BIG BROTHER: He Is Legion

Have you ever noticed how some of the advertisers that force feed internet users seem to know just a little too much about you?

Creepy…. If you visit sites with ‘sexual content’, you get an endless stream of spam about viagra, dating, swingers clubs and an assortment of dubious spammers and scammers.
Visit just one site offering education and you are doomed to an endless parade of student recruiting schemes. If you visited an education site AND a sex site, you inevitably start receiving offers for sex and dating for college age people.

YOUR ONLINE HOME!

While enjoying your weekend internet surfing, you should know that visiting a wordpress blog enables at least 3 entities to ‘track’ you; Quantcast, Comscore Beacon and WordPress Stats. Most sites allow multiple companies to do tracking. Google Analytics, Yahoo, Twitter and all the ’social networking’ sites track users and visits. Most ‘share’ or ‘like’ buttons like Facebook or StumbleUpon enable those companies to track your visits. You don’t even have to use the FB button and they track your visit anyway.

Opting out of advertising companies and other trackers does little good, as this type of activity is almost completely unregulated. Almost all EULA (end user license agreements) have clauses where you must submit to tracking. If you want to use services you forfeit your right privacy. When you do ‘opt-out’, it means little because your data profile is already well established and sold to numerous companies by the time you attempt to protect your privacy.

Being on a Mac, I use freeware ‘extensions’ that block ‘trackers’ and cookies. I suppose there are similar freeware offers for most operating systems.

Welcome to the new “Information Age’, enjoy your browsing but know the truth: YOU ARE BEING FOLLOWED!

Big Brother IS corporations, lots of them. Of course, the government can use all this tracking information too, all they have to do is ask for it.

Related articles

• | Tracking the trackers: Mozilla’s anti-Big Brother add-on! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Weekend Project: Research the Audience You Want … but Don’t Have (problogger.net)
• How smartphones and social networks are turning us into a collective Big Brother (royal.pingdom.com)

BLIND MAN / PLaying For Change

Grandpa Elliott gives an unbelievably soulful performance in Playing For Change‘s rendition of this beautiful blues number.

BE HERE NOW

For Lynn.

Immortal Bach translated:

Come sweet death, come blessed rest!
Come lead me to peace.

The Truth Behind Hamburger: PINK SLIME!

Reblogged from Kmareka.com:

If you haven’t eaten your last hamburger yet, this video should do it.  I know I’m done.

A realm where logic is banned

BY LEONARD PITTS JR. - The Miami Herald

Bob Morris is scared of Girl Scouts.

If you are waiting for the punch line, sorry, there isn’t one. Morris, an Indiana state legislator, recently attacked the Scouts in a letter to his colleagues urging them to vote down a nonbinding resolution honoring the group on its centennial. There has never been a safer, more plain vanilla measure in the history of American politics, but Morris felt the need to warn fellow legislators of the organization’s corrupting influence. The Girl Scouts, he wrote, is the “tactical arm” of Planned Parenthood. He called it a “radicalized” group with a homosexual agenda that promotes abortion while seeking “the destruction of traditional American values.”

That’s a lot to lay on little girls whose mission in life seems to be the selling of Thin Mints outside the supermarket. But Morris has what he considers sound reasons for believing them a threat. He says he did “a small amount” of online research that revealed to him the true nature of these terroristic cookie pimps. And as everyone knows, if you read it on the web, it has to be true, right?

Thus does social conservatism skid through the last barriers of basic intellect and simple decency.

There is, in a sense, nothing new here. Fear has long been the sine qua non of social conservatism, the fundament of an “us against them” ethos that simultaneously binds social conservatives together in common cause and separates them from the rest of the world. Like the mental patient who is emperor of a self-created universe invisible to sane people, they believe themselves the guardians and defenders of a moral North Star from which the rest of the world has deviated.

It might be easy enough to write Morris off as a Podunk legislator of no concern to anyone outside his district. But such sanguinity requires the belief that he is an anomaly. He is not. On the contrary, this brand of fraidy-cat politics has become a staple of the Republican Party.

You could look to almost any of the GOP’s recent presidential aspirants as proof, or you could just use Rick Santorum as one-stop shopping. He is the state of the art.

In years past, he called birth control “harmful” and questioned whether it works — something that has been regarded as settled science for decades. Just days ago, he bashed college education as a scheme of “indoctrination” and attacked 49-years-dead John F. Kennedy for a 1960 speech generally regarded as a landmark statement against religious bigotry. Somehow, in Santorum’s fevered mind, it became a statement in support of what it opposed.

But then, social conservatism is where logic fears to tread. It is a worldview driven by fear of the world beyond its racial, gender, religious, cultural and intellectual borders. Historically, it always has been.

Fear the Japs, they said. They are collaborating with our enemies.

Fear the Commies, they said. They are hiding behind every bush.

Fear the gays, they say. They want to recruit our children to their lifestyle.

And now? Fear the Girl Scouts. They are trying to conquer America one cookie at a time.

And you have to wonder: How narrow must a man’s worldview be when he is scared of Girl Scouts?

Some of us have argued that social conservatives use fear as a tactic. And there’s likely some truth to that. But one senses little of tactical planning in Morris’ missive. No, the fact is, he believes what he says. Many of them do.

If you want to be scared of something, be scared of that.

Related articles

• Ridiculed Indiana lawmaker Bob Morris maintains that Girl Scouts promote abortion, homosexuality (miamiherald.typepad.com)

Rush Limbaugh And Jesse James—Famous Missourians

Reblogged from The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance:

The first I heard that Rush Limbaugh, from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was picked to go into the Hall of Famous Missourians was when I saw Claire McCaskill on MSNBC on Monday evening.  I sort of thought it was a joke someone had played on Claire.

But nope. It is true:

Sculptor E. Spencer Schubert of Kansas City is posting pictures on his blog of a 

Read more… 628 more words

Treating Sick Rich Folks

The plutocratic elite is perverting health care into a luxury commodity.

By Jim Hightower

In these trying times of health care austerity, it reaffirms one’s faith in humanity to learn that many hospitals are now going the extra mile to provide top quality care for all.

For all super-rich people that is. These folks are so rich they can buy their way into “amenities units” built into secluded sections of many hospitals. It’s not medical care that they’re peddling to an elite clientele, but the personal pampering that the superrich expect in all aspects of their lives.

“I was supposed to be in Buenos Aires last week taking tango lessons,” a Wall Street executive explained matter-of-factly to a New York Times reporter, “but unfortunately, I hurt my back, so I’m here with my concierge.”

A hospital with a concierge? Yes. There’s one called Eleven West, an exclusive wing of New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. “We pride ourselves on getting anything the patient wants,” beamed its director of hospitality. “If they have a craving for lobster tails and we don’t have them on the menu, we’ll go out and get them.”

From New York to Los Angeles, hospitals that draw huge subsidies from taxpayers (and often are so overcrowded that regular patients are lucky to get a gurney in the hallway) have set aside entire floors for $2,400-a-day deluxe suites. They come with butlers, 5-star meals, marble baths, imported bed sheets, special kitchens, and other amenities for swells who have both insurance and cash to burn.

It’s repugnant for the plutocratic elite to pervert health care into a luxury commodity. It splits asunder America’s essential, uniting principle of the common good. To push for a national policy that treats health care as a fundamental human need — for all — contact Physicians for a National Health Program: www.pnhp.org.

Related articles

• Knotty Challenges in Health Care Costs (nytimes.com)