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Although only a few days into this new year many more important concerns appear to surfacing. These newly surfacing concerns might just possibly be worthy of our time and attention. We might want to inquire into those rather than allowing ourselves to be diverted with drivel about “swamp draining”, “what’s happening in the 8th Sphere”, “the Titanic and its twin ship”, “tracking along with the topics” during vid-chat, and who will or will not be speaking at Contact in the Desert (reg. trademark – I’m sure). Is it possible that events like this are only manufactured “Bread and Circuses” for the “Esoterically Interested Crowd” and in their own unique way contribute to the already growing, and incredibly dangerous, phenomenon of Epistemic Depletion and Collapse … possibly? …
If the software being “reported” on below (the word reported is in quotes here because this is from the NY Times, unfortunately, to say “as reported in the Times” is to say no more than ” as reported in the National Enquirer”, hence the quotation marks) is anywhere near true then this is not fear p_ _n but reality. If so, then it seems slightly more important to attend to such realities than to pay some exorbitant amount of money to yet again hear Nick “one trick pony” Pope (in all fairness “OTP” can be applied to many “performers” in Esoteric Entertainment circles – wish I had thought of that phrase before a media production company in Colorado did) rave on for “transparency” and “disclosure” while being quite careful not to violate his “secrecy oath”.
H. L. Mencken might have been right when he warned in Notes on Democracy of the dangers of popular ignorance and that American politics would be damaged most by its embrace of the fiction of an informed “people”. Even though I am not a person particularly given to making New Year’s Resolutions I have in fact made up a short list this year. On the list is to make a more conscious effort to distinguish what would contribute to my being genuinely informed rather than being diverted into simply being entertained under the guise of being informed.
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The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

Kashmir Hill
Jan. 18, 2020

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Full article at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html