Society's ChildS


Eye 1

US police spend millions on social media monitoring


RT
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 16:25 UTC
US police social media
© guyen Huy Kham / Reuters
A new study has found law enforcement agencies spent $4.75 million on social media monitoring tools between 2013 and 2016 to surveil the public and investigate possible crimes, although this sum is "massively understated," according to researchers.

The Brennan Center for Justice published an analysisof 151 US cities, counties and law enforcement departments that have spent more than $10,000 on software to monitor social media, using public records to compile the list.

The study found the City of Los Angeles, the County of Sacramento, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Macomb County in Michigan and Texas Department of Public Safety were the biggest users of surveillance, spending about $70,000 each over the past three years.
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Magnify

UK journalists slam Russia for spying laws - but keep mum as same laws get passed in UK

Martin Jay
RT
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 15:51 UTC
big brother spying
© Ben Birchall / Reuters
The greatest invasion of privacy known to the British people is about to come into force, allowing spy agencies to access your cellphone and monitor your internet traffic. But why are British journalists and MPs staying remarkably hush-hush about it?

Has mainstream media been told by London and Washington to steer clear of reporting on new spying legislation in the UK, which even Edward Snowden calls "scary"? It seems that journalists in the UK are struggling somehow to pick up the big story some tech sites have broken, in that the British will soon be spied on via their own telephones - and worse, that all their internet history is to be stored by intelligence services and possibly even be used to blackmail them into cooperating with police and security services.

Incredibly, recently the UK House of Lords provisionally gave the green light to the most draconian spying laws to date, which forces internet providers and hardware firms to make it easier for GCHQ to hack into people's phones and get into their computers to monitor their online habits.

The draft laws were originally introduced into the House of Commons under then-Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015. They are popularly known as the "Snoopers' Charter."
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Megaphone

The right to be politically incorrect

Jordan Peterson
National Post
Tue, 08 Nov 2016 18:09 UTC
U of T Protestor
© Tyler Anderson/National PostStudent protests against Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto.
A month ago, I posted three videos to my YouTube channel, as a means of speaking out against our culture's politically correct insanity. I specifically objected to Bill C-16, a bill that has now passed second reading in the House of Commons, which adds "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the list of attributes protected by the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, and to similar legislation already in place in Ontario and other provinces.

To say that the videos attracted a lot of attention is to say almost nothing. They produced two demonstrations at the University of Toronto, where I teach psychology, including a free-speech rally where the misbehaviour of social justice warrior counter-demonstrators was caught on cellphone videos that have now been watched by millions of people. They have been the subject of articles written by Canada's most famous journalists. They have been covered extensively by CBC, CTV and TVO, as well as internationally. My story has been making headlines for more than a month, and the furor is not dying down. After writing me two cautionary letters, and then requesting my silence, the University of Toronto has agreed to host a public debate about the issues I raised.

Comment: See also:
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TV

Pat Caddell: 'CNN unbelievably biased towards Clinton, now smearing Trump supporters as racists'

Dan Riehl
Breitbart
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
CNN
© Getty ImagesCNN talking heads: Monica Schipper, Gary Gershoff, Nicholas Hunt, Stephen Lovekin
Political analyst Pat Caddell told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM on Friday, "They just call everybody a racist," referring to CNN. Caddell called the network "outrageous."

Caddell said, "What they have not admitted is their complicity in Hillary Clinton's campaign, or their unbelievable bias, and worse, their smearing of people, including Steve Bannon and others so that they could make some political points."

He laid the blame on having someone from Hollywood like Jeff Zucker running the network. "I don't think it will go very well if that continues," said Caddell. "They need to start with, 'Hey, we did some not very professional things during this campaign,'" he added.

Comment:


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Eye 2

Disgusting Louisiana lawmakers celebrate birthday at Capitol with cake depicting women's body


WGNO
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 14:01 UTC
birthday cake depicting a woman’s body
Two New Orleans area state lawmakers are outraged over a birthday cake at the Capitol today.

State Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, posted a photo on her Twitter page of a birthday cake depicting a woman's body. In the tweet, she said there was a second cake - removed from the party - that depicted a woman's vagina.

The cakes were apparently ordered to celebrate the birthday of state Rep. Mark Abraham, R-Lake Charles. According to The Advocate, lawmakers deny that there was ever a second cake of a woman's vagina.

Peterson told WGNO that she didn't see the cake depicting a vagina, but that a staffer told her it was there and was removed before people saw it.
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Attention

Best of the Web: Jordan Peterson: Gender pronouns and free speech war

The Rubin Report
Youtube
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:01 UTC
Jordan Peterson
© torontosun.comDr. Jordan B. Peterson
Jordan Peterson (Professor of Psychology) joins Dave Rubin to discuss the gender pronoun controversy he has found himself in, political correctness, free speech, and more.

Part 1:


Comment: The gender pronoun debate has reached new levels of absurdity, but it can now be clearly seen as a symptom of encroaching fascism under the guise of "political correctness" or "Liberal and Progressive Values". What must be realized is that these values are nothing but an empty shell ideology that conceals total pathology underneath.The main ponerization process begins among "intellectuals" at universities because those are the guides and teachers of the young. Universities train teachers of even younger children, and thus it becomes easy to poison an entire society in a single generation if you have the power to determine what is "correct".

See also:

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Ambulance

At least 91 people killed, hundreds injured as train derails in India


RT
Sun, 20 Nov 2016 08:18 UTC
Indian rescue workers search for survivors in the wreckage of a train that derailed near Pukhrayan in Kanpur district on November 20, 2016
© AFPIndian rescue workers search for survivors in the wreckage of a train that derailed near Pukhrayan in Kanpur district on November 20, 2016
At least 91 people were killed and scores injured when 14 cars of an express train derailed near the town of Pukhrayan in Uttar Pradesh in northern India, AFP reported, citing police. Relief teams have rushed to the scene.

"The death toll has unfortunately increased and it is 91 now," Daljit Singh Chawdhary, additional police director general of Uttar Pradesh state, said, as cited by AFP.



Rescue operations are under way," Indian Express cited Anil Saxena, a spokesman for Indian Railways, as saying.



However, the death toll is expected to rise as the rescue operation is under way. All the hospitals in the area are mobilized to receive the injured.


The incident happened some 100 kilometers from the city of Kanpur, the second-largest industrial city in India, at about 3:00 a.m. local time, when most of the passengers were asleep.

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Colosseum

Americans no longer trust their institutions

Clare Malone
Fivethirtyeight
Wed, 16 Nov 2016 12:54 UTC
American institutions
We live in interesting times, but I've often wondered what it would have been like to be alive for the dawn of politics, for our first encounters with one another when we started to make rules that would help hunting and trading and fishing and fornicating and building happen smoothly. I wonder what it would have been like to be there for the birth of our first institutions, "a custom, practice, or law that is accepted and used by many people," as Merriam-Webster would have it. Marriage, government, religion, banks — these are the great sandstone blocks of rule and repetition upon which towering civilizations are built.

And yet in the year 2016, most members of the American civilization don't trust that the building blocks are sound. According to Gallup, Americans' average confidence in 14 institutions is at only 32 percent. It is perhaps no coincidence that the country just elected Donald Trump to be president, choosing a Washington outsider with no experience in politics who ran on a platform of basically doing everything differently from how it's being done now.
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Network

Inside Gab: The new twitter alternative championed by Alt-Right

Cale Guthrie Weissman
FC
Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
A dispatch from the new censorship-defying social network in the wake of "the purge" of alt-right users on Facebook and Twitter this week.
Gab social media logo
© Flickr/Darron Birgenheier
The purge is happening. At least according to the universe of alt-right users on social media: Many of them claim that in recent days their Twitter accounts have been suspended and that their posts on Facebook are not being promoted or shared like they used to. It's all part of a crackdown on "fake news" in the wake of reports that misleading reports shared on Facebook and Twitter helped influence the election. To many, these efforts are an overdue attempt to maintain online civility. But to others it's blatant censorship.

For those alt-right individuals and other social media refugees who feel that their views are suppressed, there's a new social network that promises a digital space for completely free and unfettered communications. Gab, a platform that looks and feels like a combination of Twitter and Reddit, is meant to "put people first and promote people first," as it was described to me by its founder. And this week, it's been attracting thousands of users, many of them alt-righters exiled from Facebook and Twitter, though its founder insists that it aims to expand beyond that community and build a more diverse audience. Even Richard Spencer, who leads the far-right National Policy Institute think tank and is widely credited with inventing the term "alt-right" had his Twitter account suspended on Tuesday and soon increased the frequency of his posts on Gab.
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Ambulance

Dr Sircus: Political freak-out


Dr Sircus
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 21:01 UTC
guy freaking out
You know I never thought I would enter politics but I have, at least by writing about it. It is a glorious time to be watching politics these days because so much is happening. What happens in politics, I am realizing (after 64 years), is important because these are the people who largely decide our long-term fate.

We have every reason to be nervous because the mainstream of political power both here and in Europe are freaking out as their voting public is turning against the horror show they have allowed to go on for decades. If you include the ruling elite in this, which we should, since they pull the puppet strings on the politicians, then the foulness of action has been going on for almost forever.

The ruling classes on our planet have pretty much done all the wrong things putting us squarely into the mess we find ourselves in today. This essay is not for anyone who believes everything is fine for I am not about to do any convincing. The worst does not have to happen for us to see it on the horizon as a probable future. There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in debt in our world. Don't you think that will crush us and our children sooner than later?
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