April Reign

Following Facebook’s example of giving sexist, abusive douchebags a free pass, Kickstarter is refusing to take down Redditor Ken Hoinsky’s dating advice book. Above the Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome With Women, includes such gentlemanly dating advice as “grab her hand and put it right on your dick.” Another excerpt posted on Reddit suggests [...]

April Reign – In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Michael Hastings was a bold, true journalist who didn’t accept information he was fed, but fought for the cold, hard truth. He was the opposite of an establishment reporter and refused to compromise himself to conform with the prevalent, yielding style of mainstream journalism. It did not earn him friends in media, but he rightfully earned our deepest respect.

Cenk Uygur and Sam Seder present some of Michael’s best moments on The Young Turks. He was one of the most important voices of our time for real, fearless news. He was our colleague and our friend.

Perhaps parents don’t need to be reminded that YouTube is the wild wild west, and not a garden that is carefully tended. Or do they?

Facebook Employee Outs Insidious Program That Targets Users With Ads

by Richard Spall

As originally posted on: Free Wood Post
June 10, 2013

A brave Facebook employee has recently blown the lid off the most unbelievable scandal yet known to man. The man, Edward Rainden, released scores of documents which alarmingly show that his employer, Facebook, has been systematically scanning status messages, comments, and likes in order to maliciously target users for advertisements.

Leading global privacy expert Anne Roth:

“We were totally floored when Rainden made his allegations, but his documentation seems to prove that Facebook was indeed conducting itself in this despicable manner. No one could have suspected in our wildest dreams that they could have been doing such a thing. We all thought it was just crazy coincidence when someone might comment about how tired they were and then magically an ad for a Keurig coffee maker would soon show up.”

Mr. Rainden is now attempting to evade what he expects is certain retribution from the social networking giant. He knows that their wrath will be swift and harsh, and he already believes that they’ve tracked his location to Hong Kong. “They flagged my exact location the moment I checked in with FourSquare. They’re really good. I’m being targeted even as we speak with recommendations to the best entertainment and dining in Hong Kong!”

Roth continued:

“The reason we didn’t suspect anything sooner is because if they’ve been doing this, they are really quite awful at it. Last fall, I commented about how Newt Gingrich was a disgusting pig. Then the next thing I knew, I was being bombarded with ads to contribute to Gingrich’s Presidential campaign.”

Free Wood Post continues to monitor these shocking developments and will inform you with additional details as they happen.

Behold, a ready-made answer for those who own a Linux-powered fruit machine but who are still looking for new ways to use it. It’s a simple media center starter kit, fresh out and shipping today, which makes it easy to hook your Raspberry Pi up to…

The following tweets were originally posted by “jimmylemmons” on Twitter via “his” account (https://twitter.com/jimmylemons), variously, on June 11, 2013; June 12, 2013; and June 18, 2013.elites like algore,gates,,Paulsen,,Schmidt,,Clintons are so rich…

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- George Monbiot writes about the dangers of allowing wealthy and privileged individuals to speak as the voice of the poor and downtrodden:

As the UK chairs the G8 summit again, a campaign that Bono founded, with which Geldof works closely, appears to be whitewashing the G8′s policies in Africa.

Last week I drew attention to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched in the US when it chaired the G8 meeting last year. The alliance is pushing African countries into agreements that allow foreign companies to grab their land, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. Ignoring the voices of their own people, six African governments have struck deals with companies such as Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Syngenta, Nestlé and Unilever, in return for promises of aid by the UK and other G8 nations.

A wide range of activists, both African and European, is furious about the New Alliance. But the ONE campaign, co-founded by Bono, stepped up to defend it. The article it wrote last week was remarkable in several respects: in its elision of the interests of African leaders and those of their people, in its exaggeration of the role of small African companies, but above all in failing even to mention the injustice at the heart of the New Alliance – its promotion of a new wave of land grabbing. My curiosity was piqued.
…
Bono claims to be “representing the poorest and most vulnerable people“. But talking to a wide range of activists from both the poor and rich worlds since ONE published its article last week, I have heard the same complaint again and again: that Bono and others like him have seized the political space which might otherwise have been occupied by the Africans about whom they are talking. Because Bono is seen by world leaders as the representative of the poor, the poor are not invited to speak. This works very well for everyone – except them.

The ONE campaign looks to me like the sort of organisation that John le Carré or Robert Harris might have invented. It claims to work on behalf of the extremely poor. But its board is largely composed of multimillionaires, corporate aristocrats and US enforcers.

- And Murray Dobbin likewise opines that progressive politics can’t be oriented solely around formal party structures:

(T)he remnants of what were once robust and effective social movements are (with some important exceptions) increasingly weak, demoralized and isolated. Small wonder. The context for the creation of these single-issue movements was the early Trudeau era when governments actually listened to citizens’ groups while expanding the social and economic role of governments. The efficacy of this kind of civil society organizing has however been in a steady decline since the signing of the FTA with the U.S. What is now needed is a broad social movement which incorporates all of the issues now dealt with by hundreds of disconnected organizations.

It all has to do with recovering community and the commons. The destruction of community has been the great success of the right. When Margaret Thatcher stated there was “no such thing as society” she was not describing current reality — she was describing her goal. It has been largely achieved in English speaking developed countries. If we are to even begin to address our share of the global crises we will have to do it by creating a political culture that reinvents the commons and ends people’s isolation from each other.

- The Barrie Advance reveals one right-wing smear gone horribly wrong, as Stephen Harper’s Prime Minister’s Office is on the record using public resources to attack Justin Trudeau. And Susan Delacourt goes into detail about the Star’s process in dealing with media manipulation.

- Margaret Flowers notes that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will serve largely to enshrine in an international treaty all kinds of corporate goodies which could never pass muster in a democratic process – which is why its contents are being kept secret until after they’re binding on member states. But Stuart Trew points out one twist on the Cons’ efforts to sell out Canadian interests abroad, as the constitutional duty to consult with First Nations seems to offer a rather promising basis for challenging treaties which exclude First Nations from the table.

- Finally, David Dayen discusses the lesson U.S. banks look to have learned from the 2008 financial crisis: that they can get away with large-scale fraud to access public money so long as they scare their employees into going along with the scheme.

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- George Monbiot writes about the dangers of allowing wealthy and privileged individuals to speak as the voice of the poor and downtrodden: As the UK chairs the G8 summit again, a campaign that Bono founded, with which Geldof works closely, appears to be whitewashing the G8′s policies in Africa.

Last week I drew attention to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched in the US when it chaired the G8 meeting last year. The alliance is pushing African countries into agreements that allow foreign companies to grab their land, patent (Read more…)

Statistics Canada reported today, “Manufacturing sales fell 2.4% in April to $48.2 billion — the fourth decline in five months and the largest monthly percentage drop since August 2009.” That gets the second quarter off to a bad start. Strong economic growth in the first quarter of this year (January, February, March) was underpinned by [...]

By Eric Draitser, Global Research It has long been known that cyberspace is one of the main battlegrounds in the 21st century.  However, last week’s shocking revelations about the NSA’s surveillance and data-gathering activities illustrate the extent to which US intelligence seeks “full-spectrum dominance” in cyberspace. Although there have been myriad articles in recent days [...]

Saša Petricic has been arrested in the midst of covering the Occupy Gezi protest in Istanbul. This is an outrage which the Turkish government will not be able to defend themselves from. .@evakatrina @DFAIT_MAECI Turkey must #FreeSasa! @sasapetricic— Saskboy K. (@saskboy) June 12, 2013 Short hours before his arrest, this was the scene: Many protestors’ […]

Strong congressional oversight means asking direct questions & getting straight answers. 1.usa.gov/1a0EIY3— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June 11, 2013 Encrypt your shit: Spooky reading after #Snowden: Julian #Assange’s call to take up arms against the surveillance state | Cypherpunks cryptome.org/2012/12/assang…— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 11, 2013 The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational […]

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by “azaadi”

As originally posted on: Pursuit of Happiness
June 11, 2013

i’m so sick of the government reading but never liking my statuses

George Jonas on the ethics of his fellow journalists:

…“‘Think dirty, and 90% of the time you’ll be right.’” …

Reading what some of my colleagues have been saying about public-figures-turned-media-targets … makes me wonder … Perhaps they’ll score in the end, for thinking dirty may well make one right 90% of the time, but the parallel fact is that thinking dirty is disgusting 100% of the time. [And at least 10% of the time they're guilty of defamation].

… publishing before the evidence is in, commenting on the basis of allegations as if they were proven facts, smearing people on the basis of rumours and innuendos, piling on, attacking like a pack of jackals an unfashionable target, going after someone who seems wounded and unable to defend himself — that’s disgusting, and not made less disgusting by a subsequent consensus or endorsement by public opinion. It’s especially ugly to calumniate people, then hide behind a climate of slander that the original calumny helped create. …

Bravo! Well said, George!

CBC pixillates video of mating cicadas…

*Canada: 0 Days Without Election Fraud* You can start at the beginning in great detail… Or you can jump to the end of the beginning. You can draw conclusions so simple a child, or a computer scientist could make them. I’m sure the corporate media will tell us if there’s a problem. Or maybe not. […]

If you’re suffering from low blood pressure, I have the treatment: WSJ hack interviews an editorial board nutcase Dorothy who says among other things: “Look, I represent the majority of citizens.” She’s “appalled” that bike sharing has happened in NYC. “Best neighbourhoods are begrimed by these blazing blue CitiBank bikes.” “It is shocking to walk […]

Journalism as suicide pact: “… the fact that half of Toronto does not believe the video exists, by extension, means that half the city believes Toronto Star journalists are liars.” Indeed….

This and that for your Sunday reading.

- I’ll quickly link to a few Robocon stories which I han’t yet blogged. Karl Nerenberg noted that the Federal Court decision finding widespread election fraud using the Cons’ voter database was only the beginning, and Jean-Pierre Kingsley was hopeful that the ruling would lead to needed improvements in Elections Canada’s authority. But the continued obstruction of the Cons themselves makes it clear that the public interest couldn’t be lower on the Harper government’s priority list.

- Meanwhile, as a stark contrast to the Cons’ determination not to let anybody get to the (Read more…)

.@thekeenanwire @acoyne There’s nothing that reverses media decline quite like journos sneering at the audience.— katewerk (@katewerk) June 2, 2013…