US Ambassador Calls Own 2015 Statement "Fake News"; Things Then Rapidly Go South

The new US ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, is not off to a good start following an international embarrassment on Dutch TV in which he smugly denied every saying there are no-go zones in the Netherlands - calling the suggestion "fake news." 

Ambassador Pete Hoekstra

Hoekstra - former congressman (R-MI) and chair of the House Intelligence Committee for two years, was asked by Dutch journalist Wouter Zwart of news program Nieuwsuur about comments he made in 2015: 

Zwart: “You mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands, and that cars and politicians are being set on fire in the Netherlands.”

 

Hoekstra: "I didn"t say that. This is actually an incorrect statement. We would call it fake news." 

Zwart then shows Hoekstra a clip of him saying exactly that: 

"The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have put Europe into chaos. Chaos in the Netherlands, there are cars being burnt, there are politicians that are being burnt ... and yes there are no-go zones in the Netherlands" -Pete Hoekstra, 2015

A still-smug Hoekstra deadpans to Zwart, denying that he used the phrase fake news. "I didn"t call that fake news. I didn"t use the words today. I don"t think I did." 

Hoekstra - born in Groningen, Netherlands, was sworn in on December 11th by Mike Pence. In response, he said that he "made certain remarks in 2015 and regret the exchange during the Nieuwsuur interview. Please accept my apology." 

Please see my comments regarding recent interview. Thank you. Pete pic.twitter.com/gxQOcZ8Duk

— Pete Hoekstra (@petehoekstra) December 23, 2017

Ironically, as it turns out, there are several parts of The Netherlands which aren"t quite classified as "no-go" zones, but whose residents are approximately 80% immigrants. In 2007, The Netherlands Housing Ministry identified 40 "problem districts" to be transformed into "dream districts." In a now-deleted (but archived) article, Dutch news outlet RTL Niews published 20 of the districts. 

"no-go zones" in the Netherlands, geenstijl.nl

RTL Niews requested that the government release a ranking of the list from best to worst, which the Council of State - the highest court in the country, forbade.

Islam is the second largest religion in the Netherlands, practiced by around 4 percent of the population. There are currently 47,500 refugees in the Netherlands - nearly twice the number from just three years ago. Under a 2008 regulation, working refugees in the Netherlands pay a 75% tax on their income to cover the cost of food and living expenses, as well as declare any savings or valuables they bring into the country. Asylum seekers are allowed to work for up to 24 weeks per year after they have been in the country for six months. 

Dutch Islamists protesting the arrest of three men alleged to be recruiting for ISIS.

In 2014, three Dutch citizens were arrested on suspicion of recruiting for ISIS in order to assist its armed struggles in Syria and Iraq - leading many to call The Hague "jihad city" and "sharia triangle." 

One of those detained is 32-year-old Azzedine Choukoud, known as Abou Moussa, a charismatic Dutchman of Moroccan descent. He has been involved in demonstrations in recent years, and has been in contact with fighters in Syria. In a YouTube video, he congratulated the Muslim community on the establishment of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria. A few young men hold up a black IS flag in the background.

 

They come from Schilderswijk neighbourhood, which the media have renamed the "sharia triangle". This neighbourhood primarily houses immigrants, as do many neighbourhoods in large Dutch cities - in this case more than 90 percent of the population are immigrants. Dissatisfaction is common and unemployment, crime, and poverty rates are higher than in the rest of the country.

-speisa.com

In 2013, calls for an urgent debate in the Dutch parliament over the integration of Muslim immigrants after an area near the Hague known locally as "the Sharia triangle" is being run by a form of "Sharia police." 

The claims relate to the district of Schilderswijk, about two kilometres from the city centre, where an almost entirely Muslim population of some 5,000 people surrounds the El Islam mosque, fuelling criticism that the government has failed to ensure a proper ethnic mix in schools and local housing. One recent investigation, in which local people were extensively interviewed, concluded that Schilderswijk had become “orthodox Muslim territory” which was now largely ignored by the city authorities, by politicians and even by the police, on the grounds that it had become self-regulating. -Irish Times

The orthodox Muslims had become so dominant in the area that they were dictating neighborhood attire and behavior. In one incident, a local woman claimed that her daughter was approached and told that her short skirt was inappropriate, while her son had been called a "kaffir," a racist term used against non-Muslims.

"Another man said he felt he was gradually being driven out of his home because he had a dog, and many traditional Muslims tended not to keep or favour dogs."

So, as it stands, there are "no-go" zones in The Netherlands, depending on one"s definition. Perhaps Ambassador Hoekstra should have just owned up to his 2015 comments, since the coverup was - as always happens - worse than the truth.

Apple’s Apps Have Been Categorizing Women’s ‘Brassiere’ Photos For Over A Year

If you have an iPhone, it has been secretly looking at your breasts in order to categorize your photos. And not just yours, its saving and archiving all those pictures you’ve gotten from others too.

It was discovered when a tweet by user ellieeewbu today revealed that searching “brassiere” in the Photos app on iPhones categorizes photos featuring bras automatically into a group. Other women have been responding to the initial tweet posting screenshots with similar results. Most searches have netted a slew of photos of women in lingerie, bikinis, with bare skin, or in some cases, memes.

ATTENTION ALL GIRLS ALL GIRLS!!! Go to your photos and type in the ‘Brassiere’ why are apple saving these and made it a folder!!?!!?

— ell (@ellieeewbu) October 30, 2017

It’s difficult to say what’s more alarming about all of this: the fact that “brassiere” is a category at all or that most people didn’t know that image categorization (which could obviously be easily used as a mass spying tool) was a feature on the iPhone.

As if Apple’s FaceID technology wasn’t horrifying enough…

It"s true. If u type in "brassiere" in the search of your iphotos, it has a category for every boob or cleavage pic you"ve ever taken. Why. pic.twitter.com/KWWmJoRneJ

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) October 31, 2017

Apple isn’t actually saving the photos in a specific folder they are simply being stored locally on your device, according to The Verge. Despite not having a category for “nude” or “underwear” there are plenty of categories that relate to “bra” or the chest area of women. The iPhone does have categories for brassiere, bandeau, bandeaus, bra, bras, and brassieres.

The little-known feature (image recognition) was introduced with the launch of i0S 10 in mid-2016 when Apple’s iPhone Photos app began using metadata analysis and image-recognition technology to sort users’ photos automatically and tag them for easy extraction. Apple stressed during the keynote, as well as on its website, that all object detection is done completely locally on the device.

There are literally thousands of objects your iPhone can identify too, making it the perfect mass spying tool. Categories include everything from various animals, food, fashion, and inanimate objects like furniture. It can also categorize all of those sunset pictures you’ve taken.

Apparently, the media claims that all of your images of you in your bra are “safe,” though. There’s nothing to worry about, time to move on. Most media outlets assert that the panic is because users did not know of this feature earlier.

Apple Doesn’t Think You’re Mature Enough to Know Truth About U.S. Drone Strikes

(ANTIMEDIA) “At its core was a question: do we want to be as connected to our foreign policy as we are to our smartphones? My hypothesis was no. Americans don’t care about the drone war because it is largely hidden from view.”

That’s how Josh Begley, writing for The Intercept on Tuesday, described the concept behind an app he created five years ago. The app, he says, was a simple one. It merely sent users an alert every time a U.S. drone strike was reported in the news.

Apple rejected the app three times on the grounds that it was “excessively objectionable or crude content,” but Begley didn’t give up on the project.

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“Over the years, I would occasionally resubmit the app, changing its name from Drones+ to Metadata+,” he wrote. “I was curious to see if Apple might change its mind. The app didn’t include graphic images or video of any kind — it simply aggregated news about covert war.”

He went on to tell how, after five rejections, Apple finally accepted the app in 2014. It remained in the App Store for a year and was downloaded by over 50,000 people. But then, the following September, Apple removed the app, once again citing “excessively objectionable or crude content.”

Begley persisted. The reason he was writing the post this week, in fact, was because that day — March 28, 2017 — Apple had once again accepted the app. He wasn’t writing to talk about his ordeal with Apple, though. He was writing about the issue that motivated him to create the app in the first place:

“As an artist who works with data, I think the story of this app is about more than a petty conflict with Apple. It is about what can be seen — or obscured — about the geography of our covert wars.”

He pointed out that over the past 15 years, people have worked tirelessly to document what’s happening on the ground where these drone campaigns are being waged. And that work is certainly praiseworthy. But Begley went further, pointing out what he calls the “difficult truth” of drone warfare — that at the end of the day, we don’t really know who these missiles are killing.

Again, rather than focusing on his spat with Apple, Begley stayed with the issue that inspired him and talked about the end product of that inspiration:

“Because the particulars of drone wars are scant, we only have ‘metadata’ about most of these strikes—perhaps a date, the name of a province, maybe a body count. Absent documentary evidence or first-person testimony, there isn’t much narrative to speak of.

“The name ‘Metadata’ has a double meaning: the app both contains metadata about English-language news reports, and it refers to the basis on which most drone strikes are carried out.”

The only time Begley questioned Apple’s earlier decisions to refuse his app was in his summation.

“Smartphones have connected us more intimately to all sorts of data,” he wrote. “Yet information about drone strikes — in Apple’s universe — had somehow been deemed beyond the pale.”

He used the past tense, of course, because Apple had, that very day, re-accepted Metadata. But as it turned out, the party was short-lived. Hours after Begley’s post ran at The Intercept, Apple pulled his app once more.

Highlighting the suddenness of Apple’s move, here’s how Reason opened its coverage of the news on Tuesday:

“This was supposed to be a post about how anybody who wants to easily keep track of U.S. drone strikes overseas can do so through an app on their iPhone. But never mind. They can’t anymore.”

Josh Begley chose not to go after Apple in his article when he easily could have. He took the high road and stuck to the far greater issues — the nature of drone warfare itself and how we, as a society, are responding to it in an age of instant communication.

This writer will follow Begley’s lead and not speculate on the myriad possibilities of why Apple seems afraid of his app. That’s the far less important aspect of what’s happening here. It all goes back to the core of the Metadata project and the question that drove Begley to get started: Given the option, would we really want to be as connected to U.S. foreign policy as we are to our smartphones?

Or, in other words, would we really want constant updates on all the killing?

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