Next to go - Tony Cartalucci - Banned From Facebook and Twitter

Anthony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer

(LD) -  Facebook and Twitter joined forces to investigate and delete my accounts. This includes my Facebook page, as well as my Land Destroyer Twitter account, my Thai-centric AltThaiNews account, my personal Twitter account @TonyCartalucci and my LocalOrg account discussing solutions and technology.



It even made international news with Reuters in their article, "Facebook removes fake accounts from Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, Honduras," claiming:

The accounts removed in Thailand used “fictitious personas” to promote narratives about Thai politics, U.S.-China relations, protests in Hong Kong, and criticism of democracy activists in Thailand, Gleicher said. 

“We were able to determine conclusively that some of the activities of this network was linked to an individual based in Thailand associated with New Eastern Outlook, a Russian government-funded journal based in Moscow,” Gleicher said.

Tony Cartalucci is my pen name and a form of anonyminity - it is not a "fictitious persona." I write in a country where US-backed political agitators - referred to as "democracy activists" in the Reuters article - regularly use deadly violence against their opponents.

The Reuters article and those citing it and celebrating censorship are engaged in the now familiar tactics of smearing targeted individuals to justify otherwise indefensible censorship.

I am associated with New Eastern Outlook. They regularly publish my articles, as do hundreds of other alternative media websites around the world.

What I perhaps noticed most were all the so-called "democracy activists" in Thailand - taking time from complaining about Bangkok "censoring" them - to celebrate Facebook and Twitter's censorship - including Thailand's Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Sunai Phasuk who gloated on Twitter that my "information operation" was finally "ended."
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What is the real ‘Orwellian nightmare’ now?

"In its near universal display of contempt for the masses, the liberal intelligentsia is exhibiting a particularly ‘Orwellian’ trait: uncritical political conformism"

Mick Hume
Spiked.com 

In the 70 years since George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the word ‘Orwellian’ has become a form of lazy political shorthand. It is used to condemn anything deemed to smack of the sort of Big Brother system of authoritarian control Orwell described in his last and greatest novel. The irony is that many of those who use it today might also have a touch of the ‘Orwellian’ about their views.

As the Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey outlines in his widely acclaimed new book, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, published to mark the 70th anniversary, the meaning of Orwell’s masterwork has often been reinterpreted over the years to suit the prevailing fears of the age.

Thus in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, the focus was on the threat of Stalinist totalitarianism. In the 1980s, concerns were more likely to be expressed about the ‘Orwellian’ potential of hi-tech surveillance systems and CCTV cameras. When the actual year 1984 came around, many of us young radicals imagined plenty that was ‘Orwellian’ about the British state’s year-long war to defeat the striking miners.

When Lynskey comes to now, however, he does the same thing and reinterprets Nineteen Eighty-Four to fit the prejudices of the present. Almost predictably, he begins his book by linking the dystopian world described by Orwell with Donald Trump’s America. He quotes Trump’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who claimed – in the row over the true size of the crowd at his presidential inauguration – that she was using ‘alternative facts’. This is why, Lynskey tells BBC News, people are now turning to Orwell’s novel again, ‘for what it says about truth. And flagrant lies. And the nature of exerting power by distorting reality.’

Thus a discussion of the importance of a 70-year-old classic can become yet another exercise in blaming lies – and, implicitly, the stupidity/gullibility of voters – for Trump’s victory over the liberal establishment. Many try to claim that similar propaganda lies were behind the mass vote to leave the EU – effectively blaming Big Brother tactics for the Brexit revolt.

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Political indoctrination: UK govt unveils plan to teach school kids about 'fake news'

RT

The British government is planning a new initiative which will aim to help schoolchildren distinguish real information from 'fake news' — in an eyebrow-raising move which could be described as a little bit Orwellian.

British Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds unveiled the new plan, warning that teachers need to better prepare students for the risks posed by "fake news" online, the Independent reported.

From 2020, British kids in both primary and secondary schools will learn about "confirmation bias" and "online risks" as part of a compulsory section of the curriculum. As part of the plan, teachers will help children identify techniques used for "persuasion" and be told "when to seek support." They will also learn about the reasons why someone might wish to "bend the truth" in the first place.

A concerned Hinds warned that the internet makes it easier for both state actors and individuals to "spread falsehoods." One area in particular which the government is looking at is "misleading content" regarding vaccinations. Without "firm action," the proliferation of allegedly misleading information online will "get a lot worse," he said.

Hinds recalled that propagandists have sought to "manipulate the truth" since "ancient times." Indeed, this is something any British government official should be well aware of, since it's well-known that the British mainstream media — including the BBC and British newspapers — have historically been infiltrated by intelligence agents from MI5 and MI6. One could probably safely assume that such inconvenient information will be left off the agenda, however, with the British program more likely to focus on the evils of propaganda emanating from Britain's geopolitical adversaries.

Aside from the obvious question of whether governments are best placed to create a curriculum on fake vs. real news, there's also the added dilemma of whether teachers should be responsible for imparting wisdom on media manipulation to children, when so much of the task of deciphering the news these days comes down to pure opinion. What one teacher might regard as real, another might view as fake.

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Orwellian Future: Facial Recognition & Mass Surveillance Is Coming To U.S. Schools

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

We are staring our Orwellian future right in the face.  Beginning in New York, facial recognition is coming to schools in the United States and it’ll be switched on for testing next week.

The dystopian future George Orwell warned about in his accidental historical predictions book, 1984, has arrived. According to an article by Engadget, the Lockport City School District in New York will start testing a facial and object recognitionsystem called “Aegis” on June 3rd. According to BuzzFeed News, that will make it the first in the U.S. to pilot a facial recognition mass surveillance system on its students and faculty.

The district installed cameras and the software suite back in September, using $1.4 million of the $4.2 million funding it received through the New York Smart Schools Bond Act. Funding provided through the Bond Act is supposed to go towards instructional tech devices, such as iPads and laptops, but the district clearly had other plans. –Engadget

BuzzFeed News got its hands on a copy of a letter distributed to the students’ parents, and it describes Aegis as “an early warning system” that can notify officials of threats.  But that’s the propagandized version of what the system is in reality: it’s a mass surveillance tool being sold to the public as “safety” as with any human rights infringement. The system, created by Canadian company SN Technologies, can apparently keep track of certain individuals in school grounds.

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The Next Economic Crisis, The Looming Post-Multipolar System And Hybrid War Forever

South Front

The Impending Crisis

At one time, specifically during the post-World War 2 Bretton Woods era, it looked like as if the capitalist model could be indefinitely sustainable and avoid plunging the world into major world conflicts. That era began to come to an end during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and came to a complete end at the end of the Cold War which ushered in the era of the so-called "globalization" which took form of unbridled competition for markets and resources. At first this competition did not show many signs of trouble. There were many "emerging markets" created as a result of the collapse of the Soviet bloc into which Western corporations could expand. However, the law of diminishing returns being what it is, the initial rapid economic growth rates could not be sustained and attempts to goose it using extremely liberal central bank policies, to the point of zero and even negative interest rates, succeeded in inflating-and bursting-several financial "bubbles". 

Even today's US economy bears many hallmarks of such a bubble, and it is only one of many. Sooner or later the proverbial "black swan" event will unleash a veritable domino effect of popping bubbles and plunge the global economy into a crisis of a magnitude it has not seen since the 1930s. A crisis against which the leading world powers have few weapons to deploy, since they have expended their monetary and fiscal "firepower" on the 2008 crisis, to little avail. The low interest rates and high levels of national debt mean that the next big crisis will not be simply "more of the same." It will fundamentally rearrange the global economy. 

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Big Brother and Big Pharma Collude to Choke Vaccine Skeptics Off Crowdsourcing Platforms

Big League politics

After successfully targeting Trump supporters with a repressive crackdown, Big Brother is heading onto their next target: so-called antivaxxers. GoFundMe is booting all vaccine skeptics from being able to raise funds on their platform, as they bend their knee to the digital lynch mob.

“Campaigns raising money to promote misinformation about vaccines violate GoFundMe’s terms of service and will be removed from the platform,” GoFundMe spokesman Bobby Whithorne said of his company’s Big Brother push.

“We are conducting a thorough review and will remove any campaigns currently on the platform,” Whithorne added, making it clear that the Orwellian censorship crackdown is far from over.

Larry Cook, who runs a website arguing against mandatory vaccines, was one of the activists who was targeted by this campaign against Big Pharma’s critics. He has been hit by many different media reports in an obviously coordinated harassment campaign designed to de-platform him and destroy his credibility.

This is Cook’s message that Big Pharma and their operatives do not want the public to see:

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Four Kinds of Dystopia

Darren Allen

The twentieth century saw four basic visions of hell on earth, or dystopia. These were:
Orwellian. Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed through violent control of sexual impulse. Constant surveillance and constant censorship. Control of bodies by enclosure, fear, explicit, violent, repression of dissent and forced obedience to ‘the party line’ (orwellian fanaticism: All must submit). Control of minds by explicitly policing, limiting and punishing subversive language (orwellian newspeak: state-controlled reduction of vocabulary to limit range of thought). Truth cannot be known (aka hyper-relativism or postmodernism); and therefore we need an external authority to decide what the truth is (kings and priests) and to protect society from chaos and madness (the orwellian them: commies, anarchists, extremists, radicals, infidels, plebs, proles, freaks, criminals, etc.).

Huxleyan Rule by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, technocratic systems. Super-excess of choice. Limitation of access to speech platforms. Assimilation of minorities (via tokenism), foundational belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and ‘flexibility’. Control by desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent (system selects for system-friendly voices and unconscious self-censorship). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality, promiscuity and dissolution. Control of bodies through pleasure and addiction to pleasure. Control of minds by proliferating information and enclosing language within professional boundaries (Illichian Newspeak, or Uniquack). Truth can be intellectually known (the religion of scientism) and is obvious when understood (huxleyan fanaticism: only the wicked can refuse it) and learnt in the process of setting up an internal authority (aka morality or conscience) called ‘education’. 
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How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule

Comment: These are the kinds of people infecting academia and teaching students how to interpret the world; "experts" and "teachers" who should be ashamed at their sycophancy toward this repellent individual.

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Eric Zeusse
Washington's Blog 

Modern dictatorship, as Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1921 about “the manufacture of consent,” is the “creation of consent” and “is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,” so that we now have artificial ‘democracy’, which George Orwell prophetically allegorized in his 1949 novel 1984. But here is the real version of it, today:

On May 26th, a youtube was posted titled “TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!” It’s about, and discusses this: Richard Stengel, who was a former Managing Editor of TIME magazine (2006-2013), and then the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2014-2016), had hosted, on April 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Workshop for College and University Educators — in other words, for professors — and this workshop was titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News”. Stengel and his panel of ‘experts’ were teaching these professors how to recognize ‘Fake News’, and Stengel made clear there that it’s whatever violates America’s “master narrative.” (Truth-falsity has nothing to do with it, he and they were teaching.)

After a lot of unquestioning questions from his academic audience, and only near the very end of the entire workshop, an unidentified attendee asked a questioning question: 

Q: I’m going to kind of go against the grain here and challenge us to … think about the media cartels, which control and dominate the way that the discourse is shaped. Is that not fake news in certain ways? … So for example, I’ll talk about the events in Gaza three weeks ago. Every American — every mainstream American and world outlet wrote a title that said, “Palestinians killed” or “die in clashes with Israel.” There were snipers, hundreds of feet away, shooting at unarmed demonstrators, but every major newspaper outlet — or every major news outlet called it clashes. No one calls that fake news.

So there’s a question here about how we are defining and what merits our attention as fake news that we need —

STENGEL: So just to — so a — so give me — give examples of the master narratives that existed — or still exist that maybe need to be questioned.

Q: American master narrative about — what is it — destiny — manifest destiny. American narrative about entitlement to American land despite American — Native Americans’ presence and the massacres against them. The denial of the continuing aftermath of slavery that is continuing to be a part of American mainstream media and mainstream consciousness. 

[The invited panel of ‘experts’ then answered with irrelevancies. Finally, Stengel came in with:] 

STENGEL: So I’ll — you will be the last question, but I just want to weigh in on that for one second. So there’s another word for master narratives. It’s called history. 

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1984: The UK is Illegally Detaining Two Journalists, Seemingly Making Them Vanish

Aaron Kesel
Activist Post

The UK government is responsible for the illegal arrest, sentencing, and detainment without trial of two journalists: Julian Assange, who recently had his Internet and communications cut off; and Tommy Robinson, all without any type of legal concession. Argue as you may about Robinson and his colorful past, including shortly being a member of BNP when he was in his twenties, but it’s what got him arrested this time that is the more shocking part of the story.

Robinson was arrested, charged and sentenced to prison for covering the existence of a Leeds Crown Court case of Islamic pedophile-grooming rape gangs. Further, the UK media has been issued D-notice takedown requests for articles on the grooming rape court case, as well as coverage of Robinson’s own arrest and sentencing, Infowars reported.

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UK: Sharing 'Hate Posts' Online Could Lead to Six Months In Jail Under Newly Proposed Rules

Chris Menahan
Information Liberation

The rulers of what many are now calling "Cuck Island" want to throw Brits in prison for sharing or commented on so-called "hate posts" on social media.

Though the crime rate in culturally enriched Britain is skyrocketing and London saw a 44% jump in its murder rate last year, the government is evidently focused entirely on shutting down free speech so no one can publicly complain about it.

From The Daily Mail: 

Social media users who share or comment on racist or anti-gay postings will face jail under rules proposed yesterday.

Advice for judges and magistrates recommends harsh punishments for those found guilty of stirring up hatred against racial, religious or sexual minority groups.

Among those jailed should be people who post comments or share online hate speech because they have been reckless as to whether they stir up hatred, say the proposals from the Sentencing Council.

Those found guilty of hate trolling by commenting or sharing social media should typically receive a sentence of six months in jail.

"Hate trolling" means sharing politically incorrect facts. The lunatic leftists controlling Britain want to throw right-wingers in prison for 6 months not just for posting such "hate," but for merely commenting on it or sharing it.

Anyone who is convicted of orginating hate speech that threatens anyone’s life or which is widely distributed should expect three years.

Even someone whose words or material were judged as hateful, but were not considered to have threatened life or reached a big audience, is likely to be punished with a year in jail.

[...]The council’s proposals say the most serious hate offences include speeches given by public figures with the aim of stirring up hatred, online content inciting violence towards racial or religious groups, and websites that publish abusive and insulting material to a worldwide audience over a long period.

Aggravating factors include activity ‘in a particularly sensitive social climate’ or delivered to an impressionable audience.

Using multiple social media platforms also makes an offence more grave.

George Orwell would have been laughed at had he put ideas like this in 1984 -- yet here we are.
 
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2018: When Orwell’s 1984 Stopped Being Fiction

Jonathan Cook
ICH

This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed”.

When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a “Revealed” or an “Exposed” for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.

But today’s Guardian’s “exclusive” story “Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance” is doing none of this. Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being “revealed”. No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this “revelation”. Everyone in this story – the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous “Whitehall official”, and the named politicians and think-tank wonks – is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.

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The real mind control: All mass media corporations are "extremely dangerous to our democracy" (VIDEOS)

KB
Medium

Earlier this week, a video made by Deadspin made the rounds of social media depicting local newscasters reciting clearly scripted lines warning of the dissemination of fake news on social media.

The irony was almost too much to stomach as the screen was filled with newscasters announcing in chilling unison : "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy." The original post by Deadspin on Facebook was captioned with an eerie but nonpartisan warning: "Here's what happens when one corporation owns all the TV stations." Sinclair broadcasting company has since been under fire as details of the script and commands to air the promo were exposed.

A number of mainstream media outlets have jumped on the bandwagon with utter condemnation of the company, citing Sinclair as an example of how the Trump administration's relationship with the corporation has resulted in this nightmare scenario. The story goes that Trump's cronies in conservative media are now ordering "must air" segments accusing mainstream media of being "fake news" just as he has accused them many times.

The not-so-subtle implication is that Sinclair has crossed a line that no other media outlet dare cross and that by denouncing Sinclair they indicate that the problem lies primarily within the company. The long-running tropes of Trump as Putin-puppet, despot, and demagogue only reinforce this idea that an Orwellian world has manifested via Trump's administration.  

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Fake History. How The Money Power Controls Our Future By Controlling Our Past

ICH
Jim Macgregor
Gerry Docherty

The ‘Fake History’ and ‘Fake News’ pejoratives (like ‘Conspiracy Theory’ before them) have only recently entered common parlance, but the falsification of history and news reporting is as old as history itself. For many a long year television news channels and newspapers owned or controlled by the Money Power (including the British Broadcasting Corporation), have been feeding us a daily diet of fake information. But in a black is white Orwellian reversal of truth it is the very people spreading falsehood who hurl the ‘fake news’ and ‘fake history’ pejoratives at truth tellers. To maintain control and stem dissent, the ruling elites maliciously misrepresent and question the integrity of alternative media and non-corporate news sources which broadcast genuine news, and the honest revisionist historians who relate historical truths. George Orwell suggested in his ‘war is peace’, ‘freedom is slavery’, ‘ignorance is strength’ thesis that the masses fall for the ruling power’s lies because their critical thinking has been so repressed they will believe any absurdity in contradiction of the plain facts.

Orwell famously added: ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Fake history is a weapon wielded by ruling elites to exert control over us, for it is knowledge about the past that has the power to shape us as people and develop our comprehension of reality. True history reveals to those who care to learn that democracy is a sham; that we the people are akin to Orwellian proles in Oceania watched over by Big Brother and accepting of anything he cares to tell us or throw at us. Money Power control of the received history is crucially important (more so than control of fake news) because it enables them to keep us in the dark and ensure our ongoing subservience. After almost seventy years Orwell’s observation may appear somewhat clichéd, but it is now more relevant than ever. The highly perceptive author added: ‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

George Orwell was correct and if humankind is to stand any chance of determining a future without oligarchic totalitarian control, the lies and mythology of our past must be challenged by honest history, hard but necessary truths and historical revision. ‘Revisionism’, according to Joseph Stromberg in an article he wrote about Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, ‘refers to any efforts to revise a faulty exiting historical record or interpretation.’ [1] Professor Barnes, himself one of the greatest revisionists of the 20th century, wrote that revisionism has been most frequently and effectively applied to correcting the historical record relative to wars because ‘truth is always the first war casualty.’ [2] Hold that important statement close. The emotional abuses and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime. Consequently, both the need and the material for correcting historical myths are most evident and profuse in connection with wars.

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“Fake Scholarship” and the Future of America’s University

"Students –who unduly refer or quote independent or dissident scholars and scientist–  will not be allowed to graduate. In turn, the universities will not recruit professors and researchers who do not conform to establishment scholarship. Critical debate and plurality are gradually phased out. It’s a reproductive process which consists in eliminating dissident views within academia."

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Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research

Harvard University has established a modern version of the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohibited online publications which are tagged as “fake” and “false”, broadly following the politically tainted “List” of censored independent and alternative media. As we recall the Catholic Church’s Index was a list of books “deemed heretical, anti-clerical or lascivious”.1 

Ex Cathedra, Harvard has decided in one fell swoop that virtually the entire US based “Alternative Media” pertaining to tens of thousands of authors would be categorized not only as fake news, but fake science, knowledge and analysis.

The Harvard Index however goes far beyond the Catholic Church’s Index which selectively banned books after careful reading, review and evaluation within the Church’s hierarchy. This frivolous decision by Harvard constitutes a violation of the most fundamental principles of  university education which are debate, discussion, critique and analysis.

The Harvard Index acts as a Lynchpin. It establishes a “new normal”, a guideline to colleges and universities across the land, regarding what we can or cannot read, what we can or cannot write. 

Is it a conspiracy? Yes it is.  Harvard’s Index broadly undermines the foundation of University education. It instates academic mediocrity.

In turn, the targeted websites– including Global Research-  are the object of a “wiki-smear” campaign, which has become embedded in online search engines. The latter tend to be increasingly skewed against alternative media content.

The “alternative media” sites are thereby casually tagged as promoting “fake news” and “conspiracy theories”.

Harvard Library lists the “authoritative” “Fact-Checking” sites and Plugins required by both students and professors to detect ‘Fake news”.

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Google blacklists Natural News, removes 140,000 pages from its index

Mike Adams
Natural News/HNN

This is a guest piece by Mike Adams from Natural News (not us, Health Nut News!)

Late last week, I, Mike Adams, received a direct threat that warned if I did not take steps to destroy Alex Jones and InfoWars, I would be targeted for destruction in a campaign of smears, censorship and defamation.

Instead of giving in to the enemy, I refused to take the bait and went public with details of the threat, warning everyone in the new media that sinister forces were now being pursued to undermine and silence every anti-establishment (and pro-Trump) voice on the internet.

True to form, today the entire Natural News website has been blacklisted by Google, entirely without warning. This is just one of many censorship events that have all taken place over the last few days:

• Last weekend, damning videos were leaked in a focused effort to take out Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart News editor and gay conservative who has openly supported President Trump. Milo was hit with an attack wave of "opposition research" and was forced to resign from Breitbart on Monday, citing the "cynical media witch hunt" that brought him down.
• Yesterday, InfoWars was blackballed by AdRoll.com, an online advertising distribution company. According to Alex Jones, the blacklisting by AdRoll will cost InfoWars $3 million in annual revenues, possibly causing InfoWars to abandon plans of opening a Washington D.C. bureau to cover the Trump administration with real news (instead of the fake news from CNN and elsewhere).
• The Shopify e-commerce platform was aggressively threatened by organized Leftists to dump the Breitbart online store and thereby deny revenues to Breitbart. Shopify's CEO refused to kow-tow to the intimidation and censorship and has maintained a "neutral" position on political issues, focusing on running e-commerce platforms for everyone.
• Today, Natural News has been hit by Google, which has blacklisted the entire Natural News domain and removed over 140,000 pages from its index. The take down of Natural News happened this morning, and it follows a pattern of censorship we're seeing being leveled against other pro-Trump websites. Google sent no warning whatsoever to our "webmaster tools" email address on file with them. The shut off of Natural News was clearly driven by a human decision, not an algorithm. We're currently attempting to determine Google's claimed justification for censoring our entire website, and we hope to have NaturalNews.com restored in Google's index.

Some of the news now being censored by Google includes our laboratory testing of the U.S. water supply, where we conducted laboratory testing to discover that 6.7% of municipal water is contaminated with toxic metals. Google has also blacklisted our announcement of free laboratory testing services for Native American water supplies impacted by oil pipeline leaks. Also blacklisted is our exclusive coverage of the GlaxoSmithKline criminal indictment by the U.S. Justice Dept. and our interview with the whistleblower who helped achieved a record $3 billion settlement with the criminal drug company.

Apparently, Google believes the public should no longer have access to these investigative journalism articles... and 139,997 more articles that cover activism, science frauds, drug industry criminality, political corruption and more. You are witnessing a modern-day book burning by the internet Gestapo that now decides what knowledge you're never allowed to access... especially because much of that knowledge can help set humanity free.

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Report: ‘Bias Response Teams’ Creeping onto University Campuses Threaten Free Speech

Heat St 

 

So-called “Bias Response Teams” are creeping onto university campuses across the country. This was the conclusion of the first national survey of Bias Response Teams done by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). 

 

The report identified 232 public and private American colleges and universities that had bias response teams on their campuses in 2016, affecting around 2.8 million students. 

 

BRTs encourage students to formally report on other students and faculty members whenever they perceive that someone’s speech is “biased,” which threatens free speech. 

 

Most universities receive a variety of complaints from students, including students who encounter “offensive” yet legally protected speech, but rather than responding to these incidents fairly if there’s an actual threat, campuses with Bias Response Teams conduct an investigation and if the “respondent” is found “guilty”, invite them for a “hearing”. 

 

Examples of Bias Response Teams exercising their power include a student humor publication at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) that lost its funding after making fun of “safe spaces” on campus. They got their funding pulled after people filed bias incident reports, one openly calling the university to “stop funding”.

 

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How tragic-comic has your life been under .01% US rogue state empire? With intent for humanity’s breakthrough into freedom, here’s mine

Carl Herman
washingtonsblog.com

It could be worse; much, and that evokes my relative gratitude.

On the bright side, perhaps we’ll have the breakthrough into Truth and Love we all work for. I’m confident that none of my colleagues has any grasp on reality excluding this desirable outcome.

But with appropriate dismissal of false hope to predict beyond what we can see, by any objective measure, Earth’s environment for human self-expression of virtue is the inverse of what we’re told by “leaders.” Humans attempt to “live” under these tragic-comic conditions:

• The US isn’t a limited government under the best constitution constructed, but a devolved rogue state empire chief among “developed” and “former colonial” powers annually killing millions, harming billions, and looting trillions. I state this objective factual claim as a professional educator, and among colleagues with zero known evidence of anyone refuting this Emperor’s New Clothes reality.
• The US does not engage in endless wars to achieve peace or freedom. Ongoing lie-started and Orwellian-illegal Wars of Aggression require all US military and government to refuse all war orders because there are no lawful orders for obviously unlawful wars. Officers are required to arrest those who issue obviously unlawful orders. And again, those of us working for this area of justice are aware of zero attempts to refute this with, “War law states (a, b, c), so the wars are legal because (d, e, f).” All we receive is easy-to-reveal bullshit. These are Crimes Against Humanity for ongoing intentional policy of neocolonial war and poverty that’s killed over 400 million human beings just since 1995 (~75% children; more deaths than from all wars in Earth’s recorded history).
• Americans are debt-slaves: The top three benefits each of monetary reform and public banking total ~$1,000,000 for the average American household, and would be received nearly instantly. Please read that twice. Now look to verify for yourself.

I attempt to keep talking points to three, but there are ~100 such crucial conditions damning Earth’s inhabitants to suffering on this beautiful and dominated planet.
I present my life as a case study for human tragic-comedy with three points:

• Professional work.
• Civic activism to build a brighter future.
• Being “educated” under the empire.

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The walls have ears: Warrant granted for Amazon Echo recordings

RT

A murder in Arkansas may change the way people behave around smart devices. A warrant has been issued for an Amazon Echo, revealing that Amazon may retain recordings on a server for law enforcement investigations. 

 

An Amazon Echo was cited in a warrant related to a November murder in Bentonville, Arkansas. While other smart devices were identified, police have pinned some specific hopes on the Echo for a simple reason: it never stops listening.

The Echo is only activated after a user says its wake, or activation, word. But once triggered, it records snippets of things said that are then sent to an Amazon cloud. A speech-recognition network moves things along until a response is sent back to the device, where it obeys a user’s commands.

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Obama Quietly Signs The "Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act" Into Law

Zero Hedge

Late on Friday, with the US population embracing the upcoming holidays and oblivious of most news emerging from the administration, Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which authorizes $611 billion for the military in 2017.

In a statement, Obama said that:

Today, I have signed into law S. 2943, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.” This Act authorizes fiscal year 2017 appropriations principally for the Department of Defense and for Department of Energy national security programs, provides vital benefits for military personnel and their families, and includes authorities to facilitate ongoing operations around the globe. It continues many critical authorizations necessary to ensure that we are able to sustain our momentum in countering the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and to reassure our European allies, as well as many new authorizations that, among other things, provide the Departments of Defense and Energy more flexibility in countering cyber-attacks and our adversaries’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles."

Much of the balance of Obama's statement blamed the GOP for Guantanamo's continued operation and warned that "unless the Congress changes course, it will be judged harshly by history," Obama said. Obama also said Congress failed to use the bill to reduce wasteful overhead (like perhaps massive F-35 cost overruns?) or modernize military health care, which he said would exacerbate budget pressures facing the military in the years ahead.

But while the passage of the NDAA - and the funding of the US military - was hardly a surprise, the biggest news is what was buried deep inside the provisions of the Defense Authortization Act.

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And so, with the likes of WaPo having already primed the general public to equate "Russian Propaganda" with "fake news" (despite admitting after the fact their own report was essentially "fake"), while the US media has indoctrinated the public to assume that any information which is not in compliance with the official government narrative, or dares to criticize the establishment, is also "fake news" and thus falls under the "Russian propaganda" umbrella, the scene is now set for the US government to legally crack down on every media outlet that the government deems to be "foreign propaganda."

Just like that, the US Ministry of Truth is officially born.


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Orwellian startup company will send summary reports of your social media posts to landlords and employers

Peter Van Buren
Common Dreams

Here's a shout out to all of you who said "If I've got nothing to hide I've got nothing to fear" after the Snowden revelations. And this little gem deals only with publicly available information about you. Imagine what it's like when it gets into the good stuff you think is private.

An Orwellian startup called Tenant Assured will to take a deep dive into your social media, including chats, check-ins, how many times you've posted words like pregnant, wasted, busted, no money, broke, moving back in with the parents, weed, or loan, and deliver to potential landlords and employers a "personality score."

While many people already Google folks they might rent to or hire, this new service aggregates a mountain of information and then evaluates it. At the end, someone gets some numbers that describe you (see sample reports, below,) with little idea how those numbers came to be determined.

How many times did you check-in at a bar? Are you a drunk who'll screw up at work? How often does your relationship status change? Same sex relationships? Evidence of drug use? Political affiliation?

The report will also assess your "financial stress level" as a breakdown of five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

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