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The Citizen’s Starter Kit to the top 50 Organisations in the Global Censorship Cartel

“The Top 50 List” is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex (“CIC”).” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organisation type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons.

A democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead a “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary.”

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Following Disastrous War On Terror, US Vets Try To Stop Students From Joining Up

March 20 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties putting the number at over 1 million. More than 4,600 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during and after the invasion, and thousands more have died by suicide.

[Related, How Team Bush Escaped Justice Over Iraq and IRAQ 20 YEARS: Joe Lauria — Covering the ‘Vial Display’]

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to slightly cut back on its ranks, but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push.

Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.

We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up.

“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.

“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans.

“They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”

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Facebook Felt “Pressure” From “Outraged” Biden White House To Remove Posts

Calling somebody a member of the “Disinformation Dozen” – there’s a nasty piece of propaganda work, trying to discredit political opponents in a time of crisis.

Worse still, it wasn’t happening out in the open, on actual social networks, but behind the curtains of government/Big Tech collusion.

And now – with the new US election looming large already – it’s probably prudent, if your party/political affiliation was on “the wrong” end of the stick the last time, to try to fight against this repeating “early, and often.”

The term “Disinformation Dozen” refers to a (conspiracy, to all effects) theory that there were only 12 people in the world (… right?) who were behind Covid vaccine criticism back in 2021.

And what a difference, strictly scientifically speaking, two years make…

But now, it’s time to face the “political piper,” as it were. Documents have emerged to show that Facebook at the time played along with the “Disinformation Dozen” game related not only to original posts – but also memes – and went to the significant no doubt trouble of changing its entire policy to suit the narrative rendered under pressure from Biden’s Surgeon General.

But as always, eventually, what does a Big Tech giant do? Appease the “permanent power center” supported or not by some current White House.

And so, we are now learning that Meta wasn’t thrilled about it – but “felt” it had to play along and acquiesce to government pressure.

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Officials bust illegal lab containing 20 infectious agents, hundreds of lab mice

Local and federal authorities have shut down what seems to be an illegal medical lab hidden in a California warehouse that contained nearly 1,000 laboratory mice, hundreds of unknown chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, vials of biohazardous materials, including blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus.

According to NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno, local authorities were first tipped off to the unlicensed facility when a local code enforcement officer noticed that a garden hose was illegally attached to the back of the building. That led city officials to obtain a search warrant to inspect the warehouse, which was supposed to only be used for storage.

According to court documents obtained by NBC News, city officials inspected the warehouse, located in Reedley, southeast of Fresno, on March 3. County health officials then inspected the facility on March 16. What they found reportedly shocked them.

“This is an unusual situation. I’ve been in government for 25 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba told KSEE.

There were rooms with “vessels of liquid and various apparatus,” court documents said. ” “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.” There was also a room full of mice.

According to the court documents, the mice were kept in inhumane conditions. More than 175 were found dead, and the city took possession of the remaining animals in April and euthanized 773. Substances collected from the lab were given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing. The agency detected at least 20 potentially infectious agents, the documents read.

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Biden admin withholding key funding for schools with hunting, archery programs

The Biden administration is blocking key federal funding earmarked under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 for schools with hunting and archery programs.

According to federal guidance circulated among hunting education groups and shared with Fox News Digital, the Department of Education determined that, under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) passed last year, school hunting and archery classes are precluded from receiving federal funding. The interpretation could impact millions of American children enrolled in such programs.

“It’s a negative for children. As a former educator of 30-plus years, I was always trying to find a way to engage students,” Tommy Floyd, the president of the National Archery in the Schools Program, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “In many communities, it’s a shooting sport, and the skills from shooting sports, that help young people grow to be responsible adults. They also benefit from relationships with role models.”

“You’ve got every fish and wildlife agency out there working so hard to utilize every scrap of funding, not only for the safety and hunter education, but for the general understanding of why stewardship is so important when it comes to natural resources,” he continued. “Any guidance where it’s even considered a ‘maybe’ or a prohibition for shooting sports is a huge negative.”

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A SWAT Team Destroyed an Innocent Man’s Shop. Then the City Left Him With the Bill.

It took Carlos Pena decades to build his local business after immigrating to North Hollywood, California, from El Salvador. It only took a few hours to destroy it.

While Pena is the one who created NoHo Printing & Graphics, where he fashioned commercial signs and banners, T-shirts, headshots, and other products, he is not the one who did the damage, despite the fact that he has been left with the bill and without a livelihood.

In early August of last year, after a fugitive violently thrust Pena from his shop and barricaded himself inside, a SWAT team from the City of Los Angeles fired more than 30 rounds of tear gas canisters over the course of 13 hours. When the government entered the building, the officers found their target had escaped. Left inside was a shop that was a shell of itself, with Pena’s inventory ruined and the bulk of his equipment unusable.

Pena didn’t fault the city for attempting to subdue an allegedly dangerous person. But he objected to what came next: The government refused his requests for compensation, strapping him with expenses that exceed $60,000 and a situation that has cost him tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, as he has been resigned to working at a much-reduced capacity out of his garage, according to a lawsuit he filed this month in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

“Apprehending a dangerous fugitive is in the public interest,” the suit notes. “The cost of apprehending such fugitives should be borne by the public, and not by an unlucky and entirely innocent property owner.”

Pena is not the first such property owner to see his life destroyed and be left picking up the pieces. Insurance policies often have disclaimers that they do not cover damage caused by the government. But governments sometimes refuse to pay for such repairs, buttressed by jurisprudence from various federal courts which have ruled that actions taken under “police powers” are not subject to the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

That’s what happened to the Lech family in Greenwood Village, Colorado, after cops destroyed their residence while in pursuit of a suspected shoplifter, unrelated to the family, who forced himself inside their house. The $580,000 home was rendered unlivable and had to be demolished; the government gave them a cool $5,000.

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Majority in fires in Greece were started by ‘human hand’, official says

The majority of the fires which have ravaged Greece in recent weeks were started by “human hand”, one of the country’s top climate officials has said.

Greece’s climate change minister said 667 fires had erupted, as wildfires scorched hundreds of square miles of land outside Athens, on the island of Rhodes, and elsewhere this month.

Vassilis Kikilias told a news conference the vast majority of fires “were caused by human hands” and said they were “arsons either by criminal negligence or by intention”.

It comes as at least nine countries across the Mediterranean have been hit by wildfires, as extreme heat hitting the region has seen temperatures top 40C.

However, officials have also highlighted the role of climate change in the recent extreme heat across many European countries.

Mr Kikilias warned earlier that the climate crisis “brought us this unprecedented heatwave”.

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As witchcraft becomes a multibillion-dollar business, practitioners’ connection to the natural world is changing

Witches, Wiccans and other contemporary Pagans see divinity in trees, streams, plants and animals. Most Pagans view the Earth as the Goddess, with a body that humans must care for, and from which they gain emotional, spiritual and physical sustenance.

Paganism is an umbrella term that includes religions that view their practices as returning to those of pre-Christian societies, in which they believe the Goddess was worshipped along with the gods and the land was seen as sacred. Wicca focuses specifically on the practice of the British Isles.

Witchcraft has also become a multibillion-dollar business. As a sociologist who has been researching this religion for more than 30 years, I have witnessed this growing commercialization: Witch kits are sold by large companies and in stores – something unheard of when I began my research in 1986.

This surge in popularity has changed these communities in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Groups called covens were the norm when I began my research, but as my own research shows, most Pagans now are solitary practitioners. Even while the Goddess continues to be revered, the practitioners’ connection to the natural world, at least for many, is also changing.

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California’s War on Math

“California is America, only sooner” was an optimistic phrase once used to describe my home state. The Golden State promised a spirit of freedom, innovation, and experimentation that would spread across the nation. And at the heart of the state’s flourishing was a four-letter word: math.

Math made California prosper.

It’s most obvious in top universities like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and UCLA. Those schools funneled great minds into California STEM enterprises like Silicon Valley, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aeronautical engineering. Both the Central Valley and Hollywood—America’s main providers of food and fodder, respectively—rely upon engineering to mechanize production and optimize output. 

All of this has made California’s GDP $3.6 trillion—making it the fifth largest economy in the world as of last year.

But now “California is America, only sooner” is a warning, and not just because of the exodus of people and jobs and the decay of our major cities, but because of the state’s abandonment of math—which is to say its abandonment of excellence and, in a way, reality itself. 

Perhaps you’ve read the headlines about kooky San Francisco discarding algebra in the name of anti-racism. Now imagine that worldview adopted by the entire state.

On July 12, that’s what happened when California’s Board of Education, composed of eleven teachers, bureaucrats, professors—and a student—decided to approve the California Mathematics Framework. 

Technically, the CMF is just a series of recommendations. As a practical matter, it’s the new reality. School districts and textbook manufacturers are already adapting to the new standards.

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Feverish BBC Reporting On European ‘Heatwaves’ Debunked By Actual Temperature Readings

Last week’s heatwaves in southern Europe would have been “virtually impossible” without humans altering the climate, reports the BBC, quoting model-produced work rushed to press by World Weather Attribution (WWA). Humans caused the spell of Mediterranean summer heat to be 2.5°C higher, it was said. This latest study confirms what we knew before, says frequent BBC contributor and WWA founder Dr. Friederike Otto. More to the point, last week’s coverage of these heatwaves confirmed what we knew before – the BBC will pull out all the stops to promote weather fear in the cause of the collectivist Net Zero project.

On Tuesday July 18th the BBC reported on its rolling news feed that the island of Sardinia was expected to see a high of 46°C in the afternoon “and there are warnings that extreme heat could continue for a further 10 days”.

Time and Date compiles comprehensive records of past temperatures, an increasingly useful tool for checking up on ‘World on Fire’ fantasists. The graph above shows the temperature in Sardinia peaking at 40°C on July 18th and then steadily falling during the week to the lower 30s.

Also on July 18th the BBC reported that the temperature in Rome could reach 40°C and remain above that level for 15 days. Over to Time and Date again.

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