Fb post from "I Love Reading Books," stored here with links intact to give credit

I Love Reading Books

February 2 at 5:41 PM

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Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Snowden and the general NSA uproar

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I didn't pay close attention to the Snowden situation earlier this summer.  Although this was partly because I was insanely busy (bread and circuses = how to afford decent food and "can I find paying work?" ... the poverty form of population control : P ), mostly it was because nothing I was hearing was surprising me.

I've known that the NSA and others had that level of capability for years -- and have been using it -- and that they (organizationally / generally, although obviously not in every individual case) are proud and self-righteous about it to the point of anti-rational, self-congratulatory insularity.  And I say "they" properly, in the plural, because noone should assume it's just the NSA, nor (especially) should anyone assume it's just the government(s of the world).  Any decently successful mafia and many international corporations also hire out, or have branches of, information-acquiration.

Also not news was that some vocal part of America somehow thought Snowden was being unpatriotic.  I continue to hope these people are merely loud rather than being a significant demographic force.

What *was* news to me all summer was how very many people, by their reaction, had no idea this surveillance had been going on.

Kudos, btw, to The Oregonian for running a set of articles on the Sentinel Project back in the early 90s.  I knew most of what they exposed before that (happily for any eventual court case, I have NO memory of how I already knew it ... my amazing skillz (not! : P ) at retaining ideas but not names/who is finally useful!), but it was a comfort to see it get some mainstream press.

And always remember, that everything the gvt tells us officially about its scary capabilities, information or physical violence, is olde news ... enough other nations/power-centers know it already that keeping it a secret isn't pointful, and there is already something else, bigger/better, in its place that they want to distract us from.