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How Non-Existent Cancel Culture Works at Princeton and Elsewhere

Last week in Quillette, a Princeton Classics professor, Joshua T. Katz, published an article criticizing a letter signed by some of his institution’s professors “to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations.” The faculty letter insisted that “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America” and that it was “rampant” even at progressive institutions such as the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey. The letter articulated a long list of demands regarding the recruitment and retention of people of color as faculty members and students and even called for the creation of

a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

In the Quillette article, Katz agreed with some of the letter’s action items but said that the above “scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous.” On its face, the call to investigate and discipline research and publications of other faculty is a complete refutation of academic freedom.

But of course, “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, right? So there’s no problem here, only the disenfranchised faculty of an Ivy League institution finally getting to join a conversation from which they’d been excluded. As Nesrine Malik puts it in The Guardian, “what is really unfolding here is a cohort of established influencers grappling with the fact they are losing control over how their work is received.”

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Coronavirus and Regime Change: Burundi’s Covid Coup

While the people of the western world occupy themselves wearing masks, pointing fingers and using so much hand sanitizer it literally kills them, the big world of Geo-Politics still ticks along, following the same tired old patterns with only slight variations in method. A modern twist, if you will.

Here’s a little summary of Burundi’s recent history:

  • The president of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, dismissed covid19 as nonsense.
  • The president of Burundi was vilified in the Western press.
  • The president of Burundi expelled the World Health Organization from his country.
  • The president of Burundi died suddenly of a “heart attack”.
  • The NEW president of Burundi immediately reversed his predecessor’s Covid19 policies.

And now for the long version…

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Former Cop Furnishes Secret Recording from Legendary Pascagoula UFO Event

An intriguing piece of evidence from the legendary Pascagoula UFO event has recently come into the hands of one of the two men at the center of the iconic alien abduction case. In October of 1973, Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson witnessed an unidentified flying object while they were fishing at Mississippi’s Pascagoula River and, they claimed, were subsequently taken aboard the craft against their will. Upon their return, the duo reported the incident to the local police station and, unbeknownst to them, were recorded at one point privately talking about their experience.

The earnest nature of that conversation has long been cited as an indication that, at the very least, the two men were not making up their story and, quite possibly, that they really were abducted by visitors from another world. Now, in a tantalizing turn of events, Calvin Parker has reportedly come into possession of a longer recording from the police station that evening which he never knew existed. He reportedly received the tape from a former officer of the Pascagoula Police Department who managed to hold on to a copy for all these years and decided to give it to him after they had been corresponding about the case online.

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Kamala Harris’ Wikipedia page scrubbed of information amid veepstakes, igniting online fight

An online battle has erupted over the Wikipedia page for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., with a significant uptick in edits that reflects a pattern that’s been seen ahead of past vice-presidential announcements and led Wikipedia to put the page under “discretionary sanctions.”

The trend was first reported last week by The Intercept. According to the revision history of the Harris article on Wikipedia, there have been 500 revisions to the page since May 9, most of which have been made by one highly prolific editor.

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THE MICROSOFT POLICE STATE: MASS SURVEILLANCE, FACIAL RECOGNITION, AND THE AZURE CLOUD

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS AGAINST racist policing have brought new scrutiny onto big tech companies like Facebook, which is under boycott by advertisers over hate speech directed at people of color, and Amazon, called out for aiding police surveillance. But Microsoft, which has largely escaped criticism, is knee-deep in services for law enforcement, fostering an ecosystem of companies that provide police with software using Microsoft’s cloud and other platforms. The full story of these ties highlights how the tech sector is increasingly entangled in intimate, ongoing relationships with police departments.

Microsoft’s links to law enforcement agencies have been obscured by the company, whose public response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd has focused on facial recognition software. This misdirects attention away from Microsoft’s own mass surveillance platform for cops, the Domain Awareness System, built for the New York Police Department and later expanded to Atlanta, Brazil, and Singapore. It also obscures that Microsoft has partnered with scores of police surveillance vendors who run their products on a “Government Cloud” supplied by the company’s Azure division and that it is pushing platforms to wire police field operations, including drones, robots, and other devices.

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Study Links Nike, Adidas And Apple To Forced Uighur Labor

Nike, Adidas, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are among 83 multinationals that have been linked to forced labor by Uighurs in factories across China, according to a new study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). According to the researchers, Uighurs, a persecuted ethnic minority from China’s western Xinjiang region, have been funneled to work in factories in other provinces under conditions “that strongly suggest forced labour.”

The report estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred to work in factories across China between 2017 and 2019. The period coincides with China’s campaign of mass internment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, which the government says is needed to root out terrorism and separatism. Some Uighurs have allegedly been placed in these factories straight from the internment camps in Xinjiang, where experts estimate more than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities are being held.

Although journalists have in the past linked Western companies to forced Uighur labor, this is the first time the problem is made apparent on such a large scale, enveloping factories and supply chains across the country. The 83 foreign and Chinese companies that ASPI has identified as directly or indirectly benefiting from the potentially abusive transfer programs for Uighurs include clothing brands such as Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger and Uniqlo; carmakers such as BMW, General Motors, Jaguar and Mercedes Benz; and tech giants such as Apple, Google, Huawei and Microsoft. 

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The Media’s Deafening Silence on Mike Bloomberg’s Ties to Epstein and Other Criminals

After his late jump into the Democratic primary and, as critics argue, purchasing his way into the primary debates, former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg has received mixed coverage from corporate media, with many negative critiques of the current presidential contender’s history, conduct and connections.

Yet, despite efforts by other campaigns and more progressive-leaning media outlets to dampen Bloomberg’s chances at the nomination, one clear weakness of Bloomberg’s has thus far evaded meaningful media coverage: his ties to key players in the Epstein scandal, including Leslie Wexner, Ghislaine Maxwell and even Jeffrey Epstein himself.

Silence among outlets that largely oppose Bloomberg’s candidacy regarding his connections to Epstein and those in his close social orbit is odd, especially when reporting on an individual’s connections to the intelligence-linked pedophile are a sure-fire way to generate considerable negative attention and fodder for rival campaigns. This is particularly striking given that the numerous accusations that Bloomberg has long stoked a toxic culture of sexual harassment at his company, resulting in no small number of non-disclosure agreements over the years, have received some media attention. Yet, the fact that many of Bloomberg’s close friends have been accused of far, far worse has received hardly any coverage by comparison.

For instance, when it was announced last week that the controlling stake in the Leslie Wexner-owned lingerie company Victoria’s Secret would be sold to a private equity firm called Sycamore Partners, only one media outlet — The Intercept — revealed that Bloomberg has at least $136 million of his money in that firm. The Intercept noted in passing that Wexner — the source of most of Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed fortune, his close collaborator for decades and alleged rapist of many of his victims — had been pressured to step down following the scandal, which also hit Wexner-owned companies hard and had forced the Ohio-based billionaire to seek a buyer for his lingerie brand and its tarnished reputation. Yet, the outlet did not make the direct connection that Sycamore Partners-backer Bloomberg is a friend of Wexner’s and has attended Wexner’s personal social parties for years prior to the most recent scandal.

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