News of today: Youtube has permanently shut down the channel of Jolie Olie aka CustomGrow420 for a not further specified "community guidelines violation". This channel has - until yesterday - been one of biggest marijuana channels on Youtube with far over 1 million subscribers.

How accurate are Gallup polling results in general? Like many other mainstream pollsters, Gallup wrongly predicted a win for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump right up to the day of the 2016 election. Gallup more famously predicted in 1948 that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry S. Truman and also incorrectly forecast a slim victory for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter in 1976. While Gallup correctly predicted the winner of the 2008 presidential election, it was ranked by a Fordham scholar at 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of precision. In 2012 Gallup wrongly predicted a Mitt Romney win, and received a drubbing by poll analyst Nate Silver as the least accurate among 23 major firms, with a 7.2 point gap from the final result. More gravely, Gallup was criminally charged and paid fines in 2012 over well-documented charges of falsifying data.

It’s about damn time somebody slapped that smug, holier-than-thou look off of James Comey’s face.

The former FBI Director paid a visit to ‘The View” to regale the liberal ladies with his mean-spirited stories about President Trump. Anticipation was high:

He wasn’t counting on someone: Meghan McCain.

McCain, who is still a recent addition to the show, ripped Comey a new one, calling him out for his faux all-shucks demeanor.

Let’s get things straight: Comey wrote a book on ethical leadership that reads like a jilted lover’s drunken Facebook wall message. And now he wants to pretend he’s some moral voice for America. McCain wasn’t having it.

An FBI agent faced up to five years in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to providing classified documents to a reporter in the second leak case pursued by the Trump administration linked to The Intercept.

Terry Albury admitted in a Minnesota court to charges that he disclosed information on how federal agents assess and manage informants during 2016 and 2017.

The names of the reporter and media outlet which received the information were not given in court documents.

But specifics of the leaked materials and the timing laid out in the charges pointed to The Intercept, an online publication which frequently breaks important stories on national security.

With astounding double-think, the US and Britain accuse Russia of "tampering" with the alleged chemical-weapon attack site in Syria's Douma – just days after the US, UK and France barraged the county with over 100 missiles.

If anyone is guilty of tampering with the alleged crime scene, it is the NATO trio who rushed to bomb Syria just as inspectors belonging to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrived in Syria – invited there by the Syrian and Russian governments.

The frenzied Western media campaign to find Syria and Russia guilty of a war crime involving alleged chemical weapons is further highlighted by the reporting this week by award-winning British journalist Robert Fisk.

Fisk, who has been covering Middle East war zones for nearly 40 years, went to Douma city to file his report for The Independent. Credit goes to The Independent for publishing Fisk's investigative work.

A new generic method to detect fake accounts on most types of social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, has been developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba and the University of Washington in Seattle.

According to a study just published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, the new method is based on the assumption that fake accounts tend to establish improbable links to other users in the networks.

Google may be the world’s most popular search engine, but it has also been the subject of a number of accusations in recent years that it is purposefully censoring searches and influencing results. In the case of search results related to the Parkland shooting, that alleged influence is becoming even more apparent.

This week, the staff at The Free Thought Project began testing various keywords related to the Parkland shooting on different search engines, and we noticed that if our search terms were controversial, the first page of Google results was filled with entirely different information than the other search engines. The information showed on Google was often not relevant to our search, and the results always seemed to support the official narrative.

The most striking of these results came when we searched for the words “girl says 3 shooters parkland,” expecting the news footage of an eyewitness from the school saying that there were multiple shooters.

I'm old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis. For those few days in 1962, the family dinner table was tense and the air - the attitude - in the country was surreal. People lived and went to work, as before, but hanging over every waking moment was the full conscious realization, of every second of every day during the crisis, of the possibility that civilization could go up in mushroom clouds of radioactivity. Years later, as the full story of the Cuban missile crisis was finally known and told, it became clear that the world had made it through the crisis largely because two men - Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and American President John F Kennedy - had stood down their countries' respective "war hawks." The real life scenario had come uncomfortably close to Stanley Kubrick's black comedy, Dr. Strangelove.

With the very real prospect or war hanging over the world, the media has a special role to play in getting to the truth.

A properly functioning free press is there to speak that truth and be the backbone of a strong democracy.

But what happens when a partisan media stops holding power to account – can it still claim to serve the people or does it become a weapon of mass distraction?

I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either.

What are we to make of the extraordinary war crimes committed by the United States in the 21st century that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, resulting in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced peoples? Consider, for example, the latest Washington war crime, the illegal attack on Syria. Instead of protesting this illegality, the American media egged it on, cheering impending death and destruction.

After a hopeful improvement, the New York Times coverage of the Gaza protests is unfortunately back to its normal one-sided reporting — and intense pressure from Hasbara Central is surely a major reason. Take a look at this tweet yesterday, as the paper’s main reporter, David Halbfinger, jumps to respond to a pro-Israel critic:

In the latter half of the interview, BBC’s Annita McVeigh asked the following questions after West’s comment about Bosnia:

“We know that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday, or accused a western state on Friday, of perhaps fabricating evidence in Douma or somehow being involved in what happened in Douma. Given that we’re in an information war with Russia on so many fronts, do you think perhaps it’s inadvisable to be stating this so publicly given your position and your profile? Isn’t there a danger that you’re muddying the waters?”

Robert Fisk is one of the very few excellent investigative journalists still employed in the UK. He is twice winner of the British Press Awards‘ Journalist of the Year prize, and seven time winner of the British Press Awards’ Foreign Correspondent of the Year. He is extremely smart and knows the Middle East very well. He has just made his way – not accompanied by Russian or Syrian government officials – to Douma and this is what he reports.

If you care to search for Robert Fisk on twitter, the attacks on his reputation and integrity at this very moment from achieve nothing neo-con trolls and media lackeys are astonishing. He is in Douma – they are at their desks.

“Am I surprised by any of this? No, of course not, because this is with the media in this country does,” Hannity said. “Let me set the record straight. Here’s the truth. Michael Cohen never represented me in any legal matter. I never retained his services. I never received an invoice.”

“I never paid Michael Cohen for legal fees. I did have occasional brief conversations with Michael Cohen, he’s a great attorney, about legal questions I had, where I was looking for input and perspective. My discussions with Michael Cohen never rose to any level that I needed to tell anyone that I was asking him questions. And to be absolutely clear, they never involved any matter, any — sorry to disappoint so many — matter between me, a third party, a third group at all.”

Let it not be said that sticking to your guns means you lose.

Last week, Laura Ingraham returned to Fox News after a week-long break. Before her short sabbatical, gun-control activist, and de facto Democratic Party spokesman, David Hogg launched a boycott against her program, targeting the show’s advertisers.

While many advertisers jumped ship at the slightest threat of bad publicity, some advertisers such as MyPillow weren’t so easily cowered. Fox News also stood behind their host, defending Ingraham against the vicious liberal attacks. And it looks like it paid off.

Mediaite reports:

Some defense experts poured cold water over Pentagon claims Saturday that the U.S.-led strike set back Syria's chemical weapons program "for years"

One of the three targets in the airstrikes was a chemical and biological weapons research and production facility just outside Damascus.

Experts suggest chlorine gas or other chemical agents like mustard gas are still available from an industrial base so difficult to fully eliminate.

Sebatian Gorka officially jumped the shark Friday night when he launched into an emotional, embarrassing tirade attacking decorated war veteran Colonel Douglas Macgregor for questioning the narrative on Trump's Syria strikes.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor said Friday on Laura Ingraham's show Assad launching a chemical attack when he's on the brink of victory "doesn't make any sense," and said he questions the claims he used "sarin and chlorine gas" together. "That's never happened before," Col. Macgregor said, "that's a first in the history of chemical warfare."

Col. Macgregor added that tonight's attack was a "cosmetic attack" which will amount to little because Russia and Iran are the real power in Syria.

Sebastian Gorka responded by screaming, "Shame on you for questioning General Mattis!"

Media scoundrels consistently support all US-led wars of aggression on nations threatening no one – attacked solely for their sovereign independence, refusing to bow to Washington’s will.

Following overnight US-led aggression on Syria, screaming headlines expressed support for what demands condemnation.

The NYT screamed “US Attacks Syria in Retaliatory Strike” – over nothing, the Times failed to explain.

Other Times headlines continued the self-styled newspaper of record’s assault on Syria, roaring “Britain and France Join Strikes to Show Western Resolve” – the Times way of explaining naked aggression.

Another headline roared “Tough Talk, but a Restrained Strike.” It could have been much more destructive and may be ahead in follow-up aggression.

This is hugely alarming. South Front is a valuable member of the alt-media family but its output is somewhat unique. Where the rest of us are tend to be very opinionated and specialize in commentary, South Front sticks to wire-agency style updates. Their output are dry news updates from around the world's conflict zones. If even such a matter-of-fact site is not safe from censorship no one is.

In 2014 Sky owner and media mogul Rupert Murdoch won the ADL Award. The honour was clearly awarded for a reason. On occasion, Sky changes itself into a state propaganda service. The video above shows such an event . Sky crudely cut off the former commander of the British Armed Forces, Jonathan Shaw, as soon as he went ‘off script’ by suggesting that the Syrian regime couldn’t have been behind the Douma gas attack. General Shaw attempted to point out that chemical warfare is a desperate act, not something you would expect from the Assad regime that has basically won.

Sky News cut off the former commander of British Armed Forces Jonathan Shaw in Iraq during Syria discussion after he said the gas attack in Douma was a false-flag.

Blackburn described Zuckerberg as unprepared to discuss certain issues during his testimony. She said, “One of the things that struck me was that [Mark Zuckerberg] seemed really unprepared on issues of legislation, about the Federal Trade Commission consent decrees that [Facebook] had entered into in 2011 and the implications of that. He seemed uninformed about the lawsuits that they had settled and was questioned on. A couple of my Democrat colleagues and I were talking after the hearing, and we had expected him to come before us and be conversant in those issues. … We were surprised that he did not have information to respond to the questions he was asked.”

Nowhere to be found was a pacifist: someone who opposes war, all war, no matter what. Nor were there any anti-interventionists: people who say Syria is not our business and should be left to sort out its own affairs.

Death of people is always terrible. 3 million children die of hunger every year and it is just as terrible. But no one talks about it. And of course human beings die in war. That’s not the question. The question is: “Why are they dying?” Who got it going? “” Who provoked it?” To finish what I am saying, perhaps even the viewers also want to hear: In Syria the war is being fomented with the supply of arms and training. Training, think of it: The rebels who are shooting civilians are trained by the Americans. Among other things, this has also been written up in their newspaper articles. Then they tell us that when the Syrian army, helped by the Russians, tries to free civilians from an occupied city, where the rebels are holding civilians hostage as human shields, would this be an aggression against the population? But it’s exactly the opposite! The rebels have been defeated and now they come in, EU, France and others, and they want a UN resolution to protect the civilian population.

European Commission investigators raided Twenty-First Century Fox's London office on Tuesday, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Sources at the location told the newspaper that authorities were trying to be discreet and had been told to keep details of their mission confidential. The Telegraph reported that investigators will be on site through Wednesday and maybe Thursday.

Shares of Fox fell more than 1 percent in extended trading.

The raid comes amid Fox's drawn out takeover of Sky, which has fallen under intense scrutiny by regulators at the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority.

Earlier this year, the agency provisionally found Fox's bid would not be in the public interest. It said there are concerns that the deal may lead to the Murdoch Family Trust wielding too much influence over public opinion and the political agenda.

Fox Networks Group said in a statement to CNBC that it is "cooperating fully with the EC inspection."

A new name to pay attention to: Palantir.

Palantir’s clients include the CIA, DHS, NSA, the FBI and more.

Founded by Peter Thiel and very friendly with Facebook.

Here’s what the UK’s Guardian says about the company:

“It is all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists. Palantir does not have an office, it has a ‘SCIF’ on a back street in Palo Alto, California. SCIF stands for ‘sensitive compartmentalised information facility’. Palantir says its building ‘must be built to be resistant to attempts to access the information within. The network must be ‘airgapped’ from the public internet to prevent information leakage.”

If you thought Russia interfering in America’s elections was a big deal, you might want to hear the Washington Examiner’s Michael Rubin’s plan for interfering in Syria’s affairs.

Apparently we have been doing our job too well recently, and somebody REALLY doesn’t appreciate it!

Traffic on the site has exploded over the past few days, and is about 3X its usual level - until about an hour ago.

Our site was down for about 2.5 hours yesterday evening EST, and has been intermittent this afternoon, due to a sustained and relatively sophisticated DDoS (denial of service) attack.

It took me about an hour of trying to publish this article, and I still can't load an image with it. I've sent out this same message via our email newsletter list. If you haven't signed up for that yet, please do, it may be the only reliable way to stay in touch with you if they keep disrupting the site.
I've heard that other sites, Fort Russ, and Southfront have also been under attack.

Mark Zuckerberg notably failed to mention the recent revelations about the Obama 2012 campaign’s exploitation of the platform’s weak pre-2014 data protections toharvest masses of data from non-consenting users. But when looking deeper at the number of former Obama staffers and former Hillary staffers in senior positions at the social media giant, it becomes a lot easier to see the “why” behind the obvious and glaring question.

It isn’t a secret that Facebook has been censoring anyone with a non-left political ideology. Even Diamond and Silk have had a run-in with censorship.

As the United States continues to experience sensational mass shootings and many Americans call for gun control, the London is dealing with its own rash of violent crime, mostly in the form of knife attacks.

Countless memes circulating on the internet have pointed out that despite the British government’s harsh gun laws, criminals have still found ways to commit violence and murder. Despite this, the government is clamping down further, attempting to restrict knife possession even more than it already has in its fruitless attempts to stop the wave of crime (in 2014, for example, a teenager was restricted from buying spoons, a measure that has apparently failed to reduce crime).

But there is more to the story, and what’s missing from the mainstream conversation further discredits the actions of the British government.

Last night Tucker Carlson questioned whether the Assad regime was actually responsible for the recent Syria chemical attack, stunning a lot of people, but Carlson stood by it tonight and told viewers people want them to just “shut up.”

“All the geniuses tell us that Assad killed those children,” Carlson said last night. “But do they really know that? Of course, they don’t really know that, they’re making it up. They have no real idea what happened. Actually, both sides in the Syrian Civil War possess chemical weapons. How would it benefit Assad, from using chlorine gas last weekend?”

Tonight Carlson again questioned the wisdom of striking Syria before bringing up his commentary and the reaction it received.

He said no one wants to ask the questions he’s asking, bringing up the people who “denounced us,” including New York Post editor Seth Mandel‘s simple “Stfu”:

Laura Ingraham responded to the ongoing silencing and demeaning of conservative voices in America over the past several decades.

She said that "bullies on the left" are continuing to "aim to silence conservatives."

Ingraham said educators first tried to indoctrinate 1980s students into believing Reaganism and conservative Constitutional principles were "racist" because the founders and other key icons of the movement were apparently "racist white men."

"Their ultimate goal was to bully them into silence," she said. "It failed."

But, she said that the left's "propaganda" did get through to some of the students and "shaped a new generation of young adults" who came up with new jargon like "safe spaces," "microaggression" and "white privilege" as rhetorical tools to silence opposing views.

The easily-verifiable false claim by Voice of America journalist that Russian tanks were filmed entering Ukraine was shared thousands of times before being debunked. The journalist, however, refused to issue a retraction.

Watching Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg answer questions yesterday by a congressional inquiry and saying he is open to regulations on his company is like watching my long-time suspicions play out in real-time, on live T.V.

Facebook may just become the de facto Real I.D. of a Satanic Beast System. No Joke. How you may ask, well let’s look at that.

Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, etc. have not only become the online gateways to accessing the internet, they have actually become the internet itself.