Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 05 Nov 2021
The World for People who Think

Society's Child
Map

Bad Guys

Politicization: Facebook just suspended company hired by Trump election campaign

CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix
© Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit - Day 1 at Grand Hyatt New York on September 19, 2016 in New York City.
Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica, a company many credited for helping the Trump campaign win the presidential election, from their social media platform Friday.

Here's why they did it

According to their statement, Facebook claimed that the company violated their policies by using data of their users from a third party.

Dollar Gold

Congressman accidentally admits Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies threaten government control over you

bitcoin hurts government control congressman sherman
On Wednesday, the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities, and Investment (Committee on Financial Services) held a hearing they called "Examining the Cryptocurrencies and ICO Markets." During this ostensible "examination," banker-owned politicians used their time to fabricate and perpetuate outright lies and fear about cryptocurrencies. At one point in the discussion, however, one banker shill accidentally admitted the real reason government doesn't like cryptocurrencies and the blockchain-it threatens their control over you.

Wednesday's hearing marked the first time Congress has attempted to tackle the regulatory issues stemming from initial coin offerings (ICOs). Georgetown University law professor Dr. Chris Brummer, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati partner Robert Rosenblum, and Coinbase's chief legal and risk officer Mike Lempres were featured as witnesses to the hearing.

Comment: Cryptocurrencies are still very new and certainly do have many challenges, like any new technology or paradigm, however the very things congressman Sherman accuses cryptocurrencies of doing have already been done by big banks and various other criminal institutions for decades, if not longer. Cryptocurrencies also create many new possibilities and don't appear to be going away anytime soon. For more information:


Vader

Drumming up war on the Potomac

The amateur psychologist in me suspects that the more the USA heaps Russia with censorious opprobrium and punishments, the closer this floundering polity actually is to completely losing its shit. Friday morning's front-page headline in The New York Times appears to have been written by Pee Wee Herman:
trump headline russia
© The New York Times
I can just hear Vlad Putin blowing a raspberry out of the Kremlin: "Nyah, nyah, nyah... I know you are, but what am I...?" We're also informed today by that august journal that U.S. Accuses Russia in Cyberattacks on Power Plants. (Oh, wait a second, they changed the headline at 8:02 to Russia Wormed Its Way Into Access at Power Plants, U.S. Says.) Hmmmm... well, the amateur detective in me suspects that
A) this is exactly the kind of bullshit that US intel excels at making up; plus
B) the public was actually told last year that our intel has the ability to place any kind of cyber-footprint and time-stamp it wants on digital information, so that
C) this assertion can be neither proved nor disproved.
The amateur international relations analyst in me sees in these shenanigans a desperate search for a casus belli, an excuse to go to war. But that only brings me back to amateur psychology: the US apparently wants to commit suicide. Wouldn't war be a great idea a week after Russia announced it had new hypersonic missiles that the US can't defend itself against? Hmmmm. Maybe the Russians made that shit up. And maybe they didn't. Perhaps we'd like to test that, say, by bombing a bunch of Russian military personnel in Syria, just to see what happens.

Bizarro Earth

Madrid rocked by violent protests over death of Senegalese migrant 'found by police' (VIDEOS)

immigrant riots madrid
© Olmo Calvo/Agence France Presse
Lavapiés is home to a large part of the city's migrant population.
Protesters set a bank office on fire as they clashed with riot police in downtown Madrid following the death of an African street vendor. Reports claimed the deceased collapsed after a police pursuit, which law enforcement denies.

A group of some 50 people, mostly immigrants and anti-racism activists, flooded the Lavapies neighborhood, where the street vendor had been living. Mmame Mbage, 35, had been in Spain for 12 years before the alleged encounter with police that resulted in his death.

Comment: Less than one week after protests in Italy: Migrants erupt in protest after Italian kills street vendor in Florence


Propaganda

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker, and the Art of the Big Russiagate Lie

David Remnick's New Yorker, where Masha Gessen is always welcome, is Exhibit A in the Jewish media's relentless lying about and demonizing of Russia, Putin, and Russiagate.

David Remnick's New Yorker, where Masha Gessen is always welcome, is Exhibit A in the Jewish media's relentless lying about and demonizing of Russia, Putin, and Russiagate.
The latest salvo in the Russiagate saga is a 15,000 word New Yorker article entitled "Christopher Steele the man behind the Trump dossier: how the ex-spy tried to warn the world about Trump's ties to Russia" by veteran journalist Jane Mayer. The premise of the piece is clear from the tediously long title, namely that the Steele dossier, which implicated Donald Trump and his associates in a number of high crimes and misdemeanors, is basically accurate in exposing an existential threat posed to our nation by Russia. How does it come to that conclusion? By citing sources that it does not identify whose credibility is alleged to be unimpeachable as well as by including testimony from Steele friends and supporters.

In other words, the Mayer piece is an elaboration of the same "trust me" narrative that has driven the hounding of Russia and Trump from day one. Inevitably, the Trump haters both from the left and the right have jumped on the Mayer piece as confirmation of their own presumptions regarding what has allegedly occurred, when, in reality, Trump might just be more right than wrong when he claims that he has been the victim of a conspiracy by the Establishment to discredit and remove him.

Comment: See Also: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Olympic Politics, Aleppo 2.0, and Russiagate to Nowhere


Attention

Migrants erupt in protest after Italian kills street vendor in Florence

migrant protest florence italy
© Twitter/sol2refugees
African immigrants marched chanting "no more racism" after an Italian man shot dead a Senegalese street vendor earlier in the day.
African immigrants and Italians protested in Florence for a second day on Tuesday, chanting "no more racism" and criticizing the anti-immigrant League party for stoking racial tensions after an Italian man shot dead a Senegalese street vendor.

Police said Roberto Pirrone on Monday fired six pistol shots at close range, killing Idy Dienec as he sold leather bags, umbrellas and trinkets on a bridge in the Tuscan city, one of Italy's most popular tourist destinations.

Later, dozens of immigrants marched through the historic center of Florence, knocking over trash bins, motor scooters and large flower pots.

On Tuesday, some 500 African immigrants and Italians staged another protest on the bridge where the shooting took place.

Black Magic

Britain's lunatic, bloodthirsty Cold War theatrics

Mattis Gavin Williamson
© US DoD/Sgt. Jette Carr
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis poses for a photo with the British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson in London, Nov. 10, 2017.
Britain has now been joined by the United States, France and Germany in blaming Russia for an alleged murder plot on British soil. No verifiable evidence has been provided by the British authorities to support their shrill claim of Russian violation.

It is as insane as it is pathetic, as it is perfidious. A modern-day parody of William Shakespeare's admonition "thou protest too much".

In the unprecedented joint statement issued Thursday by the four NATO powers, it was stated, "The United Kingdom thoroughly briefed [sic] its allies that it was highly likely Russia was responsible for the attack".

The "attack" refers to an apparent poisoning assault on a former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal (66), and his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia, in the English town of Salisbury on March 4. How fitting a medieval town should feature in a medieval-like inquisition.

Yoda

Craig Murray's Skripal analysis: On Not Being Refuted

Theresa May charicature
Several million people have now read my articles on the lack of evidence of Russian government guilt for the Salisbury attack. That's over 300,000 unique visitors on this little blog alone so far, and it has been repeated on hundreds of sites all over the internet. My own tweets on the subject have been retweeted over 12,500 times and received 8 million impressions. I know that journalists from every mainstream media outlet you can mention have seen the material, because of numerous tweets from them none of which address any of the facts, but instead call me a "Conspiracy nutter" or variants of that, some very rude.

Yet what I wrote has not been refuted. It would be very easy to refute were it not true. The government would just have to say "Porton Down have stated that they have definitely identified the nerve agent as made in Russia". They have not said that. Most extraordinarily, not one mainstream media "journalist" has asked a minister the question: "You keep using this phrase the nerve agent is "of a type developed by Russia". Are you able to confirm it was actually made in Russia?" .

Comment: The lunacy continues:


Handcuffs

Turning schools into prisons: More cops is NOT a solution to shootings, it's a deathblow to liberty

School bus and prison bus
Just what we don't need: more gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.

Microcosms of the police state, America's public schools already contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the "outside."

Now the Trump Administration wants to double down on these totalitarian echo chambers.

The Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has announced that it will provide funding for schools that want to hire more resource officers. The White House has also hinted that it may repeal "Rethink School Discipline" policies, heralding a return to zero tolerance policies that treat children like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

As for President Trump, he wants to "harden" the schools.

What exactly does hardening the schools entail?

Bulb

Power rationing hits Venezuela as drought causes severe outages

dinner by candlelight
© REUTERS/Carlos Eduardo Ramirez
Juana Guerrero uses a candle to illuminate the table while she dines during a blackout in San Cristobal.
Venezuela imposed electricity rationing this week in six western states, as the crisis-hit country's creaky power grid suffered from a drought that has reduced water levels in key reservoirs needed to run hydroelectric power generators.

The four-hour formal outages began on Thursday. But many residents scoffed at the announcement, wryly noting that they have been suffering far more extended blackouts during the last week.

"We have spent 14 hours without electricity today. And yesterday electricity came and went: for six hours we had no power," said Ligthia Marrero, 50, in the western state of San Cristobal, noting that her fridge had been damaged by the frequent interruptions.

Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela's power supply for years. Now, the situation has been exacerbated by dwindling rains.