Society's ChildS


Camcorder

Patent pending: Amazon's 'helpful' delivery drone surveillance service 'totally doesn't spy on your neighbors'

Amazon Drone
© Reuters/Brendan McDermid
Amazon has filed a patent for delivery drones that also surveil customers - for their own good, it claims, suggesting that a drone will inform people if there's a fire or damage on their property but won't snoop around.

Users who consent to the surveillance get a helpful eye in the sky to spot if they've left the garage door open, or if someone's broken their window, or if burglars are walking off with all their newly delivered Amazon goodies (the latter isn't mentioned in the patent filing, but would presumably fall within its purview). Users could even subscribe to the surveillance service as a high-tech alarm system, hiring their own airborne Big Brother to do daily perimeter sweeps while they're on vacation, or check up on the kids while they're at work.

Amazon claims its drones can be stopped from spying on non-consenting neighbors through geo-fencing, noting that "any image or data the drone captures outside the geo-fence would be obscured or removed," but it stops short of explaining the mechanics of that removal. It doesn't explain whether the obscuring would be reversible, or whether the original unobscured images - like the millions of hours of Alexa background recording supposedly never archived but actually heard by thousands of humans - are actually saved somewhere, however temporarily, where they can be examined by a human or AI.

Comment: Common responsibilities have become an industry as consumers are increasingly programmed to rely on mechanical services instead of their own savvy, awareness and discipline. Even more concerning, the security and privacy assurances of these services are glib promises at best.

See also:


Cult

Alaskan government meeting opens with 'Hail Satan' by Satanic Temple member.

Following an Alaska Supreme Court ruling last year upholding the right of anyone to offer the invocation at government meetings, a Satanic Temple member opened a regional Kenai Peninsula Borough this week by declaring "Hail Satan."
Satan
© AP Photo/ The Satanic Temple

Comment: And this isn't the first time this has happened.

So satanic, so normal: Satanist gives opening prayer at Colorado city council


Sheriff

ICE raids targeting migrant families set to start Sunday in major U.S. cities

ice illegal immigrant raids
© John Moore/Getty ImagesThe U.S. government is planning a round of raids to beginning June 22, 2019.
President Trump has directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct a mass roundup of migrant families that have received deportation orders, an operation that is likely to begin with predawn raids in major U.S. cities on Sunday, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans.

The "family op," as it is referred to at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, is slated to target up to 2,000 families in as many as 10 U.S. cities, including Houston, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and other major immigration destinations, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the law enforcement operation.

Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan has been urging ICE, an agency within his department, to conduct a narrower, more targeted operation that would seek to detain a group of about 150 families that were provided with attorneys but dropped out of the legal process and absconded.

Comment: The Daily Mail adds:
Trump also praised Mexico for action he said it has taken to stem the flow of immigrants to the United States.

Former officials and immigration experts said it would be unlikely for immigration authorities to move quickly to deport 'millions' of people, but Trump's tweet on Monday saying as much put cities around the country on high alert.

Trump has made illegal immigration a centerpiece of his administration and is likely to highlight it in his campaign for the 2020 election, but so far he has not brought arrests and deportations up to levels seen in President Barack Obama's first term as resources are stretched by an influx of migrants at the Mexico border.

Trump is fighting the battle on two fronts, trying to stop migrants from coming in the first place and deporting those who have been released into the United States.

On Friday officials said that the United States is more than doubling the number of asylum seekers it returns to Mexico in one city and adding groups like Cubans as it rapidly expands a policy to make migrants wait out claims south of the border, Mexican and U.S. officials said.

The policy, known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), is being applied to all Spanish-speaking asylum seekers, other than Mexicans, at three U.S.-Mexico border crossings, said a U.S. government official familiar with the program, who asked not to be named.

The Trump administration plans to expand the program, which faces court challenges, across the border to act as a deterrent to frivolous asylum claims during a surge in Central American migrant families.

A U.S. Department of Homeland Security official said the administration was considering building temporary immigration courts along the border to process MPP returnees.

The MPP expansion follows Mexico's agreement earlier this month to receive thousands more migrants under the program. As of June 19, according to Mexican officials, 13,987 people had been returned to Mexico under MPP.

'They're going to start next week, and with people coming to our country, and they come in illegally - they have to go out,' Trump said earlier this week

In its first months, the policy primarily applied to Central American migrants, but as of Monday the United States began applying it to Spanish speakers more broadly, including Cubans, said Rogelio Pinal, a municipal official in Juarez, Mexico.

Cubans, a political force in U.S. election swing state Florida, have a history of being welcomed in the United States.

Pinal said his office was told returns from El Paso to Juarez would increase to 500 per day from around 200.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the government was 'actively pursuing expansion plans across the board to include all individuals, unless specifically exempted,' in MPP returns.

The U.S. official said MPP would be expanded to cities in Arizona and south Texas, which could include Brownsville. A Mexican official confirmed new locations would include Brownsville.

Migrant advocates have raised concerns that asylum seekers have little access to legal counsel and are vulnerable in Mexican border cities, which have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Ruben Garcia, who runs El Paso's largest migrant shelter, said there had been a sharp fall in the number of migrants released into the United States by U.S. authorities.

Garcia said reduced migration during summer heat played a role, but tighter immigration enforcement in Mexico and the MPP program were driving forces in the drop to around 125 releases per day from up to 700 three weeks ago.



Headphones

El Pais publishes tape transcripts of Spaniards' attempt to extort Julian Assange: "This material is worth €3m"

assange leaving courtroom UK
© Jack Taylor/Getty ImagesJulian Assange leaves Southwark Crown Court in a security van after being sentenced on May 1, 2019 in London.
EL PAÍS has accessed recordings that police made of the group who tried to sell the WikiLeaks founder sensitive personal material from his stay at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London

"Do you work for free? This material is worth €3 million. We have to put food on our tables too, you know."

Thanks to assistance from the police, there is recorded evidence of a meeting at Madrid's Reina Victoria Hotel in which a Spanish reporter named José Martín Santos and two computer experts attempted to sell WikiLeaks sensitive material in connection with an alleged case of spying against Julian Assange while he was living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Comment:


Target

Republic of Georgia: Gay Pride weaponized by the CIA

Flags Georgia/Pride
© Unknown
Who said religion and politics don't mix? Religion is one of the failsafe of any politician - lie and cheat and abuse people, and if you say that your actions are motivated by religion, everything will be forgiven. Trump was even sent to us to save Israel!

Religious groups themselves are happy to indulge the worst kinds of politicians, as long as they feel it will give them a bigger platform to do as they want. How Evangelicals can support a man like Trump, with his track record of doing everything their Bibles tell them not to, is one of the great ironies of the US political system. But they do it because they feel his sort of outsider politics gives them a bigger platform to spread their message from - they are still "voices crying in the wilderness" (John 1:23), but when that wilderness is the White House, they might be heard.

All of which makes it so much sadder that the US is so determined to fight religion as a matter of policy. The same Bible-thumpers who claim moral superiority by displaying their faith in public (Matthew 6:5) are not prepared to allow religion to inform the policies of other nations.

Whenever faith rears its head to the US and its allies, this has to be a bad thing, to be cut off it its root. We are told that Islam equals terrorism; despite the fact no Quranic scholar accepts that. Judaism equals Zionism, trying to undermine Christianity, while Christianity itself is a negative force trying to undermine secular values, as if there can be any secular values without religious ones to form a blueprint.

Health

Surgeon wants to overturn N. Carolina's 'certificate of need' law and offer affordable MRIs

Dr. Gajendra Singh
© Institute of JusticeDr. Gajendra Singh
Dr. Gajendra Singh walked out of his local hospital's outpatient department last year, having been told an ultrasound for some vague abdominal pain he was feeling would cost $1,200 or so, and decided enough was enough. If he was balking at the price of a routine medical scan, what must people who weren't well-paid medical professionals be thinking?

The India-born surgeon decided he would open his own imaging center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and charge a lot less. Singh launched his business in August and decided to post his prices, as low as $500 for an MRI, on a banner outside the office building and on his website.

There was just one barrier to fully realizing his vision: a North Carolina law that he and his lawyers argue essentially gives hospitals a monopoly over MRI scans and other services.

Singh ran into the state's "certificate of need" law, which prohibited him from buying a permanent MRI machine, which meant his office couldn't always offer patients one of the most important imaging services in medicine. He has resorted to renting a mobile MRI machine a couple of days a week. But it will cost him a lot more over time than a permanent machine would, and five days a week, his office can't perform MRIs.

Comment:




Whistle

Gender politics should never be espoused in the classroom

sad student lassroom
Back in September of 2016, I released three videos, expressing my concern about Bill C-16, which was then under consideration by the federal government, following the passage of similar legislation in a number of provinces. C-16 purported to merely add "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. However, it was embedded in a web of policy, much of it created by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which indicated that the bill comprised the tip of a very large iceberg. I was particularly upset with the insistence that failure to use the "preferred pronouns" chosen by individuals whose gender-related identity did not fit neatly, according to their personal judgement, into the standard categories of boy and girl or man and woman would now become an offence punishable by law.

Worse is the insistence characteristic of the bill, the policies associated with it, and the tenth-rate academic dogmas driving the entire charade, that "identity" is something solely determined by the individual in question (whatever that identity might be). Even sociologists (neither the older, classical, occasionally useful type, nor the modern, appalling, and positively counterproductive type) don't believe this. They understand that identity is a social role, which means that it is by necessity socially negotiated. And there's a reason for this. An identity - a role - is not merely what you think you are, moment to moment, or year by year, but, as the Encyclopedia Britannica has it (specifically within its sociology section), "a comprehensive pattern of behavior that is socially recognized, providing a means of identifying and placing an individual in society," also serving "as a strategy for coping with recurrent situations and dealing with the roles of others (e.g., parent-child roles)."

Comment:


Heart - Black

Spain: Feminist hate screed written on grave of murdered boy

Gabriel Cruz
© screengrab
The whale-shaped monument to Gabriel Cruz is located in Almeria, Spain, where locals call it "The Whale of Gabriel and the Good People." El Español reported that graffiti was discovered on the memorial Tuesday.

"Become a feminist and abuse the male, whether he is a boy or a man," it read.

Cruz disappeared in February 2018. His body was recovered 12 days later after widespread media attention and a nationwide search involving 3,000 volunteers and 2,000 professional rescuers. Ana Julia Quezada, the girlfriend of Cruz's father at the time, later confessed to killing the boy.

Almeria City Council sources told the EFE international news agency that the municipality planned to have the vandalism cleaned up by last Thursday. There were no suspects.

Comment: See also:


Attention

Insane! UK court orders disabled woman to have an abortion despite her and her family's objections

Royal Courts of Justice
© Willy Barton / ShutterstockThe Royal Courts of Justice, London.
A British judge has authorized doctors to perform an abortion on a pregnant Catholic woman with developmental disabilities and a mood disorder, despite the objections of the woman's mother and the woman herself. The woman is 22 weeks pregnant.

"I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn't want it is an immense intrusion," said Justice Nathalie Lieven in her ruling in the Court of Protection, June 21.

"I have to operate in [her] best interests, not on society's views of termination," Lieven explained, arguing that her decision is in the best interest of the woman.

The Court of Protection handles cases involving individuals judged to lack the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves.

The woman, who cannot been publicly identified, has been described as "in her twenties," and is under the care of an NHS trust, part of the UK's National Health Service.

Bell

Human rights activist Titiyev released from prison in Chechnya

Oyub Titiyev
© Sputnik / Said TsarnaevOyub Titiyev after a court hearing.
The head of the Memorial Human Rights Center's branch in Grozny, Oyub Titiyev, who was sentenced to four years in prison for drug possession, has been released after more than 18 months of detention in Chechnya.

Earlier in June, a Shalinsky district court in Russia's Republic of Chechnya ordered the early release of Titiyev on parole, with the decision coming into force on Friday.

Titiyev was greeted by relatives, colleagues, and journalists as the gates of the penal colony settlement in Argun, 15km (9.3 miles) east of Grozny, closed behind him.