Keith Axline | 21 Mar 2019

Update: Since first publishing this post, many people have pointed out that changing your DNS isn't a huge privacy add since your ISP can still see a lot of your traffic. The real solution here is a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which I felt went beyond the "simple" scope of these steps. Read about VPNs here.

Update 2: People have pointed out that HTTPS Everywhere is not a good recommendation. I'm now using Smart HTTPS instead.

Online privacy is important for everyone, not just tinfoil hat wearers. First, it's more in line with what a user's expectation is when they browse the internet. Not many people understand all the tracking that happens by default.

Second, it's more how we operate in real life. You don't have someone following you around from store to store writing down every product you touch or look at, and then block you from entering other stores until you watch an ad.

Third, the principled view of not giving away valuable data to companies for them to sell is beneficial for everyone. Yes, in some cases you happily give up your data to sites that you enjoy so that they can stay in business. But you can't opt-in to the sites you choose until you put the tools in place to block every site.

By the end of this post, you'll be leaving much lighter footprints in the internet forest. Certainly more so than your average web surfer. We'll switch up your browser and search engine, add some plugins to block surveillance, and get a little technical with DNS servers.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

 Charles Hugh Smith

We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.

The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con.
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This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.

Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos' plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post's own political agenda and biases.

This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.

If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency.

You can read the rest of the article at this link.
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March 18, 2019


Thus will end the central banks' bombastic hubris and the public's faith in central banks' godlike powers.
Having fixed the liquidity crisis of 2008-09 and kept a perversely unequal "recovery" staggering forward for a decade, central banks now believe there is no crisis they can't defeat: Liquidity crisis? Flood the global financial system with liquidity. Interest rates above zero? Create trillions out of thin air and use the "free money" to buy bonds. Mortgage and housing markets shaky? Create another trillion and use it buy up mortgages.

And so on. Every economic-financial crisis can be fixed by creating trillions of out thin air, except the one we're entering--the exhaustion of credit. Central banks, like generals, always prepare to fight the last war and believe their preparation insures their victory.

To read the full blog, click here.

 
by Daniel J. Mitchell

When I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called Green New Deal, I mostly focused on the very expensive fiscal implications. I also noted that AOC proposed 70 percent tax rate on the rich wouldn't even pay for a tiny fraction of the multi-trillion dollar cost (in other words, you and would be pillaged).


Others focused on some of the inane goals of the legislation, such as phasing out cows and air travel.
For Those "Unwilling to Work"But the part of the plan that produced the most controversy was the promise to provide “economic security” to those “unwilling to work.” This generated so much mockery that it no longer appears in any supporting documents and some supporters even claim that it never was part of the plan.


But some true believers aren’t backing down. Let’s look at some excerpts from Christine Emba’s recent column in the Washington Post.
The rollout of the progressives’ Green New Deal has been less than smooth. One major reason: the release of an FAQ that listed “economic security” for those “unwilling to work” as one of the program’s goals. “Unwilling”? The now-retracted FAQ made other eyebrow-raising claims, but conservatives pounced on that word in particular. …welfare as a reward for laziness, it was called extreme, absurd…a “Communist Manifesto, 21st Century.”


Give Ms. Emba credit.


She didn’t pretend, like many other folks on the left, that the promise of no-strings handouts for the indolent wasn’t part of AOC’s original plan. For this reason, we should probably add her to our collection of honest leftists.


But while I applaud the honesty at the start of her column, the analysis that follows is profoundly awful.


She basically argues that the success of welfare should be judged by whether recipients are happy to get free money.


…is the idea of unconditional economic security really so extraordinary? …A state-dispensed, unconditional cash stipend for every single citizen—whether willing to work or not—has been touted as a way to…perhaps end deep poverty …most Americans look askance at the idea of giving anyone anything free, let alone something as intangible as well-being. It’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, after all. Actually getting it is up to you. But what if we thought differently? Well-being—happiness in some sense… Health is a key measure of well-being. Adequate food and housing support it. …Which outcomes do we really care about? …Work isn’t all that matters. Improving well-being is a more than respectable goal.


And she even cites the failed program from Finland to justify her position.


Finland recently completed a landmark basic income project… One of the main goals of the Finnish project was to test whether a basic income would promote employment. …the program wasn’t much of a success: During the first 12 months, at least, basic income recipients fared no better or worse at finding employment than a control group. But it made a radical difference in other ways. “The basic income recipients of the test group reported better well being in every way,” chief researcher Olli Kangas told Reuters.
The Problem with a Basic IncomeFor all intents and purposes, Ms. Emba is lowering the bar for success. Basic income no longer should be supported because it will encourage more work (as some claim). Instead, we should support it because non-working people will be happy to get more handouts.
Let’s think about what that means. I wrote about socialism a week ago and I shared a very persuasive cartoon that shows why the theory has an inherent practical flaw.


While I’m tempted to recycle that cartoon again, this Wizard-of-Id parody makes the same point.


The bottom line is rather grim. A society that taxes productivity and subsidizes idleness over time will get less of the former and more of the latter.


P.S. While recipients express positive thoughts when they get more handouts, Arthur Brooks has explained that depending on others is not a route to a genuinely happy and fulfilled life
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This article was reprinted with permission from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. 

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nationcontributing editor, he is the author, most recently, of War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
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How the Russiagate investigation is Sovietizing American politics (by Stephen Cohen)
“Collusion,” “contacts,” selective prosecutions, coup plotting, and media taboos recall repressive Soviet practices.Having studied Soviet political history for decades and having lived off and on in that repressive political system before Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms - in Russia under Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s -I may be unduly concerned about similar repressive trends I see unfolding in democratic America during three years of mounting Russiagate allegations. Or I may exaggerate them. Even if I am right about Soviet-like practices in the United States, they are as yet only adumbrations, and certainly nothing as repressive as they once were in Russia.

New Cold War is more dangerous than the one the world survived – Stephen Cohen

And yet, ominous trends are not to be discounted and still less ignored. I have commented on them previously, on the official use of “informants” to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, and such practices have now multiplied. Consider the following:

Soviet authorities, through the KGB, regularly charged and punished dissidents and other unacceptably independent citizens with linguistic versions of “collusion” and “contacts” with foreigners, particularly Americans. (Having inadvertently been the American in several cases, I can testify that the “contacts” were entirely casual, professional, or otherwise innocent.) Is something similar under way here? As the former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out, to make allegations of Trump associates’ “collusion” is to question “everyone who had interacted with Russia in the last quarter-century.” In my case and those of not a few scholarly colleagues, it would mean in the last half-century, or nearly. Nor is this practice merely hypothetical or abstract.

The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to an American professor and public intellectual demanding that this person turn over “all communications [since January 2015] with Russian media organizations, their employees, representatives, or associates,” with “Russian persons or business interests,” “with or about US political campaigns or entities relating to Russia,” and “related to travel to Russia, and/or meetings, or discussions, or interactions that occurred during such travel.” We do not know how many such letters the Committee has sent, but this is not the only one. If this is not an un-American political inquisition, it is hard to say what would be. (It was also a common Soviet practice, though such “documents” were usually obtained by sudden police raids, of which there have recently been at least two in our own country, both related to Russiagate.)

‘Silicon Valley bureaucrats deciding who gets freedom of speech’: Jimmy Dore on Facebook censorshipIn this connection, Soviet authorities also regularly practiced selective prosecution, which is persecution intended to send a chilling signal to other would-be offenders. For example, in 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested for publishing their literary writings abroad under pseudonyms, an emerging practice the Kremlin wanted to stop. And in 1972, an important dissident figure, Pytor Yakir, was held in solitary confinement until he “broke” and signed a “confession,” even naming some of his associates, which greatly demoralized the dissident movement. Paul Manafort is no American dissident, literary or otherwise, and he well may be guilty of the financial misdeeds and tax evasion as charged. But he is facing, at nearly age 70, in effect a life sentence in prison and, through fines imposed, the bankruptcy of his family. We may reasonably ask: Is this selective prosecution/persecution? How many other hired US political operatives in foreign countries in recent years have been so audited and onerously prosecuted? Or has Manafort been singled out because he was once Trump’s campaign manager? We may also ask why a young Russian woman living in Washington, Maria Butina, was arrested and kept in solitary confinement until she confessed - that is, pleaded guilty. (She is still in prison.) Her offense? Publicly extolling the virtues of her native Russian government and advocating détente-like relations between Washington and Moscow without having registered as a foreign agent. Americans living in Russia frequently do the same on behalf of their country. Certainly, I have often done so. Are patriotism and promoting détente as an alternative to the new and more dangerous Cold War now a crime in the United States, or is the selective prosecution of Butina a response to Trump’s call for “cooperation with Russia”?

Now we have an even more alarming Soviet-like practice. Former acting head of the FBI  Andrew McCabe tells us that in 2017, he and other high officials discussed a way to remove President Trump from office. As Alan Dershowitz, a professor of constitutional law, remarked, they had in mind an “attempted coup d’état.” Which may remind students of Soviet history that two of its leaders were targets of a bureaucratic or administrative “coup”- Nikita Khrushchev twice, in 1957 and 1964, the latter being successful; and Gorbachev in August 1991, though perhaps several other plots against him may still be unknown. Khrushchev and Gorbachev were disruptors of the bureaucratic status quo and its entrenched interests - very much unlike President Trump, but disruptors nonetheless.

‘A disgrace to US, big part of Russia hoax’: Trump unloads on ex-acting FBI chief McCabe

Finally, at least for now, there is the role media censorship played in Soviet repression. To a knowing reader who could read “between the lines,” the Soviet press actually provided a lot of usable information. Equally important, though, was what it excluded as taboo—particularly news and other information that undermined the official narrative of current and historical events. (All this ended with Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost in the late 1980s.) In the era of Russiagate, American mainstream media are practicing at least partial censorship by systematically excluding voices and other sources that directly challenge their orthodox narrative. There are many such malpractices in leading newspapers and on influential television programs, but they are the subject of another commentary.
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These examples remind us that we are also living in an age of blame -particularly blaming Russia for mishaps of our own making, for electoral outcomes and other unwelcome developments elsewhere in the world. Drawing attention to Soviet precedents is not to blame that long-gone nation state. Instead, we again need Walt Kelly’s cartoon philosopher Pogo, who told us decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

By Stephen F. Cohen


This article was originally published by The Nation. 
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Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nationcontributing editor, he is the author, most recently, of War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.