Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation or non-confirmation should establish once and for all if an accusation absent other proof is enough to derail a proposed appointment. It shouldn’t be. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
The Resistance didn’t quite hit it out of the park with Christine Blasey Ford. After all, how effective for the purpose of character assassination is a claim of “attempted rape” without even a when-and-where piece of the story? So the DC Dem-Progs have gone to their bench and found a real thumper in Deborah Ramirez who steps forward now with the ultimate giant-killer story of Brett Kavanaugh “thrusting his penis in her face and causing her to touch it without her consent,” (as reported in The New Yorker Magazine by Ronan Farrow, America’s self-appointed great white penis-hunter, and estranged son of filmmaker Woody Allen, infamous, reputed penis-mishandler).
An in-depth study of the military-industrial racket by Robert Higgs atmises.org:
“The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business — ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this system of doing business and do not want it changed.” – Colonel James G. Burton (1993, 232)
In countries such as the United States, whose economies are commonly, though inaccurately, described as “capitalist” or “free-market,” war and preparation for war systematically corrupt both parties to the state-private transactions by which the government obtains the bulk of its military goods and services.
On one side, business interests seek to bend the state’s decisions in their favor by corrupting official decision-makers with outright and de facto bribes. The former include cash, gifts in kind, loans, entertainment, transportation, lodging, prostitutes’ services, inside information about personal investment opportunities, overly generous speaking fees, and promises of future employment or “consulting” patronage for officials or their family members, whereas the latter include campaign contributions (sometimes legal, sometimes illegal), sponsorship of political fund-raising events, and donations to charities or other causes favored by the relevant government officials.
China’s social credit system gets creepier and creepier. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
China is developing a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, “social credit” will bring great opportunities — for others, punishment. The Communist Party’s plan is to monitor its citizens 24/7 and rank them on their behavior, as the dystopian social ranking system will be fully operational by 2020.
According to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), an active pilot program has already assigned a score out of 800 to millions of people across the country. More than 200 million surveillance cameras are currently using artificial intelligence and facial recognition software that adds or subtracts social points based on physical and digital behavior.
The EU is doing its best to stifle the internet, ostensibly to protect copyrights, but actually to limit free expression. From Neil Clark at rt.com:
It’s basically a battle between billionaires Axel Springer SE and Google. But it is ordinary internet users who will fall victim to the EU’s new copyright law, which urgently needs modification.
It’s good to share. But the European Parliament clearly doesn’t think so. Its new copyright legislation, passed last week, clamps down quite severely on sharing things online. The dynamism of the internet is at threat. When Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, warns us of the dangers the new law poses, we should all sit up straight and pay attention.
For a start, the legislation shifts the responsibility for the uploading of copyright material to the internet platforms themselves. Beforehand it was the job of the companies who thought their copyright was infringed to do this. Many don’t bother, and are happy to see their material uploaded to sites like YouTube as they know it promotes an artist’s work and boosts sales. But all that is likely to change.
This will appeal to a certain type of philosophically speculative mind. From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform.com:
Society should not do the wrong thing for the right reason, even though it frequently does the right thing for the wrong reason.
History has shown us what happens when you try to make society too civilized, or do too good a job of eliminating undesirable elements. It also shows the tragic fallacy in the belief that the destruction of democratic institutions will cause better ones to arise in their place.
An obscure Texas political consultant named Bill Miller once said “politics is show business for ugly people”. It’s true for the most part, aside from the consequences. This is because the theatrics of politicians result in policies that affect the lives of others; often against the will of the governed. In books and movies, however, the characters are much ado about nothing. Until, that is, life imitates art.
Keeping unwanted voices off the internet and social media serves the purposes of those who would indoctrinate. From Daisy Luther at theorganicprepper.com:
Just about every website owner I know is feeling personally victimized by the recent social media purge that has been going on. But here’s an interesting fact: it isn’t, as is widely perceived, just conservative voices that are being silenced. It is dissenting voices.
It’s the voices of critical thinkers whose ideas run the gamut of philosophies who find that they no longer have much in the way of reach.
This social media purge affects everyone, even people who are not on social media. It does so in several ways:
Dissenting information is silenced which stifles discussion
Young people who are avid consumers of social media are being literally brainwashed because they only see one side of the story – any story
The social media purge harms websites that post non-establishment information because it stamps out their ability to reach readers who would be interested in their content.
The unfairly biased search results show people who are trying to learn more about a topic only one side of the information.
You don’t have to be on a Twitter feed to see how this is an overwhelmingly anti-American problem. Like it or not, social media is a monumental source of information these days, and when it’s censored to only show one point of view, the future of our republic is in peril. We are well on our way to peak censorship and this has been carefully orchestrated.
Non-establishment websites are in trouble.
Their website traffic is plummeting because they no longer show up anywhere near the top of search results. Their posts on social media are not presented to the public – or even the people who deliberately opted to “follow” them. Here’s an example from my own page. I have more than 30K people who chose to follow my page, as you can see in the top image. But in the bottom image, you can see how many of those people were actually shown my post. And this was actually a more successful one than many.
And the same thing goes for social media like Twitter too. I have an email list and if I didn’t, I’d hardly reach anyone. (If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter, you can do so right here.) And I really have to wonder – will our “offensive” websites one day just disappear, scrubbed from the internet permanently? It’s only a matter of time until the web hosting companies are being pressured to get in on the censorship game.
For the record, I consider myself neither conservative nor liberal. I try to veer away from any form of extremism and I make an effort to think a situation through before automatically aligning myself with a “side.” If anything, I’m a small l libertarian. My core beliefs are personal autonomy and freedom of association are to be sought in all cases that are not harmful to others. And yet, somehow, that is threatening to some people.
Don’t think it’s limited to website owners. Twitter recently banned 70 million accounts, claiming they were “fake.” But there have been repeated accusations that conservative accounts have been at the very least “shadow-banned” if not all out deleted.
The most notable purge recently has been Alex Jones and Infowars.
Love Alex Jones, hate him, or feel utterly ambivalent aside from an occasional eye-roll, he has been the most notable victim to have been thoroughly erased from the public eye as far as the large social media outlets are concerned. He lost his voice on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Even his email service provider dumped him.
I’m not personally a huge fan of Jones, but I do believe what happened to him was collusion between social media giants. Big Tech got together and now Alex Jones has to find new ways to reach his very large audience. No one is going to stumble across him accidentally in a Google Search anymore. No one is going to see his videos embedded in another website anymore. Like him or not, he has the right to exist publicly.
Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist.
If it’s been a while, I’ll recap the pertinent parts of the plot from Spark Notes.
Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania. Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the Party watches him through telescreens; everywhere he looks he sees the face of the Party’s seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in Oceania, even the people’s history and language. Currently, the Party is forcing the implementation of an invented language called Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political rebellion by eliminating all words related to it. Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal. Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all crimes…
…As the novel opens, Winston feels frustrated by the oppression and rigid control of the Party, which prohibits free thought, sex, and any expression of individuality. Winston dislikes the party and has illegally purchased a diary in which to write his criminal thoughts…
…Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he alters historical records to fit the needs of the Party. (source)
The Ministry of Truth is control of all the things from which people could garner their opinions. They provide their own twist on history, current events, entertainment, education, and the arts. The people of Oceana believe them because there isn’t enough information to believe anything else. And questioning the Ministry is a thoughtcrime, punishable by horrible torture or worse. Part of Winston’s job is to turn anyone who doesn’t follow the Ministry line into an unperson and erase them from history as though they never even existed.
So who is behind this mass purge of dissenting voices?
There’s always a money trail to follow. Any time you wonder why or how something has occurred, look for the money. In this video by Ben Swann, an independent journalist who was mysteriously silenced for quite some time, he provides some important insight.
This is happening RIGHT NOW. We are living it. We are living in the world of 1984.
Rest assured, the way things are going, it isn’t long before we will see only what “they” – the people with the power and money to make it happen – want us to see.
Social pressure is also limiting free thought.
And not only do we have organizations limiting our views of things that would broaden our minds, there’s also the rampant social pressure that we’ve seen since the last election.
When we were recently looking at rental homes, a potential landlady asked me for whom I voted in the last election. I didn’t even bother looking at the place because that is not a standard question one asks of a new tenant. It certainly has nothing to do with my ability to pay the rent. It has nothing to do with my potential for keeping things clean and in good shape. I just left because no house is worth dealing with a person who clearly let me know she was not someone with whom I wanted to do business.
And that is only my personal example. Employers check the social media accounts of prospective employees to see if they approve of how the person thinks. People who disagree publicly with powerful groups get doxxed. Dozens of stories have circulated about social pressure, lost friendships, disagreements, and mistreatment in the workplace that originated from differences in political beliefs.
How can people be expected to form accurate opinions without all the information? How can they do so when they’re under pressure for their livelihood or their ability to rent a home or when they fear for their privacy?
It’s pretty clear that there are those who don’t want people to form accurate opinions. They want to gently, quietly, insidiously get everyone on board by limiting our access to the variety of philosophies and theories that make the world go round.
Here’s a nifty satire. From C.J. Hopkins at unz.com:
If the Left is ever going to come together to save the world from Donald Trump and his legions of fascistic Putin-Nazis, we’re going to need to confront our primary enemy … the international working classes. Yes, my comrades, I’m afraid it’s time to face the facts, depressing as they are. The working classes are not our friends. Just look at how they’ve been betraying us … and after all we’ve done for them all these years! This cannot be allowed to continue, not if we are going to rescue democracy from Trump, Putin, Assad, the Iranians, and Palestinian kids with terrorist kites, and eventually stem the blood-dimmed tide of neo-fascist anti-Globalism!
Now, OK, I know you’re probably asking, “how can the international working classes possibly be the enemy of the Left?” and “wouldn’t that render the whole concept of the Left completely absurd and essentially meaningless?” and other pertinent questions like that. And that’s totally fine, you’re allowed to ask that. Questioning aspects of the official narrative the ruling classes are forcing everyone to conform to like members of a worldwide cult doesn’t make you a Nazi or anything. It’s perfectly OK to ask such questions, as long as you don’t continue to ask them, over and over, and over again, after the facts have been explained to you. Here are those facts, one more time.
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