WINTER PARK, Fla. – A Florida parent was forced to take drastic measures when her public school refused to release her child during a dispute over standardized testing.

Jacqui Myers says another mother with a child at Winter Park’s Brookshire Elementary School called her after she arrived at the school to opt her fifth-grade daughter out of standardized testing related to the Common Core national standards initiative.

“They’re not giving me my child, can you help?” the mother told Myers.

Myers, the mother of a first grader, is active in a group working to opt children out of state tests and was at the school counseling parents.

She called 911 to report that the school wouldn’t release the child.

The school told the mother they did not want to release the child because she was in the middle of testing. But when police arrived, the school relented and turned her over.



http://eagnews.org/parent-calls-911-after-public-school-refuses-to-release-child/

[List of place names in the United States of Native American origin]

Mark Beasley, a member of the Navajo Nation, has started a petition for Buffalo, NY to change its “racist and offensive” name. According to Beasley, he speaks for his “Native American colleagues.”

Beasley writes in his petition that “Buffalo is the name of the animal that was driven almost to extinction by the non-Native forces in order to annihilate and drive out my ancestors from the American landscape.”

Further, “Within only a few years from the beginning of the campaign, all Native nations were driven off their lands and into reservations, where we have prior and since been unduly subjugated and and [sic] exposed to genocidal horrors unimaginable to the rest of the world and throughout history.”

For these reasons, Beasley writes, Buffalo “should change their offensive and racist names containing the word “Buffalo.””

If the city does this, they will “End the use of racist and genocidal imagery and symbols toward Native Americans today” and “End the pain and denigration these symbols and images incite and the damage to the psyches of Native Americans everywhere.”

On top of that, changing the name of Buffalo will “restore Native people’s dignity.”

Beasley also posted this picture to his petition:

http://thepunditpress.com/2015/03/06/navajo-nation-member-calls-on-buffalo-ny-to-change-its-racist-name/


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List of place names in the United States of Native American origin

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday sharply criticized China's plans for new rules on U.S. tech companies, urging Beijing to change the policy if it wants to do business with the United States and saying he had raised it with President Xi Jinping.

In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access.

"This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi," Obama said. "We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States."

The Chinese government sees the rules as crucial to protect state and business secrets. Western companies say they reinforce increasingly onerous terms of doing business in the world's second-largest economy and heighten mistrust over cybersecurity between Washington and Beijing.

A Chinese parliamentary body read a second draft of the country's first anti-terrorism law last week and is expected to adopt the legislation in the coming weeks or months.

The initial draft, published by the National People's Congress late last year, requires companies to also keep servers and user data within China, supply law enforcement authorities with communications records and censor terrorism-related Internet content.

The laws "would essentially force all foreign companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services," Obama said.

"As you might imagine tech companies are not going to be willing to do that," he said.

    The scope of the rules reaches far beyond a recently adopted set of financial industry regulations that pushed Chinese banks to purchase from domestic technology vendors.

The implications for Silicon Valley companies, ranging from Microsoft Corp to Apple Inc , have set the stage for yet another confrontation over cybersecurity and technology policy, a major irritant in U.S.-China relations.
Obama said the rules could also backfire on China.

"Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don’t think there is any U.S. or European firm, any international firm, that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government," he said.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman defended the counterterrorism law, saying it was "a requirement for the government in combating terrorism".

"The relevant matter is completely China's internal affair," spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing. "We hope the U.S. can correctly view it and handle it in a calm and objective way."

A U.S. official told Reuters last week that the Obama administration has conveyed its concerns about the anti-terrorism draft law to China.

REGULATORY PRESSURE

Although the counterterrorism provisions would apply to both domestic and foreign technologies, officials in Washington and Western business lobbies argue the law, combined with the new banking rules and a slew of anti-trust investigations, amount to unfair regulatory pressure targeting foreign companies.

To be sure, Western governments, including in the United States and Britain, have for years requested tech firms to disclose encryption methods, with varying degrees of success.

Officials including FBI director James Comey and National Security Agency (NSA) director Mike Rogers publicly warned Internet companies including Apple and Google late last year against using encryption that law enforcement cannot break.

Beijing has argued the need to quickly ratchet up its cybersecurity measures in the wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of sophisticated U.S. spying techniques.

China is drafting the anti-terrorism law at a time when Chinese leaders say the country faces a serious threat from religious extremists and separatists. Hundreds of people have been killed over the past two years in the far-western region of Xinjiang in unrest the government has blamed on Islamists who want to establish a separate state called East Turkestan.



https://ca.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-obama-sharply-criticizes-chinas-plans-technology-rules-074738075--finance.html

[Federal law requires government officials to conduct business communications on official media, for lots of good reasons. First, it allows for archival without the officials in question having an opportunity to “sanitize” the record. Second — and this is pretty important for the diplomatic corps — it allows the government to protect against intrusion from other nations and entities. Hillary’s practice of doing business through private servers bypassed both of those key protections.]

Ever wonder why multiple investigations of the Benghazi attack failed to turn up much from Hillary Clinton’s e-mails? So did the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the facility and the failures that led to it. To their surprise, the Secretary of State had conducted all of her e-mail on a private account rather than an official State Department account — and her aides had carefully culled only the e-mails they wanted investigators to see. The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt dropped that bombshell earlier this evening:

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. …

The existence of Mrs. Clinton’s personal email account was discovered as a House committee investigating the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi sought correspondence between Mrs. Clinton and her aides about the attack.

Two weeks ago, Mrs. Clinton provided the committee with about 300 emails — amounting to roughly 900 pages — about the Benghazi attacks that Mrs. Clinton’s aides had found among her personal emails.


Federal law requires government officials to conduct business communications on official media, for lots of good reasons. First, it allows for archival without the officials in question having an opportunity to “sanitize” the record. Second — and this is pretty important for the diplomatic corps — it allows the government to protect against intrusion from other nations and entities. Hillary’s practice of doing business through private servers bypassed both of those key protections.


http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/02/nyt-hillary-conducted-official-state-business-on-her-private-e-mail-account-all-of-it/


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I am guessing her hard drive with all private emails crashed already...

Google will soon be offering cellular network plans in a bid to bridge the gap between the realms of Internet services and mobile device software it dominates.

Vice President Sundar Pichai says Google, the leading Internet search engine and mobile software provider, is working with unnamed network operators on developing a cellular plan.

"You will see us announce it in the coming months," he said at the Mobile World Congress wireless show in Barcelona. "I think we are at a stage where it is important to think about hardware, software and connectability together.
"We want to be able to experiment along those lines."

Pichai called Google's plan to offer cellular services "a project" and insisted that the Internet company isn't a threat to traditional telephone and Internet service providers.

Pichai compared Google's latest move to its decision to launch its own line of Nexus smartphones, which he said Google uses not to compete with other smartphone makers, rather to introduce innovations in the greater world of mobile hardware.

"We don't intend to be a network operator at scale," he said. "Our goal here is to drive a set of innovations which we think the ecosystem should evolve and hopefully will get traction. Again, we will do it on a small enough scale so that, just like Nexus devices, people see what we are doing and hopefully carrier partners think our ideas are good."


http://phys.org/news/2015-03-google-cellular-network.html

The White House has plans to legalize 13 to 15 million illegal immigrants who will then establish a “country within a country.”

The following Mark Levin interview with Susan Payne is shocking but it also puts all the pieces into place.

Susan Payne is a contributor to WCBM, Baltimore and Co-Host of the Pat McDonough Radio Show,

Unbeknownst to the Obama officials, Ms. Payne was invited to listen in on conference calls at an immigration rally. Cecilia Munoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and 16 members of the White House cabinet were on the first call. White House officials were on all three calls.  What Ms. Payne learned needs to be immediately shared with Congress and the public.

It should be noted that Ted Hayes, founder of America’s Black Shield, also listened in on these calls.

The “Task Force of New Americans” and the “Receiving Communities” are part of a plan by the Obama administration to develop a “country within a country” which will eventually form a new, and instantly fundamentally transformed United States.

The conference calls and meetings surrounding the task force made it clear Barack Obama is planning to legalize and protect 13 to 15 million illegal immigrants who will then be moved onto citizenship.

When these “new Americans” come out of the shadows, the communities in which they’ve been placed will be designated as “receiving communities.”

The “new Americans” are considered “seedlings” by the White House and the “receiving communities” are the “fertile ground” to nurture them, according to comments made during the meetings.

Citizens will then be pushed into the shadows as the “New Americans” come out of the shadows.

One member of the task force said they will be forming a “country within a country”.

At the meetings, it was said that “immigrants need to be aware of benefits they are entitled to”.

The participants in the meeting also discussed the fact that these immigrants would not be interested in assimilating. They would “navigate not assimilate”.

Obama’s plan is to treat the “new Americans” as refugees as soon as amnesty is pushed through.

Refugees are given an allowance, housing, food, medical care, education, and an immediate pathway to citizenship.

The meeting participants also discussed the need to convince state and local officials to give no interest loans to the “refugees.” This way we can fund our own destruction.


Listen to this shocking and frightening interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JzLLhwGXw



http://www.independentsentinel.com/breaking-wh-plans-to-develop-a-country-within-a-country-of-15-million-new-americans/

Mattel has turned Barbie into Big Brother.

The iconic toy company partnered up with a techy startup, ToyTalk, to produce “Hello Barbie”: a wi-fi-enabled doll that learns to have “conversations” with children by storing their previous comments in a cloud database where she tracks their opinions and feelings.

Barbie’s conversations with her young friends are then analyzed by ToyTalk developers who can program her with appropriate responses.

She’s also a snitch. Nosy parents can have their kids’ conversations with Barbie stored on ToyTalk’s website, where they can later hop on and listen in. They can also program her to not talk about certain things with them, because your childhood should be as close to a dystopian regime as possible.

In addition to this being an all-around creepy concept, it has generated some obvious privacy concerns. Barbie’s cloud is sure to be vulnerable to hacking—a possibility parents are increasingly worried by, given past intrusions into devices like baby monitors.

According to Newsweek, one security researcher, Ken Munro, has already managed to hack into a similar doll produced by Vivid Toys in the U.K.
Watch a demo of Hello Barbie from a recent toy fair:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJMvmVCwoNM


“She can remember, just like a real friend.”
You will be able to purchase this horrifying product for your own home later this year, for just $74.99.


http://redalertpolitics.com/2015/02/18/privacy-childhood-dead-new-talking-barbie-will-store-kids-conversations/

[A student at a liberal-arts school in Oregon was reportedly banned from going anywhere on campus that a fellow student would be — because he looked like the person who had raped her.]

Yes — seriously.


A student at a liberal-arts school in Oregon was reportedly banned from going anywhere on campus that a fellow student would be — because he looked like the person who had raped her.

Professor Janet Halley wrote in a piece for Harvard Law Review that she had “recently assisted” a student who had been “ordered to stay away from a fellow student (cutting him off from his housing, his campus job, and educational opportunity) — all because he reminded her of the man who had raped her months before and thousands of miles away.

” The accused also had to endure a “month-long investigation into all his campus relationships, seeking information about his possible sexual misconduct in them,” which she called an “immense invasion of his and his friends’ privacy.”

And (believe it or not!) it gets worse. Even after this invasive investigation completely cleared him of any wrongdoing, he still wasn’t allowed to go anywhere where the student would be without risking punishment from the school.

 “The stay-away order remained in place, and was so broadly drawn up that he was at constant risk of violating it and coming under discipline for that,” the piece continues.

According to Halley, the only way the accused student eventually learned of the source of the complaint against him at all was “by accident and off-hand.”

It’s devastating to think of a student being unable to walk around campus without having to risk being traumatized by reminders of her rape. But restricting a totally innocent student from walking around campus because he looks like the person who raped her is obviously unacceptable.

Halley’s article did not reveal the name of the school, the students involved, or the outcome of the situation.



http://www.nationalreview.com/article/398852/student-banned-areas-campus-resembling-classmates-rapist-katherine-timpf


http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-for-the-gavel-in-title-ix-enforcement-2/

It’s starting.

As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives this month revealed that it is proposing to put the ban on 5.56 mm ammo on a fast track, immediately driving up the price of the bullets and prompting retailers, including the huge outdoors company Cabela’s, to urge sportsmen to urge Congress to stop the president.


Wednesday night, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stepped in with a critical letter to the bureau demanding it explain the surprise and abrupt bullet ban. The letter is shown below.

The National Rifle Association, which is working with Goodlatte to gather co-signers, told Secrets that 30 House members have already co-signed the letter and Goodlatte and the NRA are hoping to get a total of 100 fast.

"The Obama administration was unable to ban America's most popular sporting rifle through the legislative process, so now it's trying to ban commonly owned and used ammunition through regulation," said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA, the group's policy and lobby shop. "The NRA and our tens of millions of supporters across the country will fight to stop President Obama's latest attack on our Second Amendment freedoms."

At issue is so-called “armor-piercing” ammunition, an exemption for those bullets mostly used for sport by AR-15 owners, and the recent popularity of pistol-style ARs that use the ammo.

The inexpensive 5.56 M885 ammo, commonly called green tips, have been exempt for years, as have higher-caliber ammunition that also easily pierces the type of soft armor worn by police, because it’s mostly used by target shooters, not criminals. The agency proposes to reclassify it as armor-piercing and not exempt.

RELATED: Colorado politician who survived Columbine wants concealed carry in schools

But now BATFE says that since the bullets can be used in semi-automatic handguns they pose a threat to police and must be banned from production, sale and use. But, as Goodlatte noted, the agency offered no proof. Federal agencies will still be allowed to buy the ammo.

“This round is amongst the most commonly used in the most popular rifle design in America, the AR-15. Millions upon millions of M855 rounds have been sold and used in the U.S., yet ATF has not even alleged — much less offered evidence — that even one such round has ever been fired from a handgun at a police officer,” said Goodlatte’s letter.

Even some police don’t buy the administration’s claim. “Criminals aren't going to go out and buy a $1,000 AR pistol,” Brent Ball, owner of 417 Guns in Springfield, Mo., and a 17-year veteran police officer told the Springfield News-Leader. “As a police officer I'm not worried about AR pistols because you can see them. It's the small gun in a guy's hand you can't see that kills you.”

Many see the bullet ban as an assault on the AR-15 and Obama’s back-door bid to end production and sale.

“We are concerned,” said Justin Anderson with Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte, N.C., one of the nation’s top sellers of AR-15 style rifles. “Frankly, we're always concerned when the government uses back-door methods to impose quasi-gun control.”

Groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation suggest that under BATFE’s new rule, other calibers like popular deer hunting .308 bullets could be banned because they also are used in AR-15s, some of which can be turned into pistol-style guns. “This will have a detrimental effect on hunting nationwide,” said the group.


http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2560750


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Internet = free speech = 1st Amendment. 0bama wants to control it.
Now this attack on the 2nd Amendment. He does not care anymore. No more masks.

[Asian students however are penalized 50 points due to their race]

Asian students however are penalized 50 points due to their race

Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column.

“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps.

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.

“Zenme keyi,” one mother hisses in Chinese. How can this be possible?



http://downtrend.com/vsaxena/bonus-sat-points-for-being-black




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California must be a state run by bush loving amish tea partiers. Liberals are not racists... 

[Feminist Frequency, fronted by Anita Sarkeesian and purportedly an enterprise to “make gaming more inclusive” has its scripts written by Jonathan McIntosh, a far-left lunatic who wouldn’t condemn the death of Osama bin Laden, but had time to tweet his delight at the death of Christopher Hitchens. One doesn’t have to look too hard on his Twitter to find that the “inclusivity” claims mask a far more sinister desire to push his extreme views on video games.]

Mainstream “geek culture” media have been frothing at the mouth this month because Supanova, an Australian convention for sci-fi, comic, anime and gaming fans, has refused to rescind actor Adam Baldwin’s invitation to appear, after a petition claimed that, as a supporter of GamerGate, his attendance will make women “feel unsafe”.


Internet petitions demanding speakers’ invitations be withdrawn have become more and more common, and realising that by simply being upfront about their motives for wanting to disallow their target a platform will unmask them for the intolerant, authoritarian drones they are, campaigners have learned to up the stakes, claiming that the presence of speakers they don’t like “threatens the safety of attendees”, when the true reason is that they are banning any speakers with right-wing or even libertarian sympathies.

Baldwin wasn’t even going to be talking about anything pertaining to GamerGate or women. As the expo was celebrating the ten-year anniversary of television show Serenity, Baldwin would be appearing in his capacity as a cast member. Albert Santos, the petition’s architect, who since the announcement Baldwin would still be appearing at Supanova has announced his commitment to “fight to the end”, quite clearly articulated that Baldwin’s political stance was the problem.

“Some have argued that a person’s political views need to be separate to their professional duties, and I understand that train of thought. I’m not going after Kevin Sorbo or Dean Cain or Michael Rooker, for example, despite not agreeing with their views, because for the most part they keep it to themselves and are professionals about their work… But Baldwin chose, and continues to choose to be active in his bigotry and hatred. It’s this proactive nature that sets off alarm bells, for me.”

Translation? If you’re not left-wing, keep your mouth shut. What’s becoming clear is that under the false premise of making spaces “safe” for minorities, the only people whose safety is really becoming at risk is right-wingers and basically anyone who doesn’t wholly subscribe to the doctrine of political correctness.

I stopped reading gaming websites long before GamerGate, because I was confused as to why they were so heavily pushing a hard-left world view in all their articles. I wasn’t interested in high school-level sociology essays about the representation of women and ethnic minorities, and didn’t think politics belonged in video game reviews.

Feminist Frequency, fronted by Anita Sarkeesian and purportedly an enterprise to “make gaming more inclusive” has its scripts written by Jonathan McIntosh, a far-left lunatic who wouldn’t condemn the death of Osama bin Laden, but had time to tweet his delight at the death of Christopher Hitchens. One doesn’t have to look too hard on his Twitter to find that the “inclusivity” claims mask a far more sinister desire to push his extreme views on video games.

He has tweeted: “It’s never ‘just a video game'”, then approvingly retweeted a user calling themselves “social justice mage” replying to him, writing: “It’s never “just” anything, really. Stories matter.” Well, yes. Stories do matter and this is why it’s of so much concern that radical leftists want control of this medium. McIntosh tweeted that: “There are a very limited number of stories that involve killing stuff for 20 hours in a row. We need different mechanics.”

If one were to make a pie chart of games for which the “story” was killing stuff for 20 hours in a row, it would show that these games are actually in a minority. Just looking at the “new release” page of a major videogame store in the UK we can see how diverse the range of titles is. In the last month I’ve been playing Hatoful Boyfriend, LA Noire and One Way Heroics, none of which could be described as “non-stop killing.” So what is it McIntosh wants?

Games being pushed by games journalists and the likes of McIntosh tend to be ones given awards by the Games for Change festival, which “shines a spotlight on video games and developers pushing the medium not just as quality entertainment or educational tools but as venues for social justice.” As Joystiq notes of Papers Please, it “highlights the dangers faced by migrants crossing the US-Mexico border.” Playing as a border guard who has the power to turn away or let in would-be migrants with harrowing personal stories about why they should be let in, you must balance your sympathy against the fact if you make too many mistakes, you won’t have enough money to feed your family.

Doing this creates the impression that the “bad guy” is your employer, and that everyone would be happy if only your character were allowed to let everyone into the country. It’s a simplistic narrative of “poor asylum seekers” that ignores the fact that granting asylum from third-world countries is a fool’s errand that does absolutely nothing to alleviate poverty and in fact causes problems not just for the country receiving the immigrants but also for developing countries themselves.

What’s worrying is that the mainstream media’s blind reporting of GamerGate as a “misogynist” movement shows how successful the left has been in branding any opposition to its terrifying grab for dominance of the cultural hegemony as “bigotry”.

The people McCarthyism was attempting to stop are using McCarthy’s own tactics in their bid to wrest creative control over the video game industry and silence opposition, shouting “bigot” or “hate speech”, instead of “Red” and “Communism”. Sadly, this tactic is replicated in universities up and down the country, under the facade of ensuring students aren’t made to feel “unsafe”.

This means censorship, as Brendan O’Neill put it, of any views which lie outside the ever-expanding liberal left orthodoxy. So abortion debates are banned, universities are banning UKIP members from campus all so that students “feel safe”. Underneath such petitions there are often comments calling for anyone at all who has “hateful views” to be banned from campus.

Who is it that is more likely to actually feel “unsafe”? Is it students who enjoy full cultural backing of their views by the union establishment, who might have to hear a couple of viewpoints they don’t like, or is it right wing students who, if they opened their mouths, would likely be run off campus by vile left-wing mobs?

Unless petitions demanding right-wingers are No Platformed, and those who brand groups like GamerGate that seek to challenge the poisonous censoriousness of the left as “hate groups” and “misogynist” are recognised as the vile, McCarthyist tactic-wielding authoritarians that they are, the left will gain total control over the limits of debate, and diversity of opinion will be lost forever.

Some of the mainstream media who have parroted the crude slander of GamerGate as a hate group really should really know better. To present it that way, rather than doing research into what it’s really about, just furthers untruthful, extremist propaganda.


http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/24/adam-baldwin-could-have-been-the-latest-victim-of-the-censorious-left/


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Cancer.

Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has stood firmly against net neutrality, and presented a surgical takedown of the proposal on The Glenn Beck Program Tuesday.

“What it comes down to is, the net has worked,” Cuban said. “We’re not in an industry where the technology has become stagnant and there’s no more enhancements so we need regulation to try to make things happen. We’re not there. And so as long as the technology is allowed to advance, we’re OK.”

Cuban said the uncertainty and legal challenges of having the government regulate the Internet will be enormous, and predicted that it will slow down innovation. He also said there are many unexpected issues that will arise from such an enormous change.

“If net neutrality is taken to its logical extension … if there’s no priority for television and it’s just part of the open Internet and delivery, your traditional television, watching the evening news, it’s over,” Cuban said. “If there is no such thing as a prioritized bit, then all that digital television going through the same pipe, all those voters who like to get Fox News or MSNBC, they’re going to freak out because you’re going to have to go to their website to get it or you’re going to have to get a special box that identifies the channels and brings it to you.”

Cuban said television networks will likely begin buffering, which will force people to buy new equipment. But there are even more possibilities that aren’t being discussed.

“There’s going to be someone that comes along and says, ‘We need decency standards applied to all the content on the Internet because now that is coming through the same pipe and it’s open to everybody,’” Cuban remarked. “[Or], ‘We need educational requirements.’ Remember Bill Clinton said you have to have a certain amount of educational content?”

“This goes into the law of unexpected consequences, or unintended consequences, that you don’t know what’s going to happen when all these things change,” he said. “You would think companies like Twitter and Facebook have thought through the technological aspects of it. I don’t think they have.”

Cuban said the Internet isn’t perfect, but slowing down or reversing its progress by giving the government control is not the answer. One thing that companies are consistently working to improve is their online security, but until forms of wireless communication are more secure, Cuban suggested people try to “hack themselves.”

“What I did for myself and my kids … I just said, ‘OK, I’m going to pretend I’m them and try to get into their account,’” Cuban explained. “And what ends up happening … you go in there and say, ‘I forgot my password.’ And then it asks you for a security question.”

“If you’re a visible person like we are, chances are whatever your security question is, you thought about it years ago and you’ve talked about it since then,” Cuban continued. “My first address or my first pet’s name. If you Google that, you’re going to find it. And that’s how most people get hacked.”

Cuban said his daughter’s security question was related to her address, and his wife’s was “easy” to find as well.

“That’s one step, and part two to that is, you should use two-step authentication for everything, for all your email, without question,” Cuban concluded.



http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/24/watch-mark-cubans-surgical-takedown-of-net-neutrality-and-why-he-says-everyone-should-hack-themselves/

A new study finds that Hispanic foreigners, both legal and illegal, will account for a large portion of future job growth, taking perhaps as many as 75 percent of the jobs created by 2020.

It’s expected that the Hispanic population present in the U.S. will enjoy 2.6 percent growth per year over the next 20 years, thanks in part to the political phenomenon of encouraging overwhelming numbers of foreigners to settle in the U.S., along with birthright citizenship. That growth is juxtaposed by the declining population growth of the non-Hispanic population, including a sharply increasing retirement rate of the aging Baby Boomer generation that supported the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

“The Hispanic population is a younger and faster growing segment of the population, while trends in the non-Hispanic population are heavily influenced by the aging baby-boomer generation that is moving into retirement,” IHS said in a statement.

IHS warns that the conclusions could be affected by changes in immigration policy. Still, the U.S. Census also projects a large growth of the Latino population, thanks to uncontrolled immigration and automatic grants of citizenship to the offspring of aliens who entered the country illegally.


http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/24/study-hispanics-will-occupy-75-of-new-american-jobs-starting-in-2020/


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Time for me to learn spanish... Again.


 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-faces.html?_r=0&assetType=nyt_now



--------------------------------------------
You'll tell them how you look like every time you spit on a sidewalk...

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is preparing to charge large institutional customers for some deposits, citing new rules that make holding money for the clients too costly, according to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the plan.

The largest U.S. bank by assets is aiming to reduce the affected deposits by billions of dollars, with a focus on bringing the number down this year, these people said. The move is the latest in a series of steps large global banks have been discussing in recent months to discourage certain deposits due to new regulations and low interest rates.

J.P. Morgan’s JPM, +2.44%  steps are among the most detailed and widespread. Specifics are likely to be unveiled Tuesday by J.P. Morgan executives at the bank’s annual strategy outlook with investors, these people said. Among other points, the bank is expected to stress alternatives customers affected by the deposit moves can use for their excess cash.

The plan won’t affect the bank’s retail customers, but some corporate clients and especially an array of financial firms, including hedge funds, private-equity firms and foreign banks, will feel the impact, according to the memo.

J.P. Morgan is making the moves because certain deposits are less profitable to handle than they used to be. New federal rules essentially penalize banks for holding deposits viewed as prone to fleeing during a crisis or a stressed environment.


http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jp-morgan-to-start-charging-big-clients-fees-on-some-deposits-2015-02-24



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Is this good news for bitcoin?

[NYC firefighter kidnapped, robbed and stabbed by crypto thieves]

NYC firefighter kidnapped, robbed and stabbed by crypto thieves

Dwayne Richards, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11

Bitcoin, the technology that’s meant to revolutionize the way we think of money, is simultaneously revolutionizing the way we get mugged.

A New York City firefighter named Dwayne Richards was recently held up, stabbed and robbed by thieves who were after his bitcoin, the Observer has learned. From what we’ve discovered, Mr. Richards, who is a firefighter in lower Manhattan, was mugged and left bleeding after meeting the robbers under the pretense of exchanging bitcoin for cash in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’s alive, well, and refusing comment.

Typically, when we hear of bitcoin-related crimes, it’s a white-collar affair—millions of dollars going missing from an overseas exchange, or a plucky enthusiast finding himself in an international money-laundering scheme.

But robbing someone of his bitcoin in person can be an astonishingly effective way to make off with vast sums of capital quickly and untraceably. And Mr. Richards is far from the first to fall victim to bitcoin-related brutality.

Stagecoach robberies

Dean Katz is a one-man bitcoin exchange. Every day, he drives around New York buying and selling bitcoin, on call to a large customer base. He’s like a weed delivery guy, only instead of delivering drugs, he’s bringing people the future of financial transactions.

One day, he received a call from someone who had heard about his services, either online or through a referral, who wanted to visit him out in Queens at a secure location.

“He called because he wanted to gamble during the Super Bowl, which is pretty common,” Mr. Katz told the Observer.

When the person arrived, he held Mr. Katz up at gunpoint and forced him to transfer $8,500 worth of bitcoin. Then, the robber took $3,500 in cash and split.



http://observer.com/2015/02/bitcoin-crime-wave-breaks-out-in-nyc/

[On Wednesday, it was revealed that the group is threatening to launch a “psychological” attack by flooding Europe with 500,000 immigrants from Libya. The new details reportedly come from published telephone intercepts that appear to indicate the Islamic State could retaliate against European military action in such a way.]

 Libya, virtually a failed state in recent years, has succeeded in one way: It’s providing a perfect opportunity for the Islamic State group to expand from Syria and Iraq to establish a strategic foothold closer to European shores.

On Wednesday, it was revealed that the group is threatening to launch a “psychological” attack by flooding Europe with 500,000 immigrants from Libya. The new details reportedly come from published telephone intercepts that appear to indicate the Islamic State could retaliate against European military action in such a way.

Four years ago, former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was ousted and executed, predicted ominously that the Mediterranean would become a “sea of chaos,” the Daily Mail noted Wednesday.

“If, instead of a stable government that guarantees security, these militias linked to Bin Laden take control, the Africans will move en mass towards Europe. … The Mediterranean will become a sea of chaos,” he reportedly said at the time.

It seems his prediction could prove to be more accurate than many anticipated.


Extremists loyal to the Islamic State have taken control of two Libyan cities on the Mediterranean coast, have moved toward oil facilities and are slowly infiltrating the capital, Tripoli, and the second-largest city, Benghazi. They have siphoned off young recruits from rival militant groups linked to al-Qaida and in some places taken over those groups’ training camps, mosques and media networks.

Notably, there appears to be strong coordination between the Libya branch and the group’s central leadership in Syria and Iraq. One of its top clerics, Bahraini Turki al-Binali, has visited the Libyan city of Sirte to preach: in 2013 and again at the end of last year, soon before it fell into the hands of the group’s supporters, according to a rival militia official based there. The official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear for his life.

A video released last week showing the beheading of a group of Egyptian Christians abducted from Sirte was produced by the IS media branch.

About 400 mostly Yemeni and Tunisian fighters are in Sirte, according to Libyan Interior Minister Omar al-Sinki. The militia official said Islamic State fighters have set up headquarters in the city’s convention complex, the Ouagadougou Center, built by Gadhafi as a symbol of his secular regime’s aspirations to be a pan-African leader. An Associated Press reporter who briefly visited Sirte on Wednesday saw masked militants deployed along the main road linking the convention center to downtown.

The close connection between the Libya branch and the central leadership around Islamic State chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi underscores the strategic importance of the North African country to the group. Libya boasts oil resources – something the extremists have exploited for funding in Iraq and Syria. There are vast amounts of weapons, a legacy of the turmoil since Gadhafi’s 2011 ouster. Its borders with Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria are porous.

And the southern shore of Italy is about 400 miles (660 kilometers) away, a distance Libyans fleeing their country’s chaos regularly try to cross in rickety boats. Italy and France favor some sort of international action in Libya, while Egypt is pressing for a U.N.-backed coalition air campaign.



http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/18/former-libyan-dictator-made-ominous-prediction-about-islamist-militants-before-his-ouster-is-it-about-to-come-true/




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Time to take a break from golfing 0bama. Can't blame bush on Libya. All yours, with no authorization from congress no less...

Close your eyes marie harf. Wish them away in the cornfield...

"They have to think happy thoughts and say happy things because once displeased, the monster can wish them into a cornfield or change them into a grotesque, walking horror. This particular monster can read minds, you see. He knows every thought, he can feel every emotion. Oh yes, I did forget something, didn't I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Anthony Fremont. He's six years old, with a cute little-boy face and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you'd better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge. This is the Twilight Zone."

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You said that the U.S. cannot kill our way out of this war, that the U.S. needs to go after the root causes that lead these young men, mostly men, some women, to go and join ISIS or al Qaeda or Al-Shabaab or these terrorist groups. Give us a little perspective on what you were talking about.

MARIE HARF, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESWOMAN: Well, absolutely. I'm not the first person to say something like this. Military commanders that we've had throughout many years here fighting this war on terrorism have said the exact same thing, that in the short term when there's a threat like ISIL, we will take direct military action against these terrorists. We have done that. We are doing that in Iraq and in Syria.

But longer term, we have to look at how we combat the conditions that can lead people to turn to extremism. If you think about, you know, if there's a radical jihadi on the internet who is putting out hateful videos, that's powerful and dangerous, right? But if there are 10,000 men in a country who are willing to blow themselves up because of what that person says on the internet, that's much more dangerous. So how do you get to those 10,000 people? How do you get them not to pick up the AK-47 and instead do something more productive and positive in their life? That's what we're trying to get at in this summit, looking at the long-term problem, not just the short-term one.

BLITZER: So you suggest that maybe if you find these young men jobs, they might not become terrorists, right?

HARF: Well, I think that's a gross oversimplification. What we talked about is there's things like good governance in countries, where if there is not good governance, it can create a vacuum or a space for terrorist organizations to recruit and get people to their cause. We've seen that in Libya. That's a perfect example right now. Where there's a lack of governance, you've had young men attracted to this terrorist cause where there aren't other opportunities. We've seen this in a number of places around the Middle East and around the world. Unfortunately, people turn to terrorism sometimes. So how do you get at that root causes? That's really the bigger point of this week's summit.

BLITZER: But you know, of course, some of the best-known terrorists out there came from wealth and privilege, with higher education, degrees, whether Mohamed Atta or bin Laden himself.

HARF: Absolutely. And, look, countering violent extremism it takes on a variety of different ways that you can do that here. Part of it is military, absolutely. We are taking direct action against ISIL in Iraq and in Syria. But look, if we looked around the world and say long-term we cannot kill every terrorist around the world nor should we try, how do you get at the root causes of this? Look, it might be too nuanced of an argument for some like I've seen over the past 24 hours some of the commentary out but it's really the smart way for Democrats, for Republicans, military commanders, our partners in the Arab world think we need to combat it.

BLITZER: Just to be precise I want to give you a chance to respond to some of the critics who have been out there. You say it's important to find these guys jobs so they don't become terrorists. Explain what you meant.

HARF: Where there are places around the world where there's a lack of governance, a lack of economic opportunity. President George W. Bush talked about poverty being one of the drivers leading people to extremism. Where they are lacking in these kinds of opportunities, we need to talk about how to make that different, how to help our partners around the world give young men in that vulnerable age group a different path in life. Show them that there's a different chance for them than joining a terrorist organization. Again, it's one part of it, Wolf, but this is really a comprehensive way of looking how to combat extremism and it's not one that fits into a sound bite sometimes as I've seen over the last 24 hours but it's a really important piece of this.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/02/17/harf_on_jobs_for_terrorists_comment_argument_may_be_too_nuanced_for_some_bush_said_it_too.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSiujutDZD0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs-AivXCpgw&list=TLR0aGe6QfBkU



I always learn something from that channel, even stuff I don't agree or believe. I like that cute logo too

 

An interesting exposition on ISIS’s apocalyptic vision.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.


http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/