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Behind The Woodshed 3rd year Anniversary at Real Liberty Media

At the Situationally Aware Action Oriented Intelligence Center
Of Evolutionary Engagement

The Victory Against You in the Silent War is Your Silence

Summer Crickets

Summer Not

Protect Your Granted Rights

• Sign The Petition – Please
  
  From the Jefferson Mining District front page, Click on the petition link. Thank you very much for defending your property and that of future generations, no the real ones, and additionally, for helping Jefferson Mining District help you.

Medical Alerts!

• School Suspends All Vaccines After Multiple Students Started Collapsing After their Shots
  

  As many as 15 students at the Northampton School for Boys collapsed onto the floor Tuesday following a series of vaccines which resulted in severe adverse side effects.

  As one mother who preferred to remain anonymous described: “Several different vaccines were being administered, and around 10 to 15 pupils keeled over and paramedics were called.”

  Children were also witnessed “on their backs on the floor with their legs up on chairs,” the mom said.

  “The rest of the jabs were cancelled and a letter was sent home to the parents of pupils who had been given the jabs about what to do if they felt nauseous. Rumours say there may have been a duff batch of vaccines,” the woman said, according to the Daily Mail.

  At least one child was sent to emergency care as a precaution, but was “later discharged with no further effects,” according to a letter sent home to parents.

  The letter blamed “unforeseen circumstances” for the complications, and advised parents to monitor their child’s health, specifically looking for signs of dizziness, nausea or skin rash:

  Dear Parent/Carer, please be advised the immunisation session your child attended today was suspended due to unforeseen circumstances,” the letter reads.

• fMRI bugs could upend years of research
  

  A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” fMRI-based science has been potentially invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.

  The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters.

  When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.

  Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives.

  In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.”

  For example, a bug that’s been sitting in a package called 3dClustSim for 15 years, fixed in May 2015, produced bad results (3dClustSim is part of the AFNI suite; the others are SPM and FSL).

  That’s not a gentle nudge that some results might be overstated: it’s more like making a bonfire of thousands of scientific papers.

Operation “Transparent War Crimes”

• In Damning Report, Chilcot Inquiry Slams Blair Over Legal Basis For Iraq War
  

  The Chilcot Inquiry, a British public inquiry into the nation’s role in the Iraq war, was published moments ago. The massive report covers almost a decade of UK government policy decisions between 2001 and 2009 and took seven years to complete.  It covers the background to the decision to go to war, whether troops were properly prepared, how the conflict was conducted and what planning there was for its aftermath, a period in which there was intense sectarian violence.

  One of the key focus areas of the report is the rationale that Tony Blair gave to the public in taking the UK to war, and whether or not the war was necessary. Upon its release, the report concluded that military action “was not a last resort”, and that Britain chose to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003 before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. 

  The report’s main focus is on what commitments then-Prime Minister Tony Blair gave to then-US President George W Bush ahead of the invasion, and whether or not Blair misled the British public over the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which ultimately turned out to be non-existent. Critically, the report determined that the threat posed by WMDs in Iraq was presented with a certainty that was not justified, and the government failed to achieve its stated objectives of the war.

  As summarized by BBC, the main points of the report are:

  • The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.
  • The judgements about the severity of threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – known as WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified.
  • Intelligence had “not established beyond doubt” that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons.
  • Policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence assessments. It was not challenged, and should have been.
  • The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were “far from satisfactory”.
  • There was “little time” to properly prepare three military brigades for deployment in Iraq. The risks were neither “properly identified nor fully exposed” to ministers, resulting in “equipment shortfalls”.
  • Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were “wholly inadequate”.
  • The Government failed to achieve the stated objectives it had set itself in Iraq. More than 200 British citizens died as a result of the conflict. Iraqi people suffered greatly. By July 2009, at least 150,000
  • Iraqis had died, probably many more. More than 1m were displaced.
  • The report sets out lessons to be learned: It found former prime minister Tony Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq; and the UK’s relationship with the US does not require  unconditional support.
  • It said ministerial discussion which encourages frank and informed debate and challenge is important. As is ensuring civilian and military arms of government are properly equipped.
  • In future, all aspects of any intervention need to be calculated, debated and challenged with rigour. Decisions need to be fully implemented.

  More details from RT

   The report’s main focus is on what commitments then-Prime Minister Tony Blair gave to then-US President George W Bush ahead of the invasion, and whether the former PM misled the British public over the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which turned out to be non-existent. Others in line for criticism include spy agency MI6 for providing inaccurate intelligence, and military commanders for failing to stand up to Blair. Speaking on the findings of the report, Sir John Chilcot says the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s WMDs was “presented with a certainty that was not justified.” He says “despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated,” and the planning for Iraq after Saddam Hussein was “wholly inadequate.”

  Chilcot says the government “failed to achieve its stated objectives.”

• Globalists Are Now Openly Demanding New World Order Centralization
  

  — when elitist criminals start openly admitting to their schemes it means that they are ready to pull the plug on the current system. They simply don’t care anymore who knows their plans because they think that victory is inevitable.

  There have been more subtle and less prominently published calls for a “new world order” in the past, to be sure.  However, at no other time have I seen international financiers and their puppet political mouthpieces so brazen about calling for global centralization than in the wake of the successful Brexit referendum. It is as if the Brexit flipped a switch in the existing narrative and set loose a flood of new propaganda, all aimed at convincing the general public that central banks must combine forces and act as one institution in order to combat an economic crisis that isn’t even visible to laymen yet.

  The psychology of market investors is to always first go with what they are familiar with and what they have been conditioned to do, much like Pavlovian dogs. Investors today, as then, were conditioned to “buy the dip no matter what”. Of course, once reality and the fundamentals set in, stocks were back in free-fall only two weeks later.

  The Brexit is not going away, and the negative effects it heralds are still barely visible to the mainstream. This process is going to be actively weighing on the markets for months as investors continue to lose their blind faith in the system. We haven’t even begun the party yet, and this is assuming there are no other catalyzing moments around the corner.

  Beyond the mechanics of the economy, the elites themselves are often a good litmus test for predicting what is about to take place within the stock casino and outside the stock casino.

  The fact that the mainstream financial media is now awash in calls for extreme measures in central bank coordination and numerous elites warning of greater crisis should be of some concern to the public. Just as the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned of a crash back in 2007 and early 2008 and were proven “correct,” they have also been warning of a crash in 2016. Post-Brexit, the chorus of “warnings” from the elites has exploded. They are rarely wrong about economic crisis exactly because they are the people that create the conditions for crisis in the first place.

• Putin Warns Journalists of Nuclear War
  

  The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war.

  Putin railed against the journalists for their “tall tales” in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie. 

  The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km. At that point, Russia’s nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy. 

  Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda. He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line [Video]:

  We know year by year what’s going to happen, and they know that we know. It’s only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger – this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I don’t know how to get through to you anymore.

  Does anyone in the reeking garbage heap that is mainstream western media have a conscience?

Transparent Tyranny

• Navy engineer sentenced for mishandling classified material
  

  A Naval reservist was sentenced for mishandling classified military materials.

  A federal attorney announced Wednesday that Bryan Nishimura of Folsom, California, pleaded guilty to the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials.

  Nishimura, deployed in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008 as a regional engineer, admitted to downloading classified briefings and digital records onto his personal electronic devices. He carried the materials off base and brought them back to the U.S. when his deployment ended.

• FBI Recommends “No Charges” Against Hillary Clinton
  

  In a surprising statement which concluded moments ago, FBI director James Comey announced that Federal officials have decided not to pursue federal charges against Hillary Clinton for her private email setup, an announcement that will send a shockwave throughout national politics.

  BREAKING: FBI to recommend DOJ not pursue charges in Clinton email investigation: “No charges are appropriate.” https://t.co/gQhNLmjV9I

  — ABC News (@ABC) July 5, 2016

  In a press briefing at the bureau’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Comey said investigators and prosecutors had concluded there was not sufficient evidence to push forward with an indictment against Clinton, clearing her of a federal investigation that has loomed over her presidential campaign for nearly a year. Comey’s announcement comes just three days after the former secretary of State sat for a 3.5-hour interview with the FBI on Saturday, and just a few hours before President Obama is set to campaign with Clinton in Charlotte, N.C.

  The punchline of Comey statement is that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t face charges over her e-mail practices while serving as Secretary of State because there was no “intentional misconduct” and there was “no clear evidence” of intentional violation of the laws.The FBI’s conclusion will now be referred to the Justice Dept for a decision.

  FBI Director Comey: No “intentional misconduct” in connection with sorting of Clinton’s emails. https://t.co/z9hQnKbdJg

  — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 5, 2016

  FBI Director: No “clear evidence” Clinton and staff intentionally violated laws, but were “extremely careless” https://t.co/7TUq2xo7mU

  — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 5, 2016

  He adds that the decision, if agreed to by the Justice Dept, would remove one of the biggest remaining obstacles to Clinton’s presidential bid, putting an official end to questions about penalties for her use of a private e-mail server, though the issue may continue to resonate on the presidential campaign trail

  Still, the FBI director admitted that Clinton and her aides were “extremely careless” with e-mail and that it’s “possible” hostile actors gained access to Clinton e-mail system however no direct evidence of it found though.

  What is shocking is Comey’s admission that Clinton used not one but several different email servers, adding that 110 emails contained classified information and 8 contained top secret information, he also reported that Clinton did not turn over “several thousand” emails to the FBI and added that due to Hillary’s sloppy set up, it is possible that “hostile actors” got access to Clinton’s emails.

  FBI Director Comey: 110 emails found to have contained classified information at the time they were sent. https://t.co/Ma7iAgexE7

  — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 5, 2016

  Yet, despite all these “facts”, the FBI has decided not to proceed with recommending charges.

  It appears that the FBI is implying that the only reason why no charges will be filed is because there was no “intent”, and yet according to the US criminal code, specifically U.S. Code Section  793 – “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” subsection (f), intent in this case is not required for prosection:

  Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

  As the Hill adds, the juxtaposition is likely to inflame White House critics, who have insisted that political pressures would prevent any chance of an indictment for Clinton, regardless of the damage to national security.  Obama has previously weighed in to dismiss concerns about the investigation — to the ire of Republicans and federal investigators.

  Last week, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that she would defer judgment to the FBI and career Justice Department prosecutors, following a private and extremely controversial 30-minute meeting with former President Bill Clinton. The decision left Comey as the public face of the investigation, in what some viewed as an opportunity for the hard-nosed maverick to buck political pressures and act against Clinton.

  “It is impossible for the FBI not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton,” her presumptive general election opponent, Donald Trump, said on Twitter this weekend. “What she did was wrong! What Bill did was stupid!”

• In Clinton Case, Obama Administration Nullifies 6 Criminal Laws
  

  When the Obama Administration, on July 5th, ruled that in regard to Hillary Clinton’s privatized email system while she was Secretary of State, “Our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” to a grand jury, because “We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges,” they ignored the following six U.S. criminal laws, each of which undeniably describes very well what she did:

  —— Click the above link for the U.S. Codes and then listen to this succinct explanation from  Constitutional Attorney Jonathan Emord On Comey’s Copout via Rense Radio.

• Clinton Crime Mafia Back in Full Force
  

  In your face and rubbing your nose in it is for all to see. That’s the pattern of the Clinton clan that perfects their criminal culture of corruption and law-breaking. The unmistakable premeditated meeting between William Jefferson Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch is a violation of every ethical legal canon. It should be grounds for expulsion from the practice of the law. Well, in Clinton’s case he is no stranger to disbarment. For Lynch, who was appointed to United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York by President Bill Clinton in 1999, she should know better. Yet, if you are the successor to Eric Holder, there seems to be no need to conduct your affairs ethically as AG.

  If anyone ever tells you the United State is a country that operates under the standards of law, just laugh and shout balderdash. If you want to do an autopsy on this “so called” chance get together, go at it. However, only the most deranged Clintonistas can see no evil, hear no evil or report no evil.

  The expected spin comes out of the lying Clinton News Network. “On CNN’s New Day Friday morning, Former South Carolina State Rep. and current pro-Hillary CNN analyst Bakari Sellers probably echoed the feelings of many Clinton supporters who are wondering what the pair were thinking, telling host Alisyn Camerota that the meeting was “bad optics,” but also pointing out that it was not illegal:

  Sellers: I think you have to take both of them for what they said. You had a conversation about golf and a conversation about grandkids. But even more importantly, let’s talk about Loretta Lynch and her character and her ethics. Loretta Lynch got confirmed in a Republican-led United States Senate. Her record as a prosecutor and attorney general cannot be impeached when it comes to ethics.”

  Stop this continuous insult to our national consciousness. Stop hiding behind a false narrative of ideological differences. And by all means, develop the moral fortitude to directly face the systemic corruption that poses as YOUR government.

  This is not the way to celebrate July 4th. But who really cares any longer? The majority of the zombies that intend on voting for the Hildabeast, would not care if in some other universe, she would be indicted for her crimes. Such a career crook wears polytetrafluoroethylene. The chemical composition of the globalist establishment shields all their operatives with the Teflon of legal immunity.

  As this saga of judicial protection racket plays out in front of a dazed and ignorant public, the reality that a FBI criminal indictment will be accepted by the careerist DOJ “professionals” is about as likely as getting the Democratic Party Superdelegates to switch to Bernie Sanders.

  Any honest observer must conclude that the system and especially the political selection process are totally rigged. So what can we expect when the nauseous love feast of gender identity female Hillary supporters just dismiss any factual evidence about her lifelong subversion of lawful conduct?

  The answer is NOTHING. Such raving lunatics are mentally defective madwomen. They are eager to vote for this embodiment of Lucrezia Borgia’s worst and ruthless family values. The Clintons are more Machiavellian than any Prince that populated Italy. No, their form of mafia extortion uses the Clinton Foundation for laundering money and distributing favors. Using poison and plots against their enemies is a consistent script for this illegitimate daughter of democratic utopia.

• Presidential ‘seal’ of approval: Clinton campaigns with official POTUS seal
  

  The internet has erupted after President Obama provided Hillary Clinton with more than just a warm-up speech at a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was welcomed to use the Seal of the President of the United States, which many found objectionable.

  Clinton also was treated to a ride on Air Force One on Tuesday, as she and President Barack Obama made their way to their first 2016 campaign appearance together.

Cover-up & Mass Distraction

• Man Fatally Shot During Traffic Stop In Minnesota, Governor Reportedly Evacuated
  

  According to the WSJ, the video shows a woman sitting in a car with a man slumped in a seat wearing a shirt that appeared to be soaked in blood. A person who appeared to be an armed police officer stood at the car’s window. The woman can be heard saying “we got pulled over for a busted taillight.” And the officer tells her to keep her hands up, and says “I told him not to reach for it. I told him to get his hand out.”

• Confirmed – Philando Castile Was an Armed Robbery Suspect – False Media Narrative Now Driving Cop Killings…
  

  The Falcon Heights, Minnesota police shooting of Philando Castile is based around an entirely false narrative.  Castile and Ms. Diamond Reynolds (Facebook video uploader) were pulled over by police because Castile matched a BOLO Alert for an armed robbery suspect from four days prior.

  Unfortunately, the false statements in the video – which have gone viral, and are being pushed by the mainstream media – have created a backlash against police officers.

  Police officers in: Dallas (link), Tennessee (link), Missouri (link) and Georgia (link) have been Shot or killed in the past 24 hours as a result of a false narrative driven by the Black Lives Matter movement. It is important to get the truth out quickly.

  Saint Anthony, MN, Police Officers Jeronimo Yanez and Joseph Kauser pulled over Mr. Castile and Ms. Reynolds because the driver, Philando Castile, matched the suspect profile in an armed robbery which occurred on July 2nd, at a convenience store, only a few blocks from where their car was pulled over.

• Dallas Shootout: Gunman shooting down police officer caught on camera (GRAPHIC FULL VIDEO)
  

  Dramatic video shows an exchange of gunfire between a suspect and a law enforcement officer on a sidewalk outside a building in downtown Dallas. Five officers were killed and seven were wounded during a protest over fatal police shootings of black men in other states, authorities said.

• 3 boggling facts in Hillary email cover-up/Dallas shooting
  

  —Arch-Globalist Hillary Clinton’s no-prosecution, the recent exit of Britain from the EU which torpedoed the unchecked advance of Globalism, the current Presidential campaign which features a candidate (formerly two candidates) attacking Globalism as no major candidate ever has before—all this suddenly fades from public consciousness in the specter of the Dallas shootings—the racial conflict that has been decades in the making—made in America, by Globalists, for the express purpose of Divide and Conquer—

  I know full well how incompetent, stupid, amateurish, and ill-prepared government employees can be. But the dog and pony Hillary show of the last few days is truly staggering.

  If the effort was to exonerate Hillary Clinton, it was done so badly the American people are more certain than ever that she is guilty as sin.

  Here are the top three actions of the past few days that conspired to free her, while actually revealing how culpable she is, to anyone with a few working brain cells:

• Two Days, Two Shootings, Two Sets Of Cops Making Recordings Disappear
  

  There are cameras everywhere. But when cops start shooting, it’s usually bullets and never footage. The first recordings that ever make their way to the public are those shot by bystanders. Anything else captured during a shooting remains under strict control of law enforcement… even when the recordings don’t belong to law enforcement.

  Minutes after two cops killed Alton Sterling outside of a convenience store, police confiscated all surveillance video of the incident without a warrant and allegedly without permission.

  An attorney for the owner of the Triple S Mart, Abdullah Muflahi, told The Daily Beast a hard drive containing the complete recording of the Sterling’s death at the hands of Baton Rouge Police Department Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake was unlawfully taken by police. Muflahi showed The Daily Beast the barren cabinet where the hard drive had been.

  All that’s left of the storage unit is a sole barren wire.

  If this tactic sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen it on multiple occasions. After Laquan McDonald was shot by Chicago police officers, several cops went to a nearby restaurant and seized its surveillance recordings. It took the city of Chicago over a year to release dashcam footage of the incident — footage that was oddly missing the audio that normally would have been captured when the camera was turned on.

First Time in U.S. History

• Use of police robot to kill Dallas shooting suspect believed to be first in US history
  

  For what experts are calling the first time in history, US police have used a robot in a show of lethal force. Early Friday morning, Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot with an explosive device on its manipulator arm to kill a suspect after five police officers were murdered and seven others wounded.

  “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was,” Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters.

AI Corporate Controls

• Uber And European Robots Are Coming For Your Jobs
  

  That minimum wage you thought was below your value line may start to look pretty good as Americans slowly learn their real value as a plug-and-play employee is approaching $0. On a long enough time line, someone ends up building a robot. As we’ve reported extensively here at Zero Hedge (Walmart, Google, FoxxConn, KFC,  Starbucks), robotics have been the clear go-to decision when one wishes to abolish those pesky employees always looking for timeoff and the proverbial “fair treatment”. But now we bring you the newest member of the robotics club, none other than your every other weekend series X-whatever funding round superstar Uber!

  Uber now has a robotic security guard patrolling the lot used to park cars awaiting inspection in the Mission Bay area of San Francisco. Knightscope designed and manufactured the device, which is known as K5.

• We need to talk about AI and access to publicly funded data-sets
  

  For more than a decade the company formerly known as Google, latterly rebranded Alphabet to illustrate the full breadth of its A to Z business ambitions, has engineered an annually increasing revenue generating empire which last year pulled in ~$75 billion. And it’s done this mostly by mining user data for ad targeting intel.

  Slice it and dice it how you like but Google’s business engine needs data like the human body needs oxygen. Most of its products are thus designed to remove friction to accessing more user data; whether it’s free search, free email, free cloud storage, free document editing tools, free messaging apps, a fuzzy social network that no one loves but which is somehow still hanging around, free maps, a mobile OS platform that OEMs can load onto smartphone hardware without paying a license fee… Most of what Google builds it opens to all comers to keep the data pouring in. The bits and bytes must flow.

  The trade off for consumers handing over data is of course access to a particular Google service without any up front cost. Or getting to buy a cheaper piece of hardware than they might otherwise be able to. Or the convenience of using a dominant digital service. Of course they are ‘paying’ with their data, but few will think of it that way. It’s an abstract idea for starters, and a personal cost that’s far harder to quantify given how unclear it is what Google really does with the data it gathers and processes in its algorithmic black boxes.

  Google certainly isn’t spelling that out. Rather it makes noises about the benefits of it knowing more about you (savvier virtual assistants, more powerful photo search and so on). And without explicit knowledge of what the trade-off entails — coupled with noisy PR about the convenience of data-powered services — most consumers will simply shrug and carry on handing over the keys to their lives. This is the momentum that fuels Mountain View’s ad-targeting empire. The more it knows about you, the richer it bets it can get.

  You can dislike Google’s business model but you can also argue that consumers do (in general) have a choice about whether to use its services. Albeit in markets where the company has a defacto monopoly there may be doubt about how much choice people really have. Not least if the company is found to have been abusing a dominant position by demoting alternatives to its services in its search results (Google is facing just such antitrust claims in Europe, where it has a hugely dominant marketshare in search, for example).

  Another caveat is that Google has worked to join up more personal data dots, undermining how much control users have over how they share data with the centralizing Alphabet entity — by, for example, consolidating the privacy policies of multiple products to enable it to flesh out its understanding of each user by cross-referencing their usage of different services. That collapsing of prior partitions between products has also caused Google headaches with European data protection regulators. And contributed to a caricature of it as a vampire octopus with masses of tentacles all maneuvering to feed data back into a single, hungry maw.

  But if you think Google has a controversial reputation at this point in its business evolution, buckle up because things are really stepping up a gear.

  The Google/Alphabet octopus, via its artificially intelligent DeepMind tentacle, is being granted access to public healthcare data. Lots and lots of healthcare data. Now personal data doesn’t really get more sensitive than people’s medical records. And these highly sensitive bits and bytes are now being sucked towards Google’s algorithmic core — albeit indirectly, via the DeepMind division, which so far this year has two publicly announced data-sharing collaborations with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

  The public data in question is tied to the two specific projects. But the most recent of these collaborations, with Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Trust in London, entails DeepMind applying machine learning to the data. Which is a key development. Because, as New Scientist noted this week, Google will be keeping any AI models DeepMind is able to build off of this public data-set. The trained models are effectively its payment in this trade — given it’s not charging the NHS for its services.

  So yes, this is another Google freebie. And the cash-strapped, publicly (under)funded NHS has obviously leapt at the chance of a free-at-the-point-of-use high tech partner who might, in time, help improve healthcare outcomes for patients. So it’s granting the commercial giant access to patients’ data.

• The Google app takes on WebMD with an intelligent symptom search
  

  If you’ve ever turned to the interwebs when feeling sick you may have started worrying you had a deathly, flesh-eating virus instead of the common cold. Google aims to eliminate some of that anxiety and confusion in the following days with a few tweaks to the Google app.

  The Google app works by voice command searches for things like the weather in San Francisco or asking it to time something cooking on the stove. Google now plans to bring a smarter symptom search to the app by combing through the millions of health conditions mentioned in web results on the platform (about one percent of all searches) and then checking them against medical information collected from doctors through the Knowledge Graph.

  Soon you’ll be able to ask the Google app to tell you what a “headache on one side” means and Google will serve up a list of related conditions like “headache,” “migraine,” “tension headache,” “cluster headache,” “sinusitis,” and “common cold.”

  “For individual symptoms like ‘a headache,’ we’ll also give you an overview description along with information on self-treatment options and what might warrant a doctor’s visit,” Google wrote in a recent blog post about the update.

• Machine Learning Algorithm Spots Depression in Speech Patterns
  

  Researchers from the University of Southern California have developed a new machine learning tool capable of detecting certain speech-related diagnostic criteria in patients being evaluated for depression. Known as SimSensei, the tool listens to patient’s voices during diagnostic interviews for reductions in vowel expression characteristic of psychological and neurological disorders that may not be sufficiently clear to human interviewers. The idea is (of course) not to replace those interviewers, but to add additional objective weight to the diagnostic process.

  The group’s work is described in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

  Depression misdiagnosis is a huge problem in health care, particularly in cases in which a primary care doctor making (or not) the diagnosis. A 2009 meta-study covering some 50,000 patients found that docs were correctly identifying depression only about half the time, with the number of false positives outnumbering false negatives by a ratio of about three-to-one. That’s totally unacceptable.

  But it’s also understandable. Doctors, especially general practitioners, will pretty much always overdiagnose an illness for two simple and related reasons: one, diagnosing an illness in error is almost always safer than not diagnosing an illness in error; two, eliminating with certainty the possibility of any single diagnosis requires more expertise/more confidence than otherwise. See also: overprescribing antibiotics.

  A big part of the problem in diagnosing depression is that it’s a very heterogenous disease. It has many different causes and is expressed in many different ways. Figure that a primary care doctor is seeing maybe hundreds of patients in a week, for all manner of illness, and the challenge involved in extracting a psychiatric diagnosis from the vagaries of self-reported symptoms and interview-based observations is pretty clear. There exists a huge hole then for something like SimSensei.

  The depression-related variations in speech tracked by SimSensei are already well-documented. “Prior investigations revealed that depressed patients often display flattened or negative affect, reduced speech variability and monotonicity in loudness and pitch, reduced speech, reduced articulation rate, increased pause duration, and varied switching pause duration,” the USC paper notes. “Further, depressed speech was found to show increased tension in the vocal tract and the vocal folds.”

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In This Doge Eat Doge World

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

• The people know that they have created this farce and financed it with their own taxes (consent), but they would rather knuckle under than be the hypocrite. Factor VI – Cattle Those who will not use their brains are no better off than those who have no brains, and so this mindless school of jelly-fish, father, mother, son, and daughter, become useful beasts of burden or trainers of the same.
• Mr. Rothschild’s Energy Discovery
  What Mr. Rothschild [2] had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is “when you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you.”

The Law of War

• General Orders No. 100: The Lieber Code

  INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIELD

Where Not Throwing Oppression Off, You Live Either Under an Occupation or by Conquest.

The Choice and Responsibility are Yours. United We Strike

Behind The Woodshed for that practical education & hard but necessary dose of reality.

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