Apparently Google is changing their privacy policy to be able to better target ads across their various web site 'properties', including Gmail, YouTube, Maps and their search engine. Probably also their blogs, of which this is one. I haven't looked at the details, so my information is from this article from the Washington Post. The reason I decided to write a short blog post about it is because of this quote:
“There is no way anyone expected this,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group. “There is no way a user can comprehend the implication of Google collecting across platforms for information about your health, political opinions and financial concerns.”
Really? I actually thought they were already doing this, which is one reason why I've started using a different search engine, and in Google's favor at least they're not including their wallet in the sharing. I have to question the discernment of someone who can honestly say 'there is no way anyone expected this'. I fully expected it about 2 years ago.
In addition, you don't have to stay logged in to YouTube all the time if you don't want. Or you can use a different browser for logging in to Google Maps. I realize that many people log in on their mobile devices, so a different browser may not be an option. Share your reactions and ideas in the comments if you'd like.
So it hasn't been any secret on this blog that I support Dr. Ron Paul for President, and also supported him in 2008. A little over 10 years ago I spent a few years researching the U.S. income tax, and I now firmly believe that most Americans don't lawfully owe the tax (especially on their earnings, in which case it is a direct tax and is unconstitutional); and I further believe most politicians are complicit in allowing the deception to continue. And in some cases, not just allowing but encouraging the mis-application of the law where it doesn't apply, all in the name of increased 'revenue'.
Coming to the conclusion that most of what you've been brought up to believe is a lie, was not at all an easy thing to do emotionally. That is what led me to the study of spiritual warfare, which is the topic of my other blog.
So at some point I heard about Ron Paul, but I didn't spend much time looking at him because I thought he was surely just like the rest of them. Then in 2006 I believe, I saw the movie 'America: Freedom to Fascism' and I saw Rep. Paul had a sign on his desk that said 'Don't steal, the government doesn't like competition' (or something very similar) and thought that maybe he wasn't quite like the rest of them. Then I watched an interview on YouTube that he did at Google in 2007, and I liked almost all he had to say. I watched a few more YouTube video's, and read a couple of his speeches, and that's how I became one of his supporters.
However, just before the New Hampshire primary in 2008, the media decided to launch the 'R' bomb (i.e. racist), and used some old newsletters put out under the banner of Ron Paul as 'proof'. I haven't actually read the newsletters, and at the time they were written I was still a Democrat. It was very interesting that this inflammatory 'news' was released with no time for the RP campaign to respond, though it had the intended effect of slowing down his momentum.
In all that I've seen or heard from Doctor Paul, I have not heard anything remotely racist. If I had, I would not be supporting him. However, since this is still something that comes up on occasion, even now, I have read a couple of articles that I wanted to share here.
The first article is titled Why the Beltway Libertarians Are Trying to Smear Ron Paul. It is a long article, with some very interesting information. Apparently some (most? all?) of the quotes from the newsletter were 'cherry-picked', meaning they were chosen for a desired effect but actually incomplete. When I read the quotes mentioned in the article, they don't sound like anything I've ever heard or read from Ron Paul. That makes it easy for me to believe him when he says he didn't write them. Here is one paragraph from the article I particularly liked, and it sums it up pretty well I think:
It’s no mystery, really: Ron Paul is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Beltway fake-“libertarians.” He’s a populist: they suck up to power, he challenges the powers-that-be; they go along to get along – he has never gone along with the conventional wisdom as defined by the arbiters of political correctness, Left and Right. And most of all, he’s an avowed enemy of the neoconservatives, whom he constantly names as the main danger to peace and liberty – while the Beltway’s tame “libertarians” are in bed with them, often literally as well as figuratively.
The second article is on the OpEd News site, also from 2008. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that article:
Recently the liberal weekly The New Republic (TNR) published excerpts from a newsletter published under Paul’s name from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The worst of these excerpts are racist, anti-gay, and hateful in tone.
Before examining the offensive material in the Ron Paul newsletters cited by TNR, it should be pointed out that the TNR article wildly over-reaches in its all-out attempt to condemn Paul. TNR uses some genuinely ugly material in the newsletters as a launching pad for a wider set of unjust and unsupported smears. The article was an obvious hit piece, published on the day of the New Hampshire primaries, when Paul’s hopes for a breakthrough vote were high, and without time for Paul to undo the damage. (emphasis added) It is puffed up and padded with innuendo, exaggerations, and unsupported claims.
Immediately responding to the TNR article, Paul said: "The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts. In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. ... For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."
Lastly, I found a couple of YouTube videos I have embedded or linked below that also speak to the issue. Ron Paul: I'm the ANTI-Racist! youtube video (4:28):
I'm editing this post Jan 11, 2012 to add another article that was dated yesterday. The title of the article is What are Blacks to do About Ron Paul? I think it's a very good article.
