What's For Dinner?

What's the difference between a garbanzo and a chick pea?

Donald Trump never had a garbanzo on his face.

#DoggerelsBeforeCoffee

Threre are #Witchhunts & #Fakenews
And fascists singing the blues
From #NewYork to old #Mizzou
Sycophants are panicking in #DC, too.

The rest of us are playing "My Heart Bleeds For You".

#DoggerelsBeforeCoffee

Facebook

Facebook just made the stunning admission that 100 percent of its 2 billion users have likely had their personal data stolen by “malicious actors.”¹

That’s right. One hundred percent. If you’re on Facebook, then it’s a virtual lock that your data has been stolen.

This is a massive privacy violation on a global scale, and it’s clear that Facebook simply can’t be trusted with the massive amount of data that they’ve allowed to be stolen and used to manipulate our behaviour, influence elections, and worse.

We’re calling on the government to make sure Canada's privacy laws protect us from modern-day digital threats so this kind of privacy violation can never happen again.

Will you make a donation to help demand action to prevent the next massive Facebook data scandal?

Facebook has been saying for years that there’s nothing to worry about, and even now we wouldn’t even know about these violations if not for whistleblowers and activists.

Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed how Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the data of millions of Facebook users to influence voters in the U.K. during the Brexit referendum and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. Imagine what else has been done that we don’t know about?

The good news from all this is that the Canadian government may finally wake up and take action to put privacy protections in place to prevent this kind of massive data theft from happening again. Already, privacy watchdogs in B.C. and Ottawa are investigating whether current laws were broken by AggregateIQ in its efforts to sway the Brexit vote.² And the Canadian government has FINALLY agreed to push forward mandatory data-breach disclosure rules that have been been delayed for nearly three years.³

But we won’t be safe until the laws covering our privacy rights are significantly strengthened. For example, under current law, our Privacy Commissioner has no power to force compliance with our laws or issue fines. So many companies simply flout the law, knowing that there will be no repercussions.

To harness the momentum from these scandals, we’re launching an emergency campaign to demand a commitment from our government to reform these toothless privacy laws.

Will you make a donation to help demand action to prevent the next massive Facebook data scandal?

Footnotes: 1 Facebook: ‘Malicious actors’ used its tools to discover identities and collect data on a massive global scale: The Washington Post 
2 Privacy watchdog suggests he may join ongoing AggregateIQ investigations: CBC 
3 Feds to enforce mandatory data breach disclosure rules on Nov. 1: iPolitics

Reference:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/04/facebook-said-the-personal-data-of-most-its-2-billion-users-has-been-collected-and-shared-with-outsiders/

"Social" Media

I've been increasingly disturbed by interactions between people that I've seen on Facebook and Twitter. People are just hateful, mean and crazy. Before the advent of social media people had to be in person or on the phone to express themselves. This required a certain level of civility. But when people hide behind a computer screen or the screen in their hand they feel they are insulated somehow from the ramifications of the crazy that pours out of their heads and out through the tips of their fingers. 

But with the recent revelations about the mishandling of the data of millions of users I feel the earth shaking under my feet, so to speak.

Indeed, I have two different app nests on my devices for social platforms:

* Social 
*Anti-social 

The first holds shortcuts to things like my blogs, Diaspora*, Mastadon, and other places I feel safe in sharing to others.

The Anti-social folder holds places like Twitter and Facebook. 

But with the revelation that Facebook is also tracking my phone calls, I'm beginning to feel it is time to jump ship. Keeping close to my family and close friends, which is the ONLY reason I'm still on Facebook, is just not that important. Maybe in time they'll come to the same conclusions and follow me to a federated sharing platform. But until that happens I guess we'll just have to keep up with each other the old fashioned way: in person or on the phone (preferably on phones without FaceSnatcher or the like installed).

I guess my primary point is that when people I'm connected to behave badly I can shake my head and I have a few tools I can use to work around them. But when corporations and fascist states behave poorly and misuse my trust and information I am left with few options. So, I guess it's getting close to time to chop off the head of the snake.

Doc Shopping

I am annoyed by the derogatory use of the term "doc shopping". It implies the act of going from doctor to doctor looking for one who will give one the drugs they want. Oftentimes, however, after encountering 10's of doctor's who are unwilling or unable to actually treat one with multiple complex health issues there is a paper trail which gives the illusion of so called "doc shopping". 

When shopping for an appliance you go from store to store until you find the appliance that satisfies all your needs for that appliance. Why can't it be the same with doctors? They are, like all people, imperfect and not right for everyone. And they, too,  have likes, dislikes, and prejudices like everyone else,  right or wrong.

So, it falls to the patient to be FORCED to "shop" until they find a provider who can and will treat them adequately and fairly.

In today's United States this is a tall order. And a hard one to fill.

 

Actual alt-left

An image of actual alt-left attacking Nazis.

Anyone who can't understand that supremacy and nationalism is evil is simply a pin head and needs to be re-educated.

Trump Sends Federal Agents Into Chicago!

by Carl Dix

The fascist in chief, Donald Trump, tweeted, "Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help" He has been threatening to send the feds in to fix the violence in Chicago since his inauguration. Now 20 additional agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) have been assigned to Chicago to work with the police to deal with gun violence.

The Trump regime blames Black people for the violence in Chicago. When asked what's driving this violence at a press briefing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "I think that the problem there [Chicago] is pretty clear that it's a crime problem. I think that crime is probably driven more by morality than anything else." A representative of a president who wakes up in the morning to spew out women-hating tweets and lies on an almost daily basis, and more, has no basis to question anybody's morality.

And even worse, they're blaming Black people for what the system is responsible for. It's the capitalist-imperialist system that creates the conditions that have young Black people caught up in killing each other. The system has segregated Black people into torn-up communities with few legitimate ways to survive and raise families. The system has geared the educational system to fail the youth. And it has given the police a green light to brutalize and even murder Black people. This leaves people with no way to be somebody except to take up the street life and its code of revenge and retaliation.

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.

Sending the feds into Chicago won't do anything good for Black people, or anybody else. This is the fascist Trump/Pence regime seizing on the way so many Black people are caught up in killing each other to make Chicago ground zero for an overall offensive against Black people. These ATF agents are the advance guard of an overall program that will bring a reign of terror down on Black people. Along with sending in federal agents, the Trump/Pence regime will dole out a few jobs to enlist people as enforcers for their fascist program, destroy the public schools, and send students to schools that will turn them into Christian fundamentalist drones who are unable to think or resist.

This reign of terror will be on top of the centuries of oppression this system has already perpetrated against Black people. This country built up its wealth and power on the basis of enslaving generations of African people. It continued to brutally exploit and oppress Black people for decades as sharecroppers on the same plantations where many had been slaves, subjecting them to Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terror. In cities like Chicago, Black people have been bled dry thru cruel and perverse new forms of exploitation and oppression. Now Trump has a program that would take all this to a whole other level, speeding up the slow genocide this system has already been inflicting on Black people.

The fascist threats and measures of the Trump/Pence regime have reached epidemic proportions--the Muslim travel ban; deporting even more immigrants than the deporter in chief, Barack Obama; tweets that drip with hatred of women and attacks on women's rights; destroying the feeble measures the U.S. had taken to address the devastation of the environment; military aggression and threats of even more aggression; intensifying the War on Drugs and taking the gloves off the police, who have been getting away with murdering Black people again and again. And now, beginning to send the feds to Chicago. All this calls for resistance that is commensurate to the horrors being perpetrated--resistance that aims to drive this regime from office.

And as part of doing that, everybody who hates injustice has to call out Trump sending federal agents to Chicago for what it really is--part of an overall offensive that aims to beat Black people down so far, they could never do anything about the oppression this system enforces on them. And everybody MUST firmly oppose this!