Saturday, February 8, 2020

Wuhan Contagion Part 3 - Giant Bat-Delivered Coronavirus Was From Japan's New Unit 731


The title of this third part of my series gives away the plot on the origins of Wuhan coronavirus that arrived by air delivery to the fish-packed waters of the Yangtze River region. Now nearly a month since the start of the outbreak, the vector chain in this "mysterious" outbreak still eludes microbiologists who've puzzled, and likelier muzzled, over the missing gene sequences that trigger virulent symptoms, meaning carriers don't wheeze and blow their noses until a week or more after becoming infected, which in turn indicate it's practically impossible to identify a sick passenger with a laser thermometer at airports. Then suddenly uncontrolled coughing erupts and the patient could crack his or her skull passing out and falling backward onto the sidewalk.

As discussed further on, this omission of early symptoms is due to gene-editing; nCoV2019 was CRISPRed in a lab, a clue that's set off an crazed frenzy of accusations against a new high-biosafety level lab (BSL-4) in Wuhan. Here, to counter the online trolls jumping to conclusions, I will show that the coronavirus was clipped to prevent deaths in a clever foreign attack on China's food security, specifically the fish farms of the world's largest aquaculture producer. Here at the start, I will drop this breadcrumb pointing to the motive, saving the 2020 Tokyo Olympics from a boycott. Yes, there's conspiracy but not the one your feverish brain fomented. Yes, the Chinese can do reckless things with CRISPR and so does the rest of the labs around the world with biotech capability. Of course, the Chinese are not going to destroy an industrial city with three times the population of Chicago in the heart of China. The real tragedy is that the Wuhan biosafety lab is ineffective and totally useless against coronavirus due to the fact that all the competent microbiologists are working for big pharma down in Shezhen. So get a handle on your irrational fears.

Round up the unusual suspects

The news media has gone batty over exotic creatures, weird but edible to the Chinese, that might have conveyed the parent nCoV2019 virus to the outbreak epicenter in the Wuhan fish market. CNN, a pack of imbeciles, has been chiming in that Patient Zero never visited the market. Farm-raised fish are the main source of protein in Wuhan, whether or not it is bought at the big market or a corner fish-head window, cause it all comes from the same fish farm, you dummies! The virus is aerosol spread to the nostrils of passersby through water particles churning out of fish tanks, which you'll find all over any Chinese city. The glass or metal tanks are on every block because Chinese eat fresh cooked in dozens of delicious ways instead of gnawing on frozen sticks or fish-wiches.

In this diversionary media campaign while the investigation continues, another implicated delicacy are snakes, which taste quite good with a shot of booze. These creepy crawlies are all imported illegally from Southeast Asia so the Thais and Indonesians must be dying in droves, right (even though reptiles are not known to be carriers of Coronavirus)? In the past while doing eco-projects at a coffee plantation in Thailand I had to use tongs to remove snakes from schools and cars, and never once have heard any native Thai snake handler mention the risk of catching a flu from a cobra, krait or bamboo viper.

The tiny bats in cages are sold for a health-reviving soup, but these are Microbats that hunt insects, which belong to an entirely different branch of the evolutionary chain than the culprit Macrobats aka giant flying foxes (which are genetically related to us apes). Flying foxes are carriers of Marburg-ebola, Nipah, SARS (to civets), and dozens of other diseases identified by two letters of the alphabet. Macrobats subsist on a diet of fruit, the host environment for coronavirus and ebola. The big fruit bats are the only guilty suspect in the line-up.
Poison-tipped Bulgarian Umbrellas
What about the much-feared BSL-4 labs in Wuhan? It's sad, really, that the Potemkin laboratories are a total sham for pilfering funds and kickbacks from construction and equipment budgets, hollow spaces devoid of any recruits from the higher salaried microbiologists and lab technicians working for major pharmaceuticals, Chinese drug corporations and venture-capital funded biotech start-ups in Shenzhen and Hong Kong or overseas.

Where are these mysterious bad-guy "biowarfare" labs when Chinese patients need them? Bio-Safety, get it? The shiny new Wuhan labs were supposed to do the DNA studies in the emergency response to these sorts of bio-crises from Shanghai to Chongqing. Instead the Beijing leadership has criticized the governor of Hubei Province, for taking the construction funds and laundering them. It happens all the time in the Chinese medical system and military, the Bobbsey twins of embezzlement. If you are stranger to China, and certain things never work, get used to it and stopping reacting in shock. The trains run on time, and the restaurants used to serve fish.

The source of the BS lab disinfo is Porton Down, using the Lancet journal to cast chum on the waters The Brits who ran the hospitals in Hong Kong has an old grudge against the medical establishment in China (and so do I, but that's not a reason to spread lies). The Brit complaints are usually for the right reason but also brimming with imperial arrogance. It's enough to point out that the Wuhan labs are ineffective and incompetent; there's no need for mass-murder accusations by the sort of biological warfare they're not capable of organizing, at least not yet. Now, if this carping keeps up, I'm going to have to more closely examine the gene-editing done in the English CRISPR League.

In the online cosmos, the exaggerated claims are coming from the poison-tipped Bulgarian Umbrella squad feeding the British baloney into the online stream so that a friend of the Royals, Vladimir Putin, can keep China and the USA, Xi and Trump at each other's throats, for London and Moscow to better exploit each of them. False alarms during rising global pandemic should be dealt with by the FBI, especially when the rumor-monger is the son of a disinformation agent with Section 7 (information control and propaganda) of the Soviet-era Bulgarian State Secret Service). Zero cred, so don't Hedge your bets.

Same goes for that ebola lab in Winnipeg following the abandonment of state-run labs by avaricious lab directors, technicians and professors, jumping aboard the biotech scam. (Biofraud, you read it here first, folks.) If these vaunted microbio labs were so packed with experienced talent, why haven't any of them shown up in lab coats and safety masks to the overcrowded hospitals in Wuhan? My team crushed SARS and avian influenza with cheap and easy environmental barriers, nano-tech air filtration aka titanium or silver air cons, and traditional Chinese herbalism, but made zero profit because virus-fighting is that basic and cheap.

Microbiology has become a scam to string along investors over a dozen years of vaccine development, costing tens of millions but absolutely worthless as a product. The Wuhan has two Potemkin Labs, set up for the purpose of embezzling tax money, that's all they do. I really hope that I do not have to return to this debunking these absurd and non-factual claims from the Lancet and other scamsters fronting for Gates and his vaccinators, since I have no time to waste on fools. I'd rather do something productive, like meditate.

Lovers from different backgrounds

Bioscience logic dictates that the Wuhan outbreak originated with a fruit-eating Macrobat, during a seed-bombing flight, which infected masses of Tilapia in the vast aquaculture ponds around Wuhan. Both species have a high-sugar diet, and fructose is the energy source that powers viral mutation. This logical relationship between bat and fish has one problem, which is that my flying fox, call him "Romeo", who dwells by the ocean, has never before visited the inland home-ponds of the freshwater Tilapia, call her "Juliet". They haven't once met before this past season, and don't even text-message or look at the other's social media page, so how was this long-distance relationship set up? By Tinder Date, of course, on a hot night in Wuhan.

The bat-to-fish theory is in disrepute because of teh disruptive fact is that the Wuhan basin is outside the foraging range of Macrobats, with fruit bats are confined to Southern China and Southeast Asia, where the mangoes are, can you blame them? Just one species of Macrobat forages in the lower Yangtze Delta, in the wetlands east of Nantou (north of Shanghai) and in the flats around the new Tesla plant southeast of Shanghai. No, Romeo did not drive an e-car to Wuhan. He can't afford the down-payment and the credit union doesn't trust with a loan. Juliet being something of a cold fish prefers customers with money.Romeo doesn't have wheels, but he's got wings.

The rare wonderful moment of the Romeo's flight to Juliet occurred in November, or late October at the earliest, when the weather normally gets too cold for a tropical Okinawan giant flying fox. (Wuhan is one of three furnace cities in the summer that become iceboxes in winter.) When Venus shined down on poor Romeo, the start of winter experienced the hottest November on record and the worst drought in 40 years. Voila! Love is magical. The drought devastated agriculture throughout Hubei Province, and so local farmers abandoned thousand of tons of wrinkled pears and persimmons unpicked at orchards.

Did I mention that Romeo is on a strict diet of fruit, vet's orders? So Wuhan was a bonanza for his gang of flying foxes, who presumably can sniff the scent of fruit off the prevailing eastward wind. (Bats have the most acute senses of all mammals.) Here was the single occasion for the bat horde to storm the 200-mile-plus distance from the upper delta to the inland Wuhan basin, although it was still a bit chilly at night for their liking.

Can you see, in your mind's eye, thousands of hungry giant flying foxes cruising past the harvest moon, a chorus of alto tenors singing "When you're a Jet you're Jet all the way, When you're a Jet you're the top cat in town. You're the gold-medal kid with the heavyweight crown!" Count Dracula, you're a loser who belongs in a coffin, says the challenger Romeo Fox.

So power on, Romey! BTW, did any of your thugs remember to pack toilet paper in their suitcase? No, please don't assure me that in China that it's is OK to do it on a gutter or in the bushes. What's this going to do for the image of Okinawa? Our beaches are raked clean every morning before the rising sun. We need those tourists escaping filthy China, you nitwits, baka-yarou!

So a few hours after the Kadena Jets gorge on over-ripe, oh so sweet fruit, it's hey, Romey, bro', I got a tummy ache. The seed-drops begin according to plan from mission control behind the Prime Minister's office. The aquaculture ponds suffer intense carpet bombing as Tilapia leap to break surface and snap up a coronavirus-infected pear seeds raining down. The first one up is named Juliet, and so this is really kinky stuff that weirdos like Eric Schmidt enjoy watching over polished marble floors in Roppongi and on top of grand pianos. Hey, Romeo, you are one sick puppy! Your Oki mama-san and Leonard Bernstein would rather see you gay!

Like the Bill Shakespeare version of this classic love story, the next act of our Romeo and Julia affair is a tragedy. Lovely Julia is netted by a greedy fish grower and dumped in a see-through glass fish-tank in some big dark market, like a go-go dancer in a cheesy nightclub. Then, some fat guy ogles her: "Oh, look at that one, she's so beautiful and curvaceous and a bit plump, just what I like!" Oh Romeo, where art thou?

Before proceeding deeper into this mystery, excuse me for a moment to deal with a copyright issue. Greetings, Tim, Mr Burton. I'll have you know this ain't "Finding Nemo". if you plan to use this grotesque perverse storyline for your next big movie after all the flops since "Corpse Bride", you'd better make an appointment with my copyright lawyer. Don't talk crap about a sheet script, 'cause I know what you're thinking, that the poop-bombing scene is the greatest air-battle since Tora-Tora-Tora! It's not Midway, it's all the way!"
Shinzo Abe's Biowar-Ninjas

So what ever happened to Romeo? Winter came crashing down so he hightailed it back to the Ryukyus and hung upside down from a camphor tree watching the giggling farmers haul away the last of the juicy tangerines, as his fox head swelled like a balloon pondering his next move before starving to death. Southeast Asians are even more hostile to his kind and they have pellet guns. Romeo's something fluttering around. "Psst, Senor Romeo, air cargo to a Mexican mango patch? I hear the senoritas over there look way better than that China doll, what's her name, Julie? Hey, don't get riled now, just kidding. So OK, the Philippines are a lot closer and the lazy farmers there actually sleep all night, manana until all the mangoes are gone. Let's hit it!" So, folks, so don't worry about Romeo because I have him under contract for a fly-through role in Tim's new production "Vampire Groom".

OK, Tim, for Vampire Groom to rock, you need a totally evil bad guy who's so pathetic that he's lovable, a despicable he. And I've located the star quality you've been needing in the perfect villain, my old friend Shinzo! He's sansei, third-generation bad guy, it runs in the cold blood. No, he's not a Darth anything, but more like a combo of the Joker and Hannibal Lectur, warped devious cruelty and insane laughter, your type of action hero. Mr. Burton, sir, do we have a deal on script and casting? Sign right here.
The Kadena Jets

Now back to the rest of the Kadena Jets. Not a single case of coronavirus infection in humans or macaque monkeys has ever been reported in Okinawa, southern Kyushu, Taiwan or the Yangtze delta. That means Romeo and gang were deliberately infected with virus-tainted fruit on one of Japan's southern islands facing the Yangtze delta. The bats were infected with a gene-edited virus either a secret operation run solely by Japan or, unlikelier, in tandem with the longstanding NBC program in the small military bases around Kadena AFB and the Marines' Camp Schwab.

Since the predecessor of nCoV2019 was crispred to remove genes that cause terrible symptoms in humans, thereby reducing eliminating the possibility of mortality from heart seizures and blood-spewing during violent coughing. This shows the designer's intent to avoid killing humans who dine on the infected fish. The dilution of toxicity indicates the objective as being mild symptoms diagnosed as a case of food poisoning. On a massive scale, a food poisoning scandal would lead to the shut down of fisheries and aquaculture in a huge blow to national food security.

This is exactly what occurred in early January when the Chinese government banned fishing and consumption of fish along the entire 6,300 km (3,900 miles) length of the Yangtze River. So why isn't any of this being reported in the media?

You see the earliest victims who were not sickened at the fish market were infected with the virus prior to its mutation inside their bodies. Then people started dying in droves during the second round of mutations when the virus got around its gene-alteration and upped its virulence. This remarkable restoration of previous function shows the resilience of virus RNA, which is quicker at mutation than our cumbersome double-strand DNA.

The planned bio-strike was to trigger a food-poisoning scare with the aim of shutting down China's aquaculture economy, which now controls 70 percent of the world fish market, as in the frozen section of your local supermarket, and even Red Lobster, which are from Chinese ponds not Maine. On the defensive without any biosafety shields, the PRC leadership would not openly report that its entire fish industry worth a 200 billion dollars is infected, at least as carriers, since that would be an admission of defeat, running up the white flag. Food is a weapon, ask any Cuban about that. At that point of desperation, the ambassador of Japan out of the goodness of his heart would volunteer Japanese aid to fix the problem. The fish goes for the bait and is hooked by the fisherman.

Now how am I so certain that coronavirus is centered in fish? Because, to repeat, in the first week of January, a state-ordered ban was imposed on catching and eating fish of all 350 species in the Yangtze. As put in "Jurassic Park", that's a lot of fish.
Zeroing In

Located on the 31st Parallel along with Yangtze River, the Amami islands located between Kyushu and the Ryukyus has seen microbiology research on mono-cell eukaryotes (similar in ways to flagellates that host SARS and ebola, but lacking oars.) This research is conducted under the supervision of the joint faculty of veterinary medicine at Kagoshima University, which is a national institution of higher education. Anyone who is an ramen addict knows that Kyushu is the home of the black pig that provides the soup stock, and Kagoshima U does extensive research on swine flu, like the one that just wiped the Chinese hog herd. That's an observation and not intended a clue.

There's nothing sinister about gene-splicing, storage and retrieval for studies, which is not to say these can't be used for sinister purposes. Many labs have vast collections of gene samples, many of these severed or spliced. It just takes a single ethically warped pathologist to access an index and order a sample to begin tinkering with the genetic code, and no less than the notorious pathologist who create the "unstoppable super-flu virus" Yoshihiro Kawaoka is back to Japan after his controversial stints at the monkey lab in University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Erasmus Institute in Rotterdam, just in time for the Tokyo Olympics, I might add. (Tim, I not sure that Kawaoka fits your comic-horror genre since there's nothing humorous about him and you don't do Darth types.)

The legitimate research at universities across Japan is open to peer review and comply with standard international guidelines on ethics and legality. The dark side of microbiology finds its haven inside the dozens of veterinary schools outside the authority of the WHO, CDC, NIH and equivalent professional supervisory bodies and reporting-review systems. This shadowy zone of research accounts for the huge national controversy in Japan against Shinzo Abe's pet project (pun intended) of supporting the newly built Kake veterinary school in Imabari, Shikoku island, just across a narrow strait of the Inland Sea from research sponsor Okayama University.

That area is just a bit south of my hometown of Kobe, which besides beef, has a dark history as the home turf of the scientists with Unit 731 including its director Shiro Ishii; the postwar return of many of their staff to serve as university professors and physicians in Kobe, Okayama and later Osaka; and also as the headquarters of the world Nazi movement in exile after the fall of Berlin. Their sons were my classmates, along with boys whose fathers worked for the hidden military-industrial complex.

In the postwar era, Unit 731 members (continuing as a fraternal organization) were recruited by the U.S. Army to work at its biological warfare lab at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, with translators provided by Mormon veterans of WWII. During the Korean conflict the CIA-Yakuza alliance conducted a secret campaign to air-drop hantavirus on both sides of the Yalu River, which blew back and killed 3,000 American servicemen. Bubonic plague in China, and also discovered at Yosemite National Park and Riverside, California, still face the threat of black plague due to contamination during the transport of spores from Utah to March Air Force Base onto Kadena and then Seoul seven decades ago.

Through my palantir, I seriously doubt that the U.S. is involved in the Amami-Ryukyu bat-biowar operation against China since fish is not a major Amerian export, at least not since the collapse of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska fisheries due to radioactive seawater contamination from Fukushima. U.S. fish stocks are not coming back for at least a century. So it seems the Wuhan bat attack is a purely Japanese operation ordered and funded by Shinzo Abe, at the top of the chain of command.

Coincidentally, prior to the Olympics, the Abe government is accelerating virology studies into top gear. Japan's National Institute for Infectious Diseases (NIID), located in the Musashi-Murayama western suburb of Tokyo, is now conducting intensive R&D on five strains of ebola virus. Various species of fruit bats collected across Southeast Asia and caged in Okinawa are being sent to veterinary labs across Japan. The pretext is biosecurity while thousands of athletes from Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America participate in the Olympic Games. What happens with biological agents in those regions after the games is another question.

Virus as Archangel

Many of the retired elderly second-generation students of 731 are probably clinking glasses now about the self-therapy of the crispred Wuhan coronavirus. A self-healing virus fits into the Japanese intuitive insight into microbiology based on the ancient concept of "tama" or translucent orbs of light, which are the essential spirit of any living creature. Viruses are the warrior orbs, avenging angels of a universe invisible to the eye, and adorable cute creatures like the Pokemon, deadly when angered, machine-like creatures but with miraculous powers of transformation of species as masters of evolution.

What's so amazing about the Wuhan coronavirus was its regeneration after being clipped of virulence-causing genes that intensify the pain of symptoms in its victims. nCov2019 somehow reconstructed alternative sequences to replace the lopped-off gene sequence. An archangel will not be disarmed, for its role in the grand scheme of Life is to create new species by gene-splicing old versions. Yet viruses are also driven to destroy their outdated creations, as they did to the dinosaurs that survived the Yucatan comet for thousands of years but were hobbled by the long-term defects from the comet's legacy of radioactivity. At last, viral infections took down these giants to make way for mammals. Viruses and radioactivity, the tiniest fragments of life are connected with the Cosmos.

Motive - Stop a Boycott of the Tokyo Olympics

So every investigation much eventually reach the tricky question of motive. Since everything in Japan has been revolving around the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, what was the objective the bat-delivered contamination of China's protein production? A factor to consider is that Japan has the world-leading scientific expertise on ichthyology, the study of fish. Nobody knows fish better, as you realize at a sushi bar.

So the plan went like this: China gets clobbered by a mystery flu that jumps from fish to humans, threatening its massive aquaculture investment. Japanese professors of ichthyology and Fisheries Agency experts step up to provide all the solutions needed to fix the fish-farming disaster, then issue a clean bill of slate. So Beijing out of gratitude refuses to join the proposed South Korean boycott of the 2020 Tokyo Olympiad. The Chinese team arrives to Tokyo with healthy smiles and wins gold medals allotted to the missing Russians, who have been banned as doping cheats. The South Koreans arrive with smarmy smiles and bile up to their throats in anger and shame. Shinzo Abe has whipped them like disobedient dogs, once again for granddad Nobusuke Kishi.

The Rising Sun glows redder than ever. Shinzo Abe isn't just a world leader, he is a god, as promised by Sukyo Mahikari. Someone, screech the LP disc to a halt, please. Then things started to off the rails, when the best-laid plans of men and lab rats go awry. The cover-up is being promoted by all sides as the worldwide death toll starts to mount. Everyone is pretending like nothing's happening, the Olympics will go on and will soon be over, to everyone's relief. Radioactivity and virus outbreaks don't count when the only priority is saving face for the political class. It's a grim world of deception, lies and random death for the unlucky. So let's just say, in advance, something cheerful. Happy Valentines, Juliet and Romeo, wherever you may or may not be!

Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice

One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.
To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs.
Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country’s infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.
It sure doesn’t look like Kansas anymore.
The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay, also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.
One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like “Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow” will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump’s decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won’t be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.
Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His “closing arguments” speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as “magisterial,” “powerful,” and “impressive.” The Washington Post’s resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it “a grand slam” while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it “dazzling.” Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it “a great job” and added that Schiff is now “a rock star.” Daily Beast enthused that the remarks “will go down in history” and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it “a closing statement for the ages.” Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting “I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country.”
Actually, a better adjective would have been “scary” and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable.
It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow’s “interference” in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.
Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to “assure the integrity” of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that “The president’s misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won.”
Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said “As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that “Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power.” Aaron Mate at The Nation added that “For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let’s assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke.”
Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was “a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.”
The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded “poor innocent Ukraine” in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden’s son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.
On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that “Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.” Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the “United States” for “Russia” and “Kremlin” and changes “Ukraine” to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.
The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today’s Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don’t you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it’s first major step, per Schiff, will be to “remake the map of Europe by dint of military force.”
Donald Trump’s erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.
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Friday, February 7, 2020

Blacklist Valley: How Big Tech Reshapes Politics By Censoring Conservative Ideas

For better or worse, social media is the new public square. Of adults, 68% use Facebook, 73% use YouTube, and a quarter use Twitter. The numbers are much higher for adults under 50. Two-thirds of adults and roughly 4 in 5 under 50 use social media to consume news. Three-quarters of Facebook users are on the site every day, and Twitter users have a disproportionate influence on the media because so many journalists are on the service.
The size and scale of social media companies exploded primarily because they presented themselves as open platforms — blank slates. Google, Facebook, and Twitter all characterized their products as engines for social improvement. “We think of Twitter as the global town hall,” said former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. “We are the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
Costolo was Twitter’s chief executive from 2010 until 2015 and the immediate predecessor of current CEO Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s general manager in the United Kingdom, Andy Yang, likewise described Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” in March 2012. Google became a multibillion-dollar company by offering a portal for free, unrestricted information to anyone with access to the internet; famously, its original motto was “Don’t be evil.” An internal Facebook memo circulated in June 2016 stated that at Facebook, “we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.”
The public has given these three tech companies (and others) enormous power to select the information we read, share, and discuss with our neighbors and friends. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the role they play in our lives that we fail to notice that Big Tech is sifting through the available information and narrowing, and prioritizing, our choices. Although Facebook, Google, and Twitter once touted themselves as bastions of democracy and free speech, they are now openly moving toward direct censorship and media manipulation - and specifically targeting conservative ideas and personalities.
They have already acquiesced to their new censorship fetish. In March 2018, Google circulated an internal memo that instructed employees on the benefits of censorship. In the memo, which was titled “The Good Censor,” Google conceded that while the internet was “founded upon utopian principles of free speech,” free speech is no longer en vogue. “Tech companies are adapting their stance towards censorship” in direct response to “the anxiety of users and governments.” The memo said that “tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation” but framed that shift as a positive development. One major way that tech companies are “stepping into the role of moderator” is by “significantly amping up the number of moderators they employ — in YouTube’s case increasing the number of people on the lookout for inappropriate content to more than 10,000.” It argued that censorship was necessary partly because of users “behaving badly.”
The most alarming part of the missive, however, was that it spoke approvingly of foreign governments that were censoring online speech. Google framed the acts as “taking steps to make online spaces safer, more regulated, and more similar to their offline laws. Protected from hate speech on the street? Now you are on the net too ...” Twitter has completely and publicly abandoned its brand as the “free speech wing of the free speech party,” with Dorsey claiming the whole “free speech wing” thing was one giant “joke.” His company, once seemingly devoted to the free expression of its users, now says it is prioritizing making users feel safe from others’ speech. Facebook, too, is openly rebranding itself as a benevolent censor. Here’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees in April 2018 (emphasis added):
Overall, I would say that we’re going through a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. For the first 10 or 12 years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that, if we could put those tools in people’s hands, then that would empower people to do good things. What I think we’ve learned now across a number of issues, not just data privacy, but also fake news and foreign interference in elections, is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. It’s not enough to just build tools. We need to make sure that they’re used for good. And that means that we need to now take a more active view in policing the ecosystem and in watching and kind of looking out and making sure that all of the members in our community are using these tools in a way that’s going to be good and healthy.
Three forces are driving Big Tech’s online censorship.
  • Two are external and related: market pressures and de-platforming campaigns by liberal activists and journalists.
  • The third pressure is internal: Silicon Valley is staggeringly one-sided politically.
Profit margins and market pressures are crucial levers that left-wing ideologues use to pull tech giants and other corporations in the direction of censorship. Companies want to avoid controversy, and, in the era of outrage mobs, that means avoiding offending the Left, which controls most of the cultural institutions in America. That’s part of the reason why massive companies are embracing left-wing politics in advertising, such as what Gillette did with its “toxic masculinity” ad. Left-wing activists amplify those pressures with smear campaigns and boycotts intended to rattle advertisers and investors, forcing the hands of tech companies. If you convince corporate marketing agencies that advertising on Facebook is risky, you can be certain that Facebook will take some form of action to shed controversy and reassure investors.
The external pressures of left-wing activists are compounded by the internal pressures of the companies’ employees, who want Big Tech to embrace censorship against nonliberal opinions as a moral and political necessity. The internal office cultures at Facebook, Google, and Twitter have always been overwhelmingly left-leaning, but the election of Donald Trump as president has made them far more radical. I told one Silicon Valley insider that I thought tech culture now resembled the left-wing, activist culture on college campuses. He replied, “They’re the exact same people.” Their political opinions are certainly monochromatic. Of the $8.1 million that tech industry workers donated to presidential candidates during the 2016 campaign, 95% of it went to Hillary Clinton. Among donations from the Silicon Valley area specifically, 99% went to Clinton.
So, maybe it’s not surprising that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all become vehicles for left-wing activism. The companies encourage employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work. One Silicon Valley executive told me, “We want people to ... bring their entire perspective and all their values to work, and in the positive sense, that means getting rid of a huge distinction between my professional life and my personal life.” For left-wing activists in Silicon Valley, their professional, personal, and political lives are all one. That’s why Twitter launched an “intersectionality” initiative for its employees and Google gives millions to left-wing causes — to signal its allegiance to the tribe.
In 2017, the nonprofit Lincoln Network conducted a survey of tech workers in Silicon Valley, including those employed at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. The political leanings of those surveyed were more politically diverse than Silicon Valley’s overall population: 29% were liberal, 24% were libertarian, 22% were conservative, and 16% were centrist. But on one thing, they agreed: 75% of the liberals and 70% of the conservatives characterized their workplace as either “liberal” or “very liberal” and fewer than 2% of the survey-takers said their places of work were conservative.
Even some of the liberal respondents thought that left-wing intolerance had gone too far. One liberal tech worker said, “I witnessed repeated calls from managers and nonmanagers alike for people to be fired for the political views they expressed.” Another liberal employee said, “There are people who are looking for a reason to be offended, and any sort of disagreement would make them wonder if I’m a secret Trump supporter. The idea of ‘I agree with you 90%’ is not enough.” One self-identified libertarian said, “I have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in the face of an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment here at Google. It’s terrifying here. A real horror show. Every day could be my last.
Eighty-nine percent of respondents who identified as “very conservative” said they didn’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions at work. “It’s a postmodern, secularist Silicon Valley viewpoint. Highly liberal. It’s motivated by changing the world masquerading as intellectualism,” said one conservative tech employee. A libertarian said “there were many groups devoted to identity politics” in his company, and every one of them was leftist. “If you’re not part of the liberal Democrat crowd, you’re an outsider. Talks are often politicized, whether overtly or not. The entire executive team leans in a certain direction, and you don’t want to be the odd one out for fear of being ostracized ... Nobody who didn’t fit the company’s mold talked about their political views. The company was very homogenous in that sense.” One conservative employee said, “There is overwhelming internal support for leftist political candidates, policies, and ideas, and they are frequently expressed ... There are zero to very few senior people who dare to speak up or represent an alternative (more conservative) point of view in company debates or policy decisions.”
This groupthink affects everything that Big Tech does, every decision it makes, every program it releases. As a former Google engineer noted, Google’s algorithms reflect the assumptions and biases of their creators. The discussion about tech platforms and political bias often (and understandably) centers on what is or isn’t allowed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, but the other half of the picture is what is and isn’t prioritized on a platform. Broadly speaking, tech companies censor users and content in two ways.
The first, which we’ll call “hard censorship,” is pretty straightforward: deleting content or suspending users.
  • The second method, which we’ll call “soft censorship,” involves tech companies making content harder to find.
Hard censorship is tearing down a roadside billboard; soft censorship is making the billboard difficult to see by erecting other billboards in front of it. Soft censorship by tech companies can be just as effective as hard censorship. Studies show that people rarely click past the first page of Google or YouTube results. Even fewer click past the second or third page. So, pushing a link off the first page (or two or three) of Google is nearly the same as removing it from Google results altogether. The same is true with your Facebook and Twitter feeds: Companies don’t have to delete content to make sure you don’t see it.
Since 2016, every major tech company, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter, has been busy retooling algorithms or news feeds or monetization standards in ways that benefit liberals and sideline conservatives. Big Tech also partners with left-wing groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to “flag” supposedly problematic content. The group falsely labels individual conservatives as “extremists” and conservative organizations as “hate groups” and then promotes more restrictive content policies against alleged “hate speech.”
To give you some idea of the advocacy group’s standards, it once accused Ben Carson of being an “extremist” for stating his belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. Immersed in scandals of its own, the organization has been widely discredited. But it still works closely with Google engineers who design the digital tools and algorithms to police hate speech on YouTube as part of Google’s “Trusted Flaggers” program. Google kept its collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center a secret, hidden behind a confidentiality agreement, and the group only admitted the partnership after I broke the story. All of these partnerships are occurring while the advocacy group publicly keeps pressure on Facebook, Google, and Twitter, calling for them to do more to combat “hate speech” on their platforms, which invariably means giving the organization more power in its private dealings with the companies. The Southern Poverty Law Center led five other left-wing groups in forming a coalition called “Change the Terms” that aims to pressure all major technology service providers into setting speech codes governing what their clients say both on and off their platforms.
The coalition demands that each company agree to implement a specific set of policies already drafted by the activists. Among the required changes: empowering third-party organizations (such as, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center) to flag “hateful” actors. The activists’ targets aren’t limited to Facebook, Google, and Twitter (although those companies are certainly on the list) but also include credit card companies and crowdfunding sites. Once a company caves to the pressure and agrees to adopt the left-wing contract, it has essentially deputized the coalition to decide who can stay on its platform or use its services and who must leave. Once the contract is official, the activists immediately shift gears to identify the users or customers the company is now required to ban from its platform. Left-wingers’ plan for weaponizing tech platforms bears a resemblance to the “social credit score” system adopted by the Chinese government. Only instead of the government monitoring your private behavior and limiting your access to society as a result, it’s a collective of left-wing advocacy groups partnered with multinational corporations.
First Amendment rights do not protect you from private organizations’ limitations on speech. It’s a devious strategy, and it’s working. Media Matters is a left-wing political group devoted to silencing conservative viewpoints in the media. For much of its history, it focused on attacking Fox News, but in recent years, it targeted conservative voices online as well. Media Matters presented a 44-page memo to liberal donors at a January 2017 summit that bragged about its plans to work with Facebook and Google to destroy nonliberal media outlets. The memo argued that enlisting Big Tech in the left-wing campaign to eliminate conservative media is essential if liberals hope to defeat Trump in 2020. Media Matters promised to accomplish exactly that. “Key right-wing targets will see their influence diminished as a result of our work,” it promised.
Leftists don’t need to banish every conservative from social media; they only need to dominate social media the way they dominate the mainstream media. They’re OK with discussion that takes place within boundaries they set (as on MSNBC) and so long as they win the elections that matter to them (such as the White House). Since Nov. 8, 2016, they have shifted the digital landscape against conservative voices. By Nov. 3, 2020, they will have transformed (or rigged) social media in ways that will have far-reaching implications for America.