At
the end of the call, I remind her that she is engaging in illegal acts
by telling social media companies what content to censor. See page 7 for her message to Twitter showing them what to censor.
Twitter
follows orders, even though Carol is breaking the law. They aren’t
going to turn her in. On the contrary, they are in on it. This is
collusion to censor free speech.
If you’d like to tell her you support my suggestion, you can reach her at ccrawford@cdc.gov.
I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear from you.
You Tube censored my video within minutes of posting
I also uploaded the video on YouTube,
but it was censored after just 6 views! YouTube will censor anything
that makes the government look bad. So if you document government
corruption, YouTube is not the place to post it.
caitlinjohnstone | The
empire has had mixed feelings about the internet since its creation. On
one hand it allows for unprecedented surveillance and information
gathering and the rapid distribution of propaganda, which it likes, but
on the other it allows for the unprecedented democratization of
information, which it doesn’t like.
Its
answer to this quandary has been to come up with “fact checking”
services and Silicon Valley censorship protocols for restricting
“misinformation” (with “facts” and “information” defined as “whatever
advances imperial interests”). That’s all we’re seeing with continually
expanding online censorship policies, and with government-tied
oligarchic narrative management operations like NewsGuard.
Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.
The
notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his
account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,”
presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago
which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass
casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured,
and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”
“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said
of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the
Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”
That
we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support
the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the
least bit surprising.
Haiphong is far from the first
to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened
around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was
crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was
losing its strategic usefulness.
But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon
Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial
historic records.
This
idea that government-tied Silicon Valley institutions should act as
arbiters of history on behalf of the public consumer is gaining steadily
increasing acceptance in the artificially manufactured echo chamber of
mainstream public opinion. We saw another example of this recently in
Joe Lauria’s excellent refutation of accusations against Consortium News of historic inaccuracy by the imperial narrative management firm NewsGuard.
As journalists like Whitney Webb and Mnar Adley
noted years ago, NewsGuard markets itself as a “news rating agency”
designed to help people sort out good from bad sources of information
online, but in reality functions as an empire-backed weapon against
media who question imperial narratives about what’s happening in the
world. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal outlined the company’s many partnerships with imperial swamp monsters like former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and “chief propagandist”
Richard Stengel as well as “imperialist cutouts like the German
Marshall Fund” when its operatives contacted his outlet for comment on
their accusations.
stratpol |Response to Mr. Myard, on the United States / Russia confrontation in Ukraine.
If a good part of your analysis on the risks of the Ukrainian conflict getting out of hand seems correct to me, I come back to the sentence: “The
information provided by the Americans was decisive in countering the
Russian advance, of which the army proved incapable. to adapt, due to
outdated military concepts.”
Former
"Situation-Intelligence-Electronic Warfare" Chief of the Joint
Operational Planning Staff, I do not at all share this part of the
analysis which is based on an inaccurate "situation assessment" which
is, in fact, the conclusion from a biased Atlanticist position, aimed at
making the Ukrainians believe that Russia is weak, in order to push
Ukraine to resist until the end and let it envisage, with Western help, a
victory. Here is my argument:
Until
proven otherwise, Russia has not declared a partial and even less
general mobilization of its forces to carry out this “special
operation”. As part of
Operation Z, it has so far used only 12% of its soldiers (professionals
or volunteers), 10% of its fighter planes, 7% of its tanks, 5% of its
missiles and 4% of its artillery. Everyone
will observe that the behavior of the Western ruling elites is, until
now, much more feverish and hysterical, than the behavior of the Russian
governance, calmer, more placid, more determined, more sure and master
of itself, of his action and his speech. These are facts.
Russia has therefore not made use of its immense reserves (reserves which hardly exist any more in the EU). She has more than a week's worth of ammunition as she demonstrates every day in the field. We
are not so lucky in the West where the shortage of ammunition, the
obsolescence of major equipment, their insufficient maintenance, their
low DTO (Technical Operational Availability), the absence of reserves,
the lack of training of personnel , the sample nature of modern
equipment and many other elements do not allow us to seriously consider,
today, a military victory for NATO against Russia. This is the reason why we are content with an “economic” war, hoping to weaken the Russian bear.
Let's come to the quality of the military leadership of the Russian side and compare it to that of the “Western coalition”.
On
February 24, the Russians urgently embarked on a pre-emptive “special
operation”, preceding by a few days an assault by kyiv forces against
the Donbass.
This
operation was special because most of the ground operations were going
to take place in a sister country and in areas where a large part of the
population was not hostile to Russia (Donbass). It
was therefore not a classic high-intensity operation against an
irreducible enemy, it was an operation in which the technique of the
Russian steamroller, crushing the opposing forces, infrastructures and
populations by the artillery (as in Germany during the 2nd World War) was impossible to envisage. This
operation was special because it was more, in the Donbass, an operation
to liberate a friendly population, hostage of the Ukro-Nazi reprisal
battalions, and martyred for 8 years ., an operation in which civilian populations and infrastructure were to be spared as much as possible.
This
operation was therefore truly special and particularly difficult to
conduct, always bearing in mind the contradictory requirements of
obtaining victory by advancing and occupying the ground, while sparing
the population and the civilian infrastructure and the lives of its own
soldiers.
In
addition, this operation has been carried out, so far, in numerical
inferiority (nearly one against two), while the ratio of forces on the
ground required in offensive is 3 against 1, and even 5 against 1 in
zone urbanized. The Kievan
forces have also perfectly understood the interest of entrenching
themselves in the cities and of using the Russian-speaking and
Russophile civilian populations as a human shield...
I
observe that, on the ground, the Russian forces continue to advance,
day after day, slowly but surely against a Ukrainian army which has
achieved its general mobilization, which is aided by the West, and which
is supposed to fight for his land...
Question
the quality of Russian leadership, engaged in a very complex military
operation, conducted in numerical inferiority, in which everything must
be done to avoid excessive collateral damage. seems to me to be a huge error of assessment. We
also all too often lend to the Russians, in the West, war intentions or
aims that they never had, just to be able to say that these objectives
have not been achieved.
It
is true that NATO has never bothered with scruples to crush under the
bombs the civilian populations of the countries it attacked (often under
false pretexts), to force these countries to ask for mercy. (Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.). More
than a million NATO bombs have been dropped since 1990 on the planet,
causing the direct or indirect death of several million individuals in
the most total indifference of Western public opinion.
Before
coming to the examination of the Western leadership, for comparison
with the Russian leadership, let us note that NATO took 78 days of
bombardment and 38,000 aerial sorties to force little Serbia to ask for
an armistice. Remember
that Serbia is 8 times smaller than Ukraine and 6 times less populated,
and that it was attacked by NATO, without a UN mandate, in a balance of
power of more than ten to one. Has
anyone in the West wondered then about the quality of NATO's
leadership, which took 78 days to defeat its Serbian adversary with such
a balance of power? Has
anyone questioned the legality of this action launched under a false
pretext (false Racak massacre) and without a UN mandate?
reuters | Cowering
in the labyrinth of Soviet-era bunkers far beneath the vast Azovstal
steel works, Natalia Usmanova felt her heart would stop she was so
terrified as Russian bombs rained down on Mariupol, sprinkling her with
concrete dust.
Usmanova,
37, spoke to Reuters on Sunday after being evacuated from the plant, a
sprawling complex founded under Josef Stalin and designed with a
subterranean network of bunkers and tunnels to withstand attack. read more
"I
feared that the bunker would not withstand it - I had terrible fear,"
Usmanova said, describing the time sheltering underground.
"When the bunker started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can vouch for that: I was so worried the bunker would cave in."
"We
didn't see the sun for so long," she said, speaking in the village of
Bezimenne in an area of Donetsk under the control of Russia-backed
separatists around 30 km (20 miles) east of Mariupol.
She recalled the lack of oxygen in the shelters and the fear that had gripped the lives of people hunkered down there.
Usmanova
was among dozens of civilians evacuated from the plant in Mariupol, a
southern port city that has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks
and left a wasteland.
Usmanova
said she joked with her husband on the bus ride out, in a convoy agreed
by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC), that they would no longer have to go to the lavatory with a
torch.
"You
just can't imagine what we have been through - the terror," Usmanova
said. "I lived there, worked there all my life, but what we saw there
was just terrible."
WaPo | “What
we need is a First Amendment-respecting process in which the government
doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable
behavioral code,” Wheeler said.
Even
professionals who think that social media is a net good say that
Twitter as Musk envisions it would be terrible for users and investors.
The past few years have spawned any number of Twitter knockoffs catering
to those who feel muzzled by the original, including Gab and Parler,
but none has taken off in the mainstream.
That
is not an accident, said Alicia Wanless, director of the Partnership
for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace
in Washington. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a
nightclub that turns a blind eye to casual violence.
“Musk
can buy Twitter and try to take it back to some nostalgic lost Eden of
the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the least community
standards, like Gab, hardly rank because it isn’t a good business,”
Wanless said.
Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundationwho
has helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and
ordinary people from domestic stalking, said she “would be concerned
about the human rights and personal safety impacts of any single person
having complete control over Twitter’s policies.”
She
added, “I am particularly concerned about the impact of complete
ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not
understand the realities of content moderation at scale.”
Citing
Musk supporting the idea for allowing anything legal, Galperin said:
“Twitter’s content moderation practices leave a lot to be desired, but
they tried the policies that Musk seems to favor more than a decade ago,
and it did not work.”
A
pullback in moderation would disproportionately harm women, minorities
and anyone out of favor with the establishment, civil rights advocates
said. “Without rules of the road, we are going to be put in harm’s way,”
said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of
Change. “Our protections cannot be up to the whims of billionaires.”
Alex
Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who called out
Russian disinformation on that platform during the 2016 election, said
Musk has a notion of Twitter as a public square for free expression that
is divorced from the reality of many individuals and failed to
acknowledge that it would give more power to the most powerful.
Without
moderation, Stamos said, “anybody who expresses an opinion ends up with
every form of casual insult ranging to death and rape threats. That is
the baseline of the Internet. If you want people to be able to interact,
you need to have basic rules.”
greenwald |When Hillary Clinton's divine entitlement to the
U.S. presidency began to look imperiled in 2016 — first due to the
irreverent and unkempt (but surprisingly formidable) Democratic Party
primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator
from Vermont — her campaign and its media allies invented and unveiled a
deeply moving morality tale. A faceless horde of unnamed,
uncredentialed, unmannered, violent, abusive and deeply misogynistic
online Sanders supporters — dubbed with the gender-emphasizing name
"Bernie Bros” even though many were women — were berating, insulting and
brutalizing Hillary, her top campaign surrogates (U.S. Senators, former
cabinet members, corporate executives), and especially pro-Hillary
corporate journalists with a vast artillery of traumatizing words and
violent tweets.
This storyline — and especially the way it
cleverly inverted the David v. Goliath framework of the 2016 campaign so
that it was now Hillary and her band of monied and Ivy-League-educated
political and media elites who were the real victims — was irresistible to Harvard-and-Yale-trained journalists at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post
op-ed pages who really believe they are the truly marginalized peoples.
This narrative scheme enabled them — the most powerful and influential
media and political elites in the world, with access to the most potent
platforms and megaphones — to somehow credibly lay claim to that most
valued of all currencies in American political life: victimhood.
With
this power matrix in place, what mattered was no longer the pain and
anger of people whose towns had their industries stripped by the
Clintons’ NAFTA robbery, or who worked at low-wage jobs with no benefits
due to the 2008 financial crisis caused by Clintonite finance geniuses,
or who were drowning in student debt with no job prospects after that
crisis, or who suffered from PTSD, drug and alcohol addiction and shabby
to no health care after fighting in the Clintons’ wars. Now, such
ordinary people were not the victims but the perpetrators.
Their anger toward elites was not valid or righteous but dangerous,
abusive and toxic. The real victims were multi-millionaire hosts of
MSNBC programs and U.S. Senators and New York Times columnists
who were abused and brutalized by those people's angry tweets for the
crime of supporting a pioneer and avatar for marginalized people: the
Wellesley-and-Yale-Law-graduate, former First Lady, Senator from New
York, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The genius of the Bernie Bro rhetorical scheme was two-fold. First, it
prioritized and centered elite discomfort over the far more important
and real anger and deprivation of ordinary people. Secondly, and even
better from the perspective of elite interests, it implicitly imposed a
ban on any meaningful critiques of powerful political and media elites
by insisting that the online abuse and resultant trauma they endured was
the fault of those who criticized them. According to this
elite-protecting script, this crisis of online abuse and trauma did not
materialize out of nowhere. It was triggered by, and was the fault of,
anyone who voiced criticism of those elites. By speaking ill of these
media and political figures, such critics were "targeting” them and
signaling that they should be attacked.
dailybeast | As soon as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine,
Gonzalo Lira started sharing his thoughts and observations on the
conflict in a run of YouTube videos and posts on Telegram and Twitter.
“The commentary and analysis I post is without picking sides,” Lira, an
American who’s lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv for years and was in Kyiv at the start of the offensive, wrote in a recent post, “trying to be as balanced and factually accurate as I can be.”
He
began showing up on niche but notable podcasts and livestreams, where
hosts introduced him as an unmediated font of on-the-ground insights, as
someone willing to share truths about the complex conflict that the
mainstream media either can’t or won’t. He’s also gained a slew of new
followers—his Telegram has about 45,000 followers, up from 20,000 on
March 1, and seems to be gaining hundreds more every day. Many people
seem to view him as a valuable source, and have taken to signal-boosting
his content.
But his “fair-and-balanced” accounts often involve wild claims about the supposedly obvious “evil” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The comedian-turned-politician is a known “cokehead,” Lira has
claimed—a man who uses his people as shields, has provided arms to
criminals who have terrorized the streets of Kyiv, and has possibly
“deliberately tried to have a nuclear accident” to pin it on Russia and
possibly drag America into his war. Meanwhile, Lira has portrayed the
Russian assault as provoked—and as “one of the most brilliant invasions
in military history.” He hasinsisted that the invaders don’t want to harm civilians or civilian infrastructure and are in facttaking pains not
to, that the Russian advance has not stalled but is in fact right on
course, and that Russian domination will likely be good for Ukraine in
the end.
He has also shared widely debunked conspiracy theories to
support or build out his narratives, many of them revolving around
Russian claims that they’ve found evidence of American bioweapons labs and research in Ukraine.
He has decried stories about Ukrainian resistance as obvious Western
propaganda. And he has accused people who contradict his assessments of
being idiots or paid shills.
Independent experts who follow the conflict closely, of course, vigorously disagree.
“His
claims are nonsense,” Alexander Motyl, an expert on Ukrainian affairs
at Rutgers University who’s been monitoring the conflict, told The Daily
Beast.
Not only do Lira's narratives fly in the face of a vast amount of
credible on-the-ground reporting, they “fit perfectly with what Putin
and his associates have been claiming for months,” as Motyl put it. In
fact, Lira has been in such striking lockstep with Russian narratives
on the conflict—sometimes even posting official government statements
as definitive truths about it—that Russian propaganda outlets have used
clips of him as a supposed source of external, on-the-ground support for
its stories.
More telling: When Alexandra Hrycak, a Ukrainian
affairs expert who works at Reed College and has been monitoring the
conflict, first reviewed Lira’s claims, she assumed he was likely a
fictional persona created by the Kremlin to spread its message. These
sorts of covert mouthpieces often claim to be fair and balanced outside
experts, she noted, “and [tend to argue] that their opponents are
irrational, emotional, and need to consider the facts.”
Lira is
not fake. Nor is there any evidence that he’s a paid Russian agent. In
fact, he’s actually attempted to publicly distance himself from
propaganda content that uses his clips.
greenwald |One of the most successful disinformation campaigns
in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the
2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks
before Americans were set to vote — the nation's oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden
and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President,
wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would
again if elected president.
The backlash against this reporting
was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S.
corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies.
The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA's
all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
These "former intel officials" did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo." Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence
to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do
them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this "suspicion" based on
their experience:
We want to emphasize that we
do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President
Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we
do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.
But
a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump's defeat had
no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former
officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an
election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were "Russian
disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia
manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.'s justifiably despised class of media employees.
Very
few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials
themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to
corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count
— began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead
spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of
Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were "Russian disinformation.”
foxnews | It's still amazing that someone like Joe Rogan has become the subject
of such hatred and venom from the leftists media and their allies in
academic and public medicine. Rogan has drawn such strong levels of
invective for simply going against the ruling class on issues such as
COVID-19 and, more broadly, the classically liberal principles of free,
open, and rigorous debate with diversity in thought," NewsBusters
managing editor Curtis Houck told Fox News.
"Despite having had a
long career in Hollywood and supported politicians like Bernie Sanders,
none of his past behaviors are enough in the eyes of today's left. It's
conform or be silenced. It's twisted and, quite frankly, lame brained
for them to voice support for free speech and the First Amendment but
insist Rogan shouldn't be allowed to have a prominent platform," Houck
continued. "It's not only important to point out how he's not to be
confused with a conservative, but it's almost an imperative to
illustrate just how authoritarian and close-minded too many on the left
have become."
CNN has particularly feuded with Rogan; the two
sides feuded when Rogan took ivermectin to tread COVID-19 and the
liberal outlet ran the narrative that he had taken "horse dewormer" and a
"livestock drug." Rogan fired back in an interview with CNN's Dr.
Sanjay Gupta that his network was "lying" and Gupta conceded some of
CNN's people had misspoken.
During a headline-making appearance on
Rogan’s podcast, Gupta pointed to the "snarky" statement released by
the FDA saying, "You are not a horse. You are not a cow," in order to
encourage people to not take ivermectin, but Rogan remained persistent
on calling out CNN's coverage of a drug that's been "given out to
billions and billions of people" and resulted in a Nobel Prize.
Rogan
first told Gupta that his ivermectin was "prescribed to me by a
doctor," forcing the CNN correspondent to say the drug "shouldn't be
called" horse dewormer.
The fight continued when CNN fumed in a
statement to the Washington Post that Rogan had undermined faith in
effective vaccines, adding "the only thing CNN did wrong here was bruise
the ego of a popular podcaster who pushed dangerous conspiracy
theories." The Post's Erik Wemple wrote at the time that the statement
from CNN "sounds more like the work of an advocacy group than a
journalism outfit."
mediaite | Two hundred and seventy “scientists, medical professionals,
professors, and science communicators” are requesting Spotify add a
misinformation policy for its platform due to Joe Rogan’s massively popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE).
The “Open Letter to Spotify” calling for action against Rogan came as a result of Rogan’s interview with Dr. Robert Malone. The Malone episode has been called out for promoting conspiracy theories regarding the Covid-19 pandemic.
The letter states, “By allowing the propagation of false and
societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to
damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the
credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.”
The letter continues to slam Rogan for his stance on Covid-19
treatments. “Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly
spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in
science and medicine. He has discouraged vaccination in young people
and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are ‘gene therapy,’
promoted off-label use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (contrary to FDA
warnings), and spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”
“Notably, Dr. Malone is one of two recent JRE guests who has compared pandemic policies to the Holocaust,” the letter charged.
YouTube has removed
Rogan’s interview with Malone, and Twitter suspended Malone’s account
earlier this month for breaking the platform’s guidelines around the
posting Covid-19 misinformation.
You can read the full Open Letter to Spotify here.
theatlantic | The internet gives groups the
ability not just to express and bond over misery but to inflict it on
others—in effect, to transfer their own misery onto those they resent.
The most extreme examples come in the form of racist or misogynist
harassment campaigns—many led by young white men—such as Gamergate or
the hashtag campaigns against Black feminists.
Misery
trickles down in subtler ways too. Though the field is still young,
studies on social media suggest that emotions are highly contagious on
the web. In a review of the science,
Harvard’s Amit Goldenberg and Stanford’s James J. Gross note that
people “share their personal emotions online in a way that affects not
only their own well-being, but also the well-being of others who are
connected to them.” Some studies found that positive posts could drive
engagement as much as, if not more than, negative ones, but of all the
emotions expressed, anger seems to spread furthest and fastest. It tends
to “cascade to more users by shares and retweets, enabling quicker
distribution to a larger audience.”
Tech
executives thought that connecting the world would be an unmitigated
good. Widespread internet access and social media have made it far
easier for the average person to hear and be heard by many more of his
fellow citizens.
But it also
means that miserable people, who were previously alienated and isolated,
can find one another, says Kevin Munger, an assistant professor at Penn
State who studies how platforms shape political and cultural opinions.
This may offer them some short-term succor, but it’s not at all clear
that weak online connections provide much meaningful emotional support.
At the same time, those miserable people can reach the rest of us too.
As a result, the average internet user, Munger told me in a recent
interview, has more exposure than previous generations to people who,
for any number of reasons, are hurting. Are they bringing all of us
down?
In an essay titled “Facebook Is Other People,”
Munger uses one of his relatives as an example. The relative is in his
60s and has a cognitive disability. Munger describes him as “an
embittered, lonely man, the perfect target for information fraudsters
who will claim to explain that the source of his pain is some despised
group (immigrants, the deep state).” The relative has expressed an
interest in getting online, and Munger sees only downsides: “His
presence as a consumer of online news will have negative consequences,
both for himself and for the wider information environment.”
It may
sound obvious to say that our digital spaces are not okay because
people are not okay. But too many conversations about the problems in
online communities elide this fact. They frame the information crisis as
solely a technological issue. When Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow tech
CEOs come before Congress for their bipartisan grillings, the subtext is
that if the companies could only implement the proper moderation
policies, remove a few of the most toxic personalities, and change the
way content is recommended (according to their desired politics), the
problem would go away.
NationalReview |Dr. Aaron Kheriaty has been fired from the University of
California Irvine, where he has worked as a professor at UCI School of
Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health for
almost 15 years. Back in the spring of 2020, he could have been a poster
boy for the medical professionals we were cheering on every night. That
was then. It seems that he has not only been dismissed because he is
unvaccinated, but because he has dared to make the medical argument that
natural immunity puts people in a similar — or better — place than a
vaccine against Covid-19. I’m not a doctor, and I’d like to think
doctors are free to raise questions based on their scientific judgment.
Kheriaty is not the only doctor I know who has found
himself in situations where it is understood that you are to go along
and not raise questions when it comes to Covid-19 protocols. I know
that’s happened in other places in medicine — the scandal of women’s
health is how they use the contraceptive pill for a whole host of
problems, cover up symptoms, treat fertility as itself a problem, and
sometimes leave women infertile when they actually want to have a child
later on down the line. So it happens. And it’s not good.
An added injustice would be to not shed light on what’s
happening. At one point this fall, when Dr. Kheriaty was still on forced
leave, I tried to post a video commentary to YouTube about his
situation and it was rejected as vaccine misinformation — to simply talk
about what was happening. I myself do not know anything about Covid-19
except my own experiences and what doctors tell me, because I am not a
doctor. It’s amazing how many of us think we are. And it’s terrifying
when doctors suppress scientific debate.
More here. You don’t have to have a strong position on vaccines to be disturbed by what’s happened to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.
BAR |As you know, the U.S. incarcerates its share of political prisoners, with many having been affiliated with the Black Liberation Army and targeted by COINTELPRO.
Why won’t the mainstream media cover the trials, appeals, demands, and
resistance efforts of these political prisoners? Since they have been
deemed “enemies of the state,” are they, as a result, enemies of the
U.S. corporate media as well?
I’m not sure if most Americans have heard of COINTELPRO, but it was a
very frightening, elaborate effort by the United States government to
suppress, fracture and destroy Black liberation groups, anti-racist,
anti-imperialist, Marxist, and feminist movements in the U.S.
This includes groups like the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black
Liberation Army (BLA). The FBI used covert means to attack these groups
e.g. create infighting, sew discord among its members, attack them in
the media, label them as terrorists, and give them lengthy jail
sentences of decades behind bars. Divide and conquer, like they do
overseas.
Just a few days ago on December 4th, was the anniversary of Fred
Hampton’s assassination in 1969. The FBI infiltrated his security detail
and spied on him, before one night he was drugged and then murdered in
his bed by government agents – all for the crime of combatting poverty,
racism and uniting people under one banner irrespective of race and
class.
Hampton is just one example, but others come to mind, such as Mutulu
Shakur from the BLA, which you mentioned. The government either killed
these activists and revolutionaries or gave them sentences such as 60
years imprisonment— essentially a life sentence— in order to decapitate
these movements. There was a concerted effort to take out people in
positions of leadership and incapacitate Black liberation groups.
The United States and its European allies love pretending they are
civilized, “true democracies,” and that everyone else is barbaric. But
if any of these things happened in another country, you’d hear the U.S.
media howling about “repression by a brutal dictatorship”— but when the
Americans or Europeans do it, it’s fine, apparently. This is why they
portray activists and revolutionaries as violent, disturbers of the
peace who must be penalized. That’s their excuse for repressing change
in America.
These are political prisoners in the true sense of the word:
imprisoned because their ideas and actions challenge the power
structures of the United States. And once they are deemed enemies of the
state, who is going to stand up for them? Certainly not the media. The
media is an arm of the same corporations that control the government.
The media is not interested in standing up for true revolutionaries.
They would rather herald someone like the Facebook whistleblower for
helping liberals advocate more censorship through Big Tech.
It’s not fashionable in America to be a real revolutionary, to really
challenge racism and capitalism. The most “solidarity” you’ll see from
the media and corporations is changing their logos to black and white,
or adopting some marketing gimmicks— things that don’t require them to actually support anti-racism movements, but just give the appearance that they do.
The fact that the state invested so much energy and resources into
destroying these groups shows you how effective they are, and how afraid
they make the power structures of the white, capitalist, Western elites
that rule America.
America claims to stand for justice, equality; it claims to fight for
the underdog and prides itself in being a nation born out of revolution
– but this is what happens to real revolutionaries in the United
States: they are jailed or murdered by the state.
WSJ | “Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual
right to choose,” Nets general manager Sean Marks said in October.
“Currently the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of
the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate
with part-time availability.”
The Nets changed their mind about Irving’s availability with
Covid ripping through their locker room in a spike that coincides with a
sharp increase in cases across the league and the Omicron variant’s
arrival in New York. Brooklyn executives cited a roster that has been
depleted by the coronavirus to explain the unexpected backtracking by a
team sitting in first place in the Eastern Conference even without
Irving. As coach Steve Nash expressed misgivings about pushing the
workload of Durant, who nearly leads the league in minutes after
rupturing his Achilles’ tendon in 2019, the Nets softened their
position.
“We believe that the addition of Kyrie will not only make us a
better team, but allow us to more optimally balance the physical demand
on the entire roster,” Marks said. “We look forward to Kyrie’s return to
the lineup.”
They are likely to be waiting even longer now. The Nets have 53
games left in the regular season. Irving is currently eligible to play
in 24 of them outside of New York and Canada, but that number will
shrink to 21 after the new year.
The whiplash of Irving’s availability wasn’t the only
Covid-related turn of events for the Nets on Saturday. They had managed
to win two straight games while extremely shorthanded this week—they
fielded eight players in one win, the minimum required by the league—in
large part because Durant was sublime. Then he, too, was sidelined.
Durant has said that he is vaccinated and was one of the first public
figures to share that he had Covid in March 2020.
Irving, who has declined to comment on his vaccination status,
remained mostly silent during his absence with the exception of cryptic
messages on social media, including an Instagram video this week that
showed him lacing up his sneakers. He was also spotted at high-school
and college games in New Jersey and Los Angeles while his NBA team was
playing in Brooklyn.
The league’s Covid rules were significantly more onerous for
the tiny minority of unvaccinated players even before the NBA issued a
stricter round of guidance this week in response to the uptick of cases:
There are nearly 60 players out now, including more than a dozen on the
Nets and Knicks alone.
Forbes | A breakthrough Covid-19 coronavirus infection may not be “super” to
have. But can it actually give you what’s being called “super immunity”
on social media? In other words, can a severe acute respiratory syndrome
coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection after being fully vaccinated
against Covid-19 bring you even greater protection? Well, a research letter just published in JAMA offered a small window into this “super” possibility.
If you search for “super immunity” on social media you will find plenty of posts such as the following:
My husband and I were boosted almost a month ago. We (unfortunately) did not gain any superpowers but we DO have super immunity against Omicron which does sound like a supervillain name so I feel like it counts. Get boosted if you are able to prevent major illness <3 https://t.co/HbzYWL2z1M
You’ll also find mention of the study described by the JAMA
research letter. For example, Monica Gandhi MD, MPH, a Professor of
Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and HIV
researcher, used the terms “hybrid immunity” and “super immunity” when
tweeting about the study:
This study shows this too in delta breakthrough infections from Provincetown. Of note, this study also looks at T cells; JAMA study specifically showed increase in IgA levels which are the mucosal antibodyhttps://t.co/StZ5neUFVc
She called it “hybrid immunity,” because the potentially boosted
immune protection may come from a combination of vaccination and then
subsequent infection. Gandhi also referenced another study described in a pre-print uploaded to MedRxiv
that drew blood from 35 vaccinated individuals in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, 14 of whom had had subsequent breakthrough infections.
This pre-print described how the blood of the breakthrough infection
group had 28-fold higher levels of binding antibodies and 34-fold higher
levels of neutralizing antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant
than the blood of the rest. This study also looked at another measure of
immune protection, how the individual’s T cells responded to the virus,
a measure that I described previously for Forbes.
Those with breakthrough infections had a 4.4-fold higher Spike
protein-specific CD8+ T cell responses against the Delta variant than
the rest of the study participants. Take all the results from this
pre-print with a Ugg boot full of salt though. Anyone with a laptop, an
Internet connection, and opposable thumbs can upload a pre-print. It is
not the same as a peer-reviewed study published in a reputable
scientific journal.
Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant. I need to be very clear: vaccines alone will not get any country out of this crisis. It’s not vaccines instead of masks, distancing, ventilation or hand hygiene. Do it all. Do it consistently. Do it well. pic.twitter.com/YAVfJXsviQ
3/ I've pondered this question a lot. I've been involved in discussions with @WHO, many IPC and public health researchers and practitioners, politicians in multiple countries etc.
This thread summarizes my understanding of the causes of this situation. I look forward to comments
4/ Early in pandemic, a major historical error in the understanding of the IPC field played a major role
"Droplet transmission" was an important concept in that field... and it is an error that dates from 1910!!
5/ The concept of "sprayborne droplet transmission" was used by Charles Chapin (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V…),
a prominent US Public Health researcher (later pres. of APHA), to
explain the EMPIRICAL OBSERVATION that transmission increases in close
proximity and decreases with distance
6/ As of the start of the pandemic, @WHO and @CDCgov were completely stuck on the concepts from Chapin (e.g. his seminal 1910 book: ), as exemplified by this @WHO video showing the sprayborne droplets as explanation why distance reduces transmission:
7/ The problem is that Chapin had
made an error. He was pushing "contact infection" that he had
conceptualized, and encountered a lot of resistance (his book: archive.org/details/source…).
8/ Chapin was very intelligent, and
was well aware that short-range airborne transmission could also explain
why distance reduced transmission: we breathe less exhaled air from
someone else as we increased distance
FT | From December 1, Facebook Inc’s stock ticker FB will be relegated to the dust of time. The world’s largest social media company will instead officially morph into Meta Platforms, to trade under the official ticker MVRS.
The move follows Mark Zuckerberg’s bold decision to tie the company’s future evolution with the development of what is loosely described as the metaverse. In coming years, Zuckerberg hopes, people will transition to seeing his empire as primarily a servicer to this new digital realm.
That means investors in the near $1tn market capitalisation company — and broader society — will have to get a grip on what exactly is the metaverse.
It’s not that easy to describe. Today, it exists on many disjointed planes — from gaming universes to virtual conference call systems. Its first and most famous incarnation was probably the Second Life platform, notorious for being a flop although it still boasts some 200,000 active daily users.
Zuckerberg’s vision will benefit from far superior tech.
“The metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world,” reads the Facebook spiel.
But it’s also likely to be an attempt to standardise the metaverse’s consensus reality so that value can be harvested from users in even more creative ways. That may sound alluring to investors, but economists, politicians and activists should take heed.
Facebook’s move may also be a jarring acknowledgment that for some tech leaders, the base reality of our world is at risk of losing its investment appeal relative to the metaverse.
BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis’ once opined that “all of us in the west — not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves — have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world”.
The forward march to the metaverse pushes this trend to the extreme. It sends the message that perhaps our true world is so corrupted, so divided and so unfair, that it isn’t worth saving after all. Alternatively, we can photoshop reality to the point we can all pretend everything is as pretty as we experience it in our own heads. Also known as cultivating delusions: don’t worry about your lousy life, come join us in your own dreamworld.
WSWS | In a highly revealing passage, Silverstein writes that, in
“privileging ‘actual fact’ over ‘narrative,’” critics of the 1619
Project “seem to proceed from the premise that history is a fixed thing;
that somehow, long ago, the nation’s historians identified the relevant
set of facts about our past, and it is the job of subsequent
generations to simply protect and disseminate them.” This passage comes
after a lengthy discussion of efforts by far-right Republicans who have
sought to censor the 1619 Project—efforts which the WSWS opposes.
Silverstein’s aim is to conflate scholarly and left-wing criticism of
the 1619 Project with the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who have seized on the 1619 Project’s
attack on the American Revolution to posture as defenders of democracy,
and with earlier efforts by the Republican Party in the 1990s to
eliminate what they derided as “revisionist history” from high school
textbooks.
That the writing of history involves interpretation of
evidence is the most elementary proposition of the profession. To
suggest that historians such as Gordon Wood and James McPherson have
viewed their task to be to “protect and disseminate” facts reveals far
more of Silverstein’s own ignorance than it does these historians’
monumental achievements in researching and writing the histories of the
American Revolution and the Civil War.
But it is not really
interpretation of the archive that Silverstein has in mind. His brief
and reckless foray into historical methodology aims to provide a
permission slip for the 1619 Project’s disregarding of facts,
whenever these contradict the settled-upon “narrative.” Silverstein
gives away the game by his placement within cynical quotations marks the
word facts, and by his admission that he does not view history to be “a fixed thing.”
But history is “a fixed thing” in at least one sense. The past actually
happened. Generations of people lived, worked, created, struggled,
loved, fought and died. They did so under conditions not of their own
choosing, but those handed down to them from preceding generations. And
they did not do so alone. Out of the development of the productive
forces, as Marx long ago explained, classes emerged—lord and vassal,
master and slave, capitalist and worker—now in hidden, now in open
conflict. On top of all of this culture, law, politics, language,
nation—and, with apologies to Hannah-Jones—race developed, always reflecting the ideology of the ruling layers, and always interacting dynamically with the class structure.
alt-market | I have been asking this question of leftists lately and I have yet to
receive any concrete or meaningful answer: If you are supposed to be
the underdogs and the revolutionaries, then why is it that all of the
evil money elites are on your side? Why are the all the people you say
you are fighting against giving you billions of dollars and enforcing
your political will? Is it possible that corporatists, globalists and
you leftists are all part of the same machine? Think about it…
The relationship between the agenda of globalists and the agenda of
the political left is growing increasingly obvious and intertwined. The
globalists want to dismantle traditional western structures, and so do
leftists. Globalists want to dictate economic growth through carbon
controls and climate change doom mongering, and so do leftists.
Globalists promote a decidedly communistic approach to private property
and economy, arguing in favor of the “Sharing Economy”, Universal Basic Income (UBI) and a world in which “we own nothing and are happy.” Leftist
are embracing this concept because many of them are self serving and
they prefer to take what others have worked for rather than earning it
for themselves.
Of course, the money elites will continue to keep their wealth and
influence while the rest of us are made “equal” through the equality of
poverty, but let’s not dwell on that…
What I see moving forward is that the left is becoming the Cheka, or the political commissars of the globalist “Great Reset.”
They have been molded for decades for this role and their purpose is to
provide an element of social force and the illusion of consensus. The
interesting thing about this strategy is that it seeks to exploit people
who feel as if they are “oppressed” by the existing system, or they
have been taught to feel oppressed. As with any Marxist takeover,
Globalists use the “have-nots” as a shield while they grab more power.
Every time any conservative criticizes the lies and manipulation of
the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, we are accused of
“racism.” And this is the big trick: We all know that BLM (founded by
devout Marxists and funded by globalists) has nothing to do with civil
rights or racial justice, it’s just a means to destroy western society
and replace it with a dystopian nightmare. That’s what we are
criticizing. Black lives are not the issue, globalism and communism are
the issue. Social justice and leftists movements are a smokescreen for a
bigger agenda, and the leftists love to be used.
Why do they do this? It’s a mistake to assume they are merely “useful
idiots.” Yes, some of them are, however, I think the people that fall
into the leftist cult are people that are naturally inclined to do so.
They are narcissists, psychopaths, degenerates, lazy, spoiled, and weak.
They are people that are generally not capable of surviving
independently and they know it, so they seek out collectivist frameworks
to join and feed off of.
Question: How does a mob of BLM leftists attack Kyle Rittenhouse in
Kenosha and EVERY SINGLE PERSON he shoots or tries to shoot ends up
having an extensive and violent criminal record? It is because leftist
movements attract such people in droves (look are what a BLM advocate
and career criminal just did in Waukesha, Wisconsin). They are not
innocent in all of this. They don’t care if they are being exploited by
the elites because they think it’s a trade for power and control they
would not have otherwise. They are partners with globalism, and
globalism breeds and encourages evil.
It is important to understand this dynamic going forward because I
see the argument often that the globalists are trying to “divide and
conquer” America. In truth, we are ALREADY divided and have been for
some time. Trying to talk with and educate moderates on the facts is one
thing, but there is very little point in trying to engage in diplomacy
with leftists. They have already chosen a side, and it’s not the side of
reason or freedom.
@sameo416 | “How Covid-19 spreads: narratives, counter-narratives and social
dramas”. Some thoughts and highlight of one aspect, how what they
describe is more representative of religion than science
They distinguish between inside track and outside track that shape
policy narratives while the inside track are the literal insiders, SAG.
This sounds like Fleck’s esoteric and exoteric circles. In the Stanford
entry on Fleck is this prescient para, h/t @awsparling
“If the position of an elite is stronger than the position of the
masses, the elite isolates itself and demands obedience from the masses.
Such collectives develop dogmatic styles of thinking in which a test of
correctness is usually located in some distant past in a more or less mythical master or savior. Collective life acquires a ceremonial
character and access to the esoteric circle is well-guarded.
Conservatism reigns: there is no place for fundamentally new ideas, and
one can only better or worse realize the revealed principles.”
If that doesn’t sound familiar read some of .@AntibioticDoc
posts. The arrogance and hubris we’ve seen out of most of the public
health policy makers has exactly followed Fleck’s thought. ‘Demand
obedience’ indeed. This bit: “This is characteristic of most religious
collectives”
Droplet dogma is the mythical master by which allegiance to the esoteric
circle is assessed. Transgression from that master results in something
many religious traditions have practiced, shunning.
I’ve worked both engineering and church ministry. Huge red flag for me
when science slips into dogmatic practice and thought. Science, by
definition, is supposed to be open to new knowledge at any point.
Fortress Infection Control does not reflect that attribute.
The article talks about ‘rituals of purification’ that ‘reinforce the
official narrative’. This too is religion writ large. Liturgy and what
you do at the altar all reinforce the underlying doctrine of the faith.
The authors are spot on.
For public masking, it’s discussed and shut down but no evidence is
offered to support the anti-mask claims. This too is an aspect of
religion. Can debate the types of robes, colours, music, but if we get
to core dogma, like the divinity of Christ, there’s no room for debate.
In discussing why the flawed narratives persist, authors highlight why
people are unlikely to change their beliefs. Use of the word belief is
significant here as that’s what is being described. I don’t have beliefs
about the behaviour of electromagnetic radiation…
I hold understandings that are open for revision with further data.
Policymakers exhibit satisficing behaviour. Further reason is scientific
elitism. This includes the fetishization of the RCT as the only source
of reality. This enables a degree of symbolic violence.
Except its not symbolic. Epistemic violence is violence, worse than
blows in many ways. That is focused on ‘outside track’ voices, those
outside the esoteric and exoteric circles. The focus on maintaining
control consumes all energy that could go to real public protection
Final super line, “…the combination of policymakers’ cognitive biases
and satisficing behaviour, scientists’ desire to protect their
interests, and politicians’ alignment with individualist values and
populist sentiment proved perilous.”
Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers
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When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring,
whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that
arose in...
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
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New Travels
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immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...