Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Is Working Well within a Group the Essence of Education?
Obviously, teamwork can play a role in final decision-making. However, education should be about preparing well-informed, independent-thinking individuals who can bring fresh ideas to the table. That’s hard to do when children are trained to become nothing more than cogs in elites’ exceptionally large wheel.
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Friday, December 22, 2017
Treason: Presidential Candidates Successfully Conspired with Foreign Leaders to Thwart Official American Policy and Drag Out War
Long-time rumors about presidential candidate Nixon conspiring to delay the ending of the Vietnam War were recently confirmed.
A year ago, historian and journalist John A Farrell wrote in the New York Times:
A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, [Nixon’s] closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks [President Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion], which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.
***
We must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.
Nixon had entered the fall campaign with a lead over Humphrey, but the gap was closing that October. Henry A. Kissinger, then an outside Republican adviser, had called, alerting Nixon that a deal was in the works: If Johnson would halt all bombing of North Vietnam, the Soviets pledged to have Hanoi engage in constructive talks to end a war that had already claimed 30,000 American lives.
But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson’s actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault, a Republican doyenne and Nixon fund-raiser, and a member of the pro-nationalist China lobby, with connections across Asia.
“! Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon’s orders. “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”
Nixon told Haldeman to have Rose Mary Woods, the candidate’s personal secretary, contact another nationalist Chinese figure — the businessman Louis Kung — and have him press Thieu as well. “Tell him hold firm,” Nixon said.
Here are some screenshots from Haldeman’s notes in Nixon’s presidential library:
Nixon also sought help from Chiang Kai-shek, the president of Taiwan. [An enemy of the United States.] And he ordered Haldeman to have his vice-presidential candidate, Spiro T. Agnew, threaten the C.I.A. director, Richard Helms. Helms’s hopes of keeping his job under Nixon depended on his pliancy, Agnew was to say. “Tell him we want the truth — or he hasn’t got the job,” Nixon said.
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Nixon had cause to lie. His actions appear to violate federal law, which prohibits private citizens from trying to “defeat the measures of the United States.” His lawyers fought throughout Nixon’s life to keep the records of the 1968 campaign private. The broad outline of “the Chennault affair” would dribble out over the years. But the lack of evidence of Nixon’s direct involvement gave pause to historians and afforded his loyalists a defense.
Time has yielded Nixon’s secrets. Haldeman’s notes were opened quietly at the presidential library in 2007, where I came upon them in my research for a biography of the former president.
***
When Johnson got word of Nixon’s meddling, he ordered the F.B.I. to track Chennault’s movements. She “contacted Vietnam Ambassador Bui Diem,” one report from the surveillance noted, “and advised him that she had received a message from her boss … to give personally to the ambassador. She said the message was … ‘Hold on. We are gonna win. … Please tell your boss to hold on.’ ”
In a conversation with the Republican senator Everett Dirksen, the minority leader, Johnson lashed out at Nixon. “I’m reading their hand, Everett,” Johnson told his old friend. “This is treason.”
“I know,” Dirksen said mournfully.
Johnson’s closest aides urged him to unmask Nixon’s actions. But on a Nov. 4 conference call, they concluded that they could not go public because, among other factors, they lacked the “absolute proof,” as Defense Secretary Clark Clifford put it, of Nixon’s direct involvement.
Nixon was elected president the next day.
The BBC’s 2013 report adds details:
Declassified tapes of President Lyndon Johnson’s telephone calls provide a fresh insight ….
***
By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks – or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had “blood on his hands”.
***
In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. This was exactly what Nixon feared.
Chennault was despatched to the South Vietnamese embassy with a clear message: the South Vietnamese government should withdraw from the talks, refuse to deal with Johnson, and if Nixon was elected, they would get a much better deal.
So on the eve of his planned announcement of a halt to the bombing, Johnson learned the South Vietnamese were pulling out.
He was also told why. The FBI had bugged the ambassador’s phone and a transcripts of Anna Chennault’s calls were sent to the White House. In one conversation she tells the ambassador to “just hang on through election”.
Johnson was told by Defence Secretary Clifford that the interference was illegal and threatened the chance for peace.
This is treason: contacting foreign leaders, including enemies of the United States, in order to thwart official U.S. policies and prolong war.
(There is also some rather intriguing circumstantial evidence that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan convinced the Iranians not to release American hostages until after the election … to make rival candidate Jimmy Carter look weak.)
That is in sharp distinction to the common practice of presidential candidates contacting foreign leaders for normal diplomatic purposes.
On the other hand, what type of foreign contacts did candidate Trump have with Russia?
The only thing which has proven so far is that Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael “Flynn asked Russia’s ambassador to refrain from escalating the situation regarding the U.S. sanctions on Russia” and “Flynn asked Russia’s ambassador to delay a vote on pending UN Security Council resolution on Israel”.
The first request would promote peace between two nuclear superpowers by delaying an escalating round of sanctions from spiraling out of control.
The second didn’t succeed … Russia ignored the Trump administration’s request, and voted to condemn Israeli settlements.
Such actions pale in comparison to what Nixon (and perhaps Reagan) did.
Treason: Presidential Candidates Successfully Conspired with Foreign Leaders to Thwart Official American Policy and Drag Out War was originally published on Washington's Blog
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FBI, BLM Dug Their Own Grave: Cliven Bundy Case Declared Mistrial
It’s taken three years, but the Cliven Bundy family and their supporters finally have a sliver of vindication. On Wednesday, the case against Bundy and two of his sons was thrown out of court. After realizing that important facts were kept hidden from the defense team, and records about shocking behavior from government agents were…
The post FBI, BLM Dug Their Own Grave: Cliven Bundy Case Declared Mistrial appeared first on Conservative Tribune.
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Silicon Valley Obscenity - 1 In 4 People Are "Food Insecure"
In the years since the first dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley has become emblematic of the intensifying wealth inequality that’s making life increasingly unaffordable for millions of working- and middle-class Americans.
And while the unprecedented wealth creation in the region has helped enrich hundreds of thousands of tech workers and entrepreneurs, virtually everybody else in the region – from college students to the cafeteria workers and janitors who service the headquarters of storied tech firms like Google and Facebook – has suffered from rising rents and a cost of living that’s far outstripped wage inflation.
Now, a study has found that more than one in four Silicon Valley residents is food insecure – meaning they go without at least one meal or rely on food pantries due to lack of financial resources, according to researchers at the Second Harvest food bank.
Using hundreds of community interviews and data modeling, a new study suggests that 26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – meet this ignominious designation. Furthermore, nearly a quarter are families with children.
“We call it the Silicon Valley paradox,” says Steve Brennan, the food bank’s marketing director. “As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people.” Since the recession, Second Harvest has seen demand spike by 46%.
The Guardian interviewed local residents who qualify as food insecure for a story about the worsening wealth gap in one of the wealthiest regions in the US.
Karla Peralta is surrounded by food. As a line cook in Facebook’s cafeteria, she spends her days preparing free meals for the tech firm’s staff. She’s worked in kitchens for most of her 30 years in the US, building a life in Silicon Valley as a single mother raising two daughters.
But at home, food is a different story. The region’s soaring rents and high cost-of-living means that even with a full-time job, putting food on the table hasn’t been simple. Over the years she has struggled to afford groceries – at one point feeding her family of three with food stamps that amounted to $75 a week, about half what the government describes as a “thrifty” food budget. “I was thinking, when am I going to get through this?” she said.
In a region famed for its foodie culture, where the well-heeled can dine on gold-flecked steaks, $500 tasting menus and $29 loaves of bread, hunger is alarmingly widespread, according to a new study shared exclusively with the Guardian.
According to the Guardian, the food bank is literally at the center of the Silicon Valley boom – both literally and figuratively. It sits just half a mile from Cisco’s headquarters and counts Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg among its major donors. But the need it serves is exacerbated by this industry’s wealth; as high-paying tech firms move in, the cost of living rises for everyone else.
As we’ve pointed out, faced with some of the most expensive rental housing in the nation, some Bay Area residents are feeling priced out and are seeking low-cost alternatives like living in their cars, or commuting nearly two hours to work each way.
All of this is happening as the Nasdaq – which includes many of the tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple that are based in the region – reached an all-time high above 7,000 on Monday.
Food insecurity often accompanies other poverty indicators, such as homelessness. San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city, had a homeless population of more than 4,000 people during a recent count.
For workers like Karla Peralta – the Facebook cafeteria worker who shared the story of her daily struggles with the Guardian – there’s a stark division between well-heeled salaried tech workers at Facebook, and others like herself who work under contract.
What’s worse, many workers like Peralta are finding themselves mired in an uncomfortable gray area: they make too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to get by.
These days Peralta earns too much to qualify for food stamps, but not enough not to worry. She pays $2,000 a month – or three-quarters of her paycheck – to rent the small apartment she shares with her youngest daughter. “Even just the two of us, it’s still a struggle.” So once a month, she picks up supplies at the food bank to supplement what she buys at the store.
She isn’t one to complain, but acknowledges the vast gulf between the needs of Facebook employees and contract workers such as herself. “The first thing they do [for Facebook employees] is buy you an iPhone and an Apple computer, and all these other benefits,” she laughs. “It’s like, wow."
Second Harvest is the only food bank serving Silicon Valley. It’s also one of the largest in the country. In any given month, it provides meals for 257,000 people. It served 66 million pounds of food last year. When the Guardian visited its cavernous, 75,000 square foot main warehouse space, boxes of produce stretched to the ceiling. Strip lights illuminated crates of cucumbers and pallets of sweet potatoes with a chilly glow. Volunteers in PayPal T-shirts packed cabbages and apples that arrived in boxes as big as paddling pools, while in the walk-in freezer turkeys waited to defrost.
To Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech workers, the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of working poor in the region are often invisible.
“Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person,” Brennan said. “But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."
He added, “you’re not thinking when you pick up your shirts from dry cleaning, or getting your landscaping done, or going to a restaurant, or getting your child cared for, ‘is that person hungry?’ It’s very easy to assume they are fine."
The cost of housing is one of the biggest contributor to inequality – and the main reason many workers in the region are forced to go hungry. In Santa Clara County, the median price of a family home has reached a new high of $1.125 million, while the supply of homes continues to shrink. A family of four earning less than $85,000 is now considered low income. Meanwhile, the median income in the US is less than $60,000.
These realities mean food insecurity cuts across lines of race, age and employment status.
Minority communities in the Bay Area have been hit the hardest.
The Latino community is “passing through a hard time”, says Vicky Avila-Medrano, a food connection specialist. She runs a program that sends current and former food bank users out into the community, which has been disproportionately affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
“Here in Silicon Valley, we have a big problem. This is a beautiful place to live for people in the tech industry, but we are not working in that industry."
Of course, the problems posed by rising rents aren’t unique to the San Francisco Bay Area. As we noted back in October, rental costs growing faster than disposable income for 22 consecutive months. In September, rent ate up more disposable income than at any prior time in history.
All of this underscores the hypocrisy of the ultra-liberal Bay Area. While well-heeled tech workers spurn anybody who disagrees with their narrow-minded worldview in the name of progress, many of these same workers drift through their daily routines largely ignorant of the dire circumstances of the people who handle their dry cleaning and prepare their food.
Google famously fired former engineer James Damore for publishing an open letter pointing out flaws in the company’s diversity hiring program.
Meanwhile, the more than 10,000 employees who work at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. are some of the biggest contributors to wealth inequality in the region.
While we're sure the Bay Area's insistence on social equality in the workplace is well intentioned, progress won't feed the working poor.
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Thursday, December 21, 2017
Is Facebook Using Your Phone's Camera And Microphone To Spy On You?
Do you ever feel like you’re being watched when there’s nobody else around?
Decades ago, if the answer to that question was ‘yes’, doctors might’ve advised you to see what they called a headshrinker. But technological progress has a funny way of turning situations on their head. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, everybody had horses - but only the wealthy had cars.
Today, everybody has a car: but only rich people have horses.
The same principle applies to surveillance: If you don’t believe you’re being spied on constantly, then you should probably have your head examined.
As advertisers hone increasingly sophisticated microtargeting techniques, ordinary social media users are reporting disturbing coincidences like the one Jen Lewis recounted to the Daily Mail.
While out shopping, Lewis and a friend discussed purchasing a film camera. Not 20 minutes later, Lewis’s friend checked Facebook on her phone and discovered, to her alarm, a targeted advertisement for the very same camera she had just considered purchasing.
Then, less than 20 minutes later, an advert popped up on Lois’s phone, for the exact same product. Same colour, same model, same everything.
‘They’re listening, they’re watching,’ she said.
‘Oh don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘Who’s listening? Who’d want to listen to us?'
‘I’m serious,’ said Lois. ‘This keeps happening. This is no coincidence. Someone is listening to our conversations. Advertisers. They’re listening via our phones’ microphones.'
At first, Lewis didn’t understand what her friend was getting at. But it quickly dawned on her: Was Facebook recording their conversation and converting its content into fodder for targeted advertisements - all in real time?
‘Look at this,’ said Lois, presenting me with her smartphone, where an advert for a snazzy little instamatic camera was displayed. It had popped up a few seconds earlier, when she’d logged on to Instagram.
She met my quizzical ‘so what?’ face with exasperation.
What were we talking about? Just now? In the street, down there?’ she said.
Sure enough, we’d been window shopping before our lunch reservation, and spotted a little gadget shop. I remembered Lois had commented on the instamatic cameras on display (dropping a few hints for her forthcoming 21st birthday, I suspected).
We’d had a brief conversation about how they were all the rage in the Eighties, and how one of my memories of Christmas parties at my parents’ house was listening to that familiar ‘whirrr’ and watching the wealthier guests flapping about the instant photos, as everyone waited for them to dry.
Of course, Facebook and its fellow tech behemoths have vigorously denied claims that they utilize smartphone cameras and microphones to beef up their targeted advertising capabilities. But the battle for dominance in the digital advertising market is so fierce, it’s difficult to argue that the incentives don’t exist.
Lewis interviewed another individual who decided to test whether he was being spied on by advertisers by switching his phone’s microphone and camera off.
And sure enough, the creepy hypertargeted ads disappeared.
One Facebook user is so convinced his conversations are being monitored that he switched off the microphone on his smartphone — and, sure enough, there haven’t been any more ‘strange coincidences’ since.
Tom Crewe, 28, a marketing manager from Bournemouth, was immediately suspicious in March when he noticed an advert on Facebook for beard transplant surgery. Only hours earlier he’d joked with a colleague about them both getting one, as they remained smooth-faced, despite their age.
‘I had my phone’s Facebook app switched on at the time. Within a few hours, an ad came through for hair and beard transplants,’ he says.
‘I just thought: “Why have I been targeted?” I’d never Googled “hair or beard transplants” or sent an email to anyone about it or talked about it on Facebook.'
The fact that the ad for beard transplants was so unusual and specific made him suspect his phone had been eavesdropping.
He became convinced when later that month he received an advert to his phone — again weirdly and quite specifically — for Peperami sausages.
Of course, the notion that advertisers (to say nothing of the intelligence community) are recording our every keystroke to try and sell us stuff we don’t really need is something we, as a society, have grown eerily accustomed to. But the idea that these same entities are recording and filming us for their commercial benefit has, for many, yet to sink in. Of course, this reprehensible practice isn’t explicitly illegal, and as Lewis points out. If anything, most people inadvertently empower advertisers by blindly signing social media platforms’ “user agreements."
Tracking users offline behavior is hardly a new phenomenon; earlier this year, we highlighted a recent announcement from Google that it would begin keeping tracking users’ in-store credit card purchases.
On the flip side, this arrangement is what allows us to use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter without paying for them.
Still, imagine how these companies would react if people started demanding privacy and more control over their data?
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What’s Wrong With Apple “Slowing Down” Older iPhones
You weren’t imagining it, after all. After years of speculation and conspiracy theories, Apple disclosed this week that it really does throttle the processors of older iPhones at a certain point in their life cycle—albeit probably not for the nefarious reasons that cynics have suspected.
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