Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– C.S. Lewis

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
– Albert Einstein

If there is one thing that became perfectly clear during my time in the dump truck, it is this: The world runs on diesel. So every time I see a semi hauling a wind turbine, the following considerations come to mind: How many blades have been transported for how many windmills in how many areas? How much petroleum, or coal, or nuclear power, was utilized in the construction of said blades? How many gallons of diesel fuel were used to excavate the ground to run power lines from the rural areas where the wind turbines are located?

For what genuine purpose are wind turbines planted? Who benefits? And how much maintenance will the turbines, subjected to the elements, require over time? What is the net payoff?

Certainly, wind power, or solar, or electric vehicles, for that matter, are not currently self-sustaining. Instead, these are now subsidized by false narratives, and tax-payer funds, all in the service of Anthropological Climate Change®, which is an epic lie.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Brazil’s Supreme Court Is Hiring Contractors To Monitor Social Media and Track Dissenters

June 22, 2024

Brazil’s Supreme Court Is Hiring Contractors To Monitor Social Media and Track Dissenters

Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court (STF) has turned to contractors to keep an eye on social media and smoke out main critics – including by identifying them, and their location.

Other judicial institutions that are said to have contracts of a similar nature are the Superior Court of Justice, the Superior Labor Court, the Superior Electoral Court, and the National Council of Justice.

Reports out of Brazil about the contracting of outside entities to perform online surveillance is based on a public call for bids (the closing date was June 14), where STF looked to hire a company that will monitor, in real-time, what’s referred to as “the digital presence of the Federal Supreme Court” on social media.

The contractor will also have to provide alerts via instant messages, daily, weekly, and monthly – both quantitative and qualitative – analytical reports, as well as “occasional bulletins and preparation of a monthly action plan strategy for acting on social networks.”

This is yet another move by the country’s judiciary branch (the Superior Electoral Court’s activities offer more examples) that tests the boundaries of its powers. And, it’s a move that is explained as the need to protect democracy from “disinformation.”

But it didn’t stop there, as the Supreme Court’s lengthy investigations would at times cover not only “fake” but also real news – the kind that, in one example, exposed a former justice as having links with a company accused of corruption.

Contractors will now not only carry out “continuous monitoring” of social platforms (in search for “main detractors”), but also propose to the Court how it may “improve communication” with citizens.

In the past, Supreme Court justices and even a prosecutor general launched legal battles against people because of their online speech, but when these officials were allied with former President Balsonaro…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trudeau Pushes Online Censorship Bill To “Protect” People From “Misinformation”

June 11, 2024

Trudeau Pushes Online Censorship Bill To “Protect” People From “Misinformation”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week complained that governments have allegedly been left without the necessary tools to “protect people from misinformation.”

This “dire” warning came as part of Trudeau’s effort to have the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) – one of the most controversial of its kind pieces of censorship legislation in Canada of late – pushed across the finish line in the country’s parliament.

C-63 has gained notoriety among civil rights and privacy advocates because of some of its provisions around “hate speech,” “hate propaganda,” and “hate crime.”

Under the first two, people would be punished before they commit any transgression, but also retroactively.

However, in a podcast interview for the New York Times, Trudeau defended C-63 as a solution to the “hate speech” problem, and clearly, a necessary “tool,” since according to this politician, other avenues to battle real or imagined hate speech and crimes resulting from it online have been exhausted.

Not one to balk at speaking out of both sides of his mouth, Trudeau at one point essentially admits that the more control governments have (and the bill is all about control, critics say, regardless of how its sponsors try to sugarcoat it) the more likely they are to abuse it.

He nevertheless goes on to declare that new legislative methods of “protecting people from misinformation” are needed and, in line with this, talk up C-63 as some sort of balanced approach to the problem.

But it’s difficult to see that “balance” in C-63, which is currently debated in the House of Commons. If it becomes law, it will allow the authorities to keep people under house arrest should they decide these people could somewhere down the line commit “hate crime or hate propaganda” – a chilling application of the concept of “pre-crime.”

…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…

Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie

May 24, 2024

Noxious Disinformation. Climate: The Movie

Refuting lies takes far more time and energy than making them

Spitting oil? An excellent illustration by Jim Cooke perfectly illustrates this article. We are enveloped by disinformation every day.

This article is longer than usual. Slapping down lies takes extra time and work. It may need to be read in the app or in your browser if it’s too long for email.

A few weeks ago, I read an article talking about the potential for the slowing Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) to eventually tip Europe into an ice age. I’ve been aware of this scenario for a long while. On an intuitive level, it’s bewildering to consider as global temperatures inexorably rise. In fact, currently the European continent is warming faster than the world as a whole at 2.3° C above pre-industrial levels compared to 1.3° C globally. Another reader of the article who apparently didn’t understand the importance of AMOC’s role in regulating global temperature (or likely the basics of climate science) jumped on this possibility to share a movie promoting the lie that CO2 as a driver of climate change is a hoax, and posted a link to Climate: The Movie, a slick piece of disinformation posted on YouTube produced by Martin Durkin, a notorious climate change denier. Durkin sees the environmental movement as a threat to personal freedom and in favor of crippling economic development.

Many of you likely know such a denier in your life. The most important thing I can do as a writer is give you the facts needed to persuade others of the dilemma we face. You are my ambassadors. I watched this film as a necessary exercise to understand what this person believes…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Western Liars Aggressively Promote WWIII in Europe

May 23, 2024

Western Liars Aggressively Promote WWIII in Europe

Things appear no better this week on WWIII’s European front. That unelected worm, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at a Monday May 13th meeting of the Policy Exchange think tank, actually stated:

[If Russia succeeds in Ukraine, UK] might be next, [adding that Moscow’s] recklessness has taken us closer to a dangerous nuclear escalation than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

All these Western puppets read from the same central banking cartel mono-script.

This City of London weasel actually accused Russia of cutting off the West’s gas/oil supply when it was Western puppets following orders of their moneychanging masters to destroy Russia with unending economic sanctions that is chiefly the cause of the West’s mess today.

Now facing the worst economic collapse ever, unable to heat their homes and factories during the winter, the West is undergoing the elites’ controlled demolition, gutting out all Western economies assured to bring the intended outcome, the plotted diabolical death of Western civilization itself.

Yet another of Rishi’s false projections blames Russia for weaponizing the immigration crises to achieve its goals.

These little mindless maggots in the West are always ordered to falsely blame globalist invented enemies Russia, China and Iran for all their own malevolent crimes against humanity. It’s a never-ending broken record of nonstop lies that never stop flowing from these mealy-mouthed demons.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded to this litany of bogus allegations:

Sunak’s lies are so desperate that one could even feel sorry for him. Russia did not stop gas supplies even for a second.

Maria reminded Sunak that it is the wars led by the US-UK in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria that led directly to the thousands of displaced war refugees pouring into Europe and has nothing to do with Russia. Of course, we know that today’s unprecedented worst migration crisis on earth is the sole doing of the globalist masters creating every conflict and warzone that are responsible for this deliberately engineered global crisis. Be it the wide-open borders in both Europe and America, neither are Russia’s doing.

Regarding Rishi Sunak blaming Russia for “nuclear escalation,” again Maria reminded simpleton it was the West greenlighting Zelensky’s repeated shelling of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant at Zaporozhye NPP that endangered the entire European continent, not Russia.

And that it again was the US/NATO members that banned Russian energy imports, not Moscow.

Maria confronted that Russia stopped its energy deliveries to Europe, correcting him that it was not Russia but US-UK criminal collaborative betrayal that destroyed supposed ally Germany’s energy lifeline with Russia, the sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Truth or CONsequences?

May 21, 2024

Truth or CONsequences?

When your government cons you daily with its statistical “facts,” it’s hard to keep your balance. Conned-sumers are feeling the cognitive disconnect from reality.

For years, I’ve been saying it appears the BLS (Bureau of Lying Statistics) publishes fake labor statistics. The numbers always look like the seasonal adjustments are used by each administration to try to make the numbers look better, which means we are operating our country on delusions, not on facts. Ultimately that cannot possibly be as good for the nation as seeing reality as it is and dealing with it together.

Never, however, have the numbers looked so blatantly fake as they have under the Biden administration, and I’ve been pushing that point for months now. Then along came a major mainstream publisher (CNBC) who finally said (first I’d ever heard from the mainstream financial press), “These numbers look rigged.” And now, at last, comes a US congresswoman who tells the head of the BLS she should lose her job if she cannot come up with real numbers, pointing out, as I have for some time now, that it seems a bit too convenient that the numbers always come out initially looking great for her Boss, #NoMoJo Biden, and then get revised down to a more dismal reality later in the year when practically no one is looking … and that this happens EVERY SINGLE MONTH and ALWAYS IN THE SAME DIRECTION!

The fluctuating statistics have finally caught the attention of lawmakers in Congress. Last week, Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., grilled Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su about her Biden-friendly reports.

“I pressed the Biden Administration on why their jobs numbers are consistently wrong and quietly revised downward after they are announced. What is going on at BLS?…”

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) May 3, 2024

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Jig Is Up: It’s Time for Accountability for the Origin of COVID-19

May 19, 2024

The Jig Is Up: It’s Time for Accountability for the Origin of COVID-19

Responsibility starts with EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and ends with agency officials who funded and defended his reckless virus research.

Today’s guest essay comes from David Robertson who looks at science officials’ pattern of misleading the public and passing the buck, including possible attempts to create a fall guy to blame for reckless, NIH-funded virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a recent hearing, viewers beheld an amazing spectacle. For the first time in the Subcommittee’s history, Democrats showed interest in getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s origin and began aggressively interrogating the lone witness: EcoHealth Alliance president, Peter Daszak.

Daszak is a prime candidate for blame in a possible laboratory accident in Wuhan, for an obvious reason: his NIH-funded nonprofit was performing reckless research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with inadequate safety, right before the Wuhan outbreak. This fact has long been known.

Before working to cover all this up, Anthony Fauci and other virologists stated as much in private emails back in February 2020. Daszak, however, has evaded questions about this for years.

Daszak’s responses to the Subcommittee’s questions did not exactly fill Democrats with confidence. “I remain seriously concerned that you, Dr Daszak, appear to be eluding questions from this Committee in an attempt to avoid consequences,” Democratic Ranking Member, Raul Ruiz, said in his closing statement. “It is important that you and your organization be held accountable.”

In one telling example Daszak claimed that, in a 2020 letter he orchestrated in The Lancet to dismiss claims of a possible Wuhan lab accident as “conspiracy theories”, he was exclusively referring to hairbrained ideas that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered from snake DNA or had HIV virus inserts…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media. Greg Guma

May 17, 2024

Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media. Greg Guma

An eye-witness account that explores the unique, tumultuous history of Pacifica radio and alternative media in America.

After an eclectic career, Greg Guma discusses the evolution of radio and television, the impacts of concentrated media ownership, the rise of the alternative press, his own work in Vermont — before and during a progressive revolution that changed the state’s power structure, and decades later, how he managed the original listener-supported radio network.

Weaving together an intimate chronicle of what he saw as Pacifica Radio’s first post-revolution CEO and episodes from his earlier life as a reporter, editor and activist, Guma explores the challenges of maintaining democratic institutions in a culture of distrust and polarization, of striking the delicate balance between truth and advocacy, observation and participation, and of managing conflicts with persuasion instead of force.

Managing Chaos is a media saga, a personal story, and a cautionary tale.

…a skilled writer who has immersed himself in Vermont life and politics for decades. — Sasha Abramsky

…the first executive in Pacifica who has been willing, and able, to share his experiences…. They ought to be required reading for all PNB and LSB members. — Nalini Lasiewicz

Excerpts from the Book

“The deeper I looked the more convoluted and intractable the problems appeared: Charges and counter-charges of secrecy, waste, racism, sexism, harassment and violence, turf battles over local fiefdoms, manipulation, and alleged fraud. It seemed like a fratricidal war with no end in sight.

“It reminded me of how easily reality can be blurred by misinformation. That July, Jeff Ruch, the director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, had issued a relevant assessment of a much larger and even more dysfunctional organization. ‘The federal government,’ he concluded, ‘is suffering from a severe disinformation syndrome.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

May 17, 2024

YouTube Removes 35,000 EU Videos for “Misinformation,” Enhances Content Censorship Ahead of 2024 Elections

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

YouTube has (“voluntarily” or otherwise) assumed the role of a private business entity that “supports elections.”

Google’s video platform detailed in a blog post how this is supposed to play out, in this instance, in the EU.

With the European Parliament (EP) election just around the corner, YouTube set out to present “an overview of our efforts to help people across Europe and beyond find helpful and authoritative election news and information.”

The overview is the usual hodgepodge of reasonable concepts, such as promoting information on how to vote or register for voting, learning about election results, etc., that quickly morph into yet another battle in the “war on disinformation.”

And what better way to “support” an election (and by extension, democracy) – than to engage in another round of mass censorship? /s

But YouTube was happy to share that in 2023 alone, it removed 35,000 videos uploaded in the EU, having decided that this content violated the platform’s policies, including around what the blog post calls “certain types of elections misinformation” (raising the logical question if some types of “election misinformation” might be allowed).

As for who is doing this work, YouTube suggests it is a well-oiled machine hard at it around the clock, and “at scale” – made up of “global teams of reviewers” and machine learning algorithms.

The blog post first states that one of the goals of YouTube’s efforts is to help users “learn about the issues shaping the debate.” But then in the part of the article that goes into how the platform is “dealing with harmful content,” it at one point starts to look like the giant might be trying to shape that debate itself.

“Our Intelligence Desk has also been working for months to get ahead of emerging issues and trends that could affect the EU elections, both on and off YouTube,” reads the post.

In case somebody missed the point, YouTube reiterates it: “This helps our enforcement teams to address these potential trends before they become larger issues.”

And while machine learning (aka, AI) is mentioned as a positive when it comes to powering YouTube’s ability to censor at scale, later on in the post the obligatory mention is made of AI as a tool potentially dangerous to elections and democracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Golden Age of Disinformation Has Only Just Begun

May 5, 2024

The Golden Age of Disinformation Has Only Just Begun

The world has become increasingly interconnected and interdependent, and the opportunities for misinformation have become almost limitless.

Disinformation is all about power, and because of the harmful and far-reaching influence that disinformation exerts, it cannot achieve much without power.

As a tool for shaping public perceptions, disinformation can be used by authoritarian regimes and democracies alike. The dissemination of false information is not a new practice in human history. However, over the last few decades, it has become professionalized and has taken on exorbitant proportions at both national and international levels.The Origins of Disinformation

Disinformation can be understood as misleading information, intentionally produced and deliberately disseminated, to mislead public opinion, harm a target group, or advance political or ideological objectives.

The term disinformation is a translation of the Russian дезинформация (dezinformatsiya). On Jan. 11, 1923, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to create a Department of Disinformation. Its mission was “to mislead real or potential adversaries about the true intentions” of the USSR. From then on, disinformation became a tactic of Soviet political warfare known as “active measures,” a crucial element of Soviet intelligence strategy involving falsification, subversion, and media manipulation.

During the Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, this tactic was used by numerous intelligence agencies. The expression “disinformation of the masses” came into increasing use in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1980s. Former Soviet bloc intelligence officer Ladislav Bittman, the first disinformation professional to defect to the West, observed in this regard that ”The interpretation [of the term] is slightly distorted because public opinion is only one of the potential targets. Many disinformation games are designed only to manipulate the decision-making elite, and receive no publicity.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UN Official Condemns Health “Misinformation,” Advocates for “Digital Integrity Code”

April 30, 2024

UN Official Condemns Health “Misinformation,” Advocates for “Digital Integrity Code”

Under the guise of combating disinformation, the UN advocates for stricter censorship with its new Code of Conduct for Information Integrity.

The United Nations continues with an attempt to advance the agenda to get what the organization calls its Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms implemented.

This code is based on a previous policy brief that recommends censorship of whatever is deemed to be “disinformation, misinformation, hate” but that is only the big picture of the policy UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is staunchly promoting.

In early April, Fleming gave a talk at Boston University, and here the focus was on AI, whose usefulness in various censorship ventures makes it seen as a tool that advances “resilience in global communication.”

A piece on the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases site first asserts that AI had a “major role” in helping spread misinformation and conspiracy theories “in the post-pandemic era,” while the UN is described as one of the institutions that have been undermined by all this, while “working to dispel these narratives.”

(The article also – helpfully, in terms of understanding where its authors are coming from – cites the World Economic Forum (WEF) as the “authority” which has proclaimed that “the threat from misinformation and disinformation as the most severe short-term threat facing the world today”).

You will hardly hear Fleming disagreeing with any of this, but the UN’s approach is to “harness” that power to serve its own agendas. The UN official’s talk was about AI can be used to feed the public the desired narratives around issues like vaccines, climate change, and the “well-being” of women and girls.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Day We Stopped Trusting Media

April 27, 2024

The Day We Stopped Trusting Media

Imagine future election campaigns

One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways.

That day has apparently arrived:

Baltimore high school teacher arrested over deepfake audio of principal

A Maryland high school teacher has been arrested for allegedly using AI to deepfake a bogus recording of his principal making racist comments.

Dazhon Darien, 31, is accused of creating the hoax audio of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert.

Mr Eiswert was placed on leave and had police outside his home amid death threats he received over the fake clip.

Mr Darien was held at an airport after a security check over a gun in his bag found an arrest warrant against him.

He faces charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness.

Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers said the school, as well as the Baltimore County Police Department, launched an investigation on 17 January when they were made aware of the voice recording.

Detectives requested a forensic analysis of the audio, which found it was not authentic.

In the recording, Mr Eiswert’s deepfaked voice is heard making disparaging comments about black students’ test scores, black teachers and Jews.

Police believe Mr Darien, the Baltimore-area school’s athletic director, made the recording to retaliate against Mr Eiswert because he was pursuing an investigation into potential mishandling of district funds.

Mr Darien had authorised a payment of nearly $2,000 (£1,600) to his roommate, falsely claiming the roommate was an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team, reports the Baltimore Sun newspaper.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: misinformation

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts