Church and State blog: April 2015

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Our articles are vandalized on Facebook

This is not the first time that we have discovered that our articles are being vandalized on Facebook (see, for example, blog of 13 November 2014, "Now the photo selected by Facebook is not the one that appears on Facebook"). This morning when I shared on our Network for Church Monitoring (N4CM) page the eye-opening article "Pope Francis and the Dirty War – Part I", I had to do so with the title and description gone:

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When I share it on my personal Facebook wall or anywhere else, I get the same thing - no title and no description:

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I first posted this article on 29 March, so I have been able to track it down on my personal wall. There was nothing wrong with it then:

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I also made a screenshot of the article a few days after I shared it on the N4CM page on 29 March. Amazingly, I can't find this article anywhere on the page now. Again the title and the description can be easily seen:

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Church and State website

Church and State Press

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

If you would like to help us personally, please feel free to pick up one of our books (shameless plug, I know, but every sale helps us to work our way out of our precarious situation). There is currently five books available in Church and State Press here, and all proceeds from the first four of these books go to us with the authors' permission. Thank you all for all the support you have given us, and I hope we can keep our Church and State website going despite the constant threats.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Our Church and State website is down again (WITH UPDATES)

Part 1 (17 April 2015): SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website is down from the internet (WITH UPDATES)

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UPDATE 1 (12.01pm): To our American web host SiteGround: "Our website is down again. Everything had been working perfectly since 17 April (we had no problems whatsoever). We have not been doing anything to the site other than adding articles as usual. We have also not touched the site's database. Please could you restore our website, and explain what has happened."

UPDATE 2 (12.33pm): SiteGround: "It appears that the Varnish caching service has stalled. I have restarted it and your website is visible now. Please check the results on your end."

Church and State website

Church and State Press

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Housing Ombudsman: Complaint to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government

Part 1: Declan has to go to extraordinary lengths in his dealings with the Housing Ombudsman Service, which denies having received an email from our local councillor and repeatedly refuses to deal with its contents

Complaint against the Housing Ombudsman

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Compensation awarded to cover for the delay in completing this repair:

£50.00 Right to Repair
£175.00 Distress and Inconveniences (covering from the period this repair was raised on 25 September 2014 to when it was completed on 27 March 2015 at £25.00 each month)
Total £225.00

Friday, April 17, 2015

SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website is down from the internet (WITH UPDATES)

Part 1 (16 April 2015): SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website still a royal mess... Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million (WITH UPDATES)

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UPDATE 1 (3.07pm): Our American web host SiteGround effectively tells me to reconstruct our Church and State website with a new WordPress theme? "As I mentioned before we cannot specify why exactly your application started spawning these slow queries. However, this is now [sic] in any way influenced by the server, the MySQL service is setup in similar fashion on the previous shared hosting server and the current Cloud solution."

UPDATE 2 (4.32pm): SiteGround replies to my request for the name of the person to whom I should write to escalate my complaint: "At this time your server is properly functional and your website is accessible.... Should you still require for the case to be escalated update this ticket."

Church and State website

Church and State Press

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Thursday, April 16, 2015

SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website still a royal mess... Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million (WITH UPDATES)

Part 1 (15 April 2015): Despite a messed up site following SiteGround's upgrade our Facebook post reach exceeds 3 million people, with one article reaching over 1.5 million people

Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million

Clerical Child Abuse Article: 1,741,312 people reached

Click to view article

Related Post: Our Facebook "Like" counter is reduced in number and frozen after I post link in this blog to "How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations" (WITH UPDATE)

UPDATE 1 (16 April 2015): At 3.04pm we receive notification from our American web host SiteGround that our site is opening properly from the Cloud server.

UPDATE 2 (17 April 2015): SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website is down from the internet (WITH UPDATES)

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Our Facebook post reach exceeds 3 million people despite a messed up site following SiteGround's upgrade, with one article reaching over 1.5 million people

Part 1 (14 April 2015): CHURCH AND STATE WEBSITE SUSPENDED. We exceed our limit of 100,000 visitors per month within two weeks (WITH UPDATE)

Facebook Post Reach: 3.1 million

Clerical Child Abuse Article: 1,576,960 people reached

Click to view article

Yesterday SiteGround suspended our Church and State website because we exceeded our limit of 100,000 visitors per month within two weeks. The site is back now but it's a right mess. For example, this is a Google snapshot of what the top of our homepage looked like on 13 April 2015, before SiteGround restored it last night after an American-sponsored upgrade:

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And this is what it looks like now:

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The bottom of the homepage is even worse. This is what it should look like:

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And this is what it looks like now:

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The rest of the homepage is equally unrecognizable, as is every single item throughout the site. I got in contact with SiteGround about this last night. Late this morning they acknowledged that what I had before our upgrade is not what we've got now.

Church and State website

Church and State Press

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Update (16 April 2015): SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our website still a royal mess... Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million (WITH UPDATES)

Declan has to go to extraordinary lengths in his dealings with the Housing Ombudsman Service, which denies having received an email from our local councillor and repeatedly refuses to deal with its contents

Part 1 (13 April 2015): Housing Ombudsman: No record of an email from your local councillor on our system

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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

CHURCH AND STATE WEBSITE SUSPENDED. We exceed our limit of 100,000 visitors per month within two weeks (WITH UPDATE)

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UPDATE (9.56pm):

CHURCH AND STATE WEBSITE PARTIALLY RESTORED

American-sponsored upgrade: we can now cater for more than 100,000 visitors per month;

The site looks a complete mess at the moment but we are trying to get SiteGround to rectify the damage.

Church and State website

Church and State Press

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

Update (15 April 2015): Despite a messed up site following SiteGround's upgrade our Facebook post reach exceeds 3 million people, with one article reaching over 1.5 million people

Our Facebook post reach exceeds 2 million people, with one article reaching 1 million people (WITH UPDATE)

Part 1: Heavey v Single Homeless Project: Will the Central London County Court rule we consented to declarations for online referral that we are paying our own salaries and that we are both mentally ill, and despite our photographic evidence to the contrary?

Facebook Post Reach: 2.2 million

Clerical Child Abuse Article: 1,055,744 people reached

Click to view article

UPDATE (6.42pm):

Facebook Post Reach: 2.6 million

Article: 1,184,230 people reached

CHURCH AND STATE WEBSITE SUSPENDED
We exceed our limit of 100,000 visitors per month within two weeks

Related Post: Our Facebook "Like" counter is reduced in number and frozen after I post link in this blog to "How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations" (WITH UPDATE)

This is our Chairman's strong rebuttal of the Single Homeless Project's view that Declan and I are both mentally ill:

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Update: SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website still a royal mess... Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million (WITH UPDATES)

Monday, April 13, 2015

Housing Ombudsman: No record of an email from your local councillor on our system

Part 1: Statutory Compensation (Bedroom Leak): We appeal our housing association landlord's decision to award Newham Council for our Right to Repair and Distress and Inconveniences

Complaint against the Housing Ombudsman:

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Update (15 April 2015): Declan has to go to extraordinary lengths in his dealings with the Housing Ombudsman Service, which denies having received an email from our local councillor and repeatedly refuses to deal with its contents

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

Church and State blog

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Our articles are vandalized on Facebook

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Our Church and State website is down again (WITH UPDATES)

Housing Ombudsman: Complaint to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government

Friday, April 17, 2015

SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website is down from the internet (WITH UPDATES)

Thursday, April 16, 2015

SITEGROUND UPGRADE: Our Church and State website still a royal mess... Facebook Post Reach: 3.5 million (WITH UPDATES)

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Our Facebook post reach exceeds 3 million people despite a messed up site following SiteGround's upgrade, with one article reaching over 1.5 million people

Declan has to go to extraordinary lengths in his dealings with the Housing Ombudsman Service, which denies having received an email from our local councillor and repeatedly refuses to deal with its contents

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

CHURCH AND STATE WEBSITE SUSPENDED. We exceed our limit of 100,000 visitors per month within two weeks (WITH UPDATE)

Our Facebook post reach exceeds 2 million people, with one article reaching 1 million people (WITH UPDATE)

Monday, April 13, 2015

Housing Ombudsman: No record of an email from your local councillor on our system

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