Sunday, April 22, 2018

Questions for Earth


This week’s news carries one of the very best “Roses” of all time: the Delhi High Court upheld the Indian Patent Act, which states that both seeds and all life forms cannot be patented; it upheld as well the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act of 2001 which rules that key plant genetic material cannot be patented, this after over a quarter million Indian farmers committed suicide between the years  of 1995 to 2013, with the rate accelerating 42% in more recent years. Their desperation being forced to buy GMO seeds year after year (rather than the traditional method of saving seed), and the enforced use of fertilizer and pesticides, cornered them on a road with no return.  Compounding that road is the predatory land policies of the Indian  zamindar class of land-holders, and the cultural devaluation of girls, which forces on farmers the dowry system, although in her lifetime, a woman’s work easily surpasses that of men’s.

It is hard to imagine that such a national court judgment could have happened without thousands of farmers marching all over India to assert their rights. The most recent march saw 30,000 farmers walking on foot in sweltering heat, five days, (180 kms.) to Bombay to lay their concerns at the foot of the regional government. The take-away here is that a peasant class assures a civilization that the soil and the seed by which is feeds itself will be protected.



What Earth Wants


Central to Life on Earth is the question of where Humanity finds itself now.  The Earth by every indication is telling us exactly how small and powerless we are in the face of her great movements of climate disruption, rising temperatures, ocean acidification, polar ice melt and so forth.

And central to human life on Earth is understanding our insignificant place here, freed of the hundreds of years of so-called “civilization,” which have caused us to lose track of what is most important to us AND to all life on earth: how we live, how we manage to survive.

We do not survive by thinking, we do not survive by video game, we do not survive by talking aimlessly. We survive as do all other life forms, by eating.  What we eat does not come out of cellophane or plastic wrap, it comes from the stoop labor of millions of farmers, in Third World countries —most of them women—and by our indentured servants in the far Western world: the Mexicans and Salvadorenos, and Hondurans,—mostly indigenous people—who somehow manage to penetrate our borders to put food on our tables, the lowest paid, and most despised workers in the United States.

That is why what we eat is linked to so many other issues plaguing us now: immigration and detention policies, racial policies, oil, gas, and pipeline-derived “energy” policy, and militarism, the greatest polluter of all. Fragmentation prompts governments and people the world over to obscure our main issue:

1) The planet is becoming hostile to life on Earth.

2) Our own existence as the humans we like to think we are is threatened.

That is why the decision by the Delhi High Court is a decision that affects us and all life forms as well.


1. Give up your car.

2. Drive less; fly not at all.

3. Make less & less garbage.

4. Find ways to avoid plastic and its use.  Avoid plastic tableware and plastic straws.

5. Buy less.

6. Recycle e-waste.

7. Waste less food by shopping smart and composting.

8. Cut down on meat.

9. Turn off lights.

10. Stay put.

11. Mow less often to keep your lawn bee-friendly.

12. Vote for eco-friendly policy.

Pastinian women baking bread

Despite mounting concerns from the international community, Israeli soldiers reportedly killed at least four more Palestinians and injured hundreds last Friday as the March of Great Return continued for the fourth straight week according to Common Dreams. Palestinian women are acting as human shields, keeping to the foreground to protect the men.  Tents are arrayed all across the border, each bearing the name of the town they were forced to abandon in 1948. Conditions in Gaza have been steadily deteriorating since then, and now Palestinians of the new generation find themselves at a break point.










Monsanto loses right to patent seeds.

Common Dreams announces: Banking giant HSBC ditches coal, tar sands and offshore arctic drilling.

On Earth Day, the Global Union Against Radiation Deployment from Space (GUARDS) warns it is essential the public recognizes what experts have long known: wireless radiation harms insects, birds, and trees. As yet no global action has yet taken place.  The 2010 Report on Possible Impacts of Communication Towers on Wildlife Including Birds and Bees, commissioned by India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests, reviewed the literature on health and environmental impacts of wireless radiation.  900 peer-reviewed studies show wireless radiation causes negative biological effects on humans, other animals, plants, wildlife, bees, and birds.

Common Dreams announces: Court rules California can list glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.

Union representing 1.7 million teachers dumps well fargo over relationship with NRA and gun makers.

Durham, N.C. City Council passes a resolution prohibiting police exchanges with Israel.

Three tree sits oppose the mountain valley pipeline.

India announces first-ever programme for clean air.

A mistrial was declared in the two-day trial of the Plowshares, freeing three Des Moines drone-command protesters.

Maine Supreme Court approves ranked-choice voting for 2018 elections.


Court orders private attorney to stop Joe Arpaio’s candidacy.


California Assembly passes bill protecting all from ex-gay therapy.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Palestine Redux


This week’s most startling Palestine news of all the startling news has the IDF (the Israeli “defense” forces) killing Yasir Murtaja, a reporter, the only reporter on the ground in Gaza, despite his wearing a flak jacket with the words PRESS written on it in bold white lettering.  Israel followed this one up by its propaganda wing claiming that the reporter was with Hamas. View his last footage here. Since the start of The Great March of Return Common Dreams reports the IDF has shot and killed a total of 34 Palestinians.


Yasir Murtaja
HAMAS, by the way, is a legally recognized entity in the Middle East, regardless of the reporter’s independence from it, but unlike Israel, it does not murder civilians in cold blood.

Other most startling news is that the mainstream media failed to report on what is happening in Gaza. This newsletter is far from being mainstream news, but both it and Went 2 the Bridge have reported on this massacre just this past week.  This issue is a follow-up.

YouTube censored Abby Martin and Max Blumenthal in a full 28 countries as they tried reporting on Israeli Militarism, but vimeo contains the broadcast. Watch it here,

Askiah Adam via Transcend.org has called for a program of total boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel given that the time of patience is long past, and that the recent initiative by the international community to  censure Israel for its genocidal behavior was crushed by the U.S. veto in the U. N. Security Council which “now more than ever [is] nothing but an instrument for legitimising the interests of the powerful member states.” A horrifying video shows Israeli soldiers shouting with joy after sniping unarmed Palestinians in Gaza.

 



But not all Israelis back the official national policy of genocide. Tamar Ze’evi, 19 years old, spent 115 days in jail for refusing to serve. This is her testimony: “I understood that my only way to stay true to myself, which was kind of the point of all this process, finding what it is my moral truth, and the way I want to face reality with it. I understood that if I will simply say what I believe in and the real reasons I’m not willing to enlist, it means I will have to go to jail…. 60 teenagers signed this letter saying that they refuse to enroll in the military because of their resistance to the occupation. I mean, formally we send this letter to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Education and such, but its mainly for the media. The big success of this letter is that actually the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the Minister of Education and the head of the IDF all replied to the letter. Of course, they oppose it very strongly but it got a very big [coverage] on the media and now we have already 100 people who signed this letter. Read the full interview here.

Tamar Ze’evi is willing to make a sacrifice, not of her life, but of 115 days of incarceration.  Are we ready to make the same sacrifice?


Protest the bombing of Damascus, Syria wherever you are. Carry signs even if they are homemade.






and




                                           Thank you for your sanity.




Greenpeace announces action suspended on tar sands pipeline.

Sunday, April 8, 2018

NO FREE PASS FOR THE PASSOVER MASSACRE


With the exception of MSNBC, the U.S. mainstream has put a block on any reports of what is happening in Palestine. As of today, Popular Resistance reports that as of the second week of Palestinian protest, Israeli forces have killed a total of 29 Palestinians, including the 21 during and after the March 30 protests, which wounded more than 1600 more. Eight Palestinians died on Friday, including one who died of earlier wounds.

Starting March 30, some 30 to 40 thousand peaceful Palestinians began their March for the Great Return, a planned demonstration that will continue to May 15, to commemorate the Nakba of 1948 when some 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, and exiled either to Jordan or to the bantustans of Gaza and West Bank.



 


Israel treats Gaza as a combat zone, conflating civilians with terrorists, and framing its March 30 pre-planned use of live rounds and rubber bullets against peaceful demonstrators and deploying 100 snipers on the Israeli side of the fence separating Gaza from “Greater” Israel as “self-defense,” claiming unarmed Palestinians are a security risk. The IDF issued an official statement boasting of its responsibility for the massacre before it suddenly got taken down: “Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”


But, as this segment from Democracy Now shows, Gazans were peaceful throughout the march, despite the killing of more than 17 unarmed Palestinians with shots to the head and upper body, and over 2,000 wounded, including children, with deliberately disabilitating injuries to the knees and pelvis. At least two teenagers were shot, including a 19-year-old artist whose dream had been to draw the map of Palestinian lands before the expulsion of 1948 on the sand. In remembering him, his friends realized his dream for him.



Palestinian “reading” lock down


Raji Sourani, Gazan criminal layer, is quoted as saying:
“They want to push us…to give up, to be good victims. Never, ever we will give up. And we will continue the fight for our freedom, for our dignity, for our people, for our right to be free, to have an end for this criminal occupation, [now marking] its 50th anniversary. They want to steal tomorrow from us, but tomorrow is ours. We are on the right side of history.”



 


Why Be Concerned?

With a full plate of Republican-inspired domestic Nakbas of our own, why should we be concerned about what happens to Palestinians? Because the U.S. supports the Israeli military with more aid than it accords to any other nation, with $500 million this year, up $200 million from last year, and with a total $134.7 billion to date. The U.S. bankrolls this genocide. It’s happening on our citizen watch. And because when the Security Council recently called for a thorough investigation of this war crime, the U.S. used its veto to block the inquiry. That’s why.

There’s another reason which is less well known. Just as Nazi eugenics as practiced during the regime of the Third Reich were inspired by U.S. programs of forced sterilization (still on going by the way), the ethnic cleansing activities of the IDF are in large measure inspired by the U.S. “Indian” wars, that is, the war against First Nations (still on-going by the way) to clear the land for settlement and corporate pillage. And yet another reason: many U.S. municipal police forces have either travelled to Israel to pick up tips about crowd control or been trained on U.S. soil by Israeli IDF “advisors.” The war against Palestine has its eugenic component as well as Israel targets the capacity of Palestinian women to give birth. We could well ask which tail wags which dog?

At the same time, If Americans Knew has released a video showing how Israeli propaganda efforts based both in Israel, and in other countries, including the U.S. are highly organized by using false IPs to re-write both the Palestinian narrative, and whitewash the Zionist program.


Most Israelis vigorously back the policies of their own government, with the exception of many demonstrators insisting on pushing their country to observe human rights., And one Israeli NGO, B’Tselem, urged IDF soldiers to hold their fire: Their call reads:
“Soldier, the order to use lethal force against civilians who do not pose mortal danger is patently illegal. Using lethal force is only allowed when an actual, immediate threat to human life exists, and when there is no other option.



Eight Jewish Bostonians lock down

The responsibility for issuing these unlawful orders rests first and foremost with the policy makers, including the prime minister, defense minister, and the chief of staff. Yet obeying patently illegal orders is a criminal offense and you are duty-bound to refuse complying with them.”

And In Boston, eight Jews chained themselves to the Israeli consulate on the fourth day of Passover to protest the shooting of unarmed demonstrators.

Minimally, PM Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. But, like the Sacramento officer who recently killed black victim, 22-year-old Stephon Clark with eight shots to the back while he talked on his cell phone in his grandma’s backyard will undoubtedly walk, world-class assassins tend to get off scot-free as well.
Please consider adding your name to the petitions listed below in our TAKE ACTION section. Thank you.




 

 









 




Common Dreams: Three thousand Google employees demand Google end work on Pentagon drone project.



Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area announces that community defense won the release of Fernando Carrillo from immigrant detention. Join them one Saturday/month vigiling outside the West County Detention Center, Richmond, California.

Common Dreams: Tens of thousands join striking teachers in Oklahoma.

Common Dreams: Major cities join 17 states suing to block the #savethecensus citizenship question.


National Redistrict Foundation wins suit forcing Scott Walker to hold special elections to fill 2 vacant state legislature seats.

Judge Rebecca Dallet becomes the first progressive to win an open Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

San Francisco budget chair supports state matching funds open-source voting request.

Common Dreams: FCC commissioner slams agency’s Policies favoring Sinclair-Tribune merger.

Common Dreams: Oregon governor to reject any request to deploy National Guard to the Border.

United we Dream announces that Austin H.S. student Dennis Sarmiento will be released soon while his case is being decided.

City Council of San Antonio, after years of citizen activism, passes ordinance securing safeguards for activists’ right to free speech.

ACLU Foundation of NorCal wins suit against the California DMV for violating the motor vehicle voter registration laws. The ACLU is bring suit in the states of Ohio, Kansas, Michigan and Florida as well to insure citizens’ right to vote.

California court deals a blow to the state’s money bail system, finding current bail setting practices unconstitutional. Senate Bill 10 now before the legislature would insure that no one sits in jail for being poor.

The California values Act becomes law requiring that state and local resources not be diverted to fuel federal attempts to carry out mass deportations.

PEN announces the release of Ethiopian writer Eskinder Nega serving an 18-year sentence for criticizing his government.

Sunday, April 1, 2018

Cambridge Analytica Cracks Facebook and Our Electoral System

by Roger Herried

 Updated Note: 

The original Cambridge Analytica (CA) research article done by Roger missed a critical CBS story and interview the day after the Guardian story came out. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-phased-out-use-of-cambridge-analytica-data-before-election/
 

The CBS source for the story was not revealed.  It was apparently from the Trump administration claiming that they abandoned the use of the CA database some time in late September or early October of 2016 and supplanted it with the Republican Party's database.  However, it was used to target ads on Facebook.  

This missed news story would suggest that the impacts of the role of CA's tactics on the election didn't play as great a role as the article states. However, this doesn't mean that the use of psychographic profiling during elections or the broader impacts of our broken electoral system have gone away, or worse, are being ignored by the msm.   


*****

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” and swung the Brexit vote — Chris Wylie
 And did it on behalf of Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon.
The piece has extensive links to content meant to enhance this article. Its an attempt to broaden the discussion about privacy and our badly broken electoral system.

The 3–17–18 rehash of the Cambridge Analytica story by The Guardian’s Observer Magazine and the New York Times may have finally set off a dramatic chain reaction that could reshape this country’s electoral and media institutions like no other.

 Thanks to the billions of dollars in free Mainstream Media coverage of Trump’s vaudeville populism during the 2016 presidential primaries, our winner take all electoral system was primed for the show of the century. In June 2016, following Trump’s republican primary victory, his son in law Jared Kushner brought in Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica brainchild that was originally part of the Ted Cruz campaign.

What’s the Fuss About

A Canadian PhD (Chris Wylie) and Steve Bannon came together to form Cambridge Analytica with funding from Robert Mercer allowing it to obtain the raw data from 50 million Facebook users from Professor Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge University, and distill the list down to 17 million candidates, using computer driven psychological profiling that micro-targeted them with ads either to switch their vote to Trump or not vote at all. There was an immediate skeptical response from the left that there is no proof that profiling tactics actually worked. One author even bought Bannon’s claim that the database wasn’t used (here is politifacts response). There have been calls for Facebook to contact those affected — or investigate to see if they were impacted.

A part of the privacy side of this story includes the $100 billion drop in the value of Facebook, a campaign for people to close their Facebook accounts and proposals for the feds to regulate Facebook. But the real juicy part of the story has only started to come together with the details on the kinds of content you’re being tracked by social media sites.

 How many people even remember that Facebook was caught just a few years ago with their phone app that allowed them to record your conversations? Or even more dramatic that by 2014 Facebook had already been conducting experiments on its users on how to manipulate users mood, even going so far as to openly claim that Facebook would become one of the most powerful political election tools ever. And lest we not forget, the Trump campaign gave Facebook $70 million during the final weeks of the 2016 election with Facebook’s employees actually embedding at Trump’s digital headquarters set up by Jared Kushner.

The first decent alternative media piece on the scale of the Cambridge Analytica (CA) hack and Facebook’s involvement was written by Roberto J. González at Counterpunch. Facebook’s model of selling people’s personal information to advertisers is only the tip of the iceberg on this as there can be no doubt that they are also giving it to government agencies. Many more have since followed for example:
  

Buried in the original Guardian piece by Carole Cadwalladr was Chris Wylie’s explicit details about the scandal that exposes CA’s public claims as lies that led to their CEO being fired within days. It laid out the even more explosive details about the SCL Group (the UK military cyber warfare group and connections that CA was based on) and how two Cambridge University psychologists (Kosinski & Stillwell) designed the Facebook quiz that could be used to quantify five personality traits — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism that could be used to build personalized ads, attacking an estimated 17 million voters the same way that Reagan and the Stanford Research Institute came up with strategies to split off union workers in 1980 but in a much more targeted way (see below for more background on this.

But then Mathew Hindman was able to interview Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge professor who gave Cambridge Analytica the massive database he’d taken with Facebook’s permission. He gave Hindman details on how the data mining (psychographic profiling) worked and how good it was in identifying party affiliation or the individuals personal psychology. For a bit of mind bend, go google psychographic profiling or read this article that includes below CA profile data sheet.
CA Personal Profile spreadsheet from 5–18–17 Quartz Article
As demonstrated by this story on gerrymandering, the republican agenda of profiling Americans is far more about voter suppression than about getting the target to switch preferences — so Trump’s ongoing attack meme “Crooked Hillary” would be reinforced many times over when FBI director Comey’s announced their investigation the week before the election that resulted in nearly a 10 point drop in support for Clinton. That drop was further exacerbated with publication of the Wikileaks story describing how Clinton had taken control of the Democratic National Committee in order to torpedo Bernie Sander’s campaign. Even so, Sanders received over 40% of democratic primary votes — so why would the “Crooked Hillary” meme work? This was America’s dirty political system at work — not “the Russians.”

The Broader View — Our Rigged Electoral Process

This story isn’t just about how the U.S. came to elect a billionaire egomaniac as president, but how our electoral system has been destroyed by America’s elites. It all started with the 1971 Powell memo, moved into second gear during the Reagan era that included the formation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Network. It picked up speed with the theft of the 2000 election that was quickly followed by 9/11, and has now jumped into high gear. It took Adam Curtis’ Century of the Self BBC documentary (that has never been shown by any major U.S. media outlet) to present the historic role of the corporate media’s use of subversive public relations tactics to poison our electoral system, not to mention creating a consumer hell. The video lays out the evolution of public relations from the days of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann (who coined the concept of stereotypes and the role of journalism and an enlightened public) and documents how the Stanford Research Institute used computer generated databases and psychographic profiling of self-centered baby boomer behavior to identify Reagan democrats in the 1980 presidential election. It has not stopped since then — even Obama had his big data voter machine.
Like any two bit magician (anyone remember the Wizard of Oz?) the corporate media has self censored its own domination of our electoral system and in turn is desperately trying to distract us with Russiagate. From the historic role of voter suppression of all kinds (Jim Crow, Political PACs, Gerrymandering, work day voting, negative attack strategies etc.) to Citizen’s United or the outright theft by the Supreme Court in 2000, the biggest scandal of all is how the corporate media refuses to address its own role in shaping this country’s two party fiasco. Back during the McCain Feingold debates on electoral reform that was broadcast by C-Span, a representative stood up and said that nothing will change as long as the media which is the biggest opponent of campaign financial reform (its biggest profits come during the presidential horse races) controls the arena the game is played in. Google and Facebook know this as they are shooting to take over as the delivery vehicle for that big pot of money but does the American voter have even the slightest clue?
 
Predictions suggest that over 50% of political finance money will go to social media companies like Facebook by 2020. During the 2016 election, the media was openly claiming that their news coverage of Trump’s behavior was worth over $5 billion. They even had their own October surprise as another in a long history of such moves for Trump with the Access Hollywood Tapes but then we had the Wikileaks and Comey investigation of Clinton that was the main reason (voter suppression) for people not voting for Crooked Hillary (Trump’s winning meme). Nearly 40% of eligible voters stayed home — a figure that has remained at this level or below it for over a century, yet there has been no attempt to resolve the problem institutionally (imagine if the public school system ignored the fact that 40% of the country’s kids weren’t showing up for school).

But the story doesn’t end with its impact to our electoral institution but also drills into the heart of the growing fourth amendment crisis around privacy and how nearly an entire country has been brainwashed into thinking that they have nothing to hide by letting Facebook collect and sell what we do online. Apologies, but our privacy as well as the right to bare arms were originally enshrined because of rogue behavior by the British government and its chartered corporation, the East India Trading Company. When it comes to privacy, the dark side as exposed by Wikileaks and Snowden is willing to both kill opponents and undermine legitimate civil ones and hide the fact it is going ahead with deploying computer algorithms in military applications, prison systems, jobs and what Google and Facebook think we should read or not read that is pushing us into a negative form of tribalism. The hackers that could breach our private data on Facebook and other sites and steal our it are no longer just a bunch of punks but governments both here and around the world.
NSA Political Cyber warfare Plan — Ed Snowden release

If the MSM truly wanted to educate the public about the historic evidence of vote tampering in a true and honest way, it would have to start with this country’s long standing interference in other country’s elections or at least start to tabulate some of the other, more egregious examples of foreign interference. For example back in the months just prior to Obama’s election foreign nationals from India flooded democratic representatives across the U.S. in an aggressive campaign to remove the US ban on India over its nuclear weapons program. Those bribes worked and democrats caved in to the republican strategy.

 The ongoing Russiagate (Bill Moyer’s Timeline) campaign by part of the liberal media is a desperate attempt to remove Trump and for that reason alone is a worthy project if it actually ousts him, but also because it keeps a spotlight on our electoral system — where it should be the job of the alternative press to fill in the missing narratives — items this piece barely brings into play.

During the 2008 presidential election, the Obama campaign hoodwinked the progressive left with its own unique play on identity politics. But from the day he excommunicated Rev. Wright up until his chief staff Rahm Emanuel pulled the plug on the massive blog that had millions of users who had been promised a direct line of input to the Obama administration, an immense hole in the future of social media was ripped open almost before it ever got off ground. Major sites like Newsvine (that was bought by MSNBC and then shut down) had immense numbers of democratic activists that were able to shoot down the criminal tactics of republicans almost on a daily basis, resulting in a far different way to stop the traditional dirty tricks the right wing has long been known for. The star chamber tactics at Newsvine against the left, environmentalists and union organizers was a sobering example of the DNC’s own dirty politics.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is an important symbolic event that should be taken seriously on its face — as it represents the growing power of social media and the loss of privacy that our society should have never have been forced to opt into. And last but not least, during the last budget bill, the media completely buried the importance of an attached rider called the CLOUD Act. This act is even worse than the Patriot Act because it is designed to get around government spying laws by allowing foreign allies to do the dirty work our own laws block them from doing.

What can be done?

  1. Consider closing your Facebook account down — or strip it of all your personal information.
  2. Read this article about the privacy campaign — list of primary demands.
  • Move toward “meaningful transparency” by ensuring that users “have access to and control over their data”;
  • Protect users’ personal information by providing “end-to-end encryption” that would prevent corporate and government surveillance;
  • Cease collecting and storing data that “isn’t necessary for your product or business”;
  • Provide equal protections to all communities and stop collecting “information that is vulnerable to misuse,” like immigration status and political views; and
  • Support “laws that require a warrant before the government can demand information about your users” and “reforms that curtail mass surveillance.”
3. Don’t use Facebook for political organizing — let representatives from formal groups do the organizing — go elsewhere that promises not to track your political activity
4. There are alternatives like email.
5. Install and use EFF’s privacy Badger
6. Support public ownership of internet service providers that agree to do opt out vs. opt in data collection
7. Demand that all social media sites have an opt out policy and that they never sell or release your data
8. Tell your friends about the Cloud Act and demand its removal.
9. Learn how to delete your browser cookies on a regular basis — leave cookies in place for sites that have passwords.
10. Support digital rights groups like Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
11. Don’t rely on any one search engine (google — Yahoo or Bing) for searches. Note that all of them inject tracking services every time you do a search. Duck Duck Go is an alternative search Engine.
12. Post a statement up on Facebook that you don’t want your data sold to anyone. Many people don’t watch commercial TV because they are acutely aware of that model’s design to sell you as product to advertisers. The same goes for Facebook and any site that has fallen into the Google and hundreds of other tracking companies — the above privacy badger can be used to shut down the most invasive of them.
13. If you do any kind of activist work — please learn the ropes about Virtual Private Networks (VPN)’s and that you will need to bypass the 5–9–14 spy networks to be serious.
14. Make sure you use strong passwords and be careful of password managers as hackers are learning how to break into them.
15. What’s you favorite list of things to do about this?
 













Activists pushed Trump to sign a bill fully funding public media through September 30.










North Carolina finally bans the practice of shackling women giving birth.


United We Dream announces a free mobile text app designed to assist all who come in contact with immigration agents at:  NOTIFICA TO 877-877


California District Attorney wins court case directing EPA to uphold the Clean Air Act.


The Nature Conservancy pointed out hat under the new budget, the line item supporting the Land and Water Conservation Fund and other conservation wins total an increase of $25 million.

350.org announced a new Fossil Free Resolution campaign for cities and towns to pass resolutions banning fracking and committing to 100% renewables.