“The Digital Poorhouse”
October 15th, 2019Via: Guardian:
The Guardian has spent the past three months investigating how billions are being poured into AI innovations that are explosively recasting how low-income people interact with the state. Together, our reporters in the US, Britain, India and Australia have explored what amounts to the birth of the digital welfare state.
Their dispatches reveal how unemployment benefits, child support, housing and food subsidies and much more are being scrambled online. Vast sums are being spent by governments across the industrialized and developing worlds on automating poverty and in the process, turning the needs of vulnerable citizens into numbers, replacing the judgment of human caseworkers with the cold, bloodless decision-making of machines.
At its most forbidding, Guardian reporters paint a picture of a 21st-century Dickensian dystopia that is taking shape with breakneck speed. The American political scientist Virginia Eubanks has a phrase for it: “The digital poorhouse.”
How Amazon.com Moved Into the Business of U.S. Elections
October 15th, 2019Via: Reuters:
The expansion by Amazon Web Services into state and local elections has quietly gathered pace since the 2016 U.S. presidential vote. More than 40 states now use one or more of Amazon’s election offerings, according to a presentation given by an Amazon executive this year and seen by Reuters.
So do America’s two main political parties, the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the U.S. federal body charged with administering and enforcing federal campaign finance laws.
While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS – along with a broad network of partners – now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results, according to company documents and interviews.
How to Butcher a Cow
October 15th, 2019This is an absolutely incredible video.
Via: The Bearded Butchers:
Lights Filmed South of Groom Lake Road [???]
October 14th, 2019I’m pretty sure that is some sort of tracer ammo. The distance makes the projectiles look like they’re not moving very fast.
Via: UFO Seekers:
Counterfeiting Microsoft’s “Restore CD” Landed Me in Prison for a Year
October 14th, 2019“When I save something, that’s taking away from their market share.”
Via: Vice:
ABC Attempts to Pass Off Gun Range Footage as Combat Footage From Syria
October 14th, 2019Via: Summit News:
ABC News attempted to pass off footage from a 2017 gun range show as evidence of Turkey bombing Kurdish civilians in order to blame President Trump.
Yes, really.
The ABC News anchor presenting the footage comments that it shows “the situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria” after Trump ordered U.S. forces to leave.
…
The anchor accuses Trump of “effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against ISIS,” before discussing the video.
“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town,” he states before mentioning “horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters.”
…
However, the video (original posted here and below) is from a 2017 gun range show entitled ‘Knob Creek night shoot 2017’.
GQ Magazine Says “New Masculinity” Is Men Wearing Earrings, Giant Sleeping Bag Dresses and Crying
October 14th, 2019And why not? I’ve noticed men wearing women’s style skinny jeans for years.
So it goes…
Via: Summit News:
According to GQ Magazine, “new masculinity” is men wearing earrings and giant dresses that resemble sleeping bags while crying.
Yes, really.
“@Pharrell covers GQ’s New Masculinity issue, an exploration of identity, culture, and style in 2019,” tweeted the magazine.
The cover shot shows the musician wearing an earring while dressed in what many people are describing as a cross between a dress and a sleeping bag.
Other images from the shoot show Pharrell crying and wearing a long leopard print coat.
According to GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch, the issue is “an exploration of the ways that traditional notions of masculinity are being challenged, shifted, and overturned” as part of masculinity’s “Shut Up and Listen moment” in a “pervasive culture of sexual intimidation and violence and blatant gender inequality.”
These Scrubbed Reports Reveal New Secrets Into the Prince Andrew-Jeffrey Epstein Relationship
October 14th, 2019Via: Mint Press:
While the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has largely faded from media coverage in the United States, it has continued to attract attention abroad, particularly in the United Kingdom in connection with Epstein’s long-standing association with Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and the Queen’s son.
The Epstein-Prince Andrew relationship has long been a fascination of the U.K. press, with numerous articles dating back to the early 2000s detailing the most outrageous aspects of their relationship. Prior to that, Epstein had also garnered attention from U.K. newspapers regarding his association with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose reputation in the U.K. is rather notorious, as was that of her father, Robert Maxwell.
Yet, since Epstein’s arrest in July, many of these older articles on Epstein and Maxwell, as well as those focusing on the Epstein-Prince Andrew relationship, have disappeared from the archives of several prominent U.K. media outlets that reported on these relationships years ago.
Related: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case
U.S. Quietly Reviewing Plans for Evacuating Roughly 50 Tactical Nuclear Weapons from Turkey
October 14th, 2019Via: New York Times:
And over the weekend, State and Energy Department officials were quietly reviewing plans for evacuating roughly 50 tactical nuclear weapons that the United States had long stored, under American control, at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, about 250 miles from the Syrian border, according to two American officials.
Those weapons, one senior official said, were now essentially Erdogan’s hostages. To fly them out of Incirlik would be to mark the de facto end of the Turkish-American alliance. To keep them there, though, is to perpetuate a nuclear vulnerability that should have been eliminated years ago.
“I think this is a first — a country with U.S. nuclear weapons stationed in it literally firing artillery at US forces,” Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies wrote last week.
For his part, Mr. Erdogan claims nuclear ambitions of his own: Only a month ago, speaking to supporters, he said, he said he “cannot accept” rules that keep Turkey from possessing nuclear weapons of its own.
“There is no developed nation in the world that doesn’t have them,” he said. (In fact, most do not.)
Project Veritas: Expose CNN, “Zucker Wants Impeachment Every Single Day To Be The Top Story”
October 14th, 2019Via: Project Veritas:
