FIRE’s Position on TikTok Litigation

Excerpt from FIRE's recent Amicus Brief:

Never before has Congress taken the extraordinary step of effectively banning a communications platform, let alone one used by half the country. But this spring, Congress did exactly that when it passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The law not only threatens TikTok’s U.S. operation but also exposes other online platforms to burdensome restrictions, including potential bans, if they have even tenuous connections to certain foreign countries.

TikTok and its users quickly filed lawsuits in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which the act gives exclusive jurisdiction for challenges to the law. FIRE, joined by the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation, filed an amici curiae — “friend of the court” — brief supporting the plaintiffs. We argued the law violates the First Amendment in two ways.

First, it explicitly targets a specific communications platform — and the users who speak and access content on it — for the purpose of silencing opinions and ideas that lawmakers oppose. Such attempts to suppress disfavored views strike at the heart of the First Amendment.

Second, to the extent the law is motivated by national security concerns, Congress has failed to build a public record explaining why such a dramatic restriction of Americans’ right to speak and access information is necessary to address those concerns. (However, the court will not consider the brief for procedural reasons explained in the note following this article.)

Recent development:

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Thomas Sowell Quotes

Excellent collection of quotes by economist Thomas Sowell:

Here are a few of my favorites:

"Intellect is not wisdom”

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

"The truth is often not complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.”

"The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is. He confuses it with feeling”

“The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior.”

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

"There's now a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example"

“Since this is an era of 'fairness' & 'social justice... what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”

"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again.” 

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Many Dozens of Recent Medical Journal Articles Impugn the Alleged Safety of the COVID Jabs

Why do I regret having taken 3 COVID shots? Why do I now believe that they were neither safe nor effective? Many dozens of concerns studies are listed by "KC" in her article, "Scientific Studies on Vaccine Injuries: You want science? Here's your f*cking science." She offers this caveat:

[M]uch of the pro-jab jargon used in these studies is required to survive peer review. Journals are beholden to (funded and captured by) the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers have stated outright that they cannot get published on this topic without the inclusion of pro-vaccine rhetoric in their studies.

Please use this post as a resource to backup your own arguments with uninformed acquaintances who continue to believe and perpetuate the false government/Pharma narrative that the C19 “vaccines” are safe. They are not, and the following evidence couldn’t be more clear about that.

Here are the first three of many such articles:

Continue ReadingMany Dozens of Recent Medical Journal Articles Impugn the Alleged Safety of the COVID Jabs

The DNC Version of “Democracy”

The recent DNC coup seals the deal. Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in. Is that democracy in action? The Washington Post thinks so, as Matt Taibbi explains in his article, "In Final Kick in the Pants, Departing Biden Denounced as Another Trump: When Joe Biden failed to immediately assume the position when party bigwigs called for his head, Beltway insiders lumped him in with the Orange One". An Excerept:

Florida canceled a primary for him; North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Wisconsin submitted only his name to ballots; and New Hampshire chose delegates through a “nominating event” that didn’t include voters. Under a new vision in which “the DNC [was] not something separate” from the Biden campaign, the party refused to schedule debates with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson. Proof that “America’s beleaguered system still functioned” would have involved a competitive primary through which Democratic voters could discover Biden’s infirmities early enough for them to have a say in choosing a fitter candidate. Instead, the public was only confronted with the truth a few weeks ago, by which time only internal party power brokers were positioned to make a change. That’s a failure of democracy, unless you think choosing a candidate without voter input is a systemic improvement.

The Post cheered the stage-managed primary season throughout, running laudatory pieces about “How the DNC challenger-proofed the primaries for Biden” and profiles of the “hidden campaign” Biden ran with the party. The paper noted the Biden team’s belief that the president could “seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus” while “splintered” Republicans faced “an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination.” In reality, Republicans benefited from competition, getting long looks at Trump and rivals like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Biden was shielded from competition all the way through his calamitous collapse in the middle of a general election season.

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We Need More Hands-On Education Like This

I'm not being sarcastic. I think that the lack of hands-on know-how is damaging our children. They are not well-prepared for this world by clicking at their laptop computers and using their credit cards to hire other people to do so many of the physical things they need and want.

Thus,this video made my day:

I posted this on FB twice and FB took it down twice because it was "spam." I had merely posted this image with the link to Twitter, along with a comment that I enjoyed seeing this video of a Chinese kindergarten class:

This is the third time this month that FB has deleted my non-spam posts as "spam."

Here's how Facebook defines "Spam":

Spam Policy details

Policy Rationale We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead, or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Online spam is a lucrative industry. Our policies and detection must constantly evolve to keep up with emerging spam trends and tactics. In taking action to combat spam, we seek to balance raising the costs for its producers and distributors on our platforms, with protecting the vibrant, authentic activity of our community.

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