The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods:

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SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “JWR”.  Today, we return to the topic of the growing Internet censorship campaign.

New Writing Contest Prize!

We’ve just added a new prize to the Third Prize package, in our bi-monhtly writing contest: Three sets each of regular and wide-mouth reusable canning lids. (This is a total of 300 lids and 600 gaskets.) This new prize is courtesy of the fine folks at Harvest Guard. Their products are made here in USA. This prize has a $270 value.

Millions of Pigs in Asia Culled

More about the current spread of African Swine Fever: Millions of pigs in Asia culled as African swine fever spreads. (Thanks to G.P. for the link.)

Medal of Honor Award Announced

Reader SOG mentioned this in The Army Times:  Medal of Honor announced for soldier who fought through three floors of insurgents in Fallujah. Here is a quote:

“The president will award the Medal of Honor on June 25 to a soldier who fought through a nest of insurgents during the second Battle of Fallujah in 2004, the White House officially announced Monday.

Then-Staff Sgt. David G. Bellavia originally received the Silver Star for his actions, but his citation was revisited as part of a review of valor awards and determined worthy of the nation’s highest combat award.

The award will give Bellavia one of now seven Operation Iraqi Freedom Medals of Honor, and make him the only living recipient from the Iraq War.

During the battle, Bellavia single-handedly killed multiple insurgents, including one during hand-to-hand combat.

A squad leader at the time, Bellavia, now 43, was clearing a block of buildings when his platoon was pinned down on Nov. 10, 2004, in Fallujah, Iraq.”

Google Search Manipulation Update

Video: Google vs DuckDuckGo — Search engine manipulation, censorship and why you should switch.  JWR’s Comment:  I use Start Page as my default search engine, because it is has neutral, unfiltered search results and it maintains no search histories!

And here is a quite recent example, showing their ongoing manipulation: Google Protecting Jussie Smollett From ‘Disparaging’ Searches

YouTube is Treating You Like a Robot

Some cogent analysis by Matt Christiansen: They Think You’re a Stupid Robot — Reading Between the Hit Piece Lines. JWR’s Comment: The only way to avoid being manipulated by YouTube’s algorithms is to manually subscribe to the sites that you decide are worthy. Otherwise, the Corporate Thought Police’s constantly changing algorithms will gradually make anyone to the right of Karl Marx disappear from view. Oh, and as each of your favorite commentators is de-platformed (and they probably will be!), you will need to actively search for other platforms where they can be seen, and then subscribe there.

Two More Google Blacklists Remove ‘Fringe Domains’

Reader G.P. sent this from The Daily Caller: REVEALED: Two More Google Blacklists Designed To Remove ‘Fringe Domains’ And Op-Eds From Special Search Results.

Pinterest Censoring Christian Words & Groups

Pinterest Bans Pro-Life LiveAction, Censors Conservative Content. Here is a snippet:

“In screenshots of the blacklist shared with The Daily Caller, the instructions at the top of the page say, “To ensure the blacklist will REMOVE a URL, add a line ‘# REMOVE url’.” And, “To ensure the blacklist WON’T remove a URL by accident, add ‘# PERMIT url’,” indicating that the blacklist is manually edited.

One of the blacklisted results was a Washington Post op-ed titled, “How Vladimir Putin Became The World’s Favorite Dictator,” which the algorithm pulled in response to the query “who is the dictator of Russia.”

In one of the changelogs for the web answers blacklist, a Googler alludes to the blacklisting of all opinion content for web answers.

“We are going to be removing opinion docs from all of newsey/political/sensitive webanswers. So, BLing any document that we consider to be clearly opinion is not an issue,” the note says.”

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You can send your news tips to JWR. (Either via e-mail of via our Contact form.) Thanks!

 


16 Comments

  1. Are you certain that Startpage’s results are truly unbiased? From their about page: “You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs.” It sounds to me as if they are giving you Google’s results. Now, are they the true results or Google’s manipulated results? Who knows? I do use them, but I also use Bing and DuckDuckGo to get a balanced set of results.

      1. However, if you watched the YouTube video “Google v. DuckDuckGo”, you’ll see that Google’s search engine is highly manipulated and censored. So, even though you’re viewing Google results anonymously, the results are still skewed to see the results Google chooses for you rather than seeing true organic search. I’m not suggesting DuckDuckGo is perfect, but it does appear it stays closer to the true organic search most people are looking for.

    2. I would guess they are Google’s results based on their proprietary algorithms. You don’t think they are spending extra money to maintain separate honest search results do you?

      I’d be interested in knowing where Start Page gets the money to pay Google to hide your IP address. If, in fact, they do.

      Remember, this is the company that originally said “Do no evil” but has since quietly removed the phrase from their literature.

      1. Ladywest, I wondered about that “Do no evil” business when I started hearing about some of Google’s stinky, coercive practices years ago. Easy to say. Hard to fulfill.

        Carry on

  2. Millions of Pigs in Asia Culled
    But why? Aren’t all pathogens equal? Why would an Asian pig not be immune to an African pathogen? Aren’t all pigs and pathogens the same? Can’t they all just coexist? Are these pigs racist, er, pathogenist? Are these pigs facist anti-globalists? Look, these pigs will just have accept foreign pathogens because the NWO says that it’s for the best. All pathogens are basically good inside if they just had enough love and free stuff from the State to ensure their equality then paradise would be had by all pigs. Any similarity to real pigs or foreign pathogens in this sarc is purely coincidental. Man, I should be in some kind of re-education camp for this. I feel horrible.

    Startpage
    Yep, they switched to Google a couple of years back. They simply don’t track is all.

    Pinterest
    The snipet claims that a conclusion can be reached that “censoring” is therefore manually being done. This is not necessarily the case as it’s likely a combo of algo and human.

  3. Here’s an interesting exercise. I just put “Hitler’s writings” and ” James Wesley, Rawles” into Google and Start Page search engines. The results [for each search] were 100% similar except that on Start Page the first 3 results were ads. That’s how Google gets paid.

    The following might give you pause though. Type in “southern poverty law center” into Start Page and see the one ad which was at the beginning. Click that and you are taken to the Counter Extremism Group where you will find a Guide to White Supremacy Groups. With all the cookies you’d ever want. And a lot of bias you’d probably prefer to be without.

    Google’s algorithms. Google’s results.

      1. I’m with Craig Davis, Rebel Yeller I have seen a wide range of opinion on this site. We have ample room for disagreement. The moderator decides whether someone is on the wrong site.

        The 3% of “insurgents” who took on the British empire, lo these many years ago, developed many of the tactics used in Iraq.

        Ask duckduckgo about Col. Francis Marion, for starters. If I remember correctly, the CSA had quite a few “insurgents” bedeviling the Union army.

        According to Capt. Scott Ritter, the Marine WMD inspector, there were no WMD. The stated reasons by the Bush people for attacking Iraq, were by the testimony of Capt. Ritter, bogus.

        Many Iraqis were standing against foreign troops who they did not see as liberators. WHen a bunch of heavily armed stranger show up in your town and kill your family members, what are you going to do?

        Carry on

  6. I do what MP does, particularly when searching for information on controversial or sensitive topics. Use of a VPN in conjunction is probably a good idea as well. While Startpage is my 1st goto for most everything, if I feel the search results are “iffy” I’ll use bing and duckduckgo as well.

    As an aside, I also love bing’s multiple destinations mapping feature so I can compare multiple geographic locations at once or easily switch back and forth.

  7. Ladywest: I actually emailed Katherine Albrecht directly a few years ago and asked her where Startpage gets its funding (since she I think sat on the board at one point and had something to do with its initial creation IIRC) but never got an answer back.

    I felt like I was prying a bit but also I felt that, combined with the lack of response from someone who I previously respected greatly in the truth and Christian department, since the funders seem to be a European company that I was not able to get much more information on, I was left with the feeling that something wasn’t right.

    Whatever the case, someone has to pay all those hosting and bandwidth costs and the ancillary costs that go with hosting anything so… ya gotta wonder. Could just be a giant honeypot to quietly catalog “alternative” viewpoints. I still use it and tried out startmail as well, though.

    That’s not to malign her excellent work on exposing the RFID industry. That is some very detailed research and I was able to cross-reference everything cited. Frightening.

    1. So I asked Startpage (the search engine itself) how Startpage gets its funding and the first result was this: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/180/20/how-can-startpage-be-free-how-do-you-make-money

      “Like many other websites and Internet services, Startpage.com generates its income from advertising. When you perform a Startpage.com search, you may see up to three sponsored search results at the top of the results page. These ads are labelled accordingly. Clicking a sponsored link will take you off the Startpage.com website to an advertiser’s website.

      Unlike other search engines and websites that run sponsored ads, our ads are anonymously generated solely based on the search term you entered, not on your past searches, browser history, or tracking cookies, since we do not use those things. Startpage.com does NOT share any privacy-sensitive user data (such as IP address or cookie information) with any provider of our ads in order to display those ads to you.

      However, by clicking on an ad, like any other external website you click on after performing a Startpage.com search, you leave the privacy protection of Startpage.com and are subject to those websites’ data collection policies.”

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