Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Robotic Censorship

Protected F​rom S​peech: 

​Ilargi @ Automatic Earth:

This morning I woke up, looked around me, and saw a world sinking into a quagmire of voluntary censorship, a world willing to let someone far away choose what it can and cannot see of itself, and about itself. A world that no longer appears to recognize, or care, that this goes directly against its founding principles of liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
I can think of many reasons why someone would want to ban Infowars and Alex Jones, and I don’t even know them other than from incidental tweets and comments. But I also acknowledge that that is not the point. Just because you would like to ban a person or organization, just because you don’t agree with them, doesn’t mean you can, or should be able to.
And if Facebook, Google, Apple, Spotify and Pinterest -all within hours of each other-, think it’s a good idea to ban Jones regardless, they had better do a lot better than saying something about violating their ‘community standards’. They should identify specific instances where these alleged violations take place, and identify them publicly.
​..​
What is most important here is not who Alex Jones is, or what he’s done and said. What’s most important is that he stands up for Julian Assange as the media, across the board, is either silent or actively smearing Assange with impunity. So for once, go to Infowars and sign the petition to Trump to Free Assange.. If anyone can get through to Trump, it’s Alex Jones, and they’re trying to prevent him from doing just that.https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2018/08/assange-infowars-and-the-constitution/

More twitter accounts are unplugged for "violating algorithms", including the director of the Ron Paul Institute. Libertarians are the new entitled-white-men to be shunned by the social media cartel.

America's Kristallnacht? 
We’ll never know what “average” Germans thought on November 11, 1938, the day after Kristallnacht. Perhaps a few recognized it for what it was: a turning point, an acceleration of Germany’s descent into hell. America’s Crystal Night looms, and if it occurs, only a few will recognize it for what it is.
The fate of Julian Assange is the fate of one man, but it is also the fate of one of our most important freedoms. There won’t be shattered plate glass from vandalized businesses littering the streets, synagogues smashed, graves unearthed, or people herded onto trains. But his prosecution by the US government would destroy an inestimable value, one enshrined in the First Amendment, for which generations of Americans have fought and died: the right of the people and its press to inform the people and to hold their government to account.

Pompeo argued that “we have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.” This is straight from Orwell: you are free to say what you want, as long as you don’t say anything against the government. He claimed that WikiLeaks “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” and, “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.”

Amid desperate attempts by the neocons and their media lapdogs to disparage President Trump's agreements with North Korea's leader, claiming Kim is violating the terms, 38North has confirmed that not only is progress being made on dismantling its nuclear missile launch facilities, but "activity at the launch pad appears to go beyond that commitment."...   Commercial satellite imagery from August 3 indicates additional dismantlement activities are ongoing at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station since last observed. At the vertical engine test stand, used for testing and development of engines for ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles, the North Koreans have continued to tear down the steel base structure and appear to be removing fuel and oxidizer tanks from dismantled bunkers...    While dismantlement of the vertical engine test stand represents a fulfillment of Chairman Kim’s agreement with President Trump conveyed publicly during the post-Singapore Summit press conference, activity at the launch pad appears to go beyond that commitment. These activities, however, must be viewed cautiously as “first steps” since neither are presently permanent or irreversible. The demolition of the test stand’s concrete foundations, launch pad’s gantry tower, pad foundation and exhaust deflector, etc., would represent more permanent and irreversible actions as there is no known facility with equivalent capabilities elsewhere in the country. The coming months should provide more firm indications whether these are indeed the “first steps” in reducing the North Korean ballistic missile threat.

​Look, the price of gold appears to be relatively fixed in  Chinese Yuan/Renmenbi, not dollars. (What say ye, Masters of the Universe?)

Chris Smaje, from Small Farm Future, starts to look at the forms of social order which characterize stable agrarian societies. They tend to be role-based, rather than rule based, which is more energy efficient. What are the roles, and how have they played out in Europe, Japan, India and China? This is just a https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-08-08/the-transition-from-capitalism-to-feudalism/start. (We are going into a future with less total energy to spend on all aspects of existence, especially bureaucracy.)

​Untouchable​

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