The coronavirus pandemic and corresponding lockdown made way for “one of the greatest wealth transfers in history,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Thursday.
“The bigger the business, the more it moves the major averages, and that matters because this is the first recession where big business … is coming through virtually unscathed, if not going for the gold,” he added.
Cramer said it still only scratches the surface of what impact the halt in global economic activity will have on the country…
Why did Google suppress the search suggestion for “Clinton Body Count”?
Notice that Google omits every single prediction. Why is this? According to Google, all the Google search predictions are built off of user search data.
According to Google’s public statements, if there isn’t a search prediction then it’s because there is no one searching for that term. This would be fine and dandy if it weren’t for Google’s other service: trends.google.com which shows the real search traffic.
Continued: Why did Google suppress auto-complete for “Clinton Body Count”?
Internal documents show how the company worked to discredit critics and investigated singer Neil Young
Monsanto operated a “fusion center” to monitor and discredit journalists and activists, and targeted a reporter who wrote a critical book on the company, documents reveal. The agrochemical corporation also investigated the singer Neil Young and wrote an internal memo on his social media activity and music.
The records reviewed by the Guardian show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer. Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its “intelligence fusion center”, a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.
The documents, mostly from 2015 to 2017, were disclosed as part of an ongoing court battle on the health hazards of the company’s Roundup weedkiller…
Continued: Revealed: how Monsanto’s ‘intelligence center’ targeted journalists and activists
One of the world’s greatest privacy invaders just had his privacy invaded
Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.
In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.”
“Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” The group warned: “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.” In a separate advisory, the ACLU said of this face-recognition software that Amazon’s “marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China…”
Continue reading: Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else
‘For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews…
Facebook “allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages…”
Continued: As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants
“The memo discusses how big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter (all of which are openly censoring user accounts today) will be recruited and called upon to collude with the Soros and Brock agenda in order to manipulate the political landscape.”
Social media censorship is here and out in the open, and it has become clear that the major tech companies are working together to shut down and silence members of the free press for political reasons.
It turns out, according to a leaked 49 page document, that this special influence may be none other than George Soros himself, the world’s wealthiest liberal political agitator. Soros has long been known to exert influence, via his immense personal wealth, at the grass-roots level of many political struggles around the world…
Continued: Soros’ Role In Social Media Censorship Exposed In Leaked Document
“Of the $249,407 Sweeny received in 2015, overtime pay accounted for $111,808 of it. Of the $218,512 he earned in 2016, overtime pay made up $95,895.”
A Massachusetts state trooper is pleading guilty to pocketing $11,000 in overtime pay for hours that he didn’t actually work.
Kevin Sweeney, 40, of the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) found a way to game the system in order to receive extra money for shifts that he either left early or did not work at all…
“Sweeney concealed his fraud by submitting fraudulent citations designed to create the appearance that he had worked overtime hours that he had not, and falsely claimed in MSP paperwork and payroll entries that he had worked the entirety of his overtime shifts…”
Story: Massachusetts Cop Pleads Guilty to Pocketing $11,000 for Hours He Didn’t Work | Reason
“Days after a California jury awarded a school groundskeeper more than $289 million in damages after he claimed Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller Roundup gave him cancer, the controversial ingredient – glyphosate — has been detected in popular kids’ breakfast cereals, including Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, according to an activist group.
Lab tests conducted by the left-leaning Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit advocacy group that specializes in toxic chemicals and corporate accountability, indicated almost three-fourths of the 45 food products tested detected high levels of glyphosate, which has been identified as a “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization in 2015…
Yet, Olga Naidenko, Ph.D., and senior science adviser for the EWG, says the bottom line is that glyphosate does not belong in children’s food and that recent biomonitoring studies show detectable levels of the ingredient in people’s urine, which likely comes from dietary exposure.”
Article: Roundup ingredient found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats, and other cereals
“Though other factors play a role in the algae bloom crises, one of the most significant involves the sugar industry. A combination of federal sugar subsidies, federal regulations on pollution, and federal control of Lake Okeechobee (a giant lake in southern Florida) runoff guidelines has created a recipe for disaster.
The federal sugar subsidy prevents Americans from buying sugar from Cuba and other sources. This means that we have to produce our own sugar and that we pay the world’s highest price for sugar. It also means that we grow sugar and sugar substitutes in a high-cost fashion using a lot of fertilizer!
…the solutions are simple and straightforward. End the sugar subsidies and the EPA and its protection limits. Restore the right of the people to sue polluters that cause demonstrable harm.”
Story: How US Sugar Subsidies Bring a Red Tide of Algae to Florida’s Shores
Official data show serious discipline for feds is rare, but secret settlements obscure true figures.
One in four federal employees suspended by federal agencies in 2016 had been suspended before, according to a new review, which suggested an array of best practices for agencies to reduce misconduct in the workplace…
The review examined misconduct issues rather than poor performance. GAO cited as examples of misconduct “time and attendance infractions; intoxication; workplace violence; physical aggression toward an employee; improper use of a government-issued credit card; misuse of government equipment (such as viewing pornography or gambling); use of public position for private gain; and behavior that affects national security.”
Continued: One Quarter of Suspended Feds Have Been Suspended Before