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I’ve Been Censored, Again…Thank you DARPA and Google

/ John / Leave a comment

Update: after being posted for only a few hours, I seem to have attracted the attention of China with this. I’m sure there is no connection between the two, right.

I noticed my numbers went down when I post Covid anti-vaxx stuff. I don’t care as this is an outlet for me to express what I think is the truth. I’m not sponsored by ad’s (sorry if you get them, it’s not me). I fit the algorithm for my continual posts that have joined with many others to expose the hoax. It goes down every time I put something up against big brother.

Collectively, we the conspiracy theorist are damn near perfect for getting the actual Covid facts and timeline right.

I’ve ditched Google, PayPal, Fake book, Twitter and other means of silencing me, but I found this out, posted below.

The pattern is that we are getting close to exposing DARPA’s involvement with the Wuhan virus and vaccine. It appears that there is enough sketchy timing as to which was developed first. DARPA is a part of deep state.

This post should get my hands slapped some more, but here goes.

The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.

DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago. 

The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms. 

DARPA set four specific goals for the program:

  1. “Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
  2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
  3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
  4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.”

Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.

“One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad,” reads the report. 

“DARPA’s been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011-2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home,” Benz told Just The News. “They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014-2015.” 

The new version of this technology, he added, is openly targeting two groups: Those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results. 

“The terrifying thing is, as all of this played out, it was redirected inward during 2016 — domestic populism was treated as a foreign national security threat,” Benz said.

“What you’ve seen is a grafting on of these concepts of mis- and disinformation that were escalated to such high intensity levels in the news over the past several years being converted into a tangible, formal government program to fund and accelerate the science of censorship,” he said.

“You had this project at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator,” Benz recounted, “which was created by the Trump administration to tackle grand challenges like quantum technology. When the Biden administration came to power, they basically took this infrastructure for multidisciplinary science work to converge on a common science problem and took the problem of what people say on social media as being on the level of, say, quantum technology.

“And so they created a new track called the track F program … and it’s for ‘trust and authenticity,’ but what that means is, and what it’s a code word for is, if trust in the government or trust in the media cannot be earned, it must be installed. And so they are funding artificial intelligence, censorship capacities, to censor people who distrust government or media.”

Benz went on to describe intricate flows of taxpayer cash funding the far-flung, public-private censorship regime. The funds flow from the federal government to universities and NGOs via grant awards to develop censorship technology. The universities or nonprofits then share those tools with news media fact-checkers, who in turn assist private sector tech platforms and tool developers that continue to refine the tools’ capabilities to censor online content. 

“This is really an embodiment of the whole of society censorship framework that departments like DHS talked about as being their utopian vision for censorship only a few years ago,” Benz said. “We see it now truly in fruition.” 

Members of the media, along with fact-checkers, also serve as arbiters of what is acceptable to post and what isn’t, by selectively flagging content for said social media sites and issuing complaints against specific narratives. 

There is a push, said Benz during an appearance on “Just The News No Noise” this week, to fold the media into branches of the federal government in an effort to dissolve the Fourth Estate, in favor of an Orwellian and incestuous partnership to destroy the independence of the press. 

The advent of COVID led to “normalizing censorship in the name of public health,” Benz recounted, “and then in the run to the 2020 election, all manner of political censorship was shoehorned in as being okay to be targetable using AI because of issues around mail-in ballots and early voting drop boxes and issues around January 6th.

“What’s happened now is the government says, ‘Okay, we’ve established this normative foothold in it being okay to [censor political speech], now we’re going to supercharge you guys with all sorts of DARPA military grade censorship, weaponry, so that you can now take what you’ve achieved in the censorship space and scale it to the level of a U.S. counterinsurgency operation.'”

One academic institution involved in this tangled web is the University of Wisconsin, which​​​​​ received a $5 million grant in 2022 “for researchers to further develop” its Course Correct program, “a precision tool providing journalists with guidance against misinformation,” according to a press release from the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.” 

WiseDex, a private company receiving grants from the Convergence Accelerator Track F, openly acknowledges its mission — building AI tools to enable content moderators at social media sites to more easily regulate speech. 

In a promotional video for the company, WiseDex explains how the federal government is subsidizing these efforts to provide Big Tech platforms with “fast, comprehensive and consistent” censorship solutions.

“WiseDex helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are actionable,” says a narrator, “for example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine supresses a person’s immune response. Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim in multiple languages … The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review. WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds as well as AI techniques to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile.” 

WiseDex, in effect, compiles massive databases of banned keywords and empirical claims they then sell to platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Such banned-claims databases are then integrated “into censorship algorithms, so that ‘harmful misinformation stops reaching big audiences,'” according to Benz’s report.

Just the News reached out to the University of Wisconsin and WiseDex for comment, but neither had responded by press time.

The NSF is acting, in one sense, as a kind of cutout for the military, Benz explained, allowing the defense establishment to indirectly stifle domestic critics of Pentagon spending without leaving fingerprints. “Why are they targeting right-wing populists?” he asked. “Because they’re the only ones challenging budgets for [defense agencies].”

He added: “These agencies know they’re not supposed to be doing this. They’re not normally this sloppy. But they won’t ever say the words ‘remove content.'” 

The NSF, with an annual budget of around $10 billion, requested an 18.7% increase in appropriations from Congress in its latest budgetary request. 

In a statement to Just the News, DARPA said: 

“That program ended in March 2017 and was successful in developing a new science of social media analysis to reduce adversaries’ ability to manipulate local populations outside the U.S.

 “DARPA’s role is to establish and advance science, technology, research, and development. In doing so we employ multiple measures to safeguard against the collection of personally identifiable information, in addition to following stringent guidelines for research dealing with human subjects. Given the significance of the threat posed by adversarial activities on social media platforms, we are working to make many of the technologies in development open and available to researchers in this space.” 

DARPA then followed up with an additional message saying: “As a point of clarification, our response relates only to your questions about the now-complete SMISC program. We are not aware of the NSF research you referenced. If you haven’t already, please contact NSF for any questions related to its research.” 

Mike Pozmantier and Douglas Maughan, who serve at NSF as Convergence Accelerator program director and office head, respectively, did not respond to requests for comment.

Conspiracy Stuff Meme Dump

/ John / Leave a comment

What I can’t believe are the sheep that believe this, but I guess that’s what they get for believing the media, the government and social media. None of them are your friends or care about you. They care about them and you are the pawn.

The truth is out there, don’t be stupid. Wake up.

Also, steal at will, I did.

Oh and for stupid, Harvard is in there.

How Musk Used F/U Money To Tame Twitter

/ John / 1 Comment

When your 5th car is a Ferrari that you only drive when you are at your “other” vacation home, it’s called F**k Y** money. Look at all the bankrupt 1st round draft picks in the NFL who were paid millions. Their past is littered with F/U mistakes.

Elon Musk has taken it to a new level though. $44 Billion is the king of F/U buys so far. He’s smart enough that it might work.

I know he is trying to stop child porn, spam bots and is fighting for free speech the best since 1776, but how many people can afford to take this gamble?

He’s unloaded (not enough of) the woke employees, made fun of their business model, challenged Apple (remember Parler), exposed the child porn trafficking and was able to suffer the loss of advertising revenue from the woke. Those being corporations being those who kowtowed to the race hustlers and woketards who ruin everything they touch.

He’s showed the one sided censorship platform for evil and hate that Twitter became. See the link below where it took orders from the DNC.

I don’t know what it will become, but Musk does have a track record for success. Even if it’s not as big as Space-X or Tesla, he rescued social media (except for fake book) from being a cesspool of bias and hate against good or God.

Twitter was a one-sided censorship platform that had to be killed so that it could survive.

Either way, I enjoy all the time I got back from getting off of useless social media.

DNC Giving Orders To Pre-Elon Twitter – Twitter Saying, “Yassuh, Boss!”

TWITTERGATE: Elon releases Twitter’s private comms revealing the dark truth behind censorship of Hunter laptop story…

The Corporations Supporting Child Porn

/ John / 1 Comment

Yet these companies stopped advertising on Twitter which is purging child porn and enabling free speech.

Abbott Laboratories Allstate Corporation AMC Networks American Express Company AT&T Big Heart Petcare BlackRock, Inc. BlueTriton Brands, Inc. Boston Beer Company CA Lottery (California State Lottery) CenturyLink (Lumen Technologies, Inc.) Chanel Chevrolet* Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc.* Citigroup, Inc. CNN Dell Diageo DirecTV Discover Financial Services Fidelity First National Realty Partners Ford* Heineken N.V. Hewlett-Packard (HP) Hilton Worldwide Inspire Brands, Inc. Jeep* Kellogg Company Kohl’s Department Stores, Inc. Kyndryl* LinkedIn Corporation MailChimp (The Rocket Science Group) Marriott International, Inc. Mars Petcare Mars, Incorporated Merck & Co. (Merck Sharp & Dohme MSD)* Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.) MoneyWise (Wise Publishing, Inc.) Nestle Novartis AG* Pernod Ricard PlayPass The Coca-Cola Company The Kraft Heinz Company Tire Rack Verizon Wells Fargo Whole Foods Market IP Yum! Brands

My Favorite Twitter Meme, So Far

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(got it from Woosterman)

Everyone is laying off in Tech land. That means they kept the good employees. The Twidiots who quit over ideological differences with Musk are in for a nice Sunday surprise.

I’m glad to have left this cesspool of Social Media behind. I hope Musk can make free speech a possibility again, but I doubt it. If he can just kill the hate and one sided discussion it will be enough to call it a success.

It won’t be enough for me to go back on. It’s a waste of time.

Here’s how I look at it. No one really cares about my opinion. I extend them the same courtesy.

Not my favorite, but still funny.

Musk Takes Over Twitter, Mean Tweets To Resume

/ John / 1 Comment

No more censorship of one side of the political argument. The press can still hide and distort the broadcast news, but we are back to the 2016 rules of election. That is the one where everybody gets to have their say.

Maybe there is a chance for the truth to come out. It’s Twitter and is going to take a long time to wash the blue stain off of their reputation.

Drain the swamp, #NBADJT #FJB #LGB

And Now You Get Why Twitter Is So Messed Up Internally

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The real cowards won’t play when it’s not their rules. It must be that tough to have words bother you so much that you can’t work for a company.

I find this wildly entertaining that Musk bought a majority stake in hater Twitter. I can’t wait to see what will happen and hope for a wonderful train wreck to entertain me on this one. I am finding Must to be right far more than wrong and am learning to trust non traditional thinkers such as him.

I really don’t think much will happen, but the consternation it will stir up may split the audience for other platforms. That would take away the historical preference for Twitter Twatter.

Like in the movie War Games, sometimes the best move is to not play. I have had a blissful twitter free life now since before Trump. I recommend it or another instant platform of your choice.

I have accounts with all the competitors, but the drain of being on another social media platform is being overpowered by my introverted nature to avoid people.

The Real Reason People Use Twitter

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It’s a hateful place of bias and prejudice. My life is better without it. I’m sure they will be picking on liberals because they censored or kicked out any people that weren’t in the ideology by now.

On Government Silencing The Opposition

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Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. - Harry S. Truman

Exercise your first amendment.

This is what the MSM/current government/SJW/Woke/PC/climate change people/Fake book/Twitter/Youtube/Google and the left are doing. If you aren’t worried about your truth being challenged, you don’t have to silence anyone. If the facts don’t support your spew, see Harry’s quote.

It seems that you can’t say anything without offending someone. If you read my blog, it’s there waiting for you somewhere. It’s not going to stop me. Look down a post or two about John not giving a fuck.

On a hat tip from Moonbattery.

Fauci Spending Hundreds Of Thousands To Study Transgender Monkeys – China Reports Next Virus As Hemorrhagic Fever , Passed To Humans From Monkeys And Bats

/ John / 1 Comment

First, Fauci tortured Beagles during Covid when he was lying about gain of function. Now, he’s “studying” trans Monkeys (is there such a thing?) to the tune of $200,000 taxpayer dollars.

Put 2 + 2 together with this. A new “Ebola-Like Hemorrhagic Fever Virus” has been reported in China.

From Dr. Malone, mRNA inventor. “He died on Aug. 2, with tests finally showing that he died from Marburg, a “highly infectious disease that causes hemorrhagic fever” — and has a fatality rate of up to 88 percent, the WHO said.”

Marburg “is in the same family as the virus that causes Ebola,” which killed at least 11,325 people in the 2014-2016 epidemic that started in the same part of Guinea. The country was only recently declared Ebola-free after a brief flare-up earlier this year killed 12.

Marburg is believed to have originated in bats and is passed from animal hosts to humans.

“The potential for the Marburg virus to spread far and wide means we need to stop it in its tracks,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s regional director for Africa. 

The agency dispatched 10 experts to help local officials, who said at least 146 people had been identified as having been in contact with the man before he died.

“We are working with the health authorities to implement a swift response that builds on Guinea’s past experience and expertise in managing Ebola, which is transmitted in a similar way,” Moeti said.

Marburg outbreaks start when an infected animal, such as a monkey or a fruit bat, passes the virus to a human. The virus then spreads from human to human by contact with an infected person’s body fluids.

Sure, it’s a stretch to think that he’s done the same thing with the Monkeys that he did with the dogs, but for sure he worked with the Bats in Wuhan and helped create Covid.

How is this schmuck not in jail for murder, just for Covid alone.

I’ve figured out the key to stop Covid (along with help from Dr.’s Malone, Zalenko, McCullough and Yeadon. It’s not the vax, but a combination of vitamin’s, HCQ, Ivermectin and not believing what government, the Gates foundation, Fauci and Pfizer.

Now, we have to unlock the key to the next round from the CCP that is being unleashed on us, even if it isn’t Marburg.

I’ve learned to search the patterns, distrust the Government, the WHO, NIH, Gates Foundation, the MSM and to figure out for myself what needs to be done. I’ve learned that you should listen to who is banned from Twitter or fake book because they are exposing the people behind the bio-terrorism that is going on.

I just hope that whatever the Chi-Coms and Fauci unleash on us next is avoidable until we pick the lock like a bunch of Houdini’s while the above listed are trying to do the great reset and kill off a bunch of us.

Oh, I’ll get to the WEF and Davos as they are behind the great re-set, but that is another blog.

A Vicious Crime Against Humanity

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By Louis Gohmert linked here

Just as we saw with hydroxychloroquine last summer, government alphabet agencies, the medical industrial complex, and their willing accomplices in the media have recently made it clear that there is yet another safe, effective treatment for COVID-19 they wish to torpedo. It’s the latest naughty word which will get you censored on social media and mocked and belittled by late-night “comedians”: ivermectin.

While ivermectin has been used by certain brave doctors around the world to treat COVID-19 for over a year now, it only recently became the target of a multi-pronged attack, with the U.S. government, the media, and Big Pharma all playing important roles in the deadly dystopian disinformation campaign against the drug. As more Americans became aware of ivermectin’s efficacy against COVID-19, like clockwork the government and its propaganda arm in the press jumped in to discredit it, referring to the drug snidely as a “horse dewormer.” 

We watched the FDA embarrass itself with its ridiculing tweet telling people “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” while linking to an agency article on why people should not use ivermectin to treat or prevent the China Virus. We saw Rolling Stone magazine forced to admit that its recent story about Oklahoma hospitals being overwhelmed by patients who overdosed on ivermectin was completely false. 

Omar Marques/SOPA Images via Getty Images

Pharmaceutical company Merck, which produces ivermectin, discredited its use for COVID by irresponsibly stating, “We do not believe that the data available support the safety and efficacy of ivermectin beyond the doses and populations indicated in the regulatory agency-approved prescribing information.” It is worth noting that Merck and Pfizer are developing their own oral antivirals that would directly compete with the cheap and effective ivermectin. These antivirals, unlike ivermectin, would be patented, creating the potential for pharmaceutical companies to rake in billions of dollars from their use.

What the globalist elites and the medical establishment won’t tell you is that those who discovered ivermectin and its use to treat parasitic diseases won a Nobel Prize in 2015—it was the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine’s only award for treatments of infectious diseases in six decades. 

Almost 4 billion doses of ivermectin have been prescribed for humans, not horses, over the past 40 years. In fact, the CDC recommends all refugees coming to the U.S. from the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean receive this so-called dangerous horse medicine as a preemptive therapy. Ivermectin is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be an “essential medicine.” The Department of Homeland Security’s “quick reference” tool on COVID-19 mentioned how this life-saving drug reduced viral shedding duration in a clinical trial. 

To date, there are at least 63 trials and 31 randomized controlled trials showing benefits to the use of ivermectin to fight COVID-19 prophylactically as well as for early and late-stage treatment. Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of many viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. It has strong anti-inflammatory properties and prevents transmission of COVID-19 when taken either before or after exposure to the virus. 

Ivermectin also speeds up recovery and decreases hospitalization and mortality in COVID-19 patients. It has been FDA approved for decades and has very few and mild side effects. It has an average of 160 adverse events reported every year, which indicates ivermectin has a better safety record than several vitamins. In short, there is no humane, logical reason why it should not be widely used to fight against the China Virus should a patient and doctor decide it is appropriate to try in that patient’s case. 

Critics argue that ivermectin hasn’t been approved for use in the fight against COVID-19 and therefore should not be prescribed to patients. Doctors, however, often prescribe drugs to help patients that aren’t necessarily approved for their particular ailments—it’s called “off-label” prescription and according to the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, 10-20 percent of all prescriptions are prescribed in this fashion.

Make no mistake, the evil, deadly, coordinated globalist attacks we are currently witnessing on ivermectin will go down in history as a vicious crime against humanity; a grievous public health policy error that can only be explained by following the money. Many top doctors agree that hundreds of thousands of American lives could have been saved had early treatment protocols such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine not been so maliciously vilified by authority figures, some pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers who just so happen to have financial incentives to suppress the truth about these cheap, effective drugs. 

Dumbing Down Harvard, Again – And How They Went Woke

/ John / 1 Comment

I wrote about the decline of the education you get there a while back and thought it would improve. I guessed wrong.

You can read about it in the link above, but the old boys club is wearing off. Their most recently famous alums actually were drop outs. They also did the best in life.

Now to the rest of the story.

Of course, there is the Covid madness. The supposedly smartest students have had to go to class online again because of……you guessed it:

“In recent days, we’ve seen a steady rise in breakthrough infections among our student population, despite high vaccination rates and frequent testing”

These idiots have bought into the false narrative, despite the growing evidence (Israel, UK and the opposite in Sweden) that the inoculation (if it were a vaccine it would have worked) is the panacea.

Harvard University states on its website that 95% of students and 96% of employees are vaccinated, and notes that “COVID-19 testing requirements remain in place for every member of the community who is authorized to be on campus this fall, including those who come to campus infrequently. The Dashboard data is relative to individuals, living both on and off campus, authorized to participate in Harvard’s COVID-19 screening.”

From the same article linked above:

Data from Israel reportedly showed earlier this month that “’fully vaccinated’” people are 27 times more likely to be infected and develop COVID-19 symptoms than unvaccinated people with natural immunity,” and “‘fully vaccinated’ people are 8 times more likely to be hospitalized from a ‘breakthrough’ infection.”

WHY THIS MATTERS

Building relationships to take into the business world is the big benefit of going to one of these antiquated halls of ignorance. Harvard creates the biggest “Old Boys Club (including girls)” because of their interaction in group projects and going out together.

This just nixed the big benefit other than bragging that you paid too much to say that you went there.

We already knew in the real business world that outside of NY and Massachusetts, anyone coming in with a degree from Harvard meant that they were going to be a drag on productivity. Some finally came around to what real life teaches you, but we still had to put up with their nonsense until they either left or realized how the world actually works.

CANCEL CULTURE

The students have shown an inability to understand sarcasm from one of their own, a Law Professor with some actually creditable certifications:

Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School Professor And Intellectual Iconoclast:

This story of cancel culture would be laughable were it not for the fact that it is so serious. It involves an attempt by four Harvard Law School student groups to interfere in the employment of, and damage the career of, Professor Adrian Vermeule.

This reflects an ongoing attempt by l******g students to purge academia of viewpoints that do not perfectly align with the social justice and Black Lives Matter orthodoxy. Much like during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, students lead the way in belittling and trying to damage dissident professors, with public shaming and institutional ritualized denunciations preferred methods of intimidation.

Here was his crime, tweeting this:

For example, as unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud spread following the election, Prof. Vermeule tweeted “ Lol the election isn’t over until Team Joe fixes up your ballot for you ” and “Kids, not sure if you knew this, but missing ballots have magical properties that make them visible only between midnight and 6am .” His post-election retweets included statements such as “ Even a Saddam Hussein had to make some pretence of not getting 100% of the vote in an Iraqi election … ‘Baghdad on the Delaware .’” And these examples only scratch the surface. Prof. Vermeule may try to play off his statements as a joke, but they amount to a pattern of promoting demonstrably false conspiracy theories. His statements are harmful to democracy and unbelievably divisive. To work at Harvard Law School is to be granted a platform and a level of legitimacy. Prof. Vermeule is abusing this platform in order to undermine democracy and delegitimize the results of the election.

Are you kidding me? This stuff is funny, and even if it’s not funny to some Harvard Law students.

The whole story is here, courtesy of Legal Insurrection, but in quick summary it shows how quick they are to jump to conclusions against their indoctrination and one sided beliefs.

WHY THIS MATTERS

An intelligent mind can entertain both sides of an argument without taking sides to fully understand the context. Whether or not they choose to side with one or the other would result from critical thinking and the ability to judge based on facts and history.

This current group of woke automatons rushes to judgement before the facts are known and worse, believe they are right because of where they are studying rather than being smart.

ENTRANCE EXAM DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MINORITIES

This takes two different paths. They reduce the entrance standards for some minorities who then can’t keep up. They are then stuck with a huge amount of debt and no benefit. They are having to take remedial courses and drop out of STEM studies.

Conversely, Harvard discriminates against those with the ability to qualify, but don’t have the proper heritage.

Here is what I’m referring to:

Adam Mortara, another attorney representing Students for Fair Admissions, accused Harvard of giving Asian-Americans significantly lower ratings for certain personal qualities, such as leadership and compassion, than other races, according to the Washington Post.

“Harvard has engaged in, and continues to engage in, intentional discrimination against Asian-Americans,” Mortara said.

A Harvard University dean testified that the school has different SAT score standards for prospective students based on factors such as race and sex — but insisted that the practice isn’t discriminatory, as a trial alleging racism against Asian-American applicants began this week.

The Ivy League school was sued in 2014 by the group Students for Fair Admissions, which claims that Asian-American students, despite top-notch academic records, had the lowest admission rate among any race.

He said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.

Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.

This discrimination has now reached the Supreme Court.

Exerpt:

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, now at the Supreme Court, has the potential to reshape the course of affirmative action in the United States — for the better.

The case positions a group of highly qualified Asian-American college applicants against the university to which they seek admission, Harvard. These applicants allege that Harvard has practiced longstanding admissions discrimination against them in favor of less-qualified minorities.

GOING WOKE

Being woke is a crime of idiocy. You shouldn’t expect that of an institution heralded (not anymore) for their intelligence and education. Harvard has managed to pull it off spectacularly.

Now, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, ‘political correctness’ on campus is taken for granted. But what I experienced then was less the direct coercive tyranny of leftism than a pervasive culture of capitulation and pusillanimity, with everyone from administrators to deans and professors to students and even the campus police looking over his or her shoulder in fear of censure by others. The fear was only justified on the part of those being silenced: at one Harvard event, Ayaan Hirsi Ali required stricter security arrangements than did many heads of state.

The affirmative action that Harvard implemented required lying. Departments looking for the ‘best’ person to fill a position were obliged to demonstrate, not that they had conducted a fair and open search, but rather that they had interviewed an appropriate percentage of women and other ‘minorities’. Since individual merit and group diversity are contradictory goals, the entire process was corrupt irrespective of outcome. At one departmental meeting, when the chair asked us to supply arguments for a member’s candidacy for promotion, someone at the table hooted, ‘Why bother with all this? He’s Hispanic!’ I was the only one who laughed at this eruption of suppressed truth.

There is more at the link above, but political correctness claims another victim.

IN CONCLUSION BUT PROBABLY NOT

Those of us who have been in the real world know that real world experience trumps a diploma. Sure, it will get you in the door, but those with the ability to adapt, lead and have the above stated ability of critical thinking are the ones you want to keep.

If they keep up this idiocy, those outside of the Northeast (OK, California, Portland and Washington – both of them are just as woke and dumb) won’t want them if they intend on surviving.

Save your money unless you have a Wall Street connection ready. Everyone thinking alike and acting with the same wokeness is of little benefit to the concept of an ongoing concern of a business, a FASB standard.

How Social Media Works Against You

/ John / Leave a comment

I’ve written extensively about this, especially in Internet Road Rage. Go read it to see who these cowards are.

No matter what you do, someone has a beef (vegans will get me here, just another example) with whatever you say.

It used to be don’t talk politics, religion or something else at Thanksgiving or you’ll piss off someone in your family. Now, just like someone and you are one of Hillary’s deplorables (She gave the the best example, why I’m using politics here hoping to draw some ire from a commenter to prove my point. I could care less about her or her opinions other than it works).

Now, you can’t say anything on social media without someone being offended. I think it’s funny if they fall for it though because it just shows how shallow people are. Just go to Quora, hater (twitter) or Fakebook to find a large group of the clueless. That they are trying to censor people who don’t agree with them just shows bias and ignorance.

So, you can either be smart and blow off the idiots looking to be offended or trying to prove their point to the world, or just fall in line with the masses and get into it.

Bacon and Bombings, Testing the Censors

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I love bacon. It’s what I thought of when I saw this. Then of course, I recognized an opportunity to test out the censorship of WordPress.

I think a lot of the tech companies are loony about free speech and who is allowed to have it. That’s why I put stuff up that I know others will get mad about. It’s not about you honey, this is poking the dragon ever so slightly at first.

I self-censored Fake Book and Twitter so I can’t go after them, but then I’d have to be in that cesspool to get kicked out. I left that social media shithole behind to better my life. It worked.

Introverted Social Media

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It doesn’t take many posts for you to see that I think Fake book and Twatter are the cesspools of the Internet. More hate is spilled there than Iran towards Israel and the USA.

I happily quit both. My life is better and while I didn’t waste a lot of time on them, it still was mostly useless.

I always hated those friend recommendations because I’m sure they were on the other side also. My rule was if you aren’t my friend then you aren’t worth being my fake book friend either. I happily forgot most of the people I grew up with and didn’t want to find them again, let alone reconnect.

It’s as bad as a phone call for an introvert without first warning that you are about to intrude on my life. There was an introvert on the team that invented texting to avoid that phone call.

When I saw this one, I realized that it was time to dump fake book. I also can’t stand that they are the arbiters of free speech and who is allowed on, so I made the decision for them. I don’t want to be in a place of hate or that has special rules for people who they don’t agree with personally, and went to other platforms that don’t suggest people I’d rather not see or hear from again in life.

My View On What Social Media Has Become

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Don’t get me wrong, there are some good things, but sooner or later it goes down the crapper when someone “offends” another. It is where you can find more bias and discrimination (against anyone and everyone) since segregation.

Twitter is probably the biggest cesspool. Since Facebook Fake Book started censoring, you can’t trust what is real or not. I also don’t care about my high school or college enough to see what they are doing. If either of us cared, we’d have stayed in contact.

The hate generated against the last President just told me the people in charge of these platforms are untrustworthy. They say one thing and do another.

Do what you want. Most are addicted to social media. The truly smart people don’t waste time trying to impress others as to how good their life is or worry about what others have.

My life is better without social media terrorists. I still get what I need to know without it being filtered by a loser in a cubicle with an axe to grind over who voted for whom. The elitist oligarch’s have told them what is allowed, then they prattle on condemning exactly what they are doing.

As usual, I’ll just do my own thing and let others suffer who wish to read that tripe.

Twitter, The Cesspool Of Hate Announces Birdwatching Stasi To Spy On Others

/ John / 1 Comment

Eliminating as much social media from my life as possible has made it much better. Sooner or later, even your bestie is going to post something that pisses you off and down the toilet we go.

Now, you can spy on your neighbor like the Stasi and report your neighbor. As for me, I’m getting rid of as much hate as I can, and that started with Twitter. Their latest to shut down free speech isn’t helping anyone.

The Tweeter is recruiting volunteer truth interrupters’ to crack down on misinformation they say is running rampant across their site. The site announced the launch of “Birdwatchers” on Monday to empowering certain users to flag misleading tweets. So-called Birdwatchers will discuss what’s misleading about a flagged tweet and then be able to rank those comments, with the goal of allowing seemingly unpaid users to take a hands-on approach to combating your lies and falsities.


The Official Tweeter Support Account posted the announcement with a video of an failed attempt at humor of an egregious example of a necessary flagging of falsehood: “Whales are not real. They’re robots funded by the government to watch us.”  Now, you don’t have to read between the lines to understand the mentality that came up with this idea.


At first, Birdwatch will only be open to a few users who apply to join the program, traditional fact-checkers and other high-profile people.  Birdwatch replies to tweets will meanwhile only be visible on a separate section of the site. But eventually Twitter hopes to include the replies on the regular site, building a Wikipedia-style system of relying on users to combat misinformed and blatantly false tweets.


IP’s, User Names and Locations would surely not be cataloged. *wink wink*


Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News, said the program has “promise,” but cautioned that Twitter doesn’t seem to have a plan to prevent retaliation against Birdwatchers. Twitter said it’ll adapt the program based on user feedback before debuting it on the whole site.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=true&id=1353769252784926720&lang=en&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.diogenesmiddlefinger.com%2F2021%2F01%2Fyou-too-can-sign-up-for-dorseys-truth.html&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550px

My big concern — which I expressed many times to Twitter — is for the safety of these contributors. What happens when a high-ranking Birdwatcher whose note does well on a Ted Cruz tweet is featured on Tucker Carlson? They say user safety is top of mind but … you know.— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) January 25, 2021

Hat tip to the middle finger.

MLK On Darkness, Hate and Love

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Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Yes, I’d rather post the I have a dream, but politicians won’t let us make it come true.

Instead, this is a lesser known quote, but there has been a lot of hate and darkness (Twitter, Facebook, the elections, need I go on?). I for one am tired of it.

For today, I’m letting the Reverend point out what the problem is. He also gave us the answer, if anyone will listen. I hope I”m not alone.

I’m Shocked, Social Media Causes Depression

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Social Media, the place where you can make yourself look better to feel good about yourself when someone likes the tripe you post. Aside from being little more than a digital high school, a cesspool of hate (Twitter) and one of the biggest time wasters invented, it appears to causes depression.

In recent years, a number of studies have linked heavy social media use to an increased risk of depression.

“But then you have to ask the chicken-and-egg question,” said study author Dr. Brian Primack, a professor of public health at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville.

On one hand, he said, excessive time on Twitter or Facebook might fuel depression symptoms. On the other, people with depression might withdraw from face-to-face interactions and spend more time online.

So Primack and his colleagues decided to see whether social media use made a difference in young adults’ risk of future depression.

It did, according to their report, which was published online Dec. 10 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The study included nearly 1,000 adults aged 18 to 30 who were depression-free at the outset, based on a standard questionnaire. All reported on their usual social media time and were assessed for depression again six months later.

By that time, nearly 10% fit the criteria for depression.

Overall, depression risk rose in tandem with time spent on social media.

Full report here

Great Sayings – Self Survival By Governments, Innovation and Those In Charge, but are not True Leaders

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Hat tip to Moonbattery

For politics, we need balance.  History shows that too much dominance by any side makes for lack of clear vision as leaders.  Their goal becomes being re-elected instead of serving the office they were elected to.  There are plenty of examples.

In Companies, being the solution to a problem is one business model, until the problem goes away then so do profits.

The better model is innovation.  Not that I find it that innovative, but look no further than the iPhone as an example.  Conversely, we are still stuck with Windows however and I find no real innovation there.  I left that platform as quickly as I could

Then of course there is Facebook, Twitter, Google and host of other platforms that haven’t really offered a solution other than sucking the time out of your day and providing a place to move along anarchy.

Look at the motives of the person trying to offer a solution.  Are they selling you a bill of goods, re-election or innovation?

Journalist Jokes, Because well….They Are Journalists

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I worked with the press for decades.  The ones I worked with were nice people, but they had to write something that people will read, until now.  Journalists are supposed to (try to) and learn about the subject they are covering. Now they write ridiculous stories and then write the opposite.  They don’t even bother to fact check anymore.  No one reads corrections so they don’t care, and it shows.  I can’t even say this current lot are nice.  If you see below, they aren’t well liked either.

Lately, they have been circling the wagons to cover one side of the political scene or the other together.  They are exposing themselves to the public as to how little they know or how little they want to hide their bias.  A bunch of them just want to jam on the president out of spite, but they are either self-owning or he is swatting them like flies, especially Jim Acosta.

Twitter/Twitchy caught on and now instead of lawyer jokes, it is journalist jokes.  For the most part, this lot deserves what they are getting.  They are now as useless to regular people as celebtards and sports stars trying to give their opinion on something other than their sport.

The hashtag is #JournalistJokes, go see for yourselves.  Here is a list of some as a starter.  Others are more creative than me.

“Three journalists walk into a building. You’d think one of them would’ve seen it.”
“What’s 5 miles long and has an IQ of 30?” “A JOURNALIST PARADE!”
“Three journalists walk into bar and say ‘ouch’ – then write stories about how the bar is racist and phobic.”
“How does a journalist change a light bulb? He holds while the whole world revolves around him.”
And Twitchy’s pick for the winner: “What are the best four years of a journalist’s life? Third grade.”
“Why are there only 2 pallbearers at a ‘journalist’s funeral?” “Garbage cans only have two handles.”
“How do you make a journalist’s eyes light up?” “Shine a flashlight in his ear.”
“What do you call 25 skydiving journalists?” “Skeet.”
“How do you get a one-armed journalist out of a tree?” “Wave to them.”
“What’s the difference between a smart journalist and Bigfoot?” “Bigfoot has been spotted.”
“Why can’t a ‘journalist’ dial 911?” “She can’t find the eleven.”
“What do you do if a journalist throws a grenade at you?” “Pick it up, pull the pin out, and throw it back.”
“What’s the different between God and a journalist?” “God doesn’t think he’s a journalist.”

 

Hat tip WND

Social Media, Making Your Life Worse Just By Using It, And it Proves Sturgeon’s Law

/ John / 1 Comment

I tend to notice trends early.  I quit Twitter 4 years ago as soon as work didn’t (unofficially) require it.  Almost every time I used it, the conversation degraded by the 3rd or 4th tweet into something political, followed by unsubstantiated name calling.  You have to have a thick skin and a terse personality to want to survive out there.

A few years later I tried helping a friend get on Facebook and we both decided that it was like a high school reunion, or being in high school where you make up stuff to seem like your life is better than others.  He finally told me to stop and to not put him on.  At that point it dawned on me that most of social media falls under Sturgeon’s Law:

Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

 

There might be a corollary that 99% of social media is crap.

The trend I noticed besides people acting false was that I never felt better after being on twitter and I loathe Facebook for the same reason.  This was 5-8 years ago and now the studies are coming out proving what I noticed.

A recent article in the USA today talked about another high schoolish trend, mob mentality.

Social media also has polluted our more general life, with the ability to form online mobs increasing, as Prof. Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit recently wrote in USA Today:

People enjoy forming mobs. Mobs allow people to do things they’d be afraid to do on their own, to steal, to hurt and kill, to burn and destroy — and also to feel set free from the bonds of civil society, to experience a kind of atavistic catharsis, a feeling of power and a solidarity with their fellow rioters, in a way that’s otherwise difficult to achieve, especially without suffering serious consequences….

But now there’s a new kind of mob, an online mob. And judging by the events of the past week, this new mob is becoming a more frequent problem. Part of that is because it’s easier (and safer) to be part of an online mob than one in the real world.

Joining a real mob requires you to leave your house, go somewhere else, and experience risks and discomforts. Joining an online mob can be done from an easy chair at home.

There are times that I post something and bizarre comments come it, so much so that I have to moderate them according to the policy on the sidebar.  Some just violate the policy too much.  It’s like twitter, if it can get political it usually does.  Since I’ve posted a lot about the military and patriotism, I caught a lot of crap.

I read a blog post by Legal Insurrection that noted the increase in suicides and the link that may exist between the two.

A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel

Social Media and Teen Depression: The Two Go Hand-In-Hand

Rise in teen suicide connected to social media popularity: study

Suicide rate’s increase can be tied to social media, technology: Dr. Marc Siegel

Using Many Social Media Platforms Linked With Depression, Anxiety Risk

Why don’t people just put it down?  It looks to be like the new next cigarette, just as addictive and equally as bad for you.

As for me, I can go about my day enjoying not getting into useless tweet storms and having my head glued to my phone.  Hell, I won’t even put Facebook on because I don’t want them in my life.

I’d like to say the higher IQ people would be immune to this, but it’s not true.  They are just as susceptible to this and it goes under things they shouldn’t do.

WHAT FACEBOOK KNOWS AND IT ISN’T TELLING YOU

It preys on Women’s emotions and other mind altering and interfering techniques and the company KNOWS THAT IT IS DOING IT.

Even former Facebook President Sean Parker realizes the pitfalls of Facebook:

The former Facebook President discussed the company’s initial aim, which was mainly centered around drawing in and building their audience:

The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.

Parker described Facebook’s appeal as a “social-validation feedback loop” which exploits human psychology to keep users coming back to the app:

It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.

Comments such as this from Facebook former President, combined with Facebook’s mishandling of user data, has led to a greater level of distrust around the company. What was previously seen as just a website by many users was becoming better known as a data collection company.

It turns out that platforms like Facebook are the “Junk Food For the Soul”.  In other words crap that isn’t good for you.

When the name of the article is Facebook was designed to exploit human vulnerability, there is a big problem.

THE CESSPOOL OF HATE AND DISCRIMINATION BY TWITTER

Just say something, anything and pretty soon it can turn into a hate storm if you offend someone or anyone.  I saw someone post here’s a picture of a rock, let the arguing begin just to prove it and it did.

Now, it looks like Twitter the company is shadow banning users and groups of users just because someone complained that they don’t like the person’s views, even if they aren’t a follower.

When I check I often find that a user who has blocked me is someone I have never interacted with. So why the block? Often, it’s due to being on a block list created by a liberal activist group. Twitter supports block lists and makes it easy for users to mass-block entire universes of people they don’t even know.

But Twitter now uses factors such as the number of people who have blocked an account to determine whether to classify it as “low quality” content. The company also uses the number of complaints or reports on the account. If the number of these exceeds certain thresholds, an account can be deemed low quality and access to tweets from that user are severely diminished.

I couldn’t wait to leave that platform of time-wasting and hate and my life is better because of it.

Will Google Buzz be the Next Twitter?

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I doubt it.

Update: Nope, It looks like a loser, there isn’t any buzz nor is there Google wave and I doubt that Google+ will make it either.

In the caveman days by technology standards, something would be the buzz and a behemoth like Microsoft would swoop in with a copy and take over the market.  Word/Wordperfect and Netscape/IE come to mind.

Anymore, the next buzz could only last months before the next buzz comes around.

Twitter is too established.  So much so that the next big thing is likely to overtake it, not a me too of the same thing.  If Buzz is as successful as Google Wave, it’s already DOA.  It’s too bad that Twitter has censored certain groups because of political bias and moral casualness and relativity.  They have become an untrustworthy platform.

Google’s problem is that it has a limited audience, Gmail users.  It’s big, but not big in comparison to the the marketplace worldwide.  Google has said do no evil, but their Chairman continually does so and interferes with political bias.  With their meddling worldwide and privacy invasion, they violate the do no evil so consistently and constantly that they can’t be trusted.

The only possibility is perhaps the advertising model, but if you are like me, I hate watching an ad when I’m trying get to a video.  That’s as annoying as popup’s and spam.

Twitter may have already have an advertising model.

As for me, I’m already looking for the next new grass roots product that isn’t overtaken by the masses.  That way the message gets through easier without the clutter and noise.  And there are a lot of annoying people on Twitter, almost as annoying as Twitter’s social policy stance.

 

More on Twitter, the Positives/Negatives and Sturgeon, Now Refinement of Sources Makes It Powerful

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Update: Now that a lot of social media pressure has cut the lunch/poop talk down, combined with multiple Twitter platforms, it has become a powerful tool.  I find myself opening Twitter as my first site now to find out what is going on.  I have refined it to include those people and topics that are meaningful to me and it gets me the information I need better than almost any other platform.

I get a lot of information from blogs still that I tweet or vice-versa and can know what is going on around the world on multiple issues.  Again, refinement is the key.

I define the refinement requires that I only follow what is crucial to my interests at the time.  Since what I’m following changes, so does my sources of information.  That is why I’m not too worried about who or how many I follow, nor who or how many follow me.  Attaining numbers is far different from attaining knowledge and information.

Platforms like this along help me eliminate bias which is killing former information platforms like the network news and print media.

I follow trends.  I’ve seen much about this platform recently that has caused me to think about it. I use it sparingly and don’t post that much as I’ve always maintained that no one cares that much about what I’m doing with my time.

As an Analyst Relations Best Practice, I find that it is good to know what the analyst is doing to be on familiar terms with what they are doing.  Additionally, when I can’t reach them, I direct message an analyst as a back channel and it is very reliable.

The first article I noticed though was by Zach Whittaker who wonders “Twitter, is there any point”?

I often wonder this as Twitter follows Sturgeon’s Law.  If you look at the comments of this blog, it laments that many talk about lunch, flights and bowel movements.

On the plus side, he notes: “Twitter is what we call an “Enterprise 2.0″ application; not only a web application which tells the world what you’re doing, but is highly influential in the way businesses run, keeping customers and partners informed and gaining feedback on services. ”

On the negative is: “Whilst it may be a next-generation application, I still struggle to see the point it makes, or the impact it has. With the API and development opportunities, it’s certainly made an impact in developing technologies such as Adobe AIR, but besides this I fail to see why I should continue to update mine; something I haven’t done in months.”

The next thread was the Mumbai terrorists following Twitter.  I’m not so sure it’s a good thing to tell them where you are if they are trying to kill you.  It is not as bad though as CNN ratting out citizens trying to hide.

Recently TPTB declined $500 from Facebook to buy Twitter, so I’m wondering if they know something I don’t about its value.  The jury is out for me other than as a tool to reach certain people, but I know that the hunter in me instinctually says look for cover, not expose yourself.