Oppose Censoring the Internet

 The government wants to control access to the Internet. This is a very bad idea, opposed to all the principles it was founded on. 

https://gizmodo.com/trump-wants-to-build-a-wall-around-the-internet-how-wo-1844691997

Russia is Expert at Online Disinformation

At her Thursday keynote, Stanford Internet Observatory's research manager Renee DiResta explained how Russian military intelligence – the GRU – and the private Internet Research Agency (IRA) were putting the likes of China to shame. Security companies and government agencies have good reason to move their focus from Beijing to Moscow, she warned.

The basic methods of hacking public opinion are fairly simple, DiResta explained. Fake accounts generate content and spam it out on social media to amplify the message. If enough real people pick up and the posts go viral the mainstream media kicks in and amplifies the desired message still further.

In Russia's case, it spreads divisive material, stolen information, and fake news in an attempt to turn Americans against each other, sour civil society, sow doubt, and create distractions, leaving people unsure of what's really going on. This worked. In China's case, it tried to make people like China. This didn't work.

https://www.blackhat.com/us-20/briefings/schedule/#hacking-public-opinion-21289

What You Experience Could Impact Your Offspring

Based on this article in Nature: In 1864, nearing the end of the US Civil War, conditions in the Confederate prisoner of war camps were at their worst, with overcrowding in some camps that Union Army soldier (prisoner) death rates soared. For survivors, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life -- returning to society with impaired health, worse job prospects, and shorter life expectancy. Such hardships also had an effect on the prisoners’ children and grandchildren, which appeared to be passed down the male line of families. While their sons and grandsons had not suffered the hardships of the PoW camps -- they suffered higher rates of mortality than the wider population. It appeared the PoWs had passed on some element of their trauma to their children.

Your experiences during your lifetime – particularly traumatic ones – would have a very real impact on your family for generations to come. There are a growing number of studies that support the idea that the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics. For the PoWs in the Confederate camps, these epigenetic changes were a result of the extreme overcrowding, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The men had to survive on small rations of corn, and many died from diarrhoea and scurvy. “There is this period of intense starvation,” says study author Dora Costa, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

For a long while we have understood that child abuse, for example, is very often passed from one generation to another. And as to how far back some of these cycles of abuse go is hard to determine. There are many cases of a person who was abused themselves -- and they also know what it feels like -- yet, they repeat to another what was done to them. This suggests in some cases a human being appears to have no control over their actions.

Read more here...

From SlashDot: “It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge:

Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the school, with an added dose of facial recognition software at the entrances to make sure that the right student is wearing the right outfit (so you can't just have your friend, say, wear an extra shirt while you go off and play hooky). Try to leave during school hours? An alarm will go off.... 

There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.