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.” It also pledges to use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (previously called Agenda 21) as a roadmap.
YouTube is suspending President Donald Trump’s channel – CNN
CNN says
his channel earned a strike under the platform’s policies, the company said Tuesday evening.
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you.
That includes you also.
Suppose They Gave an Inauguration and Nobody Came?
Roger Simon writes:
Don’t show up!
When I say don’t show up, I mean really don’t show up.
Don’t protest the inauguration in any way, not in Washington, not at your state house, nowhere. Ignore the whole thing.
Don’t even watch the event on television or stream it on any of your devices.
I suspect significantly fewer are going to tune in, if not in America then at least in the rest of the world, not in protest or partisan pique but because the magic’s gone from Washington DC.
An audience that was formerly awed at a distance got close enough to see the caked make-up and the painted props. Olympus has fallen.
It may be all for the best. A free people are ruled by men not gods.
Uganda bans all social media ahead of election
Twitter outraged.
“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns – they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the #OpenInternet,” it said in a statement.
An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies
At least Weimar had the Great War as an excuse to fall apart. What alibi is there for the current moral collapse?
The best show on television right now features a major city, the capital of an unsteady government, that is gradually being pulled apart by two competing political parties. The center can’t hold; it’s being steadily overwhelmed by a pair of rival Socialist groups who don’t hesitate to take their conflicts into the streets as they sweep away their country’s past and head into a glorious future.
Washington, D.C., in 2021? No, Berlin in the late 1920s.
Idaho internet company blocks Facebook, Twitter over ‘censorship’ | krem.com
That’s different! Or it?
SPOKANE, Wash. — A North Idaho internet provider, Your T1 WIFI, confirmed it is blocking Facebook and Twitter from its WIFI service for some customers due to censorship claims.
Look Familiar?
Hard times need someone to blame. 2021 is likely to be a rough ride for countries all over the world. But it will be especially hard on those who have raised psychological expectations to an unreasonable degree. The dawn has broken so where’s the sunshine? The bad December job numbers are ominous.
What happens if DT is gone and things get worse? A post-Covid depression could make 2016-19 seem like a Golden Age. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be a fallacy but it is a persuasive one.
https://youtu.be/VRbMpLKjA80
U.S. loses 140,000 jobs in first monthly loss since spring
George Friedman’s take on the number is that many businesses are permanently lightening ship. The economic damage is now long term.
Those 140,000 cuts were made largely by businesses that have a profound understanding of the business they are in and of the appetite of their customers for what they sell. Most businesses have always controlled the number of people they employ – that is, not maintaining a mass of disposable staff. So when they cut jobs, they cut deep, and if they are cutting to the bone they are seeing something unpleasant coming. The cuts will not show up in unemployìjjment figures, nor in banking numbers, nor most certainly in the stock markets.
But it will show up. The post hoc ergo propter hoc impulse ensures that an economic crisis will be blamed on something. What would that be?
How We Went Back to the Middle Ages
We were warned in 2003 about the coming age of censorship.
Today, when censorship is being advocated to counter ‘disinformation’ or the ‘Big Lie,’ it may be time to remember John Walker, the man who anticipated way back in 2003 that a digital imprimatur would be required to say anything substantial online. Walker was the man who wrote AutoCAD.
Recipe for Gasoline
Nothing is less nonpartisan than a social media platform run by politicized CEOs. Yet social media platforms are precisely that: defined by their politics whether they be Facebook, Twitter, Parler or Gab. They are not ‘social media’ vehicles full of pictures of families having picnics or singing round campfires. They are places where activists call for the evisceration of their opponents. Nothing weiners and marshmallows about them.
Ask yourself: why is the telephone system not inflammatory? How come email never produced this incendiary effect. Perhaps the answer lies in how they differ from social media:
- they carry all messages regardless of content;
- the messages they convey are addressed to specific recipients. They are not broadcast media.
That’s why neither the telephone nor email stoked up the fires of unrest. By contrast social media is sent out into universe. Despite it’s refusal to call itself an edited platform it is full of algorithmic secret panels, alligator pits, rotating bookcases and trapdoors to snag the unwary. What we call social media is a broadcast platform, run by editors; nay by political activists.
The Costs of Wading into Politics
One of the nice things about not being in politics is not being in politics. Make no enemies where you can make no friends.
Facebook sees $34 billion erased from market cap as Trump-ban fallout continues to spook tech investors
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the ban on Thursday, saying the risks of allowing Trump to remain on the platform ‘are simply too great.’
Like I said weeks ago, both sides are so evenly matched any clash will cause mutual damage. “The populist uprising is now objectively too powerful for progressives to crush. The left must live with it, negotiate with it, coexist with it because they can no longer bulldoze it away. By the same token, the populists must accept that progressives are similarly too powerful to ignore. They cannot be provoked without cost.”
“We will have nothing left to open”
City hall can beat anyone except reality.
“Who sent you?”
(pause)
“God.”
(pause)
“Never heard of Him.”
Twitter stock tumbles 10% after Trump is permanently banned from the platform | Business Insider
Even battleships take damage. The long term damage will be greater. There a certain powers which are tolerated on the tacit understanding that they will never be used, like authority to order a nuclear strike or the capacity to beat up one’s wife. Once this capability is used, whatever the justification, things are never the same again. What has been seen cannot be unseen and things are never so free and easy as before.
Social media is global. Facebook in particular is widely used by the Third World. Presidents other than DT use Twitter. In the past this vast audience was prepared not to think about how social media spied on, used and policed them because they lulled themselves into thinking that cool, hip Tech would never act like a vengeful posse. Now there’s no ignoring the fact that if they can cancel millions they can cancel you. And everyone can imagine the noose tightening round their throat — at least potentially.
It would be surprising if in the months to come users didn’t seek a hedge against the power they’ve seen displayed.
Twitter stock tumbles 10% after Trump is permanently banned from the platform
REUTERS/Jonathan ErnstTwitter stock slumped on Monday after President Trump was banned from the platform.
“Leaked Location Data Shows Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking Users”
Glad this doesn’t happen to anyone else.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1348652231822893063?s=09
Gab.com sees traffic surge
‘Free speech’ social media platform with local ties sees web traffic surge
A social media platform with a Clarks Summit mailing address that claims to promote free speech experienced a surge in web traffic last week, according to its Moosic-native CEO.
Expect this to be the next online battleground. Gab is an obvious target because of its politics and apparent technical competence.
It’s not clear that fleeing to Gab is any more feasible than going to Parler. The same logic that closed the latter will apply to the former.
If they can close Parler, they can close Gab. As the ACLU is realizing they can close anything. It started with the NY Post but where it ends nobody knows.
Of course the real kicker is that every investor in alternative media stands to lose their stake.
Tech’s power play is a demonstration of network infrastructure dominance. Strategists and practicing tyrants will long study the CCP and Democratic party as either a how to or how not to.
(This incidentally is a preview of it means to lose the cyber war in China.)
So what’s going to stop them? Catastrophe. The very things that are wrecking California and wrecked Detroit. That’s not the facile answer but the likely one.
As an Example to Others
Parler goes offline following suspensions by Amazon, Apple and Google
Parler has gone offline after a decision by Amazon to remove the site from its web hosting services went into effect at 11.59pm Pacific time on Sunday. Parler CEO John Matze said the site “will likely be down longer than expected,” adding that “most people with enough servers to host us have shut th…
The other places of digital refuge are no safer. This has been in the making since 2003.
The dark night of fascism always looms on the right and happens from the left.
How concerned investors should be about Biden’s tax proposals
- Technology down 9.2%
- Health care down 8.4%
- Communication services down 8.2%
- Consumer discretionary down 7.5%
- Financials down 6.5%
Why Has It Gone Haywire?
“Nobody has been dealt a tougher hand than Gavin Newsom,” Gray Davis, the former California Democratic governor who was recalled in 2003, said in an interview. “Look, I had the energy crisis and a recession. He has a pandemic we haven’t seen for 100 years. He has the fallout from that pandemic, racial injustice, wildfires, and I think I’m leaving something out. But nobody, no living governor, has had to experience as many crises as him.”
https://news.yahoo.com/fallen-apart-newsom-scrambles-save-093034599.html
‘It’s all fallen apart’: Newsom scrambles to save California — and his career
The Democrat leading the nation’s biggest state is facing a raging pandemic, vaccine distribution problems and a nascent recall drive.
It may not be the only thing about to fall apart. In a crisis of competence “bad luck” cascades. Things go bankrupt gradually then all of a sudden. It was striking how the Capitol Police collapsed.
The populist challenge is primarily a symptom of the system’s weakness not its cause. The most worrisome thing is that nobody seems to know how deep the rot goes.
Yes I Can
It’s possible to be pretty well educated on very little money. Anyone with a little self discipline could have learned a lot at MIT. “Massachusetts Institute of Technology MOOCs. Browse free online courses in a variety of subjects. Massachusetts Institute of Technology courses found below can be audited free or students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a coeducational, privately endowed research university founded in 1861 — is dedicated to advancing knowledge and educating students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. Learn …
“You don’t need college to learn stuff, everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free, it is not a question of learning … I think colleges are basically for fun & to prove you could do your chores but they’re not for learning” — @elonmusk
What’s necessary for learning then? Schools largely serve to socialize students, to impart world views and attitudes as much as subject matter content. When students, some of them perhaps loners, can get the best part of a technical education what will the result be?
Building Alternatives is the Best Protest
From the privacy point of view the establishment is building a big digital prison. Don’t complain about being kicked off social media. Be glad it happened.
The whole point of leaving bondage is not to wander in the desert but to enter into a promsed land. There’s got to be more to life than providing grist for the giant machine learning mill — and there is.
To make the point unmistakably clear dissidents should build, subscribe or invest in new networks that protect privacy and data ownership. The only way to convincingly demonstrate the benefits of freedom is by competitive contrast.
Tech startups have been creating onion networks, vpns, encryption and blockchain search engines for some years as an alternative to systems everyone knows are deeply flawed. Today’s big silicon may be tomorrow’s legacy old country from whom many will be glad to be free.
The natural allies of rebels are innovators not ideologues. No rebellion is sustainable unless you can make a buck at the same time.
But it won’t happen without hard work.
The genuine new world is not just a negation of the existing one but a competitive improvement on it. It is achieved less by destruction than by construction and by learning what others are forbidden to discover.