Archive for 2016

YOU CAN’T TRUST THEM: EXCLUSIVE: Twitter Shadowbanning ‘Real and Happening Every Day’ Says Inside Source.

Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

Shockingly, as Twitter’s commitment to “social justice” jiggery-pokery has increased, its stock price has plummeted.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Voters: Media Bias Worse Than Big Money in Politics.

A Rasmussen Reports poll released on Tuesday confirmed a long-term trend in the attitude of American voters that biased news coverage was one of the worst problems plaguing the political system, even beating out concerns over big money campaign contributions. (h/t Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard)

The survey found that 47% of respondents named media bias as “a bigger problem than big campaign contributions in politics today,” edging out the 45% who saw campaign contributions as the bigger challenge. The poll also found that an overwhelming 66% of voters thought the press “have too much power and influence over elections.”

Well, as Prof. Tim Groseclose’s research has found, without the influence of media bias, American politics overall would look like Texas or Kentucky politics. This is every bit as much an exercise of unearned political power as any political contribution.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): Woman jailed over false rape claim. “When evidence was reviewed it emerged the report of rape had been made shortly after the man sent a text message to Horrocks’s former boyfriend, with whom she was trying to rekindle a relationship.”

FASTER, PLEASE. American Airlines sues Gogo, may change in-flight Internet service: “The Fort Worth-based company has notified Gogo, its current provider, that it has found a faster Internet service offered by ViaSat, according to a lawsuit filed in state district court in Tarrant County on Friday. Gogo said that it intends to submit a competing proposal.”

Never the peppiest Internet service, Gogo’s speed has gotten truly pathetic over the last year or so.

ADVICE FROM JUSTICE SCALIA ON CHOOSING A SUCCESSOR:

In a largely overlooked passage in his dissent from the court’s decision in June establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, he left detailed suggestions.

Avoid “tall-building lawyers,” especially ones who work in skyscrapers in New York. Find someone who did not go to law school at Harvard or Yale. Look for a candidate from the Southwest. Consider an evangelical Christian.

Justice Scalia was criticizing the lack of diversity of the court he sat on, and he did not exclude himself. He was right as a factual matter: Supreme Court justices these days are by many measures remarkably similar, giving the court the insular quality of a private club or a faculty lounge. . . .

To be sure, the court is by some standards reasonably diverse. For the first time it has three women, one of whom is Hispanic. It has an African-American member, only the second in its history.

On the other hand, Justice Scalia wrote, the court “consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.” Justice Scalia attended Harvard, as did five other current members of the court. The other three went to Yale.

Well, that’s America’s elite bar, where diversity means people from Harvard and Yale. Plus:

Since Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, the court, for the first time, has no Protestant member. Justice Scalia was Catholic, as are five other justices on the current court. The other three are Jewish.

In his dissent from June, Justice Scalia decried this state of affairs, writing, “Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination.”

Justice Scalia also surveyed the lack of geographical diversity on his court. “Four of the nine are natives of New York City,” he wrote.

Indeed, every borough but Staten Island was represented. Justice Scalia was from Queens. Justice Ginsburg is from Brooklyn, Justice Kagan is from Manhattan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx.

“Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States,” Justice Scalia wrote. “Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between,” he added, referring to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is from Indiana.

“Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count),” he added, discounting the backgrounds of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who was born in Sacramento, and Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was born in San Francisco.

Flyover people should focus on electing people to Congress who will then pretend to fight for them. They can’t be trusted with real power.

FASTER, PLEASE: Excitement at new cancer treatment. “A therapy that retrains the body’s immune system to fight cancer has provoked excitement after more than 90% of terminally ill patients reportedly went into remission. White blood cells were taken from patients with leukaemia, modified in the lab and then put back. But the data has not been published or reviewed and two patients are said to have died from an extreme immune response.” Lots of impressive-sounding cures don’t pan out after reports like this one, but I hope that this one does.

CHANGE: “In Competition for Black Votes, Sanders and Clinton Offer Raw Rhetoric on Race

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have begun speaking about racial disparities in America in very blunt terms, talking about themes of entrenched racism in ways arguably more aggressive than any Democratic presidential candidate since Jesse Jackson in 1988. Their raw rhetoric on race is revealed as the competition for black voters in the Democratic presidential primary has quickly become the focal point of the contest as it heads into states with a large percentage of African American voters.

Clinton met with a host of leaders in the African American community Tuesday and delivered a speech on race in Harlem, where she discussed “racial injustice” and “systemic racism.”

Pithy (and true) remarks about “all the racial healing” aside, there was a time when Clinton felt confident enough about her support from the black community that she didn’t have to pander so blatantly.

That time was about a week ago.

YESTERDAY’S GAS CAN PROBLEM SOLVED: Reader Steve Rowe emails: “There is a great solution to your gas can problem called EZ Pour. They have them at Amazon. They are retrofit kits for other gas cans. You can easily update one of the terrible cans to a working one with it.”

EMBATTLED PENNSYLVANIA DEMOCRAT KATHLEEN KANE WILL NOT SEEK RE-ELECTION FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL:

Ms. Kane faces criminal charges, and the state Supreme Court has suspended her license to practice law. Senate Republicans fell short last week in an attempt to remove her from office, securing a majority of votes but not the two-thirds supermajority needed to send the removal process on to the governor.

The House, also last week, approved an investigation that could lead to an impeachment effort. Steve Miskin, spokesman for House Republicans, said the investigation will continue.

In August 2015, Montgomery County prosecutors charged Ms. Kane with perjury, obstruction of justice and other crimes, saying she had orchestrated the disclosure of confidential information in an effort to retaliate against former state prosecutors she believed had embarrassed her in a newspaper story. Her trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 8.

She’s going with the proverbial spending more time with her family route as her excuse for not running for a second term:

“While I love Pennsylvania, I love my sons first,” she said. “I am a mother first and foremost, because at the end of my life, I hope that history judges me well, but that’s for time to tell. I hope more that God and my sons judge me well.”

Whatever gets you through the night.

CHUCK SCHUMER: DON’T USE MY 2007 SPEECH TO JUSTIFY BLOCKING OBAMA NOMINEE.

What a fascinating insight into Schumer’s ego: it’s not about you, Chuck. It’s about doing what’s right, long-term for the country, given how Democrats have essentially abandoned democracy and handed major nation-changing decisions to nine “men in black,” as Mark Levin put it a decade ago.

But also, this moment isn’t really about 2007 – it’s much more of a reflection on 1987.

WHY HEART ATTACKS often go unrecognized in women.

When you picture someone having a heart attack, you most likely imagine them doubled over with severe chest pain—a pretty obvious signal that something’s not okay—but symptoms of a heart attack in women can actually be a lot subtler than they are in men.

Yes, you might have pressure or pain in the center of your chest, but surprisingly, women might experience jaw pain while having a heart attack. Other symptoms specific to women include upper back pain, arm pain, intense fatigue, heartburn, or “just not feeling right,” says Laxmi Mehta, M.D., clinical director of the Women’s Cardiovascular Health Program at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center and lead author of the AHA’s statement. According to the AHA, if the heart isn’t giving a good signal, pain can radiate to the jaw, neck, or back. But Mehta says doctors don’t know why jaw pain and discomfort in other areas of the upper body tend to manifest as symptoms in women and not men.

I can attest from the Insta-Wife’s experience that doctors can be slow to diagnose a heart attack in women, especially women who look young and fit. In her case the expert system on an EKG machine in the ER signaled a possible MI but the cardiologist ignored it as an obvious error. Nope!

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists prove feasibility of ‘printing’ replacement tissue. “Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients. Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures. When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.”

YESTERDAY I MENTIONED THE SOLAR-POWERED FLOODS that I put out on some of the trees in my yard. I should also note that I put some of these solar powered motion sensor lights in various strategic locations, and they seem to work very well, too.