Tommy Smothers on censorship…
Author: HP McLovincraft
Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.
Gavin Newsom spotted maskless at 49ers-Rams game despite stadium mandates
California Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted on Monday to going maskless “for a few moments” at the 49ers-Rams NFL game – in defiance of a local mask mandate and the LA stadium’s own requirements.
Newsom, who was previously forced to apologize for breaking his own COVID-19 rules early in the pandemic, posed for a photo with former LA Lakers star Magic Johnson on Sunday in what appeared to be one of SoFi Stadium’s suites.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and San Francisco Mayor London Breed were also spotted in the suite without masks.
LA County currently has a mask mandate in place for outdoor “mega events” that host more than 5,000 people, regardless of vaccination status. The rules will apply for the Super Bowl matchup that will be hosted at the stadium on Feb. 13, local health officials have said.
Under SoFi Stadium’s policies — which adhere to the local health order — masks are required to be worn at all times except when people are eating or drinking.
The governor and two mayors were not eating or drinking at the time the photos were taken.
Nervy…
What Could Go Wrong? Millions of US Kids to Be Taught in School Which News is “Fake”
NewsGuard, a controversial service that ranks news sources read by clients online based on how trustworthy it considers them to be, will soon be available for free to millions of schoolchildren in the US.
The New York-based company signed a licensing agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, making the service available to members and their students, the two said this week.
AFT President Randi Weingarten called the deal a game-changer when it comes to helping kids, “particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction.”
She called NewsGuard “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”
The service was launched in 2018, when the position that Big Tech should openly censor information that it deemed undesirable was not as pervasive in the US as it is today. NewsGuard ranks thousands of news sources with a “street light” color code, and puts a nutrition label-like explanation on each one to explain the score.
The service comes in the form of a browser plug-in and costs $2.95/month, except for users of Microsoft Edge, since Microsoft licensed it to be a built-in feature of its browser in 2019.
NewsGuard claims to be apolitical and to apply a rigorous process when assessing the integrity of news outlets. After its launch, skeptics, however, questioned the abundance of people linked to the US government among its advisory board.
One of them, Richard Stengel, who served under Barack Obama as the Department of State’s public affairs chief, said on the record that state propaganda was fine and that all nations subjected their citizens to it.
1944–1956: Radioactive nutrition experiments on retarded children by Harvard and MIT
In December of 1993, Scott Allen, a journalist at the Boston Globe, uncovered documents showing years of ethically dubious experiments conducted on Fernald Center youth. The day after Christmas, he published an article, “Radiation Used on Retarded,” noting that “Records at the Fernald State School list them as “morons,” but the researchers from MIT and Harvard University called the retarded teen-age boys who took part in their radiation experiments ‘the Fernald Science Club.’”
Developmentally disabled children at the Fernald State School and a state School in Waltham, Massachusetts were subjected to radioactive nutrition experiments sponsored by the AEC conducted by Harvard University and MIT researchers. The children were fed Quaker Oats breakfast cereal containing radioactive tracers to test absorption of plant minerals and calcium. Parents were never informed that radioactive elements were involved in the tests.
“In the name of science, members of the club would eat cereal mixed with radioactive milk for breakfast or digest a series of iron supplements that gave them the radiation-equivalent of at least 50 chest X-rays. From 1946 to 1956, scores of retarded teen-agers consumed radioactive food to help the researchers better understand the human digestive process.”
“There is absolutely no ground for caution regarding the quantities of radioactive substances which we would use in our experiments,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology biochemist Robert S. Harris assured Fernald’s superintendent in a letter proposing the research in December 1945. At least some consent forms sent home to parents or guardians do not mention radiation.”
“Based on figures in an unpublished report on the project, the children’s spleens were exposed to between 544 and 1,024 millirems of radiation over the course of seven meals. By comparison, the typical American receives about 300 millirems of radiation from natural sources each year.”
“The experiments at the Fernald School, which almost certainly would not be permitted today, are one of the darker corners of Massachusetts’ atomic legacy. Along with pioneering the field of nuclear medicine, some of the state’s leading academic institutions and hospitals also subjected the terminally ill, the elderly and others to radiation doses that are considered unsafe today, often with no possible benefit to the test subjects.”
Though never secret — researchers published the results of the Fernald studies in scholarly journals — details of the research effort, funded partly by Quaker Oats Co. and the US Atomic Energy Commission, have sat in a jumble of boxes in the Fernald School library until now.
Let’s Back Up A Sec And Ask Why Free Speech Actually Matters
The Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is still going on and has only gotten more vitriolic and intense. Claims that Spotify must walk away from its $200 million contract with the world’s most popular podcaster for promoting vaccine misinformation have sparked a lot of debates about freedom of speech, online censorship, what exactly those terms mean, and whether they can be correctly applied to the practice of Silicon Valley deplatforming.
When confronted with accusations of quashing free speech and promoting censorship, those who support online deplatforming in this or that situation will often respond with lines like “It’s not censorship, it’s just a private company enforcing its terms of service,” or “Nobody is obligated to give you a platform,” or “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach,” or by posting the famous XKCD comic which says “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.”
And of course it’s true that nobody is legally guaranteed the right to speak on an independent online platform. But even if we ignore the fact that this censorship behavior is not being driven solely by the wishes of independent corporations and is in fact happening in increasingly close coordination with the US government whose officials openly threaten Silicon Valley platforms with repercussions if they don’t regulate speech, the fact that it is technically legal for those companies to silence voices they don’t like is not a sound argument. It doesn’t prove that censorship isn’t happening or that the deplatforming is okay, it just proves that it is technically legal for those giant monopolistic platforms to do those things. A casual glance at history shows that plenty of terrible things have been done which were perfectly legal at the time.
To really answer the question of whether the increasingly widespread practice of Silicon Valley censorship via algorithm and deplatforming is a major problem and whether an increase in speech restriction is desirable, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves why free speech even matters in the first place. Why is it something that’s written into constitutions and upheld as sacrosanct in so many nations? Why is it a value we’re told has supreme importance all our lives?
Fake News: Spotify Hasn’t Lost $2 Billion Because Of Neil Young
A slew of reports claiming that Spotify has had $2 billion wiped off its market value because of the actions of Neil Young and others in opposing Joe Rogan’s content on the platform are fake news.
Variety and others ran headlines over the weekend like “Spotify Lost More Than $2 Billion in Market Value After Neil Young Pulled His Music Over Joe Rogan’s Podcast.”
As pointed out by many on social media, however, the drop in value of Spotify stock is part of a longer downward trend that started before Neil Young uttered a word about Rogan.
Indeed, Spotify’s stock has actually increased in value since the Neil Young driven backlash.
Things they won’t teach…
Police Chief Gets No Jail, Allowed to Retire, Gets $72k in Benefits After Guilty Plea in Sex Assault Case
Marshfield, WI — In January of last year, Marshfield Police Chief Rick Gramza was arrested and charged with three counts of misconduct in office, disorderly conduct, and fourth-degree sexual assault against a department employee. However, instead of facing a jury of his peers for these accusations, Gramza received tens of thousands of dollars, months of paid vacation, and no jail time.
Last month, Gramza was given a sweetheart plea deal and all of the above charges were reduced to two disorderly conduct charges — on both of which he was immediately found guilty. After paying a measly $661 fine, Gramza will be free and clear.
According to reports, the former chief Gramza is accused of sexually assaulting a department employee on several occasions, as early as 2014 and as late as this past summer.
WSAW reports the Eau Claire detective sergeant investigating the case shared some specific instances the employee told him, including one in 2015, where she says she went into his office to talk about a promotion and then he sexually assaulted her.
Diversity Training Tells Teachers That Kids Aren’t ‘Racially Innocent’
A number of teachers in the UK have been told that children as young as seven years old are not ‘racially innocent’ during mandatory diversity training.
During classes described as “Racial Literacy 101” sessions, a number of UK-based teachers have been told that kids as young as seven should not be thought of as “racially innocent”.
Brighton and Hove City Council — which has since been accused of “indoctrinating” children — has said that the classes are “required for all staff” in schools.
According to an exposé by The Telegraph, 300 teachers have undertaken the training so far, which will supposedly inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for school kids.
In documents seen by the publication, the course includes reference to “covert white supremacy” — which is partially defined during the course as denying white privilege — and also claims that young children are often seen as “racially innocent” despite supposed “ample evidence” showing that this is not the case.
“Between the ages of three and five, children learn to attach value to skin colour; white at the top of the hierarchy and black at the bottom,” The Telegraph reports one of the course documents as claiming.
The UK paper also reports that the consultant giving the session described Christianity as influencing the slave trade, and that they claimed that society obsesses over the muscle size of black sportsmen, but not those of their white rivals.
Also noted is that the city council is advertising a “race adviser” job with an advertised salary of £50,000 to £55,000 pro rata for two and a half days a week.
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