And the related headline at Liberty Daily:
# # #
Jim Daws has lots of DIY advice on switching from Big Tech services to alternatives offering more privacy and less bias. His plan, posted at American Thinker, can be implemented incrementally, to make the transitions as painless as possible.
. . . Big Tech is wholly owned by
the Left and they’re using that power -- unprecedented in human history -- to
muzzle any effective opposition.
The sad part is that Big Tech’s
control over the free flow information is almost entirely illusory and based
wholly on our submission to it. Much in the same manner that consumers become
zealously brand-conscious, we have come to accept that Microsoft, Apple,
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have some innate value that makes them
indispensable. We forget that Big Tech’s dominance has come about in just one generation and we can track a direct trajectory
between the rise of Big Tech and the radical Left’s ascendancy.
To have any chance of reversing
this ruinous tide, traditional Americans must awake from their stupor and stop
feeding the beast that’s devouring them. Thankfully, that’s much more easily
done than say, defeating the British Empire, a bloody civil war to end slavery,
or storming the beaches at Normandy. All it takes is a few afternoons at your
desk to break the Big Tech habit and transition to emerging Alt-Tech options. But if we’re unwilling to do even that,
we’ll prove unworthy of our legacy of freedom and prosperity and will get
exactly what we deserve.
Ditch Windows and Mac operating
systems in favor of Linux. This may seem the most difficult and disruptive
action required of your Big Tech jailbreak but it’s far less so than you may
think and absolutely essential. By allowing Microsoft and Apple control of your
computing ecosystem you allow them to track your activities and collect private
information. Once the government has labeled dissent as “domestic terrorism,”
you can bet that the lefties in Redmond and Cupertino will be there to help
monitor your political beliefs.
Linux is a free, stable, secure,
open-source operating system not controlled by Big Tech. . . .
On the web browser front, if you're
using Google Chrome or Apple Safari, you should know that your online activity
is being tracked, recorded, and sold to thousands of data brokers. Most of that
data is used for marketing, but the sites you visit are a good indicator of
your political leanings and activities and the collection of that data is ripe
for abuse.
A good alternative is the Brave browser. . .
For the love of God, stop using
Google search and Gmail. These two services provide the bulk of Google's ad and
tracking revenue, which they then use to censor Google search results to block
content their woke and H1B visa workforce find objectionable. Google search is
the most powerful gatekeeper of information ever created and Google
unapologetically uses algorithms to promote politicians and ideas they agree
with and crush those they oppose.
Good alternatives are DuckDuckGo and
ProtonMail . . .
If Jeff Zuckerberg’s and Jack
Dorsey’s promotion and protection of leftist politicians and dogma during the
2020 election hasn’t convinced you to get off Facebook and Twitter, allow me to
remind you that, among many outrages, Zuckerberg spent nearly a half-billion
dollars subverting the 2020 election and both Zuckerberg and Dorsey censored
stories of the Biden crime family’s blatant graft and corruption. Then, after
the election, both banned the 45th President of the United States from their
platforms for objecting.
More than any other tech service,
users seem slavishly devoted to Facebook and Twitter and willing to sacrifice
the nation and their freedoms to them. This effect is what empowered Zuckerberg
and Dorsey to offend about half their customers… er, products, without fear of
reprisal.
. . .
Your transition need not be done
all at once but make a list and begin your migration away from Big Tech. Choose
tasks that are most easily accomplished and check it off. You will be surprised
at how quick and painless the process is and how good responsible citizenship
and freedom feels.
Read
the full article here.
# # #
The other day. Roger L. Simon posted a piece at Epoch Times that should frighten any of us. America is turning into – or has already turned into -- a police state:
Many, particularly those on the right, worry the United States is
turning into China, but we are a Western nation coming out of a (mostly)
Western tradition.
I believe we should be as much
concerned, if not more, that we are beginning to resemble East Germany with its
State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst), better known as the Stasi.
As Wikipedia reminds us:
“One of the Stasi’s main tasks was
spying on the population, primarily through a vast network of citizens turned
informants, and fighting any opposition by overt and covert measures, including
hidden psychological destruction of dissidents (“Zersetzung,”
literally meaning “decomposition”). It arrested 250,000 people as political
prisoners during its existence.”
I was reminded of this Zersetzung
and its psychological destruction of dissidents—soon we may all be classified
that way, if not already—by a photo I received this morning from a (necessarily
anonymous) friend who works at the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center,
among the most prestigious hospitals in the country.
With his/her permission, I am
sharing it with you.
This person photographed an
announcement taped to a wall at the hospital that read: “Implicit Bias
Anonymous Reporting System.”
Beneath these ominous words was the
usual digital code symbol automatically connecting a cellphone to the “system,”
as if the hospital were a restaurant during COVID providing a hands-free menu
for your convenience.
In other words, it was a convenient
posting for how to snitch on your friends and colleagues for their “implicit
bias,” whatever that is. (I’m probably exhibiting some just by writing this.)
I asked my friend, who has known
the hospital well for many years, whether this could be a joke, but was
vehemently assured it wasn’t. Joke or not, it gives a clear idea of where the
powers that be at that hospital—and many others, I would wager—stand.
My friend tells me that staff gets
“constant political crap” from the chairwoman of the hospital for showing bias
against “protected minorities,” whatever that means—although they observe the
Hippocratic Oath and treat all patients the same anyway.
You could call this growing
atmosphere Stasi Lite—maybe we should name a beer after it—not to mention a
good way to keep potential dissidents in line.
. . .
We must be on watch if it happens
to us. This Stasi-like existence is working on our minds, consciously or
unconsciously.
We may be used to it already to
some degree because of Big Tech, but this is more than one turn of the screw
further. With Big Tech, although they know all, or most of all, about us,
they’re only interested intermittently. Sometimes they ignore us, as long as we
keep our digital heads down.
The State Security Service—be it
Chinese, East German, or American—is always interested.
So be careful if you have, in your
past, present, or future, any “implicit bias,” let alone “explicit bias,”
because that could mean, as we know … just about anything.
Read the full article here.
# # #
The editorial board at Issues and Insights published this
earlier today:
John Kerry said earlier this month
that we’ve reached “the last best opportunity we have to get real and serious”
about global warming. What’s the difference between him and a loon walking down
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wearing one of those sandwich boards proclaiming the
end of the world is nigh? We’re struggling to see any.
Kerry, the Biden administration’s
special presidential envoy for climate – an office that amounts to much less
than a bucket of warm spit – is part of a chorus of fearmongering that goes
back more than three decades.
“In 1989 the United Nations gave us
10 years to save the world,” science site Watts
Up With That posted last year.
Guess blogger Eric Worrall then
went on to list more than a dozen “last chances” to stop global warming.
“If we do not heed this last
chance, I’m sure there will be another last chance in the near future, just
like all the previous last chances,” he said.
Dire, way-off-base predictions have
been the hallmark of radical environmentalism for at least a half century.
Reason’s Ronald Bailey took “a look back” in 2020 at the first Earth Day and
the forecasters “who
got the future wrong.” He notes that the world did not have to halve the
planet’s population or stop economic growth completely “to prevent the imminent
ecological cataclysm.”
Nor have we run out of natural
resources, been forced to shut down automobile travel, ban luxury items, and
wear gas masks in urban areas due to air pollution (though the doomsters among
us are happy that we’ve been forced to mask up for a least a year for another
reason).
Despite the unbroken string of
erroneous predictions, we still get nonsense from the United Nations World
Meteorological Organization, which says “time is fast running out” to keep
global warming at bay, and drivel from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres,
who insists “we are on the verge of the abyss.”
That these people, including the John Kerrys of the U.S., who are as useful as a broken leg, have not been driven from their positions of influence and authority is a near tragedy. To the extent that we need political leaders, our country and our world deserve serious, sober-minded people leading our institutions, not the pretenders, narrative-pimps, self-seekers, virtue-signalers, mindless agitators, think-they’re-still-in-high-school attention-seekers, power-hungry louts, and batty alarmists who currently dominate. It’s discouraging to think that maybe soon we’ll have our last chance to rid ourselves of these malign characters, because they have a way of settling in like a distant family member who makes a surprise visit and then won’t leave. We need to start kicking them out now.
Monica Showalter at American Thinker quotes John Kerry’s “Net
zero is not enough. We need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere”, to which Ms. Showalter responds:
Too bad about the plants.
# # #
John R. Smith at Biz Pac Review explains:
You may have noticed that some
folks “celebrate” Earth Day each April 22. Celebrants believe that the purpose
of Earth Day, as quoted by a naïve liberal politician, is “to preserve the
quality of our water and the air we breathe, and to protect all the natural
wonders….”
It would be wonderful if that was
all Earth Day was about.
But the political objective of the
people who sponsor Earth Day globally is much more sinister than the
preservation of our environment. Read on.
The global environmental crusade is
the modern home of the socialist/communist movement. Earth Day is the creation
of this movement. The purpose of the global environmental movement is to give
governments control of land and resources at the expense of private ownership.
They would gut private property rights. They work to create government
authority over the West’s industrial production, through such mechanisms as the
U.N.’s Paris Agreement and Kyoto Treaty, while exempting socialist countries
like China and India.
Their method? To blame humans and
the corporate world’s industrial atmospheric emissions as the primary culprits
behind global climate change.
Their ultimate goal? To curb or
crush free-enterprise capitalism.
Much more at the link here.
# # #
The Republic Journal has an encouraging word:
America is turning red one county at a time. Trumbull County, OH was always a major Democrat stronghold and was the reason Obama won OH all those years ago. Then came Trump and his pro-worker message which flipped the county by a massive 30-point swing. Now, other counties are moving to the red column and this bodes well for Republicans to pick up another Senate seat in 2024 when Sen. Brown is up for re-election. To fully appreciate what’s occurring in America we have to look at the historical numbers. 500,000 voters have switched from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans in Oh. However, that only tells have the story. Democrats have also lost about 300,000 active voters who can’t cross that aisle but can’t pull the D lever again. This is a massive shift in the rust belt states and should give all of us hope for our nation’s future.
I just hope he’s right.
# # #
The verdict: guilty on all three counts. How was Derek Chauvin going to get anything
resembling a fair trial? Michelle Malkin had some commentary and here are her closing paragraphs:
Judge Peter Cahill, however,
shrugged off the threats and ruled that the jury doesn't need to be shut off
from media and social media exposure until closing arguments begin next Monday.
Never mind the barricades and barbed wire outside the fortified courthouse.
Never mind the half-billion dollars in damage already done by George Floyd's
vigilantes. Never mind the blaring, front-page stories about shopkeepers preparing
for bloody chaos if the jury doesn't rule the "right" way.
Instead, Cahill nonchalantly
advised the jury to simply avoid the news during the trial. Sure, just ignore
the acrid smell of anarcho-tyranny permeating the air. Take no notice of
wall-to-wall coverage of Gannon's resignation Monday afternoon after he pushed
back against the media. Pay no attention to the journalists raging at police
officials calling out rioters. Tune out the black-clad militants screaming
"All Cops Are Bastards" and "No Justice, No Peace." Pretend
away the pretrial publicity and nightly news jeremiads from racial demagogues
Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump painting Chauvin as an evildoer on par with Ted
Bundy or Adolf Hitler.
With the media acting as relentless
co-prosecutors and character executioners, the well of fair and impartial
jurors who can weigh evidence without fear of retribution has been irreversibly
poisoned. Like Minneapolis, Brooklyn Center, Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore,
Detroit, St. Louis, Ferguson, and so many other cities before them, the Fifth
and Sixth Amendment rights to an impartial jury, fair trial and due process
have all gone up in choking flames. This is what the twilight of a once great
and free country looks and smells like.
Her full column is here. Another column on this topic by Roger Kimball appeared
at The Spectator here.
# # #