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On Wednesday, President Obama, who has become the executive branch equivalent of a professional Salon.com commenter troll, took his traveling roadshow of perverse failure to the Islamic Society of Baltimore.

Last Friday, a new regulation was proposed by the Obama administration that will make it harder and more expensive for employers to hire and promote white males, enrich class action lawyers, and do absolutely nothing to accomplish the ostensible goal of raising the pay of women relative to men.

"They would rather Hillary Clinton, they would rather bankrupt our kids and grandkids, they'd rather lose the Supreme Court for a generation, they'd rather see our religious liberties stripped away, our Second Amendment taken away, they would rather see Islamic terrorism continue to rise and Israel continue to be under assault than actually have a true Reagan conservative in the White House who believes what he says. That shows just how messed up Washington is, but it also shows why frustration is volcanic."...

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, locked in a tight race in Iowa with front-runner Hillary Clinton, dominated conversation about the state's caucuses on Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Monday, the social network said. From midnight to noon CST (0600-1800 GMT), 42.2 percent of conversations about the caucuses were about Sanders, the senator from Vermont, compared with 21.7 percent for Republican front-runner Donald Trump and 13.1 percent for Clinton, according to Facebook. Iowans begin choosing candidates at 7 p.m. CST (0100 GMT on Tuesday), with results expected within a few hours. The contest is the first of the state-by-state battles to pick...

So It Begins: Bloomberg Op-Ed Calls For An End Of Cash http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-31/bloomberg-op-ed-calls-end-cash So It Begins: Bloomberg Op-Ed Calls For An End Of Cash Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/31/2016 In a moment of curious serendipity, a little over 90 minutes after we showed what a dystopian, centrally-planned, cashless society unleashed in a negative interest rate world would look like ("by forcing people and companies to convert their paper money into bank deposits, the hope is that they can be persuaded (coerced?) to spend that money rather than save it because those deposits will carry considerable costs"), and briefly after we...

Company Developing ‘Tech Tattoos’ That Track Medical, Financial Info « CBS New York http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/01/29/tech-tattoos-chaotic-moon/

Monday is the beginning of National School Choice Week, featuring over 16,000 organized events across the country, an attempt to take on the anti-choice progressive left in America, the Democrat Party that prefers a government monopoly in the nation's school system in order to continue brainwashing children with their godless and anti-American Marxist ideology. Constitutional conservative presidential candidate Ted Cruz, a long proponent of school choice in America, came out with a video both celebrating and supporting school choice on Monday - calling it the "civil rights issue of the 21st century."...

If you're running Windows 7 or 8.1 on a computer that isn't attached to a domain, you're no doubt familiar with the "Get Windows 10" ads that try to convince you -- sometimes subtly, sometimes forcefully -- to install Windows 10. Microsoft's intrusive campaign has drawn much well-deserved ire among Windows customers. I think it represents a new low in Microsoft marketing -- right down there in the Scroogled end of the gene pool. Back in August, Microsoft posted KB 3080351, a discussion of new Group Policy settings and two obscure registry entries -- DisableOSUpgrade and ReservationsAllowed -- that, taken...

The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’ - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-way-police-are-surveilling-you-calculating-your-threat-score/2016/01/10/e42bccac-8e15-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html A national debate has played out over mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a new generation of technology such as the Beware software being used in Fresno has given local law enforcement officers unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. Nabarro said the fact that only Intrado — not the police or the public — knows how Beware tallies its scores is disconcerting. He also worries that the system might mistakenly increase someone’s threat level by misinterpreting innocuous activity on social...

Astra Taylor's iPhone has a cracked screen. She has bandaged it with clear packing tape and plans to use the phone until it disintegrates. She objects to the planned obsolescence of today’s gadgetry, and to the way the big tech companies pressure customers to upgrade. Taylor, 36, is a documentary filmmaker, musician and political activist. She's also an emerging star in the world of technology criticism. She's not paranoid, but she keeps duct tape over the camera lens on her laptop computer - because, as everyone knows, these gadgets can be taken over by nefarious agents of all kinds. Taylor...

A leading Democratic senator will seek legislation requiring the ability to "pierce" through encryption. The potential bill would allow American law enforcement to read protected communications with a court order. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that she would seek a bill that would give police armed with a warrant based on probable cause the ability “to look into an encrypted Web." "I have concern about a PlayStation that my grandchildren might use," she said, "and a predator getting on the other end, and talking to them, and it's all encrypted. I think there really...

Google’s chairman wants algorithms to censor the internet for hate speech - Quartz In an op-ed for The New York Times (paywall), Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, inserted himself directly into the middle of a heated debate about the line between fighting terrorism’s online reach and internet censorship. “It’s our responsibility to demonstrate that stability and free expression go hand in hand,” he writes. “We should build tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media—sort of like spell-checkers, but for hate and harassment.” His words came just after Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called...

Don’t you love donating to causes you believe in? Don’t you love that warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that contributing to a worthy cause? And don’t you especially love that you can support whatever organization you choose anonymously? That last one is especially important given the news over the last few years that the IRS has been targeting conservatives with audits and denial of tax-free status for nakedly political reasons. Well, if the IRS has their way, this may be a luxury that will soon go the way of the dinosaur. A new rule is proposing that non-profit organizations collect...

I'm not sure this shows that he want to "microchip everybody," but it IS disturbing that he'd even be headed in the microchiping direction.

<p>Parental concerns about student privacy have been rising in recent years amid the growing use by schools, school districts and states use technology to collect mountains of detailed information on students. Last year, a controversial $100 million STUDENT DATA COLLECTION project funded by the GATES FOUNDATION and operated by a specially created nonprofit organization called inBloom was forced to shut down because of these concerns, an episode that served as a warning to parents about just how much information about their children is being shared without their knowledge.</p>

Encrypted email provider ProtonMail is still being hit by a DDoS attack from what appears to be a nation state, as well as a secondary and separate lower-level assault from an identified assailant. However, the service is now operating normally, it seems. Switzerland-based ProtonMail offers an encrypted webmail system able to withstand intelligence agency-level surveillance. However, since last Tuesday the company has continued to be hit by DDoS attacks from two attackers. Talking to The Register, ProtonMail CEO Andy Yen explained: "We have been attacked every day since 3 November, so we're now entering the sixth day of attacks." "There...

THE RECENT EXPANSION of Google’s Timeline feature can provide investigators unprecedented access to users’ location history data, allowing them in many cases to track a person’s every move over the course of years, according to a report recently circulated to law enforcement.“The personal privacy implications are pretty clear but so are the law enforcement applications,” according to the document, titled “Google Timelines: Location Investigations Involving Android Devices,” which outlines the kind of information investigators can now obtain.The Timeline allows users to look back at their daily movements on a map; that same information is also potentially of interest to law enforcement. “It is now...

Telegraph.co.uk Google wants to monitor your mental health. You should welcome it into your mind Yes, you should tell the computer what you're thinking By James Kirkup 6:24PM GMT 28 Oct 2015 The use of technology to track and treat mental illness is deeply worrying but sadly necessary Next week, Dr Tom Insel leaves his post as head of the US National Institute of Mental Health, a job that made him America’s top mental health doctor. Dr Insel is a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist and a leading authority on both the medicine and public policies needed to deal with problems...

Sam Thielman The Senate, ignorant on cybersecurity, just passed a bill about it anyway. The US Senate overwhelmingly passed a controversial cybersecurity bill critics say will allow the government to collect sensitive personal data unchecked, over the objections of civil liberties groups and many of the biggest names in the tech sector. The vote on Tuesday was 74 to 21 in support of the legislation. (snip) None of the Republican presidential candidates (except Lindsey Graham, who voted in favor) were present to cast a vote, including Rand Paul, who has made privacy from surveillance a major plank of his campaign...

Philippe Verdier is a household name in France, known for his nightly weather forecasts on government television broadcaster France 2.  That gig ended abruptly on Monday, when he released a promotional video for his new book.  The U.K. Telegraph explains: Climat Investigation (Climate Investigation) [claims] that leading climatologists and political leaders have “taken the world hostage” with misleading data. In a promotional video, Mr Verdier said: “Every night I address five million French people to talk to you about the wind, the clouds and the sun. And yet there is something important, very important that I haven’t been able...