Debunking Debunkers: Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

A useful exercise is to debunk the debunkers. I've done it before with the UK's fact-checker Full Fact .

It's particularly important in this coronavirus climate of frantic "fact-checking" and "information-correcting".

An article recently published on the website of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is about a physicist, Danny Rogers, who has co-founded and is Chief Technical Officer of the Global Disinformation Index, with the noble purpose of saving the internet from lies, errors, fake news and what have you.

The first disinformation service he should perform is against some of his own claims during the interview, for example: "QAnon has led to people’s deaths."

This is a wide and sweeping generalisation with no basis in reality. If it refers, as the only tenuous link, to the murder of alleged mob boss Frank Cali by Anthony Comello in March 2019, it is highly flimsy.

Apparently on the advice of his lawyer Robert Gottlieb, Comello pleaded not guilty, since Gottlieb is trying to defend his client as not guilty due to mental defect.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Comello wanted to perform a citizen’s arrest on Cali to help Trump, as he believed the Gambino crime family's presumed boss was part of the deep state and that he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" to place Cali under citizen's arrest. When Cali didn’t comply, the documents say, Comello killed him out of fear that Cali would kill him.

What is unclear, among many things, is why Comello thought Cali belonged to the deep state.

The connection of this murder with QAnon, what Leftists call a "conspiracy theory" that Trump and his presidency have been under attack by the deep state, is at the very least dubious.

On the same grounds we could blame any political movement, in most cases with better reason, of "leading to people’s deaths". Many examples come to mind, for instance the 14 June 2017 shooting At Alexandria, Virginia, Congressional Republican Baseball Practice which only for the presence of a security detail by a miracle didn't kill anyone but could have been a massacre,

James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on GOP lawmakers and staffers with a rifle as they prepared for the annual summer baseball game between Republicans and Democrats, wounding several people.

Hodgkinson’s social media profile revealed he was a Left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter who believed President Trump was a “traitor.” In one Facebook post of 3 months before Hodgkinson wrote: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

The AAAS article goes on to say:

GDI’s [the above-mentioned Global Disinformation Index] system analyzes content and context flags which can help assess any domain’s risk of disinformation. It rates the disinformation risk for websites based upon variables that include overall credibility, whether they push sensationalism, whether they contain hate speech, and whether the company embraces sound policies regarding content.

Now, since the article is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the "debunking" website with a high-sounding name it analyses is co-founded and headed by a physicist, we would expect some more precision in its chosen criteria than this. What objective characteristics does "overall credibility" entail?

And, even more importantly, how do you define "hate speech"? What does this concept mean? What role can it have in a science-led effort of exposing disinformation?

It's an impossible task to give "hate speech" a role in refuting falsehoods, for many reasons. First of all, hate is a sentiment, an emotion, a passion. As such, it's in the realm of the subjective, not the objective. What you consider hate another may consider simply justice, or telling the truth. There's no objective yardstick for definition, let alone measurement.

Furthermore, "hate" has been overused ad nauseam by the political and cultural Left to stigmatise, place beyond the pale and therefore silence (or at least the Left hopes) its adversaries.

So, this other "fact-checking" enterprise on the face of it seems to be, like so many of the same kind, Leftist propaganda masquerading as a quest for the truth.



PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay

Best and Worst US States for Small Business

The US magazine Entrepreneur has published a map (see below) grading American states from A to F according to how small-business friendly they are.

The map is based on a survey of over 6,000 small-business owners all over the country.

It is interesting - although hardly surprising - to note that the best states for small businesses are the Republican-majority ones (Texas, Utah, Oklahoma) and the worst are Democrat-majority (California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts).

The only states that have Ds and Fs are Democrat ones.

This is, for whoever still needs it, the umpteenth confirmation that socialism makes countries and people poor.

It's not surprising that rich Texas, that "maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world", and other over 30 states have submitted a petition to withdraw from the union, to protect their citizens' standards of living and not force them to pay for the squandering socialist states.

And remember, we're talking small businesses here, often sole traders or family-run, managed by people who instead of sitting on their butts waiting for the government to solve all their problems go out, start a business and create jobs for the local community, and not the "demonic, greedy" big (God forbid!) corporations (which in fact create even more jobs).

GOP Trilemma: Compromise, Stand Firm, Go to the Right

This interesting video sums up, better than many words and in-depth analyses, why Obama won. This has truly become a client state. I like the following definition of client state, applied to Scotland:

Keep spending more and more money on more and more voters, and you've built a client state. Those in receipt of the largesse will want it to continue. One day the money will no longer be there to spend (see technical note from Liam Byrne for details), but by that point you will have engineered a situation where any modulation of public spending will cause pain to such a large proportion of the electorate that the chances of the Conservatives winning a straight fight will be much reduced.

Although I am not American, I am very, very sad that Romney did not win the election.

I had got to like him, a Christian, obviously good, warm and gentle person. I liked the way he spoke during the presidential debates, firm but always polite, compared to the impersonal and arrogant Obama.

I can easily believe what popular radio talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh said of him, that “Mitt Romney is one of the best people, human beings I’ve ever met.”

Limbaugh also said:

None of it makes any sense! Mitt Romney and his wife and his family are the essence of decency. He's the essence of achievement. Mitt Romney's life is a testament to what's possible in this country. Mitt Romney is the nicest guy anybody would ever run into. Mitt Romney is charitable. He wouldn't hurt a fly. He doesn't hate. He's not discriminatory in any way, shape, manner, or form.

This is about Romney as a person. But the reasons why I would have voted for him, if I had been American, are obviously political and I've blogged extensively about them before the election, from the economy to abortion, from Marxism to the presidential debates, from totalitarianism to the Benghazi attack.

Romney's policies were not perfect, but infinitely better than Obama's. Barack Hussein is also someone who has been very shady about his life as well as mendacious about his politics, which makes it unwise to trust him as President of the world's most powerful country.

Exactly because I am European, I've considered the US as something to look to for upholding the western and Christian values that are being eroded so rapidly in my continent.

I'm seriously saddened now to see that the US is going the European way too. But I am still hopeful: this is not the last election, and things may happen before the next that might change America's current political and economical course towards socialism, big government, welfare state, poverty and loss of moral compass.

Looking at the election results, there has clearly been a shift much more pronouncedly to the political left in US voting patterns, strongly determined by minority votes like blacks and Latinos, groups that probably made the difference about who of the two candidates got elected.

Some commentators, on the BBC for instance, said that the Republicans must acknowledge the democraphic change produced by the much higher percentage of Latinos in several states and, if they want to woo these voters, should make changes to their policies, prominently on immigration.

We have to remember this: "As Doug Ross has pointed out, Obama is – among many other things – the lawless president: the first one to sue states for enforcing laws Congress had passed".

The state in question is Arizona, and the law is the immigration law:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that one key part of the Arizona immigration law, known as Senate Bill 1070, is constitutional, paving the way for it to go into effect. Three other portions were deemed unconstitutional in a 5-3 opinion.

The part ruled constitutional is among the most controversial of the law's provisions. It requires an officer to make a reasonable attempt to determine the immigration status of a person stopped, detained or arrested if there's reasonable suspicion that person is in the country illegally.

The three parts ruled unconstitutional make it a state crime for an immigrant not to be carrying papers, allow for warrant-less arrest in some situations and forbid an illegal immigrant from working in Arizona.

The long-awaited decision was a partial victory for Gov. Jan Brewer and for President Barack Obama, who sued the state of Arizona to keep the law from taking effect. By striking down the portions they did, justices said states could not overstep the federal government's immigration-enforcement authority. But by upholding the portion it did, the court said it was proper for states to partner with the federal government in immigration enforcement.

This may help explain why Latinos tend to vote for Obama. But should the Republican Party make concessions of this sort and risk going against the Constitution? Is this just a small compromise, or is it damaging what America, since its foundation, really is and stands for?

On immigration, Obama was accused by Bush administration counsel John Yoo of executive overreach:

President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).

Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.

There are two exceptions, neither of which applies here. The first is that “the Laws” includes the Constitution. The president can and should refuse to execute congressional statutes that violate the Constitution, because the Constitution is the highest form of law. We in the Bush administration argued that the president could refuse to execute laws that infringed on the executive’s constitutional powers, particularly when it came to national security — otherwise, a Congress that had a different view of foreign policy could order the military to refuse to carry out the president’s orders as Commander-in-Chief, for example. When presidents such as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR said that they would not enforce a law, they did so when the law violated their executive powers under the Constitution or the individual rights of citizens.

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law - especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive — not to mention the Framers — cannot support.

On the other side of the debate, there are those who say that Romney was not conservative enough. Romney was chosen as Republican candidate because he covered a kind of moderate middle ground in the GOP, in the hope that this would appeal to middle America's voters come Election Day.

Some commentators now say that a more consistent conservative approach would have been the way forward.

British political journalist Melanie Phillips is one of them:

Britain and the Europeans love Obama because they think he will end American exceptionalism and turn the US into a pale shadow of themselves. What they don’t realise is that, all but lobotomised by consumerist rights, state dependency, victim culture, sentimentality, post-religion, post-nationalism and post-Holocaust and Empire guilt, Britain and Europe are themselves fast going down the civilisational tubes.

Romney lost because he refused to provide an alternative to any of this for fear of being labelled a warmonger, flint-heart or social reactionary. He refused to engage with any of the issues that made this Presidential election so truly momentous. Up against the bullying of the totalitarian left, he ran for cover. He played safe, and as a result only advertised his own weakness and dishonesty. Well, voters can smell inconsistency from a mile away; they call it untrustworthiness, and they are right.

Rush Limbaugh is another:

“If there’s one option that hasn’t been tried in a long time, it’s called conservatism with a capital C,” he said. “This was not a conservative campaign.”

This is the trilemma facing the GOP: compromise, stand firm, or go the full length and be more consistent in its conservative principles.

Ex-Federal Elections Commission Member: "Democrats Commit Most Voter Fraud"

This PJTV video "Voter Fraud: Will The Democrats Vote Early, and Often?" makes a comparison between the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s who made famous the phrase "Vote early and vote often" and the current crop of Chicago gangsters.

It is introduced thus: "Can we expect the Democrats to engage in gangland style voter fraud in the presidential election? Democrats are encouraging their base to vote early through absentee ballots." The idea, the video suggests, is to get Democratic electorate to vote twice: with an early vote and on Election Day, maybe in a different state.

Of course the liberal media try to deny the existence of voter fraud, since it is mainly left-wing parties that commit it, in the USA as in other parts of the world.

This is probably why the Dems don't like so much the idea of ID presentation at the ballot box while Republicans have righly backed genuinely tough and enforceable voter ID laws nationwide.

But Obama and Democratic Party election frauds at the highest level have already been demonstrated on video and resulted in investigations and resignations. There have been criminal cases involving Democratic-supporting ACORN in several states.

The organization Project Veritas has been conducting an ongoing series of investigations in more than a dozen states “demonstrating the ease with which election fraud can be committed and legitimate voters can be disenfranchised.”

Former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) member and Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky praises Project Veritas' work, and has said that its videos are reflective of cases he has researched, including one few weeks ago in Vernon, California, in which a judge threw out an election result after determining that voters included people who didn’t live in the jurisdiction where they were registered.

Spakovsky added that vote fraud is a bipartisan endeavor, carried out by both Democrats and Republicans, but Democrats are the perpetrators in most of the cases.

He highlighted the particular vulnerability of Virginia’s voter ID law, which unlike Georgia’s or Indiana’s does not require a government-issued photo ID, because the many other documents that can be used in Virginia, like utility bills, can be faked, as is shown in a high-profile Project Veritas videos.

And new suspicions and evidence of more voter fraud are constantly emerging.

There are the voting machines that, when you try to vote for Romney, record a vote for Obama in the crucial swing state of Ohio, in Colorado and in other states. What is suspicious is that it never happens the other way round, whereas faulty machines should produce random wrong choices. This is why it is recommended that you check your ballots when finished. The story:

The DNC’s 2004 Colorado Election Manual is a helpful reminder of what Democrats can be expected to do to try win President Obama’s reelection. Page 54 of the manual instructs:

“If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike…“

With the presidential contest too close to call, Obama’s Justice Department dispatching hundreds of lawyers to 23 states and Democrats having 2,500 lawyers stationed across Ohio, 600 in Cuyahoga County alone, to “monitor” elections there are bound to be more shenanigans than we can imagine. Don’t forget Obama’s Attorney General decided not to go after the New Black Panther Party members who were intimidating voters in 2008.

So it is troubling that we are hearing numerous reports of voting machines recording votes intended for Romney as votes for Obama.

Members of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) were denounced by poll watcher Eve Rockford, trained by True the Vote, a nonpartisan election integrity association that is "equipping citizens to take a stand for free and fair elections".

The NAACP members descended on a polling station in Houston, Texas, to “encourage” people to vote for President Barack Obama, wearing NAACP clothing and caps and behaving in many ways as if they owned the place, including "picking people out line and moving them to the front, cutting off everyone else". Rockford says: "The NAACP basically ran this poll location and the judges did nothing about it".

In addition:

the “ringleader” of the group was also accused of touching an electronic voting machine that a voter was using.

Eve Rockford said the woman in the NAACP attire first screamed at the poll supervisor and demanded that a clerk be removed during the Friday incident.

“She starts screaming at [poll supervisor Rose Cochran] and she says ‘get this clerk out of here, get him out of here I’ve had enough of him,” Rockford, 51, told TheBlaze. “He starts calmly, using his voice, ‘she’s touching the machines, she’s touching the machines, she’s not acting appropriately, she’s touching the machines.’”

WND online news magazine tested the Obama campaign and found it wanting on the crucial issue of donations:

The controversial Media Matters For America progressive group today posted a false article claiming President Obama’s campaign did not accept a donation from someone impersonating Osama bin Laden using a foreign proxy server.

...The Media Matters piece took issue with a WND article, linked at the popular DrudgeReport.com, reporting “bin Laden” successfully donated twice to Obama’s presidential re-election campaign using a Pakistani Internet Protocol address and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address.

The “Bin Laden” donations, actually made by WND staff, included a listed occupation of “deceased terror chief” and a stated employer of “al-Qaida.”

The apparently foreign-based contributions were conducted as a test after media reports described the ability of foreigners to donate to the Obama campaign but not to Mitt Romney’s site, which has placed safeguards against such efforts.

The acceptance of foreign contributions is strictly illegal under U.S. campaign finance law.

...Indeed, the two donations, for $15 and $5 respectively, were accepted by the campaign and were deducted from the disposable credit card that was used.

Media Matters further wrongly claimed, “The Obama campaign also requests ‘proof of a current and valid U.S. passport’ if a contribution originates from outside the United States and raises questions about the contributor’s citizenship.”

When the “bin Laden” donations were made using a foreign proxy server, no such requests of citizenship were made. At no point was the user prompted to enter any passport information. No questions were asked at any time by the Obama campaign website to verify proof of citizenship or even whether the donor was a U.S. citizen at all.

“Bin Laden” is currently set up on the official campaign website to contribute more to Obama’s campaign. The name is also registered as a volunteer.

Since the “foreign” contribution was sent, “Bin Laden’s” email address has received several solicitations from Obama’s campaign for more donations.

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