Dr. Robert Epstein’s testimony re Google

Earlier this month this blog reported on Dr. Robert Epstein's testimony concerning Google's invisible influence on election results.  Ned Ryun at American Greatness has an update:

Google’s Algorithms Threaten Free and Fair Elections

. . . the power of the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Epstein explained:

SEME is one of the most powerful forms of influence ever discovered in the behavioral sciences, and it is especially dangerous because it is invisible to people—“subliminal,” in effect. It leaves people thinking they have made up their own minds, which is very much an illusion. It also leaves no paper trail for authorities to trace. 

. . .

Epstein discussed the potential impact that Google, combined with Facebook and Twitter, could have on the election outcomes in 2020. “Big Tech in 2020, because if these companies all support the same candidate—and that’s likely, needless to say—they will be able to shift upwards of 15 million votes to that candidate with no one knowing and without leaving a paper trail,” Epstein said.

After six years of studying Google, Epstein’s solution for breaking up Google’s SEME is to make its index public, to make it into a sort of public commons to engender greater competition. I have argued that these tech companies must have their Section 230 exemptions removed and be redefined as publishers and telecommunications companies. And we have antitrust laws for a reason. The federal government has a role in breaking up what are, in fact, monopolies.

Whatever the solution may be—and I suspect it is a combination of all of the above—it’s time to get aggressive. . . .

Read the rest of Mr. Ryun’s report here.

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Today’s fun photo

Runner participating in the Burning River 100 Mile Endurance Run 

in northeast Ohio today (via pat dooley photography)

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More censorship: this time it’s Amazon

Image credit: americanfreepress.net

Matt Margolis wrote a book about the Obama presidency. He now reports at PJ Media:

Reports of Amazon purging reviews from conservatives books on their site have been made for some time now. PJ Media’s Megan Fox reported in March 2018 that many conservative authors noticed a mass deletion of reviews. Well, another purge has taken place. This one targeted my book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. This book was approaching 1,000 reviews until Amazon decided to clean house. On Tuesday, the book had 945 reviews. On Wednesday, the book had only 693 reviews. A whopping 252 reviews (approximately 27 percent) simply vanished. Worse yet, most of the purged reviews appear to have been positive ones, as the average rating went down from roughly 4.5+ to 4.2 stars.

I can prove this because I have screenshots . . .

The rest is here. Another example of how we are losing our right to free speech.

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D-Day in Conneaut: Aug. 15 - 17

Photo credit: Pittsburgh Gazette

Bob Batz at the Pittsburgh Gazette has the announcement:

The Allies once again will storm the beaches at Normandy,
but on Lake Erie, at D-Day Conneaut

This year is not only the 75th anniversary of D-Day but also the 20th anniversary of its biggest re-enactment, happening just over the Ohio border. A lot of Pittsburghers and Western Pennsylvanians will be part of it. 

In 1999, a small group of history buffs re-created a bit of the epic World War II battle at Conneaut Township Park in this community — on Lake Erie between Cleveland and Erie, Pa. — because the bluffs-backed beach was reminiscent of Omaha Beach at Normandy, France, that the Allies assaulted in 1944. 

The first re-enactment wasn’t meant for the public, but some park visitors witnessed it and were enthralled. So the re-enactors kept at it each summer and wound up incorporating in 2007, and proceeded to make nonprofit D-Day Conneaut not only public but also the country’s largest and most historically accurate WWII living history event.

It drew 45,000 spectators over two days last year, and this year’s  — Aug. 15 to 17 — looks to be only bigger, in that they’re starting on Thursday and growing the re-enactors to about 1,700 for this double anniversary.

Details and map are here.

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Big Tech censorship and bias: Update

I’m posting regularly on Big Tech and censorship, antitrust probes, and related news, as the next election cycle will be influenced by Big Tech and its biases. If we get to a recommended Action Alert, Cleveland Tea Party readers will have more background. Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media reports:

Google Engineer: Google News Search Results Are Intentionally Biased Against Trump

In an explosive video released by Project Veritas Wednesday morning, Google software engineer Greg Coppola blew the whistle on Google News, explaining how it is biased against President Donald Trump. This confirms the results of an unscientific test on Google News bias run by PJ Media editor Paula Bolyard last year (tweeted out by Trump himself), and a more scientific study also suggesting bias. The Google News slant is not a conspiracy theory, though Google of course denies manipulating results. After all, Google employees heavily favor Democrats in their political donations.

"Google News is really an aggregator of just a handful of sites and all of those sites really are vitriolically against President Trump, which I would really consider to be interference in the American election," Coppola tells Project Veritas's James O'Keefe in the video. "Like for example, CNN is the most commonly used source in Google News: 20 percent of all results for Donald Trump are from CNN, when that’s the entire internet of millions of sites."

"CNN is something that Donald Trump and his supporters would call 'really fake news,'" the software engineer rightly noted. He was not necessarily endorsing the accusation, and even Trump supporters who rightly attack CNN for its bias should acknowledge that its news is often based in fact, but embellished or twisted.

"I think it’s ridiculous to say that there’s no bias. . . .

The full report is here.

RELATED from Joseph Vazquez at Newsbusters:

Facebook and Amazon set new records for lobbying spending in early 2019, according to recent disclosures.

Bloomberg reported July 23, that Facebook Inc. spent more than $4.1 million lobbying, and Amazon Inc. spent more than $4 million in the second quarter. It further reported that Facebook's lobbying efforts in particular were the highest “among big internet platforms, an increase from its previous high in the same period a year earlier.” It found Google’s lobbying spending “dipped” to $3.1 million in the second quarter.

As The Hill reported July 23, “The surge in spending comes as Congress and regulators are scrutinizing tech giants’ market power and handling of user data.” The federal government has Facebook and Amazon under major scrutiny for potential antitrust violations as well as political bias and censorship of conservatives.

A lot of unholy alliances.

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Mueller's "circus of embarrassments"

By now, everyone has seen the headlines or watched the anchors reporting on Robert Mueller's hearing before Congress. So just in case you've been busy at work or otherwise occupied, here is the link to Vodkapundit's (Stephen Green) Drunkblogging on the main event. Click here. 

Mr. Green leads off:

If former special counsel Robert Mueller trying to avoid saying much of anything while being questioned by some of the most duplicitous people in the world is your idea of Must-See TV, then you're probably already tuned into MSNBC. And may the Lord have mercy on your brain.

On the other hand, if you'd rather just follow along online with a coffee or (better yet) a Bloody Mary, then you've come to the right place.

House antics to follow shortly. Bloody Mary recipe to follow almost immediately.

Welcome to a very special midweek early morning drunkblog.*

*Open bar, professional drinker. Try this at home.

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DOJ and Big Tech: antitrust probe

Nate Madden on The Hill has the story: 

DOJ announces antitrust probe into social media companies: “Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands." (Click to embiggen, or go to the link here).

How To Steal An Election

image credit:  dawn.com  

Kevin McCullough published “The Democrats' Blueprint To Steal 2020 From The Voters Of America” at Townhall. He concludes:

By adding illegal voters to the rolls they believe they can gain the odds. By lying to the American worker and voter they believe they can depress support for the president and his agenda. And by getting invisible assistance from Big Tech they believe the can conspire to steal a lawful election regardless of the people’s vote.

Full column is here.

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Another Uniparty budget deal

image credit: foxnews.com

More bad news from the Uniparty's budget deal; this update via Ace of Spades:

'Indistinguishable from Democrats': Daniel Horowitz tells Mark Levin
what's behind Republicans' debt-exploding budget deal

Horowitz explained that the current spending levels are the result of the budget deals that congressional Republicans cut during the last session of Congress, “and now they’re looking for a repeat performance” in the current spending debate. They appear ready to hand Speaker Nancy Pelosi a debt-exploding deal that suspends the debt limit, busts spending caps, and “give away the president’s leverage on the border.”

[Ace comments:] Read the article...it's the usual gang of craven and shortsighted politicians who simply don't care about the future financial health of the country. Government spending has become so ridiculous that I wonder whether they are still trying to buy votes! How many voters actually pull the lever for the incumbent because he voted for some pork? Spending is out of control on all fronts, so how do people recognize directed spending vs. the background abomination that is the federal budget?

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One Small Step For A Couple Of Privileged White Males

photo credit: Popular Mechanics 

On the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, everyone has seen photographs, cartoons, Buzz Aldrin’s thoughtful piece at the 25^th anniversary mark, online at Popular Mechanics here (h/t Instapundit), and other commemorative articles. I thought I would link to a PC satire at Issues and Insights. It starts off:

This is the golden anniversary of possibly the greatest physical and scientific achievement in the history of mankind, when two Americans walked the surface of a heavenly body and returned to Earth safely with specimens from its landscape. Those moon rocks were then shared by America with the other nations of the world.

But had Apollo 11 happened today, 50 years after it actually did, it would be viewed by our political, media and academic elites as a bigoted outrage.

“One small step” for whom, exactly? A man? What about women? What about non-white men? What right did some white U.S. naval officer from western Ohio such as Neil Armstrong have to speak for all of humanity?

For that matter, what about non-humanity? Has the space program ever atoned for all the sufferings of the various species of animals non-consensually sent into orbit to make sure space was safe for the white men? Were any of our feathered co-inhabitants in this world of ours consulted when the decision was made to name the lunar lander “Eagle”?

Good satire, or, as Instapundit would say, is it? Full editorial is here.

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The Uniparty in Action, er, Inaction

Don Surber posts daily bullet-points of headlines around the web. Here’s an item from this morning, linked to TownHall:

Michael Reagan wrote, "While I have to watch Democrats in Congress waste time hating and sanctioning the president and trashing America as a racist country after it twice elected a black president, I still have an invasion of illegal immigrants on my southern border.

"And while I watch Democrats -- and Republicans -- in Washington spend another year kicking the health care-reform can down the road, I have a daughter-in-law and son in Los Angeles who suddenly had their private health insurance cancelled and must now sign up with the state's system because there's no competition in California.

"Both Republican and Democrats are at fault for our health care and immigration messes.

"Both parties have recently held total control of Congress and the White House at the same time, yet neither one honestly tried solve the country's two most important problems.

"If they can't find the political courage to fix health care or immigration by next fall, we shouldn't give one member of Congress from either party a single vote.

More here. Background on Uniparty here. 

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I believe he is fascist

Julia Arciga at The Daily Beast reports on Representative Ilhan Omar’s charming statement about President Trump:

“We have said this president is a racist. We have condemned his racist remarks. I believe he is fascist. . . .”

Let’s define terms. The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “fascism” as

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

President Trump loves our country and individual liberty. His administration has done more for minorities than Democrat administrations. President Obama increased federal regulation; President Trump has been de-regulating. 

“Severe economic and social regimentation” is on the agenda of the Democrat-Socialist Party; think Obamacare and endlessly playing the race card (headline at the link says it all, so you don’t have to go beyond the WSJ PayWall).  President Trump is getting government out of the way and decreasing taxes, which frees up the market to grow.

“Forcible suppression of opposition?” Like the mis-named Antifa mobs that beat up reporter Andy Ngo, who was there merely to video tape Antifa’s lawlessness in Portland? Or the Antifa mobs that rioted in Berkeley, smashing windows and committing other acts of vandalism?  Antifa should be called Pro-fa; they are the ones who want to silence their critics, to intimidate conservatives from speaking out.

President Trump takes hostile questions from the media all the time. No suppression there. It’s the left-wing media and Big Tech (Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al) that deliberately suppress opposing views.

Rep. Omar is spouting propaganda. Big surprise.

PS. Some online definitions place “fascism” in the far right of the left-right continuum. But as Jonah Goldberg laid out in his bestseller Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, fascist movements were and are left-wing.

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Google: the greatest threat to the next election

Dr. Robert Epstein testified on July 16 before Congress on the dangerous control Google exerts over searches, surveillance, and behavioral manipulation. The full PDF text is here (h/t Pamela Geller). He explains what Google does, how it does it, discloses Google’s and his methodologies, and proposes a solution. It is pretty frightening, and I am bookmarking it in wild anticipation of Congressional action ASAP – so the 2020 election is not utterly corrupted. Here’s an opening extract:

I am here today for three reasons: to explain why Google presents a serious threat to democracy and human autonomy, to explain how passive monitoring systems can protect us both now and in the future from companies like Google, and to tell you how Congress can immediately end Google’s worldwide monopoly on search. My plan for ending that monopoly  was  published  just  yesterday (Monday, July 15, 2019) by Bloomberg Businessweek (Epstein, 2019d). I am attaching a copy of my article to my testimony and respectfully request that it be entered into the Congressional Record.

I have been a research psychologist for nearly 40 years and have also served in various editorial positions at Psychology Today magazine and Scientific American MIND. I received my Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1981 and have since published 15 books and more than 300 scientific and mainstream articles on artificial intelligence and other topics. Since 2012, some of my research and writings have focused on Google LLC, specifically on the company’s power to suppress content  – the censorship problem, if you will – as well as on the massive surveillance the company conducts, and also on the company’s unprecedented ability to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor on one political party (Epstein & Williams, 2019), a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge. . . .

His entire testimony is here, or you can watch it on video at Pamela Geller’s website here.

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When cultures collapse

 

image credit: saturdayeveningpost.com

Walter E. Williams sums it up:

A society's first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today's true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today's Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.

Williams considers gun violence, popular music, unwed mothers, manners, and more. His article “Things Haven’t Always Been This Way” is at Townhall here. RELATED: Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker is unhappy about the degradation of public school dress codes in Texas. Not encouraging.

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Fascism in America

via Bookworm Room

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Big Tech is hiding behind the law: update

President Trump convened a summit of social media giants, including Facebook and Twitter. Following the summit, President Trump announced:

“Today, I am directing my administration to explore all regulatory and legislative solutions to protect free speech and the free speech rights of all Americans,” POTUS Trump announced. “We hope to see transparency, more accountability, and more freedom.”

J.D. Heyes at NewsTarget further reported:

In 2016, before the tech giants began altering their search, publication, and distribution algorithms, conservative speakers were dominant on social media, likely helping propel the president to victory. But by the 2018 elections, based on several studies and investigative reporting, the tech giants had begun — in concert — campaigns to silence conservative, pro-Trump voices, led by the behemoths Facebook and Twitter.

The companies are taking advantage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which “provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information published by others,” the Minc Legal Resource Center noted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation added that “Section 230 says that ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’” 

But, argue opponents, when Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other platforms begin censoring content they find politically objectionable, that makes them publishers, and they therefore should lose their immunity to face legal consequences for those acts of censorship, especially if they have taken money from users they are censoring.

The president’s summit may already be having a positive effect on conservative and independent publishers. For instance, The Western Journal, whose Facebook traffic had been reduced significantly, suddenly found its traffic returning to normal levels a day before the summit — after months of battling with the platform to get it restored.

There is a long way to go, however, to ensure that all conservative and indy publishers’ traffic from their subscribers and followers returns to normal. The president has at least gotten the ball rolling, and well ahead of the 2020 elections.

Well, good. It's a start.

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Fail: Fox News blacks out

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse reports on yesterday’s power outage in New York City:

Fox News talking hair Leland Vitter uses his best dramatic voice, channels his inner Shep, and proclaims the end of the known universe is nigh, because the power went out in a part of Manhattan, New York City.  Evacuations, crisis, no stoplights… oh, my.

OMG… “pitch black”, it’s the beginning of the zombie apocalypse or something, only this time they’re bringing hashtags!

I’d go a little further. We had Fox News on yesterday evening, and could not help but notice a disproportionate amount of coverage of this power outage, with endless loops of video, pointless man-on-the-street “interviews,” and thrilling footage of fire engines moving down the street with all lights flashing.

But it was Saturday night, and we often tune into The Greg Gutfield Show for a few laughs. After the opening credit, Fox cut to the “Fox News Alert” bit, right back to the power outage. Ten minutes into the hour, they were still blathering on about the power outage. We switched channels. At about the 30-minute mark, I checked back to see if Gutfield & Gang were finally on air. They were not. Yet more “news” about the power outage. 

This “news” warranted maybe 30 seconds, a minute at most. A year or two ago, I might have thought that the producer in the newsroom was merely exercising poor editorial judgment. But I am more cynical these days. While Fox is covering the power outage, they are not broadcasting political satire. And their “news alerts” are not covering real news. With the hiring of Donna Brazile and others, and many anchors not even pretending to be objective (think Chris Wallace), Fox is moving relentlessly away from “fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide.” Moving slowly but relentlessly to the left.

In our household, we usually check in with One America News Network, Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, and Tucker Carlson on Fox. But even Mr. Carlson seems to have dropped his best twice-a-week guest, Mark Steyn, who has not been on for at least a month. I cannot help but wonder how long we will be able to access conservative online sources of news. Scary times.

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Trump the Builder

Karin McQuillan at American Greatness has what I nominate as a Must Read – and a real pick-me-up, about Trump's formula for success. Here’s her closing:

Trump the builder is all about getting things done. He has delivered the best job numbers in history for the very minorities Democrats claim to champion.

Trump has the confidence, energy, and aggression to take on every challenge and move toward victory. Democrats don’t even believe in victory.

President Trump earns his bragging rights. If he then enjoys bragging with gusto, so what? His supporters share his happiness in all he has accomplished for them as individuals, and for the country. They are richer, freer, and more secure because of his capable leadership, and they are grateful, even giddy.

Democrats think they can smear, bribe, bully and cheat their way to the White House. Their voters like the hate, the bull, and the promises of free stuff, and they did very well with those weapons in the midterms. But nothing the Democrats warn about or promise is real. In 2020, they will be coming up directly against President Trump, a master of reality. Reality is a stronger hand.

Read the whole thing here.

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Census citizenship question

image credit: wprl.org

The Trump administration’s proposed question asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” That’s it. 

It’s an important question. In his report “The Census Should Ask About Citizenship to Keep House Representation of Citizens Fair,” Bryan Preston at PJ Media concludes:

The census is at the heart of representation in our republic. The Constitution explicitly connects the census to representation of citizens. Citizenship has been a routine part of the census for most of our national existence, and resuming capturing this data ought not be controversial. Objections to the citizenship question are speculative at best, disingenuous at worst. The citizenship question is only controversial because like nearly everything else in American life, some want to use the census to serve their own political power plays.

I’m no lawyer, but I don't understand why President Trump would need to issue an Executive Order to restore the citizenship question to the census form. The Supreme Court lobbed the issue back to the Commerce Dept. Doesn’t that put the question back on the desk of the Secretary of Commerce? And Trump's administration has precedence on its side.

Here's Amy Howe at the SCOTUS blog:

Although the Trump administration had hoped that the Supreme Court would clear the way for it to include such a question, the justices instead sent the issue back to the Department of Commerce. In a deeply fractured opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in ruling that the justification that the government offered at the time for including the citizenship question was just a pretext. The decision left open the possibility that the Trump administration could try again to add the citizenship question, but the clock is ticking. . . 

“Pretext” doesn’t seem to square with the history of the census citizenship question that dates back to Thomas Jefferson (see Preston’s full article here). But in any event, if the issue is now back at the Commerce Dept., why doesn’t Secy. Wilbur Ross just restore the question on the census form? Just asking . . .

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Tall Ships parade into Cleveland

Coming to Cleveland on Thursday, July 11 -- TODAY!. Tall Ships info is here.

These photos, taken a few years ago, are by 

pat dooley photography.

Facts vs propaganda

image credit: legalzoom.com

New York Times, Washington Post, 

Wikipedia, Facebook, etc., etc.

I’m linking to this report by Monica Showalter at American Thinker – not because it’s about the Jeff Epstein-Bill Clinton scandal, but because it shows the blatant corruption in media and information platforms:

With the bust of longtime Democratic donor and Bill Clinton buddy Jeffrey Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, it's pretty amazing, the scope of the Left's effort to pin the whole thing on President Trump.

It's going on all over, as if directed by some Mighty Integral from far above, to borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe from The Right Stuff.  It's orchestrated.  It's universal.  It's big.  And it's about as honest and fact-filled as the Russian collusion narrative.

Here are the top three areas, and these aren't the only ones:

One, the press. 

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets have attempted to pin the matter on President Trump as a matter of his knowing Epstein in the past and saying nice things about him, and the bum deal cut with Epstein earlier in Miami, which involved Trump's now–labor secretary, Alexander Acosta.

. . .

Meanwhile, over at the Wikipedia desk, item two, the second front on pinning-Trump has leftists are beavering away, eliminating all evidence of Democrats involved in the Epstein case, too.

And, three, at Facebook, posts are being censored for references to Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton, regarding the Epstein case.

The effort is strikingly global. Anything to protect Democrats, just as the original bad plea deal in Miami was a deal to protect Democrats (and their campaign money supply) by letting Epstein off.

One can only suppose that it's going to get worse as all the names of the Democrat "faves" start to roll out.

Full article with chapter-and-verse plus links is here.

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Steve Wozniak’s advice for Facebook users

image credit: wsj.com

David Solway at American Thinker asks the question:

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Pinterest and many others that have cornered the market on a public resource, information, and an essential human activity, the consumption of information. A solution to the problem of data sequestration and restricted access practiced by these companies is to rebadge them either as publishers or, alternatively, as public utilities.

Meanwhile, TMZ via Fox News reports:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for most Facebook users: Delete your account.

The millionaire, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, recently said that a lack of privacy is his main concern regarding the Menlo Park, Calif. company and Big Tech in general.

“There are many different kinds of people, and some [of] the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” Wozniak told TMZ, which spoke with the tech mogul at Reagan National Airport in D.C. “But to many like myself, my recommendation is – to most people – you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”

Wozniak deleted his Facebook account back in March 2018, shortly after news broke about the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which revealed that the private data of millions of Facebook users was being harnessed by the firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The United Kingdom's top data watchdog group concluded that Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook's data was illegal under British law.

Full report is here. Some related info from Business Insider:

Deactivating your Facebook account does not delete your information from Facebook's servers. It's hidden from other users, unavailable to the public, but it continues to live on in Facebook's vast digital-storage vaults. If you're ever interested in revisiting the photos you posted to Facebook way back when, or getting back in touch with that long-lost friend, you may want to deactivate your Facebook page instead of outright deleting it.

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Free Men or Free Things

Image credit: farmboxford.com

Daniel Greenfield publishes at FrontPage and at his own website, Sultan Knish. His article “A Nation of Free Men or Free Things” ponders the meaning of Independence Day, and he starts off:

The 2020 Democrat primaries are underway with candidate after candidate promising a nation, not of free people, but of free things.

Free college, free health care and free everything else. Even for illegal aliens.

Of course there's a price to pay.

You get free health care by giving up the freedom to pick your own health care. You get free education, but the indoctrination is the price.

The Fourth to many is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. 

The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British weren’t providing affordable health coverage to the colonies. If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to go back.

All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning free and limited government.

There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.  . . .

Mr. Greenfield’s full article is here. Recommended.

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