When the Lives of Others is a movie about you. New at the Belmont Club
Author Archives: Richard Fernandez
Backing Up Your Social Media Data
Did you know you can back up your social media data? The Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want. The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability …
Maybe the Deplorables Are Today’s People of Color
Back in 1988 Bill Moyers was recalling Lyndon Johnson explaining how to keep whites poor by encouraging them to look down on “colored men”. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch …
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Taking Over Without a Shot
It’s a good thing Washington is immune to Chinese influence. “Its ultimate goal is to control what’s between the ears. That is, your brain or how you think, which [Beijing] hopes leads to a change of behavior,” Tzeng Yi-suo, director of the cybersecurity division at the government-funded Institute of National Defense and Security Research in …
Bidenomics Will Bankrupt Us
So argues David Goldman. Money is information. But if facts are anything you want them to be then you can create money out of nothing. Truth and money goes from being rooted in reality to a deep fake. So how can Bidenomics go bankrupt? It can happen if reality exists, if God is something you …
The Undeserving
What better way to demonstrate virtue than by intimidating the unworthy. Parler, which is a favorite of Trump supporters, was booted off Apple and Google’s platforms after the Capitol riots and Amazon took it off its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services. In response, Parler filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Amazon countersued, saying Parler’s …
“Cancel” Is Too Weak a Term
Following last year’s efforts to ban Trump Administration officials from speaking on campus, Harvard University students are now circulating a petition that calls for revoking degrees from Trump supporters and aides who attended the elite Ivy League institution The much more accurate term is “to unperson“, to create: an individual who usually for political or …
Forbidden Questions
There are two forbidden questions in public discourse today. The integrity of the 2020 elections; The origin of the Covid virus. John Hinderaker writes: “Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion …
The Capitol Narrative Gets Complicated
Reality usually is. But in an ideological world where the good side and the bad must clearly distinguishable and never stray from their categories nobody is interested in the truth. “Journalism” becomes impractical; only polemic is possible. You’re stuck with the narrative you start. This is true of everything. Maybe even lockdown advocates knew this …
Google Blocks News
Google has admitted to hiding news stories from the top of its internet searches Readers of leading Australian outlets report no longer seeing latest top stories Search giant said it changed its algorithm as part of a ‘short-term experiment’ Move criticised as show of power as Google fights plans to make it pay for news …
Political Einsteins vs HAL
Won’t stop government from creating AI because: Politicians will be certain they can pay HAL off. Politicians will fund the construction of an AI agent to control AI. Artificial idiocy always beats artificial intelligence. Part of the team’s reasoning comes from the halting problem put forward by Alan Turing in 1936. The problem centres on …
Our Selective Blindness
Facial recognition can track one face from a billion yet databases can’t identify the Covid deaths in NY nursing homes. The press can investigate a high school yearbook photo from the ’80s but WHO can’t investigate the origins of the virus in China. Our magic world leans to one side. Tech doesn’t track what it’s …
WHO Sleuths Land in China
They expect to stay for a month but will start work immediately during their two-week quarantine, according to the WHO. WHO investigators have arrived in China for a COVID-19 origin probe. But they’re already downplaying expectations … They will head straight to hotel quarantine for two weeks. During that time, they’ll be continuing their work, …
How Facial Recognition Technology Is Helping Identify the U.S. Capitol Attackers – IEEE Spectrum
“We have over three billion photos that we indexed from the public internet, like Google for faces,” Hoan Ton-That, CEO of facial recognition start-up Clearview AI told Spectrum. Every move you make, every pic you take I’ll be watching you. Oh can’t you see you belong to me. You do it to yourself. The technology …
How a Small Minority Coerced Multitudes
Impossible? Stalin did it. How he did it is why history matters. Stalinism was a rigorous attempt to implement Marxism. It wasn’t the Revolution Betrayed but the Revolution implemented with unshakeable will. The social engineering impulse makes it possible to exercise limitless, self-righteous power.
Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes
Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. …
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The Great Unraveling/Awakening
Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, realizes the devil actually exists, and rules a kingdom of lies, which sooner or later becomes a realm on earth. There was nothing so destructive as lying in a good cause. Miracle, mystery and authority are the three temptations of evil. They can only give you the …
Runaway Saves
Gab is restoring a backup of Trump’s Twitter posts. Yes, but how about you? Is YOUR information backed up: the search history, social media submissions etc mined by big silicon?
Vaccinating Vs Similar Diseases
This vaccine platform, called a mosaic nanoparticle, was developed initially by collaborators at the University of Oxford. The nanoparticle is shaped like a cage made up of 60 identical proteins, each of which has a small protein tag that functions like a piece of Velcro. Cohen and his team took fragments of the spike proteins …
It Was the Uniparty
They enjoy all of the benefits of being U.S. based companies, but their operations and customers span the world. Many of them have participated in the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council. The compact of that group states, “society is best served by corporations that have aligned their goals to long term goals of society.” …