Patrick Little: "Yay California Nazi Republicans like me!"


By Alex Thompson May 31, 2018
Less than a week before the California primary, Google listed “Nazism” as the ideology of the California Republican Party.

In the “knowledge panel” that provides easy access to information next to search results, Google was showing “Nazism” as an “ideology” of the party as of Thursday morning. The word “Nazism” was hyperlinked to a secondary page that shows “Nazism” alongside other “ideologies” of California Republicans like “Conservatism,” "Market liberalism,” “Fiscal conservatism,” and “Green conservatism."

California voters have been casting their absentee ballots for weeks ahead of Tuesday’s statewide primary elections, which will help determine the majority in the House of Representative and the potential next governor of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

But voters looking for information by searching “California Republicans” or “California Republican Party” were getting “Nazism” next to their search results until Google took the listing down later Thursday after a query from VICE News.



https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq38d/google-is-listing-nazism-as-the-first-ideology-of-the-california-republican-party

New York high school will use CCTV and facial recognition to enforce discipline

Next year, high schools in Lockport New York will use the “Aegis” CCTV and facial recognition system to track and record the interactions of students suspected of code of conduct violations, keeping a ledger of who speaks to whom, where, and for how long.

The record will be used to assemble evidence against students and identify possible accomplices to ascribe guilt to.

Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley justified the decision by noting, “We always have to be on our guard. We can’t let our guard down.”

Lockport will be the first school district in the world to subject its students to this kind of surveillance. The program will cost $1.4m in state money. The technology supplier is SN Technologies of Ganonoque, Ont., one of the companies in the vicinity of Kingston, Ontario, home to the majority of the province’s detention centers.

The Lockport district says that the system will make students safer by alerting officials if someone on a sex-offender registry or terrorist watchlist enters the property. None of America’s school shootings or high-profile serial sex abuse scandals were carried out by wanted terrorists or people on the sex-offender registry.

Deployed law-enforcement facial recognition systems have failure rates of 98%. The vendor responsible for Aegis would not disclose how they improved on the state of the art, but insisted that their product worked “99.97% of the time.” The spokesperson would not disclose any of the workings of the system, seemingly believing that doing so was antithetical to security.

The consultant who advised Lockport to spend $1.4m on the Aegis system, Tony Olivo, is listed as a “partner” of the vendor receiving the $1.4m in tax money; according to Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley, Olivo did not ask to be paid by the school district for this advice. Olivo says he also isn’t being paid a commission by the Aegis vendor. Olivo also consults for the nearby Depew school system, which is also committed to purchasing Aegis with tax money. Despite refusing to disclose any technical details about Aegis, Olivo said, “There is nothing in the world that can do what this technology does.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/21/kafka-high.html

This is as dumb as it gets.

by Edward Lynn

Honestly, if I can just speak personally for a sometimes the stuff I come across from the conservative alternative media universe really blows my mind. I mean, sometimes when I post an article to social media about something really stupid that conservatives did or said, I will find myself making the comment “the stupid it burns”. Well, in this case I already know I’ll be doing that again, because this time the stupid literally burns.

Yeah, in the course of my daily duties of perusing the right-wing propaganda-sphere I came across this amazing piece of stupidity on the steaming pile of nonsense known as Twitchy.com. And I was just stunned. Because the latest outrage driving conservatives up the wall (actually maybe I shouldn’t use that analogy) is the audacity of government scientists warning people not to try and… get this… roast marshmallows over the lava vents of an erupting volcano.

Yes, you read that right. Seems like common sense not to do this, right? Not to the don’t tread on me (I’ll tread on you) crowd… To quote the Twitchy article;

“If we lived next to Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, there’s a 100% chance that we would do this and film it and put it on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

But, according to alleged experts, roasting marshmallows over lava is dangerous”

Yes, by “alleged experts”, they do mean the scientists of the United States Geological Survey. But what do those eggheads know about science, and anyhow, science isn’t real, Jesus said so. Right? Wrong.


http://bluewavereport.com/politics/smh-conservatives-cry-nanny-state-dumbest-reason-ever/