(1 comments)        Saturday, October 26, 2019
Greta Thunberg Issues Rallying Cry Against Facebook Over Lies, Death Threats   SHARE Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg issued a rallying cry against Facebook, saying she may quit the social-media platform due to its failure to curb the abuse that is frequently leveled against her. The 16-year-old from Sweden wrote in a post on Wednesday that “the constant lies and conspiracy theories” that are spread on Facebook about her and others “of course result in hate, death threats and ultimately violence.” 

(7 comments)        Saturday, October 5, 2019
Stop Infantilizing Greta Thunberg With Claims of 'Abuse'   SHARE By casting Thunberg as little more than a puppet of her parents and climate activists (as satire site Babylon Bee put it, “Marionette Strings Clearly Visible During Greta Thunberg Testimony”) these authors can discredit Thunberg as a pawn, without agency, for a group of manipulative, Machiavellian adult activists.The weaponization of mental health diagnoses, or pseudo-diagnoses, for political gain is far from a new phenomenon and is prevalent on both sides of the political spectrum. ... Condemnations of Thunberg's "abuse" fall into the same category. They are armchair prescriptions, made by individuals who are unqualified to make such calls, without any sourcing from those close to Thunberg or mental health professionals familiar with her state of mind. 

(1 comments)        Saturday, October 5, 2019
Children, it seems, should only be seen, not heard.   SHARE It is strange to see how some on the left suddenly turn into Victorian prudes the moment the 16-year-old Swede says exactly what they have been thinking but does so to much greater effect. Children, it seems, should again only be seen, not heard. Thunberg and her generation are living on a dying planet, a planet the older generation – through their greed, their alienation from the natural world, and their spiritual emptiness – plundered and despoiled with no thought for those who would follow them. 

(7 comments)        Tuesday, May 14, 2019
US Federal Police Evicting Activists from Venezuelan Embassy in Washington   SHARE U.S. federal police have begun evicting activists protecting the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington from the illegitimate Guaido’ regime.The text of the eviction notice reads in part: ““Ambassadors Vecchio and [Gustavo] Tarre have requested and directed anyone who is present on this property to depart from it immediately, and to not return without these ambassadors’ express authorization,” said the eviction notice, which was dated May 13. “Any person who refuses to comply with these requests and orders to depart from this property will be trespassing in violation of federal and District of Columbia law and may be arrested and criminally prosecuted.”Knowing that the police were about to raid the building the activists posted this video at 7:23 pm:

(3 comments)        Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Exxon predicted in 1982 exactly how high global carbon emissions would be today   SHARE Not only did Exxon predict the rise in emissions, it also understood how severe the consequences would be. According to an internal 1982 document from Exxon Research and Engineering Company — obtained by InsideClimate News as part of its 2015 investigation into what Exxon knew about the impact of fossil fuels on climate change — the company was modeling out the concentration of carbon emissions several years into the future.Despite this knowledge, the company chose not to change or adapt its business model. Instead, it chose to invest heavily in disinformation campaigns that promoted climate-science denial, failing to disclose its knowledge that the majority of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves must remain untapped in order to avert catastrophic climate change.

(4 comments)        Sunday, May 12, 2019
Will "Neuralink" Enable Human Brains To Keep Up With AI?   SHARE "Neuralink" is developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers."Neuralink, if Elon Musk is to be believed, could be the next step in human evolution. The company's Neural Lace technology could help stave off the potential downsides of AI to humanity and could even trigger the Technological Singularity. click hereThe short term goal is to help treat serious brain disease sufferers.  They also want to help anyone with serious brain damage that has been caused by a stroke or other debilitating neurological disorder.Each and every brain-computer interface will likely be much more than just a way for you to control whatever streaming service you use. When fully developed it could be used for things like communicating with loved ones, searching the internet and interacting directly with AI.  

(10 comments)        Thursday, April 11, 2019
US Air Force Admits They Can Control the Weather   SHARE US Air Force Admits They Can Control the Weatherclick hereFrom the article: All they need to do is twist a button to change the frequency to microwave range and increase the frequency modulated [FM] transmission power enough to reach and heat up the atmosphere above the target. The technology is covered under US Patent 4,686,605 on the "Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth's Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and/or Magnetosphere."... Walker said this is "not an area that we have any need for in the future" and it would not be a good use of Air Force research funds to keep HAARP going. "We're moving on to other ways of managing the ionosphere, which the HAARP was really designed to do," he said. "To inject energy into the ionosphere to be able to actually control it. But that work has been completed."

(10 comments)        Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Two Imminent Existential Threats. Noam Chomsky: Moral Depravity   SHARE Humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war. These were virtually ignored in the campaign rhetoric and general coverage. There was plenty of criticism of the Trump administration, but scarcely a word about by far the most ominous positions the administration has taken: increasing the already dire threat of nuclear war, and racing to destroy the physical environment that organized human society needs in order to survive.These are the most critical and urgent questions that have arisen in all of human history. The fact that they scarcely arose in the campaign is truly stunning — and carries some important, if unpleasant, lessons about our moral and intellectual culture.I found this article from a link in an article by Patrick Walker.  I thought this article deserves to be posted on its own.  Thanks Patrick.

(12 comments)        Saturday, June 16, 2018
It's the world's worst humanitarian disaster. But it's rarely ever discussed   SHARE Behind every bomb dropped in the nearly 17,000 air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition on Yemen are support services provided by the U.S.At the behest of lucrative arms deals worth billions of dollars (Saudi Arabia alone spent $69.4 billion on arms in 2017, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, giving it the world’s third largest military budget), America supplies much of the hardware used by the Saudis and Emiratis, while also offering midair refueling and general intelligence sharing."The U.S government is complicit in the suffering of civilians in Yemen,” said Samah Hadid, Amnesty International’s director for Middle East campaigns. “Through irresponsible arms transfers to the Saudi-led coalition, U.S.-manufactured weapons have been used to kill civilians.

(3 comments)        Friday, May 25, 2018
Amazon Rekognition, a privacy nightmare?   SHARE Rekognition was always going to be surveillance tech for government agencies...  ... there is the possibility for facial-recognition technology to know everywhere we are going, who we’re with, and what we’re doing. ... Amazon has plans for voice-recognition technology , too. In April, the company patented “an algorithm that would allow its Alexa assistant to listen in on any conversation without requiring a wake word. This facial-recognition technology can search against millions of faces in real time – and be used to track protesters, target immigrants, and spy on entire neighborhoods. 

(3 comments)        Monday, May 21, 2018
Human race just 0.01% of all life but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals -- study   SHARE Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.

       Saturday, April 21, 2018
The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections   SHARE Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer  choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked  results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power  of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated  to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic  elections. Here we report the results of five relevant double-blind,  randomized controlled experiments, using a total of 4,556 un-  decided voters representing diverse demographic characteristics  of the voting populations of the United States and India.

(1 comments)        Sunday, April 8, 2018
Face-Swap Porn and the End of Reality   SHARE In a dank corner of the internet, it is possible to find actresses from Game of Thrones or Harry Potter engaged in all manner of sex acts. Or at least to the world the carnal figures look like those actresses, and the faces in the videos are indeed their own. Everything south of the neck, however, belongs to different women. An artificial intelligence has almost seamlessly stitched the familiar visages into pornographic scenes, one face swapped for another. The genre is one of the cruelest, most invasive forms of identity theft invented in the internet era. At the core of the cruelty is the acuity of the technology: A casual observer can’t easily detect the hoax........But Face-swap porn is just one example of what is coming to be.  "We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality."

(3 comments)        Wednesday, March 21, 2018
The "gentle giant" Sudan, the Last male northern white rhino, is put down.   SHARE Conservationists have warned that the death of the last male northern white rhinoceros in Kenya is a sign that unsustainable human activity is driving a new era of mass extinctions around the globe. Sudan, the “gentle giant” who lived in the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, was put down Monday after the pain from a degenerative illness became too great.It leaves only two females - his daughter and granddaughter - through which conservationists hope they might save the species from dying altogether using IVF.

(1 comments)        Saturday, March 3, 2018
The New York Times and Conspiracy Theory, i.e., Propaganda   SHARE I just posted a quicklink article about Lee Camp talking about how the New York Times wrote an article about him as an example of how the New York Times can write propaganda. -- Lee Camp: How to Write Propaganda for the NY Times...This just occurred to me, I remember posting a quicklink a few years back about how the New York Times plays a major role in how "conspiracy theory" is defined.  I think you will find it interesting.  I think this article is an very good companion article to the one Lee Camp wrote about the New York Times and propaganda.  This article is titled,  ""Conspiracy Theories and Falsehoods." The New York Times and Conspiracy Theory." .....  The New York Times and "Conspiracy Theory"  I.e., Propaganda

(19 comments)        Friday, March 2, 2018
Lee Camp: How to Write Propaganda for the NY Times -- As Demonstrated in an Article About Me   SHARE The New York Times vomited up a hit piece on little ol' me.At first when you’re the center of a smear job, you’re annoyed and frustrated. But as I read further through the piece, I realized it was a master class in how to write propaganda for one of the most “respected” news outlets in our country. I’m actually grateful it was written about me because now I can see with my own eyes exactly how the glorious chicanery is done. I count no less than 15 lies, manipulations, and false implications in this short article, a score that even our fearless prevaricator-in-chief Donald Trump would envy.So here now is a “How To” for writing propaganda for the New York Times – using the smear piece against me as an example.

       Sunday, February 11, 2018
When the U.S. Military Came to Guam - Environment, Wildlife, and Snakes   SHARE And then there are the snakes.Sometime in the years right after WWII, as military planes were flying in and out of Guam, a species called the brown tree snake hitched a ride from the South Pacific. It grows several feet long and feeds on small mammals, lizards, and birds. On the island, this invasive predator found easy prey. It feasted on Micronesian kingfishers and Mariana fruit doves and rufous fantails; in just a few decades, it ate 10 out of 12 native forest-bird species off the face of the island. The effects of the snake’s appetite have rippled through Guam’s ecosystem. Without birds to eat them, spiders have flourished. Without birds to spread seeds, forests have thinned. According to one estimate, the growth of new tree seedlings has declined between 61 to 92 percent.The military development of Guam has taken out a lot of forest.

(1 comments)        Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Climate change could unleash vast reserves of toxic mercury from Arctic permafrost   SHARE The northern hemisphere's permafrost regions have been concealing a really unpleasant surprise: mercury. A lot of mercury. Nearly twice as much mercury as the rest of the planet's natural mercury combined.Researchers from the US Geological Survey studied core samples from the Alaskan permafrost, and their estimates show 793 million kilograms of mercury have been trapped in the northern hemisphere's permafrost since the last Ice Age.This finding has grave implications if the permafrost melts away.

(2 comments)        Sunday, June 4, 2017
To Launch a Nuclear Strike, Donald Trump Would Follow These Steps   SHARE After reading the excellent article written by Paul Craig Roberts titled, Zbigniew Brzezinski, I wondered what it would take for Donald Trump to launch a nuclear attack against Russia.  The commander-in-chief’s power is clear: He or she has sole authority to use nuclear weapons.The consultation lasts as long as the president wishes, but if enemy missiles are heading toward the U.S. and the president must order a counterstrike, the consultation may last just 30 seconds. The tight time line raises the risk of launching hastily on a false warning.Some advisers may try to change the president’s mind or resign in protest—but ultimately, the Pentagon must comply with the commander-in-chief’s order.

(3 comments)        Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Military Officers and Generals to Trump: Don't Torture   SHARE A total of 176 retired officers, generals and admirals have written a letter to GOP President-elect Donald Trump, urging him not to reinstate the use of torture.In a letter dated Jan. 6, these retired military officials are asking Trump not to pursue past promises to bring back waterboarding and other practices that are “a hell of a lot worse.”