UK Government Hires Men to Stand in Public with TV on Head for Pandemic Propaganda
Britain’s bizarre ‘Robocop-like’ walking propaganda digital billboards (Image Credit: Gomo Digital)
21st Century News Wire | January 12, 2021
In one of the most desperate and bizarre moves yet, a local government in the UK has begun recruiting men to walking the streets with TVs strapped over their heads, supposedly to help police during a highly unpopular lockdown.
Bradford Council in Yorkshire announced their new ‘iWalkers’ scheme, where local council staff and volunteers are deployed onto the streets with a 19 inch screen weighing 18 lbs, mounted on their shoulders.
According to reports, the program ran for two days before it began to go horribly wrong. The government scheme was so ridiculous, residents thought it might have been satire at first, or a prank, not believing that the local government had lost the plot to such a degree. When they realized the plan was actually a real government initiative, the public backlash was severe, and so embarrassed council officials panicked and removed their Facebook post detailing their ‘exciting new program.’
A number of outrageous comments, both in person and online, were hurled at the walking Robocop-like human propaganda digital billboards
These real-life Teletubies were supposed to be walking the city and town streets, wearing masks, while their TV’s would be pushing out government propaganda on COVID, designed by a government behavioural insights team and applied behavioural psychologists – to nudge residents into tighter lockdown compliance, and to keep the public abreast of minute-to-minute ever-changing “coronavirus rules and restrictions.”
According to reports, the cost of Bradford’s COVID Teletubies is being paid for through Government funding of “Covid-19 communications.”
Local government officials denied they had deleted their new initiative because of public embarrassment, and instead claimed that it was suddenly taken down because of public comments that supposedly “crossed the line into abuse of people who are working hard to help residents and workers in Bradford District stay safe and stop the spread of the virus.”
The incident comes at a bad time for local councils who have recently decreed that they will be squeezing the working class even more by raising their council taxes (aka poll tax) – all of this amid a steep economic depression instigated by the reactionary COVID lockdown policies of the UK government.
Government officials tried to justify the expensive theme park-style stunt by saying that, “There are still many key workers in the city who may wish to get some information on testing where testing sites are close by and it’s really important that we have people out on the streets who can provide this.”
The Orwellian saga continues…
US Prof Faces ‘Cancellation’ For Teaching Students to Question Propaganda Amid COVID-19
© CC BY 3.0 / The Open Center
By Mohamed Elmaazi . Sputnik . 12.01.2021
Hostility to dissenting perspectives has become increasingly recorded over the past few years, but particularly since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. One apparent victim of this shrinking space for differing views is a US professor who teaches a class on propaganda in New York City.
For years, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University, has been teaching a course on propaganda, during which he encourages students to question dominant ways of thinking being pushed by media and via the government. However, Professor Miller has recently found his post at NYU to be under threat, despite having a secured tenured position, after he was accused of discouraging students from wearing masks, a charge he vigorously denies.
In a detailed interview, Professor Miller explains to Sputnik the background of his case as well as what it represents in an age where freedom of speech and academic independence appear to be under increasing attack amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sputnik: Explain your role as a professor at NYU and the kinds of courses that you teach.
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: I’ve been teaching media studies at NYU since 1997, after 20 years at [University of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1983] and then Johns Hopkins [until 1997]. At NYU I’ve mainly taught a course on propaganda, and a course on film, as well as “The Culture Industries”, which looks into the pressures faced by people trying to do good work in journalism, entertainment and the arts.
The courses are all quite popular with students, whose reviews are, for the most part, very positive. This fact is highly relevant to my predicament at NYU right now.
Sputnik: You’ve recently found yourself in a difficult situation after a student filed a complaint against you. Could you describe what led to this current situation?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: In late September, a student in my propaganda course was enraged by my encouraging the class to look into the scientific basis for the mask mandates—specifically, eight randomised, controlled studies, conducted among healthcare professional over the last 15 years or so, finding that masks and respirators are ineffective against transmission of respiratory viruses; and, on the other hand, the more recent studies finding otherwise. (I offered some suggestions as to how laypersons might assess such studies: by reading scientific reviews, and by noting the universities where the latter studies were conducted, to see if they have financial ties to Big Pharma and/or the Gates Foundation). I offered this as an example of how one must study propaganda—by looking into what a given propaganda drive blacks out or misreports, reviewing all the pertinent information, and deciding for oneself what’s true, or likely to be true.
The student who flipped out did not speak up in class, but, a few days later, took the Twitter, to demand that NYU fire me, over my “excessive amount of scepticism around health professionals”, and the “harm” that I was posing to the students’ health. (I’d made quite clear, in class, that I was not telling them not to wear masks—NYU has a strict rule, which I observe myself—but that this was an intellectual exercise, of the sort essential to the study of propaganda.) She also took screen shots of several posts on my website, News from Underground (markcrispinmiller.com), and presented them as all self-evidently false, asserting that they came from “conspiracy and far right websites”.
Sputnik: How has the university dealt with the complaint? What’s the current situation now in respect of your position at the university?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: The student (by her own account) first tried to get some satisfaction from the Office of Equal Opportunity, demanding that they take some action. They told her, rightly, that they had no grounds for doing so; so she went public—whereupon the university, or at least my corner of it, quickly took her side, in three ways.
First, my department chair immediately tweeted his thanks for her complaint, and added: “We as a department have made this a priority, and are discussing next steps”. This was news to me, since I’m a long-time member of that department, but I was not included in whatever meeting led the chair to take that step.
The next day, the dean of the Steinhardt School (in which I teach), and the doctor who advises NYU on its COVID regulations, emailed my other students—without putting me on copy—to indicate that I had given them dangerous information, and to direct them to (what the dean and doctor called) “authoritative” studies finding that masks are effective barriers to SARS-COV-2, and sternly reminding them that they must wear masks on campus (as if I’d told them not to). Again, I too had urged the class to read those further studies; but I didn’t tell them what to think. (I’d also pointed out, in class, that the CDC—the source of those links to the “authoritative” studies—had, until early April, publicly repeated the consensus of the prior studies that I had encouraged the class to read).
@nyuniversity: an MCC tenured professor spent an entire class period telling students that wearing masks doesn’t prevent the spread of COVID-19, and that hydroxychloroquine trials were made to fail so more people would be given the vaccine and have their DNA changed. thread 1/
— Julia Jackson (@julia_jacks) September 21, 2020
Finally, my chair then pressured me to cancel my propaganda course for next semester, urging that it would be better for the department if, instead, I’d teach two sections of my film course, because, he said, my film courses have high enrollments. The problem with that rationale is that my film and propaganda courses are the same size, with both of them ordinarily full up, and students wait-listed for both. Because of that, and since I’ve long taught the propaganda course at least twice a year (and think that it’s especially relevant right now), I didn’t want to do that; but I was told I had no choice, which, technically, was true.
This experience prompted me to put up a petition, in defence of academic freedom and free speech, simply urging NYU to respect my academic freedom; although I posted the petition not just on my own behalf, but in the name of all professors, journalists, scientists, doctors, activists and whistle-blowers who’ve been gagged, or punished for their dissidence on topics of all kinds, for decades, and especially this year. The petition quickly garnered many signatures from people all over the world (to date, it has been signed by over 27,000 people), including many eminent figures, including Seymour Hersh, James K. Galbraith, Sharyl Attkisson, Rashid Khalidi (Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Oliver Stone, and Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng; and it also drew a public statement of support from Ralph Nader.
Then the drive against me escalated.
Calling the petition “an attack on the department”, a large group of my colleagues sent a letter to the dean, demanding “an expedited review” of my “conduct”, on the grounds not only of my heresy on masks (claiming that I had discouraged their use, and “intimidated” students who wore them), but, primarily, because of my history of abusiveness and lunacy in the classroom (and beyond). They charged me with “explicit hate speech”, “attacks on students and others in our community”, “advocating for an unsafe learning environment”, “aggressions and microaggressions”, and other crimes. Although the letter is completely false on every point it makes, the dean—prompted by NYU’s lawyers—went right ahead and ordered that “review”, which is, as of today, ongoing (although it was supposed to end with last semester).
I sent my colleagues a point-by-point rebuttal, asking for a retraction and apology. They ignored that request, and my follow-up email; so I decided that I had no choice but to sue them for libel, as their letter makes quite clear that their intention is to nullify my academic freedom, presumably so as to get me fired (just as that student had demanded). There’s a GoFundMe page soliciting donations, to help me pay for this legal effort.
Sputnik: Have your other students been at all supportive of you?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: Yes. In response to my colleagues’ letter, and the dean’s review, many students, current and former, as well as visitors to my classes over the years, have sent strong statements of support to the dean’s office, pointedly rebutting my colleagues’ preposterous charges. Over 50 such statements have so far come in, attesting to my tolerance, open-mindedness and—above all—effectiveness as a professor, and the importance of my propaganda classes in particular. That outpouring is the only upside to this dismal situation.
Sputnik: To what extent is your situation unique and to what extent does it represent a broader culture of censorship or intimidation within academic institutions?
Professor Mark Crispin Miller: As the petition makes clear, my plight is only one of countless others throughout academia—and not just there. Academic freedom and free speech have actually been under slow assault for decades, as many urgent subjects have long since been declared taboo as mere “conspiracy theory”, so that any professors or journalists (or, for that matter, entertainers) who dare look into them risk their careers. Since that mode of censorship began in 1967, another, more explicit kind emerged with the ferocious appropriation of “social justice” as a means of “cancelling” dissident expression on a range of other urgent subjects, so that anyone who questions certain pieties is charged with “hate speech”. And this year has seen a third line of attack, as the COVID crisis has entailed much of the sort of outright “war-is-peace”/”2+2=5” propaganda that Orwell satirised in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with bald lies on every aspect of the crisis pumped out by “authoritative” health officials, and the media, always in the name of “science”.
And so the truth on many subjects, and those trying to express it, or even study it, are under fierce assault on one or more of those three grounds; and I see myself as under fire on all three bases. My colleagues charge that I make “non-evidence-based” assertions in my classes (a striking accusation, in a letter whose every claim is based, demonstrably, on no evidence whatsoever); assert that I engage in “explicit hate speech” (which I’ve never done, in class or anywhere else); and cast me as a risk to public health, for urging students to look into the scientific basis for the mask mandates, then make up their own minds.
This assault, I think, makes my case an important flashpoint in the larger struggle—now a global struggle—for academic freedom and free speech, at a time when both are under existential threat. I therefore hope that people will continue to support me, as well as others in my situation, in any way they can.
Joe Biden and the Post-Corona “Great Reset”. The Protest Movement
Prof Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research | January 9, 2021
In the wake of the Wednesday January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill Event, we must reflect on what a Joe Biden Administration will look like.
Joe Biden was not duly elected, he was selected. He is a groomed and “reliable” politician. He is a political instrument of the global capitalist establishment.
Biden is a firm supporter of the Corona lockdown. His statements concerning a “Dark Winter” in 2021 confirm that he not only endorses the adoption of staunch Covid-19 lockdown policies, his administration will pursue and adopt the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” as an integral part of US foreign policy, to be implemented or more correctly “imposed” Worldwide.
In turn, the Biden-Harris administration will attempt to override all forms of popular resistance to the corona virus lockdown.
We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.
What is unfolding is a new and destructive phase of US imperialism. It’s a totalitarian project of economic and social engineering, which ultimately destroys people’s lives Worldwide.
This “novel” neoliberal agenda using the corona lockdown as an instrument of social oppression has been endorsed by the leadership of the Democratic Party.
The Biden White House will be used to instate what David Rockefeller called “Global Governance”, which is tantamount to a Worldwide “democratic dictatorship”.
It should be noted that the protest movement in the US, against the lockdown is weak. In fact there is no coherent grassroots national protest movement. Why? Because “progressive forces” including leftist intellectuals, NGO leaders, trade union and labor leaders, most of which are aligned with the Democratic Party have from the outset been supportive of the lockdown. And they are also supportive of Joe Biden.
In a bitter irony, antiwar activists as well as the critics of neoliberalism have endorsed Joe Biden, who is now being accused by Trump supporters of being a “socialist”.
The preceding text is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of my E-Book: entitled.
The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” first published in mid-December 2020.
To access the full text of nine chapters click here
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
By Glenn Greenwald | January 12, 2021
Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.
The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.
Over the last year, Parler encountered immense success. Millions of people who objected to increasing repression of speech on the largest platforms or who had themselves been banned signed up for the new social media company.
As Silicon Valley censorship radically escalated over the past several months — banning pre-election reporting by The New York Post about the Biden family, denouncing and deleting multiple posts from the U.S. President and then terminating his access altogether, mass-removal of right-wing accounts — so many people migrated to Parler that it was catapulted to the number one spot on the list of most-downloaded apps on the Apple Play Store, the sole and exclusive means which iPhone users have to download apps. “Overall, the app was the 10th most downloaded social media app in 2020 with 8.1 million new installs,” reported TechCrunch.
It looked as if Parler had proven critics of Silicon Valley monopolistic power wrong. Their success showed that it was possible after all to create a new social media platform to compete with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And they did so by doing exactly what Silicon Valley defenders long insisted should be done: if you don’t like the rules imposed by tech giants, go create your own platform with different rules.
But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.
If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.
The united Silicon Valley attack began on January 8, when Apple emailed Parler and gave them 24 hours to prove they had changed their moderation practices or else face removal from their App Store. The letter claimed: “We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property.” It ended with this warning:
To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update and the requested moderation improvement plan within 24 hours of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines and the requested moderation improvement plan in writing within 24 hours, your app will be removed from the App Store.
The 24-hour letter was an obvious pretext and purely performative. Removal was a fait accompli no matter what Parler did. To begin with, the letter was immediately leaked to Buzzfeed, which published it in full. A Parler executive detailed the company’s unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Apple. “They basically ghosted us,” he told me. The next day, Apple notified Parler of its removal from App Store. “We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content,” said the world’s richest company, and thus: “We have now rejected your app for the App Store.”
It is hard to overstate the harm to a platform from being removed from the App Store. Users of iPhones are barred from downloading apps onto their devices from the internet. If an app is not on the App Store, it cannot be used on the iPhone. Even iPhone users who have already downloaded Parler will lose the ability to receive updates, which will shortly render the platform both unmanageable and unsafe.
In October, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law issued a 425-page report concluding that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google all possess monopoly power and are using that power anti-competitively. For Apple, they emphasized the company’s control over iPhones through its control of access to the App Store. As Ars Technica put it when highlighting the report’s key findings:
Apple controls about 45 percent of the US smartphone market and 20 percent of the global smartphone market, the committee found, and is projected to sell its 2 billionth iPhone in 2021. It is correct that, in the smartphone handset market, Apple is not a monopoly. Instead, iOS and Android hold an effective duopoly in mobile operating systems.
However, the report concludes, Apple does have a monopolistic hold over what you can do with an iPhone. You can only put apps on your phone through the Apple App Store, and Apple has total gatekeeper control over that App Store—that’s what Epic is suing the company over. . . .
The committee found internal documents showing that company leadership, including former CEO Steve Jobs, “acknowledged that IAP requirement would stifle competition and limit the apps available to Apple’s customers.” The report concludes that Apple has also unfairly used its control over APIs, search rankings, and default apps to limit competitors’ access to iPhone users.
Shortly thereafter, Parler learned that Google, without warning, had also “suspended” it from its Play Store, severely limiting the ability of users to download Parler onto Android phones. Google’s actions also meant that those using Parler on their Android phones would no longer receive necessary functionality and security updates.
It was precisely Google’s abuse of its power to control its app device that was at issue “when the European Commission deemed Google LLC as the dominant undertaking in the app stores for the Android mobile operating system (i.e. Google Play Store) and hit the online search and advertisement giant with €4.34 billion for its anti-competitive practices to strengthen its position in various of other markets through its dominance in the app store market.”
The day after a united Apple and Google acted against Parler, Amazon delivered the fatal blow. The company founded and run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, used virtually identical language as Apple to inform Parler that its web hosting service (AWS) was terminating Parler’s ability to have AWS host its site: “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” Because Amazon is such a dominant force in web hosting, Parler has thus far not found a hosting service for its platform, which is why it has disappeared not only from app stores and phones but also from the internet.
On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it.
With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler, just as they overwhelmingly cheered the prior two extraordinary assertions of tech power to control U.S. political discourse: censorship of The New York Post’s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the banning of the U.S. President from major platforms. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find a single national liberal-left politician even expressing concerns about any of this, let alone opposing it.
Not only did leading left-wing politicians not object but some of them were the ones who pleaded with Silicon Valley to use their power this way. After the internet-policing site Sleeping Giants flagged several Parler posts that called for violence, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked: “What are @Apple and @GooglePlay doing about this?” Once Apple responded by removing Parler from its App Store — a move that House Democrats just three months earlier warned was dangerous anti-trust behavior — she praised Apple and then demanded to know: “Good to see this development from @Apple. @GooglePlay what are you going to do about apps being used to organize violence on your platform?”
The liberal New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pronounced herself “disturbed by just how awesome [tech giants’] power is” and added that “it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.” She nonetheless praised these “young tech titans” for using their “dangerous” power to ban Trump and destroy Parler. In other words, liberals like Goldberg are concerned only that Silicon Valley censorship powers might one day be used against people like them, but are perfectly happy as long as it is their adversaries being deplatformed and silenced (Facebook and other platforms have for years banned marginalized people like Palestinians at Israel’s behest, but that is of no concern to U.S. liberals).
That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. Liberals now want to use the force of corporate power to silence those with different ideologies. They are eager for tech monopolies not just to ban accounts they dislike but to remove entire platforms from the internet. They want to imprison people they believe helped their party lose elections, such as Julian Assange, even if it means creating precedents to criminalize journalism.
World leaders have vocally condemned the power Silicon Valley has amassed to police political discourse, and were particularly indignant over the banning of the U.S. President. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, various French ministers, and especially Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador all denounced the banning of Trump and other acts of censorship by tech monopolies on the ground that they were anointing themselves “a world media power.” The warnings from López Obrador were particularly eloquent:
Even the ACLU — which has rapidly transformed from a civil liberties organization into a liberal activist group since Trump’s election — found the assertion of Silicon Valley’s power to destroy Parler deeply alarming. One of that organization’s most stalwart defenders of civil liberties, lawyer Ben Wizner, told The New York Times that the destruction of Parler was more “troubling” than the deletion of posts or whole accounts: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.”
Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism. And they are now calling for the use of the most repressive War on Terror measures against their domestic opponents. On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) urged that GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “be put on the no-fly list,” while The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”
So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold.
Parler was not founded, nor is it run, by pro-Trump, MAGA supporters. The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. Most of the key executives are more associated with the politics of Ron Paul and the CATO Institute than Steve Bannon or the Trump family. One is a Never Trump Republican, while another is the former campaign manager of Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Among the few MAGA-affiliated figures is Dan Bongino, an investor. One of the key original investors was Rebekah Mercer.
The platform’s design is intended to foster privacy and free speech, not a particular ideology. They minimize the amount of data they collect on users to prevent advertiser monetization or algorithmic targeting. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they do not assess a user’s preferences in order to decide what they should see. And they were principally borne out of a reaction to increasingly restrictive rules on the major Silicon Valley platforms regarding what could and could not be said.
Of course large numbers of Trump supporters ended up on Parler. That’s not because Parler is a pro-Trump outlet, but because those are among the people who were censored by the tech monopolies or who were angered enough by that censorship to seek refuge elsewhere.
It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. The Capitol breach was planned far more on Facebook and YouTube. As Recode reported, while some protesters participated in both Parler and Gab, many of the calls to attend the Capitol were from YouTube videos, while many of the key planners “have continued to use mainstream platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.” The article quoted Fadi Quran, campaign director at the human rights group Avaaz, as saying: “In DC, we saw QAnon conspiracists and other militias that would never have grown to this size without being turbo-charged by Facebook and Twitter.”
And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism?
So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
In part it is because these Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple — donate enormous sums of money to the Democratic Party and their leaders, so of course Democrats will cheer them rather than call for punishment or their removal from the internet. Part of it is because Parler is an upstart, a much easier target to try to destroy than Facebook or Google. And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. This corrupt motive was made expressly clear by long-time Clinton operative Jennifer Palmieri:
The nature of monopolistic power is that anti-competitive entities engage in anti-trust illegalities to destroy rising competitors. Parler is associated with the wrong political ideology. It is a small and new enough platform such that it can be made an example of. Its head can be placed on a pike to make clear that no attempt to compete with existing Silicon Valley monopolies is possible. And its destruction preserves the unchallengeable power of a tiny handful of tech oligarchs over the political discourse not just of the United States but democracies worldwide (which is why Germany, France and Mexico are raising their voices in protest).
No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians. No matter how repressive are the measures they support — censorship, monopoly power, no-fly lists for American citizens without due process — they tell themselves that those they are silencing and attacking are so evil, are terrorists, that anything done against them is noble and benevolent, not despotic and repressive. That is how American liberals currently think, as they fortify the control of Silicon Valley monopolies over our political lives, exemplified by the overnight destruction of a new and popular competitor.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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