For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim.
Zuckerberg’s sudden regret only came after his company fought for years to conceal the evidence of its work with the government to censor opposing views. Zuckerberg was finally compelled to release the documents by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the House Judiciary Committee.
Now forced to admit what many of us have long alleged, Zuckerberg is really, really sorry.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss Facebook’s record at length as a critical player in the anti-free speech alliance of government, corporate, academic, and media forces.
In prior testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional committees, I noted that Zuckerberg continued to refuse to release this information after Elon Musk exposed this system in his release of the “Twitter Files.”
Zuckerberg stayed silent as Musk was viciously attacked by anti-free speech figures in Congress and the media. He was fully aware of his own company’s similar conduct but stayed silent.
When the White House and President Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, Facebook continued to withhold evidence that they too were pressured to suppress the story before the election.
Viewers now get a steady diet of figures like MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal who called the U.S. Constitution “trash” and argued that we should simply just dump it.
In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically altered” to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Georgetown University Law School Professor Rosa Brooks went on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” to lash out at Americans becoming “slaves” to the U.S. Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.
I was recently called for a response to Robinson’s call. Yet, it is not clear if Robinson is speaking about the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution as that “little piece of paper.” However, she insists that “[i]n this moment, we’ve got to reimagine it with people that look and love like us at the center.”
Taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio shouldn’t be a starting place for aggressively biased coverage against either Democrats or Republicans. But you can ask Clarence Thomas how the machine works.
On Aug. 27, NPR veterans affairs reporter Quil Lawrence lit into former President Donald Trump for bringing cameras to a section of Arlington National Cemetery with some families of soldiers killed during President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The entire manufactured controversy is perverse. It’s obvious NPR is exploiting the cemetery for a political goal, and it then spread to the rest of the national media. Trump is showing support for grieving Gold Star families, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would not appear. They were MIA. But Trump was singled out as the one with grotesque political optics, not the no-shows whose negligence cost American lives.
They weren’t seriously considering the Biden-Harris disaster on “All Things Considered.” They could call it “All Democrats Defended.” Conservatives quickly found snapshots from private photographers of Biden in the same sacred section of the Arlington cemetery. That thing cannot be “considered.”
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated:
[Idaho] Gov. Brad Little must ensure that the Idaho Army National Guard upholds federal and state law and protects the free speech of enlisted personnel. This discrimination against an officer based on a frivolous complaint must be addressed and his record cleared and career restored.
To provide further detail, Liberty Counsel’s Associate Vice President of Legal Affairs Daniel Schmid joined Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” According to Schmid, “[I]mmediately upon receiving the complaint, some of the superiors in [the officer’s] chain of command brought him in and said, ‘You will resign, or we’ll make this ugly.’ Those were the words to him. They forced him to resign without counsel, without the presence of counsel, and without advice of counsel.”
Schmid went on to explain how “the complaint was not based on anything he did as a commanding officer.” It was about “a speech that he made outside of the military context, in the context of a political campaign. … He was making statements on various issues in the culture today, from a religious perspective, [and] the First Amendment affords him that right.” And yet, his statements are now “the subject of an investigation that’s ongoing even to this day.”
According to Schmid, this case is about making “sure that the individuals who sign up to defend our liberties, our constitutional rights, are [also] entitled to those same rights”—specifically, he clarified, the First Amendment. “You don’t surrender your constitutional rights or your statutory rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and others just because you sign up for military service.”
In the case of this officer, Schmid contended that he “was entitled to political speech.”
FlyCASS essentially offers FAR121 and FAR135 airlines a way to manage KCM and CASS requests without having to develop their own infrastructure. It pitches itself as a service requiring zero upfront cost to airlines that can be fully set up in 24 hours, with no technical staff required.
The researchers note that each airline has its own login page, which is exposed to the internet. According to the research, these login pages could be bypassed using a simple SQL injection.
"With only a login page exposed, we thought we had hit a dead end," Carroll said in his writeup. "Just to be sure though, we tried a single quote in the username as a SQL injection test, and immediately received a MySQL error.
"This was a very bad sign, as it seemed the username was directly interpolated into the login SQL query. Sure enough, we had discovered SQL injection and were able to use sqlmap to confirm the issue. Using the username of ' or '1'='1 and password of ') OR MD5('1')=MD5('1, we were able to login to FlyCASS as an administrator of Air Transport International!" //
When it came to disclosing the findings, it seems the US authorities didn't want this coming out, if the researchers' account is anything to go by. Carroll says the DHS completely ignored all attempts to disclose the findings in a coordinated way.
He also claimed the TSA "issued dangerously incorrect statements about the vulnerability, denying what we had discovered." //
"After we informed the TSA of this, they deleted the section of their website that mentions manually entering an employee ID, and did not respond to our correction. We have confirmed that the interface used by TSOs still allows manual input of employee IDs."
Professor Jacobson, in our previous post, analyzed the case thusly:
One important part of the complaint is that it puts in issue Media Matters’ longstanding tactic and business model of targeting advertisers…
This could give X discovery not just of what Media Matters did here, but its other efforts to attack advertisers at other platforms because Media Matters disagreed with their politics.
Keep in mind this case is in Texas. Think about how a Texas jury will feel if X is able to prove its allegations.
Did Media Matters engage in this subterfuge and fraud? Obviously that verdict will work itself out in court, but it would not surprise me in the least, having covered Media Matters for over a decade. Founded originally by the toxic David Brock, with an infusion of cash from George Soros, Media Matters has poisoned our politics as much as anyone else. They are bullies who found a weak spot in the conservative media armor, that advertisers were afraid of controversy, so all Media Matters needed to do is put advertisers in the hot seat and they would flee. //
O’Connor rejected Media Matter’s arguments for dismissal, including that it can’t be liable for business disparagement by reporting truthful statements. O’Connor said X had sufficiently alleged that Media Matters had acted with “actual malice” based on statements criticizing the platform…
The Media Matters report at the center of X’s lawsuit was published online in November. The organization said it found advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast’s Xfinity placed alongside posts touting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.
X sued Media Matters in November in federal court in Fort Worth…The lawsuit alleged the Media Matters report was published “with the intention of harming X and its business.”
stevewhitemd | August 30, 2024 at 11:46 am
If a blue state can force Mr. Kennedy to remain on the ballot despite his desire to exit, can a red state force Mr. Biden to remain on the ballot? //
Leslie Eastman | August 30, 2024 at 11:06 am
What the Harris supporters have just done is treated RFK Jr. voters like idiots. This will backfire. RFK Jr. supports are angry at the Democrat party, and hate it now more than Trump. They will vote for Trump out of spite, whereas they may have stayed home otherwise.
Standing up for unborn babies, no matter the circumstances of their conception, is on par with the pro-life movement’s long-held belief that humans are endowed with natural rights at conception.
Yet, GOP politicians and national pro-lifers alike have let Democrats goad them into a life-centered fight that distracts them from the task at hand. Many of them have taken soft or even sympathetic positions on reproductive technology. Others have become so preoccupied with Trump’s agenda that they’ve failed to gain ground in the battle to protect life on the state level.
Meanwhile, Democrats, with help from their allies in the corporate media, have taken advantage of pro-lifers’ inconsistency on IVF to make messaging and policy gains that benefit their abortion extremism. //
It’s the pro-life movement’s job to set the tone for the fight for life. Yet, a significant number of the movement’s biggest political champions are endorsing a procedure that no doubt kills more life than it creates. That’s a problem that would have been better remedied by prevention than intervention.
Now, committed pro-lifers are fighting an uphill battle against some of their biggest allies to explain to voters duped by Democrats’ deceptive narrative-setting and corporate media’s twisted polls why promoting and subsidizing IVF is wholly incompatible with protecting unborn babies or successfully curbing the industries that profit from the destruction of life.
Shiva Ayyadurai is fighting to get on ballots, but the naturalized U.S. citizen from India fails to meet a key constitutional requirement. //
In the complaint, Ayyadurai argued that the First Amendment guarantees his right to run for president regardless of the Constitution’s pesky qualifications. And he asserted that such a qualification has been “abrogated and implicitly repealed” by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. //
allowing a foreign-born, naturalized citizen access to the presidential ballot changes the Constitution without the benefit of amendment.
There are a lot of reasons why Kamala Harris does not deserve to be president, but perhaps the most important one is her unwillingness to level with the American people about Joe Biden's health. She could have done it in a way that showed respect to her boss but that still got the point across and didn't make her look like a complete shill and tool.
But she didn't. And my guess is that because in doing so she would have exposed her own complicity in the sham and troublesome cover-up.
Kamala Harris will always put personal ambition and politics ahead of country. If the American people didn't learn anything else about her from the CNN interview, let's hope they learned that much. //
Sargon of Cincinnati Granny Heartful
18 hours ago
A side effect of an anti anxiety medication is that it can result in a loss of focus, and continued returning to a point the speaker wants to make. As this happens the speaker uses key remembered phrases to gain time to regain the intended message. Resulting in long winding sentences that have little success in communicating the speaker’s thought.
Anti anxiety drugs are not intended for stress reduction before a speaking engagement. Usually they are used for stress inducing events like flying. Or, if a patient is anxious in large crowds. Not intended for interviews. //
It’s a dry heat
15 hours ago
"I have served with President Biden for almost four years now. And I’ll tell ya it’s one of the greatest honors of my career, truly. He cares so deeply about the American people. He is so smart and — and loyal to the American people. And I have spent hours upon hours with him, be it in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. "
But she is not "tethered" to Biden in any way LOL
I've talked now about Discworld's original hardbacks, and their original paperbacks. To briefly recap, both used the same two illustrators for the entire run.
Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Elon Musk's social media platform X, via a legal representative in the country, to suspend the accounts of political enemies (in other words, supporters of Bolsonaro), who the government is investigating. If the X lawyer disobeyed, he would be arrested--and there would be personal consequences for X owner Elon Musk, too:
Mr Moraes had ordered X accounts he has accused of spreading disinformation - many supporters of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsanaro - must be blocked while they are under investigation.
After X owner Musk criticised Mr Moraes, the judge ordered 100,000 reais ($19,774; £15,670) fines a day for any account that X reactivated, and stressed the possible liability of the company's legal representatives in Brazil if this were to happen.
He also put Mr Musk under investigation for charges including the obstruction of justice.
Discworld - Book Covers
I used to prefer kobodl because it's standalone, which means you don't need other proprietary software like Adobe Digial Editions or Kindle for PC (that I can't use on Linux). However, I have since discoverd a way to do this with Calibre and 2 plugins:
Leseratte10/acsm-calibre-plugin - A plugin that can read Adobe Digital Editions files that Kobo web download produces.
noDRM/DeDRM_tools - The popular DRM removal plugin.
Now you can just download the .acm file from your book list on Kobo.com and load it into Calibre desktop!
You don’t get to insist Donald Trump’s private peccadilloes are a criminal matter while being silent about the corrupt relationships of Kamala Harris, the Clintons, and so many others. //
Bill Clinton was a primetime speaker at the DNC last week, campaigning on behalf of a woman who by all reasonable appearances engaged in political corruption on behalf of a dirty politician she was having a transactional sexual affair with. Weird how these same people were not outraged by that.
At the same time, Trump’s sex life, which however disdainful, was never a matter of public corruption. And yet the whole reason they’re running around saying Trump is a Convicted Felon™ is that the Democratic Party engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort to try and turn Trump’s attempt to keep an entirely private affair with an onscreen prostitute from becoming public knowledge. //
Ultimately, it’s impossible to argue this incident merits more legal scrutiny than what Harris did in San Francisco. //
Now then some people will say, “what about Trump being convicted of sexual assault in New York?” Well, the heavily Democratic New York legislature passed a special law to undo the statute of limitations to make the case possible, and in any event, Trump’s accuser doesn’t even remember what year the assault took place. And while being wary of attacking the credibility of sexual assault accusers might be a good practice, E. Jean Carroll’s various public appearances strongly suggest she had questionable motivations and is a little crazy. //
This is about being honest about the state of American politics. If you want to understand why someone as allegedly immoral as Donald Trump wasn’t immediately kicked off the political stage because of his supposedly outrageous character flaws, you merely have to recognize that the American public rightly understands that the Democrat Party is itself fully in the thrall of figures whose personal dealings and sex lives are in many ways worse than Trump’s peccadilloes.
Eight years later, people are still in total denial about this, and maybe you shouldn’t feign outrage over a talk radio guy being cruder about the truth than your sensitive ears can handle. Especially when you’re silent about Kamala Harris’ past, the Clintons’ continued influence, and your friends and allies cashing checks from Reid Hoffman.
During the 2019 Democrat primary, Harris was asked whether she would commit to a federal ban on fracking.
“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris said. “So yes.” //
“In 2020 I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I have not changed that position, nor will I going forward. I kept my word, and I will keep my word,” Harris said. “My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.” //
“Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far,” Harris said.
DANA BASH: You said you supported banning fracking. Did it change?
KAMALA HARRIS: In 2020, I made clear where I stand. We are in 2024. I kept my word.
DANA BASH: Why did you change your position?
KAMALA HARRIS: Let's be clear. My values have not changed.
What we’ve already done –creating over 300,000 new clean energy jobs – that tells me from my experience as Vice President, we can do it without banning fracking.
And therein lies the tell: "My values have not changed." Harris repeated that line TWICE during the interview. What it shows is that she will spout whatever is necessary to pacify the Pennsylvanian and American voters, and after she is securely installed as president, she'll adhere to those values she's been committed to for decades, and that's to double down on the climate change agenda. //
Paul Hoffer
10 minutes ago
Her positions have changed 180 degrees since she ran in 2020 but Kamala Harris’ values have not changed between 2020 and 2024. What does that mean exactly? What are those values she talks anout? Obviously, the only values on display here is that she will lie and say anthing necessary to get elected. Deception and prevarication are her values.
Greg Price
@greg_price11
·
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🚨BREAKING: Never before seen footage of Pelosi on January 6 filmed by her daughter shows her admitting that its her fault that the Capitol wasn't secure.
“We're calling the National Guard now? They should have been here to start out."
"We have totally failed. We need to take… Show more
9:21 PM · Aug 27, 2024 //
“I just feel sick about what he did to the Capitol and the country today,” Pelosi said as she slumped, visibly exhausted, in the back of her SUV in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 7. “He’s got to pay a price for that.” //
In the aftermath, Pelosi and her cronies discussed who should be fired for the security failure—Capitol Police officials, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, anybody but themselves. But then she honed in on her real target:
“Typical Trump,” [former House Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer piped in [commenting on Trump’s statement about the protests].
After a beat, Pelosi said: “Insurrection. That’s a crime, and he’s guilty of it.” //
Greg Price
@greg_price11
·
Follow
Replying to @greg_price11
Once again President Trump was right: The biggest reason J6 happened was because Nancy Pelosi turned down the Capitol Police's request for the National Guard and then lied about it.
0:22 / 2:03
9:43 PM · Aug 27, 2024
I'm still seeing this as a very opaque operation where, as was the popular saying on night convoy operations in the Army, "I don't know where we are but we're making good time." //
Seveer of the 95th rifles @Seveerity
·
The russians released helicopter guncam footage of them taking out a convoy with guided missiles.
Their own convoy.
Embedded video
1:17 PM · Aug 14, 2024
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” - C.S. Lewis
I've always had a morbid fascination with the cruelty of leftism because it always comes with what they see as a moral justification. The left can denounce everything someone does as a heinous social sin of the worst kind, worthy of social isolation and exclusion, and then, in the same breath, do or say the exact same thing.
As I've said for years, the unofficial motto of the left is, and always will be, "it's okay when we do it." //
These intimidation tactics are disgusting, considering this isn't just affecting Vance but his wife and three children of two, four, and six years of age. To be sure, if this was happening in the opposite direction and these were Republicans doing this outside the personal home of a politician with young children, you'd never heard the end of it from activists, the media, and social media denizens. //
She quotes Luke Conway, a Grove City College psychology professor who studies authoritarian tendencies in populations. While he discovered both the left and the right have these tendencies, the left is largely blind to their own:
“When conservatives agree with those items, they subsequently admit (accurately) that they are authoritarian,” Conway wrote. “When liberals agree with those items, they actually are more likely to say they are not authoritarian.” The more authoritarian they are, the less they believe they are authoritarian, he notes. //
how often do you see leftists on social media, or in the media, or activist groups, completely and totally memory hole the real suffering and brutality put upon others that don't align with their way of thinking.
Those killed by illegal migrants. Trump's assassination attempt. The beating of Rand Paul by his neighbor. Antifa's attacks and assaults. The destruction and death connected to the Black Lives Matter riots. The utilization of government departments to attack citizens that reject leftist agendas.
All of these things are wholly pushed into the shadows or, when brought up, justified through some flimsy means or subjected to ridiculous and often untrue "whataboutism."
This can only be done if they truly see their opponents as not deserving of human treatment because they see them, you, as less than human. //
Rufus McGee
9 hours ago edited
Honestly, I actually think it isn't even that complicated. Of the seven deadly sins, many would argue Pride is the worst and the source for the other six.
Leftists teach that to be special has less to do with the kind of person you are than the kind of person you say you are. Combine that with a tendency many humans have in which they enjoy being cruel and you have a system that rewards cruelty in the name of right-think.
In other words, leftists give in to the worst parts of human nature simply because they enjoy it.