For this story, John Woodrow Cox interviewed more than 40 farmers across the country. He and photographer Matt McClain reported from Colorado while Sarah Blaskey talked to more than two dozen employees at the U.S. Agriculture Department and reviewed hundreds of documents and records that revealed the extent of the cuts and freezes.
June 21, 2025 at 6:05 a.m. EDT

"The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money."

wapo.st/4liDorF

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/22/capitalism-is-feeding-the-far-right-in-east-and-west-europe/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/nyregion/voting-primary-nyc-heat.html

kevinboone.me/lineageos-degoog…

In an earlier article I wrote about my attempts to remove all trace of Google from my life. Part of that process, which is still ongoing, was to install Lineage OS on all my Android cellphones and tablets, replacing the original, vendor firmware. Doing this removes the egregious Google Play Services although, of course, this severely limits my ability to run Android apps. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make, although not without some regrets.

I’ve subsequently learned that hard-core de-Googlers eschew Lineage OS, because it remains too close to the stock configuration of the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) on which it is based. There are certainly smartphone ROMs, like GrapheneOS, that are even more Google-free.

But I’ve grown to like Lineage. I don’t know what kind of future it has, but it works well for me, and it’s easy – as easy as can be expected – to install on all the devices I own. Installing and setting up Lineage is fiddly enough; I don’t want to make my life even more complicated, if I don’t have to.

Those of us who are divorcing Google worry most, I think, about Google’s intrusive data collection. Of course, Google is by no means the only business that engages in such practices – “surveillance capitalism” is big business. But Google presents a unique challenge because, not only does it collect a lot of data, it has a lot of clever ways to process it, and find connections between disparate data elements. Before my Google separation, it always amazed me how Google seemed to know where I was all the time, even with location services disabled on my smartphone. And Google’s advertisers seem to know what I’ve been shopping for, even when I’ve been doing my shopping in person at retail outlets. How Google does this, I don’t know; but I do want to reduce their opportunities to do so.

So I need to know what information my cellphone is sending to Google, even having removed all proprietary Google stuff.

I have to point out that I’m not talking about additional, 3rd-party apps that I might have installed on a Lineage OS device – all apps have the potential to create privacy problems, but I’m free not to use them. Here I’m just thinking about the platform itself.

Note
I run Lineage with no Google apps or services of any kind. If you do run Google services, you have to accept that absolutely everything you do with an Android device will be known to Google. There’s simply no point worrying about the trivial privacy breaches in this article – that would be like taking a cyanide pill and then worrying about your ingrown toenail.

In this article I’ll be describing various data leaks of which Lineage OS has frequently been accused, reporting which ones seem still to be present, and suggesting (well, guessing) how serious they might be.

The captive portal test

“Captive portals” are often found in hotels and entertainment venues. In a captive portal, all Internet traffic gets directed to the venue’s network filter, which ensures that the user has paid for a service or, at least, consented to some usage agreement.

Android performs a captive portal test every time the device enables a network connection. This test is a simple HTTP or HTTPS request on some publicly-accessible webserver. The request is expected to return a success (2XX) code if the server is reachable. In a captive portal, the service-providing organization will capture the HTTP(S) request, and return a redirection code to its own webserver. This server will provide a web page with further instructions.

By default Lineage OS uses Google’s webservers for the captive portal test. This means that Google knows every time a device raises a network connection.

Is this a problem? Google doesn’t get to find out anything except the IP number of the device, some limited information about the type of device, and the time of day. I’ve looked at the source code, and I don’t see any information other than this being sent – the code just uses the standard Java HTTP support to make the request. It’s plausible that, with a wide-area connection, the carrier might add additional information to the request, and Google might be able to infer your location from the IP number.

If you consider this to be too much of a risk, you can change the captive portal connectivity checker. Lineage provides no simple interface for this, but you can do it at the command line (e.g., by running a terminal app, or adb shell). You don’t need to root the phone to do this.

$ settings put global captive_portal_http_url http://my_server 
$ settings put global captive_portal_https_url https://my_server 

On the whole, I regard this (captive portal check) a relatively harmless breach of privacy. It isn’t telling Google anything they’re not going to find out about in other ways.

DNS

Every time you use a hostname to identify a remote server, there’s going to be a DNS lookup. This lookup translates the hostname into a numeric ID for use with the TCP/IP protocol.

Internet service providers and mobile carriers operate DNS servers, but so does Google. DNS is potentially a privacy problem because the DNS server gets to learn every site you visit. It won’t see the actual URL of a web request – just the hostname. Still, that’s enough information to be concerned about. But it’s worth thinking about who the “you” is in “every site you visit”. To track you, personally, as an individual, the DNS server needs a way to relate your IP number to something that identifies you. There’s no definitive way for Google (or anybody) to do that; but there are statistical methods that can be very effective. They are particularly effective if you happen to use Google’s other services, because these will link a small number of personal Google accounts to an IP number.

Is this a problem for Lineage OS? While it might have been in the past, I don’t think Lineage now uses Google’s DNS, except perhaps as a fallback. Both WiFi and carrier Internet connections are initiated using protocols that can supply a DNS server. On my Lineage devices, I’m sure that these are the DNS servers that are being used. Still, there are references to Google’s DNS server – 8.8.8.8 – in the AOSP source code. So I can’t prove that Google’s DNS will never be used.

If you want, you can supply your own DNS server in the network configuration in the Settings app. But, unless you run your own DNS in the public Internet, you’ll be putting your trust in one mega-corporation or another. I suspect most are less worrying than Google, but perhaps not by much.

By the way – Lineage OS supports encrypted DNS. While that will prevent third-parties from snooping on your DNS traffic – including your mobile carrier or ISP – this won’t protect you from snooping at the DNS server itself. So encrypted DNS is no protection against Google, if you’re using Google’s DNS.

Assisted GPS

It takes a long time for a mobile device to get a robust fix on GPS satellites – a minute in good conditions, or several minutes in a weak signal area. Assisted GPS (A-GPS) primes the satellite fix using environmental data. This data might including a coarse location from a cellular network. With A-GPS, a satellite fix might take only a few seconds.

A-GPS data is processed by a remote server, that has the storage capacity to handle the large amounts of data involved. The main operator of such servers is, again, Google.

What can Google learn about a device using Assisted GPS? As in any Internet operation, it will find the device’s IP number, and it might find the coarse location. The Internet traffic associated with A-GPS can be encrypted but this, again, won’t protect it from Google. To determine the location of a specific individual, Google has to be able to relate the IP number to the individual. As discussed above, that can be done with a reasonable degree of confidence.

On recent Lineage versions, A-GPS is disabled by default. If enabled, it uses Google’s servers – so far as I know there are no widely-available alternatives. I just keep it disabled, and live with the disadvantage of longer GPS start-up times.

Time synchronization, NTP

At one time, Lineage OS used Googles’ time servers to set the time on the device. So far as I know, this is no longer the case – a general pool of NTP servers is used. Even if that were not the case, I can’t worry too much about leaking time synchronizing data.

WebView

I believe that WebView is the most troubling source of privacy concerns for Lineage OS, and the one whose ramifications are the least well-understood.

WebView is a component of Android that renders web pages. Of course, a web browser will do this, but many Android apps and services have a need to render pages without actually being a browser. The ‘captive portal’ support I described above is an example: the device needs to render a page for user to log in or purchase Internet access, even if no web browser is installed.

Lineage OS uses the WebView implementation from the AOSP, which is based on Chromium. Chromium is Google Chrome without the proprietary Google stuff, and it’s undoubtedly less of a privacy concern than Chrome would be. But Chromium, even though it’s open-source, is still primarily a Google product.

There are many known instances where Chromium will provide some user data to Google servers. For example, we know that Chromium downloads lists of ‘unsafe’ websites to support its ‘safe browsing’ feature. This will happen however Chromium is used. When used as a regular web browser, Chromium might send data to Google for its ‘hot word’ detection, for example.

When Chromium is only used to provide a WebView implementation, I’m not convinced that these minor privacy breaches are significant. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Jelly browser that is shipped with Lineage OS is just a wrapper around the Chromium WebView – if you use this browser, you’ll have the same privacy concerns as if you use Chromium itself.

There are a number of Google-free WebView implementations, like Chromite. GrapheneOS uses a WebView implementation called Vanadium, which is essentially a de-Googled Chromium. Installing one of these implementations on Lineage OS is not straightforward, or so it seems to me.

I don’t use Jelly or Chromium itself as a web browser – I install a browser that is not based on Google code, like Firefox. This limits my exposure to Chromium to occasions where WebView is used other than as a browser. In my normal usage, I don’t think there are many of those occasions, so I’m not too worried about WebView.

Nevertheless, it remains a slight concern and, if I could replace it without a lot of effort, I would.

Are we in tinfoil hat territory now?

I don’t like Google knowing so much about me, but I don’t believe Google’s data collection is directly harmful to me. My disapproval of Google’s activities (and I know Google is not the only culprit) is mainly one of principle. I don’t want to be a source of revenue for Google, or to legitimize their behaviour by my own inaction. I don’t want Google to make the Internet more of a hellscape that it currently is.

But I’m not paranoid. I don’t think Google is out to get me, or is in league with people who are. My rejection of Google falls short of doing things that will make my life hugely more difficult.

I am aware, all the same, that I have one foot in tinfoil hat country.

I know a few people – some in my own family – who eschew smartphones because they create time-wasting distractions. I certainly know people who don’t give smartphones to their kids, because of the well-known risks that social media poses to their mental health. But almost nobody avoids Google because they believe, as I do, that the surveillance economy is detrimental to society in the long term. Even those few who do believe this are mostly not willing to take action, because they believe (or convince themselves) that the benefits of a connected world outweigh the costs of a total lack of privacy. For me that’s like understanding the risks of climate change, and yet choosing to run two or three gas-guzzling cars because it’s a half-mile walk to the shops.

The few people who do believe as I do, and are willing to act on their beliefs, tend to be people who also believe that they’re being monitored by the CIA, or that Covid vaccines are implanting mind-control receivers. That’s not a gang that I want to run with.

On the whole, I’m satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google’s data collection. I don’t install or use any Google services, I don’t enable A-GPS, I don’t use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection – like the Internet connectivity check – if I wanted to take the trouble.

I don’t think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google’s data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I’d have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings.

Well, I'm back online after a 4 hour blackout due to the heat in Brooklyn.

I found out that my ISP Optimum had issues with their equipment in Brooklyn due to the heat and humidity set on by this week's weather.

Now I'm worried that things will be really harsh on my equipment in the living room.

Any suggestions on how to keep the modem/router from overheating and causing problems?

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/32115867

By Jonah E. Bromwich
June 22, 2025 Updated 8:10 p.m. ET

The administration argued that he had contributed to the spread of antisemitism through his role in the protests at the university.

But Mr. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, rejected the idea that protesting against Israel is inherently antisemitic.

“I was not doing anything antisemitic,” he said. “I was literally advocating for the right of my people. I was literally advocating for an end of a genocide. I was advocating that the tuition fees that I and other students pay don’t go toward investing in weapons manufacturers. What’s antisemitic about this?”

archive.ph/wip/yMJLn

Peter Link

2025-06-23 01:55:35

Mahmoud Khalil Discusses 3-Month Detention in First Interview Since Release

By Jonah E. Bromwich
June 22, 2025 Updated 8:10 p.m. ET

The administration argued that he had contributed to the spread of antisemitism through his role in the protests at the university.

But Mr. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, rejected the idea that protesting against Israel is inherently antisemitic.

“I was not doing anything antisemitic,” he said. “I was literally advocating for the right of my people. I was literally advocating for an end of a genocide. I was advocating that the tuition fees that I and other students pay don’t go toward investing in weapons manufacturers. What’s antisemitic about this?”

archive.ph/wip/yMJLn

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-interview-trump.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/32115867

By Jonah E. Bromwich
June 22, 2025 Updated 8:10 p.m. ET

The administration argued that he had contributed to the spread of antisemitism through his role in the protests at the university.

But Mr. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, rejected the idea that protesting against Israel is inherently antisemitic.

“I was not doing anything antisemitic,” he said. “I was literally advocating for the right of my people. I was literally advocating for an end of a genocide. I was advocating that the tuition fees that I and other students pay don’t go toward investing in weapons manufacturers. What’s antisemitic about this?”

archive.ph/wip/yMJLn

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-interview-trump.html

By Jonah E. Bromwich
June 22, 2025 Updated 8:10 p.m. ET

The administration argued that he had contributed to the spread of antisemitism through his role in the protests at the university.

But Mr. Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, rejected the idea that protesting against Israel is inherently antisemitic.

“I was not doing anything antisemitic,” he said. “I was literally advocating for the right of my people. I was literally advocating for an end of a genocide. I was advocating that the tuition fees that I and other students pay don’t go toward investing in weapons manufacturers. What’s antisemitic about this?”

archive.ph/wip/yMJLn

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-interview-trump.html

Sorella di Perfezione - le poesie di Giuseppe Iannozzi - in libreria e negli Store online - LFA Publisher

**youtube.com/shorts/hk8RXKTvNTw…

Ulteriori informazioni su "Sorella di Perfezione"

**iannozzigiuseppe.wordpress.com…

“Sorella di Perfezione” di Giuseppe Iannozzi – booktrailer – LFA Publisher

Sorella di Perfezione offre al lettore poesie che trattano molteplici temi: amore, amicizia, erotismo, vita, morte, tristezza, solitudine, paranoia, ossessione, spiritualità. L’autore Giuseppe Iann…

^{Iannozzi Giuseppe - scrittore e giornalista}

Still to the east of Icefields Parkway the Cline river feeds into the N. Saskatchewan river. You’ll hike above the canyons carved over time by the Cline for 2 miles before heading back while seeing 3 or 4 waterfalls (still frozen at time of hike) and have sweeping views of Sentinel mountain. On the return, you can come back the way you came (recommended) or return via a horse trail that loses the majority of the view. Hiked 5/21

The Cline river flows away from Sentinel Mountain before cutting its way into the canyon below.

The Cline river cut through this ridge over time, creating the entrance to a slot canyon. The stream quickly redirects itself as it hammers into the cliff wall.

The still frozen waterfall shows some life as a small trickle finds its way out the lower section. There were 3 or 4 still frozen falls along the trail. Black and white.

The Cline river exits a slot canyon with Sentinel mountain off in the distance.

He likes to keep a low profile. But Sir Trevor Chinn is one of the most powerful men in British politics.

The retired businessman has donated millions to politicians, facilitated Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s rise to power, helped destroy the movement around Jeremy Corbyn, and, above all, has made sure that both major parties support Israel and its expansionist project in the Middle East.

MintPress News profiles perhaps the most influential man in the pro-Israel lobby and lifts the veil of anonymity he hides behind.

Chinn, McEvoy told MintPress, plays an “important but overlooked role in British politics.” Since the 1980s, he noted, Chinn has funded both Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), pressure groups within the U.K.’s two largest political parties. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), the most influential pro-Israel lobbying organization in the United Kingdom.

As such, Chinn sits at the head of a massive influence operation aiming to make sure that Great Britain continues to support Israeli interests. The scope of this operation is staggering; pro-Israel lobby groups have funded the majority of the British cabinet. In total, 13 out of 25 sitting cabinet members have accepted money directly from Chinn, or pro-Israel groups, according to McEvoy’s investigation.

This includes many extremely powerful figures, such as Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Chinn himself has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to these individuals.

Sir Trevor Chinn: The Tycoon Who Hijacked British Democracy for Israel

Sir Trevor Chinn has bankrolled politicians across the spectrum, from Blair to Starmer, using his fortune to ensure Britain serves Israeli interests.

^{Alan Macleod (MintPress News)}

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-22/how-a-cornered-iran-could-wreak-havoc-on-global-oil-trade

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

Source.

::: spoiler More Context

Source.

Source.
:::

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

Source.

::: spoiler More Context

Source.

Source.
:::

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that does not pose any visible threat to the United States. This appeal to reason misses the neocon logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea. That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

Around 1974 or 1975 there was much talk of creation a New International Economic Order (NIEO). I was working at the Hudson Institution with Herman Kahn on international finance and trade, and he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s northeast border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks and the Turkic Azerbaijanis are others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, by 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq and Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

From the view of U.S. strategists, the emergence of China’s industrial socialism poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control in providing a model that other countries might seek to join to recover the national sovereignty that has been steadily eroded in recent decades.

The motivation has nothing to do with Iran’s attempt to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to pre-empt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony.

Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and introducing a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS-Al Qaida Syrian Wahabi terrorists.

With Iran and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control Near Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally and also as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas. Control of Near Eastern oil also means control of the vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries.

Iran also is a key to blocking Russian development via the Caspian and access to the south. Under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank, bypassing the Suez Canal.

To the Neocons, this makes Iran a central pivot on which U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states.

The ostensible US military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the bill. Congress funds it in two ways: The obvious way is by direct arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, South Korea, Europe and Asian countries to buy U.S. arms. This shows the extent to which the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in ostensible government debt (much of it self-financed by the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).