Big Brother Comes Home to Roost
A new ZeroHedge article goes even further, detailing some of the connections between the various tech monoliths. I would wager the ordinary person probably isn’t aware that PayPal owns Venmo, which would explain why our friend Ryan over at TLAV started having issues with Venmo mere days after PayPal shut down his account permanently. And kept the money that was in it, because that is how criminals tend to operate.
In a related article for Reclaim the Net, Ken Macon points out that the push for widespread adoption and use of QR codes had largely failed… until the scam-demic hit. Some would call that a coincidence. Now, many businesses are employing the technology to reduce operating costs in an effort to keep their doors open, among other objectives. Senior policy analyst for the ACLU Jay Stanley summarizes the risk to consumers:
“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire apparatus of online tracking between you and your meal. Suddenly your offline activity of sitting down for a meal has become part of the online advertising empire.”
Still Playing Zero-Sum Games? Give Grand Theft World a Try.
Episode 38 dropped today. Shoutout to Rich, Tony, LD, Justin, Joshua, and all of the contributors who make this podcast one of the best independent sources of information around.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do receive compensation when you use one of my links to sign up at GTW. More important than that, though, is your membership helps to fund the open-source research and information dissemination conducted by the GTW community. You’ll find me there most days, and can even engage with me and other community members in real time on the Discord server or during one of our Town Hall meetings. By the way, we’re due for a Town Hall tonight at 7pm Eastern time.
Who Watches the Watchers?
You heard about the guy that laid into Tucker Carlson at a bait & tackle shop in Montana, right? I didn’t think much of it myself until I ran across this article from Information Liberation. Apparently this “chance encounter” may not have been as random or as genuine as we were led to believe it was. I guess the CIA isn’t satisfied with just writing the scripts for the corporate news repeaters anymore. Now they want to participate on camera.
Just kidding. They’ve been doing that for decades anyway.
Finally today, a group of disillusioned U.K.-based journalists have banded together in an attempt to hold the corporate media accountable for their persistent fear-mongering over the last 16 months. The group’s aim is to restore balanced debate to the media space. While some members of the group have opted for anonymity due to possible retribution, former BBC journalist Tony Gosling has not, and relays his experience regarding how most news rooms tend to operate:
“It’s the owners and editors who have the final say, so we are all of the same mind that we would like to see more journalists being editors and having their own newspapers, having their own TV/radio stations but that’s very, very rare. So there’s always an editor somewhere saying no, I don’t want this, and particularly through this pandemic that’s the way it’s been, people have found it difficult to get stories in, and it’s been frustrating.”
It seems to me we could all stand to learn a lesson from the experience and accidental wisdom of Mr. Gosling. After all, as with most things in this world, the competition for the public’s attention really is just a game. Play it better than those who make the rules, and you stand a good chance of obtaining victory. Or, as my man JEP over at Media Monarchy likes to say, “don’t hate the media… become the media.”
