patrick.net

UkraineIsTotallyFucked says

I do not know why Jason Jones thinks AOC is not playing with a full deck. It does not matter that what AOC said about X changing algorithms to alter the results of the midterms is absurd. That is just a way to force sale of X. Any honest lawyer would say that convicting someone of fraud because they overvalued the worth of properties when applying for a bank loan is also absurd, but look what happened to Trump.

https://notthebee.com/article/new-hate-crime-law-in-canada-would-allow-judges-to-hand-down-life-sentences-for-speech-crimes

There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/progressives-fear-that-without-tiktok-they-wont-be-able-to-convince-kids-to-join-their-weird-sex-cult

A story from 27 February illustrates how bad things have gotten. It involves a 16 year-old girl at the Richard-Wossidlo Gymnasium in Ribnitz-Damgarten (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). She posted an AfD-friendly video featuring blue Smurfs to TikTok, in which she said that Germany was not just a place, but also her home. School officials got wind of the blasphemy and the principal, Jan-Dirk Zimmermann, called the police; subsequently, no less than three officers were dispatched to neutralise this unusual threat to the German democratic order. After first establishing that the girl’s social media posts were totally legal and broke no laws, they took her from her chemistry class and escorted her to a staff room, where they told her to refrain from making such posts in the future, “for her own protection.”

Nice legs you got there, would be a pity if someone broke them...

Patrick says

There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.

Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.

Constitutional amendments for this and for a 15% absolute minimum reserve for commercial banks.

Make Savings Great Again.

AmericanKulak says

Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.

It's called Monetarism. And is bullshit too.

Friedman's greatest flaw.

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/consequences-minus-truth

Momentous events await. This Monday, the Supreme Court will entertain oral arguments on the case Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The integrity of the First Amendment hinges on the decision. Do we have freedom of speech as set forth in the Constitution? Or is it conditional on how government officials feel about some set of circumstances? At issue specifically is the government’s conduct in coercing social media companies to censor opinion in order to suppress so-called “vaccine hesitancy” and to manipulate public debate in the 2020 election. Government lawyers have argued that they were merely “communicating” with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others about “public health disinformation and election conspiracies.”

You can reasonably suppose that this was our government’s effort to disable the truth, especially as it conflicted with its own policy and activities — from supporting BLM riots to enabling election fraud to mandating dubious vaccines. Former employees of the FBI and the CIA were directly implanted in social media companies to oversee the carrying-out of censorship orders from their old headquarters. The former general counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI, James Baker, slid unnoticed into the general counsel seat at Twitter until Elon Musk bought the company late in 2022 and flushed him out. The so-called Twitter Files uncovered by indy reporters Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, produced reams of emails from FBI officials nagging Twitter execs to de-platform people and bury their dissent. You can be sure these were threats, not mere suggestions.

One of the plaintiffs joined to Missouri v. Biden is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor at the Harvard Medical School, who opposed Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was one of the authors of the open letter called The Great Barrington Declaration (October, 2020) that articulated informed medical dissent for a bamboozled public. He was fired from his job at Harvard just this past week for continuing his refusal to take the vaccine. Harvard remains among a handful of institutions that still require it, despite massive evidence that it is ineffective and hazardous. Like West Point, maybe Harvard should ditch its motto, Veritas, Latin for “truth.”

A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/smurf-scandal-update-and-open-thread

I offer a brief Sunday evening post with updates on The Great Smurf Scandal from last week, wherein a 17 year-old school girl was scolded by three police officers for posting content to TikTok that appeared to support Alternative für Deutschland.

1) The offending video has since emerged. I recommend viewing it with your audio muted. It consists of nothing but three looped slides. The first announces that “The Smurfs and Germany have something in common.” The second is a picture of the Smurfs with the words “The Smurfs are blue …” The third says “Germany is too!” and shows a map of AfD poll results, colour-coded in varying shades of blue.

2) State security services are investigating the Stralsund police for intimidation and violating the girl’s freedom of expression! Oh no, that’s wrong, I read too quickly. What they’re actually investigating, is the “right-wing hate campaign” against the school and the local police. Important people have received “threatening phone calls and abusive emails” because of sensationalising reporting in the “populist right-wing media,” and that just can’t stand. Thank heavens we have such an overblown overfunded state media system to report on these urgent threats to our democratic society.

3) The girl, who is named Loretta, has now given an interview to Junge Freiheit. She says that the police first assured her that her TikTok post had broken no laws, before proceeding to lecture her on “incitement” and “opposition to the constitution.” They also objected that she had expressed “too much national pride” on online, and they made her promise to stop posting content for her own good.

So, that’s it. Despite writing about Germany for over three years and reading about the sorry state of my country’s politics every day, I still routinely underestimate how extreme things have gotten. I very much doubt Loretta’s is a unique case.

https://twitter.com/SHomburg/status/1768335691765723371

https://cognitivecarbon.substack.com/p/openai-and-the-folly-of-safety-controls

It strikes me that what will actually result from these “safety frameworks” that restrains what answers "the unwashed" may obtain from future AI systems is a form of knowledge suppression that the U.S. Government itself could not dream of achieving on its own due to Constitutional limits.

It is a form of "censorship of wrong think" that these mega Tech firms pioneering AI will do on their own, just like they did with “social media”.

10 years of work summarized in 10 words:

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/why-the-department-of-justice-wants

Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Patrick says

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation.

Another tool that was blatantly put on display is the phony Trump fraud case. Anyone can be targeted by a politically corrupt judge who ignores evidence and declares a crime, then imposes a bank busting fine. Imagine that power granted through the IRS - the tax code is so complex that no one but a simple wage earner is immune to a judge interpreting fraud in a tax return, even one that is decades old. Now add the judge imposing confiscatory fines and the Dems have a perfect intimidation tool. Many think that what that corrupt judge and prosecutor did to Trump will encourage other businessmen to leave New York, but there is too much money to be made in that city. The real result, and the Dems know it, will be for businesses to be sure and never cross the Dems, and in fact, become big donors and supporters of Dem lest those business owners/leaders get the Trump treatment.

https://tuckercarlson.com/uncensored-6/

Tucker interviews self-professed "African Socialist" who was raided by and FBI armored personnel carrier to shut him up about Russia.

The point being that he did nothing illegal, yet his right to speak was violently attacked.

https://mattbivens.substack.com/p/the-thrill-of-russian-roulette-part-c69

An investigation by U.S. Congressional staff found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — has been sending spreadsheets to social media companies listing “thousands of accounts to remove.”

Let me repeat: the Ukrainian spy agency has been getting Americans deleted from Facebook.

Crazy, right?

One FBI e-mail to Meta, in March 2022, mentions having “a few more” Instagram and Facebook accounts the SBU would like reviewed for deletion — and then in an attachment lists 15,865 Instagram and 5,165 Facebook accounts.

You know, just a few more.




The Congressional investigators confirmed that real Americans targeted included a New York photographer, a South Carolina business manager, a Minnesota musician, a California professor and a Wisconsin children’s book author. The SBU not only asked that these accounts and thousands of others be removed, they also requested each account holder’s e-mail address, phone number, date of birth and so on. (Like all spy agencies, the SBU likes its files.)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/16/the-sinister-censorship-of-natcon-brussels/

The sinister censorship of NatCon Brussels

The technocratic elites are the true menace to liberty.

European public life is in real trouble, if today’s goings on in the Belgian capital are anything to go by. This morning, Emir Kir, the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels, sent in the cops to shut down the National Conservatism Brussels conference, a gathering of conservative and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and writers. As Nigel Farage took to the stage, police amassed outside with an order for the event to close, on the grounds it was ‘creating a public disturbance’.

The police initially gave attendees 15 minutes to exit the venue. But they have since decided to allow the speeches to continue while they pursue a slow-motion cancellation instead. They have said that no one else can enter, and anyone who leaves the venue will not be allowed to return. The paper-thin justification for all this seems to be that ‘anti-fascists’ are planning to protest outside the conference later on today.

This dramatic, authoritarian intervention on the part of the Brussels authorities, cheered on by self-styled left-wing activists, is the culmination of a weeks-long campaign to stop this conference – versions of which have taken place in America and across Europe – from ever taking place. Apparently, Tory MPs, German cardinals and Viktor Orban cannot be allowed to express their views in the heart of the EU.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/everything-for-g-on-the-speech-trial

Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für”) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.

The illegal phrase: "Everything for Germany."

It's wrong that Germans are not allowed to be proud of being German even now. The vast majority of Germans were not even alive during the Nazi era, and guilt is not heritable. Every baby is born entirely innocent of any guilt.