Free speech is for everyone

'think they are the speech police'

It’s always nice to see developers pay homage to classic games that inspired them throughout the years. Wuthering Waves, the latest Genshin-like gacha game to be released, has taken this notion beautifully with its references to other game franchises. So much so, that the Wuthering Waves devs slipped a hilarious reference to a Devil May Cry 5 meme into the game. Kuro pays tribute to Vergil’s chair in Wuthering Waves easter egg Screenshot: PC Invasion While some Rovers praise WuWa for its fair gacha system, others enjoy the nods developer Kuro Studios has placed into the game. During your time exploring the post-apocalyptic world, there is a chair you can find at the highest point of the map. You’ll find the location just south of Jinzhou, you’ll notice a very tall mountain. At the top, there’s a chair with the option to sit and recover health in the chair with a daunting aura, that happens to have a sword leaning next to it. Any DMC fans out th...

There are various world bosses scattered throughout Solaris-3 in Wuthering Waves, but not all of them are easy to find. While they’re all marked on the map, some of them don’t appear at all if you go to the places designated by their icons. One of the bosses that most players are having trouble with is Tempest Mephis, an Electro-charged fiend located just outside Qichi Village on the Huanglong Central Plains north of Jinzhou. When you approach the marked location for Tempest Mephis, the battle music starts playing and the boss appears for a split second before seemingly disappearing for good. Thankfully, this isn’t a game-breaking bug, it’s just a poorly-placed map marker. Wuthering Waves Tempest Mephis Boss Location The Tempest Mephis boss fight is located underground. The map marker for the boss fight is placed right on top of the boss arena, not the entrance to the boss arena, which is what is causing all the confusion among Wuthering Waves players. ...

At Tiderise Cliff in Wuthering Waves you’ll find an Induction Cell puzzle, but how can you complete it? This was the first Induction Cell puzzle I came across and it wasn’t as straightforward as it sounded. Wuthering Waves: How to complete Induction Cell puzzle at Tiderise Cliff Right by the Resonance Beacon at Tiderise Cliff is an Induction Cell puzzle that requires you to use the Levitator Utility to place two Induction Cells into two Cell Sockets. You’ll find the first Induction Cell to the left of one of the Cell Sockets. The second one was trickier to spot, use your Sensor Utility to spot it sitting between two rocks near some bushes. Turn around and place it in the last Cell Socket. Screenshots: PC Invasion After that, the power is back on in the abandoned lighthouse and you must climb to the top of it. Well, you don’t climb as much as you sprint up it. It’s a little tough to run and hop onto the platform, but take your time and sprint u...

Several major U.S. companies continue to flout First Amendment freedoms, according to a legal group’s new analysis and rankings.  Alliance Defending Freedom’s annual Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index ranks dozens of corporations based on their “respect for free speech and religious freedoms” both inside and outside of the companies.  In its third edition, announced Tuesday, the Top 10 list of shame for flouting those freedoms includes many companies on the same list last year. The companies’ scores ranged from 1% to 100%, measuring 43 different factors, including employee trainings, charitable donations, and various policies for consumers that reveal ideological bias.   ADF, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based legal nonprofit that advocates for First Amendment free speech and religious rights, analyzed the businesses’ overall histories and broke down what it regards as each company’s shortcomings. “Vague and subjective terms of service” emerged as a common factor.  1. X Corp. The company running Elon Musk’s popular social media platform X, formerly Twitter, received the worst score in ADF’s index at 2%, dropping from 5% last year. ADF faulted the platform for maintaining a “hateful conduct” policy that continues to regulate users’ speech. The policy broadly says users may not engage in “hate speech,” which ADF flagged under “unclear or imprecise terms.” The company’s score also suffered due to a lack of clear protections for employees’ personal beliefs, decisions by prior leadership before Musk took over, or because the company did not provide requested information to ADF.  2. Airbnb Coming in second at 4%, the house-sharing service’s terms of use punish users it deems guilty of promoting “bias, prejudice, racism, or hatred,” which ADF labeled as vaguely defined. The legal nonprofit also noted “divisive” training that lectures employees about “social privilege” among white people and other demographics, and how to be an “ally” for the “marginalized.”  3. Apple The tech company prohibits content on the App Store that it considers “discriminatory” or “mean-spirited” and decides each case based on what it called an “I’ll know it when I see it” policy, according to its website. Additionally, Apple “is known to require vendors, suppliers, contractors, or other equivalent third parties to adopt” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, ADF’s report said. It gave the smartphone giant a 5% rating for these and other practices.  4. eBay No sellers on eBay are allowed to list for sale “offensive materials” promoting “gender intolerance” and other undefined offenses. ADF criticized the vagueness of the policy and noted that it restricts speech “based on the personal characteristics or identifiers of” the offended person. eBay sits at 5% on the index.  5. Lyft Another 5% scorer, the ride-sharing service’s terms of use say that it may restrict a driver from using its direct-deposit program “for any reason.”  6. Pinterest ADF, rating Pinterest at 5%, noted a website policy that bans “hateful content or the people and groups that promote hateful activities.” Prohibited speech, listed under a “hateful activities” policy, includes “denial of an individual’s gender identity,” “conspiracy theories,” and more. 7. Amazon “We don’t sell … content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” say Amazon’s guidelines for book vendors. Like other companies, Amazon does not specify further what it considers offensive. The company received a 6% score. Amazon long ran a charity donation platform that discriminated against conservative and Christian nonprofits, including ADF. 8. Salesforce Also scoring at 6%, Salesforce does not allow users to “display, store, process, or transmit … [h]ate-related material,” including any material that it deems “objectionable.”   9. PayPal Customers may not use PayPal for transactions tied to “the promotion of hate” or “intolerance,” a policy that factored into its 6% rating. PayPal has a history of freezing the accounts of conservatives and others critical of the Left with little to no explanation.  10. Etsy The online store also scored 6%, in part because of its policy against undefined “offensive” speech that applies to anyone “listing items, using community spaces, and writing reviews, or having direct communication with other [users].” Previous rankings and signs of progress In many cases, the companies’ lack of participation in the survey or lack of clear policies protecting free expression hurt their scores.  X (then Twitter), Amazon, Airbnb, eBay, Pinterest, and PayPal were among the Top 10 offenders in ADF’s 2023 rankings.  ADF’s report, however, noted some “signs of progress” in corporate America. It celebrated JPMorgan Chase ending a policy the legal group saw as discriminatory against conservatives. “By the end of 2023, the bank had quietly dropped its payment processor WePay’s ‘social risk’ policy that included subjective terms like ‘hate’ and ‘intolerance’ and allowed bank employees to cancel or punish customers based on their viewpoints,” ADF said in a news release. It also noted a pattern of “de-banking” conservative groups that prompted state investigations into Chase.  “Drawing on data provided by the Business Index, a sustained campaign has resulted in a major policy change that could reshape the broader financial sector’s approach to protecting free speech and religious freedom,” the organization said.   Of the 66 companies that appeared in last year’s report, 58% had improved their scores. The post Top 10 Companies That Step on First Amendment Freedoms appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Most hardworking Americans can’t afford to spend $21 to $31 on dinner every day. If they did, they’d likely expect to get steak or lobster for their money. Yet that’s exactly how much the state of Massachusetts is spending to feed homeless migrants, according to WBZ-TV CBS Boston. The state isn’t even getting its money’s worth: The meals include spaghetti and hot dogs or rice with a single chicken drumstick. The $21 meals come from the Fairfield Inn Boston Dedham, where the state is paying $180 a day to house homeless families and migrants—even though advertisements show hotel rooms start at $129. Lunch costs $16, but a family interviewed by CBS Boston said it contains “nothing edible,” such as soup with “just bones” in it. (Photo: WBZ-TV CBS Boston screenshot) Taxpayers will spend a total of $7.3 million to feed families at the Fairfield Inn. It’s part of 17 state contracts worth $116 million that Massachusetts signed to provide free housing to migrants in hotels and motels through June, according to records obtained by CBS Boston. Nine of those, including the Fairfield Inn, are for hotels owned by Giri Hotel Management, which will make $46 million from taxpayers. When the state hired its own catering companies for migrants instead of relying on hotels, it still overspent. Massachusetts signed a $10 million contract with Spinelli Ravioli Manufacturing Co. through a no-bid process that did not ask other vendors to provide cheaper food. The state told CBS Boston that the ravioli contract, which ended in March, was justified by the “unprecedented increased demand” for food. In addition to the hotel expenses, Massachusetts spends about $75 million every month on 7,500 migrant families living in state-run emergency shelters. Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, signed a supplemental budget in March that spends $840 million over the next two years for the migrant crisis. That still wasn’t enough. The federal government agreed in April to help Massachusetts by using Medicaid funds, which Axios Boston says could cost $647.5 million over the next four years. State Sen. Peter Durant, a Republican, told CBS Boston of the hotel contracts, “This is something that we have been asking the administration for information on, for the better part of a year and have been stonewalled on the information.” Something is amiss when taxpayers are spending more to feed those in emergency housing than to feed their own children. The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com. Originally published at RealClearInvestigations.com The post Massachusetts Paying Up to $31 Per Meal to Feed Illegal Immigrants appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri is taking action against federal agencies, demanding they disclose records related to their recent initiatives aimed at censoring online comments flagged as “disinformation” ahead of the 2024 elections. Schmitt’s letter calls on FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to reveal documents detailing their collaboration with Big Tech companies to suppress information seen as unfavorable to the federal government. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. The letter follows reports that federal agencies are continuing their conversations with social media platforms, over the content on the platforms. Schmitt emphasized the federal government’s involvement in what he described as a censorship-industrial complex, particularly highlighting the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). “This activity between the government and social media companies runs contrary to the fundamental beliefs of our nation,” Schmitt wrote. “Without remorse for this Administration’s past unconstitutional actions or detailing any new protections for the rights of American citizens, senior officials have announced that this Administration will once again revive its vast censorship enterprise ‘with intensity.'” Senator Schmitt, who has been a vocal advocate for free speech, emphasized the essential role of open debate in American democracy. “The freedom to share ideas and debate opinions about the major issues of the day is a bedrock principle of our country. This exchange of opinions in the town square or virtual town square is a foundational element of what it means to be an American and critical to an informed electorate,” he stated. Highlighting past actions, Schmitt noted the scale of federal involvement in content moderation. “Now, it is well known that the scale of government officials, spanning all the way up to the White House, ordered social media companies to remove posts and deplatform users, all under the guise of combatting disinformation. In reality, this was a centralized campaign to silence conservatives and others the Biden Administration disagrees with,” Schmitt claimed. The Senator also accused the current administration of using its power to manipulate the upcoming election. “While your agencies once again ramp up massive censorship campaigns, this Administration has essentially admitted it will use this unlawful power to manipulate the 2024 election. On one of the first days in office, this Administration flagged and requested that a tweet from a political opponent in the 2024 election be ‘removed ASAP,'” Schmitt revealed. According to a November report by House Republicans, the EIP, coordinated by the Stanford Internet Observatory at CISA’s request, worked with DHS to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech before the 2020 election. This partnership was designed to evade the First Amendment and public scrutiny by laundering federal censorship efforts through private entities. The interim report documented the EIP’s attempts to censor various types of content, including true information, satire, and political opinions, by flagging them for Big Tech censorship. Among those targeted were The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis. Schmitt also pointed to the government’s influence over social media companies before the 2022 elections, noting the FBI’s role in establishing a process to flag posts deemed as disinformation. This process frequently targeted American citizens’ discussions about the election. In his letter, Schmitt demanded that Wray and Mayorkas provide detailed information on their renewed interactions with Big Tech, including the start date of these communications, safeguards for First Amendment rights, protections for political speech, and a list of topics labeled as misinformation or disinformation. He set a deadline of June 3 for the agencies to comply with his requests. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Senator Schmitt Challenges Big Tech Collaboration with Feds appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Darkness Vs. Light

Tablet: Jewish Students Describe Fear, Bullying and Threats on Campus