Google blocks Arxiv page

Correlating YouTube and 'radicals'
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2019/08/27/cornell-study-jordan-peterson-ben-shapiro-infect-people

Link goes dead after news report

Upon reading the Newsbusters report above, I tried to gain access to the Arxiv.org page (link below) in various ways via Google but was barred. Yet I was able to reach the page via the Microsoft Edge browser. Cornell took over Arxiv from the federal government, which ran it as a service to scientists. It was never intended that the site exclude members of the public from reading its articles.

It's hard to say what Google's motive is here. Who suggested that the article be taken down from Google?

Perhaps a factor is that the article, which claims a correlation between YouTube use and "radicalization," is a preprint and so has not been peer-reviewed meaning.

The authors are Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Raphael Ottoni, Virgilio A.F. Almeida and Wagner Meira Jr., all of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and Robert West of the Ecole Polytechnic Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. If Google, which owns YouTube, now blocks this Invisible Man blog post, we can suspect executives are "protecting" the authors.

Secretive Cornell article link
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08313.pdf

Trump said to kowtow to spook chiefs

Fox 'judge' blasts Prez for backing national security abuse
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/judge-andrew-napolitano-more-spying-and-lying

https://foxnews.com

You may have to cut and paste a URL into the browser bar in order to get past Fox News's unfriendly barriers.

Assange prosecution seen as attack on press freedom

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Abrams opinion piece
https://www.cahill.com/professionals/floyd-abrams

Former diplomat rebuts CNN 'smears' of Assange
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/20/cnn-media-smears-julian-assange-fidel-narvaez/

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Despite Julian Assange's "odious" and "dangerous" revelations, trying him under the Espionage Act poses a grave threat to the liberty of all Americans, argues Floyd Abrams, a celebrated media lawyer, in an opinion piece for The Dallas News.


Floyd Abrams

Abrams writes:

Some of the documents made public by Assange and identified in the Assange indictment have been literally life-threatening. They identify Afghans and Iraqis who provided confidential information of military value to the U.S. and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan that, if attributed to them, could have imperiled them.

Others identified individuals, including human-rights workers, named in classified State Department cables, who provided confidential information to the U.S. in circumstances in which their identification could also have been life-threatening.

So outrageous was Assange's conduct in making information of this sort available to enemies of the U.S. that responsible newspapers throughout the democratic world that had previously worked with WikiLeaks — The New York Times, The Guardian, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde — issued a joint statement "deploring" and "condemning" the misconduct of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Abrams also claims that WikiLeaks tried to get Russians to release any Hillary Clinton emails to it -- though this would not be a surprising move if done by a "real" news organization. Reporters will try all sorts of appeals in order to pry loose information from confidential sources. (Also, see the "rebuttals" of CNN by a former Ecuadoran diplomat, above.) But, the problem is, says Abrams, it is a dangerous move to use the Espionage Act to punish Assange.

That law, adopted a century ago, is phrased, as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan put it, in 'singularly opaque' language.

"If it can be used against Assange for publishing classified information that is potentially harmful to the country, it might just as easily be used against responsible publications such as those that criticized Assange when they receive and publish classified information that benefits the nation by revealing government misconduct.

In fact, if any publication of such material risked Espionage Act prosecutions, there is good reason to fear that a serious blow would have been struck at many journalists who cover national security issues, defense issues and intelligence issues.

Assange dad fears for son's life

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Note 1: Minor editing changes have been made to the original article, found at
Original WSWS article
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/20/ship-a20.html

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Note 2: Though the basic political orientation of The Invisible Man XaX, leans to libertarian, we will use anything that seems helpful, especially in the Assange free press matter. It should be noted that the World Socialist Web Site, which is run by Trotskyists, has a strong record for accuracy in its news content.

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Embattled publisher on a better day

By OSCAR GRENFELL
World Socialist Web Site
20 August 2019

In an interview on August 16 with 3CR, a Melbourne community radio station, Julian Assange’s father John Shipton asserted that the WikiLeaks founder’s health is continuing to deteriorate in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison.
Shipton disclosed that Assange had received a visit from his brother Gabriel several days earlier. “Julian is emaciated and not in tip-top order or health,” Shipton said. “He is suffering anxiety. He is still in fighting spirits, but his well-being is declining rapidly.”

Shipton said there was a danger that “we will lose Julian” if action is not taken to end his incarceration. His warning followed a statement by world-renowned investigative journalist John Pilger on Twitter earlier this month, who wrote: “Do not forget Julian Assange. Or you will lose him. I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated…”

Assange’s father outlined the draconian conditions in Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been held since he was dragged from Ecuador’s London embassy by British police on April 11.

“Can you believe that Julian, who is a gentle, intellectual sort of fellow gets locked up in a maximum security prison?” he asked the interviewer, WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Grech.

Assange was dispatched to the facility despite being convicted only of a minor British bail offense, which stemmed from his successful claim for political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012.

Shipton explained that Assange was “in a cell 20 hours a day and has two social visits a month. Lawyers are allowed there other times. These social visits can be arbitrarily canceled or reduced in time.”

Assange's father said that when he traveled from Australia to London 90 days ago, “we waited and were told that we couldn’t come” into the prison for a pre-arranged visit with Assange.

“No reason was given,” Shipton said, except the claim that “there were conflicting appointments made with prison doctors to come and see him." So, he declared, "they use the visiting times to have his medical examiners examine him, which means that a social visit needs to be canceled.”

Shipton, along with a WikiLeaks staff member and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, returned the following week for another arranged visit. “We waited 46 minutes for Julian to arrive,” he said. The prison authorities claimed that they had “forgotten” to notify Assange of the visit, and “so they had to go and find him and bring him down.”

This resulted in the two-hour visit, which Assange is entitled to, being reduced to just one hour. “To travel all the way from Australia to see Julian and to get only an hour, it seems cruel to me,” Shipton said. Asked by Grech whether he thought this was the result of incompetence, or a deliberate attack on Assange’s rights, Shipton answered: “I’m told that often that is done with a well-known prisoner to assert authority over him and over his visitors.”

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Also see
Media chiefs back war on free press
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/19/asio-a19.html

Toxic feminism

A rebuke by Miranda Devine
https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/its-masculinity-to-the-rescue/

Byte the bullet

Walmarts and other big box retailers may need to initiate unobtrusive AI surveillance of people walking into stores. An "AI" program would use various parameters to measure the likelihood that a person is carrying a high-firepower weapon. Persons who are identified as appearing to have, say, a 5% probability or more for mass violence would be intercepted and asked to open anything that might conceal such a firearm.

Such technology could also be used at transit hubs, entertainment venues, schools and other places that draw crowds. Certainly those responsible for safety could work with "AI" savvy firms to implement such measures.

Although I lament the need to advocate yet more surveillance, this technology can be made benign and limited only to detecting terrorists, deranged shooters and possibly drug smugglers. In the case of retailers, anyone who is asked to open what they have but who objects could simply be asked to leave, though the person's license plate, if any, should be recorded for a limited period, say six months.

I daresay most people would feel OK with such relatively mild intrusion, and it is very much better than yielding to the hysteria over the right to own gums. Even so, we would need to watch to make sure those deploying such systems don't widen their scope for marketing and political reasons.

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Read a very good commentary on the natural right to bear arms by Andrew Napolitano, a Fox News commentator and former New Jersey judge at http://foxnews.com .

Who pulled off 9/11? Trump thinks he knows

President Trump says he believes he knows who was behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that left thousands dead.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Trump flatly asserted that “Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center.”

“It was not Iraq,” he told Stephanopoulas in the interview that aired Sunday. “It were other people. And I think I know who the other people were. And you might also.”

The September, 11, 2001 attacks, were a series of strikes in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused about $10 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who went on to head the Russiagate probe, and other officials assert that the attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists -- but many experts have raised questions about the official account.

They believe that rogue elements within the U.S. government, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, orchestrated or at least encouraged the 9/11 attacks in order to accelerate the U.S. war machine and advance the neocon-Zionist agenda. Others have pointed to the great benefit Vladimir Putin and Russia reaped from the attacks.

Following the 9/11 attack, the United States, backed by some allies, including Britain, invaded Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was sheltered, according to the George W. Bush administration. Then 9/11 was used as part of the justification for the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Innuendo associating the anthrax mail attacks with Iraq's chief, Saddam Hussein, emanated from the White House. Those attacks were, by innuendo, woven into the 9/11 narrative, though the FBI under Mueller quickly decoupled them from the 9/11 attacks.