SAN DIEGO ATTEMPTS TO BAN TERM ‘FOUNDING FATHERS’ DUE TO ‘GENDER BIAS’

Adan Salazar | Infowars - FEBRUARY 10, 2016

A memo intended for San Diego city employees attempted to bar them from saying the words “Founding Fathers” because of the “gender bias” the term allegedly implies.

Entitled, “Visual and Correspondence Style Guidelines,” the memo sought to implement speech restrictions banning employees from uttering everyday terms like “manmade” and “mankind” on the basis that such terms exhibit “non-inclusive language.”

“Most alarmingly,” reads a press release from the Pacific Justice Institute, “is the guidelines directive, on page 76, that City employees should refrain from mentioning those to whom owe our most fundamental freedoms, the Founding Fathers.”

The legal organization has offered free help for any city employee that is reprimanded for referring to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington or any of the men that shaped the nation’s history.

“The manual’s inane attempt to recast the fathers as simply the ‘Founders’ reaches a level of political correctness, censorship and insensitivity towards time-honored American values that is indefensible,” the press release reads.

Evidently San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer was unaware of the manual’s “gender inclusive” efforts until recently.

In a tweet sent today, he stated he had already ordered the manual removed from city use, citing it as an example of how political correctness has gone wild.

“Suggesting that our Founding Fathers should be referred to as ‘Founders’ is political correctness run-amuck. We are proud of our nation’s history and there is nothing wrong with referring to the Founding Fathers,” Faulconer said.

“At my direction this was removed yesterday from the City’s correspondence manual. The manual will be reviewed for other misguided examples that defy common sense and changes will be made accordingly.”

Indeed, the case is illustrative of how political correctness can grow so out of proportion that it begins to directly infringe on civil liberties.

Cities such as Seattle have similarly moved to ban words like “citizen” and “brown bag” on the basis that such words are offensive. In Ontario, Canada,France and other places, the words “mother” and “father” have even been removed from government forms in the name of inclusiveness.

Twitter announces 'trust and safety' panel to police content

Washington Examiner | By RUDY TAKALA | 2/9/16 5:28 PM

Twitter on Tuesday announced the formation of a new “Trust and Safety Council,” which will work to develop policies censoring speech on the site. The group will be comprised of more than 40 organizations from 13 regions around the world.

“With hundreds of millions of tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power,” Twitter said in a statement.

"It requires a multi-layered approach where each of our 320 million users has a part to play, as do the community of experts working for safety and free expression,” the statement added.

The announcement is the latest by Twitter in a string of moves aimed at improving its public image. Both the Obama administration and members of Congress have been calling on social media sites, and particularly Twitter, to do more to assist in the fight against terrorism. A California woman filed suit against Twitter in December, claiming that propaganda spread by the Islamic State on the site contributed to her husband’s shooting death in Jordan.

The latest move will contribute to combating violent speech on the site, but will likely expand Twitter’s effort to police content far beyond that as well. Groups involved with the council include the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Feminist Frequency, European Schoolnet, and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism.

Twitter said it intended for the group to be comprised of “safety advocates, academics and researchers focused on minors, media literacy, digital citizenship, and efforts around greater compassion and empathy on the Internet,” and that it would provide input on the site’s “safety products, policies, and programs.”

“In developing the Council, we are taking a global and inclusive approach so that we can hear a diversity of voices,” Twitter explained. “As we develop products, policies, and programs, our Trust and Safety Council will help us tap into the expertise and input of organizations at the intersection of these issues more efficiently and quickly.”

Last week, the site also announced that it had silently removed as many as 125,000 accounts belonging to members of the Islamic State since the middle of 2015. And in December, Twitter amended its terms of service to more expressly prohibit abusive language.

CONGRESS SET TO CRIMINALIZE CRITICISM OF ISLAM

Infowars | The Alex Jones Show | JANUARY 26, 2016

December 17, 2015 ought to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment.

Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The Resolution has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary.

Oregon militia leader Bundy holds first talks with FBI

Published January 22, 2016 | FoxNews.com

Ammon Bundy speaks with reporter at a news conference at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Friday, Jan. 8, 2016, near Burns, Ore. Bundy, the leader of an armed group occupying the national wildlife refuge to protest federal land management policies, said Friday he and his followers are not ready to leave even though the sheriff and many locals say the group has overstayed their welcome. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The leader of an armed militia that has occupied a national wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon for nearly three weeks made his first contact with an FBI negotiator Thursday.

The Oregonian reported that Ammon Bundy arrived unannounced at the Burns Municipal Airport, close to where federal officials have set up a staging area. Bundy said that the FBI had begun reaching out to the group two days earlier and claimed to have 14 messages on his phone from the negotiator, whom Bundy knows only as "Chris."

Bundy spoke to the negotiator on a borrowed cell phone as reporters watched.

"I'm a face-to-face kind of guy," Bundy told the negotiator at one point, according to the Oregonian. "You reached out to me ... I'm not sure exactly what you wanted to talk about."

Bundy asked for the release of ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven, who reported to prison earlier this month to finish five year prison sentences for arson on federal land. Bundy and his group occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Jan. 2 following a protest calling for the Hammonds' release

Bundy said his group is "not going to escalate" the situation, and he agreed to speak with authorities again Friday.

Bundy and the FBI made contact one day after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown expressed frustration with what she described as a lack of action by federal authorities against the group.

In a statement Thursday, the FBI acknowledged the situation has caused "tremendous disruption and hardship" for people in the community and our "response has been deliberate and measured as we seek a peaceful resolution."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

WHITE HOUSE SUGGESTS ALGORITHM TO FIND “TERRORISTS” ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Kurt Nimmo | Infowars.com - JANUARY 21, 2016

IMAGE CREDIT: INFOWARS.COM

On January 8 we reported on a summit between top federal officials and the giants of social media in San Jose, California.

The talks between the government and Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft centered on the use of social media to recruit terrorists and, according to CNN, “find potential agents, inspire them to become violent, and coordinate attacks.”

On Wednesday The Intercept posted a White House briefing document on the January 12 meeting.

According to the briefing the feds want to “explore ways to more quickly and comprehensively identify terrorist content online so that online service providers can remove it if it violates their terms of service.”

The government suggested developing an algorithm similar to one used by Facebook to detect and prevent possible suicides.

“Are there other areas where online providers have used technology to identify harmful content and remove it? … Something like Facebook’s suicide process flow?” the document states.

The Intercept notes developing effective software for such an effort would be virtually impossible.

“Many believe that data mining is the crystal ball that will enable us to uncover future terrorist plots. But even in the most wildly optimistic projections, data mining isn’t tenable for that purpose,” the cryptologist Bruce Schneier writes.

“Something as unique and rare as terrorism—that’s what makes this different from credit card fraud,” Schneier told The Intercept.

Schneier said false-positives resulting from an effort to detect terrorists online would be enormous.
It’s Not Just Muslims the Feds Want to Target

If implemented the effort to find precrime terrorists online would not be limited to Muslims. The federal government is also interested in denying internet access and possibly entrapping “right-wing sovereign citizen extremists” and others it considers more dangerous than Islamic fanatics.

In 2014 the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a University of Maryland project funded by the Department of Homeland Security, designated the so-called sovereign citizen movement as the number one domestic terrorist threat in America.

Sovereign citizens do not constitute a cohesive movement, although the government characterizes them as such. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates around 100,000 Americans were “hard-core sovereign believers” in 2010 and an additional 200,000 were “just starting out by testing sovereign techniques for resisting everything from speeding tickets to drug charges.”

The SPLC works with the DHS to formulate the terrorist threat posed by citizens allegedly belonging to the sovereign citizen movement.

In addition to so-called sovereign citizens the government has categorized constitutionalists as potential terrorists.

In 2010 a Department of Justice guide for investigators of criminal and extremist groups listed “constitutionalists” and “survivalists” alongside organizations like al-Qaeda and the Aryan Brotherhood.

The Department of Homeland Security funded a study in 2012 that characterized Americans “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

“While largely omitting Islamic terrorism—the report fails completely to mention the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—the study focuses on Americans who hold beliefs shared by the vast majority of conservatives and libertarians and puts them in the context of radical extremism,” writesPaul Joseph Watson.

In 2009 the DHS came under criticism when an internal document on the supposed threat of rightwing extremism came to light. The “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” document produced during the Bush administration portrays anti-government groups as dangerous and potentially violent terrorists.

There are hundreds of thousands of groups and individuals on Facebook and Twitter that would be characterized by the feds as terrorist for opposing various government policies.

It is unclear if the algorithm suggested at the San Jose summit will be limited to Muslims or if it will used against all groups and individuals the federal government considers terrorists, including constitutionalists, antiwar activists, crypto-anarchists and dozens of other political classifications.