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The First Thing Sold On The Internet Was A Bag Of Weed

Several researchers have pointed to a drug deal that took place in 1971 or 1972 as the first online transaction made on the internet. As the legend goes, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, used the network to sell some cannabis to other tech students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The historic event was detailed in two books, “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry”, which was released in 2005 by John Markoff, and “The Dark Net,” which was released more recently by Jamie Bartlett.

In “What The Dormouse Said,” Markoff Writes: “In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of mariju**a.“

Bartlett gives a nearly identical description in his book ‘The Dark Net’, which discusses online marketplaces that have made headlines in recent years.

The Silk Road, which launched in 2011, was the first truly anonymous online marketplace, and it quickly became a target for politicians and law enforcement because of the large volume of drugs that were being sold through the site. On the Silk Road, drug users and vendors were able to trade anonymously using Bitcoin, making it one of the first major commerce platforms to adopt the cryptocurrency. The website’s alleged creator, Ross Ulbricht, is currently serving a double life sentence with no possibility of parole for operating the online marketplace.

One important point that was heavily overlooked by the media during the Ulbricht trial was the fact that the Silk Road actually made the world a safer place by undermining prohibition. Even though drugs are illegal, large numbers of people still use them on a regular basis and these people are often put in dangerous situations because of these prohibitions.

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Free Speech Activist Attacked in SF Now Faces Same Censorship He Was Rallying Against.

Anderson says he got banned from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in quick succession on Sunday night with little to no explanation after being vocal online about the attack he suffered at the hands of an Antifa activist, who knocked out his teeth.

He says it began with a notice on Sunday that his Facebook had been banned for 30 days. A screenshot of the notice provided to Human Events cites posts advertising the event that “didn’t follow [Facebook’s] community standards” against “dangerous individuals and organizations.”

But “an hour later,” Anderson says his Facebook was shut down completely.

Anderson showed Human Events evidence of at least one instance where a tweet of his, including a video of the assault, was shared to a Facebook account and flagged by Facebook as “False information” that had been “checked by independent fact-checkers.”

“I’m like you’re saying it’s false information that a man hit me in the face and my teeth came out my mouth like are you serious right now?” Anderson said.

“Instagram literally just banned me because the shadow ban wasn’t working anymore after Antifa knocked my teeth out yesterday and everyone was coming to follow me and look at my posts,” Anderson wrote on Twitter Sunday night “Instagram & Facebook are against our right to Free Speech and peaceful protest.”

His Twitter account was suspended shortly afterward.

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We Cracked the Redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition

On Thursday morning, a federal court released a 2016 deposition given by Ghislaine Maxwell, the 58-year-old British woman charged by the federal government with enticing underage girls to have sex with Jeffrey Epstein. That deposition, which Maxwell has fought to withhold, was given as part of a defamation suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who alleges that she was lured to become Epstein’s sex slave. That defamation suit was settled in 2017. Epstein died by suicide in 2019.

In the deposition, Maxwell was pressed to answer questions about the many famous men in Epstein’s orbit, among them Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew. In the document that was released on Thursday, those names and others appear under black bars. According to the Miami Herald, which sued for this and other documents to be released, the deposition was released only after “days of wrangling over redactions.”

It turns out, though, that those redactions are possible to crack. That’s because the deposition—which you can read in full here—includes a complete alphabetized index of the redacted and unredacted words that appear in the document. For example, after cracking the redactions, we know that Maxwell was asked about an email that Dershowitz allegedly sent to Epstein. In that email, Dershowitz reportedly wrote that he was “working on several possible articles about unfairness in the legal process that allows false charges to be inserted into legal documents.”

Here’s how to deduce the redacted words, using former President Bill Clinton as an example.

You can see in the index that a word that falls alphabetically between clients and clock appears on quite a number of pages. From this, we know that the word starts with the letters CL.

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New CDC Numbers Show Lockdown’s Deadly Toll On Young People

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed Wednesday that young adults aged 25-44 years saw the largest increase in “excess” deaths from previous years, a stunning 26.5% jump. 

The notable increase even surpassed the jump in excess deaths of older Americans, who are at much higher risk of COVID-19 fatality.

Moreover, according to the CDC, 100,947 excess deaths were not linked to COVID-19 at all.

Since such young people are at very low risk for COVID-19 fatality—20-49-year-olds have a 99.98% chance of surviving the virus, per CDC data—it has been suggested that the shocking increase in deaths is largely attributable to deaths of “despair,” or deaths linked to our “cure” for the disease: lockdown measures.

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, one of the most vocal and earliest proponents of lockdown measures, admitted this much during a Wednesday news appearance.

“I would suspect that a good portion of the deaths in that younger cohort were deaths due to despair, due to other reasons,” admitted Gottlieb (see video below). “We’ve seen a spike in overdoses, and I would suspect that a good portion of those excess deaths in that younger cohort were from drug overdoses and other deaths that were triggered by some of the implications of we’ve gone through to try to deal with COVID-19.”

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NPR: We’re Not Covering Biden Laptop Scandal Because It’s ‘Not Really’ A Story, ‘Pure Distractions’

Taxpayer-funded NPR announced Thursday on Twitter that it is not covering the Hunter Biden laptop scandal because it’s not really a story, which prompted widespread backlash online.

“Why haven’t you seen any stories from NPR about the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story?” NPR wrote on Twitter.

NPR then answered the question, writing: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Almost instantly, the tweet sparked accusations of bias, which comes after one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners said in a statement on Thursday that Hunter Biden allegedly asked his father, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, to “sign-off” on his business deals. The statement contradicts Joe Biden’s public statements that he never spoke to his son about his son’s overseas business dealings.

Top political and media figures responded immediately to the tweet, expressing shock and disgust.

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Don’t Be Fooled By Our Media Wars: Everybody Hates Free Speech

As America’s acid bath of a presidential campaign boils to a merciful close, the political clamor is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a shouting match about, over, and against the media. Twitter is still blocking the New York Post‘s main account a week after the tabloid’s controversial article on Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption. President Donald Trump has been waging preemptive war against upcoming debate moderator Kristin Welker and 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. Sacha Baron Cohen, in a Borat sequel that ends with a plea for viewers to vote, just tried to honey-pot Rudy Giuliani.

The partisan lopsidedness to this debate, between attempted authoritarian and “enemy of the people,” can give off the misleading impression that the divide over free speech and its applications is a clean philosophical schism, with conservatives on one side, progressives and most journalists on the other. In fact it is not.

The fight over media is more a fight over power, and who gets to wield it, than a fight over principle, and how it should be applied. Trump and Joe Biden both want to roll back the speech protections in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act; the difference is that the president would do it in the name of protecting conservatives and the former vice president would do it in the name of restricting conservative misinformation. Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) agree that Facebook and Twitter are guilty of “election interference”; it just depends on which election. Google faces antitrust enthusiasm from House Democrats and Bill Barr’s Justice Department alike. (This morning, on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria, Donald Trump, Jr., asserted that this election would be a referendum on the First Amendment, because only his father could be trusted with following through on his promise to break up Big Tech, because Democrats who talk a big game are actually in bed with their censorious Silicon Valley overlords.)

The more politics (and its worst form, war) subsumes life, the more free speech is treated as a means to an end rather than as a magnificent if always-threatened achievement of the Enlightenment. It is no accident that the bipartisan clampdown on speech in the governmental realm is coinciding in the intellectual realm with a noisy right-left rethink of the Enlightenment itself.

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