Tag: news

Authored by Dagny Taggart via The Organic Prepper blog,

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has quietly revealed some troubling information about a class of toxic chemicals that the agency found in significant levels in our food supply.

At a recent scientific conference, the FDA shared the findings of its first broad testing of food for a worrisome class of nonstick, stain-resistant industrial compounds called per- and polyfluoroalykyl substances, or PFAS.

The FDA has not made its findings public yet, but agency researchers discussed the results at a conference held by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry last week in Finland. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Environmental Working Group obtained the FDA presentation and provided it to The Associated Press.

Substantial levels of PFAS were found in grocery store meats and seafood and in off-the-shelf chocolate cake:

The levels in nearly half of the meat and fish tested were two or more times over the only currently existing federal advisory level for any kind of the widely used manmade compounds, which are called per- and polyfluoroalykyl substances, or PFAS.

The level in the chocolate cake was higher: more than 250 times the only federal guidelines, which are for some PFAS in drinking water. (source)

PFAS are found everywhere and are nearly impossible to fully avoid.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of man-made chemicals that includes PFOA, PFOS, GenX, and many other chemicals. PFAS have been manufactured and used in a wide variety of industries around the world, including in the United States since the 1940s. PFOA and PFOS have been the most extensively produced and studied of these chemicals.

As of 2015, neither PFOA or PFOS chemicals are manufactured or used in the U.S., due to health and environmental concerns, according to the rules of the EPA’s stewardship program for the substances, signed in 2006. But both chemicals persist in the environment because they don’t degrade.

PFOA has been detected in the blood of more than 98% of the population in the United States, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), you can be exposed to PFAS by:

• Drinking contaminated municipal water or private well water
• Eating fish caught from water contaminated by PFAS (PFOS, in particular)
• Accidentally swallowing contaminated soil or dust
• Eating food that was packaged in material that contains PFAS
• Using some consumer products such as non-stick cookware, stain-resistant carpeting, and water repellant clothing.

ATSDR also reports that “research has suggested that exposure to PFOA and PFOS from today’s consumer products is usually low, especially when compared to exposures to contaminated drinking water.”

Some products that may contain PFAS include:

• Some grease-resistant paper, fast food containers/wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, and candy wrappers
• Nonstick cookware
• Stain-resistant coatings used on carpets, upholstery, and other fabrics
• Water resistant clothing
• Cleaning products
• Personal care products (shampoo, dental floss) and cosmetics (nail polish, eye makeup)
• Paints, varnishes, and sealants

Are the pots and pans you are using to cook made of materials that could make you or your family sick? Check these guides for more on what to avoid and what to use: The Healthy Cookware Shopping Guide (and the toxic things to avoid) and The Healthy Baker’s Shopping Guide to Non-Toxic Ovenware.

Our food and water supplies are contaminated with PFAS.

Diet is thought to be a major source of PFAS exposure for Americans, as explained by the Environmental Working Group:

Studies show that chemicals, including PFAS, can migrate into food from food packaging and food contact substances. PFAS are commonly used in food packaging. Between 2002 and 2016, theFDA approved 19 PFAS for use in food packaging and nearly half of the fast food wrappers collected in 2014 and 2015 had detectable PFAS. But FDA did not test the food for any of the PFAS the agencies allows to be used today.

PFAS can also migrate into fruits, vegetables and grains that are irrigated with PFAS-contaminated water or grown in soils that are contaminted with PFAS.

The use of PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge, concentrated waste from residential and industrial sources, as a fertilizer on farm fields is another way PFAS chemicals find their way into crops grown for food and animal feed. Almost half of the seven million tons of sewage sludge generated in the U.S. every year are applied to land, including on farm fields. Though numerous PFAS chemicals were found in municipal sewage sludge sampled across the country, no federal regulations are in place to require testing for PFAS or prohibiting land applications of sewage sludge that contains PFAS. (source)

To see if the water in your area is known to be contaminated with PFAS, check this interactive map: PFAS Contamination In the U.S.

These chemicals can be devastating to health.

There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to serious adverse human health effects, including cancer, reproductive harm, developmental harm, high cholesterol, damage to the immune system, hormone disruption, weight gain in children and dieting adults, and liver and kidney damage. The presence of PFOA in the blood has been associated with increased cholesterol and uric acid levels, which can lead to kidney stones and gout.

The Environmental Working Group provides more information on PFAS and the FDA study’s findings:

The FDA tested for the presence of 16 PFAS chemicals in foods sampled across eight mid-Atlantic states, including North Carolina, West Virginia, Delaware and Kentucky. The FDA detected PFOS in approximately half of the meat and seafood products; PFPeA in chocolate milk and high levels in chocolate cake with icing; PFBA in pineapple; and PFHxS in sweet potato.

In a related study, the FDA detected the PFAS chemical GenX and highly elevated levels of numerous other PFAS in samples of leafy greens grown within 10 miles of a PFAS production facility. (source)

Some PFAS chemicals are no longer manufactured in the U.S. due to health concerns, but they still turned up at levels ranging from 134 parts per trillion to 865 parts per trillion in tilapia, chicken, turkey, beef, cod, salmon, shrimp, lamb, catfish, and hot dogs. Chocolate cake tested at 17,640 parts per trillion of a kind of PFAS called PFPeA. If you are wondering why the chocolate cake that was testing contained such high levels, here’s a possible explanation from the Environmental Defense Fund:

Chocolate cake with icing is a mixture of many ingredients – outside of flour and oil, no ingredient dominates. So, if the PFPeA comes from only one of ingredient, the levels would have to be extremely high.  For that reason, we think it is much more likely that the chemical got into the cake from grease-proofed paper used by the bakery.

From our review of more than 20 notifications submitted by PFAS-manufacturers to FDA describing the use of their PFAS-variant to greaseproof paper, it would not be surprising to find these levels in food. So we think these levels are likely from contact with paper treated with PFPeA.

The disturbing part is that none of the 14 different PFASs currently allowed by FDA to greaseproof paper products are PFPeA. They do not appear to be made from the chemical or expected to break down into it either. Therefore, if the use was intentional rather than simply environmental contamination, then the PFAS manufacturer and company making the treated paper must have self-certified it as GRAS. This is a loophole in the 1958 law establishing the food additive regulatory program that FDA has allowed industry to exploit. EDF and other public health advocates think that this practice violates the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act and are in the middle of a legal challenge to the agency’s rule. The lawsuit was filed two years ago. In April 2018, we asked the court to declare a summary judgment in our favor. (source)

The FDA also found levels of PFAS over 1,000 parts per trillion in leafy green vegetables grown within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of an unspecified eastern U.S. PFAS plant and sold at a farmer’s market, the AP reports. The FDA also previewed test levels for a previously reported instance of PFAS contamination of the food supply in the feed and milk at a dairy near an Air Force base in New Mexico. The FDA called the milk contamination a health concern.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Xw4Fwe Tyler Durden

In the latest move by a US company to deprive Chinese authorities access to tools that are integral to he creation of the government’s vast security apparatus.

According to the FT, the database, known as MS Celeb, was first published in 2016.  At the time, it was described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, containing more than 10 million images of nearly 100,000 individuals.

Those whose images were included in the database did not give their permission for the images to be used. Instead, their images were scraped off the web and off search engines.

Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT exposed how they were being used by the Chinese. They include: the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.

Going by professional citations, Microsoft’s MS Celeb has been used by a handful of corporations, including Sensetime and Megvii, two suppliers of the growing state security apparatus in China’s Northwestern Xinjiang province.

Microsoft’s MS Celeb data set has been used by several commercial organisations, according to citations in AI papers, including IBM, Panasonic, Alibaba, Nvidia, Hitachi, Sensetime and Megvii. Both Sensetime and Megvii are Chinese suppliers of equipment to officials in Xinjiang, where minorities of mostly Uighurs and other Muslims are being tracked and held in internment camps.

Despite its name, “MS Celeb” includes thousands of photos of non-celebrities. For example, journalists Kim Zetter, Adrian Chen and Shoshana Zuboff, the author of Surveillance Capitalism, and Julie Brill, the former FTC commissioner responsible for protecting consumer privacy, were all included in the database. Many were unaware that they were included.

“I am in no sense a public person, there is no way in which I’ve ceded my right to privacy,” said Adam Greenfield, a technology writer and urbanist who was included in the data set.”

“It’s indicative of Microsoft’s inability to hold their own researchers to integrity and probity that this was not torpedoed before it left the building,” he said. “To me, it is indicative of a profound misunderstanding of what privacy is.”

Microsoft said it wasn’t aware of any violations of Europe’s sweeping data privacy law – the GDPR – related to the database. But others argued that since it was no longer being used for strictly research purposes, there ould be violations.

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KzXsaL Tyler Durden

Authored by Fan Yu via The Epoch Times,

During the Cold War, around half of the world ran on the technologies, machinery, and political ideologies developed by the Soviet Union. The other half – the free world – adopted those of the United States and its allies.

As trade war tensions between the United States and China escalate, could we be on the cusp of a new version of the cold war, one which is driven by technology and finance?

Since U.S. President Donald Trump has deemed Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies as a national security threat and barred it from purchasing key U.S. equipment, Beijing has engaged in an escalating tit-for-tat that could have lasting ramifications on the technology industry going forward.

And Huawei may just be the beginning. Several other Chinese companies are being considered to join the blacklist with Huawei.

If a technology cold war does come to pass, it would significantly alter the existing technology landscape, dismantle global supply chains, and cleave off the global trade network that has underpinned China’s rise as a global economic power.

Decoupling of the Global Supply Chain

Global consumers are used to seeing this familiar description donning Apple products’ packaging for years: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.”

That’s the model followed by most technology companies during the past few decades. American companies develop new technologies and products in the United States, which are assembled by comparatively cheap labor in China, and then shipped for sale globally.

Going forward, purchase orders would likely need to be rerouted.

A wide-ranging ban similar to the one imposed on Huawei and its affiliates would effectively bar other foreign companies whose products contain at least 25 percent U.S.-sourced technology from supplying the Chinese.

What does this mean in practice?

More companies may begin to adopt localized R&D and manufacturing practices. Instead of Chinese factories supplying the world when labor costs were low, localized operations to directly supply the China market may be set up.

Around 33.2 percent of American companies operating in China are delaying or cancelling investments in China altogether, according to the most recent American Chamber of Commerce in China survey released on May 22. If the tariffs are more permanent in nature, U.S. companies will likely move production outside of China, which is increasingly seen as a prudent choice given rising political instability within China and growing labor costs.

Another 35.5 percent of respondents are adopting an “In China, for China” approach to mitigate the impact of tariffs, according to the AmCham survey. That refers to manufacturing products to be sold in China, within China. That strategy may be broadened in a full-on technology cold war, as research and innovation may also need to be localized and companies may need to erect internal information barriers.

Losers, Big and Small

Chinese companies will be the main losers—there are no existing domestic replacements for many U.S.-sourced components.

For example, Huawei’s chip-making arm HiSilicon currently derives its Kirin chip architecture on license from UK-based semiconductor firm ARM Holdings. But in May, ARM notified Huawei that it would stop licensing its chip designs to HiSilicon due to having certain U.S.-sourced origins.

Huawei also lost access to Google’s Android software platform, which is the main operating system running on all Huawei smartphones. As of the end of May, the U.S. Commerce Department gave Huawei a temporary, 90-day license to provide security patches to existing phones.

In addition, Huawei has been suspended from the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry standard-setting body for technology protocols.

These events don’t just hobble Huawei—they effectively ground its ambitions to a halt. Without access to these technologies, there’s simply no way for Huawei to reach its goal of overtaking Samsung as the world’s No. 1 smartphone supplier. And on the networking front, Japan’s SoftBank became the latest potential customer to reject Huawei for 5G networking equipment, announcing on May 31 that it would be turning to European telecom giants Nokia and Ericsson instead.

Should similar bans extend to other Chinese companies—many of which have far smaller operational support and balance sheets than Huawei—many of them could cease operations altogether.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/31dOrKu Tyler Durden

As part of the Fed’s broad review its monetary policy framework, strategy, tools, and communication practices that the US central bank is undertaking this year, one of the most controversial aspects under consideration is the implementation of “symmetric” inflation targeting, i.e., allowing the economy to run hot without hiking rates in hopes of stimulating growth, well, that’s the stated purpose. The real purpose is the Fed’s burning desire to inflate away the record US debt however that has so far proven virtually impossible as the current stock of debt makes any rate hikes impossible. There is another problem: as BofA writes in an analysis published today, as inflation accelerates, it is the lowest income cohort, i.e. America’s poorest, that experiences higher inflation than the highest income group. In other words, the Fed is explicitly creating even more inequality.

Unfortunately, this – as BofA’s strategists find – “is one of the unintended costs of allowing inflation to run above target.” But, as she concludes, impairing America’s poor even further, “is unlikely to deter the Fed.”

First, the background details:

Official inflation has persisted below the 2% target this cycle, coinciding with a drift lower in inflation expectations. Throughout this year, Fed officials have mused about “makeup strategies,” allowing inflation to overshoot the target to compensate for past undershooting. At the Fed’s June policy framework conference in Chicago, Fed Chair Powell noted that the models suggest this strategy would be effective, but in reality there are major credibility questions as it requires buy-in from households and businesses. In order to become credible, a make-up strategy would need to be communicated in advance of a downturn, and be followed by years of consistent policy. To BofA, Powell’s comments spray cold water all over a strict inflation averaging regime.

However, an even more important dynamic that the Fed should consider when pushing inflation above target-inflation: gains are felt unevenly by income cohort. Empirical observations find that when inflation picks up, the lowest income cohort generally experiences higher inflation than the highest income group, because they spend more income share on rent, food at home, and other inflationary items. This can be shown by comparing the inflation rate of the bottom 20% and the top 20% income distribution, reweighted by their spending shares. As shown below, inflation runs above for lower income households given their spending composition.

There is a persistently positive headline and core-excludes food and energy-inflation gap between the bottom 20% of the income distribution and the top 20%. Since 1999, the consumer in the bottom quintile has experienced 10% more cumulative headline inflation (0.39% on average) than the consumer in the top quintile income group. They have also experienced 15% more core inflation (0.47% on average), and the core inflation gap has been more stable compared with the headline inflation gap. The headline inflation gap is highly correlated with headline inflation-the correlation is around 0.8 based on the data from 1999-2017-suggesting that inflation gap is likely to widen when headline inflation picks up. As one can imagine, the inflation gap originates in spending differences in both core items and non-core items (i.e. food and energy) for people at top and bottom of income spectrum.

To understand these gaps, BofA compares the shopping carts of these two groups (Chart 2). The largest difference within core lies in shelter. The lowest income consumer is much more likely to be a renter than a homeowner, while the opposite is true for the highest income consumer. Thus, rent of primary residence has a much larger share in the former’s spending basket, while owners’ equivalent rent (OER) is bigger in the latter. Rent of primary residence inflation is persistently higher than OER inflation (Chart 3), thus a higher weight in the former at the expense of latter would bias up aggregate inflation. Also, taking into account the share differences of rent of primary residence (+12.8%), OER (-9.8%), and lodging away from home (-1.5%) indicates that shelter share broadly is a larger share of spending at the low-end (net share difference around 1.5%, Chart 2 again). This provides additional upside bias given that shelter inflation generally runs hotter than broader core inflation, and is therefore a “high inflation” category (Chart 3).

While shelter, or rather rent, is the most important spending category, there are also other categories that contribute to the core inflation gap between the top and bottom income brackets, if on a smaller magnitude. The lowest income consumers tend to spend more on medical care services and less on things like motor vehicles, household equipment, recreation, and other vehicle spending. Like shelter, medical care inflation typically runs hotter than broader core inflation, averaging 3.8% since 1999 versus 2% for core CPI (Chart 4).

With the exception of other vehicle spending, the other major core categories where the lowest income consumer spent less than the highest income consumer generally experienced more subdued inflation relative to core. Thus, the bottom bracket loses out relative to the top bracket by allocating more of their spending to a high inflation category and less of their spending to lower inflation categories.

Breaking down the core inflation gap, shelter and medical care explained 91% of the inflation gap on average from 1999-2017 (Chart 5). That said, since the financial crisis the contribution from healthcare has declined while shelter has picked up and now explains most of the inflation gap. The rent is, indeed, too damn high… and it is hurting the poor first and foremost.

The remaining 9% of the inflation gap was explained by categories where the lowest income bracket spent less and other categories with minor shopping cart differences from the top income bracket. The dominance of shelter explains why the core inflation gap tends to widen during periods of high inflation, as shelter is the largest cyclical component of inflation. This creates a problem for the Fed trying to overshoot inflation. In their ideal scenario, above-target inflation will be underpinned by core cyclical inflation, which is largely comprised of shelter.

Looking at the broader, headline inflation, food and energy spending differences further widen the cyclical inflation gap between income groups for headline inflation. As shown in Chart 2, the lowest income consumers tend to eat at home, whereas the highest income consumers often eat outside. Food at home inflation is more volatile than food away from home inflation, and as both move with the cycle the former will reach lower troughs and higher peaks which contributes to the cyclical nature of the inflation gap (Chart 6). Energy is also a cyclical category and lower income consumers tend to spend a greater share of their budget on utilities (Chart 7). As such, higher food and energy costs also contribute to greater cyclicality in the headline inflation gap.

So are the poor always doomed to get the short end of the stick from the Fed? Well… yes, especially since as BofA ominously warns, “inequality is not the first-order consideration for Fed policy.“

And her an amusing aside from BofA which asks rhetorically, it “the fact that higher inflation hurts the lowest income workers disproportionally might lead people to question if monetary policy contributes to greater inequality.” Well, of course – in fact, former Fed Chair Bernanke pointed out in 2015 that that was one of the major critiques of quantitative easing. Two effects are often mentioned.

• The “income composition channel”: People in lower income buckets primarily rely on wages for income, while people in higher income buckets will also be compensated with corporate equities. If expansionary monetary policies boost corporate profits more than they do wages, those with claims to ownership of firms will tend to benefit disproportionately, worsening income inequality.
• The “portfolio channel“: Low-income workers tend to hold relatively more currency than high-income workers. Therefore, higher inflation would hurt the purchasing power of low-income consumers more than high-income, increasing consumption inequality

In short, not only is the Fed screwing the poor… it is doubly screwing the poor!

What is the Fed’s defense to this argument that it has been the primary driver behind wealth and income inequality? As BofA tactfully puts it, “monetary policy is a blunt instrument and the Fed’s goal is to focus on the macro, not the micro.”

In other words, in the grand scheme of things the Fed’s job is to focus on those pathways that make the rich richer, even if in the process the poor become even poorer, and the US middle class erodes.

Or, as BofA puts, “the goal of price stability and full employment is to ensure that the business cycle evolves as smoothly as possible. If successful, this will underpin economic prosperity for the broad population, particularly for the lower income cohorts which tends to be most affected by business cycle fluctuations. Carpenter and Rogers (2004)corroborate this view and find that during a downturn and early stages of the recovery, elevated unemployment tends to disproportionately impact low income groups.”

This justification that “the poor will be worse off thanks to the Fed’s policy, but will be even more worse off without it”, continues:

Even for people who keep their jobs during recessions, wage growth generally worsens the most for low skilled workers. Using the Atlanta Fed’s wage tracker, we can calculate the difference in median wage growth between the bottom 25% of wage earners and the top 25% of wage earners, which we call the wage gap. We find that the wage gap is highly cyclical and tends to lag the output gap (Chart 9). Thus, bottom wage earners benefit more from a strong economy and this serves to offset the wider inflation gap discussed earlier. It is worth noting that the wage gap turned positive in 2014 and is now at the highest level since 1999.

Bottom line, the Fed’s apologists will say, “by stabilizing the business cycle and thereby promoting job and wage growth, the Fed produces a positive outcome for the lowest income cohort.”

Yes… but there is major collateral damage which is also cumulative. The most powerful counterpoint by far, is that most (poor) people refuse to accept such a unfalsifiable statement – that life would be even worse if they stood up to the actor who is making lives bad – and the outcome are soaring populist movements, events such as Brexit and “Trump”, and central banks that are increasingly the target of popular and populist ire. In fact, such grassroot anger at inflationary Fed policies taken to an extreme, as under the proposed policy frameworks of far-left Democrats such as AOC and Elizabeth Warren both of which are promoting MMT, or “helicopter money”, would eventually result in the disintegration of the central bank model as once the government is allowed to print its own money, as MMT suggests, that’s when the central bank becomes obsolete.

Incidentally, for those curious just what event catalyzed the unprecedented divergence between America’s haves and have nots, we provided the answer over 4 years ago: the dramatic ascent of the “Top 1%” of earners at the expense of the “Bottom 90%” started in the early 1970s… when Nixon ended the gold standard. It is this monetary framework, more than anything, that the current iteration of the Fed will do everything in its power to protect.

Should it be successful, one thing is certain: the implementation of more “bubble” policies that create even greater social inequality, one which – as the French discovered in the late 18th century – inevitably culminates in revolution.

Which is, no matter how one gets there, the end of the Fed couldn’t come fast enough.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Xuv2mg Tyler Durden

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

YouTube has just announced they have changed their “community standards” to combat “extremist content” on their platform. This is just the latest step in the war against free speech online.

This move comes as no surprise – the press have been laying the groundwork for this for weeks, even months.

Three weeks ago Buzzfeed reported that YouTube’s monetised chat was “pushing creators to more extreme content”, and just yesterday it was reported that YouTube’s recommend algorithm was “sexualising children”.

You cannot move for stories about how bad YouTube is.

Given that, it comes as no surprise that the mainstream media are celebrating this latest “purge”.The Guardian reported:

YouTube bans videos promoting Nazi ideology

Whilst the Financial Times went with:

YouTube to ban supremacist videos

Both these headlines are wildly inaccurate, deliberately playing the racism/white supremacy angle in the hopes that people will clap along without reading anything else.

Vox was a little more truthful in its headline, reporting:

YouTube finally banned content from neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and Sandy Hook skeptics

The Independent likewise:

YouTube to delete thousands of accounts after it bans supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other ‘harmful’ users

However, even these headlines – though a touch closer to the whole truth – leave out some really important information (I’m sure entirely by accident).

As much as the media are playing the neo-Nazi/hate speech angle, there’s far more to it than that.

To really dig down into what this means, we need to ignore the media and go straight to the source. This is YouTube’s official statement on the matter, posted on their blog.

The bans, contrary to the media headlines, are not about racism. They are far more incoherent than that – they are about “supremacist content”.

YouTube’s delightfully vague description of which, is as follows:

videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.

Honestly, almost any video you wanted – that expresses a political position – could be twisted into fitting that description. But it doesn’t end there:

Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.

What does “well documented” mean? It’s a deliberately ambiguous phrase.

The cited examples, the Holocaust and Sandy Hook, are chosen for shock value – but they are only examples: “Like the holocaust”.

What other examples might there be? The Douma gas attack from last year? The poisoning of Sergei Skripal?

You can’t deny people the right to ask simple questions. “Did that really happen?”, “Is the government telling the truth?”

These are the basic questions of journalism. You can’t simply pass history off as “well documented” and put it beyond question. Don’t let them cite the Holocaust as an example to bully you into silence. Free speech applies to all topics, and all opinions, no matter how “well documented” they are.

In an increasingly fake world, where government actions are routinely narrative-based rather than reality-based, outlawing the ability to simply say “that didn’t happen, you made that up!” is incredibly powerful.

It doesn’t stop at that either, “violent incidents” are just the start. There are other kinds of “harmful content”:

harmful misinformation, such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat

Again, note the use of extreme examples – flat earth and “miracle cures”. It’s manipulation. What they’re talking about is “well documented” science. They mean the big three: Climate change, GM crops and vaccinations. Questioning any of those will become “harmful”.

People will say “obviously people shouldn’t be allowed to question vaccination”, but they’re wrong. People should – people must – be allowed to question everything. That’s what free speech means. Imagine this was seventy years ago, corporate consensus then was that smoking was good for you. Studies saying otherwise would have been described as “harmful misinformation” that were “shaking public confidence in our industry”.

Whether censoring lies or censoring truth, censorship serves the same agenda – protecting authority. What is “harmful content”? Harmful content is anything that attacks the “well documented” official consensus.

For that matter, what is hate speech? The phrase is used half-a-dozen times in the statement, but it can mean all kinds of things.

Critics giving bad reviews to Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the Ghostbustersremake were described as “misogynists” just because the main characters were women. Will poorly reviewing films with a female, or ethnic minority, main character be hate speech too?

This might seem a trivial example, but it hands enormous power to film studios to shut down negative opinions on their films, and Hollywood is a huge propaganda outlet for mainstream ideology. Besides, the triviality is the point.

This blanket term can be applied anywhere and everywhere, and with the increasingly hysterical tone of identity politics, almost anything could be deemed “hate speech”.

As we have said many times, “hate speech” is a term which can mean whatever they want it to mean. YouTube are expanding on that though, creating a whole new category called “almost a bit like hate speech”.

Yes, you don’t even have to actually break the rules anymore:

In addition to removing videos that violate our policies, we also want to reduce the spread of content that comes right up to the line.

See? YouTube will ban channels, or at least suppress creators, who “bump up against the line”.

Meaning, even if you’re incredibly clever, and work seriously hard to keep anything that a dishonest mind could potentially twist into “hate speech” out of your content…they’ll just ban you anyway and claim you “nearly did hate speech”.

Another way they’re combatting all this “dangerous misinformation” is by “boosting authoritative sources”:

For example, if a user is watching a video that comes close to violating our policies, our systems may include more videos from authoritative sources (like top news channels) in the “watch next” panel.

For example, if you watch an alt-news interview with Vanessa Beeley, your next “recommended video” will be a piece of western propaganda mainstream news from a massive corporate interest an authoritative source telling you to ignore everything you just heard, and/or calling Beeley an “apologist for war crimes”.

It’s a beautiful system, really. Very efficient and not-at-all Orwellian.

Don’t worry though, you can still use the platform, as long as Google trusts you [emphasis ours]:

Finally, it’s critical that our monetization systems reward trusted creators who add value to YouTube. We have longstanding advertiser-friendly guidelines that prohibit ads from running on videos that include hateful content and we enforce these rigorously…In the case of hate speech, we are strengthening enforcement of our existing YouTube Partner Program policies. Channels that repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies will be suspended from the YouTube Partner program, meaning they can’t run ads on their channel or use other monetization features like Super Chat.

See? If you’re a “trusted creator” you still get your ad money. Just don’t break the rules – or even come near breaking the rules – or the money stops.

This is about creating an environment free of hate, and NOT enforcing a state-backed consensus using vague threats to people’s financial well-being. Shame on you for thinking otherwise.

Now, how will YouTube decide which stories “come up to the line” or “spread misinformation” or “hate speech”? How is it determined which users are “trusted creators”?

Well, simply put, the government will tell them. YouTube freely admits to this. Outside of its wishy-washy definitions, its incredibly vague buzzwords, and its platitude filled “reassurances”, the most important part of YouTube’s statement is this:

As we do this, we’re partnering closely with lawmakers and civil society around the globe to limit the spread of violent extremist content online.

“Partnering closely with lawmakers” means “working with the government”, essentially an admission that YouTube (owned by Google, in turn, owned by Alphabet Corp.) will remove any videos the state orders them to remove.

Something we all knew already, but it’s refreshing they’re admitting it.

So, some questions arise:

• Will this be the death of youtube as any kind of source for alternate information?

• What will be classified as “conspiracy theories”?

• What about, for example, people questioning the official story of the Douma “attack”? Or MH17?

• How long before there is a mass migration to rival platforms?

• Will those platforms be allowed to exist?

In the meantime, we suggest migrating to other video platforms, such as d.tube or bitchute.

*  *  *

Here is an initial list – courtesy of @infElePro – of those affected by YouTube’s purge so far…

Banned:

• Cultured Thug
• Xurious
• YouKipper
• The Great Order
• Varg
• Mr Allsop History
• Patrick Slattery

Demonetized:

• Jesse Lee Peterson
• Iconoclast
• Tailed Feature
• Ford Fischer
• Dan Dicks
• Revenge Of The Cis
• Martin Sellner
• James Allsup
• Steven Crowder
• Red Ice TV
• SinatraSays
• Sandman
• The Red Elephants
• Know More News
• Andy Warski
• Deep Fat Fried Podcast

Videos Deleted:

• Owen Benjamin
• Count Dankula
• Angelo John Gage
• Gavin McInnes
• Milo
• Red Ice TV
• Black Pigeon Speaks
• Drunken Peasants
• Press For Truth
• J.F Gariepy
• E;R
• American Renaissance
• Ryan Dawson
• E Michael Jones
• The Higherside Chats
• Bre Faucheux

This tweet has not aged well https://t.co/tpFLFHW613

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) June 6, 2019

Finally, SHTFplan’s Mac Slavo notes that we all knew that the censorship would be ramped up sooner or later.  There are just not enough people left to fall in line with globalist and authoritarian ideals anymore without it.

“…the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime.” – The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance

Sadly and quite horrifically, the difference between the Nazi book burning of the past and the technology giants censorship of today is support.  People all over the globe condemned the censorship of the Nazi’s, while today, people are pushing for others to be silenced.  We live in a disturbing time in history, for certain.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2EQutMj Tyler Durden

Today in bureaucratic overreach…

There has been an ongoing controversy in Statesville, North Carolina regarding the size of an American flag flying over Gander RV, a business owned by Camping World. The CEO of Camping World is Marcus Lemonis, made famous by his TV show The Profit, and Lemonis recently traveled to Statesville in order to address the ongoing controversy.

The company has a 40‘ x 80‘ flag flying over its facilities on Interstate 77, which violates the city’s ordinance that limits flags to 25‘ x 40‘. But CEO Lemonis has made it clear that he is not backing down on the issue and is hell-bent on keeping the flag up regardless of the city’s request that he take it down. In exchange, Statesville has filed a lawsuit to have it removed. 

Lemonis told Fox 46 news: “Bottom line is the flag’s not coming down. Give me a reason why this compromises the health, wellness or safety.”

The city says they’ve tried to contact Lemonis to work towards a solution but they’ve never heard back. The city’s mayor, Costi Kutteh, said: “He put a lot of pressure on us but our uniform development ordinance allows for text amendments at any time.”

Since October, the company has been fined $50 a day for flying the flag, costing an aggregate of more than $11,000 so far. But that hasn’t phased Lemonis. “It really just comes down to, in my opinion, bureaucrats trying to control the size of something,” Lemonis said.

Despite filing the lawsuit, the city now appears to be backing off. The mayor has asked the city planning board to draft a text amendment to the ordinance calling it a good compromise.

“I’M WILLING TO GO TO JAIL OVER IT”: Camping World CEO paid a visit to Statesville today, addressing the growing controversy over the massive American flag flying over Gander RV. He said bottom line, it’s not coming down.

READ MORE: https://t.co/vAbahhVTlr pic.twitter.com/3Vy8NJehH4

— FOX 46 Charlotte (@FOX46News) May 31, 2019

Kutteh also says that the fight against the RV company is starting to affect local businesses. The city’s employees have been overrun with calls and emails about the flag and some have even been threatened. The mayor says it’s time to put a stop to it.

Kutteh said: “We don’t have anything against him or his company but we do not appreciate the way some of the comments that some of the folks that have contacted us have behaved and it’s very distasteful.”

Meanwhile, Lemonis’ attorneys say that non-compliance with the lawsuit could result in him being held in contempt of court, but he says he’s willing to risk going to jail over the issue.

“I’m willing to go to the end on this issue. I’m willing to go to jail over it,” he said. 

He’s also seeking clarity on what the city’s amendment means: “Is the city withdrawing the lawsuit? Are they filing the amendment or leaving the lawsuit? We’re a little unclear,” Lemonis said.  Kutteh said the flag would be allowed to fly, but didn’t comment on the $11,000 in fines that have already been issued. “We would eliminate the injunction against flying the flag, but there’s been no direction on the lawsuit in terms of money damages,” he said. 

Our guess? Lemonis gets to keep his flag, and the great press that has come out of the situation, but he shouldn’t hold out hope of ever seeing his $11,000 again.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Xx0Yq3 Tyler Durden

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

When discussing the fact that globalists often deliberately engineer economic crisis events, certain questions inevitably arise. The primary question being “Why would the elites ruin a system that is already working in their favor…?” The answer is in some ways complicated because there are multiple factors that motivate the globalists to do the things they do. However, before we get into explanations we have to understand that this kind of question is rooted in false assumptions, not logic.

The first assumption people make is that that current system is the ideal globalist system – it’s not even close.

When studying globalist literature and white papers, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to H.G. Wells’ book The New World Order and his little known film Things To Come, to Manly P. Hall’s collection of writings titled ‘The All Seeing Eye’, to Carol Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope, to the Club Of Rome documents, to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Between Two Ages, to former UN Director Robert Muller’s Good Morning World documents, to Henry Kissinger’s Assembly Of A New World Order, to the IMF and UN’s Agenda 2030, to nearly every document on globalization that is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, we see a rather blatant end goal described.

To summarize: For at least the past century the globalists have been pursuing a true one world system that is not covert, but overt. They want conscious public acceptance of a completely centralized global economic system, a single global currency, a one world government, and a one world religion (though that particular issue will require an entirely separate article).

To attain such a lofty and ultimately destructive goal, they would have to create continuous cycles of false prosperity followed by catastrophe. Meaning, great wars and engineered economic collapse are their primary tools to condition the masses to abandon their natural social and biological inclinations towards individualism and tribalism and embrace the collectivist philosophy. They created the current system as a means to an end. It is not their Utopian ideal; in fact, the current system was designed to fail. And, in that failure, the intended globalist “order” is meant to be introduced. The Hegelian Dialectic describes this strategy as Problem, Reaction, Solution.

This is the reality that many people just don’t seem to grasp. Even if they are educated on the existence of the globalist agenda, they think the globalists are trying to protect the system that exists, or protect the so-called “deep state”. But this is a propaganda meme that does not describe the bigger picture. The big picture is at the same time much worse, and also more hopeful.

The truth is that the old world order of the past century is a sacrificial measure, like the booster stage of a rocket to space that falls away and burns up in the atmosphere once it is expended. If you do not accept the reality that the globalists destroy in order to create opportunities for gain, then you will never be able to get a handle on why current events are taking the shape they are.

Of course, in public discourse the elites have learned to temper their language and how they describe their agenda. Public knowledge, or at least general awareness of the “new world order” is growing, and so they are forced to introduce the idea of a vast societal and economic shift in a way that sounds less nefarious and is relatively marketable. They also have a tendency to hint at events or warn about disasters that are about to happen; disasters they are about to cause. Perhaps this is simply a way to insulate themselves from blame once the suffering starts.

The International Monetary Fund began spreading a meme a few years ago as a way to describe a global economic crash without actually saying the word “crash”. Managing Director Christine Lagarde and others started using the phrase “global economic reset” in reference to greater centralization of economic and monetary management, all in the wake of a kind of crisis that was left mostly ambiguous. What she was describing was simply another name for the new world order, but it was one of the first times we had seen a globalist official actually hint that the change or “reset” would be built on the ashes of the old world system, rather than simply built as an extension of it.

Lagarde’s message was essentially this: “Collective” cooperation will not just be encouraged in the new order, it will be required — meaning, the collective cooperation of all nations toward the same geopolitical and economic framework. If this is not accomplished, great fiscal pain will be felt and “spillover” will result. Translation: Due to the forced interdependency of globalism, crisis in one country could cause a domino effect of crisis in other countries; therefore, all countries and their economic behavior must be managed by a central authority to prevent blundering governments or “rogue central banks” from upsetting the balance.

The IMF and the CFR also refer to this as the “new multilateralism”, or the “multipolar world order”.

I believe the next stage of the economic reset has now begun in 2018 and 2019. In this phase of the globalist created theater, we see the world being torn apart by the “non-cooperation” that Lagarde and the CFR warned us about in 2015. The trade war is swiftly becoming a world economic war drawing in multiple nations on either side. This scenario only benefits the globalists, as it provides perfect cover as they initiate a crash of the historically massive ‘Everything Bubble’ which they have spent the last ten years inflating just for this moment.

As I predicted in my article ‘World War III Will Be An Economic War’, published in April of 2018, the tariff conflict between the US and China has become an excellent catalyst for the global reset. In my article ‘America Loses When The Trade War Becomes A Currency War’, published in June of 2018, I stated:

“One question that needs to be addressed is how long the current trade war will last? Some people claim that economic hostilities will be short-lived, that foreign trading partners will quickly capitulate to the Trump administration’s demands and that any retaliation against tariffs will be meager and inconsequential. If this is the case and the trade war moves quickly, then I would agree — very little damage will be done to the U.S. economy beyond what has already been done by the Federal Reserve.

However, what if it doesn’t end quickly? What if the trade war drags on for the rest of Trump’s first term? What if it bleeds over into a second term or into the regime of a new president in 2020? This is exactly what I expect to happen, and the reason why I predict this will be the case rests on the opportunities such a drawn out trade war will provide for the globalists.”

The economic world has a very short attention span, but a year ago in the alternative media the trade war was being treated by Trump cheerleaders in particular as a novelty – a non-issue that would be resolved in a matter of a months with Trump victorious. Today, those same people are now vocal trade war fans, waving their pom-poms and screaming for more as they buy completely into the farce. Mentioning the fact that the trade war is only serving as a distraction so that the globalists can complete their economic reset agenda does not seem to phase them.

They usually make one of two arguments: Trump is an anti-globalist that is tearing down the “deep state” system and the trade war is part of his “4D chess game”. Or, the globalists don’t have enough control over the current system to achieve the kind of “conspiracy” I describe here.

First, going by his associations alone, it is clear that Donald Trump is controlled opposition playing the role of “anti-globalist” while at the same time stacking his cabinet with the very same elites he is supposedly at war with. As I have outlined in numerous articles, Trump was bought off in the 1990’s when he was saved from possible permanent bankruptcy by Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross. Trump made Ross his Commerce Secretary as soon as he entered the White House, and Ross is one of the key figures in the developing trade war.

At this point I have to say that anyone arguing that Trump is “playing 4D chess” with the banking elites while he is surrounded by them on a daily basis must be clinically insane. Every economic and trade policy Trump has initiated in the past two years has served as a smokescreen for the globalists controlled demolition of the economy. As the reset continues in the midst of the trade war, it will be Trump and by extension all conservatives that get the blame. Trump is a pied piper of doom for conservative movements, which is why I have always said any attempts to impeach Trump (before the crash is completed) will fail. The globalists like him exactly where he is.

Second, there is a globalist controlled central bank in almost every nation in the world, including supposedly anti-globalist countries in the East like Russia and China. All of these central banks are coordinated through the Bank For International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. The globalists covertly dictate the economic policy of nearly the entire planet. They can easily create an economic collapse anytime they wish. This is a fact.

However, what they do not control is how elements of the public will react to their reset agenda. And this is where we find hope. They do not have their “new world order” yet, which is why they have to resort to elaborate theatrics and psychological operations. They know that an awake and aware segment of the population could annihilate them tomorrow with the right motivation, and so, they continue to distract us with a swarm of other concerns and calamities.

The purpose is to convince the masses to focus on all the wrong enemies while ignoring organized and psychopathic elites as the root of threat to humanity. We are supposed to hate the Russians, or hate the Chinese, or hate people on the left, or hate people on the right, and so it goes on. But these conflicts are just symptoms of a deeper disease. The great danger is that the focus on globalists as the virus will fade from public consciousness and conservative circles in particular as the trade war becomes a world war and economic collapse results in financial pain.

The reset is upon us. The narrative of the collapse is being written before our eyes. The end game rests not on the globalists, though, but proponents of liberty and sovereignty. Either we keep our crosshairs on the true enemy, or we get sucked into the maelstrom and forget who we are and why we are here. If the latter occurs, then the globalist reset will be assured.

*  *  *

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via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2wGYb1S Tyler Durden