Pointing a finger at evil wherever I see it.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Sometimes, you just need to fight lunacy with more lunacy.
That’s what a male powerlifting coach by the name of Avi Silverberg must have thought when he decided to protest new “trans policies” in the sport by “self-identifying” as a woman and then destroying a women’s record during a recent event.
Prior to Silverberg taking action, “the women’s bench press title holder in the 84+ kilogram category [was] Anne Andres, who is a biological male”, Fox News reported this week.
Source: AntiWar.com
Throughout history, most academics have been the witting or unwitting servants of power. Socrates was accused of failing to honor the gods of Athens and corrupting the youth with his ideas. He was canceled in the ultimate way: sentenced to die. Aristotle, by contrast, tutored the young Alexander the Great, future King of Macedonia, which at the time was occupying Athens. During the rebellion, Aristotle fled to save his skin.
Today, some academics refusing to toe the line are also threatened with death. Chicago University’s John Mearsheimer was placed on the US-funded Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation’s blacklist, where he and others, including myself, were accused of committing “informational terrorism” by expressing fact-based opinions about the war with Russia. At the same time that Ukrainian fascists were placing me on their list, a cabal of liberal staff at my military-funded institution, the University of Plymouth (UK), terminated my position without warning or right of reply.
Source: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
The newly released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network report finds that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prevalence in the U.S. has increased to 2.8%, or 1 in 36 U.S. children born in 2012 — up from 1 in 44 from the previous report for children born in 2010.
Prevalence among 8-year-old boys was 4.3% nationwide and as high as 6.9% in California.
The policy focus of the new report is centered not around the increasing ASD rates, but rather around a social justice narrative in which disability issues take a back seat to the equity implications.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
While Silicon Valley Bank execs may have failed to hedge against interest rate risk, they did signal $73.45 million in virtue donating to Black Lives Matter and related entities, according to a database maintained by the Claremont Institute which lists nearly $83 billion in donations to the Marxist organization.
Source: ChildrensHealthDefense.org
Story at a glance:
Continue reading “ChatGPT: Friend or Foe? – Dr. Joseph Mercola 3/13/23”
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, country music singer John Rich, and conservative commentator Larry Elder have bought a bank that they say will promote American values and protect customers from the cancel culture and de-platforming that has been seen in recent times.
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
In January 2022, news outlet Politico issued a style guide for its writers that bans the use of language that could be deemed “offensive.” The style guide, which was recently obtained by The Spectator’s Amber Athey, contains guidelines on language related to racism, transgender issues, and immigration.
Source: MintPressNews.com
The following text tells the whole story of what pro-Palestinian communities around the world are fighting for, and what pro-Israelis are fighting against: “We are delighted to report that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital has removed a display of artwork designed by children from Gaza.”
That was the summary of a news report published on the homepage of the pro-Israel group, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The group is credited for being the party that managed to successfully persuade the administration of a hospital in West London to take down a few pieces of artwork created by refugee children from Gaza.
Source: Mises.org
Incredulity. Astonishment. Disgust. Anger.
It is these feelings—amongst others—that describe the general reaction to the revelations of the Twitter Files and other egregious episodes of Big Tech censorship of the electronic public square.
The implicit deal with companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. is very simple: we will look at your ads if you give us a service for free. The deal did not include censorship.
Continue reading “The Censored Generation – Thomas Buckley 3/9/23”
Source: JonathanTurley.org
We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). The latest such case is a criminal trial of French Senator Stéphane Ravier for stating that “immigration kills the youth of France.” It is another example of why free speech is in a virtual free fall in Europe.
Source: Unz.com
It is generally observed that imperial powers like the United States frequently interfere in foreign governments in support of economic or hard political reasons. To be sure, Washington has refined the process so it can plausibly deny that it is interfering at all, that the change is spontaneous and comes from the people and institutions in the country that is being targeted for change. One recalls how handing out cookies in Maidan Square in Kiev served as an incentive wrapped around a publicity stunt to bring about regime change in Ukraine in 2014 when Senator John McCain and the State Department’s Victoria Nuland were featured performers in a $5 billion investment by the US government to topple the friendly-to-Russia regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Of course, change for the sake of a short-term objective might not always be the best way to go and one might suggest that the success in bringing in a new government acceptable to Nuland has not really turned out that well for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, nor for those Americans who understand that the Biden Administration’s pledge to arm Ukraine and stay in the fight against Russia “as long as it takes” just might not be very good for the United States either.
Continue reading “US Foreign Policy Goes “Woke”? – Philip Giraldi 3/7/23”
Source: Mises.org
We currently find ourselves in a bizarre wasteland of mainstream political discourse. These days no US institution, and indeed no corner of American life, is safe from politicization or even from becoming a mouthpiece for extreme activism.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
In order to address the issue of shoplifting and retail theft, the final two Walmart stores in the city of Portland will shutter their doors in late March.
FOX 12 Oregon reported that the Walmart locations at 1123 North Hayden Meadows Drive and 4200 Southeast 82nd Avenue at the Eastport Plaza would close on Mar. 24.
“The decision to close these stores was made after a careful review of their overall performance. We consider many factors, including current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs, and the proximity of other nearby stores when making these difficult decisions. After we decide to move forward, our focus is on our associates and their transition, which is the case here,” a spokesperson with Walmart told the local media outlet.
Source: Zerohedge.com
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) has been a hotly debated topic over the last few years.
The seemingly unquestioned march towards corporate utopia has met with resistance among those who oppose the idea that government oligarchs should dictate the affairs of private business firms. The long-term effects of the ESG movement are largely ignored by the mainstream.
Source: LBCGroup.tv
The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will require companies winning funds from its $52 billion US semiconductor manufacturing and research program to share excess profits and explain how they plan to provide affordable childcare.
Source: DailyMail.co.uk
The BBC has banned The Archers fans from putting messages on the show’s official Facebook page after they criticised its ‘woke’ storylines.
The Corporation, which launched the rural radio soap in 1951, told the 92,000 Facebook users ‘regular posting to this page is being paused’.
Diehard fans say the move is an attempt to silence critics who believe the Radio 4 show, set in the fictitious village of Ambridge, is focusing too much on politically correct issues such as climate change.
Prior to the ban, several fans had used the official page to vent their fury about recent plotlines.
Source: Wirepoints.org
Rising crime is the number one crisis facing Chicago today. More specifically, the city’s propensity for murder. Chicago was the nation’s extreme outlier for homicides in 2022, with 697 deaths. More people were murdered here than anywhere else.
What’s worse, Chicago has out-paced the entire nation in murders for 11 years in a row. It’s become an embedded, chronic wound for the city.
Source: AmericanThinker.com
The Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gives cities a blank check for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants. An astonishingly massive windfall for municipal budgets. Janet Yellen, U.S. Treasury Secretary, followed up by forming an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity (a.k.a. TACRE) to ensure cities channel those funds and future federal grants towards racial equity justice.
Source: Mises.org
“It’s an important part of society whether you like it or not,” lexicologist Tony Thorne, referring to “wokeness,” told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in January. That’s an understatement.
Wokeness is poisoning the Western workplace and constraining small and family businesses, midsized banks, and entrepreneurs while enriching powerful corporations and billionaires. It’s eating away at the capitalist ethos and killing the bottom-up modes of economic ordering and exchange that propelled the United States of America to prosperity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s infecting Gen Z and millennials, who, suffering high depression rates and prone to “quiet quitting,” are not as well off as their parents and grandparents, and who feel isolated and alone even as they enjoy a technological connectivity that’s unprecedented in human history.
What, exactly, is wokeness, and how does it impact business and the wider society?
Source: : JonathanTurley.org
There is an interesting fight brewing in Congress after various cities indicated that they may not only pay reparations but use federal pandemic funds for such payments. There has been a long call for federal reparations with various Democratic bills introduced in Congress. BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations. However, cities like Providence, Rhode Island are not waiting. They insist that federal reparations funds are already effectively approved as part of their pandemic relief.
Source: Unz.com
On February 16, President Joe Biden issued an executive order titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through The Federal Government”. The order is supposed to level the racial playing field by “addressing systemic racism in our Nation’s policies and programs”, but it does nothing of the kind. In truth, the order represents a massive and disturbing restructuring of the federal government in a way that fundamentally changes the manner in which the agencies operate. The new system will feature “equity” commissars who will have nothing to do with “systemic racism”, but will be appointees designated to enforce the edicts of the state. The senior agency official (in these agency equity teams) will then coordinate with the “Gender Policy Council” which is directly linked to the executive branch of government. In short, the administration is methodically building the basic scaffolding for a centrally-controlled police state masquerading as social justice operation. For all intents and purposes, the equity agenda is a cleverly-phrased moniker that conceals a plan to exert absolute control over the entire sprawling bureaucracy. Here is an excerpt from the White House print-out:
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Several of the UK’s most respected TV shows, movies, and works of literature have been included in a list of works that could potentially encourage far-right sympathies, compiled by the taxpayer-funded and government-led ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism program.
As The Daily Mail reports, works by some of the world’s greatest writers were included as examples of warning signs of potential extremism, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Orwell, Huxley, Kipling and Edmund Burke….
Source: InformationLiberation.com
The state of New Jersey is helping convicted drug users become drug dealers under a bold new liberal “social equity” program.
From CNBC, “They were convicted on marijuana charges. Now they’re first in line to sell it legally”:
TRENTON, N.J. — Tahir Johnson has been arrested on marijuana possession charges three times. Now, for the first time in his life, his conviction on one of those charges won’t hurt his employment prospects. It will help.
Source: RealClearWire.com
Little more than a decade ago, DEI was just another arcane acronym, a clustering of three ideas, each to be weighed and evaluated against other societal values. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion weren’t yet being used in the singular, as one all-inclusive, non-negotiable moral imperative. Nor had they coalesced into a bureaucratic juggernaut running roughshod over every aspect of national life.
They are now.
Continue reading “The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex – Thomas Hackett 2/14/23”
Source: ReclaimTheNet.org
Yesterday, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that she would be stepping down and that YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan would be the new CEO.
During Wojcicki’s tenure, which ran from February 5, 2014 till February 16, 2023, YouTube made many unpopular decisions such as introducing far-reaching “hate speech” and “harassment” rules, restricting creators that produce content that’s “made for kids”, and hiding public dislikes. Wojcicki also made many public statements in support of censoring creators based on broad and subjective terms such as “misinformation.”
Source: public.substack.com
The issues in question are conspicuously political and not clinical.
Council Members Fred Schmidt, Ian Nicholson, Wanda Towers, Marilyn Keyes, David Kurzman, Archie Kwan, Paula Conforti, Adrienne Perry, Marjory Phillips, Melanie Morrow, Conrad Leung, Kendra Thomson, Paul Stopciati, Nadia Mocan, Esther Vlessing, Carolyn Kolers, Ilia Maor, Scott Warnock, Cenobar Parker
Continue reading “Open Letter Against The Witch Hunt of Jordan Peterson – Public 2/13/23”
Source: Undark.org
Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that was used, in part, to animate the now-ubiquitous chatbot known as ChatGPT. Among other things, the researchers wanted to know how the language model would respond to “right-wing extremist narratives” such as QAnon.
Source: WhoWhatWhy.org
Part 2 of a Series
In Part I of this series, I talked about the tremendous power and influence of Wikipedia — and its cultural bias — in shaping how we think.
In Part 2, I focus on a problem that can affect anyone looking for solid information on anything — but especially when you want information to help you judge the reliability and character of individuals whose views may diverge from those of the establishment.
Continue reading “How Easy it is to Destroy a Reputation – RussBaker 2/13/23”
Source: AmericaOutLoud.com
I have two sons, ages 10 and 12; like most parents, I couldn’t be more proud of my kids, and I cherish every moment I have with them. I work non-stop, often 16+ hour days, and I do my best to still make time to spend with my family (sleep is overrated). My boys attend a Christian school, and they are both getting to the ages in their education where they are having to do a fair amount of research for their assignments. When I was their age, we had encyclopedias as our main source of information; now, our kids have the modern-day equivalent, Wikipedia. This is where we run into a huge problem. Wikipedia is a lunatic leftist by every measure; they don’t just lean left, they have fully fallen into the socialist left-wing agenda, and it’s no secret.
Source: WashingtonExaminer.com
This is the second part of a Washington Examiner investigative series about self-styled ‘disinformation’ tracking groups that are cracking down on conservative media and part of a lucrative operation that aims to defund disfavored speech. To read part one, click here.
The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed “disinformation” tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.
Source: ZeroHedge.com
Ever since ChatGPT hit the scene at the end of November, the artificial intelligence software program from OpenAI has shown an impressive array of capabilities – from writing computer code, poems, songs and even entire movie plots, to passing law, business, and medical exams.
Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly woke, and racist.
Source: VigilantCitizen.com
While the 2023 Grammy Awards featured Beyonce, Jay-Z, Harry Styles and Lizzo, the main star of the show was Sam Smith and the ritualistic drama he carried out throughout the ceremony Here’s a look at the intense symbolism of the 2023 Grammy Awards….
Source: TheDailyBell.com
What do corporations gain from virtue-signaling their support for Social Justice™ pet projects?
The Coca-Cola™ corporation makes sugar water with a splash of carcinogenic industrial food coloring to get the iconic caramel shading. What on Earth does it have to do with Social Justice™, and why does it send millions of dollars to activist groups?
Indeed, the neoliberal intersection of identity politics and multinational business is, on its face, perplexing. And it’s admittedly a complex phenomenon.
But arguably the most obvious reason: pure profit and market-cornering.
Continue reading “How Woke Coke (and Others) Cash in on ‘Social Justice’ – BenBartee 1/25/23”
Source: TheEpochTimes.com
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis threw down the gauntlet on fixing higher education on Jan. 31, vowing to eliminate all funding for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and Critical Race Theory (CRT) throughout the state.
Public universities should not be in the business of using taxpayer money to offer degrees in “zombie” studies but should embrace academic excellence and truth, and allow students to think for themselves, DeSantis said.
Source: TheEpochTimes.com
Nicole Sirotek is a registered nurse in Nevada with over a decade of experience working in some of the harshest conditions. When a hurricane devastated Puerto Rico, Sirotek and the organization she founded, American Frontline Nurses (AFLN), were there and gave out over 500 pounds of medical equipment and supplies.
Source: AmRen.com
On January 7, as the whole world now knows, Memphis police pulled over a 29-year-old black man, Tyre Nichols, and gave him a beating. He looked pretty banged up in this photo taken by his family in the hospital, where he died on January 10.
There was rising black anger — reported nationally and even internationally — with calls for officers to be fired and charged with murder. Everyone assumed the cops were white. On January 17, the Nichols family reported that professional racism-chaser Benjamin Crump would represent them. On January 18, the US Department of Justice announced it was joining the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) on the case, and would sniff out civil rights violations. This was shaping up to be the next great “white supremacy” scandal, but on January 20, the Memphis PD dropped a bomb: All the officers — who had just been fired — were black….