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Monday April 06, 2015
News Articles

Big-Bank Bad Guys Bully Democracy
BillMoyers | Richard Eskow | 03/03/15

For so-called "masters of the universe," Wall Street executives sure seem touchy about criticism. It seems they don't like being painted as the bad guys. But if they don't like being criticized, why do so many of them keep behaving like B-movie villains? That's exactly what executives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America looked like after an article appeared last week detailing their coordinated attempt to intimidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democrats who want to fix the mess on Wall Street.

They've cheated customers and defrauded investors. Now they want to use our legalized system of campaign-cash corruption to protect themselves from the very government which rescued them. ... Read more
TYT | Elizabeth Warren Declares War On Wall Street Banks (04/05/15) [5:38]

Georgia Teacher Tells Students Their Parents Aren't Christians if They Voted for Obama.

Ed Snowden tells John Oliver: 'They are still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics'
RawStory | Tom Boggioni | 03/06/15

Oliver began the segment by noting that Congress is faced with reauthorizing the Patriot Act on June 1 which contains many of the loosely interpreted laws allowing the government to spy on U.S. citizens.

"Over the last couple of years, you've probably heard about strange-sounding programs, such as XKeyscore, Muscular, Prism, and Mystic, which are, coincidentally, also the names of some of Florida's least popular strip clubs, " Oliver explained, before using the voice of a pitchman. "Welcome to XKeyscore -- our dancers are fully unredacted and Tuesdays are wing nights." ... Read more

Why John Oliver Can't Find Americans Who Know Edward Snowden's Name (It's Not About Snowden)
https://firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 04/06/15

... Oliver's overall discussion is good (and, naturally, quite funny), but the specific point he wants to make here is misguided. Contrary to what Oliver says, it's actually not surprising at all that a large number of Americans are unaware of who Snowden is, nor does it say much at all about the surveillance debate. That's because a large number of Americans, by choice, are remarkably unaware of virtually all political matters. The befuddled reactions of the Times Square interviewees when asked about Snowden illustrate little about the specific surveillance issue but a great deal about the full-scale political disengagement of a substantial chunk of the American population.

Even more striking is what they do and do not know. An Annenberg Public Policy Center poll from last September found that only 36% of Americans can name the three branches of government, and only 38% know the GOP controls the House. The Center's 2011 poll "found just 15 percent of Americans could correctly identify the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts, while 27 percent knew Randy Jackson was a judge on American Idol."

A 2010 Findlaw.com poll found that almost 2/3 of Americans -- 65% -- were incapable of naming even a single member of the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2010 Pew poll discovered that 41% of Americans are unable to name the current Vice President of the U.S; in other words, Oliver could just as easily (if not more easily) compile a video of Times Square visitors looking stumped when asked if they knew who Joe Biden, or Antonin Scalia, is.... Read more

Cruz's Politifact track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they've looked at.

Ted Cruz Isn't an Idiot -- He's Delusional and That's Far More Dangerous
AlterNet | Sophia A. McClennen | 04/01/15

For those who think like Cruz, there is virtually no amount of data, reality checks or facts that can persuade them to give up their false ideas.

Since Ted Cruz first announced his candidacy, much has been made of his chances of winning, his arrogance and his extreme conservative views. But most of the controversy over his candidacy centers on his lying.

It is no surprise to any of us that politicians lie. We generally assume they stretch the truth to get elected, to denigrate their political foes, and to bolster their images. But Cruz may just represent one of the biggest liars in recent history. In fact, he may be a whole new form of political liar.

The Daily Beast reports that, "Cruz's Politifact track record for publicly asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they've looked at." And Matthew Rozsa tell us that "Googling 'Ted Cruz lies' pulls back an astonishing 7,890,000 results, and on Twitter, the two phrases are basically synonymous." ... Read more
Ted Cruz's PolitiFact File

*RT | CrossTalk: Mideast Aflame (04/06/15) [24:11]
RT | Keiser Report: Destroy Capitalism to... Save Capitalism?! (E740) (04/04/15) [23:46]
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, April 06 [9:52]
DN | "They Couldn't Take My Soul": Anthony Ray Hinton on His Exoneration After 30 Years on Death Row (01/06/15) [27:16]
John Oliver
*HBO | John Oliver: Ed Snowden tells John Oliver: 'They are still collecting everybody's information, including your dick pics' (04/05/15) [33:14]
Edward Snowden
Pentagon Papers | Daniel Ellsberg
*TRNN | Subhankar Banerjee and Michael E. Mann: Mounting Evidence Has Republican Climate Change Deniers on Thin Ice for 2016 (04/06/15) [13:43]
*TRNN | Bill Black talks about Whistleblowers Richard Bowen and Sherry Hunt: were reporting on the toxic scam of Citigroup Falsely Represented Up to 80% of Mortgages Sold to Fannie and Freddie in 2007 (04/06/15) [8:30]
TRNN | Madawi Al-Rasheed says: the Saudis contend with ISIS to be the leaders of the Sunni world, but their interests converge as both regard Iran and the Shia as their enemy, Part 2 (04/06/15) [12:55], Part 3 [14:20]
*TYT | Karl Rove Is A Dick To Iraq War Veteran (04/03/15) [9:30]
TYT | Airstrikes = Fertilizer For ISIS (04/05/15) [4:19]
TYT | Senator Tom Cotton On Anti-Gay Law (04/05/15) [2:24]
TYT | Pat Robertson Explains How Gays Will Destroy America (04/05/15) [4:33]
TYT | Mike Pence Signs Changes To Religious Freedom Law (04/03/15) [11:42]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center, also known as the NSA Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center
Click picture to zoom in
Ever wonder how fast the computer is in the NSA Utah Data Center: it can do 27,000 trillion calculations a second.
Computer Capacity
 
  1. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.
  2. But alas, by late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
  3. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

Storage Capacity
 
  1. Total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.
  2. Global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year.
  3. A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.
  4. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Needs and Costs
 
  1. Initially Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
    When the computer gets to yottaflop size...
     
  2. It will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Ever wonder what 42 trillion file cabinets stacked together would look like?

According to a report by NPR, the NSA data center in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30,000 pages of paper) uses up 0.4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers.
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.06.2015. 11:41



Special Interest Important stuff
GOOD Shorts Videos

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GOOD Short Videos
Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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Newer Documentaries
Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Documentaries (small | pop-up)
Documentaries (big | full screen)
Good YouTube Documentaries

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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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