Kony 2012 Breakdown
Reply
SCHOOL EDUCATIONS SUCKS
Three ‘Must See’ Short Videos on Public Education
“The public school system: ‘Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.
Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and
compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it
instead into meek subservience to authority’ .” — Walter Karp
“Text Book America,” by Walter Karp
“Why Johnny Can’t Think,” by Walter Karp
Education: Free and Compulsory, by Murray N. Rothbard
Is Public Education Necessary, by Samuel L. Blumenfeld
John Stossel’s Illegal Everything
How Goldman Sachs Helped Mask Greece’s Debt
Google changes its privacy policy
February 2, 2012
Undisclosed location
If you’re like almost every single Internet user on the planet, you probably use Google for something. Maybe Gmail, maybe Google search, maybe Google Docs, maybe Google Voice… or maybe all of the above.
Google recently began circulating a new privacy policy that will take place effective March 1, 2012. With so many services ranging from a new social network to an online office platform, Google has consolidated all of its privacy policies into one. And it’s a good reminder of what’s at stake.
Anytime you perform a Google search, for example, it’s logged. Your computer’s IP address and cookie (unique identifiers that can essentially pinpoint you and your location) are also included, so your computer’s entire search history is archived.
When you receive an email through Gmail, or a voicemail on the Google Voice service, it’s archived on their servers. Even if you delete the messages, there’s still a copy on Google’s servers. The marginal cost of digital storage is so ridiculously cheap that they have little reason to delete this data.
Then, of course, there are all the government requests for user data. In the first half of 2011, the US government requested information on over 11,000 Google accounts. Google complied with a full 93% of those requests. Your account might have been one of them, and you would never know.
It’s not just Google either. Between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, the four companies power the email accounts of over 1 billion people. And all of them are in bed with the US government.
In a way, they have to be. They’re all US companies– headquartered in the US and subject to US law. When the government comes looking for information, or some judge decrees that a user’s emails be confiscated as evidence, they have to comply.
Big Brother compliance also goes far beyond email. Skype, the popular instant message and VOIP software that was once thought to be private and secure, is now owned by Microsoft… meaning that Skype chats are now also subject to courts and police agencies.
So what to do? First, and most importantly, be mindful about what you put in an email or online chat platform. The best rule of thumb is that sending an unsecure email is like shouting the contents across the street.
Further, consider using an offshore email provider that can securely host your account abroad. There are a number of them available, services like:
https://secure.runbox.com/ (Norway)
http://www.SwissMail.org/ (Switzerland)
http://www.NeoMailbox.com/ (Switzerland)
If you have your own custom domain email address (for example, admin@sovereignman.com), you can keep your existing email address and simply change the mail servers. I’ve asked my IT staff to put together a short guide showing exactly how to do this, and I’ll send it out to you soon.
Geoengineering: Our Environment Under Attack
Geoengineering: Our Environment Under Attack
The greatest public health threat can no longer be denied
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones
Infowars.com
Monday, November 14, 2011
The fact that the planet is being bombarded with chemicals from high-altitude spraying as part of numerous geoengineering programs being conducted by U.S. government agencies and universities that have been approved with no oversight whatsoever can no longer be denied.
The re-classification of global warming, a highly contentious and often scientifically fraudulent pseudo-science, as a “national security threat” has been exploited by governments as an excuse to play God, green lighting secret experiments on a massive scale that carry innumerable dangers to humans and their environment.
However, now that increasing awareness of geoengineering as a result of the chemtrails phenomenon has propagated widely, authorities are slowly being forced to disclose certain aspects of the program. We are now not far away from full disclosure of the true extent of geoengineering experimentation.
Scientists now admit that vapor trails from aeroplanes are creating “artificial clouds” that block out the sun. This is no longer a matter of debate. The chemtrail “conspiracy theorists” were proven correct.
Reading University’s Professor Keith Shine told the Daily Mail last year that the clouds “formed by aircraft fumes could linger ‘for hours’, depriving those areas under busy flight paths, such as London and the Home Counties, of summer sunshine.”
“Experts have warned that, as a result, the amount of sunlight hitting the ground could be reduced by as much as ten per cent. Professor Shine added: “Over the busiest areas in London and the South of England, this high-level cloud could cover the sky, turning bright sunshine into hazy conditions for the entire area. I expect the effects will get worse as the volume of air traffic increases.”
The report also makes reference to a 2009 Met Office study which found that high-level winds did not disperse contrails that later formed into clouds which covered an astonishing 20,000 miles.
Of course, only the completely naive would suggest that there is no connection between chemtrails that block out the sun, a phenomenon that has been ongoing for over a decade, and open calls on behalf of scientists to ‘reduce global warming’ by injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.
Mainstream science and academia has gone from dismissing chemtrails as a fantasy of paranoid conspiracy theorists to now accepting that they exist but claiming that they are natural and not artificially induced, despite numerous patents and scientific proposals that focus around using man-made dispersal of aerosols to alter the atmosphere.
The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was discussed in a September 2008 London Guardian article entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promoted the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.
“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.”
Experiments similar to Caldeira’s proposal are already being carried out by U.S. government -backed scientists, such as those at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C, who in 2009 began conducting studies which involved shooting huge amounts of particulate matter, in this case “porous-walled glass microspheres,” into the stratosphere.
The project is closely tied to an idea by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who “proposed sending aircraft 747s to dump huge quantities of sulfur particles into the far-reaches of the stratosphere to cool down the atmosphere.”
In 2008, scientist Tim Flannery also warned that “mankind might need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive,” adding that, “gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.”
Such programs merely scratch the surface of what is likely to be a gargantuan and overarching black-budget funded project to geoengineer the planet, with little or no care for the unknown environmental consequences this could engender.
Given that sulphur emissions cause ‘global dimming’, is it any wonder that the emergence of the chemtrails phenomenon coincided with an average 22% drop in sunlight reaching the earth’s surface?
What is known about what happens when the environment is loaded with sulphur dioxide is bad enough, since the compound is the main component of acid rain, which according to the EPA “Causes acidification of lakes and streams and contributes to the damage of trees at high elevations (for example, red spruce trees above 2,000 feet) and many sensitive forest soils. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of building materials and paints, including irreplaceable buildings, statues, and sculptures that are part of our nation’s cultural heritage.”
The health effects of bombarding the skies with sulphur dioxide alone are enough to raise serious questions about whether such programs should even be allowed to proceed.
The following health effects are linked with exposure to sulphur.
– Neurological effects and behavioral changes
– Disturbance of blood circulation
– Heart damage
– Effects on eyes and eyesight
– Reproductive failure
– Damage to immune systems
– Stomach and gastrointestinal disorder
– Damage to liver and kidney functions
– Hearing defects
– Disturbance of the hormonal metabolism
– Dermatological effects
– Suffocation and lung embolism
According to the LennTech website, “Laboratory tests with test animals have indicated that sulfur can cause serious vascular damage in veins of the brains, the heart and the kidneys. These tests have also indicated that certain forms of sulfur can cause foetal damage and congenital effects. Mothers can even carry sulfur poisoning over to their children through mother milk. Finally, sulfur can damage the internal enzyme systems of animals.”
Even pro-geoengineering scientist Mark Watson, admits that injecting sulphur into the atmosphere could lead to “acid rain, ozone depletion or weather pattern disruption.”
Rutgers University meteorologist Alan Robock also, “created computer simulations indicating that sulfate clouds could potentially weaken the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing rain that irrigates the food crops of billions of people.”
“Imagine if we triggered a drought and famine while trying to cool the planet,” Robock told a geoengineering conference last year.
The Canada-based Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) has called for such experiments to be shut down. “This experiment is only phase one of a much bigger plan that could have devastating consequences, including large changes in weather patterns such as deadly droughts,” the group said in a written statement.
Fred Singer, president of the Science Environmental Policy Project and a skeptic of man-made global warming theories, warns that the consequences of tinkering with the planet’s delicate eco-system could have far-reaching dangers.
“If you do this on a continuous basis, you would depress the ozone layer and cause all kinds of other problems that people would rather avoid,” said Singer.
Even Greenpeace’s chief UK scientist – a staunch advocate of the man-made global warming explanation – Doug Parr – has slammed attempts to geoengineer the planet as “outlandish” and “dangerous”.
Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who proposed a bizarre plan to send spaceships into the upper atmosphere that would be used to block out the Sun, admits that geoengineering could cause “conflicts between nations if geoengineering projects go wrong.”
As we have repeatedly highlighted, numerous universities and government agencies have been conducting studies in the field of geoengineering for years.
Discussion of geoengineering technology is often framed as a future consideration, yet governments are already conducting such programs at an advanced stage.
The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program was created in 1989 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Science and managed by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research.
One of ARM’s programs, entitled Indirect and Semi-Direct Aerosol Campaign (ISDAC), is aimed at measuring “cloud simulations” and “aerosol retrievals”.
Another program under the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Science Program is directed towards, “developing comprehensive understanding of the atmospheric processes that control the transport, transformation, and fate of energy related trace chemicals and particulate matter.”
The DOE website states that, “The current focus of the program is aerosol radiative forcing of climate: aerosol formation and evolution and aerosol properties that affect direct and indirect influences on climate and climate change.”
U.S. government scientists are already bombarding the skies with the acid-rain causing pollutant sulphur dioxide in an attempt to fight global warming by “geoengineering” the planet, despite the fact that injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere carries with it a host of both known and unknown dangers.
In addition, the Obama administration’s interest in exploring “geoengineering” mirrors recent publications penned by the elite Council On Foreign Relations.
In a document entitled Geoengineering: Workshop on Unilateral Planetary Scale Geoengineering, the CFR proposes different methods of “reflecting sunlight back into space,” which include adding “small reflecting particles in the upper part of the atmosphere,” adding “more clouds in the lower part of the atmosphere,” and placing “various kinds of reflecting objects in space either near the earth or at a stable location between the earth and the sun.”
The proposals in the CFR document match exactly the atmospheric effects observed in the aftermath of chemtrail spraying.
A report issued last year by the UK government also calls for the UN to exclusively regulate world wide geoengineering of the planet in order to stave off man made global warming.
Of course, killing millions of people in the third world through unintended consequences of geoengineering is probably seen as a price worth paying for the likes of John P. Holdren, White House science czar and strong geoengineering proponent, given that he and other luminaries in the global warming movement want to see global population drastically reduced by means of a “planetary regime” carrying out forced sterilization and other draconian population control measures.
It is now overwhelmingly obvious that geoengineering projects involving spraying chemicals at high altitudes are already underway through chemtrails.
In 2008, a KSLA news investigation found that a substance that fell to earth from a high altitude chemtrail contained high levels of Barium (6.8 ppm) and Lead (8.2 ppm) as well as trace amounts of other chemicals including arsenic, chromium, cadmium, selenium and silver. Of these, all but one are metals, some are toxic while several are rarely or never found in nature.
The newscast focuses on Barium, which its research shows is a “hallmark of chemtrails.” KSLA found Barium levels in its samples at 6.8 ppm or “more than six times the toxic level set by the EPA.” The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality confirmed that the high levels of Barium were “very unusual,” but commented that “proving the source was a whole other matter” in its discussion with KSLA.
KSLA also asked Mark Ryan, Director of the Poison Control Center, about the effects of Barium on the human body. Ryan commented that “short term exposure can lead to anything from stomach to chest pains and that long term exposure causes blood pressure problems.” The Poison Control Center further reported that long-term exposure, as with any harmful substance, would contribute to weakening the immune system, which many speculate is the purpose of such man-made chemical trails.
Indeed, barium oxide has cropped up repeatedly as a contaminant from suspected geoengineering experimentation.
Geoengineering programs conducted by politically-driven scientists who have proven adept at covering up and ignoring contradictory evidence in the global warming debate should not be empowered with the authority and funding to conduct such dangerous tests without a major public debate about the potential consequences.
The fact that individuals who embrace the dogma of global warming, alarmism which has already killed more people than man-made climate change in the third world through starvation linked to food price hikes caused by biofuel production, are now preparing to launch programs with government approval that could drastically alter weather patterns and cause droughts, is frightening.
More sober minds in the scientific community need to become far more public in their opposition to geoengineering to prevent a very real form of man-made climate change that could irrevocably damage our planet for decades to come.
In an effort to draw attention to this urgent issue which represents a threat to our health and our environment, we are launching the first Infowars.com ‘tweet bomb’ today, where we encourage all our readers to tweet the URL Infowars.com at 11am CST. Tune in to the Alex Jones Show today for further details.
Vaccines Exemptions
How to Avoid ‘Mandatory’ Vaccinations Through Exemption | Vaccination is Your Legal Choice
Anthony Gucciardi
NaturalSociety
October 3, 2011
Contrary to what state legislatures may lead you to believe, no one has the legal or moral authority to force you or your child into receiving a vaccine. While the State has the legal authority to fully establish the use of vaccines, to receive a vaccination treatment requires your voluntary and informed consent. Therefore, despite the tricky wording of school officials and mainstream public health workers, there are a number of ways in which you can exempt yourself from receiving the ‘required’ vaccinations as set by school districts and workplaces.
In 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to pass laws ‘requiring’ citizens to receive certain vaccines. Today, all 50 states have passed vaccine laws that ‘require’ proof of vaccination in order to attend daycare, elementary, junior and high school and college. What is oftentimes kept from you is the fact that all 50 states have medical exemptions from this rule, 48 states have religious exemptions, and 18 states allow for a philosophical or conscientious belief exemption.
To see what your state vaccine law says and how to apply for the appropriate exemption, check out the State Law & Vaccine Requirements page at the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC).
Vaccination and U.S. Law: A Brief Summary
Medical Exemptions: All 50 states allow medical exemption to vaccination. Medical exemptions to vaccination must be written by a medical doctor (M.D.) or doctor of osteopathy (D.O.) and are usually reviewed annually by school or state health officials.
Since 1986, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) have eliminated most officially recognized medical reasons for withholding vaccination (contraindications) so that almost no medical condition qualifies for a medical exemption to vaccination.
In most states, school or state public health officials can question or even deny a medical exemption to vaccination written by a doctor if it does not strictly conform to CDC and AAP contraindication guidelines
Religious Exemptions: All but two states (West Virginia and Mississippi) allow religious exemption to vaccination. These exemptions are worded differently in different states and require different forms of written documentation that must be submitted to state governments supporting a sincerely held religious belief opposing vaccination.
Some states require a notarized affidavit or letter from a spiritual advisor attesting to the sincerity of a person’s religious beliefs about vaccination. The religious exemption is under attack and, in some states like New York, parents are being grilled about the sincerity of their religious beliefs by state officials and denied religious exemptions to vaccination so their partially or completely unvaccinated children cannot attend public schools.
Conscientious Belief Exemptions: 18 states allow conscientious, personal or philosophical belief exemption to vaccination. These states come the closest to protecting a citizen’s right to exercise voluntary, informed consent to vaccination in America.
They are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin
Vaccine Exemptions for Military Personnel: All branches of the U.S. Armed Services provide medical and religious exemptions to vaccination, but those exemptions must be first declared before enlistment in the military.
If a military recruit does not clearly state a medical or religious objection to vaccination BEFORE joining the military, he or she gives up the right to object to vaccination during active military service. Failure to obey an order to vaccinate while on active military duty can result in demotion, imprisonment and involuntary discharge from the military, including dishonorable discharge. After enlistment, legal assistance is often required to successfully object to vaccination without being subjected to sanctions.
Vaccine Exemptions for International Travel: Different countries have different laws requiring vaccines to enter or leave the country. Most developed countries, including those in Europe, currently do not require visitors to show proof of vaccination. However, some countries in Africa, Asia and elsewhere may require certain vaccines to enter or exit. Click here to check the CDC website on travel vaccine requirements.
Other Vaccine Exemption Issues: Vaccine choices also can affect adoption, immigration, child custody arrangements during divorce proceedings, eligibility for health insurance and government entitlement programs, and medical care. Children adopted from foreign countries as well as in the U.S. may be required by US law and adoption agencies to receive certain government mandated vaccines.
Immigration laws also contain vaccine requirement provisions. In cases of divorce, one parent may attempt to gain full custody of a minor child by using the vaccine choice issue as leverage. Some families have been dropped from medical insurance plans or barred from eligibility for government funded medical care and food supplement programs if children are not given all government recommended vaccines.
Explore More:
- California Bill Seeks Mandatory Gardasil Vaccinations without Parental Consent
- California Bans Unvaccinated Children from Class
- African Country Threatens to Jail Parents for Skipping Polio Vaccination
- Vaccine Makers Immune to Legal Repercussions
- Merck Paid Legislators to Pass Mandatory Gardasil Vaccine Bill
- The Guardian, Sunday 13 January 2008
- Article history
The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 16 2008
The US intelligence community’s enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after 9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999 were anachronistically linked in the article below. Since 9/11 happened in 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two years earlier.
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. (“I like Facebook,” said another friend. “I got a shag out of it.”) It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are “popular”, in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing’s new Facebook magazine: “How To Double Your Friends List.”
It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook’s third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That’s 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: “It’s embedded itself to an extent where it’s hard to get rid of.”
All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.
Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts for the world’s biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”. He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review – motto: Fiat Lux (“Let there be light”). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.
TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: “TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us.” Their aim is to promote policies that will “reshape America and the globe”. TheVanguard describes its politics as “Reaganite/Thatcherite”. The chairman’s message says: “Today we’ll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined.”
So, Thiel’s politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterisation of life as “nasty, brutish and short”, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries – and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel’s intellectual soirees. What you don’t hear about in Thiel’s philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world’s wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it’s fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: “You can’t have a workers’ revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,” he says.
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: “The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies … heading in this direction … Artificial Intelligence … direct brain-computer interfaces … genetic engineering … different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.”
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and – with Breyer – board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: “She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century.”
Now even if you don’t buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggsted that its $15bn valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless. “We want everyone to be able to use Facebook,” says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I’ll bet they do. It is Facebook’s enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumour says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.
The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, “to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web”. And indeed, this is precisely what’s happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the following lines:
“With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users communicate and interact on Facebook,” said Carol Kruse, vice president, global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company.
“We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster in convenient, relevant and entertaining ways,” said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster chairman and CEO. “This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends.”
“Share” is Facebookspeak for “advertise”. Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.
Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they’ll be sending ads your way.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP) It’s true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called “Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!” to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from “opt-out” to “opt-in”. But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century.
Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.
Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man’s boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, and certainly you’ll be waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.
Or you might reflect that you don’t really want to be part of this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don’t want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.
For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.
Facebook’s privacy policy
Just for fun, try substituting the words ‘Big Brother’ whenever you read the word ‘Facebook’
1 We will advertise at you
“When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features.”
2 You can’t delete anything
“When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.”
3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions
“… we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content.”
4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable
“Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised experience.”
5 Opting out doesn’t mean opting out
“Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications.”
6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it
“By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States … We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies.”
The Real Reason Why Gadaffi Was Killed & Why We’re In Libya
Ron Paul president 2012
Veritas Today 