Shared posts

16 Mar 14:20

MATT TAIBBI: Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous: Did they tell you the part about giving the presi

by Glenn Reynolds

MATT TAIBBI: Why the TikTok Ban is So Dangerous: Did they tell you the part about giving the president sweeping new powers?

The unfortunate situation we’re in is that I think that TikTok is a dangerous information weapon from a hostile power, but I trust our own rulers only slightly more than the CCP.

16 Mar 14:12

LOSS OF TRUST: People Aren’t Buying the Boeing Whistleblower ‘Suicide.’ “It’s been almost a month

by Glenn Reynolds

LOSS OF TRUST: People Aren’t Buying the Boeing Whistleblower ‘Suicide.’ “It’s been almost a month since Boeing whistleblower John Barnett was found dead in a car outside of his hotel in Charlotte, South Carolina. He died of a single gunshot wound to the head and was found with a pistol in his hand. Authorities tentatively attributed the death to suicide. But friends and family members, along with some investigators are raising doubts about that explanation. Barnett had been in the midst of testifying as part of a lawsuit against Boeing over safety shortcomings at their production facilities. A close friend recounted a disturbing conversation earlier this year when he said that he could potentially wind up dead because of his whistleblowing activities and that if anything happened to him it would not be suicide.”

After Jeffrey Epstein, people are deeply suspicious.

16 Mar 14:06

Harvard honesty scholar faked her data. School wants her fired.

by Kane
Jts5665

It is harvard after all.

15 Mar 20:10

Boeing whistleblower told his friend before death — ‘If anything happens, it’s not suicide.’

by Kane
15 Mar 18:37

Colorado Democrats exempt legislature from open meetings law.

by Kane
15 Mar 17:43

SpaceX successfully launches the ginormous Super-Heavy Starship in 3rd flight test. Watch clips here.

by Not the Bee

On Thursday, March 14, Elon Musk's SpaceX launched the third test flight of its Starship Super-Heavy rocket, the platform the company is pushing to take humans to the moon and Mars.

14 Mar 02:29

WELL, YES: Big Tech’s Election Interference: Why Google and Meta Went Shopping for Former US Inte

by Glenn Reynolds

WELL, YES: Big Tech’s Election Interference: Why Google and Meta Went Shopping for Former US Intelligence Officers. “The timing and staffing changes within tech giants like Google and Meta after the 2016 election raise important questions. It’s hard to believe it’s just a coincidence that several CIA officers were put in charge of content moderation departments in these companies. Given the increase in aggressive censorship, it seems unlikely these appointments were random.”

13 Mar 20:21

Stoner rats are eating up the marijuana in the New Orleans Police Department evidence room

by Not the Bee
Jts5665

Sure they are...

Yo, hide the doughnuts, chief, the rats are getting high again!

13 Mar 18:24

Hunter Biden rejects public hearing after demanding public hearing.

by Kane
13 Mar 18:21

THAT’S UDDERLY RIDICULOUS! Israel trained cattle to spy on Palestinian village, says PA daily. Pale

by Ed Driscoll

THAT’S UDDERLY RIDICULOUS! Israel trained cattle to spy on Palestinian village, says PA daily.

Palestinian village elder fabricated a story about Israeli livestock participating in spying activity, which the official Palestinian Authority daily news outlet Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published as reality, according to a report by Palestinian Media Watch.

“On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail” in the village, the elder said.

The P.A. daily further claimed that a Palestinian village elder spotted Israeli cows that are actually “recruited and trained” spies. Rushd Morrar, a Khirbet Yanun village elder, told Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on Dec. 27, “These are recruited and trained cattle, as on the neck of each cow they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it, and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

If there’s one thing I learned from years of reading Gary Larson’s Far Side, it’s that cows are incredibly devious — particularly when they think that no one is looking:

13 Mar 16:41

THAT’S NOT THE KIND OF LOCKDOWN ACCOUNTABILITY WE NEED: Harvard epidemiologist in Chinese dictator

by Glenn Reynolds

THAT’S NOT THE KIND OF LOCKDOWN ACCOUNTABILITY WE NEED: Harvard epidemiologist in Chinese dictator hat wants ‘accountability’ for anti-lockdown academics. “After months of harsh COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, the country has slowly begun to reopen. While many scientists have come out in support of the return to normalcy, epidemiologist and Harvard Fellow Justin Feldman has been an outspoken proponent of the lockdowns to the point of calling for scholars who disagree with him to face ‘accountability.'”

This is basically a spoiling attack, designed to deflect demands that lockdown and mandate proponents be held accountable for their real, as opposed to imaginary, wrongs. The people who opposed them should be held “accountable” with prizes and cash awards.

13 Mar 16:39

Family Dollar and Dollar Tree to close 1,000 stores after $1.71 billion net loss

by Madeleine Hubbard
The company opened 641 new stores last year, but it is closing 1,000 stores.
13 Mar 13:21

New Study — Transgender suicide rate doubles after genital surgery.

by Kane
13 Mar 13:18

WATCH: Japan's Space One Kairos explodes just seconds after takeoff

by Not the Bee
Jts5665

Bummer.

A quick and disappointing end to what should have been an exciting launch:

13 Mar 13:12

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: West Point Deletes “Duty Honor Country” from its Mission Stat

by Glenn Reynolds

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: West Point Deletes “Duty Honor Country” from its Mission Statement. “As you can see, an unidentified ‘Army Senior Leader’ has approved the change in the Mission Statement to remove the reference to West Point’s motto, ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ and substituting a goal of graduating leaders committed to the ‘Army Values.’ West Point does not identify the current seven ‘Army Values’ in the new Mission Statement; you must navigate to another link to see them.”

12 Mar 12:52

NOT IF THE GREENS HAVE THEIR WAY: Can World Hunger Be Eradicated by 2030?

by Glenn Reynolds
Jts5665

If the exterminationist greens have their way people will be eradicated. Probably not by 2030 though.

NOT IF THE GREENS HAVE THEIR WAY: Can World Hunger Be Eradicated by 2030?

12 Mar 12:24

SPINACH FOR CHINESE KIDS, OPIUM FOR AMERICANS: https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/17668046

by Glenn Reynolds

SPINACH FOR CHINESE KIDS, OPIUM FOR AMERICANS:

Related:

11 Mar 20:24

Bwaahaha. Deadspin sold. Entire staff of Commie sportswriters laid off immediately.

by Kane
11 Mar 19:23

Gunmen Kidnap 227 Children From Nigerian School

by Daily Caller News Foundation

By Benjamin Zwediuk A group of armed men have abducted more than 200 children from a school in Nigeria, school officials said. 227 pupils are reported missing following an armed raid on the school in the town of Kuriga. A team of as-yet unidentified gunmen allegedly raided the building shortly after morning assembly, Reuters reported. […]

The post Gunmen Kidnap 227 Children From Nigerian School appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

11 Mar 18:42

Meanwhile in London, bloke arrested for saying ‘Hamas are terrorists.’

by Kane
11 Mar 18:28

WORST? MAYBE. MOST TERRIFYING? DEFINITELY:  Biden minder quits, shares the clip of the “senior mo

by Sarah Hoyt
Jts5665

This one actually is satire.

WORST? MAYBE. MOST TERRIFYING? DEFINITELY:  Biden minder quits, shares the clip of the “senior moment” that made her do so; “worst SOTU speech of all time”.

He’s lost his mind, his ability to remember, his mask of humanity. But the hatred? That remains.

11 Mar 18:25

IT’S A MISTAKE ANYBODY COULD MAKE:  Interstellar signal long believed to be proof of alien life was

by Sarah Hoyt
Jts5665

oops.

11 Mar 18:24

WOEING: United flight goes off runway, forcing passengers to evacuate in latest drama with a Boeing

by Ed Driscoll

WOEING: United flight goes off runway, forcing passengers to evacuate in latest drama with a Boeing jet.

And from Thursday: Watch: Tire Falls Off United Boeing Flight During Takeoff, Damages Multiple Cars.nyp

Metaphor alert from Athena Thorne: The Wheels Are Coming Off DEI — Literally. “The plane was diverted to San Francisco, where it landed safely. Officials report the tire landed in a Los Angeles International Airport employee parking lot. Several cars got glommed, but, thankfully, there were no injuries — this time. But at this point in our diversity experiment, can that sad day be far?…Warm, sloppy, woke congrats to the broads who made their way into the cockpit and all that, yada yada yada. It would be swell if United could also spare a moment to make sure its freaking planes don’t fall apart in midair, oh my God!”

11 Mar 17:52

INSIDE THE SURPRISE EFFORT TO FORCE TIKTOK’S DIVESTITURE: “I will kill you if you f**king shut

by Ed Driscoll

INSIDE THE SURPRISE EFFORT TO FORCE TIKTOK’S DIVESTITURE:

“I will kill you if you f**king shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really f**k you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”

This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app. TikTok is regularly accused of everything from feeding eating disorder content to girls to spying on journalists to extensively tracking user data — at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, no less.

The aforementioned assassination threat was far from an isolated incident. That office received around a dozen; at least one other House office confirmed that they too received a threat to murder the member. “It turns out threatening to kill members is not an effective or persuasive tool,” a staffer for one of the offices noted. “In fact, it really seemed to backfire here.”

Beyond the assassination threats, offices of both parties were flooded with tens of thousands of calls, directed in part by TikTok itself, when it urged users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” Countless kids took time out of their school days to tell their representatives that they will kill themselves if the government bans TikTok.

The mass freakout goes far to prove its critics’ point: TikTok May Be A Chinese Superweapon.

UPDATE:

TikTok does have some curious defenders though: Kellyanne Conway advocating for TikTok on Capitol Hill. “Both Conway and Club for Growth confirmed the working relationship. A spokesperson for TikTok declined to comment. Billionaire investor and Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass holds a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. Club for Growth leaders have been vocal opponents of moves to ban TikTok. Former President Donald Trump praised Yass as ‘fantastic’ when they were both at a Club for Growth retreat as the presumptive Republican nominee courts Yass to help his presidential campaign…It appeared to be a sudden change of heart for Trump, who, as president, tried to order TikTok removed from app stores because of its connections to China.”

11 Mar 17:45

SO META! MY “CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND” CO-AUTHOR RIKKI SCHLOTT WAS JUST CANCELED FROM SX

by Greg Lukianoff

SO META! MY “CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND” CO-AUTHOR RIKKI SCHLOTT WAS JUST CANCELED FROM SXSW.

It appears that I’ve been canceled … for speaking up about cancel culture.

Organizers of the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival declined to approve my participation in a panel of speakers.

The reason? Concern that I’d dared to speak out against cancel culture.

An email from SXSW staff, shared with me by the panel’s organizer, reveals the festival was “hesitant to approve” my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture.”

Oh, the irony!

You know Rikki, I heard there is this book about Cancel Culture that you might find interesting…

11 Mar 15:39

APPARENTLY MASS MURDERERS AND RAPISTS LIE. I KNOW. LOOK HOW SHOCKED MY FACE IS:  Wharton statistici

by Sarah Hoyt
08 Mar 15:33

Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines

by Chris Morrison

Germany has begun felling up to 120,000 trees from the 'fairy tale' forest of Reinhardswald – setting of many Brothers Grimm tales – to make way for wind turbines. But not a peep in protest comes from the Greens.

The post Germany Begins Felling 120,000 Trees From ‘Fairy Tale’ Forest to Make Way for Wind Turbines appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

08 Mar 15:33

America Enters the Samizdat Era

by Matt Taibbi

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. The once-mighty Soviet government was already a ghost ship and the closest thing to repression I saw was a farsovshik or black-market dealer shoved into a cop car near my school’s subway station.

Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the snitch on the “Intourist” bus (the ratio was one party snoop for every four or five travelers), or making sure to be out of earshot of the old lady sitting na lavochke (on the bench outside the apartment building) before sharing a dangerous opinion, or the stress of sharing a kommunalka, or communal apartment, with a politically orthodox family. The bloodiest period of Soviet totalitarianism ended in the fifties, but the habits remained long after, including the advanced system of alternative media that ultimately broke the state: samizdat.

Tonight, along with Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, I’ll be accepting the inaugural Samizdat Prize, given by the RealClear Media Fund. Samizdat is a bit of a play on words, since like a lot of politically oppressive groups the Soviets had a mania for reducing beautiful language to state-acceptable ugly compound words (GosPlan, GULAG, etc.), so in place of GosIzdat (State-Publish, the official publisher) dissidents created Sam- or “Self” Izdat: “Self-Publish.”

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events. Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke, getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.

Jay, Miranda, and I all share a connection to the same story. When Miranda published her blockbuster New York Post exposé of October 14, 2020, “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” Internet platforms Twitter and Facebook experimented for the first time with disappearing a major political story in the middle of an election year. Not only did both platforms suppress the story, but as I later found in internal correspondence, Twitter used tools previously reserved for child pornography to prevent individuals from sharing the story in direct messages — the digital version of a Cheka agent intercepting that copy of a Solzhenitsyn or Voinovich story before one person could hand it to another.

Meanwhile, when Dr. Bhattacharya conducted an experiment on his own initiative proving that the WHO had massively overstated the infection mortality rate of Covid-19, and later organized against lockdown policies he and many others felt were both ineffective and dangerous, the result was digital suppression — not because he was incorrect, but because his message was politically undesirable. Along with Bari Weiss, one of the first things I saw when Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal files was a page showing Jay had been placed on a “trends blacklist.” This was just before we discovered that the platforms were in regular contact about content with agents of the American versions of the KGB or NKVD in the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, State, and Defense, among others.

The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.

Like Jay and Miranda I’m sure, I’m honored to be chosen for the Samizdat prize, but also a little horrified that such an award is now necessary. People with dissenting ideas will now have to find alternative ways to distribute. As was the case in the Soviet Union, official news will be unpopular in America because the public will know in advance that it is full of untruths and false narratives — but that won’t translate into instant popularity for true reporting or great satire or comedy, because the reach of these things can be artificially suppressed.

We’re going to need to find new ways of getting the truth to each other, and it’s not clear yet how those networks will work, if they will at all. It may come down to handing each other mimeographed papers in subway tunnels, as they did in Soviet times. We haven’t built that informational underground yet, but no matter what, the first steps will necessarily involve raising awareness that there’s a problem at all. That’s why prizes like this are important, and the agitation and resistance of people like Jay and Miranda and so many others right now are so crucial. We don’t want our speech freedoms to go gentle into that good night; we want them to go kicking and screaming, or better yet, not go at all.

The good news? As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. The more the Soviets tried to clamp down, the more power they gave to books and stories like Master and Margarita or A Circle of Friends. As depressing as things sometimes look now, those who would suppress speech have the real problem. Imagine the problem of stopping the truth in the digital age? There will always be people who’ll try, but history shows — they never succeed for long.

08 Mar 14:19

ALL OF WHICH JUST MAKES EVERYTHING WORSE:  Biden’s Plan Would Raise Minimum Corporate Tax to 28%,

by Sarah Hoyt
Jts5665

Clownworld.

07 Mar 22:38

MCONNELL OUT, BUT EARMARKS ARE BACK IN, BIG-TIME: More than 6,000 of them with total value of $12.7

by Mark Tapscott

MCONNELL OUT, BUT EARMARKS ARE BACK IN, BIG-TIME: More than 6,000 of them with total value of $12.7 billion in the spending bill now before the Senate and passed yesterday by the House. No, $12.7 billion is a tiny portion of a $460 billion spending bill, but, as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) often said: “Earmarks are the gateway drug for Federal Spending Addiction” among senators and representatives.