Prime-time portions

How do we educate people to stop listening to the media; to read, to disseminate, to find their own answers and not have them conveniently dished out in prime-time portions? How can this nation of Americans be in such chaos from issues we’ve dealt with handily in the past. At what point do we say ‘enough!’?

When did the news start becoming an editorialized bunch of opinions rather than an actual account of current events? Probably when the 24 hour news cycle began and broadcasters needed to fill air time. I understand freedom of the press. I also understand fear mongering and skewing of facts. I see the selective reporting happening everywhere, the misleading headlines, all in an effort to better manipulate the public.

Americans need to open their eyes, start making their own decisions, start thinking for themselves and realizing what’s happening around them. We need to start understanding the world we live in and realizing we can effect change if we just make an effort to understand; if we just pay a little bit more attention to the life going on around us and the non-issues were being fed daily.

Only when Americans start taking control back—of their lives, of what they watch and listen to, of their own thoughts-—will we stop being a nation of Sheeple and go back to the America our parents and grandparents called home. The USA the world respected and feared rather than the object of hate and ridicule.

Holy fucking life

I’m crying for someone who died today. She died riding a motorcycle, and I only met her a little time before. But she was full of life, a good soul, happy. Her husband is amazing, too.

I’m so sad that she’s gone, her vibrancy has left the world. I barely knew her but she had a life, and she did what I love to do every weekend, as much as I can.

Do I think of mortality? Yes, every single time I get on a motorcycle.

Will I stop? No…but I still weep over the loss of Heidi.

2,248

…fires in the Amazon rainforest

In June Brazil recorded the highest number of fires, in that month, since 2007. Experts agree the climate crisis has contributed to the spike, but the country has also seen an increase in deforestation under President Jair Bolsonaro, elected in October 2018, another pro-business elected official who cates more about lining pockets than protecting a world-saving natural resource. He’s slashed funding to the Ministry of the Environment, instead encouraging logging and mining.

From May to June, INPE´s satellites registered 3,077 fires — 12.5% more than in the same period in 2019.

From book to reality

This from a book written over 80 years ago; a scary forecast of what was to come

Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of government over-reach, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviours within society.More broadly, it examines the role of truth and facts within politics and their manipulation.

What else can we expect?

Law enforcement reform ≠ defunding

Trump‘s executive order encourages changes in policing, including the restriction on chokeholds, and gives police departments financial incentives to train officers on the use of physical force. Interestingly, there’s no mention of race or profiling anywhere on it; likely because that’s what the Democrats wanted.

From Kentucky’s illustrious Mitch McConnell, “The House version is going nowhere in the Senate. It’s basically typical Democratic overreach to try to control everything in Washington.” Control Washington, seriously?

The Dems proposed more encompassing reforms, including making it easier to track and prosecute police misconduct, changing standards for using force and instituting anti-bias requirements across the country. While I am not for everything they put forth, I do believe that a major overhaul of law enforcement needs to be done. Violent riots, racial unrest and profiled incidents will continue to escalate without intervention. The bill that needs to pass is a happy medium between what the Blues and Reds want.

Here’s what actually bothers me: the use of the word ‘defunding’ as a description of what is needed. Defunding means removing financial assets; it doesnt even hint at what actually needs to happen in police departments to ameliorate sentiments and situations. Perhaps defucking would be a better term…

From Mr Trump, “I strongly oppose the radical and dangerous efforts to defund, dismantle and dissolve our police departments. Americans want law and order. They demand law and order.’

Yes Mr. President, we absolutely want law and order, but it needs to be equal and fair to everyone. How about rather than being defensive and against every single logical idea ever proposed to you, you stop , listen and see if, perhaps this time, you might get behind sweeping change that is really good for this country and all its people.

Here comes Skynet

Have you heard of Clearview.AI yet? What about Hoan Ton-That’? Well, I would suggest you look them up.

This human is using an algorithm to scrape photos from all social media in spite of cease and desists orders from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among others. They are then selling these illegally obtained images to law enforcement agencies (ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security) for use in facial recognition scenarios. All without your knowledge or permission. Nice, huh?

Without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list (to various newspapers and interviewers)

If this doesn’t scare you, there’s something wrong. This is the beginning of a computer run society quite akin to Terminator’ s Skynet; or even Tom Cruise’s Minority Report.

Facebook and other social media companies have already taken liberties with everything and anything we post, now every single image that has ever been uploaded by you or anyone else can be farmed and used to implicate or find you anywhere, at any time.

Invasion of privacy? Well, it’s pulled me off Facebook and Instagram, Unfortunately, the photos that are already out there have already been farmed. But I will definitely not be posting anything additional. Sadly, this does not only impact social media sites. This facial recognition technology scours every single image on the web, which undoubtedly means that any backup system where you house your photos can be accessed and impacted as well.

Hoan Ton-That needs to be stopped from being able to freely access all this information! It’s not bad enough that our privacy and our rights are being infringed upon every single day by the government, now this crook, under the guise of a new business to ‘help’ law enforcement, is helping himself to our personal images. Where is this going to stop?