Month: February 2019

Earlier this week, Vice President Mike Pence declared during a trip to Colombia that “every last dollar” generated by sales of Venezuelan oil, plus all of the country’s assets held abroad, should be turned over to opposition leader Juan Guaido and his shadow government in Caracas, after government-aligned militias killed several protesters, and wounded dozens, during a weekend of violence as they sought to repel US-backed caravans carrying humanitarian aid.

So, with the US tightening the noose of economic sanctions to try and topple Maduro’s regime, which has desperately clung to power despite burgeoning international opposition (though, crucially, Beijing on Tuesday declared that it would oppose a military intervention to depose Maduro), the crumbling socialist Republican’s authoritarian leader has once again looted the Venezuelan central bank to secure badly needed financing for his regime, opposition lawmakers said.

Reuters reported that the regime looted some 8 tons of gold – worth some $330 million at current prices – late last week and sold it to an unknown foreign buyer (suspicion immediately fell on Turkey) in defiance of US sanctions ordered by President Trump in November that prohibit the buying of Venezuelan gold.

The opposition lawmakers who told Reuters about the looting criticized the move as illegal, and warned that Maduro likely intends to illegally sell the gold abroad.

At least 8 tons of gold were removed from the Venezuelan central bank’s vaults last week, an opposition legislator and three government sources told Reuters, in the latest sign of President Nicolas Maduro’s desperation to raise hard currency amid tightening sanctions.
The gold was removed in government vehicles between Wednesday and Friday last week when there were no regular security guards present at the bank, Legislator Angel Alvarado and the three government sources said.

“They plan to sell it abroad illegally,” Alvarado said in an interview. The central bank did not respond to requests for comment. Alvarado and the government sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not say where the central bank was sending the gold. They said the operation took place while central bank head Calixto Ortega was abroad on a trip. In 2018, 23 tons of mined gold were transported from Venezuela to Istanbul by plane, according to sources and Turkish government data.

Since the beginning of Venezuela’s economic crisis (which roughly coincided with Maduro’s election in 2013), the country’s reserves have dwindled. It is also struggling to recover some 31 tons of gold held at the Bank of England, which the UK government has refused to return.

 

The above chart doesn’t include the most recent sales, which have brought the estimated total in the central bank’s vault down to 132 tons.

This latest sale comes after Maduro scrapped plans to sell 20 tons to Abu Dhabi based investment firm Noor capital in January when the firm balked after being threatened by US Senator Marco Rubio. Some 20 tons of gold were also removed from the central bank’s vaults last year. The US has warned bankers and gold traders to stay away from Venezuelan gold.

The central bank bought part of this gold from primitive gold-mining camps in the south of Venezuela and exported it to Turkey and other countries to finance the purchase of basic food supplies, given widespread shortages, according to more than 30 people with knowledge of the trade.

Some 20 tons of monetary gold were also removed from the central bank’s vaults in 2018, according to the bank’s data, leaving 140 tonnes remaining, the lowest level in 75 years. Abu Dhabi investment firm Noor Capital said on Feb. 1 that it bought 3 tons of gold on Jan. 21 from the Venezuelan central bank and would not buy more until Venezuela’s situation stabilized.

Noor Capital said its purchase was in accordance with “international standards and laws in place” as of that date. Maduro’s government has been seeking to repatriate some 31 tons of gold in the Bank of England’s vaults on fears it could be caught up in international sanctions on the country.

Maduro’s government has resorted to selling gold as falling oil production, mounting debts to Russia and China, and tough international sanctions have created a cash crunch. Now, with the opposition seeking to win over the military, which is the only bulwark keeping Maduro in power, the socialist dictator needs to make sure he can keep his soldiers happy…or risk losing it all.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Vp5NQY Tyler Durden

Via MassPrivateI,

Arizona State University (ASU) which spent $307 million to renovate Sun Devil Stadium has learned a lot about Smart City surveillance.

ASU used facial recognition to spy on alumni, students, faculty and families. And now they want to share what they learned by bringing it to a stadium or city near you.

An article in the Tech Republic revealed that Sun Devil Stadium and Croke Park in Ireland used facial recognition cameras to spy on fans.

“One of the technologies being tested in both Croke Park and at Sun Devil Stadium is facial recognition software, which will be used in conjunction with an additional 90 security cameras planned for ASUs stadium. Eventually the cameras will be 4K.”

Officials claim they are using facial recognition to see how fans react to standing in lines.

“The facial recognition technology will analyze data on how fans feel when they’re stuck in lines around the stadium, and how they feel overall, based on their facial expressions, said Chris Richardson, assistant vice president of IT development at ASU. “

This is the exact same thing that is happening in professional sports leagues. Last year, I warned everyone that sports teams are offering fans the option to use CLEAR’s facial biometric scanners so they can skip concession lines.

ASU law school profits from Smart City surveillance

Earlier this month the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University revealed their master plan to use Smart City surveillance technology to get rid of concession lines and traffic.

“Imagine a perfect day in metro Phoenix: no traffic congestion and autonomous vehicles glide commuters through the streets, hitting nothing but green lights. Sun Devil Stadium is packed with a roaring crowd, and the fans move efficiently through short lines at the concession stands and restrooms.”

You read that right, ASUs law school is profiting from turning stadiums and cities into a giant surveillance network.

“Collaboration is one of the key elements, and the institute has been working in partnership with ASU, the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the Maricopa Association of Governments, and cities and towns making up the Greater Phoenix region in order to create a Greater Phoenix Smart Region.”

ASUs law school professor sees nothing but dollar signs, sorry I meant opportunities for using facial recognition to spy on citizens.

“One thing they’re doing there, which may seem to be more about entertainment than technology testing, is using facial-recognition software within the suites area Bowman said. The fact that Arizona is a border state and we have an international airport suggests that this technology, once proven to be effective, could be deployed in the state by agencies to enhance public safety, which is really exciting.”

ASU tests spying on students first before going global

Why teach law students about the fourth amendment when you can ignore it and turn a profit?

In ASUs “Smarter Together” article, third year law student Dominic Papa reveals their plans to test surveillance technology on students first, before taking it globally

“If we can rapidly test innovative new technologies on these campuses, continuously measure their impact, and ultimately validate them, we can then implement these solutions into the 22 cities and towns through the smart-region initiative. Furthermore, because all cities face similar challenges, we can then export these solutions to cities and regions around the world., Papa said.

Whether it is a CIA  “Signature Smart City school” like the University of New Mexico or ASU, smart cities are about two things: profit and surveillance of the masses.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EmaxQ7 Tyler Durden

Jeff Bezos envisions a new space race of one trillion humans that will spread out across our solar system. The Amazon founder and richest man on the planet – for now, suggested that there would be “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins,” adding “Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be,” according to a speech last week at the Yale Club in New York transcribed by Business Insider. 

Bezos says that his aerospace company Blue Origin is building a “low-cost, highly operable, reusable launch vehicle” for spaceflight. 

“I really want that dynamic life and civilization for our grandchildren’s grandchildren. But we’ve got to get started,”said Bezos – who warned that “we don’t have forever.” 

Bezos praised tech entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, citing him as an example of the type of entrepreneuership that could inspire space colonization technologies but that the prohibitive costs of getting into orbit has hindered progress. 

“An even more stark example is Facebook. Here’s a guy who literally, in his dorm room, started a company — Mark Zuckerberg started a company in his dorm room, which is now worth half a trillion dollars — less than two decades ago,” said Bezos. 

“How do you get that kind of entrepreneurial [advancement] in space? You need to lower the price of admission right now to do anything interesting in space because it requires so much heavy lifting and so much infrastructure development.

The entry price point for doing interesting things is hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody is going to do that in their dorm room. You can’t have a Mark Zuckerberg of space today.” -Jeff Bezos

“It’s impossible. Two kids in their dorm room can’t start anything important in space today,” said Bezos, adding: “I want to take the assets that I have from Amazon and translate that into the heavy-lifting infrastructure that will [help] the next generation to have dynamic entrepreneurialism in space — kind of build that transportation network.“

“That’s what’s going on, that’s what Blue Origin’s mission is. If we can do that, then the whole thing will take off and there will be thousands of companies doing creative things.”

The Sun has summarized more of Bezos’s thoughts: 

• “I don’t think we’ll live on planets, by the way. I think we’ll live in giant O’Neal-style space colonies. Gerard O’Neil, decades ago, came up with this idea.
• “He asked his physics students at Princeton a very simple question, but a very unusual one, which is: Is a planetary surface the right place for humanity to expand in the solar system? And after doing a lot of work, they came back and decided the answer was “no.”
• “There’s a fascinating interview with Isaac Asimov, Gerard O’Neill, and their interviewer that you can find on YouTube from many decades ago. And to Asimov, the interviewer says, “Why do you think we’re so focused, then, on expanding onto other planetary surfaces?” And Asimov says, “That’s simple. We grew up on a planet, we’re planet chauvinists.”
• “But the space colonies we’ll build will have many advantages. The primary one is that they’ll be close to Earth. The transit time and the amount of energy required to move between planets is so high
• “But if you have giant space colonies that are energetically close and, in terms of travel time close to Earth, then people will be able to come and go. Very few people are going to want to leave this planet permanently — it’s just too amazing.
• “Ultimately what will happen, is this planet will be zoned residential and light industry. We’ll have universities here and so on, but we won’t do heavy industry here. Why would we? This is the gem of the solar system. Why would we do heavy industry here? It’s nonsense.
• “And so over time — of course you have to today — but over time that transition will happen very naturally. It’ll even be the business-smart thing to do because the energy and resources will be so much cheaper off-planet that industries will naturally gravitate to those lower-cost environments.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EAn7gj Tyler Durden

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

For some time, it’s been apparent that the former “free world” countries (the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.) have been on a downward progression – socially, politically and economically.

But, in the last ten years, the awareness of this has become increasingly pronounced. With each successive year, more and more people recognise that all facets of life in these formerly great countries are heading in a decidedly negative direction.

At this point, even those who don’t understand the decline intellectually, feel in their gut that this is not going to end well. Further, they feel it all around them and sense that when the condition becomes critical, it won’t just affect others. When it reaches the crisis stage, they’ll find it right on their own doorstep.

The average person in each of these jurisdictions already no longer trusts either the media, big business or the government and feels that, somehow, they’re all in this together and that they, the electorate, will be the ones who will be the ultimate victims.

So, is this a question of “collective imagination” gone haywire?

Not at all, I’m afraid. Their instincts are quite correct. Governments and big business alike have sold out the populace, regarding them as mere fodder in their pursuit of increased power and wealth. Governments in the former “Free World” have for decades become increasingly collectivist, promising ever-greater largesse to the hoi polloi, and the majority of voters, sad to say, have eaten it up.

Yet, as the electorate becomes more worried, they don’t ask the government to go into reverse and stop the economically illogical largesse. Quite the opposite. As their fears grow, they demand morelargesse.

And so, it shouldn’t be surprising that, as we get closer to the collapse of this house of cards, new candidates arrive on the scene, offering to take entitlements to Never-never land, promising universal free health care, free education through university and a guaranteed income without the need to earn it in any way.

Of course, when this happens, those who understand that 2 + 2 = 4, not 8 or 12, recognize that any government that attempts to deliver on such promises will cause the collapse of the system – not just the economic system, but also the social and political systems.

And, so those people who do understand that the numbers simply won’t work, ask themselves where it will all end. Typically they wring their hands, aware that their concern is the minority view. They recognize that they can no longer discuss their concerns freely, as their country is moving in the opposite direction – embracing the new, empty promises, with ever-more determination.

They search around for some form of hope and, in the majority of cases, whether they like to admit it to themselves or not, their hopes fix on the Freedom Fairy.

They vainly hope that somehow, the average voter will “wake up,” or that sitting politicians will come before the press to reverse the stance that they’ve always maintained – that big government will provide for all.

Unfortunately, that’s a vain hope, isn’t it? Deep in our hearts, we know that sitting politicians are not going to collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed. We’re sending the country into ruin. We’re going to downsize the government, introduce a free market system and then resign and get out of the way.”

Since that won’t happen, the only hope is that a Freedom Fairy will come along – someone who has never held public office before, who says, “You know what? I’m going to buck the system. If I’m elected, I’m just going to jolly well tell Congress that they’re to stop all this collectivist nonsense, stop borrowing money, and turn their backs on all the corrupt deals they’ve made over their political lives.”

Yet, as obvious as it should be that no Freedom Fairy is going to come along, let alone succeed, with each successive election cycle, the more “enlightened” portion of the electorate start to imagine, “Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe we can turn this thing around.”

And, there, in that last sentence, is the key word as to the futility of this wishful thinking – the word, ‘we.’

It seems to be human nature to imagine that if a group of us – maybe even a large group – believe that something is a good idea, it will somehow happen.

Worse, the ‘we’ suggests that the person in question actually believes that his vote has some sort of significance.

As Mark Twain famously said, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

Quite so.

In good times, the electorate gets to vote for the lesser of two evils. In the end, whichever one wins, the running of the country remains as previously planned. There may be changes in the style of the leader, but the same playbook is followed, just as before.

But in volatile times, such as we now face, the electorate gets to vote for the lesser of two nightmares. In the end, whichever one wins, the running of the country will remain as previously planned, but the electorate will be even more polarized than before and the eventual outcome will be that much worse.

And so, for the more ‘advanced’ voter – the one who understands that the political, economic and social system are spiraling downward, the most natural tendency seems to be to irrationally hope that the Freedom Fairy will come along, wave the magic wand, and send the country back to a time when most everyone worked for a living, took responsibility for themselves, paid their own way and built a strong, productive society.

It’s rare indeed for anyone who finds himself in that situation to honestly say to himself, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

And that’s the tragic truth. The former free, productive society has been whittled away. It no longer exists and it’s not coming back.

Unfortunately, there is no Freedom Fairy, nor is there a Wizard of Oz, any more than there’s an Easter Bunny or a Santa Claus. When empires collapse, the worst thing that a voter can do is to vainly mark down on the ballot card the name of whoever he thinks the latest Freedom Fairy might be. He should, instead, toss his ballot in the dustbin and leave the polling place, in the knowledge that Mark Twain was absolutely correct.

And what, then? Well, that’s an even tougher question to deal with. Because, at that point, he must accept that if, a) his country has reached its sell-by date and, b) it’s going to take him down with it, his only hope is to bow out of the system that he realizes is on the verge of swallowing him up.

If he doesn’t wish to become collateral damage, his only choice is to pursue the freedom he cherishes in a location where it still exists. Just as the more enlightened German Jews found in 1938; just as savvy Cuban business owners did in 1959, the last opportunity to pursue freedom is just before it ends where you presently reside.

Clearly, there are many strange things afoot in the world. Distortions of markets, distortions of culture. It’s wise to wonder what’s going to happen, and to take advantage of growth while also being prepared for crisis. How will you protect yourself in the next crisis? See our PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ssrmy0 Tyler Durden

The potential for major war to break out along the India-Pakistan border continues to build after Pakistan said it shot down Indian fighter jets over the disputed border region of Kashmir. India confirmed only one downed aircraft, and its foreign ministry also said a Pakistani jet was hit in retaliation, going down on the Pakistani side of the border, but what is known for sure is that an Indian pilot is currently in Pakistani military custody after his plane was struck.

Amidst international calls for calm led by both the US and China, the fate of the captured Indian Air Force pilot could be key to whether tensions escalate to full-blown war, or return to an uneasy status quo.

There is only one pilot under Pakistan Army’s custody. Wing Comd Abhi Nandan is being treated as per norms of military ethics. pic.twitter.com/8IQ5BPhLj2

— Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor (@OfficialDGISPR) February 27, 2019

But it doesn’t look good: throughout the early evening on Wednesday there are increasing reports of tanks and heavy artillery being amassed along the border on both sides, specifically near the Pakistani border town of Sialkot, where video appears to confirm major Pakistani Army deployments.

#Update: Another Video from snapmaps of earlier today of Tanks moving in #Pakistan towards border line in #Sialkot near the border of #India. pic.twitter.com/dR8N5TtbAp

— Sotiri Dimpinoudis (@sotiridi) February 27, 2019

Though Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan in a televised address to the nation called for immediate peace talks between the bitter enemies, saying that “better sense should prevail,” Indian leaders and the public were enraged when Pakistan released a video of the detained Indian pilot, filmed identifying himself as Commander Abhinandan Varthaman.

When an interrogator asked for more information beyond basic identifying questions, the pilot replied, “I am sorry, sir, that’s all I’m supposed to tell you.” Pakistan’s information ministry had also shared footage showing the pilot blindfolded and with blood on his face. This particular footage appears to have been taken just after he was apprehended by the army, and just after being beaten by local Kashmiris when his parachute deployed and he landed on the Pakistani-administered side.

India immediately condemned the video parading the pilot on a public broadcast as a “vulgar display of an injured personnel” which “violates all norms of international humanitarian law.” 

India has demanded the immediate release of the pilot amidst the continuing blame game and escalating war of words that seems quickly giving way to real war, following reports of sporadic troop clashes on the border.

A number of western legal pundits were quick to point out that Pakistan indeed likely violated the Geneva Conventions by tweeting video of captured Indian pilot, which forbids publicizing images of prisoners for “insults and public curiosity.” The information ministry quickly deleted the tweet, which included a moment in which the prisoner requested water. 

Video released by Pakistan’s military and information ministry that appears to have violated the Geneva Conventions.

Captured Indian pilot wing commander Abhi Nandan (service no. 27981). #Pakistan has captured 2 Indian pilots after shooting down 2 jets, 1 is in hospital, other in custody. pic.twitter.com/XCXfe5NYNd

— Sana Jamal (@Sana_Jamal) February 27, 2019

Currently news of the pilot’s fate is dominating news and discourse in India, with the national election scheduled at the end of May taking a momentary backseat, as war is now on the table. The potential for national fervor favoring drastic response could drive political leadership to escalate during this sensitive time, ahead of a key election.  

Pakistan’s information further tweeted a “congratulations” message praising the downing of the two Indian jets early on Wednesday.

Wreckges of Indian fighter planes burning. Well done Pakistan Air Force. The entire nation is proud of you. pic.twitter.com/TTIb1zvNZS

— Information Ministry (@MoIB_Official) February 27, 2019

Meanwhile at a time Pakistani officials and media appear to be positively celebrating, and while the prime minister makes what India will surely take as disingenuous calls for deescalation, it appears preparations for war are underway. 

The Daily Mail reports: “India is preparing for war with the construction of 14,000 bunkers to protect families on the Pakistan border as Islamabad invokes the spectre of nuclear conflict, telling India ‘better sense’ is needed.

The “better sense” remark came during Khan’s televised statement. He said: “If escalation begins from here, where will it go?”

And referencing the worrisome fact that each side possesses some 150 nuclear warheads, Khan added: “Can we afford any miscalculation with the kind of weapons that we have and you have?” After which he concluded, “I once again invite India to come to the negotiating table,” so that “Better sense should prevail.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Eh4tIX Tyler Durden

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was trying to explain to me that the world is going to melt, we are all doing to die, and probably we shouldn’t be having any more children, but I was distracted by the dinner she was preparing on camera. She was carefully cutting sweet potatoes before putting them in the oven.

She put salt and pepper on them. Salt was once so rare that it was regarded as money. Ever try to go a day with zero salt? Nothing tastes right. That was the history of humanity for about 150,000 years. Then we figured out how to produce and distribute salt to every table in the world. Now we throw around salt like it is nothing, and even complain that everything is too salty. Nice problem.

Sweet potatoes are not easy to cut, so she was using a large steel knife, made of a substance that only became commercially viable in the late 19th century. It took generations of metallurgists to figure out how to make steel reliably and affordably. Before steel, there were bodies of water you could not cross without a boat because no one knew how to make an iron bridge that wouldn’t sink.

As for the oven in her apartment, it was either gas-powered or electric. In either case, she didn’t have to chop down trees and build a fire, like 99.99 percent of humanity had to until relatively recently. She merely pushed a button and it came on, a luxury experienced by most American households only after World War II. Now we all think it is normal.

I also presume that her house is warm in the dead of winter and that this is due to indoor thermostatically controlled heat. There are still people alive today who regard this invention as the greatest in the whole course of their lives. They no longer had to work two days to heat a house for one day. Again, one only needs to push a button and, like magic, the warmth comes to you.

The more interesting question is where she obtained those sweet potatoes. The store, I know. No one grows sweet potatoes in Washington, D.C. But where did the store get them? For many thousands of years, the sweet potato was trapped in distant places in South America; it somehow made its way on boat travels to the Polynesian islands, and finally landed in Japan by the late 15th century.

Only once boating technology and capital expenditure for exploration grew to reveal the first signs of prosperity for the masses of people did the sweet potato make it to Europe via an expedition led by Christopher Columbus. Finally it came to the U.S.

But this took many thousands of years of development — capitalistic development — unless you want to see this root vegetable as the ultimate fruit of colonialism and thus to be eschewed by any truly enlightened social justice warrior.

Even early in the 20th century, sweet potatoes were not reliably available for anyone to chop up and bake, especially not in the dead of winter. Today Americans eat sweet potatoes grown mostly in the American South but also imported from China, which today serves 67 percent of the global sweet potato market.

How do we obtain them? They are flown on planes, shipped on gas-powered ocean liners , and brought to the store via shipping trucks that also run on fossil fuels. If you are playing with the idea of abolishing all those things by legislative fiat, as she certainly is, it is not likely that you are going to obtain a sweet potato on the fly.

I admit the following. It drives me crazy to see people so fully enjoying the benefits from private property, trade, technology, and capitalistic endeavor even as they blithely propose to truncate dramatically the very rights that bring them such material joy, without a thought as to how their ideology might dramatically affect the future of mass availability of wealth that these ideologues so casually take for granted.

To me, it’s like watching a person on IV denounce modern medicine — or a person using a smartphone to broadcast to the world an urgent message calling for an end to economic development. It doesn’t refute their point, but the performative contradiction is too acute not to note, at least in passing.

Now to this question about whether there should or should not be a new generation of human beings. After all, she points out, no one can afford them anymore because young people are starting careers tens of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans. She says there is also the moral issue that we need to take care of the kids who are already here rather than having more.

Truth is, she doesn’t really explain well why she is toying with the idea that it is a bad idea that people have kids. Let me suggest that it is possible that she is drifting toward the path of countless environmentalists before her and finally saying outright what many people believe in their hearts: humankind is the enemy. Either we live and nature dies, or nature lives and we die. There must be some dramatic upheaval in the way we structure society to find a new way. It’s the application of the Marxian conflict fable to another area of life.

Maybe.

In any case, those are big thoughts — too big, really, for a delightful cooking session after which a fancy meal beckons. We’ll get back to what AOC calls the “universal sense of urgency” following dessert.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UcutMb Tyler Durden

It has been more than seven hours since Michael Cohen was sworn in before the House Oversight Committee, and yet the Congressmen and women who have had their questions relegated to the back end of the hearing have still managed to cause a stir. Following questions about Trump’s financial improprieties posed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, Michigan Rep. Rashida “Impeach the Motherfucker” Tlaib caused quite a stir when she implied that Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows was guilty of racism for “parading” a black Trump administration employee in front of the committee as a “prop”.

During a question that was really more of a statement directed at her colleagues in the House, Tlaib alleged that Meadows decision to invite Lynne Patton, head of region II of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to appear in front of the committee was “racist in itself.”

I am honored to be the special guest of @RepMarkMeadows today. I am here in support of @POTUS and in support of the truth, as Michael Cohen (knows that I know) it to be. And the truth is that it doesn’t take you 15 years to call someone a racist. Unless they’re not one. pic.twitter.com/jPxeYTbTYT

— 🇺🇸 Lynne Patton (@LynnePatton) February 27, 2019

Meadows was understandably less than pleased with his colleagues’ assertion, and tried to interrupt her to ask that Chairman Elijah Cummings strip the remarks from the record and chide Tlaib for violating House etiquette. Instead, he attempted to play the mediator, calmly allowing Tlaib to explain how she didn’t intend to offend Meadows (of course, she was simply speaking her truth as a person of color).

Cummings then went on to remind the committee that he and Meadows are actually “Best Friends” despite their sometimes antagonistic demeanor in public, and backed up Meadows assertions that he is not, in fact, a racist.

Watch video of the testy exchange below:

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VnE1nR Tyler Durden

A former Facebook employee turned whistleblower has revealed that the social media giant engages in “routine suppression” of conservative pages through various methods, confirming internal documents and presentation materials Project Veritas obtained from a Facebook insider. 

The employee, who left Facebook in 2018 and was later hired by Project Veritas, along with screenshots from a Facebook workstation “show the specific technical actions taken against political figures, as well as “[e]xisting strategies” taken to combat political speech,” according to Veritas, such as “deboosting” – by which the visibility of certain content is reduced algorithmically based on certain keywords. 

Project Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the code could limit a video’s visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications. –Project Veritas

“I saw things that were going on that I personally found to be troubling.”

According to the insider, the documents revealed a routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. The technical action she repeatedly saw, and for which Project Veritas was provided documentation, was labeled ActionDeboostLiveDistribution. Said the insider, “I would see [this term] appear on several different conservative pages. I first noticed it with an account that I can’t remember, but I remember once I started looking at it, I also saw it on Mike Cernovich’s page, saw it on Steven Crowder’s page, as well as the Daily Caller’s page.” –Project Veritas

Conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder told Project Veritas that he and Facebook reached an out-of-court settlement related page suppression from April 2016. Crowder’s attorney, Bill Richmond, told Veritas: 

“Louder With Crowder is investigating the allegations of concealed stream throttling by Facebook. The accusations are deeply troubling given the previously settled dispute with Facebook uncovered by Gizmodo.com, which found the show was targeted by Facebook workers with secret audience restrictions on political grounds alongside other prominent conservative voices.”

In another case, a screenshot of an “action log” of right-wing pundit Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page reveals that his content was likely “deboosted” as well. 

Cernovich said that the most troubling aspect is that Facebook could simply “make stuff up” about people by manipulating content. 

“Facebook, or an individual at Facebook, has the unilateral power to create false allegations against someone he or she doesn’t like. The person accused not only can’t do anything about the allegation, they don’t even have an idea the allegation was made,” Cernovich said. 

Also notable, the Facebook insider says that the “deboost” action does not notify page owners that their content has been subject to the algorithm, saying: “[W]ith these ‘deboost live stream’ things, there was no warning sent to the user… These were actions that were being taken without the users knowing.” 

The insider did not notice the “deboost” tag on any left-wing pages. 

“I looked at the Young Turks’ page, I looked at Colin Kaepernick’s page, none of them had received the same deboost comment,” she said. 

The “deboost” tag appears after the word “Sigma,” which Project Veritas has learned is an artificial intelligence system used to block potential suicide and self-harm posts. Both Mike Cernovich and Steven Crowder cannot recall having ever produced any videos on Facebook that promote suicide or self-harm. Mike Cernovich told Project Veritas that in fact he has long spoken out against suicide and self-harm, and provided tweets of his and a blog post as evidence. –Project Veritas

Veritas also notes a presentation found within the leaked documents from Facebook engineers Seiji Yamamoto and Eduardo Arino de la Rubia titled “Coordinated Trolling on FB.” The presentation details current and future actions available to the company to combat alleged abusive behavior on the platform. 

Yamamoto is shifting the goalposts – claiming in a post that Facebook should address content “near the perimeter of hate speech,” which are “things that aren’t actually hate speech but that might offend somebody. Anything that is perceived as hateful but no court would define it as hate speech.”

The insider believes Yamamoto’s plans appears to be political in nature, rather than in response to abusive behaviors, “[i]t was clearly kind of designed… aimed to be the right wing meme culture that’s become extremely prevalent in the past few years. And some of the words that appeared on there were, using words like SJW… MSM… the New York Times doesn’t talk about the MSM. The independent conservative outlets are using that language.”

Also in Yamamoto’s report was a line appearing to say that online Facebook trolls are involved in “destructive behaviors” such as “[r]ed-pilling normies to convert them to their worldview.” –Project Veritas

“Red-pilling” is a reference to the 1999 movie The Matrix, and refers to educating a person to facts and information that contradict mainstream narratives or allow a person to reframe their worldview through a different context. “Normies” are people who have yet to be red-pilled.  

Read the rest of the Project Veritas report here. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BQ9pnF Tyler Durden