Thank God It’s FRIDAY!!!
Jack Dorsey Is An Enemy Of The People And The Free Presshttps://t.co/gkhVqdwP4P
— The Federalist (@FDRLST) October 15, 2020
Jack Dorsey Is An Enemy Of The People And The Free Press
Via The Federalist
The move by Twitter and Facebook to censor a bombshell report about Hunter Biden should make it clear, finally, that these are not neutral platforms.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Sam Harris during a podcast last year, “I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore.”
It was a curious remark, given that the basic idea behind Twitter and other social media companies is that third-party users can post content to a neutral platform. It’s a big reason why such companies get special protection from liability under federal law.
But now we know what Dorsey meant. He meant that Twitter is not going to be a neutral platform anymore, if it ever was to begin with. He meant that he’s going to use the immense power and reach of Twitter to influence the presidential election by doing all he can to help his preferred candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, win the White House. He meant, in other words, that Twitter was going to become an openly partisan political organization and stop pretending to be a neutral platform for third parties.
We also know that in practice that means banning media outlets that post stories critical of Biden. What began Wednesday with both Twitter and Facebook censoring the New York Post’s blockbuster story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter peddling his influence and access all over the world has turned into a thoroughgoing blackout not just of the Post but of any institution or prominent individual who references or links to the Post story.
On Thursday morning, Twitter blocked another Post report on Hunter Biden’s efforts to sell his family connections to a major Chinese energy firm. Sen. Ted Cruz, among others, pointed out that when they tried to share the story, this is what they got:
Unbelievable. Yesterday, @twitter blocks links to @nypost story alleging Joe Biden corruption on China.
TODAY, blocking links to ANOTHER NYPost story alleging Hunter Biden sold access to communist China for millions. I just tried to share that story. Here’s Twitter’s response
pic.twitter.com/NZpw4gmcb2
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 15, 2020
In the space of about 24 hours, Twitter has not just blacked out hugely important reporting from a major media outlet, it has censored or suspended the accounts of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump campaign’s official account, and the account for House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jim Jordan, which published the Post story on its own website to get around Twitter’s censorship, prompting Twitter to block a link to the committee’s webpage.
Let that sink in. Twitter is blocking links to U.S. House of Representatives servers for hosting links to the Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden.
What that means is that Jack Dorsey is, quite literally, an enemy of the people and an enemy of the free press.
Facebook Is Also an Enemy of the Free Press
It’s not just Dorsey and Twitter, of course. Facebook is just as guilty of trying to influence the election by blocking access to the Post’s reporting on the Biden family. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expended much effort to make his company appear more neutral than Twitter and portray it as a more welcoming place for the free exchange of ideas, even saying last year that Facebook would not censor political ads.
Read the entire article HERE.
Coronavirus — What if we all start to return to normal life now?https://t.co/S6TQjh98Zs
— Judge Napolitano (@Judgenap) October 15, 2020
What If We Ignore the Government?
By Andrew P. Napolitano
What if we all start a return to normal life now that the government says the worst of the pandemic is behind us? What if we all make conscious choices to move about as before or to stay sheltered, based on our own exercise of our own informed free wills and not on the basis of governmental edicts? What if each of us decides if it is healthier to breathe in fresh air from outside or recycled air from under a mask?
What if massive numbers of us make these decisions on our own?
What if the governors’ edicts don’t really carry the force of law? What if governors have assumed the power to tell us how to live from either out of thin air or from unconstitutional and outdated state laws?
What if it is profoundly unconstitutional for a state legislature to give its law-making powers to the state’s governor? What if, when that happens, all the governors’ edicts based on that attempted passage of power are null and void? What if we simply behave in a manner that shows we understand that these edicts are unlawful?
What if high school and college athletes play their fall sports without regard to gubernatorial edicts? What if public school superintendents and college and university presidents open up outdoor venues for folks to decide on their own whether they want to stay home or come out and watch a football game or a soccer match?
What if the police, many of whom have school- and college-age children, cheer on the athletes and join the observers at these games? What if they do so notwithstanding any commands from their superiors because these commands are unlawful, and they know it is unlawful to obey an unlawful command?
What if restaurants served their full complement of customers and folks became so happy that restaurants were again jammed? What if restaurant owners and customers made these choices on their own?
What if small businesses borrow money from banks — flush with cash because interest rates are so artificially low — and use those funds to restart their businesses? What if customers of those businesses choose to patronize them? What if shopping malls reopened and permitted folks to walk wherever their fancy took them?
What if fire and police and EMS and health care workers all joined in a mass exposition of personal liberty in our once-free society? What if the governors who have restrained us lose so much support that only the folks whom they have frightened to death listen to them? What if this resurgence of freedom uplifts our spirits, reunites us as a nation and is a step toward the realization of our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
What if — as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence — our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable? What if an inalienable right can only be taken away in a free society for violating someone else’s rights, and only after a conviction by a fair jury trial? What if an inalienable right — sometimes called a natural right — cannot morally or constitutionally or legally be taken away by a governmental edict or by legislation or even by a referendum?
What if inalienable rights are integral to each person’s humanity?
What if the whole purpose of an independent judiciary is to be anti-democratic? What if its purpose is to preserve and protect the life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness of those whom the government targets because it hates or fears them?
What if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were not just Jefferson’s musings for a free people but are the bedrock moral, constitutional and legal values of America, established in 1776, renewed whenever any government employee — from janitor to president — takes an oath of office, and are the foundation of all American laws?
What if each person’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is each person’s choice as to the exercise and pursuit of those rights?
What if we have other inalienable rights such as the freedom of speech, the right to assemble peacefully, the right to worship, the right to travel and to self-defense, the right to fairness from the government, the right to take chances, the right to own and enjoy property, and the right to be left alone?
What if government workers join in a massive civil disobedience of local and state rules governing personal behavior on private property? What if the governors who have been controlling us realize that they have no real support and thus have become toothless?
What if when government fails to protect inalienable rights, we simply ignore it?
Read the entire article HERE.
Google & Oracle to Monitor Americans Who Get Warp Speed’s Covid-19 Vaccine for up to Two Years https://t.co/WGJMU1WR6R via @_whitneywebb
— LastAmericanVagabond (@TLAVagabond) October 15, 2020
Google & Oracle To Monitor Americans Who Get Warp Speed’s Covid-19 Vaccine For Up To Two Years
By Whitney Webb/The Last American Vagabond
Moncef Slaoui, the official head of Operation Warp Speed, told the Wall Street Journal last week that all Warp Speed vaccine recipients in the US will be monitored by “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” for up to two years and that tech giants Google and Oracle would be involved.
Last week, a rare media interview given by the Trump administration’s “Vaccine Czar” offered a brief glimpse into the inner workings of the extremely secretive Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the Trump administration’s “public-private partnership” for delivering a Covid-19 vaccine to 300 million Americans by next January. What was revealed should deeply unsettle all Americans.
During an interview with the Wall Street Journal published last Friday, the “captain” of Operation Warp Speed, career Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui, confirmed that the millions of Americans who are set to receive the project’s Covid-19 vaccine will be monitored via “incredibly precise . . . tracking systems” that will “ensure that patients each get two doses of the same vaccine and to monitor them for adverse health effects.” Slaoui also noted that tech giants Google and Oracle have been contracted as part of this “tracking system” but did not specify their exact roles beyond helping to “collect and track vaccine data.”
The day before the Wall Street Journal interview was published, the New York Times published a separate interview with Slaoui where he referred to this “tracking system” as a “very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.” During a previous interview with the journal Science in early September, Slaoui had referred to this system only as “a very active pharmacovigilance system” that would “make sure that when the vaccines are introduced that we’ll absolutely continue to assess their safety.” Slaoui has only recently tacked on the words “tracking” and “surveillance” to his description of this system during his relatively rare media interviews.
While Slaoui himself was short on specifics regarding this “pharmacovigilance surveillance system,” the few official documents from Operation Warp Speed that have been publicly released offer some details about what this system may look like and how long it is expected to “track” the vital signs and whereabouts of Americans who receive a Warp Speed vaccine.
The Pharmacovigilantes
Two official OWS documents released in mid-September state that vaccine recipients—expected to include a majority of the US population—would be monitored for twenty-four months after the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine is administered and that this would be done by a “pharmacovigilance system.”
In the OWS document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) stated that, because Warp Speed vaccine candidates use new unlicensed vaccine productions methods that “have limited previous data on safety in humans . . . the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance and Phase 4 (post-licensure) clinical trials.”
It continues:
The key objective of pharmacovigilance is to determine each vaccine’s performance in real-life scenarios, to study efficacy, and to discover any infrequent and rare side effects not identified in clinical trials. OWS will also use pharmacovigilance analytics, which serves as one of the instruments for the continuous monitoring of pharmacovigilance data. Robust analytical tools will be used to leverage large amounts of data and the benefits of using such data across the value chain, including regulatory obligations.
In addition, Moncef Slaoui and OWS’s vaccine coordinator, Matt Hepburn, formerly a program manager at the Pentagon’s controversial Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), had previously published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that stated that “because some technologies have limited previous data on safety in humans, the long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance strategies.”
The use of pharmacovigilance on those who receive the vaccine is also mentioned in the official Warp Speed “infographic,” which states that monitoring will be done in cooperation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) and will involve “24 month post-trial monitoring for adverse effects.”
In a separate part of that same document, OWS describes one of its “four key tenets” as “traceability,” which has three goals: to “confirm which of the approved vaccines were administered regardless of location (private/public)”; to send a “reminder to return for second dose”; and to “administer the correct second dose.”
Read the entire article HERE.
CORNELL ENGLISH DEPT DROPS ENGLISH FROM DEPT NAME BECAUSE IT OFFENDED A MINORITY https://t.co/J6tdZe55nd
— Michael Savage (@ASavageNation) October 16, 2020
Cornell English Department changes name to avoid perception of ‘English as a nationality’
Via The Cornell Daily Sun
During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall semester, faculty members of color introduced a proposal — to change the department’s name.
The new proposed name — “the department of literatures in English” — would mark a distinct change in the department’s branding, helping to eliminate what Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate McCullough, English, said was the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”
Earlier this month, a significant majority of the department approved the change, and is now awaiting approval from college administration.
The decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death, according to Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, English, one of the original proposal writers. As a result, the faculty felt a sense of obligation to react in their own department.
“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” Boyce-Davies said.
Other faculty simply recognized that it was time that the department’s title represented what it was really focused on: literature written in English.
“In part, it was also a result of an ongoing shift in literary study in this department — and others across the country — to focus on a broader reach of literature,” McCullough explained.
The sentiments slowly formed into a plan of action over the summer — led by Boyce-Davies and Prof. Mukoma Wa Ngugi, English — where they began thinking about how to broach the topic with other colleagues.
“We had a Google Doc where the proposal was available for a couple of months beforehand and people had aired their questions, so the meeting itself wasn’t a place where people had a lot of concerns,” said department chair Prof. Caroline Levine.
Boyce-Davies and Wa Ngugi first introduced the idea to the department’s faculty of color, who supported the move. Early on, they felt some anxiety about the reaction of the rest of the faculty — which was apparently unfounded.
“What surprised us was the fact that so many of the white faculty of the English department signed on — we were amazed,” Boyce-Davies said. “By the time we were ready to officially take it to the department as a whole, we had over 75 percent of the faculty signed on.”
Read the entire article HERE.
Trump Attempts To Catch Hunter Biden In Trap Labeled 'Free Crack' https://t.co/Tgpc1b3bcL
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 15, 2020
Trump Attempts To Catch Hunter Biden In Trap Labeled ‘Free Crack’
Via The Babylon Bee (Satire)
WASHINGTON, D.C.—President Trump is attempting to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Hunter Biden and Ukraine. In order to catch Hunter Biden and turn him over to the authorities, the president put out a box propped up by a stick tied to a rope. The box was labeled “Free Crack” and contained a large quantity of crack cocaine underneath.
“Any second now,” Trump muttered to himself as he waited in a nearby bush. “Here, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter. Here, boy. That’s it, nice and slow. Fantastic crack cocaine over here — extremely pure stuff. The best crack cocaine, maybe ever!”
Growing impatient, Trump resorted to more drastic measures. “What’s this over here on the lawn!?” he shouted. “Wow! That looks like crack cocaine to me! Looks like fantastic stuff! Sure would be a shame if someone were to come along and pick it up!”
Sure enough, after a few minutes, Trump saw rustling in a nearby bush. Biden fell for the trap and dove for the crack cocaine. “Got him!” cried Trump as he pulled the string. Unfortunately, Biden was too quick and managed to smoke all the crack and roll out from under the box before Trump could catch him.
Trump was last seen attempting to bait another trap labeled “Free Hookers.”
Check out all of the Bee’s takes on politics and culture HERE.
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