This seems to be political indoctrination masquerading as education -- and not even masquerading very hard. 1984's "Newspeak" was a warning, not a how-to guide, but apparently that little nuance is too subtle for today's professors of English literature.
Google admits to tracking phones even if you turned off tracking
And that is their privacy executive, specifically hired to make people feel better about their personal data in Google's hands.
Remember that a lot of google's apps, which their executive just admitted do not respect user's privacy requests, are installed on gazillions of android phones by default at the factory. Consent here is effectively meaningless. Google will collect the information they want and use it however they want. No one reads the privacy policies -- not even the companies that are presenting them to you.
This is the second terrorist attack since Fridays's attack on the New Zealand mosques. The last one, in Nigeria, was done by Muslims. This one probably is too. Neither type of terrorism is anything other than horrific and evil. Murdering innocent people is evil.
The people who commit these murders, on both sides, expect to get killed in the act; even if they plan to escape, they know there's a possibility they won't and are ok with that. You can stop, or slow down, the current attack by shooting back. But that doesn't stop the next one, because someone ELSE is doing the next one. There's always someone else when your religion makes dying in combat against the infidel a sacrament and a guarantee of heaven. Western cultures prefer to response with soldiers against terrorists directly... but at some point, when that seems to no longer be an effective deterrent, some people will start trying other options.
I don't think those other options will do anything to de-escalate the situation. No one is going to back down here.
The ONLY thing that is going to work is reducing the influx of new radical Islamic individuals as much as possible -- whether by individualized interviews, ending "refugee" programs, or broad bans on countries with a terror problem -- and then identifying and removing those already here with similar extreme views. We can do this for those not yet citizens under a reasonable legal standard for determining suitability of immigrants. Those who remain after passing the vetting will hopefully be capable of peaceful coexistence with other religions and cultures.
But we need to make that vetting a priority. The problem, of course, is that it's really hard to look at a specific individual and know whether they are prone to violence. So the other thing we need to do is reduce the inflow, overall. until it is small enough to properly vet individuals seeking entry. We need to stop approving massive groups of "refugees" and transplanting their whole communities by the tens of thousands to the same little towns in, say, Minnesota for example. We're individualists -- let's treat people as individuals, and let refugees find refuge in their neighboring countries where they may actually be able to assimilate or one day return to their native country.
And to do that, we need to close the border -- because the people getting in that way aren't vetted at all.
Basically, in her testimony, Lisa Page admitted that both investigations were heavily political, that the Clinton investigation was swept under the rug (she says by DOJ's rules), and that the Trump-Russia investigation was started with no evidence and never managed to actually find any.
Page says DOJ drove decision not to indict Clinton
They drove it by excluding "gross negligence" as a factor, despite that being in the law as written. Page's testimony here contradicts Comey's dramatic speech clearing Clinton, as well as AG Lynch's claim she would let the FBI make the decision after her improper meeting with William Clinton. A little more detail here.
It seems they have taken a cue from Stalin and airbrushed out an inconvenient figure who now opposes the organization he founded. If Google is willing to do this -- an act of revisionist history clearly based on ideology -- how can we trust them as a source of information at all?
Again, the fact that a "friendly" DOJ has to be sued to get answers means they are simply trying to cover up as much as possible. And it calls into question how "friendly" DOJ really is. Hopefully, Barr will change things.
Way back in the days of castles and knights, they used catapults to launch corpses into cities under siege in hopes of creating outbreaks of disease. It was an early form of biological warfare.
I referenced this event briefly already, dealing with the attacker's manifesto. Some details on the attack itself worth noting: multiple people were involved, which is extremely unusual in these attacks. Normally you have one antisocial loner. The targets appears to have bee nchosen with religious motivation as well as the desire to start a race/religion war if you believe the manifesto. It is obviously an atrocity when innocents are murdered because of their chosen religion. I do not have to like their religion in general to disapprove of murdering those who follow it.
So, takeaways here: this is obviously a terror attack on muslims instead of by muslims. Multiple attackers were involved, suggesting organization. One of the attacks was disrupted by an armed man at the second mosque. The atacker's motive appears to involve socialism, environmentalism, fascism, race war, gun control, and opposition to migrants. New Zealand already has restrictive gun control laws.
Gun owners have occasionally joked about anti-gunners committing (or at least provoking) mass shootings in order to advance the gun control cause. After all, they already knowingly exploit such shootings and undeniably queue up their agenda items waiting for the right sort of horrific event to try to ram them through. But this is the first time that I know of when a mass murderer's manifesto claimed promotion of gun control as a motive for his massacre.
Why are anti-gun activists so violent, indeed?
I feel obligated to point out that this happened in New Zealand. Many gun control activists also like to claim that mass shootings only happen in the United States.
(On reflection, given the age and education of many anti-gun activists, I feel I should also point out that New Zealand is not one of the United States, and is in fact a foreign country).
There's a deadline for document production concerning Mueller's chief prosecutor, Weissman, and one of his colleagues on Friday. Note Weissman announced he would be leaving. Most people are taking that to mean Mueller's report is almost done (and thus that this frantic battlespace prep means it is a nothingburger), but it could be that Weissman leaving is because Barr will provide Congress with evidence proving his bias in a manner similar to Strzok and Page.
That a lot of battlespace prep for whatever's going to happen Friday evening. Hold on to your hat.
UPDATE: I'm guessing the mosque attack preempted whatever was planned.
Did she earn any of that, or is she a Mary Sue on the order of Rey? I submit to you she has not; not with one movie released 6 weeks before EndGame, set 20 years in the past.
Why should a completely unknown character come out of left field to save the day against a threat that the Marvel universe has been building up for 18+ movies? Are the existing Avengers stupid, incompetent, useless.. or just weak? And whichever one or combination of those Endgame will imply for the original Avengers' inability to solve a problem Captain Marvel is apparently destined to solve easily, why should fans of those original characters show up to see them dissed by the new girl who just got her origin story and is a demigod by authorial fiat?
Thor offered his life to save just a few humans he had met a few days ago in his first movie to prove himself worthy. and repeated the action to forge the weapon that ultimately reached Thanos. Tony redeemed himself from a career as a arms merchant (nothing wrong with that, but letting his company sell arms to terrorists was a colossal oversight for which he bore responsibility) and offered his own life in trade for New York during the first Avengers. Captain America, Dr Strange, and Vision both gave their lives to keep an infinity stone out of the hands of evil (The First Avenger and Infinity War). 18 movies of building up heroic and self-sacrificing characters.
And Captain Marvel... got abducted by aliens and gifted with superpowers 20 minutes ago and now she's ready to wipe the floor with Thanos? She hasn't earned that.
When you have to immediately follow up the phrase "Am I saying I hate white dudes? No..." with "but", you hate white dudes. And the lovefest for this movie among the liberal left (even some I respect) is about how groundbreaking it is, that's a tip-off that the movie itself just isn't anything special.
I'm sure Dan would cast me in among those "usual suspects", but I respect the man enough to hope he can look beyond that. Let me go through his list.
In the midst of an apology to GenX (and later), a Boomer wrote the above. And while apologies are certainly due for a lot of stupid decisions by his generation, let's be a little realistic.
"Iranian fanatics and a North Korean madman" aren't on the brink of possessing the capability to end life on planet Earth. Either nation would be lucky to end life in two or three major US cities if their weapons work and our defenses fail to intercept them. Worst case, either or both have an EMP device in order already -- that would be a national catastrophy, but a long way from a planetary one. Nuclear weapons have been used before, and not only did the planet recover, the human species mostly... didn't notice. Even the cities were they were used have now recovered.
More to the point, though, he writes:
Now, that is something worth apologizing for. But I would be much more impressed by an actual attempt to fix it.
On the one hand, arcane and confusing campaign finance regulations are a great way to make sure the Establishment remains Established. Occasional-Cortex is a political neophyte and some errors are probably inevitable. On the other hand, what's the first thing socialists do once they are firmly in power? Start working the system for personal profit...
