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AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS

The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself.

After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.

The camps organised by nationalist parties train children as young as 8 to hate Russians, foreigners and gay people—and they now receive considerable government money to do so, reports YURAS KARMANAU

Ex-Trump aide’s visit ‘legitimises racist views’

Another Hot, Dry Year Is Fueling The State’s Deadliest, Most Destructive Wildfire. Scientists Say Wildfires Here Are Consistently Surpassing Their Projections.

Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders.

You all know how the saying goes: “Poor Mexico–too far from God, too close to the United States.”

The Great Lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and justified U.S. military interventions all over the planet. During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said, “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two […]

Podcast (co-hosted with Marine from A Privileged Vegan): veganvanguardpodcast.com ___ adrienne maree brown –
Emergent Strategy: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrat…

By Swampside Chats. Discovered by Player FM and our community—copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio streamed directly from their servers.

In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives–supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order”–rather than in individuals.

In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation.

Physician burnout, depression, and suicide increasingly invade discussions within the medical field. Depression and suicide are more common among male and female physicians, with suicide rates 1.41 and 2.27 times greater than that of the general male and female populations, respectively.

MintPress News reports from the migrant caravan in Mexico City and met with members of the International Migrants Alliance, who gathered under the slogan: “Migrants, refugees and peoples of the world unite and fight capitalist exploitation, plunder and war!”

Italian street artist Jorit Agoch unveiled one of the largest and most impressive murals of the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara days ahead of the 51st anniversary of his assassination at the hands of the Bolivian army in La Higuera, Bolivia.   

In his 1999 book The Bridge over the Racial Divide, William Julius Wilson wrote that economic insecurity creates conditions that hollow out the civic values of liberal democracy, and constitutes the “breeding grounds for racial and ethnic tensions”.

Reading University has reminded me, and others, not just that we miss Norman Geras, but that it would be good to hear his views today. Reading University has also reminded us that there is no fool like a learned fool.