By blocking certain users social media assumed the responsibility of publishers. This may destroy them.
The law bans falsehoods that are prejudicial to Singapore or likely to influence elections and requires service providers to remove such content or allows the government to block it. Offenders could face a jail term of up to 10 years and hefty fines.
Selling indulgences to Gaia. A future historian might write: “Indulgences became increasingly popular in the 21st century as a reward for signaling virtue, hugging rough trees, and going on pilgrimage to environmental summits; for putting on processions and marches; associations demanded that their meetings be rewarded with indulgences.
Good deeds included tax donations of money for a good cause, and money thus raised was used for many righteous causes, like building abortion clinics and sanctuary cities.”
Dining out isn’t the most eco-friendly activity, thanks to the carbon footprint of food brought in and the waste inherent in running a restaurant. Now, an effort by California restaurants wants diners to help fight climate change – by paying more.
Guardian
Concerned eateries can join the Restore California Renewable Restaurant Program and add an optional 1% surcharge to diners’ checks. The money will go towards a public fund to help farmers reduce carbon in their food production practices.
The Iran nuclear deals seems to have represented a fundamental strategic choice which the Obama administration made and which Trump has now rejected without either really explaining why.
The lack of public debate is reflected in the non-ratification of Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal and the lack of Congressional consensus behind Trump’s actions toward Iran.
Maybe this is because both the Dems and Republicans don’t want to draw attention to the withdrawal from Iraq or entering Iraq in the first place, which seems to have destabilized the Arabs and given Iran and Turkey their big chance.
Tehran is virtually certain that Trump will not — indeed politically cannot — return to the Middle East in force and that the Arabs are presently too scattered to oppose them. At the same time Iran must see Israel benefiting from the same Arab weakness.
This, plus the growing realization that by using hybrid warfare Trump need not return to MENA is probably driving a sense of urgency among the Ayatollahs, who must move now lest the tides turn against them.
In this context the Iran nuclear deal, which was supported by Europe and Obama, can be seen as a strategic attempt to buy off Tehran, thereby forestalling more refugees, a course of action deemed more realistic and cheaper than trying to stop them.
Sending the pallets of cash was seen as more economical than gearing up to stop the Army of the Guardians.
And yet you hear less about China and Iran than Russia. That’s not to say Russia isn’t a factor but what a strange sense of proportionality the media have.
NPR
Together, the U.S. and China make up half the world’s military spending, expending as much as the rest of the world combined. In fact, the “significant increases in spending” by the two countries drove total global military spending up 2.6% from 2017, researchers said.
“The spending boom is driven, above all, by the contest between America and China for primacy in Asia,” writes The Economist in summarizing the report. America’s increase “reflected the Trump administration’s embrace of what it calls ‘great power competition’ with Russia and China — requiring fancier, pricier weapons — in place of the inconclusive guerrilla wars it had fought since 2001.
“The phenomenon is feeding on itself,” said Peter Langman, a psychologist who is the author of “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters” and who runs the website SchoolShooters.info. “It’s gaining momentum, and the more there are, the more there will be.”
Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources, according to a new analysis by Environmental Progress.
It sounds like ‘when’ not ‘if’. The reality of the Iranian threat means whoever the US backs in the Islamic civil war that they will be backing a “bad guy”. The only escape from this dilemma is to make both Iran and KSA irrelevant but the Greens through their policies will ensure they both remain vital.
“It’s not that the administration is mischaracterizing the intelligence, so much as overreacting to it,” said one U.S. government official briefed on it. …
The source added that the administration’s steps are a way to tell the Iranian government that the U.S. will hold them responsible for their surrogates’ actions.
A third U.S. government official close to the situation described the administration’s response this way: “It is meant to send a clear message and remove any ambiguity from a tense situation. We’re demonstrating the overwhelming capability we can bring to the region.” …“I would characterize the current situation as shaping operations on both sides to tilt the field in preparation for a possible coming conflict,” continued the second source, who is also a U.S. government official. “The risk is a low-level proxy unit miscalculating and escalating things. We’re sending a message with this reaction to the intelligence, even though the threat might not be as imminent as portrayed.”
Daily Beast
We will hold social media platforms responsible for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy. And if you profit off of hate—if you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyberwarfare, if you don’t police your platforms—we are going to hold you accountable as a community.
What we don’t like to hear is hate speech. We will punish you severely for hate speech. We will punish you for what we don’t like to hear. And by the way this is called “preserving our democratic way of life “.
Something took over. An intellectual generation scornful of “thoughts and prayers ” were wholly defenseless against a hostile meme. Like the proud Martians in the War of Worlds they proved vulnerable to a virus against which humble men had been inoculated.
“The second mistake I made was to listen too carefully to the British government. Cameron. Because the then prime minister asked me not to interfere, not to intervene in the referendum campaign,”
Barr has made plain that he intends to examine carefully how and why Comey, as FBI director, decided that the bureau should investigate two presidential campaigns and if, in so doing, any rules or laws were broken.
In light of this, the fired former FBI director apparently has decided that photos of him on Twitter standing amid tall trees and in the middle of empty country roads, acting all metaphysical, is no longer a sufficient strategy.
The increasing willingness of Twitter and Factbook to censor critics of the left was inevitable. It was unrealistic to think they would provide a platform for views their bigs disagreed with. The only practical response is to develop alternative channels. The segmentation of the Internet has been on for some time. This is the latest chapter.
The Chinese communist party seeks to diplomatically isolate Taiwan by stripping it of its diplomatic allies, by meddling in democratic elections and by applying economic pressure through redirecting tourism and financial development away from the island, Randall Shriver, assistant secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Affairs, said during a Friday media briefing about the report.
“China has never renounced the use of military force and continues to conduct military exercises,” Shriver said.
However, China does not appear to be currently investing in the equipment likely required for a direct assault on Taiwan, such as large amphibious assault ships and medium landing craft necessary for a large beach assault, according to the report. The bulk of China’s recently created marine corps forces currently lack proper equipment or operational training. …Instead, China’s recent spate of military exercises and the PLA Navy’s focus on building large aircraft carriers, escort cruisers and amphibious transport dock (LPD) ships suggest the military, for now, is geared toward blue water naval operations and smaller expeditionary missions.
USNI
One of my proudest professional accomplishments is a weird one: I convinced a handful of colleagues to just give up.
We were in a brainstorming session trying to solve a problem that had been giving us trouble for some time. We must have run through a half-dozen solutions, each more convoluted than the last, essentially trying to figure out how to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The real problem, we finally realized, wasn’t the one we were trying to solve. It was that we were so focused on finding a solution that we never stopped to question whether we should even be doing the thing causing us problems in the first place. The solution we were too tunnel-visioned to see turned out to be the simplest: Just stop doing that thing. Duh. …NYT
Compounding the problem is that we sometimes force ourselves to stick with failing endeavors — even if we’re fully aware they’re failing — because we’ve already invested so much time in them. In one studythat examined this phenomenon (known as the sunk cost fallacy)
Who benefits from renewables? Ironically those who sell oil and gas. Since renewables are not currently technologically viable this forces those who prematurely rely on it to become more dependent on things like Russian gas. Wind power was the how Putin became indispensable to Germany.
Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” (“Murks in Germany“). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.
Forbes
“The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail,” write Der Spiegel’s Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story (the article can be read in English here).
Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.
The “College Football Captain” was praying too — as fervently as he could by Virtue Signalling for all he was worth — to satisfy whatever gods or universal righteousness he believed in. Such religious zealots go by many names, mutaween among them.
Wow. An elected Dem state rep, a “College Football Captain,” videos himself (presumably he’s proud of this behavior) harassing, insulting & haranguing an elderly lady who quietly prays for him. In what universe are elected officials supposed to treat their constituents like this
Ted Cruz on Twitter
WATCH: Pennsylvania State Representative @
Live Action on Twitter
BrianSimsPA harasses an elderly woman who is peacefully advocating for the lives of preborn human beings and women who are considering abortion.
At some point in the near future there will be more dead Facebook users than living ones. It will be a vast graveyard.
The research by the Oxford Internet Institute, a department at Oxford University, describes an extremely conservative scenario in which Facebook gains no new users. In this case, at least 1.4 billion users will be dead by 2100 and the year 2070 would be the tipping point when the dead outnumber the living on Facebook. However, given it’s very unlikely Facebook user numbers will stay where they are now (at 2.2 billion,) this point will probably arrive far sooner.
Technology Review
But you can curate yourself and leave a virtual version of yourself after have shuffled off the mortal coil. Provided you are not “weeded” by the Woke.
the main complication with trying to create digital versions of the dead is that people are complicated. “We’re extremely different when we talk to different people,” she says. “We’re basically like twenty thousand personalities at once.” For example, Mazurenko had said things to her that he might have left out of a conversation with his parents. She could consult with his family and other friends to figure out which information was too sensitive to share. Could any company realistically do the same?
Technology Review
Rahnama obviously thinks so. He says Augmented Eternity will take a step toward accommodating various personalities by tailoring the conversation according to context and letting users control what data is accessible to whom. So someday his daughter might consult with his digital family persona, while a former student could ask questions of his academic persona. He sees it as one way of leaving a legacy—a way to keep contributing to society instead of fading to black.
“They say that Christians once existed. And white people too. They say these old ones created Augmented Reality.”
“Nonsense. Bernie made all.”
What better way than to install it? Russia has nowhere close to China’s tech reach.
The Chinese have taken the view, according to the DoD and other outside national security experts, that information dominance is key to winning conflicts. This could be done by denying or disrupting the use of communications equipment of its competitors.
Real Clear Defense
Venture Beat
According to IPlytics, companies in China have applied for roughly 34% of the world’s major 5G patents as of March 2019, compared with South Korea’s 25%, and 14% each for the United States and Finland. Sweden stood at nearly 8%, and Japan at almost 5%, while Taiwan, Canada, the U.K., and Italy rounded out the top 10 countries, each with under 1% shares.
Following on recent rocket attacks on Israel, whose funding is ascribed to Iran, the US is deploying a carrier group to the Middle East.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. is deploying a carrier strike group and a number of bombers to the Middle East to serve as a deterrent to Iran based on new intelligence that suggests allied interests and American forces could be imperiled, multiple U.S. officials said.
WSJ
“The United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces,” Bolton said.
Times of Israel
The USS Abraham Lincoln, which is assigned the task, is just out of overhaul.
