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“God Help Us” – British Army Readied In Case Of Hard Brexit

July 30, 2018

“God Help Us” – British Army Readied In Case Of Hard Brexit

Just as was extremely evident prior to the actual vote in 2016, scaremongering around Brexit (deal or no deal) is escalating among the cognoscenti or desperate Remain ‘told you so’-ers.

Britain’s Sunday Times reports that UK ministers have drawn up plans to send in the army to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages if Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

Blueprints for the armed forces to assist the civilian authorities, usually used only in civil emergencies, have been dusted down as part of the “no deal” planning, with helicopters and army trucks used to ferry supplies to vulnerable people outside the southeast who were struggling to obtain the medicines they needed.

However, as ominous as this sounds, The Sunday Times admits – a number of paragraphs into their “Army on standby for no-deal Brexit emergency” story – that a source inside the Ministry of Defense said they have not yet received “a formal request” to assist the civilian authorities.

And while desperate not to have this positioned as the work of “Project Fear’, pro-EU opposition MP David Lammy took aim at the news on Twitter saying: “God, help us. This is not coming from Remainers. This is not project fear. Pro-Brexit Ministers are drawing up blueprints for the army to deliver food, fuel and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal,” adding his own touch of hysteria… “We have a duty to prevent this self-immolation.”

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God, help us. This is not coming from Remainers. This is not project fear. Pro-Brexit Ministers are drawing up blueprints for the army to deliver food, fuel and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal. We have a duty to prevent this self-immolation.https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/army-on-standby-for-no-deal-brexit-emergency-dz3359lrf …

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

How Silicon Valley’s Dirty Tricks Helped Stall Broadband Privacy in California

October 25, 2017

How Silicon Valley’s Dirty Tricks Helped Stall Broadband Privacy in California

Tech, including Facebook and Google, lent their support to a host of misleading scare tactics.

Wolf here: After the US Congress repealed restrictions earlier this year, your broadband provider (ISPs such as Comcast, Verizon, or AT&T) can monetize your private data. ISPs know practically everything you do on the internet, and they know who you are and have your credit data from credit bureaus such as Equifax. California tried to pass legislation that would have reinstated some of those protections. So this is not just about a legislative defeat of internet privacy in California, but about how lobbyists for the tech industry in general operate.

As this succeeded in California — via falsehoods and national security scaremongering — the campaign is now heading to other state legislatures because the industry wants to monetize all your data in a world where you and your data are the product.

By Ernesto Falcon, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Across the country, state lawmakers are fighting to restore the Internet privacy rights of their constituents that Congress and the President misguidedly repealed earlier this year. The facts and public opinion are on their side, but the recent battle to pass California’s broadband privacy bill, A.B. 375, suggests that they will face a massive misinformation campaign launched by the telecom lobby and, sadly, joined by major tech companies.

The tech industry lent their support to a host of misleading scare tactics.

Big Telco’s opposition was hardly surprising. It was, after all, their lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. that repealed the privacy obligations they had to their customers. But it’s disappointing that after mostly staying out of the debate, Google and Facebook joined in opposing the restoration of broadband privacy for Californians despite the bill doing nothing about their core business models (the bill was explicitly about restoring ISP privacy rules).

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

Mendacity, Duplicity and Scaremongering

October 9, 2017

Mendacity, Duplicity and Scaremongering

In this post I depart somewhat from our usual format to cover three stories from last week that have a common theme of underlying chaos in and manipulation of energy policy. I begin with veteran SNP politician Jim Sillars (now aged 80) who in a letter to the Scottish Daily Mail launched a scathing attack on the SNP government’s ban on fracking.

“This brings me to the second concern: the consequences of the fracking ban. We have some 900,000 Scots living in fuel poverty, which means they freeze at home in winter. That means children in deprived areas being cold as well as hungry.”

I follow with excerpts from the Tory Party conference and with multinational utilities and foreign state-owned companies plastering the London underground with propaganda.

This jpeg copy of the letter from Jim Sillars, complete with several typos, landed in my mail box a couple of days ago. I cannot verify its authenticity but it came from a trusted source and this press reader link refers extensively to it.

The reason this caught my eye is that it makes several hard-hitting points that I happen to agree with:

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

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