The Invisible Man XaX

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Security for journalists

This fellow, Lucca RF, gives much good advice to journalists on cyber security.

Yet I found his email in my Gmail spam box.

I suppose it's coincidental that he urges avoidance of Chrome.

When I tried the link, Google tried to dissuade me, claiming it is "suspicious." If it does carry any bad code, I doubt he put it on.

What's going on, I suspect, is part of Big Tech's program to smear and delegitimize any journalist who is not "official." A few years ago, a tip sheet like his would have been welcome among news people. Now Google stigmatizes it though there is no indication of political bias. In fact, the author does not appear to be based in America.

What got him flagged was his recommendation that journalists may need to avoid GOVERNMENT snooping. Oh my word! That makes him, in Google's eyes, a dangerous conspiracy theorist.

My blog, The Invisible Man XaX, appears to have been utterly blocked from Google's search engine, though, with difficulty, recent posts can be reached via Bing.

Friday, April 16, 2021

Pope sends Assange friendly letter,
blessing the noted political prisoner

By Elise Ann Allen
Crux magazine

ROME – On Palm Sunday, Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks who made headlines in 2010 for publishing thousands of confidential U.S. diplomatic documents, received a personal letter from Pope Francis.

In a March 28 tweet, Assange’s partner Stella Moris said that “after a hard night, Julian woke up this morning to a kind, personal message from Pope Francis @pontifex delivered to his cell door by the prison priest.”

“Our family wishes to express our gratitude to the many Catholics and other Christians campaigning for his freedom,” Moris said.

The contents of the letter were not disclosed; however, it has been rumored for years that Assange is suffering from psychological trauma related to prolonged stress and anxiety over his ordeal.

As vice president in 2015, Joe Biden took advantage of a photo opportunity with Pope Francis, who was visiting Capitol Hill in Washington. (Associated Press photo.)

Assange founded WikiLeaks, an international NGO that publishes news leaks and classified information from anonymous sources, in 2006.

He came to international attention in 2010, when he published more than 250,000 confidential U.S. documents leaked to him by U.S. Army Intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. The documents dealt with U.S. military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other things.

Shortly after the publication of those documents, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange on charges of sexual assault, which Assange claimed were fabricated as a pretext for extraditing him to the United States for his role in publishing the documents.

After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, Assange breached bail and in June 2012 took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He was granted asylum by Ecuador on grounds of political persecution, with the assumption that should he be extradited to Sweden, he would eventually be extradited to the United States.

In 2019 Swedish authorities dropped their investigation into Assange, but in April of that year Ecuador withdrew his asylum over a series of disputes with Ecuadorian authorities, and UK police were invited into the embassy, and Assange was arrested.

He was found guilty of violating the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. Since then, he has been detained at the HM Prison Belmarsh, a men’s prison in southeast London.

Shortly after this ruling, the U.S. government unsealed and indictment against Assange related to the 2010 leaks, and in May 2019 was charged by the U.S. with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 – a move met with widespread criticism in the media on grounds that the charge violated the US Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press.

On Jan. 4, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States’ request to extradite Assange, insisting that doing so would be damaging to his mental health. Assange was denied bail two days later. Meanwhile, the U.S. has launched an appeal to Baraitser’s ruling.

According to an examination of Assange conducted by United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Nils Melzer in 2019, Assange demonstrated symptoms of psychological torture, chronic anxiety, extreme stress, and intense psychological trauma.

While the contents of the letter are unknown, Pope Francis’s letter to Assange is not the first time he has written to a high-profile prisoner.

Pope Francis has penned personal notes to other high-profile prisoners, including a May 2019 letter to former Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who in 2017 was charged with corruption and money laundering and sentenced to nine years in prison.

After an unsuccessful appeal, da Silva was arrested in April 2018 and spent 580 days in jail before Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled in November 2019 that incarcerations with pending appeals were unlawful, resulting in da Silva’s release.

Earlier this month, charges against da Silva were dropped on a technicality stating that the court that convicted him did not have proper jurisdiction over his case.

After his release from prison, da Silva thanked Pope Francis for his 2019 letter, which according to da Silva touched on the need to see politics as a form of charity and offered encouragement in the face of “difficult trials” he had endured, including the deaths of his wife, his brother, and his seven-year-old grandson.

Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis has shown support to inmates, visiting prisons during his international trips, and has often urged international leaders to consider granting clemency when possible.

Original story found at:
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2021/03/pope-sends-letter-to-infamous-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange

Saturday, March 13, 2021

Links to works of selected economics pioneers

If we make of economics a religion, then we will lack the ability to adapt to the emergent circumstances of the time.
That's Keynes's viewpoint, if not his words.
In fact, says Keynes, he took that outlook from Alfred Marshall who did much to make "political economy" into the scientific subject of economics. As with physics and other sciences, economics theories must remain provisional, thought Marshall, and economists ready to grapple with emergent conditions.
Keynes relates that in the 19th Century Marshall received reviewer praise for injecting morality into economics but by the 20th Century was panned for the same reason, on ground of being unscientific.
My position: If economics studies and plans are not used for the good of the people, why bother with them?

Adam Smith
Wealth of Nations
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm

David Ricardo
Anthology of best work
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/ricardo-the-works-of-david-ricardo-mcculloch-ed-1846-1888

Thomas Malthus
Principles of Political Economy
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/malthus-principles-of-political-economy#lf1462_label_063

Jeremy Bentham
Defence of Usury
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/bentham-defence-of-usury

John Stuart Mill
Principles of Political Economy (Ashley ed.)
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-principles-of-political-economy-ashley-ed

W. Stanley Jevons
The Theory of Political Economy
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/jevons-the-theory-of-political-economy

Alfred Marshall
Principles of Economics (8th ed.)
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/marshall-principles-of-economics-8th-ed

Industry and trade : a study of industrial technique and business organization and of their influences on the conditions of various classes and nations
https://archive.org/details/cu31924012536276/page/n15/mode/2up

Henry Sidgwick
The Principles of Political Economy
https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/sidgwick/ppe/index.html

Richard Cobden
Speeches on Free Trade
https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/2005/Cobden_1373.pdf

John Bright
Selected Speeches Of John Bright On Public Questions
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.52960

J.M. Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace>
A number of experts now disagree with Keynes and argue that Germany, which had not been fully defeated, did rather well economically after World War I, better in fact than its former foes France, Belgium and Britain.

A.C. Pigou
The Economics of Welfare
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/pigou-the-economics-of-welfare

Ludwig von Mises
The Theory of Money and Credit
https://archive.org/details/TheTheoryOfMoneyAndCredit

Marx's contribution
Joseph Schumpeter's widow, Elizabeth Boody, has remarked, "With Marx he had one thing in common — a kind of vision of the economic process. In his own Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter attempts to present a purely economic theory of economic change which does not merely rely on external factors propelling the eco- nomic system from one equilibrium to another."

In the preface to the Japanese edition of his Theory of Economic Development Schumpeter says,

It was not clear to me at the outset what to the reader will perhaps be obvious at once, namely, that this idea and this aim [Schumpeter's own] are exactly the same as the idea and the aim which underlie the economic teaching of Karl Marx. In fact what distinguishes him from the economists of his own time and those who preceded him, was precisely a vision of economic evolution as a distinct process generated by the eco- nomic system itself. In every other respect he only used and adapted the concepts and propositions of Ricardian economics, but the concept of economic evolution, which he put into an unessential Hegelian setting, is quite his own. It is probably due to this fact that one generation of economists after another turns back to him again, although they may find plenty to criticize in him.

Again, in the manuscript of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, the economist observes,

In his general schema of thought, development was not what it was with all the other economists of that period, an appendix to economic statics, but the central theme. And he concentrated his analytic powers on the task of showing how the economic process, changing itself on account of its own inherent logic, is incessantly changing the social framework — the whole of society in fact.

In her foreword to her husband's book, Ten Great Economists, Elizabeth Schumpeter comments, "The vision they had in common, but it led to very different results: it led Marx to condemn capitalism and Schumpeter to be its ardent exponent."