erronis
erronis's JournalZuckerberg sued for alleged role in Cambridge Analytica data-slurp scandal
Source: The Register
Cambridge Analytica is back to haunt Mark Zuckerberg: Washington DC's Attorney General filed a lawsuit today directly accusing the Meta CEO of personal involvement in the abuses that led to the data-slurping scandal.
DC AG Karl Racine filed [PDF] the civil suit on Monday morning, saying his office's investigations found ample evidence Zuck could be held responsible for that 2018 cluster-fsck. For those who've put it out of mind, UK-based Cambridge Analytica harvested tens of millions of people's info via a third-party Facebook app, revealing a at best somewhat slipshod handling of netizens' privacy by the US tech giant.
That year, Racine sued Facebook, claiming the social network was well aware of the analytics firm's antics yet failed to do anything meaningful until the data harvesting was covered by mainstream media. Facebook repeatedly stymied document production attempts, Racine claimed, and the paperwork it eventually handed over painted a trail he said led directly to Zuck.
Fast forward to this week, and in announcing he's suing Zuckerberg, Racine on Monday said: "This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions."
Actual filing: https://oag.dc.gov/sites/default/files/2022-05/2022.05%20%283%29.pdf
Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/23/zuckerberg_sued_for_his_role/
Rep. Jamie Raskin on losing his son and saving democracy - Unthinkable - VTDigger
https://vtdigger.org/2022/05/13/rep-jamie-raskin-on-losing-his-son-and-saving-democracy/Great interview with David Goodman (brother of Amy).
But Raskin was blindsided. On December 31, 2020, Raskins only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression.
Don't miss an episode.
Seven days later and just a day after burying his son Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Bidens election. Thats when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trumps second impeachment trial. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol.
Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy.
...
I want to finish where we began. It's been almost a year and a half since Tommy's passing. How is he with you now? How is the mission that you have in Congress and in life connected to the terrible experience you've been through?
Jamie Raskin
Tommy was someone who had great dreams for democracy. He wanted a lot more from democracy, not a lot less from it. I feel very driven by the things that he saw and the things that he believed in. And I feel the same way, that we need to be asking a lot more of ourselves, not a lot less from ourselves. I feel very connected to his generation of Americans because they've had a hell of a time. There's a huge emotional mental health crisis among young people now. People used to talk about mental health stigma. They don't really talk about it anymore because when you've got problems like depression and anxiety that are afflicting a majority of an age cohort in the country, it's hard to stigmatize it. And the surgeon general has declared there to be a national emergency in mental and emotional health among the young, all the way down through middle school and elementary school. So everybody is on an individual odyssey with respect to their psychological and emotional health, but it does exist in a social context. Covid-19 was a brutal and isolating time for people and a really demoralizing time for the young. I know it was in Tommy's case, and I know what the other young people in our family have gone through. I feel we owe it to them to fight for them and also to get them to see that politics although it's never going to be a complete answer for anybody, is a large part of the answer that people need to make a connection with others in their generation and with people who have fought for freedom and democracy before them. That's going to be part of the solution for us reestablishing a sense of well-being and security in a really dangerous moment for democracy. I feel connected to Tommy's generation, and I know how many young people loved him and miss him. I am a poor substitute for my son, but I'm going to do everything I can to fight for that generation.
David Goodman is an award-winning journalist and the author of a dozen books, including four New York Times bestsellers that he co-authored with his sister, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. His work has appeared in Mother Jones, New York Times, Outside, Boston Globe and other publications. He is the host of The Vermont Conversation, a VTDigger podcast featuring in-depth interviews about local and national topics. The Vermont Conversation is also an hour-long weekly radio program that can be heard on Wednesday at 1 p.m. on WDEV/Radio Vermont.
The origin of Mothers' Day - Heather Cox Richardson
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-7-2022The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come home were scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
Howe was drawn to womens rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.
For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:
"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?
Howe had a new vision, she said, of the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities. She sat down immediately and wrote an Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World. Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to mutual murder. But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for womens suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.
Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers Day when she decided to honor her own mother in the early twentieth century. And while we celebrate modern Mothers Day, in this momentous year of 2022 its worth remembering the original Mothers Day and Julia Ward Howes conviction that women must make their voices heard.
trumpfile.org - interesting site.
https://trumpfile.org/I can't vouch for its content or accuracy. But it does seem to cover a lot of that poor-excuse-of-a-human's life and crimes.
The transnational crime syndicate operating within the United States did not begin with Donald Trump and wont end with him, either. Be informed now before its too late.
The Ecological Destruction from the Border Wall, in "American Scar" (New Yorker)
Very good documentary.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/the-ecological-destruction-from-the-border-wall-in-american-scar
Film by Daniel Lombroso
Text by Murat Oztaskin
April 30, 2022
In 2016, Donald Trump energized his Presidential campaign with three words: Build the wall. On the campaign trail, Trump insisted that Mexico would pay for the project, but once in office he looked to a more likely source of funding, Congress, which for two years declined to offer the moneya battle which eventually sparked the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Then, in early 2019, the President found a different way: he declared a national emergency at the southern border, a move that allowed him to reallocate funds for the walls construction from the Department of Defense. All told, the Trump Administration built more than four hundred and fifty miles of the barrier, about a quarter of the length of the U.S.s border with Mexico. Construction continued until the moment of Joe Bidens Inauguration.
Construction projects of this size typically have enormous environmental impacts. But funding the project from the D.O.D.s budget and classifying it as a matter of national security offered the Trump Administration a way around protections: it made the walls construction exempt from the stipulations of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and more than eighty other laws and statutes. Theres a certain kind of lawlessness that applies to the southern border that does not apply anywhere else, Stephania Taladrid, a New Yorker writer whos covered the effects of the border wall, and who reported and produced American Scar, told me. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, and the Inauguration in particular, people were thinking that, with Trump gone, we could afford to just forget about the wall. And, in reality, there were just a series of questions that were left unanswered. Among them are the impacts on the seventy-plus animal and plant species that the new sections of wall now endanger, including the jaguar, the ocelot, the desert bighorn sheep, and the Mexican gray wolf.
Couple stays in Ukraine to take in all the pets left behind
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514325046596014082Couple stays in Ukraine to take in all the pets left behind (wait til the beautiful message at the end ❤️
https://digbysblog.net/2022/04/22/friday-night-soother-151/
A bit of musical and scientific "enjoyment". Dedicated to Judi Lynn and elleng
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-physics.htmlThe singing saw video may (or may not) be your cup of tea. I'm very impressed!
TooLoose LeTruck: Too good to not read
https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/04/21/three-things-dead-deader-deadest/#comment-933023But please read the whole thread. There are some brilliant (and some not) posters there.
April 21, 2022 at 8:38 pm
In honor of dead Russian generals
He Was the Very Model of A Russian Major-General*
He was the very model of a Russian Major-General,
With knowledge biological, nuclear, and chemical,
He knew the czars of Russia, great battles territorial
Kulikovo to Stalingrad, so famous in memorial;
A highly educated man, proud son of Mother Russia,
Keen to take the fight abroad, if needed into Prussia,
Hed studied all the theories and memorized the tactics,
The ideal one to send to fight the Nazi drug fanatics;
The battle started well that day until the Javelin struck,
Blowing up the generals tank and the generals luck,
And now hes headed home in a mood quite funereal,
He was the very model of a Russian Major-General.
*with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan
I am horrified and furious at what the Ukrainians are suffering thru
I can even muster some sympathy for Russian conscripts who dont want to be there
I feel ZERO pity for dead Russian generals.
Sometimes when I see a video of a Russian helicopter being shot down, or a tank erupting in flames, I find myself cheering and then I realize I just watched several human beings die a horrible, ugly death, too and I feel sick to my stomach
But when a Russian general bites it? Im fine w/ that
If we go to war with russia, can we arrest Fucker Karlson, all of fux news and their funders?
Just asking the question...
Seems that most of the RW/libertarian news media and money-bags are in traitorous territory - aiding and abetting the enemy.
Why Brexit Britain is turning purple with shame - The Guardian, Stewart Lee
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/17/why-brexit-britain-is-turning-purple-with-shameAnd some purple prose...
...
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