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Find Out and Fix What Big Data Says About You

I thought I knew all about the information that consumer reporting agencies were collecting on me. Then I discovered The Work Number—a database that reports every paycheck I’ve received from my company, with net and gross amounts, going back to my hire date six years ago.

Another consumer reporting agency shows the results of a 2016 echocardiogram. (It was normal.) Yet another tracks insurance claims on my home and car. If I’d made too many returns at retail stores or bounced a check at a casino, that could show up in a database as well.

“Any data point that someone can track, there’s going to be a bureau or someone gathering information and selling that information,” says Matthew Loker, a consumer protection attorney in Arroyo Grande, California.

Unfortunately, not all the information being reported is accurate—and mistakes can have serious consequences. Loker says one of his clients lost a lucrative job offer because an employment screening company confused her with a drug smuggler. By the time the error was fixed, the position was filled. Other people have been denied insurance, apartments, bank accounts, and government benefits because of database errors.

But discovering and correcting mistakes is no small task.

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‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists

In early 2017, Peter McIndoe, now 23, was studying psychology at the University of Arkansas, and visiting friends in Memphis, Tennessee. He tells me this over Zoom from the US west coast, and has the most arresting face – wide-eyed, curious and intense, like the lead singer of an indie band, or a young monk. “This was right after the Donald Trump election, and things were really tense. I remember people walking around saying they felt as if they were in a movie. Things felt so unstable.”

It was the weekend of simultaneous Women’s Marches across the US (indeed, the world), and McIndoe looked out of the window and noticed “counterprotesters, who were older, bigger white men. They were clear aggravators. They were encroaching on something that was not their event, they had no business being there.” Added to that, “it felt like chaos, because the world felt like chaos”.

McIndoe made a placard, and went out to join the march. “It’s not like I sat down and thought I’m going to make a satire. I just thought: ‘I should write a sign that has nothing to do with what is going on.’ An absurdist statement to bring to the equation.”

That statement was “birds aren’t real”. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The “deep state” had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you.

Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement. Or is it a movement? You could call it a situationist spectacle, a piece of rolling performance art or a collective satire. MSNBC called it a “mass coping mechanism” for generation Z, and as it has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, “mass”, at least, is on the money.

It’s the most perfect, playful distillation of where we are in relation to the media landscape we’ve built but can’t control, and which only half of us can find our way around. It’s a made-up conspiracy theory that is just realistic enough, as conspiracies go, to convince QAnon supporters that birds aren’t real, but has just enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on. It’s a conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy, a little aneurysm of reality and mockery in the bloodstream of the mad pizzagate-style theories that animate the “alt-right”.

Birds Aren’t Real didn’t stay in Memphis – in a sequence reminiscent of the Winklevoss scene in The Social Network, when they realise just how big Facebook has become, McIndoe recalls being back at college, five hours away from Memphis. “I remember seeing videos of people chanting: ‘Birds aren’t real,’ at high-school football games; and seeing graffiti of birds aren’t real. At first, I thought: ‘This is crazy,’ but then I wondered: ‘What is making this resonate with people?’”

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Cori Bush surpasses $300K spent on private security as she continues calls to defund the police

Rep. Cori Bush poured tens of thousands of dollars more into private security during the first quarter of 2022, pushing her security bills to more than $300,000 as she continues calls to defund the police. 

The Missouri Democrat’s campaign reported spending $70,489 on security services between Jan. 1 and March 31, Federal Election Commission filings show. The payments include $50,489 to Peace Security, $15,000 to Cortney Merrits and $5,000 to Nathaniel Davis.

Bush’s newest security checks follow the $233,663 her committee spent on the services in 2021, FEC records show. She has now paid out $304,152 for security this election cycle. 

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Democrats are “working with” Big Tech on new censorship calls

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has officially pushed for more online censorship. The DNC’s stand could compromise bipartisan Big Tech bills, according to critics.

The DNC has published a document titled “Recommendations for Combating Online Misinformation.” Notably, the document contains a plan that calls for more censorship on online platforms.

Among other things, the DNC recommended that tech companies should “enforce rules on hate speech consistently and comprehensively,” “promote authoritative news over highly engaging news in content algorithms, and “enforce a comprehensive political misinformation policy.”

Perhaps the most alarming recommendation was for companies to “establish a policy against the distribution of hacked materials.” In the weeks leading up to 2020 presidential election, Big Tech platforms like Twitter suppressed a story involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which, according to some, could have swayed the election. At the time, Twitter claimed the story was based on “hacked” material.

In the document, the DNC admits that it partnered with tech companies.

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Professor says minors can be ‘enthusiastically involved’ in ‘initiating sexual activities with adults’

Professor David Finkelhor of the University of New Hampshire participated in a March 23 talk discussing the “elements of voluntary participation” by juveniles involved in sex crimes, saying that when trying to prevent sex crimes against children, it’s key to realize that in some cases, it is the children themselves that are “initiating sexual activities with adults.” Finkelhor is the Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at UNH.

“If young people are initiating sexual activities with adults, or enthusiastically involved,” he said, “we can’t be effective in working with them if we assume that all such relationships start with a predatory or criminally inclined adult. As we’ve seen in the discussion, young people bridle at being forced into this box of being seen as being the victim of a predator.”

These remarks were made during a Haruv USA lecture about the “Implications for Prevention and Response” for sex crimes wherein there are “elements of voluntary participation” by the minors involved in those crimes.

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FDA Takes Only Months to Approve Pfizer Jab Yet Cannabis Remains Schedule 1 Despite Centuries of Data

Since Dec. 11, 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been available under the Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization in individuals 16 years of age and older, and the authorization was expanded to include those 12 through 15 years of age on May 10, 2021. On August 23, 2021, it was granted full approval by the FDA.

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine now become the fastest created, deployed, and subsequently approved vaccination in history. Previously, the fastest vaccine to go from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took about four years.

The swift approval of the vaccine illustrates just how fast the government can react if it wants to do so. On the contrary, however, there have been hundreds if not thousands of studies on the benefits of cannabis to safely treat multiple ailments and diseases, spanning the course of centuries, yet the FDA has failed to approve its use for anything.

To be clear, the FDA has approved patentable pharmaceutical synthetic compounds such as dronabinol. The pharmaceutical patented drugs Marinol and Syndros both use dronabinol which is nothing more than a chemical synthetic equivalent to delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — but the plant-based version you can grow in your own home remains off the list.

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Innocent Elderly Woman Pulled Over for No Reason as Cops Steal Her Life Savings, Prescription Medicine and Mock Her

In December 2021, Jeanetta Jones, 62, had harmed no one, committed no crime, and was simply driving home when she was targeted by officers with the the notoriously corrupt Brookside Police Department in Jefferson County, Alabama. By the end of the hour-long stop, Jones would be robbed of her life savings, her medicine stolen, and she would be publicly humiliated by the people who claim to protect society.

For decades now, federal government and their cronies in law enforcement have been carrying out theft of the citizenry on a massive scale using Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF).

The 1980’s-era laws were designed to drain resources from powerful criminal organizations, but CAF has become a tool for law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to steal money and property from countless innocent people.

As Jones’ case illustrates, insidious police departments will use this “tool” as a means of preying on elderly innocent women to “legally” rob them on the side of the road. All the while, these agents of the state think they are the good guys.

On the day she was stopped, Jones was driving home just after 2 p.m. when, according to her recent lawsuit, officers pulled her over for no reason. When Jones asked the officers why they pulled her over, they responded by telling her that they could pull over anyone they wanted.

For the next hour, police would launch a fishing expedition in an attempt to rob Jones of any and all of her valuables. Using an unauthorized search, police would find $5,000 in cash in Jones’ vehicle — which she told them was her life savings. They would also find her prescription medicine.

By the end of the illegal search and seizure, Jones would be robbed of her life savings and her prescription medicine she needed for pain. When she begged the officers to return her property, they responded by mocking the elderly woman.

“She requested the return of her money and medication,” the lawsuit says. “They refused to return either and laughed at her, telling the plaintiff they could do whatever they wanted.”

When looking through the history of the Brookside police department, Jones lawsuit is one of many and their attitudes during her stop reflect exactly why that is.

As AL.com reports:

The lawsuit is the 13th filed against Brookside and its police department – or one for every 96 residents in the tiny north Jefferson County town. It claims Jones was falsely arrested and imprisoned, and that her rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments were violated. It seeks damages.

After she was robbed on the roadside, the perpetrators let her go and she was not charged with a crime.

“They didn’t give her a receipt for it. They didn’t arrest her for it. They just took it,” Roger Appell, Jones’ attorney said. “When they were leaving with her money and her prescription medicine, she asked them why are you doing this to us? Why are you doing this to me? And they looked at her and said because we can.”

“That seemed like to be nothing but a shakedown,” Jones said describing the traffic stop.

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