The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Trenton NJ, Statement from Thomas R. Churchelow, Esq., President, New Jersey Utilities Association on Governor Murphy’s Final Energy Master Plan:
Americans are being emotionally manipulated to take up cause with those whose ultimate purpose is the repeal of the First Amendment and erasure of national memory.
Wars are won or lost based mostly on perceptions of events, not on what actually happens. This is true for any given battlefield, whether it’s the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam or the ideological battlefield over the future of the First Amendment as played out in Charlottesville in 2017. The reality of what takes place in the public arena is always secondary to any projected illusion.
So let’s never forget this: Whoever has the power to dictate public perceptions of reality is in a position to dictate public opinion and behavior. Abusing language and images to stir up emotions is an ancient trick of power-mongers. And once journalism turns into unchecked propaganda, we become trapped in its dangerous illusions.
Only the teensiest fraction of Americans have any real interest in violent extremism, whether it be the violence represented by the specter of the Klu Klux Klan or the violence promoted by groups like Antifa who pretend they are fighting for social justice. But the media is promoting imagery of the former as a foil for the latter
`Anonymized’ credit card data not so anonymous, study shows
By SETH BORENSTEIN and JACK GILLUM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — Credit card data isn’t quite as anonymous as promised, a new study says.
Scientists showed they can identify you with more than 90 percent accuracy by looking at just four purchases, three if the price is included – and this is after companies “anonymized” the transaction records, saying they wiped away names and other personal details. The study out of MIT, published Thursday in the journal Science, examined three months of credit card records for 1.1 million people.
“We are showing that the privacy we are told that we have isn’t real,” study co-author Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an email.
Companies routinely strip away personal identifiers from credit card data when they share information with outsiders, saying the data is now safe because it is “anonymized.” But the MIT researchers showed that anonymized isn’t quite the same as anonymous.
Drawing upon a sea of data in an unnamed developed country, the researchers pieced together available information to see how easily they could identify somebody. They looked at information from 10,000 shops, with each data piece time-stamped to calculate how many pieces of data it would take on average to find somebody, said study lead author Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, also of MIT.