Blog

Hillary Clinton: “lack of gatekeepers” and “misinformation” online is clouding Biden’s accomplishments

Former Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are not appreciating Biden’s accomplishments due to the spread of misinformation online.

The former secretary of state joined the growing list of Democrats who have said Americans are not fully understanding the issues affecting their daily lives.

Clinton made the comments in an interview on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

Clinton added that the US lacks “gatekeepers” and “people with a historic perspective” who can help Americans understand what is currently happening in the country.

Keep reading

The Metaverse Is A Scam: We’re Being Herded Into The Matrix

How do they get our souls?

Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The [soul], exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most en and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.

The passage is from Whitley Strieber’s “The Key”, a purportedly true account as related by Streiber of an encounter with a mysterious humanoid being who simply knocked on the door of his Toronto hotel room at 3am on June 6, 1998, entered his suite and told him about mankind’s place in the cosmos and his inescapable fate.

Strieber’s account may be a synthesis: partly “true” (in that he believes it occurred as he relates it), part visioning, part somnambulistic dream state. Whatever emanates from the mind of Whitley Strieber, it originates from some realm outside of our Cartesian,  materialist notion of consensus reality.

He reminds me of that other prophetic visionary of yesteryear: Rudolf Steiner, whom as I wrote previously, spent much of his life in a hypnogognic state, possibly without even realizing it.

Steiner and Strieber. Odd that. They are both talking about the same thing. The idea that the souls of humanity could be captured in a technological machine, where they would wander forever, believing they have omniscience, even Godhood.

“At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended  beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology”.
— Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering @ Google and author of The Singularity is Near.

Steiner called it The Eighth Sphere and warned that sometime in the late 20th century, Arhiman would incarnate in the west and drive a global process of harvesting human souls into it. The zeitgeist of radical material reductionism would dampen, deaden and dumb down humanity to its coarsest, most basic layers: meat. Our minds, what we think is our own consciousness, our souls, self-awareness even our freewill, it’s all just an illusion. Our experts say. It’s just something that happens when our brains gas off certain neurochemicals.

However…

We can take that illusion, what we call our consciousness, and pretty soon now (just as soon as The Singularity happens), we’ll be able to upload that illusion “into the cloud”, into The Metaverse and we’ll be able to experience anything we want, for as long as we want, forever.

Keep reading

Build Back Better’s climate pork will benefit the rich — but not the environment

The irony of the Build Back Better bill passed in the House with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s brute force last week is that it is called a “reconciliation” bill, since it attempts to straddle so many irreconcilable differences in the Democratic Party.

The whole mess now moves to the Senate, where two things are certain: The final bill, if it passes at all, will be drastically different from the House bill; and the final bill will contain hundreds of billions for “climate-change action” and “clean energy” because this (along with racism) is the central mania of the Democratic Party today.

Aside from the huge price tag, will the climate and energy features add up to a serious and coherent policy? If the House bill is any indication, the answer is a resounding “No.”

The headline is that Build Back Better includes more than $500 billion for climate and clean-energy measures, but keep in mind that the already-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill included $150 billion for clean-energy baubles such as electric-vehicle chargers ($7.5 billion) and electric school buses ($5 billion), so the grand total of both bills would be about $650 billion.

What are we actually getting for that eye-popping sum?

Some of the infrastructure bill targets worthy improvements, such as $65 billion for upgrading our creaky electricity grid and $50 billion for “climate resilience,” which includes common-sense steps such as building more robust defenses against flooding and better managing national forests to reduce wildfire risk.

The bulk of the Build Back Better bill, on the other hand, consists of large tax credits and subsidies for special interests with marginal benefits — and, incredibly, still more tax breaks for the affluent on top of the reinstatement of the state and local tax deduction that will deliver more than 90 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of income earners.

Keep reading

How China Managed to Wipe Out All Mentions of Its Most Explosive #MeToo Case

Hours after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former Communist Party official of sexual assault in a shocking online post, Eric Liu witnessed one of the most intensive censorship campaigns carried out before his eyes. 

The process looked familiar to Liu, who worked as a content censor at Weibo, the microblogging site where Peng described how former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before the two entered into an on-and-off affair. But the scale was unprecedented, the 34-year-old said, due to the shocking nature of Peng’s story, the sheer number of people on social media, and the Communist leadership’s growing desire to keep public opinion under control.

“It is an extremely grand-scale campaign,” said Liu, who quit the company in 2013 and is now tracking Chinese censorship for China Digital Times from the United States. “There is nothing that could be compared to this. Although more serious political events have taken place in the past, the internet censorship was not that strict. I would expect them to use their full capacity to carry this out.” 

The Communist Party leadership regards any scandal involving its core members as a threat to its rule. Since Peng’s post came out, Beijing has sought to wipe it out from the country’s history by banning media coverage, requiring around-the-clock human efforts from social media companies, and, through a system of punishments, coaxing citizens into self-censorship. It has demonstrated the country’s ability to keep its cyberspace insular even as the case was making international headlines every day. 

The goal is to make Peng’s accusations taboo, just like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, so even those who have read the post would avoid talking about it, letting the incident recede from memory and lose its significance as China’s biggest #MeToo case.

Keep reading

California’s new educational guidelines say math is racist

California is set to adopt new math teaching principles that are based in critical race theory. These changes, which include deemphasizing calculus and pulling programs for academically gifted students, will “apply social justice principles to math lessons.”

These guidelines do not instruct educators to teach critical race theory, but rather use critical race theory as a guide for the formation of teaching principles. Critical race theory is not being taught to students, but taught to teachers, who are then meant to use it to formulate their own practices.

The goal of the new math framework is “to maintain rigor while also helping remedy California’s achievement gaps” for black, Latino, and poor students. the reason for the changes is that California students are falling behind in math.

“We were transforming math education, and change is hard and scary,” Rebecca Pariso, a math teacher at Hueneme Elementary School District told the San Francisco Standard. “Especially if you don’t understand why that change needs to occur. But I didn’t expect it to go this far.” The inspiration for these new guidelines came from San Francisco educational standards.

In the new guidelines, which will up for consideration prior to their potential adoption in July, reading in Chapter 2, “Teaching for Equity and Engagement,” reads that “Cultural relevance is important for learning and also for expanding a collective sense of what mathematical communities look and sound like to reflect California’s diverse history.”

Keep reading

Nearly 3/4 of the World’s Dictators Receive US Weapons and Military Assistance

The US supports nearly 75% of the world’s dictators, autocracies, monarchies, military regimes, etc., with weapons, military training and money. Please remember this the next time someone tells you the US should do X or Y because such and such a nation is bad…

Comparing Freedom House’s list of Not Free nations* to FY 2020 US overseas weapons sales, military training and financial assistance**, we find that of the 57 nations considered undemocratic, 42 receive weapons, training and/or money for their military and security services. This means 74% of the non-democratic nations of the world are supported militarily by the US. Interestingly, the remaining 15 nations are nearly all sanctioned. The world’s countries can be divided into two parts: those who buy/receive weapons from the US and those sanctioned. It seems like it’s a pretty simple arrangement.

74% is a slight increase from four years ago when Rich Whitney at Truthout utilized the Freedom House list and compared it to FY 2015 military assistance data. It is likely no surprise to anyone that US support for non-democratic governments increased under President Trump, but, to be fair, it was a minor increase. The hypocrisy and dissonance between stated US support for democracy, liberty and freedom, and how the US government conducts itself exists whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.

The list of nations is below. I have listed occupied territories with the nations that are occupying them; so, Gaza and West Bank are under Israel, Western Sahara is under Morocco, Tibet is under China, and Donbas and Crimea are under Russia. Also, please note, this list only includes nations not considered democracies. Nations that are listed as partly free or free by Freedom House, but are clear and gross violators of human rights, and that are recipients of US weapons, military training and military assistance funding, like Columbia, Honduras, India, Pakistan, Philippines, and Ukraine are not included.

Keep reading

“It Would Be Crazy” To Kill Myself: Newly Released Federal Bureau Of Prisons Records Reveal That Jeffery Epstein was “Future-Oriented and Psychologically Stable” Before He Allegedly Committed Suicide In His Cell

Newly released Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) records that were obtained by the New York Times revealed how child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein had repeatedly denied suicidality and had been deemed “cooperative,” “future-oriented,” “goal-directed,” and “psychologically stable” by medical staff in the days leading up to his timely demise alleged suicide.

According to the over 2,000 BOP documents, which included extensive and detailed psychological examination records, Epstein “adamantly” told prison psychologists that he had “no interest in killing himself,” even adding that he “would not do that” to himself anyway because he is a “coward” who is afraid of pain.

Epstein even told one psychologist that he has “lots to do for [his] legal case” and how “being alive is fun,” adding that “it would be crazy” to take his own life because he “has a wonderful life.”

Keep reading

Leaked Documents Show Apple’s Attempts to Silence Whistleblowers

Tech giant Apple previously told the SEC that it does not attempt to silence employees in relation to workplace harassment or discrimination, but a whistleblower’s nondisclosure agreement is bringing new scrutiny to this claim.

Business Insider reports that on October 18, tech giant Apple made a number of statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) including claims that the company does not attempt to silence former employees or whistleblowers in relation to the company’s working conditions.

Now, a new nondisclosure agreement given to a company whistleblower is bringing greater scrutiny to these claims. Apple’s lawyers reportedly wanted former engineer Cher Scarlett to state only the following words upon her departure from the company: “After 18 months at Apple, I’ve decided it is time to move on and pursue other opportunities.”

This language was included in an extremely strict nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreement as part of a separation agreement that Apple offered Scarlett last month. Scarlett, who spent months working to improve pay equity at Apple allegedly resulting in harassment and intimidation from the company, said that when she received the nondisclosure agreement she was “shocked.”

She added: “In my mind, I should be able to say whatever I want as long as I’m not defaming Apple.” Scarlett refused to sign the gag order but was reminded of the agreement upon seeing Apple’s statements to the SEC.

Apple claimed that when it comes to NDAs “in the context of harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful acts,” its “policy is to not use such clauses.” Scarlett filed a whistleblower complaint with the SEC on October 25 in which she claims Apple made “false statements or misleading statements” to the SEC.

Keep reading

WHO Says It’s Time to Discuss Mandatory COVID Vaccinations

The World Health Organisation has suggested it is time for countries to have a conversation about mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, saying: “It’s a healthy debate to have.”

Robb Butler, executive director for WHO Europe, told Kay Burley on Sky News: “Mandatory vaccination can, but doesn’t always increase uptake.”

However, he suggested countries – and individuals – should now be thinking about the issue.

He added: “There are lessons of history here where mandates have come at the expense of trust, social inclusion. So it is very delicate, but we believe it is time to have that conversation, from an individual and population-based perspective.”

Cases are rising again in much of Europe – sharply in the case of countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, with the latter going back into a full lockdown as a result.

Keep reading