PNN 10/23/16 - THE RIVER OF WISDOM

1 Senator Chuckie Schumar opines the TOP PRIORITY for the Democrats in Congress is Corporate TAX REDUCTIONS
What about cutting costs for ACA? What about improving Social Security Benefits and removing the TAX on Social Security ? What about Diplomacy over Saber Rattling? What about Education? What about Treaty Rights? What about Pollution? What about removing Corporate Welfare and Punishing War Profiteers - What about REAL ACCOUNTING at the Pentagon?
C O R P O R A T E T A X C U T S? ? ? Are you kidding?

2. Wikileaks - Hillary wonders aloud, "Is there not someone who can rid me of this troublesome priest?"
Actually her exact words were "Can't we just DRONE THIS GUY?" According to State Department sources.
The statement drew laughter from the room, which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner sources said Assange after all was a relatively soft target "walking around freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States."

3. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council has voted to allow protesters to build a new camp on the reservation, so that permanent structures can be built protecting them from the Dakotas winter [  @aeagleshield ]

4. 12 Millions on or OFF the table
“No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI [Clinton Global Initiative] on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” top Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote to campaign manager Robby Mook in a November 2014 email revealed by Wiki­Leaks. In another email, Abedin warned that if Clinton didn’t attend, the $12 million would be off the table.

5. Hands, lets see a show of hands - How many of you have been offered MILLIONS OF DOLLARS of your spouse would show up for a meeting in the princedom of QATAR??

6. ATT/Time Warner Meger-itis?
Good news for anyone who thinks America’s leading telecom companies are too small and powerless — AT&T has agreed to buy Time Warner for more than $80 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reported deal is is the largest merger of content and distribution since Comcast purchased NBC Universal in 2011.
The merger will provide AT&T with copious content to distribute via its wireless, broadband, and satellite TV infrastructure. The telecom has been aggressively seeking an entertainment empire to bring under its umbrella, so as to stock an over-the-top video service it hopes to launch by 2017. Acquiring Time Warner gives that video service privileged access to programming from TNT, TBS, CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros.’ film and television studios.
The purchase, then, will be AT&T’s attempt to occupy a profitable place in the age of cord-cutting. As the Journal noted on Friday, Time Warner’s portfolio of news, prestige programming, and high-value sports content is likely to stay in high demand among cable distributors, even if competition from streaming services forces them to shrink their bundles, to bring down monthly fees.
However, that scale could prove the deal’s undoing. Regulators expressed concerns about the Comcast–NBCU deal five years ago. And since then, the appetite for antitrust enforcement — particularly within the Democratic Party — has grown significantly.
Throughout her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton has pledged to fight the “excessive concentration” of power within key industries. Whether a Clinton administration would deem AT&T’s ambitions excessive remains to be seen. The telecom giant has donated $196,952 to Clinton’s campaign this cycle, according to Open Secrets.

7. Chuckie Schumar TAx cutting FOR coRPSES
What about cutting costs for ACA? What about improving Social Security Benefits and removing the TAX on Social Security ? What about Diplomacy over Saber Rattling? What about Education? What about Treaty Rights? What about Pollution? What about removing Corporate Welfare and Punishing War Profiteers - What about REAL ACCOUNTING at the Pentagon?
C O R P O R A T E  T A X C U T S? ? ?  Are you kidding?

8. GOOGLE - SPYING Yes (and not exactly)
When Google bought the advertising network DoubleClick in 2007, Google founder Sergey Brin said that privacy would be the company’s “number one priority when we contemplate new kinds of advertising products.”
And, for nearly a decade, Google did in fact keep DoubleClick’s massive database of web-browsing records separate by default from the names and other personally identifiable information Google has collected from Gmail and its other login accounts.
But this summer, Google quietly erased that last privacy line in the sand – literally crossing out the lines in its privacy policy that promised to keep the two pots of data separate by default. In its place, Google substituted new language that says browsing habits “may be” combined with what the company learns from the use Gmail and other tools.
The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer.
The practical result of the change is that the DoubleClick ads that follow people around on the web may now be customized to them based on your name and other information Google knows about you. It also means that Google could now, if it wished to, build a complete portrait of a user by name, based on everything they write in email, every website they visit and the searches they conduct.
The move is a sea change for Google and a further blow to the online ad industry’s longstanding contention that web tracking is mostly anonymous. In recent years, Facebook, offline data brokers and others have increasingly sought to combine their troves of web tracking data with people’s real names. But until this summer, Google held the line.
“The fact that DoubleClick data wasn’t being regularly connected to personally identifiable information was a really significant last stand,” said Paul Ohm, faculty director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.
“It was a border wall between being watched everywhere and maintaining a tiny semblance of privacy,” he said. “That wall has just fallen.”
Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville emailed a statement describing Google’s change in privacy policy as an update to adjust to the “smartphone revolution”
“We updated our ads system, and the associated user controls, to match the way people use Google today: across many different devices,” Faville wrote. She added that the change “is 100% optional–if users do not opt-in to these changes, their Google experience will remain unchanged.” (Read Google’s entire statement.)
Existing Google users were prompted to opt-into the new tracking this summer through a request with titles such as “Some new features for your Google account.”
The “new features” received little scrutiny at the time. Wired wrote that it “gives you more granular control over how ads work across devices.” In a personal tech column, the New York Times also described the change as “new controls for the types of advertisements you see around the web.”
Connecting web browsing habits to personally identifiable information has long been controversial.
Privacy advocates raised a ruckus in 1999 when DoubleClick purchased a data broker that assembled people’s names, addresses and offline interests. The merger could have allowed DoubleClick to combine its web browsing information with people’s names. After an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, DoubleClick sold the broker at a loss.
In response to the controversy, the nascent online advertising industry formed the Network Advertising Initiative in 2000 to establish ethical codes. The industry promised to provide consumers with notice when their data was being collected, and options to opt out.
Most online ad tracking remained essentially anonymous for some time after that. When Google bought DoubleClick in 2007, for instance, the company’s privacy policy stated: “DoubleClick’s ad-serving technology will be targeted based only on the non-personally-identifiable information.”
In 2012, Google changed its privacy policy to allow it to share data about users between different Google services - such as Gmail and search. But it kept data from DoubleClick – whose tracking technology is enabled on half of the top 1 million websites – separate.
But the era of social networking has ushered in a new wave of identifiable tracking, in which services such as Facebook and Twitter have been able to track logged-in users when they shared an item from another website.
Two years ago, Facebook announced that it would track its users by name across the Internet when they visit websites containing Facebook buttons such as “Share” and “Like” – even when users don’t click on the button. (Here’s how you can opt out of the targeted ads generated by that tracking).
Offline data brokers also started to merge their mailing lists with online shoppers. “The marriage of online and offline is the ad targeting of the last 10 years on steroids,” said Scott Howe, chief executive of broker firm Acxiom.
To opt-out of Google’s identified tracking, visit the Activity controls on Google’s My Account page, and uncheck the box next to “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services." You can also delete past activity from your account.

9. Next Cold War Roundup 10/21/16
Civilians are used as human shields by jihadists in both Aleppo and Mosul. UN Human Rights Council voted for a war crimes inquiry in Syria. Russia produced evidence of a Belgian airstrike in Aleppo Kurdish village that killed civilians. ISIS claims a shootdown of a US A-10 warplane in eastern Syria. ISIS leaders are leaving Mosul and a corridor is open for ISIS fighters to flee to Syria. ISIS cells launched attacks in Kirkuk. US allies Turkey and Syrian Kurds are fighting each other in northern Syria.
Mosul
_ Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports “tensions” between members of the coalition fighting in the battle for Mosul, with Peshmerga, on the “Kurdish front” 30 miles east of Mosul, complaining that the Iraqi army hadn’t taken some of the villages they were supposed to take, and the Iraqi forces saying they were waiting for the Peshmerga to finish their bit. Some major western media seem somewhat eager to report negatively on the Iraqi forces, as demonstrated in this NBC report from Richard Engel on Wednesday.
_ A Pentagon spokesman said the villages in the area are historically Kurdish and the “ethnic dynamic” changes as you get closer to Mosul, where the Iraqi forces will be “more of the frontline troops.” Pauses during advances are done for logistical reasons, according to the spokesman. Some of the WSJ quotes came from a Peshmerga general who is the brother of Iraqi Kurdistan’s president, Masoud Barzani.
_ 5,000 US troops are in the area supporting the Iraqi coalition. Some are American and Canadian special operations forces on the frontlines calling in airstrikes. There are 10,000 Kurdish fighters and 18,000 Iraqi security forces, according to the Pentagon. The Kurds approach from 2 angles in the east, Iraqi forces from 2 angles in the south and southeast.
_ ISIS set oil wells on fire in the town of Hamdaniya as an attempt to stop the Kurdish Peshmerga advance.
_ The UN warned that ISIS is using civilians as human shields in Mosul.
_ Turkey continues to insist that it will play a role in Mosul.  US Sec. Defense Carter said “he will emphasize the importance of respecting Iraq’s sovereignty on his visit to Turkey on Friday.” Carter also “reaffirmed his support for the US-Turkey strategic alliance.”

10. WHO's BEHIND the Dakota Pipeline (80 Arrested)
Enbridge, along with Phillips 66, Energy Transfer Partners, Sunco Logistics and Marathon, are behind-the-scenes of the Bakken Pipeline — which includes the Dakota Access Pipeline — and are banking on a massive payoff at the community's expense. At $1.5 billion, Enbridge acquired the largest ownership stake.¹
An Enbridge-Spectra merger not only creates a mega-corporation, but also increases the power of Big Oil and Gas and emboldens them to continue to build the Dakota Access Pipeline over the objections of Native American water protectors. Beyond this project, they will continue to build out other pipeline and oil and gas export projects to maximize production, all at the expense of targeted communities and our climate. Send a message to block the oil and gas industry from consolidating and running rampant in our communities.
Dirty fossil fuel projects endanger our communities, and we have to look no further than Enbridge and Spectra to see how these corporations are harming us and destroying our environment. In 2010, Enbridge sent thousands of barrels of oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, and it was Spectra's pipeline that exploded in Pennsylvania earlier this year, severely burning a person.