“Google just got a tad creepier.

Thanks to tweaks made to its terms of service today, Google will be able to use its users’ names and photos in select advertising beginning next month (November 11). The updated terms of service, first noticed by The New York Times, specifically allow for the company to use what it calls “shared endorsements,” which, the Times explains, occur only when a user comments, +1s (Google’s equivalent of a Facebook ‘like’) or follows pages or brands included in Google’s services.

That means anytime a Google Plus user endorses a company—say, McDonald’s—by giving it a +1, Google can then use those endorsements alongside an ad it later runs for the company. Google will only share the endorsed ads with the people who originally saw the endorsement, making it all the more important that users specify the friend groups, or circles with which they share their feedback and reviews. Otherwise, a publicly shared endorsement will allow the company to include a user’s name and photo in online ads distributed to just about anyone. Nearly 400 million users engage with Google Plus either directly or indirectly through interaction with other Google-owned sites like YouTube.”

Read the full story (and how to opt out) at Quartz.

Meanwhile, the new Internet privacy “Czar” is a Googler, Nicole Wong.

Walter Block on Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel:

“According to Barbara Amiel, “a rapacious Asian demand for ivory is creating such terrible killing fields that elephants face extinction by poaching.” She writes this bit of economic illiteracy in Maclean’s Magazine (October 7, 2013, pp. 12-13). Before probing the reasons why this is so totally wrong, here is a bit of background. Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black (and ex-wife of  George Jonas, another semi- demi- quasi- libertarian with whom I have also tangled in these pages) is a sort of Canadian equivalent of Ann Coulter: brilliant, beautiful, a gifted writer, conservative, vaguely libertarian on a few issues.

[Lila:  Amiel is also a rape apologist and (although she makes a a good point about societal hypocrisy and moral panics) a pedophile apologist, as well. (Steubenville rape case).

The “”vaguely libertarian” bit in Block’s piece could refer to Amiel’s questioning of the “injustice” of the US justice system, for instance, during the uproar over Roman Polanski’s long-standing rape charges, and also,  no doubt, on the basis of former husband Conrad Black’s scrapes with the legal system.

Black is of-course a card-carrying member of the power-elite.]

Maclean’s Magazine is a rough equivalent of Time Magazine in the U.S.

Back to the elephants, of which Amiel is very fond; she also states: “The magnificent and highly intelligent elephant has always been treated abominably. Today helicopter gunships shoot them down in Africa and hack off heads for ivory tusks, leaving baby elephants orphaned.” Maclean’s Magazine (September 13, 2013). Why is her first statement entirely nonsensical, and her second, in that context, misleading at best? This is because the demand for ivory has nothing whatsoever to do with poaching. There is a “rapacious” demand for pork, too, on the part of “Asians,” and everyone else for that matter, and yet the pig does not face “extinction by poaching” or from any other source. The same is true for steaks and cows, wings and chickens, etc. There is also “a rapacious Asian demand for” things like cement for building, wood for chopsticks, steel for ships, etc., etc. And, yet, miraculously, there is no shortage, let alone total disappearance of, any of these things.

No, if we want to ferret out the source of the plight of the elephant, we must look elsewhere. Where oh where? I will give Amiel one hint: this difficulty stems from an institution that has played havoc with more, far more, than merely the elephant. Yes, that is it: the government. And how, pray tell, has statism caused grief in this particular case? It is simple. By not allowing private ownership in these creatures (and the same applies to the tiger, the rhino, the whale, and every other species in danger of extinction) the “public sector” has unleashed the tragedy of the commons on mankind, and with it the endangerment of all species that are not allowed to be owned privately.”

And, per Block, Elinor Ostrom, about whom I blogged here, is also economically illiterate, despite….or, should I say, based on… the fact of her winning a Nobel Prize for her work on governing the commons.

I don’t know enough to comment on her work.

Amy Goodman, the earnest and radical egalitarian at the head of the show, “Democracy Now,” one of the left’s most influential outlets, is owed $2 million by Pacific Radio, a non-profit supported by donations.

Someone making $2 million doesn’t automatically inflame my capitalist sensibilities, but when that someone spent a lot of her time deploying class and race warfare to shore up her own constituencies, while carefully engaging in  propaganda by omission, emphasis, and distortion, then my sympathies wilt.

They wilt even more when that person is a noted apologist for the Libyan invasion and a reliable Obama defender.

Seems that Goodman isn’t planning on “forgiving” any of her debts, even though she spent a lot of time raising money to buy up consumer debt and cancel it for pennies on the dollar, so consumers didn’t have to pay ,and even though a majority of Pacifica’s employees have had to be sacked so Amy gets her missing pay-checks:

“WBAI, a progressive radio channel, announced Friday that it will cut 19 of its 29 employees to cover operating expenses—which include $2 million owed to Amy Goodman’s show “Democracy Now!”—according to the New York Times.

At a board meeting last week members wrangled over the night’s agenda for the first 25 minutes, despite the radio station’s sizable layoffs only days before. Audience members sporadically jeered “fascist!” and shouted “Go back to the NSA!” before the board moved on to discuss financial matters.

WBAI’s greatest obstacle is paying their most popular broadcast, “Democracy Now!” which is hosted by Goodman. So far, “Democracy Now!” has refused to restructure the station’s debt.

Owned by the nonprofit organization Pacifica, WBAI depends on its 14,000 members to cover operating costs. Last year members contributed just $2.5 million.

The Times reported:

Berthold Reimers, WBAI’s general manager, reported that the station had $23,000 on hand and was scouring Craigslist and other sites to furnish new, cheaper studios in Brooklyn. An Ikea chair was bought for $40, he said. “That’s the cheapest we could possibly get.”

Former WBAI staff members complain that constant management turnover as the board instituted one “coup” after another made their jobs nearly impossible.

“For the last 10 years working at WBAI has been a nightmare,” said Jose Santiago, the news director for two decades. “I compare it to the nation facing Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Their priority is to stay in power and bash each other in the head, and nothing ever gets done.”

World War II “conscientious objectors” founded WBAI in 1946 as the first radio station depending solely on listeners’ donations.”

Did Jesus condone slavery, meaning chattel slavery?

Atheist Community:

“While the Bible may be morally correct in some cases, it is certainly immoral where human slavery is concerned. It is the secular state, not the Bible, which we have to thank for ending slavery. Also it is the secular state, not the church, which stands as the guarantor of freedom and human rights.”

and

“What did Jesus have to say about slavery? Well, in the revered Sermon of the Mount, widely recognized as a prescription for Christian living, the institution of slavery is never mentioned. However, in Matthew 8:5-13, the story of the healing of the Roman centurion’s slave, not only does Jesus not condemn slavery, he actually compliments the centurion for his faithfulness. Therefore, we can only conclude that Jesus was aware of slavery and approved of it.”

Comment:

This is a misleading but common attack on the Gospel.

Here’s why.

1. Since Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, condemned the rich man who did not feed the beggar at his gate, and healed the Centurion’s slave without partiality, it’s highly unlikely that his vision of the world was confined to talk or that he approved of slavery.

2. Not openly advocating violent revolution to end slavery is not the same as approving of slavery.

Words can be very subversive and powerful – far more than violent acts.

3. Jesus’ vocation was that of a healer and a teacher, not that of an armed rebel.

His goal was to change institutions by changing the hearts of people.

“I will take out your heart of stone and give you one of flesh.”

4.  The allegation also overlooks several Gospel passages that show the Jesus did not condone slavery.

1. In the prophecy from Isaiah that Jesus reads in the Synagogue as a prediction of his mission.

Luke 4: 18

King James Bible

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”

New International Version:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”

In the Sermon on the Mount, his spiritual manifesto, he himself clearly sets out his demands on his followers, demands so high that few people can master even one of them fully:

Matthew 5-7

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

The term Money (Mammon) in this verse does not not simply refer to physical coin.

It means material wealth and not just that which is unjustly acquired. Mammon is also the name of a devil, used to personify wealth or greed and exemplify an attitude toward the material world, that makes it all in all.

It refers to the worship of wealth to the exclusion of righteousness.

Jesus says that this world is diametrically opposed to his world.

But this may not imply an outright rejection of the “real world.”

For one thing, Jesus often told spiritual seekers (Children of Light) to learn a lesson from the real world (Children of the World) and  his parables were often drawn from ordinary life and business, that is, from the market-place.

He praised many rich men and at least one Roman centurion (captain) who had servants or slaves.

Still, Jesus wasn’t deluded by the “real world.”

In a notable passage ((“Render unto Caesar””) he pointed out the illogic and vanity of trying to question a system while being thoroughly beholden to it.

I blogged about it here, “What Jesus Taught About Taxes,” where I look at what Rushdoony, on the one hand, and Gandhi, on the other, had to say.

That captures the silliness of anti-capitalist jet-set “communists,” who are completely beholden to a system they claim to reject.

But it also captures the silliness of  Christian corporatists, who are equally beholden to a system they claim to transcend.

Did Jesus  advocate physical revolution?

No. I believe he thought one’s condition of life (male, female, master, slave, Jew, Gentile) was secondary to the transformation of one’s heart.

He taught, far more radically than any radical, that physical slavery or serfdom is not the real locus of evil.

The real locus is within each human being.

This is exactly the same teaching as Krishna’s in the Bhagvad Gita.

It is the teaching of Dharmakshetra Kurukshetra (the field of dharma is the real field of battle).

Spiritual jihad, in other words, not violent revolution.

“The timeless message of the Bhagavad Gita does not refer only to one historical battle, but to the cosmic conflict between good and evil: life as a series of battles between Spirit and matter, soul and body, life and death, knowledge and ignorance, health and disease, changelessness and transitoriness, self-control and temptations, discrimination and the blind sense-mind.”

God and Science has a more detailed account of the New Testament teaching on slavery.

From 50 Years of Teaching and Training Torturers,  Counterpunch, Nov. 3, 2004 an analysis of the Kubark Manual on torture techniques.

Some excerpts from the article:

Item

“It notes that psychological rather than physical debility will break a suspect sooner: “The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. The threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain.”

Item

“Caballero said the CIA taught that psychological coercion was more effective than physical torture.”

Item

“Fay’s Abu Ghraib report makes the same point about dehumanizing interrogations degenerating: “What started as nakedness and humiliation, stress and physical training, carried over into sexual and physical assaults.”

Item

This apparently routine infliction of pain, discomfort and humiliation
has expanded in all too many cases into vicious beatings, sexual degradation, sodomy, near drowning and near asphyxiation.”

Item

“The Fay report noted that nudity likely “contributed to an escalating ‘de-humanization’ of the detainees and set the stage for additional and more severe abuses to occur.”

Lila: Physical torture was actually seen by interrogators as less effective than psychological torture, but an inevitable development from it.

Note how psychological stressors were the means to break down the subject – isolation, dehumanization, humiliation, and sensory deprivation.

Dehumanization, isolation, and humiliation are all inextricable parts  of cyberharassment.

All of these are considered torture in its most sophisticated form, according to the CIA itself.

Item

“Many psychologists consider the threat of inducing debility to be more effective than debility itself.”

“Bullying,” like “hazing” and “ragging” (in India), are part of the inculcation of the brutality that undergirds imperial culture.

They are practices specifically introduced into British public schools for developing the character required to man the empire. From that has developed the attitude of indifference to what is nothing more than training in psychological cruelty.

Being stripped publicly on the net is no different psychologically from being stripped physically.

The fact that it happened in the “good old days” doesn’t turn it into a good thing.

Cyberstalking as defined by law in Florida

Florida cyberstalking law does not require a direct threat of death. It is sufficient that the target fears for his or her safety or family member’s safety:

784.048 Stalking; definitions; penalties.—

If Americans Knew.org has a critique of the Loftus-Aarons theory that the attack on the Liberty was in self-defense:

“Where do they get this stuff?” several of my USS Liberty shipmates asked after reviewing the Loftus-Aarons chapter on the Liberty. “Do they make it up?”

It would seem so. Many of these fables started with Anthony Pearson in his book Conspiracy of Silence, published in England in the late 1970s. Pearson asked me to join him in that effort. I refused. Then I learned that he was lying about alliances with a prominent writer, a senator, and a dozen Arab countries. Still later I learned that most of his book was a lie.

Pearson created the “Major Blue” fable and a host of other fairy tales related to the Liberty. Many of the stories lived on, only to be repeated and embellished by others. Pearson is also the creator of the weird story that has an ICBM submarine lying 90 miles off the Israeli coast during the Six-Day War, ready to nuke Tel Aviv if necessary to keep the Israelis from using nuclear weapons against the Arabs.

Pearson, sadly, was dying from a brain tumor when he wrote his book. It rendered him paranoid. He died on the run from the Mossad, which he believed was trying to silence him. He spent his days slipping in and out of London subways to evade his pursuers; he rarely slept in the same bed twice.

His book reflects his paranoia. Sadly, Pearson’s ramblings are constantly picked up and further embellished by other writers who fail to understand just how sick he really was. Then those writers cite one another as sources for their ravings, never bothering with any serious research or verification. Now, Loftus and Aarons bring 25 years of misinformed embellishments together and give them credence with long lists of “confidential sources” whose identities are known only to themselves.

In a very real sense, this is dangerous, because some of what they say will be believed. Suggestible people will be frightened for no reason, and that should not happen.

In the end, the only thing Loftus and Aarons seem to have gotten right is the fact that the attack was no accident. Even that, they justify as being “necessary.” It was not.”

From the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics:

“Some may have thought that Loftus extremely pro-Israel and anti-Arab bias is a bit suspect. They are right. Loftus has been an organizer and president of “the Intelligence Summit”, a club filled with hard-right intelligence, special forces, and psychological warfare veterans from the United States, Britain and Israel.
http://www.intelligencesummit.org/speakers/JohnLoftus.php: “John J. Loftus President, The Intelligence Summit” .
This is an extremely weird bunch of people. Among the members of the executive and advisory board are:
* Lt. General Tom McInerney – retired high U.S. Air Force officer. Senior military analyst for Fox News. In 2004 wrote ‘Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror’ with co-Intelligence Summit officer Paul Vallely and an introduction from Oliver North.
* Dame Pauline Neville-Jones – former chair Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), a coordinating body for MI5, MI6 and the GCHQ [British NSA], and a controversial BBC governor.
* Major General Paul Vallely – veteran in special operations, psychological and civil-military operations. Co-authored a 1980 paper with then PSYOP analyst Michael Aquino (a Satanist accused of massive child abuse) entitled From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.
* Richard Marcinko – Former Navy Seal turned author.
* Lt.Col. Gordon Cucullu – special forces veteran who sits on the board of the neoconservative Benador Associates.
* Lt. Col. Bill Cown – special forces veteran with “extensive experience with the CIA”
* Clare Lopez – former Field Operations Officer for the CIA.
* Wayne Simmons – special forces veteran recruited by the CIA in 1973. Terrorism Analyst for the Fox News Channel since 2002. Part of the Pentagon Outreach Program for Military and Intelligence Analysts under Rumsfeld. One of the first outside Intelligence officers to visit Guantanamo Bay.
* Yoram Hessel – former Senior Mossad Officer, now in the high technology business.
* Robert Spencer – director Jihad Watch.”

I

An Amazon review of  “Invading the Sacred” (by reviewer Sutapas Bhattacharya).

My Note:

The book describes how inadequately trained and maliciously motivated American scholars in the field of religion use the general ignorance about Hinduism to misinterpret, distort, and outright demonize Hindu thought and history.

What is significant for geo-political strategy is that Tantric Saivism, which the author mentions as the most accurate Indic portrait of consciousness, is preserved in its best form in the South of India, the locus of Western interference in Indian politics, under the guise of a war on terror or in the course of Afro-Dravidic consciousness-raising.

Western incursions into South India have been bent on dispossessing Hindu temples via state interference mediated by so-called secular Marxists, who turn out to be proxies for the power-elite.

Through eco-feminism centered around the Shekinah (the Kabbalistic correlate or derivative, of the divine feminine of Tantric Saivism), the goal is to appropriate the thought of  Hinduism, divorce it from its spiritual heritage, and reinsert it into a materialistic-hedonistic philosophy consonant with the vision of the elites.

Hence the continuing psychic war on India I’ve blogged about:

Here is the review:

“Indians who criticize Western scholars in regard to their dubious interpretations of Hinduism and Indian history are generally denounced as Hindu fundamentalists, fascists and right wingers in order to detract from issue of Western racism. I am in fact a left-leaning Indian and no Hindu fundamentalist, see my 1999 book on the synthesis of Science and Mysticism, in which I attack the BJP. On seeing this book I was amazed that long-discredited Freudian superstitions (see below) are allowed to pass as scholarship in academia – this book does not challenge the basis of Psychoanalysis, rather an Appendix essay by an American psychoanalyst is given which questions the validity of such Eurocentric Freudian reductionism to the Indian context and mysticism. I will give scientific arguments undermining Freud below. See the website […] the sacred.com for more info. Note also that Jeff Kripal who mistranslated Bengali words like ‘lap, head and touching softly’ as ‘genitals, phallus and sodomy’ in his attempt to portray Ramakrishna as a homosexual pedophile is now linked to the New Age Esalen Institute!
Adam Curtis showed in his BBC Series Century of the Self that Freud’s dubious ideas caught on in the USA through the influence of his nephew Edward Bernays due to Freud’s titillating emphasis on SEX. Similarly we find that Wendy Doniger’s works sell because she focuses on sex, sex and nothing but the sex, writing racy books with the sex element hyped up in spite of their inauthenticity and her struggling with first year Sanskrit! I was amused by de Nicolas’ example of how she used a Hebrew translation for a Vedic word making ‘the world of possibilities’ into ‘the one-footed goat’!

[Lila: Shades of Naomi Wolf….]
I had noticed in 1991 that the 6th East-West Philosophy Congress book “Culture and Modernity” edited by Advaita scholar Eliot Deutsch gave pride of first place to Eliminative Materialist Richard Rorty who believes that Consciousness does not really exist!

Rorty asserted that “ascetic priests” like Heidegger and Brahmins sublimate their sex drives and pretend to ‘penetrate the veil of appearances’ so as to claim to be more manly than the warriors!

Thus first position in a East-West philosophy book was given to an American who not only denies the reality of Consciousness (the (primary reality of Advaita Vedanta and much Buddhism) but uses the thoroughly discredited Freudian sex-mythology to supposedly undermine the claims of mystics to transcend mundane reality!

Were Hildegard, Mechthilde and Teresa trying to be more manly!

I also noticed in 2002 that Thomas Blom Hansen in his “The Saffron Wave” chastised Hindu Nationalists for reworking German Romanticist ideas (with no mention of the heavy Indian philosophical influence behind Romanticism founded by the Sanskritist Schlegels) whilst himself referring to the likes of Freud and Lacan (whose pretensions to Einstein-like genius were exposed in “Fashionable Nonsense”) as if these European thinkers were ‘scientific’.

Coming from a Science background and having identified the physical correlate of the Divine Light (cit, Atman, Buddha Nature, Godhead)with overwhelming empirical evidence for this and showing how Science and the core Indian transcendental mystical picture are integrated, I basically treated such ludicrous Freudian myths with the contempt they deserve.

Indeed, I am currently writing a comprehensive section entitled “The Failings of Western Philosophies, Psychologies and Science in regard to Mysticism and Consciousness” including a subsection “Sigmund Freud’s Sexual Superstitions and the Regression to the Womb Myth”. In fact my overall analyses show by undermining every possible form of western ontology that the only viable ontology is one based on distinctionless Pure Consciousness as the Ground from which physical phenomena manifest as in Tantric Kashmir Saivism – i.e. a logical argument by elimination of alternatives rather than “experience it in mystical union”.

I was just reading this week Thompson and Madigan (2005) Memory (a survey of recent research)which asserted that there is no scientific evidence supporting Freud’s key notion of unconscious Repression of memories.

David Bakan’s 1958 “Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” showed that Freud secularised Kabbala omitting supernatural elements in his “psychoanalysis”. In 1973 Morton Schatzman in his ‘Soul Murder’ showed that Schreber’s father had disciplinary devices and real child abuse had been misinterpreted by Freud as unconscious fantasy based on the nonsensical Oedipus Complex idea! In the 1980s Masson’s “Assault on the Truth” and Peck’s “The People of the Lie” continued to undermine the Freud Cult.

Freud urged Jung never to abandon the sexual theory and even “we must make a dogma” of it. Jung stated that F’s obsession with the primal incest archetype led to dogmatic rigidity. Medical doctor and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens rubbishes Freudian interpretations of dreams of predatory animals as ‘fear of castration’ when REM dream research shows that such instinctual dreams of being chased prepare all young mammals for life’s dangers. F was also wrong to locate all mental problem origins in infancy as Stevens shows adolescence and attaining ‘manhood’ etc. are more critical than early childhood. Schwarz and Begley point out that Foot Fetishism is explained by the brain maps of feet being adjacent to maps of genitals with some overlap, contrary to F’s ideas about sexual deviations. Griffin and Tyrrell whose work is followed by the UK NHS rubbish Freudian talk therapy as it usurps normal healing processes based on sleep etc.

Finally, in regard to F’s primary notion of the Libido, such a notion of a “sexual energy” is just nonsense scientifically as opposed to Jung’s notion of Libido as a generalized psychical energy. Indeed, Jordens essay on Libido and the Prana/Atman identity in Harold Coward’s “Jung and Eastern Thought” provides one of the many pieces of evidence supporting my identification of the Atman/Prana with the underlying activating energy of the brainwaves of the brainstem Reticular Activating System. This ties in with Jung’s ideas of generalised energy as the RAS is simply that, the energy underlying all gross brain activity and the brainstem Reticular Formation is the only structure essential for consciousness. Thus whilst undermining more serious philosophical ideas, my RAS brainwave/Light of Pure Consciousness correlation also undermines the nonsensical Freudian myth of an underlying Sexual libido!”

–
Sutapas Bhattacharya