The North Pole Is Now In A Death Spiral

not good for humanity, not good at all.

Empathy: Medicine for a Wounded World

War on Cash Intensifies: Citibank to Stop Accepting Cash at Some Branches

Less than a week after India’s surprise move to scrap its highest denomination cash notes, another front in the War on Cash has intensified down under in Australia. Yesterday, banking giant UBS proposed that eliminating Australia’s $100 and $50 bills would be “good for the economy and good for the banks.” (How convenient that a bank would propose something that’s good for banks!)

At This Current Pace, A Record-Shattering 2.4 Trillion Dollars Will Be Added To The National Debt This Year

Barack Obama is about to become the 20 trillion dollar man. With less than two months to go in his second term, the U.S. national debt stands less than 150 billion dollars away from the 20 trillion dollar mark. And at the pace that the debt is increasing, it seems almost certain that we will cross 20 trillion dollars before Inauguration Day. After promising us that “deficits are under control”, the federal debt jumped by more than 1.3 trillion dollars last fiscal year, and so far this year it is on pace to rise by a record-shattering 2.4 trillion dollars. This is a recipe for national suicide, and yet it wasn’t even a major issue during the recently concluded presidential campaign.

Mysterious Polio-Like Illness Plaguing Children Stumps CDC

‘Extreme Surveillance’ Becomes UK Law with Barely a Whimper

A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.The Investigatory Powers Act, given royal assent on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.

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US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

The Koch Brothers’ Favorite Congressman Will Be in Charge of the CIA

Mike Pompeo is an extremist who stokes fears of Muslims and talks of executing Edward Snowden.

Congressman Mike Pompeo was the single largest recipient of campaign funds from the Koch Brothers in 2010.

Activism

Yes, Jeff Sessions Is A Flaming Racist, White Segregationist

National Security Pick, Mike Flynn,Who He Is And Why It Should Terrify Us

Trump Considering Crony Infrastructure Bank

This is absolutely horrific news. Donald Trump transition official Steven Mnuchin (ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-Soros), who is considered a candidate for Treasury Secretary, told reporters in New York that the new administration was exploring the creation of an infrastructure bank. Banksters have been promoting an infrastructure bank idea for a very long time. They tried to push it in the Obama administration but Obama didn’t bite.

Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team

Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team. Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

This is (unfortunately) not a huge surprise, but it appears that a Trump administration is going to be much worse for civil liberties and surveillance. Earlier today, Donald Trump named his choices to head the CIA — Rep. Mike Pompeo — and to be the next Attorney General — Senator Jeff Sessions — and both have terrible records on surveillance, civil liberties and whistleblowing. They also are problematic in other areas, but in the areas where we cover, it’s not looking good. Let’s start with Pompeo. In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal back in January of this year, Pompeo called for expanding surveillance powers rather than limiting them. He criticized the USA Freedom Act and any other attempt to even moderately cut back on surveillance and said we had to go the other direction, claiming “What’s needed is a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities.”

An age of revolution is upon us. We can all feel to some extent the importance of the time we are living in. Populist movements have toppled long standing establishments across the world. Donald J. Trump was just elected President of the United States. Amidst the election cycle chaos we have lost sight of one of the other major revolutions impacting our world. We didn’t hear about it during the debates, either. The technological revolution will play a major role in Donald Trump’s presidency. He will have to deal with the pressing reality of human jobs being displaced by robots and artificial intelligence.

  The Strange History of Steve Bannon and the Biosphere 2 Experiment

Bad boy Steven Bannon has been trying to sabotage environmental research for decades.

Trump Empire Contains ‘Most Blatant Conflicts of Interest in History’

DOJ Civil Rights Lawyers Ponder Future Under Potentially ‘Terrifying’ Trump Presidency

Obama Sets New Record for Regulations – 81,640 Pages in 2016

Apple has acknowledged that its Icloud service is a weak link in its security model, because by design Apple can gain access to encrypted data stored in its customers’ accounts, which means that the company can be hacked, coerced or tricked into revealing otherwise secure customer data to law enforcement, spies and criminals. So it’s alarming to learn that Iphones are designed to synch your call history — which includes calls placed over Skype, Whatsapp and Viber — to your Icloud account, even if you have turned this setting off. To make things worse, this synch operation is hidden from you: this data is not visible when you browse your Icloud account, but Apple still has it.

For over a week now we have all sat grinding our teeth as we read story after story of our precious, millennial, snowflake children melting down at universities around the country over Trump’s victory. Some took to the street to protest and destroy private property while others were just so distraught that they convinced professors to postpone tests or simply cancel classes altogether so they could stay in bed all day. Well, some professors at the University of California Irvine have decided to be a bit more proactive in addressing the psychological needs of their distressed students who are all apparently finding it very difficult to exist in Trump’s new America. Specifically, professors of the university’s composition department have a decided to craft a whole new syllabus that will “help prepare our students for life under an avowed white supremacist presidential administration.”

Two months ago, Charlotte police confirmed that 70% of those arrested during the riots were from out-of-state. 18 months before that, as the riots flared in Ferguson, George Soros spurred the protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to financial records reviewed by The Washington Times. And now, amid more headlines of Soros’ involvement, KGW reports that more than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland were from out of state.