Tag: Censorship

The ‘Way Back Machine’

Another IST Public Service Message.

Since Donald the Orange has taken office and allowed Elmo free movement in the government agencies sites and pages have gone from public view….but for those that keep up with the government and what is done in their name there is way to reconnect with those missing pages.

The White House has ordered thousands of government web pages to be taken down over the past month, leaving virtually no trace of some federal agencies’ policies regarding critical topics such as sexual orientation, January 6 cases and discrimination.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the government’s mass removal of data and policies it finds objectionable has illustrated just how quickly data can disappear from the internet, and it has sparked renewed interest in preserving information online among digital archivists.

Thousands of pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website were taken down in January to comply with Trump’s executive orders, although some of the pages are back online following an order from a federal judge. Other taken-down sites include Justice Department web pages related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach; information about care for transgender patients on Healthcare.gov, a gender diversity page on the TSA’s website, and sexual orientation and general identity discrimination pages on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Census Bureau’s websites, as well as many others across the government.

While it is not uncommon for presidential administrations to delete or change government web pages, the second Trump administration seems to have taken down more content than usual, according to Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine.

The Wayback Machine, which the nonprofit Internet Archive operates, is a tool designed to help with preserving online data, and it has been used in the past when new presidents’ administrations took down information from past administrations. The site allows users to enter a URL and, if the page has been archived, see what it looked like in the past, dating back to the database’s founding in 1996.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/tech/internet-archives-deleted-websites-wayback-machine/index.html

Transparency is leaving the building and Trump and Elmo are holding the door for their exit.

Is this what you had in mind when you voted for the clown?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Closing Thought–23Dec19

I have seen, heard and rad some blatant ignorant crap, especially in the last 3 years, but this one is one of the crappiest of the lot.

I seems that in a ploy to gain a few votes from the these “progressive” Jews our president is wanting to make a religion a nation.

President Trump plans to sign an executive order Wednesday that will classify Judaism as a nationality, a move that will add teeth to federal efforts to fight anti-Semitism on college campuses. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars discrimination based on race, color, or national origin but not, notes CNN, religion; those who violate that can lose out on federal funding from the Department of Education. The order will reportedly make use of International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which covers “targeting of the state of Israel.” The New York Times reports that’s what the State Department uses, but it’s a definition that has been knocked by some as “too open-ended and sweeping.”

The AP predicts free-speech advocates will be no fans of the order, though an unnamed official says that it wasn’t the intention and the goal is not to clamp down on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement known as BDS, which uses a boycott on the purchase of Israeli goods or the investment in Israeli companies as a means of supporting Palestine’s desire for statehood. But the head of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights frames the order as another step in an effort to “to silence Palestinian rights activism” by, as the Times puts it, “equating opposition to Israeli treatment of Palestinians with anti-Semitism.”

What bullsh*t!

Where does it stop?

What happened to the American right of free speech?

For those mental midgets out there…..criticism of the state of Israel is NOT anti-Semitic!  This criticisms are about a fascist state and not a religion…there is a difference that even a garden slug could tell the difference if they weren’t in Congress.

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

More Control Over The News

These days we can find “news” almost anywhere across the internet……you can find any interpretation that suits your fancy.

I read something that took me aback.  The Pentagon is looking for more control over the news…..you saw that right …the military wants to control you news…..

If there’s a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of America, I can’t remember it. But we’re getting there:

From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.

One of the Pentagon’s most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing “custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.”

Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like LifeLog, a program to “gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.”

DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called “SemaFor” and an image analysis program called “MediFor,” ostensibly designed to prevent the use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies to help private Internet providers sift through content.

The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?

I have written several times about the loss of the Freedom of the Press……..read it for yourself…..https://lobotero.com/2018/08/16/censorship-by-any-other-name/

Since Clinton the Pentagon through the defense lobbyists control the news for the most part…..why?  Most outlets are owned by corporations that are heavily invested in the M-IC.

They, the Pentagon, has been controlling the news coming out of our endless and countless wars…..no more unlimited access that they had in Vietnam now they can only report what the Pentagon says they can report.  And that is called censorship.

Not to worry….just make shit up and say it enough times and then it becomes believable….that describes the Trump technique to a tee.

Learn Stuff!

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Fahrenheit 451

Sunday and I am having a lovely weekend…..

Have you ever read Fahrenheit 451? How watched the movie…both original and the cheap re-make?

No?

It is about a future society that does not like people that read…..

Set in the twenty-fourth century, Fahrenheit 451 introduces a new world in which control of the masses by the media, overpopulation, and censorship has taken over the general population. The individual is not accepted and the intellectual is considered an outlaw. Television has replaced the common perception of family. The fireman is now seen as a flamethrower, a destroyer of books rather than an insurance against fire. Books are considered evil because they make people question and think. The people live in a world with no reminders of history or appreciation of the past; the population receives the present from television.

Ray Bradbury introduces this new world through the character Guy Montag, the protagonist, during a short time in his life.

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/fahrenheit-451/book-summary

This story ties in well with something else I read…….

Book burning is not a thing of the past, at least not in Poland, where Catholic priests recently burned books they believe to be sacrilegious. Among the tomes that went up in flames were Harry Potter books, thanks to concerns about witchcraft and sorcery. The evangelical SMS From Heaven Foundation posted pictures of the event on Facebook, along with Bible verses including one reading, “Burn the images of their gods” and another explaining, “Many of those who had practiced magic collected their books and burned them in front of everyone.”


Also burned, per AFP and the Guardian: a Hello Kitty umbrella, books from the Twilight series, and a Hindu religious figurine. The group’s post has gone viral, and the BBC quotes some unsupportive comments left on it, including one noting, “I have not met anyone yet who would rape, murder and steal in the name of Harry Potter. In the name of the Bible, yes.” Other comments were supportive, like one suggesting, “Get rid of everything that does not please God and see how your life will change.”

Seriously?

It is the 21st century….this from a religion that spends more money protecting pedophiles but they do not want children reading fiction…this is pathetic and just another reason I do not like organized religion in any shape or style.

The garden awaits….the perfect time of the year…..cool sunny weather with a bit of rain sprinkled in (pun intended)….. I shall enjoy for as long as I can for the stifling heat of Summer is not far away……MoMo is getting her exercise…….she is a tan blur as she goes galloping past…….kids!

Censorship By Any Other Name

The truth is I despise the hateful, insulting crap that comes out of the mouths and off the fingers of many on the Right…..but I also believe they have the right to express themselves as they wish….short of any violence.

I have written on our 1st amendment here on IST…….https://lobotero.com/2017/02/13/will-there-be-freedom-of-the-press/

But recently a couple of the so-called “social media” sites have taken up the idea of deleting and banning some of their users….

This week, internet giants like Facebook, Youtube, Spotify and others banned the notorious Alex Jones and InfoWars from their platforms, and the purge is enjoying widespread support among the left, which has made a reputation for itself as intolerant of differing opinions (last year, for example, a group of Antifa protesters beat one of our own Anti-Media reporters and destroyed his camera equipment at a rally simply because he was filming).

In Jones’ case, Facebook cited hate speech, though this stance seems inconsistent considering the platform has caught flack for allowing anti-semitic content. This lack of principle doesn’t matter to many left-wing partisans, though, as long as someone they find reprehensible is silenced — even as others with far better reputations are banned from other platforms (to clarify, Anti-Media does not endorse Infowars in any way, nor do we consider them to be a legitimate news outlet).

https://theantimedia.com/americans-end-free-speech/

I understand why the “Zuck” did this…he was trying to divert attention from his past transgressions that are not going away as he had said they would.

But I do not think that these a/holes should be banned….that is as bad as people that called for me to be banned back in the days of my youth because I had a more socialist leaning in those days.

All the “fake news” tomes on the web are just that on the web…..a person must choose to search for the facts and the truth or believe whatever they are told by pundits who are paid to stir the pot….after all most are propagandists paid to deceive.

I have used this reference before in an attempt to get Americans thinking for themselves…..

Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past.

Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they’ll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue. Perhaps that could dissipate the amount of malarkey online, though news consumers themselves are the best defense against the spread of misinformation.

https://www.factcheck.org/2016/11/how-to-spot-fake-news/

You have the link…now USE IT!

So I Have Written!

Turn The Page!

Closing Thought–07Jul17

Censorship Makes A Comeback!

Every generation has had its bout with censorship in one form or another.  Mine?  It was books like Lolita, Story of “O” and other such baudy books.  My daughters generation had books, record albums, movies…this type of censorship has been with us for ever…..someone always thinks that they want to save society by banning things that they find offensive.

THis type of invasion has been missing for awhile but it has found a new breeding ground….Florida.

Nosy Floridians now have another outlet for their moral outrage. Now anybody in the US state can formally complain about books used in public schools, and schools are required to hear them out.

Last week governor Rick Scott signed a bill that allows any Florida resident to formally challenge new or old materials, like books and movies, available in public schools. In drafting the bill, lawmakers specifically added language that expanded the complaint process to include anyone, not just parents.

Original law:

Each district school board must adopt a policy regarding a parent’s objection to his or her child’s use of a specific instructional material, which clearly describes a process to handle all objections and provides for resolution.

New law, with new language highlighted:

Each district school board must adopt a policy regarding an a parent’s objection by a parent or a resident of the county to the his or her child’s use of a specific instructional material, which clearly describes a process to handle all objections and provides for resolution.

Source: The sizzle of romance isn’t sustainable—but science can help you build a happy relationship that lasts — Quartz

Not a fan of censorship……all it does is make the item more desirable….this is just someone wanting to impose their “morality” on everybody….not in my house!

Gotta go…..will return tomorrow with more stuff…..hope to see you then…..chuq

Service To Be Restricted

There has been lots of talk about the possibility of the internet could become limited and even censored…..some of these are great conspiracies and again maybe not so “out there”…..

Comcast is about to makes its residential internet service a lot more like smartphone data plans for millions of customers, the Washington Post reports. Starting Nov. 1, Comcast will be capping the internet usage of customers in 18 markets—including 12 whole states—at 1 terabyte. According to Ars Technica, Comcast has had a data cap in place in some markets since 2012. For Comcast customers who exceed the 1TB monthly limit, Comcast will charge a $10 fee per additional 50 gigabytes up to $200. To avoid the data cap, customers can either pay an extra $50 per month for unlimited data or $300 per month for Comcast’s Gigabit Pro fiber-optic service. A list of markets that will be impacted by the data cap is here.

Comcast claims the data cap is “based on a principle of fairness”—the people who use the most internet will pay the most for it. But Engadget argues that doesn’t make complete sense, as in only the most extreme cases does someone using more internet impact anyone else’s internet usage. A Comcast executive has also acknowledged that the data cap is a “business policy,” not a technical necessity. Comcast says 99% of customers don’t use more than 1TB of data—enough to stream up to 700 hours of video or play 12,000 hours of online games—per month. But that may not be true for long, with the increasing prevalence of HD and 4K games and videos that use more data.

Is this just the beginning?  Were all those conspiracy nuts being prophetic?