03/19/23

Trapper’s Quote Of The Week

By: Trapper Pettit

Thinking about the dangers Artificial Intelligence will pose to humanitarian freedoms while writing on my laptop, listening to Spotify, texting on my I-phone, and soon emailing this post from my tablet is a tad hypocritical. I know the Matrix is just science fiction, but where are the red pills?

03/14/23

Comrade Joe Blames Trump for Banking Collapse

By: Cliff Kincaid

Move over China Joe. Comrade Joe has made his appearance on the national stage, declaring, “That’s how capitalism works,” a reference to the banking “crisis” he created and his people knew was coming.

This is what happens when the Biden Administration inflates the currency, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates too fast, and banks like SVB are caught in the middle.

By the way, none of this had anything to do with the “Trump deregulation” of banks or the “woke” character of one bank. It’s due to a Soviet-style economic policy designed for a federal takeover of a federal banking system of about 1,200 national banks which also threatens the financial survival of regional and community banks that number in the thousands and serve millions of Americans.

So-called “conservatives” ranting about a “bailout” of the depositors, who need and deserve their money back, are missing the point. They are mostly small and medium-sized firms and small businesses which put their money in that bank and are creating new products and technologies. One of them, Roku, has pioneered streaming services for new conservative channels that enable people to bypass Fox News.

These companies should not be punished for the inflationary policies of Comrade Joe Biden and the destructive interest rate policies of the Fed.

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03/8/23

Highlighted Profile: Johnnie Hunter

By: Trevor Loudon | KeyWiki


Johnnie Hunter

Johnnie Hunter is the General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Britain. He also serves on the Communist Party of Britain National Executive Board and on the Political Committee.

He joined the Glasgow Young Communist League about a decade ago, soon becoming a Scottish Organizer.

Johnnie Hunter is also a member of the Glasgow Communist Party, a solicitor, and a union activist. In October 2017 Hunter was a British delegate to a World Federation of Democratic Youth-run communist youth festival in Sochi, Russia.


Johnnie Hunter, bottom left

The festival was timed to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution and was keynoted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Sochi, Johnnie Hunter met with Mikhail Kononovich, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine youth wing.

Johnnie Hunter left, Mikhail Konovich right

Mikhail Konovich and his brother Aleksander Kononovich are now in jail in Ukraine, accused of acting as agents of Belorussia and the Russian invasion forces.

In April/May 2022, Johnnie Hunter, fellow YCLer Micaela Tracey-Ramos, and about thirty young British labour activists traveled to Cuba to pick crops for the revolution and to meet with Cuban Communist Party officials.


Johnnie Hunter and Micaela Tracey-Ramos in Cuba

The “highlight” of the trip for most of the delegation was joining a thousand international guests from 60 countries on the tribune in front of the José Martí memorial in Revolution Square to watch the first May Day march in three years.

They shared the viewing platform with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and former president Raul Castro.

Johnnie Hunter was also affiliated with the Zero COVID Coalition, the Communist Party of Britain front group for pushing rigorous COVID-19 lockdowns.

(See more|Johnnie Hunter…)

03/2/23

Words Matter––so Do Accurate Posting Dates!

By: Linda Goudsmit | Pundicity

Since the 2020 election, a great deal has been written about information, disinformation, and misinformation. Very little attention is being paid to the newest threat in the information wars––omission of the year in online posting dates. We live in the 21st-century age of digitized, computerized information technology. In the beginning, articles posted online followed established journalistic practices, and journalism’s classic 5W + H formula. Articles answered six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Today, online journalism is eliminating the When. I began asking the question, Why?

For print journalism, the When has two components––the dateline and the actual events described in the article. The dateline refers to when the story was filed or written, not necessarily the dates of events described in the article. Datelines followed the month/day/year date convention and appeared on the first line of an article before the text.

In online reporting, especially blogs and websites, the dateline often refers to the posting date. In the summer of 2022, I began noticing the year was MISSING in the dateline. Sometimes the date was presented as an equally useless and ridiculous “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago.” At first, I assumed it was a typo but soon realized there was a change to the default date convention. As a writer, researcher, and political analyst, the change was so egregious, I assumed the new date conventions had to be a form over content esthetic decision, made by the same foolish designers who decided hard-to-read gray font was superior to easy-to-read black font! I was wrong.

I lodged my first complaint directly with WordPress, on June 4, 2022. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021. The message read:

I am a researcher, author, and political analyst. It is absolutely maddening that articles are being published with a date that does not include the YEAR. Every event happens in its historical context. “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago” or “3 months ago” is meaningless without the year. Equally meaningless is “April 10” if the article has been saved and used for reference two years after publication. Information is rendered useless without an accurate posting/publishing date that MUST include the YEAR. Please address this extremely exasperating error on all the platforms you service – the problem is becoming ubiquitous.

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02/15/23

We Are in a State of War

By: Cliff Kincaid

Washington talking heads would rather talk about flying objects than the enemies behind most of them, China and Russia. We are in a state of war. Meanwhile, despite trillions of dollars spent on infrastructure, our roads, bridges, and railways continue to deteriorate. At the same time, federal programs that millions depend on are going broke.

Ukraine, on the front lines of a war we need to win, is begging for weapons.  And yet former Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and Ron Paul are participating in a loony left “Rage Against the War Machine” rally in D.C. on February 19 demanding a Russian victory by starving the people of Ukraine of the weapons they need for self-defense.

First, however, a personal note about the financial crisis and national bankruptcy. Having passed the age which gives me access to Social Security and Medicare, I have learned more about how these federal programs work – or don’t work.

Medicare is going broke and forcing seniors to search, sometimes in vain, for doctors willing to take Medicare patients. This is because the payment system is on “an unsustainable path that is jeopardizing patient access to physicians,” according to the American Medical Association.

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02/14/23

Meet Zhe Wu and His Low Orbit Balloon Program

By: Denise Simon | Founders Code

It went with almost zero attention that our US Commerce Department added a handful of companies to a so-called Entity List last week, restricting them from obtaining US technologies in a move blasted by Beijing on Monday as “illegal unilateral sanctions,” almost as soon as the first balloon was shot out of the sky off the coast of South Carolina. Now, just exactly how did our officials know to do that so fast? Now we have to wonder why Treasury has not done the same.

At least someone was paying attention and knew of Zhe Wu and his work… yet no other part of any federal agency or any part of the military was on their game for the last several years?

Okay… sounds about right.

Beijing Nanjiang Aerospace Technology

Established in 2015, Beijing Nanjiang is controlled by a subsidiary of Shanghai-listed real estate company Deluxe Family Co Ltd, which also invests in materials and robotics projects.

The state-run Science and Technology Daily in 2015 hailed the firm’s development of a large silver helium airship as the country’s first “new near-space platform with capabilities for both military and surveillance use”.

State media said the company’s steerable, reusable and continuously powered airship was equipped with broadband communications and “high-definition observation” gear.

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