Posts Tagged → big government
DuckDuckNoGo
Like oh, so many Americans seeking digital refuge from the combined forces of tyrannical government partnered with the Big Tech industrial complex, I too began using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine about three years ago. Before that I had used some other search engine that was not Google, because Google has been overtly evil since 2015.
Evil because Google did not perform as advertised, and in fact it sought to undermine its users.
When a search engine deliberately skews its search results to fit a particular political view or goal, then it is no longer a search engine. It is an information censor, shaper, editor. But it is not a search engine in the sense that we type in some term, hit the ENTER key, and sit back as the most relevant results are presented to us. Nope, that is oh, so 2010, and we are living way beyond that innocent time now.
Enter DuckDuckGo, a high tech response to the outpouring of consumer frustration with Google providing laugh-out-loud fake results like “Hillary Clinton’s awesome fabulous answer to rising crime!” to the search “Hillary Clinton Criminal.” Instead of providing accurate results that would enumerate the many criminal wrongdoings and run-ins and cases of Arkancide associated with Hillary Clinton, Google still to this day provides a list of dodgy and patently false narrative misinformation to actually obfuscate and cover up Hillary Clinton’s long trail of criminal wreckage.
DuckDuckGo presented itself as an alternative to this about-face by what had been the world’s greatest search engine and source of arcana, with the additional promise of hiding user information and providing privacy. It was a great sell, and millions of people flocked to the Duck, happy knowing they were not propping up evil Google and also were getting more accurate information with greater privacy.
I was one of those users, and had DuckDuckGo installed on my smart phone and my laptop. In a small way, it made me feel all renegade and subtle dissenter against Google’s all-knowing, overbearing Big Tech.
About a month ago I noticed search results were suddenly fitting the same kinds of patterns I expect to experience on YouTube, where censors and book burners have been running unabashedly wild for several years. A kind of smooth uniformity and consistency of results that you could one and all fit into a thimble, due to their repetitive and simulacra nature. No more outliers, no weird blogs you’d never heard of before, no more….diversity.
For example, searching a loaded political phrase, term, or name was suddenly giving 100% mainstream media results, that almost all read exactly the same as one another, regardless of the outlet name (MSNBC sounds the same as CNN sounds the same as NPR sounds the same as ABC). This had become both the Google model and more recently the YouTube model, a shameless effort to block your access (my access) to the wide variety of information sources and opinions out there on the Internet, and to instead serve up a particular and purposefully misinformed narrative, related in numbingly same phrases and terms, regardless of the source (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS… they all sound the same).
I kind of wondered aloud to myself when I encountered this the first few times. And then the bird was let out of the cage the other day by DuckDuckGo’s founder and owner, Gabriel Weinberg. Weinberg published a tweet on Twitter, admitting to having changed the once freedom-embracing DuckDuckGo into Google Junior. No more honest search results. Nope. Instead, in the name of “fighting misinformation” DuckDuckGo would join the rest of the Big Tech lackeys and do whatever evil manipulation and spread whatever misinformation their political masters demand of them.
So now, I am like so many millions of other Internet users, former DuckDuckGo users betrayed by Gabriel Weinberg and the sick, dishonest, woke ideology he serves, searching for a fair and unbiased source of Internet search results. Right now I am using Brave’s search function, because Brave is the browser I use. I suppose that when someone offers the owner of Brave enough money he will sell it and we will be looking once again for a fair and unbiased browser.
Bottom line is I have ditched DuckDuckGo, because I will not participate in its evil lies and deception. It is now DuckDuckNoGo.
Fly away, Duck, and do not come back here. You are a dead duck to me, now.
(And while I am on the subject of individuals in Big Tech who make bizarre decisions that promote the spread of disinformation and false narratives, can I ask what the hell is in the water that Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Serge Brin (Google), and a zillion other Big Tech Jewish guys drink? Do they all drink the same poisoned water, together? Why is it that we have no Jewish radicals in Big Tech? Like, why are there no pro-freedom, anti-censorship, pro-democracy, anti Big Government, pro-individual rights Jewish people running these Big Tech companies? Instead, it seems like every. single. one. of these guys thinks exactly the same, and it is a horribly shitty sameness they push. I ask this earnestly, because I am a male version of Pippy Longstocking, and my intentions cannot be ascribed to evil. Raised in the wilds of America with a pack of howling malamutes, with few social distancing norms to guide my thoughts or my mouth, I am asking this question honestly. For a friend. For my wife. For my kids. Hey Serge, Gabe, Mark…what the f*ck is wrong with you?)
UPDATE: Today, March 14, 2022 DuckDuckGo is running ads on WHP580 AM radio. Never heard a search engine run ads before, anywhere, but the immediate and deserved ass-kicking that DuckDuckGo must be taking to inspire the company to purchase these ads is probably magnificent.
Ivermectin vs. political, cultural establishment
Among the many political battles now being waged for control of America and the soul of Western Civilization, there is one quiet fight that is beginning to break out into the sunshine. And it is the outcome of this little fight that is beginning to pack a really big punch in the much larger battle between the political and cultural establishment and The People.
The fight, or dispute, or whatever you want to call it, has to do with the use of the long-used anti-parasite drug Ivermectin. It is a real example of politicized/political science vs. science science. Ivermectin has been used for a long time to treat both humans and animals that are infected with parasites. Ivermectin as a treatment for covid1984 in humans has been derided by the Democrat Party’s legacy media (NYT, CNNLOL, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR aka Demedia) as a “horse de-wormer,” and the Demedia has mocked people who have wanted to use it, or who have espoused its use, to treat covid1984.
This mocking of Ivermectin and its medical proponents, even long time medical researchers who are the leading experts in their medical field, is based only on a political narrative. That political narrative is that a) All Americans/ Canadians/ Australians/ Europeans/ Britons must receive an injection purported to be a vaccine against covid1984, but which we now know is not a vaccine at all, and b) any person’s hesitancy about receiving this unproven, unapproved, untested injection must result in social and professional blacklisting, firing from their job, home confinement, de-licensing, de-platforming from social media, etc.
This political narrative is not just being aggressively pushed by Demedia, but by political, corporate and social elites, who while only a tiny portion of the overall population are nonetheless fully in lockstep with just one political party, its political and social messages, and its anti-democracy centralizing statist goals.
So we have the popularized but false narrative that only the government and its non-vaccines can save us from covid1984, and anything else is a threat to that narrative. This makes Ivermectin a huge threat to the entire house of cards built by Dr. Mengele Fauci and all the other Big-Government-Control-Over-Little-Citizens advocates.
More and more reports are seeping out around the Demedia information blockade about Ivermectin being an immediate and conclusive treatment for covid1984. I myself know several people who contracted covid1984 in the past month, got sick from it, and who either had Ivermectin on hand as an ace up their sleeve, or who were able to order Ivermectin in time to treat their covid1984 symptoms. Using Ivermectin, all these friends of mine recovered very quickly from their covid1984 infection, and are now fully and naturally immunized against covid1984. They had it, and survived.
When people say that America or any other nation is suffering from a health emergency or crisis, they are lying. We are not in a health crisis, we are in a political crisis, whose beneficiaries are using the subject of public health and covid1984 to artificially advance their political goals, at the expense of democratic processes designed to place checks against government overreach.
When people say the covid1984 pandemic is a crisis of the unvaccinated lepers hurting the vaccinated, you have to laugh at them. Why? Because if someone took a vaccine, or two or three, heck it might end up being ten or twenty, then they should be fully protected against whatever the unvaccinated people are carrying. That is how a vaccine works. But we have the most coercive of vaccine advocates admitting openly that the vaccines don’t actually work to protect the recipients.
In other words, you must take your vaccine “because we told you to,” in the tyrannical words of Biden Regime spokesthing Jen Psaki. There are no real, demonstrable benefits from these so-called “vaccines,” other than probably blunting the effects of covid1984 on about 50% of vaccinated individuals. But the public health and societal costs of the vaccines are enormous!
So powerful is this political narrative, and so attractive is the potential to make $30,000 per ventilated patient, that even hospital administrators have taken on the role of God in this situation, condemning patients dying of covid1984 to almost certain death, because they won’t allow the last-ditch use of Ivermectin. As if a dying patient has anything left to lose! Well, apparently the hospitals prefer that you die and they not lose their profits, or demonstrate that a simple, cheap Ivermectin pill could have easily saved the patient without all of the other fu$$.
Even state medical boards are on board with the political narrative, to the point where they are aggressively de-licensing and firing medical doctors and researchers who have a second opinion about treating covid1984 that runs counter to the political narrative. Many medical doctors have been cowed into silence or acquiescence from these threats.
Political control of people, the destruction of democratic processes that protect individual liberties, in favor of granting a small group of government employees absolute control over formerly free citizens (you!), is behind covid1984. It trumps everything else. The false political narrative must be protected at all costs, even if thousands of innocent Americans die, because they are used as political pawns to advance Big Government control. The leftist politicos prefer that thousands of Americans die, rather than get good treatment.
But Ivermectin’s success in treating covid1984 is beginning to punch holes through the Demedia’s suffocating political narrative and the unconstitutional government overreach that has accompanied it. Ivermectin’s success is calling into question the entire propaganda narrative about vaccines and Big Government. On the one hand, the initially unproven and now dis-proven non-vaccine “vaccines” are clearly a strike-out, while on the other hand a very cheap and easily obtainable treatment (Ivermectin) works quickly.
Did the Demedia, its one political party, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Tech, and Wall Street just place huge profits from requiring fake vaccines over the actual benefit of Americans? Was covid1984 really about giving a political establishment full political control, and not about public health? It sure looks like it.
These people nearly wrecked America. They have nearly stolen our liberty, our freedom, and our right to choose so many aspects of our lives, in the name of “protecting” us. Don’t you wonder what the political and social fallout from this outrage is going to be?
p.s. if you are curious about whether or not Ivermectin works to defeat covid1984, you can see right here that the US Food and Drug Administration approved it back in July of this year. This highlights just how attractive the grotesque financial profits are from requiring false vaccines, as well as the political profits from unwarranted fearmongering and stealing freedom from We, The People.
Response to PA Gov. Tom Ridge on Conservatives & the Environment
On April 22nd this year, Earth Day, The Atlantic published an opinion piece by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, about conservatives and the environment (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/environment-gop-out-touch/610333/). The Atlantic solicited responses to Ridge’s essay, and so I submitted one to them, but received back no indication they would publish it. They did not publish it, because liberals like those at The Atlantic accept and publish only liberals, and reject conservatives. So here it is, my response to Governor Ridge’s essay about conservatives and the environment.
I felt compelled to respond to Governor Ridge’s essay, in part because I worked in his administration, and in part because I have met few Republicans who can articulate a truly conservative view of environmental policy, which Governor Ridge failed to do. I was also afraid of being seen as attacking someone I hold in high esteem, and I need to say that while I may disagree with Governor Ridge’s essay and some of his recent public stances, like supporting PA governor Tom Wolf’s covid19 lockdown, I remain impressed by Governor Ridge’s high character. I am proud to have served in his distinctively excellent administration.
Governor Ridge’s essay slightly opens a doorway that I am both pleased and also reluctant to push all the way open. But it needs to be opened, all the way, because for far too long establishment Republicans have claimed to be conservatives, while acting like liberals.
Governor Ridge writes his essay “as a conservative,” and despite boldly leading by example in placing highly competent gays, women, and minorities in senior government positions literally decades ago, long before most Democrats followed suit, Governor Ridge was, in fact, a true conservative. His achievements in conservative policy are legion, including Pennsylvania becoming a shall-issue concealed firearm carry state and his administration’s brownfield land recycling program.
Nonetheless, the emphasis today is on he “was.”
Governor Ridge was a conservative, and by today’s standard, he is not. This is not because Governor Ridge has changed, but because what now defines a conservative has changed so dramatically since the time he was governor. The same holds true for liberals, by the way, in their own way (we see the Democrat Party now a totally, openly, violent, racist, anti-America Marxist organization).
And like so many, if not all other political elites, especially Republicans, and most especially establishment Republicans from the hide-bound, bunker-mentality Pennsylvania GOP, Governor Ridge has not changed with the times. Governor Ridge was a conservative, and today he often speaks like a liberal, and sides with liberals on policy disputes. He is not alone in this, but each Republican who does so still causes pain to us conservatives in the political trenches. It is frustrating as hell to experience a former Republican appointee or elected official try to speak with authority as some sort of representative of conservativism, when in fact, they are simply liberals. Or RINOs for short (Republican In Name Only – not conservative).
Probably the biggest indication that Governor Ridge is out of synch with today’s conservatives is how he encourages us to adopt a laundry list of liberal environmental policies in his The Atlantic essay. This means that his solution for conservatives to succeed is for us to adopt liberalism. Even though most of the “environmental” groups are simply employment offices for Democrat Party operatives pushing Marxist, partisan policies. Very few environmental groups today are even seeking solutions, because they are busy dreaming up new problems.
Most of the policies pushed by environmental groups today are by definition Big Coercive Government, Small Defenseless Citizen, anti-Constitution, disregard for private property rights, mountains out of mole hills, and so on. These groups are not about the environment, they simply use the subject of the environment as another avenue to push Marxism and the Big Government necessary to force it down our throats. Governor Ridge should know this, of all people.
What Governor Ridge failed to address is: How can we conservatives embrace the very same failed and inferior liberal policies that drove us to becoming conservatives in the first place? If we adopt liberalism, then we are abandoning conservativism, and failing as conservatives.
Every single environmental policy recommendation that Governor Ridge lists in his essay directly contradicts core conservative principles, like small government, less intrusive government, less spendy government, less activist government, less regulatory government, accountable government and accountable taxpayer-funded government employees. Literally every single policy he lists requires the government to intervene in a big, coercive way, often over trifling differences or demonstrably false premises.
Governor Ridge’s environmental ideas are not conservativism; they are quintessential big government liberalism.
Perhaps the centerpiece of his essay is that conservatives must concede at least a bit on “climate change.” Yet, for conservatives, this particular issue, more than any other, highlights the distinction between us and liberals. For conservatives to agree with the Marxist, disproven, and notoriously phony climate change religion would be to abandon basic, solid, conservative principles altogether….like Capitalism 101, solid math and science, and transparency. Again, we are unpersuaded the climate warming-cooling-change-whatever issue even exists, let alone that a government solution consistent with America’s Constitution could be found.
Governor Ridge writes “The Republican Party has largely abandoned environmental issues.” To which I and a host of other conservatives would respond, No, but many Republicans have abandoned the citizen voters and the forgotten taxpayers of America. Many careerist Republicans have embraced popular culture and its feel-good-now bubblegum policies. For Republicans to respect openly partisan “environmental” groups and embrace liberal nonsense like so-called ‘climate change’ and similar policies would only be one more betrayal in a long line of policy and political betrayals committed by the Republican establishment. Conservatives have perfectly sound environmental policies based on perfectly sound, all-American principles. If you but ask us, we will explain them. We conservatives didn’t abandon environmental issues, nor did we leave the Republican Party. The Republican establishment abandoned us.
Josh First is president of Appalachian Land & Conservation Services, LLC. He has worked at the US EPA in Washington, DC, The Conservation Fund, the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy, and was Director of Environmental Education and Information at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources in the Governor Tom Ridge administration.
Current American Parallels with the Fall of Ancient Rome
In the recent past I have been in touch with some old high school friends.
We were quite close way back then. All remain good people, and we have maintained irregular but meaningful contact for the past 35 years. So any communication between us now is like picking right up where we last left off way back then.
“When are you and your militia friends going to storm DC?” semi-teasingly asks one, a professional resident of Washington, DC.
Immediately I’m thinking “Trump winning pretty much was the storming of DC, in a way.”
But I don’t say it, as the cascade of shallow whining about the election results sure to follow has become regular and boorish among Trump detractors.
“Josh, I was no Hill-Dog lover [Hillary Clinton], and I liked Kasich [presidential candidate], but do you really like Trump?” asks another, this one a successful self-made businessman, his face unhappily wrinkling over Trump Anything.
Given the constant opposition to the Trump presidency from both establishment parties (Republicans and Democrats, or the ‘UniParty’ as some call both parties together), as well as from taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients, some small and many big business folk alike, and especially the media-academia Big Government complex, now seems a good time to remind everyone who has something to lose of the history that brought America up here and could drag us back down.
First, like America, ancient superpower Rome was also “too big to fail,” both in the minds of Romans and their many enemies. They had too much money, too much military power, and the Roman people were living too fantastically a high standard of life to envision it actually dissolving.
In that way, America is no different than Rome, or any other major civilization that has come and gone before us: We perceive we are too wealthy and powerful to fall, and our personal lives are so fantastically comfortable and convenient that we cannot imagine all of it coming undone. It’s just too good. How could it possibly go away?
But fail and fall, Rome did. First sacked in 410 CE by its own mercenaries, and then for good in 454 CE by its mercenaries allied with their ethnic tribes. Inside jobs, both.
Second, like Rome, America is an island anomaly in a sea of big, all-powerful governments, dictatorships, really, domineering little citizens. While by today’s standards ancient Rome may not have been a free society, by the measure of its time it provided a lot of liberty and opportunity to individual citizens, much more than anywhere else.
Rome also had a semblance of the rule of law. Most nation-states back then were simply feudal aggregations of people with swords at the top and field-cropping, over-taxed serfs at the bottom. No rule of law.
Today, Planet Earth still has mostly tyrants and dictators, with a cruel grip on their respective populace. So, like America now, Rome then had some extra work to do to hold itself together. Government power had to be diffused among senators, army officers, and business people. Standards and expectations were higher among a wider group of people. Government power, societal stability, quality of life did not depend upon the one monarch alone.
Predicting the end of America is almost as silly as predicting “climate change” -caused sea levels catastrophically rising, and super-powerful storms catastrophically leveling human civilization.
Though there is evidence of climate and weather affects on past human civilizations, it is a historical fact that human civilizations come and go of their own accord, usually due to simple power lust and ego. Sometimes environmental destruction rendered the land unfit for habitation. So on that alone we know that some day America will change. And it will not be a change good for the majority of its citizens.
America is nowhere near where Rome was when it fell, in terms of military preparedness. But in other ways we are past where Rome was, in terms of our unsustainable debt, ironically held by some of our worst enemies. The Chinese have become a kind of mercenary banker force, also supplying us with the electronics we use to run our daily lives as well as much of our military. That they are spying on us through their electronics is already proven.
Plenty of people inside and out would like to run America themselves, without the annoying, dirty citizenry in the way.
And yet so many Americans continue to party on, oblivious, as if we are invincible, invulnerable.
Go ahead and tease me, friends. Your ribbing is funny. But you should also be reflecting on the implications of ANTIFA, BLM, OWS etc mobs-cum-militia already rampaging across American streets, including DC and the US Capitol. Those stormings are already under way, under cover of national media and academia. They are real, and neither I nor any militia I know of have anything to do with them.
Go ahead and casually write off people like me, ‘kooks’ who love America in a simple way, a traditional way. We love all Americans, in all their ingenuity and passion for liberty and opportunity, and we have therefore come to despise the power-grab being waged against the citizenry by Big Government latté sippers. In both parties.
Go ahead and smugly dismiss us, mock us, cheerily toast our foolishness.
Just remember in the back of your mind, it is you we are trying to save. God knows, you can’t get it done.