Three-Quarters of Parents ‘Adulting’ for Their Grown Children

ORIGINAL LINK

I ran across a fascinating little chart in the New York Times the other day. It described the percentage of parents who take on responsibilities that their adult children should be doing. Some of the more unbelievable ones include wake-up calls (15 percent), contacting a child’s employer (11 percent), and contacting a professor to discuss grades (eight percent).

Staggeringly, three-quarters of parents with adult children ages 18-28 remind their offspring to meet deadlines. Three-quarters of them also make doctor appointments for their adult offspring.

In some ways, I get it. In fact, I’ve even been guilty of doing the first item on the list (deadline reminders) to my younger sibling when we were both in college. But looking back, I realize that my responsible, albeit controlling, nature only gave myself a lot of extra stress.

Today’s parents are likely doing the same. They love their charges, want to see them succeed, and feel responsible if they don’t. But not only are they loading themselves down with stress, they’re also teaching their children to delay responsibility until well into adulthood.

I couldn’t help but notice the contrast between today’s parents and one particular father from the early 1900s portrayed in the autobiographical Little Britches children’s book series. As author Ralph Moody explains, his father allowed him to buy a steel trap for catching animals when he was around age 10. Moody set this trap with great delight and anticipation, only to check it later and discover he had been too successful. Instead of catching a prairie dog as intended, he had illegally caught a cock pheasant.

With the thought of jail hanging over him, Moody decided to make it look like the coyotes had killed the pheasant. His conscience, however, got the better of him, and he presented the problem to his father.

To my surprise, his father refused to take responsibility for his son’s accidental mishap. Moody explains:

Father didn’t say a word for a minute or two. Then he said, “It isn’t a case of ‘if the sheriff finds out about it.’ It’s a case of your breaking the law without intending to. If you tried to cover it up, you’d be running away from the law. Our prisons are full of men whose first real crime was running away because they didn’t have courage enough to face punishment for a small offense. Tomorrow you must go to see the sheriff.

Such a requirement terrified Moody and gave him a bit of a sleepless night. And much to his chagrin, things did not change in the morning:

After breakfast I begged Father to go to Fort Logan with me to see the sheriff, but he said, “No. You haven’t learned to ask for advice before you get into scrapes, and it isn’t fair to expect help in getting yourself out every time."

In the end, Moody went to town, fled in terror, then when back again. After finally facing the Sheriff and confessing his deed, he had the joy of being absolved of the crime and flew home to tell his father:

That night when we were milking, he told me it had been a day I should remember. He said it would be good for me, as I grew older, to know that a man always made his troubles less by going to meet them instead of waiting for them to catch up with him, or trying to run away from them.

I have to wonder how many of today’s parents would tell their children the same, let alone give them a lesson in facing consequences for their actions without doing so in the shelter of a parent’s shadow. In some senses it may seem cruel and harsh, but will children actually be the better for it? Would they, like Moody, be ready to face life with an adult-like maturity when it’s time to push them out of the nest?

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Sailing And Sinking The RMS Lusitania: A Century Of Lying America Into War

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2015/05/06/sailing-and-sinking-the-rms-lusitania-a-century-of-lying-america-into-war/

Remembering The Lusitania: A Century Of Lying America Into War

ORIGINAL LINK

We see similar activities today. Washington attributed phantom horrors to countries which had committed more than their share of documented crimes, Iraq and Serbia. Americans were lied into invading Iraq when the Bush administration relied on falsehoods from Iraqi exiles, most spectacularly Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Much was made of Muammar Khadafy’s nonexistent plan to slaughter Libyan civilians after he threatened his armed opponents. Most recent has been supposed Iranian “support” for Yemen’s Houthis, a local group fighting over domestic grievances for decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2015/05/06/sailing-and-sinking-the-rms-lusitania-a-century-of-lying-america-into-war/#4745d5d31a81

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Grand Jury Filing Over Use of Explosives on 9/11 ‘Names Names’ of Who May Have Blown Up Towers

ORIGINAL LINK
A bombshell grand jury filing was announced this week naming those who had access to WTCs before 9/11 and those who benefited from their destruction.

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Why We Need a Socialist Dating Market

ORIGINAL LINK

According to Bernie Sanders, capitalism creates income inequality while socialism solves it. His fellow Socialist, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is proposing a 70 percent tax on income, also aimed at reducing inequality. In fact, wiping out inequality is one of the primary goals of those who ascribe to socialist ideology. 

Given this, it is a bit surprising that Bernie and AOC have not rolled out a plan for one of the greatest fields of market-driven, pain-filled inequality that exists today: the dating market.

We all know how bad the dating market is. Young men and young women are floundering around, helplessly looking for a mate but failing to make it to the altar. Clearly, there is something afoot that needs a remedy.

Writing in Quillette, data scientist Bradford Tuckfield explains what’s really happening in this market by presenting data from the popular dating apps “Hinge,” “Tinder,” and “OkCupid.” The statistics are brutal. These dating sites show blatant discrimination resulting in immoral inequalities:

Yet another study, run by OkCupid on their huge datasets, found that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium,” and that this 80 percent “below-average” block received replies to messages only about 30 percent of the time or less. By contrast, men rate women as worse-looking than medium only about 50 percent of the time, and this 50 percent below-average block received message replies closer to 40 percent of the time or higher.

It’s very clear. In the dating market, men are inclusive and embrace diversity. Women don’t. 

Tuckfield then goes on to discuss how the Gini Coefficient, an economic tool for the study of inequality, can help understand the dating market. The Gini Coefficient goes from zero to one. In the case of dating apps: 

The Gini coefficient for men collectively is determined by women’s collective preferences, and vice versa. If women all find every man equally attractive, the male dating economy will have a Gini coefficient of zero. If men all find the same one woman attractive and consider all other women unattractive, the female dating economy will have a Gini coefficient close to one. 

The results of applying the Gini coefficient to Tinder are simply shocking, a fact Tuckfield demonstrates by citing the following Tweet:

 

Tinder's Gini coefficient is 0.58, meaning "it has higher inequality than 95% [of] the world's national economies" pic.twitter.com/hPx9ANR0Kz

— Devon (@devonzuegel) January 22, 2019

 

Tuckfield then summarizes the research:

If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in “likes” and “matches” credibly measures the degree of inequality in attractiveness, and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.

There you have it. Although this unregulated market theoretically allows all men and women access to the dating pool, the discriminatory attitudes of the participants produce gross inequalities.

Given all the concern over white male privilege, these results should be a wake-up call. Men are the primary victims of this discrimination, for 80 percent of men on a dating app will be ignored by the women they contact. 

Some people would say that women are just pickier. But isn’t “picky” just another term for prejudice and discrimination? Millions of men suffer rejection, discrimination, and heartbreak every day. Why do we focus on the gender pay gap, when a much bigger problem of inequality is staring us right in the face? 

But don’t give up men – there is hope. Perhaps we just need to talk to AOC, point out the inequality that exists, and get her to propose a socialized dating market to end all this inequality and misery. If we’re going to be consistent and snuff out inequality, then this issue should be next on the agenda.

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Lawmakers Want to Give Voting Rights to Teens They Treat Like Toddlers with Compulsory Schooling Laws

ORIGINAL LINK

Newly-elected US Rep. Ayanna Pressley caused a stir this month when she filed an amendment to lower the legal federal voting age from 18 to 16. While Pressley’s amendment failed to pass, the action brought attention to the place of teenagers in society. Regardless of how we may feel about the role of the voter, many of us would argue that teenagers should have more autonomy and agency and be more active, productive members of their communities. The irony, however, is that at the same time legislators seek to empower teens by expanding voting rights, they are increasingly infantilizing them in other pernicious ways.

Confining Teens through Compulsory Schooling

For instance, the call to lower the voting age comes at a time when more states are tightening compulsory schooling statutes, requiring teenagers to stay in school longer under a legal threat of force. As of 2017, 24 states plus the District of Columbia had raised the minimum age at which a young person can legally leave school to 18. Lawmakers in Oregon announced legislation last month to lower the voting age to 16, but the state also raised its compulsory schooling age to 18. Sixteen-year-olds may get permission to vote, but in school, they still need permission to use the bathroom.

The alleged goal of expanding compulsory schooling laws is to lower drop-out rates and improve academic and social outcomes, yet research shows no clear benefit in raising the compulsory school attendance age. In Pressley’s home state of Massachusetts, a Boston city councilor recently proposed offering an optional 13th year of public schooling, prolonging the state stewardship of teens.

More time in compulsory school settings means less time adolescents spend working or otherwise constructively engaged with their larger communities. In fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a sharp decline in teenage labor force participation from a high of 57.9 percent in 1979 to just 34.1 percent in 2011. Much of this decline is due to the increased emphasis on time in school and academic performance while devaluing the critical life skills, mentoring, and real-life problem-solving that teens can experience through work and community involvement. Even summer jobs have been by replaced by school. According to the BLS, 42 percent of teens were enrolled in school in July 2016 compared to only 10 percent in July 1985.

Psychologist Robert Epstein points out how our society harms adolescents by stripping them of responsibility and authentic immersion into adult life. In his book, Teen 2.0, he writes that “high school is little more than a prison for many of our teens, and the time has come to explore bold new approaches to education that will allow our young to reconnect meaningfully with the adult world they are about to enter.” Dr. Epstein argues that the “artificial extension of childhood” past puberty is why so many US teenagers today are in turmoil.

The Power of Self-Education

The concept of adolescent empowerment and greater participation in the larger community is not new. For decades, social reformers have been advocating for more freedom and responsibility for teenagers. Paul Goodman brought these ideas to the forefront in his books, Growing Up Absurd (1960) and Compulsory Mis-education (1964). Goodman influenced John Holt, who took the ideas a step further. In his 1974 book Escape from Childhood, Holt promotes extending children’s rights, including allowing children the right to vote, as well as to direct their own education. The self-directed learning principle is critical for Holt. He writes in Escape from Childhood:

A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.

Holt went on to coin the term “unschooling” in 1977 as part of the nascent homeschooling movement, urging parents to remove their children from institutional schooling in favor of non-coercive, self-directed learning. Today, unschooling continues to gain popularity, particularly as more self-directed learning spaces provide alternatives to school for children and adolescents.

Lowering the voting age is a reasonable proposition. Indeed, it’s something worth considering as a mechanism for inviting adolescents into the larger discourse of our society. But lowering the voting age while forcing these same teens to spend additional years in mandatory schooling environments, cut-off from authentic, inter-generational community interactions, is nothing more than a political ploy.

Teenagers are capable of being valuable contributors to civil society. They should be granted greater freedom and responsibility. Lowering the voting age while trapping them in compulsory schooling gives teenagers neither freedom nor responsibility.

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Kerry McDonald (@kerry_edu) has a B.A. in Economics from Bowdoin and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband and four never-been-schooled children. Kerry is the author of the forthcoming book, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press). Follow her writing at Whole Family Learning.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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Colbert Smears Tulsi Gabbard To Her Face While Telling Zero Jokes

ORIGINAL LINK

Hawaii Congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard recently appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where instead of the light, jokey banter about politics and who she is as a person that Democratic presidential candidates normally encounter on late night comedy programs, the show’s host solemnly ran down a list of textbook beltway smears against Gabbard and made her defend them in front of his audience.

Normally when a Democratic Party-aligned politician appears on such a show, you can expect jokes about how stupid Trump is and how badly they’re going to beat the Republicans, how they’re going to help ordinary Americans, and maybe some friendly back-and-forth about where they grew up or something. Colbert had no time to waste on such things, however, because this was not an interview with a normal Democratic Party-aligned politician: this was a politician who has been loudly and consistently criticizing US foreign policy.

After briefly asking his guest who she is and why she’s running for president, Colbert jumped right into it by immediately bringing up Syria and Assad, the primary line of attack employed against Gabbard by establishment propagandists in American mainstream media.

Colbert: Do you think the Iraq war was worth it?

Gabbard: No.

Colbert: Do you think that our involvement in Syria has been worth it?

Gabbard: No.

Colbert: Do you think that ISIS could have been defeated without our involvement and without our support of the local troops there?

Gabbard: There are two things we need to address in Syria. One is a regime change war that was first launched by the United States in 2011, covertly, led by the CIA. That is a regime change war that has continued over the years, that has increased the suffering of the Syrian people, and strengthened groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, because the CIA was using American taxpayer dollars to provide arms and training and equipment to these terrorist groups to get them to overthrow the government. So that is a regime change war that we should not have been engaging.

Colbert: So, but if it is someone like Bashar al-Assad, who gasses his own people, or who engages in war crimes against his own people, should the United States not be involved?

Gabbard: The United States should not be intervening to overthrow these dictators and these regimes that we don’t like, like Assad, like Saddam Hussein, like Gaddafi, and like Kim Jong Un. There are bad people in the world, but history has shown us that every time the United States goes in and topples these dictators we don’t like, trying to end up like the world’s police, we end up increasing the suffering of the people in these countries. We end up increasing the loss of life, but American lives and the lives of people in these countries. We end up undermining our own security, what to speak of the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money that’s spent on these wars that we need to be using right here at home.

Like I said, this is not a normal presidential candidate. How often do you see a guest appear on a network late night talk show and talk about the CIA arming terrorists in Syria and the fact that US military interventionism is completely disastrous? It just doesn’t happen. You can understand, then, why empire propagandist Stephen Colbert spent the rest of the interview informing his TV audience that Tulsi Gabbard is dangerous and poisonous.

This was unwatchable. Colbert just went down the list of scripted Gabbard smears (Assad, David Duke) then sermonized about how US military intervention is a force for good in this world. All without telling a single joke. Late night "comedy" shows are propaganda for livestock. https://t.co/CqNF58sn9V

 — @caitoz

Colbert: You got some heat for meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Do you not consider him a war criminal? Why did you meet with that man?

Gabbard: In the pursuit of peace and security. If we are not willing to meet with adversaries, potential adversaries, in the pursuit of peace and security, the only alternative is more war. That’s why I took that meeting with Assad. In pursuit of peace and security.

Colbert: Do you believe he is a war criminal? Do you believe he gassed his own people or committed atrocities against his own people?

Gabbard: Yes. Reports have shown that that’s a fact.

Colbert: So you believe the intelligence agencies on that. Because I head that you did not necessarily believe those reports.

The reason I call Colbert a propagandist and not simply a liberal empire loyalist who happens to have been elevated by billionaire media is because these are carefully constructed narratives that he is reciting, and they weren’t constructed by him.

Trying to make it look to the audience as though Gabbard is in some way loyal to Assad has been a high-priority agenda of the mainstream media ever since she announced her presidential candidacy. We saw it in her recent appearance on The View, where John McCain’s sociopathic daughter called her an “Assad apologist” and demanded that Gabbard call Assad an enemy of the United States. We saw it in her recent CNN town hall, where a consultant who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign was presented as an ordinary audience member to help CNN’s Dana Bash paint Gabbard’s skepticism of intelligence reports about an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government as something that is weird and suspicious, instead of the only sane position in a post-Iraq invasion world. We saw it in her appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month, where the entire panel piled on her in outrage that she wouldn’t call Assad an enemy of the United States. It’s such a common propaganda talking point that the New York Times’ Bari Weiss famously made a laughingstock of herself by repeating it as self-evident truth on The Joe Rogan Experience without having the faintest clue what specific facts it was meant to refer to, just because she’d heard establishment pundits saying it so much.

This is an organized smear by the mass media attempting to marry Gabbard in the eyes of the public to a Middle Eastern leader whom the propagandists have already sold as a child-murdering monster, and Colbert is participating in it here just as much as the serious news media talking heads are. It’s been frustrating to watch Gabbard fold to this smear campaign by acting like it’s an established fact that Assad “gases his own people” and not the hotly contested empire-serving narrative she knows it is. Gabbard is being targeted by this smear because she challenges US political orthodoxy on military violence (the glue which holds the empire together), so no amount of capitulation will keep them from trying to prevent the public from trusting her words.

The journalist interrogating Tulsi seems to believe that US forces in Syria are fighting Assad. Tulsi corrects her, says those troops were deployed there to fight ISIS. These people don't even know what's happening in the places they want the US to occupy https://t.co/YWIbSVqePA

 — @RaniaKhalek

“I don’t know whether America should be the policemen of the world,” Colbert said after Gabard defended her position.

“It is my opinion that we should not be,” Gabbard replied, causing Colbert to launch into a stuffy, embarrassing sermon on the virtues of interventionism and US hegemony that would make Bill Kristol blush.

“If we are not, though, nature abhors a vacuum, and if we are not involved in international conflicts, or trying to quell international conflicts, certainly the Russians and the Chinese will fill that vacuum. And we will step away from the world stage in a significant way that might destabilize the world, because the United States, however flawed, is a force for good in the world in my opinion. Would you agree with that?”

Again, this is a comedy show.

Gabbard explained that in order to be a force for good in the world the United States has to actually do good, which means not raining fire upon every nation it dislikes all the time. Colbert responded by reading off his blue index card to repeat yet another tired anti-Gabbard smear.

“You’ve gotten some fans in the Trump supporter world: David Duke, Steve Bannon, and, uh, Matt, uh, Gaetz, is that his name? Matt Gaetz? What do you make of how much they like you?”

This one is particularly vile, partly because Gabbard has repeatedly and unequivocally denounced David Duke, who has a long-established and well-known history of injecting himself into the drama of high-profile conversations in order to maintain the illusion of relevance, and partly because it’s a completely irrelevant point that is brought up solely for the purpose of marrying Tulsi Gabbard’s name to a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Colbert only brought this up (and made Newsweek totally squee) because he wanted to assist in that marrying. The fact that there are distasteful ideologies which also happen to oppose US interventionism for their own reasons does not change the undeniable fact that US military interventionism is consistently disastrous and never helpful and robs the US public of resources that are rightfully theirs.

This interview was easily Colbert’s most blatant establishment rim job I’ve ever seen, surpassing even the time he corrected his own audience when they cheered at James Comey’s firing to explain to them that Comey is a good guy now and they’re meant to like him. Colbert’s show is blatant propaganda for human livestock, and the fact that this is what American “comedy” shows look like now is nauseating.

When Tulsi Gabbard first announced her candidacy I predicted that she’d have the narrative control engineers scrambling all over themselves to kill her message, and it’s been even more spectacular than I imagined. I don’t agree with everything she says and does, but by damn this woman is shaking up the establishment narrative matrix more than anybody else right now. She’s certainly keeping it interesting.

__________________________

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12 Statistics That Prove That The U.S. Is Facing A Consumer Debt Apocalypse

ORIGINAL LINK

In the entire history of the United States, consumers have never been in so much debt. And that would not be a crisis as long as the vast majority of us were regularly making our debt payments, but as you will see below delinquency levels are starting to rise to extremely alarming levels. In fact, some of the numbers that are coming in are even worse than we witnessed at any point during the last recession. If things are this bad already, what are they going to look like once the economy really gets bad? Because even though it appears that we are heading into a new recession, according to the Federal Reserve it has not officially begun yet. That means that much worse is yet to come. Just like last time, millions of Americans will likely lose their jobs, and without an income most of those that suddenly find themselves unemployed will not be able to pay their bills. The stage is set for the largest tsunami of consumer debt defaults that this country has ever seen, and that will absolutely devastate major financial institutions all across America.

If you think that I am exaggerating even a little bit, please read over the following list very carefully. The following are 12 statistics that prove that the U.S. is facing a consumer debt apocalypse…

#1 Total consumer debt in the United States just surpassed the 4 trillion dollar mark. That has never happened before in all of U.S. history.

#2 When you throw in mortgages and all other kinds of individual debt, U.S. consumers are now 13.5 trillion dollars in debt.

#3 A whopping 480 million credit cards are in circulation in this country. That number has shot up by nearly 13 percent since 2015.

#4 U.S. consumers are carrying 870 billion dollars worth of balances on their credit cards right now.

#5 56 percent of Americans that currently have credit card balances have been carrying them for more than a year.

#6 The number of “seriously delinquent”credit card accounts in the U.S. has shot up to 37 million.

#7 Americans now owe a total of 1.3 trillion dollars on their auto loans.

#8 At this moment, more than 7 million Americans are delinquent on their auto loan payments. The figure has already surpassed what we witnessed during the peak of the last recession by about a million.

#9 The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has reached the 1.5 trillion dollar mark. Over the last 10 years, that number has more than doubled.

#10 Right now, more than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is considered to be “seriously delinquent”.

#11 Millennials are now more than a trillion dollars in debt. No generation of Americans has ever been deeper in debt at this stage in life.

#12 One recent survey found that 78 percent of Americans “are living paycheck to paycheck”. Suffocating debt levels are a big reason why that figure is so incredibly high.

Since so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, that means that there is very little room for error. During the last recession, large numbers of Americans immediately began getting behind on their bills once they were laid off, and we saw mortgage defaults rise to unprecedented levels. Sadly, we haven’t learned from our past mistakes, and millions upon millions of Americans will find themselves drowning in an ocean of red ink once again during this next recession.

But even if you are not living paycheck to paycheck, carrying credit card balances is a very unwise thing to do.

Most Americans don’t realize that if you only make the minimum payment on a credit card every month, you can end up paying more in interest than you did for the original purchases. The following comes from USA Today…

If a credit-card borrower only made the minimum payments on $5,000 of debt, for example, they’d be in debt for more than 18 years and would end up paying $6,372 in interest based on national average interest rates, according to Ted Rossman, industry analyst for CreditCards.com.

If you keep playing this game, I promise you that you will never get rich. Instead, the only people that will be getting wealthy will be the people that are receiving your debt payments.

Credit card debt is one of my pet peeves. One of the best financial moves that anyone can make is to get out of credit card debt and never look back.

And that is particularly important at this juncture because the economy is really starting to slow down. Compared to last year, U.S. job cut announcements were up 117 percent in February.

We haven’t seen anything like that since the last financial crisis.

At this point, even mainstream economists are openly admitting what is coming. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, sounded downright gloomy in his most recent article…

The economy is throttling back. Way back. That’s the message in the near stall out of job growth last month. Job creation probably isn’t as bad as February’s disappointing numbers suggest — unusually poor weather played a role in limiting job growth to just 20,000 — but it is weaker than just a few months ago. Businesses are nervous, and sentiment is at risk of breaking if anything goes wrong.

And plenty could go wrong. A recession could materialize swiftly if businesses lose faith, and there is a good chance they will.

And when the next recession strikes, things are going to get very, very rough for U.S. consumers.

A consumer debt apocalypse is coming, and it is going to be incredibly painful.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post 12 Statistics That Prove That The U.S. Is Facing A Consumer Debt Apocalypse appeared first on The Most Important News.

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We Can No Longer Rely on USDA Organic Standards

http://healthimpactnews.com/2019/we-can-no-longer-rely-on-usda-organic-standards/

Feds Arrest Dozens, Including Famous Actresses, In "Largest College Admissions Scam Ever Prosecuted"

How Google knows your ‘secret interests’

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/security/google-knows-where-you-live-work-and-your-secret-interests-new-shadow-profile-report-says/news-story/82049f5ac0528d7481ec263de6ae0531

Democratic Presidential Contender Tulsi Gabbard Takes a Strong Stand For WikiLeaks and the Freedom of Press

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/03/democratic-presidential-contender-tulsi-gabbard-takes-a-strong-stand-for-wikileaks-and-the-freedom-of-press/

20% Of California Community College Student Are Homeless, Study Finds

How Six Years Of QE Transformed Young Americans Into Socialists

You Won’t Believe What Facebook Has Banned Now…

ORIGINAL LINK

If this sort of extreme censorship continues, pretty soon anybody that has anything even remotely important or interesting to say will be completely banned by Facebook. As you will see below, Facebook has just banned Zero Hedge, and they have also just announced that they will be systematically censoring any content that has “misinformation” about vaccines. Of course this is just the latest chapter in a relentless campaign by the social media giants to censor alternative sources of information. Since Donald Trump’s victory in November 2016, the social media crackdown has just gotten worse and worse, and it has gotten to the point where we can now safely say that free speech is dead on the major social media platforms.

It didn’t have to be this way. When Facebook, Twitter and the other major social media platforms were new, people were generally allowed to say whatever they wanted as long as they weren’t breaking any laws. As a result, people flocked to those platforms, and companies worth billions of dollars were created.

But now that those platforms are used by almost everyone, those in control have decided that only certain political viewpoints are acceptable, and the crackdown on dissenting voices has been unprecedented.

Yet with all that we have witnessed so far, I was still completely shocked when I learned that Facebook has banned all Zero Hedge content. This is what Zero Hedge is saying about the ban…

To be sure, as a for-profit enterprise with its own unique set of corporate “ethics”, Facebook has every right to impose whatever filters it desires on the media shared on its platform. It is entirely possible that one or more posts was flagged by Facebook’s “triggered” readers who merely alerted a censorship algo which blocked all content.

Alternatively, it is just as possible that Facebook simply decided to no longer allow its users to share our content in retaliation for our extensive coverage of what some have dubbed the platform’s “many problems”, including chronic privacy violations, mass abandonment by younger users, its gross and ongoing misrepresentation of fake users, ironically – in retrospect – its systematic censorship and back door government cooperation (those are just links from the past few weeks).

I have no idea why Facebook would place a blanket ban on all Zero Hedge material. I just went to share one of their articles on Facebook, and I was unable to do so.

Yes, Zero Hedge can be a little bit edgy at times, but from my perspective there is absolutely no justification that Facebook could possibly come up with for banning all content from the site.

We need to show our support for Zero Hedge, because if we don’t stand up now, eventually they will come for all the rest of us too.

This week, we also learned that Facebook will now be censoring all material that is critical of the vaccine industry…

Social media giant Facebook says it will remove groups and pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations on its site.

It’s the latest step Facebook and others are taking to stem the tide of misinformation on social media sites.

Facebook said Thursday it will take its cue from global health organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have publicly identified verifiable vaccine hoaxes.

So Facebook is actually going to use the CDC as a “neutral” source?

Really?

Well, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has aptly pointed out, the truth is that the CDC owns 20 vaccine patents and sells more than 4 billion dollars worth of vaccines annually…

“The CDC is a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The agency owns more than 20 vaccine patents and purchases and sells $4.1 billion in vaccines annually. Congressman Dave Weldon has pointed out that the primary metric for success across the CDC is how many vaccines the agency sells and how successfully the agency expands its vaccine program—regardless of any negative effects on human health.”

So of course the CDC is going to say that their own products are safe, because they have billions of reasons to do so.

I can’t tell you how angry this sort of rank hypocrisy makes me.

And the impetus for Facebook’s move appears to be criticism from Democrats in Congress.

More specifically, Adam Schiff appears to be the driving force behind this latest censorship push. The following comes from Natural News…

The drastic move comes after California Democrat Adam Schiff recently called on Facebook, Amazon, and various other Big Tech giants to allow only government-approved propaganda about vaccines to be shared, sold, or otherwise propagated on their platforms – an online “book burning,” if you will.

How would the left feel if the tables were suddenly turned on them?

For example, how do you think that they would react if anyone that criticized President Trump was permanently banned from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube?

There would be a tremendous public outcry, and rightly so.

Well, as Joseph Farah has pointed out, according to federal law it is illegal for the big tech giants to censor users based on their political views…

Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter enjoy privileged positions under federal law that includes standing as “carriers” and therefore immunity from defamation lawsuits – a status similar to telecoms and utilities. But it is supposed to come with a price tag under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, section 230. Do you know what is required of these non-publishers who are invulnerable to slander and libel laws? POLITICAL NEUTRALITY!

It is time to enforce the laws that we already have, and it is time for those that have been grossly violating those laws to be held accountable.

And the evidence that conservatives have been specifically targeted for censorship is now absolutely overwhelming. For instance, just consider the following numbers from Gateway Pundit…

Floyd Brown is a conservative author, speaker and media commentator. In 2008 Floyd launched Western Journal which quickly became one of the top conservative websites in America. By 2016 Floyd’s organization of Western Journal and other conservative websites under his umbrella had more than a billion page views. Since 2016 Floyd’s organization lost 75% of its Facebook traffic.

Likewise, we spoke with Jared Vallorani from Klicked Media. Jared traveled to Washington DC with The Gateway Pundit and website owners at 100%FedUp in June to discuss Facebook targeting against conservative publishers with Republican lawmakers. Jared told The Gateway Pundit his organization Klicked Media, which hosts over 60 conservative websites, lost 400 million page views from Facebook in the last six months if you compare the traffic to a year ago. Jared said, “We lost 70% to 80% of our traffic if you compare January to May 2017 vs Jan to May 2018.”

If you combine the total number of page-views lost by just these two conservative online publishers you are looking at a loss of over 1.5 billion page-views from Facebook in one year.

Enough is enough, and it is time to take a stand.

In addition to confronting those that are doing the censorship, it is going to be important to support those that are being censored. So if you enjoy what they do, I would encourage you to support Zero Hedge, WND, Infowars, Natural News, SHTF Plan, Steve Quayle, The Gateway Pundit and all the other wonderful alternative media outlets that work tirelessly to keep you informed.

We are literally in a battle for what the future of our society is going to look like, and the information war is the front line of that battle.

The Internet is the “public square” of today, and that is where the struggle for hearts and minds is happening. The elite know that they cannot win an honest fight in “the marketplace of ideas”, and so they are doing their best to silence their opposition.

The stakes are incredibly high, time is running out, and we simply cannot allow them to win.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

The post You Won’t Believe What Facebook Has Banned Now… appeared first on The Most Important News.

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