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Ruth King

What Facebook and Google Do With Your Information Should Not Be a Surprise By Charlie Martin

https://pjmedia.com/trending/what-facebook-and-google-do-with-your-information-should-not-be-a-surprise/

The recent fuss about Facebook and Google’s tracking programs, and the ad targeting they offer has caused me to realize that most people either don’t understand or don’t care how advertising works. As the former CTO of an Internet advertising startup, I’ve given it a lot of thought in the last few years. This being me, the math geek, I’ve done a lot of this thinking mathematically, but I promise that I won’t inflict the math part on you.

Or at least not much.

So, let’s think about what advertising is for. The idea is to entice, and even convince, potential customers to become actual customers, and to buy things.

There are a million ways to do this, from old-fashioned word-of-mouth, to newspaper and magazine ads, to ShamWow pitchmen on late-night TV, to computer games that give you some kind of in-game goodies for watching an ad. (I’ve recently been compulsively playing a “terraform the universe” game that works like this; I hope to write a review soon.)

Every advertising method has some inherent cost. Word-of-mouth is low cost; national TV is expensive; others are in between. Every advertisement also has an inherent potential reward when someone is convinced, but not every person who sees an advertisement will actually buy the product. (I regularly see ads for products I already own; I imagine most everyone else has the same experience.)

This means we’ve wandered into the world of probability. Here’s the first of the two equations I’m going to mention, and I promise there’s nothing more than multiplication and division in either one. This first equation is called the expectation value, and it’s

Why President Trump Should Listen To Kim Kardashian About America’s Draconian Drug Punishments Alice Marie Johnson is one of 3,278 people serving a life sentence without parole despite their offense being nonviolent.By Holly Scheer

Kim Kardashian is taking heat for her stances on prison reform after she spoke out in support of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who was convicted of drug trafficking.

She met with President Trump on Wednesday to discuss sentencing and reforms, particularly for non-violent first time offenders. Also at the meeting was Shawn Holley, Johnson’s lawyer, who is being funded by Kardashian. Trump has called for harsher sentencing for drug dealers in the face of growing national concern over the opioid epidemic.

Johnson’s story first was brought to light by a video by Mic.

After the loss of her job, Johnson says that she was unable to find something quick enough to make money, so she made a choice she admits was horrible and turned to dealing drugs. She was caught, and sentenced to life in prison despite it being her first time drug offense. Since her crime was a federal offense, she is not eligible for parole. She’s one of 3,278 people serving a life sentence without parole despite their offense being nonviolent. While in prison she’s missed the births of her grandchildren, and the deaths of her parents. She’s now 62 years old.

While in prison, Johnson has spent her time writing plays for her fellow inmates to act in. She enjoys encouraging them, and inspiring them to be better, and discovering positive directions for their futures. She’s also worked as a mentor to help other women cope with their sentences.

For the more than 20 years that Johnson has been in prison, she has had no disciplinary infractions. Prison staff have written letters of support of Johnson and her hopes for a presidential pardon. She was not one of the 231 people that Barack Obama pardoned, and has shifted to calling for prison reform. She admits that she has made a mistake, but that that mistake shouldn’t be the only thing that matters in her life.

Kardashian’s interest in Johnson’s case began with the Mic video, and she tweeted her feelings about how unfair Johnson’s sentence was back in 2017.

MY SAY: “THE AMERICANS”

On March 23, 2018, the Wall Street Journal’s Television critic, Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote of the final season of “The Americans”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-americans-review-from-russia-with-no-love-1521752705

“It comes as no surprise that one of the greatest drama series in television history should come to its end as powerful as ever.”

“The Americans” is a television series about Soviet Union spies operating in America. The spies, married with kids, manage to don disguises, seduce, bed, even wed, bribe, blackmail, entrap and wantonly murder dozens during their long seditious sojourn in America. They even engage their college age daughter in espionage.

It was entertaining, with mediocre dialogue, gratuitous sex, a rather pedestrian depiction of real spies, a bland FBI agent neighbor who falls in love with a Russian agent, a hardened operative who cooks borscht or some variant in almost every scene while directing deadly missions . The historical perspective on the unraveling of the Soviet Union is shallow and ignorant. It skips the role of Ronald Reagan entirely while burnishing the importance of Gorbachev.

In the infuriating final episode, the FBI neighbor/friend, who has grown suspicious, abets their escape to Mother Russia, leaving their children behind with the daughter as potential witness to the betrayal of duty of the FBI agent.

This is “the greatest drama series in television history?” Oh Puleez!!!! rsk

Rape Gangs: A Story Set in Leafy Oxfordshire by Douglas Murray

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12435/rape-gangs-oxford

What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them?

Families of some of the abused girls related that they had tried consistently to raise the alarm over what was happening to their daughters, but that every door of the state was closed in their faces.

If Britain is to turn around the disgrace of its culture of ‘grooming gangs’, it should start by changing the risk-reward ratio between those who identify these monstrous crimes and those who have been shown to have covered them up.

Since the arrest of Tommy Robinson on May 25, the presence generally — and incorrectly — referred to as ‘Asian grooming gangs’ has been back in the news. This has reignited a debate about whether victims are getting justice and whether perpetrators are encountering it.

In all this at least one key element is missing. What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them? The policemen, politicians, council workers and others who were shown to have failed time and again. They have never been sentenced to prison for any of their oversights — and perhaps criminal charges (not even charges of criminal negligence) could never be brought against them. It is worth asking, however, if any of these people’s lives, career paths, or even pension plans were ever remotely affected by their proven failure to confront one of the greatest evils to have gone on in Britain. That is the mass rape of young girls motivated by adults propelled by (among much else) racism, religiosity, misogyny and class contempt.

Perhaps the post grooming-gang career of just one public official might help to answer that question. Her name is Joanna Simons. In 2013 she was the Chief Executive of the Oxfordshire County Council. She had been at the centre of that Council’s ‘care’ programme for nearly a decade: that is, throughout the period in which the mass rape of local girls (subsequently investigated under the name ‘Operation Bullfinch’) was carried on. The barbarism, which was carried out by local men of what is erroneously described as ‘Asian’ origin, included branding one of the girls with an ‘M’ on her body. The abuser’s name was ‘Mohammed’ and the Mohammed in question wanted people to know that this girl ‘belonged’ to him and as such was his property.

Carter Page is the Biggest Victim in the Trump-Russia Hoax By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/03/carter-page-is-t

It’s hard to get a read on Carter Page.

Since the Trump campaign volunteer became a central figure in the Obama administration’s plot to sabotage Donald Trump’s candidacy and undermine—if not destroy—his presidency, Page has been the target of numerous death threats. He is mocked by opinion writers and the public. (Just check out the replies to any tweet he posts.)

While Trump antagonist Stormy Daniels earns sympathetic coverage and victim status in the pages of major newspapers and even some conservative publications, Page’s plight is largely ignored. On Fox News in April, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) unkindly called him a “clown.” Leaders of his own government spied on him for a year, framing him as a traitorous villain in their stunning scheme to mount the most deceitful political warfare against a presidential candidate in U.S. history. His professional and personal life have suffered greatly.

Yet Page, 47, maintains an upbeat attitude and keeps a smile on his face. “I think Carter has been through more of a meat grinder than I have and he’s handled it as a gentleman,” former Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo told Laura Ingraham in joint interview with Page last month. “It looks like they were really abusing Carter, really treating him poorly, and I think a lot of us owe Carter an apology.”

But Page isn’t looking for apologies or sympathy: He is looking for justice. “This has been a long, torturous road, but I think the truth will start to come out a little bit,” he told me in a phone interview last month. “The [U.S.] Naval Academy gave me good training . . . to prepare for battle and roll with the punches.”

Page’s approach to handling his unwanted role in the Trump-Russia collusion ruse is a mix of patriotism and naiveté, if not stubbornness. He met with federal and congressional investigators without any legal representation: “I have nothing to hide,” he repeatedly insists. (In addition to the MBA and Ph.D. he already has, Page is now pursuing a law degree.) As he makes the rounds on cable news shows to discuss new revelations about his ties to a so-called federal informant, Page gives off the vibe that he is embracing the fame he earned the hard way.

Mr (and Ms) Plod Abet the Maiden Tribute of Modern Britain

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/05/mr-and-ms-plod-abet-maiden-tribute-of.html

William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), was a prominent British journalist whose series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ exposed the horrible sexual exploitation of and traffic in vulnerable underage girls by seemingly respectable members of Victorian society shocked the nation and led to the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885).

StephenYaxley-Lennon (b. 1982), better known as Tommy Robinson, a working class lad with in some respects a rather controversial past, is a ‘citizen journalist’ who was livestreaming outside Leeds Crown Court three days ago when he was arrested by a group of Mr and Ms Plods, charged with causing a ‘breach of the peace’, and thrown in the slammer the very same day.

In his footage he was focusing on that dastardly maiden tribute of modern Britain, the grooming and gang-rape of non-Muslim girls (mainly but not entirely white girls) by men whose cultural heritage is that of backward tribal societies so steeped in primitive misogyny that wives are routinely beaten for producing daughters instead of sons and females are gang-raped at the behest of village elders to atone for the misdeeds of male members of their families.

As I mentioned here, Mohammed Shafiq, head of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation, declared (to his credit) some years ago:

“There is a significant problem for the British Pakistani community, there is an over-representation amongst recent convictions in the crime of on-street grooming, there should be no silence in addressing the issue of race as this is central to the actions of these criminals.

They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behaviour that is bringing shame on our community.

I urge the police and the councils not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.”

And Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, is on record as saying that such men ‘think that women are some lesser beings’.

“Enough is Enough” (video) A quick peep at recent antisemitic developments:

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/06/enough-is-enough-video.html

‘There have been countless incidents, from Europe to North America. These are just a few recent examples… In Ukraine, antisemitic attacks nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017. There were more than a dozen incidents recorded in April alone. In Berlin, a man was attacked in an upscale neighborhood for wearing a kippah. In Paris, Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was brutally murdered in her apartment. Her attacker stated that he carried out the crime because she was Jewish. 2017 set a record for antisemitic activity in Sweden. Authorities prevented a neo-Nazi march in front of a synagogue on Yom Kippur after receiving intense pressure. In Bulgaria, far-right nationalists marched in commemoration of a war time Nazi collaborator. And in the United States, a Georgia town was the site of a Neo-Nazi march despite protests from residents. Marchers there set a swastika ablaze after nightfall. Italian fans of the Lazio football club used images of Anne Frank to insult supporters of rival club Roma. British Jews rallied in response to rampant and institutionalized antisemitism within the Labour Party.’

Julie Bindel: “”I was followed through the campus grounds being screamed at by students . . . The pornographer I was debating was ignored”

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7179/full
Why has the Left become so averse to free speech? Whether it is Labour MPs, such as the redoubtable Thangham Debbonaire, bullied and laid into by Momentum thugs for attending a rally against anti-Semitism, or the transgender cabal hell-bent on destroying anyone who disagrees with a single word of their Orwell-ian propaganda, silencing by some leftists has become ridiculous in the extreme.

In an article for the New York Times recently, the German academic Ulrich Baer wrote: “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognised members of that community.” How true.

By far the worst censors and McCarthyites are the transgender activists and their allies. Guardian commentator and Corbynista Owen Jones has angered a number of feminists by telling them they are “on the wrong side of history” because they believe they have the right to discuss their rights as women, and because they refuse to accept that “trans women are women” and that “some women have penises, some men menstruate”, as goes the trans-lunatic mantra.

There are currently any number of men on the Left who are happy to see women like me silenced and bullied for not toeing the party line. It suits men such as Jones to be able to scream “transphobe” at feminists whilst being seen as a “progressive” by other leftist men.

I recently attended a meeting organised by a group of feminists in Bristol who were concerned about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would enable any man to “self-identify” as a woman (or vice versa) without any medical intervention whatsoever.

Is South Africa about to fall apart? R.W. Johnson

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7177/full

“Sorry we didn’t make it to you yesterday,” said the delivery man. “We had to come from the other side of the city and there was all that trouble in Mitchell’s Plain. They were stoning the vehicles on the highway and there was a lot of shooting. There was more shooting due to the bus strike too. Today the trouble seems to have shifted to Grassy Park and Hout Bay — we have heard of shooting in both those places but luckily they’re not on our route.”

I nodded — I’d heard about the Mitchell’s Plain trouble but these days civil strife is so common in South Africa that it often doesn’t make the papers at all, only the traffic news, and nobody bothers any more to say what the cause of the trouble is. Instead, it is all put under the general rubric of “service delivery protests”.

What seemed to be the problem, I asked. “Oh, you know how it is,” says the delivery man, who is Coloured. “Some of them say their housing conditions are bad, others are demanding houses or land to build shacks on. That’s what it’s like in the new South Africa, hey? Some people think they will be given property if they just make enough trouble.” A black workman, overhearing this, tells me more bleakly: “What’s happening at Mitchell’s Plain is that the Coloured people and the blacks are fighting one another.”

On April 21 the Kaiser Chiefs soccer team played at the World Cup stadium in Durban — and lost. Their angry fans went on the rampage, burning and looting vehicles and committing some Rand 2.6 million (£150,000) of damage to the stadium itself. On April 1 on the main N3 motorway at Mooi River, more than 100 miles out of Durban, protesters had attacked and burnt 35 large trucks and looted and destroyed a considerable number of other vehicles. This was only a small item in the news and no reason was given for the violence. However, a friend phoned me from the scene, describing a situation of utter chaos. The protest had been against the employment of Zimbabweans as truck-drivers — there is usually a xenophobic element to such troubles — but once the vehicles had been successfully stormed an army of looters joined in. My friend said that the police were just standing watching. When he asked them why they made no move to stop the looting, they had explained that it wouldn’t be safe — some of the looters had guns. This complete passivity on the part of the police is also part of the new normal — it had been just the same at the soccer riot.

A spectre haunting Europe: Karl Marx Daniel Johnson

One of the uncanniest commemorations of modern times took place last month. It centred on the Basilica of Constantine, one of several imposing remains of the ancient Roman colony of Augusta Treverorum, later the German city of Trier. This vast brick Aula Palatina — once the throne room of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, now the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer — was the setting for a celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx on May 5, 1818.

The ceremony culminated in a remarkable tribute to Marx by Jean Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission. “Karl Marx was a philosopher who thought into the future,” Juncker rhapsodised. He had recognised “the task of our time — Europe’s social dimension that remains to this day the poor relation of European integration”. Having designated Marx as godfather of the European Union, Juncker insisted that Marx’s ideas had been posthumously “reformulated into virtually the opposite” and denied that the author of The Communist Manifesto had anything to do with the crimes of communist regimes: “Marx isn’t responsible for all the atrocities his alleged heirs have to answer for.”

Such an official endorsement of an English-speaking thinker — Adam Smith, say — would be unthinkable, but the European Commission pulled out all the stops for the German ideologue. (It is worth noting that Juncker’s speeches are usually written for him by Professor Martin Selmayr, his German chef de cabinet, whom he recently — and controversially — promoted to be Secretary-General of the Commission, the EU’s most senior civil servant.)

On the same day President Xi Jingping of China described Marx as “the greatest thinker of modern times”. Xi had donated a huge bronze statue to stand guard over Marx’s birthplace; it was unveiled by Juncker amid much pomp. Meanwhile in London, John McDonnell was also defending Marx, who died here in 1883. “Marxism is about developing democracy,” Labour’s Shadow Chancellor declared, “but to have an honest debate we need to be able to cut through the lies about Marxism.”

Juncker, Xi and McDonnell are correct in one respect: Marx was no ordinary thinker. Indeed, he dismissed philosophers who had merely interpreted the world: “The point is to change it.” And change the world he certainly did.

Two centuries have passed since Marx was born, but we are still living in his shadow. No man in modern times has had more influence. Yet nobody, perhaps, has done more harm to humanity.

More than a hundred million people have been murdered in his name by Stalin, Mao and other dictators who were his disciples. Billions more have suffered under Communism, the ideology Marx created and which once ruled nearly half of mankind. But for Marx, there would have been no Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union, no Holodomor in Ukraine, no Cultural Revolution in China, no Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, nor any other famines, purges and genocides carried out in the name of Communism.