You Are Being Tracked

image credit: digitalmarketingnetwork

Via Instapundit, a reporter at The New York Times did some searches to determine the extent of digital tracking. Farhad Manjoo’s article, “I Visited 47 Sites. Hundreds of Trackers Followed Me,” starts off:

Earlier this year, an editor working on The Times’s Privacy Project asked me whether I’d be interested in having all my digital activity tracked, examined in meticulous detail and then published — you know, for journalism. “Hahaha,” I said, and then I think I made an “at least buy me dinner first” joke, but it turned out he was serious. What could I say? I’m new here, I like to help, and, conveniently, I have nothing whatsoever at all to hide.

Like a colonoscopy, the project involved some special prep. I had to install a version of the Firefox web browser that was created by privacy researchers to monitor how websites track users’ data. For several days this spring, I lived my life through this Invasive Firefox, which logged every site I visited, all the advertising tracking servers that were watching my surfing and all the data they obtained. 

Then I uploaded the data to my colleagues at The Times, who reconstructed my web sessions into the gloriously invasive picture of my digital life you see here. (The project brought us all very close; among other things, they could see my physical location and my passwords, which I’ve since changed.)

What did we find? The big story is as you’d expect: that everything you do online is logged in obscene detail, that you have no privacy. And yet, even expecting this, I was bowled over by the scale and detail of the tracking; even for short stints on the web, when I logged into Invasive Firefox just to check facts and catch up on the news, the amount of information collected about my endeavors was staggering.

. . .

The full article is here. (I had no trouble accessing it, although I understand articles in the NY Times can sometimes disappear behind a paywall if you’ve accessed a quota of pages.) The takeaway: we have no privacy. 

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David Harsanyi on The Tea Party

David Harsanyi takes a look at the inception of the Tea Party and its activities today (“The Left Can’t Stop Lying About The Tea Party”). He concludes:

. . .

The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.

In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years.  Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.

One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

Full article at The Federalist is here.

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Air Show here over Labor Day weekend

image credit: pat dooley photography

Labor Day weekend is coming up, and that means the 2019 Cleveland Air Show. Expect to hear and watch the Thunderbirds rehearsing later this week.

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Socialism in a nutshell

Mark Levin’s guests on Sunday evening were talking about socialism in general, and free "Medicare for All" in particular. Prof. Robert Lawson explained the fallacy:

If you want to find out how expensive something is, make it free.

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Neverland

photo credit: pinterest 

(it's Sandy Duncan as Peter Pan in the 1979 Broadway revival) 

As a kid, I saw the television and the stage versions of the musical Peter Pan. One of the memorable songs is “Never Never Land.” The opening lyric is

I have a place where dreams are born,

And time is never planned.

It's not on any chart,

You must find it with your heart.

Never Never Land.

And then:

You'll have a treasure if you stay there,

More precious far than gold.

For once you have found your way there,

You can never, never grow old.

An essay at American Thinker by Deana Chadwell was featured on the Lucianne aggregator yesterday. It is indeed a must-read, and its title is “The Left's Neverland.” It is a perceptive, if scary take on the emotional ideology of today’s liberal, especially young liberals. The essay begins:

I hear more and more frequently concerns about an impending civil war. It is certain that something momentous is taking place; the signs are all around us, but I’m not at all sure that the something will turn out to be two sides of the same country warring over principles, like the Civil War, which was mainly about slavery and states’ rights. Now, we’re up to our nose-piercings in politically polarizing problems and the leftist contingent of the country doesn’t even like America anymore.  If we come to open warfare, it will be as two separate nations battling it out. Over what? Not over policies, not over territory, not even over moral issues. We will be fighting over reality.

The left, which I used to see as misguided but mostly benign, has built for itself -- because it knows it can’t convince Americans to throw away freedom -- a make-believe utopian country. It has constructed, ex nihilo, a nation that has no borders, no laws, no specific language, and no recognizable morality. When Barrack Obama said he wanted to “fundamentally change” America, he wasn’t bluffing. When he’d stick out his chin and say, ”That’s not who we are,” he wasn’t talking about us; he was talking about the citizens of his make-believe land which I’ll name “Neverland.”

The name is suitable in many ways. In the first place, it isn’t real and never will be.

The full article is here. Highly recommended.

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:Michelle Malkin is on Google’s Blacklist

Michelle Malkin reports on her own experiences with Big Tech censorship. Her report is at The Daily Signal. Here are a few extracts:

I learned last week from a Silicon Valley whistleblower, who spoke with the intrepid investigative team at Project Veritas, that my namesake news and opinion website is on a Google blacklist.

Thank goodness the Big Tech giant hasn’t taken over the newspaper syndication business yet. Twenty years of column writing have allowed me to break news and disseminate my opinions without the tyranny of social justice algorithms downgrading or whitewashing my words.

But given the toxic metastasis of social media in every aspect of our lives, especially for those who make their living exercising the First Amendment, it may only be a matter of time before this column somehow falls prey to the Google Ministry of Truth, too.

. . .

My apparent sin: Independently growing a large organic following of readers on the internet who share my mainstream conservative views on immigration, jihad, education, social issues, economic policy, faith, and more.

. . .

Indeed, my first substantiated censorship by Google/YouTube, which was covered by The New York Times, occurred 13 years ago in 2006. Around that time, it also became clear to me that humans, not algorithms, were manipulating Google Images to prioritize unspeakably crude photoshopped images of me disseminated by left-wing misogynists. And not long after, my heavily trafficked blog posts started dropping off the search engine radar altogether.

Read the full report here.

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Land of Hope: book review

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story 

by Wilfred M. McClay

Philip Tervian’s review at Commentary concludes:

. . . [McClay] begins at the beginning—the archaeological evidence of our aboriginal inhabitants—and like most American histories, McClay’s tends to pass a little quickly over the first century-and-a-half of European settlement. But this is a minor complaint. His description of America on the eve of revolution is perceptive and succinct, and capacious as well. The reader never doubts the author’s perspective on the colonists’ revolt, or British government in America, but he tells the story with illuminating clarity and, above all, fair-mindedness. The answer to ignorance is not indoctrination but knowledge.

This virtue in the writing of history is not necessarily self-evident. The American Revolution, like any such episode, was a complicated matter, reaching back in history and forward in effect; and both sides—one is tempted to say all sides—were benighted and heroic, generous and arbitrary, products of their various places and time. George Washington was not without his flaws, and the Loyalists were not without their reasons. McClay sets all this out in crisp detail, balancing his judgment in conjunction with the evidence, flattering his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Which is what distinguishes this from other history texts. The present sits not in judgment but inquiry. And to the extent that we can understand people and events in circumstances far removed from our own experience, the past is revealed in Land of Hope to the present, without prejudice. The dramas and their actors—the drafting of the Constitution, Andrew Jackson, westward expansion, John C. Calhoun, the Mexican War, Samuel Gompers, women’s suffrage, Woodrow Wilson, the Great Crash, Ronald Reagan—are given the chance to speak for themselves in explaining themselves to modern sensibilities.

This is especially useful in contending with subjects—slavery and its relative significance in national life, the Civil War and its aftermath, the condition of African Americans in their own country—that routinely disrupt the historical profession, and are just as routinely distorted by ideology. This is no small matter, and no small achievement. McClay’s skill in furnishing context to emotion, in introducing modern presumption to past evidence, puts the history of the American republic in a new light by revealing its inward and outward complexity. This makes Land of Hope important, compelling, essential reading.

“Nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope,” he writes, “a sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word about them, that we can never settle for that.” I hope he’s right.

Land of Hope sounds like a must-read. Full review is here. Amazon listing is here.

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