Google, Columbia, NASA, Germany Censor Real Climatologists’ Emails
This article is intended for Columbia University and NASA as supporting evidence for an email I (Dr. Duane Thresher) sent them. However, I think America and the rest of the world would be interested too.
Emails announcing our earlier story Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf! were censored by Google, Columbia University, Germany and possibly NASA.
In preparation for the article’s Monday, August 14, 2017 debut, on Saturday evening, August 12, 2017 I posted the storyHeil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf! on RealClimatologists.org and sent out emails announcing it from my Columbia University account, which is run by Google (frighteningly, this is the case for most universities these days).
We have a large mailing list that includes climate scientists (many former colleagues), climate research institutions, funding and other government agencies and the media, particularly in Germany. That evening I had NO problems sending an emailto all of these, in batches.
On Sunday evening, August 13, 2017 we found addresses for another relevant German agency, the Leibniz Association, and I started to send an email to them. Our first address batch resulted in a Delivery Status Notification (Failure).
No reason for this was explicitly given but the photo of Stefan Rahmstorf and Joseph Goebbels that I included in the email had been pixelated out. See the photo accompanying this article.
I removed the photo from the email and tried again. It worked.
I then tried the same email on a second address batch. Confusingly, this resulted in a Delivery Status Notification (Failure).
We had less of a clue for the reason for this. We thought the subject line, Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf!, might now (why now?) be the problem so I translated that to the English, Hail Climate Leader Rahmstorf!, but left Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf! in the body (including the link there) of the email. This again resulted in a Delivery Status Notification (Failure).
Next I translated or removed Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf! out of the body of the email too. That worked. We thus got the email out to every last intended recipient but it was a struggle.
So what happened was that Google and Columbia read my private emails and blocked them based on their content.
Stefan Rahmstorf was emailed on Saturday evening, August 12, 2017, a full day before the censorship. Rahmstorf and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt are founders of RealClimate.com. Rahmstorf is well-known for these Gestapo tactics (read the article).
So I suspect that Stefan Rahmstorf, a German citizen, contacted NASA’s Gavin Schmidt (citizenship?) and arranged to have Google/Columbia censor my (an American citizen) emails.
There are laws in Germany against displaying Nazi symbols. That’s fine, if they want to be that foolish and drive it underground where it becomes more dangerous, OK.
However, first and foremost this censorship can and should be done at the German end, not here in America where it violates my First Amendment rights. NASA is a US Government agency and Columbia receives a huge amount of US Government funding, making them subject to the First Amendment. It does not matter that Google is always more than willing to help another country censor emails.
(Note too that all the blocked emails were also blocked from going to [email protected], which is not in Germany.)
Further, this censorship has to be done at all times for all people, not selectively when someone decides they don’t like a person’s associated non-Nazi content.
Finally, in the mainstream media in Germany there are numerous comparisons of US President Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler, using photos of Hitler. If that’s OK there, something less and for a better purpose should be OK in emails to there.
We are obviously not neo-Nazis. In fact we are trying to point out and prevent just such Nazi-behavior, in this case in the climate change warrior movement in Germany. Remember: Fascism is not an ideology, it is a method that any ideology can use.
Moreover, as I wrote in the article Heil KlimaFuehrer Rahmstorf!:
“Before you get hysterical about my Nazi-era comparisons (too late!), I am not the first to make these. There were some in the article that led up to the Spiegel article and among themselves the Germans make these comparisons. They are obvious.”
We thank Stefan Rahmstorf for providing immediate proof of his Gestapo behavior we wrote about in the article but it will not stop us.
Read more at columbia-phd.org
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