Society's ChildS


NPC

Protesters deface pictures of fallen agents after occupying Border Patrol museum

U.S. Border Patrol Museum
The U.S. Border Patrol Museum was vandalized by dozens of protesters
Dozens of demonstrators occupied and vandalized a privately owned U.S. Border Patrol museum near El Paso, Texas, over the weekend, according to the site's top official.

Museum director David Ham told the Washington Examiner his staff and guests worried for their safety Saturday when a group of about 50 rowdy protesters entered the facility, defaced property, and refused to leave the grounds.

"Say it loud, say it clear, Border Patrol kills!" group members standing inside and outside the facility yelled.

USA

11-year-old Florida boy ARRESTED for not standing during pledge of allegiance ritual at school

Dhakira Talbot Lawton Chiles Middle Academy
An 11-year-old Polk County student refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and after explaining his reasons, he was kicked out of class and eventually arrested for being disruptive and disobeying commands to calm down and leave the classroom.

He was also suspended for three days.

The incident happened at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy in Lakeland on February 4. The sixth grader was arrested and taken to a juvenile detention center, charged with disrupting a school function and resisting arrest without violence.

NPC

Multi-culti programming? Swedish state-owned broadcaster airs documentary claiming 'first Swedes' were black Africans

dark skinned black swede documentary
© CC0
An ad for an upcoming documentary about 'The First Swedes,' who were dark-skinned and blue eyed, has prompted fear and denial on Twitter.

The series will start to air on Swedish television this Wednesday, and when channel SVT began promoting it last week, some people reacted on social media with disbelief and anger.

The documentary will look at DNA technology which has revealed more about how Sweden was populated after the Ice Age and detailing how the first pioneers in the country were dark-skinned with blue eyes and came from the south.

Arrow Down

No remorse? Spanish media still nostalgic over volunteers who fought for Hitler

Blue Division soldiers
© Wikipedia / Vicente MartinFILE PHOTO. The Blue Division soldiers.
A Spanish newspaper has published an article lauding the "heroism" of volunteers who fought for Hitler against the Soviet Union. The piece highlights only the hardships they faced - and doesn't bother to tell the whole story.

The article was published by one of the country's major newspapers - the ABC - early in February. It came just ahead of the anniversary of Spain's main WWII battle. No, Spain did not partake in it - but its volunteers did.

The Blue Division - named after blue shirts of Francisco Franco's Falangist movement - was officially known as the 250th Infantry Division of Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht. It was created in 1941 as a volunteer unit, to show Spain's devotion to Hitler's cause without openly drawing the country into the war.

Comment: Those who don't remember history...


Attention

YouTube under fire (again) for recommending videos of kids with inappropriate comments

YouTube icon
© Bryce Durbin
More than a year on from a child safety content moderation scandal on YouTube and it takes just a few clicks for the platform's recommendation algorithms to redirect a search for "bikini haul" videos of adult women towards clips of scantily clad minors engaged in body contorting gymnastics or taking an ice bath or ice lolly sucking "challenge."

A YouTube creator called Matt Watson flagged the issue in a critical Reddit post, saying he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and timestamps below the fold, denouncing the company for failing to prevent what he describes as a "soft-core pedophilia ring" from operating in plain sight on its platform.

He has also posted a YouTube video demonstrating how the platform's recommendation algorithm pushes users into what he dubs a pedophilia "wormhole," accusing the company of facilitating and monetizing the sexual exploitation of children.

We were easily able to replicate the YouTube algorithm's behavior that Watson describes in a history-cleared private browser session which, after clicking on two videos of adult women in bikinis, suggested we watch a video called "sweet sixteen pool party."

Clicking on that led YouTube's side-bar to serve up multiple videos of prepubescent girls in its "up next" section where the algorithm tees-up related content to encourage users to keep clicking.

Comment: Meanwhile YouTube ramps up its efforts to censor legitimate views that counter their ideology, they are happy to continue to allow what is clear exploitation of children and promotion of pedophilia. See also:


Tornado2

Killer meth is sweeping through America from Mexico - and ruining lives

Bart Strickler
© Shannon VendittiBart Strickler says he used meth to treat the symptoms of mental illness because it was cheap and easy to get.
Bart Strickler drank his first beer at 9, smoked his first joint at 10. By the time he was in middle school he'd already done acid, cocaine, LSD, Quaaludes and anything else he could get his hands on.

"I shouldn't be here," he says numbly. He takes a deep breath as the past flutters across his face.

"I shouldn't be here."

The 52-year-old Strickler sits at the end of a long table in a rehab center on Main Avenue, backlit by a single window.

His arms are covered with "jail tats" from his 15 years in federal prison on aggravated assault and weapons charges. "I am trying to beat meth before meth beats me."

He fiddles with a scar on his left wrist: "That was from the second time I tried to kill myself. The first time I had a shotgun, cocked and in my mouth and getting the nerve to pull the trigger when my damn neighbors came to the house."

Comment: See also:


Laptop

Digital death - The weird rise of cyber funerals

Cyber Funerals
© Andrea Donetti /EyeEm/WIRED
Your online data is a bit like single-use plastic: there's tonnes of the stuff and it's very hard to get rid of. When you die, your physical body will slowly decay, or be sent to a crematorium or dissolved in a tank filled with potassium hydroxide. But that pesky digital corpse? That's going to be around for a while, like a data soul stuck in online purgatory, never to receive salvation. Unless, of course, you set it free.

All you need to do is organise a cyber funeral. Thanks to recent changes to privacy legislation in Europe and South Korea aimed at protecting the living, we now have more power than ever over our personal information - even from beyond the grave. While this may have felt like a gimmick in the past, cyber funerals - where our personal data is removed from the web posthumously - are slowly becoming a viable option.

But why might you want to book yourself in for an appointment with an online undertaker? While friends, family - or even a legal team - might tidy up someone's offline affairs, a digital legacy is still left to chance. An online funeral can help expunge articles or blogposts that mention spent convictions or ensure social media accounts and other online ephemera are locked down and left in good order. Simply put, when you die in the real world, it's only right and proper that you also die on Facebook. And Instagram. And Google.

Digital undertaking is the act of erasing and tidying up your public data after you die. It's a relatively new idea, but one that's already taking off in South Korea, according to the Korean Employment Information Service. Think of it as a ghoulish version of the European Union's right to be forgotten legislation.

For most digital undertakers, the tricky task is to contact the social media companies, search engines or even media companies who publish personal information, and request for it to be deleted when their client dies. If that doesn't work, then companies - be they in South Korea, the USA or UK - can bury search engine results by flooding Google with new, conflicting data about the deceased.

Pirates

Hundreds of Daesh terrorists surrounded by SDF in last remaining holdout, refuse to surrender

Daesh
© VOA
On Saturday, head of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces' (SDF) Media Centre Mustafa Bali told Sputnik that the remaining militants from the Daesh terrorist group were entrenched in a small area of Baghouz, the last village in Syria to be held by the notorious group.

Hundreds of Daesh terrorists are refusing to surrender in the Syrian village of Baghouz, where they are making their last stand, despite being surrounded by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and facing inevitable defeat, The Hill reported on Monday.

The SDF's top commander commented on the situation, saying that Baghouz is one of the few remaining areas that are controlled by Daesh.

Snakes in Suits

Hypocrisy in disguise: Postmodern philosophy is a debating strategy

Michel Foucault
Postmodernist Michel Foucault
In a recent article, Matt McManus drew a valuable distinction between postmodern culture and postmodern philosophy. Postmodern culture, he argued, was first theorized by neo-Marxists to refer to what they saw as a new phase of capitalism, characterized by heightened skepticism and a preoccupation with subjectivity. However, one need not adopt Marxist social theory in order to agree with the basic point that the social conditions which characterize twenty-first century liberal democracies make it difficult to take our beliefs for granted. The unprecedented degree of cultural and religious pluralism on offer in developed nations today undoubtedly has an impact on what we can take to be certain.

Charles Taylor in his masterpiece A Secular Age called this process "fragilization," the basic idea of which is that it is more difficult to believe in something wholeheartedly when that belief is not shared by the people one is surrounded by (indeed, we might call this sociology of knowledge 101). So, there is a real sense in which we do in fact live in a post- (or what I would prefer to call "late") modern culture, whereby our awareness of the existence of "other options"-made especially acute as a result of recent digital technologies-fragilizes our beliefs, leaving us without firm epistemic anchors. This illuminates a significant but seldom acknowledged reason why postmodern philosophy finds traction today.

Pirates

Terror group's image of downtown Los Angeles building raises security concerns

Terror image/tower
© Unknown/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesTerror group image • AON Center tower
A terrorist group posted a disturbing image showing an explosion at a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper.

The photoshopped image shows an explosion at the top of the AON tower in downtown Los Angeles. In the foreground there's a man in a uniform with his face hidden and holding an ISIS flag.

The building is on Wilshire Boulevard in the city's financial district. It is the third largest building in Los Angeles.

"You have to take this very seriously because the fact is that skyscrapers here in Los Angeles have been a target by terrorist organizations," said Steve Gomez, a terrorism and security expert.