Friday, October 19, 2018

Why Is Russiagate Rumbling Into the 2018 Midterms? | FAIR

https://fair.org/home/why-is-russiagate-rumbling-into-the-2018-midterms/

Compulsory Schooling Laws: What if We Didn't Have Them?

ORIGINAL LINK

We should always be leery of laws passed “for our own good,” as if the state knows better. The history of compulsory schooling statutes is rife with paternalism, triggered by anti-immigrant sentiments in the mid-nineteenth century and fueled by a desire to shape people into a standard mold.

History books detailing the “common school movement” and the push for universal, compulsory schooling perpetuate the myths that Americans were illiterate prior to mass schooling, that there were limited education options available, and that mandating school attendance under a legal threat of force was the surest way toward equality.

In truth, literacy rates were quite high, particularly in Massachusetts, where the first compulsory schooling statute was passed in 1852. Historians Boles and Gintis report that approximately three-quarters of the total U.S. population, including slaves, was literate¹. There was a panoply of education options prior to mass compulsory schooling, including an array of public and private schooling options, charity schools for the poor, robust apprenticeship models, and homeschooling—this latter approach being the preferred method of Massachusetts education reformer Horace Mann, who homeschooled his own three children while mandating common school attendance for others.

The primary catalyst for compulsory schooling was a wave of massive immigration in the early to mid-1800s that made lawmakers fearful. Many of these immigrants were Irish Catholics escaping the deadly potato famine, and they threatened the predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant social order of the time. In 1851, the editor of The Massachusetts Teacher, William Swan, wrote:

“In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. If left to their direction the young will be brought up in idle, dissolute, vagrant habits, which will make them worse members of society than their parents are; instead of filling our public schools, they will find their way into our prisons, houses of correction and almshouses. Nothing can operate effectually here but stringent legislation, thoroughly carried out by an efficient police; the children must be gathered up and forced into school, and those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished."

This is the true history of compulsory schooling that rarely emerges behind the veil of social magnanimity.

So what would happen if these inherently flawed compulsory schooling laws were eliminated?

A Power Shift

First, power would tilt away from the state and toward the family. Without legal force compelling school attendance, parents would have the freedom and flexibility to assume full responsibility for their child’s education. They would not need government permission to homeschool, as is currently required in the majority of U.S. states. Private schools would not need to submit their attendance records to the state to show compliance. Public schools could still be available to those who wanted them, as they were prior to the 1852 law; but government schooling would no longer be the default education option.

More Choices

Because the state would no longer need to bless the creation of various private schools and ratify their curriculum and attendance protocols, an assortment of education options would emerge. Entrepreneurial educators would seize the opportunity to create new and varied products and services, and parents would be the ones responsible for determining quality and effectiveness—not the state. With less government red tape, current trends in education would gain more momentum. Virtual schooling, part-time school options, hybrid homeschooling models, and an array of private schools with diverse education approaches would emerge. As more education choices sprouted, competition would lower prices, making access to these new choices more widespread.

More Pathways to Adulthood

Without the state mandating school attendance for most of childhood, in some states up to age 18, there would be new pathways to adulthood that wouldn’t rely so heavily on state-issued high school diplomas. Innovative apprenticeship models would be created, community colleges would cater more toward independent teenage learners, and career preparation programs would expand. As the social reformer Paul Goodman wrote in his book New Reformation: “Our aim should be to multiply the paths of growing up, instead of narrowing the one existing school path."

A Broader Definition of Education

In his biography of Horace Mann, historian Jonathan Messerli explains how compulsory schooling contracted a once expansive definition of education into the singular definition of schooling. Indeed, today education is almost universally associated with schooling. Messerli writes: “That in enlarging the European concept of schooling, [Mann] might narrow the real parameters of education by enclosing it within the four walls of the public school classroom.”² Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education. It would help to disentangle education from schooling and reveal many other ways to be educated, such as through non-coercive, self-directed education, or “unschooling.”

Even the most adamant education reformers often stop short of advocating for abolishing compulsory schooling statutes, arguing that it wouldn’t make much difference. But stripping the state of its power to define, control, and monitor something as beautifully broad as education would have a large and lasting impact on re-empowering families, encouraging educational entrepreneurs, and creating more choice and opportunity for all learners.                                                                                                                     

¹ Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The origins of mass public education,” History of Education: Major Themes, Volume II: Education in its Social Context, ed. Roy Lowe (London: Routledge Falmer, 2000), 78.

² Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 429.

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This article has been republished with permission from Foundation for Economic Education.

[Image Credit: DOD photo by Elaine Sanchez]



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Thursday, October 18, 2018

'Dangerous Dehumanization' And The NPC Meme -- Society's Child -- Sott.net

https://www.sott.net/article/398469-Dangerous-Dehumanization-And-The-NPC-Meme

BREAKING: Clinton's State Dept. Emails Appeared on Weiner's Personal Laptop – And the FBI Knew All Along

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2018/10/17/breaking-clintons-state-dept-emails-appeared-on-weiners-personal-laptop-and-n2529530

Federal Judge "Shocked" To Find Obama State Dept Lied To Protect Hillary From Email Server Lawsuits

ORIGINAL LINK

The noose appears to be tightening further around the law-less behaviors of the Obama administration in their frantic efforts to protect former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

As Fox News reports, the transparency group Judicial Watch initially sued the State Department in 2014, seeking information about the response to the Benghazi attack after the government didn't respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Other parallel lawsuits by Judicial Watch are probing issues like Clinton's server, whose existence was revealed during the course of the litigation.

The State Department had immediately moved to dismiss Judicial Watch's first lawsuit, but U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth (who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan) denied the request to dismiss the lawsuit at the time, and on Friday, he said he was happy he did, charging that State Department officials had intentionally misled him because other key documents, including those on Clinton's email server, had not in fact been produced.

"It was clear to me that at the time that I ruled initially, that false statements were made to me by career State Department officials, and it became more clear through discovery that the information that I was provided was clearly false regarding the adequacy of the search and this – what we now know turned out to be the Secretary’s email system."

"I don’t know the details of what kind of IG inquiry there was into why these career officials at the State Department would have filed false affidavits with me. I don’t know the details of why the Justice Department lawyers did not know false affidavits were being filed with me, but I was very relieved that I did not accept them and that I allowed limited discovery into what had happened."

In a somewhat stunningly frank exchange with Justice Department lawyer Robert Prince, the judge pressed the issue, accusing Prince of using "doublespeak" and "playing the same word games [Clinton] played."

That "was not true," the judge said, referring to the State Department's assurances in a sworn declaration that it had searched all relevant documents.

"It was a lie."

Additionally,  Fox notes that Judge Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

"I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case."

On Friday, Lamberth said he did not know Mills had been granted immunity until he "read the IG report and learned that and that she had accompanied [Clinton] to her interview."

We give the last word to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who was present at the hearing, as he pushed the White House for answers.

“President Trump should ask why his State Department is still refusing to answer basic questions about the Clinton email scandal,” Fitton said.

“Hillary Clinton’s and the State Department’s email cover up abused the FOIA, the courts, and the American people’s right to know.”

Perhaps the deep state remains in control behind the scenes after all (consider the recent back-pedal on declassifying the Russian probe documents)?

* * *

Full Transcript below:



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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

5 Flu Vaccine Myths Every Person Should Know

ORIGINAL LINK
From commercials, to TV shows and bill boards, you can’t miss the rush to propagandize flu vaccines for pregnant mothers, children and the elderly every fall. Not only does the CDC admit flu shots don’t…

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Czech Politician: What Multiculturalism Hides

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Jan Keller (a Czech Social Democrat Member of the European Parliament), via The Gatestone Institute,

Multiculturalism is not a manifestation of Europe's generosity, or some noble embodiment of love and truth. Multiculturalism is what remains after mass migration reveals itself as a threat, rather than a benefit, to the economies of European countries.

Take, for instance, the example of France. After the Second World War, when France underwent a boom of economic growth, waves of migration were viewed favorably: there were many job opportunities for unskilled and medium-skilled laborers, and the native French population aspired to work in the tertiary sector, which offered more qualified, better-paid jobs. From the end of the war until the mid-1970s, foreign workers tended to come to France temporarily, without their families, and return to their countries of origin. These workers were generally recruited from former French colonies to do menial and low-paying jobs -- not in order to enrich the culture of the host country.

At the end of the 1970s, that situation changed. Foreign workers began coming to France with their families and also having children after arriving in the country. At the same time, however, there were changes in the economy that ended up leaving descendants of the recruited workers hopeless. While their parents had experienced some upward mobility, they themselves -- even those with a higher level of education than their parents -- were left with fewer job opportunities and became a surplus on the labor market; they also did not have another place to go. In other words, they had been born in a country that suddenly had nothing to offer. The only thing that the government could come up with was a rationale for the dire situation -- a mission for these children of migrants: that they should enrich themselves culturally in the country to which their parents had migrated. This new policy of multiculturalism, which emphasizes the benefits of cultural diversity for society and the state, is an example of the exploitation of others based on a fantasy of virtue. Those at whom the sweet talk of multiculturalism is aimed, can see that it has done nothing to improve their lot, and are now realizing that their future is bleak.

Now let us look at those who favor multiculturalism for the Czech Republic, in Eastern Europe, which has been resistant to it. What they do not grasp is that the Czech Republic today does not resemble France in the early part of the 20th century. We Czechs do not need to recruit foreign workers to perform menial jobs. On the contrary, we need to develop an economy based on skilled labor. It also does not make sense for us to seek highly skilled migrants for this purpose. Such migrants prefer countries whose languages they speak and in which they can earn higher wages than those offered in the Czech Republic. Furthermore, given the problematic nature of our current education system, which is unable adequately to prepare graduates for jobs in tech companies, it would be absurd for us to rely on technology experts from developing countries to rescue our economy.

Some politicians claim that we need a mass wave of immigrants to care for our elderly. This is controversial: in a new country, if they are unskilled, they will barely be able to care for themselves, let alone for others, and will present an additional burden to our already overburdened social security system. If, on the other hand, we bring in highly qualified immigrants to our workforce, we would be taking away from poorer countries the best they have to offer. What right do we have to use them to solve our own problems? If we take them away from their countries of origin, the situation in those countries will further deteriorate. The result will be an even greater flow of unskilled migrants escaping those countries. These new arrivals will create an even greater burden on the social security system than it will incentivize economic development. That consequence is not because migrants are lazier or less ambitious than the local population. Their disadvantages are due to other factors, such as difficulty with a new language and that they tend to have larger families.

For decades, there has been a debate in Europe between the effort to slim down the welfare state, as opposed to continuing it to meet the needs of various disadvantaged sectors of the population. This debate has intensified sharply as the mass wave of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East has threatened to increase significantly the number of welfare recipients in Europe.

Under these circumstances, the nature of multiculturalism has changed. It has become a means to exert fierce psychological pressure primarily on the middle- and lower-income sectors in Europe. One form this pressure has taken is the equating of the plight of the current refugees to emigrants escaping to the West from behind the Iron Curtain. The comparison, however, does not really apply. The Eastern European at that time emigrants did not aspire to achieve "multicultural status". Their goal was to integrate -- to adapt to a society that was so generous as to have accepted them.

In short, mass waves of migrants represent statistically significantly greater risks than opportunities. They do not serve to boost prosperity. Our insurance systems, which were founded by, and developed for, the nation states whose populations they were meant to serve, were simply never designed to cover them.

The proponents of the new multiculturalism want to share their welfare states with masses of refugees who -- through no fault of their own -- will be unable to participate in financing themselves for a long time to come.



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Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Big Tech Pulls Off "Greatest Bait-And-Switch In American History" As It Turns On Free Speech

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,

Big tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have performed “perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch in American history” as they now have committed to an about-face to the American value of free speech.

That is the assessment of Breitbart New‘s Allum Bokhari who exclusively presented a leaked Google internal briefing titled “The Good Censor” to the public on October 9th, exposing the world once again to major tech companies’ attitude towards the bedrock of the traditional American attitude.

“The Good Censor” is an 85-page briefing that openly admits that Google and other tech platforms are undertaking a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world. Unsurprisingly – especially afterleaked video showed google employees in an emotional meltdown after the election victory of Donald J. Trump – The Good Censor cites the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the rise of the populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany as unwelcomed events.

While admitting the shift away from free speech it is also simultaneously admitted that those select few giants "control the majority of online conversations.

The briefing goes into how Google, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are stuck in a position of going along with the “unmediated marketplace of ideas” (free speech and free markets) vs. “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility” (censorship). These two directions are also described as the “American tradition” which “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility” and the “European tradition,” which “favors dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.” The internal pages claim that all tech platforms are now moving toward the European tradition.

Perhaps the most significant part of the brief, as Breitbart’s Bokhari reports, is when it associates Google’s new role as the guarantor of “civility” with the categories of “editor” and “publisher.”

This is significant, given that Google, YouTube, and other tech giants publicly claim they are not publishers but rather neutral platforms — a categorization that grants them special legal immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Elsewhere in the document, Google admits that Section 230 was designed to ensure they can remain neutral platforms for free expression.

Bokhari wrote on Wednesday:

What ordinary Americans long suspected, The Good Censor has proven beyond doubt. According to Google’s own analysis, tech companies have performed perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch in American history, promising their users free speech while they were taking over the market, only to go back on their word once they came to “control the majority of online conversations.”

What better example to prove this bait-and-switch than the statement given by Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy and communications in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa who told British politicians at the end of last year that it’s “no longer possible to stand up for all speech.”

Just 5 years prior, Twitter’s first executive in the UK, Tony Wang, described the company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

The once acceptance and defense of free speech by these big tech players is dicussed in The Good Censor, as the document reads: “This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations.”

And while Google hubrisly boasts that its free speech bait-and-switch has placed them and a few other giants as controllers of “the majority of online conversations” (aka the majority of all conversation happening on earth) the company has come out and finally admitted directly that it has a censored Chinese search engine project in the works. What better guarantor, “publisher, “editor” could the masses of internet users wish to oversee the majority of online conversation? 

Read The Good Censor, obtained by Breitbart, in full below.



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The Dark Story Behind 'Man-Made Global Warming,' Those Who Created It - And Why

ORIGINAL LINK

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The recent UN global warming conference under auspices of the deceptively-named International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded its meeting in South Korea discussing how to drastically limit global temperature rise. Mainstream media is predictably retailing various panic scenarios "predicting" catastrophic climate change because of man-made emissions of Greenhouse Gases, especially CO2, if drastic changes in our lifestyle are not urgently undertaken. There is only one thing wrong with all that. It's based on fake science and corrupted climate modelers who have reaped by now billions in government research grants to buttress the arguments for radical change in our standard of living. We might casually ask "What's the point?" The answer is not positive. The South Korea meeting of the UN IPCC discussed measures needed, according to their computer models, to limit global temperature rise tobelow 1.5 Centigrade above levels of the pre-industrial era. One of the panel members and...

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Japan plans to flush Fukushima water ‘containing radioactive material above permitted levels’ into the ocean

ORIGINAL LINK
Water that the Japanese government is planning to release into the Pacific Ocean from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant contains radioactive material well above legally permitted levels, according to the plant’s operator and documents…

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How the FBI Silences Whistleblowers

ORIGINAL LINK

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Most whistleblowers either suffer in anonymity or are personally, professionally, socially and financially ruined for speaking truth to power. Darin Jones is one of those people. He’s one of the people silenced in Barack Obama’s war on whistleblowers. And he continues to suffer under Donald Trump.



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SOTT FOCUS: "Dangerous Dehumanization" And The NPC Meme

ORIGINAL LINK

NPCs.jpg

Have you ever been called a Russian bot or a "sock puppet?" I know I have. Of course, I just have to shrug it off and get back to my life. No sense in trying to focus on it, and feeding the trolls is always a bad idea but apparently, in light of the NPC (non-player character) meme becoming so widespread, Twitter has decided that this sort of "dehumanization" can actually lead to "world harm." Go figure, they didn't seem to have any problem when it was just folks like me being dehumanized, but now it's an issue so great it could literally cause the whole world grievous harm. If you're not familiar with gaming culture, a bit of an explanation is in order. NPCs or "non-player characters" are the background in a game. They only have a set of pre-programmed responses to choose from and their activities are limited to pre-programmed sets of actions. An example from Existenz, one of my favorite films by David Cronenberg, occurs "in-game" when the game designer Allegra Gellar asks NPC...

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Artificial Sweeteners Are Toxic to Gut Bacteria

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/10/16/artificial-sweeteners-toxic-to-gut-bacteria.aspx

Google Finally Acknowledges Censored Chinese Search Engine Project

ORIGINAL LINK

Having tried obscuring the scope of "Project Dragonfly" in communications with both the public and its own employees - lies that were laid bare by an embarrassing series leaks to the Intercept - Google CEO Sundar Pichai has apparently calculated that it would be better for the company's public image if he "came clean" about Google's plans for returning to China, a market it abandoned in 2010 after repeatedly clashing with the Chinese Government over its censorship policies.

And so it was that, two weeks after Vice President Mike Pence demanded that the company kill "Project Dragonfly", Google CEO Sundar Pichai decided that now would be a reasonable time to publicly acknowledge the project for the first time. However, what Pichai tried to spin as "leveling" with his audience was, in reality, anything but: Despite reports that "Dragonfly" is "larger than many projects at Google" and employs some 300 full-time engineers, Pichai insisted on describing it as an "experiment" that was in its "early stages" of development (details from a leaked internal memo have suggested that "Dragonfly" could be up and running within the next six to nine months).

Sundar

For readers who missed the damning series of leaks sketching out the scope of the project, "Dragonfly" is intended to be a censored search engine that would block results for queries that the Chinese government considered sensitive, like the Mandarin phrases for "human rights" and "student protest". It would also require Chinese users to log in with their credentials before searches can be run, ensuring that the Communist Party can log and examine a comprehensive record of search activity.

But while Pichai acknowledged that "Dragonfly" would censor some search terms, ultimately, Google would be able to serve well over "99%" of queries. While it's unclear how Pichai arrived at this metric, we imagine there aren't too many Chinese citizens sitting at their terminals Googling "Nobel Peace Prize" over and over again...

"We wanted to learn what it would look like if Google were in China, so that's what we built internally," Pichai said. "If Google would operate in China, what would it look like? What queries would we be able to serve? It turns out we'd be able to serve well over 99 percent of queries and there are many, many areas where we would provide information better than what's available."

In a subtle dig at Baidu, one of Google's largest domestic competitors, Pichai said "today people either get fake cancer treatments or they actually get useful information," an apparent reference to a 2016 case where Baidu was found to have "distorted" information found through its portal about ineffective "medical treatments".

Given that the mainland market harbors hundreds of middle-class users, whose personal data Google and its tech rivals are eager to exploit for profits, Pichai said Google was obligated to "think hard" about the problem of returning to China, and that US companies shouldn't scuttle what could be an enormously profitable initiative just because it would require making a few ethically dubious concessions to a totalitarian state.

As Silicon Valley titans often do, Pichai managed to cloak his words in a sunny moral relativism - Google is a business after all, and no imperative more greatly influences its decision-making than the quest for "the next billion users". But as Matt Stoller pointed out on twitter, the straw-men arguments addressed by Pichai during his talk missed the point entirely.

This is insane. The problem is not that Google would do evil by censorship in China, it's the leverage China would garner over Google. https://t.co/2SAKSJXnOb

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) October 16, 2018

 



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The Facebook Purge of Independent Media: What You’re Not Being Told

ORIGINAL LINK
Facebook PurgeVictims of Facebook’s most recent purge should not forget the connections between the social media giant and the Western Military-Industrial Complex. (CR) — On Thursday, Facebook announced they were unpublishing, or purging, over 500 pages and 200 accounts who are accused of spreading political spam. Several of these pages and writers were also removed from Twitter on […]

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Self-Censorship: Where The Real Damage Is Being Done

ORIGINAL LINK

I was going to write another article today about a different topic, but I backed down because I didn’t think I could deliver the kind of fiery, forceful, unmitigated argument it would need to be without risking getting banned from social media and blogging platforms.

The article I was planning on writing, which you’ll just have to imagine now, would have been titled “ ‘Assange Can Leave Whenever He Wants!’ No, Idiot, He Can’t.” The feature image was going to be a screen shot of a blue-checkmarked empire loyalist named Greg Olear tweeting the infuriatingly dopey argument that Assange is free to just waltz out the embassy doors whenever he wants, so therefore he isn’t actually being imprisoned by an Orwellian power establishment for publishing authentic documents about powerful people. Never mind the fact that you can say exactly the same thing about literally anyone under political asylum; they are all free to leave the political asylum they’ve been granted at any time, and pointing this out is just describing the thing that political asylum is. Never mind the fact that a UN panel ruled that Assange is being arbitrarily detained by the threat of imprisonment. Never mind that the same US government which tortured Chelsea Manning is currently openly pursuing Assange’s arrest because of his publications, making the assertion that he’s “free to leave” the same as saying he’s “free” to jump off a cliff. People don’t want to believe that their government imprisons journalists, so whenever Assange is in the news you see this argument making the rounds.

It would have been a firecracker of an article, but when it came time to write it, I backed down. I’d generally rather scrap an article than write something tepid and boring that won’t make any impact, so the risk of losing access to my platforms outweighed my desire to write what I’d planned on writing.

Internet Censorship Just Took An Unprecedented Leap Forward, And Hardly Anyone Noticed "This is huge, this is dangerous, and this is being under-reported." #Twitter #Facebook #InternetCensorship #censorship https://t.co/7gg9ltEY3u

 — @caitoz

I’ve been self-censoring more and more lately, especially since the latest round of coordinated cross-platform silencing of multiple alternative media outlets the other day. Back in August I had my Twitter account temporarily deleted when I said the world will be better off without John McCain and a bunch of #Resistance accounts mass reported me; Twitter cited “abusive behavior” as its justification. The only reason my account was restored was because there was a large objection from many high-profile journalists and activists who understand the dangers of internet censorship, and I’m not willing to gamble that I’d get that lucky should something similar happen again. Being able to disrupt establishment narratives on a high-traffic website like Twitter outweighs the benefits of speaking in an unmitigated way.

And that ultimately is precisely the point. If the social engineers can make an example of a few dissident voices in the public eye, everyone else will rein in their own speech and behavior to avoid the same fate. The overall effect of this phenomenon is actually far more effective in suppressing dissident speech than the overt censorship is by itself, because self-censorship actually silences exponentially more anti-establishment opinions. For every one voice you crack down on overtly, a thousand more silence themselves out of self-preservation, not saying things they would otherwise say and not doing things they would otherwise do.

Obviously a perfectly normal and sane response to having your funding and media accolades criticized.

 — @caitoz

Meanwhile empire loyalists know that they can consistently get away with saying anything they want with total impunity. The other day for example I criticized the fawning media accolades that professional Atlantic Council propagandist Eliot Higgins has been receiving lately, and he responded by calling me “Grotbags”, an obese witch character from a nineties children’s television show. The joke being, you see, that I am overweight, and I am also a woman, so I am therefore similar to the character Grotbags. Ha ha ha. Eliot has been repeating this hilarious joke for months with zero consequences. He also made headlines back in June with his repeated public invitation for people who disagree with him on Twitter to suck his balls, also with zero consequences.

After my August Twitter suspension a #Resistance account publicly doxxed me, posting my home address, phone number and other information. I didn’t make a public ordeal out of it at the time because I obviously didn’t want to draw attention to it, but I did report it because I wanted it deleted. I was not expecting Twitter Support to reject my report, especially after they had me jump through a bunch of hoops to prove that I did in fact live where the doxxer was saying I lived, but they did.

“We understand that you might come across content on Twitter that you dislike or find offensive,” Twitter wrote back. “However, after investigating the reported content we found it was not in violation of Twitter’s private information policy. As a result, it won’t be removed at this time.”

I see this routinely across all platforms; some accounts act without any fear of consequences, others seem primed for hair-trigger suspension. The bias is distinctly slanted in the favor of those who support CIA/CNN narratives and attack anyone who speaks out of alignment with the agendas of the US-centralized empire.

So while we are mitigating our speech more and more, the Eliot Higginses of the new media environment consistently get away with all manner of abusive behavior without any repercussions. We’re fighting a media war in which we are not just outnumbered and outgunned, but are increasingly forced to fight with one arm tied behind our backs. The only thing we have going for us at this point is that authenticity is attractive and oligarchic funding can’t buy creativity or inspiration.

So anyway, there’s my confession that I have been caving to self-censorship to avoid being de-platformed. Rather than denying it, I think it’s best that we all admit to it when we do it and call it what it is, because it’s an unseen part of the people’s media rebellion that is generally overlooked and under-appreciated. I haven’t really figured out what to do about it beyond that, but in my experience drawing the light of attention to these things is always a good idea.

________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal,buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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Monday, October 15, 2018

Facebook Purged Pages Based On 'PropOrNot' Blacklist Promoted By Washington Post

ORIGINAL LINK

Via WSWS.org,

Media outlets removed by Facebook on Thursday, in a massive purge of 800 accounts and pages, had previously been targeted in a blacklist of oppositional sites promoted by the Washington Post in November 2016.

The organizations censored by Facebook include The Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, The Free Thought Project, with 3.1 million followers, and Counter Current News, with 500,000 followers. All three of these groups had been on the blacklist.

In November 2016, the Washington Post published a puff-piece on a shadowy and up to then largely unknown organization called PropOrNot, which had compiled a list of organizations it claimed were part of a “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.”

The Post said the report “identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”

The publication of the blacklist drew widespread media condemnation, including from journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, forcing the Post to publish a partial retraction. The newspaper declared that it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

While the individuals behind PropOrNot have not identified themselves, the Washington Post said the group was a “collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

PropOrNot, which remains active on Twitter, publicly gloated about Facebook’s removal of the pages on Thursday. “Russian propaganda is VERY VERY MAD about their various front outlets & fellow travellers getting suspended by @Facebook &/or @Twitter,” it wrote. The tweet tagged The Anti Media and The Free Thought Project, and included a Russian flag emoji next to an emoji depicting feces.

PropOrNot did not attempt to reconcile its own narrative that the targeted organizations were front groups for the Kremlin with Facebook’s official claim that they operated independently of any government but sought to “stir up political debate” for financial motives. This is because both accusations are hollow pretexts for political censorship.

In a separate post, PropOrNot added: “Well, look at that... @Facebook removed some of the most important gray/black Russian propaganda outlets from their platform! Bravo @Facebook - better late than never, so a BIG thank you for this.”

It added, ominously: “All of these [organizations] are cross platform & have websites, but one thing at a time.”

These comments by PropOrNot make clear where the censorship measures supervised by the US government and implemented by the internet companies are going. While these organizations still “have websites,” the authorities are handling “one thing at a time.”

The clear implication is that censorship will not end with Google’s manipulation of its search platform or the removal of accounts by Facebook and Twitter. The ultimate aim is the total banning of oppositional news web sites.

The publication of the PropOrNot blacklist and its promotion by the Washington Post helped trigger a wave of censorship measures against oppositional news sites by the major technology companies, working at the instigation of the US intelligence agencies and leading politicians.

Last year, the World Socialist Web Site reported that it an other sites, including Global ResearchCounterpunchConsortium NewsWikiLeaks and Truthout,saw their search traffic plunge after search giant Google implemented a change to its search ranking algorithm.

In the subsequent period, search traffic to these sites has fallen even further. Search traffic to Counterpunch has fallen by 39 percent, and Consortium Newshas fallen by 51 percent.

These developments confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site in its open letter to Google alleging that it was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites.

“Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting,” the letter declared.

“The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.”

On Tuesday, Google admitted in an internal document that it and other technology companies had “gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation.” The document stated that an aim of the censorship was to “increase revenues” under conditions of growing government and commercial pressure.

The document acknowledged that such actions constitute a break with the “American tradition that prioritizes free speech for democracy.”



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Saudi Arabia To Admit Khashoggi Killed During “Botched Interrogation”

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from ZeroHedge: If you anticipated that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – having been backed into a corner by Turkish spooks who had bugged the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate – would swiftly seek to blame the death of regime insider-turned-critic Jamal Khashoggi on some unfortunate underling, then congratulations. You were right. Just hours after a spokesman […]

The post Saudi Arabia To Admit Khashoggi Killed During “Botched Interrogation” appeared first on SGT Report.



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The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the 2016 Election – Consortiumnews

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/10/the-shaky-case-that-russia-manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election/

Ecuador Restores Julian Assange's Internet, Phone And Visitation Privileges

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Ecuador has partially restored Julian Assange's communications in their London Embassy after UN officials met with Ecuador's president, Lenin Moreno on Friday, reports the Belfast Telegraph

Assange, who has lived in the embassy for over six years, had his phone and internet access taken away in March over political statements he made in violation of "a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states." His visitor access was also limited to members of his legal team. 

Ecuador rolls back @JulianAssange isolation after UN meets with president

Background: https://t.co/Mb6gXlz7QShttps://t.co/0UBIVYyKll pic.twitter.com/poFi6nBU4N

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 14, 2018

"Ecuador has told WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange that it will remove the isolation regime imposed on him following meetings between two senior UN officials and Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno on Friday," WikiLeaks said in a statement. 

Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, added: “It is positive that through UN intervention Ecuador has partly ended the isolation of Mr Assange although it is of grave concern that his freedom to express his opinions is still limited.

“The UN has already declared Mr Assange a victim of arbitrary detention. This unacceptable situation must end.

The UK government must abide by the UN’s ruling and guarantee that he can leave the Ecuadorian embassy without the threat of extradition to the United States.” -Belfast Telegraph

Assange, having been granted political asylum by Ecuador, will not leave the embassy out of the belief that he will be arrested by UK authorities and extradited to the United States, where a Clinton-friendly DOJ awaits the arrival of the man Hillary once "joked" about murdering via drone strike. 

WikiLeaks' statement said that the meetings which resulted in the partial restoration of Assange's communications were held between President Moreno, the UN high commission for refugees, Filippo Grandi and UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression, David Kaye. 

"Concern over Mr Assange’s situation has also been raised by other UN bodies, as well as Human Rights Watch (who was refused access to him), Amnesty International, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, Ecuador’s Permanent Human Rights Commission, and public protests," reads the statement in part. "Mr Assange was informed of Ecuador’s decision hours after Mr Grandi and Mr Kaye met with President Moreno." 

Mr Assange had critically reported on the Trump administration’s involvement in Yemen and Spanish police brutality. High level representations were made by the Trump administration and the Spanish government over Mr Assange, who was given political refugee status by Ecuador in 2012 over US attempts to prosecute him.

“The Trump administrations stepped up efforts to prosecute Mr Assange after WikiLeaks published the largest leak in the history of the CIA last year.

“The US has announced that it now considers Ecuador a ‘strategic ally’ and helped it secure a billion dollars in previously withheld loans.

“For almost seven months, Ecuador has kept Mr Assange in a regime that has been likened to solitary confinement by Human Rights Watch. Ecuador has prevented Mr Assange from receiving visitors other than his lawyers. It installed three sets of signal jammers in the embassy, to prevent Mr Assange from communicating using mobile phones or internet.

“The extrajudicial seven-month isolation of Mr Assange has interfered with his fundamental rights and the rights of his family. It has also prevented Mr Assange from working and giving public talks.

“Ecuador has also prevented all journalists from speaking to him during this time. Ecuador’s President until last year, Rafael Correa, has denounced Mr Assange’s treatment as ‘torture’ stating ‘the government is basically attacking Julian’s mental health’.

“Ecuador has informed Mr Assange that the government intends to continue Moreno’s policy of restricting him from expressing his opinions under threat of expulsion.” -WikiLeaks

While Assange's communications have been partially restored, he will still be restricted from expressing controversial opinions under threat of expulsion. 



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