Month: January 2015
Propaganda
Blind Ferret on Income Inequality
In 1955, the minimum wage was $0.75; today it’s $7.25. Looking at it, one would say it’s been increased significantly in 60 years. However, if you apply inflation and understand what those dollars will get you (the buying power mentioned above), you would see that those 2 amounts are almost identical.
Ergo, minimum wage has not been raised in 60 years.
To make things worse, with cost of living increases taking into account, the same wage gets you far less than it did in the ‘50s.
That house? Those 2 cars? Not going to happen. That mountain of debt most likely will though, beginning as soon as you decide to get an education.
The obvious solution to this problem? Raising the minimum wage, and renaming it to ‘Living Wage’. A living wage should allow an employee working 40 hours a week to live relatively comfortably.
Opponents of raising the minimum wage claim it would cost businesses too much money, causing them to lay off employees or worse, go bankrupt. These are lies.
Do your own research, pick 10 corporations that you know of and look at their profits for the last 5 years. After you’ve done, see how many employees they have and approximately what it would cost to raise the minimum a few dollars. Which number is greater?
They can afford it, they choose not to.
This is what’s wrong with politics today
Cable companies and telcos are huge political contributors to Congress. AT&T and Comcast individually spent just under $8m in political contributions last year; the National Cable and Telecommunications Association spent $6.6m; Verizon, $6.3m.
Likewise with lobbying. The cable industry spent more than any other industry except the healthcare industry on lobbying last year. Comcast spent $12m; AT&T, $11m; and Verizon, $10m.
As has been repeatedly noted since the net neutrality debate took hold, those politicians opposing net neutrality rules have been disproportionately compensated by the cable industry.
HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one’s zip code, income level, smoking status, pregnancy status and more.
An example of personal health data being sent to third parties from healthcare.govAn example of personal health data being sent to third parties from healthcare.gov
EFF researchers have independently confirmed that healthcare.gov is sending personal health information to at least 14 third party domains, even if the user has enabled Do Not Track. The information is sent via the referrer header, which contains the URL of the page requesting a third party resource. The referrer header is an essential part of the HTTP protocol, and is sent for every request that is made on the web. The referrer header lets the requested resource know what URL the request came from. This would for example let a website know who else was linking to their pages. In this case however the referrer URL contains personal health information.
FBI Defuses Another Of Its Own Terrorist Plots; John Boehner Pretends It’s Evidence That We Need To Renew The PATRIOT Act
Last week, as you may have heard, the Justice Department breathlessly announced that it had uncovered and broken up a terrorist plot against the government, leading to the arrest of a 20 year-old man, Christopher Lee Cornell, in Ohio. According to the FBI, Cornell was planning to go to the US Capitol and kill government officials. As often happens with these kinds of announcements, the press was quick to jump in and fuel the narrative of some big terror plot that the FBI was able to miraculously disrupt at the last minute.
For years now, we’ve pointed out a pattern of how nearly every big headline about the US disrupting a domestic terrorist attack was almost always about the FBI creating its very own plot, and then pressuring and cajoling some vulnerable, poverty-stricken, desperate Muslim (almost always Muslim) young men into “joining” this plot. This happens despite those individuals rarely having expressed direct interest in any sort of terrorist activity, or having any connections or means to carry out such activity. But with continued pressure from “FBI informants” (who tend to either by paid by the FBI or are trying to reduce punishment for other crimes they’ve been charged with — or both), eventually these men agree to take part in a “plot” that was entirely designed by the FBI and had no chance of ever happening.
Hey, CNN: Cowardice is Not Tolerance – Nous Sommes Charlie
The first issue published by Charlie Hebdo after a dozen staff members were assassinated is out. Instead of the typical print run of 50,000, they printed (and sold) three million copies.
Newsworthy? Of course.
Was the cover apologetic, conciliatory, or “balanced”? Hell, no.
Newsworthy? Of course.
But when CNN reported that the magazine had resumed publishing, it was unwilling to show the cover. The cover breaks no American laws, is not “obscene,” and features neither nudity nor violence nor libel.
So why the CNN blackout of this historic event? An anchorwoman explained: “It is our policy not to show potentially offensive images of the prophet.”
Read that again: “potentially offensive.”
CNN refuses to say why they have institutionalized this self-censorship. They’re suggesting it’s because they care about the sensitivities of those who would be upset. It’s especially interesting, given that most of those upset people aren’t even in their audience.
It’s EASY to make you GRASS YOURSELF UP for crimes you never did
New research has found that people are often surprisingly willing to confess to having committed crimes – even when they’re innocent, or when the crimes never actually took place.
According to psychboffins Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire, UK and Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia, Canada, interviewers need only seed their questions with a few “wrong details” to cause false memories to form in subjects’ minds.
“Our findings show that false memories of committing crime with police contact can be surprisingly easy to generate, and can have all the same kinds of complex details as real memories,” Shaw said in a statement.
To prove the point, the researchers gave a questionnaire to the primary caregivers of 60 university students, asking then to describe events that the students experienced between the ages of 11 and 14. The boffins then brought the students in to their lab for a series of three 40-minute interviews about their past histories.
The twist? Although the scientists asked each student about two different life events, only one of the events mentioned in the questioning actually happened. The other event was pure fiction, but a surprising number of test subjects came to believe it happened anyway, even when it involved them committing a crime.
MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture’s Public Domain Movies
Despite the growing availability of legal services in many countries, movie studios face a constant stream of pirated films.
In an attempt to deter these infringements, the MPAA and individual movie studios send thousands of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.
When it comes to takedown notices the MPAA has a dubious track record. The movie industry group has got into the habit of asking Google to remove the homepages of allegedly infringing sites instead of individual pages where the infringing movies are listed.
A few days ago, for example, the MPAA asked Google to remove the homepage of the most popular torrent site Kickass.so, alongside several other torrent and streaming sites. As with previous requests Google declined to do so as the request was too broad.
The same takedown notice includes another unusual and perhaps more worrying request. Between all the “pirate sites” the MPAA also targeted Open Culture’s list of public domain movies.
For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Culture offers an archive of high-quality cultural & educational media. With Stanford University’s Dan Colman as founder and lead editor, the content listed on the site is selected with great care.
The MPAA, however, appears to have spotted a problem with the list and has asked Google to remove the entire page (containing 700 movies) from its search results
Increased gov spy powers are NOT the way to stay safe against terrorism
This really needs to be reiterated:
Riddle me this, May. Given that France not only operates a PRISM-like dragnet surveillance operation, but had the Charlie Hebdo murderers under surveillance until six months before the slaughter of the magazine’s cartoonists, would any of these new measures help stop terrorists in Blighty?
Of course, we all know the answer already: they wouldn’t. None of them would. This is a knee-jerk response to a problem which the government doesn’t know the answer to.