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2021: THE BRIGHT SIDE

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | January 8, 2021

The story they missed in DC; Covid injuries and deaths have begun; New Strain, New Pain; Doctor exposes testing and asymptomatic transmission; A glimmer of hope

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Clean Energy Hydro Plant In Canada Dubbed A “Boondoggle” After Economists Predict $8 Billion In Losses

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | January 11, 2021

British Columbia is currently in the process of trying to erect a massive hydro dam called the “Site C Clean Energy Project” on the Peace River. The point of erecting the dam was to implement the province’s “green and clean” energy policy and try to create alternative clean energy while lowering carbon emissions.

But the economic price, and lackluster progress of the project had one op-ed in the Financial Post calling the project a “hydro power boondoggle” that “shows real cost of ‘clean’ energy”.

The project has been under construction since 2015, the op-ed notes, and more than $6 billion has already been sunk into it. Despite this, there have been numerous problems identified with the project:

Under foot, according to Premier John Horgan, “there is instability on one of the banks of the river.”  Early last year B.C. Hydro identified “structural weaknesses” in the project, which has been under construction since 2015. Site C is also said to suffer from “weak foundations.”  Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer recently reported that new information on the precariousness of the project, structurally and financially…

The op-ed asks whether or not it is time for the province to simply cut their losses and abandon the job, which would likely need at least another $6 billion to complete.

A review of the project by three Canadian economists say “yes” and have concluded that “the whole project is uneconomic as an energy source and fails its major green and clean promise, which is to reduce carbon emissions.”

Photo: Financial Post

The breakdown of the numbers by the economists show how inefficient the project truly is:

The worst numbers in the study: the total present value of the electricity produced from Site C is estimated at $2.76 billion against an estimated total cost of $10.7 billion, implying a loss of $8 billion. That’s bad. However, if the project were cancelled now, the loss would be cut in half to maybe $4.5 billion. The economists conclude that “policy makers should stop throwing money at a project that is likely to end up under water.”

The economists found that the only way the hydro plant could be worth it, monetarily, would be in conjunction with a “massive national overhaul of the Canadian electricity system”:

“In summary, we find that Site C can offer value, but only if the provinces aim for near complete electricity system de-carbonization and only if new transmission between provinces can be built to enable greater inter-provincial electricity trade. Decisions about the future of Site C should be made in this light; if it is not possible to commit to fully decarbonizing electricity generation, and if prospects for inter-provincial transmission are low, Site C offers little value in comparison to its costs. In contrast, if B.C. and Alberta are committed to achieving a zero-carbon electricity system, and building new inter-provincial transmission lines is feasible, then Site C can offer value in excess of its costs.”

In light of there being a very small chance of that happening, it seems like the obvious decision to simply shut the project down and save several billion dollars.

And of course, it comes as no surprise to us that such a project is horribly cost inefficient. Because if it wasn’t, the free market would have put hydro electric plants to work a long time ago. In other words, the free market shut this project down before it ever even started. 

But instead, we get another real life example of how virtue signaling and petty worries over carbon emissions – which are all trending the in the “right” direction globally anyway – lead to frivolous spending, funded by the taxpayer.

We hope B.C. remembers this if Elon Musk ever comes calling, looking for property to build his next solar roof tile factory…

You can read further analysis of the project and the full op-ed here.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Former US representative Ron Paul locked out of Facebook for undisclosed reasons

RT | January 11, 2021

Former US representative Ron Paul has been mysteriously locked out of his Facebook page and accused of “repeatedly going against our Community Standards.” The platform didn’t explain which content on Paul’s page flipped the switch.

Paul tweeted a screenshot of his official Facebook page on Monday sporting a “You Have Limited Page Functionality” warning screen notifying him that he was “temporarily blocked” from “creating new Pages and managing our existing Pages.”

While the warning implied the former Texas senator had “repeatedly [gone] against our Community Standards,” Paul insisted he had never before been given even a notice of violating community standards, let alone a strike or other official reprimand.

The post that supposedly triggered Facebook’s discipline was not displayed, nor was Paul given any further hints as to what he supposedly did to provoke the wrath of the social media behemoth. Instead, he was only given a link to “review our Community Standards to see what’s a violation.” Facebook’s Community Standards has exploded in size over the past few years as the platform scrambles to root out political wrongthink.

Many on social media saw the move as an ominous hint of censorship to come. While Paul’s page was not deleted, it is one of thousands that have been purged or locked since November’s election, a mass disappearance Twitter has eagerly engaged in as well.

Paul’s podcast, the Ron Paul Liberty Report, was censored on YouTube in September, given a “warning” that the video violated “community guidelines” on “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.” Upon further investigation, Paul’s cohost Daniel McAdams discovered the episode had committed the (Youtube-defined) cardinal sin of disagreeing with the World Health Organization’s guidelines on Covid-19. While the WHO itself has changed guidance on the pandemic several times, ordinary users are not permitted to “dispute the efficacy of the WHO or local health authorities’ recommended guidance on social distancing and self isolation.”

McAdams himself, who served as Paul’s foreign affairs advisor during his time in the US congress, was banned from Twitter in November 2019 after trading barbs with FoxNews’ Sean Hannity. The conservative pundit had recorded an hour-long segment railing against the so-called Deep State – President Trump’s term for the swamp-dwelling unelected intelligence agents and other powerful figures – while wearing a CIA pin, a glaring oversight that led McAdams to call Hannity “retarded.”

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media platforms rushed to silence President Donald Trump last week after a horde of his supporters entered the Capitol, supposedly egged on by the president. The resulting chaos saw five people die, one shot by police and three due to unexplained medical emergencies. A police officer was also killed in the melee.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 2 Comments

Senior House Republican Says Parler Shutdown by Rivals Breaks Monopoly Laws

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 11.01.2021

Attempts by Big Tech to muzzle US President Donald Trump and his supporters have had mixed results. While conservative social media site Parler has been shut down, Twitter shares lost $5 billion in value on Monday following the deletion of Trump’s hugely-popular account.

California Congressman Devin Nunes has accused Big tech firms of breaching anti-trust, civil rights and racketeering law by banning social media site Parler.

Nunes, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Amazon, Apple and Google committed a “clear violation” of laws when they banned the ‘free speech’ social media platform popular with conservatives.

“There should be a racketeering investigation on all the people that coordinated this attack on not only a company, but on all of those like us,” Nunes told Fox News on Sunday. “I have 3 million followers on Parler. Tonight I will no longer be able to communicate with those people and they’re Americans.”

Tech giant Amazon shut down Parler just after midnight US Pacific time (08:00 GMT) when it evicted the site from its rented servers. Google and Apple had earlier blocked access to the Parler mobile phone app, although tech-savvy users were still able to download and install it after changing the security settings on their devices.

“The effect of this is that there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer,” Nunes said. “Poof, it’s gone.”

Amazon claimed Parler was “unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” posing “a very real risk to public safety”. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Parler does not aggressively moderate users’ posts according to a set of “community guidelines”.

Unintended Consequences

On Friday Parler stormed to the number one spot on Apple’s app store after Twitter deleted President Donald Trump’s account — which had some 88 million followers — in the wake of last Wednesday’s occupation of the US Capitol building in Washington DC by protesters attempting to disrupt the confirmation of Democratic candidate Joe Biden as president-elect by Congress.

Twitter shares tumbled by 12 per cent on the stock markets on Monday, losing $5 billion in value after Trump supporters left the site in droves. One pro-Trump ‘channel’ on Russian-founded messaging app Telegram had gained almost 44,000 subscribers by Monday afternoon, just two days after it was created.

Republicans and conservative media figures raised the alarm last week after tens of thousands of their Twitter followers mysteriously disappeared. House Democrats claimed those followers were “neo-Nazis”, “insurrectionists” and “terrorists” who Twitter had purged. But left-wing British broadcaster and former MP George Galloway experienced the same phenomenon.

“Republicans have no way to communicate,” Nunes said, “and it doesn’t even matter if you’re a Republican or conservative.”

Sunday’s New York Post editorial declared: “Big Tech is a cartel, and must be regulated.”

Blanket Ban

Parler CEO John Matze revealed on Sunday not only had the three tech leviathans united to shut down his company, but every firm providing services to the site had abandoned it.

“They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company,” Matze said. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.”

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , | Leave a comment

French Government “Shocked” at Twitter Banning of Trump

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 11, 2021

The French government has echoed Angela Merkel’s sentiment in saying it is “shocked” at Twitter’s banning of President Trump, asserting that Big Tech is a threat to democracy.

Junior Minister for European Union Affairs Clement Beaune said the decision to silence Trump proved the need for Big Tech platforms to be tightly regulated.

“This should be decided by citizens, not by a CEO,” he told Bloomberg TV on Monday. “There needs to be public regulation of big online platforms.”

Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire also said that “the digital oligarchy” was “one of the threats” to democracy and should be reigned in by the state.

As we highlighted earlier, the German government also warned that Big Tech’s deplatforming of Trump set a very dangerous precedent.

Communicating via a spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the move “problematic,” adding that social media giants shouldn’t have the power to decide who has the right to free speech.

“This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms,” said the statement.

While Republicans were completely toothless in their efforts to control Big Tech during Trump’s administration, Poland could be set to pass a law that would fine social media companies $2.2 million a pop for censoring lawful free speech.

“In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic,” reported Poland In.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 1 Comment

William Burns, ex-envoy to Russia who accused Putin of using judo-like tactics to ‘sow chaos’ in US, named as Biden’s CIA director

RT | January 11, 2021

[Proclaimed] President-elect Joe Biden has nominated career diplomat William Burns to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming that Americans will “sleep soundly” with Burns at the helm of the shadowy intel service.

Burns, who is currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank based in Washington, DC, retired from the US Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year career in diplomacy. He served as deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2011-2014, and as ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008. Before his assignment in Moscow, Burns was US envoy to Jordan from 1998 to 2001, and was appointed assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 to 2005.

In a press release, Biden described Burns as a “exemplary diplomat with decades of experience on the world stage keeping our people and our country safe and secure.” The statement said that Burns understood the alleged threats facing the United States, whether they be “attacks emanating from Moscow, the challenge China poses,” or plots being hatched by terrorists and other non-state actors.

Like many other State Department veterans, Burns has repeatedly accused Moscow of interfering in the 2016 presidential elections.

In a 2017 op-ed published by the New York Times, the retired diplomat accused Russia of “aggressive” and “deeply troubling” election meddling. Burns predicted that Washington’s relationship with Moscow will remain competitive and “often adversarial” for the foreseeable future, claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking greater influence in the world “at the expense of an American-led order.” He alleged that Russia is dreaming of a dominant position in global affairs unconstrained by “Western values and institutions.”

He called on the US to focus on the conflict in Ukraine, predicting that the country’s fate will determine the “future of Europe, and Russia, over the next generation.”

Tellingly, he also dismissed the “superficially appealing notions” like cooperation against Islamic terrorism. He claimed that Russia’s efforts to help the Syrian government defeat Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) has made the terrorist threat “far worse.”

His animosity towards Russia was again revealed in an interview with the Atlantic magazine in 2019. He told the outlet that Putin had been able to “sow chaos” in the United States by “acting like [a] good judo expert, which he is.” According to Burns, the Russian leader took advantage of a “stronger opponent” by leveraging the “polarization and dysfunction” in the US political system.

Burns even suggested that the now-debunked claims of “collusion” between Moscow and the Trump campaign in 2016 had merit, hinting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could potentially uncover a larger conspiracy behind Putin’s alleged judo-like interference.

Mueller’s probe ultimately found no evidence of collusion, despite years of salacious media reports alleging overwhelming proof of a vast conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.

The diplomat appears to have a more reconciliatory approach towards China. Although he has identified Beijing as a long-term competitor with Washington, he has argued that China was more focused on “adapting” to the US-led world order, rather than “undermining it,” which he accused Russia of doing. However, he expressed support for at least some aspects of the Trump administration’s trade war with China, describing the hardline economic policy as “overdue.”

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

When protestors took over federal buildings: a little thing called history

By Jon Rappoport | January 11, 2021

CBS News, October 4, 2018: “Protesters opposed to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh took over a Senate office building on Thursday, with actresses Amy Schumer and Emily Ratajkowski among the demonstrators detained. The Senate will hold a procedural vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination on Friday, setting in motion a possible final vote on Saturday.”

“New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand addressed protesters, telling them, ‘This is a moment about all of you — all of you are speaking truth to power because you care about the future, you care about our children, you care about who is leading this country and who sits on the highest court in the land’.”

“Capitol police said about 300 people were detained. In a video shared widely on Twitter, Schumer said ‘I think we’re going to get arrested’.”

Women’s March tweeted: “We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us. 1000+ women, survivors, and allies have gathered in the Hart Senate Building. Every hallway. Every floor.”

Very easy-going press coverage. No problem. No outrage. No accusations of Insurrection from the mainstream press.

It was a protest from the Left, covered by the Left. And the Capitol Police promptly shut down the original target: the Capitol Building. They didn’t lead the protestors INTO the Capitol, as they astonishingly did a few days ago, on January 6.

Here’s another item from 2018 on the same protest—ABC News: “Capitol Hill police said 128 people were arrested for ‘unlawfully demonstrating’ outside of senators’ offices and in the main rotunda of the Russell Senate Building. About half as many protesters were arrested for protesting Kavanaugh on Thursday.”

Ho-hum. Another day at the office. Not a word about “the desecration of our democracy.”

Now if you really want to revisit a chaotic moment in federal-building takeovers, let’s go back to 1954. The US House of Representatives Archives has an account:

“On March 1, 1954, while Members gathered on the House Floor for an upcoming vote, three men and one woman entered the visitor’s gallery above the chamber and quietly took their seats. All four belonged to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and only hours earlier had traveled from New York City to Washington, DC.”

“The United States had annexed Puerto Rico in 1898, and the island’s relationship with the federal government had long been a point of contention. Some Puerto Ricans sought to maintain their relationship with the mainland, and others, like the four visitors in the House that day, argued for an independent Puerto Rico.”

“The Capitol had few security protocols at the time, and the four Puerto Rican nationalists entered the gallery armed with handguns. Around 2:30 p.m. they indiscriminately opened fire onto the House Floor and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag in a violent act of protest meant to draw attention to their demand for Puerto Rico’s immediate independence.”

“Five Congressmen were wounded in the shooting.”

“Members, House Pages, and police officers quickly helped detain three of the assailants outside the gallery, while the fourth escaped the Capitol and was apprehended later that afternoon.”

Joe Bartlett, a House Page at the time, recalls: “I had just had a bundle of bills and had just stepped out the center door, on my way to the Senate, with these bills. I heard what sounded like, a stack of folding chairs falling—these metal folding chairs… I turned around and ran right back into the chamber, and they were sorting out the casualties. They were scrambling in the gallery… it was a helter-skelter scene. I went down the center aisle, and as I went down the aisle, [Clifford] Davis of Tennessee was sitting there… Davis had been shot through the calf, and he had his foot up on the seat in front of him and holding both sides of a bullet wound… I walked right into the well, where poor Al [Alvin Morell] Bentley was stretched out there… the wound contributed to his early death years later. Bentley had been shot through the abdomen…Representative [Kenneth Allison] Roberts of Alabama probably suffered more, maybe longer than anyone. He was shot through the knee. And that bullet had come through the chair that Sam Rayburn, as the Minority Leader, had regularly sat in. Fortunately, Mr. Rayburn was not sitting there at that moment. The bullet shattered Roberts’ knee… Ben Jensen of Iowa was shot in the shoulder, and the bullet followed under his hide to his waist…”

The House of Representatives survived.

After what happened on January 6, 2021, Congress will survive.

So will the endless pompous posturing of the legislators and the press about the Capitol Building being “The People’s House.”

The squalid deals contrived and voted upon in that House have nothing to do with The People.

For the place to become The People’s House, a revolution would have to occur. I’m not talking about the January 6, 2021, false flag.

I’m talking about a vast decentralization of federal power, which would return the central government to its original role, as laid out in the Constitution.

In that revolution, individual liberty and freedom would be paramount. Again.

The main river of human history reveals a war for freedom has been fought from the beginning.

It is still being fought.

Pacified humanity is the disease.

We are the cure.

Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

Tech guru Durov warns Apple & Google pose threat to freedom, as Russian Senator says Trump Twitter ban a challenge to sovereignty

RT | January 11, 2021

The move by US Tech companies to censor US President Donald Trump has raised concern in Russia, with politicians and IT industry figures expressing concerns about it, and about its potential implications for political freedoms.

Alexey Pushkov, a prominent Senator and Chairman of the Federation Council on Information Policy and Media Relations warned on Sunday that the “diktat of internet giants” set a dangerous precedent. In a message posted to his official Telegram channel, the politician added that Moscow would “draw serious conclusions from the blocking of Trump by US social network conglomerates. Almost totally depending on foreign internet platforms is incompatible with the sovereignty of the country,” he argued.

However, the founder of the Russian-created Telegram messaging service, Pavel Durov, has now warned that “the Apple-Google duopoly poses a much bigger problem for freedoms than Twitter.” Of the two, he said, Silicon Valley stalwart Apple, worth more than $1.3 trillion, was the most worrying.

This, he suggests, is “because it can completely restrict which apps you use.” Over the weekend, the tech giant announced it would ban social media service Parler from its iOS store over apparent breaches to its guidelines. Telegram, which says it prioritizes the right to free speech more than its rivals, has become popular with Trump and his supporters since the president was indefinitely suspended from Twitter and Facebook. Telegram’s Durov added that his company was working on a web-based app as a contingency, should it become the next target of an App Store ban.

The Telegram founder, who first made his name with Russia’s top social network VK, also urged smartphone users to make the switch to the Android operating system, where users have more control over what they can install and use. This, he said, is “the least they can do to retain access to a free flow of information.”

In November, Russia’s media watchdog warned Google, and its subsidiary YouTube, over perceived censorship of content from the country’s media organizations. The row was sparked by the California-based streaming service’s decision to label an RT documentary on American right-wing militias as “extremist.” Roskomnadzor, the federal communications agency, warned that “cases of the administration of the YouTube video hosting service blocking, labelling, warning, consent and other restrictions with respect to materials of Russian media and journalists have become more frequent.”

Parler goes offline as Amazon pulls the plug on the conservative social network

Donald Trump has faced a near-total removal from social media sites since facing accusations that he’d encouraged his supporters to storm Washington’s Capitol building last Wednesday. Four protesters and one police officer are said to have lost their lives in the violent scenes. While he urged the activists to “go home,” the president reiterated claims that November’s election had been rigged, and told demonstrators that “we love you. You’re very special.”

As well as his removal from Twitter and Facebook, Trump has since faced action from platforms including Instagram, Google, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and Pinterest.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hacker reveals massive Parler data leak: All users’ messages, location info, even driver’s licenses may have been exposed

RT | January 11, 2021

Recently shutdown social media app Parler is at the center of a yet another controversy, after allegations surfaced that the totality of its users’ personal data was leaked in the wake of the network going offline.

Parler, a social network popular with conservative audiences, was removed from the internet on Monday, after Amazon kicked the site off its hosting service, citing “a steady increase in this violent content” in the wake of Wednesday’s riot at the US Capitol. The decision to pull support came after Apple and Google blocked the social network from their online marketplaces over the weekend.

Shortly before Amazon’s move, a self-described hacker from Austria, going by ‘Donk Enby’ on Twitter, claimed to have gained access to all of the “unprocessed, raw” video files uploaded to Parler “with all associated metadata.” The hacker even included a link to the file library in order to prove that the data leak was real.

The development agitated the social network’s audience, especially since it occurred around the same time as Parler’s shutdown.

News of the apparent leak quickly spread online, leaving some to wonder how the hacker could have snagged the entirety of one of the network’s file libraries.

A Reddit user named ‘BlueMountainDace’ claimed to have the answer, and they posted it in the group ‘ParlerWatch,’ which appears to have been created to monitor some of the perceived extreme views of the platform’s users.

According to ‘BlueMountainDace’, it was not just the videos, but the entirety of Parler’s users’ data that was exposed.

In their viral post, the Redditor asserted that one of Parler’s hosting platforms, Twilio, accidentally exposed the app’s security authentications via a press release. This in turn could have allowed any person to create a blank administrator account and access all of Parler’s private content, which, besides message history and geo data, might have included users’ driver’s license photos, which were used to create a verified account.

Currently it is unclear which press release by Twilio might have led to the Parler data being exposed.

According to tech writer Matthew Sheffield, the breach was possible due to Parler’s long-criticized lax security standards. Specifically, Sheffield blames the potential leak on the app “never actually deleting anything its users posted,” while keeping the data accessible to administrator users.

However, Sheffield notes that it will likely “take a little while” for such amounts of data to be processed in order for it to end up in an accessible “WikiLeaks-style data dump.”

Parler and Twilio have yet to comment on the allegations.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The ‘War On Terror’ Comes Home

By Ron Paul | January 11, 2021

Last week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas. The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two “offending” Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.

Many Americans viewed this assault on social media accounts as a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans, but they are missing the point. The narrowing of allowable opinion in the virtual public square is no conspiracy against conservatives. As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.

Yes, this is partly an attempt to erase the Trump movement from the pages of history, but it is also an attempt to silence any criticism of the emerging political consensus in the coming Biden era that may come from progressive or antiwar circles.

After all, a look at Biden’s incoming “experts” shows that they will be the same failed neoconservative interventionists who gave us weekly kill lists, endless drone attacks and coups overseas, and even US government killing of American citizens abroad. Progressives who complain about this “back to the future” foreign policy are also sure to find their voices silenced.

Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era.

“Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, the “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor.

In short, US government elites have been partnering with “Big Tech” overseas for years to decide who has the right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that this deployment of “soft power” in the service of Washington’s hard power has come home to roost.

So what is to be done? Even pro-free speech alternative social media outlets are under attack from the Big Tech/government Leviathan. There are no easy solutions. But we must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers. Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity to continue pushing their ideas. Because no army – not even Big Tech partnered with Big Government – can stop an idea whose time has come. And Liberty is that idea. We must move forward with creativity and confidence!

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.

January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Big Tech Censorship: Part 1

FULL MEASURE | January 10, 2021

This past week saw a turbulent beginning of the end of the unprecedented term of President Trump. A rally in Washington supporting the president and calls to overturn the election turned violent. Protesters stormed both chambers of Congress and one was shot before being driven from Capitol Hill. Members of Congress returned to certify Joe Biden as president-elect. Meantime, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube took aggressive, new steps to clamp down hard on President Trump’s social media accounts. Among other objections, Twitter said President Trump violated policies in his video urging protesters to be peaceful and go home, because he reiterated claims about election fraud. Some welcome Big Tech’s crackdown; others say it’s a radical violation of free speech. It highlights a long-simmering battle over the control of information online. That’s the focus of our special investigation.

Zachary Vorhies was as an insider for more than eight years, a senior software engineer at Google and Google’s YouTube.

Sharyl Attkisson: Can you give sort of the short version of how you discovered or came to believe something wrong was going on?

Zachary Vorhies: Yeah. I was working at YouTube in 2016 and everything was really great. But then something happened. And what happened was Donald Trump won the election.

Vorhies: And after he won the election, the company just took a hard left and decided that they were going to abandon their liberal principles and start going towards an authoritarian sort of management of their products and services.

Sharyl: Can you describe how that manifested itself, this change in direction you describe?

Vorhies: It happened the first week after Donald Trump won the election. Google had an all hands meeting, which they usually do every week, called TGIF. The CFO broke down into tears recounting how she was communicating with the New York office about how they were going to lose this election. The founder Sergey Brin said that he was personally offended at the election of Donald Trump. And Sundar Pichai, the CEO, said that one of the most successful things that they had done in the election was applying machine learning in order to hide fake news.

Donald Trump’s candidacy didn’t only ignite a new trend of heavy handed manipulation and censorship at Google. Ten days after Trump was elected, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced efforts unheard of before. Facebook would begin judging and rating news organizations in terms of trustworthiness and attaching warning labels to content. It also changed how “trending topics” work, no longer reflecting the number of people discussing something.

The liberal propaganda group Media Matters, founded by Hillary Clinton supporter David Brock, took credit for convincing Facebook to take the drastic new steps.

Within days of the inauguration in January 2017 the whole strategy was outlined in in a confidential memo to donors by Media Matters and some of its affiliates, American Bridge, CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and ShareBlue.

The memo stated that Media Matters was a “partner” of Facebook and other Big Tech players to crack down on online information Media Matters didn’t like. “Facebook needed our help in fully understanding the problem and identifying concrete solutions. We’ve been engaging with Facebook leadership behind the scenes to share our expertise” with the goal of getting Facebook to “adjust its model” Media Matters also said it lobbied Google to “cut off access to revenue” of “40 of the worst fake news sites” —as identified by Media Matters, of course.

This leaked internal video shows the CEO of Google’s YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, discussing their new approach.

Susan Wokcicki (2017 video): We’re pushing down the fake news and demoting it, and we are increasing authoritative news and promoting it. Content that isn’t that we don’t think that is authoritative news it’s just kind of encouraging people to look at is not true. We work with Google news on that to define what reputable sources are.

Sharyl: And when you say ‘They bragged about effectively cracking down on fake news,’ that sounds like a good thing?

Vorhies: Yeah, you would think. But when I looked at the design documents, I started to notice something very interesting, which was a lot of the fake news that they were using as examples of things that they should censor were things involving Hillary Clinton. And I was sort of apolitical, but I started to think to myself, is this really fake news? Why is Google defining this as fake news in order to justify censorship of it? So once I realized that there was this fake news regimen that they were using and it seemed like it was political, I started looking for what that censorship execution could be. And I found it and the project was called Machine Learning Fairness.

Sharyl: What does Machine Learning Fairness describe?

Vorhies: Machine learning is a type of A.I. You’ve got A.I. that plays chess and checkers

Sharyl: Artificial intelligence?

Vorhies: Yeah.

Vorhies leaked a confidential Google document describing what he calls Artificial Intelligence censorship designed to rerank the entire internet by making “machine-learning intentionally human-centered” to “intervene for fairness.”

Sharyl: Do you think there’s evidence that the instructions that Google basically gave its program or machine on how to flag fake news was skewed unfairly, and in favor of liberal interests over conservative interests?

Vorhies: I mean, I wouldn’t even call them liberal because they’re kind of authoritarian, totalitarian right now. And yeah, the evidence of that is whenever you go to news.google.com or you type in a Google search, it’s always being directed towards anti-Trump sentiment. And the reason why, this is because they’re training these classifiers with people that are highly biased.

At the same time, Vorhies says Google was working on social reconstruction to correct what it calls “algorithmic unfairness.”

Sharyl: What is algorithmic unfairness?

Vorhies: Algorithmic unfairness is any sort of algorithm that reinforces existing stereotypes. So a really good question that was answered at Google is: Could objective reality be algorithmically unfair? And Google’s answer to that was actually yes. And the example that they give was let’s say you’re doing a search for CEOs. And let’s say Google returns a bunch of images and most of those images are images of men. Now, even if that reflects objective reality, this can still be considered algorithmically unfair and justify product intervention in order to fix.

Sharyl: And that was happening at Google?

Vorhies: That was happening at Google. And you could tell this because you can go into Google search and you can say, “men can”, and then let Google auto complete. And what it was doing is it was saying “men can have babies,” “men can have periods,” “men can get pregnant.” And then you try to do the same thing but for women, and Google returned results like “women can get drafted,” “women can do anything.” So it’s this inversion of the stereotypes that they were trying to enforce. And it wasn’t just them being equal. They were actually trying to reverse the gender roles. And this is what they think is an algorithmically fair engine.

Meantime, Vorhies says people within Google began organizing anti-Trump activism through an email list: “Resist at Google dot com.” and suggested chants like: “What do we want? JUSTICE! When do we want it? NOW!”

In June 2019, the next presidential campaign was gearing up. After more than eight years at Google, Vorhies says he decided to resign and blow the whistle.

Vorhies: I realized that I couldn’t remain silent anymore and that I had to go and seek out and disclose this to the public because it appeared that Google was attempting a coup on the president.

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January 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment