Still Playing The Game

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.

 

 

Hoisted On Your Own Petard

There are many Americans who believe that Robert Mueller is engaged in a witch hunt. The indictment of thirteen Russian companies was part of that witch hunt. The plan was that the indictments would show that there really was Russian influence, the people involved in the companies indicted would never set foot in America, and Mueller would look as if he actually found evidence of Russian interference. Well, the best laid plans…

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today updating us on the status of the Russian companies who supposedly interfered in our election. Things have not gone as planned for Mr. Mueller.

The article reports:

In an effort to tie their corrupt investigation to Russia, the Mueller team indicted 13 Russians after presenting their cases to a grand jury in February of this year. Immediately, these indictments were suspect as everyone on to the corrupt Mueller team knew that these ‘Russians’ would never be brought to justice, even if they were real, because they would never come to the US to stand trial and risk being put in jail.

Unfortunately for Mueller however, this soon turned into a royal mess. Lawyers defending one of three Russian companies indicted with the 13 Russians, Concord Management, showed up for court. Mueller’s team was caught off guard and never expected this. They immediately asked the judge for more time but the judge denied their pleas noting that they were the ones who indicted the Russian company in the first place.

When the case proceeded, the Concord attorney’s noted that another of the three companies indicted by Mueller was not in existence at the time of Mueller’s indictment. They called this a case of Mueller indicting the proverbial ‘ham sandwich’.

At a following court appearance, the attorneys representing Concord stated that the corrupt Mueller team’s allegations of 13 Russian individuals impacting the 2016 election were “made up” nonsense. The individuals were not even real.

The article continues:

Concord Management’s lawyers revealed that Mueller’s team had ignored over 70 discovery requests they had made for information in the case. In response Mueller’s team offered to give Concord Management’s lawyers a massive amount of social media data from those dangerous trolls who sought to influence the US election and the majority of the data was in RUSSIAN.

Mueller’s lawyers then admitted that they didn’t even have English translations for the Russian social media posts. However, somehow Mueller’s lawyers believed Americans were influenced by these Russian language posts?

The case of the Russians has now turned into a big joke as the legitimacy of the Mueller indictment is being challenged by Concord Management.

In a hearing on October 15th, Concord Management claimed that the Special Counsel’s entire case is built around a 100 year old law that he Mueller team is trying to use in a manner it was not built for.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is rather complex, but gives a lot of insight as to the political aspects of Mueller’s investigation, Hopefully this mess will be wrapped up shortly. It has cost American taxpayers large sums of money and is strictly the result of political maneuvering.

Influencing An Election Or Just Causing General Chaos?

On Friday, Newsweek posted the full text of the Mueller Indictment (here). You can read the whole thing if you choose–it’s thirty-seven pages long. I don’t have that kind of patience, but I did glance at it and found an interesting snippet:

Number 53 show that the Russian meddlers used a Muslim Facebook group to support Hillary Clinton because supposedly she had made a statement in favor of Sharia Law. Later on the same Facebook page, they stated that Muslim voters were “between Hillary Clinton and a hard place.” What does that even mean? They also used Facebook and Twitter to organize political rallies in New York for Trump. I don’t know where it is in the indictment, but it has also been reported that they organized pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies in New York City on the same day. I suspect that the motive behind that scheduling was the possibility of violence.

The thing that occurs to me here is that the Russians were able to accomplish whatever they accomplished (and it is questionable whether they accomplished anything) because of the unwitting cooperation of Americans. We, as Americans, are the ones who have let our political discourse get out of hand. Many of us have forgotten how to have a civil discussion of issues–instead we resort to name calling or changing the subject. Maybe it is time to require debating classes for everyone over the age of two so that we can bring back civility.

At any rate, I find it interesting that the Russians used a Muslim Facebook page to promote Hillary Clinton.

Also, just for the record, we as Americans have meddled in a few elections ourselves.