Feb 23
Manchester, England. Feb. 23, 2025. Blogger Peter Sweden has posted the story of Grandmother Helen Jones, who had police pound on her door for posting that Labour Party officials should resign.
British “authorities” have been increasingly monitoring social media posts and jailing citizens who post things the government dislikes.
Feb 22
Berlin. Feb. 18, 2025.
Apple announced last week that it is no longer offering its end-to-end-encryption feature in any product for sale in Great Britain. This cancelation is in response to British government demands that Apple I-Phones must manufacture a “back door” in every I-Phone so that the British government can access user data.
The “leftist Government of Keir Starmer continues to establish a dystopia in the United Kingdom,” according to The Gateway Pundit.
“The company [Apple] said Friday that Advanced Data Protection, an optional feature that adds end-to-end encryption to a wide assortment of user data, is no longer available in the UK for new users. The technology had provided an extra layer of security to iCloud data storage, device backups, web bookmarks, voice memos, notes, photos, reminders and text message backups.”
Feb 22
In just the past decade, Germany has fallen under increasing government control. The German government’s censorship regime was recently highlighted in the U.S. “60 Minutes” news program. 60 Minutes produced a favorable expose’ about German censorship which included video of a German arrest raid aimed at silencing social media posts.
One German recently saw his home raided because he reposted a comment that called Minister Robert Habeck a “dimwit.” The new German “hate” law has little to do about creating a nicer place to live. Rather the law’s purpose is to make it easy to raid homes of dissidents, spread fear and to silence opposing voices.
Increasingly Germans must be careful expressing themselves. See here.
Feb 21
A global movement by governments and elites to impose mass censorship on social media platforms has arisen over the past decade. This movement has become intertwined with the “left” worldwide. Even in the United States, where “the left” was formerly identified with free speech advocacy, this change is palpable.
In Brazil the forces of censorship are led by the dark judge Alexandre de Moraes, who issued a series of tyrannical censorship orders and decrees. This “judge” often acts in secret, without indicating what process is used to make his censorship decisions.
Jan 09
Massive New Study finds UBI makes Households POORER
California. December 2024. A massive government-funded study of Californians who received “universal basic income” (UBI) finds that the program did little to help poor households. The study was conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
While being given ~$500 per month in free money, participants only ended up $100 richer and smoked more cigarettes.
The study gave about $500 per month to 695 households over two years in Compton, California. Another 1,402 were designated as a control group. The findings: (2/10)
“Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers had a lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points.” (3/10)“
Income (excluding the transfer) was reduced by $333 per month on average relative to control households, and expenditures were reduced by $302 per month.” (4/10)
“At the same time, average non-housing debt balances declined by $2,190 over 18 months relative to the control group, although the drop is not statistically significant.” (5/10)
“We find a significant improvement in housing security, but no overall effects on indices of psychological and financial well-being.” (6/10)
[…]
“The list experiments show strong evidence of relative reductions in IPV, weak evidence of reduced alcohol consumption, and moderately strong evidence of relative increases in tobacco consumption.” (9/10)
Jan 08
The failures of so-called peer review in climate science journals has been given insufficient attention. But an article in the recent edition of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, “Climate Denialism,” by Tinus Pulles, highlights this problem. Scientists whose findings differ from the government-approved narrative have always had great difficulty getting their findings into peer reviewed journals. This is because of the flood of government research money in academic “science.”
Recently a petroleum scientist named Andy May penned an article in an academic journal laying out the basis for skepticism of the government’s catastrophic-global-warming-by-manmade-CO2 narrative. May’s article was quickly attacked by a government-funded professor, Tinus Pulles. But although May identified “20 clearly false statements and three additional problematic statements in Tinus Pulles’ article, the editors of the journal failed to address the misstatements or even publish May’s list.
May writes:
What is puzzling is I was asked to peer review this paper months ago and I sent in the review in October. Nearly all the errors you will see in the list below were pointed out then, yet they remain in the paper. To nearly everyone familiar with climate science literature and our paper, these errors are obvious. I find it more than a bit alarming that even the grammatical errors I pointed out in the paper last October are still in it. Why such a flawed paper was published is a mystery. Peer review is not working as intended.
Pulles appears to believe that dangerous human-caused climate change is an undisputed fact. He also repeatedly conflates “climate change” with “dangerous man-made climate change.” Human-caused global climate change has never been observed, either directly or statistically, only modeled. The paper is critical of our paper from earlier in the year (May & Crok, 2024), but that paper makes it clear that human-caused climate change is not an existential threat and the incidence and magnitude of recent extreme weather events have not exceeded expected natural variability as shown in the recent IPCC AR6 WGI report on page 1856 and elsewhere.
Dec 31
According to The Gateway Pundit, a North Carolina postal worker was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing over $750,000 in U.S. Treasury checks, including tax refunds, Veterans Affairs benefits, and Social Security disability payments.
Zerion Marcos Franklin, a government postal worker, was pulled over while driving his private car by a cop in June 2024. The cop “noticed drug paraphernalia in plain view. A subsequent search revealed not only 47 U.S. Treasury checks but also marijuana packaged for sale, a loaded 9mm handgun, and over $22,000 in cash.”
Franklin quickly pled guilty.
Dec 31
Since 2007, the USPS has reported staggering losses exceeding $100 billion. In the last fiscal year alone, the agency hemorrhaged $9.5 billion—a sharp increase from the $6.5 billion loss reported in 2023, as noted by Reuters. See here.
The agency enjoys every conceivable advantage in the marketplace. It has a monopoly. It owns and controls some of the nation’s most valuable and prestigious real estate–including strategic locations at the heart of America’s urban areas. It pays no employment, income, corporate, or property taxes.
Yet USPS loses billions annually. It pays its “workers” so much that THOUSANDS of people apply for every opening.
Now there is increasing discussion even among political officials regarding privatizing the “Service.”
Dec 27
Washington, D.C. May 2024. There are new revelations of secret government control over Big Tech. Marc Andreessen, a tech billionaire and venture capitalist, described a “horrifying” meeting with the Biden Administration that cemented his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president.
“Andreessen is a towering figure in Silicon Valley, with many investments in start-up tech ventures.” He states that Biden administration officials explicitly discouraged entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) startups.
Andreessen said the government was seeking to consolidate AI development into the hands of a few government-aligned corporations while shutting out startups and entrepreneurs. This is so the US government will have total control of the development of the technology.
Government officials said they were “reviving Cold War-era tactics to suppress knowledge and innovation by classifying AI’s foundational mathematics.”
Marc Andreessen:
We had meetings in DC in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. We came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.
AI is a technology that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, “Don’t start, don’t do AI startups. Don’t fund AI startups. It’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen.They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point.” They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we’re going to basically wrap them in a… I’m paraphrasing, but we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition, we’re going to control them, and we’re going to dictate what they do.
Then I said, “I don’t understand how you’re going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there, and it’s being taught everywhere.” They literally said, “During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed.”
Marc Andreessen:
If we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. I said, “I’ve just learned two very important things because I wasn’t aware of the former, and I wasn’t aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.”
Dec 10
London. December 7, 2024. Wattsupwiththat.com reports (from Chris Morrison of the Daily Skeptic) that the U.K. Met Office is “inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites.” But “[f]ollowing massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims.”
Now “the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.
Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.
The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.
Again we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth.
