On the same day that Joe Biden obtained the Electoral College majority needed to become president of the United States, a metallic asteroid roughly half the size of New York City made its closest approach to earth. Far from indulging in apocalyptic visions of cosmic destruction, mining company executives like Bob Goldstein of US Nuclear Corp. were seeing dollar signs. Somewhere in the ballpark of $10,000 quadrillion of them in fact. Continue reading
Many prophetic scenes depicted in a series of Mayan codices written in the early days of the Spanish colony, and translated and compiled in El Libro de los Libros del Chilam Balam, describe a world foreign to its original authors. But, one which was barreling down on them and their civilization even as the Mayan high priests recorded their visions for each stop on their cyclical calendar system. Continue reading
The vaunted “17 intelligence agencies” that comprise the U.S. intel community will be sharing a network of private-sector cloud computing service providers which includes Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of a 15-year contract said to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Continue reading
Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years. Continue reading
Imagine standing at a TSA security checkpoint on your way home for the holidays. You’re getting ready to go through the awkward travel procedures instituted almost immediately after 9/11 when the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA) was created and air travel in the United States morphed into a search and seizure operation with the implied possibility of your detention and interrogation. Continue reading
Citing “censorship outcry” from the three branches of government, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced yesterday via tweet the agency’s intention to move forward with regulation of social media by looking to modify Section 230 of the Communications Act, which protects the likes of Facebook and Twitter from the parts of the U.S. code that opens publishers to legal challenges over the content posted to their platforms, which inevitably puts content creators, themselves, in the cross hairs of the legal system without the benefit of their First Amendment rights. Continue reading
A simple wave of Trump’s hand from his motorcade at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was enough for QAnon believers to race to their internet-connected devices and begin decoding the latest Q drops. These “encoded” social media posts spread through obscure internet forums like 8-Chan that are considered by adherents to be veiled communications from “patriots” with special access to the hidden truth behind the American deep state and what they perceive as its subversive campaign to destroy the foundational values of the country. Continue reading
The Trump White House wasted no time in nominating Amy Coney Barrett, a devout Catholic, to the Supreme Court after RBG’s passing gave this administration an unprecedented third bite at the SCOTUS apple. Barring an improbable successful challenge by Democrats, Barrett is on her way to becoming a Supreme Court justice and tipping the scales of the highest court in the land in favor of Conservatives by a margin of six to three. Continue reading
China doesn’t want Trump to win in November, according to William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC). Russia, on the other hand, is “using a range of measures” to undermine Joe Biden’s candidacy. The intelligence official also accuses China of “expanding its influence” ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but only to “deflect and counter criticism” as opposed to a direct attack on the incumbent. Continue reading
Greater Albany Public Schools (GAPS) Superintendent, Melissa Goff, is calling on county commissioners to allocate funding for oversight of “suitable child care options” for the families of the 9,000 children enrolled in the small city’s K-12 system, who are now proscribed from their regular classrooms and will be forced to “attend” school on a screen come September. Continue reading
Money laundering and cooking the books are usually treated as separate things when discussing white collar crime, even though the latter is often the mechanism through which the former is carried out. In the world of corporate banking, hedge funds and the host of satellite market services that underpin the financialized economies of the U.S. and U.K., tax haven jurisdictions allow money flowing in from all sorts of highly profitable illicit activities, shell companies and brass plate trusts to become an asset on the books of massive institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC; all of which have been embroiled in massive money laundering scandals. Continue reading
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), a Big Tech lobby group has just launched a “working group” called the Public Health Tech Initiative (PHTI) to explore the ways in which technology can help in future pandemics. The coalition of companies that form part of the “broad coalition” include tech giants like Facebook and Microsoft, transnational behemoths like Philips, as well as U.S. pharmaceutical retail chain CVS Health. Continue reading
A non-profit organization that “that provides for wellbeing of the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)” was awarded a $2.5 million forgivable PPP loan by the (Small Business Administration) SBA. The Friends of Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF) is the only organization “authorized to represent the IDF across the United States and Panama” where they claim to operate 20 regional offices, with a P.O. Box in New York. Continue reading
In what has already become a parody of a shrinking empire’s habit of clutching at the vestiges of its Cold-War era mistakes, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and fellow war-hungry reactionaries in the United States Senate, Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ted Cruz ((R-TX) have put a bill on the Senate floor meant to undercut Cuba’s medical missions program, which sends trained medics all around the developing world to assist in general healthcare services and emergencies in more than 60 countries. Continue reading
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Wayback Machine latest victim of big tech consolidation and censorship
The promise of an Internet modeled around democratized access to information is quickly eroding before our very eyes as the Wayback Machine falls prey to censorship creep and major tech sector consolidations take us to the point of no return
Posted on May 25, 2020 by Raul Diego
In what is turning out to be something of a latter-day dot com bust, many small to medium-sized tech startups are teetering on the edge of oblivion as the deliberate economic shutdown eats away at their capitalization and opens the door for the biggest fish in the tech space and others to pick the ripest fruit from the tech start up tree. Continue reading →