A Facebook friend posted The Guardian opinion piece Children are tech addicts – and schools are the pushers.

When Silicon Valley bosses send their children to screen-free schools, why do we believe the claims of the ‘ed tech’ industry?

I will reproduce the thread of the discussion below. However, first I will give you the conclusion I came to after thinking about this some more.

The recent spate of oligarchs who have tried to convince us that social media is evil, and that the computer billionaires that have foisted this on us are now repenting has an ulterior motive that they are hiding. The oligarchs have come to realize how powerful social media has become as a tool for disrupting the control by the ruling class. They now feel the need to put a stop to this before the olicarchy is overthrown by the people. Hence the battle to get rid of net neutrality, the attempt to censor “fake news” from the internet, and the spate of articles convincing us that the little people should pay less attention to the internet.

You don’t really think that the people who have become billionaires from computer based enterprises really want to shield their progeny from computer education, do you? I don’t see that their repentance for making billions from their enterprises is resulting in their offering to give all their billions back to us, do you? No, they want to keep their ill-gotten gains, and take away our freedom to learn about other cultures and other economic systems by talking to each other in an unrestricted way on the internet.

My initial reaction

There is only so much baloney like this that I can read. I used to study and I was an electrical engineer at the start of the computer age. I am amazed at how much more information is available to me now with computers than there was when I started. I still have a collection of slide rules, but I am amazed that we actually used to depend on those. For my bachelor’s degree thesis, I used a mechanical adding machine to do a lot of design work. Oh what I could have done if I had had a computer.

I have decades worth of technical magazines that I collected over my career. It was 20 or more years ago when I realized that even if I had the magazine in my collection, I could find an article online faster than I could find it in my library.

I made a career out of developing, supporting, and instructing about computer simulation of electrical circuits. I could get better insight into how circuits worked by simulating them than I could get in the laboratory.

Brian Leonard

The myth of technological progress is a utopian fantasy. I work with children who are addicted to these machines, don’t know how to communicate, and suffer all kinds of social problems related. Look what technological progress gave us: depleted uranium bombs, drones, nukes, automation and computer management systems, Google, Facebook, and corporate surveillance– technology is not going to save us– it’s more likely to destroy social relationships and possibly even life on earth. It’s thanks to so-called progress that we face a mass extinction, nuclear and oil and all other kinds of toxic contamination of the environmental, machines made in Chinese slave shops and using metals mined by slaves in Africa…. I’d rather not cheer for that progress which is destruction. But you can believe your utopian fantasy…. The evidence all around me shows destruction, not progress. We need Ludd, not a brave new world!

Steve Greenberg

You can cherry pick the problems and ignore the advances, but you are not doing a fair assessment. Society is free to make good use or ill of technology. If the society has made some bad decisions, try to correct those. It is silly to think that getting rid of technology will solve societal problems.

If you look at your personal experience, but keep a blind eye to other experiences, then you will not be a good teacher to your students. If you can’t see that oligrachic ascendancy is the real problem, but you focus on technology instead, you will be wasting your energy. You are more likely to send us back to the dark ages than you will be able to lead us to a better life.

If you think of only “Chinese slave” shops, but don’t see the advancement in standard of living in developing countries, then you are swallowing the oligarchy’s propaganda that tries to make you think that people in advancing countries are your enemy.

People in India, China, and other advancing countries have a right to do jobs they are capable of doing to better their lives. Don’t be so quick to think that forcing them to stay on the farms is fair treatment. It is not ordained that Americans have a right to a superior lifestyle to the rest of the world.

Remember the history of the industrial revolution. At first, people were attracted from the farms into industry because it promised them a better life. Soon the factory owners started to take advantage of these workers. Unbridled competition caused the oligarchs to drive down the wages and worsen working conditions. Eventually workers rebelled, formed unions, and solved many of the problems of urban work. We have backslid in recent years, but that doesn’t mean that workers won’t rise to the occasion again to put us back on the right track.

In the past, workers didn’t overcome their problems by giving up. I know it is hard for middle-class people to think of goiing through the struggles that the workers of the past did. That is why it may depend on the younger generation to save us.

The Washington Post has the story The Dutch were a secret U.S. ally in war against Russian hackers, local media reveal.

You can read the article to see for yourself what is claimed. Here is one statement I have chosen to highlight.

Even though American intelligence agencies agree that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election and have stood by their assessment, Trump has sent out mixed messages.

The American corporate press has lied to us before about the agreement among intelligence agencies. Perhaps they aren’t lying this time. Just remember that The Washington Post is nothing like the organization that the movie “The Post” is all about. The company and people that the movie is about didn’t have lucrative contracts with our intelligence agencies. For a hint of what I am talking about with the new ownership of the newspaper read the article Amazon, WikiLeaks, the Washington Post and the CIA from August 6, 2013.

The Nation has the video Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen.

I found this to be an amazingly well balanced assessment of Putin and Russia. I was not at all surprised by what he said because I have been able to develop a well balanced idea of Putin by reading and listening to sources outside the USA corporate press. By watching videos and reading translations I have personally heard some of the things that Professor Cohen said that Putin has said.

Common Dreams has the article ‘Reckless’: Trump Deals Blow to Renewable Transition With Solar Panel Tariff.

Dealing a serious blow to the U.S. solar industry and despite protests from experts and a national trade group, President Donald Trump has approved a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panel materials.

Responding to recommendations from the U.S. International Trade Commission, which was lobbied by two foreign-owned U.S.-based companies that argued they couldn’t compete with cheap materials from Asia, Trump on Monday authorized a 30 percent tariff on solar cells and modules that will drop by 5 percent annually over the next four years.

Just to add a little more fodder to the discussion.

The Washington Post has the article China’s breathtaking transformation into a scientific superpower.

I have cut out the bad ideas and kept the good ideas in the excerpt below.

The best response to this technological competition is to reinvigorate America’s own technological base. … increase other federal spending on “basic research.” (Government provides most of the money for this research, which is the quest for knowledge for its own sake, and amazingly has cut spending in recent years).
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It is hardly surprising that China has hitched its economic wagon to advanced technologies. What is less clear and more momentous is our willingness and ability to recognize this and do something about it.

If you don’t like the outcome when you play by your strategy, perhaps it is time to consider why the opponent’s strategy is working so well. It is silly to claim that the other side is cheating because they have come up with a better strategy. Of course they don’t want to play by your rules. Your rules are designed to make you win.

The Washington Post has the article Trump imposes tariffs on solar panels and washing machines in first major trade action of 2018.

The Suniva-SolarWorld request for protection was opposed by much of the domestic U.S. solar industry. Tariffs make solar panels more expensive, and thus discourage their use, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The trade association said the tariffs would cause 23,000 installers, engineers and project managers to lose their jobs this year as billions of dollars in planned investment evaporates. Up to one third of the 260,000 Americans currently employed in the industry are at risk because of the tariffs over the longer term, the group said.

Unlike Tonya Harding, I thought most USA residents believed that kneecapping your opponent is not their idea of fair play.

Before I retired, when faced competition from another business I preferred the challenge of outperforming the competition rather than trying to impede the competition. I had professional pride in trying to do a better job as an engineer.

I did not feel that there was an unwritten law that said I had to be paid well for my job when there were others who could do it better and for less money. What I preferred was to do my job so well, that I deserved what I was paid. When I couldn’t do that anymore, I retired.

I am continuing my reading of US Department of Defense. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department’s Secret History of the Vietnam War. Red and Black Publishers. Kindle Edition.

I have come to the section on the waning days of French control in Vietnam. I excerpt a section of a French Parliamentary mission to Vietnam to assess the situation.

“It is grave that after eight years of laisser-aller and of anarchy, the presence in Indochina of a resident Minister has not been able to put an end to these daily scandals in the life in regard to the granting of licenses, the transfer of piastres, war damages, or commercial transactions. Even if our administration is not entirely responsible for these abuses, it is deplorable that one can affirm that it either ignores them or tolerates them.”

Commenting on this report, an influential French editor blamed the “natural tendency of the military proconsulate to perpetuate itself” and “certain French political groups who have found in the war a principal source of their revenues…through exchange operations, supplies to the expeditionary corps and war damages . . . He concluded that:

“The generally accepted theory is that the prolongation of the war in Indochina is a fatality imposed by events, one of those dramas in history which has no solution. The theory of the skeptics is that the impotence or the errors of the men responsible for our policy in Indochina have prevented us from finding a way out of this catastrophic enterprise. The truth is that the facts now known seem to add up to a lucid plan worked out step by step to eliminate any possibility of negotiation in Indochina in order to assure the prolongation without limit of the hostilities and of the military occupation.”

This situation sounds remarkably like what the USA continued as it took over the effort to defeat the will of the people of Vietnam. It also sounds remarkably like the continued corruption of our present day military/industrial complex.

I am starting to read the US Department of Defense. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department’s Secret History of the Vietnam War. Red and Black Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Our involvement in the war was predicated on the fact that Ho Chi Minh’s government was a puppet of the Soviet Union. How our intelligence service came to this conclusion seems to be similar to how it has recently decided that Russia was the source of the leaked DNC emails.

“Since December 19, 1946, there have been continuous conflicts between French forces and the nationalist government of Vietnam. This government Is a coalition in which avowed communists hold influential positions. Although the French admit the influence of this government, they have consistently refused to deal with its leader, Ho Chi Minh, on the grounds that he is a communist.

“To date the Vietnam press and radio have not adopted an anti-American position. It is rather the French colonial press that has been strongly anti-American and has freely accused the U.S. of imperialism in Indochina to the point of approximating the official Moscow position. Although the Vietnam radio has been closely watched for a new position toward the U.S., no change has appeared so far. Nor does there seem to have been any split within the coalition government of Vietnam.

“Evaluation. If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly so far. Possible explanations. are:

“No rigid directives have been issued by Moscow.

“The Vietnam government considers that it has no rightest elements that must be purged.

“The Vietnam Communists are not subservient to the foreign policies pursued by Moscow

“A special dispensation for the Vietnam government has been arranged in Moscow.

“Of these possibilities, the first and fourth seem most likely.”

Our “intelligence” community seems to start with an answer, and then explain away the reasons that they cannot find evidence to support the assumed conclusion. The absence of evidence seems to be as strong support for their conclusion as finding actual evidence would have been.

I have always thought that a principle of science was that if you did an experiment that allowed you to draw the same conclusion no matter the results of the experiment, then the experiment was completely worthless.

As it becomes clearer and clearer that Google and Facebook are going to act as censors on what you can find on the internet. there is a need to find an uncensored search engine. I tonically, You can do a Google search for uncensored search.

One item tha comes out of the search is the article Best Uncensored Search Engines for Anonymous Searching.

Uncensored search engines are nothing more than search engines, which help you, browse the “censored” part of the Internet.
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A search engine which does not censor its content and let’s you access absolutely everything

On of the search engines that is uncensored is one that I already use Duck Duck Go.

1). Duck Duck Go

Clearnet URL: https://www.duckduckgo.com
Onion URL: http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/
.Onion Pages Index: Yes
This is the default search engine provided with the TOR browser. DuckDuckGo is also available on, and for the regular web, so you can use it both to access the deep web, as well as your regular websites.

They are primarily in demand for the fact that they are anonymous, and do not keep track of your activities, search history, interests, or anything else for that matter.

Also, they are one of very few uncensored search engines which actually show deep web marketplace URLs directly on the search page.

That’s exactly the kind of uncensored search engine you need while accessing the hidden/censored parts of the web, isn’t that so?

Not only that, but DuckDuckGo also doesn’t show any Ads like most traditional browsers, and even though it’s not a deal-maker, relief from those ads is surely something I personally look forward to.

The Interface resembles that of Google Chrome and has similar features and filters, but obviously, it’s much more liberal and un-conservative as compared to Chrome.

Here is an example of using Firefox to look at a site in the .onion domain using Duck Duck Go.

YouTube has the video of the Jimmy Dore episode American Journalist In Russia Tells Truth About RT.

I wasn’t surprised by the general discussion of the major topics, but there were a few details and perspectives that I found to be highly educational. If you haven’t been following the news with an open mind, but have been blinded by oligarchic propaganda, you might be very surprised at some of the discussion.