
Google and Facebook Watch Our Every Move Online – It’s Time to Make Them Stop
Google and Facebook’s impact on our privacy cannot be understated.
76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to one study.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Google CEO Larry Page
To make any real progress in advancing data privacy this year, we have to start doing something about Google and Facebook. Not doing so would be like trying to lose weight without changing your diet. Simply ineffective.
The impact these two companies have on our privacy cannot be understated. You may know that hidden trackers lurk on most websites you visit, soaking up your personal information.
What you may not realize, though, is 76 percent of websites now contain hidden Google trackers, and 24 percent have hidden Facebook trackers, according to the Princeton Web Transparency & Accountability Project. The next highest is Twitter with 12 percent. It is likely that Google or Facebook are watching you on many sites you visit, in addition to tracking you when using their products.
As a result, these two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more. They then make your sensitive data profile available for invasive targeted advertising that can follow you around the Internet.
This advertising system is designed to enable hyper-targeting, which has many unintended consequences, such as the ability for bad actors to use the system to influence the most susceptible or to exclude groups in a way that facilitates discrimination.
“These two companies have amassed huge data profiles on each person, which can include your interests, purchases, search, browsing and location history, and much more.”
Because of their entrenched positions in a wide array of Internet services, each collecting personal information that together combine into these massive digital profiles, Google and Facebook can offer hyper-targeting much better than the competition.
As a result, they now make up 63 percent of all digital advertising, and accounted for 74 percent of this market’s growth in 2017, according to eMarketer. Together they form a tight digital advertising duopoly, showing no signs of abating.
Google and Facebook also use your data as input for increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms that put you in a filter bubble — an alternate digital universe that controls what you see in their products, based on what their algorithms think you are most likely to click on.
These echo chambers distort people’s reality, creating a myriad of unintended consequences such as increasing societal polarization. On their unending march to profit from more and more personal information, Google and Facebook have shown little regard for all the negative consequences of their runaway algorithms. . .
via Google and Facebook are watching our every move online. It’s time to make them stop
Steven Singer: Disaster Capitalism Clears the Way to Privatize Schools in Puerto Rico
“Make no mistake. This has nothing to do with serving the needs of children. It is about selling off public property because it belongs to poor, brown people.”
First it was New Orleans, its public schools crippled by a devastating hurricane, which was used to sweep away public education. Now, it is Puerto Rico, crushed by a powerful hurricane, with most of the island left by the federal government without access to electricity or clean water.
Now Puerto Rico will abandon public education and turn its students over to private operators and religious schools. Let someone else run the schools. The government prefers to abandon them.
Steven Singer writes a cogent analysis of the death of public education in Puerto Rico.
“More than five months since a devastating hurricane hit the island’s shores, some 270 schools are still without power.
“Roughly 25,000 students are leaving with that number expected to swell to 54,000 in four years. And that’s after an 11-year recession already sent 78,000 students seeking refuge elsewhere.
“So what do you do to stop the…
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Study: Rate of American Boys Developing Neurodevelopmental Disorders a National Crisis
At least one in six American children (roughly 17%) has a diagnosed developmental disability. No matter which once-rare disorder one considers—learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), tics, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or emotional disturbances—each has witnessed a dramatic escalation over the past several decades.
AGR Daily 60 Second News Bites
What are Little Boys Made of? Too Many Chemicals!
by the World Mercury Project Team
At least one in six American children (roughly 17%) has a diagnosed developmental disability. No matter which once-rare disorder one considers—learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), tics, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or emotional disturbances—each has witnessed a dramatic escalation over the past several decades.
A systematic literature review recently published in Acta Neurobiologiae Experimentalis contends that these trends are at crisis proportions. The crisis is spiraling out of control, with society-wide impacts on services, institutions, families and, especially, boys.
There are at least two boys for every girl with a neurodevelopmental disorder. For ASD and ADHD, the male-to-female ratio is roughly four and five to one, respectively.
Genetics cannot explain this consistent sex-specific pattern.
What can explain it is children’s vastly increased exposure to and bioaccumulation of chemical neurotoxins at the same…
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February 6, 2018
Release of Nunes memo throws anti-Russia campaign into disarray
The memo has undermined the aura of professional impartiality that the Democrats and their semi-official news outlets, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have sought to cultivate around the so-called “intelligence community.”
By Andre Damon
Source: WSWS.org
The Democratic Party was thrown into disarray Friday after the publication of a classified memo exposing as a factionally-motivated witch-hunt the investigation by leading intelligence agencies into the Trump administration’s alleged collusion with Russia.
The so-called Nunes memo, which Democratic lawmakers, US intelligence agencies, and major newspapers had been seeking to block for days, alleges that the FBI under the Obama administration used discredited sources and withheld key information to initiate a wiretap of former Trump campaign adviser Cater Page.
The Democrats responded to the prospective release of the Nunes memo with undisguised hysteria, declaring that it threatened National Security and was insufficiently deferential to the US intelligence agencies. Now that the memo has been released, Democrats’ claim that it contains sensitive national security secrets has been exposed as lies.
The memo, written by Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, claims that the FBI…
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Mainstream Media Outlets Keep Hiring CIA/Intel Veterans and It’s Gross
“Former CIA director John Brennan has become the latest member of the NBC News and MSNBC family, officially signing with the network as a contributor,” chirps a recent article by The Wrap, as though that’s a perfectly normal thing to have to write and not a ghastly symptom of an Orwellian dystopia. NBC reports that the former head of the depraved, lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency “is now a senior national security and intelligence analyst.”
Brennan, who played a key role in the construction of the establishment Russia narrative that has been used to manufacture public consent for world-threatening new cold war escalations, is just the latest addition in an ongoing trend of trusted mainstream media outlets being packed to the gills with establishment stalwarts from the US intelligence community. Brennan joins CIA and DoD Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash on the NBC/MSNBC lineup, who is serving there as a national security analyst, as well as NBC intelligence/national security reporter and known CIA collaborator Ken Dilanian. Former Director of National Intelligence, Russiagate architect, and known Russophobic racist James Clapper was welcomed to the CNN “family” last year by Chris “it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks” Cuomo and now routinely appears as an expert analyst for the network. Last year CNN also hired a new national security analyst in Michael Hayden, who has served as CIA Director, NSA Director, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and an Air Force general.
Former CIA analyst and now paid CNN analyst Phil Mudd, who last year caused Cuomo’s show to have to issue a retraction and apology for a completely baseless claim he made on national television asserting that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is “a pedophile”, is once again making headlines for suggesting that the FBI is entering into a showdown with the current administration over Trump’s decision to declassify the controversial Nunes memo.
More and more of the outlets from which Americans get their information are being filled not just with garden variety establishment loyalists, but with longstanding members of the US intelligence community. These men got to their positions of power within these deeply sociopathic institutions for their willingness to facilitate any depravity in order to advance the secret agendas of the US power establishment, and now they’re being paraded in front of mainstream Americans on cable news on a daily basis. The words of these “experts” are consistently taken and reported on by smaller news outlets in print and online media in a way that seeds their authoritative assertions throughout public consciousness.
As we discussed recently, the term “deep state” does not refer to a conspiracy theory but to a simple concept in political analysis which points to the undeniable reality that (A) plutocrats, (B) intelligence agencies, (C) defense agencies, and (D) the mainstream media hold large amounts of power in America despite their not being part of its elected government. You don’t need to look far to see how these separate groups overlap and collaborate to advance their own agendas in various ways. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for example, is deeply involved in all of the aforementioned groups: (A) as arguably the wealthiest person ever he is clearly a plutocrat, with a company that is trying to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy, (B) he is a CIA contractor, (C) he is part of a Pentagon advisory board, and (D) his purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 gave him total control over a major mainstream media outlet.
Jeff Bezos did not purchase the Washington Post because his avaricious brain predicted that newspapers were about to make a profitable resurgence, he purchased it for the same reason he has inserted himself so very deeply into America’s unelected power infrastructure: he wants to ensure a solid foundation for the empire he is building. He needs a potent propaganda outlet to manufacture support for the power establishment that he is weaving his plutocratic tentacles through. This is precisely the same reason other mass media-controlling plutocrats are stocking their propaganda machines with intelligence community insiders. . .
via Mainstream Media Outlets Keep Hiring CIA/Intel Veterans, And It’s Gross
The Crumbling of America
Crumbling America
Directed by Henry Schipper (2009)
Film Review
This is a compelling, though somewhat melodramatic, documentary about crumbling US infrastructure – especially its bridges, roads, levees, dams, water delivery systems, sewage systems, and power grid. The US presently spends less on infrastructure (2% of GDP) than the developing countries China (9%) and India (8%). The percentage of GDP Americans spend on infrastructure has declined from 12% in 1960.
Most bridges, superhighways and water and sewage pipes are designed to last 50 years, and many are approaching or have exceeded their expected lifespan. There are no programs to repair vital levees along the Mississippi River and in California. A 6.9 earthquake would totally destroy San Francisco’s earthwork levees, contaminating all southern California’s drinking water, as well as destroying acres of prime agricultural land.
Shoddy maintenance of urban water and sewage systems leads to hundreds of thousands of leaks per year, especially in eastern rust belt cities. While parts of the national electrical grid are subject to ever more frequent and lengthy power failures due to poor maintenance and obsolete switches, sensors, data systems and transformers and rotting utility poles.
Reaching the Wrong Conclusion
Despite the wealth of data they present, I strongly disagree with the filmmakers’ conclusion: that taxpayers need to front up with trillions of dollars to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure. I strongly believe this massive decay presents a unique opportunity to replace 100-year-old technologies with cheaper, more efficient, people-friendly 21st century technology.
For example, I totally disagree with their assertion that the electrical grid was “the greatest infrastructure achievement of the 20th century.” Besides being one of the most inefficient infrastructure projects ever invented (according to the EPA the US power system loses approximately 67% of the power it creates), the grid was never intended to serve the public – it was intended to increase the sale of electricity and electrical products, as well as consolidating the control of production and distribution in the hands of Wall Street corporations (see Reclain the Commons: Take Back the Grid). The renewable energy revolution, which enables households and neighborhood to produce their own solar energy, also allows ordinary people to control its destruction.
Likewise our totally gridlocked super highways don’t need to be rebuilt – they need to be replaced with cheaper and more efficient and climate-friendly high speed and computer trains and buses.
While inefficient and unhealthy (adding chlorine to our water creates a variety of dangerous chlorinated organic compounds) water delivery and sewage systems need to be replaced with more modern technologies that allow us to recycle our water instead of pouring it down the drain.
February 5, 2018
It’s Time to Put the Internet Back Into a Box in the Basement
Very cogent argument for regaining the skill of living in the real physical world.
Source: Raptitude
by David Cain
February 2018
My first online interaction, circa 1992, fascinated but also terrified me. I should have taken it as a warning.
At the time, computers were just machines you had in your basement. They had programs in them, and you would sit in a chair and use those programs for a while, then go do something else. The whole time you used this machine you remained, both physically and psychologically, in your own house.
Nobody had the internet yet really, but there were Bulletin Board Systems. Your computer could phone another computer, presumably in someone else’s basement, and access a virtual space for posting messages, designed by that computer’s owner. No images, just bare text. Only one person could visit at a time, because it occupied the owner’s phone line.
One time I was using a BBS, believing I was alone in my basement, when…
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Is Congress Finally Pushing Back Against Security Agencies’ Over-Reach?
Here we go again, with rogue security agencies abusing their powers. All that’s changed is the political parties have switched places; where the Republicans were defending the status quo abuse of power then and the Democrats were pushing for a transparent investigation of the agencies’ abuses of power, now it’s the Democrats who are defending the agencies’ abuses of power while the Republicans are pushing for a transparent investigation of the agencies’ abuses of power.
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The last time the U.S. Congress pushed back against the Imperial Presidency and the over-reach of the nation’s Security Agencies was 43 years ago, in 1975.
The last time the U.S. Congress pushed back against the Imperial Presidency and the over-reach of the nation’s Security Agencies was 43 years ago, in 1975. In response to the criminal over-reach of the Imperial Presidency (Watergate) and to the criminal over-reach of the security agencies (FBI, CIA, et al.), the Church Committee finally resusitated the constitutional powers of the Congress to serve the interests of the citizenry rather than the interests of political elites and the rogue agencies of the federal government.
The erosion of congressional power (or more correctly, the surrender of power by Congress) long pre-dates 9/11. The rise of the Imperial Presidency and the Shadow State of “national security” agencies dates back…
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Kidney doctor who sounded the alarm on vaccine damage was targeted for murder when the brake lines of her vehicle were secretly clamped
Dr Suzanne Humphries goes public with the attempts on her life.
Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch
This sheds a verification light and vindication for all of the other suspicious deaths of holistic Doctors doesn’t it? … well over 50 of those now since truth’s been emerging on the dark side of modern medicine & particularly vaccines. EnvirowatchRangitikei
(Natural News) Many in the natural health community are already aware of the recent death threat that vaccine truth advocate Dr. Suzanne Humphries received from an anonymous assailant. But what you may not realize is that Dr. Humphries was previously targeted for murder when someone maliciously severed the brake lines on her vehicle.
During a recent interview with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, Dr. Humphries bore it all about her history working in medicine; the criticism and animosity she’s faced over the years for departing from its dogma; and more recently the vulgar threat she received on her life via anonymous email. Dr. Humphries also told of…
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February 4, 2018
NZ: federal control of fluoridation would be a nightmare
New Plymouth voted to remove fluoride from their water supply in 2011.
NZ: Federal control of fluoridation would be a nightmare
So would censoring debate on the issue
by Jon Rappoport
February 1, 2018
For the past year or so, I’ve been following a critical situation in New Zealand, where local communities decide whether to fluoridate their water supplies. A number of communities have said no.
A bill in the national parliament would change all that.
If the bill passes, the decision to fluoridate would fall into the hands of so-called District Health Boards—which are part of a federal system. At that point, New Zealand would be fluoridated as a matter of top-down command; local choice would be gone.
Now, there is a battle going on in the parliament about allowing debate on the science of fluoridation. Apparently, the pro-fluoridation forces are terrified that open presentations will expose official lies and destroy their position.
A press release (1/31) from Fluoride Free New…
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