some us are old enough to remember the idea of protect and serve, which wasn't really how it went but at least the marketing said so, but now its open season on any the thin blue line choose to assault, and now they're dressed in black;


Evanston, IL – All too often, those who blindly support authority without question will say,  ‘If you don’t want to get beat up by police, don’t break the law.’ However, time after time after time, they are proven wrong — often in the worst way. Dr. Lawrence Crosby is proof that not breaking the law is no protection against getting hurt by police as he was beaten and arrested by cops who thought he’d stolen his own car. Now, instead of the officers begin held accountable for this abuse, the taxpayers of Illinois are shelling out $1.25 million.

As the AP reported on Wednesday, a Chicago suburb has tentatively agreed to pay a former doctoral student $1.25 million to settle a lawsuit alleging police officers tackled him to the ground and arrested him for stealing a car that turned out to be his own, his attorney said.
“This isn’t the story that I expected to be telling at this point in my life, having just received my doctorate from one of the top schools in the country. The bigger story of my life is growing up without knowing my father, losing my mother to illness when I was 8 and becoming a ward of the state,” Crosby aptly noted in his piece for WaPo last year.
Crosby is not a criminal. In fact, he’s an upstanding citizen and accomplished engineering student who was on his way to school to complete his doctorate at Northwestern University that night. However, in today’s see something, say something society, not even innocent doctoral candidates are safe from police abuse..........https://thefreethoughtproject.com/dr-stealing-own-car-police-lawsuit/

i've used the following metaphor in previous situations, and find it fits again. years ago there was a tv program called: the outer limits. in one episode titled: to serve man, inhabitants of earth were visited by aliens who brought a book called: to serve man, and took earthlings on their ships to their planet. one earthling decided to translate the book and discovered as some of the last were leaving for that planet that the book was a cookbook. humans run to the things they believe are good for them without sufficient review of the possibilities and now we're running towards what the following article will show you;



A FRIEND OF mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.
WHEN HE OFFERED to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.
China’s social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.
By 2020, if the Party’s plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one’s social rating.
Personal “creditworthiness” or “trustworthiness” points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a “green channel,” where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be “unable to move a step.”
Big Brother is an emerging reality in China. Yet in the West, at least, the threat of government surveillance systems being integrated with the existing corporate surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon into one gigantic all-seeing eye appears to trouble very few people—even as countries like Venezuela have been quick to copy the Chinese model.
Still, it can’t happen here, right? We are iPhone owners and Amazon Prime members, not vassals of a one-party state. We are canny consumers who know that Facebook is tracking our interactions and Google is selling us stuff.
Yet it seems to me there is little reason to imagine that the people who run large technology companies have any vested interest in allowing pre-digital folkways to interfere with their 21st-century engineering and business models, any more than 19th-century robber barons showed any particular regard for laws or people that got in the way of their railroads and steel trusts.
Nor is there much reason to imagine that the technologists who run our giant consumer-data monopolies have any better idea of the future they're building than the rest of us do.
Facebook, Google, and other big-data monopolists already hoover up behavioral markers and cues on a scale and with a frequency that few of us understand. They then analyze, package, and sell that data to their partners...........https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-24/big-tech-merging-big-brother-big-problem

as i was reading this i was remembering the vonegut book, player piano which dealt with automation and its effects upon the great unwashed, which is mostly us, so form your own conclusions as you will;


Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of existing work, according to a new Brookings Institution report.
The report, published Thursday, says roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation — meaning at least 70 percent of their tasks could soon be performed by machines using current technology. Among those most likely to be affected are cooks, waiters and others in food services; short-haul truck drivers; and clerical office workers.
“That population is going to need to upskill, reskill or change jobs fast,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and lead author of the report.

Muro said the timeline for the changes could be “a few years or it could be two decades.” But it’s likely that automation will happen more swiftly during the next economic downturn. Businesses are typically eager to implement cost-cutting technology as they lay off workers.............https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/01/24/over-30-million-u-s-workers-will-lose-their-jobs-because-of-ai/#more-190720

i'm as surprised as you that this guy's points are regularly ignored by 'our' government;


https://twitter.com/i/status/1088541616514785282

over the years since nixon i've come to see that buchanan asks good questions that never seem to be answered;


If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.
Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday set aside to honor King:
“We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. … While Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well.”
At the headquarters of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, wrote The New York Times, Jeffries’ remarks were “met with … much cheering.”
At a Boston breakfast that same day, Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose to honor King’s memory in her way: “Our government is shut down for one reason … So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.”
At a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, Sen. Cory Booker declaimed — in what could be taken as a shot at his New Jersey colleague, the lately acquitted Sen. Bob Menendez — “We live a nation where you get a better justice system if you’re rich and guilty than poor and innocent.”
Booker urged the crowd “to apply the ideals of Dr. King” and avoid vitriol in dealing with political adversaries............https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/01/patrick-j-buchanan/democrats-america-the-heart-of-darkness/

i have to wonder when i read these statements how people like pompeo can keep a straight face when making the statements 'our free press' quotes them as saying;

Pompeo turns reality upside down

By Philip M. Giraldi
Posted on January 24, 2019 by Philip M. Giraldi

The speech made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the American University in Cairo on January 10 deserves more attention than it has received from the US media. In it, Pompeo reveals his own peculiar vision of what is taking place in the Middle East, to include the impact of his own personal religiosity, and his belief that Washington’s proper role in the region is to act as “a force for good.” The extent to which the secretary of state was speaking for himself was not completely clear, but the text of the presentation was posted on the State Department website without any qualification, so one has to assume that Pompeo was representing White House policy.
Pompeo immediately set the stage for what was to follow, asserting in his first several paragraphs that “This trip is especially meaningful for me as an evangelical Christian . . . In my office, I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth. And it’s the truth, lower-case ‘t,’ that I’m here to talk about today. It is a truth that isn’t often spoken in this part of the world, but because I’m a military man by training, I’ll be very blunt and direct today: America is a force for good in the Middle East.”.............http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/26017

steve goodman singing a song i loved when it came out in the early seventies;


https://youtu.be/2SfPyg-mGhU