Category Archives: Cities

Relentless Totalitarianism Toward What Ends? Depopulation & Global Rule | Zero Hedge

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The New York Times’ Liz Alderman reported on 11/21/18 that 4,000+ Swedes have accepted microchips to eliminate the use of cash (erroneously believing the desire to do so is theirs). The article is entitled “Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’.” Later on, the article mentions Christine Lagarde, the woman who heads the IMF (International Monetary Fund) as stating that digital currency needs to be investigated further. If she is involved in it, and the IMF? You had better run for cover. Half of Sweden’s banks no longer accept cash deposits, and the article leads off with a photo of a couple of “soy boys” (Ragnar Lodbruk must be turning over in his grave) in a cafe that accepts no cash.

An article by Strange Sounds from 11/20/18 is entitled “Is the government concealing California’s wildfire death toll?” The depth to this one comes not only in the form of potentially-concealed numbers, but in this excerpt, with the “kicker” parts emboldened:

According to our sources, an anonymous White House official and a pair of California firefighters, the Trump administration and CAL Fire are acting in collusion, underreporting a catastrophic death toll because “they don’t want people to freak out and panic,” said our White House source. He said CAL Fire has found the charred remains of 480 people, and that number increases hourly.

“It was FEMA Director Brock Long’s idea. He told [President] Trump that Americans can’t handle another mass casualty event after the recent string of mass shootings. His idea is to slowly release the number of fatalities, one here and one there, to soften the impact. Eventually, maybe in a year or two, they’ll admit all the missing people died in the fire. By that time, though, everyone’s mind will be occupied with other events, and no one will remember what happened in California in November 2018,” our source said.

more @ Source: Relentless Totalitarianism Toward What Ends? Depopulation & Global Rule | Zero Hedge

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The Highway of Death | Amusing Planet

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BUSH 1991

 

“The first reason why we bombed the highway coming north out of Kuwait is because there was a great deal of military equipment on that highway, and I had given orders to all my commanders that I wanted every piece of Iraqi equipment that we possibly could destroy. Secondly, this was not a bunch of innocent people just trying to make their way back across the border to Iraq. This was a bunch of rapists, murderers and thugs who had raped and pillaged downtown Kuwait City and now were trying to get out of the country before they were caught.”

Twenty five years ago, one of the most brutal massacres in war history occurred in Iraq, along Highway 80, about 32 km west of Kuwait city. On the night of February 26–27, 1991, thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were retreating to Baghdad, after a ceasefire was announced, when President George Bush ordered his forces to slaughter the retreating Iraqi army. Fighter planes of the coalition forces swooped down upon the unarmed convoy and disabled the vehicles in the front, and at the rear, so that they couldn’t escape. Then wave after wave of aircraft pounded the trapped vehicles for hours on end. After the carnage was over, some 2,000 mangled Iraqi vehicles, and charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers lay for miles along what came to be known as the “Highway of Death”. Several hundred more littered along another road, Highway 8, that leads to Basra. The scenes of devastation on these two roads became some of the most recognizable images of the Gulf War.

more at Source: The Highway of Death | Amusing Planet

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Tepper: Competition Is Dying… & Taking Capitalism With It | Zero Hedge

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Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy. Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition. Workers have help

Source: Tepper: Competition Is Dying… & Taking Capitalism With It | Zero Hedge

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Google’s “Smart City” in Toronto Faces New Resistance

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THE WORLD’S MOST ambitious “smart city,” known as Quayside, in Toronto, has faced fierce public criticism since last fall, when the plans to build a neighborhood “from the internet up” were first revealed. Quayside represents a joint effort by the Canadian government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., to develop 12 acres of the valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto.

In keeping with the utopian rhetoric that fuels the development of so much digital infrastructure, Sidewalk Labs has pitched Quayside as the solution to everything from traffic congestion and rising housing prices to environmental pollution. The proposal for Quayside includes a centralized identity management system, through which “each resident accesses public services” such as library cards and health care. An applicant for a position at Sidewalk Labs in Toronto was shocked when he was asked in an interview to imagine how, in a smart city, “voting might be different in the future.”

Other, comparatively quaint plans include driverless cars, “mixed-use” spaces that change according to the market’s demands, heated streets, and “sensor-enabled waste separation.” The eventual aim of Sidewalk Labs’s estimated billion-dollar investment is to bring these innovations to scale — first to more than 800 acres on the city’s eastern waterfront, and then to the world at large. “The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge,’” explained Eric Schmidt, Google’s former executive chair, when Quayside was first announced.

From the start, activists, technology researchers, and some government officials have been skeptical about the idea of putting Google, or one of its sister companies, in charge of a city. Their suspicions about turning part of Toronto into a corporate test bed were triggered, at first, by the company’s history of unethical corporate practices and surreptitious data collection. They have since been borne out by Quayside’s secret and undemocratic development process, which has been plagued by a lack of public input — what one critic has called “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues.” In recent months, a series of prominent resignations from advisory board members, along with organized resistance from concerned residents, have added to the growing public backlash against the project.

Source: Google’s “Smart City” in Toronto Faces New Resistance

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