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Nutball Dem Candidate Marianne Williamson Takes Aim At … Andrew Jackson?

Marianne Williamson isn’t bothering herself with targeting the other 22 candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination. No, she’s got her eye on one guy — Andrew Jackson.

Forget the fact that the seventh president of the United States has been dead 174 years. Williamson thinks Jackson is a key issue in the 2020 race.

“We will begin by taking that picture of Andrew Jackson off the wall of the Oval Office,” the candidate told the Native American audience at the Frank LaMere Presidential Candidate Forum on Monday. “I am not a Native American woman, but I find it one of the greatest insults. You will not be insulted. You will be more than not insulted. If I am President of the United States, there will be a level of atonement, there will be a level of making amends.”

For laymen, when Democrats saying “making amends” that means they plan to hand out your tax money to “victims.”

Jackson was the son of immigrants who became a war hero in the War of 1812. But as with all early president, Jackson owned slaves and he battled Native Americans, eventually signing into law a bill passed by Congress known as the Indian Removal Act. The act forced the relocation of Native American tribes from their native Georgia to Oklahoma, and under his successor, Martin Van Buren, thousands of Cherokees died as they marched along what is now known as the Trail of Tears.

“It is one of the great shames, the great pockmarks on the heart of the psyche of American history,” Williamson said. “This is not a president who should be shown the honor of his portrait hanging in the Oval Office.”

President Trump has praised Jackson, calling him one of his favorite presidents. “Andrew Jackson had a great history” of “tremendous success for the country,” Trump told NBC News in 2016. Trump also opposed a move to replace the president on the $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman as “pure political correctness.”

“I want people of the United States to come to understand that what occurred on this planet was one of the great evils of history, but that I believe in redemption for nations as well for individuals,” Williamson said, referring to the federal government’s historic mistreatment of America’s original inhabitants.

“We can atone. We can make amends. And if and when I’m president of the United States, we will,” she added. “We will begin by taking that picture of Andrew Jackson off the wall of the Oval Office, I assure you.”

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Amazon facial recognition once again identifies lawmakers as criminals

Jeff Bezos must really be getting tired of these headlines coming up all the time. It seems that their facial recognition software (known as Rekognition) has been subjected to yet another test and come up a little short. Or a lot short, particularly if you happen to be one of the more than two dozen state lawmakers who showed up as hits matching them against a database of known criminals. But hey… when you’re making omelets you’ve got to crack a few eggs, right? (CBS San Francisco)

A recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition technology reportedly ended with a major fail, as some state lawmakers turned up as suspected criminals.

The test performed by the American Civil Liberties Union screened 120 lawmakers’ images against a database of 25,000 mugshots. Twenty-six of the lawmakers were wrongly identified as suspects.

The ACLU said the findings show the need to block law enforcement from using this technology in officers’ body cameras. Meanwhile, supporters of facial recognition say police could use the technology to help alert officers to criminals, especially at large events.

As usual, let’s get the obvious joke out of the way first. If the software is identifying California legislators as criminals, honestly… how broken is it really? (Insert rimshot gif here.)

Getting back to the actual story, the first thing to note is that the “test” in question was performed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). At least that’s how it’s phrased in the CBS report. Last I checked, they weren’t a software development firm, so did they really make up and perform the test themselves or shop the job out to a firm with more direct experience? I’d like to see the details.

Of course, the results aren’t that suspect. Of all the facial recognition software out there that we’ve looked at, Amazon’s seems to be the one that winds up producing the most spectacular (and frequently hilarious) epic fails when put to independent testing. In that light, perhaps the ACLU wasn’t off the mark.

Of course, the ACLU isn’t looking to improve the technology. This test was run so they can continue their campaign to prevent law enforcement from using the software. Democratic Assemblymember Phil Ting of San Francisco (who was tagged as a felon) is quoted as saying, “While we can laugh about it as legislators, it’s no laughing matter if you are an individual who is trying to get a job, for an individual trying to get a home. If you get falsely accused of an arrest, what happens? It could impact your ability to get employment.”

These types of scare tactics are all too common and should be derided. I’ve asked multiple times now and am still waiting for an answer to one simple question. Does anyone have evidence of even a single instance where someone was misidentified by facial recognition and gone on to be prosecuted (or persecuted, as Ting suggests) because the mistake wasn’t discovered? I’ve yet to hear of a case. Did the police show up and arrest Ting after he was misidentified? I somehow doubt it.

Look, the technology is still in its infancy and it’s got a few bugs in it. They’re working them out as they go. Eventually, they’ll get it up to speed and the error rates should drop down to acceptable levels. And if this software can help catch a suspect in a violent crime in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days or weeks after they were spotted by a security camera, that’s a tool that the police need to have.

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Trump: New Report Finds Google Bias Helped Hillary; Hillary, Fact-Checkers Weigh In

President Trump turned the tables on Hillary Clinton’s "stole the election" routine on Monday in a post citing a report on how alleged bias in Google searches may have impacted the 2016 election. According to one expert’s findings, suggested Trump, his victory was "even bigger than thought"!

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Miss Nevada State Barred From Miss America Pageant for Being Conservative Speaks to TGP

Army National Guardsman and combat veteran Katie Jo Williams says that she has been stripped of her “Ms. Nevada State 2019” title and barred from competing in the Miss America pageant over her political views.

Williams tells the Gateway Pundit that over the five months that she held the title, the director would frequently call her and tell her that she was being too political on social media and ask her to delete posts.

“Over the course of the five months that I actually had the title, every now and then the director would basically tell me that I’m being too political and she’s not a fan of what I’m saying.”

In other messages, William’s said, the director would tell her to take her sash to events and get photos with political leaders. They wanted her to get photos with Donald Trump Jr. at a Turning Point USA event, for example, but would then hypocritically chastise her for “being too political.”

“I was very confused by this,” Williams said of the mixed messages she was receiving from the organization.

Williams explained that because she has been in the military for 12 years, she knew to have the organization send her all of their requests and demands in writing, “because I learned that if it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.” She has been posting some of the exchanges to her Twitter account.

On Monday, Williams posted a video explaining that she had been ordered to surrender her crown and sash and remove all mention of the pageant from her social media — as if she had never held the title. She has refused to comply with their demands.

“The pageant’s actually this Saturday,” she said in a video explaining what happened. “So, that means everything’s been paid for. Everything’s been done. All the sponsor money has been collected, and now I don’t get to compete.”

Williams frequently posted about her conservative views, but says the director specifically took issue with posts in which she called Antifa a terrorist organization.

They were also upset about a post in which she wore a “Trump 2020” hat.

“I am so tired of being labeled as this crazy, right wing, whatever you want to call it,” she said. “I just don’t understand how you could censor someone with conservative values when I’m not even really saying anything that’s bad.”

Williams is the second beauty queen to seemingly have their crown revoked over their political views this summer. Conservative commentator Kathy Zhu was also stripped of her crown in Michigan.

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Dianne Feinstein Falsely Claims ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Lowered Crime

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) claims the 1994 “assault weapons” ban lowered crime even though a Department of Justice report shows it had no impact on recorded figures.

On August 20, 2019, Feinstein tweeted:

She followed that tweet with a second that said, “It’s long past time to reinstate a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines before more lives are lost.”

On February 19, 2018, Breitbart News reported the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) report showing the federal “assault weapons” ban could not be credited with any reduction in crime.

The NIJ report was authored by University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper. And the Washington Times quoted Koper saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

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Bokhari: The Koch-Soros Alliance to Censor the Internet

Left-wing and establishment conservative billionaires are teaming up to censor the Internet.

Organizations established by left-winger George Soros and libertarian Charles Koch have been working together on a key priority of globalist neoliberals and neoconservatives: censorship of the Internet.

Last year, the Charles Koch Institute pledged its support for the “After Charlottesville Project,” an initiative organized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) aimed at combating “online extremism.”

Sponsors of the initiative include Comcast, NBC Universal, the Kresge Foundation, and the George Soros Charitable Foundation.

Other groups involved in the project include a host of Soros-funded organizations, including “Hope not Hate,” the British equivalent of the far-left SPLC, and the pro-immigration National Immigration Forum.

The former group, Hope not Hate, has a reputation for far-left extremism. Liberal anti-extremism campaigner Maajid Nawaz accused them of “book burning” after it announced a campaign to get allegedly “racist” books banned by major retailers. It was also forced to retract a smear against a Jewish pro-Israel activist last year.

The National Immigration Forum, which initially aimed to persuade evangelicals and conservatives to support amnesty for illegal aliens, was exposed for its ties to George Soros by Breitbart News in 2013.

The ADL, which leads the After Charlottesville Project, was once a politically neutral anti-semitism watchdog. However, under former Obama White House official Jonathan Greenblatt, it has shifted in a markedly partisan direction, accusing President Trump of “racism” and attempting to blame rising anti-semitism on Trump supporters.

The Charles Koch Institute, once seen as a conservative nemesis of the left, has now aligned itself with this group of left-wing, pro-censorship, anti-Trump agitators. When it comes to censoring the Internet, both the progressive and “conservative” establishment appear to be converging on a common position.

More recently, the Charles Koch Institute has teamed up with Engine, a Google-funded think tank to host a series of events on internet content moderation, billed as discussions about “how and why various Internet companies of all sizes moderate their users’ content to the benefit of the platform and its users.”

Attendees at the events have included representatives from Airbnb, Cloudflare, Tumblr, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Automattic, the company that owns and operates the WordPress.com blogging platform.

ADL-like rhetoric about fighting “hate” or “extremism” is frequently used as a pretext by major tech platforms to censor lawful expression. In one such example, just over a month before their representative attended the Koch-organized panel on content moderation, Automattic deleted several WordPress blogs aimed at tracking the spread of radical Islam.

The Charles Koch Institute now appears committed to advancing Internet censorship — or “content moderation,” as they might call it. Sarah Ruger, the Institute’s director of “free expression initiatives” has praised Airbnb for canceling the reservations of far-right activists, and has called for “online hate” to be treated like a “virus.”

As always, there’s an elephant in the room — what counts as “online hate?”

Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.

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Report: Harvard ‘Tweeting Tree’ Project on Climate Change Funded by Taxpayer Dollars

A Harvard project involving efforts to “equip a tree with a voice” about climate change was funded with taxpayer dollars from the National Science Foundation.

According to a report by Campus Reform, a program at Harvard University that involves a tree that tweets about climate change was funded by taxpayer dollars. Harvard, which boasts an endowment of almost $40 billion, received funding from the publicly-funded National Science Foundation for the project.

“We’ve done the work as a team to equip the tree with a voice, which we decided made the most sense in the first person, and even with a personality, in order to make it relatable to a larger audience,” the project’s leader said in a comment to a Harvard publication. “But most importantly, our Witness Tree is an objectively data-driven account, which I expect will amplify messages of climate change. But we don’t decide what gets posted, the tree does.”

The account often tweets the temperature at the tree’s location and compares it to historic temperatures.  “Yesterday, it was very hot. With a daily average of 27 ℃ (80.5 ℉), it was the 24th hottest day I can remember,” the account tweeted in July.

The researchers behind the project claim that their “tweeting tree” is amongst the most advanced of its kind in the entire world. While other similar “tweeting trees” may note the current temperature, the Harvard tree compares current temperatures with historic weather records.

“This is one of the things that sets it apart from existing twittering trees in Europe,” one of the researchers said, “as our tree’s social media messages can also draw on the decades of data in Harvard Forest’s incredible data archive. Meaning, a sensor on a tree anywhere in the world could tell you that a summer temperature is hot, but our tree has the ability to report that it’s the hottest temperature it has seen in 50 years. Our tree is not just witnessing in real time; it’s got a memory.”

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AOC-Aligned Climate Group Demands Media Silence ‘Climate Deniers’…

Censorship, how progressive. Via PJM: The Climate Mobilization, a group pushing for a World War II-scale national mobilization to fight global warming, condemned the media for pursuing “objectivity” by giving air time to “climate deniers.” Aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the organization wants the media to silence all voices […]

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Google Nest Security Cameras Can Be Hijacked Due to Vulnerabilities

Tech giant Google is facing yet another privacy issue after vulnerabilities were revealed in the company’s Google Nest Cam IQ indoor security camera which could allow hackers to hijack the device.

ZDNet reports that Lilith Wyatt and Claudio Bozzato from the Cisco Talos research team recently revealed a number of major vulnerabilities in the Nest Cam IQ, an indoor security camera device manufactured by Google. The researchers noted that in certain versions of the Nest Cam IQ Indoor, a vulnerability was discovered which left the device open to digital attacks.

The researchers stated: “It [Nest Cam IQ Indoor] primarily uses the Weave protocol for setup and initial communications with other Nest devices over TCP, UDP, Bluetooth, and 6lowpan. It is important to note that while the weave-tool binary also lives on the camera and is vulnerable, it is not normally exploitable as it requires a local attack vector (i.e. an attacker-controlled file) and the vulnerable commands are never directly run by the camera.”

The researchers noted a total of eight vulnerabilities including denial-of-service problems, code execution, and information leaks. The first vulnerability called CVE-2019-5043 is a denial-of-service vulnerability prompted by multiple TCP connection attempts. This results in unrestricted rouse allocation and system crashes. Another security flaw in the Weave tool can be exploited by luring a user into clicking on a malicious Weave command which can then give hackers the opportunity to execute code.

A number of other network-related hacks were discovered, which ZDNet has gone into detail about here. A Google spokesperson commented on the vulnerabilities stating: “We’ve fixed the disclosed bugs and started rolling them out to all Nest Camera IQs. The devices will update automatically so there’s no action required from users.”

Google has recently begun offering users the opportunity to combine their Nest and regular Google accounts into one following Google Home and Nest joining together in May.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com

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