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Authored by Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear via TheCritic.co.uk,

Wikipedia is the most widely used source of information in the world, and a great deal has been written about its impact on public perception of certain topics. Wikipedia shapes both scientific research and real-world economic outcomes, and is the top source of medical information for both doctors and patients. The widespread reliance on Wikipedia would not be a problem if it were a neutral and authoritative source, but earlier this year Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger declared that “Wikipedia’s ‘NPOV’ (neutral point of view) is dead.” Is Sanger’s statement correct?

A 2018 study by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu compared levels of political bias in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica by quantifying each encyclopaedia’s respective usage of phrases favoured by Democratic or Republican members of US congress. Their study found that Wikipedia articles are more politically biased than those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as being slanted towards Democratic (as opposed to Republican) points of view. The study also found that the amount of bias in Wikipedia articles tended to decrease the greater the number of people who had edited them. The reason for this trend was explained in an earlier study by the same authors: “Benefitting from the efforts of many contributors, an article is also more likely to present controversial content in an unbiased way: thus diversity may help reduce content bias.”

One limitation of Greenstein and Zhu’s study is that it considered only the contents and histories of Wikipedia articles, and did not examine the site’s internal social dynamics. In this article, we build upon Greenstein and Zhu’s analysis by examining specific mechanisms that produce political bias in Wikipedia, with a focus on administrative decisions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard. We also discuss how this bias ultimately affects the site’s content.

Bias in judgments about sources

Wikipedia has several internal policies intended to prevent the spread of false or biased information. One policy, named “Verifiability,” requires that all content on Wikipedia be based on “reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.” Another policy, “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), requires that Wikipedia articles include all viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in the source material. This does not necessarily mean giving equal validity to all views: for example, most reliable sources that discuss creationism describe it as an unscientific viewpoint, so NPOV policy requires that Wikipedia present it the same way.

An inevitable consequence of these two policies is that the more sources taking one perspective are judged as reliable, and the more sources taking the opposite perspective are judged as unreliable, the more Wikipedia’s articles will lean towards the viewpoint of the first group. Decisions about which sources may or may not be used are left to the judgment of “editors” (that is, people who write, edit, or otherwise contribute to Wikipedia articles), and these decisions are usually made at Wikipedia’s reliable sources noticeboard. Most relevant to assessing bias is the question of which sources have been “deprecated,” which means a source that has been formally prohibited from being used in all but a handful of cases.

Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats. Other politically biased sources have also been deprecated, but it is harder to position them on the left-right political axis, such as media companies controlled by the Russian or Chinese government. The deprecated right-leaning sources include both those that advance far-right conspiracy theories (Infowars and WorldNetDaily) and those that advance ordinary conservatism (the Daily Mail and the Sun), as well as many shades of grey between those two extremes. It could be argued that even the non-extreme sources that have been deprecated are not of a particularly high quality, so the prohibition against citing them is not a problem per se, but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos.

According to Ad Fontes Media‘s widely-used media bias chart (which is commonly cited in discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard), CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos are all less reliable than the Daily Mail. This is significant because the Daily Mail, a deprecated right-leaning source, is often used as a benchmark for judging whether other right-leaning sources should be deprecated. All three of these left-wing sources are widely used at Wikipedia. An external links search shows around 2,580 Wikipedia pages linking to CounterPunch, around 2,400 linking to the Daily Kos, and around 1,640 linking to AlterNet. (These search results include both articles and talk pages, because Wikipedia’s software does not have a way to confine an external links search to just articles.)

A proposal to deprecate AlterNet was made in April 2019, but the proposal received very little support. One user argued that AlterNet should be deprecated due to the site’s distribution of false medical information—that anthrax can be treated using homeopathy, for instance—meant that following its instructions can cause bodily harm. On the other hand, one of the users opposed to deprecation argued that AlterNet is “valuable for providing progressive viewpoints and reporting or interviews of progressive organizations.” The majority of the Wikipedia articles citing AlterNet are not medical articles, but in light of Wikipedia’s status as the most widely used source of medical information for doctors and patients, allowing citations to AlterNet poses a risk that does not exist for most of the deprecated right-leaning tabloid newspapers and political websites.

The discussion that failed to deprecate AlterNet had sparse participation, with comments by only seven users. This outcome underlines the subjective nature of judgments about sources because with a different balance of viewpoints among its participants the discussion could have easily produced a different result. To understand the root cause of bias in discussions like this it is necessary to understand the factors affecting the balance of viewpoints among the discussion’s participants.

Bias in Arbitration Enforcement

Wikipedia calls itself “The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit,” but this is only true for uncontroversial articles. Many controversial topics have additional restrictions about who is allowed to edit them, such as only users who have registered an account and have accumulated a certain number of edits. More relevant to content or sourcing decisions is another type of restriction applied to some topics known as discretionary sanctions. These are a special set of powers given to administrators (admins) in some topic areas that allow them to place blocks or sanctions on any person editing the topic whom they believe to be acting disruptively. Discretionary sanctions can only be authorized by the Arbitration Committee (a.k.a. ArbCom), which is English Wikipedia’s highest ruling body, and usually are authorized at the conclusion of an arbitration case covering a topic.

Discretionary sanctions are authorized in most of Wikipedia’s controversial topics, and cannot be lifted or modified unless there is a consensus among admins to do so. Because it is quite difficult for them to be lifted or modified, and because it is up to admins’ individual judgment what behaviour should be punished under this system, it would be quite easy for any administrator to use this system to suppress one side of a dispute. This could be done by blocking or topic banning most of the editors on one side (a topic ban prohibits a person from contributing to any articles or discussions related to a topic), or by making editors on one side feel unwelcome until they choose to leave. If this were to occur it would affect the balance of participants in discussions about sources or article content, and ultimately affect the outcome of those discussions.

We have examined the history of reports at Wikipedia’s Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard with respect to four politically controversial topics in which discretionary sanctions are authorized, and how the viewpoints of editors involved in those reports relate to the reports’ outcomes. Arbitration Enforcement is Wikipedia’s main forum for implementing discretionary sanctions, as well as for reporting possible violations of decisions made by ArbCom. To make our analysis as systematic as possible, we have excluded reports made on other noticeboards, as well as sanctions imposed by ArbCom directly, because outside of Arbitration Enforcement it is much more difficult to measure the number of opportunities for disciplinary action to occur. This examination was performed using the chi-squared test for independence, which measures whether there is a statistically significant relationship between categorical variables and represents the core of our analysis. Click here for a complete description of the statistical analyses and its results, including tables of the raw data.

The first topic area we’ve examined is the articles covered by the American politics 2 arbitration case, and more specifically those reports that relate to President Trump, as well as to closely related topics such as the 2016 election and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. We decided to include just these topics because other disputes that have fallen under the American politics 2 case can be difficult to break down along party lines. For example, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has received criticism both from the Republican party and from his rivals in the Democratic party.

Figure 1: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in American politics AE reports.

The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when Trump won the Republican nomination in July 2016 until the end of August 2020, and includes a total of 114 disputes, each consisting of two or more editors. We have classified most of the editors involved in these disputes as either “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump.” An editor being classified as “pro-Trump” does not necessarily mean that they consider Trump a good president or that they voted for him—it simply indicates that this person’s edits or proposed edits to Trump-related articles were more favourable than negative, while being classified as “anti-Trump” indicates the opposite.

Our analysis of this topic found an odds ratio of 6.02 (95 percent confidence interval: 3.23, 11.23), meaning that pro-Trump editors were about six times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement (AE) than anti-Trump editors.

The second topic area that we examined is the articles covered by the Gun control arbitration case. The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the gun control arbitration case concluded in April 2014 until the end of August 2020. Our analysis of this topic, which included 19 disputes of two or more editors, found an odds ratio of 3.73 (95 percent CI: 0.98, 14.23), meaning that editors who were opposed to stricter gun control laws were about four times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement than those who were in favour of stricter gun control. (As before, these classifications refer to the overall balance of a person’s edits to gun-related articles, as it is not always possible to know an editor’s personal opinions.) This analysis, though trending in the same direction as the others, was not statistically significant at the p < .05 level, likely due to the small sample of reports available for analysis.

Figure 2: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in gun control AE reports.

The third topic that we examined is the articles covered by the race and intelligence arbitration case. The dispute covered by this arbitration case, and by the subsequent AE reports, has mostly been between those who argue that the cause of ethnic group differences in average IQ scores should be described as a legitimate scientific debate, and those who argue that research about race and IQ should primarily be described as racist pseudoscience. This topic’s political nature becomes clear when examining the various attempts to have academics who have written about race and IQ, such as Noah Carl and Bo Winegard, fired from their positions. These attempts have come almost entirely from the Left, while right-leaning publications such as the Spectator, the Telegraph, and Spiked Online have generally been more sympathetic to these researchers.

The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the race and intelligence arbitration case concluded in August 2010 until the end of August 2020, for a total of 43 disputes (several of which involved more than two editors). Our analysis of this topic found an odds ratio of 6.23 (95 percent CI: 2.26, 17.13), meaning that editors who are favourable towards research about race and intelligence are over six times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement than those who are opposed to it.

Figure 3: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in race and intelligence AE reports.

The fourth topic area that we examined is the abortion arbitration case. The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the abortion arbitration case concluded in November 2011 until the end of August 2020. Only seven AE reports have been made under this case, which limits the power of the analysis, but the limited data from this topic shows the most unequivocal relation between viewpoints and administrative results of any of the four topics we examined. Every AE report in this area against an anti-abortion editor has resulted in a warning or sanction, and no such reports have ever resulted in a warning or sanction for someone whose edits were favourable to abortion, although this perfect alignment between editorial positions and report outcomes would not necessarily have been the case in a larger sample.

Figure 4: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in abortion AE reports.

Among the 30 or so topic areas in which discretionary sanctions are authorized, these four topics were chosen because they are areas where the two sides of the controversy tend to align with the left-right political axis (whereas this is less the case in other DS-authorized topics such as, say, Scientology or India and Pakistan). In other words, people who lean to the left politically are more likely to view President Trump and race research unfavourably and are more likely to be in favour of stricter gun control laws and keeping abortion legal. In all four of these topics, the evidence for bias points in the same direction: editors who support views associated with the political right tend to receive disciplinary action more frequently than those who support views associated with the political left.

Considering this common trend shared by the four topics, we have performed an aggregate analysis of the data from all four topic areas, comparing the overall rate of disciplinary action for editors with left-leaning positions and those with right-leaning positions. This leads to a total of 368 opportunities for disciplinary action, split nearly 50/50 among right- and left-leaning editors. Examining these four topic areas in aggregate produces an odds ratio of 6.41 (95 percent CI: 3.94, 10.43), meaning that overall, in these politically loaded topics, editors who support right-leaning views are over six times more likely to be sanctioned at Arbitration Enforcement than those who support left-leaning views.

Figure 5: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in combined American politics, gun control, race and intelligence, and abortion AE reports.

Administrative attitudes

In the absence of any additional context, one possible interpretation of some of these results is that Wikipedia’s administrators are apolitical, and that right-leaning editors are sanctioned more often because their behaviour tends to violate Wikipedia’s policies more often. This argument has been made with respect to Trump-related AE reports: that because the coverage of President Trump in the mainstream media is predominantly negative, people whose edits take an anti-Trump viewpoint inevitably are supported by reliable sources, while those whose edits take a pro-Trump viewpoint are not.

However, our results indicate that the tendency for right-leaning editors to be sanctioned more harshly is not limited to reports related to Trump. The same tendency also exists in areas such as gun control, where this alternative explanation presumably would not apply, at least not to the same degree.

In addition, the argument that Wikipedia’s admins are apolitical ignores another important point: in many cases they do not claim to be apolitical. It is a widely expressed view among Wikipedia administrators, as well as by Wikipedia’s parent organization, that Wikipedia should show little tolerance for editors perceived as having right-wing points of view.

In December 2018, when several administrators were applying for positions on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, all of the applicants were asked the following question:

With the rise of far-right and hate groups online, are you concerned that editors espousing such beliefs may try (or are already attempting) to use Wikipedia as a vehicle for propaganda? Why or why not? If yes, what role do you think ArbCom could play in counteracting their influence on Wikipedia?

The majority of the candidates, including four of the six candidates who went on to win positions on ArbCom, answered that far-right editors were a particularly severe problem at Wikipedia and that ArbCom must take an active role in stopping them. (Of the two candidates who were elected without giving this answer, one responded that dealing with these editors was the responsibility of the Wikipedia community rather than of ArbCom, while the other declined to answer.) One experienced administrator who has served several terms on ArbCom gave an answer representative of the majority view:

Yes, Wikipedia has had this problem since before [the arbitration case] Race and intelligence, but the methods of these groups have become more sophisticated in recent years. Biased use of sourcing and other neutrality problems is the first problem posed here … The use of biased sourcing and other verifiability problems is the other problem. This is more difficult to tackle in arbitration (ArbCom cannot easily say “That source looks and sounds real, but it’s a far-right mouthpiece and your use of it was disruptive”), but we make do with what we have.

The perceived need to combat right-wing editors is explained in greater detail by a Wikipedia essay stating that editors who are Nazis or racists should be blocked on sight, even if their behaviour is not violating any Wikipedia policies. (This essay uses the terms “racist” and “Nazi” interchangeably.) Wikipedia essays do not have the same force as actual policies, but they are commonly used as guides for administrative actions. The essay’s definition of racism is very broad: A subpage of the essay listing “pages often edited by racists” includes the articles “Ann Coulter,” “Intelligence Quotient,” and “All Lives Matter.”

Individual administrators have expressed similar views. For several years, a personal essay written by one administrator argued that “uncritical right-wing ideology is disqualifying for Wikipedia editors” or (in another version of the essay) that “in my view, believing that Trump is a good president indicates that you are probably not competent to edit Wikipedia,” although following criticism from several non-admins he rewrote the essay in milder form in May of this year. His rewriting of this essay does not appear to indicate a real shift in attitude about the politics he expects Wikipedia editors to have, as he has expressed a similar sentiment in a subsequent discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement: “You can be one of three things: ally, enemy, or collaborator. Be an ally.”

The most recent major statement about the political views expected from Wikipedia editors has come from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. In June 2020, the organization published a statement endorsing the goals of Black Lives Matter, which reads in part: “On these issues, there is no neutral stance. To stay silent is to endorse the violence of history and power; yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is well past time for racial justice in America and beyond.”

The statement “there is no neutral stance” is probably a reference to Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, which is still an official Wikipedia policy. This apparent rejection of a core Wikipedia policy by the site’s parent organization did not go unnoticed by members of the Wikipedia community, who subsequently debated the statement’s implications.

The views expressed by various Wikipedians about the WMF’s statement reveal an informative contrast. Non-admins commenting on the statement expressed a variety of opinions, but more disapproved of the statement than approved, with a few being highly critical. However, no Wikipedia administrators openly criticized the statement. Of the seven administrators commenting in the discussion about it, two (Nosebagbear and DGG) expressed mild concerns or disagreements, one (Llywrch) commented without expressing an opinion, while the other four (Pharos, Sj, The Blade of the Northern Lights, and Amorymeltzer) all defended the WMF’s statement. Ironically, one of the more prominent Wikipedians to directly criticize the WMF’s statement was an ex-administrator, who was stripped of her admin powers in January of this year.

This contrast between the views of admins and of non-admins hints at the existence of a cultural divide over the issue between Wikipedia’s management and its ordinary members. In general, Wikipedia’s management has expressed more positive views than its ordinary members about the idea of requiring editors of controversial articles to hold left-leaning views. However, only administrators have the authority to decide the outcome of Arbitration Enforcement reports, so the broader Wikipedia community cannot easily prevent this type of activist approach from being used there.

How administrative bias affects articles

Over a period of many years, as Wikipedia editors on one side of a dispute receive disciplinary action more often than those on the other side, the position that is supported by admins tends to become over-represented among editors. One might expect this imbalance to result in article wording that is subtly biased in favour of the dominant viewpoint, or to result in an excessive number of sources that support the opposite viewpoint being judged as unreliable, but the imbalance also can affect articles in more profound ways. Here we’ll examine one of these more significant effects on Wikipedia’s article about Linda Gottfredson, a psychologist who has published research about race and IQ among many other topics (and consequently an article that is covered by the “Race and intelligence” arbitration case).

From January 2016 until October 2017, Wikipedia’s article about Gottfredson contained a highly disparaging quote. The Wikipedia article said the following:

Barry Mehler writes in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that Gottfredson is attempting to promote racial theories used by the Nazis:

Thus, we see that Gottfredson’s opposition to affirmative action is based not in any such claimed “objectivity,” but in a sanitized resurrection of ideas put forward by Nazi racial theorists. Under the false pretence of intellectual honesty, she has endorsed the same poisonous ideology that half a century ago led to the Holocaust.

There is one problem with this quote: Mehler most likely never said it. The citation that Wikipedia gave for the above quote is “Mehler 1994,” with no title or issue number given. But according to Google Scholar, Barry Mehler has never published a paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) in 1994 or any other year. Mehler published only a single paper in 1994, and while the paper does compare the twin studies used by behavioural geneticists to Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz, it does not mention Gottfredson. Mehler’s writings have a tendency to be examples of Godwin’s law, so the quote comparing Gottfredson’s views to Nazism does seem like the type of thing he might have said. But there is no source indicating he actually did.

The non-existence of a real source for this quote can be corroborated with a date-restricted search for the quote on Google, Google Books and Google Scholar, limited to before it was added to the Wikipedia article in January 2016. These three combined searches turn up a single result: the 2005 book Destructive Trends in Mental Health. This book contains a chapter by Linda Gottfredson (which is probably why it appears among the Google results), but it does not contain this quote, or cite Mehler. Judging by the Google results, the Wikipedia article about Linda Gottfredson was the first place this quote ever appeared.

This alleged Mehler quote was removed from the Wikipedia article as “unverifiable” on October 20th, 2017, but by that point the damage had been done. This quote was subsequently repeated in the book Modern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism, published by ABC-CLIO in 2018. Instead of copying Wikipedia’s vague reference to a non-existent JBHE paper, this book instead cites the quote to a 1999 article from the Southern Poverty Law Centre. While the cited SPLC article mentions Gottfredson, it does not contain this quote.

Wikipedia’s policy regarding biographies of living people, also known as BLP policy, requires that all statements about living people be supported by a reliable source, and for unsourced and poorly-sourced material to be immediately removed. But like all Wikipedia policies, this policy can only be applied if there is someone willing to uphold it. During the 21 months that the Gottfredson article contained this apparently fabricated quote, the article was being sporadically edited by several people, who quickly undid attempts at removing negative material from the article. But the people maintaining the article during this time were almost entirely people who had unfavourable opinions of Gottfredson, and their diligence did not extend to making sure all of the negative material was cited to sources that actually existed.

The principle illustrated by this series of events is that members of Wikipedia are far less likely to notice and remove vandalism or hoax material if it is in support of a viewpoint that they agree with. (This is true of all viewpoints, both left-leaning and right-leaning.) While this particular example was more severe than most, the same principle also applies to more subtle violations of Wikipedia’s content policies, such as article text not adequately supported by the sources it cites. When Wikipedia’s administrators suppress one side of a dispute in a controversial topic, one of the long-term results is that policy violations favourable to the opposite side may be overlooked for months or years.

The history of the Gottfredson article also demonstrates one of the dangers that arise from suppressing one side of a dispute, and the resulting lax enforcement of BLP policy or other Wikipedia policies. Many journalists and academics rely on Wikipedia as a source of information, so when hoax material—including hoax material about living people—is not removed in a timely manner it may eventually be repeated in published books or articles, as happened in this case.

The importance of viewpoint diversity

In the view of the Wikimedia Foundation, on certain controversial topics there is only one acceptable opinion, and this view also has been supported by many of English Wikipedia’s administrators. This attitude is reflected in administrative decisions at Arbitration Enforcement and, ultimately, in the content of articles. The problem currently facing Wikipedia is that the creation of a high-quality encyclopaedia requires the exact opposite attitude, for the reasons explained by Greenstein and Zhu: A diversity of editorial viewpoints and backgrounds makes controversial topics more likely to be presented in an unbiased manner.

As both the news media and academia become steadily more partisan, perhaps it was inevitable that Wikipedia would eventually follow a similar route. However, one difference between Wikipedia and most newspapers is that Wikipedia has core policies, such as NPOV and BLP policy, that still theoretically remain in effect. It remains to be seen how Wikipedia and its parent organization will handle the contradiction between these policies and their growing politicization.

There are three possible outcomes:

• One is for Wikipedia or the WMF to implement reforms protecting the viewpoint diversity necessary for its core policies to be upheld.

• A second option is for these policies to be officially overturned, although it is unlikely the Wikipedia community would agree to a change on that scale.

• The final possibility, and perhaps the most likely, is the one predicted by Larry Sanger: that these policies will remain on the books, with perhaps a few half-hearted attempts at reform, but that in the long term they will come to be understood as unenforceable.

*  *  *

Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear are pseudonyms of two American academics.

An analysis of 95 arrest records from Seattle riots from May reveals that nearly half of all suspects are white are white men from other cities who traveled to Seattle to commit crimes, according to King5.

Of 95 cases obtained from public records requests and through court filings, KING 5 found:

• 48% of suspects are white
• 18% of suspects are black
• 28% of cases race was undetermined or not listed
• 32% of suspects listed Seattle as hometown -King5

The report kicks off with the story of Ed Little, a resident of Everett, WA - located approximately half-an-hour North of Seattle.

"I thought it was crazy. That shouldn’t be happening at all," said Little - who thought that peaceful protests against police brutality had been hijacked by criminals.

Then police came knocking on his door to arrest his 25-year-old son and search the family apartment after Jacob Little was caught on camera stealing a rifle from a burning Seattle police car, firing shots into a crowd, and wounding a 15-year-old boy.

"It’s hard to believe. We don’t know Jake like that. It’s not the kind of boy he is," said Little. "He’s not a troublemaker. Not normally. He doesn’t go out looking for trouble."

Jacob Little pleaded not guilty to federal charges of possessing a stolen firearm and shooting the boy, who survived.

In another case, 20-year-old suburbanite Kelly Jackson was charged by federal prosecutors with throwing Molotov cocktails into Seattle police vehicles in late May. He was immediately fired from his job as a plumber's assistant in Edmonds, WA - some 24 minutes North of Seattle where he lives with his parents.

"He definitely doesn’t seem to have an issue vandalizing and breaking into businesses and destroying other people’s property," said Noah Center Executive Director Stacie Ventura.

Court records show the 20-year-old was awaiting trial on three burglary cases in Snohomish county court when Seattle police and FBI investigators caught up with him.

Since 2018, county prosecutors have accused Jackson of breaking into an Edmonds ferry toll booth, a marijuana shop just outside the city, and a Stanwood animal rescue facility where he’s accused of walking off with a nearly 100-pound Rottweiler in the middle of the night.

“I wish I knew. We don’t know,” said Noah Center Executive Director Stacie Ventura, when asked about Jackson’s alleged motive for the canine heist. -King5

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Jacob Greenburg is accused of one of the most 'disturbing social media videos' of the protests when he was filmed smashing a metal baseball bat into a Seattle cop's head on September 23.

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Robert Stevens via Decrypt.io,

In brief

• On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper.

• Since then, Bitcoin's journey has taken in highs and lows, from the Mt. Gox hack to an all-time high price of $20,000.

• In 2020, it's seen renewed growth in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, as institutional investors take a growing interest in the cryptocurrency.

Today marks the 12th birthday of the Bitcoin whitepaper. There will be no party, no cake: Bitcoin’s friendship network is decentralized, and its creator anonymous. Yet, since its release, the whitepaper has had a profound impact on the world.

What’s happened? Let’s go year by year:

2008: the birth of Bitcoin

On October 31, 2008, our story began. Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym of Bitcoin’s anonymous creator—or team of creators—releases the whitepaper for Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. In it, Nakamoto sketches a plan for a system that allows “online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

The previous month, Lehman Brothers, one of the largest investment banks in the US, collapsed as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. This was Bitcoin’s raison d'être—as the centralized US financial system ran into trouble, a gap in the market opened for a decentralized system that bypassed its burning wreck. 

2009: Bitcoin’s first year

2009 marked the release of Bitcoin. In January, its code was released as open-source software, and the genesis block—Bitcoin’s first block—was mined. Nakamoto mined the first 50 bitcoins, though they weren’t worth anything at the time. A few weeks later, Nakamoto sent Hal Finney 10 Bitcoin in the first Bitcoin transaction between two individuals. As Bitcoin turned one, Wikileaks published 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, and the Times Square Bomber—who failed to detonate in the New York City tourist hotspot—was sentenced to life in prison.

2010: Bitcoin Pizza Day

Bitcoin shared its 2010 birthday with Instagram; the photo-sharing app launched on October 6. In 2010, Bitcoin was worth around $0.20, and hit highs of $0.39 during the year. Nakamoto, who had mined around one million Bitcoins at the time, passed over the keys for Bitcoin’s code repository to Gavin Andresen. 2010 also marked Bitcoin Pizza Day: on May 22, Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas from Papa John’s. At current prices, that’s over $137 million.

The #BitcoinPizza would be worth US$137,558,701.15 right now (up 3.56352655% in the last 24 hours) #Bitcoin

— Bitcoin Pizza (@TheBitcoinPizza) October 31, 2020

Years later, Hanyecz was sanguine about his multimillion-dollar purchase, telling the New York Times that, “It wasn’t like Bitcoins had any value back then, so the idea of trading them for a pizza was incredibly cool [...] No one knew it was going to get so big.”

2011: The first Bitcoin bubble

Bitcoin took off in 2011—and it didn’t take long for the black market to take note of its supposed anonymity, with Silk Road, the dark net market which traded Bitcoin for guns, drugs, and other illegal contraband, opening for business.. 

2011 was also Bitcoin’s first bubble: Bitcoin skyrocketed in price, rising to $31.50 on June 8, but  by Bitcoin’s third birthday, its price sunk to $3.12; an early sign of the volatility that continues to affect the cryptocurrency to this day.

Bitcoin was also met with competition on its third birthday:  Litecoin, the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” launched in October 2011. Elsewhere in the world, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was killed as part of the Arab Spring uprising.

2012: Blackout, schmackout

October 31, 2012 marked something of a triumph for Bitcoin; on that day, the New York Stock exchange opened up again after closing for two days as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Bitcoin remained operational throughout, providing ample evidence of the power of its decentralized network.

Bitcoin’s price continued to grow throughout the year: by October, it reached highs of $12.4. Its price, which averaged $5.27, was a 1,656 percent increase from 2011.

In September, the Bitcoin Foundation was started, headed by Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, Patrick Murck, Charlie Schrem, and Peter Vessenes. BitPay, the Bitcoin payments service, announced that 1,000 merchants started accepting payments through Bitcoin.

2013: Silk Road seized

In February 2013, Coinbase reported sales of over $1 million, and in March, Bitcoin’s market capitalisation surpassed $1 billion. Silk Road, which opened in 2011, was seized by the FBI in October, along with 26,000 Bitcoin; its founder, Ross Ulbricht, is now serving a double life sentence without parole; in 2020, he marked his seventh consecutive birthday in prison. Prosecutors said that, from 2011-2013, sellers on Ulbricht’s site made over $214 million.

By its third birthday, Bitcoin’s market cap had surpassed $2 billion and the price for a single Bitcoin was over $200. Elsewhere in the world, Peter Higgs and Alice Munro win Nobel Prizes.

2014: Mt. Gox collapses

By Bitcoin’s sixth birthday, its market cap is over $4 billion, the price of a single Bitcoin is $329, and its daily volume is over $13 million. But not all is well in Bitcoin world: back in February, the cryptocurrency exchange, Mt. Gox stopped accepting withdrawals after 744,000 Bitcoins went missing; around $473 million, or 6 percent of the Bitcoin supply. Around 200,000 of those Bitcoins have been recovered, though the rest are gone. 

2015: Volume up

By the end of October 2015, Bitcoin’s market cap was $4.6 billion, and the price of a single Bitcoin was $312. Though the price and market cap stagnated, Bitcoin’s daily volume skyrocketed to $52 million. Outside of Bitcoin, China started to build islands in the South China Sea, and Russia got involved in the Syrian war. 

2016: Bitcoin goes mainstream

In 2016, the price of Bitcoin begins to grow. On its whitepaper’s birthday, its 24 hour volume hit $93 million, its market cap $11 billion, and the price of a single Bitcoin, $703. Many more high profile businesses start accepting Bitcoin, including Valve’s Steam video games store and ride-sharing service Uber.

In October, Colombia signed a peace agreement with FARC rebels, and Kim Kardashian had $10 million stolen from her in a hotel room in Paris. If only she’d kept it in Bitcoin...

2017: The Bitcoin bubble

2017 ushered in a new US President in Donald Trump, but for cryptocurrency holders, it was the year of the Bitcoin bubble.

On the birthday of the Bitcoin whitepaper, one Bitcoin was worth $6,131, and its market cap was over $100 billion—a figure that some attribute to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s listing of Bitcoin futures contracts, which made it far easier for the world to bet on Bitcoin. CME traded $460 million in its first week. This price was to skyrocket to over $20,000 in December. On December 7, almost $50 billion worth of Bitcoin was traded. 

2018: Down, but not out

In 2018, everything came crashing down. The market, based purely on speculation, flipped, and Bitcoin fell to $6,538 in February. The cryptocurrency muddled through a tough year: on the 10th anniversary of its whitepaper, the price of Bitcoin was $6,325. While its market cap remained strong, at $109 billion, the crypto crash prompted a backlash from mainstream publications and social media.

Twitter, Facebook, and Google duly banned advertisements for cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Google and Facebook have since lifted the ban, with Facebook going all-in on crypto as it tries to get its own digital currency, Libra, off the ground.

2019: Bitcoin’s back, baby

In 2019, the market came rushing back, following further price drops in 2018. Bitcoin started the year at $3,764, and its price skyrocketed to $13,796 in July. Since then, its price waxed and waned, but held relatively strong, boosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping's endorsement of its underlying technology, blockchain.

On its 11th birthday, Bitcoin cost around $10,000, and its market cap was around $165 million. By that point, the Bitcoin network comprised over 55,000 nodes, while over 820,000 addresses had traded Bitcoin.

2020: New heights

Ah, 2020. Bitcoin started off strong, as excitement mounted for the imminent Bitcoin halving. But few could have foreseen how the year would pan out, as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the world in March. The chaos initially throttled the price of Bitcoin, with the cryptocurrency dropping to lows of $4,000.

But as massive stimulus packages followed lockdowns around the world, Bitcoin began to come into its own, with investors seeking it out as a hedge against inflation. Bitcoin’s price reached around $10,000, and stayed there for the remainder of the summer. The series of financial shocks endured by the world economy seemed to prove the case that Bitcoin is antifragile—not only resistant to shocks and stresses, but stronger for them.

Then the big money started to pour in; institutional investors such as Grayscale and Square scooped up vast amounts of Bitcoin, and digital payments giant PayPal introduced crypto buying and selling features, opening the door to mass adoption of the cryptocurrency.   

The news sent the price of Bitcoin soaring past $13,000; on the 12th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper, it reached its highest price since 2018. Those who'd previously bashed Bitcoin, from Grayscale CEO Michael Saylor to JP Morgan, fell over themselves to sing the cryptocurrency's praises.

#Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.

— Michael Saylor (@michael_saylor) September 18, 2020

One thing's for certain: whatever happens next, Bitcoin is in a very different place from when it first emerged into the world, 12 years ago.

San Francisco has managed to curb the virus slightly in its city - but at what cost? Those paying sky high taxes to live in the Bay Area may soon be wondering why they are paying to live in a shut down city that state and local government officials have refused to allow to reopen due to a virus with a CDC-predicted infection fatality rate of between 0.00002 and 0.093. 

The entire downtown area of the city, once vibrant with business and tourism, is now "empty" according to a new report by AP. Everything from food trucks to local workers used to be sights one would see on a daily basis in San Francisco. Now, the city has been all but abandoned.

Even the tech giants that San Francisco is known for have left the city, in favor of working remotely from elsewhere. Families have moved out of the city in favor of the suburbs. Rents in the city are crashing, as we highlighted about a month ago. Tourists, once part of the lifeblood of the city, are now "scarce". 

As a result, business owners wonder if the city will ever get back to normal. Evan Kidera, CEO of Señor Sisig food trucks, said: “Is it ever going to get back to normal, is it ever going to be as busy as it was — and will that be next year, or in 10 years?”

This past week, part of the city re-opened as a result of virus numbers slowing. We're sure it won't be long until case numbers freak out elected officials heading into the winter, however, and everything is once again put into draconian "the government knows what's best for you"-style lockdown. 

San Francisco first announced its residents should stay at home in March, leading to just 12,200 virus cases and 145 deaths among 900,000 residents since then. It is one of the lowest death rates in the country. Long Beach, which is about half the size, has had about 900 more cases and 100 more deaths.

But at the same time, the city has been crippled, with many residents leaving. And many are unsure whether or not the slight re-opening will do much to re-populate the city. 

One tech executive, who moved out of his $4,000/month apartment last week, told AP: “San Francisco can say, ‘Hey, it’s cool to open back up.’ But what’s changed? The virus is still there, and there’s no vaccine.” He said of the move with his partner: “We’re both extreme extroverts, so the working from home thing makes us miserable.”

They packed up their things and drove to an Airbnb in San Diego, instead, and are planning on making trips around the country. 

30 year old Deme Peterson, another former San Francisco resident, said: “The spark of living in the city just kind of burned out a bit with everything being closed. We kind of didn’t see when it would come back to normal.”

Many restaurants in the city have already closed permanently. Many others are on the brink. 

The city's office vacancy has almost tripled to 14.1%, the highest numbers since 2011. At the same time, the median price for a one bedroom apartment has dropped 20% to $2,800. 

Coldwell Banker realtor Nick Chen commented: “San Francisco rents have been really inflated over the past couple years. It will come back, but I think the question is: Will it come back to the level it was at previously? Maybe not.”

City historian and author Gary Kamiya concluded: “I don’t know if it’s an exodus, but a lot of people are leaving.” 

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Chad Wolf called on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to “commit to never again censoring content” on its platform after the big tech giant temporarily suspended the account of Acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan.

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf testifies at his Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, on Sept. 23, 2020. (Greg Nash/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Twitter suspended Morgan’s account on Oct. 28 after he posted updates about the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The company reinstated the account 20 hours later on Oct. 29. In a letter addressed to Dorsey on Friday (pdf), Wolf said that Twitter’s recent action was “disturbing” and called the company’s censorship a national security threat.

“As the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies continue to rely on Twitter to share important information with the U.S. public, your censorship poses a threat to our security,” he wrote.

The Twitter by Morgan on Oct. 28 had a video of the progress of the wall along with the message: “CBP & U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continue to build new wall every day. Every mile helps us stop gang members, murderers, sexual predators, and drugs from entering our country. It’s a fact, walls work.”

Screenshots of the tweet by @CBPMarkMorgan (L) and the email Morgan received from Twitter regarding his account suspension. (Courtesy of Mark Morgan)

Twitter’s moderators removed the tweet from public view and emailed Morgan, saying, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”

“The acting commissioner’s tweet did none of these things. Read it. Watch the video,” Wolf told Dorsey in the letter. He also called Twitter’s action “unjustified,” adding that “the tweet is supported by data.”

“Whether you know it or not, CBP guards the front line of the American homeland. CBP repels and arrests thousands of violent criminal gang members each year. CBP rescues young girls who are forced into cross-border sex trafficking. CBP intercepts dangerous drugs and contraband, including enough of the opioid fentanyl to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States several times over,” Wolf asserted. “CBP fulfills the United States’ most obvious and essential law enforcement and national security responsibility to the people of our country. Your company may choose to be ignorant of these facts, but it is no less censorship when you choose to suppress them.”

“There was no reason to remove Mr. Morgan’s tweet from your platform, other than ideological disagreement with the speaker,” he added.

“Such censorship is disturbing.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testifies remotely during a hearing to discuss reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act with big tech companies in Washington on Oct. 28, 2020. (Greg Nash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Morgan’s suspension came on the same day that Dorsey and other big tech CEOs faced questioning during a Senate hearing to discuss reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 shields tech companies from liability for content posted on their platforms while letting them moderate content, including on political discourse.

Republican lawmakers used most of their time during the hearing to accuse the companies of selective censorship, while Democrats primarily focused on insufficient action against so-called misinformation that they said interferes with the election.

Both Wolf and Morgan traveled to the border in Texas on the following day, Oct. 29, to announce the nearly 400 miles of border wall system built under the Trump administration.

Wolf said that the border system has reduced narcotics smuggling in the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas by 26 percent. He also said that in Yuma, Arizona, illegal entries in the areas with a border wall system decreased by 87 percent in fiscal year 2020 compared to fiscal year 2019. In Tuscon, Arizona, the wall system was an aid for border agents, with drug seizures down 25 percent from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020, Wolf said.

‘Intentional’ Censorship

In the letter to Dorsey, Wolf wrote that Twitter’s censorship was “intentional, not accidental.” He recounted that the CBP reached out to Twitter’s office of government affairs, and also appealed Twitter’s censorship decision, but the office ignored the CBP and Twitter denied the appeal.

“Only after CBP reached out to Twitter’s office of government affairs a second time and went public with this censorship, then finally Twitter admitted its bad judgment and unlocked the account,” Wolf wrote.

“I call on you to commit to never again censoring content on your platform and obstructing Americans’ unalienable right to communicate with each other and with their government and its officials, including the thousands of law enforcement officers at the DHS who work vigilantly and diligently to protect your safety every day,” he wrote.

Mark Morgan, former Border Patrol chief, in Washington on April 24, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Prior to his account being reinstated, Morgan told The Epoch Times that his suspension was “unbelievable.”

“Twitter is out of control in their clear bias against this administration and their blatant censorship of anything that may go against the policies of those who sit in cubicles in Silicon Valley,” he followed up in a statement.

Wolf’s letter to Dorsey came the same day Twitter decided to unfreeze the account of the New York Post. The outlet was unable to post content on its Twitter account since Oct. 14 after it shared a stories about alleged overseas business dealings of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Twitter stipulated that the outlet had to delete the original Biden Twitter posts before being able to tweet again, before changing its stance on Friday.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

Earlier this week, value investing icon David Einhorn surprised his hedge fund peers when he declared that not only is the tech bubble created by the Fed "enormous" but more importantly, that it had burst on Sept 2, the day the Nasdaq hit an all time high, and as a result his Greenlight hedge fund added "a fresh bubble basket of mostly second-tier companies and recent IPOs trading at remarkable valuations."

Einhorn's renewed crusade against the tech bubble came a time when futures traders had taken their Nasdaq net exposure to the 2nd shortest on record, but then quickly reversed as the Nasdaq continued its grind higher, only to be caught flat just as the tech index suffered its biggest weekly drop since March.

For Einhorn, however, it appears that the early-October meltup was another opportunity to add even more shorts and after the latest Nasdaq rout, which saw the index drop on 9 of the past 14 days as it approached a 10% correction from its Sept 2 highs...

... Greenlight Capital returned an impressive 7.7% in October - the hedge fund's best monthly performance all year - according to Bloomberg.

As reported last Tuesday, Einhorn told his investors that "we are now in the midst of an enormous tech bubble,” adding that his working hypothesis was that Sept. 2 was the top and the bubble had already popped.

Bubbles tend to topple under their own weight. Everybody is in. The last short has covered. The last buyer has bought (or bought massive amounts of weekly calls). The decline starts and the psychology shifts from greed to complacency to worry to panic. Our working hypothesis, which might be disproven, is that September 2, 2020 was the top and the bubble has already popped. If so, investor sentiment is in the process of shifting from greed to complacency. We have adjusted our short book accordingly including adding a fresh bubble basket of mostly second-tier companies and recent IPOs trading at remarkable valuations

It wasn't just the tech shorts that worked: on the long side of the book the primary driver of Einhorn’s gains in the third quarter was homebuilder Green Brick Partners, which also had a strong October return when it shares climbed 11%. The company is benefiting from low interest rates and pandemic-driven demand for single-family detached housing. According to Bloomberg, Greenlight owns almost half of the company’s stock. Einhorn has been affiliated with Green Brick since before it went public and is its chairman.

While its October performance was impressive, Greenlight has a big hole to dig out of: in 2015, the year Einhorn first made his bet against tech bubble names, the main Greenlight fund fell by 20%. The slump deepened in 2018 with a 34% drop. Last year, Einhorn rebounded with a 14% gain across the funds. Following several turbulent years, Greenlight managed only $2.6 billion as of Jan. 1, down from $12 billion at its peak.

For those who missed it, we excerpted his key thoughts from his latest investor letter at the following link.

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

“I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others…. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

 ~ Sherlock Holmes – The Adventures of Silver Blaze

Is it possible to make sense out of nonsense?

So much these days is an incoherent mess.  It’s complete nonsense.

Page 1 excitedly beams about a glorious rebound in GDP.  Yay economic growth!

Page 2 worryingly notes the near complete failure of Siberian arctic ice to reform during October and that hurricane Zeta (so many storms this year we’re now into the Greek alphabet!) has made punishing landfall.

Each is a narrative. Each has its own inner logic.

But they simply do not have any external coherence to each other. It’s nonsensical to be excited about rising economic growth while also concerned that each new unit of growth takes the planet further past a critical red line.

These narratives are incompatible. So which one should we pick?

Well, in the end, reality always has the final say. As Guy McPherson states: Nature bats last.

So better we choose to follow the narrative that hews closest to what reality actually is, vs what we desperately want it to be.

‘They’ Don’t Care About Us

While issues like climate change and economic growth may be difficult to fully grasp and unravel, direct threats to our lives &/or livelihoods are much more concrete and something we can react to and resist.

Such immediate and direct threats are now fully in play and, once again, they’re accompanied by narratives that are completely at odds with each other.  I’m speaking of Covid and the ways in which our national and global managers are choosing to respond (or not).

It’s a truly incoherent mess about which both social media and the increasingly irrelevant media are working quite hard to misinform us.

The mainstream narrative about Covid-19, in the West, is this:

• It’s a quite deadly and novel disease

• There are no effective treatments

• Sadly, no double-blind placebo controlled trials exist to support some of the wild claims out there about various off-patent, cheap and widely available supplements and drugs

• Health authorities care about saving lives

• They care so much, in fact, that along with politicians they’ve decided to entirely shut down economies

• There’s a huge second wave rampaging across the US and Europe and there’s nothing we can do to limit it except shut down businesses and people’s ability to travel and gather

• You need to fear this virus and its associated disease

• All we can do is wait for a vaccine

The alternative narrative, one that I’ve uncovered after 9 months of almost daily research and reporting, is this:

• It’s not an especially dangerous disease and it’s certainly not novel

• There is a huge assortment of very effective, cheap and widely-available preventatives and treatments including (but not limited to)

  • Vitamin D

  • Ivermectin

  • Hydroxychloroquine

  • Zinc

  • Selenium

  • Famotidine (Pepcid)

  • Melatonin

• Use of a combination of these mostly OTC supplements could reasonably be expected to drop the severity of illness and the already low mortality rate by 90% or (probably) more

• Western health authorities have shown either zero interest in the results of studies mainly conducted in poorer nations on these combination therapies or…

• They have actively run studies designed to fail so that these cheap, effective therapies could be dismissed or…

• Set up proper studies but which started late, have immensely long study periods and most likely won’t be done before a vaccine is hastily rushed through development.

By the way – every single one of my assertions and claims is backed by links and supporting documentation from scientific and clinical trials and studies.  I am not conjecturing here; I am recounting the summary of ten months’ worth of inquiry.

The conclusion I draw from my narrative (vs. theirs) is that we can no longer assume that the public health or saving lives has anything to do with explaining or understanding the actions of these health “managers” (I cannot bring myself to use the word authorities).

After we eliminate the impossible – which is that somehow these massive, well-funded bodies have missed month after month of accumulating evidence in support of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, NAC, zinc, selenium and doxycycline/azithromycin – what remains must be the truth.

As improbable as it seems, the only conclusion we’re left with is that the machinery of politics, money and corporate psychopathy is suppressing life saving treatments because these managers have other priorities besides public health and saving lives.

This is a terribly difficult conclusion, because it means suspending so much that we hold dear.  Things like the notion that people are basically good. The idea that the government generally means well. The thought that somehow when the chips are down and a crisis is afoot, good will emerge and triumph over evil.

I’m sorry to say, the exact opposite of all of that has emerged as true.

Medical doctors in the UK NHS system purposely used toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine far too late in the disease cycle to be of any help simply to ‘make a point’ about hydroxychloroquine.  They rather desperately wanted that drug to fail, so they made it fail.

After deliberately setting their trial up for failure, they concluded: “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help, and it even makes things worse.”

Note that in order to be able to make this claim, they had to be willing to cause harm — even to let people die.  What kind of health official does that?

Not one who actually has compassion, a heart, or functioning level of sympathy.  It’s an awful conclusion but it’s what remains after we eliminate the impossible.

Getting Past The Emotional Toll

Science has proven that cheap, safe and significantly protective compounds exist to limit both Covid-related death and disease severity.

Yet all of the main so-called health authorities in the major western countries are nearly completely ignoring, if not outright banning, these safe, cheap and effective compounds.

This is crazy-making for independent observers like me (and you) because the data is so clear. It’s irrefutable at this point.  These medicines and treatments not only work, but work really, really well.

However most people will be unable to absorb the data, let alone move beyond it to wrestle with the implications.  Why? Because such data is belief-shattering.  Absorbing this information is not an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one.

I don’t know why human nature decided to invest so much in developing a tight wall around the belief systems that control our actions and thoughts. But it has.

I’m sure there was some powerful evolutionary advantage. One that’s now being hijacked daily by social media AI programs to nudge us in desired directions. One that’s being leveraged by shabby politicians, hucksters, fake gurus, and con men to steer advantage away from the populace and towards themselves.

The neural wiring of beliefs is what it is. We have to recognize that and move on.

Some people will be much faster in their adjustment process than others.  (Notably, the Peak Prosperity tribe is populated with many fast-adjusters, which is unsurprising given the topics we cover…tough topics tend to attract fast adjusters and repel the rest)

To move past the deeply troubling information laid out before us requires us to be willing to endure a bit of turbulence.  It’s the only way.

For you to navigate these troubling times safely and successfully, you’ll need to see as clearly as possible the true nature of the game actually being played.  To see what the rules really are – not what you’ve been told they are, or what you wish or hope they are.

The Manipulation Underway

The data above strongly supports the conclusion that our national health managers don’t actually care about public health generally or your health specifically.

If indeed true, then the beliefs preventing most people from accepting this likely include:

• Wanting to believe that people are good (a biggie for most people)

• Trust and faith in the medical system (really big)

• Faith in authority (ginormous)

There are many other operative belief systems I could also list. But this is sufficient to get the ball rolling.

Picking just one, how hard would it be for someone to let go of, say, trust in the medical system?

That would be pretty hard in most cases.

First not trusting the medical system might mean having to wonder if a loved one might have died unnecessarily while being treated.  Or realizing that you’re now going to have to research the living daylights out of every medical decision before agreeing to it.  Or worrying that your medications might be more harmful to you over the long haul than helpful (which is true in many more cases than most appreciate).  It might mean having your personal heroes dinged by suspicion — perhaps even your father or mother who worked in the medical profession.  It would definitely require a complete reorientation away from being able to trust anything you read in a newspaper, or see on TV, about new pharmaceutical “breakthroughs”.

Trust, which is safe and warm and comforting, then turns into skepticism; which is lonelier and insists upon active mental involvement.

But, as always, hard work comes with benefits — with a healthy level of skepticism and involvement, the families of those recruited into the deadly UK RECOVERY trial could have looked at the proposed doses of HCQ (2,400 mg on day one! Toxic!) and said, “Not now, not ever!” and maybe have saved the life of their loved one.

Look at that tangled mess of undesirables that comes with unpacking that one belief: regret, uncertainty, shame, doubt, fallen idols, and vastly more additional effort. Are all up for grabs when we decide to look carefully at the actions of our national health managers during Covid.

Which is why most people simply choose not to look.  It’s too hard.

I get it. I have a lot of compassion for why people choose not to go down that path.  It can get unpleasant in a hurry.

But, just like choosing to ignore a nagging chest pain, turning away in denial has its own consequences.

The Coming ‘Great Reset’

My coverage of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) and Covid-19 (the associated disease) has led me to uncover some things that have made me deeply uncomfortable about our global and national ‘managers’.  Shameful things, really.  Scary things in their implications for what we might reasonably expect (or not expect, more accurately) from the future.

Once we get past the shock of seeing just how patently corrupt they’ve been, we have to ask both What’s next? and What should I do?

After all, you live in a system whose managers either are too dumb to understand the Vitamin D data (very unlikely) or have decided that they’d rather not promote it to the general populace for some reason.  It’s a ridiculously safe vitamin with almost zero downside and virtually unlimited upside.

Either they’re colossally dumb, or this is a calculated decision.  They’re not dumb.  So we have to ask: What’s the calculation being performed here?  It’s not public safety. It’s not your personal health. So… What is it?

This is our line of questioning and observation. It’s like the short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in Silver Blaze that many of us informally know as “the case of the dog that didn’t bark”.  As the story goes, because of a missing clue – a dog who remained silent as a murder was committed – this conclusion could be drawn: the dog was already familiar with the killer!

The silence around Vitamin D alone is extremely telling. It is the pharmacological dog that did not bark.

One true inference suggests others.  Here, too, we can deduce from the near total silence around Vitamin D that the health managers would prefer not to talk about it. They don’t want people to know. That much is painfully clear.

Such lack of promotion (let alone appropriate study) of safe, effective treatments is a thread that, if tugged, can unravel the whole rug.  The silence tells us everything we need to know.

Do they want people to suffer and die?  I don’t know. My belief systems certainly hope not. Perhaps the death and suffering are merely collateral damage as they pursue a different goal — money, power, politics?  Simply the depressing result of a contentious election year?  More than that?

We’ve now reached the jumping off point where we may well find out just how far down the rabbit hole goes.

A massive grab for tighter control over the global populace is now being fast-tracked at the highest levels. Have you heard of the Great Reset yet?

If not, you soon will.

In Part 2: The Coming ‘Great Reset’ we lay out everything we know so far about the multinational proposal to transform nearly every aspect of global industry, commerce, trade, and social structure.

If you read on, be ready and willing to let go of cherished beliefs and to suspend what you know to be true. Because none of us has that in hand.  It’s going to be a wild ride from here.

Something very big is afoot and I suspect that Covid-19 is merely an excuse providing cover for a much bigger power grab over the world’s wealth and peoples.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access).

The Pentagon announced Saturday that US special forces have been successful in a daring rescue operation of an American citizen who had been taken hostage earlier in the week by an armed group in Niger.

It was reportedly conducted by the Navy's most elite SEAL Team in the early hours of Saturday, which in media reports is often referred to as SEAL Team 6 (though goes by other names internally within JSCOC).

It remains unclear as to the precise identity of the group of kidnappers, however, current US official statements suggest it was not an organized terrorist group but instead likely "bandits" seeking ransom money. The American had been subsequently taken by the group across the border into northern Nigeria where the special forces raid rescued him.

Big win for our very elite U.S. Special Forces today. Details to follow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2020

The dangerous border region is known for the presence of al Qaeda activity as well as the Islamic State's Boko Haram. The State Department had earlier in the week reported an American was taken captive Tuesday. Follow-up reports identified the man as a missionary named Philip Walton.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said the US citizen has been recovered and is safe, and further that no US personnel were injured during the rescue.

An American missionary was abducted in the middle of the night by six gunmen armed with assault rifles in southern Niger close to the border with Nigeria on Tuesday. https://t.co/QpddTcQdvY via @CBNNews

— CBN News (@CBNNews) October 28, 2020

"U.S. forces conducted a hostage rescue operation during the early hours of 31 October in Northern Nigeria to recover an American citizen held hostage by a group of armed men. This American citizen is safe and is now in the care of the U.S. Department of State. No U.S military personnel were injured during the operation," Hoffman said in a statement.

"We appreciate the support of our international partners in conducting this operation. The United States will continue to protect our people and our interests anywhere in the world."

Multiple members of the armed group were killed in the raid on their compound where the American was held, according to details given by CNN:

The mission, which was several hours long, was conducted by the Navy's elite SEAL Team 6 who were flown to the region by Air Force special operations, a US official with knowledge of the operation told CNN.

The US forces who conducted the mission killed six of the seven captors, the official said. The US believes the captors have no known affiliation with any terror groups operating in the region, and were more likely bandits seeking money.

President Trump congratulated those involved in the mission in a Saturday morning tweet, saying, "Big win for our very elite U.S. Special Forces today." And he added: "Details to follow!"

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have been discussing the continuing blackout on the Hunter Biden story, even as reports have surfaced that the FBI not only rejected claims that the story was “Russian disinformation” but confirmed that it has an ongoing investigation into possible money laundering. Now, NBC has finally responded with an expose into allegations against the Biden. However, the article entitled “How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge,” does not deal with the laptop or its content. It instead focuses on an obscure document that no one has covered or discussed.

[ZH: while we agree with Turley's perspective that this is a blatant distraction from the actual content of the laptop, we disagree that the Typhoon report is 'unrelated' and 'obscure' since all the points made by the report are completely backed by actual data, making the author irrelevant even as he has effectively done the media's homework for them.]

The value for the Bidens was simply the headline, which was immediately used to warn people not to follow up on the Biden story as Chinese disinformation.

The NBC is breathtaking in its careful avoidance of the real story and its apparent duplicity in seeking to shield the Bidens from any inquiry before the election.

There is something incredibly insidious in this story. The media has allowed itself to be boxed in by the Biden campaign. Reporters willingly bought into the narrative that there is no real story to pursue over the laptop.  The longer they have ignored the story; the more difficult it is to admit that there are real issues raised by these disclosures. Reporters simply cannot walk back from the dismissal of a story even as it grows daily with new disclosures. The only recourse is to discredit another story and another source.

The emails on the laptop have now been verified by various sources and those emails support allegations of an influence peddling scheme by Hunter Biden and James Biden, the brother of Vice President Joe Biden. Yet, the media has maintained a tight protective cocoon around Biden protecting him from any questions, even after a former business associate Tony Bobulinski directly accused Biden of lying in his denial of past knowledge or involvement in the dealings.  President Trump’s re-election campaign Thursday accused NBC News of “actively running interference” for Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter via a widely ridiculed report that critics feel was designed to dupe voters into thinking recent allegations that are harmful to the former vice president are simply part of a conspiracy.

That is why the NBC News story is so unsettling. Rather than ask a simply question of the Bidens about the laptop (like is this Hunter’s laptop and emails), NBC went to extraordinary lengths to find another document to discredit. It focused on a 64-page document with “questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing” that it claims as a source by “far-right influencers” to “baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government.”  What is equally concerning is that the story makes reference to the laptop story and the Bobulinski allegations but does nothing to verify or address those allegations. It spends considerable time and resources addressing what it says is a complete fabrication in this document while steadfastly refusing to address verified emails discussing influence peddling by the Biden family and direct references to Joe Biden.

The House Foreign Affair Committee immediately jumped on the story to discourage people from looking into the Hunter Biden scandal despite the fact that it does not address the allegations and evidence in the scandal.

“How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge” via @BrandyZadrozny / @oneunderscore__ / @NBCNews

We’re not surprised.

Read this thread to find out why… 1/https://t.co/QwQFe6uaCI

— House Foreign Affairs Committee (@HouseForeign) October 30, 2020

I will say it again. These emails are not proof of criminal conduct.  There are a lot of unanswered questions on these sources and emails. However, this is a major story either way. It is either disinformation (with criminal acts committed in lying to the FBI and Congress) or it is evidence of potential crimes and clear influence peddling by the Biden family. On its face, Joe Biden’s past denials of knowledge or involvement have been contradicted by a witness who has repeated those allegations to the FBI at his own legal peril. That is why the media blackout makes no sense. You can probe the specific allegations which now involve detailed dates, locations, and individuals — exposing lies on either or both sides. That is what the media normally does when the possible next president has been tied to possible influence peddling, suspicious foreign contracts, and direct alleged contradictions.

I have no reason to question the veracity of the NBC story, just its relevancy.  Rather than find some unknown, obscure document to debunk, NBC could start with simply asking Biden for a specific response to allegations of meetings and discussions about these foreign dealings.  Otherwise, the most relevant post-election article could be “How an evasive press report laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy denial.”

A convoy of SUVs and pickup trucks flying Trump flags escorted the Biden-Harris Bus down a Texas highway Friday, nearly forcing the bus off the road, resulting in Democrats to cancel a bus tour due to "security reasons." 

According to Texas House Rep. Sheryl Cole, the Biden-Harris Bus tour in Austin, Texas, was "canceled" due to "security reasons," which she took to Twitter, accusing Trump supporters of operating "well beyond safe limits." 

This is a 1st for me - but we just cancelled a joint event in Pflugerville w/ @JoeBiden campaign, @AustinYoungDems, & more, due to security reasons. Unfortunately, Pro-Trump Protestors have escalated well beyond safe limits. Sorry to all who looked forward to this fun event. https://t.co/tSq4moqro0

— Sheryl Cole (@SherylCole1) October 30, 2020

Cole quoted Travis County Democratic Party Chair Katie Naranjo in a tweet, who provided some details about the convoy "following the Biden bus throughout central Texas to intimidate Biden supporters." 

Naranjo said one Trump supporter "ran into a person's car, yelling curse words and threats." 

Texas State Rep. Rafael Anchía tweeted: "Armed Trump trolls harassing Biden Bus on I-35, ramming volunteer vehicles & blocking traffic for 40 mins. 

Armed Trump trolls harassing Biden Bus on I-35, ramming volunteer vehicles & blocking traffic for 40 mins. Eric Trump took to FB to incite this violence.

At least the Trump hearse is appropriate given the 200K+ Americans who have died due to his incompetence. #VoteHimOut pic.twitter.com/vUyhhKyceo

— Rafael Anchía (@RafaelAnchia) October 30, 2020

Anchía said, "Eric Trump took to FB to incite this violence." 

Numerous videos, with several angles of the incident, were posted on Twitter. 

The first video shows the convoy rolling down the highway, surrounding all sides of the Biden-Harris Bus. 

This is the most badass thing I've ever seen in my life. Go Texas. pic.twitter.com/dnr8Ns9qe0

— L ?? (@SomeBitchIKnow) October 31, 2020

The next video is from within the convoy - shows a Trump supporter, in a lifted truck, appears to hit a white SUV with its front driver side tire. 

This is violence, hitting people with cars is violence. All Republicans need to denounce this political violence

pic.twitter.com/BdQs8tuf97

— Alex “Test, Trace, Isolate” Lawson (@alaw202) October 31, 2020

Naranjo tweeted out a picture of the damaged white SUV.

Today, @realDonaldTrump supporters followed the Biden bus throughout central Texas to intimidate Biden supporters. They ran into a person's car, yelling curse words and threats. Don't let bullies win, vote. pic.twitter.com/CIyEWwbvqU

— Katie Naranjo (@KatieNaranjo) October 30, 2020

Forbes reached out to the Biden campaign about the incident, who stated the convoy "attempted to slow the bus down and run it off the road." 

While some political polls show Texas could be a tossup between Trump and Biden, the incident Friday exemplifies the strong support that Trump enjoys across the Lone Star State.