Google unvanishes stats prof

Zerohedge helped Salil Mehta get his email, blog, and other accounts back after they were vanished by Google.

Yesterday we reported that in a shocking, and unexplained move, statistics professor Salil Mehta, adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science and whose work has appeared on this website on numerous prior occasions, had been banned by Google on Friday, with his email, blog and other Google-linked accounts wiped clean and no longer accessible.
As we discussed yesterday, it was not clear what Salil did to provoke Google:
On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.  A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident.
As Salil explained, he had never engaged in political discourse, and his content was purely math/statistics-focused: “My background is clean, and without a political or social agenda.  I am not promoting any specific viewpoint.  I teach probability math and that’s it.  Have worked with both the Obama administration and advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign, am an adjunct professor at three top universities, an editor of the peer-reviewed journal of the American Statistical Association, and wrote a best-selling statistics book (all the proceeds of which I gave to charity!)”
And yet, Salil’s attempts to get to the bottom of his purge were fruitless:
I have followed their common “appeal” form but no response for three days.  Also connected with one of the VPs over the weekend and it still takes time until receiving this today!  Just more of a reflection of how cold a company can treat someone very poorly: without any information, and lack of ability to move forward in their life (can I get real reasons if any, can I get advance notice, can I get my contact list back from gmail, and why are university properties unrelated to my blog shut down?)
We are going to be looking back on this time in Google’s history and those of other social media and know that they have done some very immoral and confusing things, and it has hurt their public reputation with decent people who wanted to grow into the next future with them.
Until yesterday, Google’s only response was a generic form statement it issues to every account that is “in violation of its Terms of Service.” That changed yesterday, because after our article detailing Salil’s plight went viral, and was read 300,000 times, Google responded and as of this morning, has restored all of Salil Metha’s accounts.

That’s great and all, but the irony of someone being unvanished because he did NOT engage in any Constitutionally-protected political free speech is sizable indeed. Most people are not going to have the online might of Zerohedge behind them, or happen to be a politically unblemished minority professor who worked with the Obama administration, which means that most of us are beholden to the goodwill and commitment to Internet neutrality of the various social media giants.
Since these corporations are heavily converged, since SJWs always double down, and since the executives who are not themselves SJWs have repeatedly shown themselves to be too weak to stand up to much direct pressure from their internal SJWs, it is imperative that everyone who is to the right of Salil Metha have a backup plan already in place and already implemented starting right now. That means everything from email addresses, websites, and payment processors to ISPs and domain registry alternatives.
If you want to be accessible by our rapid response program and you are not VFM, you have four alternatives.

  1. Follow me on Twitter. This is the least preferable option since I anticipate a massive, multiplatform strike will be the next step after the surgical deplatformings and demonetizations prove ineffective. I am reliably informed that SJWs inside Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Paypal are already putting this plan together and are now working on figuring out how to sell it to the decision-makers at their respective corporations. Saner heads may prevail, in fact, they probably will prevail at Google and Paypal, since the executives there understand that further fracturing the Internet is not good for their future growth, but there are no guarantees, and as we know from our experience with Amazon, even a rogue strike or two by employees acting without permission or approval cannot be ruled out.
  2. Follow me on Gab. This is safe, but not necessarily timely, particularly if you’re not already actively using Gab.
  3. Sign up for the Book Club. You’ll get 1-3 book announcements per month. This is the least disruptive option that ensures you are rapidly contacted.
  4. Sign up for the Daily Meme Wars. You’ll get six emails per week, five with the Meme of the Day, and the sixth containing a summary and a poll to vote in the meme of the week. This is the option I’d prefer people to select, because #DailyMemeWars has proven to be increasingly effective social media artillery.
You can, of course, do any combination of these or all four if you see fit. But the important thing is to do at least one of them. And remember, you can always reach me at my infogalactic email if my gmail address is vanished.

“The Trump presidency is over”

As always, don’t count the God-Emperor out. Not even if Darth Bannon has.

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
It is plainly Bannon’s view that his departure is not a defeat for him personally, but for the ideology he’d urged upon the president, as reflected in Trump’s provocative inaugural address—in which he spoke of self-dealing Washington politicians, and their policies that led to the shuttered factories and broken lives of what he called “American carnage.” Bannon co-authored that speech (and privately complained that it had been toned down by West Wing moderates like Ivanka and Jared).
“Now, it’s gonna be Trump,” Bannon said. “The path forward on things like economic nationalism and immigration, and his ability to kind of move freely . . . I just think his ability to get anything done—particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just gonna be that much harder.”
Bannon assigns blame for the thwarting of his program on “the West Wing Democrats,” but holds special disdain for the Washington establishment—especially those Republicans who have, he believes, willfully failed to provide Trump with meaningful victories.
And, he believes, things are about to get worse for Trump. “There’s about to be a jailbreak of these moderate guys on the Hill”—a stream of Republican dissent, which could become a flood.
Bannon says that he once confidently believed in the prospect of success for that version of the Trump presidency he now says is over. Asked what the turning point was, he says, “It’s the Republican establishment. The Republican establishment has no interest in Trump’s success on this. They’re not populists, they’re not nationalists, they had no interest in his program. Zero. It was a half-hearted attempt at Obamacare reform, it was no interest really on the infrastructure, they’ll do a very standard Republican version of taxes.
“What Trump ran on—border wall, where is the funding for the border wall, one of his central tenets, where have they been? Have they rallied around the Perdue-Cotton immigration bill? On what element of Trump’s program, besides tax cuts—which is going to be the standard marginal tax cut—where have they rallied to Trump’s cause? They haven’t.”
Bannon believes that those who will now try to influence Trump will hope to turn him in a sharply different direction.
“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”
But Bannon believes that Trump, with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, has already effected a lasting realignment of American politics.
As for himself, Bannon says the fight is just beginning.
“I feel jacked up,” he says. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”

I tend to suspect that Trump is not going to react well to the Republican establishment attempting to chain him and ride him like a newly broken horse. We’ll see.
The Darkstream on the subject.


The DNC-Pakistan connection

While NeverTrump and the media is still muttering RUSSIA-RUSSIA-RUSSIA like a crazed homeless man, the FBI is actively investigating the DNC-Pakistan connection:

FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation.

Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, has since desperately tried to get the hard drives back, an individual whom FBI investigators interviewed in the case told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group.

An additional source in Congress with direct knowledge of the case, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, confirmed that the FBI has joined what Politico previously described as a Capitol Police criminal probe into “serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network” by Imran and three of his relatives, who had access to the emails and files of the more than two dozen House Democrats who employed them on a part-time basis.

Capitol Police have also seized computer equipment tied to the Florida lawmaker….

Soon after Imran began working for Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his two brothers and two of their wives — plus Abbas and another friend — began appearing as IT staffers on the payrolls of other House Democrats. Collectively, the Awan group has been paid $4 million since 2009.

Fellow IT staffers TheDCNF interviewed said the Awans were often absent from weekly meetings and email exchanges. One of the fellow staffers said some of the computers the Awans managed were being used to transfer data to an off-site server.

One of the many, many reasons you don’t want to hire Indian or Pakistani IT guys. They can’t even manage to correctly wipe their hard drives when desperately needed to do so.


America, the overfed

Readers here well understand that government science is as intrinsically unreliable as anything else being produced by the government. And the U.S. government’s dietary advice has been about as bad as it gets.

“The change in dietary advice to promote low-fat foods is perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history.”

Let’s say you want to lose some weight. Which of these foods would you choose: A skim-milk latte, or the same drink with whole milk? A low-cal breakfast bar or steak and eggs? A salad tossed in light dressing or the same salad doused with buttermilk ranch?

If you’re like most Americans, you either aren’t sure how to answer, or you’re very sure—but very wrong. And it’s not your fault. It’s the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

Recently, research has come out strongly in support of dietary fat and cholesterol as benign, rather than harmful, additions to person’s diet. Saturated fat seems poised for a similar pardon.

“The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong,” Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person’s diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig’s colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.

I have to admit, my father called this one in the early 1990s. He never bought the “eating fat makes you fat” line, kept a low-carbohydrate diet, and stayed much slimmer than most of his peers as a result.

The thing is, you can work out all you like, but once you pass 40, the combination of becoming more injury-prone and your body metabolism slowing down means that your diet is a necessary component of losing weight. I’ve always been in the gym or on the soccer field at least three days per week, and I’ve never been that overweight, but I’ve dropped 13 pounds as part of my quest to get back my six-pack and return to my old fighting weight of 175 – I have four more to go –  and it is entirely the result of eating less and eating fewer carbohydrates.

It’s not about major changes, just getting your caloric intake south of the energy usage line. In my case, that means a cup of yogurt for breakfast instead of a bowl of cereal, a mochacino after lunch instead of dessert, and a smaller portion at dinner, no seconds, and no snacking. I still have three cappucini – sometimes four, including the one mocha – dessert, and two glasses of wine per day. So, it’s not exactly torture, just reasonable exercise combined with a modicum of self-discipline.

Note, by the way, that it’s not just Americans who have been affected by this disastrous dietary science. Keep that in mind when you consider the “global climate change consensus”.

In a recent editorial appearing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researcher Zoe Harcombe from the University of the West of Scotland explains that obesity rates among British men and women rose from 2.7 percent in 1972 to 23 percent and 26 percent, respectively, by 1999.


Five questions about Russia

Charlie Martin has a few questions about the Trump-Russia “scandal”:

Question One. Does agreeing to meet with any Russian constitute collusion? Does lobbying by a Russian constitute collusion?

Question Two. What criminal statute covers meeting with Russian private citizens? For that matter, what criminal statute covers accepting opposition research about a candidate?

Question Three What is the massive ethical breach involved here? Was it more unethical than these?

Question Four. Does this photograph indicate collusion with the Russians? Is it only collusion when your name is “Trump”?

Question Five. What the hell is is wrong with these people?

I can only conclude that the media never heard the tale about the boy who cried wolf. Then again, it is Russian….


A leading cause of death

Are you kidding me? ANOTHER Clinton-related “suicide”:

Haiti Official, Who Exposed The Clinton Foundation, Found Dead In Miami

Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official who was expected to expose the extent of Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice next week, has been found dead in Miami. He was 50.

Eberwein was due to appear next Tuesday before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake donations from international donors.

According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head“. Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide.”

Eberwein, who had acknowledged his life was in danger, was a fierce critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in the Caribbean island, where he served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years.

According to Eberwein, a paltry 0.6% of donations granted by international donors to the Clinton Foundation with the express purpose of directly assisting Haitians actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations. A further 9.6% ended up with the Haitian government. The remaining 89.8%  – or $5.4 billion – was funneled to non-Haitian organizations.

“The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year.

Are we really supposed to believe in this increasingly unlikely string of timely, but entirely coincidental suicides? That’s two in a week! At this point, “investigating Hillary Clinton” must be rapidly approaching the top ten list of causes of death in America. Typhoid Mary was less lethal.

Can you imagine if she had won the presidency? There would have been an epidemic of “suicide” to rival Japan’s WWII-era Divine Wind.


His name was Peter Smith

At this point, the Clinton emails have a more extensive body count than The Ring. It’s like watching a political horror movie in real time:

GOP operative who sought Clinton’s emails committed suicide

A Republican Party operative who said he tried to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers committed suicide days after speaking to The Wall Street Journal, records acquired by the Chicago Tribune show.

Peter W. Smith, an 81-year-old GOP donor from Chicago, was found dead in a Rochester, Minnesota hotel room on May 14. The Tribune obtained a state death record stating Smith committed suicide in the hotel on the date.

The Journal reported that Smith, a longtime opposition researcher for the GOP, “mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen by Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers” and implied he was working with Gen. Michael Flynn, then a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

Smith said he had created a team to find the emails that might have been stolen by hackers during Clinton’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, although the Journal reported Smith was focused on obtaining the 30,000 emails Clinton claimed she deleted because they were personal.

That doesn’t sound suspicious at all. I’m only surprised that it wasn’t found that he committed suicide by shooting himself three times in the back of the head before being run over by a train on an abandoned railroad track.


A meme, corrected

So, not the DNC and Team Clinton, but rather, the Obama administration, with a connection to Natalia Veselnitskaya.


The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.


This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.


The fabrication of an anti-Trump attack

Remember, /pol/ is always right. Not only has Weaponized Autism demonstrated that the Russian Server story is bogus, they have identified the locus for the attack named “Tea Leaves”:

On October 31, 2016, Slate published an article titled “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” This article described the work of Professor L. Jean Camp and her colleagues, all of whom had developed an interest in the activity of mail1.trump-email.com, an email-marketing server associated with the Trump Organization:

The computer scientists posited a logical hypothesis, which they set out to rigorously test: If the Russians were worming their way into the DNC, they might very well be attacking other entities central to the presidential campaign, including Donald Trump’s many servers. “We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election,” says one of the academics, who works at a university that asked him not to speak with reporters because of the sensitive nature of his work.

This professed altruism as a rationale for digital snooping may be hard to swallow given that Camp and her associates spend a great deal of time on Twitter launching unhinged attacks against President Trump, but pushing ahead, enter Tea Leaves:

In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups on his screen. “I have an outlier here that connects to Russia in a strange way,” he wrote in his notes. He couldn’t quite figure it out at first. But what he saw was a bank in Moscow that kept irregularly pinging a server registered to the Trump Organization on Fifth Avenue.

Tea Leaves is another piece of work in the “concerned and impartial researcher” department. Check out Tea Leaves on medium.com (@tea.leaves) play-acting as the innocently curious Lea Vestea (roughly a cyclic permutation on “Tea Leaves,” in case you missed it):


If you are a billionaire, do you have lesser people “take the fall” for you? We already saw a loyal Trump employee — who is a woman — used as a scapegoat in the scandal about Melania Trump plagiarizing a Michele Obama speech. After reading details of an under-reported story that seems to be just emerging — I predict that The Donald will do it again and yet again find a woman amongst his large organization to blame his own extremely risky actions upon.

We were assured that known DNS experts vouched for the authenticity of the DNS logs. We were assured that nine computer scientists considered it nearly impossible for such logs to be forged or manipulated. And thus a virulent narrative was reinforced.

Now, I neither know anything nor care about DNS lookups or servers so long as my Internet is working. And I always assumed that this “Russian server scandal” was just another anti-Trump put-up job, just like the current non-scandal involving Donald Trump Jr. is. But there is one thing about this that is very interesting to me as a writer. There is a tremendous tell in that quote from Tea Leaves, who was commonly supposed to be a man all along. See if you can spot it. I mean, does that read like anything a man would ever write?

No, it most certainly does not….


Surrender or antisemite

Those are the options being presented by the Israeli ambassador to Hungary. I have no doubt that Hungary will rightly choose the latter.

The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment.

The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.

George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front for the criminal people smugglers bringing third world migrants to Europe.

What is lesser known however, is the extent to which Soros is using his ‘soft power’ to influence civil society.

The Central European University in Budapest was founded and bankrolled by the Jewish billionaire, and has attempted to exert its influence against Viktor Orbán’s popular government in loosely veiled retaliation for recent legal measures against the university.

In recent months Hungary has seen protests by students carrying the Soros message against the potential closure of the university, with some fearing that this could be the beginning of another ‘colour revolution’.

Soros’ Open Society organisation has also worked tirelessly behind the scenes against the Hungarian government’s opposition to illegal immigration, despite the fact that 98.5% of Hungarians rejected illegal migrant quotas in a referendum just last year.

Yet despite the validity of the Hungarian government’s complaints against George Soros, it is apparently antisemitic to speak out.

Hungary’s largest Jewish organisation Mazsihisz has also called for the government to end its campaign, also on the basis that it is ‘antisemitic’.

This is precisely why I don’t give an airborne rodent’s fornication about it when people cry antisemitism or Holocaust anymore. It’s no different than when Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian cry sexual harassment and death threats; the accusations are just a rhetorical means of attempting to shut down legitimate and well-merited criticism. There is simply no substance to them.

If you’re going to call me a Nazi, or a Fascist, or an antisemite, or a Holocaust denier, or a rape apologist, or an Alien Autopsy denier, or a racist sexist transgenderphobe, or an anthropogenic global warming denier, or whatever vituperative label you can concoct because I disagree with your belief that one world government under anyone but Jesus Christ is desirable, then I do not give so much as a single electron for your opinion.

The undeniable fact is that most people have a very good reason to hate certain individuals and what those individuals have done to their nations as well as the rest of Mankind. Their creed and ethnicity is irrelevant. If you don’t hate what Immanuel Celler did to the USA, you’re objectively anti-American. And if you don’t hate what George Soros has done to European countries from the UK to Hungary, you’re either evil yourself or you are simply unaware of the unmitigated wickedness of his globe-spanning Evil Society. And if you don’t hate these creeps who believe God has chosen them to enslave the rest of humanity, well, you’re clearly suffering from a severe lack of self-esteem.