Right Wing Granny

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Right Wing Granny

Tag Archives: Google

My Head Is Spinning!

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The Covid pandemic has brought us a lot of information and a lot of censorship of information. Oddly enough, a lot of the information that was censored is now being reported as true. Currently the difference between a conspiracy theory and a major news story is a few months.

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights reported the following:

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, QAnon racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The article notes how the lab leak theory was treated in the past:

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.” CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

The article concludes:

One of the articles that Google is right now targeting is our Feb. 23 editorial applauding Congress for investigating COVID vaccines (Congress To Probe COVID Vaccines — And It’s About Time).

Apparently, merely calling for a congressional investigation “promotes harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” according to Google’s thought police.

So, let’s review.

The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true. The supposed guardians of credible information turn out to be some of the biggest peddlers of actual disinformation. And groups that are supposedly targeting disinformation are really just out to defund conservatives.  

In all this confusion, one thing is perfectly clear. If you want to know what will be labeled as disinformation tomorrow, just look at whatever is on the left’s agenda today.

The mainstream media is simply pointing out the need for Americans to find alternative sources for their news.

We Need To Hire Congress As Our Stockbrokers

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On Wednesday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about some of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades. It seems that Nancy and Paul Pelosi sold up to $3 million in Google stocks just before Congress began an antitrust probe of the company.

The article reports:

Paul Pelosi sold 30,000 shares of Google from Dec. 20 to Dec. 28, according to a financial disclosure filing the former House speaker submitted to the House Ethics Committee. The Pelosis made an undisclosed profit from the investments, according to the filing.

The trade proved timely. On Monday, the Justice Department and attorneys general from eight states—including California—sued Google over its monopoly on the digital ad market. The lawsuit could force Google to break up its online ad business, which generated nearly $55 billion in revenue for the company in the most recent quarter. Google’s stock has dropped around 6 percent since the Justice Department announced the lawsuit.

The trades are the latest in a string of questionable transactions for Paul and Nancy.

They saved roughly $600,000 in June by selling shares of microchip maker Nvidia weeks before the U.S. government placed restrictions on the company’s business in China and Russia. The Pelosis have seen their fortune grow $140 million since 2008, thanks largely to Paul Pelosi’s stock trades, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The article notes:

Pelosi’s stock market charades have sparked calls for tougher regulations on members of Congress cashing in on their positions of power.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) on Tuesday introduced the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act—the PELOSI Act—to prohibit members of Congress and their spouses from owning or trading individual stocks.

I don’t have a problem with members of Congress owning stocks, I just have a problem with them trading stocks related to forthcoming legislation of investigations. Even blind trusts are not as blind as they should be.

There Is More Than One Way To Influence An Election

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On Friday, Breitbart posted an article about Google’s suppression of Republican emails, beginning in September.

The article reports:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is accusing Google of suppressing more than 22 million campaign emails since September, by sending them to users’ spam folders, and is now considering legal action against the tech giant.

Google, which insists party affiliation plays no role in determining which emails get sent to the spam folder,  launched an FEC-approved program to ensure campaign emails reached users’ main inboxes under pressure from Republicans.

But the RNC, which shared data from its email campaigns with Fox News Digital, says this has not resolved the situation, with masses of emails getting spammed by Google at the end of every month.

The article concludes:

In a statement to Fox News, Google spokesman José Castañeda insisted there was no bias in how emails are sent to spam folders, but did not explain the strange pattern of RNC emails getting suppressed at the end of every month.

“We enable political committees and other organizations to reach their constituents, donors, and key audiences via email. When Gmail users say that they don’t want to receive an email, we place the email in the spam folder, politics or political affiliation plays no role in this determination,” said the spokesman.

Somehow, I just don’t believe him.

A Victory For Freedom Of Speech

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Having been routinely shadow banned on Facebook (there is a Right Wing Granny group on Facebook, please join), I appreciate the fact that Texas is fighting the censorship that Big Tech has imposed on conservatives in recent years. It seems that there may be an end to that censorship. As I write this, a friend’s post has been thoroughly blacked out because Facebook didn’t think anyone should be allowed to see it.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported the following:

A federal appeals court upheld a Texas law on Friday that seeks to curb censorship by social media platforms. The ruling, a major victory for Republicans who charge companies like Twitter and Facebook are limiting free speech, is a step in a major legal battle that could end up at the Supreme Court.

The lawsuit is challenging HB 20, a Texas bill signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott that regulates social media platforms with more than 50 million monthly users, which includes Google, Facebook and Twitter, and says they cannot censor or limit users’ speech based on viewpoint expression. 

In his opinion, Federal Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the Fifth Circuit said the platforms argued for “a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment” that “buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech.”

“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Oldham continued.

The article notes:

Friday’s ruling created what is known as a “circuit split,” since the eleventh circuit struck down a similar social media law in Florida. A circuit split generally increases the likelihood of the Supreme Court taking up a case.

It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court will take the case and what their ruling will be. It is also interesting to see if this case settled  before the mid-term election.

Unacceptable Behavior By Search Engines

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On Monday, The Federalist reported that Google and Yelp have both agreed to stifle search engine results for life-saving pregnancy clinics.

The article reports:

Despite the fact that nearly 2 in 3 Americans support public funding for life-saving pregnancy centers, many of which offer free or discounted pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and other care to women in need, both Google and Yelp have decided to harness their censorship power to implement the “fake clinic” framing touted by Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Two months after congressional Democrats demanded Google block search results for crisis pregnancy centers, the Silicon Valley giant also announced it would add labels to pro-life clinics explicitly stating that they do not offer abortion services.

Is this the policy of organizations that truly care about women’s health?

The article concludes:

“It’s well-reported that crisis pregnancy centers do not offer abortion services, and it’s been shown that many provide misleading information in an attempt to steer people seeking abortion care to other options,” Yelp’s VP of User Operations Noorie Malik said in a statement. “With this new consumer notice we’re aiming to further protect consumers from the potential of being misled or confused.”

Shortly after news that the Supreme Court planned to overturn Roe v. Wade broke, Yelp and Google offered to subsidize travel for its female employees to get abortions. Google, which already has a long history of banning and throttling pro-life advertisements, even promised to delete the location history of anyone who visits an abortion facility.

Abortion is not healthcare. There are actually very few instances where the dangers of abortion are less than the dangers of continuing a pregnancy. Abortions do have risks, and the pro-abortion community has done a very good job of hiding those risks. To create obstacles for women who are searching for crisis pregnancy centers is certainly not in the best interests of women or of society.

Weaponizing Government Agencies For Political Purposes

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On April 13th, Project Veritas reported that between November 2020 and March 2021, the Department of Justice issued nine secret subpoenas and warrants to Apple and Google for the private information of Project Veritas journalists.

The article reports:

  • In addition to using Apple and Google to surveil the data of Project Veritas’ journalists, the DOJ also spied on journalists’ security detail, accessing private information about them, as well.
  • Documents show the Department of Justice compelled Apple and Google not to disclose that they were providing the individual’s private data to the government.
  • In the case of Google, the DOJ accessed individuals’ payment information, MAC address and browsing history, in addition to other personal information.
  • Project Veritas’ attorneys filed a motion outlining how the DOJ’s seizures violated the Privacy Protection Act and the Fourth Amendment, in addition to the First Amendment and Common Law Reporter’s Privilege.

The article also notes:

In a statement, the ACLU said they were “deeply troubled” by the “secret electronic surveillance” conducted by the Department of Justice.

Paul Calli, an attorney for Project Veritas, pointed out that the actions from the government were disproportionate, in addition to arguing the DOJ violated the Privacy Protection Act, the First and Fourth Amendments, and Common Law Reporter’s Privilege.

“By no reasonable measure can the wholesale seizure of newsgathering materials, attorney-client privileged communications, and irrelevant personal information be considered a proportional response to an alleged low-grade larceny, much less to a non-crime,” said Calli in Project Veritas’ motion filed in response to the disclosures from Microsoft.

The DOJ’s spying campaign represents the latest example of governmental misconduct in, what appears to be, a politically motivated investigation. President Biden’s Department of Justice has placed its crosshairs squarely on Project Veritas’ newsgathering activities pertaining to apparent allegations against then-candidate, Joe Biden, which were made by his daughter, Ashley Biden, in her diary.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It includes screenshots of the notification Project Veritas received from Apple about the surveillance.

If we continue to elect members of the Washington swamp to Congress and to the Presidency, we will reach a point where we are no longer free to exercise our First Amendment rights. Please consider that when you vote in upcoming elections.

The Long Reach Of The Government Just Got Longer

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The Patriot Daily wire is reporting the following today:

The federal government is issuing warrants from compliant Google to turn over anyone typing in certain search terms.

But they assure the American public that they can be trusted. Just like the federal government assured Americans they would not abuse the secret FISA courts to spy on innocent Americans!

We now know that crooked feds were spying on Donald Trump, his family, his campaign and his presidency using the secret courts to obtain warrants.

Frankly, I use Duck Duck Go as a search engine. I am not sure if they have been hit by warrants yet.

The article includes the following excerpt from a Yahoo News article:

The U.S. government is reportedly secretly issuing warrants for Google to provide user data on anyone typing in certain search terms, raising fears that innocent online users could get caught up in serious crime investigations at a greater frequency than previously thought.

In an attempt to track down criminals, federal investigators have started using new “keyword warrants” and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim’s name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows.

Google has to respond to thousands of warrant orders each year, but the keyword warrants are a relatively new strategy used by the government and are controversial.

“Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes.

“This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation,” she added.

The government said that the scope of the warrants is limited to avoid implicating innocent people who happen to search for certain terms, but it’s not publicly disclosed how many users’ data are sent to the government and what the extent of the warrant requests are.

This may be what eventually will change the focus of the American Civil Liberties Union to protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans, which is what they should actually be doing.

Our Country Is Changing Very Quickly

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Newsmax reported yesterday that Amazon is removing Parler from its web servers.

The article reports:

Amazon is removing the Parler social media service from its web servicers, BuzzFeed News reported Saturday night.

If Parler cannot find another hosting service once the ban takes effect Sunday, Parler will go offline, Buzzfeed reported.

The news comes after Apple and Google Play removed the app from their stores.

Parler has been used increasingly by conservatives amid what they see as increasing censorship by Twitter. Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump on Friday for tweets it said violated its rules of inciting violence.

Conservatives have said the ban is a stifling of free speech.

Amazon has suspended Parler from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, for violating AWS’s terms of services by failing to effectively deal with a steady increase in violent content on the social networking service.

I am old enough to remember the 1977 march by the National Socialist Party of America (Nazi Party) in Skokie, Illinois. Most Americans hated the idea that they were allowed to march. There were lawsuits filed, but it was decided that they had a First Amendment right to march. Amazon and Twitter are private corporations, but it seems to me that they are infringing on Americans’ First Amendment rights.

The article concludes:

In addition to Parler, right-leaning social media users in the United States have flocked to messaging app Telegram and hands-off social site Gab, citing the more aggressive policing of political comments on mainstream platforms such as Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc.

Google, in its announcement Friday that it was suspending Parler, said that Parler must demonstrate “robust” content moderation if it wants to get back in the store.

This is a blatant attempt to shut down conservative speech. I have been on Parler for a while, and I have not seen any hate speech or anything encouraging violence. If encouraging violence is a problem, why has no one dealt with some of the comments members of Congress have made about harassing members of the Trump administration if you see them in public?

A Small Update On Some Of The Fake News You Are Hearing

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PJ Media posted a list today of the top ten lies the news media has told about President Trump’s response to the coronavirus. Please follow the link to the article to read the details–I am simply posting the list:

10. Trump downplayed the mortality rate of the coronavirus

 

 9. Trump lied when he said Google was developing a national coronavirus website

 8.  Trump ‘dissolved’ the WH pandemic response office

 7. Trump ignored early intel briefings on possible pandemic

 6. Trump cut funding to the CDC & NIH

 5. Trump ‘muzzled’ Dr. Fauci

 4. Trump didn’t act quickly and isn’t doing enough

 3. Trump told governors they were “on their own”

 2. Trump turned down testing kits from WHO

 1. Trump called the coronavirus “a hoax”

The sources for this misinformation vary. The sources include MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Joe Biden, and Michael Bloomberg. If you are still depending on these sources for accurate reporting, you are being mislead. The article at PJ Media lists the source for each lie, so you can see where the lies came from.

Meanwhile stay safe, and be careful who you listen to.

Privacy Is Now A Total Myth

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Yesterday NBC News posted an article that illustrates how the surveillance state can be a problem for perfectly innocent individuals.

The article reports:

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google’s legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

“I was hit with a really deep fear,” McCoy, 30, recalled, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. He had an Android phone, which was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. Now police seemingly wanted access to all of it.

“I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew the police wanted to get something from me,” McCoy said in a recent interview. “I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don’t know what.”

There was one clue.

In the notice from Google was a case number. McCoy searched for it on the Gainesville Police Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others.

The article goes on to say that McCoy went to his parents, explained what was happening, and they funded a lawyer for him. McCoy was trying to figure out how he got involved in something he was totally unaware of. He began to look at his phone and realized that he was using an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record the bike rides he was taking for exercise.

The article continues:

The lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “geofence warrant,” a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby.

The warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help police find potential suspects when they have no leads. They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the crime, often without their knowing ─ which Google itself has described as “a significant incursion on privacy.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article. However, the bottom line is simple–Mr. McCoy’s civil rights were violated when he was accused of a crime simply because his exercise application placed him in the neighborhood of the crime. There was no other evidence other than the illegal surveillance of his movements.

The article concludes with the outcome of the case:

On Jan. 31, Kenyon filed a motion in Alachua County civil court to render the warrant “null and void” and to block the release of any further information about McCoy, identifying him only as “John Doe.” At that point, Google had not turned over any data that identified McCoy but would have done so if Kenyon hadn’t intervened. Kenyon argued that the warrant was unconstitutional because it allowed police to conduct sweeping searches of phone data from untold numbers of people in order to find a single suspect.

That approach, Kenyon said, flipped on its head the traditional method of seeking a search warrant, in which police target a person they already suspect.

“This geofence warrant effectively blindly casts a net backwards in time hoping to ensnare a burglar,” Kenyon wrote. “This concept is akin to the plotline in many a science fiction film featuring a dystopian, fascist government.”

The filing seemed to give law enforcement authorities second thoughts about the warrant. Not long afterward, Kenyon said, a lawyer in the state attorney’s office assigned to represent the Gainesville Police Department told him there were details in the motion that led them to believe that Kenyon’s client was not the burglar. The state attorney’s office withdrew the warrant, asserting in a court filing that it was no longer necessary. The office did not respond to a request for comment.

Kenyon said that in a visit to his office, the detective acknowledged that police no longer considered his client a suspect.

On Feb. 24, Kenyon dropped his legal challenge.

The case ended well for McCoy, Kenyon said, but “the larger privacy fight will go unanswered.”

This is frightening.

The Thin Line Of Censorship

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A friend of mine who is in radio advertising tells me that radio stations do not have the ability to refuse political ads. During an election season, a station must air all ads that a political campaign pays for. Evidently this is the result of the fact that radio stations are controlled by the Federal Communications Commission. Unfortunately the new media is very loosely controlled by anything. This is a very mixed blessing. I don’t want the government telling me that I have to accept political ads on my blog whether or not I agree with the ads. However, the censorship of conservative speech that is going on at YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc., is not acceptable.

Breitbart is reporting today that according to a report by 60 minutes more than 300 of President Donald Trump’s political ads have taken down by Google and its video platform YouTube, mostly over the summer.

The article reports:

The CBS reporters were unable to find specific reasons for the mass takedowns of Trump ads, a common problem with social media companies, which are often reluctant to explain precisely why a ban or other act of censorship has happened. “We found very little transparency in the transparency report,” concluded 60 Minutes.

The article includes the following quote from CBS News:

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Wojcicki, “Have you taken down any of President Trump’s ads at all?” YouTube’s CEO responded, “There are ads of President Trump that were not approved to run on Google or YouTube.” When pressed for an example, Wojcicki added, “Well, they’re available in our transparency report.”

In response to concerns raised after the 2016 election cycle, Google and YouTube, like Facebook, keep a searchable archive of political ads that have run on the site.

60 Minutes reviewed the archive to learn more about President Trump’s problematic political ads. We found that over 300 video ads were taken down by Google and YouTube, mostly over the summer, for violating company policy. But the archive doesn’t detail what policy was violated. Was it copyright violation? A lie or extreme inaccuracy? Faulty grammar? Bad punctuation? It’s unclear. The ads determined to be offending are not available to be screened. We found very little transparency in the transparency report. 

We are coming into a very important election season. American voters need to hear both sides of every campaign. We already know that the mainstream media is extremely biased. How are people supposed to get information when free speech is being suppressed?

If They Really Believed What They Are Saying, Would Their Behavior Change?

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The Gateway Pundit reported the following today:

A slew of A-list celebrities have flocked to Sicily, Italy on private jets and massive yachts to discuss the woes of global warming caused, they say, by things like private jets and massive yachts.

The founders of Google invited a a throng of the rich and famous,  including former President Barack Obama, Prince Harry, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and singer Katy Perry for a huge party they’ve dubbed Google Camp.

“The three-day event will focus on fighting climate change — though it’s unknown how much time the attendees will spend discussing their own effect on the environment, such as the scores of private jets they arrived in and the mega yachts many have been staying on,” reports the New York Post.

“Everything is about global warming, that is the major topic this year,” a source told The Post.

The cost of the extravaganza — $20 million.

According to the Italian press, at least 114 private jets will land at the Palermo airport.

So let me get this straight. The Green New Deal wants to cripple the American economy in the name of saving the earth–no more fossil fuel, no more cows, etc., yet the richest of the rich attend a meeting on fighting climate change in machines with some of the biggest carbon footprints on earth.

I guess if we are all going to die in twelve years because of global warming, they are going to go out in style.

Still Playing The Game

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The Washington Free Beacon posted an article yesterday that explains why many people are moving away from Google as a search engine. Other than the fact that Google tracks your searches (DuckDuckGo.com does not), Google is not an unbiased search engine. It has a political agenda despite claims to the contrary.

The news of the day Friday was that there would be no further indictments in the Mueller investigation. If you went looking for that news on Google, it would not be immediately obvious.

The article illustrates:

Using Google search on multiple browsers and on private-browsing mode, the Free Beacon found Google search had an aversion to the search term “indictment.”

Using either “Trump” or “Mueller” as the subject, the following word “indictment” was not suggested even after spelling out most of it. For example, putting “Trump indi” into Google’s search bar does not lead to “Trump indictment” but rather to “Trump India,” “Trump India Pakistan,” Trump India tariffs,” and “Trump Indiana.”

Seems like Google might have overlooked the obvious. When “Mueller ind” was entered, the results were similar. The article also includes screenshots of Yahoo and Bing when the letters “Trump ind” and “Mueller ind” were entered. The first entries that came up were “Trump indictment” and “Mueller indictments”.

The article concludes:

Google was previously accused of pushing positive stories about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has denied this kind of bias occurs in its search results, saying so repeatedly in a congressional hearing last year. Democrats, however, seemed to undermine Pichai’s message by arguing in that hearing that Google is free to suppress conservatives in its search results if it so desires. Pichai said such suppression of different views would violate the company’s “core principles,” although an executive was caught emailing about making sure Google services helped Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The company’s fidelity to principles of free expression has also come under scrutiny as it has continued to work with Xi Jinping’s autocratic regime in China. Because of severe free speech restrictions in that country, Google had been developing a special search engine “Dragonfly” that would block topics disapproved by the regime, including history about China and the Communist Party. Dragonfly was put on hold after it spawned an outcry against Google, but employees have expressed concern that it’s being developed in secret.

Domestically, the Silicon Valley giant is also dealing with pressure to have its products more strictly regulated. Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren (D.) has called for breaking up major tech companies on anti-trust grounds.

On a somewhat related personal note, when I began this blog in 2008, Facebook was a good source of articles posted by conservative friends and conservative sources. Blogging was very easy. That has changed in recent years–many friends have spent time in Facebook jail, and many conservative sources have been blocked. Social media in its freest state is a wonderful thing, but gradually those in charge of social media have been removing our freedom. All Americans need to be vigilant about what they read on social media and also about what search engine they use. That is sad, but necessary.

 

 

About That Privacy Thing

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Breitbart is reporting today that Google failed to tell consumers about a secret microphone in its home security product, Nest Secure. So your security system may be eavesdropping on you. Great.

The article reports:

According to Business Insider, Google announced this month “users would now be able to use Google Assistant” on Nest Secure devices.

However, “users didn’t know a microphone even existed on their Nest Secure devices to begin with.

Google apologized for failing to disclose the “secret” microphone on Tuesday, claiming it was due to an “error.”

“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs. That was an error on our part,” declared a Google spokesman. “The microphone has never been on, and is only activated when users specifically enable the option.”

“Security systems often use microphones to provide features that rely on sound sensing,” the spokesman explained. “We included the mic on the device so that we can potentially offer additional features to our users in the future, such as the ability to detect broken glass.”

There is a saying that you should never put anything in writing that you wouldn’t want your mother to see as a headline in The New York Times. I think we need to change that saying to never say anything within range of your security system, your cell phone, or Alexa that you wouldn’t want to see as a headline in The New York Times.

Even People You May Not Agree With Have The Right To Speak

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One of the really positive aspects of the Internet is that it allows voters to bypass the mainstream media and find their own news sources. That is a serious threat to the mainstream media and those who control it.

In 2012, the following charts appeared at Business Insider:

I have no reason to believe that things have changed significantly since then.

It is an open secret that Google and Facebook largely support the political left. Google tracks your searches. That is one of many reasons I use ‘DuckDuckGo.com.’

The Gateway Pundit is reporting today:

On Monday Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify banned Infowars and Alex Jones from their platforms in a coordinated attack.

Meanwhile, actual hate groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter freely post on Facebook. This is called censorship. It is happening because the political left is losing control of the dialog and is trying to regain control. Whether or not you support Alex Jones, he has the right to voice his views.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported:

The InfoWars official app surged in popularity Monday evening, and surpassed CNN, following the Orwellian deplatforming of the outlet by multiple tech giants.

The app was already beating the New York Times, ABC, BBC, WSJ, NPR, CNBC, CBS, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and the Washington Post before they bounded ahead of CNN on Tuesday evening.

Losing a monopoly is hard. Gaining freedom of the press for the American people through the Internet is wonderful.

Shutting Down The Free Speech Of Conservatives

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The alternative media has had an impact on the politics of America. Facebook and Twitter have been a place where conservatives could share information and ideas. Well, that is changing. According to an article posted at The Gateway Pundit yesterday, google and Facebook are purging conservative content from Facebook and YouTube. That is not a surprise, it is simply an unfortunate truth. Because many arguments by the political left are based on emotion rather than fact, they do not like engaging in rational debate. Thus, if they can, they shut down the conservative side of the debate.

The article lists the websites that have been blacklisted or targeted by Facebook and google:

Young Cons: Extremely popular conservative news site and received millions of daily readers during the election.  The website received nearly all of its traffic from Facebook. Since 2016 Facebook shut down stories to Young Cons.  Each algorithm change meant less traffic for the popular website.  YoungCons was blacklisted by Facebook and struggles to maintain readers.  The site regularly switches domains to save traffic.

SarahPalin.com: With over 4 million fans one of the popular conservative pages on Facebook until Facebook blocked all traffic to the website.  The page was forced to change the domain to save traffic numbers.

Right Wing News:  Right Wing News grew to an enormous website in the past few years thanks its popularity on Facebook. In July of 2015, in just a week, the Right Wing News Facebook page reached 133 million people. Because conservatives were sharing content they were interested in, Right Wing News (with 3.6 million Facebook likes ) was driving the same amount of web traffic as some of the biggest newspapers in America.  Since the 2016 election Facebook blocked traffic to the website.  Owner John Hawkins announced he was shutting down the website in January.

Western Journalism: Newsweek reported that the site has grown from receiving 1,000 page views a day in 2009[3] to more than 1 million during 2016. The website was averaging around 6 million page views a day according to Quantcast during the election. Today it is down to around 500,000 a day. Western Journalism was blacklisted by Facebook.

The Gateway Pundit: TGP was ranked as the 4th most influential conservative news source during the 2016 election. The site in 2016 received nearly a third of its traffic from Facebook. This past weekend Facebook blocked all traffic from recent stories to the website. TGP advertised with Facebook and is another top conservative website blacklisted by the company. TGP is also shadow-banned by Google and frequently attacked and smeared by the liberal media.

President Trump Facebook page:  A recent algorithm change has caused President Donald Trump’s engagement on Facebook posts to plummet a whopping 45%. In contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) do not appear to have suffered a comparable decline in Facebook engagement, reported Breitbart’s Alum Bokhari.

Independent Journal Review:  A massive conservative website based on Facebook audience.  The Independent Journal Review (IJR) terminated a number of its employees on Thursday, leaving an unclear future for the millennial-focused conservative website that has recently faced a declining audience.  IDF was also shadow-banned and blacklisted.

Breitbart.com:  Breitbart was the most influential conservative news source in 2016 with a massive audience.  Since the election Breitbart is constantly targeted and smeared by far left operations.  Breitbart advertising was targeted by Sleeping Giants and other Soros sites.

InfoWars:  Infowars is another dominant conservative site with enormous traffic.  After several years of video production and tens of thousands of video YouTube gave Infowars its third strike this week and threatens to shut the YouTube Channel down.

Rightside Broadcasting: This YouTube Channel had millions of views before the election.  Since 2016 YouTube has shadow-banned all of their videos.  YouTube has classified its videos of President Trump at a rally as hate speech.  YouTube has demonetized hundreds of its videos.  YouTube hides its videos.  Income for the site is down 95% since the election.

Natural News: A very prominent health website and the world’s top source on natural health. The site receives tens of thousands of readers every day. YouTube wiped out over 1,700 videos covering everything from nutrition, natural medicine, history, science and current events.

Prager Report:  PragerU, a conservative educational site, is suing Google and its subsidiary YouTube, accusing the video site of censoring its online videos because of their political leanings.  YouTube has banned several of its videos including segments on abortion and Islam.   Prager U has a massive conservative audience in the millions.

Pamela Geller.com:  Pamela is well-known for speaking out against radical Islam.  ISIS has threatened to behead her several times.  During the election PG had over 100,000 daily views from Facebook.  Today Facebook has shut down most of her traffic.  Her website suffered serious losses in revenue since the election.

Diamond and Silk: Pro-Trump YouTube sensations have a suit against YouTube. The Trump supporters announced in August 2017 that 95% of their videos have been demonetized on YouTube.

I will admit that I do not have 100% confidence in all of these websites, but it is troubling that they are being taken down. We may actually have to fight for the First Amendment rights many of us took for granted for so long.

Don’t Look For Me On The First Page Of A Google Search

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Yesterday PJ Media posted an article about a new research paper from Leo Goldstein.

The article reports the following:

“Google Search is found to be biased in favor of left/liberal domains and against conservative domains with a confidence of 95%,” Goldstein found. “Further, certain hard-Left domains have such a high [percentage of domain traffic, referred by Google Search, net of brand searches] that their standing raises suspicions that they have been hand-picked for prominent placement,” he says, adding that “certain respected conservative domains are blacklisted.”

The article includes the following chart:

Conservatives need to realize that they are going to have to get smarter in their research about the news. I strongly recommend DuckDuckGo as a search engine. Not only are their searches unbiased–they don’t keep track of your searches. It’s time for google to lose its users and its advertisers. That is one way conservatives can make their voices heard.

Good News

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As google, facebook, and twitter censor conservative speech, it is going to be more difficult to find alternative sources of news. A website called ‘government slaves‘ has made a list of 400 sites google does not want you to visit. Rightwinggranny.com has made that list. That is something of a mixed blessing–it is an honor to be recognized as an alternative news site, but chilling that any news site is being blocked because of their perspective. At any rate, it is a good idea to bookmark ‘government slaves‘ for future reference. I am sure the list will be updated as time goes on, and the websites on it are good alternative news sources.

Regular Readers Of This Blog Know This, But Here It Is Again

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I  have periodically posted the YouTube video “Burning Down the House” on this website to remind people what actually caused the housing bubble as opposed to what they were being told caused the housing bubble. There is a reason I am posting it again.

In December 2012, a website called examiner.com posted a story with the headline, “New study confirms economy was destroyed by Democrat policies.” Sounds like the video at YouTube. The study was done by the National Bureau of Economic Research and released the week of December 21, 2012.

The article reports:

-No one was making bad loans to unqualified people until Democrats came along and threatened to drag banks into court and have them fined and branded as racists if they didn’t go along with the left’s Affirmative Action lending policies…all while federally insuring their losses. Even the New York Times warned in the late 1990s that Democrats continuing to force banks into lowering their standards would lead to this exact catastrophe.

–Obama himself is even on the record personally helping sue one lender (Citibank) into lowering its lending standards to include people from extremely poor and unstable areas, which even one of the left’s favorite blatantly partisan “fact-checkers,” Snopes, admits (while pretending to ‘set the record straight’).

If we are to remain a free people, we need to understand facts–not spin. The lies that have been told about the financial collapse of 2007 are astounding. Even worse is the fact that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed as a result of the collapse does not come anywhere near addressing the core issue.

The graph below from the National Bureau of Economic Research study shows the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act on mortgage lending:

It is time to change both the Washington culture and the media culture. Unless we do that fairly quickly, we will cease to exist as a free, prosperous nation.

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It’s Not About A Movie

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Below is the Google Map of the Anti-American protests. An interactive map with a narrative can be found at Google Maps. In case you haven’t been paying attention, this is not about a movie. It is unfortunate that these protests may be used to curtail American free speech to bring America into compliance with the Muslim definition of free speech included in Sharia Law. Under Sharia Law, nothing can be said that is negative toward Islam. Anything negative is regarded as slander, regardless of whether or not it is true.

Hot Air reported that the White House had asked YouTube to take down the offensive video. When the Christian cross was desecrated and called art, did Washington ask to close the art exhibit? Free speech is written into our Constitution. Admittedly, the film in question has been used as an excuse for bad behavior, but bad behavior is still the responsibility of those participating in it. Let’s not forget that.

The thing to remember as we watch the American flag being taken down and stomped on and the Al Qaeda flag hoisted is that Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have the same goals–they only differ in exactly how to achieve them. Al Qaeda is impatient and wants to use violence. The Muslim Brotherhood is much more subtle, using propaganda and infiltration of governments (google the documents from the Holy Land Foundation trial to learn exactly what their plans for America are and how they intend to implement them). Both organizations seek a world-wide caliphate–they share that goal–and both are working toward that goal. As the Middle East erupts, we need to remember that.

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It May Be Part Of Our Future, But It Is Not Part Of Our Present

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 Steven Hayward posted an article at Power Line about some recent events in the quest for green energy. On Friday, the Huffington Post reported that the lithium-ion batteries in the Chevy Volt have caught fire after being involved in crash tests. The fires did not occur immediately–in one instance the car was being stored in a parking lot of a test facility in Burlington, Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, Google has abandoned its quest for running its data center entirely on green energy.

The article reports:

Meanwhile, Google has quietly abandoned an alternative energy program that it launched with great fanfare just two years ago.  Google’s “Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal” project featured all the hallmarks of the pie-in-the-sky energy mongers, especially the “it’s-just-around-the-corner” trope.  Google’s green energy czar at the launch, Bill Weihl, predicted that renewable electricity cheaper than coal would be achieved quickly: “In three years, we could have multiple megawatts of plants out there.”

The article also reports on Google’s other investments in green energy:

“Google’s stakes in the wind farms are ‘tax equity’ investments, in which investors buy into a project and use federal tax credits granted to the project to offset their own taxes.”

Remember all the uproar from Occupy Wall Street about corporate welfare? This is what corporate welfare actually is–the government granting a tax break to a company that funds the government’s pet project. This is what crony capitalism is about. Taxes and government are being used to control the behavior of corporations. When you consider that many of the major investors in green energy companies are key players in Congress, this begins to look really ugly.

Green energy is a wonderful idea. I suspect we will see it actually work sometime in the near future. However, pouring government money into a technology before it is ready for prime time is not a wise move.

 

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