Tomorrow may be too late
Former US National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden said, explaining his break with American intelligence agencies: “I don’t want to live in a world in which everything I say and do is recorded.” This was five years ago, and the other day a book by journalist Johannes Broeckers “Shut up, Alexa!” was published in Germany, confirming that this is exactly what is happening.
Broekers's work talks about the pervasive influence on a person's private life from those forces that are known in Europe as "Big Brother".
In 1999, the reality television show Big Brother appeared in the Netherlands. Soon it migrated to the UK, received extraordinary success and became popular all over the world.
The participants of the show, volunteers, were placed in isolation and lived in it for weeks, creating some kind of relationship with each other, and any television viewer could observe what they were doing, right down to the details of their intimate life. It was a life in full view of the whole world.
Broekers' book tells that "Big Brother" has long gone beyond show business and secretly monitors every resident of the "developed" part of humanity - the USA and Europe.
There are already many publications in the media that the “digital monopolies” of Facebook and Google create opportunities for penetration into the privacy of users. It no longer surprises anyone that for any household request you receive an unexpected wave of offers from a variety of addresses. This indicates that your profile has been processed and that you are registered with operators unknown to you. And intelligence agencies can always use such an array of data to their advantage. However, this is only the visible part of the work of Big Brother.
Broekers talks about how deeply “digital monopolies” have penetrated into people’s lives using the example of the work of the American company Amazon. Since 2016, Amazon has offered the Alexa device, which serves as a home assistant. Alexa monitors sounds in the home and responds to the orders of its inhabitants. The device operates in interactive mode, that is, in dialogue mode. For example, at your request, it will turn on your favorite music, report the weather forecast, record purchases made, and schedule a calendar of meetings. Alexa can perform 50 thousand functions, and in the near future you will be able to rely on it for everything, including washing clothes, cleaning rooms, adjusting heating, etc.
It looks like an extraordinary convenience, but every order that is given to Alexa goes to the servers of the Amazon system. There, a person’s habits and inclinations, his behavior in everyday life are examined, and the person turns into an absolutely transparent consumer. Amazon analyzes conversations and knows why, for example, the owner prefers this or that cosmetics, certain intimate care items, etc.
The founder and owner of the Amazon system, Jeff Bezos Amazon, started with a workshop in a garage and in 25 years created the most expensive enterprise on the planet. Today, Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. There are 2 million sellers offering their products on Amazon. The firm controls computer centers that track trading conditions and has 300 million user profiles. This “everything salesman,” as Jeff Bezos calls himself, is on the path to “having everything” and “knowing everything.”
The general public continues to be captivated by detective stories that feature spy bugs for listening, while in real life there is a “super bug” from Amazon that is recording every sound in the home.
Alexa doesn't ask if it's allowed to record conversations. Of course, if you really want to, you can get Amazon to erase your records, but the main thing is that all of them have already been processed and analyzed. You were weighed, measured, studied. So you pay for comfort with your right to privacy and, ultimately, freedom.
Recently, Amazon filed a patent according to which the machine recognizes the user’s voice and can give him recommendations on behavior. For example, if you don't take an umbrella in rainy weather or dress too lightly. She will prescribe you treatment if she suspects you have an illness. All this develops an emotional relationship with the car, primarily in children. They will be more willing to communicate with Alexa than with their parents.
Meanwhile, it is known that Amazon has a low culture of internal relations. It pays its employees poorly, arranges video surveillance of them, ruins entire industries, and is one of the largest tax evaders. However, Amazon “rided the trend.” In Germany alone, this company has more than 40 million clients.
Professor David Cheriton of Stanford says: “It feels like someone is depositing their brain with Bezos or asking him to think for himself. Once you enter these structures, it is very difficult to get out of them. If we start by spying on consumer behavior, then Amazon takes into account the insights of thousands of companies that use its system. Not to mention the fact that the CIA is in charge of the “secret cloud” Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Today, Jeff Bezos has a fortune of $150 billion and is the richest person on the planet. Only 58 states have a greater GDP than his fortune, and 135 states lag behind him. This is colossal money and colossal power.
Digital monopolies are rapidly becoming the “Big Brother” of humanity. Whether we are talking about Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Google founder Larry Page, all of them were in the right place at the right time in the early 1990s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, and were able to discern the possibilities of digital technology. Thus, a new form of “control capitalism” has emerged, to which civil rights and people’s privacy are sacrificed.
People under "control capitalism" become one-dimensional consumers who play the game as long as they can pay. As soon as the ability to pay disappears, people are thrown out, but before that the person is entangled in a web from head to toe.
Johannes Broekers shares his personal experience: there is still time to stop this danger and say: “Shut up, Alexa, I don’t use Amazon.” And if this is not done, digital imperialism will finally suppress the image of God in modern man. Tomorrow may be too late.
He is in great shape for these years.
- Apart from being dead?
I think you and I are not comfortable with this matter.
When all this mud of lust and murder foams up to their waists, all the whores and politicians will look up and cry: “Save us!” And I will whisper: “No.”
The night stinks of fornication and a bad conscience.
Nixon, what an idiot. Wow, I voted for the idiot five times.
Is this bean sauce?
- Bean-human.
When you walk through a city dying of rabies, past cockroach people looking for heroin and child pornography, do you feel normal?
People have been trying to kill each other since the beginning of time. Now we have the strength to finish the job.
We are the only ones who protect society.
- From whom?
- Don’t you understand? From ourselves.
What happened to the American Dream?
- It came true.
I am a retired businessman.
It turns out that I have no friend closer than my enemy.
Born in 1918. Buried in the rain.
There is no time for friends, only enemies leave roses.
Lives full of violence end in violence.
People are savages by nature, no matter how hard we try to hide or embellish it.
Good anecdote. Everyone laugh. Drum roll. Curtain.
Your finger stings like a battery.
You know how everything works in this world, except people.
You are my only connection to the world.
“I don’t need such responsibility anymore.”
My father was a watchmaker. He quit this job when Einstein discovered the relativity of time.
This symbolic clock is as useful to the intellect as a photograph of oxygen is to a drowning man.
A living human body and a dead one contain an equal number of particles.
It's too late. It was always, always will be, too late.
Leaving the world without nuclear reactors and oil wells is like weaning.
The only one with whom I felt a kinship died three hundred years before the birth of Christ.
People are being arrested. Mad dogs are killed.
If the Lord saw us then, he decided not to interfere.
It is not God who makes the world this way. We the people.
None of you seem to understand. It wasn't me who was locked up with you. It was you who were locked up with me.
John sees a lot. But he doesn't see me.
Big shot, small world.
Why should I save the world if it has lost meaning for me?
My red world means more to me now than your blue one.
Our new peaceful world will be indebted to your great sacrifice.
I have lived my life free from compromise.
Tell me how our conversation will end and we will save time.
The existence of life is a greatly overrated phenomenon.
The concept of a miracle is by definition meaningless. Only what can happen happens.
Long time no see.
- Not as long ago as I would like.
My whole life is one big mistake.
The world is paying for its flirtation with World War III.
Human animal nature will inevitably lead to the destruction of the planet.
I can change anything except human nature.
I'm leaving this Galaxy. I'll look for something simpler.
Nothing ever ends.
Who needs a cowboy for president?
Oil, PR, war Collon Michel
Will we always find out the truth too late?
Will we always find out the truth too late?
Every war begins with lies in the media, because governments need to gain public support for the army's actions.
As a rule, we learn the truth about a war only many years later. For example, the truth that information about the attack by Vietnamese submarines on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, disseminated by the United States and which served as the reason for the outbreak of the war in Vietnam, was pure fiction. The fact that information about the theft by Iraqis from Kuwait City of a large number of incubators for nursing premature babies was also completely fabricated in 1990 by an American company specializing in PR. Too late we realized that the media, using obvious lies and manipulation of facts (see below), “justified” in advance the invasions of Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1995) .
Are we forever doomed to discover the truth too late?
Not at all. Using the example of the war against Yugoslavia, the proposed book is designed to help the reader learn to distinguish truth from lies, from the abundance of impressive information about massacres, mountains of corpses, and ethnic cleansing. The book examines the means and methods of disinformation, as well as the basic principles of “military propaganda” used to manipulate public opinion.
Of course, the analysis of materials and facts indicating the falsity of the media deserves extreme attention. However, it seems more important to identify the true goals of the great powers inspiring wars and participating in them. It is important to understand what these powers are hiding from the public.
Can we be sure that we know all the information about the “ethnic” conflict between Serbs and Albanians? Why was the information hidden from us that Western secret services had been supplying weapons to the KLA for a long time, just as they supplied them to Croatian and Islamic separatists long before the outbreak of the war in Croatia and Bosnia in 1991? Who exactly was stirring up this conflict from behind the scenes?
Whose interests did the United States defend by systematically pushing the Serbs and Albanians into war? In particular, why was a obviously unacceptable “agreement” proposed at Rambouillet, unacceptable because it implied the military occupation of all of Yugoslavia? Perhaps, in fact, the point was that the United States, with the help of NATO, was thus imposing itself on the whole of Europe as a gendarme?
We were told that NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia was due to purely humanitarian reasons - the desire to protect the Kosovo Albanians. At the same time, NATO is arming Turkish generals who are bombing Kurdish refugees, while Madeleine Albright publicly admits that maintaining control of Middle Eastern oil is “worth killing five hundred thousand Iraqi children through an embargo.” Whose interests are covered by this humanitarian curiosity?
Or maybe there is a whole secret program of action of this kind? In 1996, the head of the Belgian air force, General Van Hecke, warned: “If discord breaks out in Russia, Europe will have to intervene armed and we will have a tenfold Yugoslavia.” When the famous American strategist Brzezinski declares his desire to divide Russia into three parts, are we to believe that the United States will carry out this program peacefully?
What are NATO's next goals? Who armed the separatists in Chechnya, and will it become the next Kosovo?
NATO's expansion to the East continues step by step. Next, plans for probable next wars will be considered: the Caucasus, Russia, perhaps China... However, first of all, economic goals will be analyzed, since in its advancement NATO seeks to establish control over the routes of movement of oil and gas, these sources of colossal profits and keys to tomorrow's world.
The war against Yugoslavia is a different form of battle that took place in Seattle due to unfair economic rules and laws imposed by multinational corporations. One American strategist said: "NATO's primary responsibility is to bring more and more areas into the Western economic community." If this is true, then it turns out that NATO is an army defending the interests of transnational corporations.
And when NATO is at war, does the media tell us the whole truth about the war? What is being hidden from us when using the term “error”? (“bavure”)
Did NATO “by mistake” bomb two refugee columns, an international train, the Chinese embassy, a market and hospital in Niš, and numerous civilian targets? Is this organization really waging war using “civilized” methods?
Many questions arise. We must certainly find answers to these questions. This is the only way we may be able to avoid the next wars.
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When a relationship is falling apart before our eyes, the first thing that comes to mind is to save it and fix the existing problem. Why do we wait until it's too late? This often happens to people who have been together for quite a long time. They try to remain calm until the moment when an explosion is actually brewing. In any long-term relationship, there is always a sleeping beast waiting to be awakened. This beast holds all the secrets, anger, pain, hidden problems, mistakes and small sins that you both made in the past. This is why most people avoid bringing up a certain topic that will ultimately awaken this beast. But the question is, why not just neutralize it? All these thoughts are wandering around in the head of your partner and you. You don't want to change anything because you're waiting. And you wait. And you wait until it's too late.
- What?
The first thing you need to do is ask yourself, for WHAT are you both struggling? What made you stick together for so long? What is keeping you in this relationship? If you have the answer, then the relationship is worth fighting for. If there is no answer, it may be time to leave.
- Why?
WHY Are you fighting each other rather than fighting together? This is a common mistake in all respects. Sometimes we get so used to each other that we don’t even consider it necessary to say what’s going on in our heads. We just keep waiting until the other person realizes their mistakes. And when he doesn’t realize them, our patience breaks and everything falls apart. This leads to the next question.
- Where?
WHERE and where did we go wrong? In most cases, due to the length of your relationship, you stop asking this question to yourself or your partner, since you yourself do not know the answer. You go with the flow, thinking that problems will float past you. The fact is that problems do not solve themselves, and the questions in your heads will remain unanswered if you do not voice them.
- When?
WHEN began misunderstanding, alienation and collapse? To solve a problem, you must find the root cause. When did this start? When your partner forgot about your anniversary. Or when I forgot to pick you up from work. Or when he deceived you about something a long time ago and you pretended to have forgotten about it. Go back in time and remind yourself when it all started.
- Who?
WHO right? You or your partner? Your heart or your head? This is the moment when you agonize over whether you stay or go. This question literally makes people break down. How will you live without the partner you spent so many years of your life on? How will you wake up every morning without it? And how can you continue to stay with him if it does not bring you happiness or joy?
- How?
And now the last and most difficult question, when you have almost reached the “too late” line. HOW can you save the relationship, and do you need it? Or HOW Do you want to end the relationship with minimal emotional and mental loss?
When a relationship is falling apart before our eyes, the first thing that comes to mind is to save it and fix the existing problem. Why do we wait until it's too late? This often happens to people who have been together for quite a long time. They try to remain calm until the moment when an explosion is actually brewing. In any long-term relationship, there is always a sleeping beast waiting to be awakened. This beast holds all the secrets, anger, pain, hidden problems, mistakes and small sins that you both made in the past. This is why most people avoid bringing up a certain topic that will ultimately awaken this beast. But the question is, why not just neutralize it? All these thoughts are wandering around in the head of your partner and you. You don't want to change anything because you're waiting. And you wait. And you wait until it's too late.
The first thing you need to do is ask yourself, for WHAT are you both struggling? What made you stick together for so long? What is keeping you in this relationship? If you have the answer, then the relationship is worth fighting for. If there is no answer, it may be time to leave because it is too late to fight.
Why?
WHERE and where did we go wrong? In most cases, due to the length of your relationship, you stop asking this question to yourself or your partner, since you yourself do not know the answer. You go with the flow, thinking that problems will float past you. The fact is that problems do not solve themselves, and the questions in your heads will remain unanswered if you do not voice them.
When?
WHEN began misunderstanding, alienation and collapse? To solve the problem before it's too late, you must find the root cause. When did this start? When your partner forgot about your anniversary. Or when I forgot to pick you up from work. Or when he deceived you about something a long time ago and you pretended to have forgotten about it. Go back in time and remind yourself when it all started.