Patrick's Notebook

by AMN

[ Clearly, U.S wars are about natural resources, money supply and trade routes; the classic imperial empire ]

The U.S.-backed forces have seized Syrian Commercial Bank in the Al-Hasakah Governorate, as they expelled all the employees inside the building and established full control over the site.

According to a field report, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), alongside the U.S. Coalition, attacked the main building of the Syrian Commercial Bank branch of the government located within the gathering of official departments in the southern section of Ghuweiran District, at the entrance of Al-Zohour neighborhood in Hasakah city.

“The building that was controlled by Qasd (SDF) is located near the Industrial Prison, the Industrial Secondary School, and the Industrial Institute,” a source told Sputnik Arabic.

The southern section of the Al-Ghuweiran District is where the Industrial Prison is located; this is the same jail that the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh) broke out of earlier this month.

The U.S. Coalition and SDF reportedly expelled government officials and students from the Tourism Directorate building, which also includes the hotel’s tourist high school and the Technical Institute for Tourist and Hotel Sciences in the Al-Zuhour neighborhood of Al-Hasakah. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Tamar Lapin

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked an extension of the state’s coronavirus stay-at-home order.

Gov. Tony Evers’ administration overstepped its authority when it pushed the shutdown to May 26, the court found in a 4-3 ruling.

The decision doesn’t immediately invalidate the order.

The court’s majority agreed to keep the shutdown in place until May 20, to give legislators and Evers’ administration time to drum up a new coronavirus plan.

The Democratic governor had issued a stay-at-home order in March, closing schools and non-essential businesses. It was supposed to lift on April 24, but was extended by the state’s Department of Health.

Worried about the economic fallout of the shutdown, Republicans asked the Supreme Court to block the extension, arguing it required legislative approval.

Evers’ administration argued it had the power to enact emergency measures to control viral diseases.

Nearly seven out of 10 Wisconsin residents back Evers’ “safer at home” order, according to a Marquette University Law School poll released Tuesday.

By GlobalResearchSyndicate

Even Ford, the birthplace of the 20th-century mass production economy, is on the trail of the surveillance dividend, proposing to meet the challenge of slumping car sales by reimagining Ford vehicles as a “transportation operating system.” As one analyst put it, Ford “could make a fortune monetizing data. They won’t need engineers, factories or dealers to do it. It’s almost pure profit.”

Surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives were refined in the competition to sell certainty. Early on it was clear that machine intelligence must feed on volumes of data, compelling economies of scale in data extraction. Eventually it was understood that volume is necessary but not sufficient. The best algorithms also require varieties of data — economies of scope. This realization helped drive the “mobile revolution” sending users into the real world armed with cameras, computers, gyroscopes and microphones packed inside their smart new phones. In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car, your medical conditions, and the shows you stream; your location as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city. They want your voice and what you eat and what you buy; your children’s play time and their schooling; your brain waves and your bloodstream. Nothing is exempt.

Unequal knowledge about us produces unequal power over us, and so epistemic inequality widens to include the distance between what we can do and what can be done to us. Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system. Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives. This third imperative, “economies of action,” has become an arena of intense experimentation. “We are learning how to write the music,” one scientist said, “and then we let the music make them dance.” » Read the rest of this entry «

By Peter Andrews

The MSM is pushing a narrative that the coronavirus presents an existential threat to humans, jumping on findings that the coronavirus is mutating as evidence for this. But in reality, mutations are anything but alarming.

Over the weekend, the Guardian published a piece titled: ‘Scientists concerned that coronavirus is adapting to humans’. One might be forgiven for doing a double-take at this headline – hasn’t the virus already adapted to humans? Otherwise, what would all the fuss be about? In any case, the piece refers to recent analysis of thousands of coronavirus genomes worldwide, revealing that some have mutations not present in the original Wuhan strain.

Newsflash: Viruses mutate. All DNA mutates – including your own. But this is no bad thing. Admittedly, the word has negative connotations; we imagine mutants as horrible, deformed creatures and, X-Men aside, usually bad guys. But in fact, mutation is as natural a process to DNA as repair or reproduction. Evolution relies on it. Famously, mutations to the lactase gene allow people of European descent to consume dairy products.

Some factions of the media seem committed to capitalizing on the negative associations people have with ‘mutants’ and ‘mutation’ to scare the unsuspecting public. But as long as there are still some voices of reason commentating on the coronavirus, such alarmist tactics will be readily challenged. » Read the rest of this entry «

Pushback With Aaron Maté

As the US government hunts Julian Assange, it refuses to extradite a CIA agent who killed UK teen Harry Dunn in a road incident.

The British Home Office has sought the extradition from the US of an American citizen for a road collision that killed 19-year old British citizen Harry Dunn in August 2019. The American driver of the car that killed Dunn is Anne Sacoolas. The US government claimed she had diplomatic immunity because she was the wife of a US diplomat working in the UK at a nearby US military base. Sacoolas fled the UK on a US military plane in September, and the US has fought her extradition since. But recently a new twist emerged. Sacoolas was not the wife of a diplomat, as the US claimed, but in fact, a CIA operative. Dunn’s family is voicing outrage, saying that they were lied to by both the US and British governments.

Watch this compelling interview by Aaron Maté with Radd Seiger, spokesperson for Harry Dunn’s family.

by Colin Todhunter

Following the court decision in the US to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson (exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference:

“The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…”

Johnson’s lawyers argued over the course of the month-long trial in 2018 that Monsanto had “fought science” for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product.

Long before the Johnson case, critics of Monsanto were already aware of the practices the company had engaged in for decades to undermine science. At the same time, Monsanto and its lobbyists had called anyone who questioned the company’s ‘science’ as engaging in pseudoscience and labelled them ‘anti-science’.

We need look no further than the current coronavirus issue to understand how vested interests are set to profit by spinning the crisis a certain way and how questionable science is again being used to pursue policies that are essentially ‘unscientific’ – governments, the police and the corporate media have become the arbiters of ‘truth’. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Jeet Heer

The president’s incompetence and malice are leading to countless deaths. He must be brought to justice.

On Tuesday, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter to comment on new projections showing even more deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic than previously were expected. “Those projections are without mitigation,” Trump responded. “We’re doing a lot of mitigation.” He added, “The people of our country should think of themselves as warriors. Our country has to open.”

On their own terms, these comments are incoherent and self-refuting. The main mitigation the United States is doing is social distancing, which has been effective in slowing down the spread of the disease but not stopping it. In fact, outside of New York and surrounding states, Covid-19 is still spreading rapidly.

As The New York Times reports, “The country is still in the firm grip of a pandemic with little hope of release. For every indication of improvement in controlling the virus, new outbreaks have emerged elsewhere, leaving the nation stuck in a steady, unrelenting march of deaths and infections.” The pace of that spread will only increase with the opening up of the economy Trump advocates.

Trump’s comment that Americans “should think of themselves as warriors” becomes more ominous when coupled with his frank acknowledgment that the death count from the pandemic will rise. “Will some people be affected badly? Yes,” Trump admitted in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday. » Read the rest of this entry «