“Most Biased Encyclopedia in History” | Wikipedia Co-Founder


I just discovered that Wiki considers NO right-leaning outlet “reliable.” Not Fox News Politics, The Daily Wire, the Daily Caller, the FDRLST, or New York Post. What DOES Wiki consider “reliable?” CNN, MSNBC, Jacobin, Vox, and Buzzfeed! Give me a break!


Wikipedia Co-Founder Condemns WIKI: “Most Biased Encyclopedia in History” The entire opening/interview starting at the 10:37 is HERE.

here is the hat-tip AMERICA FIRST REPORT:

….Sanger says he noticed a bias creeping in around 2006, particularly in areas of science and medicine. Around 2010, he started noticing that articles about Eastern Medicine were being changed to reflect blatantly biased positions, using “dismissive epithets” to paint this ancient tradition as quackery.

In 2012, evidence also emerged revealing a Wikipedia trustee and “Wikipedian in Residence” were being paid to edit pages on behalf of their clients and secure their placement on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did You Know” section, which publicizes new or expanded articles — a clear violation of Wikipedia rules.

“It really got over the top between 2013 and 2018,” Sanger says, “and by by at the time Trump became president, it was almost as bad as it is now. It’s amazing, you know, no encyclopedia, to my knowledge, has ever been as biased as Wikipedia has been

I remember being mad about Encyclopedia Britannica and The World Book not mentioning my favorite topics, [and] presenting only certain points of view in a way that establishment sources generally do. But this is something else. This is entirely different. It’s over the top.”….

In 2007 a hacker and tech whiz named Virgil Griffith revealed that the CIA, FBI and a host of large corporations and government agencies were editing pages on Wikipedia to their own benefit (or the benefit of associates). Now Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is reporting that the intelligence agencies are still at it, routinely editing pages relating to the Iraq War body count, treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and China’s nuclear program. In the video below Jimmy mentions Aaron Maté. Jimmy Dore interviewed him regarding this incident of the Syrian chemical attack (HERE), and the article can be found on Aarons GRAYZONE.

REUTERS (2007)

The changes may violate Wikipedia’s conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.

The program, WikiScanner, was developed by Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and posted this month on a Web site that was quickly overwhelmed with searches.

The program allows users to track the source of computers used to make changes to the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can submit and edit entries.

WikiScanner revealed that CIA computers were used to edit an entry on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A graphic on casualties was edited to add that many figures were estimated and were not broken down by class.

Another entry on former CIA chief William Colby was edited by CIA computers to expand his career history and discuss the merits of a Vietnam War rural pacification program that he headed.

[….]

It violates Wikipedia’s neutrality guidelines for a person with close ties to an issue to contribute to an entry about it, said spokeswoman Sandy Ordonez of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization….

Here is HEARTLAND INSTITUTE’S quick noting of the bias:


Heartland Institute President Tim Huelskamp discusses Wikipedia bias.


Creator of the Redskins Logo Is American Indian (PLUS: FLASHBACKS)

(Hat-tip to Frank R.) This will be a combination of two old posts along with new information. The New info first, and I will date the others. THE DAILY WIRE has the update:

While many have been celebrating the Washington Redskins’ decision to officially change the team nickname into something less triggering, not everyone is happy about the development, including the Native American family of the man who originally designed the NFL team’s logo.

The Redskins logo that America knows today was originally designed in 1971 by Native American Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, whose iconic image depicted John “Two Guns” White Calf, a Blackfeet Chief who also appears on the Buffalo Nickel.

“Wetzel grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and was eventually elected president of the National Congress of American Indians in Washington, D.C.,” WUSA9 reports. “He was instrumental in the Redskins franchise logo change from an ‘R’ to the current depiction of a Native American.”

Wetzel’s son, Lance Wetzel, said the logo evokes pride in Native Americans and should not be considered offensive. Though he understands the decision to change the team nickname, he believes the logo should stay.

“Everyone was pretty upset (about the change),” Lance Wetzel said. “Everyone understood the name change. We were all on board with that. Once they weren’t going to use the logo, it was hard. It takes away from the Native Americans. When I see that logo, I take pride in it. You look at the depiction of the Redskins logo and it’s of a true Native American. I always felt it was representing my people. That’s not gone.”

“The Native Americans were forgotten people. That logo lets people know these people exist,” Wetzel continued. “If it were changed and it removed any derogatory feelings toward any person, then I think it’s a win. I don’t want that logo to be associated in a negative way, ever.”

Earlier this year, the butter company Land O’ Lakes announced that it would be removing the famed “Butter Maiden” – a Native American woman named Mia – from its packaging, a logo designed by Native American artist Patrick DesJarlait. In an article for The Washington Post, DesJarlait’s son, Robert, said his father crafted the logo to “foster a sense of Indian pride.”…..


(June 24, 2014)


I am going to start this post with a very STRONGLY WORDED rant on the asinine political correctness found on the professional Left. Again, language warning, but you should be just as flabbergasted as these men (via THE BLAZE):

Jonathan Turley (via THE WASHINGTON POST) gets into the mix in his now patented warning from the left about the excesses of government size, growth, and overreach. Some of which I have noted in the past HERE. But here is the column from which Dennis Prager touches on, and Goldberg’s will follow:

It didn’t matter to the patent office that polls show substantial majorities of the public and the Native American community do not find the name offensive. A 2004 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found that 90 percent of Native Americans said the name didn’t bother them. Instead, the board focused on a 1993 resolution adopted by the National Congress of American Indians denouncing the name. The board simply extrapolated that, since the National Congress represented about 30 percent of Native Americans, one out of every three Native Americans found it offensive. “Thirty percent is without doubt a substantial composite,” the board wrote.

Politicians rejoiced in the government intervention, which had an immediate symbolic impact. As Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said Wednesday: “You want to ignore millions of Native Americans? Well, it’s pretty hard to say the federal government doesn’t know what they’re talking about when they say it’s disparaging.”

For the Washington Redskins, there may be years of appeals, and pending a final decision, the trademarks will remain enforceable. But if the ruling stands, it will threaten billions of dollars in merchandizing and sponsorship profits for NFL teams, which share revenue. Redskins owner Dan Snyder would have to yield or slowly succumb to death by a thousand infringement paper cuts.

The patent office opinion also seems to leave the future of trademarks largely dependent on whether groups file challenges. Currently trademarked slogans such as “Uppity Negro” and “You Can’t Make A Housewife Out Of A Whore” could lose their protections, despite the social and political meaning they hold for their creators. We could see organizations struggle to recast themselves so they are less likely to attract the ire of litigious groups — the way Carthage College changed its sports teams’ nickname from Redmen to Red Men and the California State University at Stanislaus Warriors dropped their Native American mascot and logo in favor of the Roman warrior Titus. It appears Fighting Romans are not offensive, but Fighting Sioux are.

As federal agencies have grown in size and scope, they have increasingly viewed their regulatory functions as powers to reward or punish citizens and groups. The Internal Revenue Service offers another good example. Like the patent office, it was created for a relatively narrow function: tax collection. Yet the agency also determines which groups don’t have to pay taxes. Historically, the IRS adopted a neutral rule that avoided not-for-profit determinations based on the content of organizations’ beliefs and practices. Then, in 1970, came the Bob Jones University case. The IRS withdrew the tax-exempt status from the religious institution because of its rule against interracial dating on campus. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1983 that the IRS could yank tax exemption whenever it decided that an organization is behaving “contrary to established public policy” — whatever that public policy may be. Bob Jones had to choose between financial ruin and conforming its religious practices. It did the latter.

There is an obvious problem when the sanctioning of free exercise of religion or speech becomes a matter of discretionary agency action. And it goes beyond trademarks and taxes. Consider the Federal Election Commission’s claim of authority to sit in judgment of whether a film is a prohibited “electioneering communication.” While the anti-George W. Bush film “Fahrenheit 9/11” was not treated as such in 2004, the anti-Clinton “Hillary: The Movie” was barred by the FEC in 2008. The agency appeared Caesar-like in its approval and disapproval — authority that was curtailed in 2010 by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.

Even water has become a vehicle for federal agency overreach. Recently, the Obama administration took punitive agency action against Washington state and Colorado for legalizing marijuana possession and sales. While the administration said it would not enforce criminal drug laws against marijuana growers — gaining points among the increasing number of citizens who support legalization and the right of states to pass such laws — it used a little-known agency, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, to cut off water to those farms. The Bureau of Reclamation was created as a neutral supplier of water and a manager of water projects out West, not an agency that would open or close a valve to punish noncompliant states….

…READ IT ALL…

Here is the article from THE NATIONAL REVIEW — in part — that has Jonah Goldberg likewise raising alarm about the bureaucracy that Turley speaks to in the above article.

Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life 1984. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

The evidence is everywhere. Every day it seems there’s another story about teachers’ unions using their stranglehold on public schools to reward themselves at the expense of children. School-choice programs and even public charter schools are under vicious attack, not because they are bad at educating children but because they’re good at it. Specifically, they are good at it because they don’t have to abide by rules aimed at protecting government workers at the expense of students.

The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled down to the fact that VA employees are the agency’s most important constituency. The Phoenix VA health-care system created secret waiting lists where patients languished and even died, while the administrator paid out almost $10 million in bonuses to VA employees over the last three years.

Working for the federal government simply isn’t like working for the private sector. Government employees are essentially unfireable. In the private sector, people lose their jobs for incompetence, redundancy, or obsolescence all the time. In government, these concepts are virtually meaningless. From a 2011 USA Today article: “Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.”

In 2010, the 168,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C. — who are quite well compensated — had a job-security rate of 99.74 percent. A HUD spokesman told USA Today that “his department’s low dismissal rate — providing a 99.85 percent job security rate for employees — shows a skilled and committed workforce.”

Uh huh.

Obviously, economic self-interest isn’t the only motivation. Bureaucrats no doubt sincerely believe that government is a wonderful thing and that it should be empowered to do ever more wonderful things. No doubt that is why the EPA has taken it upon itself to rewrite American energy policy without so much as a “by your leave” to Congress.

The Democratic party today is, quite simply, the party of government and the natural home of the managerial class. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents the IRS, gave 94 percent of its political donations during the 2012 election cycle to Democratic candidates openly at war with the Tea Party — the same group singled out by Lois Lerner. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the VA, gave 97 percent of its donations to Democrats at the national level and 100 percent to Democrats at the state level

…READ IT ALL…


(June 27, 2014)


I was honored to be called an “ultra-rightest” and “racist” by an extremely liberal blogger, So That The Peoples May Live (STTPML). Here is a clipping from the site to my post:

The post referenced my excellent post, Thin-Skinned Over the Redskins ~ Warnings of Government Overreach. So I asked this blogger (we will see if I get a response) the following:

Navajo Code Talker Washington Redskins

Please tell me how I am an racist? A leader of the Navajo Code Talkers who appeared at a Washington Redskins home football game said Wednesday the team name is a symbol of loyalty and courage — not a slur as asserted by critics who want it changed.

Is this Navajo leader a racist?

Are the 90% of Native-Americans who are not maligned by the name racist? I am sure many of them vote Democrat… would that mean they [Democrats] are “ultra-leftists/racists”??

Maybe next you can push to rename Oklahoma ~ which is Choctaw, “okla humma,” which literally means “red people.”

I will let Napoleon Dynamite finish off my thoughts of your post:

Since most Native-Americans vote Democrat (as linked in the above text), and most of them support the Redskins name, thus, making them [Democrats] racist… are they not also racist for supporting Obama in the general election[s]?


June 29, 2014


(See HotAir for more) The Washington Times reports:

Veterans aren’t happy with a recent op-ed by the Washington Post, which charged that the Apache, Comanche, Chinook, Lakota, Cheyenne and Kiowa military vehicles were a “greater symbolic injustice” than the NFL’s Washington Redskins’ name. 

“Even if the NFL and Redskins brass come to their senses and rename the team, a greater symbolic injustice would continue to afflict Indians — an injustice perpetuated not by a football club but by our federal government,” Simon Waxman of the Boston Review wrote for the Post on Thursday.

He added that the helicopter names were “propaganda” that needed to end, because Native American life expectancy statistics indicate the “violence is ongoing, even if the guns are silent.”

Readers at the popular military news gathering website Doctrine Man reacted Friday.

“I suspect that the author is less unhappy that our choppers have Indian names, and more unhappy that there is a U.S. military,” wrote Alex Kuhns.


(August 13, 2014)


More at HOTAIR:

  • A palate cleanser via Time, which notes that the “Redskins Facts” site is behind this and that the team itself is apparently behind “Redskins Facts.” (The anti-Redskins ad that inspired this rebuttal is also embedded [at link].) This is really just a taste of what they’ve got cooking; go to their YouTube account and you’ll find interviews with individual Native Americans defending the name. It’s an understandable counterattack — if your critics claim you’re victimizing a group, the natural response is to find members of the group who don’t feel victimized — but realistically we’re past the point of argument on this subject. It’s already reached litmus-test status. If you’re a Democrat, social justice demands that the name be changed lickety split; if you’re a Republican, the line must be held against political correctness. (Dan Snyder, for one, is obviously not giving in.) If you’re an average low-information voter, you probably don’t mind the name but don’t care much either way and will eventually be badgered into grudgingly accepting the bien-pensant position just to make this farking issue go away already.

 

 

Police Departments and Progressives (The Five Update)

Minneapolis officials vow to dismantle city’s police department.

Brian Fallon was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager; and is now a leading
member of the resistance movement serving as Executive Director for Demand Justice.

A friend called the below “Evil Masquerading as Virtue” – yep, couldn’t put it better.

(My Facebook intro to this video) June 7th — take Note MC Hammer was on stage — A veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced during a rally at Powderhorn Sunday that they are planning to dismantle the police department.

So, I have noticed that many of these Leftie’s look young, or at least think in childlike terms. Take for instance POWERLINE commenting on their home states Minneapolis Mayor:

Today at a rally in Minneapolis, Boy Mayor Jacob Frey addressed a crowd that was even more left-wing than he is. Dutifully wearing a mask, he told the crowd that he doesn’t favor defunding the Minneapolis Police Department.

I’m actually not sure what “defunding the police department” means. I take it that these people really want to live in a city that has no police services. So, if you see that someone is trying to break into your house, what do you do? One possible answer is, pull out the semiautomatic pistol that you keep next to your bed, and blow him away. But I don’t think that is what these people have in mind. To put it politely, I don’t think they are serious.

But even Jacob Frey’s modest engagement with reality was too much for Minneapolis’s leftists. They booed him off the stage:

[I INSERT THE LONGER VERSION]

THE DAILY WIRE notes the interview of Minneapolis’ City Council President on CNN. (A previous story by the DAILY WIRE may be worth your time for context) I will HIGHLIGHT the magic words/phrases:

Speaking with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Monday morning, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, which has stated it intends to “dismantle” the city’s police department, was asked what a citizen should do if an intruder broke into their house in the middle of the night and there were no police to call. In response, she blithely suggested that the opportunity to call police “comes from a place of privilege,” adding that those citizens should “step back and IMAGINE what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm.”

[….]

Bender answered, “Yes, I mean, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know, and myself too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and IMAGINE what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done.”

[HERE IS A SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION]

And to finish off DAILY WIRE’S post, they say this [quoting]:

  • Bender continued, “Our commitment is to do what is necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis Police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”

These kids are all influenced by their professors and most hyper politically correct influences from their work environment. Take Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender, she has her master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from University of California, Berkeley.

Berkeley.

Which is why she can say things like, “end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department,” or, ““step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality,” or, “and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.” Because of the atheistic, progressive bull-crap spoon fed her there.

Anyways, when a friend posted this, he intro’ed it by saying:

  • The definition of “woke” may as well be “evil masquerading as virtue”.

To which I added,

  • Wow. She is a child (watched the video in the DW article). Thinks in child like terms. Uses words like “imagine”. A “Blackwater type organization” will have to be used as contracted security… and the “well-off” [rather than everyone through 911] will truly have a system that works JUST for them. And conceal carry should be allowed fully to everyone without a record.

Here is another conversation with said friend and the intelligent analogy with Pakistan:

(Joshua P.)
Minneapolis will officially disband their police department and replace it with “community law enforcement”.

If you value your life and property, get out of Minneapolis and avoid the city like the active war zone it will be.

(Brandon P.)
I refuse to step one foot in a city without a Police Department.

(Joshua P.)
Yeah, they basically want to replace the police with publicly sanctioned gangs. It will be interesting to watch an American city model it’s security on Kabul, Afghanistan.

I wouldn’t go in the city unless I was in a tank, and then only if I had to, and I had air support.

Yep, the same thing will happen as in other parts of the world, since there is a large Somoli Muslim area in Minniapolis, no-go zones may be the norm? (via CONSERVATIVE TREE HOUSE, June 4th)

This “community policing” process is already taking place in many European communities the results create what are known as “no go zones.” Neighborhoods, and entire parts of cities, where local Sharia compliance enforcement officers have replaced the police force; and the rules, regulations and enforcement are detached from the larger social compact. Considering that Minneapolis has a large concentration of Somali Muslims within the local population, it makes sense this approach is now discussed for their city.

Minneapolis – […] Now the council members are listening to a city that is wounded, angry, fed up with decades of violence disproportionately visited upon black and brown residents. Various private and public bodies – from First Avenue to Minneapolis Public Schools – have essentially cut ties with the police department. Council members are trying to figure out what their next move is.

Their discussion is starting to sound a little more like what groups like Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective have been saying for years. On Tuesday, Fletcher published a lengthy Twitter thread saying the police department was “irredeemably beyond reform,” and a “protection racket” that slows down responses as political payback.

[….]

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the man now in charge of the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis police officers involved in George Floyd’s death, is a very well known Muslim activist and supporter of the sharia doctrine….

Are ‘No Go Zones’ where non-Muslims are not allowed and Sharia Law prevails coming to the West. Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam takes a closer look in new book: