Tuesday, March 22, 2022
Censorship Takes Many Forms, Including Refusing to Cover Certain Stories
There has been much in the news lately about censorship. The major media have been reporting on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to keep the Russian people from hearing the truth about his war against Ukraine and what President Joe Biden has called war crimes.
Dictionary.com offers this definition of a censor: “an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds.”
That “official” can be a head of state, like Putin, the head of a news operation, or even an individual reporter. Anyone who chooses to suppress a story or fails to investigate one because it does not conform to their worldview could be labeled a censor.
Which brings me to the Hunter Biden laptop story: the “discovery” by The New York Times that his laptop and its contents are real, after all. Not only did the Times and other major media and social media ignore the story, in some cases the story was deemed fraudulent and blocked on several platforms.
I think the more accurate explanation as to why the story was censored by these entities is that it was broken by the New York Post, which the mainstream media deem a “conservative” newspaper and by their standard, unreliable. The line favored by much of the suppression press was that the laptop story was Russian “disinformation.”
The real unreliable purveyors of disinformation (or no information) are those who failed to do their journalistic duty and investigate. That the story was not followed up on during the 2020 presidential campaign adds to the suspicion, especially among many conservatives, that the information suppression was deliberate.
NPR last year “corrected an online article that falsely asserted that documents from first son Hunter Biden’s laptop had been ‘discredited by U.S. intelligence.'” The correction came after the election. It took the Times and others until this year to fess up. According to the New York Post, 51 intelligence officers who signed a public letter claiming the laptop story was Russian disinformation have so far refused to apologize.
“Fact-checkers” published what they said were lies told by former President Donald Trump. The Washington Post calculated Trump had lied or uttered misleading statements 30,573 times during his four years in office. No such diligence has been conducted by the major media of Hunter Biden and his family’s alleged business and personal relationships with nefarious individuals and corrupt governments.
For years the legacy media has seen itself as the only “legitimate” source of news. In a type of “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it still make a sound?” scenario, if The New York Times, The Washington Post, broadcast and some cable news networks don’t report it, is it still news? Yes, it is and the source—whether it be the New York Post, U.K. Daily Mail, or talk radio—should not matter so long as the story can be independently verified.
That The New York Times failed to do so until now is a dereliction of the newspaper’s journalistic duty. Had the information been known before the election, it conceivably might have changed votes in...
How To Make More Good Communists...
Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane
Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again
Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt
Adolf builds a bonfire, Enrico plays with it
Whistling tunes we hide in the dunes by the seaside
Whistling tunes we're kissing baboons in the jungle
It's a knockout
If looks could kill,
They probably will
In games without frontiers
War without tears
Games without frontiers
War without tears
The Takeover of America's Legal System
The kids didn't grow out of it.
If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions.
Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times.
Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew.
But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else?
Today, Aaron Sibarium, a reporter who has consistently been ahead of the pack on this beat, offers a groundbreaking piece on how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming “a totalitarian nightmare.”
In 2017, the super lawyer David Boies was at a corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, Florida, hosted by his law firm, Boies, Schiller and Flexner. Boies was a liberal legend: He had represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and, in 2013, successfully defended gay marriage in California, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, paving the way for the landmark Supreme Court ruling two years later.
On the last day of the retreat, Boies gave a talk in the hotel ballroom to 100 or so attorneys, according to a lawyer who was present at the event. Afterwards, Boies’s colleagues were invited to ask questions.
Most of the questions were yawners. Then, an associate in her late twenties stood up. She said there were lawyers at the firm who were “uncomfortable” with Boies representing disgraced movie maker Harvey Weinstein, and she wanted to know whether Boies would pay them severance so they could quit and focus on applying for jobs at other firms. Boies, who declined to comment for this article, said no.
That lawyers could be tainted by representing unpopular clients was hardly news. But in times past, lawyers worried about the public—not other lawyers. Defending communists, terrorists, and cop killers had never been a crowd pleaser, but that’s what lawyers had to do sometimes: Defend people who were hated.
When congressional Republicans attacked attorneys for representing Guantanamo detainees, for example, the entire profession rallied around them. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that John Adams took pride in representing British soldiers accused of taking part in the Boston Massacre, calling it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered to my country.”
But that’s not how the new associates saw Boies’s choice to represent Weinstein. They thought there were certain people you just did not represent—people so hateful and reprehensible that helping them made you complicit. The partners, the old-timers—pretty much everyone over 50—found this unbelievable. That wasn’t the law as they had known it. That wasn’t America.
“The idea that guilty people shouldn’t get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,” Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. “People will ask: ‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ The answer is that a society where accused people don’t get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don’t want to live in. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”
‘Operating in a Panopticon’
The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.
Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.
Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this:
Severe Drought And “Dust Bowl Conditions” Threaten To Create A Disastrous Winter Wheat Harvest In The U.S.
Food prices in the U.S. have already been soaring, and now we are on track for an absolutely horrible winter wheat harvest. Of course this comes at a time when the war on the other side of the globe is going to greatly reduce wheat exports from Russia and Ukraine. Over the last 12 months, the price of wheat has already risen 69 percent, and now this crisis threatens to go to an entirely new level. In all my years of writing, I have never seen anything like this, and I am deeply concerned about what the months ahead will bring.
Due to extreme drought, winter wheat is in very bad shape in states such as Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The following comes from one of the most prominent agricultural websites in the entire country…
Some farmers in southwestern Kansas, the top U.S. wheat producing state, have not received much measurable rain or snow since October. Winter wheat is planted in autumn, lays dormant in winter and begins sending up green shoots in spring. Proper soil moisture is critical at this stage for the crop to thrive.
More than half of Kansas was classified as under severe drought or worse as of March 8, the driest conditions since 2018, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center. Severe drought is also covering three-quarters of Oklahoma and more than two-thirds of Texas, both of which also are large wheat producers.
If that sounds really bad, that is because it is really bad.
Farmers are praying for rain, because they desperately need it.
That same article also discussed the fact that winter wheat was severely damaged by a wind storm “that brought ‘Dust Bowl’ conditions to Kansas”…
The coming weeks will be critical for the southern Plains wheat crop, said Lucas Haag, extension agronomist at Kansas State University. Many farmers apply fertilizer to maximize crop potential, but moisture is needed to carry nutrients to plant roots, he said.
Wheat plants damaged by the December wind storm that brought “Dust Bowl” conditions to Kansas face additional drought problems because plants have been weakened either by the sand-blast effect of blowing dust and dirt or by soil nutrient loss from the 100 mph (161 kph) winds.
How many years have I been warning that “Dust Bowl conditions” would return to the middle of the country?
Now it has happened.
And forecasters are telling us that “abnormally dry” conditions will likely continue across much of the nation for the foreseeable future…
Abnormally dry to exceptional drought conditions are expected to persist across 60% of the continental U.S. as spring in the Northern Hemisphere begins. Forecasters expect little to no rain for certain parts of the western U.S. through June.
From April to June, above-average temperatures are expected from Southwest to the East Coast and north through the Midwest, according to a new outlook published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NOAA’s map shows a greater than 50% chance of drought persistence for nearly 60% of the continental U.S.
We have been witnessing very strange weather patterns all over the globe in recent months, and that is one of the reasons why major agricultural commodity prices have been spiking dramatically…
Over the past year, wheat prices are up 69 percent. Among other major food exports of Russia and Ukraine, corn prices are up 36 percent and barley 82 percent.
Now war in Ukraine has created an immense “supply shock”, and this is going to have ripple effects that are felt all across the planet.
Ukraine is normally one of the key “breadbaskets” of the world, but now the invasion has...
Here we go again: Racist note in school restroom — which led to campus protest — reportedly written by student of color
Yet another racist note was discovered in a school earlier this month — this time in a restroom in Our Lady of Mercy School for Young Women in upstate New York, a private, all-girls Catholic school serving students in grades 6 through 12.
And yet again, a student of color reportedly wrote the racist sentiment — which included the N-word.
What are the details?
The graffiti — which read "This school is filled with a bunch of [N-word]. Get out or else!!" — was discovered in a school restroom March 7, WHEC-TV reported.
Students sent a message to Primetime585 — the social media handle of Karen Iglesia, who chronicles local sports and knows many high school athletes, the station said.
Iglesia shared an image of the graffiti on Twitter and added: "My inbox was flooded today from @OLM_HS girls. This note was written in the bathroom, and they had issues on how the administration dealt w/ it. They (many athletes — all WHITE) begged me to post it because they were so upset at how trivial the school made it."
WHEC said students protested outside of the school on the morning of March 8.
Well, by March 10 the school announced that an investigation into the incident culminated with a student coming forward and taking responsibility for writing the...
Gates, Fauci, Daszak Charged With Genocide In International Criminal Court
Besides the four kingpins, twelve others were named, including the CEOs of the leading vaccine corporations and the health leaders held accountable for the United Kingdom.
- Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
- Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
- Pascal Soriot, CEO of Astra Zeneca
- Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson and Johnson
- Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO
- Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister
- Christopher Whitty, UK Chief Medical Adviser
- Matthew Hancock, former UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
- Sajid Javid, current UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
- June Raine, UK Chief Executive of Medicines and Healthcare products
- Dr. Rajiv Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation
- Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum
Klaus Schwab, a wickedly intelligent, perhaps diabolical German with double doctorate degrees in Economics and Engineering, is the founder of the World Economic Forum, a club for the wealthiest percentile of the world’s corporate and political elite. He is a power broker who has groomed many presidents, prime ministers, and tech CEOs who now view him with reverence and unswerving loyalty.
Schwab, an economist, and technocrat has befriended many nations, most significantly China’s Xi Jinping, who delivered a key speech at Davos. He praised his vision of a New World Order. On January 25, 2021, Klaus Schwab vowed his support for Xi Jinping with these words, “Mr. President (Xi Jinping) I believe this is the best time to reset our policies and to work, jointly, for a peaceful and prosperous world. We all welcome now, his excellency, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China.” See mark 2:26.
Many consider Schwab the mastermind behind the current movement towards cryptocurrency, universal identification, and a one-world (fascist) government to be run jointly, in totalitarian fashion, with China.
Attorney Hannah Rose and seven applicants brought the Nuremberg action on behalf of the victims, the entire population of the United Kingdom. She filed the legal proceeding with the International Criminal Court located at The Hague. The Hague is notable for its long history in helping victims seek redress for war crimes and defining appropriate ethical guidelines for conduct during war.
Following the Nazi atrocities committed during World War II, the war crime trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany. Following these, a set of principles was developed, which ultimately led to the development of the Nuremberg Code.
These principles essentially meant that anyone, no matter how wealthy or powerful, even a head of state, was not above the law. The fact that the law of their home nation would permit their action would not relieve the person from justice under international law.
In particular, the medical experiments conducted by the Nazi doctors led to strict rules and ethical principles regarding future human scientific trials, including the doctrine of necessary informed consent and freedom from coercion or threat in submitting to experimental drugs.
As we all know, before receiving a surgical procedure, there is a legal and ethical requirement that the patient be apprised of any significant potential risks, including infection, bleeding, nerve damage, or even death. The patient usually signs the consent form following this explanation. And as we all know, whenever we receive prescription medication, we are notified of the potential risks on a package insert and usually a discussion with the Pharmacist.
The vaccines should be no different, yet they are. A person about to receive the jab is rarely told that there are risks of blood clots, bleeding, cerebral...
The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #965
Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,
Please Only Do So If You Are Over 21 Years Old.
If You are Easily Upset, Triggered Or Offended, This Is Not The Place For You.
Please Leave Silently Into The Night......
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1665
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
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