Rival Gods

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 @
BrianSimsPA harasses an elderly woman who is peacefully advocating for the lives of preborn human beings and women who are considering abortion.

Live Action on Twitter

Deadbook

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?
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. 

Technology Review

“They say that Christians once existed. And white people too. They say these old ones created Augmented Reality.”

“Nonsense. Bernie made all.”

China’s info strategy

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


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.

Venture Beat

Is Iran on the march?

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.

Conspiracy

The difference between ISIS and other “hate groups” is that ISIS has the resources and organization of quasi state.

KATTANKUDY (Reuters) – Sri Lankan police on Sunday discovered a 10-acre camp in the eastern town of Kattankudy, where Islamist militants linked to the deadly Easter attacks are believed to have practiced shooting and bombmaking. 

Reuters

This is illustrated by the Islamist network in the UK. Though not necessarily part of ISIS it illustrates a high level of organization.

Young imams are being trained in a network of Islamic schools across the UK that have been accused of promoting intolerance and misogyny, a secret Government report has warned.
The report claims preachers emerging from some of the dozens of Darul Uloom madrasas scattered across Britain have views as extreme as those held by radical clerics who move to the UK from Islamic countries – and may spread them to worshippers.
The Mail on Sunday has identified 48 Darul Ulooms – which can be translated as House of Knowledge – that follow a strict syllabus called Dars-E-Nizami.

Daily Mail

Why is the British report ‘secret’? To prevent awkward political questions about the downstream of the oil industry, Western relations with the Gulf States, Iran or Pakistan all of which potentially fund various stripes of ‘Islamic organizations’. The Western elite has a special and financial relationship with organized religion and contrary to what the papers imply that relationship is with political Islam and not Christianity.

Biden is Obama’s political body armor

The great advantage of Beto, Elizabeth, Kamala and Pete is they are essentially firewalled from any Obama Era scandals. They are a promissory note, not a bounced political check or worse, a potential co-conspirator.

The DNC’s dilemma is polls show they can’t win from the extreme left. Their chance is in the center but Joe Biden is the last of the Mohicans and scandal may taint him. Meanwhile the unbridled woke are driving issues even further left making Joe even more vital. Hence the worry over Joe’s link to the Dossier.

Perhaps the most sensitive question is how high up this goes. Text messages between two key figures in the Comey FBI, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, say it goes very high, indeed. An Aug. 5, 2016 message from Strzok tells Page that “the White House is running this.” We don’t know yet if that’s true, or who might be involved, but the message suggests how significant the political stakes were then — and are now.
How do the Barr and Horowitz investigations affect Biden? In at least three ways. First, they could strengthen President Trump’s claim that he was the victim of dirty tricks by Obama appointees in law enforcement, intelligence, and national security. Second, they are likely to tarnish the reputation of the Obama administration, which is one of Biden’s strongest assets. Finally, if the Obama White House was directly involved (and we simply don’t know at this point), then Biden will have to distance himself from everyone involved. That’s obviously his best move. But it comes at a price. It makes him look like a marginal or clueless figure on a crucial foreign-policy issue, which Biden has always claimed as his area of expertise. (He headed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.)

Real Clear Politics

The Dossier is rapidly becoming poison. In a way you can’t blame the Dems from going hard left. They’ve been let down so badly by the old guard that even Marx looks good by comparison.

Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.
The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.
Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.

Victor Davis Hanson

Boomerang?

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country’s president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.

Hill

Facebook Opens a Command Post to Thwart Election Meddling in Europe

The cramped space is home to Facebook’s newly opened operations center to oversee the European Union’s parliamentary election, which will be held May 23 to May 26 in 28 countries.

Modeled after the “war room” that the Silicon Valley company created before last year’s midterm elections in the United States, the people inside are tasked with washing Facebook of misinformation, fake accounts and foreign meddling that could sway European voters. A similar command post was set up in Singapore for elections in India.

NYT

Is Putin selling Maduro out to hold on in Venezuela?

Some analysts think that the two heavyweight countries might be coming to some kind of deal over Maduro’s potential departure.
”(There’s) little doubt in my mind that the Russians and the U.S. have been talking for weeks about some kind of deal to ease Maduro out of office,” Timothy Ash, a senior emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, said in a note Wednesday.
He said several factors led his to this conclusion — firstly, that Moscow had gained leverage to negotiate with the U.S. by sending military advisers to Caracas and, secondly, that President Trump had so far not signed off on new sanctions on Russia for its alleged use of a chemical weapon following the nerve agent poisoning of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in the U.K. in 2018.

CNBC

Putin is on the ropes even if the US has so far not landed the knockout. Rubio is throwing the fence sitters off the rail by exposing the double crossers.

Maduro & Cubans know @MaikelMorenoTSJ was plotting against #MaduroRegime. Strong indications he will try to save himself by issuing an arrest warrant for @jguaido.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

Maduro says he investigating who was behind today’s military uprising. Won’t have to look very far. 4 of them were sitting with him at the conference table when he said that.

Marco Rubio on Twitter

We will not be thrown away

Today a classmate died. He was funny, brave and incredibly successful. It was a sobering moment to realize that the world outside didn’t stop and a memento mori for ‘if the heavens do not stop for princes they will not stop for me’.

Simone de Beauvoir, I remember reading somewhere, felt the same realization on hearing of Camus’ death. The sun would rise in Paris and the cars would rumble down the boulevards and there would be no Albert Camus.

But she had got in reverse. The hope lay precisely in that the sun still rose and people went to work as usual. Imagine what would happen if the world did stop when a prince or pauper died?

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote: ‘Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.’ Yet that is false. All true stories, if continued far enough, continue.

The tale continues in the children, in what we have or have not done. We become part of the blockchain. “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

Bring on the dawn, bring on the traffic. We are remembered in it.

Why the Chinese are so formidable

A couple of years ago I started noticing elderly Chinese or Asians going around Sydney’s upper North Shore with prams or supermarket trolleys filled with cans or plastic bottles. Having been a scavenger in Tondo one time in my life I recognized exactly what they were doing.

These old Chinese folks were going around segregating trash so they could sell them for their return value, amounting to maybe $20 for a day’s work. To a Tondo scavenger first world garbage is essentially gold. We used to come back with mostly paper, rags, some bottles and cans.

The paper, cans, bottles and wires got segregated at the scavenger warehouse. Long fiber paper was “Waste 1”. Short fiber was “Waste 2”. Bottles were crushed and cans pounded flat and sold to the paper mills, glass factories and steel mills.

If a Tondo scavenger saw first world trash he’d be goldstruck. The Chinese immigrants to Australia can afford houses, cars, electronics. But they are not beneath working for $20 extra bucks by scavenging through garbage. This is why China is so admirable and terrifying.

Can tech be neutral?

Or must it “take a stand”?


I watched Dorsey’s ted appearance on my computer at home … Listening to him speak at ted felt like witnessing the end of something: the end of the techno-utopian period when social-media architects could speak eagerly about democracy and openness, without also mentioning the potential for enabling authoritarianism. …


This Tuesday, a week after Dorsey’s appearance at ted, Twitter released its first-quarter earnings report. It announced that, in the past year, the number of monetizable daily active users had increased by eleven per cent; there are now a hundred and thirty-four million active users on the platform. At the news, the company’s stock soared. That afternoon, Dorsey swapped his hoodie for a suit, removed his beanie, and sat down for a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump, who, earlier that morning, had tweeted that the platform was “Very discriminatory” against Republicans. According to the Washington Post, the President’s primary concern in the meeting was his follower count. Dorsey also took the time that day to call Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, to discuss a tweet by Trump, sent earlier this month, that combined footage of the Twin Towers on September 11th with out-of-context excerpts from a speech Omar recently delivered on Islamophobia. After the tweet posted, Omar received a host of death threats; Twitter did not intervene. Dorsey explained to Omar that the President’s tweet had not violated his company’s rules.

New Yorker

What the media want is a man in the loop, because there was always a man in the media loop. The alternative to human intervention is a ruthless competition of memes, some of which may spread at the expense of the host.

However there is a technical solution to making memetic competition fairer and that increase trust of issuance; that is to make sure institutions cannot create facts or tokens of value from nothing.

Twitter cannot prevent the media or trolls from creating facts from nothing. The two most common ways to “print facts” are to quote secret sources (unidentified informant) or to argue from victimhood or virtue.

These are the media’s (and social media’s) engine of creation. Trump tweets something; Steele releases a dossier; the NYT publishes an unbylined editorial. Greta Thurnberg worries about climate change. And presto a meme is born.

Can Jack Dorsey fix this? No. But he could for example implement code so we can go back to the Tweet Zero of anything. This would make it possible for readers to reward or punish truth or falsehood. It won’t solve everything but it’s a start.

Each new Twitter user could get a startup sum of tokens. To tweet he must use up some of his tokens, which are either replenished or consensus fined by Tweeters, of course expending tokens. Solving the problem of junk info is like solving spam.You can’t have a competition of memes without a market.