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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.

VIDEO

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

24 Dead and 137 Infected at NY Nursing Home After Experimental COVID Injections

Nursing Home had Zero Coronavirus Deaths Before “Vaccination”

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | January 10, 2021

Things seem to be working backwards at The Commons on St. Anthony nursing home in Auburn, New York. Vaccinating people is supposed to reduce or end coronavirus deaths. Right? But, at The Commons, such deaths are reported to have occurred only after residents began receiving coronavirus vaccinations.

James T. Mulder wrote Saturday at syracuse.com that until December 29 there had been no coronavirus deaths at The Commons. December 29, when deaths of residents with coronavirus began occurring at The Commons, is also, Mulder’s article discloses, seven days days after the nursing home began giving coronavirus vaccinations to residents, with 80 percent of residents so far having been vaccinated.

Over a period of less than two weeks since December 29, Mulder relates that 24 coronavirus-infected residents at the 300-bed nursing home have died.

Is the timing just a strange coincidence?

Read Mulder’s article here.

This is the penultimate paragraph of Mulder’s article, where vaccinations at The Commons is mentioned:

The nursing home began vaccinating residents Dec. 22. So far 193 residents, or 80%, and 113 employees, or less than half the staff, have been vaccinated. The nursing home plans to do more vaccinations Jan. 12.

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

Pentagon Study: Flu Shot Raises Risk of Coronavirus by 36% (and Other Supporting Studies) .

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr | Children’s Health Defense | April 16, 2020

On March 12th, 2020, Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta held a global town hall on “Corona Facts and Fears.” During the discussion, Anderson said to the viewing audience, “And, again, if you are concerned about coronavirus, and you haven’t gotten a flu shot…you should get a flu shot.”

Setting safety and efficacy of influenza vaccination aside, is Anderson’s claim that the flu shot will help people fight COVID-19 remotely true? The short answer is no.

In fact, the results of many peer-reviewed, published studies prove that Anderson’s recommendation may have been the worst advice he could have given the public.

In searching the literature, the only study we have been able to find assessing flu shots and coronavirus is a 2020 US Pentagon study that found that the flu shot INCREASES the risks from coronavirus by 36%. “Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as “virus interference…’vaccine derived’ virus interference was significantly associated with coronavirus…” Here are the findings:

2020 Pentagon study: Flu vaccines increase risk of coronavirus by 36% 

Examining non-influenza viruses specifically, the odds of coronavirus in vaccinated individuals were significantly higher when compared to unvaccinated individuals with an odds ratio (association between an exposure and an outcome) of 1.36. In other words, the vaccinated were 36% more likely to get coronavirus.

Many other studies suggest the increased risk of viral respiratory infections from the flu shot:

2018 CDC Study: Flu shots increase risk of non-flu acute respiratory illnesses (ARI) in children

This CDC supported study concluded an increased risk of acute respiratory illness (ARI) among children <18 years caused by non-influenza respiratory pathogens post-influenza vaccination compared to unvaccinated children during the same period.

2011 Australian Study: Flu shot doubled risk of non-influenza viral infections and increased flu risk by 73%

A prospective case-control study in healthy young Australian children found that seasonal flu shots doubled their risk of illness from non-influenza virus infections. Overall, the vaccine increased the risk of virus-associated acute respiratory illness, including influenza, by 73%.

2012 Hong Kong Study: Flu shots increased the risk of non-flu respiratory infections 4.4 times and tripled flu infections

A randomized placebo-controlled trial in Hong Kong children found that flu shots increased the risk of non-influenza viral ARIs fivefold (OR 4.91,CI 1.04—8.14) and, including influenza, tripled the overall viral ARI risk (OR 3.17, CI 1.04—9.83).

2017 Study: Vaccinated children are 5.9 more likely to suffer pneumonia and 30.1 times more likely to have been diagnosed with Allergic Rhinitis than unvaccinated children

Vaccinated children were 30.1 times more likely to have been diagnosed with Allergic Rhinitis and 5.9 times more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia than unvaccinated children.

2014 Study: Influenza-vaccinated children were 1.6 times more likely than unvaccinated children to have a non-influenza “Influenza-like-illness” (ILI)

Even more published science

The well-respected Cochrane Collaboration’s comprehensive 2010 meta-analysis of published influenza vaccine studies found that the influenza vaccination has “no effect” on hospitalization, and that there is “no evidence that vaccines prevent viral transmission or complications.” The Cochrane Researchers concluded that the scientific evidence “seem[s] to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.” 

In their meta-analysis, the Cochrane researchers accused the CDC of deliberately misrepresenting the science in order to support their universal influenza vaccination recommendation. Nevertheless, CNN and other mainstream media outlets continually broadcast CDC pronouncements as gospel and, ironically, ridicules those of us who actually read the science as “purveyors of ‘vaccine misinformation”.


This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

EU Citizens Initiative calls for ban on biometric mass surveillance systems

By Katya Pivcevic | January 8, 2021

A European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI), ‘Civil society initiative for a ban on biometric mass surveillance practices,’ has been registered by the European Commission, calling for a permanent end to the disproportionate uses of biometric data in ways which can lead to mass surveillance or any undue interference with fundamental rights. Dozens of civil society groups have supported the movement.

The ECI was made part of the Lisbon Treaty in 2012, and introduced as an agenda-setting tool in the hands of citizens. An ECI allows for 1 million citizens from at least one quarter of EU Member States to invite the European Commission to propose legal acts in areas where the Commission has the power to act. Since 2012, 76 Citizens’ Initiatives have been registered.

This initiative for a ban on certain biometric applications urges the Commission to cease their development and deployment of arbitrarily-targeted biometric systems, even on a trial basis, recalling actions by EU agencies which have resulted in violations of EU data protection law. Under such law, the processing of biometric data is forbidden except where there is a “substantial public interest,” subject to strict necessity and proportionality requirements.

Should the ECI receive one million statements of support within one year from at least seven different Member States, the Commission will have to react within six months. The initiative hopes to gain transparency, protection from discrimination and respect through the Reclaim Your Face movement, which opposes biometric mass surveillance systems.

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

What Leftists Think About Freedom of Speech

AwakenWithJP | January 9, 2021

Join my Awakened Warrior Newsletter at https://awakenwithjp.com/joinme

A conversation between two leftists sharing what they think about freedom of speech. Should free speech be a right? Of course not! Nobody should have rights to human rights.

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January 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 2 Comments

Erdogan’s press office ditches WhatsApp as Ankara urges Turks to use domestic apps in fight against ‘digital fascism’

RT | January 10, 2021

The media office of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reportedly shutting down its WhatsApp groups over privacy concerns. The move comes after Ankara called for a nationwide boycott of the Facebook-owned messaging app.

Starting on Monday, the office is switching over to encrypted messaging app BiP, which is developed by Turkish firm Turkcell, Bloomberg reported, citing internal messages posted to the WhatsApp groups.

The decision comes amid growing consternation over WhatsApp’s plan to begin sharing personal data with its parent company, Facebook. The policy comes into effect on February 8, and users who refuse the new terms will not be able to access their accounts on the messaging platform.

The updated user terms have been met with hostility by the Turkish government, which has used privacy issues to promote homegrown apps and internet services.

Ali Taha Koc, head of the presidency’s Digital Transformation Office, released a statement on Saturday in which he warned that foreign-made applications “contain significant risks to data security.” He urged Turkish citizens to switch over to “local and national software,” claiming the move would help Turkey safeguard its data.

“As President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated, let’s stand against digital fascism together!” he concluded.

The message seems to have resonated. Turkcell reported that around one million new users joined BiP Messenger in the past 24 hours. The app has been downloaded more than 53 million times since launching in 2013.
Why doesn’t Facebook just buy your data if it’s so valuable? RT’s Boom Bust digs into WhatsApp privacy controversy

Meanwhile, Turkish media outlets have been highlighting high-profile individuals who have joined the exodus. State-run Anadolu Agency reported that a senior executive at Baykar, a Turkish drone company, announced that he was dropping WhatsApp due to its new data policy and would begin using BiP.

Erdogan has previously warned of “digital fascism,” arguing that the monopolization of data control would spell disaster for the world. In a speech from November, he said that remaining “human” in the digital age would be one of the greatest challenges going forward. However, his own government has been accused of policing social media platforms and websites for political views it deems unsavory.

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | 1 Comment

Parler CEO Speaks Out After Amazon Boots From AWS, Vows To Rebuild ‘From Scratch’

“This Was A Coordinated Attack”

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – January 9, 2021

Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):

Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.

#speakfreely

* * *

Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.

* * *

Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.

“The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”

Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.

A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:

“Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”

Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.

John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”

“They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”

Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”

* * *

Earlier:

A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.

According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”

More via CNBC:

Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.

Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC

To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some say handed the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).

In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”

Torba’s letter continues:

After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.

Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading.

Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.

Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunch

And as conservatives scramble to download the app before it’s deplatformed at yet another social media giant, we now have to wonder if they’ll even be able to find a new home among a collusive constellation of big-tech – at least one of which used to value the phrase ‘think different.’

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Last Stand

By Israel Shamir • Unz Review • January 9, 2021

President Trump was decisively beaten, if not fair and square. The hopes of millions of American voters were squashed and extinguished. The saga of the Orange Man is over. The victors used a gambit: they sacrificed the sanctity and security of the Capitol, allowed intruders in, permitted them to take selfies in the Speaker’s office, and then faked horror and outrage. The attempted calls for electoral transparency were deflated in real time as huge crowds were dispersed, electors were confirmed, and the ascendancy of Biden was assured, while Trump followers were branded ‘domestic terrorists’.

Donald Trump denounced the people whom he personally called to protest. His close political allies withdrew their support. Within hours, or even minutes, this ruler of the world admired by millions became a non-person. Like a boy who posted an obscenity, he was banned by Twitter and Facebook. Time will tell whether he will go to prison, as so many Dems pray for, but his political life seems to have ended, even if his cause may live.

The deck was stacked against President Trump from Day One. His orders were ignored. The US courts, judges, police, the whole system of law enforcement was against him; his orders were blocked or overturned, while the media made fun of him and the opposition relentlessly delegitimised him. He was blocked even by Fox News. Dem-run states adjusted their laws to assure the elections’ result. Trump was a lame duck from the very beginning of his presidency to its bitter end. He was kept on a short leash by the almighty Deep State, and when he tried to free himself, they pulled the leash.

On January 6, a massive demonstration in his support gathered in Washington, DC. Hundreds of thousands Americans came to the capital to demand justice after the election fraud became obvious. They hoped that the Republican representatives would refuse to certify the fraud and appoint a commission to check and recount the votes. Some of the protesters managed to break into the Capitol, or were let in by the police. This peaceful Occupy Capitol action, the exercise of a natural right to protest, was met with lethal fire, and a young female protester from San Diego, Ashli Babbitt, was murdered by the plainclothes police. The Republican representatives were cowed and surrendered; Biden was confirmed to take office.

The horror and outrage of the Dem politicians and media were as faked as their news. During last year, many government buildings were taken over by Dem-sponsored BLM activists, and in not one case did the police use lethal weapons or even rush the protesters out of buildings.

“Shortly after 8 p.m. Wednesday, hundreds of protesters gathered outside the locked King Street entrance to the Capitol, chanting “Break down the door!” and “General strike!” Moments later, police ceded control of the State Street doors and allowed the crowd to surge inside, joining thousands who had already gathered in the Capitol to protest the votes. The area outside the Assembly, which is scheduled to take the bill up at 11 a.m. today, was crowded with protesters who chanted, “We’re not leaving. Not this time.” …

Department of Administration spokesman Tim Donovan said although protesters were being encouraged to leave, no one would be forcibly removed. … Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said he had instructed … Police Chief Noble Wray not to allow his officers to participate in removing demonstrators from the building.”

This was what happened in Madison, Wisconsin in March 2011, as Steve Sailer reminded us. Indeed, this is what the protesters expected; some were dressed in flamboyant carnival attire; they behaved well and peacefully, within acceptable limits. It was not an insurrection; they didn’t try to take over the Congress in any meaningful sense. For them, it was an honest and funny way to express their indignation. But the real gambit plotters intended to frame them. They even murdered four protesters hoping they would respond with violence, but in vain.

White American protesters are exceptionally non-violent lot; as with Occupy Wall Street a few years back the January 6 Capitol protesters were timid and obedient as lambs. For this reason, BLM was invented, for Blacks are able to riot violently, as opposed to well-trained whites. It is not a race thing: lily-white French Yellow Vests and Ukrainian nationalists have fought the police all right. But US whites are not prone to riot, not since the Civil War. Being a foreigner, I do not understand why the Americans want to keep their guns if they never use them, but that’s the way they are.

Anyway, their non-violence didn’t help them. The president-elect Biden begrudged them even the name of protesters: “Don’t dare call them protesters. They were a riotous mob, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists.” Indeed, the name should be preserved for Deep State-authorised looters and their brethren all over the world, whether in Hong Kong or Minsk, in Seattle or Portland.

Russian social networks were comparing the Washington DC events with those nearer to home and complained of ‘double standards’. The US media expressed no indignation when their appointee Boris Yeltsin shelled the Russian Parliament in 1993. The New York Times and the State Department had encouraged the nationalist mob to storm Ukrainian government offices in 2014. They cheered on the opposition in Minsk in taking over their parliament after failing to win elections. The Belarus protesters claimed their country’s election results were rigged, just like Trump supporters did for the US elections, but Biden didn’t call them “domestic terrorists”. (Actually, neither did President Lukashenko: he called them ‘protesters’, and their violent demos were dispersed without a single shot fired.) In such cases, Jews respond with “How can you compare?!”

The Russians compared the Capitol ‘coup attempt’ with their own semi-staged ‘coup’ of 1991, a partly pre-planned provocation. In 1991, the feeble coup organisers could not detain Yeltsin and surrendered as if on cue; the wave of indignation removed Gorbachev and the Communist party from power. In the Capitol, too, police waved the ‘invaders’ in, as you can see on this video forwarded by the BBC. More videos suggesting Capitol police involvement in the ostensible provocation are presented here. The orchestrated indignation allowed the victors to censor and purge the defeated Trump and his followers. Just as the USSR went down in August 1991, Trump’s America went down in January 2021, and the liberal elites representing the big corporations came to power. It was achieved by a provocation, but ordinary Trump followers were really angry with the Election Steal. Likewise, 1991 was a provocation, but ordinary Russian citizens were angry at Gorbachev’s perestroika, while the liberal elites used it to dismantle the Soviet state and transfer all assets to their oligarchs.

People with a good knowledge of history refer to the Reichstag Fire of February 1933, the arson contrived by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its opponents and to assume emergency powers. Alternatively, other researchers have contended that there was no proof of Nazi complicity in the crime, but that Hitler merely capitalised on the Dutch Communist van der Lubbe’s independent act. The fire is the subject of continued debate and research, says the Encycopaedia Britannica. Probably the same will be said about the Capitol “invasion”, and researchers will argue whether duplicitous Biden’s minions organised it or just capitalised on the Trumpers’ sincere protest.

There is no doubt that to an objective observer the 2020 elections were profoundly unfair. I won’t trouble you with too many published details about the statistically impossible results, but here is one example of fraud. The city of Detroit gave 95 per cent of its vote to Biden/Kamala, a number that Mr Kim Jong-un would view with slight envy, while Mr Lukashenko would murmur, “How can it be done?” It is highly likely this mind-boggling result was achieved in the following way.

Detroit Dems outsourced ballot harvesting to local drug lords, offering them as a prize – recreational marijuana business licenses. These licences are the best thing since a licence to print money. Having such licenses is like having your own ATM. Here you can read about their profitability and the lengths criminals will go to obtain them. Detroit Dems had changed local laws allowing the sale of marijuana in their fine city (it was forbidden until November 2020). They changed local laws prescribing the issuing of marijuana licences to drug dealers with previous convictions for drug dealing. They let drug lords out of jail. They changed local laws to allow ballot harvesting; that is, collecting postal votes and assisting with the filling in of ballots. After that, the drug dealers went around collecting postal ballots and filling them in immediately, if they were conscientious, or just filling them in at their leisure, if feeling lazy. They had a judge at their disposal, Cynthia Stephens, who single-handedly changed Michigan election laws, and then rejected Trump’s claims of fraud.

Yes, Virginia, there was election fraud in many American states. They are used to gambling; they aren’t surprised by a beautiful hand of four aces, as Mark Twain suggested. Usually the two parties deal in turns, and cheat in turns. Only this time, Trump convinced many people that it is different; that this is their last chance.

The problem is, Trump was a poor organiser. He could win elections, if he could prevent Cynthia Stephens’s kind of legislation, outlaw postal ballots, enforce obligatory IDs for voting, mobilise his people for election control. A formidable task, but not impossible, while dealing with a prone-to-cheat adversary. He could even do a revolution on January 6, tasking the right people to act, forming a revolutionary HQ, planning a strategy of takeover, but he didn’t do anything of the sort. He probably thought Congress would see the vast crowds and allow for the checking of election results.

Alternatively, he was so naïve that he believed revolutions just happen by themselves, as in the movies. They do not. Behind every successful revolution, there is a lot of planning, armed force, weapons ready for use, supply lines, logistics, media support, and communications. Trump had none of that. It was enough to turn off Twitter to make him deaf and dumb.

There was no coup attempt, as correctly stated by Tyler Durden: “Trump has never had the concentration, organizational acumen, or ideological coherence to mount a bona fide “coup,” and a mob intrusion which was swiftly dispersed by armed agents of the state doesn’t change that. Shortly after the breach, he released a video instructing his followers not to take Senators hostage or imprison Mike Pence, but to “go home.” No factions of the federal government joined the mob on Trump’s orders, because he didn’t bother issuing any. The whole episode never stood the remotest chance of preventing the certification of Joe Biden, much less overthrowing the government. It was just another goofball charade, and in that sense, a fitting end to the Trump presidency.”

Conspiracy theories played their disappointing part in the debacle. Many Trumpists believed in the QAnon and Kayfabe conspiracies; they posted reports of bad guys being arrested, of servers snatched by the FBI, of Clinton and Biden waiting for rough justice behind bars. This belief disarmed people who would otherwise have fought to achieve this very result. That is the problem with conspiracies: imaginary conspiracies prevent real action.

Still, I do not want to finish this piece on such a sad and disappointing note. President Trump was a great leader. He succeeded against enormous odds in improving the lot of American workers: for the first time since the 1970s, their incomes rose in relation to the other classes. He stopped mass migration to the US: legal immigration went down to a trickle. He avoided new wars; he tried to make peace with Russia. He refused to bomb Iran even in the last days of his presidency, though some pro-Israel supporters promised him a second term if he would.

His fight against the corona madness was his great achievement. He was against the lockdowns that are about to destroy our world so completely that few things will survive. The last great US ruler who didn’t wear the cowardly mask will be remembered. He could not defeat the mighty medical complex, or FAGMA, or the Masters of Discourse, but he tried.

The day of his defeat, January 6, was the Epiphany, or Adoration of the Magi, of the Three Wise Men who came to worship Jesus in his cave. It was also Christmas Eve for the Eastern Church. It is the darkest time of the year; from now on, the day will increase and so will our hopes.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

January 10, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Lawsuit That Could End Covid-1984 with Dr. Pam Popper

Spiro Skouras | December 27, 2020

Ever since the world became aware of Covid-19 in early 2020, we have warned of the possibility that the government response, may turn out to be worse than the condition itself.

Many have described this response as a form of medical tyranny, sold to us as a temporary measure for the greater good. Two weeks to flatten the curve they said.

Four months into the lockdowns, some of us half jokingly said things like, ‘I hope they lift the lockdowns before the 4th of July, so we can celebrate our freedoms.’

Now we find ourselves eight months in to a two week lockdown with no end in sight. Despite the fact that a Federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled the shut downs were unconstitutional. The Michigan Supreme Court also ruled that the Governor’s emergency orders had violated the constitution. So why hasn’t anything changed?

In this interview Spiro’s guest Dr. Pamela Popper discusses two new lawsuits that she believes could end Covid-1984. The two lawsuits, one in Ohio and one in New Mexico, challenge the root of the problem, the emergency itself.

Show Notes: https://www.activistpost.com/2020/12/the-lawsuit-that-could-end-covid-1984-with-dr-pam-popper.html

January 9, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment