Our Democracy ends when we lose faith in the fairness of our elections. Nancy
Forget Big Brother, Big MUM is Google’s new tool for suppressing conservatives.
MUM or Multitask Unified Model was hyped last year as the company’s new machine learning algorithm. MUM had been initially described as an innovative way to allow Google’s dying search service to answer natural language questions by drawing on multiple sources.
While MUM’s applications initially appeared to be apolitical, that quickly changed.
Google first unleashed MUM to fight what it considered COVID “misinformation” by making sure that everyone saw “high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization”. By reducing the number of sources to only those that agree with its agenda, Google is able to deliver fast results while getting rid of different points of view.
A Forbes article described how MUM would “check information across multiple reliable sources” to allow “the system to come to a general consensus”. Google had once built its search around the vast diversity of a bygone internet, but it has spent the last decade draining the diversity and depth of the pool and replacing it with the shallow manufactured consensus of its agenda.
Google long ago ceased being a way to find different answers and its search results are deliberately repetitive. Search is an illusion. The user thinks that he’s browsing the internet when he’s actually spinning his wheels in Google’s walled garden. This is most obvious in shopping and in politics: two areas where Google has strong interests and tries to manipulate users into believing that they are exploring options when they’re being hand fed variations on a theme.
Or as Pandu Nayak, VP of search at Google, wrote in a recent post, “By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact.”
The last thing the world needs is another centralized computer system enforcing a consensus.
Google disagrees with many of its users about what “reliable sources” or “high-quality sources” entail. MUM helps the Big Tech search monopoly manufacture a consensus, on what it claims is a universal fact, and to promote snippets on its own site that promote that consensus.
JAN JEKIELEK
I sit down again with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole for an update on the alarming trends he and his colleagues have seen since the rollout of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, including the rise of “wildfire cancers” and the emergence of large blood clots.
“The cells don’t lie. The clots don’t lie. The damaged organs don’t lie,” Cole says.
Cole breaks down the mechanisms by which the spike protein can cause the symptoms being reported, from brain fog to reactivated Epstein-Barr virus to changes in hormonal cycles.
JAN JEKIELEK
TikTok is one of the Chinese regime’s most powerful weapons of mass manipulation and misinformation, argues Nicolas Chaillan, former chief software officer of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force. TikTok was the most downloaded app globally and in the United States in 2021.
The Chinese regime is using TikTok to manipulate Americans—particularly the younger generations, Chaillan says. And it’s gathering enormous amounts of data, from voice prints to face prints, to power the next generation of AI weapons.
At the same time, the best and the brightest are leaving the Department of Defense, Chaillan says.
“When you hear the DOD talk about focusing on climate change and focusing on domestic terrorism as the number one threat, that’s just plain nonsense … If China is not the number one threat, I don’t know where these people have been living, but they’re not on the same planet.”
We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?
In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.
The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.
The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China.
JAN JEKIELEK
From Our Sponsor: Why Now Is the Time to Buy Gold & Silver with Goldco. Call 855-973-0470 for your FREE Wealth Protection Kit Today!
A former Wall Street analyst and BlackRock portfolio manager, Edward Dowd has been analyzing excess mortality data from the CDC and from insurance companies with his partner, Josh Stirling, an insurance analyst. Excess mortality or excess deaths refers to the number of deaths from all causes above what would be expected under normal circumstances.
Earlier this year, the CEO of a major life insurance company said death rates among working-age Americans had gone up 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels. A recent report by the Society of Actuaries now reinforces this alarming data, Dowd says.
“In the 25 to 34 [age group], they saw 78 percent excess mortality in the third quarter of 2021. They also saw, in the 35 to 44 age group, 100 percent excess mortality,” Dowd says.
Dowd said he and Stirling looked at data from the CDC and arrived at similar numbers: “The age cohort from 25 to 44, which we call the millennials, experienced an 84 percent rise of excess mortality into the fall of 2021—August, September, October—and the rate of change was just dramatic. So they’re running around 40, 50 percent in the summer, and then this parabolic spike move up into the fall,” says Edward Dowd.
Dowd is the author of the upcoming book, “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022
U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., wrote a letter last week calling on the Canadian government to scrap its controversial ArriveCan app for anyone seeking to enter the country, referring to the mandate as a “misguided burden” on travelers.
ArriveCan ostensibly screens incoming travelers for Covid-19 while enabling the federal government to collect a wealth of electronic data, personal information, and medical records, including someone’s vaccination status. Refusing to use the app while traveling to Canada can result in significant fines and even mandatory quarantine.
“The ArriveCan app serves no public health purpose and continues to harm both commerce and the flow of traffic at our border. I urge you and the Canadian government to cease this app’s harmful impacts on our border communities and immediately halt its required use,” the congresswoman stated.
When it comes to testing, vaccination status, and quarantine requirements, the app is completely at odds with new guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So why exactly is Canada refusing to follow the so-called science?
Prolonged processing and wait times at the U.S.-Canada border are also being attributed to the app, as Stefanik suggested. “We’re so short-staffed and spending so much time dealing with this app that we really don’t have time to do our actual jobs anymore,” said Mark Weber, national president of the Customs and Immigration Union.
Pressure has been mounting on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ever since a “glitch” earlier this summer mistakenly ordered more than 10,000 people to quarantine at home. The government waited 12 days to notify them of the error, prompting concern from data and privacy experts who say the ArriveCan app may be violating constitutionally-protected mobility rights.
In May, it was revealed that Canadian authorities had “closely tracked” citizens via their smartphones — without their knowledge — during the pandemic. Through unprecedented surveillance, public health officials were reportedly “able to view a detailed snapshot of people’s behavior, including visits to the grocery store, gatherings with family and friends, time spent at home, and trips to other towns and provinces.”
Poor people in Myanmar are bearing some of the brunt of Chinese mining for American green energy.
CLIMATE CHANGE / MICHAEL SWARTZ / AUGUST 17, 2022
There’s an intriguing quote we wanted to share from a recent Associated Press exposé on mining for rare earth in Asia. We’ve talked at length about the Chinese stranglehold on the market for certain minerals, but it’s worth noting that we once did that here. As the lengthy story by Dake Kang, Victoria Milko, and Lori Hinnant notes: “The United States offshored its rare earths mining to China in the 1980s because of environmental and cost issues. China’s leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, declared rare earths China’s answer to ‘oil in the Middle East.’ Tens of thousands of Chinese in the countryside discovered that they could make more in a month of mining than years of farming.”
That may have seemed like the end of the story, but over the last decade the Chinese have become wise to the ecological damage this mining — oftentimes done by small “mom and pop” operations — was creating in their country. So they did what any communist regime would do: paint a pretty picture of being conscious of the environment by cracking down on the small-time operators mining in their country while getting the nearby military dictatorship of Myanmar (generally known as Burma) to take the hit.
China’s loss is now Myanmar’s loss, too. Strip-mining in unlicensed private mines in the northern reaches of the nation is fouling its waterways and destroying the habitat of native plants and animals. But one longtime mine worker, who gave his last name as Guo, is a Chinese national who relocated to Myanmar after losing his mining job in China. Guo is quoted in the AP piece: “I’m only responsible for digging the mountain up and selling it. The rest is none of my business. … They talk about future generations, I’m talking about survival today. We just see if we can make money. It’s that simple.”