Encourage good people to do something

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

14JULY20

Google famously wrote their own motto: “Do no evil” …and have struggled to live that down.

At this time in world affairs, there is no need to create anything new as the one above has an awkward resonance. It is generally attributed to the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke and has been tragically true at far too many points throughout history.

It is a close relative of the "line of least resistance".

The UK is presently an example of what can happen when good men are not doing enough.

A democratic vote of the British people dramatically confirmed their wish to leave the European Union, and recover their ability to govern themselves through directly elected representatives. This means leaving the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats of Brussels to focus on maintaining the EU as a protected trade area designed and maintained (mostly) to provide France and Germany with protected markets for their agricultural and industrial products.

The UK will now return to its once-familiar role as a powerhouse of creativity and custodian of what is, without doubt, the world’s favourite international language, on the much bigger world stage, where 93% of the population live and do business.

Meantime, the Remain campaign has never given up the hope of overturning the referendum result, and so has been working directly and indirectly using whatever tactics and means it can - with the conviction of true conscience-free zealots whose unshakeable belief in their own self-righteousness can excuse just about any means to their preferred end.

Particularly unfortunate are those “shape-shifters” who have been lifelong opponents of the EU who are now expediently choosing to shift their positions, if they feel they can gain an advantage in this febrile atmosphere.

The immediate purpose of NewsScape is to encourage good people to do something.

We presently operate mainly through the umbrella page at facebook.com/newsscape. We are establishing these section headings, where specialist contributors and curators can operate autonomously within the "NewsScape Federation". Not all these are fully maintained at present, and we welcome hearing from potential contributors, curators and editors. (And also feel free to suggest other channel topics you might want to manage?)

... more to follow if we can get Facebook to enter into a dialogue with NewsScape and cease arbitrarily attempting to block NewsScape because they don't understand what we are trying to do. But Facebook does not publish phone numbers, and it seems it does not allow staff to talk to users unless very closely chaperoned. Quite how such a curiously arrogant and unhelpful business is allowed to operate in the UK is becoming a mystery.

But we press on...

Newscape: Past present and future

NewsScape has been around as an idea for the past 25 years. All the obvious variations of the domain name were gathered to “ring-fence” the brand, and NewsScape began work as a story “scraper” that scoured the web and news sources for content. NewsScape used intelligent agents to sort what it found, to create the most comprehensive news aggregator as long ago 1999. When this service was suspended in 2006, it had collected more than 6 million de-duplicated and classified stories in MS SQL Server databases. The proposition was - and remains - that “ NewsScape reads the news, watches the TV, listens to the radio and scours the internet, so you don't need to ...” But there was no suitable business model, and user numbers were not enough to warrant devising an advertising-funded strategy. And we expected that the idea was going to be taken and developed by one of the 800 pound gorillas, so when Google News duly showed up we were not surprised; and any further development of

NewsScape

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