Tag: media

I wonder what took so long for the mainstream media to get around to updating the usual narrative?

“You’ve got to remember that the Chinese regime is deeply racist with its Han nationalist ideology. This is something we haven’t quite seen since The Third Reich.”

Gordon Chang, an expert on United States-China relations, and author of The Coming China Collapse, spoke with Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Cabot Phillips to break down what it all means and what must be done in response.

Never mind all those other post-WWII New Hitlers. It would appear the Great Leap is definitely off. I wonder what’s next?

Ron Unz inadvertently discovers why taking the ticket is a fool’s short-lived game:

Just over a month ago I was riding high and celebrating the steady upward progress of our alternative media webzine. I proudly noted that our traffic had now far surpassed that of the venerable New Republic, a century old publication that had spent decades as America’s most influential opinion magazine.

But pride goeth before the fall. At the end of April we were suddenly purged and banned by Facebook, the world’s leading social network. Not only was our rudimentary Facebook page removed, but every last item of our website content was declared illegal, with all past and future links eliminated. Any attempt to post our material on Facebook now produces an error message reporting that the content is “abusive” and a violation of “community standards.”

Although I personally don’t use Facebook or other social networks, billions of people do, and totally excluding all of our content from that important distribution channel eventually produced a 20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} drop in our regular daily traffic, a serious blow that set us back many months.

Whatever they give you, they can – and they will – take away from you. And contra the backwards reasoning of the average conservative, the bigger you are, the more at risk you become. That’s why UATV’s Basic subscribers will all be receiving invitations to the new site today as well as why you will never see a Facebook page for UATV or a Facebook ad for it.

The good news for Mr. Unz is that only 20 percent of his audience was Facebook-based. He’s better off growing organically without it. After all, this blog is still averaging around 100k pageviews per day despite the best efforts of the social media mafia to deny it links.

It’s rather remarkable to see the normally phlegmatic Ron Unz publicly bitchslapping a commenter. But he does it rather well:

Its amazing the irrelevant factoids people here throw out to obscure and deflect Chinese responsibility for unleashing a deadly pandemic on the world. I can understand Chinese threats and bullying to keep global opinion from demanding accountability from the criminals in Beijing. Its what totalitarian dictatorships do. Doesn’t change the facts though.

Well, ignorant retards like you can believe whatever ridiculous nonsense you get from FoxNews or similar sources. But the actual evidence is pretty strong that the Coronavirus outbreak was an American biowarfare attack on China (and Iran), presumably arranged by the Deep State Neocons in the Trump Administration.

Otherwise, how could our Defense Intelligence Agency have distributed a November report to all our top government officials and European allies describing a “cataclysmic” disease epidemic taking place in Wuhan OVER A MONTH before any Chinese officials had become aware of it:

Four separate government sources described the report to ABC News and its existence was independently confirmed by Israeli TV:

Now go back to watching Mike Pompeo’s silly accusations on FoxNews…

If you’re not sure who to believe, remember to apply Vox’s First Law of Media: the Official Story put forth by the mainstream media is always false. 

The current China-China-China refrain concerning the coronavirus is no more legitimate than was the Russia-Russia-Russia refrain concerning the 2016 presidential election. Remember, it was barely six weeks ago that the media was telling you that the whole thing started with bat soup.

Unz further lays out his logic:

There are multiple, independent sources in both the US government and Israel that agree that our Defense Intelligence Agency distributed a report in November warning of the “cataclysmic” disease outbreak that was taking place in Wuhan. Those facts seem almost incontrovertible.

As it happens, that was indeed right around the time that the Coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan had actually begun, but at such an early stage that no Chinese officials were yet aware of it, just like the virus later began circulating in various parts of America several weeks before people noticed it.

So unless you believe that our DIA has developed “precognitive technology”, how can they have possibly been aware of the outbreak before anyone in China unless elements of our national security establishment had themselves released the virus in Wuhan as a biowarfare attack against China?

At this point, it appears to be fairly obvious that the coronavirus pandemic was a Deep State biowarfare attack on China intended to create global disruption as well as direct conflict between the Chinese government and the Trump administration. With a side dish of a biowarfare attack on the Iranian elite.

Ron Unz observes, with mild bemusement, the fact that Facebook has belatedly banned The Unz Review:

My morning newspapers had recently mentioned Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, and probably like most other readers I just nodded my head. After all, many Americans might die if cranks or pranksters began promoting highly dubious cures to the deadly disease, perhaps even suggesting that people should inject themselves with Lysol to ward off an infection.

However, those bland public statements took on an entirely different meaning yesterday afternoon when I discovered that all material from The Unz Review had suddenly been banned for alleged violations of “community standards” and our own Facebook page eliminated.

I don’t use Social Media much myself, but others obviously due, and blocking all our website content from access to the 1.7 billion Facebook users seems a pretty drastic step. So it’s quite reasonable to wonder why, and especially why now?

From the very first, the motto of our publication has been A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media, and I think we have fulfilled that pledge, publishing many thousands of articles and posts on an enormous range of extraordinarily controversial and even forbidden topics, notably including my own American Pravda series.

Under such circumstances, being banned by Facebook might hardly seem surprising. However, many of our most extremely controversial pieces were published years ago, drawing angry denunciations from various quarters, but received with apparent equanimity from the Lords of the Social Network. Nearly all of the “touchy” pieces we published in the last couple of weeks seem no more “touchy” than the ones from a year or two years or even three years ago. So what suddenly sparked this unprecedented action?

Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the triggering event was my own most recent American Pravda article, dealing as it did with the Coronavirus epidemic, the supposed focus of Facebook’s current crackdown. And this piece not only accumulated more early readership than any of my previous articles here, but also two or three times as many Facebook Likes, which might have raised serious concerns in certain quarters.

Fortunately, since Unz has long practiced the dark art of building his own platforms, this won’t harm the Review in the slightest. But it does serve as a reminder that even in times of extreme difficulty, SJWs won’t hesitate to cut off their own nose if they imagine doing so will harm you.

I left Facebook long ago, of my own volition, and I’m confident that my life is the better for it. Don’t live in their walled gardens.

Courts outside the USA are increasingly uninterested in hearing the social media platforms assert that they are above the civil law:

Google has been ordered to pay $40,000 in damages to a Melbourne lawyer after a Supreme Court of Victoria ruling found the internet giant was a publisher, and had defamed the man. In today’s ruling, Justice Melinda Richards has determined that Google was a publisher, despite denials by the company.

The case centred on articles and images published by The Age newspaper in 2004, after Mr Defteros was charged with conspiracy over the murder of Carl Williams and other underworld figures.

At the time, Mr Defteros ran a legal firm in Melbourne whose clients included gangland figures.

The charges were dropped the following year, but Mr Defteros had surrendered his practising certificate for three years.

Mr Defteros argued that in 2016 and 2017, searches on Google continued to turn up articles and hyperlinks to web material that defamed him, including an entry in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

During a trial last year, Google’s lawyers had argued it was not the publisher of the material and it had not defamed Mr Defteros.

It submitted that the automation of its search engines meant it was not an intentional communicator of words or images, particularly if a user clicked through to another website.

Justice Richards rejected this in her ruling today.

“The Google search engine … is not a passive tool,” she wrote in her 98-page judgement.

“It is designed by humans who work for Google to operate in the way it does, and in such a way that identified objectionable content can be removed, by human intervention.

“I find that Google becomes a publisher of the search results that its search engine returns to a user who enters a search query.”

She also found that providing the hyperlink within the search results “amounted to publication of the webpage”.

Unfortunately, they can still get away with their curated weaponization with complete impunity in the USA thanks to the federal laws that let them do the publisher-not publisher dance and state laws that let them use anti-SLAAP laws to impose costs on their victims.

BJ Campbell points out the statistical implausibility of the “wet market” theory of the coronavirus, not that anyone with more than half-a-brain ever bought it in the first place:

This thing came from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don’t need evidence gift wrapped by the Chinese to make this case. We just need simple mathematics, and the case is rock solid.

The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.

There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.

But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.

The only real question is who arranged for its release there, as there are only three plausible state parties:  China, the USA, or Israel, and one non-state party, the Deep State. At this point, we have absolutely no way of knowing which of the four are responsible.

USA Today ran an article on prepping and mentioned Castalia’s own David the Good and his survival masterpiece.

Not everyone has the privilege of owning land, but even having a backyard can offer opportunities not available to apartment dwellers, like starting a garden or raising chickens. Many preppers even had remote “bug out” locations in rural areas perfect for social isolation.

If you had a time machine, you might want to go back in time and buy 50 acres, but your best bet now is to use what you have. Our supply chain is being stressed to its limits, and even if barren shelves are more a symptom of panic buying than an actual shortage, anything we can do to relieve stress on the supply chain will help. Spring is almost here, so now is the perfect time. You might need less space than you think: Steven Cornett in San Diego started his own commercial farm on a mere quarter of an acre.

Here are some resources to get gardening fast:

• Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts, which is just what it sounds like.
• Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening. The late Mel Bartholomew wasn’t what you’d call a survivalist, but his intensive, low-labor method is as close as you can get in terms of a “gardening quick fix,” especially if you have easy access to water.
• David the Good’s Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, which again, is just what it sounds like. David outlines the best crops to plant for survival, how to fertilize with your own urine, and even how to grow your own tobacco. His YouTube channel is a wealth of information.

You can pick up a paperback copy of Grow or Die at Amazon. Because this is the one book you do NOT want to have only in ebook.

A 40-year Wall Street veteran imparts the most important lessons he has learned from swimming in the swamp of fake capitalist corruption:

The same players who were bailed out then went back to what they do best. Too big to fail is now bigger, but with one crucial difference – the concentration of toxic risk remains in fewer hands and is enabled by Washington’s pay-to-play swamp. As corporate debt hits new all-time highs, balance sheets remain riddled with accounting fraud and enforcement hits all-time lows; we will soon see who is naked and it won’t be pretty.

Last autumn, I warned investors that Germany’s economy was falling off a cliff and was either in a recession or would be very soon. I cautioned that Italy’s debt is a huge problem and other member states and the rest of the world are not far behind Germany. Now in March, you can expect and will need to prepare for a full-blown economic depression.

Banks, politicians and governments will scapegoat Covid-19 to shift the blame for over 30 years of fiscal profligacy, loose monetary policies, fraud, and the lack of any proper regulatory enforcement away from themselves and onto anything or anyone else. Eventually, taxes will skyrocket to pay for these opaque bailouts, reckless spending policies, and record low interest rates during the past three decades.

Covid-19 presents an easy way to assign blame while forcing through “emergency legislation” allowing big government to implement 1984-style draconian social controls that will impinge and dismantle personal freedoms, liberties and democratic principles as they fleece taxpayers – again. If you think the 2008 recession and bailouts were bad, wait until you see how the greatest economic depression in history plays out.

This bubble has only begun to pop, and there are many more shoes to drop from this centipede before prices hit bottom. The downside will be significantly worse than the upside. Until leverage, valuations and corporate debt return to reasonable levels, stay clear. When these events do happen, we will see once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to create wealth. 

The two most important lessons I learned from my 40 years in international financial markets, lessons that can also be applied to politics and to life in general, are to never make any decision based on emotion or ideology and to never, ever trust the news. Today’s media are exponentially worse than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. They no longer provide news. What they provide are stories that are around 80 percent ideology and opinion,10 percent lies and spin, and 10 percent fact.

Keep your powder dry. Exploit the opportunities as they present themselves. And always, Always, ALWAYS critically examine every piece of so-called “news” with a highly skeptical eye.

The Roger Stone trial demonstrates how the Prometheans pervert the U.S. justice system:

Juror 1261, we now know, was Tomeka Hart. Her identity would have remained publicly unknown except for a public statement she made after the Department of Justice (DOJ) rescinded its initial sentencing recommendation for Trump confidant Roger Stone. In the midst of the firestorm of allegations of political interference, Hart disclosed that she was the foreperson on the Stone jury and gave a full-throated defense of the trial prosecutors: “It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors.”

That statement led many people to Google her name, and what they found was a litany of postings not only hostile to President Trump and his administration but also specifically commenting on Stone and his arrest — before she ever appeared for jury duty…. Hart is a Democratic activist and critic of the Trump administration. She was the Memphis City Schools board president. Not surprisingly, given her political background (including a run for Congress), Hart has been vocal in public on her views of Trump and his associates.

She referred to the President with a hashtag of “klanpresident” and spoke out against “Trump and the white supremacist racists.” She posted about how she and others protested outside a Trump hotel and shouted, “Shame, shame, shame!” When profanities were projected on the Trump hotel, she exclaimed on Jan. 13, 2018, “Gotta love it.” On March 24, 2019, she shared a Facebook post — no longer public — while calling attention to “the numerous indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions of people in 45’s inner-circle.”

More worrisome are her direct references to Stone, including a retweeted post, in January 2019, from Bakari Sellers, again raising racist associations and stating that “Roger Stone has y’all talking about reviewing use of force guidelines.” She also described Trump supporters such as Stone as racists and Putin cronies.

In addition to her prior statements about Trump, his associates and this case, Hart is a lawyer. That only magnifies concerns that any bias on her part may have had a more pronounced influence on her fellow jurors.

In fact, except for a jury pool composed entirely of House impeachment managers, Hart would appear to be a standout for a peremptory challenge by the defense team over bias. That is why the most surprising aspect of this story is not the review of her public statements but the review of her examination before trial. The brief examination in the voir dire hearing shows that Hart did disclose her ties to the Democratic Party. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson asked if Hart’s political history would prevent her from being fair, and Hart assured her it would not.

While Hart’s answers on the jury questionnaire remain sealed, Judge Jackson noted, “You’ve also indicated a fair amount of paying attention to news and social media, including about political things?” Hart does not volunteer that she did far more than “pay attention to news and social media” and was, in fact, an anti-Trump protester and social media critic.

The exposure of a jury plant demonstrates the same technique used in the media narrative, in town meetings, in political caucuses, in science propaganda, and every other type of collective activity in which the illusion of a majority consensus is required or deemed desirable.

As expected, YouTube followed up its demonetization of Nick Fuentes with a banning of his channel:

My Youtube channel has been wrongly terminated today for an alleged violation of “hate speech” policy. This is the end result of a concerted effort by leftists, conservative inc gatekeepers, and silicon valley censors to silence my show and the movement it has inspired.

This is why we build our own platforms. But never forget that it’s not our job to provide a home for everyone outside the mainstream. We will always help our friends and allies, but the enemies of our enemies are not necessarily either.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Fuentes actually has the mettle his followers believe he does or if he will simply accept his banishment as meekly as the average conservative. I would tend to assume the latter, but perhaps he will exceed our expectations.