Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

@Viss

This is amazing work by @alshafei and team. You can search by company, country and funding entity, and learn things like:

"safeXai is the entity that has quietly resumed the operations of Banjo, a digital surveillance company whose founder, Damien Patton, was a former Ku Klux Klan member who’d participated in a 1990 drive-by shooting of a synagogue near Nashville, Tennessee."

https://www.surveillancewatch.io/

Pleased to announce the launch of Surveillance Watch, an interactive map and resource that documents the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry: https://www.surveillancewatch.io/

By mapping out the intricate web of surveillance companies, their subsidiaries, partners, and financial backers, we hope to expose the enablers fueling this industry's extensive rights violations, ensuring they cannot evade accountability for being complicit in this abuse.

#Privacy #Surveillance #InfoSec

@gandalf_the_blue @pluralistic
Ronald Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher) would not have happened were it not for Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand. It began much earlier than the 1980s.

@pluralistic People still don't understand ALL the damage that Reagan did to the USA.

Page 150 of Project 2025 calls for local police to become deputized agents of Trump's agenda.

Image if your local cops were taking their orders directly from Donald Trump. Would you feel safe?

United States remains last for life expectancy among English-speaking countries https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2024/08/14/United-States-last-life-expectancy-English-speaking-countries/2831723640603/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Majority Of Voters Say Trump Lacks Mental And Physical Stamina To Be President https://www.politicususa.com/2024/08/14/majority-of-voters-say-trump-lacks-mental-and-physical-stamina-to-be-president.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Mitch McConnell issued this "dire warning" to republican state legislators...

"Let's assume our worst nightmare: The Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate. The first thing they'll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster."

Weird how he didn't have any problem eliminating the filibuster on SC nominations in 2017.

If you sign up for a free trial of Disney+, you can never sue them for killing a family member:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

‘Bored’ Megyn Kelly Chalks Trump’s ‘Rambling’ Performance in Elon Musk Interview Up to His Advanced Age https://www.mediaite.com/politics/bored-megyn-kelly-chalks-trumps-rambling-performance-in-elon-musk-interview-up-to-his-advanced-age/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Why the fuck would anyone assume at this point that this pathetic wad of grievance and entitlement would do anything BUT refuse to acknowledge he lost? He could lose in a electoral landslide - and just may! - and he would still have a pissy little tantrum about how he actually won. We KNOW this already. It's 100 percent going to happen. Stop pretending it will be anything otherwise.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/14/politics/donald-trump-harris-election-outcome-denial/index.html

@pluralistic How come when we're looking at big business' abusive practices, it always leads to Reagan? The most disastrous decade, no doubt.

'Insult comic' Trump incapable of running on policies – only 'abuse': conservative https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2668964536/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Working at a dollar store is incredibly dangerous, thanks to low staffing levels that make them easy targets for armed robbers. Then, they jack up prices, selling goods in "cheater" sizes that are smaller than the normal retail packaging, and which are only made available to large dollar store conglomerates:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

10/

Walmart didn't just *happen*. The rise of Walmart - and Amazon, its online successor - was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics.

1/

Another fundamentally useful feature of Google Search has disappeared: cached pages.

'We indexed the entire web over and over again so you can find stuff! But we won't tell you when we found it or what it used to look like!'

Allegedly, this is a new "Russian joke":

Putin has a nightmare because of events in Kursk, and the ghost of Stalin appears to him.

Putin pleads with Stalin: "The Nazis are invading Kursk! My army is retreating! What can I do?"

Stalin tells him: “Do just as I did in 1943! Send your best troops from Ukraine to the front, and get American supplies!"

Just this evening I spoke to a friend who is a professor teaching EE and CS courses. I mentioned that I hoped that Mechanical Engineering wasn't doing the equivalent, which would be to turn into a "Using AutoCAD" degree. He reports that his colleagues in ME have complained about that very thing.
2/

The White House should stop ignoring Musk’s behavior & insulate agencies against risk, starting with shifting unique agency activity off of X. https://civic-texts.ghost.io/if-x-and-musk-are-not-politically-neutral-democracies-need-to-act-to-mitigate-the-growing-risks/
No American should have to use a private platform to read official statements or interact with our elected representatives or appointed officials.