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Winslow Homer Salt Kettle, Bermuda 1899

In the wake of a number of the Lehman and 9/11 commemorations in America, and as a monster storm is once again threatening to cause outsize damage, we find ourselves at a pivotal point in time, which will decide how the country interacts with its own laws, its legal system, its Constitution, its freedom of speech, and indeed if it has sufficient willpower left to adhere to the Constitution as its no. 1 guiding principle.

The main problem is that it all seems to slip slide straight by the people, who are -kept- busy with completely different issues. That is convenient for those who would like less focus on the Constitution, but it’s also very dangerous for everyone else. Americans should today stand up for freedom of speech, or it will be gone, likely forever.

The way it works is that president Trump is portrayed as the major threat to ‘the rule of law’, which allows other people, as well as companies and organizations, to drop below the radar and devise and work on plans and schemes that threaten the country itself, and its future as a nation ruled by its laws.

Bob Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House” and the anonymous op-ed published in the NYT a day later serve as a good reminder of these dynamics. If you succeed in confirming people’s idea that Trump is such an unhinged idiot that an unelected cabal inside the White House is needed to save the nation from the president it elected, you’re well on your way.

Well on your way to separate the country from its own laws, that is. Not on your way to saving it. You can’t save America by suspending its Constitution just because that suits your particular political goals or points of view.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Ritual Burial of the US Constitution

September 13, 2018

The Ritual Burial of the US Constitution

Winslow Homer Salt Kettle, Bermuda 1899

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

YouTube Bans Media Supporting Syria’s Liberating Struggle

September 12, 2018

YouTube Bans Media Supporting Syria’s Liberating Struggle

Alphabet/Google-owned YouTube is a censoring machine like its parent company – waging war on speech and media freedom, in cahoots with dark US forces waging war on humanity.

Google transformed itself from a search engine to gatekeeper/censor, eliminating what it calls extremist content, its YouTube subsidiary operating the same way – wanting information conflicting with the official narrative eliminated, the hallmark of totalitarian rule.

The Internet is the last frontier of digital democracy, the only reliable independent space for real news, information and analysis – threatened by social media, Google, YouTube, ISPs and tech giants in cahoots with Washington.

Ahead of what may be the mother of all battles to liberate US-supported terrorists in Syria’s Idlib province, YouTube banned Damascus state-run and other pro-government channels – including the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), channels belonging to the country’s presidency and Defense Ministry, each closure accompanied by one of these shameful statements saying:

“This account has been terminated due to a legal complaint,” or

“This account has been terminated for a violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

A message on SANA’s takedown said: “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that. Try searching for something else.”

Banning Syrian media occurred on Saturday after Joint Chiefs chairman General Dunford said Trump was told about “military options” in response to a looming (false flag) “chemical weapons” attack – wrongfully blamed on Damascus.

Banning Syrian media on YouTube is all about silencing information conflicting with US anti-Syria propaganda – likely knowing a false flag CW attack is imminent.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said “irrefutable” evidence it obtained confirmed it’s coming. Syria’s UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari said the same thing during a Security Council session, presenting documents to SC members on what’s planned.

US-launched aggression in March 2011 appears set to escalate more than already, risking possible East-West confrontation.

Facebook Is An Intolerant Authoritarian Organization That Suppresses Free Speech

September 2, 2018

Facebook Is An Intolerant Authoritarian Organization That Suppresses Free Speech

Facebook, Twitter, Google are information monopolies that intentionally violate the US Constitution’s protected First Amendment right. These organizations are evil and they are destroying the public’s right to know. These organizations should be nationalized without compensation and put under the governance of known and committed defenders of the First Amendment. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are inconsistent with a free society. They are functionaries in Big Brother’s police state.

If an investigative journalist looked into these organizations, I believe many links to the CIA and deep state would be found.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/technology/inside-facebook-employees-political-bias.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/30/facebook-engineer-stunning-admission-we-tear-down-posters-welcoming-trump-supporters.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/31/facebook-censorship-mad-ben-nimmo-and-atlantic-council.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/29/social-media-giants-enter-nato-service.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/27/facebook-kills-inauthentic-foreign-news-accounts-us-propaganda-stays-alive.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/14/four-person-nato-funded-team-advises-facebook-flagging-propaganda.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/05/24/facebook-partners-with-hawkish-atlantic-council-nato-lobby-group-protect-democracy.html

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/04/30/how-facebook-etc.-suppress-key-truths.html

Social Media vs the Constitution

August 30, 2018

Social Media vs the Constitution

Salvador Dali The burning giraffe 1937
Dali: “The only difference between immortal Greece and our era is Sigmund Freud who discovered that the human body, which in Greek times was merely neoplatonical, is now filled with secret drawers only to be opened through psychoanalysis.”An ancient Latin saying goes: “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” (what is permissible for Jupiter, is not for an ox). It feels very much on topic when social media are concerned. And as the heat over their censorship is turned up, it may well be the decisive factor.

Reuters reiterates today that on May 23, Manhattan US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that Donald Trump’ Twitter account is a public forum and blocking Twitter users for their views violates their right to free speech under the First Amendment. The same, says the ruling, applies to other government officials’ accounts.

On August 10, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sent the Justice Department a list of 41 accounts that remained blocked. Since, at least 20 have been unblocked. Interestingly, the same Justice Department has stated that the ruling was “fundamentally misconceived” arguing Trump’s account “belongs to Donald Trump in his personal capacity and is subject to his personal control, not the control of the government.”

Potentially even more interesting is that “the Internet Association, a trade group that represents Twitter, Facebook Inc, Amazon.com, and Alphabet Inc, filed a brief in the case earlier this month that did not back Trump or the blocked users but urged the court to “limit its decision to the unique facts of this case so that its decision does not reach further than necessary or unintentionally disrupt the modern, innovative Internet.” “

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

August 24, 2018

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

Representatives from around a dozen US tech titans are holding a private Friday meeting at Twitter headquarters to coordinate their efforts ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, reports BuzzFeed News.

Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco… –BuzzFeed News

“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.

The meeting has a three-part agenda; each company will present their latest efforts to counter “information operations,” then there will be a discussion about problems each company faces; and finally, participants will discuss whether such coordination conclaves should become an annual affair.

Nine of the companies meeting Friday also met in May at Facebook to discuss similar issues along with two US government representatives; Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force created last November. The attendees say they were discouraged after the meeting after receiving little input from the G-men.

Red Dawn?

Social media giants – particularly Facebook and Twitter – faced harsh scrutiny from Democratic legislators following the 2016 US election for allowing “fake news” and Russia to rob Hillary Clinton of her turn to be president, or for somehow forcing her to ignore several key states while campaigning.

On the other hand, Facebook VP of advertising, Rob Goldman, admitted in February that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” and “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google Is Constantly Tracking, Even If You Turn Off Device ‘Location History’

August 14, 2018

Google Is Constantly Tracking, Even If You Turn Off Device ‘Location History’

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Google is actually tracking you even when you switch your device settings to Location History “off”.

As journalist Mark Ames comments in response to a new Associated Press story exposing Google’s ability to track people at all times even when they explicitly tell Google not to via iPhone and Android settings, “The Pentagon invented the internet to be the perfect global surveillance/counterinsurgency machine. Surveillance is baked into the internet’s DNA.”

In but the latest in a continuing saga of big tech tracking and surveillance stories which should serve to convince us all we are living in the beginning phases of a Minority Report style tracking and pansophical “pre-crime” system, it’s now confirmed that the world’s most powerful tech company and search tool will always find a way to keep your location data.

The Associated Press sought the help of Princeton researchers to prove that while Google is clear and upfront about giving App users the ability to turn off or “pause” Location History on their devices, there are other hidden means through which it retains the data.

According to the AP report:

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.

For example, Google stores a snapshot of where you are when you merely open its Maps app. Automatic daily weather updates on Android phones pinpoint roughly where you are.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Apple, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter Subvert the US Constitution, Free Speech, and American Liberty

August 8, 2018

Apple, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter Subvert the US Constitution, Free Speech, and American Liberty

The coordinated attack on widely watched Info Wars host Alex Jones by Apple, Facebook, Google/Youtube, and Spotify is all the proof that we need that the total failure to enforce America’s anti-trust laws has produced unaccountably powerful firms that are able to exercise far more censorship, not only in America but also abroad among Washington’s vassal states, than the Nazi Gestapo or Stalin’s NKVD were ever able to achieve.

Recently the progressive Rob Kall and I discussed on his show the implications of a trillion dollar company, which Apple now is. A day or two afterward, Rob Kall wrote an article on his website OpEdNews in which he made a case that a trillion dollar company had too much power for our continuation as a free people. I agree with him. Only 16 countries out of 195 countries in the world, a mere 0.08 percent, have a GDP equal to or larger than one trillion dollars.

Think about that. Apple is larger than the GNP of almost every country in the world. In other words, Apple has the power of a major government. Apple could be a member of the G-20. Apple could institute its own currency and be part of SDR drawing rights. Apple could participate as a backer of IMF and World Bank loans. Apple could have its own military and secret service.

No sooner than Rob Kall made his case than Apple proved it, along with the other tech monopolies: Google/Youtube, Spotify, and Facebook. https://www.rt.com/usa/435259-infowars-ban-twitter-reacts/

In the US almost everything has been monopolized—the digital world; 90% of the print and TV media owned by 5 or 6 companies; 90% of bank deposits in 5 large banks “too big to fail; Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes which have abolished independent community family stores; auto parts franchises that have abolished family businesses; restuarant franchises that have destroyed family restaurants; pharmacautical and chemical monopolies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Not Just Fangs: Manias and Echo Bubbles Abound

August 5, 2018

Not Just Fangs: Manias and Echo Bubbles Abound

It’s not just the FANGs investors should be worried about. A Tweet and an article explain.

✔

“With the FANG stocks faltering lately investors are starting to become concerned about their impact on the broader market. And there is certainly something to this.”https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/69386-it-s-more-than-just-fang-stocks-investors-should-be-worried-about?type=guest-contributors …

6:17 PM – Aug 3, 2018

It’s More Than Just FANG Stocks Investors Should Be Worried About

What investors really should be worried about then is the possibility that the reappraisal of the FANG stocks is representative of a much wider reappraisal that began back in February.

app.hedgeye.com

Echo Bubbles Abound

Pater Tenebrarum at Acting Man discusses Stock Market Manias of the Past vs the Echo Bubble.

The Big Picture

The diverging performance of major US stock market indexes which has been in place since the late January peak in DJIA and SPX has become even more extreme in recent months. In terms of duration and extent, it is one of the most pronounced such divergences in history. It also happens to be accompanied by weakening market internals, some of the most extreme sentiment and positioning readings ever seen and an ever more hostile monetary backdrop.

The above combination is consistent with a market close to a major peak – although one must always keep in mind that divergences can become even more pronounced – as was for instance demonstrated on occasion of the technology sector blow-off in late 1999 – 2000.

Along similar lines, extremes in valuations can persist for a very long time as well and reach previously unimaginable levels. The Nikkei of the late 1980s is a pertinent example for this. Incidentally, the current stock buyback craze is highly reminiscent of the 1980s Japanese financial engineering method known as keiretsu or zaibatsu, as it invites the very same rationalizations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Tech Giants Are Too Big, Too Powerful and Now Are Running Into Serious Trouble

August 4, 2018

U.S. Tech Giants Are Too Big, Too Powerful and Now Are Running Into Serious Trouble

Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny.

“I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people, and feel like transparency around what’s being done is in the public interest,” the source said, adding that they feared “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.”

From The Intercept article: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

Today’s post will explain why I think the U.S. tech giants are in the early stages of destroying themselves. It will focus on two of the biggest names in the space, Facebook and Google. Both face serious issues that are only now truly coming to a head and rooted in two primary factors, size and politics.

Facebook is further along in the process of being in serious trouble, so let’s start there. The social media company currently has 2.2 billion active users worldwide, which amounts to well over half of all human beings online at the moment (estimated at 3-4 billion). In other words, the company already has a tremendous share of global potential users. Since everybody already knows what Facebook is, you have to assume those who aren’t using it (like me), aren’t using it for a reason.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Economy is Cracking Up. Are You?

July 21, 2018

The Economy is Cracking Up. Are You?

Economic cracks big enough to drive a car industry into are opening up all over the globe. Trade gaps are opening up between major allies. Widening spreads between the dollar and other currencies are shredding emerging markets. As we start into summer, these cracks and several others described below have become big enough to get everyone’s attention, just as I said last year would become the situation.

I had, as readers here know, predicted the same for last summer but revised my timing to this summer after Trump was elected and the hope for tax cuts lit on fire one of the world’s greatest stock rallies. Those tax cuts are also creating another rapidly rising gap between government revenue and government spending.

That rally died, pretty much as I said it would, almost as soon as those tax cuts became law. In fact, it died sooner than I said it would because I thought the tax cuts would provide more economic levity than they have. The Dow and S&P 500, as of last Monday’s close, hit their longest correction period since 1984! That’s more than half of my lifetime since we saw a correction period last this long.

However, now that the trade war is officially engaged, FANGMAN stocks (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and NVIDIA) are taking the market up again. Whether they will undo my prediction that the second leg down in the stock market will occur in early summer … remains to be seen.

Even so, this past Monday, when nearly every expert fully expected Netflix would blaze the trail upward as markets refocused on “earnings”, Netflix shares got slammed (down 13% in one mammoth stomp) because it had almost 20% fewer new subscribers than it had projected in April.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

July 8, 2018

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State

There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

I invited Levine on my radio show (it will air in the coming weeks) and asked him what he thought was motivating the revolt over at Google. Were they objecting to a particular kind of weapon, in the manner that some people rather bizarrely object to drones only if they are automated but not if a human pushes the murder button? Were they actually clueless about their own company?

Levine’s answer requires investigation but certainly makes an interesting hypothesis. He said that all during the Obama years, the tech press and community aired no concerns whatsoever about militarism, whereas since the arrival of Trump such talk is to be heard and read. Levine maintains that Google employees do not object to militarism, they object to Trumpian militarism.

I had hoped for and wrongly predicted this phenomenon in the general public the moment Trump gained the throne. Is it possible that it’s finally begun, but begun in Silicon Valley?

Levine’s book describes Google and other internet corporations as major military and spy contractors from the beginning. Google partnered with Lockheed Martin on parts of the war on Iraq and is a major partner of the military, the CIA, the NSA, etc. Surveillance Valley goes back to the post-WWII origins of today’s military madness. Military experiments as preparation for war, “field tested” in Vietnam, and supported by President Kennedy as appropriately hi-tech and modern, were actually war and developed into one of the worst wars ever seen. Vietnam was mass-surveilled — or the attempt was made and foiled with bags of urine and other low-tech tricks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

July 4, 2018

Amazon’s Fusion With the State Shows Neoliberalism’s Drift to Neo-Fascism

In our next installments, we will continue exploring the rise of Surveillance Capitalism and the implications of Amazon-fueled spying technology, both in the workplace and in U.S. city streets.

“Capitalism is a system that seeks to transgress all boundaries in its production and sale of commodities, commodifying everything in existence, which today, in the age of monopoly-finance capital and surveillance capitalism, means intruding into every aspect of existence,” John Bellamy Foster told MPN.

SEATTLE – This year may go down in history as a turning-point when the world finally woke up to the dark side of the ubiquitous presence of popular Silicon Valley companies in our daily lives. One can only hope so, at least.

From Amazon to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and PayPal – among others – revelations poured out confirming the ongoing abuse of user data by monopolistic corporations, as well as their growing role as vendors of surveillance technology to the U.S. police state, military, and migrant detention agencies.

In March, the lid was blown off of the violation of user data on Facebook, with Cambridge Analytica mining user information for the purpose of providing millions of detailed “psychological profiles” to the Trump campaign, among others. Scarcely two weeks later, the Google campus was in an uproar over the development of its “Project Maven,” which was building an AI-fueled platform to vastly upgrade the automatic targeting abilities of the U.S. military’s global drone fleet. Faced with public outrage and internal dissent, the companypulled out of bidding to renew its Pentagon contract, which ends next year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google and Facebook Are Quietly Fighting California’s Privacy Rights Initiative, Emails Reveal

June 27, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the annual F8 summit at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on May 1, 2018. - Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced the world's largest social network will soon include a new dating feature -- while vowing to make privacy protection its top priority in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)

GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ARE QUIETLY FIGHTING CALIFORNIA’S PRIVACY RIGHTS INITIATIVE, EMAILS REVEAL

LOBBYISTS FOR THE largest technology and telecommunications firms have only three days to prevent the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, a ballot initiative that would usher in the strongest consumer privacy standards in the country, from going before state voters this November.

The initiative allows consumers to opt out of the sale and collection of their personal data, and vastly expands the definition of personal information to include geolocation, biometrics, and browsing history. The initiative also allows consumers to pursue legal action for violations of the law.

The idea that Californians might gain sweeping new privacy rights has spooked Silicon Valley, internet service providers, and other industries that increasingly rely on data collection, leading to a lobbying push to defeat the initiative before it gains traction. Their best hope may be to convince the sponsors of the initiative, including San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart, to pull the proposal in exchange for compromise privacy legislation, AB 375, which would achieve some of the same goals of the initiative. Lawmakers behind the legislation, led by state Assembly Member Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park, and state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, have promised to swiftly pass their bill this week if sponsors withdraw the CCPA.

Emails obtained by The Intercept reveal that tech giants are fighting behind the scenes to water down the privacy legislation, hoping to prevent an expensive and potentially losing ballot fight this year.

Andrea Deveau, a lobbyist for TechNet, a trade group for Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, has continually updated an ad-hoc business lobbying coalition formed to defeat the CCPA. In an update sent on Sunday evening, Deveau provided a “compilation of feedback re: the most problematic aspects of AB 375.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Morgan Stanley: The Tech Bubble “Can Burst At Any Moment, Without Warning”

June 11, 2018

Morgan Stanley: The Tech Bubble “Can Burst At Any Moment, Without Warning”

Earlier this week, Goldman Sachs, whose market-timing calls leave much to be desired, declared that tech stocks are “not a bubble”, and went so far as to predict that the secular increase in tech names could continue for decades, spawning vivid memories of Goldman’s May 2008 prediction of $200 oil just months before the start of the second great depression, and before oil crashed more than $100/barrel, wiping out a generation of muppets.

However, it is now safe to say that with the exception of some truly naive individuals, virtually nobody believes Goldman any more, and thus Goldman’s “all clear” may be just the top-tick so many had been waiting for.

One skeptic is Bank of America’s Michael Hartnett who back in March, just as the tech sector suffered its first big rout of 2018, had the gall to tell the truth and observe that the “e-Commerce” sector, which consists of AMZN, NFLX, GOOG, TWTR, EBAY, FB, was now up 617% since the financial crisis, making it the 3rd largest bubble of the past 40 years, and at this rate – assuming no major drop in the 6 constituent stocks – was set to become the largest bubble of all time over the next few months.

Hartnett followed up this this week by noting that while so far Tech stocks have seen record inflows as they have emerged as the “defensive growth” sector of the late market cycle…

… the “big risk” is “as in 1998, that credit tremors spread and investors forced to deleverage from risk assets, raise cash”, while the “biggest risk” is a “quick, deep tech selloff. Or, as Bloomberg’s Andrew Cinko put it on Friday it, “if the times get tough and investors must delever they will sell “what they own,” and that “those who are rotating to financials and banks this week and away from tech may simply be trading the frying pan for the fire.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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