About the Use of the Word “CIS”

I completely agree with J.K. Rowling:

Recently, Elon Musk declared that "Cis" would be considered to be a slur on Twitter.

I oppose any censorship of the word "cis." Even if it is considered "hate speech," it would be protected by the First Amendment. FIRE explains:

There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. So, many Americans wonder, "is hate speech legal?"

Contrary to a common misconception, most expression one might identify as “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment and cannot lawfully be censored, punished, or unduly burdened by the government — including public colleges and universities.

The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly rejected government attempts to prohibit or punish “hate speech.” Instead, the Court has come to identify within the First Amendment a broad guarantee of “freedom for the thought that we hate,” as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes described the concept in a 1929 dissent. In a 2011 ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts described our national commitment to protecting “hate speech” in order to preserve a robust democratic dialogue:

Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.

In other words, the First Amendment recognizes that the government cannot regulate “hate speech” without inevitably silencing the dissent and dialogue that democracy requires. Instead, we as citizens possess the power to most effectively answer hateful speech—whether through debate, protest, questioning, laughter, silence, or simply walking away.

I want to see what other people are thinking, unvarnished, whether or not I approve of it, whether or not it is crude or wrongheaded. It gives me important information about that person.

"Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly."

Spencer W. Kimball

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Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

Democrats have been busy Creating Republicans

We do have problems with book-banning in the United States. There are very real attempts to ban books, including many such attempts at school libraries. As noted by FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley, “There’s always been some amount of book banning, but this is unprecedented. It is a tsunami — it is an avalanche of censorship.”

That said, many people on the "political left" are being disingenuous when they claim that the phrase "book banning" accurately describes the controversy regarding grade-schooler access to books with sexually explicit images, including a book called Gender Queer. In "If I disagree with my liberal tribe, does that make me a conservative? A lot of rhetoric on the left is proving to be unpersuasive — and even alienating," Kat Rosenfield tells us what is really at stake regarding that book, as well as the wider ramifications.  Here are a few excerpts:

The graphic novel “Gender Queer,” a memoir of sexual and gender identity written and illustrated by Maia Kobabe, has been described as the “most banned book in the country.” A flashpoint in the current culture war over the content of school libraries and curricula, it is at once celebrated and despised. Liberal commentators describe it as groundbreaking and essential, a work of art that helps struggling young people to feel seen; conservatives denounce it as pornographic and demand its removal from children’s spaces.

Almost all the objections to “Gender Queer” center on a single page that appears about two-thirds of the way through the book. If you’ve followed this controversy online, you’ve probably seen the illustration in question. If you’ve only heard about it via cable or traditional news, then you probably haven’t — at least not without a censor’s blur in front. This is because the scene depicts a moment in which the protagonist and a partner experiment with a strap-on dildo.... It’s racy. Enough so that the page can’t be shown on TV, not even in the late-night hours when the Federal Communications Commission’s obscenity regulations are relaxed; enough so that I can’t name the sex act in question without playing an elaborate game of charades to avoid running afoul of the Globe’s editorial standards. (Hint: It rhymes with “whoa, bob.”) And while reasonable people can disagree on whether the scene qualifies as pornography per se, the fact that this is a debatable point at all is revealing in its own right. Once you’re haggling over whether an illustrated sex act is dictionary-definition pornographic, surely you’ve already ceded the point of whether it’s appropriate for children.

In a less fractious, less polarized moment, this is where the debate would end. It is possible to imagine a world in which “Let’s not stock the [rhymes-with-whoa-bob] comic book in the middle school library” is not a controversial statement. Alas, we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a world where not only are we locked in a stalemate over whether the [rhymes-with-whoa-bob] book belongs in the middle school library, but the way you answer this question determines your side in the culture war at large. That is: If you believe that illustrated depictions of a person getting a you-know-what while wearing a you-know-what are best reserved for adult readers, you must be a conservative . . . or worse.

Objections by parents to “Gender Queer” and other sexually explicit books are frequently characterized in media coverage as stemming from hatred or bigotry. One New York Times article quoted a PEN America director who ascribed the controversy to “anti LGBTQ+ backlash.” Similar criticisms are leveled at the parents’ rights movement that is challenging the teaching of race, gender, and sexuality in US schools.

Continue ReadingDemocrats have been busy Creating Republicans

Whistle-Blower Daniel Ellsberg’s Final Thoughts

On June 4, 2023, two weeks before he died, Daniel Ellsberg gave one final interview at Politico. Michael Hirsh's interview appears in an article titled: "Daniel Ellsberg Is Dying. And He Has Some Final Things to Say: The iconic whistleblower reflects on the urgent need for others to follow in his footsteps."

I have the greatest admiration  for Daniel Ellsberg's bravery and his patriotism as a whistle-blower. I am writing this post to share some of his final thoughts, which I consider to be critically important in this era of increasing societal willingness to tolerate both corruption of own's own tribe and overall government censorship. But first, a few thoughts about whistle-blowers.

A lot of people are uneasy with whistle-blowers--they think of them as law-breakers, which is true. But what else are you supposed to do when you are a government employee who has a front-row seat to corruption in your own office? I admit that I feel more passion for the plight of whistle-blowers than many people because I was one. In the late 1980s, I became an anonymous source for various newspaper articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporting the corruption of Missouri Attorney General, William Webster. See also here.

I understand the hesitation that many people initially have for supporting whistle-blowers, because they are law-breakers. We have laws that put whistle-blowers at financial and criminal risk for exposing corruption, which usually (as in my case) requires revealing internal documents to prove that corruption. The choice might seem daunting from the outside, but it becomes stark for whistle-blowers: Would you rather stay quiet, thereby acceding to government corruption? Or will you break laws, risk getting fired (which I was) and risk losing both your liberty and your means to pay your bills, all for the higher purpose of letting fellow citizens know that they are being betrayed by their elected officials? If your reputation is important to you, the choice becomes easier. And as one of my confidants told me back in the 80's, "You will need to look in the mirror at yourself every morning for the rest of your life. What kind of person do you want to see?"

For many whistle-blowers, including Daniel Ellsberg, there is no choice at all. He needed to expose the corruption because so much was at stake. He chose to become a whistle-blower in an especially dramatic and dangerous way. He did it to stop the tragic farce we refer to as "the Vietnam War," where 50,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people were being slaughtered based upon an initial big lie (the purported Gulf of Tonkin incident) and subsequent non-stop lies spewed by the U.S. government that the Vietnam War was winnable. Contrary to these lies, secret internal U.S. communications made it absolutely clear that, for a variety of reasons, the U.S. would never prevail militarily.

The entire Politico article is well worth reading. Here are a few of Ellsberg's last thoughts that I'd like to share:

“The need for whistleblowing in my area of so-called national security is that we have a secret foreign policy, which has been very successfully kept secret and essentially mythical,” [Ellsberg] says. “I’m saying there’s never been more need for whistleblowers … There’s always been a need for many more than we have. At the same time, it’s become more and more dangerous to be a whistleblower. There’s little doubt about that.” . . .

During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”

“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile.

I respond by saying those were all Cold War policies, if covert ones, and ask him whether he thinks anything has changed since. In announcing the complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, for example — as the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of the country — Biden declared that the United States was “ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

Ellsberg doesn’t believe it. “Democrats in this area are as shameless as Republicans,” he says. “Our elections in the realm of foreign policy and defense policy and arms sales, I have come to understand, are essentially between people vying to be manager of the empire.”

 

Continue ReadingWhistle-Blower Daniel Ellsberg’s Final Thoughts

Dr. Peter McCullough Discusses COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Syndromes

Why have I (and many other Americans) lost so much faith in American public health officials and institutions? Well, there was the official narrative that we heard from government officials, something like, "The vaccine is safe. Take it. Or else you will be socially ostracized, perhaps fired from your job." Matt Orfalea's mashup illustrates that official narrative:

On the other hand, consider the testimony of Dr. Peter McCullough in the Pennsylvania Senate. You will learn about massive conflicts of interest among public health institutions, including the CDC and the FDA. You will hear that there was no independent organization dedicated to patient safety of the vaccines, which is ghastly.  McCullough discusses the VAERS risk signal associated with the vaccines, which has been corroborated by subsequent studies.

McCullough testifies that 5% of Americans have suffered permanent disability, primarily stroke and neurologic disability as a result of taking the mRNA vaccine (min 27). He discusses the use of therapeutics for those detrimentally affected by the mRNA vaccine, including the use of the supplement called Nattokinase and other natural substances that seem to dissolve the spike protein that is already in the human body (discussed at min 27). Throughout this video you will hear his descriptions of a hubristic network of government "experts" and pharmaceutical manufacturers who are withholding data and refusing to enter into wide-open no-limits discussions regarding potential adverse affects of the COVID vaccines.

Why are some Americans having adverse affects regarding the vaccines while others are not? McCullough cites to a new R-Squared analysis study tracing problems to certain batches of the vaccines (and not others) (min 22). About 1/3 of people who received Batch 1 and report no side effects. Almost 2/3 of of people took Batch 2 and had side effects, but very few serious side-effects. About 4.2% of Americans received Batch 3, the bad batches and about 75% of those people receiving the bad batch have health issues related to the vaccine. Why? McCullough suggests that there was a "product manufacturing problem."  Either hyper-concentrated lipid nano-particles with an excessive amount of messenger RNA or CDNA contamination or other types of contamination.

I am not an expert, so I have no ability to evaluate McCullough's claims, but I listened closely as he cited to recent studies. What he is saying very much concerns me. At a minimum, how was it that experimental vaccines that never received standard testing labeling (with package inserts) were foisted (often under duress) on Americans via the Emergency Use Authorization?

And again, why are we not seeing wide discussion of these issues?  Why, instead, are we seeing suspicious activities by public health officials, things like this?

Continue ReadingDr. Peter McCullough Discusses COVID-19 Vaccine Injury Syndromes