NEWS EDITION for late October 2018.

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LATE UPDATE, Monday morning: this edition's news item # 6, the expose of Facebook's predatory business model and how it damages democracy and erases privacy, is our main feature story. It is TIMELY, before tonight's two-part "Frontline" airs nationwide on PBS. We have replaced our as-published version of the story with the later version that ran in Monday morning's "L.A. Progressive." If you read it at their link, you'll get the art and a larger-font, for a nicely-titled read.

IT ALSO LETS YOU FORWARD A LINK TO JUST THAT ONE FEATURE STORY! Or just stick around and scroll-down in this edition.

Link is:
https://www.laprogressive.com/pbs-examines-facebook/
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EVENTS for the weekend and beyond are in a separate edition, also published today (Oct 27, 2018).

Here's the NEWS ("The News of the non-Trumpcentric universe" (c) 2018)

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First, the Guide stands with our fellow citizens of our nation and the world in joining in sorrow and mourning with the American Jewish community following the killing this morning of eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA. Never, when such a thing happens, can we allow ourselves to say, "Another one. Another gun nut filled with hatred and intolerance, with extremist ideas, another one, has committed a massacre of the innocent." Because making it generic numbs us to what it is, numbs us to the horror, numbs us to the shock and bewilderment of survivors and the families and loved ones of the dead. And we must never allow ourselves to become conditioned that "this happens." It need not happen, if we will force our politicians to listen to the high school students who survived Parkland. It is a national disgrace that our politics are accepting of gun lobby money and responsive to the desire of weapons manufacturers to maximize their sales, even to dangerously intolerant extremists, regardless of the impact on citizens and society.


LATE ADDITION...

Sun, Oct 28:

2 pm - "INTERFAITH SOLIDARITY MARCH FOR PITTSBURGH" begins from Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills. All are welcome to attend this march, organized in the wake of Saturday's massacre at the Jewish temple in Pittsburgh.


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# 1 news item...





15th ANNUAL "IAMA" -- INTERNATIONAL ACOUSTIC MUSIC AWARDS -- NOW ACCEPTING ENTRIES





We've told you about  this one in previous years. With a November 9th deadline to enter this year, you can't dawdle.



IAMA is a big deal, sponsored by D’Addario Strings, New Music Weekly, Loggins Promotion, Airplay Access, Aspri Reverb, Sirius XM Radio, Acoustic Café Radio Show, Bandzoogle, MixButton, MusicGateway.com, Kari Estrin Management & Consulting, Sonicbids, and USA Songwriting Competition.



Entering IAMA can get you recognized as a musician / performing artist and for your music.



There are many awards categories, including Best Male Artist, Best Female Artist, Best Group, and more.



Winning artists appear on a compilation CD circulated within the music industry and for broadcast and web radio airplay -- allowing the contest to assert "Winning artists will receive radio airplay," as well as "Gain music industry exposure."



It's easy to enter online or by mail.



Those who enter promptly can still get featured among their "Artists of the Month."



Online entries can be made with your mp3 file, OR with the URL of something you've already posted to YouTube or SoundCloud. That can be done at:



https://online.songwriting.net/iama



Full info, including how to enter by mail, and more, is at:



https://inacoustic.com/enter-here/



DEADLINE: Enter by November 9th or earlier.



We'll bring you word on who wins the 15th annual IAMA -- International Acoustic Music Awards. But why be a spectator? If you're a music-maker seeking a broader audience, why not enter?





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# 2 news item...





NEW ACOUSTIC RADIO PODCAST EPISODE JUST RELEASED BY IAMA





Featuring recent and past winners of IAMA -- the International Acoustic Music Awards -- podcast includes performances by Kevin Fisher, Bertie Higgins, Meghan Trainor, Tom Chapin, Mermaids Exist, and more. That newest music podcast has just been released by IAMA. (See the news feature above if you don't know what IAMA is.)



You can listen to -- or download -- the radio program and hear the award-winning performances by all these artists and bands, at:



https://inacoustic.com/iama-2018-podcast/





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# 3 news item...





"GLOBAL RECORDING ARTISTS" INTEGRATES SOCIAL MEDIA IN A CROSS-PLATFORM GROUP





The concept of "being on a label" has gone through so many evolutions and revolutions that many artists find it irrelevant to their careers. Still, others lament the crushing amounts of time required to sustain all those logistics and non-creative details and boring business aspects.



That's opened the door to an octopus of "services" that often prove to be more tentacle than service, from online music listening and distribution to tour and booking support.



Enter Global Recording Artists and its alter-ego, GRAgroup. At least part of their concept is distribution of cross-platform e-newsletters and promo to fans, journalists, and generally within the industry. Get something from them and you'll see graphics with blurbs and links to Facebook, Twitter, or other places where their artists have music available.



A good place to dip in for a sample is:



https://globalrecordingartists.fanbridge.com/campaigns/show.php?id=1480559&src=facebook



Now, you already know that we, at the Guide, are NOT advocates for the social media giants because of their invasive spyware and wholly predatory practices that sustain business models that make them richer than God. That said, we do recognize that most people have no problem joining the lemmings for the interaction they find beneficial, so we do not ignore that aspect of music presences in the cyber realm.



Global Recording Artists web presence enables multi-artist areas that provide cross-platform musical bazaars, which you can narrow with selectable genre categories.



A "new releases" page includes links, for example, for new CDs by John York and Maria Muldaur.



That's at:



http://www.gragroup.com/index.html



Of course, things eventually direct you to pages that allow you to hear and purchase individual CDs.



Examples of the latter range broadly, and include:



Merrell Fankhauser's "Flying To Machupicchu" at:

http://www.gragroup.com/fankhauser.html



Yes, there are folk artists and bands. There are also categories for easy listening, internation, accent records, and spoken word and books.



The full stable of artists and bands in the "folk and rock" category (they combine them) includes:



Allright Family Band

Anton Tsygankov

Big Brother & The Holding Co

Bill Mumy

Breath of Fire

Buffy Ford Stewart

Chris Darrow

Craig Caffall

Crawfish of Love

Dave Getz

David Peel and the Lower East Side

Djin Aquarian

Duncan Faure

Father Yod And The Sprit of 76

Flanelhed

Frost

Gail Muldrow

Hangmans Daughter

J. Jaffe

Jerry Burgan

John York

Karl Green Band

Ken Petersen

Kim Fowley

Linda Imperial

Maria Muldaur

Merrell Fankhauser

Nirvana

Normal Bean Band

Patrick Campbell-Lyons

Peter Daltrey

Redline

Sal Valentino

Sky Sunlight Saxon

The Seeds

The Standells

Sleepyard

Strawberry Alarm Clock

Sweet Jam

Tamarind

Tim Garon

Vigilance

We Five

Yahowha 13



It's a fun place to poke around, and you can sign-up for their free newsletter that brings those clickable oases of music across the spectrum of social media sites.





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# 4 news item...





ANN WILSON TO GUEST DJ ON SIRIUS XM'S "TOM PETTY RADIO"



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Her version of Petty's "LUNA" is released as latest track from her "Immortal" album, which has already produced two top-ten hits

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You probably know we've often celebrated the pivotal ACOUSTIC role of HEART. That's the ostensibly rock band led by sisters ANN & NANCY WILSON, since way back in the pre-disco seventies. Anyone who has no idea what we're talking about, hit YouTube or mom's old stack of vinyl for tracks from "Dreamboat Annie." Your musical world will expand exponentially beyond the acoustic "Stairway to Heaven" and James Taylor's and Linda Ronstadt's acoustic chart-toppers of that period.



Point is, music is a continuum, and the best artists are constantly seeking either perfection within their genre or new avenues of expression, or both. Along the way, their own celebrations of the influences of other artists is fulfilling for everyone, artist and fan alike.



In stepping-in to guest DJ on "Tom Petty Radio," ANN WILSON brings more than serendipitous timing to release her cover of Tom Petty's "Luna." It's the newest song from her critically acclaimed "IMMORTAL" album (on BMG), and she'll play the track alongside some of her favorite Petty songs, like "Room at the Top" and "A Woman in Love," among others.



The concept of "IMMORTAL" is poignant. It features 10 musically diverse tracks that pay tribute to some of Ann's influences and friends -- specifically, to those who've recently passed. All are easily among those whose music poignantly lives on for all of us.



Other highlights from the album include the Eagles' "Life In The Fast Lane," in honor of Glenn Frey, and Cream's "Politician," in honor of Jack Bruce, both of which made the Top Ten of the Mediabase "Classic Rock Tracks" chart.



Ann tells us, "'Luna' is perhaps my favorite Petty song; it's simple, romantic and aching."



She continues, more descriptively:



"The words say, 'Luna come to me tonight...I am a prisoner.' Speaking directly to the moon, as romantics will, there is a desire to be free in the moon's metaphysical power. 'Free' from what or whom? Though it's only reflected light, the soul of the moon has inspired countless lovers, dreamers and existentialists for time immemorial. This song is a classic and I have reimagined it in a sultry, unhurried, southern mood with Warren Haynes on guitar as the voice of the moon."



You'll get several chances to catch Ann's guest DJ session. That's especially good news, since it premieres Monday, November 5 at 5 am (Pacific). It gets its first repeat that day at 1 pm (PT).



All broadcasts are on SiriusXM's "Tom Petty Radio" via satellite on channel 31 and through the SiriusXM app on smartphones and other connected devices, as well as online.



The guest DJ session will rebroadcast throughout the week on SiriusXM's "Tom Petty Radio," the channel that musically celebrates that artist's legendary career, including his solos and collaborations  as well as music from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.



Here are all the repeat times, US Pacific Time (watch for changes from Daylight to Standard time when that kicks-in):



Mon, Nov 5, 5 am & 1 pm

Tue, Nov 6, 7 am & 5 pm

Wed, Nov 7, 7 pm

Thu, Nov 8, 9 am

Fri, Nov 9, Noon & 10 pm

Sat, Nov 10, 10 am

Sun, Nov 11, 3 pm





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# 5 news item...SCIENCE CORNER...





LONG STREAMING CLOUD ON MARS -- WHAT DOES IT MEAN?





We've all come to understand that "Major Tom" is no longer David Bowie's everyman astronaut. These days it's a robot. Cold, inhuman, but able to awkwardly and slowly -- ever so slowly -- perform some good science and send back evidence of distant discoveries.



The latest?



A 1500 km-long cloud is streaming westward from atop a 20-km-high Martian volcano. That's wholly unexpected on a planet that's had almost no atmosphere for millions of years.



To be properly impressed, go have a look at Europe's ESA "Mars Express" image, released Oct. 25th. It's just one in a series the spacecraft has sent back as it nears the Red Planet:



http://m.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2018/10/elongated_cloud_on_mars/17836348-1-eng-GB/Elongated_cloud_on_Mars_article_mob.jpg



Since Sep. 13 2018, the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board ESA’s "Mars Express" has been observing the evolution of this curious cloud formation. It appears regularly in the vicinity of the 20 km-high Arsia Mons volcano, close to the planet’s equator.



In units you know, that 20 km mountain is 65,600+ feet high, more than twice as high as Mt. Everest. The cloud, as seen in today's VMC image (taken Oct. 10) is the obvious and prominent white, elongated feature.



The 1,500 km-long cloud measures 932 miles.



For all you wannabe Martian geographers, a view of the region with human-applied labels is provided by ESA at:  



http://m.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/10/Elongated_cloud_on_Mars_annotated



Nearby Olympus Mons, barely visible in the shadow of night, is the largest and highest volcano in the Solar System. All these more-o-less conical peaks are in the Tharsis region. It's home to all the giant volcanoes on Mars -- sort of like the volcano-dotted US Pacific Northwest on steroids. Mountains on Mars can get so big because the planet is a third the size of Earth, so it has lesser gravity.



It's our planet's gravity that restricts Earth's mountains to a maximum of about 30,000 ft. They're simply squashed back down by gravity if tectonic forces try to make them higher. Thus, Mt. Everest is 29,029 ft. high and can't grow much more -- despite the colossal collision of India with the bottom of Asia that continues to ripple things upward from ancient sea floors into the high Himalyas, in the biggest fender-bender imaginable.



Okay, all that tectonic tutelage is fine. To think, tours of the highest peaks on two planets without leaving the comfy chair. But tagging along for a ride to Mars would be much better. Wanna go? (Virtually, anyway.)



You can play Major Tom and follow the development of this big Martian cloud by keeping up with the daily images sent from the Visual Monitoring Camera on Mars Express. Your ticket to ride is at:



https://www.flickr.com/photos/esa_marswebcam/





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# 6 news item...

OUR FEATURE THIS WEEK



*** Saturday's original edition has been replaced by the version that ran in Monday morning's "L.A. Progressive." If you read it at their link, you'll get the art and a larger-font, for a nicely-titled read. Or, since you're here, stick around. Text content is the same.

Link is: https://www.laprogressive.com/pbs-examines-facebook/


PBS EXAMINES FACEBOOK, MONDAY & TUESDAY NIGHTS -- TIME FOR A HARD LOOK


By Larry Wines

A two-part PBS "Frontline" examination, "The Facebook Dilemma," will examine the growing gulf between the richest web predators, their widespread exploitation of everyone and everything, and public perception and expectation of privacy and democracy. Part 1 airs Monday, 9-10 pm, and Part 2 follows Tuesday, 10-11 pm. In L.A., both will be on KOCE, aka PBS SoCal.

But just where will they go with this?

The story of Facebook began as a way to engage in interactive email with several people at once. As its capability expanded beyond that, it left MySpace in the digital dust. In no time, its popularity increased exponentially. At first, it seemed the theoretical monetary worth of social media was consistent with previous tech bubbles, and the only worry was it would collapse and you'd lose your circle of "friends" you had never actually met.

It expanded beyond anything anyone imagined. It became powerful. Powerful in ways that defied the ability of its vast population of users to accept. Everyone was on Facebook, and no one was ready to see anything malevolent about it. That empowered it all the more.

But power brings hubris. Being drunk on power ultimately brings a painful hangover of hubris.

Facebook experienced that in a dramatic economic fall that followed a shocking revelation about its predatory business model. Yet, almost immediately, it seemed all was forgotten, even forgiven, about that fall from grace. It spoke to a less quantifiable power wielded by the social media giant.

IS REGULATION COMING?

It remains to be seen if fits and starts of Congressional calls for accountability will reestablish privacy. If you've heard the questions posed in hearings when the heads of tech giants have testified, you know what boobs our lawmakers are when it comes to even a basic ability to comprehend the capability of the internet.

Given what we know about Facebook, that should raise acute concern whether the cyber age will inflict its profitable paradigm of predictive analytics on every aspect of our lives, structuring every scrap of news to produce a desired outcome.

Silicon Valley execs publicly brag about knowing what you want before you know you want it. Sometimes they add the boast of being able to make you believe it was your idea to want (or "need") it in the first place, even when it didn't exist until they created it to make you want it.

From support for the next war to disposable trendy fashion, social media embodies an unholy alliance of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Silicone Valley, and the military-industrial-cybersecurity complex. It functions to empower those who profit from tastemaking, trendsetting, and building political characterizations. And building support for or opposition to anything where a buck can be made. It often functions amorally to produce trends at the level of slogans and their modern counterpart, social media memes disseminated in cyber echo chambers.

CONSEQUENCES OF A RUNAWAY MONEY MACHINE

Let's do a reality check. The entire premise of where social media has gone is ridiculous. Facebook -- a corporation that makes nothing, in terms of manufacturing or production -- has a theoretical monetary worth that exceeds the biggest manufacturers in the world. So, a web giant based on supplying nothing but addictive echo chambers creates soapboxes and town halls as ethereal constructs. That, in turn, validates individual beliefs that are, most often, half-baked and not dependent on facts. And the dissemination of such garbage is universally accepted as the anxiously anticipated content of undeniably influential "news feeds" of millions of people.

It's "News" that is never subjected to the scrutiny of the most basic tests of journalism. Yet its reach and power to persuade or gain unquestioned acceptance is without match since Guttenberg brought reuseable type to the printing press.

Moreover, that somehow gets the entire world to give our social cyber validator access to all our private information. And how it does that seems to be as simple as manipulating a universal and quite pathetic human need to find validation. If that occurred by reasoned intellectual exchange, a different dialog might be possible. But it's done by having others identify and agree with our sources of frustration, and our visceral impulses for what ought to be done about them, and therein to unleash our half-baked opinions. About everything.

Desire to partake in this phenomenon has been able to keep anyone from noticing (or at least caring) that Facebook is, in effect, a friendly-faced predator. One that, more than any other business in the world, is actively hunting, capturing, and selling everything it knows about you.

Let's be clear about that: installing Facebook in any of your devices introduces an infestation of spyware, and exempts it from being identified by your anti-malware protection program. Installing Facebook gives it access to your non-Facebook email and everything else you read, write, browse, access, create, photograph, manage, share, communicate, or keep in storage. Facebook is the most effective intelligence agency the world has ever seen, and it gives itself real-time updates on all your whims, beliefs, preferences, changing attitudes, outrages du jour, susceptibility to media narratives, characterizations of events, and turns of phrase. It has created wholly unprecedented capability to meticulously analyze your every thought and attitude -- and provides an all-inclusive data set for any in-house or client analyst to know how to influence and change all of them.

It does those things quite purposefully, to profitably enable other predators to exploit all your hidden weaknesses. Often that's to keep your credit cards maxed-out in support of runaway consumerism that mindlessly depletes the planet's resources. All while making itself and its infectious mob of exploiters and predators richer than anyone who actually makes anything.

There's another aspect entirely. It is the ability for individuals with extreme viewpoints to monetize their presences with their rants, even as social media helps them find and build susceptible audience. While enjoying the smokescreen of "somebody else's fault" for the outcome of the 2016 election, Facebook has laughed all the way to the bank about the distraction of the two-dozen overseas purchasers of political ads during the 2016 US election cycle. That small-change focus of attention has protected commercialized social media from scrutiny over the millions of exploitable user accounts marketable for extreme ideology.

Facebook's business model facilitates fact-free zones to house cyber public squares for ignorant intolerance and energizing hate groups; it profitably drives audience to them; and it profitably markets them to its other customers.

DECRYPTING THE MATRIX

We hope these questions will be examined as central topics in the two-part PBS "Frontline" examination, "The Facebook Dilemma." But PBS hasn't been independent since Congress replaced public funding with corporate underwriting. We know that PBS and NPR have long been subject to protectionist vetting of content by current and prospective corporate underwriter-sponsors.

Wherever two hours of "Frontline" goes, all this bears far more scrutiny. Most likely, that will only come from concerted objective, take-no-prisoners, independent journalism.

The voices of journalists who actually are independent are gaining broader audiences across the spectrum of neglected and obfuscated topics. But the cadre of objective fact-miners still have miniscule impact and tiny investigative resources compared to the narratives of corporate mainstream media. And increasingly we see that "independent" may well be a cover for tribal. So every news consumer must look to whose nest is getting feathered and whose ox is getting gored.

I was among the first journalists to research and report an expose on Facebook nearly four years ago, back in 2015. In a two-part piece, I revealed that the social media giant's business model is based on marketing millions of snippets of purloined data and updates from continuously active surveillance -- all surveiled, collected, crunched, baked, distilled and compiled into sophisticated profiles and sold by subscription to myriad forms of corporate predators, political interests, and government "customers."

When I first revealed that Facebook was running a commercial intelligence agency engaged in universal spying on its users, there was immediate push back. Facebook blocked anyone from seeing the pages where the story appeared. They simultaneously banned me from their platform-- which is something I wear as a badge of honor.

DO ADDICTS PROTECT THEIR PUSHER?

That wasn't all. There was unexpected pushback. A large measure of resentment came from those addicted to Facebook. Revealing their cyber opiod was, it seems, regarded as a threat to maintaining their habit. Relatively few found the facts disturbing. Mostly, the hordes responded with either ridicule or resentment -- until Facebook erased all record that any such subject or commentary had ever existed.

Then life went on, disturbance forgotten, for those who check their Facebook pages every nine minutes to verify their validity as chief influencer of their own echo chamber.

We've learned since then that Facebook continually fine-tunes its propensity for addiction. It is cynically insidious. It preys on lizard-brain impulses and the most primal emotions to profitably create reinforcement loops.

They have perfected the message: Go back to Facebook for your fresh dose of validation. Everything else in life may be challenging and require you to tolerate uncooperative presences, annoying entities, disagreeable bosses, banal employees and blabby coworkers, along with unhelpful help-line voices, or people-in-the-way, in general.

But Facebook is always there, instantly ready to receive your rant and provide "friends" for the way you see things. "Friends" you'll never actually meet. But who will tell you you're brilliantly right and especially deserving of "likes!!!" with three exclamation points. "Friends" chosen by metadata analysis to be predisposed to the same half-baked conclusions at the center of your pet peeves.

Facebook provides a universe of "friends" who can be relied upon to tell you how right you are about, well, everything. Which makes you seek, and then need, more of the same fulfilling validation. Continuously.

Little is left to chance -- constantly adjusted research enables the model of addiction to self-correct. It adjusts like a cross between an amoeba and a chameleon, producing the right endorphins for a fierce happiness that needs to be fortified and reinforced by another dose, another Facebook experience.

God help anyone who threatens that. A Facebook addict is no different than any other addict when it comes to protecting the supplier of the euphoric experience.

It seems the unquestionable benevelonce of Big Brother from Orwell's "1984" -- the untouchable but essential presence who is too needed to be impersonal, who must know-all to protect you and keep you happy -- is just a few decades late.

Along the way we have discovered something George Orwell didn't anticipate: vehement tribalism is created and reinforced at the primal level. It's a function of the fragmentation of society into emphatic echo chambers that addictively validate their cyber dwellers as the only ones who can possibly be right, while anyone not in adherence is stupid or evil or both.

Perhaps that should have been predictable, given the crazy loyalties to college and professional sports. It tells a lot -- the easy adoption of the sense of "we" when talking about an athletic team of which the seeming participant is not a member. After all, hasn't the political bandwagon effect been around longer than the tailgate party in the stadium parking lot? And aren't both of them products of the need "to belong" and to see oneself as an essential part, a centrally indispensable figure, in -- something?

Whether playing a role that's truly influential, or indulging one as ethereal and impermanent as morning dew (beyond the hundreds of dollars spent on official team fan swag) people are responsive to and motivated by the fantasy that they are influential and their unique ideas matter. Even if an appropriate metaphor for the uniqueness of their creativity is the forty-dollar team shirt they bought -- with somebody else's name plastered across the back. Or becoming important by plastering a van with stickers to power a social media fantasy world of polarized political heroes and villains and real homemade bombs.

Little in the past year has been fortunate for our society. But there has been a growing presence of sources of disclosure of power-and-money alliances and their corrosive, disruptive, and destructive influences.

Along the way, one disclosure came as an incredible irony -- because it came from Facebook itself, through its own hubris. And we will watch "Frontline" with interest to see how they present this part of the story.

HOW FACEBOOK OUTED ITSELF

What finally produced widespread public interest in the hidden and predatory world of Facebook was its own effort to "out" one of its predatory clients. It came not from whistle-blowing to warn the public that someone was stealing your stuff. It came from Facebook yelling that a data thief was not sharing enough of the wealth for the data he got from Facebook.

That became a "limited hang out" disclosure that occasioned a particular kind of press characterization. It escaped mainstream media identification for the real nature and magnitude of what it was.

Facebook slut-shamed Cambridge Analytica. That predator of data / personal information was outed by Facebook for profitably exploiting Facebook users' personal data, beyond what it had paid Facebook to use. It seems the social media behemoth believed the public would take Facebook's side and help it to inflict costly crippling damage on the data-reselling customer it was branding as a freeloader.

Instead, there was a widespread if transitory gasp in response to collective shock of another kind altogether. It was the shock of some of the masses at having been "had," because Facebook had given itself access to all of everyone's private information.

ALL of it.

Just because you gave them the keys to your cyber home, cyber garage, cyber car, cyber storage space, cyber vacation home, cyber little black book and intimate diary, bank records, purchase history, fetishes, favorite positions as verified by your online cameras, everything you buy or peruse online, and all of your non-Facebook email messages, to and from anybody about anything -- it was, by god, an unwarranted invasion.

It was hard to tell which was more unbelievable -- Facebook's expectation that the world would be on their side when then pointed and yelled at the kid that stole their stolen lunch money, or the abject failure of mainstream media to report the full scope and magnitude of Facebook's immeasurable armada filled with pirated treasure.

HOW THE DEFENSE DEPARTMENT FUNDED FACEBOOK

I already knew that Facebook was laying claim to a right to profitably exploit anything and everything that is in any way connected to its users. That was from my own reporting nearly four years ago -- the reporting that got my banished from their platform.

Yet with all that's READILY available out there -- starting with Facebook's own claim of proprietary rights in its encyclopedic user agreement -- mainstream media has never reported the most salient information, the stuff that changes the way Facebook should be seen by its user-subject-datamines / marketing-crash-test-dummies / psychologically-conditioned-into-impulsive-consumers-of-anything-anybody-is-determined-to-sell / addicts, and how all this came to be in the first place.

That is the tale of how nerdy Mark Zuckerberg -- the kid who wanted to run a computer hookup operation at Harvard so he could get laid -- was able to go big-time with surveiling, compiling, analyzing, and selling EVERYBODY'S personal information, and in so doing, make himself a gazillionaire. His facilitating benefactor was DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

WHEN GOVERNMENT "PRIVATIZES" ITS FUNCTIONS (AND DESIRES)

That came to pass because the federal government was prohibited in a raft of post-Watergate laws from setting itself up with a massive mainframe computer that could know everything about everybody. Which is exactly why the Defense Department and US intelligence agencies made sure computing went into private, commercial hands. Because nothing prevents government from being a customer of the private sector it sets-up to, you guessed it, know everything about everybody.

Why all this is toxic to democracy and incompatible with individual rights is immediately obvious. Given Facebook's developed capacity to produce public perceptions and make those it influences believe they are leaders with original thoughts, it isn't a reach to know how support for the next war can be built. Or how anyone rich enough to buy everything necessary to galvanize public opinion can become a successful office-seeking politician. Or how any expenditure of public funds can be popularly demanded or denied.

All based on manipulated perceptions.

Right now, Facebook knows more about manipulating individual and group wants and desires, dislikes and revulsions, than any entity in human history.

There is a way to stop this. Since my experience four years ago, I have continued to take particular interest in latter-day efforts to disclose nefarious influences and to stop them.

A WAY TO GET OUR PRIVACY BACK AND STILL BE "SOCIAL"

We can all become advocates for a wholly new structure for Social Media, based on Open Source programming and operated as nonprofit user co-ops. All questions of data mining and availability of any user data, individual factoids or metadata compilations, would be wholly decided by the user co-op itself.

Copyrights on all content would then protect everything from illegal raiders, exploiters and predators. And new laws -- US, EU (which has already taken the lead) and other international bodies -- should proscribe harshly expensive penalties for violators, with cyber-ban "e-death sentences" able to get rid of predators, for good.

Along the way, we must reestablish Net Neutrality to assure equal-opportunity access to all. We must prohibit corporate gatekeepers from running the internet as a toll road that's too expensive for anyone but themselves. And assure they cannot make intrusive access to our devices and data a condition of allowing us to get on the web. Think of that like figuratively demanding to plant a microphone in the car to allow us to get on the information superhighway.

These proposals are consistent with the values of the web as a cross between a post office and a public library. Public access to, with scrupulous protection of, private messaging and information, and universal access to knowledge and information without exploitation. If content providers need to be paid for access to what they provide, that must not allow them to infest us with their monitoring presence, either.

Pretty simplistic solution. Certainly a different vision than the reality we face today.

The two-part PBS "Frontline" examination of Facebook airs over two nights, Monday and Tuesday. Schedule is at the top.
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FORWARD A LINK TO JUST THIS ONE FEATURE STORY! IT'S...

https://www.laprogressive.com/pbs-examines-facebook/


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That's all for this NEWS edition. Also see today's EVENTS edition.

Stay tuneful!





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We'll be back again soon with music news and more "News of the Non-Trumpcentric Universe." (c)







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LEGALESE, CONTACTING US, 'N SUCH...







Boilerplate? Where's the main pressure gauge? And the firebox?







What "boilerplate"? Who came up with that goofy term for the basic essential informational stuff...



________________________________







Direct to the Guide's current editions /







MOBILE-DEVICE-FRIENDLY







editions load quickly at



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www.acousticamericana.blogspot.com



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CONTACT US -- Post Comments / Send Questions / say Howdy at:







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OR USE THE COMMENTS FUNCTION on the Blogspot site.



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Entire contents copyright © 2018,



Lawrence Wines & Tied to the Tracks.



All rights reserved.



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♪ The ACOUSTIC AMERICANA MUSIC GUIDE endeavors to bring you NEWS – and views of interest to artists everywhere – more specifically to musicians and the creative community and music makers and fans of acoustic and Folk-Americana music. That includes both traditional and innovative forms. From the deepest roots to today’s acoustic renaissance, that’s our beat. We provide a wealth of resources, including a HUGE catalog of acoustic-friendly venues (now undergoing a major update), and inside info on FESTIVALS and select performances in Southern California in venues from the monumentally large to the intimately small and cozy. We cover workshops, conferences, and other events for artists and folks in the music industry, and all kinds o’ things in the world of acoustic and Americana and accessible classical music. From washtub bass to musical spoons to oboe to viola to banjo to squeezebox, from Djangostyle to new-fangled-old-time string band music, from sweet Cajun fiddle to bluegrass and pre-bluegrass Appalachian mountain music to all the swamp water roots of the blues and the bright lights of where the music is headed now.



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The Acoustic Americana Music Guide. Thanks for sittin' a spell. The cyber porch'll be here anytime you come back from the road.







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