Category Archives: Censorship

With Russia increasingly cut off from the world following its 24 February invasion of Ukraine, the countrys remaining contemporary art market, facing evident economic and often unspoken ideological pressures, is increasingly looking inward. The tenth Cosmoscow International Art Fair, which runs from 14 to 17 September, was no exception.

Even before the event began, such ideological pressures had apparently been felt by some of the participating dealers. A Telegram channel called Courier of Culture, run by a contemporary art publicist, reported that three unnamed galleries had complained about censorship by the fair, at the application stage, preventing any political works or anything that could in any way be linked to the current state of affairsmeaning the warfrom being exhibited.

One anonymous dealer tells The Art Newspaper: "Cosmoscow asked that we change the design of the stand, the artists, their work and the hanging of it. There was nothingpolitical in the works, nor in the idea of the stand, but it was as if the board was trying to choose works where in the current context definitely no second hidden meanings would be sensed."

They add: "Every year [at Cosmoscow] we show young artists of roughly the same style, and this year there was a feeling that the objections were at the level of 'degenerate art'."

A law signed by President Vladimir Putin just days after the invasion makes it illegal to call the invasion a war and threatens those who spread fakes about the Russian military with up to 15 years in prison.

In April a criminal case was opened against the artist Oleg Kulik on charges of rehabilitation of Nazism for his sculptural installation Big Mother (2015), which was shown at the Art Moscow fair at the Gostiny Dvor centre, just yards from the Kremlin, which is also the venue for Cosmoscow. The work came under fire for allegedly mocking The Motherland Calls, a monument in Volgograd commemorating the Battle of Stalingrad. Kulik, who grew up in Kyiv, has said it was meant to depict the pain of his divorce.

Margarita Pushkina, fair director

Photo: Alexander Murashkin

Censorship not allowed

Margarita Pushkina, Cosmoscows founder and director, says: We have never allowed and do not allow internal censorship. Meanwhile, the fairs expert committee is working as usual, selecting the best galleries to participate in the fair.

The most important thing right now, Pushkina adds, is not to multiply contradictions and conflicts, but instead to maintain human and professional relations, continue the dialogue and discuss ways to resolve complex issues. The fair and galleries, she points out, are all directly dependent on the state of the economy.

For a long time there was a question mark over whether the fair would go ahead at all. Simon Rees, the artistic director of the fairs previous edition, resigned immediately after the invasion. Pushkina says a successor has not been appointed because the fairs priorities have shifted.

One of the tasks of the artistic director of the fair has always been to develop international cultural dialogue and to attract galleries from other countries, Pushkina says. In the current situation, we understand that there is emotion involved for international galleries, as well as many difficulties and risks. First of all, there are logistical difficulties, so their participation does not seem simple and obvious.

Indeed, there are no longer any direct flights to Moscow from the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe, except for Turkey and Serbia, and leading shipping companies are boycotting Russia over the invasion.

The only solution, Pushkina says, is to now concentrate on working with Russian gallery owners in order to try to stabilise the situation and continue working on the development of the domestic art market.

The vast majority of the more-than 65 participating galleries at Cosmoscow are Russian, compared with 82 galleries in 2021, when the fair had the broadest geography in its history, and on par with the 62 participants in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ukrainian artists were always an organic and integral part of the Russian art scene, but understandably no Ukrainian galleries applied for stands this year, Pushkina says.

In recognition of the present situation, Cosmoscow is not marking its tenth anniversary with any special events, Pushkina says, though she did not directly mention the war.

All of us in one way or another are influenced by current events and react to what is happening in our country and in the world, she says. In the current situation, it is impossible to remain indifferent. Everyone determines for himself which path to follow, to remain silent or to continue the activity in a modified format.

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First Cosmoscow fair since Russian invasion of Ukraine to open with no foreign galleries and internal complaints of censorship - Art Newspaper

President Joe Bidens Philadelphia speech was certainly something to behold. An orchestrated attack on half the citizens of this country. An attempt to classify an entire political party as extremist. In effect, Biden was calling for a one-party state. Its also worth noting that Bidens speech was written for him, by those who effectively control the Biden regime. And that speech was effectively sanctioned by the White Housebecoming, in a very real sense, the official position of the executive branch of our government. If you doubt this, take a look at some of the tweets that were sent out under Bidens official accountsincluding the White House account. And it was only a week earlier that Biden referred to the MAGA philosophy as semi-fascism.

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Biden's Censorship Enterprise Is an Assault on the First Amendment | Truth Over News - The Epoch Times

Tiago Henriques, a seasoned artificial intelligence expertwho noticed that news of adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines were highly censored in the media, decided to create a Facebook group that lets the vaccine-injured and their loved ones share their stories.

Most Facebook pages on the topic of vaccine side effects and adverse events get removed very quickly by the social media platform, managing to get only a few thousand followers. With technical skills and the use of methods that stay within the confines of Facebooks terms of service, Henriques and his team managed to keep their page up much longer, getting over 245,000 followers to date.

The Facebook group Died Suddenly News was created in late June 2021. Members of the private group share personal stories of people they know who have developed serious medical conditions or even died shortly after receiving the COVID-19 shots.

I wanted people to talk to each other. Individuals whove gone through the same experience, they can be there for each other, be compassionate, show some love, and just get a little bit of relief, because a lot of these people live in small communitiesthey have nobody to talk to, said Henriques in an interview on NTDs Evening News aired on Sept. 9.

The physicians wont listen to them, the nurses wont listen to them. And I think this was a great avenue for these people to feel listened to.

Henriques, who resides in Nova Scotia, says that the group started off slowly but that as the months went by, it gained momentum with more and more people signing up. In the last three, four months, its like absolutely exploded, he said.

The AI expert says the heartbeat of the group is those who share their stories.

The stories that you read on there [about] vaccine injuries, vaccine deaths, theyre very visceral, he said. These are real people in your communities, telling you, telling everybody about their story, and I think thats what makes it more real.

Henriques says the page is currently moderated by about 15 to 20 moderators, who remove any trolls attempting to disparage members or be disrespectful to them.

We keep a pretty tight lid on things. We try to make things run like a Swiss watch, but sometimes its challenging. It is a big group, it is growing, so were going to have those growing pains, he said.

Henriques, who programs in languages such as Python, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, says his team has respected Facebooks terms of service but is aware that even then their page may still be targeted and shut down. He is in the process of creating a separate platform that is not prone to censorship by social media companies.

[Its] kind of like Facebook, except with all the statistics from all over the world, he said.

Im going to have the geographical locations, which vaccines they took, what lot number, what happened to them, all the important statistical data. Were also going to have a section there where they can find help.

The programming expert says he will keep the new website open source for anyone, including those from media organizations, who are interested to see what the data is almost in real time of people around the world injured by the vaccines.

To fund the project, Henriques has set up fundraising campaigns in GoFundMe and GiveSendGo, where anyone who is interested in the cause can donate.

My mission is to have our very own platform free from censorship and judgmenta place where caring people can come share their stories free from harassment and feeling safe in a community that truly listens to them, his fundraiser pages say.

The need for the new platform is important as it would allow us to compile statistics and evidence on whats really going on in the world. It will give us autonomy and not have to fear being turned off at any time by the powers that be.

NTDs Jason Perry contributed to this report.

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Isaac Teo is an Epoch Times reporter based in Toronto.

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Facebook Group Provides a Platform for Vaccine Injured to Share Their Stories - The Epoch Times

One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb?

The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictators policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regimes policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regimes policies are just and goodregardless of what those policies actually areand that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.

One of historys great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As Lszl Ladnyrecalled, Maos decades-long campaign to remold the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War.

By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organized lynchings and public executions.These grim liturgies followed set patterns that once more were reminiscent of gangland practices:during these proceedings, rhetorical questions were addressed to the crowd, which, in turn, had to roar its approval in unisonthe purpose of the exercise being to ensure collective participation in the murder of innocent victims; the latter were selected not on the basis of what they had done, but of who they were, or sometimes for no better reason than the need to meet the quota of capital executions which had been arbitrarily set beforehand by the Party authorities. From that time on, every two or three years, a new campaign would be launched, with its usual accompaniment of mass accusations, struggle meetings, self-accusations, and public executionsRemolding the minds, brainwashing as it is usually called, is a chief instrument of Chinese communism, and the technique goes as far back as the early consolidation of Maos rule in Yanan.

This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as Chinas dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Maos enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their countrys own history, demolishing Chinas relics en masse.

Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies.

Until now. As it turns out, anastonishingnewreleaseofdiscoverydocuments inMissouri v. Bidenin which NCLA Legal is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covidreveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.

Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Governments efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring across the federal enterprise. It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated.The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalizing snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal Censorship Enterprise, which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social mediaall with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavor.

The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.

The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, includingofficials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the US Election Assistance Commission.And it rises to the highest levels of the US Government, including numerous White House officials In their initial response to interrogatories, Defendants initially identifiedforty-fivefederal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all within only two federal agencies, DHS and HHS), who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation and censorship.

Federal officials are coordinating to censor private speech across all major social media platforms.

The third-party social-media platforms, moreover, have revealed that more federal agencies are involved.Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officialsincluding senior officials at the FDA, the US Election Assistance Commission, and the White Househave communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs interrogatories to Defendants.YouTube disclosed eleven federal officialsengaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants.Twitter disclosed nine federal officials,including senior officials at the State Department who were not previously disclosed by Defendants.

Federal officials are granted privileged status by social media companies for the purpose of censoring speech on their platforms, and officials hold weekly meetings on what to censor.

These federal bureaucrats are deeply embedded in a joint enterprise with social-media companies to procure the censorship of social-media speech.Officials at HHS routinely flag content for censorship, for example, by organizing weekly Be On The Lookout meetings to flag disfavored content, sending lengthy lists of examples of disfavored posts to be censored,serving as privileged fact checkers whom social-media platforms consult about censoring private speech, and receiving detailed reports from social-media companies about so-called misinformation and disinformation activities online, among others.

Social media companies have even set up secret, privileged channels to give federal officials expedited means to censor content on their platforms.

For example,Facebook trained CDC and Census Bureau officials on how to use a Facebook misinfo reporting channel. Twitter offered federal officials a privileged channel for flagging misinformation through a Partner Support Portal.YouTube has disclosed that it granted trusted flagger status to Census Bureau officials,which allows privileged and expedited consideration of their claims that content should be censored.

Many suspected that some coordination between social media companies and the federal government was occurring, but the breadth, depth, and coordination of this apparatus is far beyond what virtually anyone imagined. And the scale of this censorship apparatus raises troubling questions.

How could so many federal officials be convinced to engage in the clandestine censorship of opposition to tin-pot public health policies fromChinawhich havekilledtens of thousands of young Americans andlets be honestwere never really that popular to begin with? The answer, I believe, is that high-level White House officials such as Anthony Fauci must have been simultaneously threatening social media companies if they did not comply with federal censorship demands, while also threatening entire federal bureaucracies if they did not toe the Party line.

By simultaneously threatening both the federal bureaucracy and social media companies, a handful of high-level officials could effectively transform the federal government into a sprawling censorship army reminiscent of Maos Red Guards, silencing any opposition to tin-pot public health policies with increasing detachment and certitude as this systematic silencing falsely convinced them that the regimes policies were just and good. A few of these federal employees must have eventually let slip to the Republicans that this jawboning was taking place, which appears to have been how this suit began.

In plaintiff Aaron Kheriatyswords:

Hyperbole and exaggeration have been common features on both sides of covid policy disputes. But I can say with all soberness and circumspection (and you, kind readers, will correct me if I am wrong here):this evidence suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated, and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal governments executive branch in US history.

Republished from the authors Substack

Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. He has been researching the influence of the Chinese Communist Party on the worlds response to COVID-19 since March 2020 and previously authored Chinas Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign and The Masked Ball of Cowardice in Tablet Magazine. You can follow his work on Substack

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Faucis Red Guards: The Mass Censoring of Social Media - Brownstone Institute

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Published on September 2nd, 2022 | by Paul Hernandez

While some countries offer legal protection against censorship, others do not. Even the nations that do afford these freedoms can require a fight to exercise them. Dip Salvador has a strong message for those who wish to block any creativity in music: it is futile to put limitations on art and creative expression.

This goes beyond a cultural plea as it can move into the field of being illegal. After all, artists and musicians have been jailed in numerous parts of the world for speaking their minds. Whether the censor boards feel the work is obscene or threatens civil unrest, Dip Salvador believes it is not about suppressing music; they are censoring human emotions.

Music is the ultimate vehicle for sharing creative expression; thus, it is deeply personal. Whether or not people seek to censor some music can be based solely on opinion and perception, which, as we all know, can vary tremendously. While some lyrics are straightforward and can raise even the most jaded eyebrows, others can be grossly misinterpreted.

Dip Salvador feels that no matter how direct or suggestive music is, it should be censored after interpreting numerous angles. The same goes for any type of art, for that matter.

But, as he says, if you dont like it, you dont have to look or listen, but do not impose your disapproval on others. So saying this to civilians is one thing, but swaying censor boards is another. His explanation is simple, Im not going to alter my work due to draconian laws.

The repression of speech and creativity is akin to blocking a part of our existence. It is a tactic to control and silence a population, not just a portion of that population. Dip Salvador advocates for letting creative expression flow freely and fearlessly.

Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/artist/6PN1qeD3PiiYj6QIDMqfUz

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Dip Salvador says, "Censorship Blocks Creative Output" - The Hype Magazine

Long before Netflixs Blonde landed a controversial NC-17 rating, the Motion Picture Association gave films like Baby Doll (1956) and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) adults only designations as a way to placate concerned parents and reformers.

Now, when news surfaces of Hollywood allegedly kowtowing to everything from domestic social crusaders to foreign governments, debate lights up headlines and social media conversations. But, historically speaking, industry moguls have most often erred on the side of not ruffling feathers, home or abroad, in order to court consumers as evidenced in the birth of the MPA 100 years ago.

The lobbying group, which is marking its centennial in 2022, was born as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in 1922. MPPDA counsel C.C. Pettijohn once told a 1929 Public Relations Conference that the film industry was first understood as a three-legged stool that included production, distribution, and exhibition. Pettijohn argued that the MPPDA allowed the public to work as the fourth leg that could make or break the industry.

One moment that led to its creation: When Americas Sweetheart Mary Pickford obtained a divorce from her husband, Owen Moore, in 1920 it rankled millions of Catholic fans sold on her wholesome image. When the gossip rags let loose about her man waiting in the wings, swashbuckling screen star Douglas Fairbanks, moral crusaders found new firepower to question the living standards in Hollywood. Things got worse when Pickford was accused of breaking up Fairbankss marriage. While Pickford and Fairbanks still managed to become Americas Royal Couple, the precedent for questioning Hollywoods morals was set.

Hollywood had another battle with social reformers in the wake of silent comedian Fatty Arbuckles scandalous San Francisco soiree that allegedly resulted in the death of actress Virginia Rappe. As trials commenced, discussions of censorship began to swirl, something the industry was staunchly against. Censorship is as rotten as human slavery and it has less friends, opined Moving Picture World editor-in-chief Arthur James in October 1921.

Hollywoods response was to self-regulate by creating the MPPDA in 1922. Pressures from social reformers led the industry to hire Will Hays, President Hardings Postmaster General, to come to the industry in hopes of winning the confidence of an increasingly weary public. Lewis Selznick referred to these turbulent times as an era of scandal. Selznick cited the new baseball commissioner as offering a template for Hollywood to maintain audience confidence. In his memoir, Hays wrote that while I am not a reformer, I hope that I have always been public-spirited. Hays offered a bridge between Hollywood and the public. Opposed to outright censorship, Hays opted for a democratic process, because self-regulation educates and strengthens those who practice it.

Hays accepted the industrys offer on January 14, 1922. When Hays took office, Arbuckles second trial was just about to begin. The nation was following the story closely, and while the comedian would eventually be acquitted (complete with an apology from the jury), Hays banned Arbuckle from the industry. The move showed industry skeptics that Hays was serious about keeping the industry clean. Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players-Lasky (soon to be Paramount), shelved Arbuckles future projects and took a $500,000 loss. The industry distanced itself from problematic publicity, just as they have many times over the last century.

By the end of the 1922, Hays offered Arbuckle a comeback tour. It was too late. The court of public opinion had settled its case. Theater owners were worried that the one-eighty on Arbuckle would lose any public trust gained since Hayss appointment. The Motion Picture Theater Owners of America issued a statement, arguing that no act of any official can make up the public mind on this matter.

Hays offered a thirteen-point agreement that included eliminating from films overt sexuality, prostitution, cavalier depiction of vice, passionate love scenes, any ridicule of government or religion, and any salacious advertising. But the 1920s provided no shortage of scandalous material for Hays to moderate. Wallace Reids newsworthy drug addiction became a difficult, but manageable, public relations story. However, when stars like Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and Clara Bow put their sexuality on screen in front of patrons the world over, it would erupt another series of social outcries. Others decried the Hollywood arrival of Elinor Glyn, author of the so-called sex novel Three Weeks (1907) and future inventor of Clara Bows It (1927).

For some U.S. consumers, movies had become nothing more than a Babylonian product. By the end of the decade, it was clear that moviemakers were not adhering to any self-censorship. An emphasized list of donts and be carefuls was added in 1927. Even publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst was lobbying for film censorship. A formal Production Code was added in 1930. Three general principals were emphasized: Movies should be regarded as entertainment, are important as an art form, and have moral obligations.

However, none of these added provisions along with the lengthy corresponding rulebook were followed any better than Hayss original thirteen points. The years 1930-1934 are lauded by fans as the last Pre-Code years when filmmakers had a heyday with stories that violated every facet of the Production Code. So-called fallen woman films (The Divorcee), gangster pictures (Scarface), sex-filled musicals (Gold Diggers of 1933), sex comedies (She Done Him Wrong), Depression pictures (Wild Boys for the Road) and everything in between ruled the day.

During the Pre-Code years, new forces arose to push back on Hollywoods free-for-all approach to lascivious content. The Payne Fund Studies began to (unsuccessfully) link the rise of juvenile delinquency with Hollywood movies. Each study was published while a summarizing and propagandizing volume was published as Henry James Formans Our Movie-Made Children (1933). Formans book became a best-seller, alerting studio moguls that the public was on the verge of being lost again. The Great Depression was hitting the studios. Even those that were in better shape at the end of the 1920s were feeling the effects by the Depressions nadir in 1933. Nobody in Hollywood was in a place to risk ticket sales.

At the same time, the Catholic Legion of Decency was up in arms over the dangers of films and even had a Legion Pledge that congregations spouted from the pews. I make this protest in a spirit of self-respect, concluded the pledge, and with the conviction that the American public does not demand filthy pictures, but clean entertainment. The social and political winds were blowing hard against the movie industry. It was time again to make a big move, as the previous decade had not offered a consistent response to social reformers.

The answer to the public concern was Joseph Breen, an Irish Catholic who worked as a journalist before landing jobs at the US Foreign Service and the 28th International Eucharistic Congress. It was at the Eucharistic Congress in Chicago during summer of 1926 that showcased the power of the Catholic Church in the United States. Catholics moved from the margins to the mainstream, and by 1933 were a sizable social and political force. The Legion of Decency also kept its own ratings system, never afraid to condemn a film it felt out of line with its own standards. This was the crowd Hollywood needed to appease.

Hays hired Breen to be the Codes enforcer, a role in which he served from 1934 until 1954 (which a brief stint running RKO in 1941). Less of a gentlemans agreement and more a process of arduous negotiation, the Production Code impacted film content and satisfied many anti-Hollywood activists for nearly two decades. Movies would now have to adhere to the industry standards, as no film would be released without a Production Code Administration seal.

By the end of 1934, newspapers around the country celebrated Hollywoods new direction. The Motion Picture Herald printed praise from the press who reflect audience appreciation of higher-class product, showing that the new strictures resulted in increased audience attendance.

The first years of the Motion Picture Association (as the MPPDA) set the standard for industry responses to contemporary mores. Hiring a political insider was the move in 1922, and by the early 1930s the industry needed to respond to growing church boycotts. Breen allowed the industry to create a product that met churchmen half-way. The social and political winds driven by the public, that global fourth stool-leg highlighted by Will Hays, will always be a major focus of Hollywoods operation.

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100 Years Ago: How Hollywoods Early Self-Censorship Battles Shaped the MPA - Hollywood Reporter

The Ethereum network will be able to withstand censorship risks both in the short and long term, according to Ethereum community member and investor Ryan Berckmans.

The ban of Ethereum-based privacy tool Tornado Cash by U.S. authorities earlier this month left many wondering whether Ethereum transactions could be also at risk of censorship, especially after Ethereums imminent transition to a proof-of-stake system.

A widespread concern is that entities controlling a large chunk of staked Ether (ETH), such as Coinbase or Kraken, would start censoring transactions to comply with U.S. sanctions. That is an unlikely scenario, according to Berckmans, who sees the high centralization of staked ETH as a temporary issue.

With time, the costs of entry to the staking business will drop due to the maturity of open-source tools and industry expertise as well as the generally reduced risk profile, said Berckmans. That will allow more and more players to enter the staking business, thus reducing the dominance of large staking pools.

The idea that these will be able to somehow sustainably censor user transactions or affect the fork choice in Ethereum, its just not a credible idea, Berckmans pointed out.

Moreover, according to Berckmans, the Tornado Cash ban in the United States was a policy mistake that is unlikely to result in more government sanctions. He said that U.S. policymakers are likely to acknowledge the mistake and take a more favorable approach to Ethereum, which is inherently aligned with Americas interests.

Ethereum is about permissionless innovation, free enterprise, property rights, globalization, Berckmans explained.

Check out the full interview on our YouTube channel, and dont forget to subscribe!

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Will Ethereum 2.0 be vulnerable to censorship? Industry professional explains - Cointelegraph

I read with interest your editorial (The Guardian view on Chinas censors: the sense of an (acceptable) ending, 24 August). In 2016, I was about to publish a book on pop art, which had a short section on artists responding to political and social turmoil in the 1960s, and which included an illustration of Jim Dines Drag Johnson and Mao (1967). The etching depicts Mao Zedong of the Peoples Republic of China and the US president Lyndon B Johnson, who sent troops to counter Chinese communist support in the Vietnam war.

Dines coloured etching applies cosmetic touches to the lips, cheeks and eyelids of these two supposed (and opposed) freedom fighters (and a black heart painted on the chin of Mao), essentially to caricature political propaganda and masculine conviction. The capitalist and communist leaders appear as drag actors whose posturing affects a global audience. The printers of my book a Chinese company forced the London publisher to remove the offending illustration and text. In our cosy western world, we should never take free speech for granted, especially if it concerns art.John FinlayEdinburgh

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Chinas censorship reaches far beyond its own borders - The Guardian

Anti-censorship protestors at a meeting of the Lafayette Library Board, defending a librarian who included queer teen dating in a book display in defiance of the board. John Burnett/NPR hide caption

Anti-censorship protestors at a meeting of the Lafayette Library Board, defending a librarian who included queer teen dating in a book display in defiance of the board.

LAFAYETTE, La. The culture war inside America's libraries is playing out in the monthly meetings of the Lafayette Library Board of Control. Conservative activists are demanding the removal of controversial books, librarians are being falsely accused of pushing porn, and free speech defenders are crying censorship.

The August meeting in Lafayette was fairly humdrum routine reports on the bookmobile, library hours, and plans for a new branch until the lectern was opened for public comments.

"Everything that has happened in the past 18 months with this board and to the library has basically been a dystopian nightmare," declared one unhappy library patron.

Since conservatives took over the Lafayette library board last year, the controversies have come fast and furious:

"Hold up your signs for Cara again," one speaker told the audience. "We don't support fascism in the Lafayette Public Library."

Lafayette Parish is deeply religious, conservative Trump country red as a boiled crawfish. So others in the community have applauded the board's rightward shift.

"I'm a father of four young children," said a man in a tie and blue blazer, "and my daughter found a cartoon book that was basically pornographic. It encouraged children to explore themselves in a variety of ways. It was in the children's section."

The father concluded, "These are local libraries which should reflect the prevailing local community standards."

For many critics, this is the crux: whose community standards?

A somber librarian named Connie Milton stepped up to the podium and explained that libraries are struggling to keep pace with societal changes that emphasize the inclusion of diverse genders, races, and sexual orientations.

"We just want everybody to be able to come into a library and see themselves represented. That's all we're doin'," she said to hearty applause.

Milton announced that she had just given her two weeks' notice.

"Morale is not good," she said. "People are afraid to lose their jobs."

Lafayette Parish is by no means unique. Across America, fractious debates over free speech in public and school libraries have turned these hushed realms into combat zones. Cops are regularly called to remove rowdy protestors.

Texas leads the country in book bans. In the towns of Katy and Granbury, uniformed peace officers came into school libraries to investigate books with sexual content after criminal complaints from citizens. And the school district in Keller, Texas, pulled 41 challenged books off its shelves, including a graphic adaptation of "Anne Frank's Diary," "Gender Queer: A Memoir," and the Bible.

Traditional-values groups are demanding the removal or restriction of books with explicit sex education, and books that unflinchingly document LGBTQ realities and the Black American experience. The American Library Association in its unofficial tally reports that challenges of library books have jumped fourfold, from 416 books in 2017 to 1,597 book challenges in 2021.

In Lafayette, the president of the library board is Robert Judge, a retired insurance claims adjustor and high-school science teacher, and a devout Catholic. He gets criticized for imposing conservative church teachings on library policy, for instance, regarding LGBTQ topics.

"I think the idea that I have to drop off my Catholic Christian worldview at the door when I walk into serving the public is silly," he said in an interview at his kitchen table.

Judge believes the library's mission should submit to a traditional notion of family values and community standards, not the other way around.

"This is where we get into the sticky ground," he said, "Do we allow a governmental agency and the library is a governmental agency to supersede parents' rights? And do we protect parents' rights, or do we just say, 'Well that's the stuff that we have and we put it anywhere and if your kid stumbles on it, it's not our problem?' "

Judge sought to have several books banned outright, but the board didn't go along with him. As a compromise, the library moved all 1,100 nonfiction books from the young adult section to the adult collections. No books have been banned, says Danny Gillane, director of the Lafayette Public Library System.

"I don't care if they [the board] want to censor the library, if I don't have to remove things from my collection," he said. "That is my goal is to keep all of the materials we have in the library."

But some critics consider making a book harder to find is a form of censorship.

"We don't need to refile it in another section like it's something shameful," said Christopher Achee, parliamentarian with the Louisiana Library Association.

"We encourage you as a parent to know what your child is reading," he said. "That parent has every right to tell that child, 'No, this isn't appropriate for you.' But that right ends when another parent comes in looking for that exact same information."

The changes at the library since conservatives took over the governing board have infuriated liberal patrons.

"We're really upset that the library is being used in the culture wars," said Jean Menard, a home-school mom who says she depends on Lafayette libraries for her two teenagers' education. Menard started an anti-censorship Facebook group, Supporters of Lafayette Public Libraries. The group has more than 2,000 members.

"It is not the board of control's position to micromanage the library," she said. "Librarians need to be able to manage the library. This is a public library. It's for everyone. [If] they don't like the programs or materials, don't attend, don't check out the material!"

That argument has gone nowhere with conservatives on a crusade to cleanse Louisiana libraries. Standing in their way can have severe consequences.

Amanda Jones, president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, made a speech against censorship and now she says she's hounded by conservative activists on social media who say she advocates pornography. John Burnett/NPR hide caption

Amanda Jones, president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, made a speech against censorship and now she says she's hounded by conservative activists on social media who say she advocates pornography.

Last month, a middle-school librarian named Amanda Jones stood up and spoke out against censorship at a meeting of the library board where she lives and works in Livingston Parish, near Baton Rouge.

"The citizens of our parish consist of taxpayers who are white, black, brown, gay, straight, Christian, non-Christian people from all backgrounds and walks of life," she said in prepared remarks. "No one portion of the community should dictate what the rest of the citizens have access to."

She concluded, "Hate and fear disguised as moral outrage have no place in Livingston Parish."

Though 19 other people spoke up against censorship at the meeting, Jones's speech got all the attention. She's won several national Librarian-of-the-Year awards and is currently president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians. But she was completely unprepared for what happened.

"A few days later," she said, "I open the internet and there were pictures of me, awful memes, saying I advocate teaching erotica and pornography to 6-year-olds. It gave my school's name. None of that is true. I gave a blanket speech on censorship. And they decided they wanted to make me a target."

"They" is Citizens for a New Louisiana the same group behind the conservative takeover of the Lafayette library board. The group has harshly criticized Jones on its Facebook page which has 19,000 followers for defending books they consider obscene and inappropriate for children.

Michael Lunsford is director of Citizens for a New Louisiana, which he describes as a government accountability group.

In his office in Lafayette, he pulls out one of the controversial sex-ed books, "Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human."

"We have this page that actually shows intercourse," he said, showing an illustration. "Then we have things like this that have closeups of genitalia. We've got a page here on masturbation and how to do it."

"Any reasonable person who looks at this material I hope would say an 11-year-old doesn't need to see this," he said.

Michael Lunsford, director of a conservative citizens group, has pushed to remove graphic sex education books they consider inappropriate for children, and he says anyone who disagrees with him is promoting smut. John Burnett/NPR hide caption

Michael Lunsford, director of a conservative citizens group, has pushed to remove graphic sex education books they consider inappropriate for children, and he says anyone who disagrees with him is promoting smut.

In ultra-conservative Louisiana, sex education in public schools, grades 7 to 12, is at the discretion of the local school board, with an emphasis on abstinence until marriage and no discussion of abortion or homosexuality.

But why attack a librarian for a book that's in her library? Is defending a graphic sex ed book the same as promoting smut?

"I don't know that we attacked her personally," Lunsford said. "We asked a question: What type of influence does she have over what our children see in school libraries as the president of the association? I think that's a valid question."

In the current toxic political climate, school librarian Amanda Jones says she has begun to fear for her life. When asked how the social media onslaught has affected her, she broke into sobs.

"It's horrible. My anxiety is through the roof. I live in constant fear that some person that they've incited is going to come and get me or get my child. Or come up to the school where I work and harm a child. It's been a month of this and it just won't stop."

Last week, Amanda Jones sued Michael Lunsford, Citizens for a New Louisiana and a local individual she says is trolling her. The lawsuit asks for a state district court judge to issue a temporary restraining order to stop what it calls the harassment and defamation.

Meanwhile, with their successes in Lafayette, Lunsford's group plans to expand its campaign to purge library books and programs that it finds offensive in Louisiana's other 62 parishes.

Read more:
Cultural war moves to libraries as some groups demand removal of books. - NPR

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expects the nation's war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

On Aug. 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition, it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congresshas approvedover $53.6 billion ($13.6 billionin Marchand a further $40.1 billionin May) since Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. Theproposed budgetfor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while theproposed budgetfor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.

The militarists whohave wagedpermanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades haveinvested heavilyin controlling the public narrative.

The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler.Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is a traitor or a foreign agent.

Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.

The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.

In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted.CBS Newscaved to pressureand retracted itsdocumentarywhich charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that wasseparately reported uponby U.S. journalistLindsey Snell. CNN hasacknowledgedthere is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine,longconsideredthe most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud,completed byErnst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed.

There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.

War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police andthe maintenanceof the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, asSeymour Melmanwrites in "The Permanent War Economy:American Capitalism in Decline,"

is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society. The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion. When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible.

If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry's funding of politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government "sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace."

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Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee noted, "has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations."

This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman called "the manufacture of consent," is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation's crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global COVID deaths although we are less than 5 percent of the world's population to gouge the public; carry out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis.

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public's quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled.

You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalismhereandhere.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, is never held accountable for military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. It is showered with ever-larger sums, nownearly halfof all discretionary spending.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters from Vietnam to Afghanistan it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government's discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

An organization likeNewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed "false" assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine's military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable.Consortium News,Daily Kos,Mint PressandGrayzonehave been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the "green" rating" for truth and credibility. (NewsGuard, after beingheavily criticizedfor giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July, revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.)

The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, whichpublishedfake naked pictures of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outletowned and operatedby the Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for "failing" to publish retractions despiteadmittingthat all the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Timesand the Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigationimploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.

NewsGuard, established in 2018, "partners" with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former director of the CIA and NSA, retired Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.

Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: "Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability."

Negative ratings willdrive awayadvertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show "On Contact," which was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But manydid examinethe evils of U.S. militarism.

In anexhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:

NewsGuard's accusations againstConsortium Newsthat could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West's war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. ThreeCNwriters have been kicked off Twitter.

PayPal's cancellation ofConsortium News' account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company's view thatCNviolated its restrictions on "providing false or misleading information." It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, butCNtrades in information and nothing else.

CNsupports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media.

Those causes are: NATO's expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia's security concerns into account.

Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media only 16 percent of Americanshave a "great deal" or "quite a lot"of confidence in newspapers, and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news is a sign of desperation.

As the persecution ofJulian Assangeillustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknecht reminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.

Read more

from Chris Hedges on war, peace and the future

Read the original here:
Ukraine, media censorship and the ruthless politics of permanent war - Salon