The golden state instituted a series of minimum wage hikes - set to reach $15 by 2022, or 50% over 2012 levels, according to Forbes.
Society's Child
The golden state instituted a series of minimum wage hikes - set to reach $15 by 2022, or 50% over 2012 levels, according to Forbes.
© Mohammed Asad
Palestinian boy attempts to retrieve his belongings. Gaza, May 6, 2019.
Palestinian boy attempts to retrieve his belongings. Gaza, May 6, 2019.
The seven-story al-Qamar residential building in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in the Gaza City was then leveled by six Israeli missiles.
"He was honest, while my lifetime dream was turned into fallen dominoes," Doghmush, 50, said.
© John Brecher/For The Washington Post
If you use Sonos speakers with Alexa, Sonos keeps track of what albums, playlists or stations you listen to — and shares that information with Amazon.
If you use Sonos speakers with Alexa, Sonos keeps track of what albums, playlists or stations you listen to — and shares that information with Amazon.
Yet that's essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it's hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley's next frontier.
Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.
So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.
Comment: Alexa is not only a spy, she's also nuts.
- AI stealth programming? Alexa blurts out 'Kill your foster parents', chats about sex in AI experiments
- Amazon's Alexa now emitting 'bone chilling' laughter & ignoring user commands
- Amazon error allowed Alexa user to eavesdrop on another home
- Data 'sharing': Amazon's Alexa sends thousands of recordings to the wrong user
Richard Sackler
The email exchanges have been added in un-redacted form to court documents filed this week in the state of Connecticut's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma.
A top Connecticut state official said that the email exchanges "encapsulate the depraved indifference to human suffering that infected Purdue's entire business model."
An attorney for Sackler confirmed through a spokeswoman the authenticity of the email exchanges but said they were written long ago and taken out of context.
Sackler "has apologized for using insensitive language that doesn't reflect what he actually did," attorney David Bernick said. "These emails were written two decades ago following news reports about criminal activity involving prescription opioids, such as drug store robberies. Dr. Sackler was expressing his worry that this news coverage would stigmatize an essential FDA-approved medication that doctors feel is critical for treating their patients in pain. The same concern from twenty years ago exists today."
Comment: While there's a lot to be said for taking personal responsibility for one's addictions, it is companies like Purdue Pharma that used aggressive and predatory practices to ensure that an ungodly number of people became addicted to their products. All in the name of profits of course. The amount of cognitive dissonance on display here is mind-boggling.
See also:
- New book 'Dopesick' documents how doctors and Purdue Pharma are responsible for getting millions of Americans addicted to drugs
- How the American opiate epidemic was started by the Purdue Pharma company
- Oregon sues Purdue Pharma, claims it misrepresented OxyContin risks
- Washington city sues Purdue Pharma, Makers of OxyContin, for flooding their town with opioids
- Billionaire OxyContin dealer Richard Sackler set to rake in more money with patent on addiction treatment drug
As far as I can discern these days no one in the general population has any thoughts of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Ur. For the American young the 1940s, not 2,500 BC, is the ancient past.
A time so long ago that it predates the Old Testament by 2,000 years is probably imagined as a brutal and politically incorrect time of inhumanity and human sacrifice. In short, a script for a horror fantasy movie or a video game.
In actual fact, these civilizations were more advanced and more humanitarian than our own. They were more advanced because the rulers were focused on ensuring the society's longevity by maintaining a livable balance between debtors and creditors. It has all been downhill ever since.
The rulers maintained social balance and, thereby, the life of the society by periodically cancelling debts. The rulers understood that compound interest resulted in debt growing faster than the economy. The consequence would be foreclosures on agricultural land, which would shift riches and power into a small oligarchy of creditors. The ruler and the society would be deprived of a self-supporting population on the land which provided tax revenues, soldiers for the military, and corvee labor to maintain public infrastructure. Disaster would follow. A grasping oligarchy could overthrow the ruler or the dispossessed population could flee to a potential invader offering their military services in exchange for debt forgiveness.
To protect their societies from dissolution by unpayable debts, rulers periodically cancelled agrarian debts owed by the citizenry at large, but not mercantile debts among businessmen.
The reason for debt forgiveness was stability, not egalitarianism.
© Reuters/Christian Hartmann
France has suffered numerous terror attacks in recent years.
France has suffered numerous terror attacks in recent years.
In a decree published Tuesday, the French Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn announced that authorities will be able to merge two streams of personal data in cases where a suspect is hospitalized without consent "for the purpose of preventing radicalization."
The first stream includes data such as the name and date of birth of those undergoing "psychiatric care without consent" under a system codenamed Hopsyweb. The second data stream covers a person's profile from their Terrorism Prevention and Terrorization Reporting File (FSPRT).
In certain cases, regional magistrates and the prefect of police in Paris will be notified when the personal information of a forcibly hospitalized patient match those contained in the FSPRT system.
Comment: While they're at it, perhaps they can also request the psychiatric records of NATO's Gladio B terrorists - that have terrorized Paris in recent years:
- Sibel Edmonds on 'Gladio B' and the Paris shootings
- Operation Gladio: France armed terrorists that struck ParisOperation
- Gladio Redux: At least 11 killed in shooting at Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo
© Twitter
Mangesh Ransingh (23) and his 19-year-old bride Rukmini were allegedly immolated by three family members on the bride's side, including the woman's own father. Rukmini was 2 months pregnant at the time of the attack, police say.
Things turned violent when Ransingh came to pick up his wife from a visit to her family's house in a village just a few hours from Mumbai on May 1. The family reportedly refused to release Rukimi, at which point Ransingh got into a fight with two of Rukmini's uncles and her father. The three men then allegedly assaulted the young couple before dousing them in kerosine and setting them ablaze.
© Reuters / Russell Boyce
The bill warns that "children are being exposed to pornography at an alarming rate, leading to low self-esteem, eating disorders, and an increase in problematic sexual activity at ever-younger ages." Adults aren't safe either, suffering "toxic sexual behaviors, emotional, mental and medical illnesses and difficulty forming or maintaining intimate relationships."
While proponents insist the resolution isn't a plot to outlaw porn - its most direct provision urges the state to "educate individuals and families about [porn]'s harms and develop pornography-recovery programs" - some lawmakers want it to go further, while others denounce it as legislative virtue-signaling, worrying it distracts from actual public health crises like homelessness and opioid addiction.
© Police State USA
No family is safe while CPS is operational.
No family is safe while CPS is operational.
In a new Performance Audit of DCFS Investigations of Abuse and Neglect released Tuesday, state auditors found that 15.5% of children whose deaths were investigated by DCFS had prior contact with the department through abuse or neglect investigations. The report found that there were 163 prior investigations for these 102 victims, with one victim even investigated nine times before their death. In addition, because of an issue with the system DCFS uses to track its cases, auditors wrote that "it is difficult to know if these are all the death victims with prior contact with DCFS."
In the three years from 2015 to 2017, auditors found that DCFS investigated 450,483 allegations of abuse or neglect. About quarter of those investigations, 114,653, were found to be bona fide by the department. In the report, auditors highlight the welfare agency's failure to follow procedures for conducting investigations, including the ability to have them completed in a timely manner. According to the report, in the latest year studied, more than 12% of investigations were not completed within 60 days. The audit found "required interviews with the alleged victim and perpetrator were not always completed in a timely manner" and that department data showed that "the alleged victim was not interviewed within 24 hours in more than 29 percent of cases" and the "alleged perpetrator was not interviewed within 7 days in 24.5 percent of cases."
Comment: What's even more disturbing is that the Illinois CPS is reflective of many 'child protective' agencies throughout the country. The agency uses the power of government to kidnap children, subjecting them to far worse treatment than they receive in their own homes and often completely loses track of their victims.
- Child Protective Service has helped create a Gestapo-like police state
- School districts weaponizing child protection services against uncooperative parents on the rise
- 'Child protective services' in the US lose 18,000 children a year - many aren't even reported missing
- CPS took daughter from mom over addiction, then gave her to leader of child sex ring
- Child Protective Services children found in human trafficking sex trade
- Pedophiles in Power: Congresswoman Nancy Schaefer says U.S. Child Protective Services is a threat to children everywhere
- Foster children in CPS custody are being enrolled in drug experiments without parental consent
- Endless war on children: Exposing child 'protective services' abuses
© KUSA
Children file out of the STEM School Highlands Ranch on Tuesday.
Children file out of the STEM School Highlands Ranch on Tuesday.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office said it responded to the STEM School Highlands Ranch just before 2 p.m. Tuesday when a school administrator called dispatch to report shots fired. Authorities believe the suspects, first described as an adult male and a juvenile male, used a handgun. The younger suspect was later identified as a female.
"Two individuals walked into the STEM school, got deep inside the school and engaged students in two separate locations," Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said.
The sheriff's department confirmed that one student, an 18-year-old male, was killed in the shooting. The father of Kendrick Castillo told NBC News that his son was the student killed, but the family declined to be interviewed Tuesday night.
Comment: More from RT:
Douglas County Sheriff Anthony Spurlock told a press conference that the attackers, who the authorities have so far refused to identify, targeted students in two different locations after they went "deep inside the school." Neither of the two suspects were known to law enforcement prior to the rampage, he said.
The suspects are in custody.One of them is a juvenile; both are students. There is no longer believed to be a third suspect, according to Douglas County Undersherriff Holly Nicholson-Kluth. A lockout of all Douglas County schools has been lifted, but after-school activities have been canceled for the entire district.
Administrators called police after shots were fired in the middle school, and first responders were reportedly able to apprehend the suspects within minutes.
The suspects were not injured in the altercation.
Investigators from both the FBI and the ATF arrived at the scene.
Multiple air ambulance helicopters were spotted landing on the school grounds.
Comment: Other studies have also noted a pattern where minimum wage increases result in reductions to hours worked thereby offsetting any gains. The mandatory minimum wage movement is essentially destroying jobs. See: